Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat …

Gabby Gruen: I met Joan Rivers, and Joan encouraged me to go to New York. I was not really ready. I did move to New York, and I took my page of jokes that I wrote for Joan, and I went to Rollins and Joffe, the people who promoted Robert Klein and other great people. And there was a guy there named Buddy Mora who looked at my stuff and said, it’s a little premature. 

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, A podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us, as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat Beat. We’re coming to you from the steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Gabby Gruen, who spent most of his professional life as a writer and producer inside the country’s most prominent ad agencies. After 20 years of elevating the brands of some of our most prestigious advertisers, and with the help of a screenwriting MFA from UCLA, Gabby started writing screenplays. His original scripts found home inside a major motion picture studio and on assignment for several less prominent purveyors of the cinematic arts. With the recent publication of his first novel, the Uniform, a thriller that takes place during the Holocaust, Gabby has begun his fiction writing career. I’ve read the Uniform and can tell you it’s an intense trip through a nasty piece of World War II as experienced by David Corda, a young doctor and Jewish labor camp prisoner who’s become an enslaved road crew worker destined for a death camp until he comes upon the body of a murdered Gestapo officer. David contrives to use the officer’s bloodied uniform as a means of escape. I was riveted by this chilling page turner. If you like great reads, I highly recommend the Uniform to you. Gabby will soon publish his second book, the Ride of a Lifetime, a crime story set on the frozen streets of Detroit. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s a great privilege for me to have the author, Gabby Gruen as my guest on StoryBeat today. Gabby, welcome to the show.

Gabby Gruen: Thank you. And thank you for the kind words.

Steve Cuden: Oh, it’s my pleasure. I really truly enjoyed reading your book. So let’s go back in time just a little bit. And by the way, we will talk about your book in a bit.

Gabby Gruen: Okay.

Steve Cuden: I’m curious where your interest first began in life, in both writing, entertainment, advertising. Where did this all begin for you?

Gabby Gruen: Well, believe it or not, I was A real fan of stand-up comedy. So I grew up in Detroit and I used to go to Windsor, Ontario, across the river to see people like Joan Rivers and Pete Barbudi and other, pros of the time. Joan Rivers actually bought a few jokes for me and encouraged me to move to New York. So a little encouragement goes a long way with me.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s, useful for most people to have a little encouragement, that’s for sure.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: So was writing that came first for you? Did you start out writing?

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, it did.

Steve Cuden: What did you work on?

Gabby Gruen: I was a graduate student at the time at Wayne State University in Detroit, the Harvard of inner city Detroit. And I was taking writing classes. And, when I did, somebody said, hey, there’s a person here connected to Motown who needs some writing done, as anybody interested? And I raised my hand and they connected me to a comedian ventriloquist who was affiliated with Motown Oay. And his name was Willie Tyler.

Steve Cuden: Oh, yeah.

Gabby Gruen: And I started writing for him.

Steve Cuden: Willie Tyler and Lester.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, Willie Tyler and Lester, yes. And it was really fun. You know, I occasionally go with him to New York for his appearances on talk shows. That was the beginning of my writing.

Steve Cuden: So you started writing jokes. That’s where you started?

Gabby Gruen: I did, I did, yeah. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: You wouldn’t know that from reading The Uniform. Although there’s actually a really good sense of humor in there too, which we’ll talk about.

Gabby Gruen: Thank you for saying that that was intentional.

Steve Cuden: It’s clear, it’s absolutely clear that you intended it that way. So what age were you when you started working for Willie Tyler? How old were you?

Gabby Gruen: I was in my early 20s.

Steve Cuden: So you didn’t start out as a high school person or even in college as a comedy writer or a writer at all?

Gabby Gruen: No, I didn’t.

Steve Cuden: how interesting. So what then led you to pursue that life as a professional? Was it by meeting up with Bully Tyler? Was that the beginning of it, where you decided, yeah, I should do this?

Gabby Gruen: That was the beginning of it. And I told you that I, met Joan Rivers and Joan encouraged me to go to New York. And it was really. I was not really ready. I did move to New York for a short time, and I took my page of jokes that I wrote for Willie and for Joan, and I went to Rollins and Joffe.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Gabby Gruen: The famed management company, you know, the people who promoted Woody Allen.

Steve Cuden: Woody Allen, yeah.

Gabby Gruen: And Robert Klein and other great people. And I went in there with my page of jokes, and there was a guy there named Buddy Mora who very kindly looked at my stuff and said it’a little premature. And he was right.

Steve Cuden: So you were working at a high level quite early then.

Gabby Gruen: Oh, thank you for saying that. I don’t know.

Steve Cuden: You were already meeting big people at the top of the game.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, I probably, could have, stuck it out a little bit and seen where it would lead.

Steve Cuden: So did that somehow get you into advertising? How did you get to be in the advertising business?

