NEW PODCAST: "The Writer's Room with Sam and Jim"

Hey, Sam, you come up with that intro line?

You didn't tell me that was today.

Hello, everybody.

Welcome to the Writer's Room with Sam and Jim.

This is the show where we bring writers

into our Writer's Room to help them work on

and develop their story.

For this introductory episode, though,

we're gonna talk about who we are,

how we got into the business,

and why we're doing this podcast.

So let's start with where we are now.

We're executive producers on Carnival Row for Amazon,

we were on Daredevil for Marvel and Netflix,

we created a show called Haven

that ran on the SyFy network for six seasons,

we've sold pilots and movies,

we're established writers.

I don't know how this happened.

Oh, wait a minute.

I do know how this happened.

You just don't want to remember sometimes.

That's true.

So the question is, how did we get here,

and why are we doing this podcast?

And when you ask a writer why,

you always get a story.

And so here's our story.

We actually met as freshman roommates in college

in St. Paul, Minnesota,

a big city Jew.

Small town Indiana Catholic.

And we were the ones that got along in the dorm.

We had a lot of things in common,

but one of the-

None of which were obvious.

But we loved television,

and we knew we wanted to be involved in it.

We watched an awful lot of TV our freshman year

when we should have been in class

or doing other productive things.

Right, and we'd have those long,

geeky Comic-Con kind of discussions

about Star Trek and everything else that we would watch,

and the movies we would sneak off to.

And when we graduated college,

we thought,

all right, we got to do this.

We want to write for television.

And we had no idea how to do it,

and we were in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Which is not an easy place to get started

in the TV business.

No.

And that's when I suckered Jim.

Although it's actually my own fault,

because I was working for a bookstore,

and the guy who owned the bookstore

wanted to put in a restaurant to go with the bookstore.

I stupidly said to Sam,

hey, this guy wants to open a restaurant.

I think we could do this for almost no money.

And little did he, he didn't say,

and what little money we do have,

we could lose all of it.

That was kind of a given.

It's a restaurant.

But I said to Jim,

let's do this,

because we know nothing.

We're 22, 23 years old.

Let's open this restaurant.

We'll meet a million people.

We'll know about characters.

We'll have something to write about

when we actually sit down and write.

Which was kind of true,

although there's a lot more efficient ways to do that.

And then we opened the restaurant,

and it became this huge hit.

Like lines around the block,

three-hour waits,

people, grown-ups coming to this restaurant.

It was hilarious.

Trying to bribe us,

to get reservations on a Saturday night.

We were trying to get the kids from our own college

to come for soup, salad, sandwich,

and we wound up with BMWs around the block

and cutting-edge food.

Yeah, and all of a sudden,

we look up five years later,

and this little 40, 50-seat restaurant

called Table of Contents in St. Paul, Minnesota,

went from that to two of them,

one downtown with a martini bar and catering,

and we now had-

Banquet room.

And we had 100 employees and managers

and accountants and a lawyer.

And it was like, what?

How did this happen in just a few years?

And we were sitting at the counter,

and we were drinking Voflico champagne.

That's right, on New Year's Eve.

And I said, Jim, tomorrow morning,

I'm going to start writing at 10 o'clock.

Will you be there?

And I showed up.

And you showed up, and we started writing,

and it was terrible.

But we were having fun.

And we arranged our schedule so that we could write.

And we wrote, and we wrote, and we wrote.

And every now and again, we'd get somebody,

a friend of a friend,

who kind of might have been associated

with Hollywood in some way,

or at least he pumped gas somewhere

in the vicinity of California.

Whose dentist once worked on some agent's teeth.

Right, and maybe they'd read our script

and give us notes.

And we did that.

And we finally got to a place

of what we thought was mediocrity.

And we thought, that's enough to move to LA, isn't it?

And the funny thing is, we weren't mediocre.

We were not very good at all.

But we had written 10 scripts.

