Creator Spotlight - David J. Loehr
A Q&A with podcaster, playwright and fan of the arts David J. Loehr
Welcome back to Creator Spotlight! This week we’re featuring writer, performer, panelist, editor, playwrite, podcaster, father and cat bed David J. Loehr.
David is a playwright and podcaster based in southern Indiana (his website). You might know him from any one of a number of series at The Incomparable, from the “mothership” panel show to the Game Show on to the Incomparable Radio Theater which he writes and produces. Besides the current Galaxy Scouts miniseries on the Radio feed, he’s currently producing and co-writing a romantic time traveling adventure with fellow playwright Andie Arthur called “Where or When,” coming soon to The Incomparable network.
Over to David!
Your work revolves around writing, whether for the stage or online. Have you always been or considered yourself a writer?
Yes, I always knew I was going to be a writer. My earliest memories are of wanting to write for television. My mother sold a script to the original Hawaii Five-O early in its run and flew out to Hollywood for a week to work on revisions. When she returned, I did not talk to her for a month because “I was the one who was supposed to do that.” I was maybe three. She’d always been a writer and in different styles, media, formats, so I grew up with the idea that I could write anything I wanted to try: prose, scripts, poetry, songs, what have you. And flexibility is a good thing, it’s allowed me to adapt as needed. I fell into theatre because it was convenient—it was something I could do once we settled where we are—and from there to theatre conferences and consulting and then podcasting.
Did your mother write episodes for other TV series?
Alas no. While my mother sold the one Five-O script and went out to work on it—which she realized was something of an audition for joining the staff—they wound up not filming the episode. They kept inviting her to other things—hey, want to go see a Sonny and Cher taping? how about an episode of Rhoda? maybe a Carol Burnett Show?—but she wasn’t interested, she just wanted to work on the script and make it better fit what they wanted. “I wasn’t starstruck enough for them,” so that was that. But she was able to join the Writers Guild which meant a subscription to their journal. The “TV Market List” in the back—a list of every show then in production with contact info and whether it was open to freelance writers or not—was to me what baseball cards and stats were to other kids. Just an aside for some Glenning: while out there, she did wind up having lunch one table over from—and then meeting—John Carradine one day.
In particular, how did you become a playwrite/actor/producer? This includes your work with Finley Quality.
When my then fiancee got a job as a librarian at a small college in Indiana, I joined her. College aside, it’s a small town, real civilization is about an hour to an hour and a half away. (By real civilization, I mean shopping choices beyond Walmart and, well, Walmart.) But I fell in with the theatre department at the college—she introduced me to the chair, “you should meet, you have similar brains.” I wound up volunteering to a certain degree, doing marketing and graphic design (mostly) in exchange for workshopping scripts with student actors. After a few years, we decided to start our own theatre company in town to do shows that didn’t require casting 15-30 actors at a time and, not incidentally, putting on some of my own scripts.
We took several shows on the road that way, going to various fringe festivals, also performing at a couple of colleges and regional theatres. That was good practice for learning how to adapt a play to various venues and settings, how to produce a lean and easily portable show, how to write to certain parameters. I wrote a few one person shows and learned an invaluable lesson about those: always know who your person (or people, if switching characters) is talking to, and don’t just make it a generic audience. That helps tighten and focus the writing.
It didn’t hurt living near one of the major regional theatres in the country, Actors Theatre of Louisville. Events there like the annual Humana Festival of New American Plays helped me connect with theatre artists and producers from around the country and occasionally beyond. Twitter was a big help there as well. And from there, I fell into podcasting, but we’ll get to that in a minute…
Dumb question but do you live in the real life version of Pawnee, IN? Does it resemble the version we saw on Parks and Recreation?
Not quite the real life Pawnee—that’s a blend of Bloomington, where Indiana University is, and Muncie, which is where Bob Ross’ “Joy of Painting” originated and was taped. This is a much smaller town next to a slightly bigger one where the main shopping option is Walmart and a few farm equipment supply places. It’s down on the Ohio River between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky, and was at one time the largest port on the river. (That one time would have been around the Civil War era.)
