Finding Success in Hollywood: Lessons from a Veteran Screenwriter

Chris: Over to you, Bob.

Dave: Well, can I. Bob, can I just say that I had a shudder from. From grade school when you said, we all have to turn in our homework. Are we going to talk about our homework? I immediately said, oh, did I have homework here? I. That’s my waking nightmare that I didn’t do the homework. So sorry.

Bob: You see me. You strike me as the kind who would not do the homework and just be smart enough to sort of wing it through the entire class talking about it.

Dave: Right. Hoping. Yeah, I can just get. Hoping the bell would ring and I can get out of there. Yes. Yeah.

Bob: Yeah. That’s why I was an English major in all the poetry classes. I could read it real fast before the bell rang. So how are you, Dave? How’s things?

Dave: Good, Good. Everything’s good. You know, I’m. I’m just writing like everybody else, probably on the zoom. I’m writing and I’m writing one of two or three things, you know, to see which one is going to pop. And I have some. I’m. I. I handed in. I handed in a spec to my managers like, a month ago, and then they’re trying to shop that around. And. And it’s actually a very funny thing because this. I don’t know how you want to run this. This talk, but my spec was. And I can tell you, is basically a version of sort of like a born identity. I’m just to jump in. And it was done with a female lead who. She was a spy 25 years ago. And then her memory gets wiped and she comes back and she. When she wakes up, she’s a mother driving a minivan in Missouri. And so then one thing leads to another. She goes to Europe and her spy things kick in. The point I’m bringing up is I gave it to my agents. I said, we love it. We don’t know if it’s a Jason Bourne movie or my mom is a spy movie. So they’re right now trying to figure out what movie. And I said to them, tell me what movie is stronger and I’ll rewrite that one. So that’s what I’m waiting on, those notes. Kind of weird, but that’s what I’m. Anyway. But other than that, things are good. Sorry.

Bob: That’s a valuable lesson for all of us, is like, you know, that’s the answer. That’s the energy. That’s the answer the manager wants to hear.

Dave: Yes.

Bob: The question is, which movie is it? And the answer is, not it is this movie. The answer is, which movie do you want?

Dave: Well, Unless of course, you have a movie in mind. Then you say it’s this movie. And they go, well, that didn’t come through or that didn’t come through strong enough for me. So then you make the adjustments that way. But this one was, I was just trying to service both ends of this. This character, like the character she was before, the character she is now, and then they’re merging and then my manager, I think you have to pick a lane here. You have to say, is she Jennifer Bourne or is she. I, My mom is a spy or whatever it is, family movie or action movie. And I literally, to your point, Bob, I said, I really don’t care. I mean, of course I care, but I really want my, I want my notes assignment. Tell me how to make this better. And then if they said, oh, make it, my mom is a spy, you just throw, you chuck away all that other stuff or use the bits that you can use and you just focus on the family fun and my mom’s spot. So while I’m waiting for those notes to come in in that direction, I’m writing something completely different. Because I think, Bob, you and I have talked. We’ve always got to be doing something. And unless you have a genre that you’re really great at, you should start bouncing around because you never know what’s going to hit next, right? Somebody’s going to go, oh, I need a two hander, like with a budget of 100 grand. Or I need a, you know, like a Star wars type movie that’s 150 million, you know, so you have to be ready as a writer, depending on your skill set, to go any which way you can in this day and age, I feel.

Bob: So, yeah, it’s. Since you brought it up, talk to me a little bit about what it’s like, what it means to be a jobbing writer now and what’s the market like out there. You said you turned in a spec, but then everyone here knows that this summer you had Garfield out, which I assume was not a spec. So how does that talk about the business of being a writer in the business, right?

Dave: So I was, I knew the director. Mark Dindle is, he’s the, I, he’s the animation director that I wrote the Emperor’s New Groove for. So he and I, he would, he and I have worked, tried to work together for many years. Since then we have worked together and he came on, this was like three or four years ago, he said to me, you know, we were trying to develop an animated feature at Warner Brothers and We were down the line with Warner Brothers and he said, hey, listen, the people at Garfield want me to come over and maybe take this over. And as again, this is another thing. 

