Episode Highlights

• Getting a film from spec to being made
• The importance of consistency in writing
• The tension between working long hours and doing good work
• Appreciating negative and positive aspects of the creative process
• Developing productive writing habits
• How losing sleep is sabotaging your own work
• Mortgaging and blocking your time

Useful Links

• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Kyle Long, who is the showrunner and creator of the television show Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac Shakur and the notorious big and also a guy that I spent at least seven or eight months with last year in a small dark room for long long hours at a time, so Kyle, it was a pleasure to finally get this conversation on the record.

Kyle Long: Likewise, likewise.

Zack Arnold: So, what I want to do today for the audience, and this is actually going to be for me too, because I’m not even sure I understand how this works, but I really want to have a clear picture of what it looks like to decide I want to make a TV show, and then have it become a reality, because there are so many people in creative industries, whether it’s on my side in editing or people that are aspiring writers or directors, they just kind of look at the industry and say, I don’t get it, like we’re not doctors, we’re not lawyers. I don’t see a path. I don’t really understand how all of this works, and you really kind of work through every step of the machine to get your show to the point where it was a show that was on television. It was very well regarded, highly critically acclaimed. It’s a fantastic show. Might also say that it was fairly well edited. Tooting the own horn there, so I really just want people to understand what it looks like from the writer side, because I’ve talked a lot about the editor side, talked a little bit about the directing side, but I’ve never really talked to people about the writing side, so where I want to start is just kind of understanding your origin story, like where you grew up and what drew you into the writing craft, and then how you ended up in Los Angeles.

Kyle Long: I grew up in Virginia, right outside DC, and went to school in DC, and then went to college in Virginia. I always loved to write, and I think even more so, I always was a big reader. I’ve never met a writer who wasn’t a big reader, at least a good one. That’s one of the first questions I asked people when they say they want to write. I’m like, well, do you read? So that’s where my kind of love for it all started, with just kind of being a voracious reader, and then really falling in love with movies first. So I knew I wanted to, I wanted to be a screenwriter, and I was. I went to the University of Richmond, and they have no film program, and I didn’t know anybody that was a screenwriter who, or who worked in Hollywood, and I kind of kept it to myself that I wanted to do this for a while, and then a year out of college, I finally moved to LA, and I just thought, okay, I’m either gonna make it or I’m gonna find something, it’s gonna lead me to something I want to do, because I had, there was nothing else I really wanted to do, so it was a big leap of faith, it was a temp at the Writers Guild, that was a great job. It quickly led to a full-time job, because A was really not that demanding, and B, I got to read a lot of scripts and just kind of be around writers, and I just kept writing, writing, and it really.. I think I sold my first script feature script about five four or five years after I moved to LA, which in many ways was very fast. I was still very young. I did not know what I was doing when I look back at it, and there was no, there’s no training, like you sell scripts and you’re like, oh, it’s easy. It really, in many ways, is after you sell that first script, it’s just the next thing is to kind of keep working, and that’s equally as hard as selling the first one, at least in my experience. So I had this weird feature career where I would sell a screenplay, and then usually get like a writing assignment off that as well, and then these things, they wouldn’t get made. A lot of the ideas that people were coming to me with weren’t really great movie ideas, and that’s probably why they were coming to someone like me, or, you know, it wasn’t that expensive at the time. All these things, it kind of becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy of, like, some producer has an idea that’s really not a great idea for a movie, and you try to execute it the best way you can, and it’s just kind of get why they’re not making it. So I did that for a long time, and then I would always circle the drain financially, and then write my own original screenplay again, and manage to sell it. And that happened for I made a living for about seven or eight years doing that, and at the time, television, I mean, it sounds so ridiculous for me to say out loud now, but I remember, like, thinking I don’t want any television, I mean, it was just ridiculous, because A, it’s not like I had this scintillating feature writing career, and B, obviously, television is not only awesome now, but it’s always been the place where the writer really has so much more control. So, I had a good friend who I’d met in the feature world, who had kind of transitioned in television, this guy Matt Nicks, and we really, you know, had a lot of respect for each other as writers and as people, and he basically said you have to come work in television, and he had this show called The Good Guys that was coming up, and he hired me, and really empowered me, and I didn’t know anything, and I just remember being on set for the first time thinking I have been wasting last, you know, five years or whatever it was, writing movies like I had never been on the set before. It was, it was like so eye-opening. And from there, you know, that show didn’t last long, was an awesome experience, but it didn’t do well. And after that, you know, I sold a couple pilots, and then circled the drain again, and then I got on this show Suits, which was a really fun job, and really, you know, it allowed me the best thing about that job is it allowed me to swing for the fences, basically. When I wrote Unsolved, think you know, I wrote Unsolved on spec. I love writing on spec. I love waking up early and writing, and not having anyone tell me what I should be writing. So, having a job, a writing job that I liked on Suits, that you know paid my bills, and you know, kind of got got my life back, back in order, it really, you know, kind of gave me this freedom to go. Well, I’m going to write this script on Solve that I just am so passionate about, and I didn’t think anyone was ever going to make it. I thought maybe this will open up some new doors for me, because I’m so excited about it. And then, you know, the rest is they ended up buying it and making it, and the best part about it all was had so many ups and downs, and had sold a lot of things that never got made that I loved, that I feel like I was really able to enjoy it as much as you know, like if this had happened right out of the gate for me or earlier, I don’t think I would have been on set and reminding myself, like, this doesn’t happen, you know. You don’t get to create your own show and you know, be proud of it, and you know, work with all these amazing people all the time. It usually something goes wrong. So it was a very fun experience for me.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, there’s just a whole lot of stuff that I could dig into there, but the first thing that I will say is I have yet to work with anybody. You know, I’ve, for those that don’t know, Matt Nicks is also the creator and showrunner of Burn Notice, so we have a lot of people in common. We both, both worked with, just as an aside for anybody that didn’t know that, but I don’t think I’ve worked with anybody else that just had a sheer appreciation for the process, the way that you did, and the process is ugly, and it’s messy, and it’s stressful, and it’s frustrating, but there was always a level of appreciation that you had, where it was, man, this day has been nuts, and this is happening on set, and blah blah blah, but there’s always a part of the you like, yeah, but I’m making a TV show, like this is awesome, right? So, there’s.. I definitely always saw that appreciation, which is one of the reasons I really liked working with you, and hope to again, is because there was this thing called perspective, and there are so few people that have perspective where they think that we are literally curing cancer in the edit bay or on set, like they just. They had this mentality that this is the most important thing in the world. People don’t understand how hard this is, and how important it is. And these every deadline is urgent, and everything’s like going to the emergency room, and it’s like we’re making TV people, everybody just take a chill pill. Okay? Can we just chill out and realize this is fun?

