Celebrities, Crushes and Comics with Bryan Edward Hill

Welcome to Eighties tv Ladies, part of the weirding Way Media network. Eleyn So Pretty through the City. Welcome to Eighties tv Ladies, where we examine female driven television shows from the nineteen eighties. You're your hosts, Sharon Johnson and Susan Lambert had him. Hey, guys, I'm Sharon, And when I was growing up, my favorite comic books were Archie comics.

I can't say that I've read any since then, although I am aware of some. But yeah, I was an Archie girl. That's so funny. Do you watch Riverdale? I do not because it's it's so not Archie.

Yeah, but it's Archie apparently. Anyway, I'm Susan, and my favorite comic books from the eighties were the ones I read when I got to visit my cousin Mark in Mississippi and he had a stack of him in his closet, The Amazing Spider Man, Justice League, X Men, Wolverine, and of course I personally collected the first ten Star Wars issues, which I still have today in a box in my closet. I'm really a little astonished that, as a Star Wars super fan, that I wasn't aware that there were any Star Wars comics to be collected at that time, so I have none. Oh yes there were. Are they worth anything, Well, you know, probably not, because I actually, you know, if they were in perfect condition, then maybe they would be worth like a couple thousand dollars.

But they're not in perfect condition. I was eleven. I read them and kept them in a drawer, not in sealed plastic, and then I stuck them in a box. But they're worth a lot to me. Well, that's what you're supposed to do with things like that.

I don't read them. That seems to be what the purpose is, not stick them in hermetically sealed plastic or whatever. I guess some people read them and then stuck them into meradically steal plastic because they were wanted to be precious about it. But I wasn't that. I read a lot of books.

I had a huge collection of you know, you at school, you'd you'd be able to order books through the catalog and stuff. I had tons and tons of books. They still have that now it's gone online. But in the early days, when our youngest was in elementary school, they still sent home the little like magazine thing going here's all the books you can get, and here's and here's all the toys you can get with it now, because that's what they did to it. But what was that called?

Uh, I can't for the life of me remember, Oh my gosh, I remember the riff mobile. Remember reading is fundamental. Oh I do remember. Reading is fundamental. But I don't think they sent a mobile around to us.

It was like a mobile, you know, library that you could go in and look at a book. Well, I was very lucky. I remember at one point when when we were living overseas, the librari is literally across the street. I spent a lot of time over there, that is, checking out books. It was awesome.

The Scholastic Book Club, oh nice. And you'd get those little pa Oh my god, I love that, and circling the ones that I wanted. All I had the Highlights magazine. I love the Highlights. It's awesome.

I think that's still around too, It is still around. Goufus and Gallant wasn't that Highlights. I don't remember them. I don't remember it that well. Oh well, it would like so, because Goofus was always kind of a jerk, and Galant was really nice and polite and you know, and gallants people.

It's got to be the those old television Christian animes, count the oh yeah, Gumby this gumpy count as a cartoon. Yeah, but I also watched Captain Scarlett. Wow, I don't remember Captain I don't remember Captain Scarlett at all. Would Mad Magazine be considered that's not really a comic book, but there was a lot of animation, there was a lot of there was a lot of drama stuff in it. I would count it is a graphic publication.

Love Mad Magazine, Love Mad Magazine. Yeah, I did love him. I love a lot of graphic novels now, but don't read as many comic books. But it's big, and there's a lot of television shows that were based on comic books, and a lot of comic books that are based on television shows. But anyway, today we're going to actually talk to a comic book maker and television writer and producer and filmmaker, and so we're going to talk to him about the television and you guessed at comic books.

We have an awesome special guest today, my friend and amazing writer Brian Edward Hill. Brian graduated from NYU Film School. His TV and film writing includes HBO's Titans, Ash Versus Evil Dead, and The Legend of Muie Thai Nine Satra. For comics, he's written for Black Panther, Fallen Angels, American Carnage, Angel and Spike and Chariot, among many many others. DC, Marvel and Independent Publishers Welcome Brian to Eighties Stevie Ladies.

Thank you for having me. It's a joy to be here. I am so happy to have you on because you've been so supportive of the show and your friend and so it's really a treat to have you on. Well, I just thought the show was a wonderful idea. You know, since I'm a fellow that grew up largely in the eighties, you know there's some nineties in there somewhere, but we don't talk about that.

Don't talk about the nineties. And you know, I grew up in a single parent household, raised by my mother, so you know, like dimensionalized, strong female character is huge part of my childhood. So that intersection of that and the eighties, I mean, I couldn't resist. So we know each other because we met through my husband, Richard HadAM, Because you guys have spent the last four to five years working on HBO Titans together. We have we have indeed the unsingable Richard hatterm uh yeah, yeah, and it's been uh, it's so wonderful that able experience.

You know, it's it's speaking of television briefly. It's just so interesting because you spend the same time working on a show that you would spend in like graduate school, you know, and it sort of feels a little bit like college or graduate school as well, because the hiatus. Then you come back and then you're back in class and oh who got a haircut? You know, who got new shoes. I had never made the correlation before, but that's that's exactly right.

That's absolutely it's just like that. It's just like that. That is so fantastic. And then it's like, okay, well who's back, and who's new, who transferred in, who's new? Don't let them sit by themselves at lunch, that would be rude, like all of those different things, all of those different things.

Oh my god, I love that because it's like it is, yeah, and you know, and you're hoping you make it, you know, through through the four five years of grad school, what hopes. I'm certainly ups and then you can start another grad school. Lead, you can start another grad school. You know, once you get into that kind of mindset, I guess it never stops, right. Yes, it's true.

I mean that's what this show is is. I was just had something to say, but also a lot of questions and that I wanted answer. So I'm giving myself a grad school in eighties TV ladies. So Brian, let's go back and kind of start at the beginning. Where are you from and how did you get to Hollywood?

Originally I am from Saint Louis, Missouri, and I went to NYU, and so I spent about ten twelve years or so in New York, and then I came out to Hollywood when I sold a screenplink. So, because I was poor in Saint Louis and I was poor in New York, I was determined not to be poor in every major American city. So I didn't move to Los Angeles until I had sold something so I could come out and not have any memories of top Ramen on the West Coast, and I don't have any. I'm very proud to say that is fantastic. I love that we could just spend hours talking about being poor in New York because I don't, but certainly that my hat's off to you, because that's not a city that is cheap, not at all.

