JJason Hartman hosts accomplished screenwriter and producer, Hank Steinberg. Hank is known as the acclaimed creator of the award-winning CBS series “Without a Trace” and HBO’s 61. He gives us a rundown of his latest book “Out of Range.” For potential readers, the book has the war on terror as a central part of the novel. For those who prefer the screen, Paramount Pictures is working on the screenplay. He talks about his current work with Michael Bay.
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Jason Hartman 2:22
It’s my pleasure to welcome Hank Steinberg to the show. He is the acclaimed creator and award winning CBS of the award winning CBS series without a trace hbos 61 and author of his new book out of range, which is becoming a movie pretty soon. He’s also got a new series coming up, entitled The Last Ship and that will be on TNT. And it’s a great pleasure to have him here. Hank, how are you today?
Hank Steinberg 2:45
I’m doing well. Really. Thank you so much for having me.
Jason Hartman 2:47
Good. And you’re coming to us today from Beverly Hills, California. I believe
Hank Steinberg 2:50
I am indeed I just took a break from from my writers room for my new series to step out and talk to you. So I’m happy to be here.
Jason Hartman 2:56
Fantastic. Well, we’re happy to have you. So first of all, maybe we should Well, let’s talk about what’s new first. And then we’ll kind of go back in time a little bit. And I especially want to talk about without a trace. But your new book is entitled out of range. And it’s a novel. And it is being turned into a movie as we speak, I believe,
Hank Steinberg 3:13
tell us a little bit about it. Well, I’d always wanted to write a thriller, obviously, coming off without a trace, I kind of you know, had some of those skill sets, you know, from doing a thriller of the week for 160 episodes on that show. And I was, you know, was intrigued with the idea of doing something Hitchcockian which started small with some, you know, small domestic situation, and Hitchcock’s heroes were always kind of every man who got thrust into, you know, an impossible situation with, you know, a much larger scope than they ever could have imagined. And they always started with a kind of small incident of mystery, and then just got bigger and bigger. And I’ve always been attracted to those kinds of stories. So that was something that I always wanted to do. And I was just kind of Waiting for the right point of inspiration. And that actually, that actually happened. It just happened to me by accident to something that happened in my own life. And so, my wife was driving home from Disneyland three years ago. And she had my 18 month old son in the car with her. They just had an exhausting day in Toontown and Dumbo the flying elephants and they were both frazzled and exhausted and they were driving home at night, my wife called me from the road and she said, You know, I tried to figure out how to get home. Can you can you guide me through and it’s like six different freeways and, and you know, the way and I said, Sure, I started navigating her through and I was on the Bluetooth, I can hear everything going on in the car. And my son starts to just freak out, kicking and screaming and crying and he’s inconsolable. And my wife can’t do anything to help him from the front seat and she said, I’m just gonna pull off I’m gonna pull off the freeway and I’m getting off and try to deal with him. And I said something in my stomach said, Honey, Georgie put our play back in five minutes. He hung up the phone, we click. So few minutes went by and I’m Mind my paranoid mind just started racing.
Jason Hartman 5:03
Well, that was in LA where your wife was pulling off the freeway. So I think you had good reason to be concerned. Right?