Kyle Long: It’s weird. I think part of it was I was so excited about the show we were making that I was so blown away that I was getting to make it, but at the same time, yet it is really TV can make your world really small, like you think, because especially when you’re the boss, because you know everyone is kind of catering to you, and you know it’s very easy to feel important, but inside you know we’re all feeling so insecure about everything, and it’s just, you know, there’s approximately 18 million television scripted shows right now. It feels like, like most people aren’t going to watch your show, like most people don’t know anything about it, and I just always kept trying to tell myself, like, enjoy the work, enjoy the process, enjoy the people, because the rest is completely out of your control. You know, there’s a lot of luck involved. There’s a lot of, like, you can work just as hard, and you could actually write the same script and have it not turn out as well, just, you know, the amount of people that get involved, the amount of things that have to go right. So I tried to always appreciate that, and you know, wasn’t I was wasn’t always successful. There are definitely days of, you know, losing my mind, as you definitely saw.

Zack Arnold: Oh, yes, and I was there playing the role as a therapist while you were on the couch. I was in the chair, like that’s part of what I do, for a living, you know, that’s that’s why, yeah, exactly, that’s why people enjoy working with me, is because it’s not just about Avid, it’s not just about hitting the keyboard, or, you know, cutting a scene together, you have to be able to manage and shepherd the whole process, and a lot of that is politics and emotions, and you know, the analogy that I use a lot, as an editor, you feel like the child between two divorced parents, because you’ve got this person that wants one thing and the other person wants the other thing. Oh, don’t tell them I told you to make that change, and then you’re like, where’d that change come from? And you’re like, I don’t know, I just did it, and you’re like, ah, but you two just start talking and get along, seriously. You know,

Kyle Long: I think that one of the really crazy things about writing in Hollywood, especially in television, is most writers, they didn’t become writers because they loved, like, a managing people, and B, you know, kind of, or A, being the boss, I should get to say, and be like having to go out and sell themselves, and it’s hilarious that you kind of have to do that in Hollywood, like you know, being being a showrunner, like you have to write it, and then it’s also like there’s an amazing, a huge amount of just dealing with people, it’s not a natural, it certainly wasn’t a natural thing for me, and it’s just, it’s not inherent to being a good writer, so it’s like all these things are kind of working against you. I mean, some people really are great at it, but it’s not, you know, so definitely the learning curve is really big, and I understand why I think some writers, they get in charge, and they can really turn into monsters, and maybe not even realize it, just because they’re so stressed, and they just don’t know how to deal with people, and there’s a lot of, a lot of pressure.

Zack Arnold: Well, when you spend most of your craft for a fair amount of your career, like you did, where it’s just you and a laptop and a room, and you’re, you know, spending years upon years writing these feature scripts, or doing spec stuff, or TV, or even when you’re on a writer staff for a show, so you’re working on suits, it’s still just kind of you, and you’re being hired for your ideas and your creativity, so that’s a very different part of the brain, and it’s where most of the people I feel are on the creative spectrum, they’re very introverted, and they chose to be creative and do these things because that’s their nature, and that’s where they feel comfortable, but then all of a sudden you cross over this giant chasm, the expectation is that you can all of a sudden magically, without any training over the last 20 years, manage people, manage department heads, manage time during the day, manage schedules, and, oh, by the way, after you’ve done all that, we’re going to need a draft of the next script by Monday.

Kyle Long: And the truth is, you don’t do it all yourself. I mean, I think there’s.. I mean, I guess it’s good. On one hand, there’s been this rise of the television showrunner, like, you know, the kind of Hollywood media, like, writes about all these people, and it’s like all about how hard this job is, and all this stuff, and it’s always kind of portrayed like these guys are, or women, or are doing this, like they’re doing it all, it’s just not true, like there’s no way to do it all, like, you, I, you know, had an amazing partner on this, as you know, Anthony Hemingway. And he took the amount of stuff he took off my plate was incredible, you know, and I don’t, you can’t control it all, you’ll lose your mind, it’s a collaboration and you’ll get in arguments and things like that, but it’s also the only way to do it, and usually you have a good partner, it only makes things better.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, there’s no question about that. And I’m, I’m still trying to snag Anthony and lock him down and do the podcast, but he’s like getting that guy to like take an extra breath of air is impossible. So I don’t know if I’m ever going to find 60 minutes to get him on here, because he’s a machine. I’ve never seen anybody that works as long and as hard as consistently as Anthony does, like he’s just a force to reckon with,

Kyle Long: And being around that, that kind of energy, you know, it makes you want to work harder, it makes you not want to disappoint him, you know.

Zack Arnold: Absolutely, yeah, I couldn’t agree more. But speaking of working hard, I actually want to take a step backwards now, because I know that one thing that you probably dealt with, and you can tell me about it even more than I could, but even I was asked this question multiple times when I was on the show. Yeah, they’d asked me, “Oh, what are you working on? Oh, I’m going to be doing this, this new show, Unsolved, that’s for USA. It’s, you know, this kind of true crime story. Oh yeah, who’s doing it? It was this guy named Kyle Long. Yeah, who? Yeah, who’s this guy? And then they’ll go on IMDB, and it’s like, but he’s, he’s worked on suits, and a couple episodes of Good Guys, like, how can he be a showrunner? And what I think is so important for people to understand specifically about Hollywood is that you look on IMDB, or you look at a, you know, page on deadline, or whatever it is, they don’t see years and years and years of the habit of working on and perfecting your craft, and you’ve talked a little bit about that, but I want to dig in even deeper, because I think whether you want to be an editor, you want to be a writer, you want to do something creative, there’s always this feeling of, oh, well, I only do it when the inspiration strikes. Well, good luck with that, right? And, and it sounds to me like you just, it’s something that you can’t not do.

