Erik Bork, 2x Emmy 2x Golden Globe Writer | Earth To The Moon & Band of Brothers

Welcome to the success story podcast, I'm your host, Scott Clary. On this podcast, I have candid interviews with execs, celebrities, politicians, and other notable figures, all who have achieved success through both wins and losses, to learn more about their life, their ideas, and their insights. I sit down with leaders and mentors and unpack their story to help pass those lessons on to others through both experiences and tactical strategy for business professionals, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between, without further ado, another episode of the success story podcast. Before we start today's episode, a quick note from our sponsor, Enthrown, a fully comprehensive equity management platform. This is what they do. Business owners, are you looking to raise capital and unlock shareholder liquidity? Before hiring expensive consultants or brokers, you need to know about Enthrown. Private businesses use Enthrown to unlock liquidity without bloating costs. With Enthrown's equity management suite, you'll be able to create liquidity, engage with shareholders, and control your company's destiny, all in one secure platform. Get your free guide to liquidity. Go to enthrown.com slash liquidity. That's enthrown.com slash liquidity. All right, thanks again for joining me today. I am sitting down with Eric Bork. Now, Eric is a screenwriter, best known for his work on the HBO mini series, Band of Brothers, and from the Earth to the Moon, Eric has won two Emmys and two Golden Globes as part of the production team. He's also sold series, pitches, and written pilots at NBC and Fox, worked on the writing staff for two primetime dramas, and written feature screenplays on assignment for companies like Universal, HBO, TNT, and Play Tone. He teaches screenwriting for UCLA, National University, and the writer's store. He offers some consulting and education, as well as he has released a book, The Idea, the seven elements of a viable story for screen, stage, and fiction, which is released in 2018. I'm very excited. Thank you so much for sitting down, Eric. I'm excited to unpack your story, understand more about you, what you've done, screenwriting, storytelling, all that stuff. Totally my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Scott. No, it's my pleasure. So this is about you. So tell me, how do you get into screenwriting? Walk me through from wherever you started your career and what are your passions that led you here. Yeah. Well, different people start different ways, but the path I ended up taking was kind of a tried and true path. I grew up in Ohio and I became interested in writing and the arts as I entered college and thought about music or fiction writing or moviemaking, circling those different creative professions just because in high school, I became obsessed with the arts and creative artists I admired in those various fields, certain movies, filmmakers, especially inspired me. The movie world, the world according to Garb, with Robin Williams, which came out when I was in high school, was a particular inspiration for some reason to me. Partly it's about a writer and it's about writing, but something about the storytelling of that spoke to me and made me think about writing in a different way as opposed to just being a consumer of stories I started thinking about wanting to express myself in that way. So I ended up going to film school, my undergraduate degree was in film production in my home state. And after school, I decided to move out to LA, which is typically the thing you do if you want to pursue screenwriting even today. The internet has made the world smaller, but most people that succeed in this field do end up making the move to LA, usually in their 20s, right out of college kind of thing. And a very helpful thing to do, which I did, is to seek employment within the industry very often, you know, the classic mail room at William Morris kind of thing, you know, as an assistant, as a go-fer, as a, you know, as either an on-set production assistant or an in-the-office, secretarial assistant type of entry-level position. And to just do that as your day job while you're working on your bigger dream, whether that's writing, directing, producing, acting, etc. Acting's harder because actors need to be free during the day for rehearsals. So they end up waiting tables, I'm sorry, for auditions. So they often end up waiting tables at night and not working in industry job, but writers who can write at any time, morning, evening, weekends, whatever, you know, often are best suited trying to get more of like an office job in the business. So that was my intent when I moved to LA, and I immediately applied with the temp agencies that service the studios and the other big entertainment companies, like the agencies, and started temping at Fox Studios in the kind of corporate office tower next to their studio in the International Home Video Department. So very, very corporate, non-creative environment, but I was at a studio and I had a paying job, and I was able to pay my rent from that. And that was my starting point, and I always was planning to try to make it as a screenwriter with the kind of naive, I guess, idealistic hope that I might break through not quite aware of just how competitive it is, which is often a good thing when you're starting out, so you don't get too intimidated by that. So it began a lifestyle of working nine to five and then writing an hour a day kind of thing. And I was writing feature screenplays, feature film screenplays I'd written one or two in college, and maybe one or two cents, and they would take me like six months through a year to finish, and