YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Koppelman

lines on the record: 93
first: 2019-03-16
most recent: 2019-03-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No matter what, we're turning something in that's 57 or 58 minutes, maybe 56 if we could do it. We're going to take all of those questions off the table before showing it to the people who put up the money. And I'll tell you, we gave them this cut. And where realistic people, so we knew all the flaws and the things we would want to reshoot before it would go in the air. But, you know, they're going to make it, as maybe some of the audience doesn't know, when you shoot a pilot, there's no guarantee you're going to have a series, right? They've invested a bunch of money. Showtime's known for if they make a drama pilot, it's very likely they're going to put on the air, but you don't know. And so we turn over this pilot. And the first thing they said to us when they called us was, you guys have already done all the stuff that normally takes a month for us to work through with showrunners, which is you've gotten the thing into show shape. And so that's because we looked ahead at best practice, true best practices. And by the way,”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seven minute pilot because every idea they had, everything they want to be there. Now, David and I, because by the time billions had come around, we've been doing this for a long time. And what happens when you give the 67 minute thing is you're inviting a bunch of people to tell you how to get the thing to seven or 58 minutes. And suddenly they're giving you their opinion on it. Also, by you not having to have rigorously with discipline make those decisions, you've inevitably left in a bunch of stuff that you shouldn't have. So Dave and I decided.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a pilot gets greenlit, they give you this amount of money to go make the pilot, and you're in, they've already approved the script, you cast the show together. So that's another one of these things where you're trying to find a way to express your opinions, make sure you have the cast you want while understanding we're in the real world. You're not going to cast a complete unknown to play the lead unless you have a bunch of other ways to say, well, that's okay because in these three spots we have people who aren't. But then once that stuff's done, guys go off, make your show, right? Because once it starts going and before it's edited, there is no feedback they can really give you. You're making the show. You're making the show. You go in the editing room after you have all this material. You know the show is going to fit in an hour-long slot. But most people, when they cut their pilot, because they don't actually have the real limitation of an hour, will turn in a 60.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you're a showrunner of a going concern, you're going to get to prove it out or not prove it out because you're making the show. And I will say, Certainly in the relationship we have with Showtime, all their notes are suggestions. And so Dave and I are getting to prove it out every episode. I will say we did. So, okay, there are a few other things. It's not bad thing to learn the mistakes people have made ahead of you. It's not bad to do research and know, well, what is the third rail in this situation, right? So if the third rail in the situation is don't go more than 3% over budget on a given episode, then you should having conversations, that that's the, that is the third rail, then don't go, then don't be a jerk. You're in an incredibly lucky situation. Find a way to do what you have to do. But there are many other non-budgetary examples. So here's how a pilot works when I lay this example out. There will be parallels to your world.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You constantly have to remember if you're in our position that you're grateful to be in this situation, but that you're not an indentured, you're not so grateful that you're going to prostrate yourself and ruin the thing in the process. And if you remember that, you're in okay shape.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes say that's a stupid idea, but here's the thing if you have the right kind of relationship with the people with whom you work, you can say that because they know that's not your default position and they understand because you're in dialogue with them but not operating from a place, no one's operating from a place of fear, hurt, or misunderstanding. And by the way, if you say that's the stupidest fucking note I ever heard, call them the next day and say, let me tell you what was going on yesterday. Here's the way I'm going to think about addressing it or read this and tell me if you still think so. It's a constant.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sometimes, listen, nobody's nobody's perfect. So there are times I'm working 17 hours a day and somebody gives me a note I really disagree with. And I might say. As you might, I might once in a while”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's like what I tell people is like, that's the baseline. If you can just do that, you're better than most. And then, and then to your point, if on top of that, you can actually consider and actually absorb someone. And sometimes, listen, nobody might be good.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and then, of course, you know, in the show, the suit leaves the room, he rips up, yeah, he rips up the bedroom, and the suit are on their way, and they're like, that was the best meeting ever.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would literally say that is a really interesting idea. I am really going to think hard about that one. And you write it on his legal pen. Okay, okay, what else do you have?”