Jun 24, 2024
Show Notes:
As a student, Elijah Aron started writing plays, musicals, and making weird films with friends. After school, he moved to San Francisco and started a theater company with friends from college. They transformed an old shoe store into a theater, where Elijah worked and slept. He talks about the imaginative and adventurous shows, which included surrealist works and musical elements, and simulated carnival rides, but despite their creative success, he struggled financially and worked as a temp and at a bookstore to support himself where he met a wide assortment of interesting individuals.
Working in
Television
Elijah initially pursued the idea
theater, as he was drawn to weird art and unconventional ideas. He
explains how he began to write scripts for a TV show called
Black Scorpion and in 2000, Elijah moved to LA to try his
hand at the TV business where he started working as a low-level
executive at Disney Television Animation.
Tips on Pitching a
Television Show
Elijah talks about his career at
Disney where he became a development executive, helped produce
cartoons and look for new shows. He shares tips on pitching that he
learned from this experience, including which pitches sold and why.
He emphasizes the importance of being relaxed and friendly in
meetings, as well as summarizing the idea in a sentence to sell it.
His job involved listening to pitches and working as a programming
executive, reading every draft of the script, and looking at
storyboards.
Elijah also developed and wrote
television shows, and he wrote some TV movies. However, he wanted
to move into adult TV and was hired on the show Drawn
Together, which was an animated reality show with different
characters from different cartoons.
100000 Jokes and Working
in the Writer’s Room
Elijah talks about his experience in
TV writers rooms and recalls the first joke that got him quoted in
TV Guide. He spent a decade of writing for network sitcoms,
including Better Off Ted and Raising Hope.
Elijah's work on these shows was characterized by stress,
high-pressure work, and a focus on ratings. He enjoyed working with
talented writers and developing sitcoms, but eventually changed
course to work on Bojack Horseman, an animated show about a horse
actor dealing with depression, and Undone, an animated show about a
young woman who learns to move through time and space. He states
that being a TV writer is challenging, as it involves
collaboration, rewriting, and finding the right balance between
being funny and not being offensive. He talks about writing jokes
and how he combines inspiration and a method of thinking that helps
him find the funny. He also mentions that most writers do not want
to use AI for ideas and/or writing, but that it can be useful for
research.
Influential Harvard
Courses and Professors
Elijah discusses his lifelong career
in the arts, focusing on his extracurricular activities such as
creating weird plays and participating in a community of artists.
He mentions his experiences with free speech and the creation of a
zine called The Little Friend at Harvard, where anyone could
publish opinions. He also shared a story about making white
jumpsuits with numbers on the back, which led to a cultural
education. He took animation classes with Derek Lamb and Janet
Perlman, which provided him with a history of animation and allowed
him to create his own films. He also mentioned that he is a fan of
Helen Venders’ poetry classes.
Timestamps:
05:08: Creating and staging surreal, experimental plays in college
09:43: Career paths, including temping, writing, and TV production
16:58: TV show development and pitching, with insights on what sells and what doesn't
22:07: Writing for TV shows, including jokes and animation experience
27:02: TV writing career, from sitcoms to animated shows
33:12: TV writing, comedy vs. drama, and joke-writing process
38:16: Using AI in TV writing, personal experiences, and career development
Links:
Undone: https://www.amazon.com/Undone-Season-1/dp/B0875GVR67
Instagram: @things_in_elijahs_house
Featured Non-profit:
The featured non-profit of this episode is Healthy Humor Inc., recommended by Reggie Williams who reports: “Hi, I'm Reggie Williams, class of 1992. The featured nonprofit of this episode of the 92 report is healthy humor. Healthy humor is an arts organization whose professional performers create moments of joy, wonder, laughter and comfort for hospitalized children and their families during some of their most difficult times. I'm proud to have served on the board for healthy humor for more than two years. Alongside our classmate Derek Horner, who's the board's chair. You can learn more about their work at healthyhumorinc.org. And now, here's Will Bachman with this week's episode.”
To learn more about their work visit: https://www.healthyhumorinc.org/