It's not. Was it always your goal to be a writer for television or movies? I would love to tell you it was, Sharon, but it really wasn't. My goal was really to make a lot of money and not have to grow up, And so I searched in high school for something that would allow me to do that. That was keyed into a passion.

Right, So storytelling was always a comfort for me. You know, stories were always very important to me. Kind of helped me frame myself. I talk about stories as the last vestige of philosophy we have in culture. It's very difficult to get someone, you know, sixteen fifteen fourteen to read Aristotle or Marcus Aurelius, but you can present these ideas in fiction.

So since I was an eighties media baby, basically, you know, I was of the you know, you know, try not do or do not there is no try right. Yes, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few are the one right, So these things were really important to me. And then as I was kind of charting a course through life, I didn't want to be the interesting guy with a cubicle and the Spider Man tie. You know, that was always the fun guy to be around at the office party. That didn't seem like the way for me.

So I was like, well, writing is interesting. I have some facility with words. I'm interested in the human condition. And I went to NYU to be a filmmaker as well, because I loved film too. Writing was easier, so I just did more writing.

And then when I came out of NYU, I intended to write to fund my filmmaking career, and then I got seduced by the ability to make money in an air conditioned room without lugging equipment up flights of stairs, and so writing became more of a passion from that point on. And that's kind of how I landed in Hollywood. You know. I just threw a bunch of things at the system, and ninety nine point nine percent of them came right back to me. But one of them got in, and then I got things started, and you know, so on and so forth.

So when did the comic books? What came first? Comic books, television, film like, it was sort of all simultaneous. I mean when I was a kid, you know, you could get a Snickers bar, a slurpe, and a comic book for about five bucks, right, So there were impulse buys and there were some of the first things I bought with my own money, right. I mean, you know, you can't really buy this and that, but you sort of chaerish the things you can, you know, buy with your lawnloiing money, and it's going to love them as stories.

And then my father died when I was sudden, and so I struggled with that like any young man would. And I just found a real affinity with Wayne, and that really bonded me towards Batman and then comics written large, you know, in a lot of ways, it kind of bonded me to fiction in general. I mean, this is a whole different podcast. We could talk about about how I was raised by fictional fathers. Because I had no idea what masculinity was.

I knew it was some kind of combination of Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Bruce Wayne and I would figure it out somehow, right, So they were all comics were a really important thing for me. And then the interesting thing is as I grew older, the writing got more layered and more dimensional. See, a bunch of British writers came in and did like really strong work in the space in the eighties. So around in the eighties, like mid eighties, you know, when the Alan Mooores and the Neil Gaiman's and the Grant Morrisons showed up, right Frank Miller, and so as I was growing older and seeking more nuance, these stories also grew in nuance. And they also sort of framed how I looked at female characters and fai because you know, comics are replete with interesting, dimensionalized heroines and villains and all of that.

It's sort of like a unique landscape in that way when you combine that with James Cameron movies and what have you. I mean, how I arrived is pretty apparent. So yeah, as I, you know, kind of grew older and started writing as a pursuit, you know, comics were interesting to me to do a bit opaque how one does them. But once I opened up a few doors in Hollywood, I suddenly became more attractive to comics, imagine that. And then I started working in comics, and to this day, I still, you know, write comics on a semi regular basis, and I write feature screenplays, and I also write and produce television.

So you keep busy. I try to idle hands, you know, idle hands. I do try to keep myself fairly because as the only child, so I grew up having to keep myself busy, I think, and I think you just never lose the knack of that. And so when you were watching television, what what sort of eighties driven shows or eighty particularly eighties driven female shows do you remember we're in I have to say a lot of it has to do with people I had crushes on. Sorry to disappoint, No, that's where a lot of things start, exactly ma per whatever it was, it was like Scarecrow Missus King because I had a crush on Kate Jackson.

And we could be here for eight hours talking about Jane Badler in the v Oh yes right, and Fay Grant right, yes, you know, Susan Day and La Law Jackie Harry on two seven. Like I was just getting my heart broken across television most of the eighties, you know, So I think someone that still left an impression on me. Like even when I come up with comic book characters sometimes will come out like Partrician McPherson from night Rider, you know, played Bonnie right, like like Stephanie Zimbelist, you know, will still kind of show up in the iconography as it were, Marilyn McCoo will show up. I love that. So, yeah, you know, that's the thing of it.

So that was my relationship because I was coming of age at the same time, you know, and and a lot of that is just formative and it kind of burnt way into Yeah, they're so beautiful too, Like you know, you you're watching, you're like actors and actresses are so beautiful. They're so there is something really amazing. Like I think about how much we adore actors, right, and we can kind of watch them do anything, and it's often physical, physical beauty. But it's also like I think of of you know, Tye Daily, who were very physically beautiful. But you know, also I was sitting here and I was just like, I'll listen to you read the phone book literally, just please whatever you want to.

You want to read their newspaper, come into my house every day and just read something out loud. To me, just sit They're into just anything you want to say, because there's a real gift in that ability to I still don't know how actors do I'm around actors all the time, I've directed actors, I've written for actors. I don't know how they do it. Well. It was magical back then in a way that it isn't now because you didn't have twenty four hour social media access to celebrities, right, I mean you basically you had the shows they were on, and if they were in movies, you had those movies and then maybe you would have like Mary Hart on Entertainment Tonight that would do an interview or something.

But you had very specific ways that you would experience these people, and it was the magic of them getting beamed, you know, through a television set, you know, in your grandmother's living room or you know and your mother's apartment where the big TV was, and you'd sit there and you'd watch that. Right. So it was a kind of different relationship I thought think that we had back then then. Now, you know, I'm kind of glad that, you know, I never you know, could go on to Susan Day's Twitter feed like that, you know, like No, I didn't need that, you know what I mean, Like I that would have been too much that it would have broken, It would have broken logic, broken some magic. You know.

There there are things I don't want to see Melody Anderson coming out of the gym, you know, like that's not interesting to me, Like I would rather sort of watch things. You know, Sybil Shepherd was just larger than life, right, all those things. And so it's not that I think it's worse now, but I just think our relationship to media, celebrity, human iconography is different now than it was when I was growing up, and I think some of the inexorable quality of it all has been lost. I mean, I appreciate, and I'm sure they do too, the ability of a for lack of a better words, celebrity to be able to communicate what they want to communicate directly without the filters of publicists or udios or whatever.

