My guest today is Troy DeVolld who is a reality television producer, author and speaker with dozens of credits on shows such as The Surreal Life, The Osbournes, The Bachelor, and Dancing with the Stars. Troy is also the author of the books Reality TV, One Hundred Poems about Los Angeles series and the book about the TV notes process, And Another Thing.
In his more than 23 years in the industry, Troy has no doubt developed an in depth passion for his craft. Troy and I dive deep into some of the wisdom he gained from his experiences to be happy and fulfilled in his chosen craft, including diversifying your skills, setting boundaries while collaborating effectively, and even setting boundaries with yourself. Troy has so succinctly summarized our entire conversation into one short sentence:
“I sacrificed my life to have a version of my life.”
No doubt that my conversation with Troy will inspire you to rekindle your passion for your craft while equipping you with the right tools and mindsets so you can stay happy, sane and well.
Troy DeVolld began his career in Hollywood 23 years ago on the MTV series Fear and has been credited on shows like The Osbournes, The Surreal Life, The Bachelor and multiple seasons of Dancing With The Stars. He’s a sought-after consultant in the reality space and a speaker at Story Expo and Masters of Story events. Books include Reality TV, And Another Thing and the One Hundred Poems About Los Angeles series.
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Zack Arnold: I'm here today with Troy DeVolld who's a reality television producer and author and speaker. And you've got dozens of credits on show such as The Surreal Life, The Osborne's The Bachelor, and Dancing with the Stars, several seasons all just to name a few. You also have two best selling books Reality TV, and and it's called And Another Thing, and you've been both of these have become staple reads for, as you say, a new generation of both producers and executives. And you're also a highly sought after consultant in the reality television space. So Troy, it is an absolute pleasure that we have the opportunity to connect, because we live in two totally different worlds. But we also live in exactly the same world. So I think there's going to be a lot of good things to talk about today.
Troy DeVolld: I spend a lot of time with my friends in post land, we're not that not that different.
Zack Arnold: And that's exactly what I want to make sure people get out of this today is that there's so many things said about the unscripted world versus the scripted world versus post versus production, et cetera. So I want people to better understand the value of the entire collaborative process. And I think this, this is one of those conversations, like we said, off the record, you and I aren't necessarily in exactly the same circle. So we might not bump into each other and have this conversation otherwise, but the intersection of our different worlds and our experiences, I think it's going to bring some really, really interesting insight. So I'm excited about that. Cool. So where I want to get started, this is actually going to be a little bit of insider baseball, and this is intentional, this is going to end up kind of being like a meta podcast, if you will, is Debbie, my Podcast Producer, she and I beforehand, were like, we're not really sure what is the actual narrative thread of this conversation. Because Troy, you have so many different story points and things we talk could talk about your origin story, there's the fact that you had a stroke a few years ago, and how that changed your trajectory there the books that you've written, everything that you've produced, and I thought to myself, gee, if I only had an experienced writer and producer that really understood how to take disparate, disconnected story points and turn them into a narrative thread. If only I could find him to help me find the narrative thread of this conversation, then it's gonna be a little bit meta, and then we can find it together.
Troy DeVolld: There you go.
Zack Arnold: Right. So instead of me just completely guiding the conversation. I know a lot of the things I'd like to talk about. But the first question would be, if I'm reaching out to you saying, Where do I start, when I'm given all of this random information, and I want to tell a better and more engaging and more cohesive story and retain people's attention. With all the story points you have to share? Where should I start? What's the first question I should be asking you?
Troy DeVolld: Golly, I suppose if you want to start with talking about structure, I would say always find out the things that you think will have an A, B, C progression. I used to have people on shows that would complain to me, this is on the talent side. So how come you never show me doing this? This this? How can you never show me doing this? And I said, because there's no setup thing pay off. If I can't set up a thing, I can't pay it off later. And this is an argument I had with an executive 10 years ago that set my career back 20 years because he erased the first 10 years of my career. And it took me 10 years to build it back. You can't pay off things that you don't set up. So if you think that something's you know, oh, well, this, this seems a little slow and creaky. Like the setup for this doesn't work. Just remember that like you? I can't I can't tell you anything revelatory. If you don't ask me anything that's genuinely curious.
Zack Arnold: Hmm, well, genuine curiosity is not going to be a problem. You can ask my producer or anybody in my program, I never stop asking questions I have yet I've yet to use an entire prep sheet for a podcast interview. Usually, I cover about 15% of what I want to cover in these 90 minutes. But the good news is now you've helped me understand what's the story thread that I should pull first. And if I have some idea of where the payoff is, I know that in your case, your origin story is the setup. So then my technically second question, which will be my first question to you, is, tell us a little bit more about your origin story, why you came to Hollywood when and how all of this started to come together?
Troy DeVolld: Sure. In the early 1990s, I was at the end of a 15 year arc of trying to become a comic book artist, is I wanted that more than anything else in the world. I had great correspondences going with people. Will Eisner who was a huge influence on me, was actually like, corresponding with me through the mail and saying things like, well, you know, draw me a page of telephone poles, and God help you if two of them look the same. Just always think about this. I used to put my characters in these weird abstract geometric settings and you'd say, give me a background like do this, like try this. I was so excited about getting started in comics. I put one comic book out in 1991. And the distribution got screwed up on it. And I just was like, I can't afford to do this and I don't want to eat tomato soup for the rest of my life. I better find another career. So I said, Well, how can I write and tell stories? I fell into doing it by to TV commercials for Woody Woodpecker is 50th anniversary for Universal Studios. And the Jefferson meant they were selling watches. And I worked with these two guys, Andy Freeman and Stuart fail. We did a bunch of TV commercials about these brothers who were trying to unload a Volkswagen thankful when he went back our merchandise. And we did these silly little commercials. And I said, you know, it's so fun to work on something and then see it on TV in a couple of weeks. So I decided I'm going to keep chasing, I'm going to keep chasing it. I started writing screenplays, got some interest in a screenplay, moved to California, and crashed with a friend of mine whose name I saw go by in the credits on a TV show when I was halfway across the country. I said, Well, he'll be the first call I make and he said, Well, you know, come crash on our futon. So that's what I did. And I ended up working on a reality show with him called fear for MTV. I was just working as a lager transcriptionist I wasn't working as a writer. It was something to do. But because that was around the same time that survivor blew up, everybody wanted to make reality shows. So they were hiring producers that hadn't necessarily done things before. By the end of the first season on MTV sphere, I was a story producer, I ended up working on the finale of that season. I stayed with the same producer, a guy named Chris abrigo for three years, Chris went on to do shows like The Surreal Life surf girls for MTV, other stuff, and I was on all of them. And by then, you know, I had fallen in love with reality TV, there was a real aptitude for it, because I don't think people will really understanding how important it is to mock the structural methodology that you see in regular scripted television. I'm a big fan of like, the seven scene half hour. And I just timing and pacing and storytelling were my thing. And as a friend of mine said, you know, it's like your job is writing poetry with refrigerator magnets, you have a finite amount of material that you can rearrange. And if you know how to rearrange that, you could put something interesting on the fridge. And if you don't have it, you got to go back and spend more money and buy more words, which I didn't like to do, because nobody reality TV likes to spend any money, the allure of making it is that it's so cheap. So I just stayed there. And I lucked out, I ended up getting into some of the seminal shows of the beginning of the current celebrity reality era. I got to work on the Osborne's, I got to work on the Surreal Life. The Bachelor, back when it was still I was thinking I got on in like season six in 2003, or four. So I was just in the right place at the right time. And the first half of my resume is amazing, if you look at it through just the historical context of how reality TV has evolved. And the fact that I refer to reality TV evolving in a historical context tells you just how much I think of it. I mean, I don't think it's as disposable as people would like to believe it is. I think when it's done right, it's as good as the best scripted, I would rather marathon somebody feed Phil and Dexter, that's just me,
Zack Arnold: I can already think of about 12 Different story threads to pull on. So there's a there's at least two than I want it, there's actually at least three that I already want to dig into. And because we're kind of looking behind the scenes and making this matter, I'm actually going to drop the story threads. And I'm going to go to the first one. And then anytime you want to be my story producer or my writer, and you're like No, we should put these threads in a different order. Because we want to keep this structure, you and I are going to be writing this conversation on the fly.
Troy DeVolld: I usually only do that when I'm getting paid. But I'll do my best.
Zack Arnold: Well, in this case, I'll trade you that it will do some publicity. And we'll we'll get your conversation out there in front of the right people.
Troy DeVolld: What a swell idea.