they weren't very good, but you learn your craft, and you join writers groups, and you try to get feedback, but mostly I was just working my job and sort of sponging what it was in the film and TV industry on that assistant level, because tempering soon turned into more long-term assignments. I got to work as a writer's assistant on a TV show. Picket Fences show that David Kelly created, which won the Emmy. It's first two years for Best Drama. I was on the first season. Writer's assistant is like really a plum job for an aspiring TV writer especially, because you're working around the writing staff for them, and they get to know you, and you may have a shot at writing something for the show if you do it long enough. I was only there for one season, so that didn't happen, but I did get a lot of exposure to professional writing from that one season, and started to realize TV writing might be of interest. And so I started writing half-hour comedy spec scripts, as they call them, for existing hit shows like Frazier. I took a class at UCLA's extensions writers program, which is a great program, which I've since taught for, as you mentioned, where you can just take one-off classes, and I took a class in sitcom writing, which I've never tried before, and I started writing this Frazier script, and eventually gave the script to a writer friend who'd also worked on picket fences as an assistant, and this is where the networking of being in that business at a low level is helpful. One of the reasons is helpful. She had just signed with an agent. She was also an aspiring writer, and she showed that script to her agent. The agent liked it enough to want to read something else, so I sent her my latest feature script that no one was interested in, and she liked that, and she had enough to sign me and start working with me, and so she started giving me feedback on my stuff. Well, on the Frazier script, she wasn't ready to send it out, but she liked it enough to sign me with it. So she gave me all this notes and feedback and had me rewrite it, and eventually liked it enough to kind of try to send it out to her contact. She was a very junior level new agent at a small agency, but it was great for me because she was very hands-on, which is what I really needed, somebody to give me feedback, who was invested in what I was trying to do, and liking what I was trying to do with those things are key. And so she immediately said, right, your next one, and then your next one. So in the course of a year or two, I cranked out a mat about you and a friend's script between the first and second season of friends. So these three sitcom scripts that she was helping me with and then trying to sort of hawk in the industry, the eventual goal being to get a job on a sitcom as a junior lowest level staff writer. That was what I was hoping for, and thinking was my best shot at that point. It might be a show I didn't like, it might be a show that got canceled in its first season, which they usually do, but it would be a job as a writer, and that would be the start, hopefully, of something. That's a grind, eh? That's my good, isn't it? Yeah. But things took an unexpected turn, which was in my day job, where I had been temping and working as a writer's assistant on that show, picket fences, and then temping again, which meant the human resources department at Fox would assign you to anywhere and everywhere at their studio as short-term temp assignments. They assigned me eventually to Tom Hanks' production company. Tom Hanks had just left his production company, well his production company had just left the Disney studios where they'd had like a two-year deal or something, and signed a new deal at Fox. You know, big stars like him, the studios will offer a development deal, which basically means you have a production company quote unquote with offices that they pay for and staff that they pay for and money with the hope that you'll bring ideas of things you want to produce and really star in would be their real hope if it's a Tom Hanks production deal to them first because they sort of own the first writer refusal to any project you bring forth. And so he had one of those deals like most of the big actors do, and all he had at his company at that point was his long-time assistant, who was the person that went with him when he traveled on location and just took care of everything, you know, his travel, his everything. And so I was brought in as attempt to help her get their offices set up at Fox because I knew the Fox lot by then, the lot, the studio lot, and she was new to it. So eventually that turned into a full-time kind of second assistant position, one in which Tom, I got to know Tom as my boss and he knew I was an aspiring writer, but I knew well enough to not try to push that on him or to try to get his help with that. My job was to answer the phone and do all the basic assistant work. So I was in that job for a couple of years when I got to the point where I had this agent and I'd written sitcom scripts, the friends and the mad about you and everything. And his assistant eventually offered suggested that Tom should read one of those scripts, which I would never ask, but okay. So Tom Hanks read one or two of those scripts and pronounced me talented. He basically told me, my talents were being wasted and stuff like that. And I'm going to be a big TV writer someday, et cetera, which was awesome. And and then a few months later, as I recall, offered me this life-changing promotion, which was instead of being one of his assistants, I would be more like what we would usually call like a junior development executive in the business, although we weren't calling it that, where I would have my own assistant and I