Theresa Rebeck is the show runner on NBC's Smash, a moment of which is pictured here.

After our original interview with Theresa Rebeck she was gracious enough to call us back and chat more about running Smash, finding a good mentor, and finally feeling like a writer. Here's everything we couldn't fit in print!

 

In thinking about people trying to make it in the arts commercially, you can't get too married to your ideas because something is inevitably going to get changed.

That's true. I think the show addresses those questions of innocence dashed a bit. What happens when a dream hits reality is one of the themes of the show, and I think that gets included in those larger questions.

Inevitably Smash is going to get packaged or perceived as an adult version of Glee, which it really isn't.

No. I don't mind that. I've always been a big admirer of Glee. I guess it is the easiest place to go, but the other precursors are things like Upstairs, Downstairs or The West Wing or big, muscular nighttime comedy/dramas, which is what I trained in. You're going to think this is so funny, but in a lot of ways it's like NYPD Blue because that was a big workplace drama, and that's what this is. It's just that the workplace is Broadway, and it's about how all these lives come together in the workplace.

Writing is not an easy profession. I'm trying to juggle magazine writing, book writing and script writing. It's not easy to move back and forth between formats.

Here is what I have learned as a show runner: As much discipline as I have—and I seem to have more than most writers—you really have to suck it up and have even more. You just never know what's going to hit you. You have to be really, really flexible and good on the spot.

Is this your first experience as a show runner?

Yes.

Have you found it easy to make the transition to being a show runner? Have there been certain things that you have learned that have surprised you?

I knew what I wanted to do. It's interesting, there's a kind of formula for running a show. Now there is a given around how shows will run, which is not the way I was trained. I was actually trained by David Milch and Stephen Bochco and some truly great show runners. They relied more on the muscularity of individual writers, and there was always a very strong voice at the head of the show. That's what is true of Smash, so it's more Aaron Sorkin-like, what's going on. Somebody has to be steering the boat or it will go off in a million directions.

How much of the show bible did you have done for Smash before it was submitted to the networks?

Not a ton. I knew what was going to happen, but it was more in my head. There was a strong sense of knowing what needed to happen, which changed a bit. We were originally slated to do this with Showtime, and then it moved over to NBC. Bob Greenblatt had developed it at Showtime, and then he left Showtime and later landed at NBC. So the show was very much in limbo for about six months, and then when he started moving ahead at NBC, he called us and said he wanted to bring it over there. So there was some rethinking about what the show would be. When he said it was going to be midseason and not going on in the fall, it was a great gift to us because there's a lot of prep that goes into this. The one thing I really, really had to instruct people in was that people are really used to doing things last-minute in television. It's a very odd culture that way, and I had to insist that we really finish eight scripts before we started shooting. We got them all done. There's no reason we couldn't do those. It just meant that the writing staff had to work harder over the summer than people usually think they should. We really had to have scripts banked. Everyone's amazed that we've managed to keep this going without the ship capsizing, but I very much credit that bit of planning because with a lot of shows, when you get behind you have to shut down for a week. With this show, if you shut down for a week it goes haywire because there are so many moving parts.

How do you move between different types of writing without becoming scatterbrained? Is there a process that you go through or are you just naturally able to move between different formats?

I think it takes a lot of practice. When I was younger I was more naturally gifted at it, but now I've got so much practice. Sometimes I don't really feel like doing it, but it is like a technique. If you play the piano a lot or write a lot, you get good at it. There are certain things that are easier for me than other things. I've been in the middle of my third novel for a couple of years now. It's hard for me to reenter that world. It takes longer. With television I have to sit down and do this right now, and I can kind of do that with the theatre too because I've done so much more writing in those forms.

But regardless of the format, you have to have character backgrounds and story timelines.

It's interesting for me to talk to my writing staff about the characters because you can't just go with a generalized version of them, and they don't naturally stand inside them because they didn't come out of them. There's a little bit of channeling that goes on to land on a character. I'm standing inside of them all the time, so I have such an advantage. I can write scenes for these characters very quickly because I understand them so innately now. Many of my writers have to come at them from a different angle.

For younger people who can't afford to get a Masters or Ph.D. or have a background like yours, how do they find a mentor or the right kind of situation to develop their talents?

Honestly, I don't know. It always seems to me that if you're interested in film that we have so many resources at our fingertips now that we didn't have when I was starting. You can actually make a movie with a teeny camera, dump it on your computer and cut it. Everybody's got an editing function on their computer now. Then you can truly take that and put that online. You can practice your craft. For me, that's what I did at the beginning in the theatre. I was just writing short plays that you could do with no budget and finding places to do them around the city, and that gives you a lot of street cred. I was instinctively doing that, then people know you around. I think that's what people are doing in film and television now. People are creating their own webisodes and getting them on YouTube. For me, the one thing that I do know that's very true is that waiting for someone to give you permission to do your art is a colossal mistake. What you have to realize is you own the right to make art, and now we have the method of getting art out into the world. So it's changing, but it's not any more difficult than when I started. If anything, it's easier. Blogging and making art—there are just so many ways to get your stories out there, and that usually grows like a tree. That's how connections are made.

Does the Internet give an advantage to theatre actors and writers? Broadway is a small community.

Although there are always stories about people who leapfrog over everybody in a peculiar way, where you just go, "Huh? How did that happen?" I think that's disorienting to people, just because there is this myth of instant stardom. That's not actually how it happens for most people, and if you want a life of an artist it is a much more complicated journey.

As writers, there is no stability in what we do, and maybe that's part of the challenge.

I think it is. I think that's the thing we give up. I'm in a stable place right now, but I could've gone the law school way. People make choices for their lives that are more conventional, and what happens to them is they get a lot of stability. We don't get that, but we also don't have to sit around offices and be bored to death and suck up to people we don't like. We don't have to do that because we chose this other crazy thing.

That's more rewarding.

I think so, but the price is this lack of stability and this confusion, and I think questions of legitimacy are constantly plaguing us. Like, am I a real journalist? Am I a real writer? It constantly comes back to me.

Do you feel that you are a real playwright and a real TV writer now?

Yes I do, but it's a pretty recent phenomenon that I feel that way. A lot of people have said, "I don't understand why you don't feel that way yet." There's always something elusive around questions of legitimacy for me. I'm not sure why, but I don't think it's unusual.