Zack Arnold: We should do a podcast together. So let's do this. Having said that, there's three areas that I want to go into one of which is you're using the word reality TV. And as I know, politically, your world is transitioned largely from reality to unscripted. That's one story thread that we're gonna put on the list. And other ones that I want to put on the list is you talk a lot about collaboration and note taking and working with different teams. And I want to start with just a basic understanding, knowing that I have a fairly broad audience, most of whom don't actually work in reality or on unscripted. So another kind of basic story thread, just to do some education would be understanding what is a story producer versus the you know, one of the editors or that it's the storytelling in the writing process, in reality, unscripted is very, very different than it is in the scripted world. So those are two story threads that I want to put on our list. But there's actually one that I want to dig into first. And that's when you said at the very beginning of your story, you quote unquote, fell into writing for Woody Woodpecker cartoons and Woody Woodpecker commercials, right. And the reason that I bring this up is I don't believe that anybody really falls into anything. And you're somebody that's been talking about how reality slash unscripted is in kind of a slow period. And it's in a little bit of it a bit of a downturn and thanks to you know, current economics and politics and our industry in general, everything is in a downturn. So I'm curious Can you tell me how you quote unquote, fell into it? And maybe there's a lesson or two that people would be able to use even today, given the tumultuous pneus of our market?
Troy DeVolld: Well, sure. I'm going to quote a friend of mine, Larry Katz, who's an instructor at Full Sail University. But he was also the second ad on all the Pirates of the Caribbean films. He always tells his students he says, when you look at film or television, he says what you see is a castle. And they've got the front door drawn up, and all you see is the moat and that door and you stand there and you wait for that door to come down so that you can run across when somebody else comes out or goes in. And what you should really be doing is looking around the sides, for any of the little side doors that open and close, somebody's taken out the trash. Every door is a valid entry. And when I say I fell into something, it's just that I was open to trying a thing that wasn't my preconceived definition of what it is I wanted to do. I was at art school at Flagler College in the early 90s. I came home one Christmas, I was feeling rather disillusioned. I had one of my art teachers told me that comic books and illustration, aren't really fine art. And I might be, you know, wasting my time going to university, which I disagreed with. And I wasn't really feeling like I was fulfilling my destiny by doing what I was what I had thought I was supposed to be doing. So I came home for Christmas. And I ran into Andy Freeman, who's the guy I went to high school with Andy Freeman, somehow just on his own, had gotten with this guy, Stuart fail. And they had been working with an advertising agency in in the Tampa area to write these commercials for what he would pick a merchandise to celebrate what he's 50th anniversary, and they said, We're still working on it. Would you like to write for this? The money was terrible. As I recall, I was being paid and traveler's checks and asked not to report it. Like it's that kind of a production. Like it's just sort of like, well, you know, we can do this. But I ended up doing a lot of local television. We did a series called Billy's bogus B movies, which was kind of a precursor to MST. 3k was a bunch of people sitting in a bar watching old movies on the TV in the bar and commenting about the show as it was happening. And I just was having an unbelievably good time. And I said, Well, all right, maybe maybe television, maybe advertising, maybe something like that. So I started paying more attention to the opportunities in that area. And based on my limited exposure to making stuff in Tampa, I decided I was going to go to film school. I went to Full Sail University 9596 Because I didn't want to spend another four years in college to find out later that that wasn't what I wanted to do. So I went they had a 13 month FBS ad program, which is the film and video specialized associate's degree, which you can't put that on a resume because everybody wonders what what's the flip side I've never heard of that before. So when I got out of full sail, I was still too, too chicken to really dive in. So I got a day job. I was an executive assistant at one of the Time Warner companies in the magazine division. And I would would continue to write spec scripts for Screenflow for screenplays and sitcoms and things like that. I got some encouragement from a woman named Janice Hirsch. Janice Hirsch, at the time was producing a show called Hope and Gloria for NBC. I kept up a correspondence with her. I thought when I got to California, I'd reach out try to find her and see if there was any work I could get on a sitcom. And I ended up when I finally got enough money put back that I thought I could move to California and not literally die on the street and the first month I moved here. I was halfway across the country had no real plan, saw my friend crystal Garcia's name go by at the end of the show and then TV called fear. Turns out they were just getting ready to start on the back eight episodes of the first season. He was able to get me hired onto that show as a logger transcriptionist. And I just started following the story department and putting together reports of my own design for the story department that they didn't ask for. It's like, well, I know you're following this story. But I noticed these things are happening in a sequence that maybe we could follow this. And I was trying to use whatever story instinct I had to sort of dazzle these more experienced people. He'd been around. He'd been on the real world and done a lot of the really big shows for MTV in the 90s. So he kind of knew how everything was supposed to come together. My boss, I was working at 4pm to seven, excuse me a 7pm to 4am shift when I started and I used to come in at three or four in the afternoon and just been around the office and talk to the story people and the executive producer, Christo Garcia, Matt crystal Garcia. Chris rego. Chris rego comes down the hallway one afternoon and he says, Why are you always here three hours early? And I said because if I'm not here three hours early, you're never going to see my face and we're never We're going to have this conversation. So when you see me talk to me, I want to know how to do this. I want to know how to be good at it. And I know that this is the place for me to learn how to do that. And he was terrific and kept me employed for years brought me on to the Surreal Life brought me on to a bunch of other projects, I did development, I did all kinds of little things for him, he just didn't let me go for three years, I just, if I wasn't writing on a show, or if I wasn't doing story work, he'd have me back to help out the locations guy to try to put stuff together, or the story team to help them do just backstory for the places we'd go. And I think so much of it is just being open to experiences and being verbal about what you're trying to do. If nobody knows what you're trying to do, they don't know how to help you. And I think most people really genuinely in here, they want to be mentored, or they want to be seen as mentors, there's no greater expression of respect and saying, I want to learn from you specifically. And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong, really, the people that have the same job for 20 years, they're not, they're not looking to advance, they're not looking to learn, they're looking to come there, do a job and go home, which is being celebrated now. Because it's always, you know, everyone's killing themselves by working so much. I worked 100 hours a week for 23 years and had a stroke. And it's like, do I want to die for TV? Probably not. So now, thank God, you know, the pandemic, the only upside of the pandemic was, we were all working from home. And it just became so much easier, I can get so much more done, I could probably do two shows at a time if I was working from home. Just because I've got my I've got everything down to a science, I know how to do things very quickly and move things along. As long as I don't have the abstract interference of people who just need to have their fingerprints in the fudge, I can really go pretty far pretty fast.
Zack Arnold: I could swear right now that you are basically copy pasting from my manifesto on understanding how to break into the industry how to build relationships, like it's, it's always eerie to me how the universe works in whatever way that it does the we don't understand where you put a certain energy out into the world. And then I quote unquote, was lucky to have your email land in my lap, because it is clear that you and I are so much on the same page as far as the value of putting yourself in the right place, stating your intentions. Because if you don't ask for what you want, or clarify where you need help, I believe that people want to help you but they don't know how to help you. And you've clarified how important that is. And the other thing that I tell people. Number one, I've used almost the identical same like Castle analogy. It's not necessarily a castle and a moat. But as you've got this big giant wall in front of you or this gate, and I always say to people, have you looked over at the side, because there's a door swing and wide open right now you're focused on this. Look in your peripheral vision. That's probably where the entrance is, right. And what I find so interesting is that people get stuck so much on what they're doing, like, Well, yeah, but it's not exactly what I want to be doing, especially early in your career. I always tell people, what you're doing isn't nearly as important as where you're doing it. And the people that you're doing it around, and you just showed up and said, I'm here teach me I want to learn. And now 23 years later, you know you've clearly attained success. But that was where it all started.
Troy DeVolld: And nobody, nobody joins the army as a general. And that's the thing I wish to work with the guy on that first show. He was really great. He had graduated from Tisch which very prestigious school in New York. And he used to literally every morning at about three o'clock, about an hour before we were supposed to knock off. He would throw himself away from his desk, and I went to school to be a director not do this. And it's like, well, you don't you can't just come out here with a resume with your non resume and say, Well, I'm a director, have me direct something. And I don't know what happened to him. I hope he's still working. I hope his attitude changed. But just in the moment, it was just kind of like, I don't know what to tell you, man. And then the other thing, sorry, I'm gonna slip this in while I can. The other thing that I think that younger people that are trying to get into any kind of entertainment, no matter what it is, they're very quick to discount anybody who is more than 15 or 20 years older than them, as well. You know, these people aren't relevant anymore. I learned more about this business paying attention to I joined a group called the caucus for producers, writers and directors. Towards the end of its life, it has now dissolved it was a bunch of guys that were originally fighting against the networks and vertical integration where the network's owned everything as opposed to independent producers selling stuff to networks. The people I learned from there's a guy named Chuck freeze. Chuck ran Columbia Screen Gems for a long time he was there when they were doing shows like The Flying done and the monkeys and all this other stuff. That guy taught me more about television than I would have learned from anybody who was close to my age. And when you start paying attention to people who've been Never before you can sort of it's like the David HealthKit. Thing and shine where everything starts lighting up in the room around them and Bell starts to make sense. Once you understand the trajectory of your business, you're better prepared for what's coming. You're not surprised by situations that repeat themselves, like, strikes, and what to do when things are slow. If you're not prepared for it, you'll just burn out, you'll get frustrated, and you'll go work at a plant nursery. Or do some art as my former agent used to tell me, you know, why? Why don't you just get a job? I load like a low stress job, go work in a bowling alley. And I said, I don't know how I feel about my literary agent telling me maybe I should get a job at a bowling alley. Maybe you should go spray out rental shoes until the business picks up again. No.
