We have a special treat for listeners in this episode as DePauw University’s Jordan Sjol sits down with acclaimed playwright, screenwriter, and TV writer José Rivera for a conversation about his journey from playwriting to Hollywood, writing across different media, adapting literary classics, and balancing artistic integrity with commercial demands.

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SHOW NOTES
José Rivera
Motorcycle Diaries (Feature film)
Blood Wedding (Stage play)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Television series)
Eerie, Indiana (Television series)
Sueño (Stage play)
Life is a Dream (Stage play)
The House of Ramon Iglesia (Stage play)
Walter Salles
Central Station (Feature film)
Caryl Chruchill
The Dybbuk (Stage play)
References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot (Stage play)
Marisol (Stage play)
Cloud Tectonics (Stage play)
Sonnets for an Old Century (Stage play)
Letters to Juliet (Feature film)
On the Road (Feature film)
Jordan Sjol
DePauw University

Banter
KCRW’s The Business podcast
Jordan Sjol episode of Aca-Media
Northern Exposure Streaming
The Rehearsal Streaming
Paramount reportedly had no idea Nathan Fielder was going to do them like that

Episode 80 Transcript

*Theme Music*

Christine Becker 00:13

Welcome to Aca-Media, presented by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. I am Christine Becker.

Michael Kackman 00:19

And I am Michael Kackman.

Christine Becker 00:20

We are joining you from sunny South Bend, Indiana, ... technically cloudy and like 50 degrees. But it's still spring. It counts as spring.

Michael Kackman 00:20

Take every win.

Christine Becker 00:23

Yep. And we are at nearly the end of our semester, so we hope you all are someplace tolerable in your semesters or quarters. It's been a, it's been, it's been a semester, I guess is what I can say.

Michael Kackman 00:44

Yeah, it's been a time. Ugh. I don't have anything wise to say. I've been, I kind of got in the habit in my classes this semester to, like, just begin class by asking them who had good news, like, who's got something good to talk about. And, you know, it could be a job or, you know, just like, watched a good episode of TV or something. And for a while I was telling myself that I was doing this because, you know, I felt like they needed it. But of course, it wasn't about them.

Christine Becker 01:14

Yeah, well, also. so we have now a two-semester History of Television sequence, and you did Part Two this semester. And then a number of your students come right into my Media Industries class just after that, and I got to say, you, you, you leave them a little depressed about the state of of the world so... And then they come into mine, and it's, um...

Michael Kackman 01:36

We're not going to make it better, kid.

Christine Becker 01:38

No, no. And it's, it's just difficult, and, you know, deciding what, what, what do they need to know about, because that's the other thing. It's, you know, I always try to stay in my lane and just teach what my topic is, but especially things that the Trump administration are doing are seeping into every single aspect of our lives. And so, so much of my class, and I start out the class with what I call news banter inspired by KCRW's The Business podcast, which I'll give a shout out to. It's fantastic. And they start out with banter. And so we do that, like the students bring in news stories and I bring in industry stories. And by the end of the semester, I decided I have to end news banter now with a happy story or good news, like the big one near the end was how well Siners did at the box office, and the idea that people are maybe going back to movie theaters. Because otherwise, I was ending on whatever the latest nightmare was, and like, okay, now let's talk about distribution, whatever. It was a tough shift. So...

Michael Kackman 02:35

Yeah, it's been a grizzly semester for that kind of thing. And I'm sure we are not alone in that experience,

Christine Becker 02:41

Yep. Well, now let's move to our interview! (laughs)

Michael Kackman 02:45

Okay!

Christine Becker 02:47

Yeah, here we go. So we have a really special event here. This is an interview of playwright and screenwriter Jose Rivera, and this is an interview conducted by Jordan Sjol, who has been on our podcast before. And also want to give a shout out to Jonathan Nichols-Pethick, who brought this to us. So we're extremely excited to have this, this interview, great interview, great interviewee. And so we're super excited about this.

Michael Kackman 03:11

Yeah, this is a good one, and it's a, it's a really nice snapshot of, I really like hearing people talk about kind of the weird stuff in their career, like all the kind of goofy steps along the way that only in retrospect start to cohere as a career. And I think there's some of that here.

Christine Becker 03:26

We should also note, as they do in the interview, this was recorded on January 21st, so politics comes up, but just keep in mind, this was recorded before we fully knew what all was going to happen in the next few months. Let me also give you a bio for Jose Rivera. He was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but his family moved to New York City when he was four, and then when he was 12, he saw a performance of the play Rumpelstiltskin, and the audience reaction to it inspired him to become a playwright. So his plays include Cloud Tectonics, Marisol, References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, and Adoration of the Old Woman. He's won two Obie awards for playwriting. He's also written for television, including Norman Lear's AKA Pablo, and he co-created the series Erie, Indiana. But he's most famous as a film writer, in particular for writing the screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries based on Che Guevara's memoir that earned him an Oscar nomination in 2005. So here we go, Jordan Sjol interviewing Jose Rivera.

