SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Beat the Prosecution, presented by Northern Virginia criminal defense and DUI lawyer Jonathan Katz, where we are here to regularly present you information and ideas for beating your prosecution as best as possible. Nothing on any of our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Katz only provides legal advice to current clients or for individuals who have paid for a consultation. And now for your host, John Katz.

SPEAKER_02 0:31

Hello, everybody. I'm John Katz at Beat the Prosecution. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer here in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. I know I tell it to you all the time about how much I'm having trouble controlling my excitement about the guests we have here. But how many times do I have people on here I haven't spoken to for decades? Someone who helped uh introduce me to what the heck was going on in college. This is Steve Angle. When I started Tufts University, well, actually, a few weeks before I started Tufts University, 1981, I received this beautifully handwritten letter uh welcoming me to Tufts and this uh seminar I'd chosen because all the freshmen had to be in a seminar. I chose one about uh comedy and humor called Are You As Funny as You Look? And very aptly, Steve said, when we all got there, he said, Well, no one responded to my letter. There was no email or whatever. I figured Figured, I'll just respond when I get there. So Steve went to NYU law school at some point, and his name just came to mind recently. I don't know. I looked up what he's been up to, and I said, Whoa! He's been involved with writing and production of major TV, uh, such as Ant Farm and Mighty Mid and Mad About You, Big Bang Theory. Some of these things I watch, but I've been out of touch with TV. And storytelling is so important to me as a criminal defense lawyer and and as a persuader. And uh, I've talked too much. Steve Engel, please introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Well, you did a wonderful introduction. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Uh yeah, I uh I met John at Tufts uh f 45 years ago, incredibly. Um I moved out to LA in 1991 to uh work on a show on HBO called Dream On, uh, which was one of the first big HBO hit comedies. Um it ran in an hour time slot with um the Larry Sanders show, if you remember that show. Um and then I went on and worked on, as you mentioned, um Mad About You. I worked on Just Shoot Me, I worked on the Big Bang Theory, I worked on many other shows in between. I created several shows which uh got on the air on uh including a sitcom starring a then unknown, very funny comedian named um uh Kevin Hart, if you've heard of him. Uh he was probably 20 to 22 years old. And we did a show that was a reverse of uh Fresh Prince of Bel Air. It was about a rich kid from Malibu who uh uh has to move back in with his aunt and uncle who live in West Philly. Uh and you know, he's used to having uh tons of space and privacy, and now he lives in this small house with very big personalities. And he was great in it, and um, I guess it like many like most shows, it didn't it didn't last. But uh yeah, I've had an interesting career.

SPEAKER_02 3:34

Well, there there's there's more TV I haven't seen that I have seen since starting college. But for me, anything with uh Dennis Hopper, no matter how good or bad, anything by Jim Jarmosh, I'm there for instance, but that's perhaps more movies than TV. Yeah. Uh Steve, you graduated from Tufts, what was it, in 1983 or 84? Was it 83, 83? And uh where did you go from there? Did you go right to law school?

SPEAKER_01 3:59

I did. Uh, you know, back then, especially at Tufts, people were heavily pre-professional. Um, I didn't know what to do. My sister was uh just starting out as an attorney. So when I was a junior at Tufts, the year that I met you, she was a summer associate at a big firm in Manhattan. And all I knew was that summer she was going to you know Yankee games, sitting behind the first base dugout. She was going to theater and all the best restaurants. I was like, that sounds okay.

SPEAKER_02 4:27

I can that's the summer associate version, Steve.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

Yeah, that is exactly right. Um uh she then went on to work at a firm and discovered that it was not quite that. Uh there's a great joke about that where a guy dies on a golf course, goes, Do you know that joke? He goes to hell and it's fantastic. And then, like, 50 years later, he comes back to life 50 years later, he goes back uh to hell and it's hell as you would imagine it. And he says, I don't understand what happened. I I was here 50 years ago, it was fantastic. And he said, You must have been here on our summer social program. That's right. Yeah. Yes. Uh so anyway, I was pretty LA law was big then. It seemed very glamorous. So I I took the LSATs, I did well, and I got into NYU and I went and I knew pretty early on that I'd made a terrible mistake.

SPEAKER_02 5:11

Uh but I So you and I had an overlap in Manhattan because from 85 to 86 I worked at the then known Irving Trust Company. Okay. Uh working as a financial auditor over there in the Wall Street area. And I got an SRO apartment at the corner of East 23rd and Lex, right across from Baruch College. And I was having the time of my life, and then I started law school.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

Okay. Well, law school, you know, at the time seemed pretty rough. Uh in retrospect, it was like a vacation compared to being a lawyer. Um, but um yeah, I actually I like to think that I got something out of it um to sort of justify all the time I spent. You know, I did practice for about three years, three, three or four years um before I finally um decided to write full time. I had been doing both at the same time. I had been, uh I took a year off after law school to write a movie. Uh, and right before I started my law job, I deferred an offer at this firm that I had been a summer associate at. Uh right before I started, I got hired to write a movie for 20th Century Fox, but I was too cowardly to not start the law job because I thought, what if it's my only movie that I ever write? So I started my law job and was writing at the same time. I was sort of treating my law job like a bartending job. You know, I didn't tell them that I was working and had uh and had another full-time job at the same time. But um after about three years of trying to do that, I I couldn't juggle it anymore. And I finally decided to give it up and write full-time.

SPEAKER_02 6:45

Okay, so my biggest interest is of course your involvement with uh doing the creative work. So when did this creative uh work start? I I I take it that uh it wasn't just in isolation, for instance, that you were interested in uh uh being involved in uh doing that seminar about uh about humor. I assume it uh something started before then.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

Yeah, you know, I had always been interested in comedy, you know, as a kid when I was 14 as you know, Saturday Night Live started. Um I used to stay up late and watch that, you know, when I was 14 years old. I used to watch Monty Python, which was on PBS, uh very late at night. I would go and downstairs and watch that. Uh I I discovered um the Woody Allen books of his uh New Yorker pieces that I loved, and I was you know went to see all of his movies, and I just really was very interested in comedy, and that's what led me to want to teach that uh seminar at Tufts. Um and you know, I I did not have a plan to become a comedy writer, but if you look backwards, all the dots sort of points kind of connect, and you can see a path that I wasn't aware of at the time. Um, you know, I took uh I did was a TA of a uh at Tufts at a course called French Comedy, um, which uh Seymour Simchis was the professor, great professor.