But Parks and Rec is pretty spot on for this general area. The murals in their city hall bear a striking resemblance to the murals on the walls inside the Shawnee Summer Theatre, a summerstock theatre about a hundred miles west of here—uncannily so. I was lucky enough to ask Mike Schur, creator of the show, whether anyone there had experience at the Shawnee, but no, it’s just that those types of hideous and vaguely politically incorrect murals are common all through the midwest, which, fair enough.
Do you prefer to compose with a keyboard or pen and paper? Pros/cons of either?
I don’t really have a preference, it just depends on the project. Most everything starts with a yellow pad, preferably college ruled. Sometimes it just starts with notes and random ideas, bits of dialogue here and there, just trying to sort out a through line. I also do this with the Bear app on my phone because it syncs with my desktop and iPads. (https://bear.app/) Sometimes, I’ll knock out a rough outline, general points along the journey, the rise and fall of story, just so I have a roadmap. Some stories or scripts need a more extensive outline, I do that for full length plays or large projects. The Radio Theater, on the other hand…a lot of those episodes will have a few lines of outline before I just start writing. Because they’re working off the template of 1940s radio shows and pulp adventures, those tropes and styles are almost like second nature. If I have a mystery, I need the setup, the clues, and the solution, but then I just write because the structure of it, the steps from Points A to Z are straightforward.
One of the things I love about making the Radio Theater is that I don’t have to stick to one genre or set of characters. The premise of the podcast is that these are all shows from the “Finley Quality Network” in the 1940s, so sometimes it can be a mystery, sometimes a sci-fi adventure, maybe a western, whatever I want to try. I still remember when we decided to do a regular series and Jason Snell said, “You know, you can do cliffhangers now.” It took about ten seconds to realize what that first cliffhanger would be—I’d been wanting to write a stage play that used Schrödinger’s Cat and Erwin Schrödinger himself as the center of a bedroom farce, but it could be fun with our Nikola Tesla series—and then about ten more seconds to realize we could break the two episodes up with an unrelated one because “we couldn’t find part two, please enjoy this from our sister service in the U.K.” I’d been wanting to try writing an homage to the Goon Show—the cornerstone of modern British comedy where Spike Milligan and Peter Sellars got their start—so why not then and there? Even better, listeners wouldn’t be expecting cliffhangers yet, so the bigger the farce could build by the end of part one, the better. That one needed more of an outline—good farce works like clockwork—but even there, it was finding act breaks and climaxes, then how best to complicate things by the end of part one. But even there, I don’t think the actual outline was more than a page for both parts combined.
(The “Finley Quality Network” is a lift, I mean, homage to the comedy duo of Bob and Ray, as is the series. They were largely radio comedians from the 1940s through to the 1980s, and spoofing all the various types of shows was their stock in trade. As the Goons influenced later comedians like the That Was the Week That Was gang, Monty Python, Eddie Izzard, and more, so Bob and Ray were huge influences on Saturday Night Live, especially the initial cast and writing staff, as well as David Letterman and his writers and on to podcasters today.)
I discovered you through one of my favorite podcasts, The Incomparable’s flagship podcast. How did you become an Incomparable panelist, did you know Jason (the host) or any of the other panelists prior to your first Incomparable episode
Falling into podcasting. That happened when Jason reached out—we’d been online friendly for a while, I’d been a longtime fan of the old “teevee” blog he ran which featured many people who’d wind up as panelists on the Incomparable. One thing they used to do there was re-skin the site each year for April Fool’s Day: one year, it was a fake Wikipedia complete with insane links, they did a fake New York Times site, and one year even a fake ABC network site touting an all-reality-show season. (They even got invited to pitch some of the shows to the real ABC, but they did not because “these would all be horrible in real life.”)
