HUMANITAS INDUSTRY 101 PODCAST

Episode 1: Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick

Our first episode comes from a discussion between legendary writers, directors, and producers, Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, recorded December 11, 1993. 

While the business of screenwriting has changed dramatically over the last 32 years, their advice about structure and character remains evergreen. 

With five Emmys, an Oscar, and multiple Humanitas Prizes between them, Marshall and Ed have a storied partnership spanning film and television. They met as students at American Film Institute (AFI) and have gone on to write, produce, and direct projects such as The Last Samurai, Legends of The Fall, Traffic, thirtysomething, and My So-Called Life.

Recorded on December 11, 1993, this conversation was moderated by Greg Apparcel during the Humanitas Master Writers Workshop series held in the early 90s through the early 2000s.

Full episode transcript appears below.

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If you’d like to hear more about Ed Zwick’s time in Hollywood his memoir, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood, was released in 2024 by Gallery Books and is available where books are sold.

Books and authors mentioned in the episode include Shakespeare (King Lear), The Oresteia, Stanislavski, Uta Hagen, and Aristotle.

Humanitas's Industry 101 is made possible with support from our series sponsor Sony Pictures Entertainment.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

MICHELLE FRANKE

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Welcome to Humanitas 101 podcast. I'm Executive Director Michelle Franke.

Industry 101 is a conversation series that introduces topics foundational to understanding and launching television and film writing careers.

Dating back to 1974, Humanitas has a long history of presenting workshops for writers exploring craft and career issues. In those days, the organization's founder would invite writers to studios, community centers, and homes to speak about their craft.

In 2022, we created industry 101 as a continuation of that work, and in just three years, industry 101 has received over 15,000 registrations across 36 events, featuring a combined 172 speakers. Guests from states across the US, as well as countries around the world have joined us monthly.

We're now launching the Industry 101 podcast to start new conversations and highlight historical ones from our archive, which holds over 200 hours of audio.

Our first episode comes from a discussion between legendary writers, directors, and producers Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, recorded December 11th, 1993.

While the business of screenwriting has changed dramatically over the last 32 years, their advice about structure and character remains evergreen.

With five Emmys, an Oscar, and multiple Humanitas Prizes between them, Marshall and Ed have a storied partnership spanning film and television.

They met as students at the American Film Institute and have gone on to write, produce and direct projects such as The Last Samurai, Legends of the Fall, Traffic, 30something, and My So-called Life.

Stick around for a brief writing prompt and reading list at the end of the episode, both inspired by the conversation. Now here's Marshall Herskovitz with a brief introduction.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

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Hi, this is Marshall Herskovitz, and thanks for listening to this piece of a lecture Ed Zwick and I gave more than 30 years ago. And boy is it strange to hear your younger self saying things you thought you'd just figured out last year.

In the talk, we delineated between structure and texture, and most of what you hear is about structure, especially what we call the obligatory beats of a story. As terrified writers, like any others, we found the idea of obligatory beats to be a huge help in facing the terrible unknowns of a new story.

What's left out of the recording is the rest of the conversation we had about texture, which for us always meant the voice of a script. How people talk, what they say and don't say, how long it takes them to say it.

In order to do this, you have to entirely inhabit the characters to the point, as we say in the piece, that in some real sense, they're doing the talking and you're just trying to write it down.

But with that comes the realization that most interactions between people are between the words, the looks, the pauses, the sighs, the head shakes, the unspoken thoughts.

There's a scene in the pilot of 30-something where Michael Stedman and his wife, Hope, are talking about Michael's partner, Elliot, and one tiny moment of hesitation from Michael causes Hope to realize he's not telling her something.

Gleefully, she bombards him with question after question as he grows more and more defensive, begging her to stop until finally there's a long pause and she says he had an affair, even though there's absolutely nothing in the conversation that even hinted at that. Michael puts his head down, defeated.

And when we showed this to a live audience, we got the biggest laugh we ever got. And for us, it was a breakthrough in understanding that scenes are not about the word, they're about what's going on between and inside each of the characters. And when an audience can feel themselves inside that experience, it can be truly delicious.

We hope you find this exploration useful, and we're so grateful to Humanitas for keeping these recordings and reminding us that we once sounded like young people.

Even back then, Ed and I were already interrupting each other constantly. Some things never change.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

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Two huge parts of writing are structure and texture, and they interact.

