Patricia Resnick On Writing “9 to 5,” Working With Cher, And Writing For Mad Men

We have a fantastic episode for you. My guest is screenwriter, producer, and standup comedian Patricia Resnick, best known as the writer of the iconic film “9 to 5” and the author of the book for “9 to 5: the Musical.” Patricia Resnick was also involved in writing and producing on TV’s “Mad Men” and “Better Things,” among many other projects. Writers and friends, I promise you'll want to listen to this episode multiple times. Patricia shares her journey of becoming a successful, working screenwriter and explains how she, as a single mom, navigated a writing career during a time when women at work were often called "the girl."

The PAGE International Screenwriting Awards sponsors the WRITERS HANGOUT.
Executive Producer Kristin Overn
Creator/Executive Producer Sandy Adomaitis
Producer Terry Sampson
Music by Ethan Stoller

Transcript

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Hello, my name is Sandy Adamidis, the social media director for the Page International Screenwriting Awards and your host for the Writers Hangout, a podcast that celebrates the many From inspiration to the first draft, revising, getting the project made, and everything in between. We'll talk to the best and the brightest in the entertainment industry, and create a space where you can hang out, learn from the pros, and have fun. Hey, writers and friends, it's Sandy coming to you from Studio City, the crown jewel of the San Fernando Valley. Tonight as I record this intro, The planet. Saturn is supposed to be visible against the New Moon, but I can't see it because if I move, I would disturb my cat. We have a fantastic episode for you. My guest is screenwriter producer and standup comedian, Patricia Resnick. Best known as the creator and writer of the I. Iconic film nine to Five, and the author of the book for nine to five, the Musical. she was among the writer, producers on TV's, mad Men and Better Things, writers and Friends. This episode is a gift. Patricia not only shares her journey of becoming a successful working screenwriter, but also describes how she as a single mom. navigated a writing career during a time when women at work were often called the Girl. I'd also like to dedicate this episode to Luke And Darlene Chan, my dragon. Patricia Resnick, thank you so much for joining us on The Writer's Hangout. Of course. I'm happy to be here. Hey, it's a bit of a sad day that we're recording. We lost Robert Redford today. Yes. I, was shocked because somehow in my mind he was not 89. And I was lucky enough to meet him through Jane Fonda. Years ago when we were working on the script for nine to five, she was shooting Electric Horsemen in St. George, Utah. And she had a little dinner party just for. Herself Redford, me, her producing partner and our studio exec.'cause we were all there. Patricia, get Outta town. You were in an intimate dinner with Robert Redford. I was, and I have to tell, I have to tell you for a while it was a bit disappointing because I always loved movies and loved show business and so I was looking forward to, having them talk about barefoot in the park and the other things they'd done together. And during dinner all they talked about was the problems of sewage in Utah. But during the course of dinner and after enough vodka was, had that eventually I was able to get them onto, reminiscing a bit. How wonderful. Do you have a favorite Redford movie? I think it's a tie between Butch Cassidy and the way We Work. And as far as his directing, definitely I just blanked with Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton. Ordinary people. For me, I think it is all the president's men. And. One movie that I'm gonna have to revisit. I think I was a little too young to watch. It was barefoot in the park. Not because it was R-rated or anything like that. It was very hard for me to watch a woman stay at home waiting for her husband to come home all day. But that it's very dated. Yes, it's very dated. It didn't, some things hold up better than others. Yeah. your career started when you met Robert Altman while studying at USC, which for the writers out there that don't know the University of Southern California and you began working with him on three women, how does one run into Robert Altman? I was born and raised in Miami Beach, Florida, and I was completely obsessed with movies and theater. My mom. Always had wanted to be an actress, which she wasn't. She got married very young and had a family. And back then it was hard to do both. But she took me to a, just a tremendous amount of theater in New York and movies. And so when I came out to LA to do my last two years of college at USC and study film, anytime I was driving around town and I saw trucks that indicated something was being shot, I always pulled over and I would walk over and asked what they were shooting and who the director was. And I was in Westwood and I saw some trucks and I asked, and it was Robert Altman and I was a huge fan and I actually had to write a paper for a class. On an American director. And so I waited on the sidewalk until he was working on a movie, by the way, named not one of his better known ones, California split. But they were shooting in an office building. And I waited outside till he came out and I introduced myself and I told him I was writing the paper on him for school, and I asked him if I could make an appointment to interview him for the paper. Which he said, okay. And I did. And then when I finished the paper, I dropped it off at his office and a couple of days later he called me, which was an incredible thrill. And um, he loved the paper. He thought it was the best thing anyone ever wrote about him in his movies. And he told me the next time he had a movie, he wanted to hire me. And that took about a year. So I finished school. Right after I finished school I went to work for him on a movie also. No one ever heard of called Buffalo Bill and the Indians. Patricia Resnick. You have just told this most wonderful story that I think will really benefit our writers out there who are trying to break into the business. There's no set of rules. I so admire what you did. Pretty pretty gutsy. very cool. I really did think you were gonna say something along the lines of, oh, I was taking a class and, I got to meet him after class. But you you, wow. Nothing gets in your way. I had more guts than brains at that point. And something that I don't have a lot of backup for this, but I kept this, keeps going. In my head you have the number three and three women throughout your career. Starting with three women. You, a couple of your movies of the week had three women, like Parker Posey, Shirley McClain, and, oh I'm forgetting Shannon Dougherty. Shannon Dougherty. May she rest NPA? And then just nine to five. Did you ever reflect on that at all? That three is a very good number for you. It's funny. No. But just the other day I was talking to one of my cousins and he brought up out of nowhere a script that I wrote. In the seventies that didn't get made. Alan Pula became attached to it, but it was called three after 30. I definitely, I definitely knew at that point that numbers, in my titles were, gonna be a thing. I never thought about specifically the number three. But