SPEAKER_02 8:06

A great professor.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

Yeah, really wonderful mentor to me. Um so I was really always interested in comedy of all kinds. And then when I got to law school, I actually started doing stand-up in the village uh as a creative outlet. And um I quickly decided that I liked writing jokes better than I liked going to nightclubs and waiting two hours to get a five-minute slot at 12 30 at night. So I just focused on writing instead of performing.

SPEAKER_02 8:35

So maybe I missed your name and the village voice when I was uh swimming through there.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

I don't believe uh they they would have mentioned me. Yeah, I was going to open mics and um uh it was fun, you know, for a while, but I I really did enjoy the writing of the material more than the delivering of the material.

SPEAKER_02 8:52

Um I take it that uh you really did not have a roadmap to doing this because there are people who give their their left arms, right, right legs, and uh both eyes to be able to do what you've been able to accomplish.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Well, you know, I I I've been very fortunate. Um I started out early in my career with a writing partner who I met at Tufts. Um we were writing movies together, and then uh after a while, he ended up, he he took a different path. He decided not to go to law school. He ended up taking a different path. He ended up getting hired on uh late night with David Letterman, uh, the old NBO NB NBC version uh back in the 80s. So uh we were still writing movies, but I realized when I quit my law job I needed to have my own independent career because he had his own independent career. So I um I wrote a TV spec, not knowing anything. I wrote a feature first, which um um my agent sent out and it got a good response. Then I decided to write a TV spec of an existing show because that's how you get hired on a TV show. So I I had seen a little known show back in 1990, 91, that uh I said, oh, I like this show. I could write this. I didn't know at the time you don't write a show that's brand new because it may not be on uh, you know, another week. But I really liked it. So I wrote what was probably the first spec script of a show called Seinfeld. Uh oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah. So that spec script, because it was the only one of its kind, really kind of stood out from the pack. Like a lot of people then were writing Cheers and Murphy Brown and Roseanne, and my script kind of stuck out as being different. And I ended up getting offered a job in LA on the show Dream On, which was created by the writers who created Friends ultimately. Um and I moved out here for that job, and I've been here ever since.

SPEAKER_02 10:42

I guess so. You write this spec for for Seinfeld, and did did that get into one of their uh episodes?

SPEAKER_01 10:48

It it did not, they did not buy it. They did read it. They did uh I think um, as I as I was told, I think Larry David had really liked it, and I think Jerry was like, yeah, it's okay. You know, so uh you don't typically write those specs with the hope of getting on that show, uh, because they're they're so particular about you know what a spec looks like compared to their own episodes. Whereas if somebody who's not affiliated with the show would read a spec of Seinfeld and go, oh, this is a really good sample, you're holding you're held to a much higher level of scrutiny when the the actual show is reading a sample of its own material. Um you know, they go, ah, we've done this, or oh, that we would never do this. Um but it served me well and got me my first job, and from there, you know, I ended up getting several others and uh have been lucky enough to work pretty steadily for 35 years.

SPEAKER_02 11:39

All right. So for me as a trial aura, I've uh been blessed by learning from many of the greats, including Jerry Spence. I was at his trial aura's college for the full month of August of 2025 and 1995, and the year before that, I was at the seminal uh two-week trial practice institute of the National Criminal Defense College in Georgia for two weeks. And what's really big uh with uh both of these uh organizations is persuading through storytelling, and the trial or his college takes it even deeper. Now, it probably doesn't matter for this uh uh uh sh uh interview, but I'll say anyway, there was this schism at the Trial Aurora's College in 2020 when Jerry Spence at that time was around uh let's let's do the math, about 90 years old, and uh he kicked the Trial Lores College off uh off his ranch and uh remade his own college when there was a power struggle about who could keep the name Trialores College. And Jerry passed away a few months ago. Uh, I I felt a very uh very close to him. I mean, regardless of what people thought about the schism. But what what the church the trialores college folks on heavily with storytelling, Stephen, please tell me how much this has any overlap with what you do or what Hollywood does successfully. It is about doing psychodrama, for instance. Are you familiar with psychodrama? Yes. Okay, and in fact, uh I had Jonathan Moreno uh on my uh uh on my podcast a few weeks ago with my lawyer friend Chris Flor, who's the son of uh Jacob Moreno, who developed uh psychodrama. So this is about role-playing, reverse role-playing, of course, going deeper than that, doing scene setting. And you know, Jerry Spence at once was the greatest living shawlore of his time, at least if except to the extent there was any overlap between him and when Clarence Darrow lived, uh, and he had so much pain and he was very open about it. He had the alcoholism that he overcame and the pain of uh uh so many other things. And what he would do is uh so I I wish for you to share with this also, is he learned about the importance of embracing our pain, not chasing the pain, knowing our pain, embracing the pain. Sure, you can send it on your way then, knowing your anger, really knowing yourself, and how do you find out who you who you are? Well, I mean, you you you gotta go deep, you gotta be willing to face the pain. I I had a uh fellow uh lawyer who went to the trial's college who said that when he went a few years ago when Jerry was just visiting on and off, uh Jerry showed up and and this lawyer was doing a um uh a jury selection void e exercise. And Jerry said to him, Is that the way you usually did it? He said, It is. I'm trying to incorporate what I'm learning here. And Jerry said, You want some help? And he said, Of course I want some help. That's what I'm here for. And Jerry said, It's gonna be painful. This is was all public. This is on an interview he did with me. It's gonna be painful, and uh he said, No, I want to do it. And Jerry said to this man who at the time was around 350 pounds, tell the jury what it's like to be fat.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 14:58

