Sea Control - Sea Control 156: Sink the Montana! - Part 2

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

1. https://gijoe.fandom.com/wiki/Sink_the_Montana!From Joepedia, the definitive fan site for everything Joe, the episode summary.2. https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-navy-ships/battleships/montana-class-bb-67-71.htmlNaval History and Heritage Command's website for the Montana-class battleships.3. https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/ships/ships-of-sail/uss-constitution-americas-ship-of-state.htmlNaval History and Heritage Command's website for the USS Constitution

You're listening to part two of our Sea Control Preble Hall podcast, Sink the Montana. What you're about to hear is an interview between Preble Hall host, Dr. Claude Barabee, and Sink the Montana's writer, David Caron. Enjoy. With us today is David Caron. David is a professor. 17 years. I've been teaching about 17 years.

How did you transition from being a screenwriter to teaching? Well, the first thing I found out, I really needed an MFA. So I got a Master of Fine Arts at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. A terrific program. I will give them a plug here. It was like threatening a starving dog with meat. What I had to do for that program was write screenplays and analyze screenplays and write essays and talk about screenplays. So I just really had a great time.

I really enjoyed it. And with that credential, I was able to teach at higher education levels. And you need a terminal degree for that. My credits didn't hurt. And let's talk about some of those credits. You have been a writer. You've been a producer for shows that everybody is familiar with. I mean, growing up in the 70s, we'll remember Starsky and Hutch, obviously, Star Trek Next Generation, Stargate SG-1, et cetera.

How did you get into screenwriting? Was that something right out of college? Was it something that you wanted to do before then? Well, I tell this story to my students because I think it's instructional for them on how you deal with loss and change and success and failure. I actually wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to be like Hemingway, roaming the world, covering ugly wars and romancing beautiful women. And I was going to write novels like Hemingway. And to do that, I went to the University of Texas, Austin, which at that time had one of the best journalism schools in the world.

And I graduated a semester early in January of 1974. I had a very high grade average. I had like all these extra hours and I graduated a semester early and I got a job right away at the Big Spring Herald in Big Spring, Texas. now big spring at that time was the kind of town that looked up to odessa and midlands and called them the twin cities and there were about 35 000 people in the town there was an air force base there was a refinery but it was also basically how we should always put they shot a movie confound that was set on the moon they shot it at big spring so i worked there for about four and a half months and before the rest of my class my graduating class graduated in may i was fired from

big spring for lots of intelligent reasons i was a terrible journalist terrible reporter and my journalism career my dreams of being Hemingway had begun and ended before the rest of my class graduated I never worked on another newspaper I was done as a reporter but while I was in Big Spring uh I found a magazine they had this uh this large hotel and you'd go there and buy magazines I think it was for the Air Force personnel they had all these magazines for over the world because the air base there and I found a advertisement for a class at USC where you would go to go to USC in Los Angeles and the classes were held at Universal in fact I think they still have this program now this is 45

years later 46 years later they still have it and you spend eight weeks going Universal and taking classes at USC and I had always loved movies and TV shows and I taught my parents and letting me go out there to take this class and of course I fell in love with everything TV and film I was in love with LA in 1974 LA is very different from today's LA it was almost the traffic was a whole lot better the air was a whole lot cleaner it was a whole lot less crowded. And ironically, also, there was a huge freelance market in television at that time I found out about. So again, I thought my parents were delaying me to stay. I was 22. And I stayed. I took that course. I found an apartment. I worked in a bookstore. I did various

crazy things to survive and became a screenwriter, a TV writer. It took me a couple of years to get started to get my career going do you remember your first screen uh screenplay that was accepted uh well i never got a screenplay accepted except that well i will say this you write scripts for a whole bunch of reasons not just to sell them but you write them also as examples of work to get an agent and it i arrived in la in june of 74 and in october september i had an apartment August, I had an apartment. In September, October of that year, I wrote a screenplay. And that screenplay eventually got me my first agent.

