[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - The best response you can have to a payoff in a thriller is someone goes, "Oh, right, I forgot, of course..." [multiple voices chattering] [Narrator] On Story offers a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.
All of our content is recorded live at Austin Film Festival and at our year-round events.
To view previous episodes, visit OnStory.tv.
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[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is On Story.
A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.
This week's "On Story," "Parks and Recreation" co-creator, Michael Schur.
- Character writing, long-form writing is so, so different and so much less about the joke.
Sketch writing is just about the joke.
That's all it is.
It's like, what's the premise?
What's the joke?
What's the game?
Exploit it, twist it, end it, leave.
And so I was like, "Okay, all of the writing that I've done is meaningless."
[paper crumples] [typing] [Narrator] In this episode, award-winning director, writer, and producer, Michael Schur, talks about his role in creating and writing for some of the most beloved comedies, "Parks and Recreation," "The Office," and "The Good Place."
[typewriter dings] - I'd like you to tell that story about how creatives have to learn to do what they do.
- So I got hired at "Saturday Night Live" when I was, essentially, right out of college.
I interviewed for the job -- I graduated in June.
I interviewed for the job in July.
Didn't get hired.
The time you interviewed, we walked around in pairs through the 17th floor of "30 Rock," and you met with the producers and then you eventually met with Lorne Michaels.
And I was paired up with a woman who was just much funnier than I was.
And I remember thinking like, "I'm not getting this job, 'cause this woman is much funnier than I am."
It was Tina Fey.
I was right.
[audience laughs] So I didn't get hired.
But they said, "You know, we like your stuff and stay tuned."
And then that December, NBC fired Norm MacDonald.
They called me on a Friday, essentially, and said, "You start Monday."
So I started the job in January of 98.
"SNL" is a very weird show.
It's very difficult show to write, unless you're Tina Fey or Adam McKay.
And I was extremely bad at it.
Every time I tell this story, it feels like I'm begging for compliments or that I'm expressing false modesty.
I promise you I'm not.
I was extremely terrible at this job.
My sketches tanked so hard at read-throughs.
It was a weekly humiliation because of how bad I was at the job.
The thing was because Chris Farley had passed away and because Norm had been fired, nobody noticed.
I was able to hide in plain sight, sucking at the job.
So I realized that if I didn't figure out how to do it, I was doomed.
I was never gonna survive.
And so I looked at Tina, and I looked at Adam McKay, and I looked at Rob Carlock, who went on to co-create "30 Rock" and "Kimmy Schmidt."
And I saw they knew what they were doing.
Without them knowing it, I interned for them by just observing them, looking at what they wrote, taking their sketches home, studying them, watching them produce them, talking to the actors, just trying to sort of do a forensic analysis of what the job was.
And by the time they figured out that I sucked, I had figured out how to do it.
And I think just in time.
About a year later, I had, I think, gained enough understanding of how to write the show that I was able to stick around.
So it just seemed like a lesson to me that the way to succeed is to just stare at people who are already succeeding and try to figure out what the hell you're supposed to do.
- Do you remember the first piece you wrote for "Saturday Night Live" that made it that didn't suck?
[laughs and groans] Did I ever write one that didn't suck?
It was a piece, a sports thing actually, and it was on the observation that, at the time, a lot of athletes would thank Jesus when things went their way.
- I give thanks to the Lord for blessing me today.
I was swinging great.
My cuts were clean and with Jesus Christ on my side, I pulled it off.
- Tell us about the pole climbing competition.
It's traditionally your weakest event.
But this year, different story.
- Yeah, well, I was halfway up the pole.
I was getting kind of tired.
And suddenly, just like He's done so many times before, Jesus Christ, eternal Son of God, climbed in my arms.
- Jesus did.
- Right, Jesus.
And once He was in my arms, and I just "Zoo!"
flew right up the pole.
That was all Jesus.
- And then it was an interview with a guy from the losing team, who was like, "What can I say?
Jesus just really let me down."
You know, like, Jesus blew it.
I don't know what to tell you.
- Clyde's always hogging Jesus.
- Clyde, how do you respond to the allegation that you are a Jesus hog?
- Hey, hey, I'm not the boss of Jesus, okay?
If the Son of God wants to help me climb poles and roll dudes off logs, hey, I'm all for it.
- It's a bunch of crap, man.
You know, if he gets Jesus, we should get Jesus.
He always gets all the Jesus.
Give us some Jesus!
- Hey, you shut up!
Don't make me get Jesus on you.
- All right, I'm cool.
I'm cool, bro.
- And then it was an interview with Chris Kattan, who was Jewish, and he was like, "I don't know what went wrong.
I don't know why Jesus wasn't there for me," you know.