Zack Arnold: Well I do think that there have well, I completely disagree with the advice of just go, you know, clean up bowling shoes and work at a bowling alley. I think especially given the climate that we've been in for well over a year now what whether or not this release is when all strikes are resolved. And we're back to work or otherwise. This is just an ongoing spectrum over the course of years and decades. So no matter when somebody listens to this, I feel this advice is evergreen, especially with the direction we're headed, which is that diversification of your skills, and your experience is absolutely essential in a business that's very upper down, there are always going to be slumps. There are always going to be peaks and thinking this is the only one thing that I do and it's what I do. And it's an embarrassment. Or it's insulting if I need to do something else. You have to diversify if you're going to survive. And you're the perfect example of that.
Troy DeVolld: Oh, I'm trying to do everything I can I just like they switched over to books for a while. I was like, how do I make myself like an expert in my field? Like so I wrote the only book at the time on reality TV production. And that took off very well. And that was another conversation I had with my agent where she said, Well, do you want to be the guy that wrote the book? Or do you want to be a working producer? And I said, I think I can be both. I mean, when Jerry Lou, I'm comparing myself to Jerry Lewis, like I'm that great. I'm wearing one of his shirts. So it's a little jail on the pocket. Jerry Lewis wrote the total filmmaker, when he was teaching at USC, it's still a very popular book, it's probably one of the best reads on becoming a producer. And just the complete overview of the process of filmmaking. I don't, I don't see it as an either or I think anytime you want to share your skills in a way that works, you should go for it. So I've done blogs, I've done books, I've done other stuff.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, it's one of the things I really admired about you as I was digging more into your history, is the fact that there are so many different diverse things, whether it's story producing, writing for reality, and unscripted, writing actual books, writing poetry, producing your own documentary. So I think that, you know, we're just so trained to be highly specialized and go down this lane. And I think that there, I think that there's value in both directions, to a certain extent, to extent, but one of the things that I always tell my students is that I believe you can do it all. But there's no way you can do it all at once. So you can be a successful reality unscripted TV producer, and you can be a successful author. But if you're not careful, you try to do all of it together and 23 years and you end up having a stroke. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit more about that journey.
Troy DeVolld: Well, I'll start off by saying as far as strokes go, it's a one star situation, I don't recommend it. If you can avoid them, avoid them. Not that I could ever play piano that well, but it's a little tougher when you got one arm that works in one arm that's got the GI Joe kung fu grip. I was very lucky that I was at home and I'm very lucky that the documentary that I was working on, I've spent 10 years on it so far. And when the stroke happened, I had a camera. Literally, they hadn't taken apart and put back in the bag yet the camera was sitting on the table next to the couch when I stood up and fell over and I said I gotta get this like what? So I'm lying on the floor with my camera on its side just shooting out the door shooting the sirens or the little flashing lights of the ambulance to the blinds in the window and shot myself in the hospital on my phone when I got when I first came together. And it's one of those things where it's just it's all part of the process is always be making even if you don't really know where something fits in or how useful it's going to be. Have something of your own that you're working on all the time because it just keeps your brain going. Ali Willis who I will talk about ad nauseam Ali Willis was a songwriter who wrote bogey wonder excuse me Cobra Boogie Wonderland September The Color Purple was a good friend of mine for the last 11 years of her life. And if there's one thing I learned from her, it's that addiction to process is a beautiful thing. If you just want to make stuff, it's fine if you don't know what you're doing, do it anyway because by the end of it, you will have learned she taught herself how to animate. She taught herself how to do all kinds of things. She didn't know how to read, write or play music, when she started that she would collaborate with other people. But she'd come in and she'd write the lyric and the other person would write the music. She ended up working very early on with Patti LaBelle, Herbie Hancock, all kinds of people. And that career just exploded after she gave up on a solo career as a performer, due to bad sales on child star, which was her first album, so it's just a matter of keeping momentum and trying to learn to do new stuff, and not having any real stakes. You know, life is a series of ads, when you reinvent yourself. People always want to say, I used to do this, but now I do this. You know what, I still know how to make an espresso. I could walk into a Starbucks and crank one of those things out like it was yesterday, that I learned how to do it. But it's one of those things like every skill you have, it's cumulative. The more you know how to do, the more you know how to do and it informs everything you know how to do informs every other thing you know how to do and it just becomes this sort of beautiful matrix of opportunity.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more. This is something that I talk about all the time. And I even have an entire workshop where I help people break down, what are all of the skills and the abilities that I've acquired from not just my resume or my work experience, but from my life experiences, the challenges that I've overcome, right? So you could say, well, I'm proficient and Premiere and Final Cut Pro? Well, that's great, but so is everybody else you're competing with. But your view for story, your understanding of structure, the fact that you've literally written the book on collaboration, and notes in the unscripted space, like, there's so many other things that you can bring to the table. Right? And that I feel like so many people get lost in? Well, this is, this is my identity. And this is this one thing that I do now. And I'm sure you go through the same thing all the time in your world, where if you're in any kind of a networking setting, or industry setting, it's always about so what are you working on? What do you do? And you can't really talk about who you are?
Troy DeVolld: Yes, who you are, is always 1000 times more important than what you do? There is there is of course, the question of what what do you do, but what do you know how to do my resume is terrifying, who you would you would never understand it? Unless I mean, it's just almost like that to look at the lights pinging around my resume, I'm a big fan of continually continuing education. I have a certificate from the Charles Fried contract law course at Harvard. Why do I need it? I don't know. It's so I can understand my own contract and people around me and what you're offering other people when you bring them on to a show and how to how to keep yourself out of trouble. By understanding how contracts work. I've tried to learn everything there is to know about the history of our industry. Because again, it's that thing like I tell you, it's so important to understand the trajectory of things, how things have played out before. You know, I'm glad that I was there, when the big writers strike happened in 2008 2009. Because I know what it's like to see people not work for a period of time and how much they tie their value to whether or not they're working. That's a very hard thing to let go of. And you know, after the stroke, I was like home for a month. And it was like, half the people heard buzz, buzz buzz, he had a stroke. And there are a lot of people even now that I call them when I find out they're doing a show. I'm like, Oh, I thought I heard you died. No. And the reason I'm vocal about the stroke is because I think it's something you can come back from. I mean, I'm not a mess. I don't look like a melted candle, I'm still able to do really good work.
Zack Arnold: And my guess is that there are a lot of a lot of things in as far as the projects you were working on the hours you were working the the lack of production protections in the unscripted or the reality space, where I know that you largely credit the trajectory, it was kind of inevitable leading up to a stroke. So I want to I want to kind of better understand the working conditions because that's a big thing that I talked about on the show, and I've been talking about for years, which is burnout, exploitation long and unnecessary hours. And I want to pair that story point with the second tour story point, which is this idea that you call unscripted reality, the ugly stepchild of Hollywood. How do these story points merge?
Troy DeVolld: Well, they emerge, first of all by you have to understand the difference between being exploited and just caring too much about what it is you do. I when I got into reality television, the reason I wanted to do it, this is 2000 2000 When I started I said celebrity reality is so new. It doesn't have its big stars yet it doesn't have its Garry Marshalls it doesn't have the guy there is no the guy yet and it's the only chance I have to be the guy in a profession. So I might as well try and see how much of myself I can invest in this. And a lot of those 100 hour weeks, were unnecessary because shows weren't resourced properly, where I had to spend a lot of time in post, one of the things I don't like to do is waste other people's time. So with editors, every night I would go home and I would say to the AES said, do me a favor, put up an FTP of the cut of the show, as it looks. Now, I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, start making notes on the FTP. And then when I got to work, usually about an hour before the editors got in, I would print a time coded hardcopy of the changes that I wanted to see made. I'd walk into the edit bay, I put it on, you know, on the keyboard. And then I'd sit at my desk and when they came in, they'd get it and they go, oh, like, this is what I need to do today. And I said, if you have any questions come and get me, this is me trying to articulate just that you can work as quickly as you can. Because I don't like to have anybody waiting for me. And I don't think editors have correct me if I'm wrong. Editors love when somebody sits in the back of the room eating a sandwich from Firehouse Subs and going the take three frames off of that. Don't you guys love that isn't
Zack Arnold: Oh not only that, but especially when you're on the phone, taking care of all of your errands, calling the bank calling your family, we love that absolutely love it not distracting at all.
