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Is it really possible to make it in Hollywood when you’re a mixed person or foreigner living in the US?Theory of American optimism compels us to say, “Yes.”But why is it harder than it looks? Is it really possible to walk the paths less traveled in the US—and still get fulfillment?When we can live and do as everyone does, and yet we love food no one does, we are motivated by internal beliefs that few understand, and we have aspirations and connections thousands of miles away, then … How exactly can anyone, even a foreigner or mixed person living in the US, make it in one of the most coveted, vast, and widespread industries in the world: Hollywood?UCLA’s clinical Assistant Professor and TV writer, Paul Puri, MD—who has been involved in the writing of 20+ hit shows like Marvel’s Moon Knight, Netflix’s Iron Heart, NBC’s Chicago Med, and Peacock’s Bel Air—weighs in on the hidden fluency behind making it in Hollywood. Even if you come from a mixed heritage or if you’re a foreigner living in the US. Listen to this episode if you want to find better and more fulfilling ways to make it in the US, including in Hollywood.—In case you’re out and about without WiFi later, download this episode now.Previously: Why we want to do everything at once [An Internal Logic]In this episode:The Start-to-Finish roadmap for turning script into screen in Hollywood The 8-step ladder of writer producers in Hollywood, so you know who to talk to.An Insider’s Encyclopedia of who’s the staff writer, story editor, executive story editor, coproducer, producer, supervising producer, co-supervising producer, and executive producer.Real differences between TV vs Netflix (and why it’s not about the device or whether it streams).The light and dark side of Youtube that few understandsBeing a high-functioning individual with opposite life interests: A How-ToAccording to 3,041 Americans, this is what we regret mostEpisode 2 TRANSCRIPT“An Ode to: Making it in Hollywood with a mixed-heritage background”Thalia Toha: You kind of touched on a little bit of the assembly line a little bit. As far as, starting with, maybe the idea, and then the script or whatever it is. Is it usually the script? And then investors?Paul Puri: It really depends on the project. So some of the bigger sort of breakdowns are: Is it from a pre-existing IP or intellectual property? Or is it an original—what we call a spec script. Which is basically a script written without pay. If I write an idea that nobody's paying me for, what I might do is write a script version of it. And then go out and try and sell it. And in the process of that, as I'm trying to sell it, I'm trying to get a producer involved, get a director involved, get a with a producer, a whole production company.And then try to then sell it to a studio. And then the studio would take it and try and sell it to essentially the network who distributed it as its TV show.The start to finish roadmap for turning script into screen in Hollywood Paul: Features, I have very little experience in. They basically—there's the financing. So that's like an original piece. If there's like a spec piece, if there's an original or something based, excuse me, on prior IP. So, like, you know, Marvel as an example, but anything that's based on a pre-existing character. There's usually a studio or somebody that wants to do this project. Or sometimes in a company, they're going to say, “We're going to invite in a group of writers to come in and pitch what they think this project should be. A take on it.” And then we're gonna hire one of them. And they're gonna kind of lead the team of assembling the project. Sometimes it's a little more direct. Like an executive see somebody who is an up and coming, or hot creator, writer, producer, director. And they'll invite them onto the project more quickly. So that can take months. And the writers are often who are coming in to pitch on something, or often mapping out an entire take on a character, a season—they're usually doing that for free. For no money. And, only one of them is going to get the job. So there's a lot of pre-work involved. And that can take months. You know, often you can spend weeks. Pitching on a project. Or if you get hired, you might then—if it's like a more broadcast related TV—you might have meetings with the producers. Very often, selling a project will involve attaching a production company or something ahead of time. But you meet with your team. And then you try to sell it to the studio still. You try to sell it to the network. Try to find if it's going to have distribution, if it doesn't already. And then once it's green lit, you'll go down the road of hiring your staff. So then you are getting— I'm not a show runner, but if you're a show runner (that's the highest showrunner), for the most part, and there are some other exceptions to this—the highest level writer and executive producer. The 8-step ladder of writer-producers in HollywoodPaul: So writer-producers in Hollywood, in TV, have an 8-step ladder. You have staff writer, story editor, executive story editor, coproducer, producer, supervising producer, co-supervising producer, and then executive producer. And so writers in TV are generally writer-producers. The highest level one is the show runner. They are a writer and executive producer. And they hire basically all of the other writers on the show. And then they'll often coordinate with the producer and others in terms of other hires. Paul: So you put together your writers room. You start writing scripts while your director and producers are trying to hire a lot of the other below-the-line talent. Which is like your assistant director, everybody that's like doing the production work and putting that together, finding sound stages, finding location scouting, all of that stuff—while you're figuring out what the story is and writing the scripts. And there's a little bit of a lead time on that. But eventually you have to star meeting deadlines. Because you might have premiere dates. And you've got to start getting scripts into the hands of people to start shooting them. And you have your casting. And all of the stuff's happening simultaneously. So TV—the joke of it is it takes 7 years