We had done, we'd gone as far

as we thought we could go.

We felt like we had to be here to go further.

That's right.

So Jim talked his wife into moving,

and I talked mine into moving.

I actually got married,

and we put all the stuff in in the U-Haul

and drove to California.

And we got very lucky, because as it happens,

our wives' careers both took off instantly.

They got here, they immediately did much better,

which turned out to be really important,

because our career did not.

That's one of the most important things as a writer,

is to marry someone who's not a writer or an actor.

But we got out here, and I remember the thing

I really wanted most was to get into a writer's room.

And we went to Everyone Loves Raymond,

and we were watching a taping,

and we asked the warm-up guy

if we could get into the writer's room.

And he actually went down to the floor of the stage

and asked one of the writers.

And I waited, and it was like this long beat,

and then I saw the writer shake his head, no way.

So the whole time we were out here,

we thought, we still owned the restaurants

back in Minnesota, and we thought we could get

some income out of them, it would help keep us going

while we figured out this new career.

And then 9-11 happened, and instead of doing that,

our restaurant business got destroyed,

along with a lot of the hospitality business

around the country.

Yeah, and suddenly, I was on the front lawn

of my house with my infant, newborn baby in my arms

when some dude in a silver Jetta pulled up

in front of my house, walked up and said,

hi, are you Sam Ernst?

And I said, yeah.

You've been served.

I've been served.

And we got a lawsuit for $1.3 million,

which is just one of the things that we owed

for the restaurants.

So there we were with bankruptcy hanging over our heads,

and luckily, we managed to settle it for almost nothing

because we had almost nothing.

That's right.

And then we sold the pilot.

And things started picking up for us.

We found our way into the dead zone, writer's room.

Yeah, where we got to sit there, and finally,

we're in a writer's room, and it was just as cool

as we hoped it was going to be.

And luckily, we'd gotten some good advice

from some other senior people to,

when you show up in a writer's room, say nothing.

Keep your mouth shut for a couple of weeks and just listen.

That's right.

And we learned so much, and we got to see

how the senior writers could take ideas

and how could they spin them out

and how they could evaluate them.

And it just was unbelievable for us.

It was a revelation, right?

It's people who actually know how to break story

and write it without going down the same blind alleys

that we'd been going down for years.

And it was the best experience.

And then that was over.

And then we thought, well, maybe that's it.

But we had one.

We had one more pilot we'd sold.

That's right.

It was based on a Stephen King book,

and we sold it to ABC, and our hopes were really high.

We turned it in, and then the Writers Guild

promptly went on strike.

That's right.

And we were now holding picket signs

in front of the very studio that had bought our pilot.

It was so bad.

Right in front of the same building.

It was sitting on a desk through some window

that I could see from where I was picketing

on the sidewalk was our pilot just waiting.

Maybe the worst moment of that whole thing,

was when the man responsible for making the decision

of whether he would pick up our pilot,

or at least make it, his name was Steve McPherson,

and he's the president of ABC,

and he drove right past us, and he flipped us off.

And I felt like, you know, the president...

Maybe this isn't going to work out so well.

And as it happened, it didn't, right?

It didn't.

As soon as the strike was resolved,

everybody's development, like there were a couple of shows

that came out of that season's work,

but they threw everything away, including ours,

and we were...

And we were in the wilderness once again,

but not that long.

And maybe a year later,

thanks to the producers not giving up,

we got the call that our show had been sold

to another studio and a network, Sci-Fi Channel,

wanted to buy it.

Not only buy it, but make 13 episodes of it.

And we went from nothing to working insane number of days,

getting the show on the air.

And we went from going in the desert

to...

To suddenly, we were executive producers

on a TV show we'd created.

And then there we were being flown to Nova Scotia

to see the production in action,

to help out and shoot the pilot of our series.

So not long before this,

I remember there's the Silver Jetta pulling up

and suing us, me and Jim, for $1.3 million.