Troy DeVolld: My job is to get the hell out of the bay and let you work and then see what it looks like when you're done. So I always tried to make sure that everybody else had this optimum time. And what I was doing was I was sacrificing my help and my time in order for everyone else to be efficient. I'm a single guy, I didn't have anybody at home to go home to I have no kids that I have to pick up and take from here to there. I have no commitments other than being alive and making TV shows. So I prioritize that because I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to be legendary in my field. And I thought if I just kept investing that time and that personal move that it would get me there. I don't know if it has, I don't think it has. It certainly hasn't made me rich. But I've never felt bad about something that went on the air with my name at the end.
Zack Arnold: So then let me dig into this a little bit further. Because I know that now we're literally talking to the guy that wrote the book on collaboration and notes. Looking back at how you did your notes way back in the day when you had 178 hours a day to go through the FTPS and give the notes and here's time coded down to the frame of all the things that you need to do. Knowing what you know now about the collaborative process. Do you think that's the most effective way to get what you want? It's efficient, do you think is the most effective way to get there?
Troy DeVolld: It depends. There are editors that I have worked with who are so good. You just say oh my god, this act free. Like we did the assembly and the act like X ray is 17 minutes long. It needs to be 12. Why don't you see how much you can pull out of it and just make sure that the story points stay, and then all of a sudden, like my notes become less fiddly, tweaky and more like, I know, you know how to do this? Like, why don't you show me what you can do. And if I miss something, I'll tell you, I will put it back in. Because you can always go back to the previous cut. So I've been a little bit less of my editors fantasies about you know, how they do what they do. And a better understanding of somebody else's process, which I didn't have in the beginning is also important.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, so this is an area where there are a lot of different ways that editors approach their jobs, and ways that the process works for them. So I'm going to zoom way back in the day to where I thought I was learning what it meant to be an editor. I think I was a sophomore in college, maybe I had an internship for Fox Sports. And essentially, I was just running cables at sporting events and recycling tapes. And I realized I'm gonna have this long laundry list of things that have to go in the shownotes. Like, what's a tape? Who's Woody Woodpecker? Who the hell is Jerry Lewis, like, we're gonna make this long shownotes list for everybody that's millennial or younger. The point is that there was a day and they knew that I was interested in post production and one of the producers had a session where they were going to put together a highlights package for one of their sports games. So I went to the session, and the producer sat on the couch behind the editor and had a paper cut literally down to the frame and said, Okay, go to this shot. And it was all taped to tape, by the way. Now go to the shot, add this one make this two frames shorter. And I thought to myself, well, this is what an editor does, this isn't what I want to do. Because I want to have, I want to really be able to collaborate and storytel. But again, that doesn't mean that one is better or worse, they're different. So I know for a fact that your style wouldn't work with me because I'm of the style. Sit down and tell me what isn't working. Just tell me the problems. I'll come up with the solutions. But then there are other editors that say, why are they not telling me exactly what they want? And I've always believed the best idea wins, which I know that you agree with as well.
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Totally. I have been talked out of a lot of things in my life, usually by good editors, and when editors try things, I still think that Funniest thing I ever saw, I had an editor for a long time on Basketball Wives, one of the shows I worked on, and there was a fight in a restaurant. And I hate fights anyway, I'm always trying to figure out how to cut a fight, so that it has all the energy there and that everything is implied. I don't want to watch people pull on each other's hair for 30 seconds and follows around a table, I want to see somebody move towards somebody else, I want to see an interview bite, like a reaction bite, and then I want to see the fight breaking up or somebody being pulled away. I don't like to see contact. It's that whole thing where I like, it's like the side of the shower scene in psycho. Sick, you never see the knife penetrating anything, you just see it coming. You see the aftermath, your brain fills in the rest, and it's way worse. So we had this big fight and somebody threw a wine bottle, like a full closed wine bottle at somebody. The editor had slowed it down, and it looked like a missing scene from The Godfather was very slow, you know, slow the footage down, somebody was yelling, and you see, I don't know how he was able to push in. Because we weren't, we weren't at, you know, the 4k universe yet. You see, this fan throws the bottle of the bottles starting to move through the air. And you're hearing somebody talk about how chaotic this whole thing is. And then the bottle misses and then somebody's yelling at somebody else. And then we go back into the scene at a regular speed ramps back up. And the conflict is over. It was really beautiful. And we did not send it to network because I knew the executive that that we were dealing with at that network did not really grok the concept of art. Like everything for him was steaks and story and are we moving fast enough, or somebody's going to get up and pee and not come back to the program if it's not, you know, going 100 miles an hour all the time.
So given all of that, now, if we can rewind back to the very first beginning of your process, where you said, I'm going to be the guy, and it's going to take 178 hours a day, and it's going to take all of these notes and everything else. You've seen years and years of you trying to balance all of these things, or lack thereof, partially, as you said, kind of led to where you ended up. What I'm really interested in the core of the reason that I do what I do, whether it's talking to producers, editors, directors, or people completely and totally outside of our industry, is I believe that we have to design a more sustainable, balanced and fulfilling version of our careers and lives. If we want to be good Creatives. They're not mutually exclusive, they have to work together. So knowing where that trajectory took you if you were to start maybe not all over. But think about when you started to become a relatively successful writer and producer. How could you attain a similar level of success without doing all the crazy hours and all the micromanagement?
Troy DeVolld: If I had paid more attention back then to what other paid other people were able to do without you puppeteering them. I think I would be better off, I think some of the shows would be better. Because there are guys like Jim Munoz, like literally like when we were doing fear. He came in once we had an episode that had a lot of notes and a lot of revisions that we got from network. And he would come in a room and close the door. And as long as you would open that door and put a Red Bull in there. Once in a while, he would just bang it out. And he was like literally there overnight, and the show was done the next day, and everything was beautiful. There are people that you could trust to execute without having to be there. I think my thing was, I don't want to be accountable for something that is not what I think it should be. And I internalize that to the point of thinking like, Oh, they're like, it's not like, I'm Quentin Tarantino, it's just like, I gotta be there for the whole thing. And if it's not what I want, then it'll be something different. And the reason that I'm here is because people want what I've been able to give them so far.
Zack Arnold: So would you say then that the the approach that you were taking as far as really digging in and being as absolutely specific as possible, almost to the point of like you said, sacrificing the quality of the story in the world, right?
Troy DeVolld: It's mania, it's not really sacrificing the quality of the story. It's sacrificing the quality of the experience for someone else who should be enjoying the experience because of their experience and the level at which they've been able to work long enough to be working with me.
Zack Arnold: Right. And I love this idea that you recognize that just kind of delegating the notes meant that you're you're missing out on some of the actual ideas or solutions that that other other person could bring. And one of the things that I want to bring with this conversation is some sense of perspective. So I don't want to put any words in your mouth you tell me if this is incorrect, but if we look at some of the motivations behind why you might have wanted to give them all those very specific notes, part of it was that my identity and the success that I'm working towards is tied to how invested I am in this and it's got to be the best possible be My vision that's in my head. And my argument would be that and this comes with all creatives this isn't about you specifically, I believe that this comes with all creatives, there's a certain level of insecurity. And like that the giving all those notes and feeling like, well, this is really all my success is tied to that, and this is who I am.
Troy DeVolld: And a lot of the two is I was trying to be the most fun person you could work with. Because it was like, if you're fun, you work you stick around. The thing I didn't have going for me is, I don't look great in the Speedo. So whenever you like when I was working on Dancing with the Stars, I would constantly come back on Monday, and everybody's social media feeds will be full of, oh, we had a big, big pool party at the W over the weekend. And everybody on staff, except for the guy who's 10 years older than all of us, was they're having a great time. And it's like, oh, and it just kind of hurts your heart. And you're like, why? Like, why not me? Like what did i What did I do wrong, and it's like, you didn't do anything wrong, you're just not young. So what I thought I was doing was by doing all those notes, I thought I was freeing people's time up to be present for other parts of their own lives. And that's genuinely what I thought it wasn't so much that I had this death grip on it like it has to look like I did it. It was that thing where it's like, I thought I was helping other people to have fuller lives, and punishing myself for not chasing one for me.
