THE BEAR / 3x5 Tool
The Italian Beef is my number one, all-time, absolute favorite sandwich.
There are two reasons:
1) It’s delicious.
2) Spring break my sophomore year of college my friend Jonathan Clark and I drove to the suburbs of Chicago to visit our friend Steve Colella. His family owned an Italian bakery called Claudio’s on North Avenue in Elmwood Park. The first day we went to visit we entered through the back door and found his dad John and his Uncle Lenny squeezing out icing and cannoli cream from pastry bags, their forearms bulging like Popeye from the hundreds of thousands of reps they'd ‘d put in over the years.
These were peak Jordan/Pippin years and the first thing his Uncle Lenny said to us was, “How does it feel to be in a great fucking city with a great fucking team?” Then he pulled out a roll of cash from the pants of his track suit, the size and shape of which I’d only ever seen in the movies, and he proceeded to count out a hundred dollars in twenties. He handed them to Steve, saying, “Go to Boston Chicken, get two whole chickens, pulled, and get whatever you guys want for lunch.” The man ate two whole chickens, pulled, for lunch.
We didn’t get our lunch at Boston Chicken. Instead, Steve took us down the street to a local institution called Johnny’s Beef. There was a line out the door that snaked around the restaurant. While we were waiting Steve gave us the lowdown on what to order when we finally got to the counter. There was a bit of a Soup Nazi vibe, like you didn’t want to get to the front of the line after half-an-hour, look up at the menu and go, “Okay, yeah, let’s see, what do you have here?” They would immediately move on to the next person and give you time to think about your actions. And God help you if you asked for ketchup on your hot dog.
It was exactly the kind of hole in the wall joint I’d recently come to appreciate. It was authentic, a place where locals hang out. I felt like I’d stepped into a David Mamet play, my writer brain crackling with electricity. And that was before I ever took a bite of the sandwich.
There are only a few components to the Italian Beef. There’s the thinly sliced beef which has been simmering away in a broth loaded with garlic and other spices, the bread, which is usually a French roll, and it’s topped with “sweet” green peppers or “hot” giardiniera, or both. You also have a choice of “dry,” meaning the roll comes as is, or “wet/dipped” which means they dip the entire thing in the gravy. If you want to roll the coronary dice you can make it a combo and throw an Italian sausage into the mix but like my friend Steve warned me that first time, “It’s a lot of meat.”
After lunch we went back to the bakery where his dad and uncle set us up with a tray of cannoli shells and a bag of cream and let us fill our own cannolis. That whole afternoon is seared into my memory. If you’re lucky you get a few dozen days like that over a lifetime.
At the tail end of summer, weeks before I was supposed to move to New York and find an apartment with my Steve, I pulled the plug and decided to move to Chicago instead. I talked about this a bit in the last issue but after spending some time there I found myself being pulled to Chicago as much by the lore (Second City, Steppenwolf) as the blue-collar nature of the city itself.
My girlfriend at the time decided to move there as well and we rented an apartment on Paulina, just off of Clark Street. I knew Chicago was cold in the winter, I knew it was called “The Windy City,” but I’d only ever been there in the spring and summer. When winter hit in mid-are-you-fucking-kidding-me October I was wholly unprepared. The only thing thing I wanted to do was stay inside and write.
Lucky for me, right out the back door of our apartment building was a hot dog/beef stand on Clark Street called Byron’s. The interior was decorated with huge plastic cartoon aliens and UFO’s hanging from the ceiling. I holed up there with my notebook for hours at a time, multiple days a week, packing on hibernation weight and writing hundreds and hundreds of terrible pages. A huge chunk of my 10,000 hours took place there, roasting in the au jus air like so much thinly sliced sirloin. For that reason the Italian Beef is forever tied to the period of time where I felt like I was finally becoming a writer. Even today, biting into one reminds me of that time.
When I saw the trailer for THE BEAR on FX/Hulu I thought it was just a show that took place in a restaurant, and while I love restaurants, I wasn’t in a hurry to watch it. Then I started to see more and more good reviews and people I trust talking about how great it was. I decided to give it a shot and much like my first bite of Italian beef, once I started I couldn’t stop. I was hooked the moment I saw it was set almost entirely within the friendly confines of a beef stand like Johnny’s. Even if it had just been a standard issue soapy workplace drama I would have gladly watched every episode. But it’s so much more than that.
If you’re not familiar with the story, here it is in a nutshell with very light spoilers: Carmy is a superstar chef in the fine dining world, with stints at places like The French Laundry. When his older brother passes away Carmy comes home to take over his family’s struggling Italian beef joint. The staff, including his livewire cousin, Richie, resists his attempt to turn things around, leading to a lot of hostility and much shouting during the busy lunch rushes. It’s all chaos, all the time. Not only is Carmy carrying the guilt from his brother’s death, he’s also carrying PTSD from working for an abusive boss who might as well be Scott Rudin in a pristine white chef’s jacket. He knows there has to be a better way he just has to get over a lot of his own (and everybody else's) personal demons to get there.
It’s fast paced, with the ability to switch gears from laugh out loud funny to punch you in the gut on a dime, and filled wall to wall with excellent performances. But the thing that rocketed it to the top of my “must recommend” list for writers and really anybody, the reason I’ve written over a thousand words so far to tell you about it, has to do with one of the underlying themes, which I've translated to mean:
“You can reach for and perhaps even achieve greatness without reducing the people around you to rubble in the process.”
It seems simple and obvious but there aren't enough works of art and entertainment out there preaching this gospel.