Within about six to eight months, I had an agent offer that script. And that agent got me my first job or my first intro to my first job, which was Starsky & Hutch. One of the things that we wanted to discuss with you as the Center for International Maritime Security and Preble Hall are particularly interested in your work on a cartoon in the 1980s, G.I. Joe, and we'll be discussing that in depth here as the second part of the podcast. but there's a specific episode that i remembered when i was in college and it's called sink the montana and could you tell us the essence of that story and how that uh how that came about well that that was in 84 and actually i i had written some cartoon material before that i had worked on he-man what he-man master of the universe i got it you know and uh but i hadn't really gotten any cartoon scripts produced uh oh god it was alan brenner that he was a very uh

famous uh writer by the way he's a novelist and all that he introduced me to steve gerber who was the story editor of of gi joe at sunbow at sunbow international i think was the company that produced the point i wanted the reason i'm bringing up this art this stuff is it's unusual their production company like in animation at that time would spend so much time and money producing a tv a cartoon like that why was that most cartoons were done very hannah barbarus set the bar which was very low for limited animation cartoons and if you watch they were of course they did some great stuff yeah but the animation is very limited and they did the reason they did so much juvenile material was that it was very expensive to animate people it's not as expensive

to animate character characters like huckleberry hana such as it's not as difficult you have a lot more leeway so human expressions are and human figures are harder to animate and uh the one time they tried that with johnny quest if you might remember sure i remember that and johnny quest was incredibly expensive and difficult show for them to do because it had action sequences actually very dark there were a lot of people killed in that show if you remember they were killing a lot of bad guys and uh it was it was pretty intense but also it was just difficult to animate at that level of quality so not a lot of people were doing shows like gi joe with human beings and that level of action and all that and they really invested the money i think they were

spending i may be wrong here but i think they were spending like 400 000 or something an episode which is a lot of money back then and steve gerber who was the uh story editor was a very talented man he created howard the duck the comic book not the much limited movie which he was very brokenhearted over by the way uh but he's a very very talented guy and a very good guy to work with and he hired me on now when he hired me on i worked on a show on episode the first episode i wrote was battle for the train of gold i think it was called and they steal it the cobra's trying to steal a train of gold from that stole all the gold from port knock and i had to rewrite that quite a bit because honestly my dialogue was flat and gert steve caught me on that he was right

because i thought i was writing like i wasn't writing it at the level that the reason i'm mentioning this is some boat really wanted the writing to be at a live action level wanted to be like hannah barbara they didn't want it to be juvenile they wanted very high level this really wasn't just for 10 or 12 year olds i mean you were really truly writing for an older audience right and uh we we we we try to do sophisticated ideas we try there was even one episode which i didn't write but i remember it where you actually met a couple of the cobra all these cobra you know spear carriers you follow two cobra spear carriers and they're just just their lives and they're trying to be good cobra soldiers just like any working people you know and they did

one episode which was basically take off on um 36 hours you know where they try to make uh one of the one of the joes think that cobra's conquered the world or something and it's all a trick to get them to reveal information they they did a lot of very interesting ideas it was a good place to work uh i think i wrote six or four i i think i wrote six of those things at least the first go around then dc deke took it over years later and i had a partner by then and we wrote like two two parters for them at that time and the writing was still good but the you know the animation was not as exciting jumbo years but uh to get to sink the montana i'd always loved the movie sink the bismarck and i was a big military naval fan or hobbyist or whatever i read everything

i could get i'm still fascinated with what happened to the hood i can't believe what happened to the hood i'm sure i'm astonished as to what happened to the mighty hood imagine what the british felt in 19 absolutely absolutely you know and that was their largest the flagship of their entire navy and it goes poof you know uh but and i just love that whole story and i was just thinking that is perfect joe country uh battleship battles when i first pitched it to now by then buzz dixon was running the show steve gerber moved on to other things and buzz was a great guy to deal with uh and i and of course i'm sound like i'm saying they're all great to work with no they're not i mean in the sense of television uh i worked on some shows

where the people were just unbelievable uh i won't get into it but really honestly these were really good guys to deal with unfortunately we couldn't have a big battleship battle i i initially wanted to have the montana the joes take over a battleship and they're fighting for another battleship well there are a whole bunch of problems with that the joes are not navy people their army basically their army they've got a mix of the air force in there because they can flying helicopters and stuff and jets and things but bottom line is they are army people they're not navy people and also they've been colossally expensive to have two different warships with different silhouettes so they have very distinctive silhouettes you know you can tell them what they

look which battleship you're looking at from 10 to 10 miles away that's how distinctive their silhouettes are and they didn't they rightly buzzed and want to try and cheat and have the same battleship shooting at itself so then i forget whose idea it was to come up with the device that kills all the electricity the electromagnetic pulse i forget who i don't know what genius came up with that but of course that solved the battleship problem there's no ship could get near it anyway with electric power or electric electric computerized systems or anything like that so i think i came up with the idea of the of the constitution because uh the main port where you know the battleships come in it's not that far from where the constitution is really