Gabby Gruen: So I left New York after about a month or month and a half, went back to Detroit, and, there was an advertising agency not far away. I mean, that just seemed like the next logical step for me. And, I accidentally spoke to a guy at the most, what I thought was the most creative agency in Detroit, a place called WB Donor. And the creative director told me to send him a resume and contact him and that sort of thing. But after that, he never answered my phone calls. And I was sort of unsophisticated enough to call every day for a month.

Steve Cuden: Okay.

Gabby Gruen: After which I wrote him a nasty letter.

Steve Cuden: All the things you’re not supposed to do.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, I wrote him. I told him he was the consummate asshole the side of Eight Mile Road. And that got him to call me back because I had demonstrated some writing talent with that sentence that’s sort of.

Steve Cuden: Like, from the original Mary Tyler Moore pilot. You know, you’ve got spunk. I don’t like spunk.

Gabby Gruen: Right, yeah. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: But he then hired you.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And were you at that agency for your whole career or did you move around?

Gabby Gruen: No, now I was there for a year or less.

Steve Cuden: I see.

Gabby Gruen: But it was, you know, it was nice because I got to learn the business. I got to learn how to solve a problem professionally, a marketing problem. And there were a lot of really talented people there. I mean, Kathy Guys White, Larry Kasdan, a comedian named Tom Sharp.

Steve Cuden: Wow. They were all dis advertising the agency in Detroit at this time.

Gabby Gruen: Yes.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Gabby Gruen: Yes.

Steve Cuden: So for people who don’t know Caathy, Guy White, created and wrote Caathy, the comic strip Caathy. Lawrence Kazdan goes on to become a great writer director, including writing the Empire Strikes Back, among other movies, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, among other movies. And Tom Sharp was just a well known stand up comic.

Gabby Gruen: Yes.

Steve Cuden: That’s pretty awesome. Did you know by working there that this was something that you not only could do, but should do, and this would be a professional move for you for a while? Did you know that at that time?

Gabby Gruen: I thought so. I mean, I wasn’t really? Sure. Because, I didn’t really have the tools or the maturity to know whether I could go farther.

Steve Cuden: So what then told you? When did that happen for you? Were you thought to yourself, yeah, I am good at this, I should do this?

Gabby Gruen: Towards the end of my stint there, one of my commercials, one of my radio commercials won an award. And, I had called upon my experience being outrageous in a letter to sort of carry it forward. So at the award show, when they were bringing the award to me, I screamed out, I need a job. And after that, a number of people from agencies who were present started calling.

Steve Cuden: You’re just right out there. Most people would shy away from that, but you’re right in there.

Gabby Gruen: yeah, it’s true.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that that’s the way that people who want to get ahead in the business should think about setting themselves apart from everyone else by doing things like that?

Gabby Gruen: You know, that was spontaneous for me. So I don’t know if I would advise it for other people.

Steve Cuden: You wouldn’t contrive it?

Gabby Gruen: No. Unless you were really good at it. Unless you could come up with a really good gambit.

Steve Cuden: And so how long was it for you to be in the business of advertising prior to your becoming a producer? Was that sort of right away, hand in hand?

Gabby Gruen: So I would say after that job, I got hired by an agency in Columbus, Ohio. So the producing started there. I mean, I was producing radio commercials, which is just a great experience. There’s a skill set that a voice over people bring to the art of radio production that is, really wonderful. I mean, you just learn all about performance and concept and that sort of thing.

Steve Cuden: And it’s, correct me if I’m wrong, the hardest storytelling there is, you have to do it in 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds. And you’ve got to get everything in there, right?

Gabby Gruen: Oh, yeah, yeah. And you have to communicate, a world, you know, you have to, realize that people can’t see what’s going on. And you have to suggest things so that people actually feel that they are transported to this crazy world, whatever it is.

Steve Cuden: And so when you’re figuring out a commercial at that time. Well, and with that space, that short amount of time.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: What is the trick? How do you do that? How do you think it through?

Gabby Gruen: the first thing you got to do is have a concept, have an idea. how am I going to communicate the things that I need to communicate for a client in an interesting way. And the interesting way is the thing that carries the process forward.

Steve Cuden: And is there A technique or a method that you used in order to find those interesting ways?

Gabby Gruen: No, it was just pretty. It was pretty spontaneous. It was just based on what I was thinking of that day.

Steve Cuden: Are you able to tell us any of the products you advertised? Would we know any of them?

Gabby Gruen: I’ve done a lot of those. I could tell you, you know, when it came to la, I mean, it was a more prominent group of, companies. I worked on Nike and Mattel and American Express. when I was in Columbus, Ohio, I did work for a fast food company in Detroit. There was the Detroit News. That was the client for which I got the first award.

Steve Cuden: So you didn’t write for the car companies. They probably would have been out of New York, right?

Gabby Gruen: Well, actually, a few of them were in Detroit. And the thing that distinguished WB donor from the other ad agencies there was that they didn’t have any car clients. They didn’t. But when I, won that award and I got calls, one of them was Campbell Ewald, which was the Chevy agency. And I think they still may be.

Steve Cuden: Yeah, well, that’s because you yelled out, I need a job.