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And yet they're very different.

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And I think in many ways, with the danger of oversimplifying in many ways, Ed came to this through structure and I came to it through texture.

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It's the thing we do the most when we work with other writers. What we give them is structure, because it's so hard for the writers we meet.

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And I must, I must generalize from that, because it's been such a constant over 15 years that the ability to structure a story by yourself is so difficult and so hard to learn, and so worth putting the energy into.

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Because, you know, we can say this a million times and it won't become less true

that without that structure, the story just won't work.

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It won't have the emotional resonance that, that you're trying to have. You can't move people.

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This is the most upsetting part for me, because you can have all sorts of emotional

things happen in a story, but if it's not structured well, people will not be moved, they'll be restless, they'll be bored, they'll be unconnected.

ED ZWICK

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We'll talk for a second- I mean, about what we think structure is, because I think there's a great impression about structure, that, you know, that you can learn it in some sense from a, from a class.

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I think the nature of structure goes much deeper. I think structure goes all the way back to the primitive, ritualized and religious aspects of what stories are and what their purpose is.

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And I think that whenever we sit down to write a story to some degree, we ask ourselves this question of what deepest, most resonant part of our experience, our universal experience is this pertaining to -

MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

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What idea is it.

ED ZWICK

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What idea is it? And also, what what wish fulfillment is attached to it, what excitation of our imagination is involved in it. And when you think about structure, it's only when it, when it works is when it seems to have that inevitability of a story.

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And I remember a wonderful professor of mine in Shakespeare saying, the best part of tragedy, he says, is because it's so restful.

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In other words, when Lear gives away his kingdom to to his daughters, you know where that story is going.

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You know, when when Macbeth kills Duncan, you know what the end of that story is going to be.

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When Hamlet teases father's ghost, there's an inevitability and an ineluctable movement towards something which is deeply resonantly satisfying because the purpose of story was always to satisfy some inner demand of explanation of our experience.

MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

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Since life is chaos,

ED ZWICK/MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

We try to find order out of it.

ED ZWICK

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So we've actually developed a kind of a system which we apply, and this would maybe be a good place to start just talking about that.

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When we start to talk about a story. I mean, I mean, let's take episodic

television only because it's maybe the greatest common denominator, although it pertains to to a 7 act structure of a TV movie or a 3 act of a feature, it doesn't matter.

00:07:44.380 → 00:07:57.059

I mean, TV is a 4 act structure, but there is something that we do when we first start a story, we say to ourselves, okay, what are and this is the most important word to me, I said, what are the obligatory beats?

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Obligatory.

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In other words, what must be done in this story? What will satisfy our hunger?

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Knowing the signposts along the road to know before this story is done. For instance, I mean, let's just take the most predictable boy meets girl story, okay?

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You know, the boys got to meet the girl. Okay?

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You know that at certain point, the boy and the girl are going to get closer. You know, at a certain moment that the boy and the girl are going to fight. And, you know, at a certain moment they're going to break apart, and you know the moment, they're going to come together.

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Now, that's just overly simplistic. And yet by just putting those little coordinates on a, on, on, on a map, you could then know okay, it's within this rock that I can find my sculpture. This is the size of the rock.

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And that's often, to me, the most difficult part of starting any story, which is to say, how big of a story am I going to tell?

MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

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That's right.

ED ZWICK

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How much of it is it trying to accomplish?

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And once you take those obligatory beats, whatever they may be, and put them on a map, on an outline, you can then find the ways to undercut them, subvert them, dress them up, put them in the context of other action, make them part of subplots.

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But to literally in the most meat and potatoes way, try to plot out those coordinates.

MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

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We can even be more specific.

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I don't know.

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You know, I think this might be of some value, even for people who don't write episodic television just to talk about, you know, what we've developed as a kind of a format for the four act structure of an episodic television show.

00:09:41.789 → 00:09:51.549

That that we use, the act breaks as kind of what the signposts are of what we have to have achieved in that story by that time.

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And before that, though, there's, there's a thing we want to get to about conflict.

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So much of drama is about conflict. You don't you really don't have a story

if you don't have some conflict.

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The issue for us, it's always so interesting is how much of that conflict is external between people and how much of that conflict is internal within the main characters of the story.

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And, and when it gets very interesting for us is when there is a very complicated mixture of, of, of conflicts.