*Interstitial Music*

(José Rivera interviewed by Jordan Sjol)

JS: So why don't you tell me a little bit about how you fell in love with playwriting?

JR: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I fell in love very early in life. I wanted to be an actor for a short, short time. But, yeah, I was lucky to go to a really good public school that had a theater and a black box theater and an orchestra - one of those well-stocked schools. So, I was exposed to a lot of really good work, very young and performed in a lot of plays. But it was reading The Glass Menagerie that kind of like hooked me like a drug. And I said, "I love this, I want to do this very thing." And started writing plays in high school, and that continued in college. And then I didn't go to graduate school after college, but went to New York and kind of learned on the streets, as it were, and just watched and hung out with older writers who were happy to sort of take in a young kid and teach them a few things. So that's really how it all began for me.

JS: What did you find yourself gravitating towards in those early plays, the first ones that you wrote? What was the sort of thing that sparked your imagination in terms of your own content, what you wanted to write about?

JR: Yeah, I think early on a lot of things just came from life experience. So one of my after school jobs was at this factory that employed young people who had Down syndrome, for instance, or had some kind of learning disabilities. And I was a volunteer. I went there and I would talk to the kids and help them with their projects and stuff like that. And I wrote a play about that and so almost everything that I had done early in life especially, was really just in a way, recording dramatically what my life experience was at the time.

JS: And over the course of your career, do you feel like that has changed? Do you still start from a very personal place, or do you often find yourself starting more in invention?

JR: Yeah, I think it's now become a hybrid of the two. So virtually everything I do has a deeply personal component. So the play that we're reading tomorrow here at the school just started from an actual night that I spent watching an eclipse in Brooklyn with a bunch of people in a basketball court. So everything I do has that kind of personal inspiration spark or origin. But then I do like to invent things. And there are two characters in this basketball court play that are from another dimension who come to our dimension through the portal created by the lunar eclipse. So obviously not real. But to me, that was the fun part. That to me lifted the play from kind of just kitchen sink realism into something more theatrical and fun for me to write and hopefully for an audience, you know. So yeah, I have I've written autobiographical plays. I'm from Puerto Rico; I've written plays about Puerto Rican independence or my parents immigrant experience, that kind of thing. You know, if it doesn't have a deeply felt core, I don't even attempt to write it.

JS: So you had moved to New York, you were writing plays. You were meeting artists, and you started writing for the screen with television. Is that right? How did you get into that?

JR: Yeah. So in 1983, my very first play was produced in New York called The House of Ramon Iglesia. It's about my family, and as dumb luck would have it, Norman Lear, the TV producer, was looking for a writer for a series he was developing about a Chicano family living in LA, and his executive had seen the play. It got a good review in the New York Times. And suddenly, lo and behold, I was in the room with Norman Lear having a meeting, and he liked me. And I liked him, and he hired me on the spot to work on the series. And I said to Sir Norman, I don't even own a television. I don't know anything. I'm not funny. I don't know why you want me for a sitcom. I'm not Chicano. You know, there's so many reasons not to hire me. But I think he thought that was all very charming and funny and hired me.

JS: I'm sure there are not many writers in a room with Norman Lear who would try and talk their way out of a job.

JR: I know I was just like, let's be honest here. So yeah. So I moved with my then wife, from Brooklyn to LA, which was a culture shock. And, unfortunately, I was the only Latino on the writing staff, which is a problem. And as I said to Norman, I said, look, the experience of Chicanos in LA is so foreign to me, being a Puerto Rican from New York. But he didn't seem to care or it didn't worry him. And the show is not a good show, to be honest. It was too big. It was a big family. Norman was experimenting because usually sitcoms are three cameras. He had, like, nine. I mean, it was just a mess. And so we were cancelled after the end of, I don't know, six episodes or something. It was on ABC. And they kept me on salary for a while. I ended up working on another sitcom and I was miserable. And at the end of that experience, I went back to New York. I said, to hell with this, this is nuts. But then again, my ex and I had had a child; suddenly we have a two-year old and no money. So we went back to LA and I had an idea for a TV series, which can be summarized in two words. Maybe it's three. Teenage Twilight Zone was the idea, and I pitched that to my agents and they said, that's brilliant. Oh my God. And so it just it was just a crazy experience. I was paired up with a writer from ICM, which is my agency. And I had an idea, but I didn't have a deal. He had a deal, but no ideas. So they thought they would put us together. And we end up selling it to NBC, and that became a series called Eerie, Indiana, which was on the air for one season.