Gabby Gruen: I need a car.

Steve Cuden: All right, so let’s talk about the remainder of what you’ve been doing, which is screenwriting and storytelling and now novel writing. You seem to gravitate. If I’m following it correctly, and you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, that you gravitate toward action stories or thrillers or things that are full of action. Y.

Gabby Gruen: Yes.

Steve Cuden: The Uniform is full of action. Where does your passion for those kinds of stories come from?

Gabby Gruen: Good question. Because I actually began writing comedies. Right. The Uniform was really based on my father’s experience. It was, ah, my father’s experience as a labor camp prisoner during the Second World War.

Steve Cuden: Oh.

Gabby Gruen: Really inspired this story.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah. So I used to talk to him and to my mother about their experience during the war. And I heard many, many stories. And I knew that my father, had been a labor camp prisoner. And one day I had the idea. What if a labor camp prisoner stumbles on the body of a, murdered Gestapo officer and contrives to use the gashed and bloodied uniform as a means of escape?

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s, a wonderful idea.

Gabby Gruen: Y.

Steve Cuden: It is thrilling when you read it because it’s. You don’t know what’s going to happen around every turn, which is exactly what you want in a good story. Are there types of stories that you avoid that? Do you avoid writing comedy at this point, or do you still want to write, so.

Gabby Gruen: Not really. I would. I still love a great comedy.

Steve Cuden: Where do you find most of your inspirations? Do they just come to you or do you actually go out and seek them?

Gabby Gruen: I think they just come to me.

Steve Cuden: You’re fortunate that way, that the universe is throwing stuff at you.

Gabby Gruen: Yes, yes. I mean, you have to be open to it. I had been writing comedies, I think, before I wrote the Uniform, I wrote other thrillers. you know, actually there was a thriller that I wrote based on my mother’s wartime experience. And it landed me my first literary agent. It was a Holocaust story as well. And at the time, Holocaust stories were not doing well at the box office. So I just ended up putting that aside.

Steve Cuden: Well, we’ve seen at this point literally thousands of World War II books.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And who knows how many hundreds of World War II movies and TV shows.

Gabby Gruen: Yes.

Steve Cuden: And I was going to ask you why you wanted to do another, but you’ve already told us the reason. It’s because you’re inspired by your parents.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, exactly.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s a pretty good reason, I think. I’m going to ask you a question. I ask lots of guests, and I always am fascinated by the answers. What, for you, makes a good story good?

Gabby Gruen: What makes it work, assuming you have a good overall concept. I think the thing that is really critical is the detail. How you burnish a character, how they carry themselves and talk and, you know, what are they facing. I think that the thing that’ actually most critical in all of this is the opposition. The greater the opposition, the greater the story.

Steve Cuden: You’re talking about that magic word, conflict.

Gabby Gruen: Absolutely.

Steve Cuden: It’s really all about that. Without that conflict, you don’t really have.

Gabby Gruen: Anything to engage the audience in the uniform. The antagonist, the Nazi, is a really difficult, opponent. It’s a really difficult, thing to get around.

Steve Cuden: You could say that for sure.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And all of the Nazis, he’s surrounded by them.

Gabby Gruen: Oh, yes, yes.

Steve Cuden: I mean, David, is tell the listeners a bit more what the Uniform is all about. We’ve got the general, overview, but give us a little more detail of what it’s about.

Gabby Gruen: Well, it’s really. U. you know, I had to think about this because I tried to present this to the Jewish Book Council and they would say, what makes this a Jewish story? And I think it’s because, everything, all of the little details are an indication of deliverance that you end up using this to overcome your opponent. For instance, there is an early scene in the story where David is presented by a dying friend with his prayer shawl. And you think it’s just going to be, you know, why are you giving me this? And he says, well, you know, you can keep warm with it. But it ends up being a tool for his deliverance.

Steve Cuden: Would you say that’s the main theme of the book, is deliverance?

Gabby Gruen: No, actually to me the main theme is rank. Rank, yeah. Because wherever I could, in a visual way, I would show a sign of rank. Even one of the earliest paragraphs in the story showed a hand drawn red cross, which David used to sort of distinguish himself as a medical person.

Steve Cuden: Not only is he a road crew worker, but they also sort of force him to do medical work as well.

Gabby Gruen: Yes, yes.

Steve Cuden: This makes him a very fascinating and rich character.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah. He treated his fellow captives that way. The Nazis sort of forced him into that where it came up. There’s actually a moment in the story, I don’t know if I’m giving away too much, where we actually see him as a flashback in medical school on the day he’s thrown out.

Steve Cuden: You’re not giving away too much that doesn’t tell something that’s not rated. It doesn’t tell you anything about what’s happening.

Gabby Gruen: That actually happened to my father.

Steve Cuden: That actually happened to your father?

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: So how much of the book is from stories that you were told?

Gabby Gruen: A fair amount. I mean, it’s really a work of imagination, but there are things that you use from life. For instance, the horse plays a fairly prominent part in the story. And I didn’t set out planning to do that, but my mother had a horse and she used to tell me stories about the horse, about how important.

