HUMANITAS INDUSTRY 101 PODCAST

Episode 4:Fay Kanin

The fourth episode of the Industry 101 Podcast comes from a writing workshop with Fay Kanin recorded on January 19, 1995.

Fay Kanin was a screenwriter and playwright who began working in Hollywood in the early 1940s, often in collaboration with her husband, Michael Kanin. Across her six decades as a writer, actor, producer, and activist, Fay built a reputation as an excellent writer and a steadfast advocate, most notably for women and film preservation.

She was nominated for an Oscar and a Tony Award, received the ACLU Bill of Rights Award alongside several Emmys and Peabodies, and was the first woman to serve as the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ president for four terms. Fay also received the Humanitas Kieser Award in 2003 and was nominated for a Humanitas Prize for Friendly Fire. She passed away in 2013 at the age of 95.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

MICHELLE FRANKE

00:00:08:19 - 00:01:40:17

Welcome to Humanitas Industry 101.

I'm Michelle Franke, executive director of Humanitas.

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

Humanitas has a long history of presenting conversations and workshops for writers

exploring craft and career issues. Industry 101 is a continuation of that work.

It includes our online event series, in-person events, and this podcast, which will present both new episodes and conversations from our archives highlighting our history.

Today's Industry 101 Podcast episode comes from a writing workshop with Fay Kanin, recorded on January 19th, 1995.

Fay Kanin was a screenwriter and playwright who began working in Hollywood in the early 1940s, often in collaboration with her husband Michael Kanin.

Over a 60 year career as a writer, actor, co-producer, and activist, Fay Kanin was nominated for Oscar and Tony Awards and received the ACLU Bill of Rights Award and several Emmy and Peabody awards.

She served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for an unprecedented four terms.

In this episode, Fay discusses why she became a writer, how she chose her projects, and the themes that she kept returning to.

Stick around for a brief writing prompt at the end of the episode, inspired by Fay’s advice.

[MUSIC]

FAY KANIN

00:01:50:20 - 00:23:40:08

I love to learn about things.

I cried when I finished college because I thought, gee, I'm going to stop learning, and I, I love that aspect, but it's only half of it for me.

And I learned that I'm not satisfied enough to learn, but I seem to want to give it back. I want to communicate what I've learned to somebody. It's like I don't want to hoard it.

And so I began to realize quite early that the best way to do that was in writing. That I could learn a lot about just in my life, or in research, or in anything about what I'm interested in and about human beings.

And then I could give it back, so that that was really the impetus.

When I was in grammar school, I lived in, by the way, I lived upstate for a lot of my life in a town called Elmira, New York, up in New York State, and the paper in the

town was called the Elmira Star Gazette.

And it ran a column called “My Most Embarrassing Moment.” And there were always four letters about what was your most embarrassing moment, for which you were awarded $2.

And so when I was in grammar school, I thought, I've had an embarrassing moment. So I wrote it and I got $2, and I realized you could write and you could also make money from it, which was a nice thing to find out.

And then I thought the next, the next week when it appeared, I thought, gee, I've written, I’d like to write another one.

So I got all of my friends to send in the letter that I wrote under their names.

And at one point I had all four letters in that, in that how I. But I made $8, and that that taught me that there was a profession there, that an a career that you could make, you could make money from as well as enjoy.

And then I went on, I wrote in, I edited my high school yearbook, and I edited my college yearbook, and I wrote for the literary magazine, and I did all the things that probably many of you did, and I liked it. I found I had an aptitude for writing and I liked it.

So when I came to live in Los Angeles, I wanted to write for the movies. I really was like, as most of us are in love with the movies.

And I got out of USC and went to to a meeting at RKO that someone set up for me to the story editor, and I said, you know, I really think that I could even write

Gone with the Wind.

I love it, and I could write it. But he told me Mr. Goldwyn had a what he said

was a more expensive writer in mind.

At any rate, they gave me a chance to, to to talk to a producer or two. And I found, unlike now, where being young is really a very good thing to be in today's movie market, being young at that time when I came in was really a handicap, and they all patted me on the head and say, said come back when you have experience. And I thought, how am I going to get experience if no one will give me a chance?