Zack Arnold: The reason that I want to bring this up, and I really appreciate like how honest and how deep you're going into this, because I think this is so vital in understanding the collaborative process. I know so many editors that I've worked with over the years that as soon as the notes come in their inbox, it's like, oh, God, like you just see this endless list of this and this and that. And they're so grumpy. And if that's not going to work, that's dumb, don't they know that I already showed them that and it didn't work. And what I tried to emphasize on them is number one, it's a collaborative process. But number two, especially in your case, all of those were met with incredibly good intentions, you wanted to make their life easier and be more clear. So they could go out. And they can have time to be with, you know, the group on the weekends or whatever it might be. But they always see it from well, this is now what I have to do. And again, their identity is attacked creatively as well. And given the you wrote the book on collaboration, I think it's really important. For those that do creative work, it doesn't matter if you work in unscripted or scripted or post arrangement does not matter. Anytime you're creating anything, there's going to be collaboration unless you're a painter, and you're not being commissioned to do it. Right, right. So what what are some of the lessons that you share in your book that you think were so vital that you're like, I have to write a book on notes.
Troy DeVolld: While the book on notes is actually the result of a particular note that I got on the show that I was doing for Bravo in 2008. I got a note back from an executive after this is like a fine cut, we've gone through a couple of rough cuts. And the note came back and said, Thank you for so thoroughly addressing our notes. Show is now boring for some reason, what can we do about it. And I was like, oh my god, like the lack of awareness that I've addressed everything that you've demanded that I do down to the nth. And your response to it is now the show is boring. I was like, if I need you to let go, there's probably places for me to let go. So I started writing the book on the notes process. I wrote it as a PDF, the history of that book. And another thing. I wrote it as a PDF that I was just going to send to a couple of friends. There was an assistant I knew at Uta. And she started bouncing that around to people that she was interacting with in the unscripted world that were clients that UTA and the thing went viral. Like it was just bouncing all over town that this PDF it was like that. The things that we do the things we think but do not say from Jerry Maguire. Just this is like this mythical. Some guy wrote a thing about notes.
Zack Arnold: Or if we're talking in the real world, this is Chris Vogler's origin story too. I know you're actually doing you know, that upcoming event with
Troy DeVolld: Chris Vogler is such a great guy. The thing was after that, I was like, Well, you know what, you know, I might as well try and make some money off of it like I did with reality TV. So I blew it out a little bit. I mean, it's still a very thin book. I think it's like 70 pages. It's almost like a leafless leaflet. It's a it's a treatise. It's, you know, it's an extended manifesto. Yes, but a loving one. And it said things like, don't do this, don't do this. I want to help people to give better notes because I think a lot of people give notes from a reactive place. And again, it's that thing where a lot of people want to put their fingers in the clay. There's a phenomenon that happened about 15 years ago, where all the network executives who used to take a credit at the end of the show as executive in charge of production or You know, Vice President of alternative for such and such a network, those credits turned into executive producer credits. Because they, this is my show, like I said yes to this show. So it's mine. And I have to note them into the ground so that people know that I worked on this show. And it's a lot of pressure for them, because I don't think a lot of executives have a history with story. That's why we're doing Masters of story in New York. It's a conference with Chris Vogler and Robert McKee and John Truby, and me and a guy named Michael tab. It's the people who are mid career, a lot of them have never really learned the art of story. We get addicted to moments, most of the notes that I get, and this may be your experience, as well. And most, most of the notes that I get are changed this or don't we have a moment where this happens? And people become addicted to the idea that the moment is the story? Well, where's this? Where's this noisy thing that happened? Where's this, you know, really annoying moment when someone does something awful. If it didn't work in the context of telling the story, and moving it forward, I probably cut it out. Because it shows only a half an hour long, or an hour long show is really only 42 minutes long nowadays, like the time is at a premium. If there are things that I leave out, I did a pilot several years ago, where we had 14 scenes in the hour. In the rough, it worked very well. And one of our executives said, Well, you know, we shot a lot more than this, we should see everything we shot in the show. And it was just like, oh, no, like, how are we gonna get 26 scenes into 44 minutes and not have it look like it's like you're watching the film that doesn't have any Sprockets just watching it was by? And I thought like, you know, maybe execs need a little help, too. Because the way that an executive starts is you get hired as an assistant, you get pulled in somewhere, your boss says, Why don't you do the first pass and notes on this, which I think is flipping the pyramid upside down. I think whoever's in charge should write the first passive notes, and the person under them should do maintenance on those notes. That way, you don't have an assistant who doesn't know what they're doing, saying change this, this, this, this. And by the time that second cut, or third cut, gets to their boss, their boss is not going to go I don't understand what's happening or why we're doing any of this. Well, the people who are doing story on the show, they don't understand it, either. They're doing whatever this 25 year old with a pair of $400 shoes is telling them to do. And those people, you know, rather than throw them into the lion's den, wouldn't it be great if there was a book that just said, If you don't know how to give notes, here's maybe a list of 15 things to think about while you're watching the cut? Like, is this consistent with the style of our network? Very basic question. You know, if it's not consistent with the styles and network, maybe there's a note you can make to guide that there and just say like, oh, this needs to be paced up a little bit. Or maybe there's too much music here. Can we pair peel some of the music out? Those are notes that are useful because you're trying to achieve something that the network really desires from the program. Rather than just you feeling like you have to say, Oh, I really like her. Can we see more of her in this scene? I don't know. And I always get these nerves like, can we upgrade these shots? Like are these the best shots against the best angles? No, we intentionally put the worst angles we could find into the show.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, let me go to my better shots. Ben. I'm holding them just in case.
Troy DeVolld: Camera A plus should go in here.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, well, the what if we had been speaking live on stage? I think as soon as you said I'm going to teach network executives about how to better understand notes we would have had to stop for the standing ovation from all the creatives is like yes, it is about time we help them understand the story process and the notes process.
Troy DeVolld: It's not it's not from a bitey standpoint, it's not like I'm so network executives don't know what they're doing. I'm just saying the more that they understand the function of the notes that they're giving. I think the better notes you get and a lot of the notes when you start getting notes that come in imperious tone. Like my least favorite word in the world is really followed by the phrase who cut this is this whole thing like we're going to hold somebody accountable for your taste? Hmm, that's a weird like, we're gonna punish you for not having the same taste I have that I did not articulate to you in the beginning. If you can't tell me what a comparable show is, when you start a new show, just say we want it to look a lot more like selling sunset or we want it to look like this other show we already have on the network. That's enough to give me a frame of reference that the editor and I can work together to make something that looks and feels like the existing show that you already like something that will partner with it on the same night. That will make it look good But you have to be able to articulate that vision in the beginning, you can't wait for the show to come in.
Zack Arnold: I'm very glad that you pointed that out. Because I didn't want this to just be an attack on executives and studio people that don't understand the creative process. Because we'll get to this in a second, I think there's, there's tremendous value that comes from a lot of their notes. And I want I want to look at this from both perspectives, the first of which is I agree with you, we have to invert the pyramid completely, because there's nothing more frustrating, where you have worked with a director, you've worked with producers with story producers in your case, and you feel like we've created something the best it can possibly be, we know all the material that's there. And then somebody that doesn't only not understand the show, but doesn't understand the creative process and post, they totally derail it before the people that really understand it, see it. And what I feel often happens, like you said, when you bring in a young junior exec, their their job is on the line, and they need to prove that they know what they're doing. So it's not just I need to find the notes. Now I have to create the notes, because it makes me look smart, even though at the end of the day, it does the opposite. And there's Oh, sorry, go ahead.
Troy DeVolld: No, I'm just gonna say and a lot of those people are spread over one executive could be overseeing 6 10 15 shows, there's just, there isn't the time for them to give things that consideration that I think that they might. And a lot of that has to do with like, well, you know, so and so it's going to be an aspen for two weeks. So we're going to have to put it up on FTP for them to watch. in Aspen, you're not going to get to it on time, they're not going to get you the notes back on the date that you're supposed to get them back. They're feeling rushed. Like they have to say something, because they're trying to have fun. They're trying to have their life. You know, and it's that thing where I just I don't think people are always thinking as well as they could be if they're like maybe they're having Summer Fun Fridays like they did at a particular network, where all the executives are out on Friday, all summer long. So they have three day weekends all summer, just because they don't want to sit at home on Saturday morning, and try to come up with notes to send you on Monday, which is still better than getting your notes at 6:30 on Friday night and then wanting to see a fresh cut on Monday.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, agreed. And the reason I really love going into the weeds with all of this is that I think it's so important when you're receiving the notes that you know where the notes are coming from, and digging into what it looks like from a studio executives perspective or network exec or a junior exec, it's a lot easier to understand the notes underneath the notes. And you're like, this note doesn't make any sense. But I understand why they created that note, I might not agree with it. But if you better understand it from all sides, and you know where it's coming from, you can have a more educated conversation versus every note is taken personally. And I see especially with younger editors, every single note is an attack on their choices and their identity. It's like most of these notes. They're not about you. They're about the person that's giving them.