Kyle Long: Yeah, that is, I will always do this. Whether I’ll always be getting paid for it, is you know, that’s, you can make a lot of money in Hollywood, but it’s very hard to, as a writer, to say, like, “Oh, we’re gonna have this like 30 year career consistently working. It’s just, you’re gonna, it’s like, you’re gonna have ups and downs, but what you can control is trying to write stuff all the time, and I just always have something I want to write, like it’s just a big part of my life. And, like, I will say, the credits thing drives me crazy, not even on my own behalf, but in general, it’s one thing for people that just go on IMD and not understand how the business works, I get that, and to make like snarky comments. Oh, this guy only did this. How’s he gonna do this? What really drives me crazy is it feels like people in Hollywood don’t know that, like your credits aren’t always a reflection of things you want to write, things you have written, and where I know people who’ve written for really sexy, you know, awesome shows that get all kinds of buzz that I don’t think are very good writers, you know, like they’ve kind of gotten this job somehow, and then they eventually, you know, who knows actually who wrote what, and then I know people who really had bad luck in the business and you know, never even really broke through, and aren’t working. Who I know are great writers. It is not a meritocracy, and there’s a lot you can do to improve your odds, you know, and having success in this business, but there is definitely, you know, there’s a lot of putting yourself in position to get lucky.

Zack Arnold: It does, and anybody that’s listened to my show on a regular basis knows how I feel about the word luck, because I really don’t feel that luck is something, at least good luck I don’t feel exists. I do think there’s something called bad luck, where you’re just walking down the street and you get hit by a truck, like, all right, that’s bad luck, right? But as far as good luck, I think you have to be very careful about that term, because people often use it as an excuse. Say, well, I’m just not getting anywhere. Just, I haven’t caught a break yet. I haven’t, I haven’t gotten lucky. It’s like, no, luck is where hard work meets opportunity. You can’t create an opportunity all by yourself. You have to wait for those opportunities to come, but you can certainly put yourself in the right place at the right time with the right skill set, or all of a sudden you become quote unquote lucky.

Kyle Long: Yeah, I agree, and I think you, there’s also what, so you really have to kind of have a healthy sense of denial, like if you think about like moving out to Hollywood, and people say, like, oh, the odds of making it, like, how many people have success? You start thinking about that stuff, you’ll just not do it. You really have to lock, you know, just kind of build this bubble around yourself, and that doesn’t really change, you know? Like, you really have to just go, this is what I want to do, I’m excited about it, and I just. Have to sit down and do it, and then we’ll see what happens.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I’m glad that you said that, because that’s exactly where I want to go next. Is we’re in that bubble, we’re just going to sit down and do it. So, what are some of the habits that you employ to consistently write, whether it’s every day or every other day, or like, give me a glimpse into the daily process, not the career, but really down into the micro. How is it that you’re able to stay so consistent?

Kyle Long: Listen, I wish I’ll say some things, and I wish I always followed my own advice. I’m getting better at it as I get older, and I just feel like I don’t know, you just.. I guess the.. it’s like a muscle, you’re constantly strengthening, I guess, but most importantly, it’s just to, for me, I like having.. I don’t like going to coffee. I can’t write around other people. It drives me bonkers. I know a lot of people can. I like having a space that I go to every day, and sitting down and work. I goof off like any writer does, but you know, I shut down the internet, you know, for big chunks, and I just sit there and work, and there are days that are especially when you’re just trying to figure out what you want to write, that are pretty maddening, you know, you’re just kind of.. it’s just a lot of banging your head against the wall, but you just kind of keep doing it, and eventually you have a script. I heard a writer, I think it’s the guy who wrote American Hustle, Eric Singer, talk about writing in this great way of, like, imagine if you’re climbing like I think he just described it like climbing like Everest, and you don’t look up, you just kind of, you know, you just, it’s like one reach at a time, you know, like, because if you look up, you think, like, I’m never going to finish this thing, you know, like, you just have to take it one moment at a time, and have the confidence that eventually, you know, you’re going to work hard every day, and eventually, you’re going to have a script, you know,

Zack Arnold: It’s the same process in the editing room as well, where if I look at the sheer volume of material that gets dumped on me every day and say, wow, I’ve got 56 hours worth of raw footage, and in eight or nine days this needs to be an arable quality episode of television, like that’s an insanely overwhelming amount of material, but for me it’s like, no, all I have to do is watch this 30 minutes of material, and I need to do a first pass of this one scene, and then shove it, and then do the same thing again, and the end of the day do a quick polish on just this material. I don’t care about tomorrow, I don’t care about a week from now, I’m not even thinking about handing in a first cut, it’s just this scene. So you have to really put on this tunnel vision and just do it, literally looking down at your feet one step at a time, because you’re right, if you look up it takes your breath away, and you’re like, oh my god, I’m never going to be able to do this.

Kyle Long: Yeah, and now we’re living in a world where, on top of, you know, you could feel overwhelmed by the amount of work you have, but also just the amount of distraction now is just, it’s staggering, you know, like you really have to make a concerted effort to block things out.

Zack Arnold: Sorry, I say that again. I was just checked on a text message that I got. What was that thing you said? Sorry. Yes, obviously, distraction is a huge, huge thing that I talk about all the time that I spent years learning how to build systems, so I can get into that creative zone, because it’s nearly impossible between just the regular distractions of the world and the internet and the news and Twitter and social media and all this garbage, but especially for somebody like you in your position, you have distractions that are important distractions that you can’t just put on a Chrome extension and block out the world. There are decisions that need to be made, and you’re the only person that can make those decisions, so that’s a whole new level of distraction when you’re trying to be creative.

