[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] On Story is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

"On Story" is also brought to you in part by the Bogle Family Vineyards, six generation farmers and third generation winemakers based in Clarksburg, California.

Makers of sustainably grown wines that are a reflection of the their family values since 1968.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story."

A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

This week on "On Story," showrunner, writer, director, and producer Liz Hannah discusses her work on series such as "The Girl From Plainville" and "The Dropout," and is joined by writer Michael Starrbury, known for his work on the series "Colin in Black and White" and "When They See Us."

- Being honest is a good start, not just about intentions, but about insecurities of telling their story.

You know, like when you're trying to get the rights to somebody, you really wanna stroke that ego and be like, "Let me tell you how this can be great."

I just don't approach things that way.

I just think that it's more authentic to be like, "This is why it affected me."

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [Narrator] The two expand upon the art of writing series based on true stories and the delicate process of adapting real life into scripted television.

[typewriter ding] - I think everyone has a story to tell.

That's the thing we say to everyone.

Does every true story-- do you think every true story can be made into a series or a film?

- I look for something that is very unique, a unique story that is then also universal.

So I guess the answer to your question is no, I don't think every story has that.

But that's just every story for me.

I think there's a lot of stories out there that other writers can find their way into to bring that to light that I don't necessarily have the perspective on.

- Michael, how do you feel about that?

Do you think anything is adaptable?

Or what sort of true stories are you drawn to?

- You know, I'm huge into story and character.

I just don't wanna be bored when I'm writing.

So if I'm curious enough to explore this person's life, then that's going to be exciting for me.

And if I can figure out a way to tell that story in my voice, which, you know, that's always going to be attractive, then that's what I try to do.

Um, listen, I have emails from every producer who knows a rapper in L.A. because they all feel like their, you know, life is a movie.

But not everybody's life is a movie, man.

- How much are you using or adapting an actual article or an actual book?

I know for example for "The Dropout" there is a very clear podcast that I think shares the same name.

There's a documentary.

I know there are books about Elizabeth Holmes.

There's also just straight up research you can do.

How do you find the balance between using the research or the works of others versus finding your own story within real life?

- So I've been able to interview or read interviews or just talk to 'em.

I mean, I had Colin Kaepernick in the writer's room a couple of times.

You know, so that part's been easy, you know, to kind of just get stories from them and, you know, try to figure out the best way to make it, you know, TV-worthy or movie-worthy or whatever.

But it can get tricky.

It can get tricky with real life people [chuckles] when they're there.

You know, it can get tricky.

- I think everyone thinks they're the star of the story.

Even if they're not the subject of the story, if they were involved in it peripherally, everyone believes they were in the room where it happened and where decisions were made.

So to answer the first part, I'm not a journalist.

I didn't go to school for journalism.

That's not where I got my start.

I don't want to present myself as a journalist because I'm creating fiction out of fact.

I'm creating a narrative, a creative narrative, that's condensing sometimes people's entire lives into two hours.

So there's no way for me to make that into fact.

In terms of "The Dropout," there was the podcast and there was the documentary and the book, and we spoke to a number of people that were already interviewed in the documentary or the podcast or the book because it's very different when you're being asked before all of this came out and then when somebody's making a television show about it.

And there's very different conversations that will be had if you know that you're being fictionalized versus your voice, your face, your name is on it.

So there are ways that I think we actually can get a lot of truth into story and things like that, that maybe can't be or people aren't comfortable putting in a documentary.

In "Plainville," we had the journalist of the article, Jesse Barron, in the room for 12, 15 of the 20 weeks of the room, and that was integral to telling the truth of that story.

He lived it.

He was there.

The reason Jesse wrote about it is he's from that town and he heard about it, and before there was any media about it he started following it three years before the case even went to trial.

So there was a number of experiences, there were a number of experiences he had that couldn't make it into an article.

- Seventeen-year-old girl texts her friends for three days telling them her boyfriend's missing, maybe dead.

Nobody can find him.

She's panicked.

Only thing is, he's not.

- Not what?

- Not missing.

- Well, where is he?

- At home for three more days.

- What happens after three days?

- He killed himself.

But this girl knew he wasn't missing or dead.

She was in contact with him the whole time.

- You think she knew he was gonna kill himself?

- They were texting about it for months, weeks, days, hours, right up until the point that he actually did it.

She was telling him to do it.

[typewriter ding] - I do wanna talk, since you brought this up, especially about talking to people.

You said it was easy when you had people in the room, and I imagine it is, but I also imagine getting those people to trust you and to feel like you're going to tell their story correctly is not easy.

- I can just tell you that my relationship with Colin, it grew organically, you know?