Since then he's had bariatric surgery, when he weighs a lot less. Uh-huh. Good looking man at that. So I've given you a lot there. Yes. Can you run with this? About to what extent uh are you gonna be able to uh say whether there's any overlap, to what extent are you gonna be able to help me and the other criminal defense lawyers with our storytelling persuasion? And of course, yes, prosecutors are are are listening, but I used to say to uh a legal assistant I had who wanted to be a sex offense prosecutor, I said these these tricks don't work on the prosecution side, although I was exaggerating.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

You know, um I think the most important element in in all storytelling is uh is relatability. So if if uh there's some overlap there, everyone has their own pain, everybody has their own you know experience, their own problems, their own conflicts. Uh it's very difficult for an audience to uh enjoy uh television or or movies or any story if they can't relate to what's happening in the story. Uh, even if it's not uh a direct relation. You don't have to be, you know, uh a ninja or uh uh you know uh uh Star Wars, you know, uh Jedi to relate to what's going on for Luke Skywalker in in Star Wars. You just have to be able to connect emotionally to what the characters want and what the obstacles to their objectives are, uh to care about them in one way or another. Um sometimes you can you can you can relate to a villain and want to see them fail, or an antihero and want to see them succeed despite the fact that their goal is nefarious, like in Breaking Bad or the Sopranos, you find yourself rooting for this meth you know tycoon. Um I think that if you can't find a way into a uh a character or a story as an audience or a writer, you're not gonna have a very compelling story. So I would imagine as a trial lawyer, you've got to figure out a way to relate your client's story to the audience, to the, in that case, the jury. Um and have them find sympathy for or an understanding of your client and the predicament they might be in. Um there's really if you if you watch a movie or TV show and you find yourself bored, it's probably because of one of several things. One, you're not relating at all to what's going on in the story. More often than not, two, nothing is happening in the story. There needs to be a clear objective and there need to be obstacles to that objective. If if my objective is to find the holy grail and I find it in the first scene, it's not a very compelling story. You know, um, you've got to be able to the you know, it's often said that the the uh uh a story is uh like a hero story is only as effective as the villain is uh is uh you know um impress impressive or difficult. You know, the the stronger the villain, the better the story. If the villain is easy to conquer, then it's not much of a story. David and Goliath. If David, you know, if Goliath had been David's size, we wouldn't be talking about David and Goliath right now. Uh so um I think everybody has pain in their lives, everybody has uh wants and desires that that they uh they can't achieve or would like to you know achieve uh or struggle to achieve, and it's that struggle that people are I think drawn to and root for your uh your protagonists to overcome.

SPEAKER_02 18:36

Right. Okay, well that's uh that's a lot of good uh uh good information ideas there. Now how about uh okay, well let me ask, did was any of your legal work in litigation?

SPEAKER_01 18:51

Not really. I mean I did do some I did mostly uh estate planning and trust in estates, some taxation. I did get involved in some uh uh uh will contests and and and some um uh tax uh litigation, but not a lot. Um I didn't ever really do any trial work. I I appeared in court maybe once or twice to to just file a motion.

SPEAKER_02 19:21

Uh but I never I I asked that then, you know, to see if you'd been in the court room about what you think about this, which is about I I'm looking for an overlap maybe. It's very important uh for a criminal defense lawyer, especially with a uh a client whose alleged crime is not very sympathetic, and if the lawyer wants to be jury nullification, we're not allowed to ask for jury nullification, but we we can't tell them not to nullify either. For instance, you know, I had I had a guy who the jury acquitted for having eight pounds of marijuana in the backseat of his car. Okay. So I just figured we're in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I don't know if the pe if the people really care much about if you you know, this was in the days when marijuana was still uh a crime to even possess a small amount, right? And uh the the jury acquitted him, and um I figure there must have been some uh uh uh jury nullification there. So what I did there was I essentially worked to empower the jury to decide, okay, he's got eight pounds of marijuana in his back seat, but is he does he know what's in the back seat? Because what the cops said is that they follow this eight-pound package of marijuana from the uh the BWI airport to the postal service where it went to. My guy picks up the package uh that was sent to his P.O. box. Well, how does he know what's in there? Uh he's is he any more guilty, I said to the jury, than if uh someone didn't like me sent me a stolen uh ring. And uh and how am I responsible for that stolen ring when I don't know anything that there's a ring uh and that it's stolen? So this idea about letting the other uh do the story. So I imagine that at least for you, I take it that you were not the sole storytell, story writer on a lot of these shows. I assume there was a lot of collaboration. And I take it then when you were dealing with some of the great actors, that the actors were part of the story, either making the story, either because uh the the TV show, the the TV uh show uh producers or directors wanted that, or else because the the actors made that a condition, you know, I'm not gonna uh I'm not gonna just be a puppet on a string. So if you can uh uh address all of that perhaps or other.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Yeah, well, you know, uh almost all TV shows, especially comedies, are a collaborative process. Um when you're creating a television show, you're essentially doing it on your own. Or with if you're writing with a partner, you're doing with a partner, uh, you're the the the actual you know, initial conception of the idea, the pitching of the idea, the development of the idea. You might work with a producer, you might pitch to a producer here's my concept, here's the the one. Description of the show. Here are the characters. Here's here's tonally what we're going for. And then the producer might attach themselves. And now the producer might give you some feedback about what might help sell the project. You might then attach an actor who might then, as a precondition, make themselves a producer, and then they would have creative input. But once the show gets on television, you have to hire a staff of writers, typically between five and eight writers that you work together in a room and you brainstorm and come up with ideas and try to come up with story arcs for the season and individual stories for the episodes. You know, oftentimes the actors are not that involved. Sometimes there's a lot of tension there. I had a show where an actor wanted to be involved. I had created the show, cast him into the show. It wasn't developed for him, but he was a pretty big name and he wanted to be in the writer's room. And I said I didn't think that was a great idea. And he didn't like that, and it was a source of conflict. Um he always felt um, I think he he was he probably never should have agreed to do the show. He wanted to have his own show, and CBS just backed up the money truck and he couldn't say no, and he was resentful that he wasn't more involved in the process. And what an actor will do if if they're not invested is they will, you'll know they're not invested. They will, you know, they will um undercut all the material or they won't sell it. I remember going to table read one time where he was unhappy with the script, even though the network had loved the script. He delivered the entire you have a table read in front of the network in the studio uh where you read the script aloud and you want to hear what's working and what's not. And he delivered the entire uh uh section of his uh of the script with sunglasses on and a baseball hat with his head down. And it was uh I guess he's unhappy. But you know what? He did that in front of the wrong audience. He did it in front of the network who loved the script and saw that he was tanking it, so it actually blew up in his face. But um, so there are sets where I've been where it's been wonderfully collaborative. Um, you know, the actors are thrilled when you come down to stage, it's just like a big party, and there are other ones where you walk on the stage and you can immediately feel it's the writers versus the actors, and you know, the actors are pissed off that they don't like them scripts, the act the writers are pissed off the actors aren't committing to the material, and it it can be a real struggle. Um, but it is highly collaborative. You've got a director involved, the network has thoughts, and you know, they're not always great notes. Um, I did a show called uh for NVC, it was called Inside Schwartz, and it was the premise of the show was that there was a young, uh, it's very much autobiographical, but instead of wanting to be a writer, the main character wanted to be a sportscaster. But he had this double life where he was working for his father who wanted him to take over the family business. That was my the you know, analogous to me being a lawyer and my parents wanting me to, you know, have a safe, secure job and be a lawyer, and at night trying to, you know, practice being sportscaster and trying to pursue that dream and juggling those two things. So uh it was quote in such wartz because it was it was a bit of a uh, I guess, um, influence by, if you remember, played against Sam, where the main character, we saw his internal dialogue in the uh in the form of athletes and coaches that he would turn to and ask for advice. Like he'd be wondering how to handle a situation, and all of a sudden, uh, you know, Bobby Knight, the basketball coach, would be there and he'd say, What should I do here? And he'd ask for coaching. Um, so it was very much about a character who was in his own head, and we got to dramatize what was in his head in the form of these fantasies. And the then network head who had picked up the show and bought it, after about six or seven episodes, we had a meeting and he said the ratings were good, but he wanted the focus of the show to change. He wanted the character to be less in his head and more like a guy who would act first and not think, you know, like think later.