There were two things. He said, if I get this Garfield thing, will you come over and just help me rewrite dialogue and all that stuff. And the Warner Brothers thing, they had a change in command out of left field. All of a sudden, that thing got blown up. I have nothing. I said, yeah, you want me to come? I came over to Garfield. Then I jumped on Garfield. Now the same time I’m doing this, I’m writing my own specs to try to get work out. But then the Garfield workload got so big that I had to go full time on Garfield for a year and a half and then whatever. That’s how that happened. So when that came out, you know, I was able to get some meetings, but everybody said, you know, oh yeah, we just saw like in the old days, if you had a hit movie, you wouldn’t even have to go into a meet. You go into me, they’ll offer you a job. Now it’s the other way around. They’ll say, what do you have to show me? Right? So I feel like, you know, it’s not doom and gloom, it’s, listen, we’re all writers. That’s what we want to do. Let’s just finish our stuff and try to sell it. So, like my spy movie, try to sell it. I’ve moved on from. I have two other movies that I wrote. A like a John Hughes sort of like two hander, really low budget, and that’s out. So all the. I’m just trying to get things out into the system and, and you know, take every call I can. So I don’t know if I answered your question, but my thing is I’m just still scrambling like I always have. And I don’t mean scrambling in a bad way, but you’re just always working to get an in somewhere. 

And, you know, the, the Garfield thing was really good. It worked out well for me. I mean, I got some nice reviews off of that and, you know, meetings and things like that. And I actually have a sort of a in with the people who own the property of Garfield. It’s a. And then they want me to do another. Take another comic strip and make it into a movie, which is another whole road to go down. But that’s very, very early, so.

Bob: Well, that’s fantastic. You know, a lesson I think that we can all take from that is how you started that story about how you got on to Garfield was. I knew the director, Mark Dindle. Right, right. It was. It didn’t come from answering a call on Facebook for scripts or whatever it came from. I knew a guy and the guy needed me. Right. So can you just talk a little bit about the building of relationships and friendships and where business and friendships kind of meet for a writer working in the business.

Dave: Now, the thing. Listen. Yes. My. The way I. My career is gone is it’s like any job. And the thing is, you make a thing, and what you make is your right. Your writing is your tool. Right. Okay. And you’re hired onto a job. And, you know, we’ve all worked on jobs, other jobs other than writing. You go, that guy’s really great, but he’s a jerk. That guy’s is not very good, but, you know, he’s kind of fun to have around. So there’s always kind of different people that you can have. My thing was, my approach has always been I come in as a writer and I’m working for a director. I’m working for a director or a producer director, depending on you, figure out who the. Who the point person is. And you said, I have to feed them my version of what they want. There’s a problem, they can’t solve it. You’re going to solve it, and you solve it. But the thing is, the whole thing is if you do it the right way, that’s how you keep working with people. If they go, yeah, he fixed our problem, but he was such a pain in the. Oh, my God, you’re not going to get that call back. Because life is so short. Projects are so big, they’re so unwieldy. You go, do I want to have somebody who’s really great, who’s just so hard to work with? So you just come into it, like, going, you’re my director or you’re my head of the production, and I’m just going to give you the best version. And I’m going to be open to changes. I’m going to be open to the story shifting. And you always have to have. When you go into any meeting, you always have to have a couple, like, sort of. If they go, hey, we’re going to go direction A. And they go, you know what? A’s out. You go, you know what? I got B and C. I’m open to. You have to be flexible on the shifting sand of a production meeting. They could come in and go, you know what? That actor we wanted, he’s out. We got this other guy in who does a different skill set. So you’ve got to go, well, you know what? I wrote the thing for that guy, so good luck. You know, you can’t. You got to go. We’re switching gears. So if you develop that relationship where you’re. Where your reputation is, you’re a team player. I guess that’s what it comes down to. It always is. You’re a team player. And I know it sounds silly, but if you do your job right and the director does, and everybody on the crew does, and Chris has been working on these movies, these massive movies, but if one guy throws a wrench in it, it kind of screws up everybody. So the thing is, you don’t want to be that guy. You want to be part of the team. And if the. If the scene or the movie or something works, we all get credit, right? We all get credit. So it’s never about going into, like, oh, my script was the greatest part of this whole thing, and everybody should be thankful to have me there. But go, well, you know, if they didn’t shoot it, nobody would know about your script, right? So it’s. It’s. It’s how you view yourself now. When I first started writing on television, way back in the day, I was one of the original writers on Late night with Conan O’Brien. I was one of those. The first group of writers. And we were doing five shows a week. We were doing six pieces of comedy per show per week. We were doing a lot of stuff, and there were six of us, so we were jacking out a lot of content. And about. About two months into it, I realized what happened was I never anyone ever during that time said good job or thank you. Never. Because we were moving at such a clip, you can’t sit there and pat people on the back all the time. So then I realized, oh, if I don’t hear anything, I’m doing a good job. The only time you heard your name called or when people confronted you is when you screwed up. So I always took that in, like, if I could do my job, and I do great, and, you know, people just keep hiring me back, I go, all right, I guess I must be doing a good job, right? So you have to assume that you’re doing well until people tell you you’re not. If that makes sense, right? And if you can keep going on with that and just trying to be a good team player, I think the career people, just word of mouth. It’s like any other job, people. Word of mouth will go and, hey, this Guy’s great. This guy will do this. You know, you need a joke. He’ll be the guy. He can flip. He can flip arcs, whatever it is, your skill set will get out because people like you as a person to work with.