to get a feature made. But TV, you know, you can get greenlit and be on the air in less than a year for a full, sometimes 20 episodes of, TV. So it happened very fast sometimes. But Marvel’s been the exception. Real differences between TV vs. Netflix (and why it’s not about the device or whether it streams)Thalia:  But I don't even know if we should consider—and I don't know if people in the industry consider the streaming still TV? I guess so. Because there is the TV component, still. But I almost don't look at it from a consumer standpoint. I don't even look at it as TV anymore. It's almost kind of like a—Paul: I mean, the distinction we make is basically around the length of the story. So it's one uninterrupted piece. Then that is, I think, the minimum length of 70 minutes to qualify as a feature. And not a short. But I might be making that number up.And then if you have multiple sections of it, then it would qualify as more of a serialized component. And so you have, generally, a comedy is 20 minutes based on broadcast network standards. And that's been, of course, broken by streaming. And then 45 minutes, or 22 and 45 minutes for dramas. 22 minute dramas coming out. And dramas and every genre is mashed up. So the rules are definitely broken more. But people still—we still call it TV for the most part. Even if you're streaming Netflix. Thalia: I see. So it's more like a categorization at that point. It's not really quite the medium per se. Paul: Yeah. I mean, we don't, a lot of people bristle, a lot of people in the industry bristle, calling it all “content.” Because they feel like it waters down their identity in some way. And equates and creates a false equivalency between Youtube creators and people who've been doing television for 30 years. Thalia: There's some generational differences too, right? Is there the sort of low-brow element of it then? Paul: I mean, I think that originally features were the prestige movies in the theater. And then TV kind of took a turn around the Golden era. Starting with Sopranos and things. Where we feel like, “Oh, TV is so cool! We can do so much with it. Now we're doing like a franchise within features.” And like that, “We can carry out and keep an audience for a long time, and make billion dollars a movie. And isn’t that tremendous?” And all of those things. The production value just obviously went way up. And then at the same time, there was sort of this, I don’t want to call it a “democratization.” In that the barrier to entry was much lower in terms of Youtube. What's different is that, if you are going through that, you can't use production values to grab attention. You have to do something else. And so it's not usually—from what I've seen, based around this—it's a different skill set. I think most TV writers would argue that what they really love is things like story. They love being able to figure out how to craft stories. And that's very different than the question of, “How do you build an audience necessarily?” I think that some people hope that if you're telling a good story, your audience will find it, and it will come. But I don't know that that's always the case. And I think that the use of spectacle and figuring out how to grab people’s attention—is somehow a little bit different in the social media or Youtube landscape than it is in film and TV. So I think there's maybe some overlap. But they're very different. The light and dark side of Youtube that few understandsThalia: I'm noticing a lot of, there's that element of spectacle. And it's almost to the degree of … where with Twitter you get to—the more outrageous something is, the more it's likely to grab attention. Is that something that you've observed as well? If so, what do we make out of it? What is it? What is that? Paul: Yeah, I mean, I think that that occurs in any kind of noisy system. The more noise you have, it’s easier in some ways to stand out and be louder than all the other noise, to grab the attention. There's probably other ways to do it. And I think that if people can sort of think of—what's the expert like? What's your signal? The noise ratio? Like, how do people find the signal within the noise?If you are consistent with your signal, and that resonates with somebody else, and that's maybe enough, but I think that's it. I think it's true in any market, really. The challenge is that sometimes the things that people do to be noisy is to be more salacious or offensive. And so that leads to sort of a progressive eroding of social constructs of politeness and acceptable behavior. Because in the online world, you also mix in the level of anonymity and lack of accountability. And therefore people can get really out there and get another 100,000 subscribers or viewers or whatever followers and therefore they are validated to continue doing that even. Even though it's eroding the kind of things we need for a civil discourse on subjects. So it's a tricky thing because we, as humans, experience the world through contrast. We sort of level out on whatever we're experiencing. And so something is required to what it could be different, to break out. I'll make the comparison of like ASMR, I think it is. It's like people who are into this like whispered audio. That’s going the other way doesn't always have to be louder. It can just be different. There's different ways of grabbing people's attention besides having being louder or more offensive. Thalia: Well, I like your point on contrast.Because if the noise works—if all you're doing is just noise consistently, it no longer becomes a noise. And that contrast is gone. And in a lot of ways, what you originally set out to do is now backfiring, almost. And that erosion that you mentioned I think is really interesting. It's probably something that people aren't expecting when they set off to work on social media, for instance.But it is computerized. It is a robot. And so they're not really taking into account what you're talking about. That civil discourse and the potential, you know.There’s not really much of that organic matter. You're just kind of highlighting some of the parts. And compacting it, and almost piling it, into one piece. Constantly. Yeah, you almost lose sense of it, and you're kind of dull and jaded