But at the same time, yeah, I do kind of it does kind of take away from the magic of whatever it is that they do. Like Susan I, sometimes it does seem like a magic trick some of the things that some performers are able to do. So, but that does come back to the audience and there, at least from my standpoint, choice in terms of what they want to consume and how they want to consume it. But we're still kind of going through this phase of trying to figure all that out because this is so new that all this stuff is just out there. But in the eighties, no, that wasn't an option.

Yeah, you didn't have the expectation of access. Lucky if you got the TV Guide interview right and the People magazine interview right, and it leaves an imprint on you too, Susan, Like you know, you know, I've been very grateful to have met quite a few celebrities just through work, whether it's developing a script with someone or the rest of event. And you meet someone, and you know, you meet people that are, you know, undoubtedly a less famous what have you. It's it's kind of a moment, it's cool whatever, but it recedes. I'm pretty good.

I'm pretty cool about all of it. I bet your bike cool. I think you see that. I was at accomp book convention maybe about two and a half years ago, three years ago, and Aaron Gray was sitting next to me. I didn't have the power of speech because it was different, right, because that activated something in my lizard brain from being like eleven years old and watching Buck Rogers or something or Silver Spoons, and I just literally just could not I think I started in front of her.

I mean she was very lovely about it. I think she gave me a photograph. No, but I hear what you're saying. I had a similar reaction and quite unexpected. I was at I don't know, some event something or other and suddenly saw Thomas Carter across the way and literally could not speak, could not move.

And my friend Brittany was like, let's go say hello. I'm like, I can't. I don't. You know, it's you just never know and it's where that reaction is going to happen. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's just it's it's uh, it's just different.

You know, you can't sort of get that back. I mean, it's happened on occasion with you know, uh, other folks like you know, like a Buffet, a Schwartzenegger or something. It's kind of hard to just take that one and stride. I've never worked with Tom Cruise, but I've known people that have worked with him, and you know, I'm sure that's a moment, you know for sure. But yeah, it's those folks that, uh, when you were a kid and it was all like it's kind of been possibly real but also fantastic at the same time.

You know, those feelings never leave you. And luckily I've never had a bad experience that's meeting someone from that era, you know, where it would you know, tarnish anything that I used to love growing up. And I've been really grateful for that as well. Everyone. Everyone I've ever met who worked on those things, you know, from when I was a kid and kind of growing through that has all been very very kind and very very patient, even though I'm sure they hear the same things over and over and over again.

I'm sure Catherine Bach never wants to hear any more about how someone had a crush on her, right. Yeah, Like when you're in that developing moment of your teen years and you're young, you know, early twenties, there's something really you're looking for. Who you're going to follow, I think, or who like how do I behave in the world, right and who is going to inspire me? And like you said, the philosophy of our days in art, comics and stories, well, and that's why I think representation is so important, because I know it is empirically from my own experience, because I grew up watching Linda Carter right as a kid. That opened up my mind to the perception of, you know, a woman as a leader, a woman as a hero, right, a woman as someone that you would follow, virtuous reasons, the rest of it, right, So all these things leave an impression on you when you're yelling.

And if you don't see those things playing out dramatically in entertainment, it becomes harder to recognize the existence of those things in the real world, to champion those things in the real world, right, And it's influenced a lot of my writing to this day, you know, still just kind of I never really had that barrier of gender when I thought about a hero or even a villain, you know, like whether we're talking about Linda Carter or James Badler, you know, they were equally powerful and left a deep impression on me, you know, And it's it's something that I do consider a lot when we sort of, you know, people get into the vicissitudes of you know, if you know, like we're being pressured to do this pressure to do that pressure to do that.

It's like no, no, no, I mean, we're just sort of reflecting the world it is. And I think it's critically important that we do these things because our ethical language lives in our popular culture, and if we don't consider that, then we're not considering the potential harm of having a narrow vocabulary in our ethical language. I love that ethical language lives in our pop culture. I'm writing it down. So sometimes you're looking at a mirror to what you're going through, and then sometimes you're looking at a window to what you can become, right, and so you know, for like par Tic Batman for instance.

So Bruce Wayne was kind of both right. The mirror was I'm sad, He's said, the window is this is what you can do with that sadness, right. You know, Bond was incredibly important to me growing up, right, and I kind of grew up in the Moor era. You know, Connery's I found later, but you know, when I was younger, it was always Roger Moore's Bond, James Bold, right, like that was the thing, and it was like, oh, oh, so you have to be polite and you had to do the right thing, and you have to save people and to have a sense of humor, right, and so all these things. That's an impression on me just kind of like, Okay, I think I get how to grow up, you know, and I sort of sacrificed my teenage years knowing that, like Brian, you're not really going to find your stride into your thirty five.

You knew that as a teenager. I absolutely, Susan, Oh, interesting, I just knew it. I just gave up. I gave up on adolescence. I was like, I don't understand how any of this works.

I'm gonna read Esquire magazine. I'm going to read Ian Fleming books. But it wasn't only enlightening for my own life, Susan was also it gave me kind of a window into other aspects of my life. For instance, like Kenyon Lazy you mentioned, you know, say a sharing glass time daily now in my TV viewing, you know, there was sort of like a slide, right, Like, so the stuff that kids would be interested in happens first. That's when you get your riptides and night riders and a teams and the rest of it, and then the grown up shows start to happen a little bit later.

When you're yawning, but you don't want to go to sleep, and you've got that little television room and you're keeping it going. And so I'd watch a lot of Cagney and Lacey, and I didn't understand most of it. Yeah, it's very adult. Like, looking back, I realized, like how adult it is in terms of it's more Hill Street Blues than you know, it's super adult, like in the in the opening credit sequence when the flasher guy opens up the thing, you know, and then they make the funny faces. I had no idea what he was doing for like three years until I realized, like, oh, that was a flasher.

I didn't really get who that was, but I could recognize an emotional parallel between what Cadney and Lacey were doing as characters and what my mother was doing. In a way, you know, he just sort of felt the same, like the same kind of emotional battles, the same kind of things. And I didn't recognize it consciously, but like subconsciously, it gave me a window into what her experience might be like taking care of me and doing all of that, you know, And it was like a glimpse into adulthood, which I think is a lot of how children get the first sense of adulthood, and adulthood's terms, it's the media because you're not going to be in the room during adult conversations. Normally you're not going to be involved in these things.