But the story editor of RKO said to me, it'll be very hard to find a job for you as a writer, but I'll put you in the story department. I'll make you a reader.

I didn't know what a reader was. He said, you'll read all the, the, the things that are submitted or many of them don't.

And Trumbull was a reader at that time, too. So I was in distinguished company. And, and I went on as a reader for $25 a week.

And as he said, I learned more about writing than I would have learned had I gotten a quick job and then gone on and probably been years before I got another.

And I wrote at night. I wrote for myself at night, and I read other people's work in the daytime, and I learned about being a writer.

And when I when, when I got married, I married to my husband, whom I met at RKO. When I got married, we wrote our first screenplay together.

I think that that distinction blurs that both characters and themes, they seem to go together. In my case, I recur a lot. I think, well I know, that I write strong women protagonists in almost everything I write.

That doesn't mean I write weak men, but actually the, the engine that drives most of the movies that I have done have, have had strong women protagonists.

They are generally people who rock the boat. They’re people who who take unpopular stands.

I went down through through some of my movies and I saw that in Heart Sounds what my leading character took on was the medical and the hospital establishment really challenged it, questioned it.

In Hustling, I took on the, the commercial and political hierarchy that controls prostitution. The police, the politicians, and then the people and institutions

that make money from it.

Again, the protagonist, the major protagonist was a woman journalist and a street girl. There were others, but they were the two major characters.

In Friendly Fire, I took on I, not I, but through through my characters, I took on the military establishment, who also forget that soldiers aren't hardware, that they're people.

So I found that, that the themes that that recur all the time and the characters are fighters, people who who really see what's something that they feel strongly about and have the courage to get in there and fight, even at great risk to their, themselves and their standing in their community and, and they’re risk takers.

I'd like to say that's the most dangerous part of the writing for me, which is getting discouraged. You sit, and you agonized, and you go up this path and you go down this path and you write it and you don't like it.

And at that point, I used to call my agent, even sometimes at 12:00 at night and say, I want off this. I'm through.

And she would say, Fay, go to Palm Springs for the weekend. Just relax. And inevitably when I went to Palm Springs or what I did after a few go away from it, she said, and I do, and I'd come back.

But I did learn something that helped me, which is I would then sit down and write.

And I think you said there's something, I knew I felt good about, that I had solved one of the problems. I wrote that scene, that gave me a sense of accomplishment. I had really broken the block, and then I would skip over what I didn't know or what I hadn't solved and write another scene that I really knew was good and that I liked.

And I had found the character, and I began to hopscotch around. And then after a while, I. I knew enough from my feeling of success and dealing with the character that I could go back and then write it in sequence.

But I broke the block that way. I don't know that I deconstruct it, but I pick from it the things that speak to me, that I think are the essential things in it.

And I since you can't put everything in, I mean, if particularly if you're working from a long source piece of source material, I just pick again, I just hopscotch, I go through and pick the things I love.

By the way, I have the books of the whatever I've adapted, and I look at them once in a while. They are full of underlining. I'm the greatest underliner in the world. And under line, there's red underlines and there's green underlines. There's one I like better than this. I like this scene and this scene and I go through and that becomes my deconstruction.

Somebody said once and I have treasured that. They said the most important moment in writing is when you choose what you're going to write.

And I thought about that a lot in my own life. And I think in others it's true.

When you either, when you get an assignment, when, you when somebody wants you to write something or when you write an original. I just have a yardstick for myself.

I will let me, just tell the case of Friendly Fire. Friendly Fire. This book and articles were out there and whatnot. And then one day the, what turned out to be my co-producer called and said, I have, a I have a book that you may have heard about, but I would like you to look at it.

I had just finished an assignment. I was very tired, and I said, Phil, I don't want to read it. I don't want to like anything because I'm tired and I want a little space. He said, well, let me send it along and, and just, just, you know, look at it.

Well, he sent Friendly Fire and I read it, and I get my husband and I had a word we invented. We called it the “Grillich.” And when we when I feel that thing, I feel it's a kind of inner excitement.