I will now. Cool. Now I came up in development of TV movies. And you wrote many of them the Battle of Mary Kay in 2002, sex Lies and Obsessions in Perfect Match. Can we talk about the world of TV movies? For the writers out there, they may, wanna start out in film, television half hour comedy, but that's a genre. And when you were making all these TV movies, how did that come about? So basically what happened was, what, when I started working for Altman I didn't really have a lot of interest in television at the time. I just wanted to do movies. And back then movies and TV were very separate. That's not true anymore. Almost everyone moves very easily back and forth between them, but back then they were very divided. Yes. And so I just worked on movies then I actually had two kids on my own in my early forties. Congratulations. Thank you. And, at the time I was adapting a book for Whoopi Goldberg And I was being paid a lot of money and everything seemed good. And then things started to change. And whether it was, partly my age, partly that they stopped making the kind of movies that I wrote. And I was so supportive to kids, so I had to figure something out. And although at that time nobody was interested anymore in me writing movies features. For TV, movies, I was considered, a big get, oh, Patricia, if you came into Davis Entertainment while I was working in TV development, we would've put Rose Petals out before your feet. Which Davis? John at Fox. He was at Fox down on the lot on the film department. And then we were up in Fox Plaza, so funny because at one point. I'm thinking a little before this, I had an overall deal at Fox and I had an office on the Fox lot and it was right down the hall from John Davis. Oh, yes. That bungalow. Brook Brooks. Yes. Yes. It was over on the side, towards, toward the west. Anyway, he would, he was very nice to me, and he would he liked to bring people that had come in to see him. To my office I had my nine to five poster up and whatever else I had on the wall. And he liked to bring them in and say, this is Pat Resnick. And she wrote nine to five, and Aw. Yeah. Yeah. That's very sweet. It was. That's funny that you worked with him, Going back to TV, movies. Yeah. Anyway I needed to do whatever I could do to continue to support my family. So I started doing TV movies and what I found out pretty quickly was, although they didn't pay what features paid they mostly got made and I could write them fairly quickly. And I was able to do a bunch of them, just one after the other. And then that whole business died. Just TV movies went away. So that was then time to pivot again. But yeah, for a while, I wrote some Hallmark movies. I wrote some Lifetime movies. The Battle of Mary Kay was for CBS, which was an unusual thing for them'cause it was a satire. What a wonderful movie. Very funny. thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Very funny. I think that was definitely my favorite, of everything that I did in terms of TV, movies, that was for sure my favorite. I remember when we worked at Davis. That the feature people, whenever they didn't like a feature movie, they would always go, ah, maybe it's good for tv. And they were always a little taken aback when we, the TV development people were like no, it's not right for us. I think just back then, and going back to also what you said about TV and film being so different, that was really true. If you worked on a TV set feature, people didn't wanna hire you. But then Davis people would always turn to us and say, hire our feature people. And we'd go they shoot a two hour movie of the week so fast. Yeah. Feature people. Their minds were blown. And the development does also go fast. Yeah. For sure. At that time. People and features definitely look down. Yes. Look down on television. And that's, now that's, I don't know about the ba the crew, but in my mind that kind of switched with John Travolta a bit'cause he did welcome back Carter. And then he was cast in Saturday Night Live and for actors Saturday Night Fever. Oh, Saturday Night Fever. Thank you. Saturday Night Live is totally different thing. Yeah. And it was good for actors that they could start going back and forth. But I think writers and directors didn't as much and no, I'm actually looking. I think, oh no, it was after I was gonna say so Lily Tomlin did a movie called Moment by Moment. It was very odd. It was a romance with her in Travolta. she cast him in that before Saturday Night Fever came out. Although I'm seeing that the movie came out Saturday Night Fever came out in 77 and I think Moment by Moment came out in 78. But I remember when she told me that she was going to do this movie and she cast John Travolta and I remember saying to her, the Welcome Back Coter guy. Yes. You could be right on the timeline. They could have, rushed Saturday night fever out. Yeah. And if those producers had enough power, they could have even held back moment by moment. Yeah. what did Lily say? Do you remember? She said something along the lines of Yeah, and he's great it was a strange movie. It didn't really work, but not, certainly not his fault. Speaking of superstars, yes, you. Pat Resnick have worked with Cher. Yes. Tell me everything. I love Cher. Cher is, one of the people I was lucky enough to work with pretty early in my career. What happened was Sandy Galland, who was a superstar manager, and he actually not only managed share and Dolly, he had a company called Sand Dollar with Dolly, and they made movies. I rewrote a movie for them called Straight Talk. But I, because of my connection with Sandy. He asked me. Okay. Backing up. Cher at that time would do a special, an hour special once a year for television. And they would hire sketch writers, which I really wasn't. But I had written sketches for Lily Tomlin's first Broadway show. I met her on the set of a film that Altman directed. Wow. So people would ask me to write sketches and so Sandy asked me to write a sketch for Cher and the guest star of the first special who was Dolly. And that's actually how I met Dolly. The second year. The Star was supposed to be Kate Jackson, who was one of the original television Charlie's Angels and was Cher's best friend. But somehow at some point they got into an argument and Kate Jackson walked off. Kate Jackson was probably 35 at the time, I'm guessing, and they replaced her with Lucille Ball, who I think was about 80 in the same sketch. And then Lucille Ball decided to do a different sketch and somehow it became Shelly Winters. So anyway, that was a cluster fuck. But Cher was great. Cher is very down to earth. She was the kind of person that if you worked with her and hadn't seen her for a few years. If you ran into her at a party, she would not only remember you, she would say hello, and when she was talking to you, she wouldn't look over your shoulder to see if there was anybody more important behind you that she would rather be talking to. And she used to have I used to love this. She used to have garage sales at her house by invitation only her house was, gated and you had to be invited. And at no point in my life, even at my thinnest could I ever fit into anything that Cher fit into. But I did buy a pair of her thigh high boots, which I still have. Oh, you better? I still have. And my