But when you're watching thirty something because you have a crush on Mel Harris, which I do and still do, and then you're seeing you know, these like different sort of nuances going on, you know, between adults. It doesn't all land, but it gives you an idea of what grown ups are kind of going through, you know, and TV was a was a real window into that for me. Have you had an opportunity recently to go back and take another look at some of those shows, those formative shows for you from back in the eighties, Yeah, for sure. I mean it's kind of hard to know Rich Hadham and not revisit late seventies and eighties era television. I'd to say, although on my own accord, I watch and rewatch Miami Vice.

So that is just something I always do, you know, because I love that. But yeah, yeah, I have gone back and seen them. And then you know, now as a student of film and culture and all that, I can look at Hill Street Blues and see the link to the French connection in it, you know, I can like, oh, okay, so this is a little bit of a Free Connects take, but it's got, you know, this emotionality that's in there and the rest of it. And then and then sometimes there are things that you saw when you were a kid that had moments that like burned into you emotionally and you didn't really catch all of what was going on, but you got to go back and you got to revisit it. So there's a lot of little moments like that I remember growing up, Like I have a very vivid memory of the scene where Mark Harmon takes a drunk Bruce Willis and takes him back to his apartment and say him down and even though they're both in love with Maddie and Bruce is mad at him, Mark Harmon's character isn't mad at him.

And I was like, oh, Bruce is mad, but Mark isn't. He's not really a bad guy like that stuck in my mind. Or Daniel J. Travanti and Connie Selica in that movie I think it was Adam, Yeah, they were both in that movie. Adam and it was the moment where Travanti finds out Adam Walsh playing at Walsh.

Adam Walsh finds out that his son has died, it has been killed, and I just remember, like Travante like grabbing a mattress or something and mooting in this powerful way, and I just hadn't really seen a man do that on screen before, and I remember that being incredibly affecting, you know, And so I do revisit this stuff all the time. You know, it's weird these things that just kind of lock themselves into your mind, you know, like that one episode of twenty one Jump Street where Hanson's girlfriend get shot in the convenience store and Hanson, play by Johnny Depp, couldn't save her, and it was like I forgot the exact number, but he had gotten the security footage of her shooting and he recognized that there was about two point five seconds or something that he would have had to do something different.

And within the episode you see Hanson making a list of all the different things you can do in two point five seconds. You can take off your shoes, you can do this, you can do that. And there's a scene where Holly Robinson at the time Holly Robinson. Holly Robinson, Pete now was like kind of consoling him through all of this, right, And so it just maybe maybe I saother episode once or twice, but it just it doesn't leave you, you know. And so yeah, so sometimes I'll revisit it and be like, I need to rewatch this to kind of understand exactly what the context of this was, sort of remaster it, yeah, you know, it kind of take it out of the deep viscera of it all, and then kind of revisited to what's going on.

So, yeah, I do it. I do it quite a bit. So were you finding that those emotional moments that you were describing they did They still hit you, maybe not in the same way, but in at least in some deep, deep way this time around or on a rewatch as they did the first time around. They did because you know, there was you know, see like you know, fifties and sixties television, you still kind of have the theatrical presentation of drama largely, you know, I mean you had some of your your your kind of edge of your works that you know, started to kind of push the envelope a little bit. And then when you go into the late seventies.

You know, that's when folks like Michael Mann were starting in TV, right, and Michael Mann was working on Vegas and all these things, and so the naturalism kind of comes in in the eighties. Was a really interesting nexus of naturalism and style. Yes, I agree with that for sure, and so the moment still were because they're presented in like a seventies method way, but there is a little bit more heightened style on top of the whole affair. And I think they're still like largely effective. I mean, the acting within a lot of those shows is still really really great.

A lot of emotional journeys in those eighty shows that I think are weirdly still resonant. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, the stories still work largely and it's a lot of first love stuff. Like you know, my experience with law was watching La Law. You know, I was like, Okay, I guess that's what's being a lawyers like it to be really good looking and then you have to get some wisdom from Richard Disart, yes, and then you can go do a thing right, and so like Victor Swints was like, Okay, I guess that's that's what you do. Right, that's how you be Alwyer even like Hunter right, like and you know it was Dede McCall.

You know, like on its surface, it's just you know, a cop show and she has to go under cover. I think she went undercover as I'll hook her like maybe seven too many times. Yeah they did. It was like DDI's go to Gay was like, you know, you gotta walk the streets and then you gonna whip out the Silver thirty eight. But there there is a lot of really good, like fresh banter going on uh in there, and there's all there's a real crack to a lot of those scripts that I kind of wish we had more of that today.

Well, Hunter has come a lot because and the actress is Stephanie Kramer, and the relationship between Hunter and Dedie McCall has come up a lot as a working relationship male female that is less romantic and more professional and French. Sure, and that's unusual I think both at the time but even now, Yeah, there always seems to be some push towards making the male and female lead have some sort of romantic relationship. And most of the time I'm like, do we really need this, let's just right but anyway, right, well, you write comics and television and features. Is in terms of storytelling and in terms of approach, do you do you come at them differently? Do you in terms of trying to figure out story for each of those kinds of things.

It's a very good question. I mean, you know, in certain ways, storytelling is storytelling is storytelling, right, So in a larger philosophical sense, the work is about the same. I think the real difference is the level of economy that you have to use. So a screenplay anywhere usually between one hundred and ten pages, maybe one hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty. If you're working in one of those important films, you say, but you have a lot of pages, and you have a lot of scenes.

Seems to lot to be efficient in all of that, But you have a little bit more time. TV I find is much less time because you have to almost deliver a emotionally resonant, feature level experience in literally half the space. So I think your scenes have to accomplish more things in television than they do in a movie. Like when I'm watching a movie, what I'm struck by is that scene was only about one thing. You know, and I'm like, I can't ever do that.