to it.Being a high-functioning individual with opposite life interestsThalia: And now, I want to talk about you right now. Because you're a high functioning individual. You just mentioned that you at UCLA. You have a clinical practice. Your TV writer. You do it all. And now you have a new venture that you're about to kind of launch. Which we'll talk about in just a minute. What did you think it was when you were growing up? What was it that brought that level of focus? And being able to focus at multiple different things.Because that, I think, is quite a rare skill. Not a lot of people have that. And when they do have that skill, they get interested in this other thing.But you have multiple paths that you are maintaining well into adulthood. So what do you think it was? Paul: We have very much lived in a society that carries on a belief that you're only supposed to do one thing. Because we had shorter lifespans. And people could have one career in a business that give them a gold watch after 40 years. And I think we don't  … that's just not reflective of our society anymore. I guess in terms of my heritage, I'm a child of an immigrant. So my father is Indian. He came up early in the 70s. And I have had a fairly  … I grew up in the Midwest. And I'm ethnically ambiguous. People look at me and they can't quite tell what I am. And so I'm writing about this in a new pilot I'm developing. But basically, I have the experience of sort of fitting in everywhere and belonging nowhere. And so to me, that meant I simultaneously identified and de-identified with every group I was in. Paul: Which gave me the opportunity to sort of reflect on, “What do I like about this? And what do I want to do for me?”And it meant that I tried on a lot of different things. And I sort of reached a point of knowing what I want. My father was formerly an engineer. And then became an entrepreneur and jumped multiple industries of saying, “OK, I don't have to do just what people tell me I have to do. I can figure out something else.”And so that lets me look at what I'm interested in. I went to a fairly eccentric college. Also called Hampshire College, which has no grades and no credits. And they encourage to sort of pursue your own interest academically. And try to really ground those in study. And then try to integrate them into larger projects at the end. And that helped, you know, guide it more. And so I knew that I was interested in psychology. And I knew that I was interested in storytelling. I got into theater. And then I got kind of burnt out on theater for a while. And I put it away.And I've been writing on the side for a long time. A lot of bad stories. And I went to medical school. And even once I got into medical school, I still want to keep writing. So I just kept doing them in parallel with the idea that there's nobody that can force you to put away everything.Aside from if you want to be—I don't know, I'm gonna make something up right now: you’ve got to be a submarine pilot and a race car driver.It’s really hard to do those two things at the same time. But it's like, if you want to be a writer, you can write whenever you want to write. So I'm going to write. I'm going to keep writing. And I never knew if any of that would go where I wanted to go. But I just sort of made choices along the way. That meant I could keep each of them alive. And so I went into psychiatry because I enjoyed the rotations. And I thought I could be pretty good at it. And then, I made choices about that. Like, “How could I do this in the most effective way, where I'd be proud of my work? And if the writing didn't work out, I could do this for the rest of my life and be satisfied with it.”And then I found along the way, there was a path where I could carve out a private practice in a way that I could make a little more per hour. And that would mean that I'd have more freedom and time to write. And then the psychiatry started to inform the writing and got me in certain doors. And then, they play back and forth. But that: “How can you honor yourself and honor the things that you're interested in, and keep moving them forward?”Well, also thinking long-term for your own well-being in terms of, “How am I going to not have regrets when I'm 85?”According to 3,041 Americans, this is what we regret mostPaul: And so for me, those were the guiding principles of: I want to do something that I think is useful and uses a lot of the aspects of me that I think I can be good at, and that helps the world. And so, I just kind of use those guiding principles to make my choices, and things have luckily worked out. So far, I wish I was more successful as a writer. But that's: I’m juggling a couple other things at the same time. So I recognized that I only have so much time to devote to each highway at the same time at once, basically. Thalia: So it's almost like a completely different approach from what I see today, where a lot of people—and I'm guilty of this as well, I’ve got to admit—you want to be as good as possible that you want more and more. And so there's a lot of kind of an exertion attitude to it. Whereas in your case, it seems that the attitude is more preservation and continuation. Because you get to have these multiple different parts of your life that's kept alive. But you feel like that is something that can be adopted by most people?Or because of the construction of society being the way that it is, then you have to earn a certain income or so to live a certain way that we have to focus on one main thing, and then everything else is a side side thing. Paul: You know, I think I'm in  … I happened into a form of relative, like luck, or privilege, or something. I didn't go into medical school even knowing how much doctors made. I didn't look it up. I guess it’s like, “Oh, you know, I'll figure it out.”It's just going to be—it'll be a good career. And I'll feel good about my work. And then everyone should go become a radiologist because they're making so much money. And even though there's a drought in that along the way. So I was fortunate that the stuff that I stuck with ends up paying pretty well. And there's been like this shortage of mental health providers. And I'm pretty developed at this point. What I do, because I just sort