daughter wore them to high school one day and. I have a someone bought it for me. Do you remember, because I cannot find it anywhere on the internet. Way, way back in the day. She had a catalog and she sold things. They were very gothic things. And I have a share like little jewelry box that's in the shape of a heart and it's one of my very favorite things. That's very cool. Not as cool as your stories, Patricia. Yeah. But thank you so much. Yeah. Anyway, she was wonderful and I recently got to know a young woman who helped her, I don't know what she did exactly, but was somehow involved in helping her with her memoir and said she's still, that's still exactly how she is. She has not. Wonderful. Yes. I'm gonna be at some point doing a cross country trip, and I think her autobiography is one of the things that I'm gonna listen to. Can we continue? That's a good idea. Can we continue with tv? Do you mind still talking a little bit about tv? Great. You wrote two episodes of Ooh, one of my favorite shows. Better Things You wrote Season four, episode five. Of course. I'm gonna mess up saying this simple word, carp car. It's the spaghetti. Can you say it? Carbonara. Carbonara, yeah. And season four, episode eight. Father's Day. I watched both episodes. Love them. Thank you. Now on Carbonara. Louis CK is credited. Were you in the same room as Louis ck? Can you talk about that a little? Yeah. No, not at all. Pamela Alon, who created better things and is the genius behind it, she starred in it with most I think all the later episodes she directed. She ran the room. She was a recurring character on, Louis, which was Louis Cks half Hour show. And they together concocted the idea for better things, which was fairly closely based on Pamela's. Real life, divorced mom, three kids. Her mother lives down the street. She takes care of her. And she's a, a working actress in Hollywood, but not a star. So pretty close to Pamela's real life. And they wrote all the episodes together. Then all the stuff came out about him and he got canceled. And so he, could no longer do the show with her, at which point she realized that if she was gonna move forward, she felt she didn't wanna do it alone. She wanted a writer's room. And so each season, I think that started with season three. She had a writer's room, season four, season five. He. Still got a credit on every show because he's the co-creator. Okay. But he was nowhere, he was not anywhere around. Was there a draft of the script with that he did some work on then you guys took it over? No. He was way off the show by then. Really? Because I think on it's not a writing credit. He doesn't have Oh, I think IMBD has him on there. That's why I was just, oh, that's incorrect. I should go in and do something about that. No. Oh, okay. He just has a co-creator credit at the top of every. episode. That makes so much sense. I get it now. Yeah. I'm gonna hop around and I'm gonna jump to your standup and then come back. Okay. Because I know you're doing standup and you're out there with a lot of females younger female comics. Do they know of Louie? Do they talk about him? Is he persona non grata or they just don't discuss him? I, I haven't heard him mentioned, honestly. Yeah, I was just curious. Yeah, I, I'm trying to think, but. No, I really haven't heard him. That's probably a good thing. Nobody's even thinking about him. Now, you also worked on the final season of Mad Men, another incredible series. You were the Consulting producer. Now I'd I'd like to talk to you about Matt Weiner. I, during my, I was a doing estate managing for a while, Uhhuh, and so I worked for Linda Breer, his wife. Yeah. Yes. And very much involved in the house and the kids. Oh my goodness. Those kids. I love them so much. And I really admired Linda. But recently social maid. Yeah. Told Hollywood reporter about his mistreatment of her onset. Now. It wasn't just, maybe she took a comment wrong or she was being really sensitive. It's pretty brutal. He yelled at her for almost a half hour in front of the crew. What was your experience? What was it like for you there with the writers?'cause now you're not an actor, you're in the writer's room. It's separate. Madman was actually the first time I ever worked in a writer's room. And, it was pretty late in my career to try to, enter a writer's room. But what happened was when my kids were growing up, I really wanted to do things that I could work on from home. I didn't wanna be gone all the time. So hence the TV movies. And then there was a long period of time I was working on the musical of nine to five and, but when my older child went to college and my younger was in 11th grade and had, that's when they go into their room and they don't talk to you for a couple years anyway, I thought, oh, you know what, I could work in a writer's room if somebody would be willing to hire me. At this point. I knew Matt a little bit because his oldest son, Martin and my son were in school together. The kids were old enough to drive and he and my son were friendly. He slept over there one day and I went over one morning to pick him up and Matt was in the kitchen making breakfast for the kids and we got to talking. He loved that griddle in the kitchen. He did. He was making pancakes. That's funny. Yep. Anyway I heard through the grapevine after that, for the last season the couple that had been, the showrunners had left the show and he had one of the writers semi cell was gonna be running the room, but that he was looking for. A couple of new writers and he definitely wanted one female. So I went back to my Altman playbook and I emailed him and Matt, before Matt worked on The Sopranos, he worked on sitcoms. And so I wrote to him and I said, I know I'm known more for comedy, but if anybody should know that someone can write both, it would be you. And I hear you're hiring, and all I would like is, can I get my sample script in the pile? Patricia, again, I'm just gonna hold you up as a model to all our writers. What a great opening line because it wasn't, Matt, help me out, our kids go to school together. You offered him up. What will benefit for him being able to write drama and comedy? he said yes, and I guess it went in the pile, according to him, he told me later, the pile initially went to the execs. And I made it out of the pile and, it was one of, the few scripts they had called out that landed on his desk and I ended up meeting with him and yeah, he hired me to be a consulting producer. And that was my first time in a writer's room now consulting producer sometimes don't come in all week. So I didn't come in every day. I came in two to three days a week and I alternated. There were two other consulting producers, a woman with a lot of TV credits named Lisa Albert and the ably famous screenwriter Robert Townsend. Who wrote we'll start with Chinatown. And then, almost every famous movie of that era, he either wrote or had his finger in, I learned a tremendous amount. It was an extremely smart room. It was a very big room. There were a lot of writers over 10. He also had two advertising consultants, one who worked in the period, and one who worked in advertising now. And they switched off, but I'd say often there were about 10 people. better things was half that Very interesting. Now, for the writers out