Transcript
Geri Cole: Hi, I’m Geri Cole and you’re listening to OnWriting, a podcast from the Writers Guild Of America, East. In each episode, you’re going to hear from the people behind your favorite films and television series, talking about the writing process, how they got their project from the page to the screen, and so much more.
Today, we’re going to bring you a special conversation between Liz Meriwether, the creator and showrunner of The Dropout and Melissa Silverstein, the founder and publisher of Women in Hollywood. Liz and Melissa are going to talk about The Dropout, the new Hulu limited series based on the ABC audio podcast that follows the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos.
In addition to The Dropout, Liz created the hit network television series New Girl, and Bless This Mess. She also wrote the screenplay for the romcom classic No Strings Attached. Now, let’s turn it over to our guest moderator, Melissa Silverstein.
Melissa Silverstein: Thanks so much for being here, Liz.
Liz Meriwether: Thanks for having me. I’m excited.
Melissa Silverstein: So if you had to give the logline for what the show was, what would you say it is? What is your logline for this?
Liz Meriwether: I’m notoriously terrible at titles and loglines. It’s the story of a woman’s rise and fall as the CEO of the company she founded. And then it’s also the story of a bunch of other things. I feel like this story has so much scope, I think, which is what really excited me about it was that it touches on just so many parts of our culture and big kind of historical moments. I mean, in recent history. I don’t know. Every time when I was working on it, every time that I thought I had kind of figured out what it was about, something surprised me and I was like, “Oh, there’s this whole other layer to it that I have to explore.” So yeah. Sorry, long answer.
Melissa Silverstein: It’s okay. No worries.
Liz Meriwether: It’s tough. It’s tough for me to put it in a logline.
Melissa Silverstein: So for me, I am like freaky follower of Elizabeth Holmes. I don’t know what my obsession is, but it’s like a serious obsession. I’d love to know if other people who are listening have gone the whole bad blood roots and all the podcasts and everything and read every story about it. Before I get into my fixation stuff, I want to ask you how you got started on the show and how you came to create it.
Liz Meriwether: I had read about Elizabeth Holmes in a Vanity Fair article, I guess it must have been in like 2017 or something, but it was when the company was falling apart. And I remember just pouring through it and thinking it was amazing and fascinating and then just kind of forgetting about it.
And then towards the end of New Girl, Searchlight asked me to come in and meet on the podcast that they just optioned The Dropout. And I hadn’t listened to the podcast yet. And I did and I was riveted. I thought that what Rebecca Jarvis did with the podcast was… I felt like it was this incredible exploration of who she is in a way that I thought some of the other reporting kind of hadn’t gone as deep on who Elizabeth is as a person.
So I felt like I was just so excited by the podcast, but I did ask myself, I was like, there’s been a book, there’s been a documentary, there’s been so much reporting about this. What is the point of doing a limited series about it? What do I think I can bring to this story? And it’s not just rehashing the stuff that’s already out there that’s been really well done by a lot of journalists.
And I guess I felt like the central question, that central mystery of who she is and what this story looked like from her point of view, from her imagined point of view, because obviously it’s a dramatization, I felt like that was a part of the story that hadn’t been told and that I was really interested in kind of exploring that.
And then my experiences running New Girl, I felt like I had a personal experience with being a young woman in a position of power at an early age when there were a lot of things I just didn’t know how to do. And I had that fake it till you make it and scary loss of identity throughout the process of suddenly being a leader at a young age, I think I really understood that.
So I don’t know. I was in the actual meeting with Searchlight and as I was talking about it, I just found myself getting more and more worked up about it. And I realized like, wow, I’m incredibly emotionally invested in this story. It was in the actual meeting that I realized how invested I was in the story. So yeah, that was my way. That was a long time ago because we also were supposed to start shooting March 2020 and we didn’t.
Melissa Silverstein: Right.
Liz Meriwether: We’ve been working on this for a long time. I mean-
Melissa Silverstein: So you started shooting a year later, right?
Liz Meriwether: Yeah.
Melissa Silverstein: A year, March 2021?
Liz Meriwether: Summer 2021. Yeah.
Melissa Silverstein: Okay. So almost like a year and a half later from when you were supposed to start. And you had a change of cast person, which I actually love Kate McKinnon, but I actually think worked out well for you.
Liz Meriwether: Amanda’s fantastic.
Melissa Silverstein: I want to get into Amanda because she’s spooky good in this, but talk a little bit about the writer’s room and how you put together all the Lizes. There’s a bunch of Lizes in that writer’s room and how you guys organize how to write something that, of course we know she was convicted now, but at that it was like it had a beginning and middle and end that was real. So how do you go about dramatizing something that we know happened?