Bob: You know, I don’t know if you’ve ever had an experience like this, but I have. So I’ll, I’ll relate it as my little piece of anecdotal evidence where I’ve been working with producers, directors, whoever, who maybe I don’t see the movie the same way as they do, or what they need is not what I have to offer. Or so, like, from a perspective of being a writer, my talent wasn’t enough, right?

Dave: But.

Bob: But I was that team player and so on. So I got another. I still got another call another time, even though I didn’t do the job they needed at the time. In a lot of ways. In a lot of ways, the way that I saw an interview with Brendan Hunt from, from Ted Lasso and the end of all these interviews is always, you know, what’s your advice to writers who want to get on a show? You know, and it’s. And it was, yeah, you got to have a good packet and you got to be able to get an agent, get, get in there. But when you, when you get to the interview, man, you just got to be a good hang, right? You know, And. And so if you’re comfortable talking about an experience like that where like the Dave Reynolds of it all won the day, even if the writing wasn’t 100% what they were looking for, I’d love to hear that kind of story.

Dave: I, I’ve been on, like. So I did a lot of movies at Disney Feature Animation, and there were some movies that I, that I worked on that I did not agree with the Tap. And I also worked at Dreamworks Animation too, and I have a philosophical difference in storytelling sometime the way what I like, because I kind of came up through the Pixar school, so I came. I was. I was on the. I was there early on in 95 through 2002 or whatever it was, and I work with them and then I would work on these at these other studios. And I was not a guy that would do puns. I was not a guy that would just do surface jokes. I. My stuff was all character based, hopefully, even though even a silly movie like Emperor’s New Groove was character based. It’s all the. We just figured out those characters. And so that’s what I’m good at. I’m good At. So I was in meetings where you would say, they would pitch out a sequence. I go. I would just go, I don’t buy that guy doing that. Now, I would try to say that as diplomatically as possible. And then sometimes in some studios, you go, yeah, but it’s funny how it works out. So they don’t care about the character, but they care about the slapstick or the puns or the whatever it was. And there was a couple times that I had worked sort of extensively on movies and stuff, and then at the end they go, do you want credit on this movie? And I said, no, I’m. I’m fine. I’m fine. You like. Because you just didn’t feel like it was your movie, right? It didn’t feel like it was what you were good at or what you were. What was true to the way you did. Now, the thing is, you can help somebody, you can help them along, you can give them your opinion, but at the end of the day, you’re these big teams, especially in animation, it’s huge productions. Everybody’s got to be rowing in the same in the same direction, right? And so you don’t want to be the guy that’s there going, no, no, you’re doing it wrong. You’re doing it wrong. You just sort of. I’ve had situations where I’ve completed my assignments and did it as best as I can. I try to write in their voices and then sort of parted ways. I mean, at the end of. At the end of it all, you just have to kind of be true to yourself. So I’ve had some situation. I’ve had other things where I was on a project and they all had the. The. The director, not the director, the. The production people and the studio and the producers said, we need different eyes on this project. That’s the way they say it to writers. They go, yeah, we need new eyes on this project. And meaning, not yours. So that was one thing. And I. I think I’ve told you this, Bob. That was. I was working on where the Wild Things Are for Universal, and they wanted to do a big slapstick thing. And Eric Goldberg, who was an animation genius, and. And I were developing a character base where with Maurice Senec. And they came in and they said, we want different eyes on the project. And they basically said. They said to people. And I heard it back channel to me, as they said, because they had to justify. They go, Dave Reynolds doesn’t know how to write animation anymore. They just said, I don’t know how to write animation anymore. And. And so I. So I heard that whatever. Two weeks later, I was in a recording booth with Albert Brooks and we were doing Finding Emoji. So my friend Andrew Stanton called me up right after I got sort of kind of cut loose. And he says, hey, you got any time on your hands? Do you want to help us on Nemo? I go, yeah, I think I’m free now. And I went from literally being told I didn’t know how to write anymore. You know, I don’t know how to. I don’t know what I’m doing to I’m in a booth with Albert Brooks, six feet away from him, lobbying ad lib line. So I rewrote all his parts. And that’s the way this business is. So this one was, they wanted slapstick comedy. They wanted all this stuff. And they. And we were saying you knew more, you know, character stuff. And they said, we’re crazy. Eight days later, I’m working on a movie that seemed to do okay with everybody.