in real life so i connected that to that and then we did the the device on the battleship and the rest we the only significant change in my draft and it wasn't changed with an addition was uh buzz added those beautiful black and white flashbacks to establish why the captain in the montana would do anything to preserve her including cross over to cobra of the experience he's had on that ship as a young man and all through his career and that was great stuff it was only a i think like a page or two of material that really added a lot to the story and i i will hand that to buzz you know so it's interesting because obviously the montana class was never built it was proposed they had started construction i believe on montana and pretend i think kentucky

but i'll have to double check but i was i was struck by the episode because the montana unlike the iowa class was supposed to have four turrets two forward two aft and and i was wondering is that was that a function of the illustrator or was it a function of your research in the script that you say hey there's this is what the montana was supposed to look like and that's what they followed uh well i i i remember i said to you last time we talked i would try to find a hard copy of the montana script and i have a couple of them i do have a battle for the train of gold and uh oh oh and v for viper which is that's an interesting one uh but as i remember it i did not scriptwriters aren't really unless it's a story level issue you don't establish

specific elements like that in the script because it's just not your job uh unless it's important and when i'll give a character a semi-automatic pistol i don't necessarily describe it as a glock or a beretta unless it's a story element and that was the same with the ship uh i was thinking iowa class and what happened was they did the layouts i don't know if the guy who did the storyboards and the layout in america the way it worked i know i'm sounding like here the way it worked was the storyboards the layouts the character designs all of the model work all the major work of the ships the characters props everything that's all done in the united states by this was done in the united states by this team of people at sumbo and their offices

were in the same offices where the writing offices were and they had this huge war in the desk making all these layouts and whatever now i never talked to any of them but i know that's what they did one of those guys added those extra turrets uh probably to make the ship look scarier and i he might have been wasn't didn't the uh bismarck have four turrets and he may have been he might have been inspired by the bismarck or something like that or the iman so he may have been inspired because it would have been a lot easier for him to get a hold of those ships you know so that may have been what he was thinking then it got animated in in japan i think they were animating in japan at that time now they animate in the philippines and it's it's interesting because

you use the constitution obviously she's the oldest commission worship uh afloat in the world hms victory is the oldest commission worship what was there any other reason that you turned to the constitution for this i just wanted to do a broadside i mean i was a pirate fan long before Pirates of the Caribbean. I mean, I sat through Cutthroat Island. I sat through Swatchbuckler. Horribly disappointed like everybody else. Horribly disappointed and confused.

Wondering why they didn't do a good pirate movie when it's so obvious what a good pirate movie is. So, I just want to do a broadside. I'm sorry. And also, it was perfect, of course, because it was wind-driven and there wasn't any problem with the electric problem with the PM first.

And I just think you think color, you have to think visually with these things because it is a cartoon and you also have to take advantage of the fact that you can do so much visually although believe it or not uh there are still certain limitations you only want to do even in an episode of cartoons you didn't want to do more than one major new location because it was still expensive to animate and create stuff that they hadn't done before but again sumbo was pretty generous we had that the constitution we had uh the montana inside and out it was pretty nice in the writing process for this script or for other scripts

how much did you do research i remember when we when we talked before you mentioned that there was actually a library either on the lot yeah i mean this is before the internet of course We didn't have the internet, of course. We didn't have a whole bunch of stuff that's easy. We didn't have Google, of course, anything like that. So most of the studios at that time still had libraries, research libraries. Universal had one. Warner Brothers had one. Paramount had a library. And I think it was at Paramount's library. Now that I'm really thinking about it, I think it was Paramount's library went over there. And I went to their library looking about our material about battleships and came up with this whole package of stuff on battleships. And I found the uranium, I'm sorry, I don't have the script in front of me, but the machine, the anti-aircraft web fire uranium spent shell, I found that and I put that, I did put that detail in the script because I didn't want them to say AA, you know, and I like those neat weapons I found. I forget what they were called, some really neat name, firing these heavy-spent uranium shells, which sounds really – wouldn't they be radioactive? Pleated uranium. But I found details like that that I do remember putting in this group.