Kyle Long: Yeah, and it was, you know, I think there were days when I was really good about it, and there were days, and I managed it all pretty well, and there are days that I didn’t. I think the thing that helped me is I’m a morning person, I would always come in very early to the office, after you know, drop my kids off at school bus, and I would get two hours, I’m like, I’m just going to focus on writing, you know, like, and I would get that done before the day really started, and that helped a lot. I did not have many late nights outside of maybe with you in the editing room, but like I don’t work well, that you know, really late at night, I diminishing returns, you know, I’ve heard these stories of like writers, show runners who have like their staff bring sleeping bags, and I’m just like I just think it’s ridiculous if you work hard and efficiently, you can get a lot of great done in normal business hours.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and what I want to point out for the audience as well, because I think from their perspective versus your perspective, it’s so different. When you said, well, you know, we had some late nights in the edit suite, people in my industry are thinking, oh yeah, they’re probably. There, until like three four in the morning. What people need to understand is, you and I were never once, either during the pilot or the entire series, together in that room after 8:30pm

Kyle Long: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: Ever.

Kyle Long: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: Right. And because you and I were both on the same page, that it’s about using the time that we had and being as efficient with it as possible. But I remember one time, I think it was near the end of the pilot, when it was really crunch time, and it was like we were getting ready to hand it to the studio, or we were in testing. It’s like, whatever is usually the worst period of a pilot, and it was like 830 or 9o’clock at night, and you and I really hadn’t worked together a lot yet. It may have been a few days, we were still filling out the process, you were new to the process, and like, all right, so I’m really curious, is this guy gonna do one of these? Let’s just power through, and we’re gonna do it until one in the morning, it was like 830 at night. You’re like, all right, I really apologize, I know this has been a super long day, but we should just cut it, so we can be fresh tomorrow. I’m like, oh yeah, I want to work with this guy. Oh, yes, we’re on the same page here,

Kyle Long: Right? That I mean, listen, a lot of this might have been colored by the fact that we all had, we were on the same page, you know, like, and we had something that we felt was close, you know, and there were certain episodes that were, you know, took a lot more editorial work, and you know, I was going a bit crazy, but yeah, I don’t, I’m for me, and some people might be different, but for me, like, if I’m up really late at night, like nothing good is getting done, you know, likeI’m not going to have some eureka moment at three in the morning, you know,

Kyle Long: Yeah, and that’s not you, that’s just the way that the human brain works, we’ve just chosen to ignore all those signs and think, well, we’re going to be able to get more done at a higher quality in 80 hours than we can in 60 hours or 45 and I just, I adamantly refuse to believe that, and I, I now I’m at the point where I’m, I’m, I was going to say lucky enough in my career, and I realized I can’t say that, because I’m going against my own philosophy, but I’m, I appreciate where I am in my career, and the credits that I have where I have the ability to interview showrunners and directors instead of them interviewing me, and I can find out all right, what is this really going to be like? So I’ll talk to them about the process and how they work, and if they have kids, that’s a huge thing for me. Is I now at the point where I almost don’t want to work for a showrunner if they don’t have kids, because then you come to them and say, hey, I’ve got, you know, a winter sing in the morning, or whatever, like, what are you talking about, like, we have to get a cut out, it’s like it’s called real life, okay, perspective, so working with somebody that has all that, you get it, you’re like, oh no, I understand, do that, whatever, like, you realize there’s life and there’s television, but it’s they’re not the same thing,

Kyle Long: Yeah, and for me, I’m talking to one of the writers on Unsolved, this woman, Dee Harris Lawrence, she’s running her own show now, or running a show, and she was, you know, asking me for advice, because I had just done it, and I’d never done it before, and I said, you know, you really do need to make sure you get sleep and prioritize it, because, you know it’s just gonna catch up to you, and you’re not gonna be operating at a high level, you know, and you’re just up all the time, and it does. I seen it happen to people, I mean, there it happened to me too. I mean, there are plenty of nights where I couldn’t sleep, or I was just frustrated about something, and the next day would just be awful, you know, like it’s just you’re not, you need it, you can’t, you’re just gonna be better if you’re healthy.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and the analogy that I use with people a lot of times is a financial one, because everybody gets money, and I talk about either a 401 k or just a, you know, a quick turnaround investment, so you’re basically saying to somebody, you know what, I need to borrow $1,000 today, but I’m going to pay you back $4,000 tomorrow, and you think, who would ever do that? You’re doing with your time, it’s like, well, you know what, I’m going to stay until two in the morning, that’s an extra four hours that I can get worked on. You’re giving away 12 hours of either the next day or even after that, like, who would ever make that investment? It makes no sense to me.

Kyle Long: Yeah, yeah.

Zack Arnold: Well, now, where I want to go, because I have about 150 hours worth of material of me jumping on a soapbox and talking all about health and sleeping enough, and we could do that forever, and I’m sure I’ve done it with you privately. But where I want to go now is going to be a little bit different, and what I want to understand is how a tall, lanky, whiter-than-white guy from Virginia decided that he was going to become uber passionate about murders of Tupac Shakur and the notorious Big. So, let’s just start with the origin story of Unsolved.