Bob: So can you imagine?

Dave: You.

Bob: You’re working with Maurice Sendak and they’re like, wild. Where the Wild Things Are with Sendak. Know about that.

Dave: Right, right, right. It was, it was a very funny thing because at the time, Universal didn’t have Melodrandri. They didn’t have all these people. They were running it like a feature, like a movie studio. So they were just like, where’s my 120 page draft? Where’s this? And we were like, you have to develop. The animation is a boring. But animation, you have to piecemeal bore, build every character and then you work it over time. And they just wanted a script that worked and we could shoot it tomorrow. And we said, it doesn’t work that way. And they said, you’re crazy and you don’t know how to write. So it was just so. So every once in a while, it does sort of work out for you, but you have to sort of trust your own instincts. And when I was younger in my career, I would do. What we’re talking about now is try to get as much stuff as I can in the Hopper and do as many things. And I heard through Lorne Michaels, who’s the executive producer live and Conan and all this stuff, he said, keep saying yes. So I always, this is my mantra. Keep saying yes till they make you say no. That’s it. So they said, can you write a space Western? Sure. Can you write this thing? Sure. Can you write this thing? Sure. And you just say yes to everything when you’re trying to Take assignments because you never know which one’s going to go forward. You never know which one’s going to go forward. So if you can balance all these things and in your mind you go, hey, if this thing goes, I’m going to go with it. If this thing goes. And then you finally get to the point like, hey, do you want to do this pun filled slapstick thing that you don’t. I. And you go, no. Or you say yes. You know, it’s. So it comes down to what you feel you can manage and what your skill set is good for and if this ultimately is going to be good for you. Now, if you’re a young writer, if you’re a new writer, you’re going to say yes to everything because you know, we can talk about that. That’s how you learn. Like get on a, get on a crappy show, get on a bad movie. But writing’s writing. So I hope I’m not telling anybody, like, don’t take jobs. You’re not in that position. We’re all in the position like, yeah, if it’s a good job, take the good job, get the money, get the benefits, gets all that stuff. You want that and you will learn from it. But you’re always trying to learn like, okay, if I have a TV show or if I’m writing a movie, it’s not going to be like this, right? You’re going to keep that to yourself. But you’re constantly learning how to run the restaurant right before you own one. Right. It’s just like you go, oh, right, okay. They do the. I have an ad who yells at everybody. I would have an ad that’s very nice. I would have. It talks to people like human beings. So you just are. It’s like any other job. You’re just trying to figure out how to go through it. But the skill set is not like is you. Because you’re the one bringing all the writing. You’re the one that. Bringing all the ideas. So I hope I’m not confusing people by saying, oh, say no to things. But I’m saying when you’re in the position and it’s an equal position, take the one that feels right to you. Right? And don’t go for the one. You have to kind of see where it’s going to take you. So.

Bob: Well, you know, even something great can even come out of a production that is challenging.

Dave: Yes.

Bob: I mean, look, I, I recommended to everybody to try to see the sweat box who’s in the room. But you know, and I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna ask you to cast aspersions on Emperor’s new groove. You know, it’s one of my favorite.

Dave: Movies of all time, but my favorite movie ever.

Bob: You met Dindle on that, right?