For so many years we’ve put up with the “difficult genius” archetype because of the results they produced. Over the past few years there’s been a slow-rolling revolution, largely thanks to younger generations of people who aren’t going to put up with the endless parade of abusive assholes like Rudin and Weinstein. No box office total or award shelf is worth putting up with David O. Russell, not when there’s a better way. The upper level guys in one writers room I worked in would often remind us of the philosophy of one of the main characters: “It’s not enough just to win, you have to be worthy of the victory.” I think about that all the time, in my personal and creative life. I want to be worthy of the victories.
THE BEAR shows us a better way, whether that’s running a restaurant, a sports team, a television show, a classroom, a household, or anywhere people come together in pursuit of a common goal. Aiming higher has a transformative energy all its own. It may take time, people may resist because it forces them out of their comfort zone, but eventually they will see the results. You will, too. Like Mike Tomlin says, "Don't seek comfort."
That’s not to say that you won’t have disagreements, that there won’t be external forces that throw whatever operation you’re running into chaos again, but if you take time to listen, if you set expectations and learn to communicate clearly, if you treat people with respect and build them up rather than tear them down, you can weather those storms. You can do great things together, impossibly hard things, and end the day with a little peace in your soul.
Anyway, I hope you give it a shot and I hope you dig it.
I just did a quick search on YouTube for a video on Johnny's Beef and there's a Soup Nazi reference AND the "no ketchup" rule:
Johnnie's Iconic Italian Beef Is A Delicious Mess Of Beef And Gravy | Legendary Eats — www.youtube.com With how ubiquitous Italian beef sandwiches are in Chicago, it's hard to pick just one. But the line outside Johnnie's Beef and its #1 rankings on several be...
3x5 Tool
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve done a few pitches for OWA’s on the feature side. During one of the pitches a producer asked me to explain a little more about how the themes I talked about at the top would be threaded throughout the story. I realized I'd spent a good chunk of time in the beginning setting them up but I was maybe light on the moments that highlighted the theme while pitching the story itself.
In a similar vein, I turned in my first draft of a concept document to the studio and producers of this new series idea I’m developing. I gave some tonal comparisons in the intro section but that tone didn’t quite come across in the rest of the document. There were a number of moments that were incongruous. They didn’t read sexy and fun and propulsive, they read kind of heavy and maybe a little self-important. So on this next pass I’m focusing on a few more moments that will function as indicators of tone, rather than relying on the comps to do the heavy lifting.
It's not enough just to call your shots in the early part of these pitches and concept documents. You have to connect with the ball and follow through.
During this time I was reading the PAGE TO STAGE back on adapting by Vincent Murphy and he has an exercise where you write down 5 major actions that your main character takes on their journey. I found that super helpful and adapted it as a diagnostic tool for my next pitches.
The basic idea is:
I took three foundational elements of my pitch (THEME, TONE, CHARACTER) and made a list of five moments for each element that illustrate them in the pitch. 5 moments that embody the themes, 5 moments that convey tone, 5 character beats that chart the character's emotional journey. Ideally there's a lot of crossover.
It's easy to forget that other people can't read my mind. It's easy to put too much your faith in comps and assume everyone can see them in the moments you're pitching. Doing this exercise showed me some holes that needed patching up. Maybe it will help you too.
The Russos on Process
I read a great article on The Russos and they shed a little light on their creative process with the writing team Markus and McFeely:
"We start with a three-page document that could take weeks or months on end to create. Basically, the first page is Act 1, the second page is Act 2 and the third page is Act 3. You need to agree as a group on what that story is before you waste your time turning it into a much larger document that's harder to unravel, and that could get off track in a way that could set the project back months, if not a year or more," Joe explains. "Once we do that three-pager, we go to a 10-pager where we start to infuse character and thematics, and we do some sample dialogue. And then from that, it's very easy to write a script. You're working in a more malleable format for a longer period of time before you commit to building the house instead of building the house and realizing that you don't have any doors on it."
The Russo Brothers explain how 'The Gray Man' became their first big post-MCU action epic — www.yahoo.com In April of 2019, the release of Avengers: Endgame not only closed a huge storytelling arc in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but it marked the end of a grueling, four-year filmmaking marathon for directors Joe and Anthony Russo. Based on the success of their prior films, Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014) and Captain America: Civil War (2016), the brothers were handed the gigantic task of landing the massive Infinity Stones story-arc in two parts with Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and then En
I'm Coming to San Diego Comic-Con
I was so excited to receive this invitation by Spiro Skentzos, my first time back to SDCC since 2014 when we did a panel for EXTANT and I was a guest on Ben Blacker's Writer's Panel podcast. If you're going to be around come check it out!
Spiro Skentzos on Twitter: "Super excited @Comic_Con has programmed my "Intro To TV Writing" panel for the 12th year in a row! 4/22 10A Rm4. We're back with these amazing panelists: @ketomizu @sugarjonze @MickeyFisher73 @dsigurani Come get some #writingtips! #WritingCommunity https://t.co/PJ1UFN2nWm" / Twitter “Super excited @Comic_Con has programmed my "Intro To TV Writing" panel for the 12th year in a row! 4/22 10A Rm4. We're back with these amazing panelists: @ketomizu @sugarjonze @MickeyFisher73 @dsigurani Come get some #writingtips! #WritingCommunity https://t.co/PJ1UFN2nWm”
Fuck This
A few years ago Julie and I started taking Ellie out to Montrose a couple of evenings a week. We would often see a young woman named Katherine Terrien busking on the street with her guitar and ukulele. We became big fans, she's a gem of a person with enormous talent.
She's turning thirty this week and wrote a song that perfectly captures what a lot of people are feeling right now:
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