I still remember walking back to the writer's room on the eighth floor and just thinking like, "Okay, I did it once.
I know I can do it now.
I have it in me to figure out whatever weird template this is," you know?
- So how did you go from that to "The Office"?
- I was at "SNL" for seven years.
After three years, Tina and Jimmy Fallon were on "Update," and Rob Carlock, the aforementioned Rob Carlock, was leaving to go write for "Friends."
And I remember thinking like, "Who are they gonna get to do that job?
That's a hard job."
And then Mike Shoemaker, who now produces Seth's show, Seth Meyers' show, came to me, he was a producer at "SNL" at the time, and he was like, "You're gonna do that job."
And I was like, "How am I qualified to do that?
I just got here."
And he was like, "Because you can remember things.
Just you being able to remember things puts you in the top 5% of comedy writers anywhere."
[audience laughs] So I got that job and that job was so fun because "Weekend Update" within "SNL" is its own little fiefdom.
It has its own small writing staff.
So suddenly I was producing my own little show and Tina and Jimmy, at the time, were so popular and they were so good at it that it was always a sort of highlight of the show.
So that segment really worked really well for the three years that I was doing it, or the whatever.
The first show I ever did was the first show after 9/11.
So yeah, that was my reaction.
And so suddenly, it wasn't just dumb jokes about the fake news.
Suddenly it was like, "Oh, man.
We have the hardest job now, which is we have to make jokes about this stuff around the worst tragedy in our nation's recent history."
But that was weirdly exciting, and it was weirdly fun.
And the very first joke we told was -- - US officials continue the search for Osama bin Laden.
Reports suggest that bin Laden is most likely hiding out somewhere remote and barren where he will not encounter others.
The FBI has begun searching theaters showing the movie "Glitter."
[audience laughs] - We were so nervous and so timid about how to begin that process of telling jokes about it.
So we told that joke and that's not an amazing joke, but it worked.
People laughed at it, and it was like, again, it was like [sighs].
Most of succeeding at SNL is just relief.
You don't actually feel joy.
You just feel relief.
[typewriter dings] Going into the 03, 04 season, I was about to have been there for six and a half years.
My then girlfriend, now wife, had moved to LA, and we realized that if it was gonna work, one of us had to move, and it made more sense for me to move to LA.
So I spent the year going out to LA and meeting with writers, or show runners and stuff.
And I met Greg Daniels in the spring when he was just about to adapt "The Office."
I was a huge fan of the British "Office."
I, like most people, thought that adapting it for American television was a terrible idea, right?
And I went into the meeting with a great deal of skepticism, and I left the meeting thinking I will follow that man to the end of the earth.
Two hours of conversation that was so insightful and so interesting.
And in the middle of the meeting, he said, "I have a bad back.
Would you mind if I lay down?"
And I said, "No, not at all."
And then he laid down on the floor.
So I was sitting like this, and the guy interviewing me for a job was prone on the floor in front of me.
And I was like, "Do I lean down to talk?
Like, how does this..." But I left, and I sent my agent an email and said, "I don't know if adapting 'The Office' is ever gonna work, but if it doesn't work, it won't be because that guy doesn't know what he's doing.
That guy is a genius, and if he offers me a job, I'm gonna take it."
- I love "Parks and Rec," and my daughter has made me watch every episode at least two or three times.
And there are certain ones that whenever there's a bad day, we have to watch that episode.
And to me, it was like watching Dick Van Dyke when I was growing up.
You wanted to invite these people into your home, and that's really how you feel about everybody in "Parks and Rec."
What spurred your view of how they were gonna be together?
Because they really are a community.
- So Barack Obama is campaigning on an actual message of hope.
That Shepard Fairey poster was everywhere.
Just says hope.
And that sort of dovetailed with two things.
One, our idea to set a show in the world of government, even if it's local government, but also just a preference that I have, personally, for shows that don't involve the characters warring with each other.
You need conflict to create comedy.
That's a truism.
But some shows that I remember watching, which shall remain nameless, got that conflict by having the characters go at each other.
The combination of Barack Obama and Amy Poehler, who is a beaming ray of light and goodness, and that preference that I have led to a situation in which we said, "Do you think it's possible to create a show where the characters themselves love each other and support each other, even if they have differences of opinion?"
And the conflict comes from the world, right?
The conflict comes from, if you are a person who believes in the power of local government, you are going to constantly be bashing your head against a wall as the citizens that you represent deny you at every turn the ability to get anything done.
Then she can have with her a team of people who are drawn in by her relentless optimism and enthusiasm for her work.
And they can stick together, and they can fight against the forces that are trying to drag down her vision of the world without her fighting, without them fighting each other.
[Ron grunts] [car honks] - Ron, we're back.