JS: I've been watching Eerie, Indiana. It's a delight. It's so fun.

JR: Oh, good. I'm glad. Yeah, we had fun doing it. And I had fun. I was the co-creator and producer on that series, and I had a great time writing them and overseeing production and stuff like that. And I didn't know anything about production at all. And it was shot on 35-millimeter, just like an old-fashioned movie. Joe Dante directed the pilot and several episodes. So it was a good production. And I had never been involved in a shoot and I had never been involved in post-production. So all that was new to me, and I was just learning and learning every day, which was great. Unfortunately, we were at the bottom of the ratings barrel, and we were on at the same time as 60 Minutes, which was the top-rated show of its time. And we were decimated in the ratings and we would beg NBC to change this time slot. A half-hour sooner or a half-hour later. That would help. But they refused to do it. And the show was like the sacrificial lamb, and we died. I was deeply disillusioned by that experience and I said never again am I doing television. I hate television, I hate television people, I hate the networks. And so I started writing screenplays. So I went from one fire into another. And that's really how that all began.

JS: And I know that you worked in film writing screenplays for a while before The Motorcycle Diaries. I'd love to hear just about Motorcycle Diaries, how that came about, and how that changed your career.

JR: The short answer is I spent 14 years writing screenplays that never got made. So, I mean, I made a living. I put my kids through private school, I bought a house, we got out of our debt, and every year I would get another assignment. Oh, here's a screenplay for Michelle Pfeiffer. Here's a remake for Disney. Here's a rewrite for someone else. And I would take the assignments and I would do my best, and then nothing would ever happen. And so for 14 years, I thought, well, that's screenwriting life. You know, you write things that are never seen. And then I get a call from my manager and he says Walter Salles, the Brazilian director, is looking for a writer on this project based on The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara. Are you interested? Do you want to meet Walter? And I thought, oh, that sounds really interesting. And I hadn't read the book, so I didn't know anything about it. And I hadn't seen Central Station, which was the film that was nominated for Best Foreign Film. And so I quickly got a copy of Central Station and watched it like the day before I met Walter. And I loved it. Oh, it's such a beautiful movie. It's such a gorgeous film. But I said to myself, wow, if Walter is nothing like this movie, I'm going to be so disappointed. So we met. It wasn't the Beverly Hills Hotel, but it was a hotel in Beverly Hills. We met for lunch and I had just had an anthology of my plays published, so I brought one for Walter as a gift, which he found very charming.

JR: And he's just a charming man, very cultured, speaks seven languages. You know, his father was an ambassador to France. He just came from a very different background than mine. But we got along so well. And also, I think he felt that I wasn't intimidated by this project. You know, like a lot of people, I knew about Che, but I didn't know the nitty gritty. And so I wasn't either deeply for or against him. And so I think that helped a lot. For him, it was funny because he had announced to the industry that he was looking for a writer. So every agent in Hollywood sent him a screenplay. And so he had a stack of screenplays on his desk from ICM, William Morris, you name it. And he didn't want to read any of them. So he had his assistant read all the screenplays because he didn't want to. And afterwards he said to her, is there anything in that pile worth reading? Anything good in there? And she says, yeah, there's this one screenplay I really, really liked. And it was the screenplay I had written on spec called Lucky, and she just loved it. And so of all the screenplays, that's the one she passed on to Walter to read, and he liked it. So on the basis of that, that's when he decided to have lunch with me.

JS: Great luck again. And of course, having a strong spec that's out in the world will get you these opportunities if the spec is strong enough, of course. But I would like to ask, I think related to that, about the sort of psychic economy of your own investment in playwriting, in writing for TV, because I know you're back to TV now with One Hundred Years of Solitude, though a very different form of TV than the network sitcom. And you've written for film for such a long time. And especially because your playwriting seems to generally be coming from your own impetus. And so much of your film is...you are working on projects that other people have initiated. I'd just love to hear about your own attachments to your different types of work that you do.