Steve Cuden: She had a horse in Germany.

Gabby Gruen: It was in Hungary where she came from.

Steve Cuden: Oh, in Hungary.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah. And it stuck with me. And I didn’t know, but you know, David ends up being confined to a barn. And I thought to myself, what can I use in the barn? And having a horse there was pretty helpful.

Steve Cuden: I think you just said something that’s absolutely critical, not only for basic storytelling but especially for motion picture storytelling, screenwriting.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And that is to be able to take whatever setting you’re in and use whatever’s there. And you kind of have to figure out, either in your mind’s eye or through research, what’s in that space.

Gabby Gruen: Oh, absolutely.

Steve Cuden: And I think a lot of people don’t pay any attention to that. They think, well, m. I’m just going to tell a story. But if you start to think about those wonderful things that are around a character.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah. you can use them, no question.

Steve Cuden: So I’m curious, as you were developing the book, what did you spend most of your time on? Was it plot, character action? What did you think about the most? What did you work on the hardest?

Gabby Gruen: Well. Oh, I need to give you a little bit of a pry.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Gabby Gruen: I had originally written this as a screenplay.

Steve Cuden: Makes sense.

Gabby Gruen: And I couldn’t get anybody interested in it.

Steve Cuden: I understand.

Gabby Gruen: But I thought it was a good enough story that it was worth developing further. So I had the whole story laid out. And what the book allowed me to do was to go a little bit deeper.

Steve Cuden: All right. So when you were developing the screenplay, I’m still curious. Did you develop these characters over a long time, or was it that the plot came to you and you needed to develop that? What did you spend the most time on?

Gabby Gruen: I think it was plot originally. Yeah, I think it was plot. I think that the other stuff came later. I mean, there were character issues that really didn’t develop until the novel.

Steve Cuden: M

Gabby Gruen: But I, you know, to me it’s always a matter of how can you add detail to enrich the story.

Steve Cuden: Well, I think that’s right. And the book is richly detailed. And now that you say that you wrote it as a screenplay, it makes absolute sense to me. I know any number of authors who have taken their screenplays and turned them into books because they couldn’t sell them as a movie.

Gabby Gruen: Oh, is that right? Yeah, sure.

Steve Cuden: And then I think that the question for me, for you, would be, are you going to try to now take the book and use it to try to sell the screenplay?

Gabby Gruen: I hope so. That would be nice.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s, frequently what it is. Sometimes the studios don’t want anything that’s original in a screenplay, but if there’s something that exists underneath it that is a book, Y. They’ll suddenly get interested in the screenplay.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah. And one of the conceits of my life as a fiction writer now is that I get to produce other stuff and publish other stuff. So I’ve always been told that the more you have to sell, the better your chances.

Steve Cuden: I think that’s right. It is a business, I think, of amounts of material, not of just one thing.

Gabby Gruen: Yes.

Steve Cuden: Though if you’re lucky, you hit one thing and that can carry you for a long time. Y But certainly volume is helpful as a writer.

Gabby Gruen: I have an inventory.

Steve Cuden: You have a war chest.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: where did Dr. David Ka come from? Is this based on Your dad?

Gabby Gruen: Yes.

Steve Cuden: Based on your dad. Was your dad a doctor?

Gabby Gruen: My father. Well, to his everlasting frustration, he had been through medical school, and he had been a labor camp prisoner, and he had been a concentration camp prisoner. And after my parents were freed, they emigrated to the United States, and he couldn’t get anybody in New York at the time to accept, his credits. So he ended up becoming a physical therapist. But it was like a, ah, great frustration for him that he couldn’t just be a doctor.

Steve Cuden: What did he want to specialize in? Anything in particular?

Gabby Gruen: You know, I really don’t know.

Steve Cuden: interesting.

Gabby Gruen: That never came up.

Steve Cuden: Did you learn about his doctoring skills that you actually talk about in the book? Certain how to suture and that kind of stuff. Did you learn that from him, or did you learn that through research?

Gabby Gruen: Just from research.

Steve Cuden: Just from research. And how much research did you do ultimately to tell this story in the first place?

Gabby Gruen: Less than you would think. I wish I had done more, but, you know, Google helped a lot. There was some research. I saw a lot of photographs that my parents had. You know, there were pictures of them walking on Prague streets, and I always noted the cobblestones as where they would walk. And I did look up to see what Prague was like so that I could, describe those scenes. And, this is a bit of, unintentional research. A friend of mine, a, commercial director named Brent Thomas, who, unfortunately is no longer with us, went there to shoot, and I asked him what it was like, and he said it was like Dracula meets Disneyland. And that really helped me formulate stuff. I may have even used that line in the novel.

Steve Cuden: did you take photographs off of the web or from books and put them around you so that you had them in plain sight as you were working?

Gabby Gruen: I didn’t.

Steve Cuden: No, you didn’t. So you were using your imagination at all times?

Gabby Gruen: That’s right, yeah.