When everyone started to have more real world responsibilities like heavier workloads at day jobs as well as having children, the site wound down a bit. But podcasting was just taking off. Thus the Incomparable was born. And they continued the April Fools tradition for a few years. So somewhere around the end of 2012, Jason asked if I’d be interested in maybe writing them a radio play for the next April episode. No idea what about, but “you’re the only playwright we know.” And no restrictions or requirements, just “something like a play.” I thought about it for a few months—there were all kinds of ideas, but did they really fit? Then it hit me. A set of fake 1940s radio shows, that fit with the pop culture focus of the podcast and allowed for both parody and pastiche as well as plenty of in-jokes related to the regulars. As a longtime listener, I had a lot to draw on there. That was episode 133, which we thought would be a one-shot thing. https://www.theincomparable.com/theincomparable/133/ As a result, Jason invited me to join the regular rotation of panelists and has only regretted that several times a year since.
Within a few days, we started getting feedback, a lot of which was essentially “when’s the next radio episode?” We even received fan art. There are even a few people who’ve done fan fiction which still cracks me up. Then we were invited to do a short live set at a conference. “Is this a thing? This might be a thing.” So we decided to do another one at Christmas time, that was episode 174. https://www.theincomparable.com/theincomparable/174/ And again, we thought “okay, that’s that.”
By January, we were planning a spinoff. Between that and the Total Party Kill series, that’s how the Incomparable grew from a podcast to a network.
It’s funny, if you go back and listen to my earliest episodes as a panelist, I’m very timid, Jason has to invite me to say something. It’s not that I’m shy—as I think the next 400+ episodes can attest—it’s that I was so used to listening to these voices for a little over two years at that point, I kept forgetting that now I could interact with them too. That wore off pretty quickly. Between being a listener and, in many cases, a reader when they wrote at the teevee site, I was familiar with many of the regulars and had been interacting with a number of them once Twitter became a thing. Through doing shows and then eventually getting together for live shows and events, I got to know everyone much better. (And to tell the truth, they make living in Hoosier exile bearable.)
How scripted are episodes of The Incomparable? Do they require significant editing? Do you have a "no Glenning" rule?
Episodes of the Incomparable are completely unscripted. Even the opening statements are extemporaneous. Most of the editing involves eliminating crosstalk, sliding everything apart so no one’s interrupting or talking over anyone else. We don’t record with video usually, so there can be a little crosstalk sometimes. Also coughs, false starts, moments when someone might sneeze in the middle of saying something and start again for a clean take.
Once in a while, an episode might need more editing—the “Human Santapede” episode is a good example, that was supposed to be a quick, simple episode to fill a last minute gap in the schedule right before Christmas one year. It turned into an epic with extra panelists, extra stories, and went off the rails so thoroughly, I think that might have been one of the most difficult editing sessions. Jason is still editing and re-editing that one all these years later. (There’s been a re-release as well as the uncut, chaotic original version.)
Do you have any favorite panelists to work with on The Incomparable?
I love them all. That’s not a joke either. They are delightful to a one, and very fun to play with—they spark my improv instincts which is always fun. Steve Lutz might be the most fun that way—we tend to get silly, especially when recording a Game Show or rehearsing a Radio Theater episode. But I love the conversations with everyone there, whether I’m on an episode or just listening.
I seem to remember an anecdote where you either grew up in a museum or in very close proximity to one. Not a MUSEUM like the MMA in NYC but maybe a house of oddities? Am I remembering this correctly?
Ah, the museum. Yes, I grew up at a doll museum in central Florida. My grandparents had amassed a large collection and when they retired, they moved to Florida with my mother and myself in tow to open a doll museum. We were a little south of Orlando and opened around the time Walt Disney World first opened. At its peak, the collection held around 4,000 dolls from various eras, from China head dolls to French porcelain to wax figures and up to modern day collectibles. To this day, when I watch Antiques Roadshow and dolls come up for appraisal, I can usually name the make and year within a few years, and occasionally a reasonable estimate of the price. Why that’s all still in my brain, I could not tell you.