Dave: Yes. Mark and I met when it was a different. All right, so the very quick thing on that was there was another movie that had been in production for two years called Kingdom of the Sun. It was an epic, sweeping, epic CinemaScope animated movie with six original songs by Sting. And it was, it had Eartha Kit was the villain and had David Spade was this, you know, arrogant prince. And it was a prince in the pauper. And. And it had all this mythology of the Incan world and all this stuff and what they had. And this is a thing for all screenwriters. What they had was too much story in the movie. So when we put the reels up, the in work in progress reels, it was so confusing about what I’m rooting for now. This is, first of all, it’s animation, right? So to Disney animation, you’re going to go, well, little kids are going to see this. Even though it has big songs and everything is like, at the end of the day, they want kids to see this and all families to see it. And Mark Dindle and I, he was the co director and we got to know each other during the production a little bit, but we had never met. And we were sitting next to each other in a screening and I go, I have no idea what’s going on in this movie. And I said, and we’re making it. And that’s how we started to joke about like, there’s just so much story math up there. I think, Bob, we’ve talked about this before about the story math. It’s just got to work out. And you just go, oh, this guy does this. Then he gives us and then he gets the king at the end. You just feel the math. This had like four plot lines. And I said, this is just so crazy. So what I was there to bring what they brought me and there was another writer on it. They brought me in to bring to do character comedy. So I started writing all these little things about the guards. Like a scene would be over and then two guards would talk to each other and I was just like making funny things and trying to lighten up the stuff. And then that all came to a head and then they said we might shut this movie down, blah, blah, blah. It’s all in the movie, the Sweat Box. But Mark Dindell came up to me and he says, I think we can do a comedy with some of the people, some of the characters in this. And I immediately was on it. And he goes, I think it’s. And he said. And he. I remember finishing the sentence, I said, I think. And he said, oh, it should be like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. He goes, yeah, it’s going to be like a Chuck Jones cartoon. And we just looked at each other like, huh? And so we decided to keep, obviously, Yzma Earth a kid. And Spade was the lead on the other side. And then we needed a grounding character. So that’s where we got John Goodman as Pacha. And then we had to have stakes for him. So it’s going to be his village that wiped out. And then I was the one that said, he, Pacha should have stakes. And so then I made his wife pregnant. And so I made his wife pregnant. And then they come up and go, you made the first pregnant animated character. I was like, well, it’s just a story point, but okay. And then. So then. So then when we had Eartha is the thing, we came up. Chris Williams, who’s a director now, the story, great storyboard artist came up with. He had a riff about a guardian, and the guard was a big muscle head. And I said, oh, that’s Patrick Warburton. I said, he’s a guy on Seinfeld. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that’s how we came up with Cronk. And so then it just all fell together and we pitched it. We pitched this, and then they pitched their redo of the other movie that we’re going to shut down. And they came up, they. They called me. I was. I. We pitched. Then I went out to lunch with my wife, who was like, we got to get out of the building. And I. And they called me, go, Dave. Good news, bad news. Good news is they want to do your and Mark’s version. New group, the new group thing. And the bad news is we’re not changing the release date of the movie. We just shut down. So Instead of having four years, we have 18 months. And so that means. And there was. So I said. I was on the phone, I said, so do you mean I should come back into the studio now? And he said, jacob, could you come in after lunch? And so I came in, I picked up a yellow legal pad, and Mark Tindall and I and Chris Williams went into a huge conference room. Was like something out of a Barton. Like a huge movie, massive conference room, and I had a yellow legal pad in a pen I go, okay, what’s the first scene? Let’s go. And that’s how we started writing. New group. We just started writing and we just. We didn’t have time to shop it around. We just had to create within us the smartest, funniest story that we could do with a simple storyline. But yes, I found him, Mark, and I became sort of. He let me do a lot of, like, what ifing. And again, you’re going to find this in your careers. If you’re a writer. You’re always. You don’t have to be, like, as chaotic as me, but you, you should always have a, like a backup pitch. Like in case the thing you’re working on is, or the scene you’re working on or the moment you’re working on is not working. You go, if they. You get to that thing going, I don’t know. And somebody goes, well, what if she came in instead of him? Always flip it just. And then they go, no, no, we tried that. Or, oh, you know what? That actually might be good. Then you could run with it. So that’s what your job is to keep filling in the blanks for the director, to try to keep the story moving forward in a direction that, you know, everybody wants. But you can’t say, this is my opinion. You can’t say, well, we tried it. We got to think of something else. They go, no, no, no, let’s just. We got the story, we got the scene, we got the whatever. Let’s just look at it from a different angle. Flip. Because that’s the thing that I came in that didn’t like, was I always flipping ideas? What if he said it instead of her? What if she said, what if the boy was a girl? What if the girl was, you know, what if it was a dragon? Instead of, you know, whatever it was? Because you’re trying to test. You’re always trying to test out your theories. You’re always trying to test out your ideas, right? You’re, you know, it’s just like anything else. You just, you do a shakedown run. You just want to see if your idea is going to work to go, well, let’s hit it from all sides. Well, if he does this, then what’s going to happen in that scene way down in third act? Well, then we’d have to either change it or we can’t do it. So you’re constantly. Your movie’s on a clothesline, and it’s just like little pins on a clothesline. If you move this one here, it just. You gotta look down the end of the line to go, oh, we can’t do it because we have that big third act thing. And it hinges on this. To that point, I’ll just tell one little story about New Groove. When we were doing this handwriting thing at the very beginning, and we’re kind of getting scenes together. They let us kind of run for about six weeks where we’re trying to storyboard out stuff and trying to think of ideas. They. They like where we were going. And then somebody walks in and says, okay, we need a big sequence. And I go, Mark and I like, what are you talking about? We need a big. We have three. They go, we. They pointed, like to the next room, basically, they go, we have 300 animators that are sitting, waiting for you guys. So we need something for them to do because we’re paying them, right? And so we were in the middle of the first act. And so then I, Mark and I kind of came up with the idea, if you saw the movie, when they’re tied to the tree and they go down the river and then, you know, and then it goes over the waterfall. That whole sequence. I came up with that because it involves special effects and water and stuff and, you know, whatever. So it all developed, you know, and. And I. We furiously kind of wrote that and boarded out and handed off to them. They’re like, good, because now that gives us a couple months to keep working on the front part of the movie, right? And so then we’re working along and I swear to you, all of a sudden I go, oh, wait, I have a better way of them. Instead of going down the river, what if they did something else? And I pitched this, a whole other thing to Dindal and he goes, yeah, that’s great. So we walk into the produce, the studio head, and we said, hey, listen, you know that river thing that we just did, like, you know, that we gave everybody. We’re throwing that out. We’re gonna do a. Like a hot air ball. I don’t know what the hell it was. It was something different. And they go, dave, that’s in the movie because we paid for it and we have no time. We’re not throwing it up. And I go, all right, let’s go back to it. We just. But so two things. Number one is I completely shot my own idea that I really love. I love that scene. I still do. But I. I was always thinking of a better. I was always trying to think of a better one. And then they came up and they said, the money’s already been Spent jump over that and you know, work on the other sides of that sequence. And so, yeah, I did. So it was, it’s, it’s, it’s a weird thing because you’re going to keep fixing stuff but then you’re going to keep thinking of other ways to keep fixing. I don’t know. That’s me. Sorry.