Hank Steinberg 5:09
Yeah, very much so and of course, you know, off the freeway, it’s always a little bit kind of deserted. So it’s at night and I’m just having these imaginings about what might what could go wrong there. And and then I start to think to myself, if she doesn’t call back, how soon would it be before I grab the keys to my car and jump in the car myself and go chasing after her because I was talking to her on the on the way home I know approximately where she got off the road. Almost exactly exit so I could go, you know, you take me 45 minutes to get there, but I could go after her at some point. Anyway, she ended up calling back everything was safe and she was fine. She came over so I’m but it gave me the kernel of an idea. If that was the setup to the mystery, you know, a husband on the phone with his wife. She pulls off the side of the road. She says she’ll call back in five minutes and she never calls. And now he waits. He waits and he starts calling hospital. He starts freaking out. After 45 minutes, he says, screw it. I’m going in the car going after her. He gets five signs of freeway exit, and he finds the car. And there’s cops everywhere. And his kids are out of the car. They’re young kids, they’re crying, and his wife is missing. What happened to her? Why did somebody take his wife? Why did they leave the kids? Why it’s a car and a spot on the road. And then the worst part is the cops Look at him and say, What are you doing here? How did you find her? And his story doesn’t sound plausible. 90% of the time a woman goes missing, it’s the husband has nothing to do with it. They try they trace phone records and turns out he called who’s calling her 567 times in the last hour, but never left it that never left a message. It seemed that he was stalking her. So and now it just looks like he’s showing up to the scene of the crime the way people are always doing so. Now not only is his wife missing, but the police aren’t going to be helpful. So I thought that was just a great hook for a story about a guy in over his head. It’s his fundamental urge to find his wife. And then lo and behold, just like you know, an A good episode of my TV show. It turns out the more he sneaks into it, he realizes his wife has been lying to him. She’s been keeping secret. She’s been communicating with an old boyfriend who may himself be embroiled in some international conflict and problems. And that’s how the story starts to widen out. And it turns out she’s gotten in over her head. And our hero Charlie Davis has to a find his wife and solve the riddles of his marriage with his wife to love him. Should he even should he go after her given to the fact that she might have given up on their marriage?
Jason Hartman 7:32
Where’s the tie in with Uzbekistan though? Well, the
Hank Steinberg 7:34
the man that she, her ex boyfriend, who she had started talking to is a nice Pakistani billionaire, and was involved with some nefarious things. And the backstory which is the prologue of the book is a Charlie and Julie had had spent some time and it’s Becca Stan. Charlie is a roguish international war correspondent. He goes into the darkest corners of the world and try to snoop out you know, story Nobody’s telling and he and his wife had met who’s Becca, Stan. And it turns out whatever she found involved, and it’s gonna draw them both back there, and I love that kind of roguish hero that sort of, you know, Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones mold, you know, a guy who’s a self starter who’s savvy, who’s dauntless and, you know, take on the tough stories, it’s kind of self starter does things on his own. And I think what’s a cool combination of this storyline is because he has done that job and he has that skill set. He knows his way around the world. He speaks different languages, and he knows how to bribe people and he savvy and he knows how to get in and out of tough situations. It makes him a quick to find her equipped to get to the bottom of what’s going on in the larger story. It makes him equipped to be that kind of physicalized hero, but at the same time, he’s he’s kind of a regular guy just like you and me and we can relate to him when he can’t find his wife and she’s pulled off the side of the road. So it’s a kind of a combination of of me We manage Superman, which allows him to do these adventurous things and have it be plausible yet still be an underdog.
Jason Hartman 9:06
fascinating stuff. fascinating stuff. That’s one of the things about a great novel, there are so many tie ins to things, lessons that people might learn for real life. It’s not just fiction. And there’s there’s a lot, a lot of substance there. And maybe you can tie in, going back a little bit to without a trace. And
Hank Steinberg 9:25
how did that tie in with the novel? Or did it at all? It seems like it would have just based on content a little bit? Well, the underlying metaphor of the story is, you know, the, the Julie’s been lying to Charlie, because it’s something empty and missing in her marriage, and she had not wanted to confront him with it. She doesn’t agree with some of the choices that that they’ve made together, the fact that he has pushed and he starts to come to realize that he’s got some culpability and in what’s going on in their relationship, so that you know, the underlying metaphor of this story is, is there’s problems in them And when you don’t talk about your problems, bigger problems arise and, and I think that’s, that ties back to most episodes without a trace, the missing person has some problem or some secret or something that has led to their disappearance. And because in some way they have been hiding their problems and not, you’re dealing with dealing with a with the people that are around them, that that comes back to bite them. And I think that is, you know, a valuable lesson for anyone who’s married or anyone in a relationship to not simmer and seize and hold resentments and, and carry things but to get them out in the open before they buy you. And, um, you know, of course, that is what happened here. And, you know, it explodes into a huge, huge situation, you know, something with a lot of scope, but it works as a metaphor for any, any marriage because I think people in all marriages, you know, hide things from this thousands of times because they don’t want to deal with it or they don’t want to confront the issue and it almost always causes problems. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Well, that’s That’s good advice. So do you have any favorite episodes of without a trace that maybe you want to just talk about for a moment? Sure. I mean, there’s a handful
Jason Hartman 11:09
that ran for what like nine seasons right?