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But nevertheless, you don't have a structure unless you have some conflict going on between people.

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And what we find is we always use Family.

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I don't know how many of you remember that show, but we always use it as a, as a kind of a, as our barometer because it was very rigidly structured in many ways, and you'll always knew exactly what you had to accomplish by the end of each act.

00:10:44.727 → 00:10:52.443

Basically, as you might guess, the end of act one is the statement of the problem of the show.

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Buddy is in love with her teacher, or, you know, or Willy has lost the money for the whatever it is, you know, what's going to be the dilemma of the show?

00:11:02.328 → 00:11:07.124

What's going to be the conflict has to be stated by the end of act one.

00:11:07.166 → 00:11:09.543

It gives you all of act one to get to that point.

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There's a lot of grace in act one in these to sort of set up the various components, but there has to be a clear message what's this going to be about? Then act two and act three are the kind of both of the sort of classical three act structure, because you're taking two acts to do what is really one act in classical structure.

00:11:32.525 → 00:11:38.489

It's act two and act three are what are the developments from this conflict?

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You've said there's going to be a conflict, now we're going to see the conflict.

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You know, we're going to see the people get angry in some way.

ED ZWICK

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Watch it escalate, watch it resonance.

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I mean, I would also say this is not any different to the description of a three act structure for writing a movie. Right.

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And you know, and why are we going about this, which is pretty pedestrian, I think, to a lot of you. Why are we talking about, about, you know, something that may be transparent.

00:12:04.598 → 00:12:22.450

And that is because only once you have these kind of handholds on a slippery slope can you then begin to do, which is what is what has become more our much more significant agenda. And that has to do with texture.

MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

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Well, before we get to that, though, there is a ruthlessness that you have to have.

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This stuff may seem very fundamental, but still, it's still very hard for most writers to understand what needs to be in the story and what doesn't need to be in the story, what's going to move the story forward, and what's just going to lay there and be a set piece just to finish this, the end of act three, in the way we structure our shows is the darkest moment before the light.

00:12:48.976 → 00:13:02.990

You know, if the if the end of the show is going to be about the, the, the guy who's been underground for years and is going to turn himself in the end of act three is where he says, I'll never turn myself in, where it's the farthest from the resolution.

00:13:02.990 → 00:13:08.496

It's, it's what in Shakespeare was also happened in act three, but he had a 5 act structure.

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It's in some way the, the turning point that makes the rest

of the story inevitable.

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And then you're left in what we do with an act four, where you try to pack all this stuff in, where you have the resolution, the turn the thing that makes the end possible for us, a structure that we use very often is the notion of finding the truth is that and this, this now gets into what becomes about inner conflict.

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That so many of the stories we write about people in denial in some way, people not dealing with what's going on.

ED ZWICK

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It’s very important.

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Because this goes back to why we may have become writers. I think that we particularly having been raised in the 1950s, having looked at television movies of the early 60s and the such, were made enormously anxious by the unwillingness of those venues to in any way approach truth telling.

MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

00:14:12.101 → 00:14:19.567

You can you can deal in structure in ways that don't really pertain to truth telling or not truth telling.

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I mean, eventually you have to. But but in texture, to me, it's all about truth, and truth is all about ambivalence.

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Truth is all about the fact that human beings never are of one mind about anything.

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There's a level of self analysis, although I always mean psychoanalysis in this case, I mean a more limited form of trying to understand, literally, just as an artist must be taught how to see, an artist has to learn.

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Oh, that's a form there, that's a negative space there, a writer has to understand in some way, consciously what he's seeing.

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Writers have to learn how to delineate what's going on in their own minds. What are the forces going on?

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And, you know, do I want to say this and I'm afraid to say it, or is it that I don't want to say it or that I want to say something else?

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And by the way, this gets into something else we want to talk about, which is we're both trained as directors and, you know, the whole language of acting, of action and tension and obstacle is so valuable.

ED ZWICK

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I would I would make a make a plea to everyone as a writer, if they do not if taken an acting class or a directing class, that it's a it's an absolute necessity to understand the-

MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

00:15:36.644

Incredibly important,

ED ZWICK

00:15:36.644 → 00:15:54.203

-and beyond that, to read Stanislavski, to read Uta Hagen, Stella Adler, those people who have been the great commentators on the process because worlds upon worlds will open up about the nature of scene work and writing that may have been otherwise somewhat mysterious.

MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

00:15:54.203 → 00:16:05.839

The basic theory of most of these acting styles is that no one ever says what they're really feeling, and that is also the basic theory of writing.

ED ZWICK

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How many times have I looked at a script of the first draft?

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And there's the shorthand, which is OTN, you know, on the nose, on the word, who would ever walk into a room and just say what they are thinking? Just say what they are feeling? No one that I know.

MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

00:16:22.314 → 00:16:43.085

One of the greatest evidences of this is of the of the many, many scripts we read that, you know, one of the most common problems is that all the characters sound the same, and you can immediately tell a really good writer, when you see that the character sound differently, that you find you don't need the character names to know who's talking.

00:16:43.085 → 00:16:54.513

And the only way you can achieve this is when you start a scene, you have to know what is the state of mind, what's going on inside every character?

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What is that character bringing into the room? What happened in the scene before? What was that person thinking? What was that person? What's the entrance of that person into the scene? What are they bringing into the scene?

ED ZWICK

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What does he want in that scene? And then each character has a different one.

MARSHALL HERSKOVITZ

00:17:09.319 → 00:17:12.865

Exactly. They're all different. They want one different things, and they also have internal obstacles.

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This is the this is the language of acting.What is your action? What is your obstacle? The action is what do you want? Obstacles.

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What's keeping you from getting what you want, you know, is an embarrassment, is it fear? You know any number of things.

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And I find this incredibly valuable in writing because it in some way helps me to simplify or make sense of the chaos of human life.

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That that as long as I know at least these things must be going on in the scene, it helps me to give a direction to each character in the scene and then, you know, then it becomes, as I'm sure everybody's aware, you know, when this stuff works, it becomes the strange sort of semi hallucination where you're sitting there and you're just the sort of the stenographer, you know, taking down what these people are saying and what they're doing.

00:18:01.580 → 00:18:03.248

You know, you're just trying to keep up with them.

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And it's a wonderful feeling when, when you've got these people sort of up and running, but you've got to get them up and running.

ED ZWICK

00:18:09.505 → 00:18:24.561

And inevitably, what comes from the understanding of a character's action is conflict, is the fuel and fire that drives the scene. And this is again, a moment finally where, and there will be several, where structure and texture come together.

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Because structure not only can fulfill the obligatory beats as I described them before, but it can also describe inner conflict.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

MICHELLE FRANKE

00:18:41.703 → 00:20:34.149

Thanks again for being here today.

As we wrap up, Industry 101 asks writers to apply lessons learned to their own writing. Today's exercise is called obligatory beats. It can be applied to any script you're working on.

First step, ask what kind of story are you trying to tell? Think in terms of genre, is it a sports movie, a courtroom drama, maybe a rom com? Once you have your answer, ask what are the most basic needs for this genre? These are your obligatory beats.

The baseball team needs to be assembled, the evidence reviewed, the lovebirds meet, and so on.

Now, what are the examples of conflicts and obstacles in your genre? List those out. Maybe the players on the baseball team don't get along. A lawyer can't track down an important witness. Maybe the lovebirds get into an argument. Making this list helps you discover how conflict manifests in your story, and will help you build the outline of your script.

In terms of suggested reading, Ed and Marshall mentioned Shakespeare, such as King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth. When it comes to studying Shakespeare, it can help to read the text while watching a recorded performance, and you can find many performances online for free.

Ed and Marshall also suggest that studying acting can help your writing. A good place to start is reading the works of Uta Hagen and Stanislavski.

And with that, thank you for listening to Humanitas's Industry 101 Podcast.

This work is made possible with support from our series sponsor, Sony Pictures Entertainment. If you'd like to learn more about Humanitas and the work we do, please visit our website at Humanitas Prize dot org.

Until our next episode, be well and be writing.

Credits:

Host/Writer-Producer: Michelle Franke

Featuring: Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick

Audio Editor-Producer: Campbell Moore

Writer-Producer: Daniel Plagens

Mixing/Mastering: Jeff Schoeny at Voxstop

Music: "We Don't Stop" and "Got to Be" by Mooveka

Music Licensing: Artlist.io

SERIES SPONSOR

Humanitas's Industry 101 event series is made possible with support from our series sponsor Sony Pictures Entertainment.