Colin would...

There was a story that he told us in the writer's room that made me cry in front of everybody.

Like, I just started bawling and I just said, "Okay.

Wow, I have to write that one."

And I wrote it and it was, you know, he was touched by it, I was touched by it, and we decided not to air it.

- Do you think that vulnerability was key in- - You know, I have a very small circle.

You know, I'm super loyal and I hope I present those things genuinely and sincerely to anybody that I'm working with.

My writers' room was tiny, but we're all family.

Chemistry means everything to me.

So hopefully he felt that in the room with us.

And he opened up.

Like when he was with us, it was- it was magical to me just hearing this and learning his story and finding like the commonalities that we have with each other.

You know, him being born in Milwaukee, I'm from Milwaukee, like all these little things.

And yeah, you know, it was just, you know, just people connecting.

- Liz, what about you?

How did you make those connections with people that needed to trust you in order to move forward?

- Being honest is a good start.

Being honest not just about intentions, but about insecurities of telling their story, you know, I think in a non... You know, like when you're trying to get the rights to somebody, you really wanna stroke that ego and be like, "Let me tell you how this can be great."

I just don't approach things that way.

I just think that it's more authentic to be like, "This is why it affected me."

You know, "The Girl from Plainville," I've dealt with mental health.

I've dealt with suicidal ideations.

I've dealt with people in my life dying by suicide.

I've dealt with a number of things that happened in that show.

That is the reason that I wanted to be a part of it, rather than it was part of this true crime thing that happened, you know, in television.

That was not interesting to me and I sort of bristle at the fact of that show being called true crime.

- Researching is obviously important.

You can also research forever.

There's always more and more to see.

How do you know when you're ready to start writing?

How do you know when you can feel confident enough that you have enough of the story to get going?

- For me, it's like always there's a moment where I start dreaming like I'm the characters, [people chuckling] like, which is both something that I need deep therapy about and also a good sign that I can start writing in their voice.

That is the part for me that is the most important, is can I write in their voice?

Have I done enough research to sort of be able to take a pretty good educated guess about how they would speak in a certain situation if it didn't exist?

But I do know whenever I get to that point and I can start imagining like, okay, so I'm in the grocery store and I'm having this conversation, how would they have this conversation?

- I love that grocery store exercise.

I feel like that's something everyone can use.

Michael, what about you?

I guess especially for "When They See Us," was there a point where you're like, I think I know enough, or I think I've talked this through enough, or I think I've researched enough that I feel confident starting to write this out?

- I didn't know if I was going to ever be prepared to do it as far as research goes, even though I had it all in front of me.

I didn't know.

I just, I had no idea, but I knew.

I just, I tapped into Korey, like that feeling that he must have been going through.

I couldn't imagine being accused of raping someone.

You're 16, 17 years old.

Honestly, I didn't think about Korey that much.

I thought about me.

I said, "This would be awful."

But I tapped into my own emotions.

You know, like it was important to me to be able to connect, and that's when I started writing.

I wrote it.

I remember telling my wife, I'm like, "I'm just gonna write this thing, and I don't know what Netflix is gonna say, or Participant or Ava.

I have no idea, but I'm just gonna do this thing."

And yeah, I mean, it just spilled out of me.

It was- it was an exercise.

It was super emotional for me.

[Detective Hartigan] You got it.

- Yeah.

Uh, uh, yes, Officer.

- Detective.

I'm Detective Hartigan.

Let's start with you telling us who you were in the park with.

- I don't know names.

I just, I just got lost.

[arm banging] [typewriter ding] - Life is a story, but it's really more like a cluster [bleep] of a lot of stories all at the same time.

Finding like the throughline I feel like, or finding a story out of it sounds like a needle in a haystack or just like a very, very hard thing.

How do you go about I guess finding that one line and finding the beats in that line?

- I think the interesting thing for "Plainville" was how far back we went and how forward we would go.

And that was a really difficult journey in terms of like just, I mean, I would say cards, but it was a Zoom room, so we used some program and still it's gone from my memory.

But you know, we sort of plotted a really toxic relationship out, and like therapy, we're sort of trying to find the moments of where these people became the people that they were that related at a certain point and talked about things the way they did.

- I miss my friends.

Oh gosh, I've gotta go.

- Let me just get you home.

- No, I'll walk.

- For "Plainville," it was really specific with Michelle's journey of feeling... We watched all of the court tapes and she had been ridiculed for being very disconnected and all of these things and that.

And what we learned from talking to people and what we saw was that actually it was a woman who was completely disconnected from reality, who didn't understand what was happening.

And we started at the end and then when we went backwards to, how does somebody become disconnected in this reality?

