Building the Perfect Writers’ Room with Jon Stahl

Welcome to On Production presented by Wrapbook. Today I am thrilled to host Jon Stahl, who is a versatile creative who transitioned from being a writer's assistant in top writers rooms across the industry to founding Prolog, a platform designed to enhance the workflow in creative development. John's journey spans pivotal roles at NBC, Nickelodeon, HBO and Fox, before sort of diving into a UX design and technology career. And he's contributed to companies like WriterDuet and Light Iron, and he's now at the helm of Prolog. So John aims to sort of transform the creative process for film and TV development, and I'm really excited to kind of dive into his journey and learn some insights on what that journey has been like for him. Welcome to the show. 

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Amazing. Appreciate you inviting me on. Cameron, so I want to know, John, can you walk me through your transition or even sort of your origin story of getting into a writer's room. Tell us about working in a writer's room at the highest level, like you have, and then the transition, sort of into technology and entertainment technology. 

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I actually started before being in the writers room. I started working in production. So I started in New York on a feature film. I ended up on a TV show that shot in Stanford, Connecticut. And I only got into a writer's room in 2015 because I had a connection. And that's, that's kind of the way that it works in Hollywood. It's like, you need to know someone in order to get into the room. And I managed to wriggle my way into the writers room of a one season show called Mr. Robinson that started in 2015 and from there, you know, just kind of rode that train, and I got another writer's assistant gig. I turned that into a script coordinator gig. Ended up in the writer's room of Veep, which is at that was at the time of my favorite show. Worked on the final two seasons of Veep, which was a really intense, fun, wild experience. And it it taught me so much about how great stories are told and how great comedy is written. After that, I moved into the writers room of a show called House Broken on Fox, where I ended up writing the ninth episode of the second season with my writing partner. And that was a an amazing experience as well. It was an animated show, and so we got a lot of time with talent. We got a lot of time in the edits, in the design sessions, got to give feedback on, you know, our episode, not just from the perspective of the the writing and the script, but also the actual production of what was being made. Um, so that was an incredible experience. We got to work with incredible, really high level talent, Lisa Kudrow, Will Forte, like big names, and we were like, in the same, you know, same recording sessions as them, and giving them notes on the read. It was really something special. 

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I love Veep. I think it's one of the funniest shows I've ever enjoyed, maybe second to Nathan for You, or anything Nathan fielder does in my own personal but what was that like Veep? I mean, it was, it was, like I said, it was very intense, like, by the time that we got to production, it was, there were very few days where we weren't doing, like a rewrite after we had already blocked a scene. So I hope I'm not giving away too much, but, but, you know, it's a few years past. We had, you know, mostly set days on set in the studio and the writers room was whatever a five minute walk away from from set most days. And so how it went for, I would say, like, 60 or 70% of of of shooting days was we would block a scene with the director. We would walk through the scene and, you know, Dave or Julia or someone else would would comment, say, you know, something's not working here. We need a little extra. This scene feels a little flat. This part doesn't work, whatever it was. And we would have to, like, go back, run back to the writers room, do an entirely, write an entirely new scene. I mean, it was like, ended up being like so many scenes ended up being 80% rewritten and then deliver them to, you know, directors, other actors, producers on set and say, Okay, here's the new scene. Let's block it and shoot it. On top of that, you know, the fact that we had countless 1000s, probably 1000s of alts, like old jokes that we would have to keep track of. And, you know, we would shoot the ones that actually ended up working. That was, that was a really wild experience. And you know, I had more than my fair share of overnights, 20 hour days, you know, 100 hour weeks. Right, just because it was such a big production, and it really was one of the best educational experience I've ever had in my career, learning from these top level writers on how great comedy is written, how notes should be given, how you know drafts should be written, the things not to do, the kind of like procrastination that ended up happening a lot of the time. And so it was incredibly educational. It was incredibly rewarding experience. Well, some of this, I mean, you, you did pivot a bit, not entirely, but you, you started getting into UX design and entertainment technology. What led you there and and what led you to a founding Prolog 