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time. Yeah, we were like, um, so if people haven't seen it, I don't even know what that is. You must watch it immediately. So Artie, the producer of Torn, the legendary Artie the producer. And so typically we see this with young people a lot in here, which is like you give somebody in your world, it's called a note in our world. It's like feedback or like, you know, here's an idea. And you give somebody an idea and like they immediately get their backup, right? Well, they do one of two things. They either take it way too seriously and they try to do everything you tell them or they get their backup and they get offended like how dare you question my vision kind of stuff. And then that sets up a weird dynamic where you feel like you can't talk to them, right? And so both of those are bad, right? One way you basically hijack their creative vision usually to bad effect the other way is you end up with a bad hostile relationship. And so our sole approach to dealing with the network executives in Larry Sanders is a show inside a show, basically. It's a show about a show. His way of dealing with the suits from the network was basically that, you know, they'd say, well, I don't know. I think that, you know, the curtain at the talk show is red. We really think it should be purple.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's our job to make the show, to make the actors comfortable, to make the crew feel empowered, to make sure the show is written, edited, and shot, right? It's also our job to make the show on budget, to communicate with showtime if there's going to be, hey, guess what? This next week it's going to look like we're over. But here's how we're going to solve that the week after. Also to make them feel heard when they're talking about the show. You're so if they're giving notes, make them feel heard, make them know that you actually are listening, then it's really important that we only take the notes that'll make the show better and that we do that in a way that makes them feel better.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can tell the main thing is don't treat them as most of the time, don't treat them with a sense of awe and that they're like their station makes them better than you, but also don't try to condescend to them as though you're the smartest person in the world. And you know the biggest thing? Make them laugh once in a while. That's actually great. I mean, right? Walk into a room, make them laugh, make them feel like you have the answers to their problems and that you're comfortable in your own skin. I mean, so much of what I'm talking about is ingrained sense of comfort in your own skin, is being able to just continue to grow. You must always continue to grow, continue to better yourself, but find a way to sit there in the room relaxed and understand that you're not sitting there with the all-knowing, all-powerful oracle or oz, which is to say, to answer your question.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that when people ask about advantages, yes, getting college paid for was a huge advantage, meaning that I knew I could take certain risks that other people couldn't because I didn't have a massive debt. But much more important are certainly equally important was from a young age, my dad would like put me in situations where I would have to deal with powerful people and I would have to find a way to get the result I wanted. He would let me be in a recording studio when he was making records and sometimes ask my opinion in a room full of incredibly scary, powerful people. He would let me be in meetings and he would leave and then I would conduct stuff. And so I understood from a young age how to interact. How do you talk?”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you, it's so analogous to the way a founder and Will work with the investors, right? The VC, the board, it's up to you to manage that relationship. It's up to you to set the terms. And look, this does get into questions of privilege. Like, as two white men growing up with David's grandfather and my father were pretty successful, we learned that a young age had to talk to powerful people. Most people don't get an education in talking to powerful people.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what was really great about that is then that allowed us to be on set every day because when you're the one who brought the director in and you have this relationship plus John has no ego and he knew we understood the world of poker. Also this incredibly lucky thing was we were the same age as Matt and Edward. And so there was a relationship that developed right away, which was we were going to take these guys and show them the world of underground poker. We were going to be experts about this. John Dahl gave us our limits. He was like, you have to really think carefully about what we say to actors. You can't contradict me. You have to, we're going to work together, but there's a chain of command. And with that, he gave us complete freedom. Within that, he was like, now help me make the movie. But none of it would have happened if we would have pitched a movie, we would have been powerless. We had ownership because we'd written the whole thing and we'd proven we were experts.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The newness of the situation, even though often people in that situation think that they work for the agents. You know, the agents do a really good job of making people feel lucky to have them. But we were aware of the actual leverage in the situation. He got the script to John. John read it. Luckily for us, he really liked it. He came over and met us at our hotel. We all shook hands on it. We knew he was an honorable person. We then got to have this incredibly incredible moment, which now and I think back in it, I kind of can't even believe happened, which is we then called the producers and the studio and we said, John Dahl's going to direct rounders. And they all went, well, that makes no sense. He's supposed to direct this other move for how could you do that? You overstepped and we all said, well, do you want John Dahl to direct the movie? And they all went, yeah.