And then that shaped a lot of the fantasy elements of the show in terms of trying to get into the psyche of someone who doesn't understand the world, doesn't understand that like this is the ground and this is a chair I'm in and we're in a church and doesn't have a grasp of that.

And Elizabeth Holmes was the complete opposite.

It was that we knew that a very traumatic event that had not been published at the time, a very traumatic event had happened to her in college, and that was a very pivotal moment, and that changed the narrative of her narrative.

You know, her narrative had been she dropped out to start Theranos.

- What's wrong with her?

Did something happen?

- At the party?

I think a guy did something to her.

I don't know the whole story, but she went to the police.

- The police?

- She said it was rape.

- Really?

Do you believe her?

- And that shaped the narrative in a way of just getting into her character and understanding who she was as a person.

Finding her end point was much more difficult because I think it was very difficult to...

There wasn't an end point, and that was that her story being in progress while we were in process of writing it was a little more complicated.

- Michael, what about you?

Do you find beats?

How do you find that one story?

- With Colin, we had dinner and he told me this story about-- if you've seen the show, at least the pilot, you'll recognize this, he told me the story about the first time he got his hair braided.

And, you know, Colin's a biracial guy, adopted, both of his parents are white.

- What?

- You have to cut your hair if you're gonna stay on the team.

- Oh, [chuckles] you're joking, right?

This is about your brain energy thing or whatever.

- It's a team rule, Colin.

[Colin] What team rule?

- Well, it makes sense.

[napkin rustling] Truth be told, you do look unprofessional.

- Unprofessional?

Why am I supposed to look professional?

I'm 14.

I'm a kid.

- Okay, rules are rules.

- What rule?

I play on that team every year and I've never heard of this.

[Parent] Well, if you wanna play this year- - Listening to Colin talk, he's telling me this story about his hair, but the thing I'm picking up on is his parents only know how to raise a white kid and they are only interested in raising a white kid.

This is the thing that I'm gleaning from everything that he's saying.

That's what I hooked into, you know?

And, you know, it's a little bit, you know, kind of like being a therapist where I'm just sitting there listening and I'm just jotting all these notes down just like, oh my god, dude.

Like, I can kind of see where like this real kind of pro-Blackness came from because you're in this world where people are trying to tell you you're one thing or trying to raise you as one thing or sees you as one thing and there's something in you that wants to be more.

I think, you know, maybe a little overcompensation, but I also understand it.

So anyways, for me it was just listening to him talk about his hair and really talk about how his parents were kind of dismissive of it and picking up on, you know, I think a lot of his stuff, even though his parents love him and he loves them, there's something there that's not quite, you know, clicking and, you know, I hooked into that.

[typewriter ding] - Life doesn't have a neat arc.

There's no one climax to anyone's life, I don't think.

It's just goes on and up and down and up and down.

But [chuckles], yes, but you gotta find one if not for a movie, for each episode or for a moment.

So how do you find a shape there?

- Episodic television is an ensemble medium.

Even if there are shows where there's a lead character, there are other supporting characters, and so it's not just finding a story that is about one person's perspective in life.

It's that also that point in their life also had interesting perspectives from the other people that they were surrounded by, which complicates the process even more.

So that I think is- is- is sort of where you go is like, who else is involved in this story?

What are their emotional journeys?

You know, with "Plainville" Lynn Roy, who was Coco's... Obviously Coco and Michelle are the important arcs of the series.

Lynn, for me, was actually the way I connected to the series outside of sort of the mental health and like sort of umbrella of topics that that story touched upon.

Lynn was somebody that I sort of intellectually connected with, found very empathetic.

And then I was pregnant during the making of the show, and like I, surprise baby, um... found out the day we got there for prep.

The show had been written and then I found out I was carrying a son and was making this show about losing your son.

No, I didn't have that experience, but like it made me look at it and say like, how do I feel like the story should end in this episode?

What story am I telling?

Lynn's story became really important to me, and so her story became a lot of the driving factor of the series emotionally.

Her starting in grief, and, I mean, she really sort of shaped all of the stages of grief in the show.

And I think in television it's multiple points of view.

For us, it was like every single character had an arc in that series, and we needed to be able to show it.

And even if it happened off screen, and even if only we knew it, it was still motivating what happened in each episode and how we paid attention to it.

- Michael, the Central Park Five story isn't really a story as much as I feel like it's just horrific chaos and just injustice.

So how do you find a story from all of that horribleness?

- It does have a beginning, middle, and end.

You know, the ending was, it feels kind of obvious, like, you wanna see those guys get out of jail.