there who don't quite understand, the room can be very intense. Yes. You're sitting at a table yes, there's chatting, but your brain has to be on and you're pitching pitching, trying to figure things out. It's a lot to get into when you're used to being a writer like you were, that you have your own space and you put your own ideas on the paper. And there's rules. You can't just go, I don't like that idea. You have to say it in a nice way and add in a suggestion. You just don't get to tear people down. Yeah. You can if you're the showrunner, you can if you're the, you're absolutely right. Back to you. Was Matt running the room or was he mostly on set, editing, all that kind of stuff? So the first couple of months he was in the room pretty much full time with us because they hadn't started shooting yet.'cause we had to turn out a couple of scripts. And then once shooting started he was, pulled between, this is the life of the showrunner. If you're doing a show that's shooting while people are still writing some shows, like I worked on a show called Tales of the City for Netflix. We did all the scripts before they started shooting, so that was a different situation. But I think more often people are still writing as shooting has started. So he was then pulled between the room casting directing war wardrobe, you know, any of the 10 billion dailies, editing, all the other things that he had to be in charge of. So he was then in and out. it's a very intense job. It is, yeah. Yeah. And things were cool in the room. You like everybody was nice to each other. I found it a really lovely room. I was, worried because other than myself and a writer named David Ierson, everybody had been together, for a while. And I thought, it might be cliquey where they wouldn't want the new people. That wasn't the case at all. Not at all. Oh, good. And it was one of, it was one of the shows that I worked on where I feel like everybody was working really hard to try to do whatever they could to help Matt get his vision, to the screen. And help it be the best that it could be. that last episode. There was a lot of pressure on you guys to carry the Mad man name home. Everybody had such great expectations for that last episode, and I think you guys hit it out of the park. I think he did a great job. I actually was gone by them. But I think he did an amazing job. I was worried because Matt had a history throughout the show of he would often read, fan, I don't know if he went on Reddit or where he was reading stuff, but he would go on social media and he would read, all the way along what people thought was gonna happen, what they wanted to happen, what they didn't wanna happen, and if there was something that everybody thought would happen, he wouldn't wanna do it. Interesting. Yeah. He was a contrarian, and because of that, and because everybody wanted, or the vast majority of people wanted Peggy to have somewhat of a happy ending and a successful romance I was thinking, oh God, he's gonna kill her in a car wreck or something. But, he didn't I thought it was one of the better final and really satisfying, the only person that he really that had a pretty sad end was Betty. What happened to Betty, she dies of lung cancer. But here's the thing, everybody in that show smokes their heads off for seven seasons. And he said, it would be ridiculous that someone didn't get lung cancer. And I think Betty was very loosely based on his mother and, if one has some other issues, I guess killing off the character based on them is satisfying. those studios were downtown, I've been in every lot, every little, industrial section of this town working. I've never worked down there. Are those cool studios? Do you like it down there when you're working? Yes. It was really nice and the nicest thing about it was so for the people that don't know, when you work on a show. You get lunch during the course of the day, and most shows have a a dollar limit. I can tell you it's$19. Okay. So on Mad Men By Mad Men season seven. Guess what? There was no limit and we could order, we were in downtown la, which was filled with some of the best restaurants in Los Angeles, and you could order anything you wanted. So a lot of us would just, order stuff and take half of it home. And that was dinner. when I was working on Hell On Wheels, which is an a MC show almost every day, somebody made a joke. I wonder what the Mad Men people are eating? God, we were eating everything. Hey. When you and I were coming up, scripts were actually written on paper. You printed out the script and today even hard copies are frowned upon. Can you share any little experiences or anything of what it was like to write back in the day on a TV series or a film as opposed to now? Do you find things different or things don't change? No, it's really different. First of all, the first many years of my career. I was working on a typewriter When they came out with the IBM Electric, which you didn't have to use what was the white paper? White out White. Carbon, yeah. You didn't, no, you didn't have to use whiteout when you had a mistake. The IBM Electric had a little white tape you could go over it. if you had a typo. But everything was typed, which meant that rewriting was really difficult. And basically what you would end up having to do is you would, so let's say you a scene started halfway down a paper. A piece of paper, but you were keeping the top half. So you would literally get a scissors and cut it, and then have a glue stick or tape. Oh my goodness. And then type the new one and cut that and tape it together. And then that you do that through the whole script. And then there was a place called Barbara's Place, and their entire business was retyping scripts and binding them, and putting them in a nice cover. Because even though, we wrote scripts and typed, we were not as adept, typists as professional typists. So it was really different. The plus side to that was I find that now they bother you to rewrite every little thing. Constantly because they know it's on a computer. It's not, it's not such a big deal to do it But you get asked to do it a lot more. But it used to be, it used to be so much harder. And I actually know a couple of people that came up when I did. One of whom is still working and she still writes her first drafts by hand, really? That I didn't, that, that I didn't do. But yeah. And she'll then have them input and she'll rewrite on the computer. Okay. When you are out and about and people find out that you wrote the movie, nine to Five, do their faces just light up and do they pepper you with endless questions like I'm going to do next? I would say generally the reaction is very positive. Often they wanna tell me their relationship to the movie. You know, it was one of the first, VHS's we had in the house. And we used to watch it all the time. And then I would say the number one question is, what is Dolly really like? And when I talk about how wonderful she is, everybody says the same thing. Some version of, oh, thank God. If you had told me anything other than that, I would've been absolutely crushed. I agree. I would've been absolutely crushed. Yes. She's an amazing human being. She's just an incredible human being. Yes. Now, what is the name of the movie? Is it NINE to FIVE or is it numeral 