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think part of it is, and this gets into this, I know part of it was that we were, each of us were raised in environments where we saw people take these kinds of risks. And my dad was an entrepreneur, and I saw a lot of the time the way that he would just overstep his position to achieve a result. And so we found out through some sources who directors were that the movie company, who they were interested in making movies with, we triangulated that with people we could get to and found out that our agency represented John Dahl, who was really high on our list. And we said to our agents at the time, listen, we're going to stay in California until you can get us a meeting with John Doll. And they were like, well, how are we going to do that? We said, well, send him this script with a letter that we write, and we'll just wait around. And they had all just competed to sign us, right? So this was the very beginning of this relationship with the agent. And in a way, he had to prove himself to us. So we were with a...”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is something I guess they used to say with pride. And Dave and I were just the writers. We weren't the producers on the movie. We weren't the directors of the movie. But we, and this has to do with continuing to work with Rigor, there was a moment where they were going to hire a director who we thought would fire us off the movie and we thought would do a bad job. We met him. We didn't like him. And so even though it wasn't in our billet, we decided we'd better find a director who they would hire but who would be someone we felt we could work with. And it was really overstepping our position.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they all, nobody owned it. Not one of them said, you know what? I guess they all said I didn't read it. It was my reader. It was my assistant. I meant to read it. I read the wrong script that was about poker and I thought it was your script. It was incredible. But immediately just like it immediately framed the question for me for the rest of my career about who knows what. So then it's bought by Miramax and”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it wasn't that the movie had gotten made and they liked it. It wasn't that the movie was a commercial success. It was simply that you'd”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever you want to say. So the trigger got pulled. Yes Well, so we finished the screenplay. It was first rejected. I mean, it's my favorite story. And I tell them in detail on my blog, which is not a very active blog at Briancoblan.com. But we were rejected by every single agency in Hollywood. One said it was overwritten, another said it was underwritten. I still don't know what either of those terms mean. And I wrote down everything they all said. And this was an incredible Hollywood lesson because in the beginning, every rejection feels so personal. Every rejection also feels so final, right? In the beginning. So I wrote down what everyone said, and then we sold the thing. And that Monday, so we sold the thing over a weekend on a Monday. And by Tuesday, every single agency that had passed called us to try to sign us. And I read them all, their comments. I had it on a yellow legal pad. And I just read them. I said, well, but you said that the thing was overwritten. I did. I read it to them all.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what did you guys when you guys sold rounders or got the gun, whatever you want to say, the trigger got pulled? Yes. So, what did you guys have when you walked into the room to do that?”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just gets out there on the page. Also, it has the effect of I can't be blocked. I've already written three pages. So you're in a state of flow. You're in a state of movement. That is the tool I used to become unblocked when I was 30. And when I was that unhappy and I said I had to try to write something, I had given Dave awake the giant within and Dave gave me the artist's way. And the combination of those things made me realize I had to figure out what it was that I really wanted to do and be. And then the artist's way gave me this tool to try to actualize. And then as soon as I started doing those pages, I was like, oh, I can do this. I can write. I can actually make good on it. And I've done it for 23 years.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I do. I meditate every morning and I do morning pages every morning. Morning pages, like out of Julia Cameron's book, The Artist Way, I do three longhand pages of real brain dump where I just let the pen move for three pages no matter what. And it has this incredible effect on me. It's self-hypnosis. It's a brain dump so that you're putting all the draws.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we've had this success. But I know I can point to a movie like Solitary Man, which was a commercial failure. I mean, it made its money back, but it was not a big commercial success. But I know it's the best movie we ever made. It got these incredible reviews, so I wasn't crazy. That's how I know this question I'm really interested in is delusion versus genius or delusion versus capability. But I wouldn't change anything of the four-year struggle to write that movie. And then we directed the movie because as an artist, if you get to express the thing you want to express and then you get to make it, you've kind of won the odds against are so great. Even the odds against completing something, right? Even the odds against actually showing up, I want to be a writer is way different than I am a writer. I want to be an artist is way different than I am an artist. And we decide where you get when you get to give yourself those designations. But I was so sad so miserable that, and it immediately changed upon doing the work. And so that's, I have had to force myself to have that be the standard.