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Around 2020, 2021, I started to see the writing on the wall that the number of opportunities for, I guess, early state, early career writers was just growing smaller and smaller. And, you know, I reasons that I kind of like internalized but never vocalized. I knew I had to try something else and try my hand at something else, because I knew that I had a lot of ambition and and drive and creativity to give, and it wasn't necessarily being utilized to full capacity in, in as a writer, writer’s assistant, script coordinator, and I talked to a bunch of people, and I tried my hand at coding. I tried, I learned. I taught myself Python in 2021, and, you know, I learned the syntax. And then when I tried to, like, actually implement code, it was not for me. It was a lot of you know, wasn't, it wasn't the right type of of creativity. And I talked to a bunch of people, and UX design kept on coming up, and I got curious about it. I learned a little bit more about what it was and and it appealed to me, because I've always really loved well designed software, well designed products, not just hardware and not just software, hardware, software integration between the two well designed products really like impress me, and anything that lets me do my job better, I appreciate it. And so I was instantly intrigued by that and wondering how stuff got made, how these digital products got built. So I enrolled in a boot camp at Springboard, which was a great experience. It was a little more unstructured than I was expecting it to be, but ended up graduating in 2022, and by then I had already kind of begun working at light iron in kind of an intern sort of capacity, helping them with the build of a an automated dailies platform that they're still working on. And I also was in touch with Guy Goldstein over WriterDuet. And I've been using WriterDuet for years, so I've known guy for a decade, and he was looking for someone to help out with, kind of the UX of another platform he was building, and brought me in. I got a little bit of contract work out of that, and kind of just did that for a few months. But at the start of 2023 I got the itch to create something, right? And my friend approached me, my friend, and now, you know, partner in this venture approached me and asked me if I had any interesting problem space is worth exploring. And I said, Yeah, as a matter of fact, you know, I've seen the process of staffing writers room with writers firsthand, and it's really inefficient, and there's a lot of like, redundant manual labor that goes into it, tedious tasks that could be automated pretty easily. And we started just conducting research into the space. So we spoke with 30 or 35 showrunners, and started exploring the that space I want to know, like paint the picture for us, for our listeners, they like to tune into on production, because we dig into production like we talk to production people. It's not about the shows, per se. We all know the shows are good, but it's the process of making the craft happen. Describe, for me, sort of the gaps in the development process in the writers room that inspired you to make Prolog. And how are you thinking through addressing these issues? Like, tell us the story, like, how does it work today? And how do you envision it working? Yes, I mean, like, you know, you go into any kind of creative adjacent