You, you just get excited and you somehow want to deal with this. I called them back and said, oh, you sly. You knew I was going to love it and I'm going to do it.

So I just use my Grillich when when someone sends me something and I don't feel that excitement no matter what the money is, unless I were desperate or whatever, were the persuasions, I don't want to write it. It's a year or more of my life, and I really don't want to invest that in anything I don't feel excited about.

So for me, the whole thing is, is the is, is is getting. I say, if you write something you yourself don't like, you're you're bankrupt. Because even if you write something

and they don't make it, you have you fed yourself you’re ahead because you wrote it, something you loved and you've got that in you. That experience is in you.

What you learned about it, what you felt about it is there. If you write something

that you didn't really like, but you want to do, but you did it for whatever word the temptations and it isn't made, you really have gotten nothing. You have just got nothing. You're left with zero.

So I always try very much to pick things that that I, I'm, I'm a Taurean, I'm Taurus and I'm very stubborn and, and I stick with it and I look for projects that that are stubborn, that won't let go of me, that just stay with me all night, all day. And then I do them.

Hustling, I was sent these articles again by Gail Sheehy. I don't know how many of you knew them. They appeared in New York Magazine, also very celebrated. And then she wrote a book of the articles, and it was about the whole prostitution scene in New York. She covered in the in the articles in the book she covered call girls and street girls and adult bookstores, pornographic bookstores, prostitution hotels.

It was the whole New York scene. And the producer who had that and the network, ABC, it had not been able to lick it, that nobody they just couldn't find a way to do it.

I, I read the book and I found it very Gail had done a marvelous job of, of the, of the material and I got excited. But the part I got excited about were the street girls, because I go to New York and I stay in a hotel. On 58th Street.

And that was it isn't so much today, but 58th Street and around sixth Avenue and 59th Street was the parade ground for the, for street girls. And I used to go every year 2 or 3 times, and I would see these girls in, in their little short things in their boots, and they're standing on the street corners. And I would I would say to myself, how do how can they do this? Why do they do it and I can't? What is so different with these girls? There are women like me. They're there. And why is that so impossible for me and so possible for them? What is that mystique.

So I had been feeling that for years. And when I read the street girl part, I thought, boy, here's here's my chance to ask myself this question and to do it in a dramatic form.

And so I told them that I would do the piece if I could concentrate on the street girls. And there was one other aspect, the prostitution hotels, because a couple of them had been pointed out to me also. So I said to ABC, if I do this movie and I haven't figured all the ways, I don't want to do it. If you want to make a patty waste movie, because if you're not going to go all the way with this and really make a strong piece, then there's other writers. They're better than I am.

And I must say, for Brandon Stoddard, who was the head of ABC pictures at the time, he said to me, Fay, you write the movie and you trust me that, that movie will get made. You write the movie you want, and I did.

I had God, me and my learning. I had five months of terrific research where I went out with the police on all these, with the Midtown Manhattan police and went to the into the police station and sat in the cages with the girls and got to know them. And I learned.

And then came the part to tell it back. My big problem was how to dramatize it. I didn't want it to be episodic, I. So finally, one day of that great revelation came, which was to make, one of the protagonists, myself or Gayle, the woman who wanted the straight woman who wanted to find out. And she's a journalist. And the other major protagonist is a street girl. And actually, it's it's their relationship that's the center of the movie.

I think it is important someone was asking me about or saying something about the two sides of how do you give a character depth and, and how do you make them two sided? And I said, look around you. Everyone you know has so many different levels and aspects, and just pick one of them and model a character after it. But I do think that we are all extremely complex. Therefore our characters are. But I do try to I think, that's wonderful for a character to have those sides.

I just love the research part of writing. It's my wanting to learn. And it's true. It's very seductive because you can go on researching forever. It also allows you to delay that terrible moment when you have to go in the room alone and with the blank page.

But I do think that research is very important. Not only what you learn, but you see the the ambiance of it, it, I call it filling up the barrel so that I fill myself up with it

so much that again, I can write a scene because I I've got it all in me now. So I'm a big admirer of research and I love it.

The danger is that you have to at one point say to yourself, enough, you've learned enough. Now get in that room and write.