Steve Cuden: Well, you say that you think you should have done more researcher. You could have done more research. What do you think you didn’t do enough research on?

Gabby Gruen: I don’t know, because can’I. Can’t say that I’m happy with what I turned out.

Steve Cuden: Are you serious? It’s really good.

Gabby Gruen: So the screenplay went, only so far as the plot is concerned. The book developed a whole other angle. I don’t want to give anything away. But in the screenplay, he subdues his opponent.

Steve Cuden: Okay.

Gabby Gruen: And in the novel, the opponent finds a way to continue pursuing him. And so that’s, you know, another element of the Deliverance.

Steve Cuden: I’m not going to give anything away. But it. No, it plays out to the very end. Yes, it definitely does.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Because you have a lot of stuff with Desdemona, the horse. We talked about the horse a moment ago.

Gabby Gruen: Yes.

Steve Cuden: Did you learn about hors horses from your mom, all about that, or did you also do research on horses and that sort of stuff?

Gabby Gruen: No, I invented most of it. I did do research on horses. You know, that stuff about Desdemona being an Olympian, an Olympian jumper and stuff like that.

Steve Cuden: Well, because you know a lot about the structure of horses from the book and how they walk and all the rest of it. That’s all in there. Because of stuff that happens in the book that I don’t want to give away.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, Yeah. A lot of it was just. For me, it was logic.

Steve Cuden: Logic.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: I’m not exactly a hoarse person, so you may have gotten away with me telling me things that aren’t correct.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Have you had anybody read the book who is a horse person, give you critiques?

Gabby Gruen: I did. I did. And it got his approval.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s good.

Gabby Gruen: It shocked me. Yeah. And not that I was afraid of getting found out, but.

Steve Cuden: So what would you say were the biggest challenges in conceiving the story? What were the big hurdles you had to overcome?

Gabby Gruen: Just making it believable, making it something that people would identify with. I think, like the human element. How do you get people to follow this poor guy, you know, who’s, you know, barely has anything to eat, who just has no resources, but is very resourceful?

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s the key. you just hit it on the nose. It’s that he’s incredibly smart.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: He’s very clever and he’s very resourceful, even though he has absolutely nothing to work with. He has no tools, he has no instruments. He has to figure it all out and find stuff and make it work. And that’s what makes it really compelling, is because he’s super smart.

Gabby Gruen: And that’s what makes the challenge so challenging that he has to face that stuff and figure our a way forward.

Steve Cuden: I think that that is exactly right. I’m glad that you said it that way. How long did it take you to write the book? You already had a screenplay, so how long did it take you to develop the screenplay in the first place?

Gabby Gruen: The screenplay, I think, came, like, within six months.

Steve Cuden: Okay.

Gabby Gruen: I think it took me another year to write the novel.

Steve Cuden: And did you write the novel right away, or was there time between.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, right away. I did right away because I refused to be defeated because you already knew.

Steve Cuden: Right away from the screenplay that it wasn’t going to sell, at least not immediately.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, I was going to make this work somehow.

Steve Cuden: And you don’t know yet whether it’s circulating in Hollywood at this point?

Gabby Gruen: I don’t know. I don’t think it is. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe.

Steve Cuden: I hope maybe you get it into the hands of someone like a Steven Spielberg. Because he would be someone who, if he didn’t do it himself, he would be somebody that might shepherd it.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, that would be nice.

Steve Cuden: Well, absolutely.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Let’s talk a moment about screenwriting because obviously you did that for a while too. How old were you when you started writing screenplays?

Gabby Gruen: I would say in my 30s.

Steve Cuden: In your 30s?

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Obviously advertising is what you did first. Yah, really As a career. And then in your 30s you get into screenwriting. You and I are both graduates of the UCLA screenwriting program, the MFA program there.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: What do you think you learned at UCLA that you didn’t know previously?

Gabby Gruen: This is going to sound, I, don’t know, not very thoughtful, but theme, Believe it or not, I believe it. It’a word that people don’t understand. When I talked about rank, about giving the story that visual component, I think that that was steame to me. And I think that sort of helped, give a little bit of depth to the story.

Steve Cuden: We’ve already talked about Hal Ackerman and one of the lessons I learned from Hal was, and he taught us very plainly that he says, when you start writing your story, don’t think about theme, think about desire. What does the protagonist want?

Gabby Gruen: Yes.

Steve Cuden: And develop your whole story. And when you’re done, go back and look and figure out what the theme is and then make sure that that’s throughout the story.

Gabby Gruen: Right.

Steve Cuden: Is that your approach as well?

Gabby Gruen: That was my approach, because I had no idea about the theme when I started this. It was only when I started writing the novel I started applying that.

Steve Cuden: Do you have a preference in terms of the way you sit down to write? Do you prefer to write screenplays? Do you prefer to write novels? What do you like better?

Gabby Gruen: Right now I’m just thinking about novels because there’s only so much bandwidth and, maybe I have a bit of an audience. As a novelist, you very well might.