would be helping him to develop projects he wanted to produce. Most specifically, the project that became from the Earth to the Moon, a 12-hour mini-series about the Apollo program, dramatizing and recreating the entire program the way the movie Apollo 13 had done without one mission. Tom was a lifelong fanatic about this space program and he had just done Apollo 13. So he pitched this idea to HBO that he would executive produce first thing he'd ever really produced, this big mini-series. And they said yes. So he wanted me to help him kind of figure out the mini-series initially, help write a kind of outline or treatment or Bible document for what the mini-series would be. We had the rights to a book, a recent great book called Man on the Moon by Andy Chacon. And so from that book, I worked with him to kind of figure out like three or four page treatment for each episode, which eventually he liked, he gave it to HBO, they liked it, and that became the blueprint from which we looked to find writers to write the individual scripts. Eventually I was asked, again, somebody else not me asked on my behalf, maybe I should write one of the scripts. And so that became my first professional writing gig that I got to write one of the scripts for this mini-series that I was also helping to produce on a very junior apprentice level. By the time it was all said and done three years later, I'd written one and rewritten other writers we'd hired on a couple of others, like done a lot of writing on various episodes, and got a co-producing credit as basically part of the creative team from the beginning all the way to the end, which meant when it won the Emmy, as you said, I got to the Emmy because there were like ten of us with producer titles and you all get, you know, when it won't. No, no, but still it. Don't, don't, don't discount an Emmy. I don't. That's it. I'm going to the sidebar before I want you to keep going now. I just want to clear something up so I understand because there are people that aren't as involved obviously in the screenwriting portion of a business listening to this. So when you take on a project like this, why do you get all these other writers to work on it? Is it just too much for one, like I feel like, how do you eliminate this jointedness of a piece when you have all these well? You have somebody at the top who's overseeing it all and making sure that it is cohesive creatively. And if that means having another writer come in and rewrite, which I became one of one of the couple of writers that was doing that, Tom did some of that himself as well. You know, rewrite scripts to make them all more cohesively, creatively. You know, you normally have one or two people at the top who are supervising and possibly rewriting and reshaping the scripts or hiring somebody else to rewrite until you're happy with them. But yeah, it's a big thing to write everything yourself. I mean, like Julian Fellows with Downton Abbey did it. He wrote every episode. David Kelly was notorious for writing almost every episode back in the picket fences and then like Alimic Beel in the practice days. But for most writers and most productions, you know, you want a staff of people and somebody at the top who we're seeing but not doing it all themselves. That makes sense. So after the Emmy, and well deserved, that was your first big break and you got to do me out of it. That's not bad. That's the fairytale element of my story because most screenwriters, most of the work that they do, they don't get paid to do, like they write and hope someone will buy it. And then when they do get paid to write, most of the time they get paid to write, the things don't even get produced because Hollywood will, you know, pay 10 writers to write things or buy, you know, scripts from 10 writers for every one that they actually make, right? And so not only did the first thing that I wrote professionally get produced, I was a producer on it and had some like a bit of creative power over seeing other writers and for some extent and rewriting other writers and having a say in the total production, not the main say, but of voice in the room with Tom and a couple of other key people. And then it won the Emmy and I got to win the win in Emmy as well. So yeah, it was a total fairytale first experience of a first break into the business. So where do you go from there? Straight down. Yeah, that's going to say that's the hard thing to reproduce. I mean, Banda Brothers was a very similar thing that happened a few years after that where again, it was about a three year period where I was there from the beginning with other writers and other producers, but had an ongoing writing and producing role, multiple episodes, seed in the room, a voice in the creative, you know, discussions, a handful of people that were making the big decisions. Steven Spielberg was exactly producing that with Tom. So I got to know him a little bit in various meetings and creative discussions and that also won the Emmy's Golden Globes. And I got to share in that again, I again had a producing title a higher one this time and a and writing to credit on some of the episodes. So and then that, you know, project I think did even better than from the earth to the moon was even more well received and then that enabled me to sort of try my hand in the larger industry with bigger agents who were bullish about sending me out and having me pitch my ideas for series and, you know, vie for positions on high level, you know, prime time shows and, you know, get assignments writing script, you know, feature scripts. And I still did some stuff with Tom's company and with some other people I'd met on those many series, you know, other projects, but, but, you know, haven't