I'm embarrassed that people will know that I can't ride a bicycle. For years, I have been feigning bad ankles and saying I wasn't in the mood for a bike ride.
Jill Soloway
There's something about the kind of unconditional wild joy of creating that you have with your siblings that I am always trying to get back to.
I'm a naturally open person - some might say radically open.
I think of myself as a producer. As a producer and as a showrunner, I already understand what it meant to gather people into a room and step back, to create the boundaries of 'everything's okay' to allow TV writers to go to their craziest places.
I've been playing with this idea in my mind that the hero's journey that we're all taught as screenwriters may resonate more specifically for male protagonists and maybe even male viewers.
I'm a minimalist Jew, but on Friday night, I celebrate Shabbat. At sundown, we light candles, say the blessing, and I don't turn on my computer for 24 hours.
For clothes, I like this little store on Fountain, Matrushka Construction. Beth Ann Whittaker and Laura Howe make amazing things. You can get a designer skirt with cool embroidery for 40 bucks instead of $400 or $4,000.
So many features at Sundance seemed to be powered more on the director's need to be a director than any particular story.
My sister and I created a show called 'The Real Life Brady Bunch,' which was sort of a theatrical sensation that got us attention in L.A. and New York.
I really like writing television, and I like the collaborative writers room feeling. It's ten people, and you're together every day laughing your heads off.
Guys, there's only one thing I hate more than bloggers who start sentences with 'guys' - and it's those mealy-mouth hipsters who crochet codpieces and their ye-olde-sideburned friends who pickle stuff and slaughter their own gluten-free goats.
I was the kind of Jew who'd be in a bar, somebody would say it's Yom Kippur, and I'd go, 'Really?'
I'm always going for truth and honesty.
People who don't have experience setting healthy boundaries, they have secrets instead.
The first time that I saw people actually make the thing that I wrote was my first episode of 'Six Feet Under.' It was called 'Back To The Garden.'
It's hard enough to be a lady writer. Doubly hard to be a funny lady writer.
I always wanted to find my voice and claim my tone, but I was doing it through the steps of being a TV writer. I had the executive producer title. I was running the room.
At East Side Jews, we can take a risk because it isn't all about the rules. I started it to create a space for all those people who wouldn't go to temple because they were scared of getting the rules wrong.
I always wanted to do a family show.
On Sunday morning, it's Brooklyn Bagels on Beverly Boulevard. We get them hot. Then we walk some of the famous Silver Lake steps or hike in the hills to the highest vantage point to see the reservoir.
From the moment you say 'action,' this is the fun part - things should happen that surprise you, excite you, scare you, turn you on, make you laugh. If things aren't surprising you, when you say 'cut,' whisper things to the actors that will make them do things that do surprise you.
If you're in a room and can be seen by actors, you need to understand that you can be felt by them.
What I have to offer as a writer/director is the stuff with the feeling in it.
'Six Feet Under,' for me, was college. Alan Ball and Alan Poul ran that show and really taught me what it meant to really run a show in a classic way.
We're a whole culture of people who have a really hard time seeing beyond themselves.
I love the Army-Navy surplus store Surplus Value Center. They have really good long underwear and multicolored bandanas, cool camo jackets, and really, really scary-looking knives. If you're into that sort of thing.
When I write, I lose time. I'm happy in a way that I have a hard time finding in real life. The intimacy between my brain and my fingers and my computer... Yet knowing that that intimacy will find an audience... It's very satisfying. It's like having the safety of being alone with the ego reward of being known.
My sister and I are incredibly close, and we created together from childhood through the time we spent in Chicago at the Annoyance Theatre.
The inbox is always open in my brain, and anyone can get in any time and access me. Turning it off is taking back control. I decide who gets in. It's about emotional privacy, having a self.
I've always been really interested in secrets - how people find ways of doing things without telling anyone else in order to keep themselves feeling safe in the world.
Watching 'Girls,' it was really angering for me at first, because I really had spent decades hiding unlikable, unattractive Jewish girls in likable, attractive, non-Jewish actors and characters.
If there's a woman who is exhibiting her femininity or performing her femininity, it's always seen as meant to pull in the male gaze.
Normally, I think the people you would use on your first film, it would be a real struggle to bring them with you onto your television show. I just brought every single person with and expanded my little indie film world.
After 'Nikki' and 'Steve Harvey,' I had written on a show called 'The Oblongs,' which was pretty well respected and had a lot of 'Simpsons' writers on it. So I was a TV writer with an interesting voice at that moment.
My purpose as an artist is to heal the divided feminine in our culture. Well, okay wait, that sounds incredibly cheesy and like something a massage therapist might do at Esalen.
Every project is a race between your enthusiasm and your ability to get it done. Go fast. Don't slow down. A year from now, new things will interest you.
Some of you guys are going to boo, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't like dogs.
I'm very aware that just driving blindly towards money won't get me anything. I drive blindly towards making the world a better place.
In most shows, there's usually a hero or a protagonist, and even if there are multiple heroes or protagonists, most shows try and make it so you really always know who's the good guy and who's the bad guy.
We grew up watching Woody Allen and Albert Brooks movies, and we see this neurotic, annoying, unlikeable male at the center of a story, and people root for him anyway. I think that's really what we have been craving as women is the hero who doesn't look perfect and doesn't act perfectly.
I used to think that, when I was a director, I would have a very specific vision of what everything would look like, but now I am more of a camp counselor.
The network shows have this very commercial voice that you have to adhere to, and the cable shows, it's kind of like winning the lottery. The independent film world is a world you can actually get to. You can get the under-a-million-dollar film by finding a good cast and financing.
Your first job, I tell people I mentor, is managing your affect. Be nice and say nice things. Make it so that the people walk away from interacting with you and say, 'That was fun.' That will make them want to come back and do it again.
I've always been really interested in how people's identities are shaped by where they come from and how they want to get away from where they come from.
For me to be able to punch above my weight creatively, to actually take a stand for what I was doing, I had to take on everything. I had to be the person who says, 'I wrote it. I directed it.'
All writing is propaganda for the self.
I love a kind of shambling outsider protagonist who always feels like they're 'other.'
I guess a show like 'Entourage' would be wish fulfillment, right? But 'Entourage' is wish fulfillment for men. It's that you can be kind of schlumpy-looking and have access to someone famous and find yourself at a pool party surrounded by girls in bikinis.
I love TV, I love writing, but I love movements more.
My interest in community is what fuels my work as a writer, more than just wanting to write or just wanting to have a TV show.