of kept going. I was like, “This isn't enough. I want to do a little more. I want to give a little better in these other areas.” I've had this conversation with people who want to get into TV, and they're like, “How did you do it? And I tell them.” And, basically, what comes across is: this is not a repeatable formula for most people to get into TV. I have like one younger doctor who is an aspiring writer. She's written some good stuff and is getting starting to get noticed. For most people, they're not going to go to medical school to try to become a TV writer.And they're not gonna like—so, I think that there is a shift that has to be considered in terms of: what are you going after? Is it about doing all your side hustles for the purpose of making as much money as possible? Or is it about life satisfaction? For me, I'm tired. I do a lot of stuff. I've got a young daughter. And I wish that I was doing more. Because I would have more success in the creative field. But, if you can shift away from the brass ring of some kind of financial end point as being the real end of it  … And think about continuing to something else with the idea that you can accrue 10,000 hours over, you know, if you, if you're doing a 10,000, like the Malcolm Gladwell outliers model, then you can do 10,000 hours.But you're gonna do it over years and years. Because that's what you have space for. That's cool. It’s not a race anymore.If somebody is tracking you and is trying to look for your progress, it's like: Who really gives you **** If you're trying to learn the piano and you're doing that for your own time, you don't have to go do a piano performance. That doesn't really matter. Is the implicit reward, the enjoyment of the experience still there? Like writing, I do like. There are external metrics of success. But I just like generating and developing these ideas. And so I want to keep doing it. Despite all of the other problems of the industry. We're in a writers’ strike right now. There's all of this stuff going on. Thalia: How did we get into that mode of racing? Because you mentioned it's not a race. And I agree. I really agree with you. Who cares? Right? Nobody cares. Really, you can count with your one hand, the amount of people who actually care about whether or not you do something. So how did we, you think, get into this point of always having to do more? Always having to one up somebody else? Is there something in psychiatry or psychology that relates to that? Why it feels like it’s never enough in the US: “of the people, by the people, for the people.”Paul: Well, there's a couple of schools of thought you could get into.One of which is the nature spirit of capitalism and market forces. Like selling us the idea that playing at the external proof, is the thing that equates to that success in those areas. Equates to happiness. There's the nature of competition being able to show other people of that. And then, I like the Carol Dweck idea of mindsets. It is the idea of the people tend to fall into two camps of: the growth mindset or the fixed mindset. And the growth mindset people believe that sort of life is about slowly leveling up. And the stakes are really welcome. Because mistakes are what you learn from. And that it's about slow, incremental improvement in your life. And the fixed mindset people believe that what you're born with is what you got. And that either you got it or you don't live. What’s interesting is: one of my takeaways from that that they mentioned, is that it's the fixed mindset people that seem really overdriven.And the reason is that they're trying to prove that they've got it. They're not actually trying to level up. But they're just trying to show other people that they're good enough. That they have whatever this important thing is.I think that's a piece of it. And when we can escape from that mentality that we have to prove something, and that we all start out wherever we are, and it’s about like personal development, and slowly making our lives better, I think a lot of things will shift. Maybe we'll be less lonely. Maybe we'll be less myopic in terms of our pursuits, right?Thalia: So you think loneliness does have something to do with whether you are driven in the way that the fixed mindset is. People are driven that they want to, they want to prove something. Paul: They’re multi factorial. I think that we over invest in the nature of the rugged individual.You know, “Go west young man”— in our culture. And that because of that, it's the idea of each person being an island, the nature of life, these external pursuits, devalues or undervalued interpersonal skills. Even though there's research that shows that those are some of the biggest determinations of success. It is how to be able to interact with other people.So I think all of that are pieces of it. And that when there's an eastern thinker, Krishnamurti is sort of the philosopher around the 60s. And he had some very  … If you can buy into the  … Which is a bit of a spiritualist belief that we are all energy and interconnected and all of that. Then, if you can be in touch with that, loneliness is gone. Loneliness is an illusion. Loneliness is based around the illusion that we are individuals in our own little meat sack. Those are my words. We don’t really have any way to interface with each other, versus we all feel and resonate with each other. And we're together in this experience. And storytelling in its current form feeds this, too. Which we think about the individual hero journey. It's an individual story, in some ways. It feeds that sort of isolationist identity. Thalia: Yeah, and I was talking about this with somebody else about kind of that lone wolf hero journey. I don't know why there's such a focus in that in other cultures. I know it's a little less so then. Maybe now, they're really starting to hone in on that. Mostly because of the leadership of the Western World.Paul: And also definitely the storytelling aspect in the globalization of filmmaking and TV. Thalia: So what's the alternative to that? [TO BE CONTINUED … ]Subscribe to get updated on next published episodes.Living in the US is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Living in the US at livingintheus.substack.com/subscribe