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workplace, and you kind of examine the tools that people are using to track the things that they're tracking, and they're tracking tons of stuff. They're tracking their projects through different stages of development. They're tracking writers that they've met with. They're tracking writers that they have to meet and and samples that they have to read, and talent they have to evaluate before, you know, giving them a chance and hiring them. And this happens up and down the ladder. Right? It happens at the show runner level. They're constantly. Staffing their shows with writers for for a new season of the show. It's happening at the production company level, both in terms of staffing for existing shows and open writing assignments for IP that hasn't yet been written and all of this stuff from you know, talent tracking, taking notes on meetings, taking notes on samples, tracking mandates. You know, submitting talent or or accepting talent that gets submitted by agencies. It's all to it's all happening right now in in spreadsheets. And spreadsheets are incredibly powerful if you know how to use them and how to take advantage of the flexibility that's built into them. But most people who are working at a production company or under a showrunner don't have that kind of training, right? They're not excel specialists. And so what ends up happening is you get this really, like, inefficient way of tracking this data, you don't have any kind of like, intelligence and mapping connections between data, so you can't say that, like, this writer worked with this writer on this show, and so you could use this writer as a reference for the other writer, right? So that mapping doesn't exist. What's worse is you can't like, it's not there's no easy way in a spreadsheet to like house, a, you know, materials house, like a sample or any kind of other written material. You have to link to it and then find it in the drop box. Or worse, you don't know where it is, and you just go searching through all the emails. And that's that's something that came up over and over and over again when we were talking to show runners, is that that process of like getting an email from an agent, having the showrunner assistant copy and paste all the information into this spreadsheet, losing track of where the sample was that was attached to this one particular writer, having to go back into the email search through hundreds of emails, and this is all in the middle of a process that takes anywhere between four weeks and eight weeks, and is incredibly hectic and chaotic, and there's a bunch of other stuff going on. And, you know, we just knew that that wasn't the optimal way of doing things, and we could build something that was smarter, better allowed for more automation and less kind of tedious administrative work. So John, I gotta know, like from doing that research, can you elaborate on some of the key features of Prolog and really how you feel like they enhance the workflow for folks in writers rooms, in the creative development process? Yeah, absolutely. So you know that staffing process, like I mentioned, happens anywhere it takes anywhere between four and eight weeks. And in the middle of that process, what a showrunner is encountering is they're reading upwards of 300 samples. And by the end, you know, let's we'll be honest, they're not reading the entire sample. They're usually reading the first, whatever, dozen, half dozen pages, and then evaluating from there, because you said, they just don't have the hours in the day to read every single sample. So they're reading samples. They're evaluating talent. They're evaluating skill sets. They are examining credits. They're seeing who this person came from, who their agent is, if there's any connection between you know them as a show runner and that writer through the agency and the idea behind Prolog is that it centralizes all of that information, right? So you can really easily find someone who is repped by XYZ agent, or you can really easily find someone who has experience running a room, or has whatever legal experience or medical experience or military experience, because those are pertinent to the story that you're telling as a showrunner, and our goal is to not just help the showrunner staff their room much more quickly and find the best staff that they can find, but also to save a ton of time on the people who are doing the bulk of the ground, which ends up being the showrunner’s assistant, right? So the Assistant's doing all this stuff. It is entirely manual. There's no automations at the moment, and we're going to change that paradigm so it's getting it's growing every day, and its functionality, something called that we're calling smart input, is normally, you know, an assistant gets an email from an agent or a manager, and it has six or seven writers in it with bios and samples and credits and all this information. And how it works in the old way of doing things is people would just take that information, copy it and paste it into the spreadsheet and then find a place for the samples to house them and store them somewhere else. Instead, what smart input does is you take that same email, no matter how it's formatted by the agent, and you forward it to a specific Prolog email address, and it automatically gets ingested by the system. So we're. Leveraging, you know, generative AI, natural language processing, to automate that input process and save literally hours of time every week for these assistants who don't want to be doing this data input, they want to be doing creative things. They want to be getting notes on scripts, and they want to be helping the showrunners being more creative. So John, I think that's an important thing to talk about there. So which is the impact of technology? I mean, like, I've been having a number of discussions with software entrepreneurs in the entertainment industry, and obviously technology is what we live and breathe all day, but almost within the framework of sort of existing paradigms. And obviously, there's been a tremendous amount of media attention on generative AI, you just mentioned it yourself. But even outside of that paradigm, there's always a new sort of wave technology emergent. How do you see technical advancements influencing, specifically the creative processes in film and television that you've been so focused on, which is in the writers room, and how it kind of relates to the staffing up and the reviewing of these materials across the network that you're aiming to really build and dig into. One of the things that we have planned, and this is not yet part of the product, but one of the things that we have planned is integrating automations in summarizing and evaluating scripts. So just like share runners are going through dozens of samples, hundreds of samples, to review candidates, production companies and studios are also going through those types of materials to evaluate projects, to to bring under their roof and also evaluate talent the same way that showrunners do, and there are tons of ways that AI can help that process unfold. And so I think one of the things that we're most excited about is leveraging one of the there are several actually out there platforms that do automated coverage. From our perspective, it's more exciting from the side of summarizing the materials and potentially providing examples of comparable projects, as well as character breakdowns, stuff that has to get done but isn't necessarily as creative as as say, like evaluating the script and and giving your notes on what you thought of the script, right? Because we think that that's going to be for a long, long time, the domain of human beings, and it should be right. Because the reason that you hire someone to work at a production company in a development capacity is to provide, using their experience, provide feedback on creative materials that come in, and creative talent that comes in, and that's the reason they're there, right? You don't want AI doing that stuff, because that there's no point, right? But what AI is really, really good at is that kind of summarizing thing. And there are several tools on the market that provide that automated coverage experience, and, you know, not to, like, hoist one above the other. But we've been speaking with Guy over at Writerduet. He's, he's got Screenplay IQ, and I've tried it with a number of my own, you know, pilot scripts that I've written. And it is. It is very accurate. It is kind of uncanny in in its comprehensiveness and how comprehensive it is of providing summaries of the material. Plan is to partner, uh, with screenplay IQ, or some other platform that provides that sort of that experience, just to save people so much time. Because, you know, after you've read, read something, or even before you've read something, it is so, so valuable to have a log line and a synopsis generated automatically, because that is just, it is it is necessary. But for the most part, it's redundant work, because you've already, like read the materials and you know what it's about. It's just like getting all those thoughts down with paper, it's a process that takes hours and hours, and so we're hoping to get that down to minutes, and then leaving the creative aspect, the analysis, you know, the consider, recommend pass to the people that were hired at the company.