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To answer your question about success, the moment that I was in there for two hours a day, I was charged the rest of the day. So the job that had seemed mundane and bitter and sort of annoying to me was much easier to get through because I'd spent two hours already firing on all cylinders. And so that in the beginning, and of course, along a career, you can hold on to those things and you can let them go because we're all human, which means that we're all prey to, we can all fall prey to being judged by a standard that isn't our own. And we have to find a way to remind ourselves that our own standard is the standard that matters. So, of course, I'm not going to say that the whole time I've been doing this, I only cared about what I felt like when I was doing the work. I will say that each time I have reframed and refocused to remember that what matters is what I feel like when I'm doing the work, it immediately makes me feel better. And then I immediately don't care about the rest of that stuff. Easier to say, of course, you might think easier to say.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Home and tell my kids that they should chase their dreams with rigor. You know, people often just think of it as a relic of the 60s and it's like, hey, pursue your dreams, do your thing. But it's like, well, wait. If you have a dream, if you have a dream, work with incredible rigor and discipline to pursue it. And so I finally got to the place where I knew, and it wasn't about can I have a movie in the movie theaters? What it was about was can I find a way to have the courage to do the work that I'm worried I'll fail at, the work that I think is going to be meaningful. And so I decided to follow my curiosity and my obsessions. And it's not merely following your passion. What it is, is figuring out if I'm obsessed, I'm incredibly curious. If I can get to the root of that, and I can somehow create something out of it that is worthy. First of all, in the doing, I will change and become better.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right Well, let me back up. We're rotating on data. So let me back up to answer that question. I have to tell you where I was before we wrote the first thing and where I was was in a pretty decent state of misery because although I had a job that was well paying and on the surface seemed creative, and although I had, I was lucky enough, even having Amy and then our first child did not was not a salve for the way I was feeling, which was like I wasn't doing this thing that I knew I had to pursue. I wasn't doing the work. I was blocked. And I have this notion that when you're a blocked person, when you allow this creative impulse to be kept down, it dies. And like any other kind of death, there's toxicity that's attached to that. And in the toxicity, I knew would leach out and would actually leach onto the people that I loved because I would become a bitter person. And I wanted to be the kind of person who would come.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, probably not. Other than we got someone would have paid us five grand. But But then later, we did make the mistake of pitching at various times. And I mean, occasionally a pitch has become a movie for us. But for whatever reason, we've found that our strongest work is done in private, and then we take it out and show the world. And that's for us, we find that when you pitch an idea, as you know, when someone comes to pitch you, you're entering into dialogue about this endeavor. And inevitably, what we found is a smart person would say something in the room, because let's assume for a moment that the people across the desk aren't idiots. Someone says something smart. You can't help but have them in your head when you're then going to do the work. And that might be a smart thing, but it really might not be the right thing. Because maybe I've only explained this feeling that I have about what this thing could be. Maybe I've explained it in a way the best I could at that moment, but left to my own, it would take all sorts of different turns. But I have that.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you had shown up and if you guys had just gone and tried to pitch, tried to get an agent at that stage of your careers, would you have been able to do the project?”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, the way I view Need for personal expression. I don't, I actually completely disagree with that quote. I don't understand what the quote is. It's talking about don't be taken advantage of. And it's also kind of making fun of the artistic impulse. It's saying, are you a professional or not? But I would assert you can be a professional. You can act like a professional before you're paid as a professional. It depends how you're going to approach it. It depends what your expectations are. But our expected value, even though it might have been foolhardy to think so, was that there would be something on the other side of it that, and I'll tell you this, the expected value of not doing the work is zero. Like there's no question about the EV of just thinking I'd like to write and not writing.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you're a sucker, you're being taken advantage of, right? Never, never, you know, a doctor wouldn't do surgery for free. A pilot wouldn't fly a plane for free. Writers shouldn't write for free. And I know you're not writing for free per se, but like there is an element to this of like how it feels like a lot of your peers need the deal before they'll write. Is that right?”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me ask this. A lot of professional writers, one of the adages I think a professional writer is never write for free. If you write for free, you're a sucker.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Told them the idea, and the producer offered us $5,000. Now, and said, for five grand, I'll be your partner. I'll give you five grand, but then we're going to share. And if we sell it, we're going to share in the writer's fee. And I'm going to be your partner on the thing. And we were tempted because represented, hey, wait, someone's paying me to write. We're professionals then, right? But we asked some advice a woman named Rachel Harvitz, who was at Fine Line. She happens to be the sister of Adam Harowitz, the Beastie Boys. That's awesome. Rachel was a great executive, and I knew somebody who knew her. And we met and met with her and we said, what should we do? Someone's willing to pay us $5,000. And she said, I don't need to hear the idea.