- Bully.
- The bankrupt government of Pawnee has been shut down all summer, so it's been three months of no work, no meetings, no memos, no late nights, nothing.
I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
Oh, rounding up the team.
So exciting.
I have goosebumps.
Feel.
- That is what that show became, but it's also just came out of what I thought was, you know, "The Office" is a very cynical show.
It's cynical about the private sector.
It's cynical about business.
It's cynical about- - Bosses.
- Bosses, yes.
Fluorescent lighting, copying machines.
It's cynical about everything, but I said earlier that the show succeeded in part because of some very good creative decisions that Greg Daniels made.
And one of them was he saw "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," which is now an ancient movie.
It feels like it's in black and white, it's so long ago.
But if you remember that movie, Steve Carell's character is so lovely.
He's just such a lovely person.
He's so earnest and heartfelt.
And the thing that Greg said to us on the first day of season two of that show was, "We are gonna take 20% of that character and we're gonna stir him into Michael Scott.
He's still gonna be a buffoon.
He's still gonna say stupid racist things, because he's unaware of the world.
He's still gonna screw up all the time, but he's gonna have 20% more of that sort of loveliness and earnestness."
We thought he was nuts.
And the truth is he was totally right.
The show remained exactly what it was, but got better because he realized something fundamental about the way people watch television, which is you don't wanna watch TV and leave miserable and sad.
You just don't.
- That is our building.
And we sell paper.
I'm really proud of you.
- Thank you.
- What?
- Do you have something in your pocket?
- A Chunky.
Do you want half?
- No, thank you.
- Okay.
[typewriter dings] - Lot 48 is actually one of my favorite pieces of the show, that it keeps weaving back in and this, they haven't really ever forgotten about it.
You might disappear for a little while from view, but that was, I think, a really beautiful element to show how relentless Leslie ultimately was, that she wasn't a person that was ever gonna forget her goal.
- Lot 48 was the municipal lot where their giant hole was in her town that she wanted to transform into a park.
The original pitch of the show was in the pilot, you were gonna find out that there was a giant hole in the ground.
And however long the show lasted, the last episode would be the ribbon cutting for the park.
Because the process of doing literally anything in city government takes 5, 6, 7, 8 years.
And so we thought like, "All right, well, this will be the metaphor for the difficulties that people like Leslie face."
We ended up not doing that in part because we felt like we got off to such a rocky start in the writing that if we didn't signal to the audience that progress was going to be made, that they wouldn't go along with us for the ride, that we wouldn't get those seven years to tell the stories.
So we filled it in in the sixth episode of season two.
- We are about to fill this hole now.
Not with dirt, but with the courage of a thousand lions and the solemn memory of all of our friends who have fallen in this cursed hole.
Dump it!
[excavator rumbling] [thud] - Ah, what the [bleep]?!
[Ann] Andy?
[Andy] I'm okay.
[Leslie screams] [Ann] Oh, God!
[Leslie screams] - I was also, at the time, obsessed with "The Wire."
And "The Wire" was such a great example of slow-cooked storytelling.
You know, you meet characters in that show and you don't even learn their names for five episodes because they're just slow-playing the story so much.
And at a certain point, I was like, "Well, that's a drama.
You can do that in drama.
You can't do it in comedy.
In comedy, people need to feel like things are happening and things are progressing and changing and that there's hope, and you know.
So we ended up not following through on our original plan, but yes, that metaphor was based on these conversations we had with city planners and with people in the parks departments of Glendale and Pasadena and all these places that where we just went and talked to them.
There was an amazing story, by the way, while we were doing that research.
So we had this idea for Ron Swanson.
Basic idea was he was a libertarian who wanted to destroy the government from the inside, that he had gotten a government job specifically to destroy it and to keep anything from ever happening.
We were meeting with this woman from a town near LA, and we said, we were like, "Listen, we have this idea.
Tell us the reality of this.
You know, we have this idea for this character who has a job, a high ranking job in the government, but he's a libertarian.
Is this nuts?"
And the woman was like, "No, I'm a libertarian."
[audience laughs] And we were like, "Really?"
and she was like, "Yeah."
And we just kind of stared at her for a second.
And then she was like, "I'm aware of the contradiction."
And we're like, "Okay."
So we wrote Ron Swanson.
- I've been quite open about this around the office.
I don't want this parks department to build any parks because I don't believe in government.
I think that all government is a waste of taxpayer money.
My dream is to have the parks system privatized and run entirely for profit by corporations like Chuck E. Cheese.
- Were you ready for it to end?
- That show was a, and I say this in the most joyous and loving way, was a true partnership between me and Amy Poehler.