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I think that's at technology's very best. That is, it's it's promise is to enable and really enhance the capacity for people to shine with their creativity, their imaginative their imaginative nature, and to really like build more access for people to be publicly creative. I think just more tools for creative people makes the world more interesting and weird and wonderful. So that's really awesome. I am curious, like broadening that scope out beyond Prolog. I'm curious just, I mean, you know the industry from your vantage point as a writer, you've been on set, you've seen it before, you've you've worked at Technology companies, sort of along the spectrum of the release cycle of productions, going a little bit broader. How do you see sort of advancements influencing the creative processes and entertainment? Yeah, I mean, I think generative AI is incredibly powerful, and there's a lot of fear surrounding surrounding it, because a lot of people don't understand exactly how it works. I mean, like some creators of generative AI don't understand exactly how it works, because there's so much going on under the hood that it ends up being a little bit of a black box. And so there is kind of an inherent fear surrounding it. I've heard everything from writers saying, Oh, this is going to take our jobs to it's never going to amount to anything or be able to write anything great, to anything in between. I'm very optimistic about what it means for creatives. I think people are going to use it as a tool. I think people are going to leverage the power of generative AI to brainstorm and to bounce ideas off of someone else. The thing that generative AI ends up doing, in terms of the creative process, in my experience, is unless you, unless you're like a brilliant prompter, which is going to end up being like its own thing in the writing world. Eventually, unless you're a brilliant prompter, ends up provide like generative AI that I've played around with, and I use it quite a bit, ends up sanding off the rough edges and making things, I guess, in an attempt to make things more mainstream or digestible, smoothing things down to like, almost the lowest common denominator and The most like easily packageable piece of material, right? And that's kind of what it's made for, right? It's a prediction engine based on countless amounts of of data that already exists. And generally what it does is, in my experience, at least it finds kind of the average between that data and that average ends up being like the most vanilla kind of boring stuff that you can that can be generated, right? It's never gonna, I mean, now the max say never, that's that's actually probably not true, because Never Say Never when it comes to technology, but at least for the foreseeable future, having it independently write something truly groundbreaking and wonderful and eye opening is just not in the cards, because first of all, it requires external input. It requires someone to provide prompts, and so whatever it's going to end up producing is going to be a result of someone else's creativity or someone else's imagination, right? So it's never going to like again. Shouldn't use the word never, but for the foreseeable future, I don't think that it's going to be able to independently overtake writers as a mechanism of creative production. I think it's a super interesting and maybe even wise answer to the question. I appreciate that I have spent some time thinking about it, but probably not enough. So let me ask you this, John, before we kind of conclude here, where can listeners learn more about Prolog and learn more about your journey and maybe engage further if they're curious about exploring the product, and especially if they're writers. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I've kind of an open door. I love meeting new people. I rarely refuse someone approaching me, especially if they're from the entertainment industry. I rarely refuse a meeting with someone who approaches me and wants to have a conversation. Learn more about myself, tell me about them and what they're working on. So yeah. I mean, the best way to get a hold of us, get a hold of me and rest the team. Think there's some contact information on our website, which is helloprolog.com, P R O L O G as the No you or E, because we're, we're the start of the story, but we're also a log of pros so that's, that's one way to think about the spelling. But yeah, our contact information should be on there. I am, Jonathan Stahl on LinkedIn, CEO of prolog, pretty easy to find. And yeah, I'm open to people reaching out. I love I love meeting new, new folks. That's awesome. Well, John, thanks for joining that on production. Appreciate it. Cameron, thanks for having me.