Bob: Do you like, do you. When you had the better idea but it wasn’t going to be in the movie, you just stick that in your pocket and put it something else. Right.

Dave: If. Yeah, if it works out. You never throw anything away. You never throw anything away.

Bob: You know, so getting back to you and Dindel and having a relation, having relationships with human beings.

Dave: Yeah.

Bob: I think a lot of us, I think a lot of us in the room tend to try to think of meeting other writers, meeting someone like yourself, whatever, like with a very strict agenda. I’m going to talk about this thing. I’m going to pitch a specific project. I’m going to so on and so on and so on. Be very sort of mercenary about it, right. But I mean, you and I go back a little ways now. And a memory that I fondly keep is when I was in Sweden last year and last spring, right. And Garfield, Garfield was out and there was an ad like in a bus kiosk for Garfield. So I took a picture with the Swedish poster and I texted to you and I’m like, you know, hey, you’re in Sweden. And we had a nice little text conversation going on where it was like it was neck and neck whether you were going to be number one or I don’t remember who you were competing with.

Dave: I’ll think of it in a second. Yeah, yeah. It was some sec.

Bob: Some second rate movie. But whatever it was, but it was fun. Just. It was almost like a sporting event. It’s like, you know, Friday’s numbers came in and we’re here. You know, Saturday’s numbers came in just a little bit. But Garfield’s gonna do good on Sunday matinee. So it’s got a shot, you know, and.

Dave: Yeah, there’s a storm in Portugal. There’s like a storm in Portugal. And that moon. Well, we might. The box office is gonna. You’re like. And you’re just kind of seeing the whole field, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bob: So it’s like. But it wasn’t about, hey, what can you do for me? Or what can I do for you? Or you know, can you come to. It was about like, you know, it was. I think I also texted you Last April, like, you know, the Dodgers won their first baseball game of the year, and I’m like, should we just give them the World Series trophy now?

Dave: You know? Yeah.

Bob: And of course, they’re in the World Series starting tonight, so. Yeah, you know.

Dave: Yeah, but.

Bob: But it’s. It’s. It’s about sort of being that person who is liked by other people and developing those skills as a human being.