Troy DeVolld: They're about something the sponsor said offhand. I did a show once several years ago, that was a home run out show. And the people that were sponsoring the show, were extraordinarily conservative. And we had a scene where you know, it's 100 degrees in Texas, and people are outside working on their house. And they were like, Why is that woman wearing a tube top? And it's like cuz it's 100 degrees outside? Well, can we can we de emphasize that or not see her in as many shots? And it's like, okay, I mean, she's the central figure in the scene, but okay. And you try to do that. And then the judges come up, and they're like, why does the female judge have to undulate up the sidewalk. And I'm like undulate, because it's a very, that's a very specific thing that a person could do. And that is a woman in possession of a bus line, walking up the sidewalk. I don't know what to do with those notes. And I'm sure the network was as frustrated as we were getting those notes. And we try to cut around and minimize screen time for things that they didn't like. But it's like, if I know that's their problem, then I know, in the next episode, just to avoid the same type of shots, or to figure out how to work around, you know, mediums of that person doing their thing. If I know what somebody doesn't like, and I can establish a pattern of what trips or switches for better or worse, I can give you a much better cut. But you have to be able to articulate that to me as the executive of the network. And the executives that just clam up and they're like, why aren't you doing what I'm asking you to do? It's like, I need a dialogue with you to understand where you're coming from. So you had every single cut and not knowing what's motivating you to not like it. You gotta let me know.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, it's, again, all comes back to communication and an open mind about the best idea winning versus like you said, this empirical structure of notes. And now I want to look at it from the other side, because I know that you see it from this perspective as well. I am so guilty just as anybody else of thinking once you deliver the showrunners culture, the producers cut whatever it is looks like in the the unscripted world, I'm sure it's the same thing with a different term. Because all the words are the different, we all we all do the same thing. The point being, you feel like this is the best it can be. Now we got to just do the busy work of getting the studio notes and the network notes. And then they send it and I know showrunners that literally refuse to send it to the studio and the network is I think all the notes are done. And I've often been of the mind of this is just two days of busy work as so it's on the calendar. But I've learned my lesson over the years and grown, or I found that even when you get bad notes, they're still on to something, and they pulled a thread. And it might be like, the solution isn't the best solution. But they're right about the problem. And then it's your job to collaborate to maybe use a different solution to solve that problem. And almost always, when I've embraced embraced what I thought were bad notes, I came out the other side. And I'm like, damn, they were totally right, because this is way better. And I didn't see it. And I feel that that perspective is so valuable. But as creatives we get in our own way, and we just believe that because they come from the suits side, they couldn't possibly understand this process.
Troy DeVolld: That's right. I think the thing too, is, you know, you got to have some kind of I know, it sounds funny, like every time you get on a group call, I hate notes that come on a group call. But the group call is your opportunity to say, got your notes, just wanted to clarify a few things. This this this you're asking for, I can do that. That scene is already four minutes long. If I put in this other thing you want, it's going to be eight minutes, and I'm going to have to split it over an act break. Do you really want this scene to be eight uninterrupted uninterrupted minutes of two people sitting in armchairs talking about something just so you can hit these extra topics that don't pay off later in the show? Like, what's the reason for that? Oh, we just really liked seeing this person or this person tested? Well, no, I understand you're, you're stuck in the middle that you're an executive who is trying to appease someone that said, this show should have more of this character in it because this person is testing Well, I don't have access to your tests, I've in the entire time I've been in television, for 23 years, I've sat in on one focus group. And the one focus group complained the entire time, they're like, We don't like how these people are being portrayed on this show. And it's like, kid, like the camera was turned on that person did what they did, and I made it into a TV show how they were portrayed. The show is not CGI, I'm not telling them what to say or what to do. I'm just taking the most active interaction that they have, and turning that into story. But when I did that, I mean, I understood that there is there is no pleasing certain types of people. And the network doesn't always understand that because their directive is to get eyeballs. That's what they want to do. You know, and you don't know how to fight things. Like when you work on a show. And they they get a new network president out of nowhere in the middle of you doing the show. And that guy says, Oh, we don't want to do any more shows this type. And you're like, Okay, this is the show we've made? Like, what can I do to pull it back or make it into a different thing. And again, it's just that communication and getting people to articulate what they want. You can change the feel of the show, you can't change the entirety of a show, based on somebody's sudden preference for something else.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. And with the way that I the strategies that I found that best helps me kind of get out of that jam, which I kind of mentioned before, but I've used this strategy more than once. And it works really, really well when nobody's really communicating. I say, just tell me the problems. That's it. I don't need solutions. So an example here would be they'd say, Well, the problem is this person tested well, and they need more screen time. And I might think, you know what, I know a way to get them more screen time, this idea of slugging eight minutes worth of garbage, we're not going to pay off. That's not the solution. But I bet I can find a different way to get this character more screen time. But the quality of the question begets the quality of the answer. And whenever we're stuck, I say, just just share with me all the problems, I'll figure out the solutions, because it would be like me going to a composer and saying, Well, this isn't sad enough. So what I want you to do is I want you to use the violin strings here and layer on the cello and I want it to be this and I was like, no, no, just tell me it's not sad enough. I'll give you something that makes it sadder. But I feel like in editorial, that's not the way that we communicate often.
Troy DeVolld: And you can then you can do what I call the reaction shot show. Which is just you know, if there's four people in a room and one person's talking, and they wish the other person was in the scene more, you just got to cut away to them going more often.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, there's been a few times that I can even in the scripted world, when you have to change story points, your stuff and a bunch of ADR and somebody's just nodding their head from a totally different part of the scene. You're like, why aren't you cutting to them talking? Because they weren't talking on camera because all of that's made up BS in post right? So yeah, there's definitely that but there's a store worry point that I kind of alluded to and it is then using your story structure, I'm going to try and pay off a little bit further. And that's this idea. That unscripted slash reality number one that reality has kind of gotten a bad rap. And we now call it on scripted. But that's within the larger umbrella of this is the ugly stepchild of Hollywood. What do you mean by that, because I personally am coming from the perspective of and I'm gonna put this on the record, anybody can share this the wants to the the craft of unscripted television is one of the most complex and difficult crafts and to look down upon unscripted versus scripted is the most asinine thing I've ever heard of. But that's no pun intended. That's the reality of our industry. So talk to me more about this phenomenon of being the ugly stepchild of Hollywood.
Troy DeVolld: It's as I have a friend of mine named Steve shivers that I interview in my documentary, he says, I have other friends in scripted, and he's done both scripted and unscripted. For years, he bounces back and forth, there are a lot of really great people that do that. Lamar Damon, who is one of my favorite reality, unscripted producers, is also a writer, he created this series, but it's, it's this idea. When people look down on reality TV, the people that work in reality TV, you're like, sure, but I'm probably working three times as hard as you are. Because I have to try to come up with x niello fixes. But I only have so much stuff in my bag to make those fixes with. Whenever I lecture to college or university, the first thing I do in the morning is I take a like a three by five index card. And I write the Kardashians on it. And I put it in my pocket. And I say, You know what, you know, so about reality TV, and there's always some kid that stands up. And his question is, how do you feel about contributing to the decline of Western civilization? Or something to that, to that effect? And I'm like, What are you talking about news? Well, you know, just reality shows are terrible. I said, Give me the name of reality reality show that you think is terrible. The Kardashians comes out. You know, it's funny, there isn't a show. Or there wasn't a show at the time called the Kardashians, there was a show called Keeping Up With The Kardashians. But I pull it out. It says the Kardashians on the other side of the card is the number zero. And I'm like, how many episodes of that show? Do you watch? Oh, I don't watch that show. Zero. How do you know it's awful? Well, everybody says it's terrible. I'm gonna tell you most of what I think when people have a problem with the Kardashians, I think it's a very thinly veiled misogyny. Like these women who have managed to turn negatives into positives, and spun that stuff into gold, I have nothing but respect for them. And the few times I've ever interacted with the Kardashians, anybody in that family, they've been lovely. Can Kendall Jenner very nice. I mean, they're, they're not awful people. There are people who are trying to make a living and have run various empires, sticking their names on products. And it's worked out very well for them. But we're always going to be looked down on because the action on these shows we got addicted in the early 2000s, to the trashy side of it, where every reality show was about how are we going to humiliate or embarrass somebody? How are we going to multiply candid camera by the square root of evil, and turn it into just embarrassing people and embarrassing people and embarrassing people? And just, you know, setting them up to fail? I think that's a terrible thing to do to people who have said, Yes, I'll be on your show. And sure, I'll take $500 to come out and shoot for a week. That's an awful thing to do. And when people talk about reality TV, they always choose the worst examples. And what's funny is when I tried to give them a good example, if I say somebody feed Phil, which is my favorite, current thing. It's basically just Anthony Bourdain was a slightly more hapless guy who's just happy to be there. They don't see that as reality, tell them Well, that's not really reality TV. And it's like it's shot the same way and all comes together the same way. The only thing that's different is it's one person's point of view, instead of an entire network's point of view on top of six different people in the scene on top of six producers to had to put the show together. Good reality is as good or better than scripted. Every time. I say that loving scripted television. But good reality TV is so hard to make that when you pull it off. There's something magical about it. Because you really care about real people. Which is what all of us really in our hearts want to be able to do in this sort of sour crappy world we're in right now.