Kyle Long: I had moved to Los Angeles right around the time Biggie Christopher Wallace got got shot in. He was my generation, like that Biggie and Tupac. They definitely kind of.. I don’t know how, if you’re our generation, you remember like how much, how big the East Coast, West Coast rap. War was, and how it was just kind of had totally crossed over. I was, you know, I was into it very much. And then when he got murdered, I worked really close to where Biggie got murdered, like I worked at the Writers Guild, that’s about, oh God, a quarter of a mile away, and I would go on these walks, and I remember walking by the Peter Sonata Museum, which is where Biggie got killed, you know, and I was just like, it was so surreal to think someone could just kind of get gunned down in such a bubble, a celebrity could just get gunned down in this kind of public place, and no one ever be arrested for it, and I just was obsessed about it. I would always read about it. There were a couple books written about it, and I could never get enough of it, and I always was just reading about it. I thought it was kind of this just absolutely amazing true crime. There’s a crazy true crime element, and then the more you know you’d read about these young men, you.. I just was so fascinated by him, so I didn’t really think of it. There’s kind of a denial of it all right there, like I didn’t really think about like being a white guy writing it much, because part of it was I was like, this is just a drama, this is a drama I’m passionate about, and you can’t really choose what you’re passionate about, you know, like it’s.. I’m kind of doing it again right now, this thing I’m writing, where I’m kind of sure I’m going to get some of the same questions, because it’s very female driven, and I can’t worry about it, you know, I’m leaving, you can choose who you collaborate with later on, and I certainly have an amazing partner and amazing group of writers from all different backgrounds, but I can’t worry about that stuff, you know. It’s basically what gets you excited, and if I start thinking stuff like, well, I shouldn’t try to tell that kind of story, it’s just.. I don’t know. It this was just something I really, really wanted to write, and I didn’t think about it too much, you know.

Zack Arnold: So, from the point that all that happened, and you were walking by the Peterson, like you were just a bystander that was fascinated by something that happened in the real world, right? So, from that point to the point where you actually sat down in front of a laptop and said, “I’m going to dedicate this amount of time to writing a spec script that nobody’s ever gonna make or pay me for. How much time was that?

Kyle Long: It was a long time. It was because part of it’s a really long story, but part of what happened is so Biggie was killed 96

Zack Arnold: 97 Tupac was 96

Kyle Long: Yeah, sorry,

Zack Arnold: I saw there was this show that I, that I worked

Kyle Long: A couple years after he was killed, this detective, Russell Pool, for the LAPD started making a bunch of noise about, you know, the LAPD may have been involved, and then this documentary came out called Biggie and Tupac, and then this book, Labyrinth, came out, and all these big articles came out, and that was a huge deal for a while, and that was like, I remember, because I was my feature career basically consisted of writing comedies, just kind of once you write one movie that sells, they kind of think that’s all you can do, and I always remember thinking like I don’t want to write these things, you know, like I really want to write like cop stuff, but I remember reading some of these articles and getting one of them to a very successful feature writer friend, going, man, you should do something like this, you know, like it’s amazing, and nothing ever happened with those that stuff. And then, you know, I always would read about it every couple years, a new story would come up, and kind of the longer it went on, the more and more insane it became about, like, how is this thing, how are these murders still unsolved, and there were more and more books written, and then when I was working on Suits, I read Greg Hatings’ book, and that was like how this investigation had been reopened, and I just remember reading it, going, oh, I know how to do this, I think I could turn this into this like crazy television show, and then I remember just like waking up and reading all as many articles as I could, and at this point there were like 20 years of articles, it felt like, and making all these big binders, and just figuring out like I’m gonna write a script and we’ll literally, I have, I thought about all this stuff, I, we would have to get to get the script made, you know, I just wouldn’t have written, you know, like I really just wanted to kind of get it out of my system, it had so many, you know, there were so many hurdles to getting a script like this made, if I thought about it, I never would have written it, so I don’t know, it was, it was just something I was obsessed with for a really, really long time, and then one day I just sat down and started working on it, and then it was pretty quick.

Zack Arnold: Basically, the image that I have in my mind right now, knowing you well enough, is just this room, the. It has like newspapers and articles and yarn strings everywhere, like basically somebody would walk in and think, is this guy a serial killer?

Kyle Long: Like, wow, it’s very true.

Zack Arnold: I can, I can totally see that from you, because I, that’s one thing I think where you and I really connect is we have this very kind of calm nature, and you know, very for the most part easy to be around, relatively introverted, but that inside there’s this crazy obsessiveness over some topic or concept, or whatever it is, and there’s nothing that gets in the way between whatever the vision is in our mind and seeing it, and just.. it’s.. it’s.. I don’t know how else to explain, except just this laser-sharp vision.

Kyle Long: Yeah, you really have to, you really get obsessed, you really go down the rabbit hole, and you know it’s one of the things that’s kind of hard about making these kind of things is there’s a lot of there’s an obsession and there’s an emotional toll because they’re real people and you feel real responsibility, but it’s also what’s so great about it is like you. I just couldn’t stop reading about these people. I was so fascinated by every aspect of it all, and it’s.. it wasn’t really.. I’ve been pretty good about it. Like, the moment we finished, I was like, “I’m done, you know? Like, I don’t like talking about it too much, because it’s just like we did it. Let’s move on. Every once in a while, something comes up, because there’s still all kinds of crazy stuff going on with the investigation, but it’s just like it was a chap, a huge chapter in my life, because not only just making the show over the course of the time it took to make the show, but just that part of my brain that was so obsessed with it, I’m like, I have to let it go, you know.

Zack Arnold: So you’re saying that Unsolved Season Two isn’t still gonna star Biggie and Tupac?

Kyle Long: No, no, I’m sure the network would like that, but

Zack Arnold: that has definitely been a misconception that I’ve had to answer many times. Like, so what’s gonna happen in the next one if it went through full investigations? Like, no, you don’t understand. Yeah, yeah, Dubug is done, that’s the whole story. Finished. There isn’t a season two specifically for their story. So, anyway, that’s like an inside joke that I know you and I had to deal with. So, what I’d like to know now is, you had this period of what, if I do the math, was probably over 15 years between seed planted. Here’s the idea. This is something I’m really obsessed with, but I don’t really know what to do with it. I’m just curious as a person, and I want to learn more. And then, bam, I get it. I see the story, I see how to put this together. I just need to get it out of my brain, because I’m thinking about all the time. Spec script is done. All right, that’s finished.

Kyle Long: Yeah.