Dave: Right? Yes. The thing. The thing is with that is, okay, so we all. All of us on this, all have writing styles. We’re all, you know, if we, you know. You know, you could put in, like, oh, he does comedies. He does your dramas or whatever, and action things. And the thing is. But we’re all. We’re in a little subset of writers, right? So that was always the thing that I always found when the writers get together and they get competitive, I go, what the hell are you doing, dude? We’re. We’re against the world. Like, everyone’s against us. We. So me helping you, you helping me, that’s. We’re just. We’re in the same pod together, right? The other thing is, you have to bury your anxiety. Like, you know, like, people meet me, and I downplay what I’ve done if I know that person’s a new writer. Only because it spins the whole conversation the wrong way. Because if you had a new thing and I wanted to talk to you about it, and they go, well, you wrote Finding Nema. Well, you wrote this and you wrote that. I go, no, listen, I. I was you 20 years ago. So when I come in, I don’t. Everyone has their own way about it. Because in order for us to. To talk about writing, you just want to, like, put all the. You want to put all the credits aside, because at the end of the day, we’re all sitting behind the computer trying to figure out how to get out of a scene or how to get into a scene, right? But when you get younger writers who come to more veteran writers, like, you go, oh, you must know everything. I remember this truly happened to me. I was fortunate enough after Nemo. I was nominated for an Academy Award. And I’m walking down the street, and I see this guy who was in the building that we all had offices together, and he goes, oh, dude. Hey, how’s it going? Oh, congrats, congrats. And I go, oh, thanks. He goes, so, man, you’re nominated. Okay, so what now? What’s happening? Tell me, tell me. And I go, I’m looking for a job. That’s why. And it was the honest to God truth. He goes, what? I go, dude, I’m. Look, I’m out. I’m trying to get a meeting to get a job because. But you. You get the biggest movie and all this. His brain exploded. I go, yeah, but that was that. Now I got to get another one, right? And he’s like, don’t say that. He was joking. Goes, don’t say that to me, man. You’re. You know, I keep. Everybody keeps thinking I’m going to be like, you know, picking and choosing and all this stuff. I go, no, at the end of the day, you got to produce something somebody wants to buy or somebody wants to hire you for. You know, none of that’s going to change. I. So I think the way you deal with other people, just the way you deal with other people, like at a coffee shop, you don’t know what they do. You just strike up a conversation, and if you get on a subject that you both know, in the middle of the conversation, you don’t stop and go, you know, by the way, I am an expert on this whole thing. And you go, well, that would just completely derail the whole conversation. So as a writer, you have to remember where you were and where you want to go. But when you get to the where you want to go, you have to remember where you were, right? You have to go, oh, I remember that. You’re writing TV specs. Oh, I remember that. I, you know, whatever. Or I’m still doing that, or I still can’t figure out how to do this. You have to be relatable, and people will go, oh, you know, he’s a good guy. You know, he’s. I will tell you, I have met people that are, quote, unquote, contemporaries of mine because we’ve been doing it for so long, and they’re jerks. They’re pompous jerks. And I think my mother would always say, oh, they’re just insecure. And it’s true. They’re insecure because what you do and what I do usually don’t bump, Right? They don’t bump. So why would I be better than. I’m not. We’re not. It’s silly. It’s just. It’s just like being a bad human being. So it, It’s. It’s a funny thing that just as you go along just to try to be a nice person, I mean, I know it’s a preachy whatever, but it helps you in the long run because people want to hang out with people that are just normal and you can do random text threads across the country, across the world, on old jokes. Because we met at one of your events, like, 20 some years ago in Burbank, and you said to me, I love the. What was the SNL cartoon?

Bob: Yeah. The Harlem Globetrotters go back to the first Christmas and beat Mary and Joseph at basketball. So they get the last room at the end.

Dave: So Robert Smigel created these TV fun house. And I know Robert Smigel, and I helped him out with one because I was the Catholic guy. He knew that. Knew all about Christmas. So we wrote that thing. It was just the most. But when I met you, didn’t know you from Adam. You came up to go, TV fun House. I love that thing. I was like, oh, my gosh, that’s so cool. So we bonded on, like, just normal goofy stuff, and we’ve been friends ever since, because that’s the way we should be. Right? I mean, it’s just. I don’t know.

Bob: Yeah. Well, first of all, I want to say this because I keep meaning to say it and then not saying it.

Dave: Sure.

Bob: If any of you guys have questions for Dave, put them in the chat so that we can get to them. Secondly, speaking of that TV fun house thing, I say to people, I say to everybody, you know, Dave Reynolds wrote Finding Nemo. Or I say, Dave Reynolds wrote. Wrote Emperor’s New Groove, basically. Usually I say it in the context of Dave wrote a Christmas horror short for me about a haunted fruitcake.

Dave: Yeah.

Bob: He wrote these other things. But to my brother, my brother Matt, I’m like, Harlem Globetrotter’s first Christmas. I met the writer, and he was like, are you me? You. I might as well have said, I met Jesus himself.