Zack Arnold: So let's go now back to this idea of unscripted versus reality. Because you you know how the sausage is made?
Troy DeVolld: Yes. Unscripted. Do you know when people started using the word unscripted? I don't That's why I'm asking when we estimated by them reality TV started organizing under the Writers Guild of America. For nine years, and these people said, we should be able to have union protection, and union coverage and portable pension and health, and all of these things that we thought we should have for working on all these shows. And people said, well, you know, we don't we can't call them writers, we don't want to call them producers, because that's too legitimate. So they would call a story editors. But Story Editor, this is where they screwed up. Story Editor is a term that is used in scripted television, which is why you see a lot of shows from the early 2000s, that people are listed the story editors, and then somehow magically, around 2000 456, story editors become story producers. Oh, they're not really writing. They're producing, oh, all this stuff is just falling into the lens on its own. There's no one in the field saying maybe we should do this. Let's try to accomplish this, this and this today, see if that gives us a story. So I think the move to unscripted was a way to avoid admitting that there is creativity behind the scenes in reality shows that should be considered a union gig. That's just my opinion, is based on conversations that I may have had with four or five production company guys that explain why they do what it is they do.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. And that's all of that's really interesting. Like you said, you you just want somebody that can be curious and ask questions. And I had no idea about any of that. That's fascinating.
Troy DeVolld: The stigma, the stigma of reality. Because of shows that had been so grossly like that I used to go crazy. There was there was a show. It was a prank show. I can't for the life of me remember, it was what it was. It was like a sci fi prank show. They they drove some people out in the desert, and the car broke down. And there's three of them in the car. And a giant six foot alien runs over the hill and tears off a car door and pulls a woman screaming out of the car. And this turned into like a giant slap because the woman sued for emotional trauma and blah, blah, blah. And it was like, I don't want to do shows like that ever. And I don't I would rather sit at home for three months than take a show where somebody's wellbeing is compromised, because they're put into a situation that is designed to be too much for them.
Zack Arnold: And like you said, a lot of that isn't about shows that people have seen, but it shows like that that we associate with the word reality television.
Troy DeVolld: Yes. And reality just had this very negative conversation, this negative connotation about it based on like, well, you know, what are we going to do this week? Well, you know, in order to win $500 You've got to eat a pig fetus. What? Oh, my God, like, that's TV? Well, that's the same box that gave me Dick Van Dyke. I don't think so.
Zack Arnold: Exactly. And I think the other thing and I don't really know how all this worked politically behind the scenes, because it's your world and not mine. But from the rumblings that I've heard, one of the reasons they the industry is trying to move away from reality to unscripted is the lack of reality and reality. And again, you know, how the sausage is made? And there's varying degrees, but some reality is anything but. Correct?
Troy DeVolld: Yes, it's always cheaper. But the shows where the hand of the producer is to evidence. It's not fun to watch. Audiences are savvy, they've been watching this stuff now for 20 and 30 years.
Zack Arnold: So where I want to end now he's kind of going back to more the career journey and the life lessons learned. And there's a very distinct choice. And I'm really curious about and that was the distinct choice after having a stroke. That, to me seems the point where you say, I'm out. I'm done with this industry. I have fallen out of love with Los Angeles and writing and television, and I'm getting the hell out of here. You chose not to do that. What did you choose to do instead?
Troy DeVolld: I love it. I love the city. I love being around people who are creative. You know, before Ali Willis passed away, she died in December of 2019, about five months before he had the stroke. Ali used to throw these insane parties. And you drive over to her house, and the backyard would be full of a bunch of people that you hadn't seen since the 80s. You could go there on a Thursday night. And it would be like Buck Henry and Ruth Hall. And you'd be like, What are these two people doing sitting on the same couch? It was just like this crazy eclectic mix of really interesting people. And the LA at large, has been so full of those kinds of events for me. I've met everybody I've ever wanted to meet since I was a kid. I got to write for George Hamilton. I got to write sketches for Cheech and Chong. When I did Dancing with the Stars. I'm like, this is a dream. This is like what this is. Any kid would want to be able to work with all these people that were their heroes. And the only way that could happen is in LA. And unfortunately, you know, LA has gotten expensive. It's scary. It's kind of oppressive in the amount of stuff you have to do just to stay afloat now. I can't do anything else with my life. Like I'm not gonna go back to Tampa and stuff aluminum siding, or working in a lawnmower dealership, or rent shoes in a bowling alley. I have to be here because this is where I feel my past was, this is where I feel my future still is. I'm finally getting in with some people who are doing independent features. I'm going to get a chance to produce a horror film next year, things are moving for me and another direction where there's still curiosity to be explored. I'm not going to bail on it. And having a stroke just makes you more conscious about how much in charge of the quality of life you really are. Your decision to keep on like, I could go back and and sit in Tampa, I could go live with my mother who's still with us. You know, I went back to Tampa for a year last year when things were so slow. I couldn't wait to get back to LA there was nothing going on. I was dying from what I call a red a red leather booth deficiency. If I can't go to Musa and Frank and have a tomato, bisque. You know, Saturday night, it's just it's like, what am I doing? Like these are these are my places.
Zack Arnold: So one of the things that I find curious, which can also kind of transition into a shameless plug portion of the program is the exercise that you went through to redevelop your love of the city and convince yourself that you needed to stick around what was that exercise?
Troy DeVolld: Yes, well, you know, I had, I had lost this half of my body for a while for about a month. And when we finally got to the point where we were doing physical therapy and occupational therapy, they said, What's the most important thing for you like, what do you really want to work on? I said, well, obviously I need to walk instead. But what I really want to do is I want to get this hand back, I said, I've got to be able to work on a laptop or a computer, because that is 100% of my career. So the laptop came in, I wrote a book called 100 poems about Los Angeles, both as an exercise for my hand to try to get my coordination back. And also just to get my mind back to the point where I'm like, I love this town and the people in it so much. Like if I decide, oh, man, I'm so mad at the industry, because all the shows were shorted on resources. So you have to work three times as hard just to get something that you could get in a reasonable period of time. If they weren't trying to put everything up on the air two months after they ordered it. Like, I'm not going to let myself get mad at what I do for a living. I'm not going to let myself get mad about my choices. I'm not going to feel bad about myself. I've got to be able to do something creative. And Ali Willis, His thing was, he was always like, I'm never gonna I'm never going to let not knowing how to do something stop me from doing it. You know, when she was a kid, she cut her throat really badly because she didn't understand oatmeal was boiled. She thought you put steel cut oats in a bowl of poured milk over it and just ate it. So she shredded her throat when she was a kid eating this uncooked oatmeal just the story she told me. But she always was like, I don't know how to animate. I'm going to learn how to animate and her significant other. I hate that phrase. Her partner, Prudence Fenton was the animation was the animation executive producer for liquid television on MTV back in the 80s. They were together for 27 years. So she learned how to animate and work with burdens on teaching yourself how to do those things. A lot of her music videos for the stuff that she self produced. She had their long animated sequences in the I confess, and the D which is a song she wrote about Detroit that has over 5000 artists on one track. It's it should be in the Guinness Book of World Records. I don't know if it ever got certified.
Zack Arnold: I can't imagine it wouldn't be. 5000, that's quite a few.