And every year I would call her on this certain day in July, and I would run through the entire season with her and say like, "This is everything we have planned."
And we would have this long conversation about it, about what it meant for Leslie and what it meant for the show.
And she would ask questions and probe and poke around.
And it became this sort of wonderful tradition where it just felt like the two of us were doing it together.
Even though she wasn't in the writer's room, she was the captain of the ship, and I was the loyal first mate.
And we would have these incredible conversations about where we were going and what we were doing.
And so at the end of season six, we sort of moved that conversation up and we sat down, we actually went out to breakfast, and we were like, "Let's talk about this.
Where are we going?"
We had passed a hundred episodes.
We had done almost everything we wanted to do.
And we sort of organically both came to this conclusion of like, "I think one more."
But it also made for this soft landing for me, where as "Parks and Rec" faded out, "Brooklyn" was taking off and "Master of None" was happening and some other stuff was going on that I could sort of turn my attention to.
[typewriter dings] - You told this story earlier, you weren't sure that this was the right idea.
And the person you thought to call was Damon Lindelof.
And I'm still trying, actually, to imagine -- I'm still trying to actually figure out why he was your first person to call on that one.
- I needed reassurance for a couple reasons.
Number one, it was genre.
It was essentially science fiction, which I'd never written before.
Two, another Greg Daniels-ism is that you should create shows that take place in very boring places.
His theory was the background, the setting, should be as drab and uninteresting as possible because that's what allows the characters to be the things that are interesting.
And this suddenly was like, "Well, this is about the most non-boring location.
Like, the literal afterlife."
That really worried me.
[Michael] The Good Place is divided into distinct neighborhoods.
Each one contains exactly 322 people who have been perfectly selected to blend together into a blissful, harmonic balance.
- Do all the neighborhoods look like this?
- No, every neighborhood is unique.
Some have warm weather, some cold, some are cities, some farmland.
But in each one, every blade of grass, every ladybug, every detail has been precisely designed and calibrated for its resonance.
- There's a lot of frozen yogurt places.
- Yeah, that's the one thing we put in all the neighborhoods.
People love frozen yogurt.
I don't know what to tell you.
- There were just so many things about it as I started to develop it that worried me, and I didn't know whether I had any ability to write it.
And I didn't know whether anyone would watch it.
Damon is the champion of that kind of show.
Think about "Lost."
Think about "The Leftovers," which I think is a masterpiece.
Think about "Watchmen," which he was working on at the time I was talking to him.
He worked on that for four years before they made it.
And I just thought that he, as a guy who had worked in spaces like that for a long time would be able to give me a quick read on whether this was a good idea.
And even if it was a good idea, what are the traps here?
What are the pitfalls, right?
So he's like, "If you don't know where you're going, if you don't know what the end of that story is, you're gonna flail around."
And he told me a bunch of stories from seasons two and three of "Lost" of them just up against it, not having any idea where they were going, throwing new characters into the mix and not knowing why they were there.
And he was like, "If you don't know what the end of the story is, you're never gonna be able to pull it off."
So I worked on it for another two or three months just by myself and came up with the twist.
If you haven't seen the show, spoiler alert, there's a big twist at the end of the first season.
[Chidi] Eleanor, what's going on?
- It took me a while to figure it out.
But just now, as we were all fighting, yelling at each other and each one of us demanding we should go to the bad place, I thought to myself, "Man, this is torture."
And then it hit me.
They're never gonna call a train to take us to the Bad Place.
They can't because we're already here.
This is the Bad Place.
[intense music] [Michael laughs menacingly] - I didn't even commit to writing it because of his advice until I knew exactly what the entire season was gonna be.
And it was great advice because if I hadn't known, I don't think I would've been able to pull it off.
What we're essentially doing is telling a story about how every one of us, all humans on earth, are deeply flawed people.
Given that that is true, given the fact that we all know that that is absolutely true, what's the prescription for how to change it?
And our argument was, the prescription is, you gotta think about what you're doing and study a little bit and learn about what makes people good or bad and what makes actions good or bad.
We had to start with a person who had all those kind of crummy qualities in order to tell the long-form story of how you improve.
[music "My Way"] ♪ And now the end is near ♪ ♪ And so I face the final curtain ♪ [cart crashes] - Ow!
What the hell?
- Walk if off, Lululemon.
♪ I'll say it clear ♪ ♪ I'll state my case ♪ ♪ Of which I'm certain ♪ ♪ I've lived a life that's full ♪ ♪ I traveled each and- ♪ Live every day like it's your last.
Bite me, I'ma live forever, [bleep].
[typewriter dings] [Narrator] You've been watching A Conversation with Michael Schur on On Story.
On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story project.
That also includes the On Story radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive, accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.
To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.
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