9 2 5? I see it everywhere both ways. So when the movie originally came out, as I recall. It was spelled out somehow over the years, it devolved. I'm actually looking at, I have on my wall a Japanese poster. Oh, cool. From back in the day, which has the numbers, the musical, we absolutely went with the numbers. We never spelled it out, but it's funny because the musical, which was on Broadway in 2009, Dolly did the music lyrics and I did the book. And it's, it probably does a hundred or more productions a year. Everything from high schools to touring companies, summer stock. And there's a company that handles that. That if you wanna do it. Or if you wanna do one of the other, hundreds of musicals, they perform this service for you, contact them and they're the ones who will get, everything you need to you. But I noticed recently that if you were searching, it only came up if you put the numbers. Oh. And I contacted them and I said, please also put it spelled out, because somebody may go on there, spell it out, it won't come up. They'll think you don't have it. And they'll move on to another show, which I don't want you to, because I get some money every time the show gets signed. Could you explain to the writers for, with regards to Broadway, what a writing the book means? Writing the book is everything that's spoken. It's what we would call the play. I don't know why in a musical it's referred to as the book. I think they just want it to be different, is my personal opinion, But that's what it is. It's just anything that's not sung. Yes. Can you share with the listeners the babies out there that might not, and I'm not saying that as in a rude way, just meaning maybe you're young, but the youngins, the Utes the plot of nine to five, would you mind? Yeah, sure. It's three secretaries who work for the world's worst boss, boss, and although at the beginning they're divided, they eventually unite in an attempt to take over the office And make some much needed changes. And it's a flat out comedy. It is a brilliant comedy. Now, is it true nine to five was supposed to be a drama? Not that I knew of. So what happened was Jane Fonda got involved, Jane Fonda, who's an activist and has been most of her life got involved with an organization that was trying to unionize clerical workers and get some rights for them. How lovely. How lovely. Yeah. And they're still around, by the way. And she decided that, she wanted to make a movie that somehow brought that in front of people. But from when I first heard about it. I actually read about it. It was in there was a guy named Army Chard who wrote, it would be like the page six from Variety. Yeah. It was in, the little gossipy column. He put that Jane Fonda wanted to make a movie about secretaries with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, and I read that. And so Lily gave me my first paid writing job. And Dolly, I knew a bit from that chair special. So when I read that, I thought, and I, I didn't know Jane Fonda, but I was like, always been a huge fan. And I thought, I wanna write that. And I asked my agent to find out if there was a writer attached yet, and there wasn't. And we were both with what was then William Morris, now WME. And they sent over a couple of script samples of mine to Jane and she liked them. And I ended up meeting with her and she gave me just a huge stack of the driest material about offices and clerical workers. And she said, but I want it to be a comedy because I think that will make what I wanna say more palatable to people. And Jane is right. Yeah. And then she sent me off to, try to come up with a story, in a part for each of. The three women. Was she good at notes, giving you script notes? She's very smart. She had done, she did China syndrome, which also was a message, movie which did very well at the time. The hardest thing, the toughest problem for me with Jane was and it's funny because she plays comedy well. She's not a, she's not a funny person. She's a serious person. And so sometimes, there would be, comedic lines of dialogue or things that happened and she would read them and she'd say to me, now, why am I saying this? Or Why is this happening? And I would say,'cause it's funny. And then she would say, why is it funny? Which you cannot explain ever about anything. I love that. Yeah. I love that story. I really do. Now I'm not sure if I'm on solid ground on this. Okay. But do you think the critics really understood the feminist undertones? No. Okay, good. So I am. Okay. The workplace sexism a gender pay gap? Not the, when the original movie came out No. And by the way, when the show went to Broadway, so when the movie came out, it was dismissed, first of all, other than Pauline Kale, I think all the newspaper reviewers at the time and magazine reviewers were all men. So we'll start there. It was dismissed as just silly. And then in 2008 when we were rehearsing to open on Broadway, the, again, at that time, primarily male journalists who were interviewing me would ask me, is it gonna be set back then or was it gonna be contemporary? And I said, no, it's gonna be set back then. And they all said, but how is a contemporary audience going to relate? All these problems have been fixed. So that was prior to me too, and I think that most men really had no idea, how much of that was still going on by the time the musical was revived. In 2019 on the West End in London, that was no longer the case. There were many more female critics. Our reviews were much, much better. And they often mentioned the political underpinnings. Bravo, London, Bravo. I just roll my eyes but it's also just frustrating to hear, that they were saying, Hey, we fixed all those problems, ladies. It was jaw dropping. Oh my goodness. Now, how did you feel about the final cut of nine to five? Was there a premiere? Did you go to a premiere? Oh, please. Tell me about that evening. First of all it wasn't the first time I saw the movie. There, there usually is a cast and cruise screening. Okay. And so I saw it there. I had a lot of trouble with it because we had a hard time getting a director that both Jane and the studio wanted, who could work in the very narrow window of time we had where all three ladies were free. it was a very tiny window and Jane originally wanted some of the directors that she had worked with who were, the top guys. So Sidney Pollock Mike Nichols, who actually wanted to direct it. I got to go to New York for two weeks and meet with him in his unbelievable apartment overlooking Central Park every day. For two weeks to rewrite it based on what he wanted. But that script the only people that liked it were Mike and me, nobody else. Anyway, we had a real problem getting a director, and finally there was a guy who was really trying to get the job. And eventually they said, okay, his name was Colin Higgins. He had directed he had only directed one movie. I believe he had directed foul play. But he had written Harold and Maude and he had written Silver Streak, I think it was called. Anyway, but he was a writer director, so of course he re rewrote it. That, and that was shocking to me because he didn't want me around. He didn't want me on the set. Alt men always had the writer or writers on the set always. And you were extremely involved. As a matter of fact, we