unknown 26:05

Right.

SPEAKER_01 26:05

So, you know, a much more of an active instead of a sort of deliberative character. So I said to him, So instead of inside Schwartz, you want outside Schwartz. I said, exactly. I'm like, why did you buy inside Schwartz? You know, and so we had to like uh make an adjustment kind of on on the fly. So it's very difficult because there's everyone has got a different, it's the same, I'm sure it's the same in in being in a uh a litigator. You know, you are telling you're trying to spin the facts in a certain way. It's like a Roshamon thing. There may be 20 different versions of the same set of facts. Right. And each person might have their own filter through which they're viewing what is you hope for is objectively the truth, but there's no objective truth. The way you view a set of facts and the way I view a set of facts is is uh is affected by our life experience. So it's very difficult. You may think you're on the same page with the network, or you may think you're on the same page with your client or with the jury, but you can't ever know what's in their head and how they're thinking and why. So it's it's very imperfect form of communication, I think. Which is why you have to try to persuade them to see the to see your point of view. Right.

SPEAKER_02 27:24

Um we do a lot of brainstorming to get to uh uh to get to success in um in court, at least the people who've been to the trial or his college and apply it. Uh getting back to my friend Chris Floor, who I was mentioning, he does this amazing thing of every uh second Saturday morning of the month uh hybrid in person and by Zoom, he gets together people to select one person's upcoming trial and to work to bring it to quantum levels higher. Um without me giving up what I'm not allowed to give up because we're sworn to secrecy in the room. Sometimes tears are shed in there. Sometimes for the person by the person's client if they're there, sometimes by the lawyer, sometimes by the other lords in the room, sometimes it has to do with the case itself, sometimes it has to do with the pain that someone in the room has gone through, or uh or one of the lords. It's it's really something. Uh okay, so I don't know the difference to to which uh uh TV shows can go as deep as is some of the deepest movies, but to what extent does it get to that sometimes in the creative uh process that you've been involved with?

SPEAKER_01 28:37

You know, it comedy look you know, comedy and drama are are related for sure, but you know, uh comedy typically has you know less uh high stakes. The stakes are there, there have to be stakes, they're not typically life and death. Um, you know, so uh so you don't really get too heavy. I mean, you know, it's hard, you know, it's hard to do a comedy where somebody is, you know, dealing with cancer, or you know, it's just hard to it, you know, it's challenging. You can. I've done episodes of shows that are pretty serious, but for the most part, you don't, you know, you you know, that's the purview of drama. Uh, you know, comedy tends to keep it lighter. Um, there are tearshed in the writer's room, people talking about their own experiences. Right. Whether it's comedy or drama, no matter how deep you end up getting, or how there needs to it needs to be an emotional component, whether it's so deep to bring you to tears, or whether it's just it it it's heartwarming, or it's um uh inspiring or it's upsetting or it's frustrating, it has to elicit an emotion. Uh you know, drama tends to do it much more heavily. You know, you I I remember watching ER, and my wife and I used to say as soon as there's a baby who's sick or dying, we're turning it off. Like I don't need to tune in after a long day to see somebody dealing with my worst possible nightmare. You know, so we would tend to keep things lighter in comedy than you might delve into in in drama where you've got violence and death and you know, sickness and you know, infidelity. Well, there's certainly all those things, you know. You can touch on those things in uh in comedy as well. You know, I remember doing an episode of Dream On where the main character's mom dies in a very kind of comical way. Uh, she dies in his apartment having sex with her boyfriend, who feels horrible because he had just gotten an inflatable penile implant, and he was trying to impress her, and he's like, It's my fault. I overpumped the plane, you know, I it was too much for her to handle. She has a heart attack, you know, during sex, and the main character is like, does not want to hear about this, about his mother. And the whole episode is really about his mother essentially setting him on this wild goose chase about something in her estate that she's having he's having to deal with. Right. She's left this piano to this person that he can't find. And he's like, even in death, she's like, she's annoying, you know. Uh and he's suppressing his emotions the entire episode. And then the end he discovers that his mother had all this whole life he never knew about when she was younger, and that she had wanted to be, she was like a show girl and she had wanted to be in show business. She never talked about it. And this character was this man that she was involved with before she, you know, she met her husband. And he realizes that he never knew this part of his mother and he never would. Right. You know, it was too late, and it was very touching, you know, and he finally has his breakdown, uh, emotional, you know, outpouring, but it's all built up by his frustration in trying to suppress his feelings about the loss of his mother until he can't hold it back anymore. So, you know, it was a very touching episode, but and it was about as you know heavy a topic as you can deal with, you know, a character dying, but we tried to put a comedic spin on it because otherwise we're writing a drama, you know.