Zack Arnold: Now, what happened? How did you go from the point of having a spec script that was never going to get sold away. To all of a sudden, you’re getting ready to shoot a pilot tomorrow morning.

Kyle Long: That was wild, because I had not told anyone I was working on. I had not told my agents, because if I think they would have been like, ‘What? What are you working on? So I finished the script, and I sent it to my agent, and I spent it with a long email saying, like, this will probably never be made into a show, but I’m really proud of this script, and hopefully it’ll open some new doors for me. If someone was to be interested, we’re gonna have to go get this cop’s life rights and this book, and they read it, and like read right away, and they just went crazy for, and then it was like I was on suit, so I was on a Universal cable show, and this is kind of inside baseball, but basically that means they get first crack at it, so they read it right away, and they loved it, and I definitely think the people versus OJ being such a big deal at the time was a big part of that, that they just saw, like, oh my god, this is a true crime thing, and then it has these two huge celebrities, so they were just like, we have to do this, and then they had me, and I told them, like, this is all the stuff we have to do, and then I had to go get this guy, Greg Hating, on board, which was probably the hardest part of the process. He didn’t know who I was the time, he didn’t know there was a script. He had multiple suitors, because his book had been out for a couple of years, but then this documentary, Murder Out, came out, and then true crime was getting popular, so he had a lot of people that wanted to be in business with him, I just basically, we really hit it off, but it took a long time to kind of get him officially on board. He really had to trust me, and also I think what really helped was that he had a network saying we are going to work, we make this, you know, like we want to make this, and you know, he had to be educated in the business a little bit about, like, you know, we were much further, I was much further along on the process than other people who just wanted to option his book, but that took a long time, months and months and months to convince him, and then once he signed on the dotted line. Then I said I want they said, Who do you want to direct, and I said this guy, Anthony Hemingway. And then once Anthony signed on, it was like, you know, we’re making a, we’re making a pilot.

Zack Arnold: So this next question, if this is like too insider, personal, or whatever, you don’t have to answer, um, but I don’t understand this, and I think there are a lot of people that don’t understand this part of the process as well, because you wrote the script on spec, does that mean that once they decided, hey, this is something that we want to make, do you then get like paid retroactively the way that you would if they hired you to do it, or is it just kind of like, well, we’re going to pay you for the series, like that work,

Kyle Long: Buy it, they have to buy it, so it’s they have to pay, they have to acquire the script, and then in television, what they do is they then negotiate a deal with you, saying, like, here’s the money for the script that we’re buying, and then if it becomes a television show, here’s what we’re gonna, we’re gonna pay you every episode, so they negotiate all that stuff, then,

Zack Arnold: Right? So, so basically, if you had sold the script and the next morning they said, yeah, no, no, nevermind, you still, you’d have a check, you just

Kyle Long: You get paid for the actual script,

Zack Arnold: Right. Okay, so then from the point that you handed this to your agent, then going through the process with Greg Kading, to then having the studio say green light Anthony Hemingway is directing, we’re in pre-production tomorrow morning, roughly. What was that time frame?

Kyle Long: Yeah, I first sent my script to my agents in about a year before, and then there was a couple, it was there was a couple month period with, with, with Greg Haiti getting him on board,

Zack Arnold: Got it. So we’re really talking about from the point where you had a finished spec script, handed it to your agent as an employed TV writer. I want to make sure that people have perspective, because if they’re like, “Well, I’m going to write a spec script and get it made. You were already in the system, working for a studio on a high-profile type TV show. So they read it the next morning, they say this is the next great American television show, it has to be made. It still took a year.

Kyle Long: Yeah, yeah, basically. I mean, there was a lot of.. it feels fat, and that feels like a long time now, but there was.. there were a lot of. like, we knew we were making it long before that. There’s like scheduling, and you know, it takes a long time to cast and all this stuff, but yeah, but yeah, so it, it was a while. There was, there was nice, and then the script in May, but I feel now that, like, there was some back and forth from my agents before they actually gave it to UCP, and all that too. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: Right. So, what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to put together all of the ingredients of the recipe. Everybody’s always trying to find, well, what’s the path? What do I need to do? And there isn’t one path, but I think that the very clear things that I pull out of this is that it’s different if somebody came to you now as a successful showrunner and you’ve done a hit show for them to say we have an idea, would you like to make this show, like that’s different, like you get to a certain level where that just happens, but for most people, I think to be put in a position where you are now, the first ingredient is you truly have to be passionate slash obsessed about whatever the story is that you want to tell. Yes, I can see that in your script, right? When I remember reading the unsolved script, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t even think I read it until we started shooting. Trusted Anthony, and when Anthony says, like, I remember I wasn’t even working at the time, I was on sabbatical, I said, I need a break from Hollywood, I’ve been editing straight for 15 years, and I get a text message one night while I’m walking outside, it’s from Anthony, saying I’ve got a pilot. Do you want to edit it? And I’m like, sure. That was it. Done. Like next day, he sends it to me. And the funny thing was, he sent it to me. It was, must have been your writer’s draft, because it didn’t have any studio information. It was just, it said, unsolved by Kyle Long, and that was it. Blank page. And I’m like, Who’s Kyle Long? What is this like? What did Anthony get me into? And then I kind of didn’t even like, I kind of looked into it and scanned through, and like, okay, so this is about big and Tupac, this sounds pretty cool, but I had no idea what I was getting into until I really read it thoroughly right before shooting started. I was like, whoa, this is going to be something different, and the reason that it felt that way was because the amount of time and energy and attention you put into learning the story and putting all that on the page,

Kyle Long: Right.

Zack Arnold: To me, that’s the first ingredient.

Kyle Long: Yeah, and it’s.. it’s.. I’m talking to a friend of mine there, and I was a writer. There’s a lot of stuff in Hollywood. There’s this whole system about, like, how you pitch shows, and you know every step of the process, and you know what’s your story idea, and then everyone gets involved, and I feel a lot of good intentions, but I just don’t get it, like I feel like the odds, your odds of success would be just as high, if not higher. If you just said we like these writers, what do they let them kind of come in and say what they’re really, really want to write, and if we think it’s something we might be interested in, let’s just let them go and write, you know, like let them kind of get obsessed about it. That’s Fantasyland, I know, but it’s like you really have. To, if you want, you really have to dig in and really love something for it to be good.