And, of course, I wanted to know where the engine room was, how many levels down it was. I did all that. I wanted to be very specific as to the nature of those engines and the nature of the watertight compartments and all that. They cut some of it. As I may have mentioned last time, there was a much more elaborate introduction of the battleship of the Montana at the beginning as it docks at the port, and I think they animated all of that. I know they storyboarded it because at one point I did have the storyboard. I had a storyboard. I may still have it somewhere, and they cut a lot of that at the time, I would assume. So I teach history, and one of the things that I discuss with my students is researching and finding primary sources and going to archives. So just out of curiosity, would something like that still exist, or if it was cut out of, say, a G.I. Joe cartoon, it's lost to history? Is there some sort of archive?

Now there would be. I mean, when they cut everything down, they know that it's worth money because you can put it on DVDs or you can just put it on YouTube for promotional purposes. there's a whole bunch of things you can do with that stuff now but back then i doubt it i doubt it they probably disjuncted or it may be stored away somewhere in japan i don't think sunbow exists anymore i and sunbow might have it but probably not it was a really nice sequence not to mention it but it's probably long gone one of we've discussed the the ships themselves out of this story but obviously there are characters and you had mentioned that ji jo is primarily army-driven, but there are naval characters as a Coast Guard character.

Oh, yeah. But the primary Navy character is a chief petty officer named Shipwreck. Yeah, Shipwreck. In order to maintain some consistency with other writers for G.I. Joe, did you have to watch some of the other episodes to make sure they had the same kind of dialogue, the same kind of reactions? Definitely. And I'm glad you're touching on that.

uh the people will fail in writing television because they don't understand a very important thing about writing tv well i'll tell you i'll tell you what the first job i had was and the producer was a guy named michael fisher and he basically he's he when i was working with him on that script he said you're going to school on us because i i didn't know what i was doing i was talented but i didn't have i had let's put it this way i had my talent but i certainly didn't i was doing i needed experience i needed needed to know how to really make this work and one of the key things he told me that i never forgot was i turned in my first draft he said david this show is called starskin hutch it's not called david karen's character your characters are supplemental

the characters are established have to talk sound and act and react the way they've been established you cannot change that you can bring new things to them you can create new stuff that build on those characters but they have to fundamentally be the same and the most important thing is their voices and this is the thing that kills amateur writers is they can only write one voice which is their own all the characters will sound like them all the characters will act like them even if they're male female children or whatever they just basically or there'll be caricatures or characters a sudden character will sound like a hit and the dreams will be dropped from his his name is he'll say nothing he'll say nothing you know i knew that by by the time i worked on

on gi joe i did understand the basic reality of television which is you're a chameleon you go in and you recreate enhance you enhance and build on the characters they have but you do not fundamentally recreate or change them you know unless some extraordinary circumstance like they're in an alternate universe or something like that so i watched the show i read their scripts i've loved reading scripts i still do and they gave me a half dozen or so scripts and before we would get into these episodes uh we weren't we had to be careful about which characters we think uh now the names escapes me right now gung-ho yes gung-ho various characters like that we couldn't have we we were given a list of characters to use in the jet episode not because

for dramatic purposes but because there was an expense issue if you had too many distinct characters of different voices it cost more money sometimes the voice actors you could do two or three voices many of them could only do one voice gung-ho was voiced by that wrestler he brought him in it cost the extra money so gung-ho was used sparingly but also it was a toy issue they wanted all the characters to be kept alive throughout the season but not all at the same time because it was expensive so we couldn't have 20 or 30 joe characters talking in an episode we were limited so i they gave me a list whatever joe character besides the lead character what was his name the lead joe character hawk yeah hawk general hawk was in pretty much every episode and if

you notice hawk was the most realistic of the characters he didn't have a bizarre costume he didn't have an odd way of speaking anything like that he was a pretty traditional leadership kind of character and he was in almost every episode i think uh but the other characters they gave us a list and said you're going to put this character in this and then we do our research and say okay this character talks like that or whatever so but we we couldn't have all the joy i forget how many of them there were i think there were 25 of them every season seemed to have new characters and it was probably in line with new characters are being introduced uh in the toy line exactly right and and then we would and there were machines and the end of and vehicles that

would get introduced as i remember there was some talk there was some talk of something that we are in montana sinka montana being turned into a toy i forget what it was maybe it's the epm device i don't think it was the montana that would be but there was something they talked about turning into a toy but i this or some other episode but uh yes we do research on the character voice but we only did that when we found out what the list was we were given a list we said okay you're using these guys in this episode but you otherwise you were given carte blanche for example to on how you wrote uh shipwreck for that particular episode i was complete i i had a lot of freedom and it was very unusual in television it's especially now almost all television staff written which is why