SPEAKER_02 32:02

So well, I'm gonna loop uh some things, or at least one thing, back to another thing we do with the psychodrama and scene setting, which is uh let's say that I'm preparing my client to testify. And often with our criminal defendants, we want to keep them off the witness stand. But I will tell you, Steve, some of my clients who are clearly telling the truth and end up telling the truth on the witness stand, they often do so magnificently. And and one thing is for us to take that person, say, okay, uh set the stage, scene of a scene here. You said something happened in your home. Bring us to your home. Just you know, show us what the pictures are. I take you somewhere in your home right now, and uh, before we started talking, I asked if that's Hirschfeld buying. Yeah, and uh that's cool. You said that was Hirschfeld from uh from which show again?

SPEAKER_01 32:50

Just shoot me. It was a gift from the creator, you know. Um, he he gave uh limited editions, had had Hirschfeld at the time, Hirschfeld, you could you pay him enough, he would do whatever you wanted him to do. Uh you know, if I he wanted a you wanted to uh do a portrait of you, he would for the right price, he would do it. Uh so he did uh you know a limited edition of uh the cast of Just Shoot Me. So is David Spade and uh Wendy Malik and George Siegel, and um it's yeah, so you know, I I it's a prize possession. Um there. Sorry? There are Nemo. There are new Nemo on there. Uh I'd I'd have to look. I think there's about five, but uh I'd have to double check. But what you're talking about is specificity. Like the more specific and vivid your story is, the more impact it will have. I always teach my students, you know, you need to make specific, strong, specific choices. If it's too generic, it's not gonna register, it's not gonna land. So whether it's whether it and less about what the room looks like, but more about specificity about the character and what interests they have and what their flaws are, you know, uh that's what makes for that what that's that's what makes for good storytelling, is the more specific and unique it is, the more impact it will have.

SPEAKER_02 34:09

And how about uh uh conveying feeling?

SPEAKER_01 34:12

That you know, that's that's gotta be there. You know, it it it has to be there. If the story is not about something human, not about something relatable, as I talked about earlier, it's not gonna work. Like you you talk about, well, what's the story about? And that's the what's the plot, and then what's the story really about? What's going on underneath it? What is the subtext? What's at stake emotionally for this character? Uh what are they trying to achieve or what are they trying to avoid? Uh do they or don't they achieve it? How does that make them feel? Uh it is all at its core, it's just about the human condition. And if you don't, uh if you try to tell a story that has no emotion, even Seinfo, which was famous for its no no hugging, no learning, it was about characters were going through things. They wanted a job they couldn't get, they wanted a relationship they couldn't have, they wanted to get out of a relationship they couldn't get out of. It was all about stuff that you could relate to yourself, right? It may not have been the you know the high most high-stake things, but we've all been in a situation where we're how do I get out of the situation, or how do I tell a friend that I that they're annoying, or what you know, how do I deal with something that I don't want to deal with? Um, and the more you uh bump up against it, the more fun it is, the more overt you are about if in the first scene you just say, listen, it really bugs me when you do X, Y, and Z, it's not a very interesting story. If I'm if I'm projecting or if I'm acting out or if I'm treating you badly because I'm bothered by something you're doing, and then at the end it gets to this, the gloves come off, and then you go, What the fuck? Like, what is really going on? Why are you being such a dick? And then it and then you get to the root of the issue, you know. Uh, but if you get to it right away, then there's no build. You know, so you want to build to an emotional climax. And I'm sure in your storytelling, you want to tell a coherent story that builds to a climax that that is clear and and easy to follow. And you know, I always say confusion is the enemy of comedy. If you don't know what's happening in the story, you can't enjoy it. You know, you can't laugh at it.

SPEAKER_02 36:15

Okay, now I'm gonna get to uh political correctness for lack of a better word. Okay. It may have been Sherry Seinfeld, who I don't know when said, you know, uh the the the death knell to a lot of comedy is being too careful about offending people too much. But let's get to that show, Big Bang Theory, that you worked on. I don't know, is it still on the air? I don't know. I don't watch it.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

It's on in repeats, which I'm grateful for. I'm I'm grateful for because uh it's the wonder of uh the beauty of uh residuals. Okay, so it's all the time.

SPEAKER_02 36:47

So I've seen snippets of that, and I'm not gonna put you in the hot seat to say whether you had anything to do with what I thought was pretty offensive by the way they dealt with uh uh what was the character who was from uh India, I forget. Raj, Raj. Kutra Polly. Right. Yes, and in uh in the Simpsons, I mean I like just about everything about the Simpsons except for the Apu character. And in fact, our fellow uh Tufts uh alum Your classmate from your years attendee, right? Uh Hank Azaria. I mean, he said it himself, so I'm not I don't think this is anything uh uh gossipy. He said that for Apu he was told uh make an offensive character. Yeah. So for for you, I'm not gonna ask the the extent to which you were involved in developing that Raj character or or who made the comments about his his Indian background, but but where where do you where do you try to draw the line yourself as a writer and producer?