did most of the dealing with the actors'cause I think he didn't really want to. Working on something where the director didn't really want me around was weird. And I remember at the time I said that it felt like it would be like if you had a child and when they were about 10 years old, somebody took them and sent them off to military school and then you went to visit them and you looked at them and you were like, it was your child. But they had a buzz cut and were in a uniform and so it wasn't really your child. It was like that. Yeah. And that was hard. That was hard for me. I bet. Yeah. Whenever I look at credits and I see written by, a writer's name, and then I see the director's name next to it I'm always like, there's some bullying going on that set. I just, yeah. And for some people, I don't know this director but they'll just do it. They'll just do rewrites just to get their name on it. And that takes money out of your pocket. Yes. And I don't like that. Yes. And I can't imagine you in New York, just working with Nichols and now Silver Street comes in. A little disappointing. Yeah, it was. Yeah. Yeah, it was tough. If there was one thing, if, you know it was a magic night and somebody woke you up and said, you can go back and fix one thing and nine to five that you weren't really thrilled about. Yeah. Do you have anything in mind? Yeah, and it's funny because it's a lot of people's favorite part of the movie, but oh, can you gimme hints? Can you gimme hints? Can I guess? Sure. Take a guess. You said favorite part of the movie. We all really like those opening credits, but that's good, right? That, yeah. Not the opening credits. Okay. Which actually were directed by somebody. Completely different. Oh, okay. That makes sense now. Oh, I love everything Dolly's doing. For some reason, I really liked that scene. With Lily Toman and her son. I had never seen a mother and son interact that way before. So it was the fantasies. Oh, and w what, why I would wanna change them is my original script was a much blacker comedy. And my original conception was they actually try to kill their boss, but in funny ways, and Colin, and it's weird because he wrote Harold and Maud, which is so dark, but then he wrote that when he was at UCLA, later his movies. Became much more less dark and more commercial. But he wanted it. Jane was worried about it. Jane was concerned that people wouldn't feel sympathy for the women if they tried to kill him. And his comedy taste he told me was more like he liked Abid Costello, that kind of thing. And he replaced them trying to kill him with getting stoned and having the fantasies. So even though the fantasies people really like that's probably what I would take. Yes. Yeah, I can see that now. I read that Jennifer Aniston and Echo Films, her production companies are considering a remake with Ariana Grande, Sydney Sweeney, and z. As the leads now, all three of those actors would be great. But who would you like to see in a remake as the leads of nine to five? we've been trying to either remake it or do it, reboot it or do a sequel for years. And I've worked on two, the last one I had after Me Too happened, I had an idea of how to do it with three new women and bringing in the three original women like halfway through. And I met with Lily and Jane and pitched it to them and they liked it. And then I had a phone call with Dolly and she liked it. And then I called my manager and I said, I have a way to redo it. I've got all three of the original. What do we do now? And so we went to Sean Levy, who's the producer of Stranger Things, and a lot of very big movies. He came on it, and then we decided we would pitch it to Fox. But I thought I'd have a better chance selling it if I brought on a younger writer, because at that point I had been really just running TV for a long time. And I thought it would be helpful if it was a writer of color because we wanted to make the new casting less all white. And in fact, the musical, as it's been touring and everything, I've noticed that they're casting, casting it all over the place in terms of race, which I think is great. But we got Rashida Jones involved. And at that point we were talking about I'm trying to remember, we were talking about like Jennifer Lawrence and Issa Rae and then I can't remember who else. The Sidney s Sweeneys and Ariana Grande certainly is like massive star power. It would definitely get noticed. The only thing I don't like about that is that they're substantially younger. Yes, I was thinking that. And they, Jane I think was in her early forties. Lily was in her late thirties and Dolly was probably in her early thirties. But my understanding and the way that movies work is. No one even told us that they were remaking it. Lily didn't know. Jane didn't know. Dolly didn't know. I didn't know Colin Higgins passed away years ago, so he didn't. Oh. We had no idea. And from what I've read, Diablo Cody is writing it and instead of making it patriarchy, she's making it generational. So I believe she described it as boomers versus millennials, which I don't like that I also think now would be more Gen Z versus, would be more Gen X versus Gen Z. Boomers are not, people my age are not in the office very much anymore. But that's what they're doing with it. So if that's what they're doing with it, then it makes sense that you would wanna ask the three women young. Yes. The three of them do play very young and I have no idea what the plot is, but I don't like the pitting the women maybe against other women just'cause they're older. But maybe it all works out in the end. Yeah. I don't, I have no more idea than you do. I didn't even, I don't even know where you read about the three women. I hadn't even heard that. I'll go back through my research and I can send that to you if you wanna yeah. I'm just curious, but cool. Sure. Back to the original nine to five. Yes. Would you, play F Mary Kill with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton for us I wouldn't, only because I'd fuck any of them. I wouldn't kill any of them, but I definitely marry Dolly. I agree. I'm with you. Okay. Now last week, I was fortunate enough to see you do stand up at the Improv and West Hollywood. First of all, Patricia it's been a long time since I've been out, especially on the West side. It was such a lovely evening. Our mutual friend, Darlene Chan and her husband Frank, we walked in West Hollywood to go see you. Can you talk about how you ended up on stage at the Improv on Melrose Avenue? It was it was a very fluky thing. It's just about a year ago, August. My 92-year-old mom passed away and the funeral was in New York and my son and I were flying back to LA and I happened to be seated next to a guy I call him a young guy. And my son is he wasn't that young. He's probably in his late thirties. My son's 29. I'm like, okay. Everybody's young to me at the moment. But he was a television writer and he told me that he really had wanted to be writing more comedy. And I asked him what he'd been working on and he'd been working on seven seasons of possibly the least funny television show ever aired, which is Law and Order, SVU, which I love, but no comedy in it. But he had decided he wanted to write comedy and somehow he had heard through friends about a guy who teaches standup