you have 30 or 40 producers on these things uh back then there was like one you never had more than one or two story editors on any uh i think gun they did 65 episodes of gi joe in the first season i think they only had two story editors and no staff writers none it was all freelance that's pretty amazing uh now into television you do 12 episodes of boardwalk empire you have 15 or 16 executive producers and they're all writers i don't know what they're doing i guess they they each write an act of an episode i don't know what overall how would you say that you're understanding of the navy or naval history influenced your writing either for that particular episode or you you've obviously written for other series star trek next generation which had

a ship in space and some of us suggest that it's a naval show how how has that influenced some of some of the writing that you've done for television my military experience was limited to three years of rotc in high school and which was not a great experience this is the m1 days I mean, we marched with them once, but I've always been fascinated with every aspect of the military. I was a big fan of combat and rat patrol when I was a kid. I loved McHale's Navy, for God's sake. If you remember McHale's Navy. Oh, sure.

Which, of course, had very little to do with the Pacific War. I mean, the Japanese are very nice people in that show. Except that Ernest Bergeny did serve in the Navy during World War II. That was the interesting thing about those shows I watched. All the people who wrote, produced, or acted in them were all World War II vets. And I think that might have been the reason combat in particular, at least until it turned into

let's see how many Germans we can kill on an episode show, actually was a very well-produced, extraordinarily well-produced action show. That wasn't the Gene Roddenberry series, was it? Or was that The Lieutenant? Oh, you're thinking of The Lieutenant, which was on, like, one season, but he got Leonard Nimoy and half his cast on that show. But Combat, I mean, they do amazing things, production-wise. What was truly amazing about those old shows, and I don't know if this is something we should talk about, but if you look at Star Trek and there was Hold Up, those episodes, the first year and a half, two years of episodes, Hold Up, until Freddy Freiberger took it over. And I ended up working for Freddy Feiberger on another show called Beyond Westworld, which was the first Westworld spinoff in television.

And they ordered five and they aired three. That's how good a show that was. But they hold up really, really well. And they have a real sense of how the military really works, the way a leader really works, the way a good leader deals with his people, how the chain of command works, what a military engagement would be like. I mean, Bounce of Terror really could be an exercise for naval maneuvers. Yeah, Star Trek Bounce of Terror episode between the Enterprise and a Romulan ship is probably the best, the most naval episode that you can imagine on the first series. Extremely well-designed engagement. And the thing about and combat did amazing things. I mean, they would have entire bunkers being blown up. They would have a town, a town, a battle in the town. These shows were all shot for five or six days. They shot Star Trek in five days. There's a reason they stay on the bridge so much of the time. Ten days shooting almost all the cable shows now.

television is a really i love television i love the material you can come out of it and a lot of it like this gi joe show they hold up so we've talked about the platforms that you've had on there you we've talked about the characters but the structure of the show it's essentially a play in three acts yeah of course that's because of the commercials but it's also very helpful i mean half-hour shows the history of tv has not been was really launched by half-hour shows our shows are much harder to structure realistically because it's not really a three-act format it's a four-act format whether it's chopped up with more commercials than i it's a four-act format but a half-hour show like like i think the montana you can really get to

the nitty-gritty of the thing in three quick acts just like the old twilight zone show and do some really good stuff. One of the exercises I used to use early on in my class is I'd have my students write a two-page paper, and when they handed it in, I'd hand it back and say, okay, turn it into one page. Same essential ideas. You know, in 22 minutes, you really have to hone the dialogue. You have to carry this through. When you're doing a first draft for a script, do you find yourself, okay here i've got 45 minutes worth of dialogue and action sequences and i've really got to rephrase this or take this character out what happened with sumbo was it was less of a problem because buzz and steve knew what they were doing and when we would structure these things we would

know pretty much by the end of we'd have an outline process we put together an outline we'd work on the outline and they had enough story sense and production sense to know that when we're getting too far afield or producing too much material and we also as you go along you tend to write lean anyway professional tv writers know not to beat a cat to death you know or beat the horse to death or whatever and we we know how to keep it tight and lean it's just the nature of it you know i get very uncomfortable when i write two two more than two sentences of description for a scene. If it's more than two sentences,

it's a major action sequence. And one sentence should cover it. Daniel Terradage was a famous screenwriter back in the 50s and 60s. He wrote the beginning of a script. Interior, apartment, and one word description, shitty. That's what we all emulated, right?