When Glenn Fleishman was editing The Magazine, I wrote a piece about a particular collectible that almost wound up in the museum. And which I still have to this day. (Although the plea at the end is out of date, I did finally find one, though not an original.) https://the-magazine.org/49/still-life-with-jamest-kirk/index.html
What are your thoughts about the concept of peak television? In particular, do you think that the best of 2020s television compares favorably with the best of other decades?
I do. I welcome the age of “peak” television if only because it means more people have more opportunities to tell their stories, and hopefully stories we haven’t all seen and heard before. When I look at the broadcast network lineups from my childhood, we had a variety of sitcoms and dramas seven nights a week, we had settings like Phoenix, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Boulder aside from the standard New York and Los Angeles with a hint of Chicago and San Francisco. These days, on American broadcast networks, you have…a full night of Law and Order, a full night of FBI, a full night of Chicago Med/Fire/P.D., and all nine of those are from one producer. You have NCIS (D.C.), NCIS: L.A., and NCIS: Hawai’i. (RIP, NCIS:NOLA.) And then the new Magnum P.I. which is largely indistinguishable from the recent Hawaii: Five-O reboot. The bulk of the rest are New York or Los Angeles set, most of them indistinguishable from one another. At least American Auto (Detroit) and Abbott Elementary (Philadelphia) are presenting lives and settings we don’t see everywhere else.
Looking at the current broadcast schedule, I’m realizing I don’t really watch anything on any of the major networks beyond Abbott Elementary. (This would shock childhood me.) All the appointment shows—the shows we watch the day they drop—are not even on cable networks but on streaming services. Ted Lasso, Strange New Worlds, For All Mankind, Only Murders in the Building, Reservation Dogs, Our Flag Means Death, Dark Winds, Ms. Marvel, Slow Horses…I could go on. (Heck, if peak tv allows us to have and enjoy a brilliantly intricate jewel box like Only Murders in the Building, I say keep pushing towards the peak.) And those settings: London, outer space, Houston/Moon/Mars, NYC, rural Oklahoma, pirate ship, Navajo reservation, Jersey City/Karachi, London. Only one New York show in the pack, and well worth it—it’s such a specialized style and tone, its credit sequence and title fonts plant the flag that this feels like something out of The New Yorker magazine, so it’s not quite the same as “generic cop show” or “generic workplace sitcom” set in NYC.
We’ve had a regular “golden age” in just about every decade, and each successive one pushes to newer, better, more interesting places. And each golden age begets the next. I could trace a kind of family tree of American television comedy starting with “Your Show of Shows” in the early 1950s and how the DNA of that writers’ room spread into the next era, those writers mentoring the next era and so on right to the present day. (It’s kind of stunning. There’s a similar lineage in British comedy dating at least back to the Goon Show on BBC Radio in the 1950s.)
Now that the television world isn’t quite so small or finite, this current age has been more robust and long-lasting—one could argue it began with The Sopranos and hasn’t really ebbed since. But this is a newsletter, not a dissertation or a book. (Or is it…?)
One other question: I believe that a hallmark of multi-camera television (sitcoms) is that they continued traditions of stage and theater acting and direction (I.e. blocking, sets still based on theater stages). Do you think that the advent of single-camera sitcoms and modern dramatic television has fundamentally changed how writers and directors think of "the stage"?
That’s right—early television all grew out of theatre staging, it’s closer to that than film because of the need to work live and in order instead of filming scenes at random. There were dozens of anthology shows in the 1950s that were essentially just plays staged for the camera, either shows adapted from the stage or playwrights writing single stories for television that might then go on to the stage. There is an astounding musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” featuring Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager and Paul Newman as the romantic lead, and the only reason anyone even thinks about it is because that’s where the song “Love and Marriage” originated. There are also some very good things like “Marty,” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight” among others. One reason so few of these remain today is because the live cameras did not record, only transmitted. Most of what we have from the early days are "kinescopes,” literally filmed recordings of the shows as they aired on a television set.