JR: The one-line answer, and it's not very romantic, is that I write movies for money and I write plays for love. I don't need to be paid to write a play. In fact, you can't stop me from writing a play. I'm always writing a play, and so that's just a natural impulse on my part. And if I didn't have to make a living, I wouldn't write films. I just wouldn't. But somewhere along the line, around the time of The Motorcycle Diaries, which was 2005, I started really falling in love with the craft of writing screenplays, and I became a real student of screenplays and movies, you know? So I would, like, watch Casablanca time and time again to, like, how did they do that, you know. Or The Godfather, and I think I became a better writer of screenplays when I started to respect the form more because I had grown up in the 70s, with really schlocky movies like Towering Inferno and all that junk. And I just didn't know, you know? Then I took a film history class and I was like, oh my God, there's this filmmaker named Renoir and this film and Méliès and Orson Welles. And I'd never heard of these people. And I didn't understand that film was an art form until then, until I was watching these great films. And I thought, oh, okay, I don't know if I can write at that level, but it's certainly something to aspire to, you know? And I became a much better screenwriter that way. And so generally I juggle the two. A lot of it comes down to like, okay, what's my bank book look like today? You know, I've been lucky in the sense that the screen work comes to me. I don't have to go hustle like I used to. I used to do that a lot, but not anymore. And so I'll get offers or things will come in. And I generally say yes to everything if it has any kind of interesting hook to it. So I wrote a film about Greenpeace and I wrote a play about Cesar Milan. Do you know him? The Dog Whisperer? I wrote a play about him, a screenplay about him. So if the subject is that semi-interesting, I'll usually...and if I don't know much about it, I'll say yes, because I'm curious. I want to know. One of my heroes in the screenwriting world is Rod Serling. And Rod had a problem, apparently, with not being able to say no, and he would take on too many projects and not be good at them. So I have fallen into that pattern sometimes where - not so much anymore - but at a certain time I was just taking on too much and I wasn't good at any of them.

JS: Part of the way that you even talk about your playwriting and your screenwriting, too, I think reflects a very different approach to the craft of them as well. You know, talking about screenwriting as something that you do for hire, something that is a job. You know, you are a worker, a professional with words. I think in some ways reflects all of the genre expectations. All of the ways that screenplays are following the form and playing with the form. But also we know what a screenplay looks like and what the expectations of screenplays are. Whereas your plays, I mean, many people describe your plays as being rule breaking, but there is a different way that you seem to be playing with expectations there. And I'd love to hear just more about your approach to the craft of your media.

JR: Sure, yeah. I mean, I think for me, I guess if I have a formula for plays or a rule, it would be form follows function. And so when I teach playwriting, I teach this idea that there are no genres in theater, but there are a million genres in theater. Meaning Pinter is a genre, Chekhov is a genre, Caryl Churchill is a genre, and they have created a form unique to their voices. And that's what that is. You, young writer, you don't have a genre yet. You're just starting out. But strive to create that, to be your own genre. And so that's what I've tried to do. And it's funny because my genre, if I have a genre, is no genre. Meaning every single play is different from the previous play. And Caryl Churchill writes that way. Like you read two of her plays, you go, this can't be written by the same person. And I kind of love that. And so I like to establish rules of one play and break those same rules in the next play. You know, write a tight kitchen sink drama and then write something completely bonkers. And that's fun because as I said earlier, I don't do it for money. The money in theater is not very good, and so what I get out of it is the satisfaction of the artistry of it. And that's really where...that's the treasure of writing theater. You know, the film world likes to pigeonhole writers. Puts you in a category. Oh, you're the rom com writer. You're the historical drama writer. You know, you're the mystery writer.

JS: You do magical realism.

JR: Yeah, I do magical realism. Yeah, but I have fallen into a bit of a not a rut, but a kind of category, which is: I can adapt novels very well. And so One Hundred Years of Solitude, On the Road, which some people would say is not very well done. But I adapted a novel called American Rust into a film. Oh, and I did - even though a movie never got made - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao into a film, which would have been a great film, but I can't get into the horror story of it. But it did not go anywhere. But that's sort of like, I guess if I have a lane in this business is that I'm good at adapting literature and there's some great books I really want to adapt, and I can't read a novel without thinking of the movie. Unfortunately, I just read this incredible novel by a Norwegian writer called Septology, which is 600 pages long and is, like, gorgeous. And I kept thinking, oh man, please let me make this into a movie.

JS: But yeah, it was quite an occupational hazard to always have the images running through your head in a very cinematic way.

JR: Yeah. Like oh yeah. Is this a close up or is this a two shot or.

Where's the first act end?

JR: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

JS: But you've also done adaptation in theatre, right? Sueño adapts the Pedro Calderon de la Barca Life is a Dream. What's your approach to adapting in theatre?