really topped me into others since we're going a lot of different things, but, but, you know, 20 years later, that's still the kind of towering thing on my resume, although I've been writing every day for those 20 years and, you know, whether it was something that got produced or not, whether I sold it and got paid for it upfront or after writing it or not, you know, the life of a screenwriter can be very circuitous and up and down. You're hot, you're cold, they love you, they hate you, you know, you're, you're, they want to buy everything, they don't want to buy anything, you know, you try different genres, different media. So I've done a lot of different things, but, um, yeah, that's still my biggest credit and, you know, these days I'm writing, you know, I've kind of like, decide I really wanted to write and direct movies, which I always want to do, but never really had done. So these days I'm like writing, like micro budget independent features with the goal of raising the money to direct one, which I have a couple that are close to that happening, having done a short a couple of years ago, a short film that I wrote and directed and took to film festivals and stuff. So I kind of had a very Hollywood career for a while and lately it's more like trying the indie route while also teaching and like you said, coaching writers writing a book about screenwriting. So, um, that's kind of been my evolution. No, I appreciate, I appreciate the, um, I guess, not only like just the story that that you've lived in and sort of has right where you are today, but also like the understanding of not, not luck, but just like the, uh, I don't know, the craziness of what a career as a screenwriter seems to be. And I think that it's very different from a lot of traditional, traditional career paths because, you know, you can hit it out of the park and then, and like you said, like the next time you write something, it's not the right flavor, you know, it's not the right style, it's not the right genre. So, and it's because to get to the point where you get to know is so much work. That's what, that's what blows my mind. It's not a little bit of work. I'm sure there's like, you don't write the whole thing before you get a known, but ensure you write a majority of it. Like it's not like a itch. It's like hours of work. Well, even a, even a pitch is hours of work, but yeah, a lot of times writers are writing a full script and hoping that the full script will, and that's many, many, many hours of work. So, you know, it's maybe a kind of like starting a small business where there's a whole lot of sweat equity. There's a whole lot of unpaid hours of conceptualizing and working on something and reworking it and then eventually, you know, presenting it to venture capital and they may just say, no, across the board, you know, it's kind of similar that I suppose in a way. Screenwriters, you know, tend to not be able to have a stable long term predictable employment pattern. It's a very insecure, it's like being an actor. You're just, it's job to job. But of course, we all know of actors who are always working, like the biggest stars at the top of the industry. And there are writers like that too. The vast majority of people that have professional screenwriting careers don't have a sustained decade plus, you know, constantly, you know, working for money and being paid and having a kind of like stable income. If there's a saying, you can make a, you can't make a living, but you can make a killing at screenwriting. So, you know, short term killing and then not even a living and then maybe a killing again and sort of back and forth. So, it's, it's definitely challenging in that way. And can I ask, um, what, what are the things that you have to be able to do to be a screenwriter as opposed to somebody who writes a novel? It's so simple for you, but I'm just asking as a as a total layman, like, what are the differences? Well, a novel, you know, is, I mean, there's a lot of things that are similar, but the differences are a novel goes directly to readers. It's a consumer product in and of itself. You still need the middle people to get it there, the agents, the editors, the publishers, but ultimately what you create is what the consumer consumes directly. Your words on a page, whereas a screenwriter is creating a blueprint for a film or TV show where no one's going to really ever read your script. Your script is the thing they're going to make something from. And so you're not communicating directly with the consumer unless you are the one that then directs and makes the movie from a script. You are, you are putting in motion a kind of almost business plan that if it's successful needs a lot of funding and a lot of other people to bring it to to the consumer, like a small business word, whereas a book, anybody can write a book, self-publish it, put it on the internet, give it away, whatever, without anybody in between, although you won't get millions of paid customers if you don't have a big publisher and all that. So you understand that what you're doing isn't the finished thing. And unfortunately, for most screenwriters, you're not treated with the respect of a novelist either because you're just the one writing up the plan. Somebody else makes the product. And if you're not involved in making the product, you are somewhat discardable and replaceable. So you kind of have to accept that. Unless you get to a point where you're writing and directing, if it's in the movie business or in the TV world, if you're writing and creating a show where you're the showrunner and the executive producer and the boss of everybody, those are the places where a screenwriter can become sort of more empowered. But most screenwriters