Steve Cuden: What is it that separates screenwriting from novel writing? Is it that detail that you can get in depth?

Gabby Gruen: Oh, yes, absolutely.

Steve Cuden: That’s the main thing, isn’t it?

Gabby Gruen: You know, I don’t have a whole lot of time for reading these days, for reading fiction. But what I do is, I listen to audiobooks and there’s something that it does to me as a listener that such. That is so emotional that that is the depth that I’m seeking. I was about to start writing my mother’s story, my mother’s Holocaust story. And I thought, I need to know about other fiction with female protagonists. So I looked around and I kept on seeing this story called the Women by Chris and Hannah. And it’s about combat nurses in Vietnam. And it was such a thrilling emotional experience. I would be walking down the street sobbing because it reached me that way.

Steve Cuden: As you were listening to it.

Gabby Gruen: As I was listening.

Steve Cuden: So people probably thought you were crazy.

Gabby Gruen: Absolutely.

Steve Cuden: This guy wandering down the street’s crying.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, I didn’t care. I was having just a wonderful transcendent experience walking down the street.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that your years as an advertising copywriter and producer influenced the way that you look at stories and that allows you to feel that emotion?

Gabby Gruen: Maybe superficially, I don’t really see a strong connection to that. For me, advertising was an opportunity to tell jokes and to solve a marketing problem.

Gabby Gruen: You had to solve a marketing problem. But that was, you know, really helpful. I mean, it just sort of made me more mature to learn that stuff.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that your ability to solve marketing problems helps you in the business end of selling books and screenplays?

Gabby Gruen: Not really. Well, maybe. Maybe a little bit. No. You know, when I started, marketing the uniform, I came up with some ads. And I had an ad, for this book that I thought was, you know, pretty strong. And the headline was it explodes when you turn the page. And that was something that I couldn’t have come up with if I hadn’t, you know, gone to work at Shia a day where they really emphasized the value of a good headline with depth and with wordplay.

Steve Cuden: I have a funny feeling you might have come up with it, but you wouldn’t have known what to do with it.

Gabby Gruen: Yes, that’s right.

Steve Cuden: Because I think if somebody, a writer thinks the way that you just thought, with that headline, that explosive headline, they might think to themselves, well, I can’t tell anybody that.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Because that’s not my job. But you immediately think of it as here’s a hook.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And it is really all about hooks, isn’t it?

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, absolutely. You.

Steve Cuden: I think thats a great hook.

Gabby Gruen: I had not done a lot of thrillers, so I didn’t have reason to come up with explosive hooks. So this was a World War II story and explosions were like a common part of it.

Steve Cuden: Well, yeah, that’s an absolutely big part of it. When you have a new story, do you usually outline or you just go.

Gabby Gruen: So my screenplay for the uniform was my outline. I do a little bit of outlining now. Yes, I do. I think one of the things in Paul Chiplic’s class was he really taught you how to deliver a screenplay in a short amount of time. And his outlining technique was really valuable in that, area.

Steve Cuden: So Paul Chitlik, for the listeners that are wondering who he is, Paul Chitllic was a teacher when we were both at school at UCLA at different times. We weren’t in school at the same time, but, he was a teacher there that we both took class from. And Paul’s been on this show twice and he’s maybe one of the finest screenwriting teachers I’ve ever known. And so you’re getting top notch advice and teaching from m someone who really understands what that’s all about.

Gabby Gruen: Oh, absolutely. You know, I mean, I had never been able to write anything sooner, than a year before I took a class with him and all of a sudden I had a, a screenplay in 10 weeks.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s part of the game at UCLA is you, you’re going to get a degree there. You got to write four of them in your time and they’re all within 10 week quarters. So you have to jump through hoops and make it happen. Yeah, it does give you a good training, doesn’t it, for marching your way through a task?

Gabby Gruen: Oh, yes, yes, absolutely. You know, sort of Chiplic’s technique was just so helpful in helping you develop a frame for a story that you can deliver within 10 weeks.

Steve Cuden: Well, and he’s all about the outline.

Gabby Gruen: Yes.

Steve Cuden: He’ll take you through the first six weeks of 10 before you get to your screenplay and then write the screenplay in the last three or four weeks.

Gabby Gruen: That’s right.

Steve Cuden: And it is very effective. If you have a really good detailed outline, you can just go. You write your book off of the screenplay, which is already a developed story. So you could just go. You didn’t have to really. You might have added detail, but you didn’t have to think too hard about the overall.

Gabby Gruen: Right.

Steve Cuden: That’s a grand way to go. Do you work with a certain audience in mind? Are you writing for an audience or are you writing for yourself?

Gabby Gruen: I’m, writing for myself. I think that may be a mistake the way a lot of people think about the business.

Steve Cuden: I’m not so sure. I think if you have taste and you are a good audience member if you think of yourself as you’re in the pack of audience that if you’re writing for yourself, you’re writing for others who are like you.

Gabby Gruen: Huh? Huh? Yeah. Well, I mean, I’m always approaching things from, is this entertaining, Is this thrilling, Is it funny? It’s just engaging. And that’s what I’m always going for.