SPEAKER_01 37:44

I try I try not to offend anybody. I you know, I don't I don't want to be milked about things, but I certainly don't want to be um offensive. Um I don't think I mean I don't know that the character the Kuthar Pali character, Raj Kuthra Pali on on Big Bang Theory, I don't know that he was, I mean, he he might have felt stereotypical, and and that was the same problem with Apu, is that he seemed stereotypical uh rather than uh offensive. I don't know, I don't know that he was like I don't remember that much about him. I don't know that he had negative attributes other than the fact that he was, you know, well he worked at a you know 7-Eleven and he, you know, had a you know he was Indian, so he had an Indian accent. Uh, you know, I don't I don't know, I don't really I try to have every I try to have every character be real and honest, and you know, that that means you know flaws and all. You know, I try to have diversity of characters, you know. Uh I've I've written shows. I wrote a the show I wrote for Kevin Hart, the entire cast was black, and I was not, and I'm still not. Uh, but I wrote it from my own, you know, I wrote what I thought was a universal experience. Uh you know, uh and if they if there was something that they felt was stereotypical or or offensive, they would let me know.

SPEAKER_02 39:13

Right.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

I I I didn't really have that problem. It didn't, you know, it didn't really come up. Um it's really more about um subject matter that you can and can't do, you know, perhaps. Uh you know, I remember doing a show back on Dream On where um the main character was dating a woman and it was um a great relationship. Uh until he the way he met this woman was he had been dating this her daughter. It was uh it was called the undergraduate because it was the inversion of the graduate. He's dating this girl who's like 19 or 20, and he's like 35 or something, and he doesn't, he's like, I can't, this is not gonna, this is not good. I shouldn't be doing this. And then he finally meets her mom and falls for her mom, uh, and eventually breaks up with her and starts dating her mom. Uh later, it was pretty heavy stuff uh at the time. He uh he discovers that uh the girl comes to him and asks him for borrow some money because she needs an abortion, and he's worried that it was his uh baby, and she's it's not your baby. You know, we haven't had sex in five months, it's not your baby. Um but he uh agrees to take her to the clinic and but lends her money to do this, and when her his girlfriend uh finds out she is outraged because she's uh pro-life and entirely uh uh anti-abortion, never it never came up between them. And they have this blowout argument about how could you do that? You killed my granddaughter. It's like you can't come back from that. The relationship ends. Once someone says to you, You killed my grandchild, you you're not coming back from that. So that was a pretty heavy, controversial episode. I remember at the time thinking we're gonna get a lot of letters. We were on HBO, we could do that kind of stuff. No letters. Interesting, not one letter, and then we did an episode where um I guess a character accidentally killed a cat and we got like five letters from like the from ASPCA and PETA and all this other stuff, but the abortion episode, not a peep.

SPEAKER_02 41:20

As you were talking about, yes.

SPEAKER_01 41:22

Yeah, it is it is harder now to to to tell certain stories. Uh, I think it, you know, there's it's easier now than it was four or five years ago. I there's been a certainly uh a reaction to uh to wokeness, which uh we won't get into the politics of that, but uh you know, right now a lot of the DEI and and uh uh diversity movements in in my business have have sort of gone the back the other way. It's rebounded the other way. Right. Um so uh I I you don't have to be quite as careful, uh, but you know, I try to be careful. I try to I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. I don't want to be uh controversial just for the sake of being controversial. Uh I try to find the you know the flaws and the qualities in all my characters, whatever nationality or ethnicity they are, and I try to represent them respectfully and write them, you know, as people, not as generalizations and one-dimensional characters. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:25

Now I'm gonna give a shout out uh to the other three people who were involved with that seminar because uh you did introduce it. There was Woody Allen's Without Feathers and another one. And I and uh Woody Allen's brilliance is not tampered down for me uh, you know, by any allegations. And you said you had you have uh an artwork of him on the wall too. I do, I do. So the other people uh leading that seminar, there was Steve Allen, who you say is now a physician. Sorry, Jeff Allen, you're Steve. Yes, and he's a physician now in Georgia.

SPEAKER_01 42:56

Yes, he is, yes, yeah. Great, great guy, um a great artist. Uh he was always interested in art, um, sculpture, painting, drawing, amazing artist, and he's been doing a lot of painting. And um, I think once he retires from medicine, he will do even more uh super interesting, uh, a lot of passions, art, and movies. And he's involved with uh Israeli Film Festival that he uh watches probably 150 films a year to figure out, you know, or more to put this film festival together. Always he and I used to go every Friday when a Woody Allen movie opened, we would go to the Beekman Theater at noon to see the first show in the 80s, uh in the in night in the 1980s, um 65th or 66th and 2nd to the Beekman Theater, get online and be at the first showing of the new Woody Allen movie, which was every year it came out, and you know, he did a new movie. Um I agree with you. I I I can separate the artist from the art. I I uh um you know I don't He did some pretty terrible things in his relationship uh with Mia Farrow. Um whether they were legal or illegal, uh, you know, there were some questionable things he did, but I I it's hard for me to watch. I must say it is a little hard for me to enjoy the movie Manhattan as much as I used to. Um, knowing now his his uh life story a little bit better. You know, in that movie, he's 42 and he's dating a high school girl. Right. So uh probably couldn't do the story today.

SPEAKER_02 44:29

So I was gonna segue into a few things about what I learned from his two books, either without feathers and or the other ones you didn't getting even, I think.

SPEAKER_01 44:36

Oh, or no, uh uh without feathers and uh oh god, I'm blanking on the first one. It's it's so good.

SPEAKER_02 44:41

They're both great. There's three of them. Before I do that, I'll also give a shout-out to Madeline. What was what's Madeline's last name? Madeline Sidney. That's right. And then we had Professor Fields. And so was that just coincidence that uh so uh you you were doing uh stuff with French and and Professor Simchez, and and Professor Fields was a uh was a French profess a French instructor or professor at the time.

SPEAKER_01 45:06

Uh I you know what I it's funny, I I I don't really even remember how that came about. Um I do remember really thinking you know very highly of the it was through the experimental college at Tufts, which I thought was a great program. I aside from those explorations, I I took a I took a course at at Tufts from through the ex-college that was called Merging of the Courtroom with Theater, which would have been a great class for you. That was taught by um the head of the drama department, uh Sherward Collins was his name, uh, and and like a prosecutor in Boston. So we would do opening arguments, they would critique them. Um we read out. Oh, it was great. We we read um Inherit the Wind and we analyzed that. We read the K-mutiny court martial and analyzed that. We as I said, we we'd would do state opening statements and get critiqued by about our performances. Um it was um it was interesting. You know, it was a really uh a really good class.