who are even working professionally, they're answering to people above them who have the power to fire them and have them rewritten and, you know, just and change what they've written when they actually make it and so forth. So there's that aspect in terms of the work of it, screenwriting tends to have a more of a complicate, not complicated, a more of a structure to the form that one has to learn and execute. Novels can sometimes be, depending on the genre, a little more freeform, a little by the seat of your pants, writing without really knowing where it's going, whereas most screenwriters like relentlessly structure and plan an outline and advance and don't jump in with both feet if they're smart until they have something that really has a whole scale to it that feels like it's going to work. So you're building a building as opposed to just sort of telling a story that can ramble wherever you want to go because the process of consuming film and TV is different from a novel in a lot of ways and grabbing an audience in that visual medium and the kind of things that your characters are doing or saying or facing, you know, there's certain kind of novels that are very cinematically like, say, the divinci code or something where the difference isn't that great, but more literary fiction compared to what one has to do when they're writing screenplays. For the most part, the difference is pretty great in that respect in terms of the pre-planning and the kind of structural conventions that you need to abide by. Unless you're doing something really already, which is probably going to have a very niche audience, but if you're going more mainstream, there's a lot of knowledge one has to take on and master. I suppose there is, there is for novels too. I'm not saying it's harder. It's just it's like maybe more restrictive in a way. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And that brings me to the question that I really wanted to get into. So you wrote the novel seven elements of a viable story for screen stage or fiction. So not fiction, but not novel. Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So what are what are the seven elements of a story? What makes a good story? So the book, yeah, the book's called The Idea and then the subtitle is the seven, the seven elements of a book. Oh, my God. I just put it all in. It's okay. So the idea, the idea, it's really based on my experience, both as a writer and as somebody coaching and teaching aspiring writers, that the big mistake people tend to make as I alluded to earlier was they jump into writing a script before they've really vetted the idea and the concept and the basic structure and approach of the story, which is where most of the big decisions that matter to its future success or failure lie. And if you have a professional agent or manager as a writer, they will want to hear your ideas before you spend much time and they'll knock, they'll talk you out of most of them because they understand that. But aspiring writers tend to not have anybody to do that unless they have somebody like me that they find and hire to do it. And so they tend to just jump right in and start writing with an idea that if any professional heard it, they would have said, and here's why. And so the book is presenting what those elements are that you want your idea to really have. And the seven elements are an acronym for the word problem, P-R-O-B-L-E-M, because every story in my view is really about a problem. A problem that takes the whole story to solve that you're hoping the audience is emotionally invested in and wanting to see solve and relating so much to the main character of that story that they almost become them emotionally and they feel like it's all happening to them and they get cut up in the emotion of what's going on and and there's an exciting entertaining to watch process. Well exciting, maybe the wrong word, some genres, it's not so much exciting, but entertaining in one way or another process by which the main character is trying to solve their problem. So within that sort of fundamental description of a good story, there's a few of my seven elements kind of embedded there. The seven elements that form the word problem are punishing, relatable, original, believable, life-altering, entertaining, and meaningful. And so ideas or scripts that don't work or don't impress the right people or don't do well with an audience if they happen to get in front of an audience. Usually have flaws at their basic concept level in one or usually more than one of those seven categories. And so the book kind of spends a chapter on each one of those and talks about what that really means and what the pitfalls are and what the challenges of it are and also how TV is a little bit different than film and how one has to execute within the series world versus the future film world. I mean it also applies to like it says stage screener fiction to stage or commercial fiction as well, but since I'm mainly a screenwriter, my examples are mostly from the screenwriting world. And I just want to because I was looking through some of the main concepts that you spoke about and I was looking actually to do some past interviews that you did just sort of prefer this. And one of the one of the interviews you did was sort of focus on what is that viable idea? You mentioned before that some ideas are not viable or some ideas will get shot down. So what does make a good idea to start with? Well it's those seven things with more explanation to what each of those are. So it's an idea in which the problem at the center of the story is going to punish the main character who we're going to be relating to emotionally and it does it in a somewhat original way where