Hank Steinberg 11:11
ran for seven seasons and 160 episodes Yeah,
Jason Hartman 11:14
very successful. That’s
Hank Steinberg 11:16
a lot to choose from. A lot of there is an episode or season one finale called Fallout, which is dealt with a man who was in a PTSD after 911 with a very powerful episode that I wrote and was very attached to. There was an episode called Wahby, which dealt with bullying in schools, which I wrote and was very, very close to my heart and I drew on some personal experiences to write that so physical as someone who I ended up bullied and I’d often bullied other kids. And that was interesting to me, because I explored you know, we, we often demonize, you know, kids who bully and and it is an awful thing to do, but I think there’s a whole culture that exists Where it’s going to kick the dog phenomenon where someone can bully by someone else, and then they turn around. And in order to make themselves feel okay, they they turn around and bully someone else altogether and 10 you know, the exit was very, very effective, we actually ended up having 3000 schools call the network the next day to ask if they could get a copy of it, because they want to use it, but use it as a teaching tool in the schools. And this was back in 2003. I think so, you know, as well before a lot of the cyber bullying that we’ve seen, and, you know, the issues become some an issue that’s been much more powerful and that the schools are dealing with more head on but at the time, 10 years ago, it was, it was, I think it’s a little bit ahead of the curve of calling attention to, to these things that were happening and that was, you know, a very gratifying thing to be able to turn a personal experience that I had into something I felt was, you know, artistically inclined and be able to evoke really strong feelings with people and and how it feels to deliver a message that was hopefully effective and hopeful. have conversations in schools and having having people deal with it and having it in use, which is the best thing you can do when you create a piece of art?
Jason Hartman 13:08
No question. That’s a huge problem. And hopefully, that episode when we helped help attack the problem, to some extent, at least tell us that what you’re working on now your new series is, is entitled The Last Ship and that’ll be running on TNT. What’s it all about?
Hank Steinberg 13:23
It’s about a navy ship, its captain and the 230 people that are following him in the wake of a global pandemic that wipes out most of the world and onboard the ship as a scientist who may may be able to create a vaccine to solve the problem of a pandemic and save who’s ever left in the world. And it’s got a high seas adventure. A little bit of Star Trek on the water or madmax on the water with them having you know adventures every week, and tried to find the cure and save people and fight their enemies and it’s big, very big production values. Michael Bay production so it’s huge and exciting. And Eric Dane from Grey’s Anatomy and Physiology plays a captain. And it’s really fun. And I’m sitting here with my with my pick of the writers, you know, breaking a story for the first season. The pilots been shot and came out great. And the whole the whole first season all 10 episodes will air next next June 2014.
Jason Hartman 14:23
You know, what amazes me about shows like The Last Ship, that when it’s an ongoing saga, as you mentioned, how do you how long do you plan to have the the shelf life of that? That Series B I mean, because it’s it’s the same story, right? And they’re they’re constantly just adding to that so it’s another hour, another hour, another hour of the same people the same situation. And then I guess the the end of the series is the situation resolves one way or the other. Out of writers plan for that.