Some of it wasn't a problem like that. There were occasions like that ship being introduced that we wrote it, and I know they storyboarded it, and I bet you they animated it. because if you watch the episode real carefully it does look like there's a little bit of a abrupt cut there a cut in the sound to cut the music and i think they did just lift it out whole it just ripped it out when you run into a problem though

is when the producers of certain shows only remain unnamed like star trek overnight right where they don't really have that facility and you'll find yourself writing a 65, 70 page scripts and you need 60 and it's like 8, 10 pages too long and you just need 8 minutes you have to cut out or write a 54 page script and it's about

8 minutes short and you have to write 8 minutes of material while you're shooting the episode so it'll be long enough when it airs if they're not real also to tell to be fair to everybody the film does have a life

of its own it's not film anymore let's just call it recorded material but it does have a life of its own when an actor, you hire a new actor for an episode, maybe he talks real slow or he talks fast or the director shoots real fast

it still works but he shoots real fast he cuts a lot of corners they are so military or in some cases navy centric I think we were Hasbro centric basically whatever Hasbro wanted. I mean, for one thing, we had a character named Bazooka. When was the last time a bazooka had been used

in a military engagement? Korea? And we still had a character named Bazooka. I mean, I don't think he ever used a bazooka for obvious reasons. I have worked on... Well, Star Trek, we had a tech manual, and we followed it when we were talking about

the containment fields, you know, for the antimatter pods on the warp drive. didn't make that stuff up episode episode that was came out of the tech manual there were two guys that consistently kept that manual updated if an episode created new technology that new technology would go into the tech manual and we were consistent and i like that kind of thing i think that's really great when they do that kind of thing but we didn't have that on sunbow hasbro sent us toys and it's characters sent us whatever now i did my own research when i was working on a thing in Montana, I wasn't going to put cruise missiles on the Montana, although I

think the Iowa class did have cruise missiles, but I wasn't going to have Tomahawks on the Montana and cruise missiles on Montana because it was being decommissioned. It was World War II style ship at that point. We have a lot of listeners, not only with the Preble Hall podcast, but the SimSec Sea Control podcast, who are naval officers or sailors who are interested in writing. Naval officers have been writing for almost 200 years in publications could you give some advice like three key points on writing or writing better in for their careers well i will say one thing military people have an enormous advantage if they want to write fiction because they know how it really works unlike uh some writers who write stories about the

military or whatever and they they never spent a day in the military and never spent a day in uniform or in combat or whatever so they have a huge advantage right there if they want to pursue it depending on what service they were in or whatever the three key points is well first of course is don't be afraid to write don't be afraid to fail it's not going to be perfect whatever you write it's not going to be perfect i had a partner at one point everything we wrote had to be perfect it destroyed the partnership because we couldn't finish anything when someone's going to dislike whatever you write because to quote william goldman nobody knows anything in the film business well what you think is good is going to be terrible to other people but

doesn't necessarily mean it's bad and what you think is bad may be wonderful to somebody else so a don't be afraid to write because you're going to fail so you should really enjoy it Number two, take advantage of your assets, whatever they may be, to pursue whatever it is you're trying to do. Like I just mentioned, the military. If I did, you may look it up somewhere, Lullaby's for Lieutenant. I hooked up with this wonderful VFVET, Frank Cox, and had written this wonderful book about an artillery unit in Vietnam. And we wrote a screenplay that won a grand prize at StoryPro. and just a talented man.

We had a great team on that. Look for your assets either with other people or with yourself and take advantage of those assets. And the third thing is depending on the kind

of writing you're doing. The first two things both, by the way, works for nonfiction and fiction, right? And I hope the third thing does too. And it should be obvious,

but please don't write for someone else write for yourself don't write something that you think other people will like and therefore you should write it a certain way i love science fiction so i wrote science fiction i've written military material because i love military material i just wrote a western because i've loved what i love westerns and no one's producing westerns these days i wrote it because i loved it i wrote a western with a 19 year old latina lead character who's making movies like that. Write what you love. Write what you want to do. Write what you want to read, and you'll be okay. David, thank you very much for joining us and for sharing your thoughts and your recollections

of not only St. the Montana, but how to write and the whole process that, you know, something that we all enjoy, whether it's going to movies or watching television. So thank you very much for your time. We really appreciate it. I really appreciate talking with you about this. Teaching is my day job. I love talking about this stuff anytime. Thank you. © BF-WATCH TV 2021