You know, you wanna see Korey, you know, get that phone call that, you know, the real dude who did it confessed and you get to come home.

Finding that story was not difficult.

- Did you rape her?

[suspenseful music] - Yes.

♪ ♪ - Did you leave her for dead?

♪ ♪ - Yeah, I thought she was gonna die.

- I had a movie called "The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete" that Ava had read the script for, but she read the script and wanted to meet me and we talked about a couple of projects.

One was called "Central Park Five."

The arc was easy.

It was already there because everything that happened to those kids was, you know, I cried at this part.

It made me wanna do this.

It made me wanna do that.

That's how you know it resonated with people and we told it in the right medium.

And I don't know, it's hard for me to say, you know, what it was that made me understand that this should be, you know, a limited series, but it felt right.

- Real life is often tragic, and I think both of you have dealt or have had to handle really sensitive, heavy subjects: suicide, horrific racial violence.

But there's a dissonance there because you're still adapting it for an entertainment medium and for mass public.

How do you find that balance, and how do you tell a story like this that would entertain and challenge, but still be respectful to these people's lives and these subjects in general?

Was that scary to you to tackle?

- I put levity in everything that I do.

Everything.

Because, I mean, I would sit here in these meetings and I would tell people, "I don't do melodrama."

You know, I can't tell a director how to direct their scene, but it won't be melodramatic on the page.

And I promise you there's going to be levity.

Why?

Because I've never met anybody who's always serious.

Anybo-- even-- Listen, as Black people, that's how we cope too.

We'll make fun of anything, you know?

[Liz] I'm a New Yorker, it's the same thing.

- Yeah?

[chuckles] - As a New Yorker, you just are constantly being sarcastic and trying to avoid any actual real question.

[audience laughing] - And I think that just kind of spilled into the way that I write characters.

So, you know, I deal with it with a dash of levity would be my answer.

- I'm just gonna say I completely agree.

I think it's-- I approach it with humanity.

And we're all human, and I think somehow expecting that in television or in features people don't behave that way is how things can feel melodramatic, how things can feel self-serious.

I think like on "The Dropout," "The Dropout" was kind of authentically funny because everybody in the story is really weird.

And like, not in a dismissive or like derogatory way.

They're weird people.

And the notes we would get on from the network were like, "So this just feels really outside the box."

And you're like, "That happened.

That's the one that happened."

[audience laughing] And you know, with "Plainville" it was like, you know, being an awkward teenager is awkward.

Like, we all remember what being an awkward teenager is.

We all remember these things.

And, you know, the levity we found in that show was actually trying to sort of...

It was different, but it was like trying to explore this lack, this distance from reality.

So somehow we ended up with three musical numbers in a show that's about teen suicide, you know?

♪ But he doesn't know who I am ♪ ♪ And he doesn't give a damn about me ♪ ♪ 'Cause I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby ♪ ♪ Yeah, I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby ♪ - So I agree.

I mean, I think that's the only way to approach anything you do is not...

I mean, it's also like, don't take yourself too seriously.

We work in television.

Like, it's- it's-- like, I'm not trying to solve the world's problem.

I'm doing something to entertain you, and it is the greatest, best job in the world, but like, we all need a little perspective on that.

- So were there like civil rights experts or lawyers or anything like that, that were in the room or that helped you out?

- On "When They See Us"?

No, but the guys were involved.

- Okay, that's good.

- Now let me tell you, when this happened to 'em, they were kids.

It's different when you're dealing with them when they're adults.

You know, everybody has their memory of things, but they were great, they were fantastic.

Good partners.

Great partners.

There was a bunch of people who were reading scripts and making sure everything was cool and all good.

And even that, even then at the end of the day you don't leave unscathed.

- I mean TV in general, but also sensitive topics, you're going to deal with criticism and you're gonna deal with people who have seen it differently or don't appreciate how you told it.

- You know, there's no way to please everybody.

There's no way.

And when you're talking about sensitive material, there's just no way.

I think you just have to be really respectful about it in everyone's process and also understand that they will not like it.

Like, there's no version of them thinking that it's perfect.

There's no version of them thinking that you got it exactly right.

You will get certain things exactly right, and that's what you can hope for, but you won't get the whole thing right.

And so again it's like, you know, you kind of just wanna be prepared for that and understand also that it's probably the hardest thing that they will have to do that you will never have to do, which is watch your life story played by somebody else.

[typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching "From Fact to Fiction: Turning a True Story Into a Series" with Liz Hannah and Michael Starrbury on "On Story."

On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story project that also includes the "On Story" radio program, podcast, book series, and the "On Story" archive accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [projector clicking] [typing] [typewriter ding] [projector dies]