JR: Yeah, I mean, I think what I try to do is pretend - like when I was working on the Calderon piece, I tried to pretend that I was Calderon living right now. And if I were to write Life is a Dream, how would I do it today? You know? So with that, I changed certain things. Like the original play is set in a sort of vague Dark ages, Middle Ages of Europe and set in Poland, a kind of fictional Poland. And I thought, no, no, no, I don't want to do it that way. I want to set the play in the year it was written. It was 1621, I think. And I want to set it in Spain. And so the king, who was in the original a Polish king, is now the King of Spain dealing with colonizing a new world. And what is that all about? So those changes were really fun to do. I mean, I kept Calderon's plots because I'm not I'm not good at plot, I have to say. And so but what I did change were the nature of his language and his metaphors. So, for instance, the character of Segismundo is trapped in a tower, and he's miserable; he's lived there all his life. And the Calderon lines are beautiful descriptions of his misery and his yearning to be with people and God and everything. And I was thinking, what would be a good metaphor for that kind of misery? And so I wrote this line that could never have been written at the time. It's completely anachronistic. And he says, I am the soul of polio and anthrax, and that's how he described his misery. And so you have this 17th century character saying that. And it's like weird but theatrical. And so to me that I look for the ways in which I can theatricalize this classic. One of my very first adaptations was, I don't know if you know the play The Dybbuk, you know.

JS: Oh, yes.

JR: Yeah. Great classic of the Yiddish theater, which I love that play. So I took that play and put it in a Puerto Rican ghetto and - basically the same story, you know? So that kind of stuff. I find it a lot of fun.

JS: You've mentioned working with I mean, obviously Life is a Dream is a classic of the golden age of Spanish drama. The Dybbuk is a classic in its own right, of course. One Hundred Years of Solitude is incredibly, incredibly culturally important. You know, people have very strong attachments to Che Guevara. People have very strong attachments to On the Road. So having worked with such sort of momentous material, I'd like to ask you about the sort of sense of responsibility around that. And I think in two ways. The first is just that I can't imagine any writer not being nervous tackling such momentous things, but also just in terms of your responsibility to the material, to the people who actually...to the cultural heritage, what you imagine your own role being.

JR: Yeah, it's a very good question. I mean, I think I take the responsibility very seriously. I once was asked to adapt Blood Wedding into a Broadway musical, which is fishy at best. And then I heard that the producer wanted to hire Ricky Martin and J-Lo as the leads, and I thought to myself, I just don't want to be the guy that ruined Blood Wedding for a generation. I will not be that. So I quit the project. I didn't do that. That's the one I didn't do. But for these, yeah, I mean, I you got to love the material. So I loved On the Road and One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, those things that I adapted. And I think starting from that love that is love but not worship. You know, if you worship it, then you're dead. If you're intimidated by the meaning of what you're doing, you're dead. I had to take the enormous cultural importance of each work and just put it aside and say, I'm not dealing with that. I'm dealing with mundane day to day problems of adaptation. And how do I get from point A to point B in this story and to do it with some originality? And so to me, I really had to divorce myself from what it was that I was really doing, which was tinkering with classics and masterpieces. I had to stop thinking about it. I would have been paralyzed if I really took in the enormity of adapting The Motorcycle Diaries. I wouldn't have. When I was hired, people warned me to get an unlisted phone number because the conservatives in Miami were going to kill me, which didn't happen. But if I had really taken that seriously, I don't know if I could have continued, you know?

JS: Well, it's at very least an incredibly impressive capacity for compartmentalization. Which is very good. But also, I mean, you studied under Garcia Marquez at Sundance, too. Was his was his voice not in your head as you tried to...

JR: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, he did say to us point blank. He said, I wrote this book so it can never be done on film. And he was very proud of that. And when you read the book, you go, yeah, he did. He accomplished that. But I don't think even he had imagined a television series for that book, a limited series, sixteen episodes. So when you break it down into sixteen one-hour episodes, you can do that book.

JS: And you wrote all of the episodes for that?

JR: Yes, I was the first writer to tackle it. And so I wrote 16 one-hour episodes and kind of like turned that massive novel into television. But when production happened, I wasn't in Colombia. So all that happened down there. And there were, I think it's three writers who then took my scripts and tinkered with them, made some cuts, rearranged some scenes, mostly for budgetary reasons. And so when you see it, you go, oh, yeah, that's my work. But it's also the work of other people.

JS: But not a traditional writer's room where you were all writing together.

JR: Yeah, I wasn't part of it. I think they were. Because when I was working on the series by myself, it was mostly during the pandemic. And so no writer's room existed at the time. So after that happened, the writers came together in Colombia. But they were there for production.

JS: Okay.

JR: You know, it wasn't like...they were not inventing the wheel.

JS: So you need a rewrite, you need to bring scenes together, you need to sort of adjust things there. They're the writers on the scene.

JR: Yes. And they did a good job. I mean, they're very, very, very skillful.

JS: So obviously One Hundred Years is an extremely political book, and you've worked with a lot of very political material. As I was watching Eerie, Indiana, it occurred to me that some of those are also quite political episodes, despite being a kids show. There's an episode about a school nurse who has the support of the administration to sort of zombify the students with hypnosis so that they can have higher test scores. Which I know this is still a decade before No Child Left Behind, but seems pretty on the pulse.