Hank Steinberg 14:54
Well, you hope to start with a premise that you feel like has has legs You can see that the story can continue to unfold and open up and expand, you know, in a way that you can feel like you can see, we don’t know what the third and fourth and fifth seasons are going to be, you feel like you know, that it’s going to provide the premise is going to provide you with a real estate to be able to do that. And so, that’s, you know, for starters, especially when you’re doing a serialized show, like this show is you start with that and then you know, it’s always an interesting push and pull between how much story line anything like the burned through at the beginning, because you just want to use up all your great ideas and just get everybody hooked. And and a balance between you’re not not burning to stuff so fast that you run out of steam and end up having to jump the shark and do something you know, to bend over backwards now to to sustain what you have. And those are the kinds of debates that people have in writers rooms on every on every show that that has that serialized storytelling element is how quickly do we or slowly do we on folder stuff and you know, you have to see if you stay grounded with your characters and stay true to the characters and have their motivations feel real. And I think the audience will go with you. It’s when you start pushing your characters around into plotting, you’ve created where the audience goes, Oh, that feels like the writers telling the character to do that, as opposed to the character wanting to do that, you know, that’s when you get into trouble. So it’s difficult to do, which is why you know, most just to help but you know, when it’s done well, they’re incredibly satisfying. Sure they are and I just, I, I so much appreciate things that are well written, whether it be a book or a television show or a movie. It’s just all about the writing.
Jason Hartman 16:37
It’s amazing when you look at sitcoms I think Seinfeld was so far above so many others you may disagree with me you probably don’t but
Hank Steinberg 16:47
I don’t know. Well, it’s one of my all time favorite shows and still watch it you know a lot before big smile before I go to bed.
Jason Hartman 16:54
It certainly does. It’s it’s just so great. It’s so brilliant the way they tie things in you know later in the show. and so forth. I wish they’d make a more contemporary version. But But then, you know, I compare it to a show like friends, for example. And I just don’t see the writing. I mean, it’s just I don’t know, it just doesn’t impress me the way Seinfeld does, but but writing matters so much. And it seems like and what I was really getting to and making that statement is that, it seems like writers don’t get enough credit. Now. Maybe you feel that way sometimes. Because you’re so integral and so important to the, the the production. I mean, the writer, you know, unless you’re in the business, most people don’t know who the writers are.
Hank Steinberg 17:33
Right? Yeah, there’s there’s definitely a, you know, a thing with that. I mean, you know, it depends on the medium. You know, I think what’s gratifying about writing a novel now is, there’s no one else to get the credit besides me, you know, with my name on the front, and there’s no actors interpreting my lines and no directors shooting, there’s no production designers making the sets and all which is very gratifying when you do that, because that’s a very collaborative experience. And that collaboration can be really fun and exciting, but so you know, have all I wanted wrote a play. So in that case, you know, the playwrights name pretty much goes above the title. That’s just how that that industry works and, and in movies and TV, and movies in particular, the writers really at the bottom and television, we do get a lot of credit within the industry and a lot of the power of, you know, TV series rests with the show’s creator and executive producer and writers. But, you know, but at the end of the day, it’s people go to see the actors, the actors are the ones on the red carpet. And, you know, I think half the people think it’s the actors make up their own lines, which sometimes they do, which we haven’t, we’d like, but yeah, you know, it’s Look, I love my job. It’s, you know, to be able to come to work every day and create stories and use my brain and think creatively and and, you know, the KC television able to work with other really talented, smart people in a room while they just taught him how to tell great stories. It’s pretty hard for me to think of anything else I’d rather do.
Jason Hartman 18:53
How did you get into it? I mean, did you just go to college and then decide you’re going to be a writer or did it happen later?