Zack Arnold: You realize studio executives can’t take any credit if they just let you go off in a room and write like they need their thumbprints all over it.

Kyle Long: But what’s crazy is a lot of places now, like the kind of, you know, places everyone’s, where everyone’s watching television now, you know, Netflix, all these places, that is just because of the sheer amount of television they’re making, and all these things, is that they are very hands off, and a lot of, not all the time, but in a lot of instances, and I will say, in this case, in USA, they completely empowered me. I mean, there were notes, and there were times that we fought, but I, I was kind of shocked by how much control I had over at all, they really backed me up, so maybe just because I didn’t know how to give notes on a show where it was true story, and I knew so much about it, but they were, they were pretty great.

Zack Arnold: Well, and that’s another one of the reasons I want to bring this up as such an important key ingredient, if you’re trying to go from the place of being relatively unknown, and for a lot of writers or editors, or whomever, they would look at you and say, but you were already on Suits, but you know you were a staff writer on a hit TV show, and there’s a lot of other staff writers on hit TV shows, so the ingredient of passion and conviction is another one that’s so important, and the reason is that when you get to that point where you hand in the script, they know that they have the power over you, and you’re thinking, oh my god, this is such an opportunity, and I know that this would get made, but then there was this, this part of you that I saw multiple times that I just, I respected so much, and admired you knew the show that you wanted to make, and people tried very, very hard to make a different show that they thought other people would enjoy more, or would be different, or would be, you know, for whatever reasons, but you knew exactly the show that you wanted to make, and you were unapologetic about that.

Kyle Long: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I’m not a confrontational person, I kind, which is, you know, I don’t like getting an argument, but you know, and this was a show where you really could have been, you know, and in valid ways could have been, you could have leaned. There was so much story to tell, and it was kind of told in this, you know, I don’t really know what I was thinking at times, like I’m gonna tell them three time periods and all this craziness. It could have, you could have leaned into different aspects of the story, and, and for good reason, but I just was like, you know, this is what I want to do, and I have to trust it, and there are things about it that I look at, it didn’t, you know, that bother me, but they were the end of the day, they were, I guess, my mistakes, you know, like the only things that bothered me about the show were things where maybe I didn’t, I didn’t trust my, my instincts enough, and, and that bothers me, but you know, if you’re gonna get steamrolled, you’re gonna, you’re, it’s gonna, you’re gonna be a miserable, so yeah, you really have to know the show you’re making, because you work with a lot of good people with a lot of good ideas, but it does, you just really have to know what you’re doing, you really, really have to trust yourself, and you may not always be right. That’s, that’s the weird thing about it all.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think the other component that goes even deeper on a much more emotional level, and this is something that I’ve talked about a lot in past shows, but more from a theoretical standpoint, and this is a very practical standpoint, is that you had a very clear reason why you wanted to make this show. It wasn’t just this is going to be my Hollywood break. This is it. I got to do whatever it takes. Like, you had a much deeper emotional connection to why you wanted to tell the story.

Kyle Long: Yes, I was. I tend to get really emotionally invested in whatever I’m writing, like especially if it’s the kind of original idea I always do. And it can, it doesn’t have to be a true story. It can just, you just kind of get obsessed about whatever you’re writing, but with this, because it was a true story, and there was all these people that were still alive, and I met a lot of them, that was bonkers, it was crazy.

Zack Arnold: Well, I certainly am not going to forget the day that I had to box your core brother sitting in my edit suite, giving us performance notes, like I’ve pretty much settled into working in Hollywood. I’ve been in LA for almost 20 years, worked on a lot of big shows, had been on Empire, but I remember sitting there, I’m like, Tupac Coors brothers on my couch, like, come on, like this is just as Hollywood as it gets right now.

Kyle Long: Yeah, it’s really good when he came on board to help, like, just to be involved, I remember, like, sitting.. I was.. it was pretty.. we had already started the process. We were like, we had shot the pilot and all this stuff, and I remember sitting down with him and just being like, I just felt like such an ass, you know? Like, who am I to make this? Who am I to.. you know? And he was so awesome, like, he was all he wanted to do was help, and I know there were things about in the show that he probably didn’t want 100% agree with, or, but he loved it. He loved it. I saw him at this thing, he just loved it, which was so cool, and it really could have gone so wrong. But you also have to be very careful, like you, you have to block out a lot of the noise, and you have to. Objective, there were other people that wanted to get involved that had kind of tangential, you know, connections to the story, and it wouldn’t have helped, you know what I mean, like you can’t, you can’t have, you can’t have everyone saying you need to do this, you need to do that, you need to tell this story, there was just, there were too many stories to tell.

Zack Arnold: Well, the final area that I want to just chat about real quick, because we alluded to it in the beginning, and I kind of want to revisit this very, very quickly, as you talked about how, when you first started as a writer, that you very quickly sold your first feature film, which only took five or six years, and you had said it almost kind of came too soon, because you didn’t realize how hard it was to maintain it, so then my question is, now is there a part of you that feels like, well, I’ve gotten this one show out of the way, now what?