When I first started writing, I wrote the most detailed outlines. I mean, I went, and after a while I began to see just what you said, that, that it was restrictive. I learned just to, first of all, to desert it whenever I thought of something better. And then after a while I said, well, this is silly. Why do I want to write all that for?

I just jot down what I consider. I guess you call them signposts, the key things. And I must say that I have learned to be flexible. I used to be more rigid in my demands on myself, but now I leave room in my own psyche for any kind of new ideas, and I find that it it grows as I as I go. So. And I refuse to write treatments

that I hand in the only treatment that, and I just use that word because it's a standard word. I would never hand in a treatment because then I would be expected to stay with it, and I'm not going to.

So I just say, I won't write a treatment, I'll come tell you where I am if you want to hear it, because I do find that it is comforting to those people up there to, to hear that you're working and that and to hear sort of the track you're on.

So I tell them that. But my feeling is you tell as little as you can get away with, because you do want to leave yourself room to change and to grow and not be inhibited by what your thoughts were a few weeks ago, a month ago.

Teacher's Pet, it's a movie that my husband and I wrote quite a few years ago. When comedies were different. They were not like the comedies of today. Most of the comedies of today, which are, I don't know, action comedies, you know, they are not comedies in that day, either were very sophisticated and classy, or they had an underlying theme. Whatever.

Anyway, I think comedy is the hardest thing to do. I think when you do a good comedy, it is the toughest thing. It's the hardest thing to write, in my mind, the hardest thing to direct, the hardest thing to play.

I think it is underrated. And the proof is that in the, in the Oscars, I look back at the list. Maybe three comedies have won in all those years, and we know that we're great comedies because somebody thinks it's easy.

I mean, there's a tendency, oh, comedies are easy, but if you honor the strong dramatic pieces, which are wonderful, but comedy has really been a stepchild.

Michael and I wrote a lot of originals, and we did a pretty good job of selling them. We would write them for ourselves, and we we seemed to know the market or we wrote what we like, but it seemed to fit the market and we sold them. And then we we got this idea for Teacher's Pet.

It came about. It was the theme of Teacher's Pet is the snobbery of the self-made man which is a reverse of the usual snobbery. This whole thing of what he says

amateurs teaching amateurs to be amateurs is what, the way he does it. We wrote this movie as a serious piece, first we were going to do the thing about the self-made man. We wrote it, we put it on the market. It did not sell. It just sat there. Nobody wanted to buy it.

We thought, what have we done wrong? We put it away. We did some other things for a year or two. In the meantime, my brother in law, my husband's brother Garson wrote, Born Yesterday. Born Yesterday, as you know, had a very strong underlying theme. But it was a very funny piece.

And Michael and I said, gee, I think Gar has the idea, which is if you're going to well, what Goldwyn said, you know, only send a message by Western Union, we decided only send a message clothed in a comedy. If you got a message, boy, put it in a comedy.

So we took it back one and we worked a couple more months and we wrote it as a comedy. We put comedic things in it. We made comedic situations, not just lines, but we, we changed the way we told the story. We put it on the market and we sold it the first week.

I feel very cheated when I walk out of a movie. Not not, not my own, but other people's movies where I don't come out with some element of hope. I where there isn't something at the end that makes me feel good or hopeful.

That's just my own choice. I really feel I come dragging out of the theater saying, oh no! And therefore in my own work, whatever depths it may go to in terms of, of disillusion and anger and whatever, I would hope that I always try at the end to say something to the audience that says, it's going to be all right.

[MUSIC]

MICHELLE FRANKE

00:23:46:18 - 00:24:41:14

Thanks again for listening to the Humanitas Industry 101.

At the end of each episode, we ask writers to apply the lessons learned to their own writing through a writing exercise.

Today's exercise is defining your “Grillich,” your inner excitement about your writing

or the writing in a script you love.

Choose a script of your own or someone else's and study it. List the specific moments that stir your emotions and then sit down and write. Try to define and elaborate on why those moments moved you.

And with that, thank you for listening to Humanitas Industry 101 podcast,

which 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: Fay Kanin

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