JR: And that was a metaphor for Scientology.

JS: For Scientology. I see. Okay. There's also an episode with a sort of fantastical Bureau of Lost Items that I really like, which is a sort of scheme for planned obsolescence, so that people will buy things to keep the economy going, which again in the early 90s feels...

JR: There were buses taking people to the mall. If you remember that.

JS: Yeah, yeah. And then, of course, in your plays, you're approaching politics again from a very different angle. I think References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot, which is a wonderful title, by the way, is tagged - time period is tagged as shortly after the first Persian Gulf War. And the play - through an interpersonal relationship - processes the sort of effects of war on a family. But it's also a play with a talking cat and coyote and a sort of Lorca-esque animate moon who's a bit of a letch...

JR: Big time.

JS: I'd just love to hear your thoughts about the way that politics are in your work.

JR: Yeah. I'll go back to Eerie for just a second, because I wrote an episode that was so political and never made it, never got on the air. And that was about a kid who's kind of a rebel. And he listened to this hardcore metal band called Pitbull Surfers. And he also had a very abusive father, so the father was always yelling at him like, you're a loser, you're a punk. I can't believe you're my son...over and over again. The kid was just like, and so the kid ends up stealing a car, and the cops take the kid to the house and the father says, see, it's the rock n roll. It's the rock n roll that made him do that. If you play the songs backwards, you hear the satanic messages. And he says, look, I'll show you. He puts a record on the thing he plays, spins it backwards, and what you hear out of the speakers is the father's voice abusing the son. You're a loser. You're a jerk. And that's how the episode ends. Well, it was too much for the head of NBC. And he literally said to me, he says, as long as I'm the head of this network, that episode will never go on the air. It was shot. They spent a lot of money.

JS: Really?

JR: Yeah, it was shot. It was quite good, but I think there was just too political for that. I mean, I think politics is required of a writer. You know, if you're conscious, if you have half a pulse and you think about what's happening and you're worried about the people in your lives and the larger community, you can't help it. You know, and I can't help it. And so we're about we're entering a new political era. And so interesting to see what happens in the arts in film and TV. Because what could happen is that everyone just bows and rolls over and plays dead. And I'm not going to make waves. You know, that can happen. I hope that doesn't happen. I hope there's still enough rebellious spirit in the arts, you know? But I'm not that confident. I mean, I'm just not. So we'll see. But I think, I mean the Persian Gulf War had a big impact on my family. Two of my brothers were there. One was in a tank and fought in the largest tank battle since World War II in the desert. And my other brother was what they call a forward observer. And so, yeah, I took that very personally, I took that war very personally. I was very against it. And I wanted to see I wanted to explore the idea of what happens when the war comes home. What happens in the bedroom? And what happens in this couple? And so that was, to me, the reason to write the play.

JS: And speaking of this, "How are the arts going to react to the upcoming political scene?" we're recording this on January 21st we should say. You are in two such very different industries, right? And in part in part because film costs so much money and make so much money and is run by many people who are exclusively interested in making money which you do not necessarily go into theatre if making money is your primary goal. So I wonder if you just have thoughts about what you expect to see coming up.

JR: Yeah, I mean, I think everyone's going to have choices to make. And people, even the people who have huge financial interests in film, will have choices to make. And it's all going to depend on what those choices are. I will have to respond to the marketplace as it happens. And I am in my late 60s so I could retire, and have thought of that. I said, you know what? If it's just too crazy, if it becomes something I can't believe in anymore, I'll just retire from film and just write my plays. But yeah, it's very concerning. I mean, I came of age in the 60s and very inspired by, like, the life of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and all that stuff. And, I really wanted to be an artist because of them in a lot of ways. And I don't know where a young person finds inspiration politically anymore, at least to be an artist. I think people find inspiration to do lots of other stuff.

JS: Yeah. Well, you mentioned retirement, so I'm going to ask a question about sort of retrospection. You've built up such a huge body of work over your career. So if you imagine someday many years down the line, when people are looking back at your body of work, are there particular things that you would most want to be remembered or you would most want people to take thematically or in terms of your commitments?

JR: Yeah, I mean, I am very proud of some of the plays I wrote. References to Salvador Dali is one, Marisol, Sueño, Cloud Tectonics, Sonnets for an Old Century. You know, these are plays that I just poured my heart and soul into them, and I want to be remembered for them. You know, fortunately, they are taught in schools. So something is staying alive. Somebody once asked Tony Kushner what his definition of fame was? And he says, when they produce your plays in college, so I dig that definition a lot. Yeah. In terms of film, I mean, I think my record is spotty. Fully 90% of what I wrote never got made. So how do I judge that? How does anyone judge that? It's just paper at this point. The films that I have had made, I'm very proud of The Motorcycle Diaries. You know, I think On the Road is a very imperfect film for many reasons. I had had written and there was fired from a film called Letters to Juliet, which, take it or leave it. So I don't have, until One Hundred Years of Solitude, a body of anything that I felt super, super proud of. Like that's something I'm proud of, you know? And I am proud of Eerie, Indiana. And so it's sort of like if you ignore the ones that were written and never made, then I have a very patchy past.