Steve Cuden: Well, okay, so in the uniform, which I find fascinating in this very bleak setting, very dire life and death, and yet David Cora is filled with a sense of humor. He is very wry, and he says all kinds of things to these people. I think it goes over their heads, but it doesn’t go over the audience. ###ience head that was your intention, wasn’t it?

Gabby Gruen: Yes. Well, I don’t know if I intended it to be a really wry story, but I think that’s my approach to it.

Steve Cuden: Well, the story’s not right, but he is.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah. Yes.

Steve Cuden: I mean, I enjoyed it. Every time he would say something that was like, wow, he’s got balls.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Because he’s saying this to these Nazis.

Gabby Gruen: You know, they’re in such bleak circumstances. And I think that kind of. I don’t know if the word is deadpan, but the ryinus comes out of the, ironic brains of the people who go through it.

Steve Cuden: It also seems to me that this particular character probably knows he’s close to being dead.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And so what has he got to lose? So he says, what’s on his head?

Gabby Gruen: Oh, yes. Hadn’t thought of it that way, but.

Steve Cuden: I think that that’s really great. Yeah. I mean, he just. He has the freedom to say what he feels like.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Because what’s the difference? He doesn’t care anymore. So when you’re writing, do the scenes play out in your mind’s eye before you write them?

Gabby Gruen: I think so. I think so. I mean, well, I don’t know. I’ve done it both ways. If you set out writing without knowing where you’re going, you may go to an interesting place. But if you have, an idea, a frame for a scene, then that comes from an understanding of that world, and it sort of pushes you into the conflict zone, you know? I mean, and that’s always what you want. The more difficult the circumstances, the better.

Steve Cuden: All right, so I think you are a very gifted writer of dialogue. That’s part of what your training is. You obviously came up where you were writing radio ads and so on, and you’re Very gifted with words that communicate quickly through dialogue, which is a certain kind of writing. What do you think makes dialogue work and what do you think writers should think about to avoid in dialogue writing?

Gabby Gruen: I think one thing that immediately comes to mind is it has to be reflection of the character who speaks it. And that gives you a direction that you can then, complicate with conflict. You know what I mean? The dialogue is sort of like an expression of desire, I think. And by laying that out as, a path to follow for the scene, in the scene, you can then oppose it, you know, with a terrible opponent.

Steve Cuden: A difficult opponent, an adversary, an antagonist.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, absolutely.

Steve Cuden: Oh, yeah. Well, you’ve got to have it or there’s no friction.

Gabby Gruen: Otherwise, it’s everything.

Steve Cuden: It is everything. I’m glad you say it that way. Are you a big rewriter?

Gabby Gruen: Well, I guess I am because, I started out just doing simple screenplays. But I think that the novel business has forced me to sort of rethink everything and reconsider it.

Steve Cuden: In what way?

Gabby Gruen: Well, I think I had mentioned that David overcomes his opponent at a certain point in the screenplay.

Steve Cuden: Yes.

Gabby Gruen: You know, I just. To bring back the Fire Sign Theater. I used to talk to Philosn, a wonderful guy. Wonderful guy.

Steve Cuden: So we’re now talking about the fire SC theater that we haven’t talked about in the show. But Gabby worked with Phil Proctor, who’s been on the show a couple times, and the Fire Sign Theater a long time ago. So that’s what we’re now talking about.

Gabby Gruen: And I knew that Phil, Austin had written novels. And I said to him, you know, how do you take 100 page novel and turn it into a 200 page book? And until Austin said to me, that’s when you discover whether you have something to say or not. And I took that thought and, I actually use it today I just started editorializing. That was my takeaway from that. And it seems kind of superficial, but I think it’s been the key to making my stories more interesting.

Steve Cuden: All right. For the listeners that don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you mean by editorializing?

Gabby Gruen: So when you’re writing a scene, you have the events, but, you know, like I say, you had to basically double the content to make a novel. And so editorializing is just me adding, you know, adding filigree to the events, my observations about the place and about the people. And I, had the idea of a horse. I didn’t know what I was going to do. With it. And then I thought I gave the horse some history, that the horse was a participant and a medal winner in Olympics. So there are always ways that you can sort of create, complications to make a story more interesting.

Steve Cuden: I don’t want to say it too detailed, but you’re putting meat on the bone.

Gabby Gruen: Yes, absolutely.

Steve Cuden: And you’re filling things out where there is in a novel. You’re getting this rich detail that you actually have to get rid of in a screenplay.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, that’s right.

Steve Cuden: You can’t add that in the screenplay because the audience is only going to see it or hear it on the screen. They’re not going to read it.

Gabby Gruen: Yes. This is a story about people driven to extremes by anti-Semitism. So anti-Semitism can be discussed, you know, and I would say things about characters and about dealing with that. And what I do a few times is I discussed the subject and I pose questions about it within the narrative.