and he thought that would be a great way to, learn how to write jokes. And he took the class and he started telling me about the class. And the class just sounded so appealing to me. And. I've never had any desire to be on stage. In the mid eighties, the improv was my hangout mostly because my cocaine dealer was there, which was something I was doing up until the middle of the eighties when that all stopped. Patricia, who wasn't? Yeah, everybody was but I used, I got to be friendly with a lot of the comics and they knew that I wrote comedy, so they would ask me to see their sets and, get them notes. And then they were all like, you should do this. And I was like, oh my God, I would never do that. That just sounds like a complete nightmare. But I thought, I was sad. I lost my mom. I thought it would be I'm gonna take this class. And I'll learn more about joke writing because even though I write comedy I don't really write jokes. So I took the class and what I didn't know was until I'd already paid for it was the class ended with after many weeks. And by the way, it's a wonderful class. The guy's name is Jerry Katzman. You can look him up. I highly recommend it. At the end, you have to do a five minute set in a showcase where everyone, there's usually 10 people in the class. Everybody invites 10 people. So you're in front of roughly a hundred people. And the day of the showcase, I was so nervous, I thought I was gonna throw up and I thought this was just a really bad idea. And I really just wanna hand. My set to someone else and let them go up and do it. But I had to do it, and he put me next to last, which meant that I had to sit there working myself up into a complete frenzy. But the second I got up on the stage, I was very comfortable. I'm not I'm not afraid of speaking in front of people. That's not one of my fears. I'm afraid I'm gonna forget, you know what I'm gonna say, or that people wouldn't laugh. Anyway, it went incredibly well. It was a really adrenaline rush and I got the bug and then someone else asked me to do a show and I thought I'm just gonna ride this train and see where it goes. So that's what I've been doing. Now I noticed what, watching you do your standup. You connected the joke seamlessly. You just didn't hop, from one joke to the other. And the other comics, they were hilarious. But, and this is a lab, so it's not like you're coming out and doing a perfect set. Is, am I correct in that? It was a lab? They call it the improv lab. Okay. So sometimes you're just working things out. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And it had that feel, it had a little bit of a loose feel. Yeah. But I wanna explore that a little further. Do you think because of your background in writing and you had to always answer maybe to someone, people were reading and they're giving you notes is your process for writing jokes different from your other writing? I think you're almost a little advanced in your joke writing. You're almost like creating a set as opposed to just joke. Did you realize you were doing that? I think, here's the thing. You absolutely don't have to set up jokes. You can jump from joke to joke, right? As long as they're funny. I have a very good friend of mine who's been really wonderful. He was part of a standup comedy team for many years. He's been retired now. But, when I was first starting out, he would come see my sets and he would give me advice sometimes, performance notes or hit this word harder or, wait here. But one of the things he said to me was, you don't have to set up your jokes. You can just jump from joke to joke. But I think for me, that's hard to do and I think you hit on it. It's because, I write scripts where you don't just drop things in out of nowhere. So the set that you saw. The first joke, which is the Tesla joke really doesn't connect to anything, but I say. Oh, I noticed something on my way over here tonight. Okay. And then all my next jokes have to do with my age and in some way or another. And then and then I switch. And the second half of the set is all about being a gay, single, sober mom of two kids by donor insemination. But I do set that up. I have a sentence that sets that up so that I'm not suddenly just, I was talking about my age and now I'm talking about, stuff that happened a long time ago. My kids are 29 to 31. So I do try to set it up. I notice a lot of the younger comics will often say to me, oh my God, your writing is so good. And sometimes they don't know what my background is and I feel like I'm cheating. Because Yeah, because I have 40 some odd years experience as a writer. Some of them are really funny and great performers. They're not really writers, they're just learning that part of it. Now open mic nights can be tough. Are you doing open mic nights? I do some open mic nights, and here's what I learned. Because standup comedy is certainly a business that's adjacent. To, movies and tv, but it is its own business. And so I had to learn, it's like the first, when I went to work on Mad Men before I went to work I took someone out to lunch who'd done a ton of tv, and I was like, now what's a showrunner? Am I the showrunner? And she's no, you were not the showrunner. I was like, what am I, what am what is a writer's room? So standup comedy was the same thing. I always thought my idea of open mics was that you went to, people showed up at these evenings. There was an audience who were there to see, whoever showed up. And you would sign up and then you would get up and you would do, five minutes or whatever for that audience. And that's how you would work stuff out, because. When you first write a joke, it's very hard to tell what's gonna work, what's not gonna work. You might find it funny, maybe nobody else finds it funny or it needs an adjustment, but you don't know till you get it in front of people. It actually turns out most open mics are not that, at least in LA they're not most open mics. The audience is the other people who want to get up at the open mic. Yes, they are. Other comics. They are not necessarily a particularly good audience. No, they are not. I have done open mics where I did some stuff that I had done at real shows and it consistently killed and it didn't get even a chuckle. So IFI find them not, they're good for if you wanna time stuff out or just get comfortable saying it in front of people they're not that helpful, I find in terms of figuring out what's gonna work and what's not gonna work. What I do instead now is when I'm doing a smaller show, I will sandwich in some new stuff in between stuff I know is gonna work. So that way you don't wanna do a whole show of new stuff because if none of it works you have not entertained people. But if you sandwich it in, it's fine. E every single joke is not gonna be a banger, the other open mics, and I haven't done these, but the big comedy stores, so like the Comedy Store or the Improv, they have open mics, but those aren't really open mics. They're curated. So once a week you can go stand in a line there forever and give them your name and then allegedly it's done by lottery or who gets there first. But I don't know if that, I've heard they pick the people they know. I don't know. I have no idea because so far I'm not willing to go stand in the line for an hour for a chance