everything that happens feels believable, where the stakes of what the characters grappling with are life altering, meaning they're big enough stakes that really matter to their life. So that's why they're so obsessed with and focused on solving the problem. The process of them addressing it needs to be entertaining which means it needs to bring the audience to emotional states that they consume that genre to access whether it's comedic emotions, whether it's romance, whether it's action, thrills, etc. And the last one meaningful just means ideally there's more being explored beyond the surface plot that has some resonance about the human condition in general that the audience feels they connect with and that stays with them in some way, which is maybe the most optional of the seven. If you really hit the other six you might have a commercial success that's sort of forgettable but fun to watch like a Transformers or something. But for writers starting out trying to establish themselves it helps if what you're writing feels really meaningful as well. And the works that are lasting in our culture that people look back on and revere that stand the test of time tend to have that. Have you seen? Have you seen an evolution in the type of content that people seem to gravitate towards? Where that question is coming from is I'm thinking of more people watching on other mediums like on on YouTube, on Netflix. It seems like people are looking towards other types of platforms and traditional films. I'm wondering if the type of style and even the way things are produced and directed and written. Is that change or is that still the classics are and what rings true in terms of what is a piece that is like just a blockbuster film. I don't know just has that always been the same or is it changing? I think the classic elements that I talk about in the book are not really changing that much. I think there are surface changes that are a little more on a superficial level but that those basic elements of what makes a compelling story aren't really changing. I mean the thing nowadays with Netflix and Amazon and Apple and all these different venues for one's work, especially television work means that for professional writers there are more places to sell your content and reach an audience and also more of an openness to different kinds of subject matter and material because it's not just like three main networks and they all have to reach 20 million viewers or it's a failure. That's great in the sense that different kinds of stories can be told in terms of the subject matter. But I think those elements of story that my book talks about still have to be there for things to be really successful. Although there's a greater range of subject matter that you can apply those story elements to. Obviously there's the binge watching phenomenon on the idea of serialized television that people don't wait and watch one every week but they watch them all at once and that's somewhat changes. Some of the storytelling elements on some series, the way episodes are structured but that's a fairly minor superficial change in my view compared to the larger concepts that I'm talking about in my book and you know I still think most people are consuming content that are like half-hour comedy episodes, one-hour drama episodes, 90-minute plus feature film. You know I mean yeah there's TikTok and there's YouTube and there's you know shorter content, people watch on phones and so forth but I think that's a different experience than what one is typically looking for when they sit down to really consume a story. It's more like you're watching a comedy sketch or you're watching something that's quick diversion as opposed to okay I'm relaxing in the evening on a couch and I want to see something and I think or I'm going to a movie theater. I think I think of there you still have the same basic desires that audiences tend to have maybe it will change more over time but I don't see a convincing argument that it that it already is. And I think that you know when you speak with the elements of this story I agree with you. What I'm curious about and what is up in the air for me as a technology or just like what are natural habits of viewing things have changed like our movie theaters ever going to be as prominent as they were six months ago or have people's habits permanently changed and shifted to new or are we just going to go back the way that we always saw movies which means that if we are then that's fine but if we aren't then all those blockbusters are now going to be launching on other mediums and the people are going to be gravitating towards those Netflix's and Disney's and and all those other ones. Just I was thinking about that and I've asked a couple people that are involved in the industry so the basics of storytelling I think you're 100% correct but do you think that the traditional way of viewing and consuming is going to change? I mean my personal opinion is that it may not change as much or as quickly as what you may be talking about. I mean assuming that you know we get past the coronavirus which I'm assuming we're going to and sitting in a crowd and sitting in a crowd of movie theater is no longer a health risk and as you know I believe there will still be the desire to go out and watch things with an audience of other human beings in a in a in a big room. I don't think that's good I mean people have been predicting demise of the motion pictures since television started you know I mean because everybody always is like oh this new thing means the old things dying and I think what history has shown us is more that there's room for additional new things that have some impact on the old thing but don't completely