Kyle Long: Yeah, I feel like I’m starting from square one, you know, like I know I’m not, but you know, it’s like I’m just trying to trust my instincts, like, just here’s what I want to do next. Let’s see if it works out again, you know. I feel confident that I work for a while, like I get a job, but which is a nice feeling, but that’s about the only confidence I have. The rest is just there’s always a certain amount of, you know, like it’s a subjective thing, like you sit down and you write something, and let’s see how it turns out, but I, it’s not, it’s, it feels good to have made a television show, but I certainly don’t feel like, you know, fancy pants, I feel like I gotta, I gotta just sit down and do it all over again, and it’s gonna be just as hard.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I think that that’s the most important part that I really want to make sure people are taking away from this episode and this conversation is that it’s all about consistency over years and years and years. There’s just this, this myth and this image that people have of I just need to do this one thing, I need to get discovered, this thing gets sold, and then I’m set. That’s it, man. Like, I’m in right, and it just doesn’t work that way. And you’re the perfect example of somebody that just consistently shows up at the keyboard every single day, or almost every single day, whatever it is. Writing, writing, writing, nobody’s seen the writing, then somebody buys it, then nobody makes it. Then you write again, and you write again, and you have an idea. You write something, and it becomes a TV show, and you’ve made it. Oh, but guess what? You’re doing now – you’re writing like you’re just consistently perfecting your craft and getting better at it every day, and not thinking, well, I don’t have to do this great anymore and put it all the time, because I’ve quote unquote made it.

Kyle Long: Yeah, I like my really good friend, future writer. We kind of started a business at the same time, and you know, he’s a workhorse, and we love telling stories, because I didn’t meet him until fairly recently, and we love telling stories about, like, when we started, and all these guys that got movies made, like, right out, like, million dollar screenplay sale guide into movies. I won’t name the movies, because I don’t want to, like, you’ll see why, but, like, they got movies made. I remember meeting with some of them. They had companies, they were 28 years old, they had assistants. I would go on the Universal lot, sit with them, and being like, oh my god, and they are out of the business now. You know, like, done. They don’t work. Like, I always said, what happened to that guy, like it can go away very quickly, you know. So I always think about that every day.

Zack Arnold: Well, I want to be super respectful of your time, but before we go, just the last kind of quick question I would want to ask, because I don’t get a lot of writers on the show hoping to change that, because I really want to dig deeper into the creative process, but for anybody that’s listening, that is specifically an aspiring writer. If there were one tiny nugget that you give, whether it’s when you’re, you know, speaking at the Writers Guild or on another podcast, like, what’s kind of the one nugget you tell them? This would be the piece of advice I can give to help you the most.

Kyle Long: Write every day, get off social media now. These are things I don’t always do, but just write, just write, and focus on that. Just block out the time every day. If you have a full-time job, you know, either we just block out an hour and a half every day. You just need to do it, you know, on a regular basis. If you just kind of think you’re going to do it in spurts, it’s not going to work. You need to dedicate yourself to it, and you need to find an idea that you love, not an idea that you think, like, oh, this is gonna, you know, this is the perfect idea. It’s like it’s gonna, you know, this is what they’re looking for. You need to find what you’re excited about, because that is going to come up. That’s going to come across.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I certainly could not have said it better for myself. The last super quick question I have for my audience, and even for myself, is when is Unsolved going to be on Netflix, so people can actually watch it? Because not a whole lot of them watched it while it was on television.

Kyle Long: It is on Netflix International right now. I don’t know. I think it’s going to be on Netflix. Yes, I would think it’s going to be on in a couple months. I don’t quite understand it all. It could be all about if there’s going to be an unsolved season two, because then they will probably want to kind of time it all, you know? Like, I know they, they put the center on Netflix right before season two came out, so I don’t know. I’m trying to figure it out, it’s a little frustrating, because I love watching. I, you can buy it on iTunes, people, if you want to spend some money, but I, and I love watching it that way, like when they just kind of run into each other, because it really is a 10 hour movie. I don’t know, but it will be, it’ll be soon, it’ll be soon.

Zack Arnold: Well, I was hoping it was gonna come out like around any time, so people could actually watch it, but

Kyle Long: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: What do I know? I’m just, I’m just a lonely little little editor sitting in a dark cave all day.

Kyle Long: I will say this about the lowly little editor you are, for all your people that are listening to this podcast, this show would not have worked with without you, like that was that was the big one of the better parts of the process was connecting with you. I had no experience editing, just I had worked with an editor on The Good Guys on Suits. We were not really part of the editing process, so much of this show was made in the editing room, and I think more than most shows, because of all the different time periods and timelines, and then really connecting with you on a music level. I mean, it was, you are a massive part of the process, and I know you know that, but I don’t think you know everyone else knows that, and I, you know, I was, that was, it was so much fun to be working with someone that I go, I don’t know how to articulate this idea. I don’t know how to articulate this opinion on the music or the score, but you and I connected so much that you got it, and those are the kind of things that you just love. So there’s my kissing Zach’s butt, everybody, but as well,

Zack Arnold: I appreciate that very, very much. And you know, it was, it was a fantastic process for me. And what I’m trying to do with this show and the blog and everything else is really help other people that do what I do for a living realize they’re not just keyboard monkeys, because it’s so easy to allow other people to treat us that way, so it really is about valuing what you bring to the process in treating yourself as such, because if you don’t treat yourself as such and you don’t respect yourself, you can’t expect the directors, the producers, and the show runners to do it as well, and you were lucky to work with what I think was a great crew of editors all around, so I can’t take all the credit, like we had other great editors, but there are going to be some that are going to be a much more difficult process for somebody as a showrunner, and you really just do kind of see that person that devalues themselves, and they’re just kind of waiting to be told what to do, because they know how to run the avid, and I’m, I just want to empower anybody that does this creative work for a living to realize that we are tremendously valuable to the process, so that’s really that’s the deeper reason why I do what I do, all this stuff, so people really understand that, and obviously you know this, that applies to writers as well. So, so that having been said, it has been a pleasure to finally get this in the books. We’ve been talking about it forever, and there’s so much other stuff in the way, but I’m glad that we finally were able to make this happen, and hopefully the time comes when we can work on Unsolved the Resurrection of Biggie into,

Kyle Long: Yeah, that would, that would be something.

Zack Arnold: It’ll be like the end of the Passion of the Christ cable,

Kyle Long: Right? We’ll just figure out a way, right?

Zack Arnold: It’ll be pretty awesome. Well, cool. Well, thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

Kyle Long: Okay, all right, buddy, I’ll talk to you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared and published by Elyse Rintelman. The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).