In a TV script. Every scene has to do multiple things at the same time, you know, I can't just have you know, a scene where Moneypenny comes to bond and plays a video from m and that's the whole scene. No, that has to also be about this thing and setting up this character thing and paying off the last episode and the rest of it. So it's economy. And then a comic book it's even more economy because you only have twenty pages and about five panels of artwork five images per page to push that story forward, right, So it's you have to be even more efficient and more targeted about what you do.

But one of the reasons why I really love writing comics is working in that efficiency matrix makes it easier for me, at least to accomplish more I think in a television script, and a television script makes it easier for me to accomplish more in a feature, you know, because you're sort of used to having to do all that. So I think that is the largest difference in the art forms. But you know, I write visually in all of them, a visual thinker, so you know, that's kind of carried through. But yeah, I think that's what it is. It's really just about how long do I have to create the experience?

Is the big question between all those forms. When you have an idea, though, do you know going in which way it's where it's going to be. Is it going to be a comic, a TV show or something else, or does that sort of come as you begin to work through what the story is actually going to be? Good question? You know.

Unfortunately a lot of that decision making is also encumbered by business strategy. Frankly, right, more about viability? Is this idea more viable as a comic or a television idea or a film idea? You know that Rarely do I just get to sit and sort of think formatic, gnostic and sort of feeling out that way. It's usually a conversation with my reps, with some friends sort of figuring that all out.

Now, there are some things that I think just work better as a comic book because either they're far too expensive to try to write as a screenplay or a television idea, or they're just so visually driven that you want to direct them on the page, you know, because the imagery is how the story is being told for those kinds of things where I think the imagery is really part of the experience, and I kind of view myself like Rich is it is a master writer. He's an excellent writer. I am not. I'm a pretty good writer who can also design an emotional experience. So experiential design is really what I do, I think, and writing is a part of that.

But sometimes the experience I'm trying to create is just better served by having something that has images associated with it rather than living in the theater of the mind, you know, So that also kind of comes to bear when I'm making these choices. And then oftentimes a comic book for me would be a palate cleanser. You know. I just got done working on a thing here, Like I'm working in this huge movie for Universal right now. I can't talk about the details of it, but if we want to get too late about it is enormous, right and it's got cultural importance in all of those things that you know, you say you want to do when you come to Hollywood.

And I love working on it, but you know, it takes skin, you know, bone and marrow and blood to kind of get this thing going. So working on a comic book for Marvel, you know, just helps me create eight and keep myself productive, but just kind of get out of the Olympic level kind of pressure from that process to just be like, here's a yarn about a superhero who stops a bad guy. Right, So a lot of that is also kind of like govern's what I do, how I do it, and where does Titans fit in. I'm just curious about your experience on Titans, because it's been Titans. It's interesting because I came in very new to television.

I'd only done one season of a show Ash Versus Evil Dead, which wasn't an intensely dramatic show because we didn't have much time. Half hour runtime. You have to have two demon fights every episode, so you basically had four pages where people talk to each other. We had a lovely showrunner, Mark for Heyden, who I think is amazing. Who should be on the show too, actually, because Mark is a brilliant guy.

He's been working forever and he knows a lot of these folks, like he just he was about He's talking to me about Virginia Madson the other day, Like he's that's got He's got all the anecdotes. Right, Mark's a lovely guy, and so I loved working on the show, but only in a season of that. And then I went to Titans. So that was the first hour long show I'd ever worked on deep serialization. You know, I was familiar with the comic book stuff, but also more of a Batman guy than I am a Titans guy.

So I had decent familiarity, but I didn't have the fluency that I have with like Batman. Well, I was gonna say, but you've written for DC. Yes, okay too, but but yeah, I understand, but that's a huge pantheon. You know. DC comics is everything from you know, Lawyer Superheroes was more marvelous stair double but likes everything from like super grounded stuff to like very cosmic, you know whatever.

So and I sort of worked in the more like kind of gothamy, you know, it could be possible for two weeks maybe you know kind of space rather than the high fantastic. But it was it was great, you know, I mean I got to gonna learn. I was pretty useless the first season of Titans, to be honest, I was doing more learning than I was contributing, and everyone was very patient with me, I think, but I think as the series went on, I started to find my sea legs a bit. And you know, like I said, like you grow through these processes. And since I've been on this thing for four or five years, absorbing everyone's technique, which I think is the biggest benefit of being in a writer's room is you get to see how other people solve problems, and then that can go into your toolbox because everyone comes at something from a different perspective, right, and that's kind of hard to do when you're just on your own running a screenplay.

Sort of shift your point of view. So that was really helpful. And yeah, and it's it's you know, it's been really rewarding. But it gets speaking to what we were talking about earlier. One of my focus points in working on Titans is making sure the female characters, I think, have you know, dimension and agency.

You know. I don't want to say strong female character because I don't know what that means, but like very human female characters that have you know, shades and flaws and strengths and the rest of it. I'm very focused on it. And I think that's because of a lot of the stuff I saw when I was growing up, you know, you know, growing up on David and Maddie, you know, growing up on Kate Jackson, on various television shows. You know, some actors I would just follow from show to show to show.

Right, So it's like, yeah, Charlie's Angels reruns, and then Scarecrow and Missus King, you know what I mean, like that kind of thing, and you know, you it all goes into the mind, goes into heart. And so now we're working on TV, it's kind of hard to get that stuff out of your mind in execution, and so I do pay a lot of attention to that, just to make sure that you know, these characters I think hold up to the kind of experiences I had when I was growing up with you know, at some point that's okay, we want to keep talking. We're going to take a short break, sure, but we'll be back with more. Okay, We're back. So I had a comic book I wrote called Seven Days from Hell that was like Ian Fleming meets Rod Serling, basically not going to get into the story of it all, but it was like a metaphysical spy thriller.

Codeing wrote the adaptation of it as a screenplay on my own. I just kind of specked it out, as we say, into the business because I had a vision for it and did a couple drafts of that floated around, and it got to Pierce Brostman because his producing part of the time bo Saint Clair, who passed away a few years ago. She was so lovely. It got to her. She read it and she was like, oh, I think Peers really like this.

You know, I showed him. So she showed it to him, I think, and I don't know if he read all the way through it or what have you, but he wanted to meet me personally. We went all the way up to Malaban and never into Malibu, and so I've never seen that side of Los Angeles, you know. I'd seen like the Tony Scott Los Angeles. I've seen like the Martin Breast Beverly Hills cop Los Angeles.