The legend is that multi-camera television started with Desi Arnaz and cinematographer Karl Freund developing a system to film I Love Lucy. Several shows were already doing that at the time; Arnaz and Freund’s main innovations were to film on 35mm instead of 16mm—which provided a higher quality copy for reuse later—and to use a multi-camera setup with a live studio audience. That was key because Lucille Ball came alive before a live audience, so being able to perform with one improved the show. For years, it was a three camera setup, but nowadays a four camera is standard thanks to Garry Marshall adding a fourth one to the Mork and Mindy set to allow for Robin Williams’ improvisation and not sticking to his marks.
But even in the 1950s, we had single-camera sitcoms made more like films, and those dominated 1960s television. So there’s been a steady ebb and flow between the two formats. Nowadays, it feels like there are more single-camera than multi-camera, but shows like the recent revival of One Day at a Time show there’s still plenty of life in the format. There’s a similar thrill to seeing a live performance in person—knowing that the actors have to be off book and rehearsed, ready to do the whole script in order in an evening. Saturday Night Live has that as well, and literally live with no stopping.
I think the two feed off of and improve one another—stage and television, that is. We’re seeing more fluid transitions between scenes on stage, more of a cinematic feeling to them, and using more of the language and shorthand of television and film in stage plays, both in the writing itself and certainly the directing. And a lot of television is being written by playwrights, or people who came up through theatre. For example, Warren Leight ran Law & Order: SVU for many years as well as Law & Order: Criminal Intent, but I knew of him years before for his Tony-winning play “Side Man” (which is excellent). Several playwright friends are staffed on shows like SVU and even Ms. Marvel. There are certain things that each medium needs and/or does better than the other, but the fundamentals are still basically the same: tell a good story well.
Years ago, near the dawn of Twitter, I remember having a back and forth with a theatre director friend where the argument was “could you stage something from television on a live stage?” My argument was that yes, you could. He countered with The Wire—he couldn’t see how you could do that well on a stage. It wouldn’t be the same as the television version, and maybe it would be revised and redesigned to work on a stage, but the story, the characters, the world? You can totally do all of that onstage. In some ways, it might be more compelling, more empathic.
I took one of the spec scripts I’d originally written for Homicide: Life on the Street and reconceived it for the stage. The trick was how to make it compelling throughout instead of a simple, linear progression, especially since we wouldn’t have the budget for big sets or specific scene changes. So I deconstructed it from top to bottom. I started in a dark stage, we have a complex sound cue involving a police-related shooting and the chaos around it, and then the lights come up on “the box,” the interrogation room, where we see two plainclothes detectives and the police officer involved in the shooting sitting at a table. I wound up directing it the first time, and the first time I played the sound cue for the cast, I said, “Now, the next 40 minutes is parsing that sound effect.” So it really began in the interrogation, and as the audience needed a detail, one of the detectives would walk to a different part of the stage for a “flashback” to a previous interview whether with witnesses, relatives, what have you. It was a way to build those details in without belaboring them or trying to catalog them all beforehand. Sometimes they illuminated the officer’s story, sometimes they contradicted it, but it was a fascinating way to structure it. After staging it and seeing how well it worked, I think that would have been a more effective structure for it as a filmed episode too. Certainly more interesting.
My typical closing question: pretend you wake up one morning and you discover that the Internet has been destroyed. What's the first thing that you do?
If the Internet has been destroyed, I might try to reinvent it. It’s made life easier here in the not-Pawnee, not-Hawkins portion of Indiana, and I can say it literally changed my life—without Twitter, I might not have made the same theatre connections I have or built the audience I have let alone fallen into podcasting. So I might try to make an internet again. But that first morning? I’d probably make some hot tea, pull out a yellow pad and a Blackwing pencil, and start making notes. It’s a good habit to get into for a writer.
My thanks for David J. Loehr for this interesting Q&A! Don’t forget to check out The Incomparable Radio Theater as well!
A really insightful and interesting discussion, Mark!
A very interesting interview and I will definitely be giving Incomparable Radio Theater a listen!