SPEAKER_02 46:05

Um and this is what really hit me home. Woody Allen hit me home in so many ways because you were talking about you know how far it can really go with comedy. Of course, you know, you've got comedy that's mixed with the tragedy too. So in one of his essays, in one of those two books that was part of that as Are You As Funny As You Look seminar, he was talking about his obsession with death. My guess he's probably still obsessed with death. Completely. He said, uh, and if there's an afterlife, am I gonna be able to break a $20 bill?

SPEAKER_01 46:38

Yes, yes, yes, a lot of jokes about a lot of jokes about death. There I went to there's a whole play about him.

SPEAKER_02 46:47

Go ahead. Sorry. There was that uh uh music club in Manhattan where when he was in town, he'd be there in the sacks. I forget the name, but I think it was Dixie Land Band.

SPEAKER_01 46:57

Uh yeah, I I remember that that that it was on the in the 60s on the east side, uh Joe's something. I don't remember the name of the book.

SPEAKER_02 47:05

It was there around 1985 when I started uh work in Manhattan, and when he wasn't playing, when he had to wait for his turn to play, he's just looking down at the ground, like all non-confident, neurotic, or whatever. Yeah. It relates right to there was the story that when he would go into a lanes, that he'd he'd like be looking down at the ground, maybe walking, be shown to the table, he probably had his own table. Yeah, the server would come over and say, Do you have anything to recommend? When apparently the menu never had never changed for years or decades.

SPEAKER_01 47:37

I always used to think about what I would say if I if I ever ran into him, and I never did. Um But uh, you know, look, the guy completely shaped my sense of humor. Um, you know, I there's I don't think to this day, I don't think there ever has been and or ever will be a comedy writer as talented as Woody Allen. Yeah, he he wrote what I think is the to me the perfect joke. It may not be for everybody, it's it was from his stand-up material. We I don't know if you remember we used we listened to his stand-up albums. Maybe there's a there's a joke from his stand-up routine where he's on stage and he's got a pocket watch and he takes the pocket watch out to look at it to to check his time, how much time he has left. He's like on the Steve Allen show or something. He looks at his pocket watch and goes, you know, this is a pocket watch, is you know, it's uh it's got tremendous sentimental value for me. Um my my grandfather on his deathbed sold me this watch. I hope it was a good price. Oh my god, what I mean to me, it's just uh it's just the greatest, the greatest joke.

SPEAKER_02 48:44

Uh I'm gonna loop this into so Hannah and her sisters, and uh I think I think that's when I was living in uh Manhattan, working at the bank. 1985, yeah, 1985. And he was talking about how he put the rifle to his temple, and the only reason he well, a reason why he ended up not successfully killing himself was he was sweating so much that when he pulled the trigger, the the the rifle uh butter, whatever you not the barrel slips off his head. So he goes outside and he goes to the movie theater and he watches a Marx Brothers movie. I think which one that was duck soup, duck soup. And and you got the Marx Brothers playing the mallets on the almost of these guys said, Whatever this life is about, I want to be part of it.

SPEAKER_01 49:32

Yes, it was that was such a I love that. I I watched that recently again. That first of all, that the scene from the Marx Brothers movie that they show is one of my favorite things that's ever been filmed. Uh, you know, they're singing uh they're doing that whole song about uh you've got guns, we've got guns, everybody's got guns, and Harpo is like they're all dancing, moving toward the camera, and Harpo is like doing this like crazy dance. It's it's so funny. Um, even out of context, it just makes me it makes me laugh so hard. And um, you know, it it it was a beautiful sentiment in that movie, and the whole the whole story about his you know grappling with religion and is there a meaning to life and is life worth living? There's that's it. He takes all the he's gonna convert to it.

SPEAKER_02 50:19

That's right, the religion where he and he gets the white bread and mayonnaise because he wants to be a big thing.

SPEAKER_01 50:25

He takes out a Bible, he takes out a crucifix, he takes out a jar of mayonnaise and a wonder bread, you know, it's it's just it's great. It's just brilliant. It's brilliant. Well, uh all of that is just look, we've all grappled with these things, and these are all you know uh heavy issues, but he managed to figure out a way to do it in a way that is so fun and funny and smart. Um, and that's the key is how do you figure out it's the specificity, it's the relatability, it's it's the emotional components. Right. That's what you need in storytelling. You are, you know, in addition, there's structure. You need to have a story, it needs to build, you know, uh there needs to be uh every scene needs to build from the scene before it, it needs to have drive. Um, you know, but but underneath that all it needs to have those things I've just talked about.

SPEAKER_02 51:15

I would like to talk to you about casting and somehow lead that back to my doing direct and cross-examination. You get to choose who's in your cast. I am stuck with my cast to a point I get to choose which witnesses are best and which are not, right? If I can. Uh well, speaking of Woody Allen, you know, he chose Wally Sean to be a man at as short as he was in that scene, he was spectacular. So have you ever met Wally Sean? I've not met Wally Sean. I've uh uh I would love to, I'm a big fan.

SPEAKER_01 51:48

You know, I'd love him to construct.

SPEAKER_02 51:50

I bumped into him at Grand Central Station, probably around 1989, when I was returning uh back to uh uh back to Washington uh when I was in my last year of law school, and there he is. I said, Are you Wally Sean? He said, Yes. I said, I loved on Dan and Lennon. I don't know if you saw his uh that was off Broadway and it was with Linda Hunt. And if I loved Madeline Conn was in the audience of all things. Wow. And he said, You did, because I knew that uh the critics, not all the critics, loved it. And I said, the stupidest thing, and this really uh uh Steve, my my wife is so good, she said, don't don't don't sell yourself short. Don't don't tell our son who's now 19 that you're a terrible athlete. I'm good in some athletics. Don't you sell yourself short. So I sold myself short, then I said, But what do I know? And I it's like you know, you have a great date with a woman and tell right how great a time you said, but oh, I hope your boyfriend doesn't find find out again. He said, What do you mean? I said, Well, you're up here and I'm down here. He loved that I made the compliment to him. That's nice, that's nice. Okay, so do you have any suggestions for how uh a criminal defense or any trial or should ask questions of witnesses while engaging the judge and engaging the jury?