But Malibu was different. Yeah. Right, that was like Aaron Spelling, you know, this is where the gajillionaires live. And so I'm going into Malibu, going to some private club or something to meet Pierce Brosman. Nearly shaking in my nikes.

I walk into this place feel totally out of place because I'm just in this private club. Why am I here that kind of thing. I get to the table and I see Pierce and he's sitting next to VJ Armitrage, the tennis pro who was also an Octopusy right, and Octopusy was a more film. But I apparently Piers in VJ Front in the Bond world, they just hang out. It's just like you're all on a text chain.

Yeah, I'm not only am I am I sitting down with Riminton Steel, Thomas Crown, James Bond. Right, there's also VJ Armatrosh who if it was just a tennis pro, he's an amazing tennis player, but on top of that, he was an antipussy and I can barely handle myself. So I sit at this table and Pierce sees that I'm kind of nervous, and he's so gentle, you know, He's like he said something like, do you need like a few minutes to get through the Bond thing? And I said, I need like ten. So he talked to my manager for a bit and then I rejoined the conversation and everyone was laughing.

But I told Pierce that when I was like eleven years old, I used to watch for Remington Steel religiously. I thought he was the coolest guy on TV, and I would try to act like him. So one of the things I would do is I would kind of lean back and put my finger against my temple like this an eleven year old boy. This that I absolutely picked up from Here's Brothman and Ribbons zeal And. He had a good laugh at that, and I made James Bond laugh.

And doesn't matter that that movie went nowhere. I mean I could have literally been kicked out of Hollywood five minutes later and I would have had no regrets. That's fantastic, my gosh. I once got to pitch a project to Jodie Foster and it was pretty freaking amazing. The only thing that was terrifying about it was that we were in her office the heat the air conditioning broken, so it was a thousand degrees and she had a big giant stand up of Anthony Hopkins from Signs and Lambs right in her office staring at me during the entire bitch She was really I bet she's lovely, right, she was absolutely lovely.

She was absolutely lovely. Yeah, she lovely. She had she like told got everything. She had questions that were really smart and but very love but in it not in an attack way. And then like, oh my god, so let me so this happens, and that it was absolutely the height of of of a lot of things, and yeah it was great.

Yeah. I don't know many people who've told me Jody Foster's stories, but I've never heard a bad Jodi Foster story. I just hear that she's just amazing. I walked down a big fan and walked out probably a bigger fan. Those are always the best, much better than the alternative.

I've had those too, but I won't share those in the podcast. I'll do that later on podcast. That's a party later, Hill, Oh my god, we definitely need that. All right. I want to talk about Titans and the female characters on Titans for a minute.

Well, first, I have to give full credit to the female writers that we've had on the show over these years, right, Like you know SE's Well, we had Gap Stanton, who's amazing, should be on this podcast. Going to get her on the podcast because she's just an amazing human being in every way one could define the word amazing. And so that that always helps because you have someone who really understands the experience in the center to add to it. And then we also pay a lot of attention to the actors. I'm I'm very grateful that I have a I've always had a decent relationship with the cast, even even during season one.

You know, whether it was Tegan who's very young. You know, she is about fifteen or sixteen. I think when I started, she was very you know, an Anna Diapho plays a Starfire, you know, she she was a little older. I'm still very young, but you know, like you know, old enough to go to a barn order a drink, but like very friendly. And for me, it was really about harnessing the experience of the people in the room who lived through these experiences, listening to the actors who play these characters, thinking about them and what they want to explore on screen, and then kind of filtering that in with my knowledge of the characters from the comics and how we could realize them inside the vision of the show runner Greg Walker, which is different than an exact replica of the comic books.

But it was really just a couple of things, just kind of making sure that every character, but especially the female characters, weren't acquisitions. They weren't you know, there to be rescued or there to be oogled at, and you know, and all of those things, and just making sure that they had layers right like you know, like before, I kind of gave the Heisman trophy arm to the phrase strong female character. And I do that because I think that can lead to very one dimensional writing. And instead of like, well, she has a gun, she shoots somebody, or she has laser beams and she'll use them, and she looks cool in her outfits, so we don't have to write her anymore because she's strong. Instead, it's just the layering of it all and and thinking about the emotional consequence of things.

But a lot of that just comes from the real time human feedback you know, you have. And we also have a showrunner who is open and amenable to that kind of exploration, which is critical, right because there's nothing we can do on the show that the show runner you know, uh, you know, can't stop us from exploring, right, And so you need a leader who says, yeah, I want more of that, you know, yeah, I want to I want to go deeper there. We can do more with this character in this moment and in those things, you know, I mean there's look, there's a certain inherent amount of aesthetic style to these things. The outfits are very tight. It's an equal opportunity googling going on and all these things, right, So that is an element of it.

But I love the collaboration. I love working with people and getting their experience that I don't have. You know, when I was on Evil Dead, I was sitting in my little writer's office, just a staff writers, as lowly as one can be, while still writing a script, and I hear this beautiful voice ask me if I knew where the pretzels were. And I turn around and it's Lucy Lawless just standing there in the doorway, right, And so I remembered how to breathe. And then I was like, miss Lawless, I could take it to the pretzels, and she was like, just call me Lucy.

I'm not even gonna try to her accident. It's molifluous and beautiful. And then so I showed up what the pretzels were and we just had this long conversation, about fifteen minute conversation, but it was, you know, I kind of wide rangings, you know, like her experience as like an victor and then doing stunts and the rest of it, and it all goes in somehow into the subconscious and comes back out. So I hope that, you know, the the work that we do that comes out on screen is really evocative of the real kind of family aspect of the show, you know, and how we're all paying attention to one another and ultimately we want everyone to do their best work. And that's kind of what I'm focused on all of the time.

And because I'm a James Cameron kid, you know, and all that, I have absolutely no problem with letting a woman run things in a genre story when it's all the Titans. I think of Season two and three, four of the eight Titans were women, which true again in the superhero collective shows, that doesn't always happen. It doesn't always happen, but there are a lot of interesting female characters within comics. Yes, now we should it's getting better now, but for decades there weren't many women that were writing books, you know, Like there's a wonderful writer and Nocenti, who did a lot of work on Daredevil. I think it's like super awesome and open and all of that and she actually might be an interesting guest in the show too, and wonderful and so there have been Michael Simon has been there for a long time.

