For someone as successful as the both of them to say, “You know what? You are good at this and you can do this,” that helps a lot when you’re very insecure writing your first script, and when you turn in your first script and they’re like, “Oh, we need to rewrite this page one,” which happens all the time, and it happened to me. The best thing they did for me was encourage me and give me confidence. Yes, I feel like I grew up in ShondaLand University, if you want to call it that. They are pivotal to my growth as a writer. How important was working with Shonda and Betsy in your evolution as a writer, and what were the lessons you took away from them? You mentioned Betsy Beers, who is Shonda Rhimes’s partner. And to be able to pitch well is just to have confidence in your pitches. And then the strike, good or bad, allowed me to take a breather and to absorb all these things I’d learned and sort of gain my confidence, because in a writers’ room, you just want to feel confident in your gut and be able to speak it. I went into one writers’ room and then another writers’ room. So I had a very tumultuous first year, which probably saved me because it’s so intimidating to be in the writers’ room, and I’d never been a writer’s assistant or anything like that, so it was all very new to me. Then we went on strike about a month later. And I worked there for a few months, and then Grey’s Anatomy was short on writers, so I got moved. So when that show started, I had never been in a writer’s room Betsy Beers and Shonda Rhimes were very nice to read a script of mine and hire me on that. I actually got my first job on Private Practice, when they spun off Kate Walsh’s character. I want to ask you about one of your first jobs in television in 2008, where you worked as a story editor on Grey’s Anatomy.
So, it was rough, but also very educational. So, one time I locked my keys in the car, left the car running, and had to go into one of the actors’ houses and use their phone because I didn’t have a cell phone. After work, we would have to drive scripts around because they did not email them then. The only thing I do remember is we also had to deliver scripts. It was an eye-opening to Hollywood.ĭo you remember any of those people? Did they go on to have great stardom? Were you watching Benedict Cumberbatch at age 12? I had to basically sit in a little closet with about 20 VCRs and press record on actor demos and screeners and all that stuff for about three months. The fact that there was still VHS tells you how long ago it was. I moved out here knowing one or two other people, and my first job was that cliché working in the mailroom thing where my job was to dub videos. In the introduction to the book, you wrote that “In order to make it in the entertainment business, you have to start from the bottom up.” What was the bottom like for you? You co-wrote a book called The Hollywood Assistant’s Handbook: 86 Rules For Aspiring Power Players. (Listen to part of Horn and Nowalk’s interview below, and subscribe to The Frame at iTunes or Stitcher.)
John Horn, host of Southern California Public Radio’s new daily arts and entertainment show, The Frame, talked to Nowalk about his show and what it was like to come up through the ranks of Shonda Rhimes’s empire.
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In our recent interview with Tom Verica, who appears on How to Get Away With Murder, the latest addition to ABC’s ShondaLand block, and has also directed many episodes of Scandal, Verica describes Shonda Rhimes’s overarching message to her staff as the following: “ We have a phrase - it doesn’t come from Shonda per se, but I know it’s a philosophy she has: ‘Don’t be boring.’” Pete Nowalk, creator of HTGAWM, has surely internalized that, as his show is one of this fall’s genuine smash hits.