And now we're driving in a transportation vehicle

and we're in the wilds of Nova Scotia.

And we get to a building and it...

The sign is...

They made a sign and it says,

Haven Production Offices.

And I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

And Jim and I walk in and there's all these people

and they're working hard on the...

Producing the first episode that we had written.

And I thought,

who are these people that are taking this bullshit

that we came up with seriously?

And they did it.

And we had to write episode

and I was sitting in the corner in the production offices

on my laptop writing episode two and three.

And we wrote as fast as we possibly could.

And we got through the season and my agent called me.

Our agent called me and she said,

listen, a lot of people, they're broke

and then they do well.

And so don't go out and buying any Maseratis or...

Don't do anything crazy with the money

because it's not guaranteed this is going to keep working out.

And I thought about this and I said to her,

you know, I bought a couch.

Is that okay?

Because there was no effing way

I was going to go spend that money.

I was taking that money and it was like cream.

I was applying to my body for all the burns

that we'd had for the last bunch of years

and September 11th and all that crap that had gone down.

And we were writing and we were getting paid for it

and we were seeing on the screen and it was magic.

So fast forward, it's a number of years later now.

It's all kind of worked out for us.

We've had a career.

Who knew it finally happened.

We were able to make it work out.

And then we found ourselves thinking about a podcast,

about how we got into this.

And back when we were in Minnesota,

uh,

way back in the dark snowy days of Minnesota,

there was a column on the internet called Wordplay

by Terry Rossio.

He and his partner, Ted Elliott,

created Pirates of the Caribbean

and a whole bunch of other movies.

Shrek, Zorro.

Yeah, very successful writers.

And so Terry wrote a series of columns

about what screenwriting is really like,

how it works.

And there in Minnesota,

where there's a screenwriter behind every palm tree,

which is to say none,

to help you try to learn how to do this stuff.

That was our guide.

And we thought, well,

what if we could do something to help other people

learn how to write and follow their aspirations?

And that's when we remembered that moment

where we thought,

can we just get into the Everyone Loves Raymond

writer's room?

We'll learn so much.

And we went to the Dead Zone writer's rooms years later

and we learned so much.

And we thought maybe we could create a writer's room

in a podcast and invite aspiring writers in

and show them how we break story

and help them work out their story.

And for those people that,

aren't, don't want to be writers,

but are curious as to how you can put a few people in a room

and have them generate story after story,

how they find the fun in it and the drama in it

and the comedy and how do they do it?

Well, you're not going to learn that from us,

but you will learn,

you'll learn our version of that.

Right. And, and, you know,

hopefully you'll pick up some tips and tricks along the way.

You know, we want to invite everyone to participate

in this with us.

Come join our writer's room,

cash in on this chance to have, you know, a chance to write,

have the experience that we didn't

until we actually got hired on a show.

A chance to learn from people who've done this for a while.

Now, and again,

we're going to bring in established writers

that we've worked with or that we know

so they can help us break story.

Every single week,

all we want to do is talk about how we write television,

the craft of making television

and why we love the jobs that we have now.

And hopefully along the way,

you'll find out why the writer's room is always a ton of fun.

And we invite people to call, you know,

to reach out to us on Instagram,

or on Twitter and call into the show

and we will help you break your idea.

And then everyone else could learn the way that we learned,

which is watch people and participate with people

in breaking television shows.

Our producer, Jair Zamora-Thal,

is working the mixing board.

Our logo was designed by Julien de Bar-Moncler

and our music was provided by Buda Rays

out of Austin, Texas.

If you want to get in touch,

we are at the Salmon Gym on Instagram,

and Twitter,

and you can find us on Facebook and YouTube

as The Writer's Room with Salmon Gym.

And if you like hanging out in the room with us,

give us a follow on Apple Podcasts,

Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And tell a friend, would you?

So we can get J.R. paid.

Thanks everyone.

See you next week.