Troy DeVolld: She was recording them. In sessions like in Detroit like 200 people at a time. She had all the guys that used to play bass for Motown back in the day. And they're all on the same track. It's called we sing the D if you look it up on YouTube, it is phenomenal. But she taught herself how to do all that. And all that animation is her work. Just like I got to try to figure out how to love LA. And the book was received really well. When it first came out. It came out the same year 2020. I wrote it in May in June of 2020. And the book came out before the end of the year, the second book came out. Within about six months, I just kept just churning these things out. They're all based on my memories of Los Angeles, and the things that make me happy and the interactions with people who are not me. That made me curious enough to want to stay here. So I could talk about this book all day, but I won't.
Zack Arnold: No. I appreciate that. And I what I love about the story so much is that you are faced with a tremendous amount of adversity and if ever there was a wake up call for this industry or this town isn't for you. It was this and you decided no this is just going to strengthen my resolve in my love of the work that I do. I want to re emphasize the importance of the love of the process and not chasing an outcome because this industry is So driven towards chasing the outcome of the gold statues and you embrace the process. But
Troy DeVolld: I just don't want to I'm sorry, just quickly, when you talk about being so results oriented, I remember getting called into an office to talk to the head of a company that was working for it. And he said, we're gonna have you work on this other show, at the same time you're doing the show you're on. So he's going to run two shows. And he said, and I have to tell you, this new show, this new show cannot fail. And I was like, what a messed up thing to tell somebody, I'm like, I'm not the marketing department at the network. I have less to do with whether the show succeeds, succeeds or fails than anybody because I'm working with material that's coming back from the field that another producer is working on. How dare you tell me, this show cannot fail? You can't, you can't put that in my lap. It's not right. And yet, that's the way a lot of people work is it's just sort of like, this has to be great. And you have 30 minutes starting now. Right? You can't work that way.
Zack Arnold: But it's so much easier than if it fails to blame on somebody else, right? passing the buck is such a huge thing in this industry, which in and of itself could probably be an entire story thread of multiple episodes. But here's where I want to end. What I again find so intriguing, intriguing about this kind of this, this major inflection point in your life of the stroke is number one, it helps you reinvigorate your love and passion of the processing of the industry. But I would imagine at the very least, it's also helped you reexamine your work habits or your perspective of life in general. So how is it done that?
Troy DeVolld: Well, I dropped my mantra that I got from Gary Marshall. Gary Marshall always said, everything moves faster. If you learn these four words, my fault moving on. By the time somebody wastes time trying to figure out who's to blame for something, you could have said, my fault moving on, and I would just absorb the blows for the shows I was on for things that had nothing to do with me. And it's like, well, you know, the camera team decided they were going to shoot on a camera that costs $25,000 a week to rent. Because they think it's going to make the show that much better. Or we're going to start shooting the show on these custom, one of a kind anamorphic lenses that have been retrofit to work on a video camera. And it's like, that's a lot of money to spend playing around with equipment, the show is about story. But I'm going to eat two weeks of posts, because you're going to, you're going to give me a shorter time in post so that you can take the money from post and put it back in the field. Like it's not, it's not my fault, man. And I've learned to say, I will accept and do what I can do if you need to take some time off the bus schedule. I'll work a little bit harder to do this. But I will never let it happen on the scale that had happened to me over the course of my career at large.
Zack Arnold: I love it. It's this idea of setting very clear expectations and boundaries. Because it's something I talked about all the time.
Troy DeVolld: Doing it in a way where you're still helpful, and you're respectful. Yeah, throwing up your hands and not well, f these guys were thinking I can do this that never, because they respond more to your attitude than the thing that's actually happening.
Zack Arnold: Agreed. So given that as the framing for what's going to be my final question we're going to do, I don't do this with every guest, but I do it when it's appropriate. And I think it's perfect for today's conversation, given what you've learned about setting boundaries, setting proper expectations, making a lot of those mistakes earlier in your career, knowing that some of those choices and habits and behaviors at least partially led to the stroke. You know, correlation doesn't always mean causation. But we can make some safe assumptions, your time traveling back to the futon and you're just about ready to break in like you said, Everybody's looking for that gate. You see the back door, you're going in the back door getting ready to do these commercials for Woody Woodpecker and then your ascent begins. What advice are you going to give yourself while you're sitting in that suit, futon getting ready to start your career?
Troy DeVolld: We're harder on interpersonal relationships. I think that's the thing is I I don't mean for it to sound sad. But I sacrificed my life to have a version of my life. I have never been in a relationship that could survive the way that I worked. And I watched a lot of things implode. I just I would I would have spent a lot more time on my general happiness, about trying to figure out how to keep in better touch with people. I wish I would have thrown more parties if that doesn't sound like the stupidest thing you've ever heard.
Zack Arnold: If you enjoy parties more power to you.
Troy DeVolld: Well, no, it's just it's just like you gotta be a connector. You got to put people together. It's the fastest way to do it. I never everything for me was I'm going to rent the cheapest apartment I can find. At the top at the zenith of my career, I was paying $850 a month for a one bedroom in Sunland that looked like it had been carpeted and Muppet fur. And it was just like, I'm not going to spend any money because I have to be able to survive if something doesn't work out. If I have a dry spell, I've got to have money put back so I can do these other things. And then I just was associated with people who just were just manufacturers of financial emergencies, and I just threw that money out.
Zack Arnold: Well, here's what I can tell you to conclude today. If we had 89 minutes of absolute drivel, which by the way we didn't, because I don't think we I don't think we would have to cut out a moment of this. I loved all of it. But all of it was worth it for the following. I sacrificed my life for a version of my life. Yes, that needs to be a bumper sticker, and a T shirt and a desktop wallpaper and an Instagram account like that just says it all right there. I love that saying.
Troy DeVolld: Well, what you have to know is, I really in my heart believe it was worth it. I don't need a wife, I don't need kids, I feel fulfilled. Knowing that I have done a lot of stuff. After I died, none of it will matter. Like reality shows, you're not going to see a marathon of anything I've run 30 years after I'm dead on Nick at Night. Like it's not going to happen. Nothing that I've worked on is that kind of thing. But I don't regret a moment of it. And I don't feel like I don't I don't feel like the things that I've missed are bigger than the things I've gotten.
Zack Arnold: And I have a ton of respect for the fact that you own your choices, right? It's not a matter of like you said, I need to live a version. And the version is what everybody says it needs to be. You're owning your choices, the good ones and the bad ones.
Troy DeVolld: One thing in my life is somebody else's fault. And I'll laugh about it over a drink with the guy when we're both dead. People just sit on a cloud and go you know what you messed my life up when you were 27. And I hope you're happy because I paid for it for the rest of my life. And then we'll, as we say in the notes will clink our glasses. Nobody ever toasts in reality show if you read the notes from the field of Allah says they clink and it's laugh. I don't know why. Maybe just nobody in the field is literate, I don't get it.
Zack Arnold: Well, having said all that, I want to now transition to the full shameless self promotion portion of the program, which is I want to make sure anybody listening, they can find you they can find your books, they can find any speaking whatever it might be, where's the best place for people to get started, if you've inspired them on I want to learn more.
Troy DeVolld: I have a blog called RealityTVBook.com. There's a lot of pro tips for reality production. But there's also a lot of general philosophical stuff. And anything that I'm going to be doing publicly is posted there. If you want to go online to storyexpo.com, I speak at all the story Expo TV writers Summit. And now masters of story events. I'm going to be there in New York, October 20, and 21st. I'm the keynote speaker on the second day, and all I'm going to talk about is how executives and writers can better get ourselves on the same page and work in a way that's not adversarial.
Zack Arnold: I love it. Having said all that, we're going to make sure that there are show notes, we have those links anywhere. So anybody that wants to find out more and go to all those resources, they will be very easily available and at the swipe of their thumbs. But having said that, once again, I will reiterate for at least the third time, I am so fortunate that you literally fell into my inbox in my lap. Because this was just a tremendously beneficial conversation just for me. And I hoping for those that were listening as well. They learned a thing or two about the process of collaboration, understanding other people's perspectives, and also maybe you know how to or how not to give notes. So
Troy DeVolld: And thank you for bringing more curiosity than an agenda, it really is nice to have a conversation on a podcast.
Zack Arnold: Well, I make it very, very clear that I don't like to interview people. In fact, I hate interviewing people. What I love is talking to people. I love having conversations. So I'm glad that you you framed this as a conversation because that's very much my intention. So having said that, I can't thank you enough and I'll make sure that we're going to send as many people your way as possible. So we appreciate it.
Troy DeVolld: Very good. I had a good time. Thanks a lot.
This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared by Debby Germino and published by Glen McNiel.
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).
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