Hank Steinberg 18:59
Yeah. pretty much it. I mean, you know,
Hank Steinberg 19:02
I always love these kinds of stories. I always love emotionally rich, character driven stories and I love thrillers so without a trace of kind of a perfect mixture of that and hopefully that’s what the book of ranges is going to accomplish also, but you know, just writing was always an interesting it just always interested me and then I just was a junior in college I said, I’m going to do this I was just, you know, naive enough and and blindly ignorantly blissful enough to think I could do it and have you know, moved out to LA and and hustled and struggled and wrote a bunch of bad scripts, and then finally figured out how to write a good one, and broke through and got an agent and started started getting work and things may start to come together. What was your was your educational background in English or journalism or something else or film? I was I was an English major at the University of Pennsylvania. I wrote a screenplay for my senior thesis in which my advisor was a playwright in LA Let’s lynnie who’s a great guy and who’s actually more money, Father, more money, great actress, and he was really supportive of me and really helped me kind of get over that first hump of finishing that first script. I was a journalist at that pan. I was writing sports for the for the daily paper there. So I had that training too, and ultimately decided screenwriting over over journalism. But you know it, I think it’s something that you don’t have to have formal education to be a writer that for sure some of it helps. It’s definitely a skill and craft and you can learn things. But you know, it really takes practice. You just have to keep working. It’s like nothing. Gladwell talks about that. 10,000 hours,
Jason Hartman 20:38
right, right. In the book outliers. Yeah,
Hank Steinberg 20:41
yeah, you got to put in that time. And that was a really gratifying thing about doing television is up until that point, working on my own schedule. It was easy to procrastinate, once you’re in TV and you got to be 20 to 24 episodes a year. You just gotta, you just got to burn. And you get those. You get the 10,000 hours on your belt and you come out of that. Just a whole nother level of craft, that, that you now have to lean on churcher.
Jason Hartman 21:06
And I know this is all over the board to answer this question, but I’m just so curious. And hopefully listeners are too. How long does it take you an experienced writer to write one episode of The Last Ship, for example, or an entire movie? Well, I guess out of range is really, I mean, you’ll write a screenplay as well, but it’s taken from the novel. But how long does it take to do this work?
Hank Steinberg 21:31
Well, it’s funny because most people think of writing is probably being the process of sitting down and writing the script. And, and there’s actually so much more that goes into it before you start that process. So for to do the right app to physically write the actual script of an episode of television can take 10 days it can take as little as three or four days but that’s because all the legwork have been put in, in the writers room coming up with a storyline, you know, going over every scene beat by B and how And outlines by Thomas Cook have actually write the script, the lion’s share of the work is done, the hardest part of the work is done. And the fun part is actually writing a script where you’re maneuvering within what you’ve done. You make changes of course, as you go, you discover things in the scenes and the characters
Jason Hartman 22:16
do lay things out. Do you like lay a storyboard out, you know, on the floor or on a on a wall? Or do you use a software program that there’s a lot of those screenplay programs out there nowadays? How do you do it? No mechanics,
Hank Steinberg 22:30
most, most TV writers rooms have a cork board with pins, you know, very old fashion and index cards and on each index card is the same, you know, two or three lines about what the scene is. And you put those up on the board so you can see the whole story and you know, if you want to move things around, you take, you take your index card off, off the pen and you move on to a different part of the board. And then when you feel like you’ve got it completed, you know, you write it up into an outline and then you Go to a script. And when you’re writing up that standard for TV and works really well and you’re working with other people, I do the same thing if I’m writing a script. And even for writing out of range of the book, I did the same thing where I had a corkboard with every chapter plotted out. And then, of course, you get the writing, you discover all kinds of things. So that’s generally my process. I very rarely just sit down start writing with an idea without knowing where I’m going pretty hard to do that, in a story that has to be interested in a topic. You kind of have to spend a bunch of time thinking about the story and the story points before you before you actually write.
Jason Hartman 23:35
Yeah, good stuff. Well, this has been a very interesting discussion, Hank, and I appreciate you joining us and telling us about this. Do you have any websites that you want to direct people to?
Hank Steinberg 23:45
Well, people can go to the Harper Collins website to check out out of range. It’s important that of course amazon.com it’s, it’s up there and readily available in most one in all the Barnes and Nobles and a majority of probably local bookstores. People are browsing. And I will probably have an I will have a web page up an author page probably in the next couple of days. So if you’re looking to buy the book amazon.com is easiest and harpercollins.com.
Jason Hartman 24:14
Fantastic. Well, the book again is entitled out of range. And it’s by Hank Steinberg and Hank, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you.
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