Dave: Right, Right. Those are. Those are weird. Those are very strange. You know, you will do things and people will pick, cherry pick these crazy little things out of your life. And I had one where I was on the first year of Conan, where we used to do fake guests all the time, and we used to kind of work with a celebrity guest. And I had one where I had Fran Drescher, if you remember Fran Drescher from the. The. The Nanny. And I used to see her out here in LA with these little. These poofy little dogs, and they’d all wear sweaters. And I was from Chicago, like, what is this? You know? And so I. She came on to promote something, and I came up with a sketch idea, and she was game enough for it. It was really funny. But people call me out. I don’t know why is it was the time. So she comes up and she has. She brings on this dog, and she. We gave the name, like, Trinket or something. It was, you know, this just 93 or whatever it was. It’s one of those things where the celebrity brings a dog in, like, oh. And so my spin was, I. I had a coyote come down from the audience and come and grab the dog and run off the stage like this. And it’s just this coyote comes down and grabs this dog and runs right off stage. And, you know, Conan just goes, what the hell? And he turns to our producer off camera, goes, jeff, what is going on? A coyote just took Fran Dresser’s dog in the middle of the show. And Jeff Ross, our real producer, just said, hey, Conan, Cody’s a big animal. I can’t have him locked up in a green room. He’s got to roam around. How to roam around again. People are just like, what the hell? This is the kind of show that we were doing because. And then we just did all these bumpers, and Fran was really funny about it because she was, like, literally putting up lost dog signs in all our bumper, like a commercial bumpers. And she would find a. Anyway, leash. And it was always. But it was that kind of thing where people would just take these little tiny jokes, remember that kind of thing? And you just keep building off of it because I thought Conan’s version of this talk show, where David Letterman was the snarky anti talk show talk show. Conan was so meta in so many ways about why am I doing this? I’m a Harvard guy. This is what I’m doing for the rest of my life. It was like. And we all of us writers were like, let’s just give them the weirdest, funniest, wackiest, craziest, completely illogical things to do and see if we could break it. And we had. We almost broke it a couple of times because there was one bit. I’ll leave it at that. One bit we had. Do you guys remember there used to be. I’m dating myself. You remember they used to be dial a joke. You call them and you hear a joke. I don’t know if you guys are too young. Anyway, we had Dial a joke, 900 number, and so Conan started a Dial joke, and I had this thing about it was Inspector Gadget because they Inspector Gadget and just go, Okay, here is Conan’s dial a joke. And I had a guy, I think it was Louie Anderson at the time. I can’t remember who. And he just goes, hello, welcome to Conan’s dial a joke. Here’s the joke. This guy, Fred, wants to buy a parrot, and then Conan goes to commercial break. And we were off by a millisecond because our Dial a Joke was 60 seconds long, but Conan’s commercials were 58 seconds long. So every time we came out of commercial break, you would hear, and he shot the guy in the face. Like.

Dave: …you’d hear, “and he shot the guy in the face!” or something equally absurd, and it’d be out of context every single time. It was just this random, jarring punchline that would air right after the commercial break, completely baffling the audience. We ran with it for a few episodes, and it was hilarious to watch people’s reactions. We weren’t even trying to make it connect. We just wanted it to feel as surreal as possible, like, what the hell was that?

Chris: That’s such a classic bit of surreal humor. But I think that shows so much of what made Conan and other shows like it work, especially with writers like you, who really committed to taking those absurd ideas and running with them. There’s something about that kind of humor that’s timeless.

Dave: Exactly! The commitment to the bit, even if it’s weird or doesn’t immediately make sense, is what sells it. It’s about pushing the joke until it becomes something totally unique. And I think that’s really important for all writers, especially comedy writers. You have to trust in the humor, even if it’s out there. Sometimes the stranger it is, the more memorable it becomes. That’s part of why I always tell writers not to censor themselves too early in the process. Let the absurdity fly!

Chris: That’s a great point for all the writers here. Embrace the weirdness!

Bob: Yeah, and sometimes that’s what leads to the most iconic moments. Like, look at The Emperor’s New Groove—it’s full of those unforgettable, out-there jokes that have stood the test of time. So, thank you, Dave, for sharing so much of that creative process with us and for your insights.

Dave: My pleasure! And really, thank you all. This has been awesome. It’s always great to chat about writing, especially with people who get it.

Chris: Agreed! And thank you again, Dave. We’ll wrap up here, but hopefully, we can bring you back for another session in the future.

Dave: Anytime! Thanks, everyone.

Chris: Alright, everyone, a huge round of applause for Dave Reynolds.

Audience: [Applause]

Chris: Thanks for joining, everyone. We’ll see you all soon!