kill it. At least in terms of this maybe they killed Betamax and they killed you know the vinyl record or the cassette tape or something that's just a delivery system but in but well I guess you could say movie theaters are also a delivery system but somehow I don't think that analogy tracks there. I mean certainly it's always evolving I mean it's evolves to where you know like you said blockbusters in like Marvel movies and franchises have more and more dominated with the studios make for economic reasons there's always that evolution of what they're making and how many movies and what budgets and what genres but the idea that you know what movie theaters are dead now and no one's gonna ever go to movie theaters again because everything's gonna be at home or whatever I don't really buy that myself but it's really just a personal opinion it's not like I have such expert insider knowledge. You do have expert insight you're in the industry or I was like I wouldn't ask and I appreciate that. I think I think you nailed on a really a touch of you know a couple really good points on on how that we always have room for more additional ways to consume in an industry if it's not directly replacing so I think that the movie theater there's still a social social aspect to it that can't be replicated by sitting at home whereas direct technology replacement you know watching movies at home between renting them from a blockbuster or renting them from net renting them from Netflix the there's no social aspect to sitting at home watching a movie it was a direct technology replacement not but that's a good way to put it yeah I agree with you yeah yeah so that's that's one thing that I think you know you could have you could have a really a really social need to go and sit in a movie theater somewhere and and be around other people and it's an event and it's and it's a night out and it's like a it's a different environment but this is totally off of I apologize I didn't mean to take that this road but I just thought it was interesting because I know that you know you're in that industry you're very much doing that you know you're dealing with it every day like in that that impacts like what you work on and where your attention is and everything like that so I was just curious what your thoughts were on it yeah what for for yourself I do like I have some like rapid fire questions that I like to ask just to tee it up and we went over a ton of stuff but where do you want to take your career next what's you know what's your focus now well it's what I mentioned as far as writing and directing you're starting right now on the kind of indie low budget level life focus right now is is writing and directing you know independent films that are that are my own original ideas that I you know find the funding and see them through the completion creatively on my own and you know where that goes I'm open to but successfully doing that and multiple projects like that is what I'm really excited about and focused on at the moment very good and is there anything you know we just we spoke about your career about storytelling about the current state of film and a whole bunch of things about you know screenwriting and just the nuances of your industry is there anything that we didn't touch on that you thought would be relevant that that I didn't ask you that you wanted to bring up or did we do a good job I think you did a good job all right good I'm glad because I don't know all the questions asked so good good I'm glad all right I have some rapid fire just to ask to tee it up I'll ask these to everyone so what's one life lesson that you would tell your younger selves that would help you get where you are your attitude and inner beliefs are more important than just your actions that you take that's a good one that's a very very good one and then the follow up to that is what's a resource that you go to to learn from it could be a podcast book audible it could be a person just one resource for people to go check out I mean Wikipedia I mean I don't have any like you know unique answer that only I know about I don't think to that question but I think Wikipedia is pretty amazing I always donate whenever I get those we need three dollars today yeah because I use it so much I mean it's a go to place even though I know that anything in there can be questioned you know and so forth but I do think it's an amazing I like to not take for granted things that we have that we do tend to take for granted and Wikipedia is one of those things that I think is pretty amazing good very good and last where do people go to find out more about you about the book yeah I mean the books on Amazon the idea but you know my website is called flying wrestler.com also if you just google my name Eric with a K-bork B-O-R-K you would find it and other things about me I have a lot of stuff online a lot of you know interviews and various things but yeah the websites of the main the main clearing house for anyone's interested in hearing more about any of this stuff that's all for today thanks again for joining me on another episode of the success story podcast you can download or stream this podcast wherever podcasts are available including iTunes Spotify Google Stitcher iHeartRadio and many others you can also watch this podcast on YouTube if you haven't already please subscribe and share this podcast with your friends family co-workers and peers please leave us a rating on iTunes it takes about 30 seconds as it allows other people to find our podcast and let's our amazing guests reach even more people with their message and remember any rating is fine as long as it contains five stars I'm Scott Clary from the success story podcast signing off you