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we met every day for two hours in the morning to write the script. And this was purely on speculation, completely on spec. In fact, this is, I think, a piece of this puzzle that I never told before. Which is that when we had the idea, David met a young producer and”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the character's question would be who the character would be, what the important relationships would be in his life. And then we had to, so then we started outlining it. And then we had to just decide, okay, starting tomorrow, we're going to meet every morning. One mistake I see people make when they decide they have to do some kind of artistic work is they think it means they have to grab that identity so hard that it's to shut out the rest of their identity But what I found was you don't have to do that. I didn't want to put all the pressure on myself of quitting my job and saying I need a beret and an easel and I'm an artist. So what was your job at the time? I was working as an executive in the music business. David was bartending. And so what we did was when he would come off bartending, he would sleep a couple hours and I would get up extra early and we would meet in a storage locker underneath my apartment that had a slop sink in it because it was like an institutional little room, had barely room for both of us to sit. I sat on the floor a lot of the time.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, it was about researching. So I walked into a poker club one night, heard the way the people spoke, saw what it looked like, and immediately recognized nobody's made a movie about this. I can't believe this exists. This should be a movie. I called Dave. He said, that's great. Who are the people in the world that we're going to write about? Who are the characters? Who are we going to care about? So we started going to this poker club most every night taking notes surreptitiously. And then at a certain point we felt we had enough of those notes. We started really figuring out.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rounders is a movie set in the poker underground of New York and Matt Damon and Edward Norton, John Malkovich are the stars of the movie and John Suturo. And it's about a character who's faced with a life decision, which is, is he going to pursue his passion, this thing that he believes he's great at? Even though he's had setbacks. And in fact, these setbacks have threatened his stable life. And so he's at a point where he has to choose the stable traditional road or the road that his heart is telling him to pursue. And that's the central question. I mean, the movie has a lot of sort of heightened dramatic, you know, you want to choose a heightened, dramatic construct in which to hide the theme, because the last thing you want to do, if you want to talk about the theme's, you know, be Eliezer Edkowskowski and just write essays. If you're going to tell it in a fictional construct, make that construct compelling so that only later people wonder and feel what the themes are.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's start with for people who haven't, for our listeners who haven't seen Rounders, maybe a thumbnail description of rounders.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been really important to our ability to continue to do this work, David and me, for this long, is from the beginning, it was only about us getting in a room or going separately in our individual rooms before we would come back together and doing the work itself, trusting that if we found a way to do the work itself well enough, some rewards would come. Some have been really delayed rewards and some have been much quicker. We never seem to know which it's going to be.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was rounders for which we wrote the screenplay. And so today there are people online arguing about that movie, which is incredibly satisfying because as you know when you make these bets, it takes a long time to know if you were right very often. And Rounders was rejected. It was incredibly difficult. The movie wasn't a big box office hit. But 21 years later, people are in ferocious online arguments about the most microscopic moments in the film, which back then, of course, I would have said two things. I would have said we were trying to make a movie like and write a movie that would have the effect on people that movies like Diner had on us, which is that we would watch them over and over again and quote them. And so the fact that that happened is really rewarding. And it was kind of in our minds. But when we set out to do that, we knew that there was only a needle and a haystack chance of success. The doing it, we knew right from the beginning, and I think this is something that has been.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fantastic. So, Brian, thank you for doing this. So, I've always been fascinated. I'm deeply fascinated by the process of creative expression and success for sure in technology. And we think of what we do up here as fundamentally trying to find the most creative entrepreneurs and trying to help them build enormous, both creative and professional and business success around what they do. And it strikes me for a long time that there are a lot of similarities between how the Valley Works and Tech works and how entertainment works, film, television, other forms of entertainment works. There's some big similarities. There's also some big differences, which hopefully we'll talk about Galaxy has obviously been super successful across both film and television for a long time and even before that in music, but I want to focus on film and television. Let's start with this. What was the first project that you and I think as you and your partner David? First project that you view that you and David were responsible for creating, selling, and making.”
2019-03-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source