Steve Cuden: So in order to get to the added dimensions, your posing questions that you then answer. Yes, I think that that’s a, ah, very good way to do it. So it is important that you ask questions in a novel because that’s where the answers come from. You don’t just feed the audience the answers. You have to think the questions up first.

Gabby Gruen: I won’t bet on it because I can’t at the moment think of a question that I asked that I then answered.

Steve Cuden: Oh, I’m sure you had many. yeah, I understand. I have long told people that one of the secrets to being a decent teacher is asking the right questions.

Gabby Gruen: O yeah.

Steve Cuden: Because if you don’t ask the right questions, you’re not going to get the thinking going on in the room. Oh, so that’s an art of itself. And you can ask the wrong questions in a class or in a book and come out with something that’s not useful or valuable. So figuring that out is really important.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Steve Cuden: Do you have any techniques or thoughts toward pitching?

Gabby Gruen: no, no, I’ve never been very good at that. I mean to me the important part of the pitch is just having the log line because I think that that communicates so much that it engages the person that you’re pitching.

Steve Cuden: That is a fact. Well, I have been having a really fabulous conversation for almost an hour with, ah, the great writer Gabby Gruen. And we’re going to wind the show down just a little bit now. And I’m wondering, in all of your experiences, do you have a story that you can share with us? That’s either weird, quirky, offbeat, strange, or just plain funny.

Gabby Gruen: You know, I wrote, a comedy screenplay. It’s called Hamlet vs Godzilla. And I brought it into Hal Ackerman’s class when I was at ucla.

Steve Cuden: Hal Ackerman, who’s been on this show twice.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, yeah. And he said, did you just think of that on your way in? You didn’t really think m much of it, but I still, you know, kind of love the story, you know, to do the send up of Elizabethan dialogue and all of that stuff.

Steve Cuden: But in a horror setting.

Gabby Gruen: Is it a horror setting? No.

Steve Cuden: Well, Godzilla?

Gabby Gruen: Well, yeah, yeah, I guess a quasi-horror. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: All right, so you’ve already given us tons of advice throughout this whole show, but last question is, do you have a single solid piece of advice that you like to give to people who are starting out in the business or maybe they’re in a little bit trying to get to the next level?

Gabby Gruen: Well, I just think that the whole project, the business of trying to advance and getting turned down over and over again, getting feedback that is not that encouraging is the best thing. Because the wounds really not only toughen you up, but it matures you because you end up asking, you end up coming upon these questions, these dramatic questions and figuring it out and learning how to, figure things out. You grind. But if you do it for long enough, it pays off.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s really very wise advice. You can’t gain any kind of knowledge without learning along the way and that usually requires some failure.

Gabby Gruen: Yes.

Steve Cuden: And some things that don’t work and you have to figure out why didn’t it work and how do I make it better?

Gabby Gruen: Yes, absolutely.

Steve Cuden: And I have to assume that you have had your share of down a dead end road as you’re writing. That didn’t work. Okay, I’m going to cut that and we’re going to do something different.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, yeah. It wasn’t necessarily me responding directly to that comment. It was just learning from it, you know.

Steve Cuden: Learning from it.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah, yeah.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s the way that you do learn is by, going into those places where either you’re learning it on your own or somebody giving you feedback like an audience is giving you feedback.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And it’s the only way to learn.

Gabby Gruen: True.

Steve Cuden: I don’t think otherwise. You can.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: You know, George Bernard Shaw, who was a relatively decent writer but not a very good man, once famously said, a man who makes no mistakes makes nothing at all.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: So I think that’s a really important concept that you have to make mistakes and be willing to accept them and embrace them. In fact.

Gabby Gruen: In fact, the second part of that for me was that you have to get to the place where you’re open enough to changing, where you’re willing to take that kind of feedback and imbue your work with, your wisdom.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s also a great piece of advice is you have to be willing to be open.

Gabby Gruen: Yes.

Steve Cuden: Because there are legions of stories of writers who go in and they just refuse to listen to anybody’s thoughts.

Gabby Gruen: m. Absolutely.

Steve Cuden: And when that happens, nothing happens.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah. I think I was guilty of that when I was younger.

Steve Cuden: Well, I think many people are. Because it’s precious to you, what you’re doing early on in life, and later on you realize it’s not quite as precious as you think and you’re willing to let that go a little bit.

Gabby Gruen: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Don’t you feel that for yourself at this point that, you know, if somebody came along and gave you a solid piece of notes on a book or something, you may not take all the notes, but you at least pay attention to them?

Gabby Gruen: Absolutely. There’s no question.

Steve Cuden: Yeah. I think that’s the way you have to be. Gabby Gruen, this has been an absolutely wonderful hour on StoryBeat today, and I cannot thank you enough for your time, your energy, and your wisdom. And I hope that you continue to write and that people will go out and buy the uniform and read it.

Gabby Gruen: Oh, thank you, dav. It’s been a pleasure.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat. If you like this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you’re listening to? Your support helps us bring more great StoryBeat episodes to you. StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Tune in, and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden, and may all your stories be unforgettable.