Kale is also a wonderful person, and she's into writing. But it hasn't been as balanced that way in terms of who's creating the stories. But in terms of the characters, there have been a lot of characters, and maybe some of these characters started as male fantasy. True wonder Woman kind of started as like a bondage thing wrapped in an American flag, right, right, But yeah, the true story of Wonder Woman is it's insane crazy. Yeah, bananas, bananas, but that's another podcast, go ahead.

But these, you know, these characters are a bit like clay, right and they and they they travel between the hands of storytellers and hopefully everyone is kneading out some of the bubbles as they go along, right, And so, you know, as the clay passes through different people, you know, some of those unfortunate aspects are worked out and more interesting things are worked in, you know, and they look at like Kelly's Sudaconic's work on wonder Woman recently with an artist Phil Jimenez, which is brilliant, brilliant stuff. Right. So there's a lot of these really interesting characters that are there that have a great backstories, great character conflicts and all that. So I grew up steeped in that stuff.

That's why I've always been mystified at the resistance to women leading a genre story or you know, any of these kind of gendered aspects of this stuff, because that just wasn't like experience growing up. You know, like like growing up, like you went to rent Conan the Barbarian. If they didn't have it, you rented read Sonya and you were happy about it. You know, like I think, you know, this is film, but I think to like Doom you know, and Channi working with Paul in the David Lynch film, you know, Sean Jung, you know, doing all the cool adventury things, right Like, So it really tripped me up when I got out here because I was writing all these female driven genre pieces. That was my library coming out to Hollywood.

I just had tons of them I was doing, and I would get this weird resistance sometimes I'm just like that this stuff is already happening alone in the place. So I'm glad to see that one of the aspects of comics is we do get now these female characters that have agency, and because they're being developed and written and filmed by really thoughtful creators. You know, Matt's Catwoman is a lot more than just a fetching young woman and a skin tight outfit, even though I would argue that Michelle Pfeifer's cap was also a lot more. I would too. We could go on for days about that.

I would love to come live with you in your big mansion and stay with you or whatever, but I just couldn't live with myself. That line has stayed with me since the moment I saw it. Okay, but go on, it's like kind of quietly feminist Batman returns, you know, and it's got like shades of working girl in it a little bit, right, So, going kind of back to where we are. I was really awkward growing I was terribly awkward. So one of the things I would do to like learn charisma basically, would be to mimic characters from shows.

And so I picked up mimicry when I was a kid just to kind of find things to say and how to relate to people. And then later on I used to watch a lot of stand up comedy, and I would sort of study it because I knew that if I could make people laugh, that I could disarm situations a little bit. You know, it seemed like something and people learn how to do. So I watched a lot of stand up comedians, and this is how weird I was. I would watch their sets and I would remember their jokes, and then I would tell the jokes to myself in the bedroom.

And then if I was watching like Rich Little or you know, any Murphy would do oppression on occasion. I watched a lot of the roasts, so Likelie Crystal, like they were huge. I used to watch all of those just kind of figure it out right. But it all started with me getting over my social anxiety. I used to stutter really badly when I was a kid, and I think it was more of a psychological thing, probably a holdover for my dad's death.

The brain does weird things with trauma, right, And I couldn't and you know when I couldn't, I thought I couldn't. But I got over it. But yeah, it was rough, so everything. That's why I'm I'm always out there on social media telling people don't give up, keep moving forward. Working yourself gain success and degrees, because everything that people may think I'm good at, I was terrible at for a while.

Right, people are like, Brian, you speak so well well. I didn't always and writing was difficult for me, like so many things were difficult. And so I don't think I'm a person that was born with talent. I think my talent is I don't quit, right, Like, that's where I think my talent lives is. It's nearly impossible to get me to quit.

I don't give up. I don't give up on people. I don't give up on tasks. And that might result in acquiring skills. But I don't think I came out of the womb gifted artistically or anything like that.

I kind of wrestled myself into it through the sheer force of will you know. So, Education's incredibly important to me. I was a scholarship kid growing up. I didn't have very much money, so I was able to go to a high school where all the kids had a lot of money. Now, it made me miserable the entire time, because I was ashamed and the rest of it, and dealing with all the things you deal with when you're the poorest kid in your school.

But what it did give me was the proximity to successful people, and it demystified success. When I got to Hollywood, I realized like, oh, this is just another high school. I know how to do this now. It was like going back to my high school with the skills of adulthood, understanding people's archetypes again, how to do that. So I think education is important in two equal ways.

One, you have the academic aspects of it, the acquisition of information, the regurgitation of information with a sprinkle of active problem solving critically important. But what you also need is a social education. Yeah, I love that. I you know, I'm coming out to La to go to film school at you know, seventeen from Georgia was a very cultural and social shift that I was very unprepared for. You're like, I'm on a different planet, absolutely.

You know. That's why I that's why I love Bond movies so much, because being in this business feels like being James Bond. Yeah, you're poured it in and you got to solve a problem. You're poured it in. There's a bunch of rich, dangerous people who want to destroy you, and you have to accomplish a goal without getting destroyed in the process.

I think. I think watching Casino Orial is excellent training for working in all and whatever you do, don't get caught in the wrong room with the wrong because because they won't save you exactly, because you are on your own when you're out there, so it is up to you to get yourself back safely. All right, Let's talk about some of the projects you're working on besides Titans. Yeah, I wrote an issue of Black Panther. I'm working on, like I said before, this enormous film for Universal, which, without getting way details, it's romantic, it interfaces with music in a way that's very important to me.

It's sort of a dual coming of age story. It's progressive in a lot of ways that matter to me philosophically, and I'm very, very excited about it. One of the things that I haven't really been able to access in most of my work has been romance, love stories, even like sexuality, not really a lot. I haven't been able to do that much, you know, because I do comic book work largely. So I'm hyper excited about that one.

I'm a horror project I'm working on that is that is brewing and across my fingers. I should be directing a feature soon, so more to hear about that. But yeah, that is most of what I can say. Yeah, one of the reasons why I do a lot of different things is I never really have to obsess about the fate of any one thing. Yes, because I have some other thing I do.

Right. The penalty for that is I don't sleep, you know. I just have to keep moving forward and and keep creating and remaining prolific. We'll see how it goes. Oh my gosh, this has been such a pleasure talking with you.