SPEAKER_01 53:16

Oh boy. Uh well, as you know, the first thing they teach us uh when we taught when we learn about um litigation, you know, especially trial work, is to oh never only take the inch. Never ask a question that you don't know the answer to, of course. Um, you know, don't ask an open-ended question that allows your client to go off and shoot themselves in the foot or the mouth or whatever, wherever. Um you know, that that stuff I don't, you know, I just remember from doing lawyering at law at law school. Um but I I assume that you know that you want to keep them talking as little as possible. Uh no matter how compelling your your your client is, you don't want them ad libbing. The same thing when I'm writing a script. It's like stick to the script. The words are there for a reason. Let's, you know, they they've been thought through thoroughly. They've been given a lot, you know, there's been a lot of time spent on crafting it. Right. Don't just start going off on tangents because every word needs to be in there for a reason. So you should, I would imagine you want your uh your uh client or your witnesses to be as scripted as possible without sounding scripted. The whole key to to being natural and compelling and convincing is to sound to be so rehearsed that you're that you that you're you appear to be contemporaneous and spontaneous.

SPEAKER_02 54:54

Um what do you think about this? I want the story to be able to tell itself in a way that's gonna help my client and to unfold in that way. And I was just thinking, as you were talking about how well uh Mike Wallace uh developed from there, where he I forget what that 1950s show was where he's saying the cigarette is uh whatever it was by Philip Morris, and he would over-ask questions, he would ask these huge quotes, he would uh state these big quotes of the interviewee, and he was he was putting the camera too much on him rather than on the interviewee. And so, what I do in court, for instance, is I'll use some self-deprecating humor. Uh, even if I'm in front of the judge and want to make sure I get a trial postponed, I'll say, April 1st wouldn't be bad. I heard the cops are available then, that's my birthday. And if the judge starts smiling, I might say, you know, some people might think that makes sense. You know, just for me to get away from the spotlight and tell and and to have the story tell itself.

SPEAKER_01 55:54

Yeah. Well, again, I think you have to it's a balancing act. You know, if in my in my work, you know, as I said, if if there are show entire shows that are unscripted, you know, um Kirby Enthusiasm, they had a tight outline, and then the script and then the scenes were improvised. Um you know, you end up shooting a lot of material and then you end up using the best of what you shot, but you then have to craft it in editing. You still have to have structure and there needs to be purpose to what's, you know, if if characters are just going off on a tangent, you're gonna lose the story thread. So, yes, you want to you want to keep let the story tell itself the way you want it to be told. Yeah. Yes, it needs to appear to be telling itself, but it needs to be, in my opinion, it needs to be so crafted and so structured that ever no word is wasted, that every word is in there for a reason. I remember and I remember in law school, the first thing I, you know, I learned in legal writing was how to shade the statement of facts, you know, by using different words. Like, you know, you might say, this is not to come up often in a case, but you would say you might call someone stingy, I might call them frugal.

SPEAKER_02 57:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 57:11

You know, it means the same thing. They have different weights, they have different connotations to them, negative or positive. It's to try to put the most positive spin on your client's case by using the most favorable shading in the language without straying from the truth. You can use, you know, more forgiving language, more positive language. Um things that you know people can understand and relate to, the foibles of your client. Maybe that maybe the jury has the same or similar foibles. Right. Jealousy, or whether it was, you know, you're not claiming your client's perfect, but they're not a, you know, but they didn't, but they're not a criminal. You know, yes, they had yes, they had feelings of jealousy and rage, but who doesn't? You know, um, whatever it is, uh you want it to be as as carefully structured. You don't have so much time in the courtroom. You can't just if you start, if your character is just kind of, you know, Donald Trump does the weave, as he calls it. You don't want to do the weave in a story, and you don't want to do the weave, I would imagine, in court. You want a structured, clear, concise, understandable story that uh is as economical and as sufficiently told as possible. Because people don't have people don't have endless uh attention spans. They have, you know. Yes, exactly. You got the the more you go off on tangents, the more you're gonna lose them, and they're gonna not remember any of the more you're gonna bury your most important points in fat. You know, you want you want to keep it lean.

SPEAKER_02 58:47

Well said. Well, I I could go on and on if I had permission, but if I don't, we've already gone a minute or two over time from 7:30. I've got the time, but you're an important person. So I really appreciate it. What I do with my guests who I like, and I still like you very much after all these decades. And I you take it away from that. I give you the floor to say anything that you haven't already said. It can be about anything we've talked about or not talked about, your favorite uh URL that you're on, your favorite charity, anything we talked about, anything at all.

SPEAKER_01 59:19

I'm good. I'm good. I don't, I don't, I'm not much for self-promotion. I don't like to uh uh you know, I don't do that sort of thing. It's probably to my detriment. Um I've had a great you know time talking to you. Uh I've had a wonderful career and a terrific life, and uh I'm grateful for all of it. And I've it it's been a it's been a pleasure talking with you.

SPEAKER_02 59:42

Same here, everybody. This is Stephen Angle. He spells his name with a P. Angle E-N-G-E-L. He's got a really short Wikipedia uh around down on there, but you can find more about him there. Uh thank you so much, Steve. This is John Katz. This is Beat the Prosecution because there is no other way. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense Laura in Fairfax.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:04

Thank you for listening to this week's episode from Beat the Prosecution. This is a regular podcast giving people a leg up against police investigations and prosecutions. Nothing discussed on our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Katz only provides legal advice to current clients or to individuals who have paid for a consultation. We welcome you contacting us via email at info at beat the prosecution.com by calling our office at 703 383 1100 or texting us at 571 406 7268.