JS: So we're here at DePauw University, and I know that you have taught a good number of times, and you've been working with students here, and I teach screenwriting here. And I'd be interested if you have pieces of advice that come to mind first for young playwrights, for young screenwriters, for young writers; things that you think are most important to know when you're at the beginning of your journey.

JR: Yeah. I think one of the most important things to know is that it's a long journey. I tell students it's a lifetime apprenticeship. You will never know it all. No one will ever know it all. If you're not constantly learning, then something is wrong, you know. And be prepared for that. Be prepared to not know what you're doing for a long time and to slowly accumulate skill. I'm just going to take talent as a given with students, I always do, but it's the level of skill and craft that will improve with time. And it will get better. You know, I used to write endless drafts of my plays because I didn't know what I was doing, and now I can write a play in two drafts and it'll be solid. I don't waste time like that anymore. Both fields are dependent on relationships, on the kind of relationships you have with people. Keep those relationships pure and honest. Don't steal from your friends. Don't stab people in the back. Remember that people will talk about you and you want them to say only good things. And that's about your craft as a writer, but you as a person: that, oh, yeah, that person, you know, he'll keep his word. If he says he's going to do something, he'll do it. It's really, really important that that follow you wherever you go; the good reputation is part of....it's on your resume in a way. Patience. I always preach a lot of patience: that impatience and exhaustion are two of your biggest enemies. Not bad agents, not whatever. It's just your own making up deadlines that are artificial, like: Oh, I've got to get a play on Broadway at the time I'm 30, or I've got to publish a novel, or whatever. I just think those things are deadly and counterproductive, you know? So I always preach patience. This is going to sound odd, but it's really important who your partner is. If you have a partner that doesn't support you 100% in your work, then it's very difficult to get anything done. You're always fighting them and yourself. Not that you have to have a doormat for a partner; that's not fun either. But somebody who celebrates what you're doing, and knows that it's valuable, isn't going to nag you into, like, go into real estate and go to dentist school or something. It's really, really important who you have at home, you know? Yeah, I think those are sort of the big ones. Work hard, know the field really well. Know the history of film if you're going into film. Know the history of theater if you're doing that. I'm shocked sometimes to talk to students, young film screenwriters who don't know, like, they hadn't heard of - they knew Casablanca, but don't know much more. And hadn't seen The Third Man or know what film noir is or the French New Wave or the Czech New Wave. That's important to know that stuff. It's part of your history and can be so inspiring. You're going to watch The 400 Blows or whatever those movies are, and some of them are great. I think it's really important. And in theater, too: know your Lorca, know your Ibsen, know your Chekhov, know your Sam Shepard. That kind of stuff is really key.

JS: Those are all really great pieces of advice.

JR: Good.

JS: Thank you so much, José Rivera, for coming in and talking to us.

JR: Thank you. It's my pleasure.

*Interstitial Music*

Michael Kackman 45:16

All right, that was a great interview.

Christine Becker 45:18

Yeah, I really love, and especially the fact that he's worked in multiple forms of media, and especially the one that stood out to me was that he writes plays for free and movies for money. That says a lot.

Michael Kackman 45:29

Yeah, and I think that that probably is going to resonate with a lot of people. That's a, that's a common challenge working in creative media industries, right? You know that the projects that pay the rent and the projects that are passion projects are not necessarily the same things

Christine Becker 45:44

Well and this, speaking as we were in the first part of the podcast about the state of the media industries, this was one of those depressing topics that came up continually in my class especially was the state of independent media and independent filmmakers who want to tell original stories or radical stories, and the constriction within the industry about the ability to do that, and so you know that also kind of really throws into relief the challenges that any artist has today. So even if you want to do movies for money, that can also be difficult.

Michael Kackman 46:11

Yes, indeed. And as Rivera says, there are some hard choices to make.

Christine Becker 46:17

Yes, everybody's going to have choices to make. He said that one stood out to me, too.

Michael Kackman 46:21

Yeah.