to maybe get up. There is a real audience. What's good about those is often the booker from the show, from those places will see those open mics and, you might get booked. But I, so far I haven't done that. I think you came up with a good solution. When you're doing a show like that, I saw, get some new material in there. Yeah. I'm working on a set right now. I'm gonna do a 10 minute set. It's actually a fundraiser for Senator Adam Schiff, who is one of our two senators from the state of California. Yes. So he's doing a fundraiser and it's a very big deal for me because the closer is Sarah Silverman. I'm gonna be the opener. And that's a big thing. So I'm gonna do 10 minutes, so I'm trying to get, make sure I have the best 10 minutes I can. So the show that you saw was me trying out some stuff to see, this I know is gonna be in, this is questionable. This is new. Let me see how it goes. So I knew right away there's one new thing that did great. I'll keep in. There was one old joke I brought back. It did. Okay, I'll take it out. And there's one, I'm still on the fence, but I'm, I'm gonna do a show before that other show and I'll do that again and see, see how it goes. Patricia, that is so exciting. I, would love a follow up. Just call me and tell me how that evening went. That sounds really exciting. I'm very excited about it. are you seeing anybody out there that you're really excited about? Do you have any comics that you've liked over the years? It's funny, I'm not like a big standup comedy fan. I find a lot of the specials. I start watching them and I lose interest. But I do listen in the car a lot. There's, a number of standup comedy stations Yes. Series has. That's when I listen to standup. Yeah. There's a whole bunch of'em. And I switched back and forth. Just trying to hear what other people are doing. You know what I think is funny and um, the problem with it is a lot of times, I don't know who it was. I would say who do I really like? I did a show one night with Atsuko Otsuka. Oh, she has the funny haircut. Yes. She's funny. And I seeing her live I found her really funny. The person who I would say almost consistently can make me laugh is Ricky Vets. Ricky D's piece on how dogs got their jobs is truly, I could watch that over and over it. It's so funny. You just said his name and it made me smile. Yeah. I just find him very funny. I haven't seen her in a long time. I might still love her, but Early Margaret show, like her first two specials Yes. I thought were really funny. Is it true that you pretended to write articles for your high school paper and you convinced celebrities to grant you interviews? Yes. Who did you get and how did you obtain that kind of contact information before the internet? Let me think. So some of these people, nobody's gonna know who they are anymore, but, okay. Dionne Warwick goddess Robert Golet Mel Brooks and Ann Bancroft. Oh, wait, hold the phone. Mel Brooks and Ann Bancroft. Yeah. They were together. Oh, of course. Yes. But wow, I'm sorry, just that just takes my breath away and wait, this one's the best. I didn't, she didn't do the interview, but I did get a signed photograph and she did open the door to her own hotel room. Joan Crawford? She opened the door, I knocked on her hotel room door and it was opened and it was, there was Joan Crawford. And she told me she didn't have the time, but if I gave her my name and address, she would send me a signed eight by 10, which I didn't think she would. But a couple weeks later, I got an envelope that had the Pepsi logo, because at that time she was married to the CEO of PepsiCo. It was a signed eight by 10 of Joan Crawford. Did you, do you still have the eight by 10 of Joan? I do. You know that scene in Mommy Darris where She's schooling the Pepsi board Brilliant. Yes. Yeah. Patricia Resnick. I so appreciate all the time that you are spending with us and your stories. I'm gonna have a hard time editing this because I have been laughing over you this entire time. Oh, thank you. Now, what is the best piece of writing advice you ever received? That I ever received. I would say it was two things. One was fairly late in my career and it was Matt Weiner. And it wasn't specifically advice to me, but it was just something that he often said in the room. So very often when he was called out for a while, we would continue to work on, whatever episode we were on, whatever we were trying to figure out. And we would put a lot of time and a lot of very good brains into it, and a lot of talented writers. And we would come up with the best thing we could. And then he would come in and he'd say, okay, what do you got? Walk me through it. And he would be walked through it and often he would say, yeah that's good. Do better. And what that taught me was that sometimes I think we think that our first idea whether it's a whole idea or how to fix something or how to do something is the best idea. It probably isn't. Because we're probably accessing it from everything else we've ever seen, and it's probably not fresh. So that I learned a lot from that. The thing that I learned, oh, maybe, I don't know, eight to 10 years into my career, that saved me a lot of arguments and trouble was and now it's pretty known, but I hadn't heard of it then, which is, look for the note behind the note. So if you are a writer, you are going to get a lot of notes. You're going to get notes from studio execs, producers, actors, directors. Everybody's gonna have, some idea of how they think you can make your thing better or fix something. And often what people do is they'll tell you what they think is wrong, and then they'll give you an example of how they think you should Change it. Often the example is really stupid or does it work? Because they're not seeing is, oh, if you do that, you're now pulling on a thread up at the middle that's gonna unravel at the end. However, what, when I was young, what would happen is if the example they gave you was really dumb, I would dismiss the note. Just because the example isn't good doesn't mean the note's not good or Right. and the other thing is something I just learned over the years, which is do not fall in love with your first draft. I always thought, oh no, my best drafts the first, the first be it probably isn't. Yes. So those are the three pieces of advice that I think help me the most. Wonderful. Thank you. Absolutely. Um, Would you like to share your social media handles or where you're gonna perform next? Yeah, absolutely. On Instagram, it's Patricia Resnick, R-E-S-N-I-C-K. Please follow me. I will always put what my next show is where it is, and hopefully a link to tickets. That's the best place to go. Great, Patricia, thank you so much. I had such a great time talking with you. And will you come back? A hundred percent. This was terrific. I really enjoyed it. And that's a wrap for the Writer's Hangout. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your positive feedback will help us keep the show going so we can continue bringing you more future episodes. Remember, keep writing. The world needs your stories. The Writers Hangout is sponsored by the Page International Screenwriting Awards, with executive producer Kristen Overn, producer Sandy Adamides, and myself, Terry Sampson. And our music is composed by Ethan Stoller.