Where can people you well, as long as it's operating. You can find me on Twitter at Brian Edward Hill Brian with a Y. That's where I'm most active on social media. I'm fairly dubious of social media. I tend to think that social media is this generation cigarette.

Yeah, like fifteen years from now, we're going to be like, why do we let children use this? We were crazy people who let children use this? Right, But here we are. So there's Twitter at Brian Edward Hill. You can also find me on Instagram at Brian E.

Hill. I have a YouTube that's called The Hill Administration. I rarely post videos there, but I do have some videos about writing and also the psychology of kind of getting through the business and dealing with some of the self doubt issues and poster syndrome things I've run before, So there might be value there on YouTube. But those are the ways to You can also shine the bat signal and I'll show up. But good not everyone has a bad signal.

Not everyone has a bad signal. And if you call for the Roger More bond, that's yeah, right, And then as a special phone it rings right to me and you know, you know, but those are those are more difficult people to access. Maybe just stick with Twitter. I will say that on Twitter, I haven't thoroughly enjoyed following you, and I really find your advice incredibly prescient and helpful. Well, that warms the heart, susn't I.

You know, I don't know what to do with it, but I try to be positive. Yes, I don't want to. I was just gonna be a bond of guide online, you know, keep the cycle of abundance flowing. Yes, Oh my gosh, Well, thank you. This has been a real pleasure.

Thank you so much. This has been wonderful. Thank you Brian, it's been great. Jane Badler comes on. We're calling.

We're calling you will come do it in person? Okay, all right for today's audioography. You can follow Brian at Brian Edward Hill and that's Brian with a Why on Twitter, and at Brian E. Hill also with a Y on Instagram and at the Hill Administration on YouTube. And if you want to check out some of his comic books, I recommend American Carnage and Angel and Spike, Black, Panther and Chariot.

And you can find a link to some of these in our website. And if you'd like to know more about American TV comic books, there's a book by Peter Bosch called American TV Comic Books nineteen forties to nineteen eighties. From the small screen to the printed page. To your listeners. We had some of your questions listener questions that have come in over time for Eugenie ross Lemming, who we interviewed back in season one on episode four.

So we wrote to Eugenie and got answers back for some of these question questions. So one of the first questions we had was did she and Brad have any special touches tricks rules they would use when writing Amanda King and Lee stets and scenes. And we had a couple of questions in that direction, and this is what she had to say about that we were marrying two realities suburban mom with James Bond, fish out of water. But often instead of Amanda being the fish, we put Lee in the odd situation where he didn't fit and had no skills. He would pick up a flamingo lawn decoration and deel with it because he had no spy gadgets available.

Her common sense complimented his training in arcane stuff, so she didn't always mess up in need saving. Sometimes he needed her to lead the way. That's awesome. That's awesome here, and I thought that was really great. Yeah, and they I think they did a very good job of carrying that through.

Yes, the whole the whole series. So that's great to know where it all began. Next question. The show's blend of action comedy romance feels like a nod to classic films like If Charade, North By Northwest and Bringing up Baby Had a Baby, A Screwball Noir, If you will. Were there any films or television shows that inspired this show?

What was the tone you and Brad wanted for the show. Eugenie said, Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes or Victorious were inspirational, the predicament of an innocence swept up in a world of danger, excitement and intrigue, but our style was more contemporary and less arch I love that answer too. And then we got a question about the Fun theme song. If there were any neat little tidbits about the Fun theme song by Arthur Rubinstein when we did our music podcast, and Eugenie said, we hoped for a grander than TV, more like a film score score. We played Bernard Herman for our composer Arthur as an example, and wanted Bernard Herman but with more of a wink.

And he wanted to create a theme for Amanda and another more heroic theme for Lee and Marry the two. I don't know about you, but when I hear that theme song, it stays with me for days. It just will keep rolling over in my head, out of my control. It's fun to be a spy and it's fun to be a mom. It's fun to be a mom and a spy.

It really is a great theme song. Weed I missed theme songs as we've discussed. Yes, thank you Eugenie for sending us those answers. Keep your questions coming, listeners, and we'll try to get them answered from whoever we can. It will still stuck to us after this.

Hey, Sharon, you know what else what? We won three podcast awards. I know we did, didn't wait, guys, we don't know how it happened, but somehow they gave us three podcas Cast Awards from the People's Choice Podcast Awards. Thank you voters, Thanks you listeners, Thank you to our entire crew. We won Best Art Podcast, Best TV and Film Podcast, and Best Female Host Podcast.

I Like You, I think is the one that I like the best out of all three of them. Listen, I'll take any of them. I never expected we'd win any of them, let alone all three of the ones we were nominated for. So it's it's really amazing. It's really great.

Congratulations to all the winners. You can go over to Podcast Awards dot com and check out the streaming award show and see all the winners and all the nominees, and there are really great podcasts in there. I also want to shout out our team. I want to thank Sharon, you right there for joining me on this crazy podcast journey that's now an award winning crazy podcast journey. I want to thank Melissa Roth, our producer, Kevin Doocy, our sound engineer and editor.

You guys have been on from the very beginning. I want to thank the nineties TV babies, Sergio Perez, Serita Fontanesi, and Megan Ruble, and I want to shout out Sullivan and Sean from Concept Marketing, and all of our amazing guests and all of our amazing, fabulous listeners. Thank you, guys. We're thrilled and frankly, none of this would be happening without Susan. She's the one that came up with the idea that invited us all to go on this journey with her, this incredible, amazing journey with her.

So, Susan, it all begins and ends with you. So thank you, Thank you. Yay. Don't forget Richard, don't forget. Oh, I won't forget Richard Adam.

I thank him every day, But thank you Richard Adam, because yes, we wouldn't be here with our Richard Adam, of our original guests and a co producer on this podcast. Thank you for listening to Eighties TV Ladies. Please rate and review us on Apple podcast or your favorite podcast platform. We're on all of them, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Good Pods, search Eighties tv Ladies and tell your friends. Be sure to tune in for our next episode and listen to all the previous ones.

If you're just joining us, we hope Eighties TV Ladies range your joy and laughter and lots of fabulous new and old shows to watch, all of which will lead us forward toward being amazing ladies of the twenty first century. Let's go. Thanks for listening. Eighties so Pretty into the city man world.