Christine Becker 46:22

And then one other thing I wanted to, especially as we also reflected in the first part there, on teaching, that idea of telling your students know your field, know your history, I always love telling our Media Industries students, like, if you want to work in the film industry, if you want to be a director, work in development, whatever it is, you gotta know your film history. You know, you have to know you have to know what's come before you, and then it's also what everybody in the industry talks about, right? They, they love movies and TV. Certainly, whatever things are on now are important, but you know, you want to be able to make references to past artworks and so knowing your field, knowing your history, I think it's another really good lesson.

Michael Kackman 46:56

Not a bad one, not a bad one at all. Speaking of knowing your history, this isn't reaching too terribly far back, but I have, over the past several months, been going back and watching some older TV series.

Christine Becker 47:09

Oh, nice.

Michael Kackman 47:10

And honestly, because it's because, you know, I've got, like, this whole, like, a pile of dystopian misery that, and I'm not talking about reality, I'm just talking about TV shows that I have queued up that I know I want to watch. But, you know, I like the Scandinavian noir stuff and Severance I need to get back into. And, you know, The Last of Us, heartwarming tales about the power of the human spirit, for sure. And I know I'm going to want to get back into those. You know, this summer, when the sun is shining and, you know, hopefully there's a little bit more distance from everyday reality. But I have to say that one of the things that's been really good for my mental health during this semester has been re watching Northern Exposure.

Christine Becker 47:54

Oh, nice.

Michael Kackman 47:55

Which is, you know, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on it. Apologies to Jane Shattuc, who had to read a lot of mess about that so many years ago. But much of it ages really, really well, and mostly because it's like kind of a community of oddballs that are mostly kind to one another. And it's sort of refreshing and nice, and it's also very episodic. There's a little it has some seriality to it, but it's pretty self contained, so it's pretty easy to dip in and out.

Christine Becker 48:27

And I can see that being a show that holds up well culturally, especially, you know, a show that's kind of about its own unique little world, rather than trying to capture something realistic about that world in the moment, is something that that can hold up.

Michael Kackman 48:39

Yeah, and it and it's definitely ambitious. It's ambitious aesthetically, in terms of its storytelling and and sometimes visual techniques, but it's also fairly ambitious culturally, you know, it is, it's dealing with race and ethnicity and gender in interesting ways. I think some of it is like, I was kind of worried that it would be a little cringy with the way that it deals with particularly the Native American culture, and sometimes it's a little quaint, but I think especially for its time, it's really trying to build a different kind of story world. And I think that's kind of nice to see.

Christine Becker 49:15

That's great.

Michael Kackman 49:16

It's not not perfect, but definitely interesting. All right, so there's our viewing recommendation for this episode. That's mine. I don't know if you have any-

Christine Becker 49:24

What streamers is it on?

Michael Kackman 49:26

it's on Amazon.

Christine Becker 49:26

Okay, all right.

Michael Kackman 49:28

Yeah. And it took, it had not been released for a very long time. I think it's one of those shows that probably got held up on music rights. But it's there, and and the music is actually, you know, the soundtrack stuff, the score is good too, but the the commercial music that's in the that's in episodes is often really, really great.

Christine Becker 49:46

Um, yeah, I'm watching all current stuff right now, and of course, one of them being The Studio, right? A satire about the state of the industry.

Michael Kackman 49:55

Ah right.

Christine Becker 49:55

But I found even more trenchant industry satire in The Rehearsal. So the second season of Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal has just started, and the second episode in particular has a brilliant take down of Paramount+. So I don't want to spoil anything about it, because you know, if you've watched any of The Rehearsal, you never know what's gonna, what turn it's gonna take. And so I don't want to spoil any of the turns. But especially anyone out there who studies media industries: second episode. You have to watch the first episode, but the second episode has a brilliant little bit.

Michael Kackman 50:27

Okay, good. I will put that in the queue as well.

Christine Becker 50:30

Right.

Michael Kackman 50:30

All right. None of this would be possible without the help of SCMS and the University of Notre Dame.

Christine Becker 50:36

And then we want to thank some individual people as well. So thank you to Jordan Sjol, who interviewed Jose Rivera. So thank you to both of those folks. And then also thank you to Jonathan Nichols-Pethick for helping to coordinate that; he is at DePauw University, along with Jordan Sjol.

Michael Kackman 50:53

that was a nicely produced interview as well. So yeah, appreciate the work on that.

Christine Becker 50:57

Yeah, definitely. And the golden ears of Todd Thompson will be really very grateful for that too.

Michael Kackman 51:02

Yes, they will.

Christine Becker 51:04

And so Todd provides our mixing and music. He's at University of Texas at Austin, and then we're also ably assisted by David Lipson at University of Strasbourg, Stephanie Brown at Washington College, and Frank Mondelli at University of Delaware.

Michael Kackman
That's the crew. We all appreciate you listening to us. Thanks so much.

*Ending Music*