Liz Meriwether: Yeah. I mean, I had never done that before. I’d only kind of written things with characters that I’d made up. And so I was excited about that challenge, but it was definitely daunting because there was so much research to do before we even got started. And then I feel like there was this moment when it was important to put the research aside and really just try to figure out how to organize the episodes emotionally, if that makes sense. Like what is the main emotional through line in this particular episode? Which it’s difficult when you’ve done all the research and you know the chronology and you know all the facts to kind of have to-
Melissa Silverstein: What’s the big point of each episode based on… Yeah.
Liz Meriwether: Having to decide what to lose, like where to veer from the facts after you spent a long time learning the facts.
Melissa Silverstein: Right. How long a period were you all doing the research and then you were like, okay, now we got to figure out this? Was it like two months, three months?
Liz Meriwether: No, it was probably like a month or so, but it was ongoing. I’d say that too. It was always kind of looking at stuff. But yeah, I feel like there was about a month of we interviewed people that they’d interviewed on the podcast and everybody read everything and we put in the writer’s room, our writer’s assistant put up all of the different prototypes that they’d had in Theranos.
Melissa Silverstein: Like the Edison and all that?
Liz Meriwether: Yeah.
Melissa Silverstein: Oh my gosh.
Liz Meriwether: The mini lab, which we didn’t include in the series because it was too confusing, but just like Theranos 1.0, 2.0, Edison. And then because it was like we were also trying to learn engineering and chemistry or at least understand enough science to be able to dramatize why she made the choice to move on from a certain prototype at certain times it. Was like we had to just learn enough to understand the bigger choices that she made.
But yeah. All around the writer’s room, we put up like all the real life pictures of the people just to keep the names straight. So there’s just like George Schultz staring down at me every day in the writer’s room. But yeah. And then the Lizes, I mean Liz Heldens and Liz Hannah were each keys with me for the writer’s room. And it was incredible because I was actually running Bless This Mess, which was a sitcom on ABC at the same time as The Dropout. So the writer’s rooms were on the same floor, so I was just running back and forth-
Melissa Silverstein: Oh, that’s fun.
Liz Meriwether: … between the writer’s rooms, but it was like just completely different tones. Like one room is just we’re talking about [inaudible 00:08:38] with chickens and then the other the room is really deep and-
Melissa Silverstein: Microfluidics.
Liz Meriwether: Micropolitics and and politics. I don’t know. So I knew that I needed really great drama EPs because I’d also never written a drama. So I really wanted to find people that understood drama structure and could kind of run the room in my absence. It was just this really weird coincidence that everybody was named Elizabeth. It was honestly the strangest.
Melissa Silverstein: And was it all female writer’s room?
Liz Meriwether: No, we had Dan LeFranc and Matt Lenski who were great, but yeah, just a small room.
Melissa Silverstein: And so for people who haven’t been watching, which I don’t know how you haven’t been, there’s two more episodes. One comes out tomorrow, Thursday, and then the next week is the last one. So can you talk about how you found the tone? Because even though each episode has a different focus, there is a consistent tone throughout it. So talk about what you think the tone is and how you were able to find it.
Liz Meriwether: Yeah, I mean I think that was everyone’s main question just from the beginning because they hired me and it was a little bit like she’s a comedy writer. She’s a sitcom writer. Is this going to be a comedy? I think Hulu had that question and it was the question that I had to ask myself too.
I guess I went into it thinking, I’m going to try to just tell the story the way that I want to tell it and not think about the tone because I knew I wanted it to feel grounded and always feel emotionally grounded, but I didn’t want to say like, this is a drama or this is a comedy because I didn’t want to rule stuff out, I guess.
I think there was so much absurdity to the story. If you listen to the podcast, if you read the book, and if you watch the documentary, you just-
Melissa Silverstein: It’s insane. The whole thing’s insane.
Liz Meriwether: Yeah. There’s so much insanity and absurdity and I didn’t think it would be right to tell the story without acknowledging all of that because I actually think it’s part of it. I think it’s part of the tragedy of it too. I think the two go hand in hand a lot of the times where it’s like it’s people kind of fumbling, trying to do things that they don’t understand and be people they aren’t. And it is important to kind of embrace the absurdity to me.
But yeah, I mean then there were moments that I felt like I felt my comedy muscle reaching for a joke, or I would write more of a classic joke with a setup and a punchline. And I felt that those moments always stuck out. It just became clear in working on the outlines in the scripts. It was like, okay, if anything feels like a joke, if anything feels like we’re trying to get a laugh, it’s not going to be exactly right. It should always kind of blend in organically with the emotions of the story, if that makes sense. So, that kind of became apparent.
Melissa Silverstein: And you used the SEC deposition as a kind of through line through the whole thing, which is basically the beginning of her downfall, having to actually honestly answer things and not being able to answer things. And so what was it about that deposition?
Liz Meriwether: I actually struggled with that because I felt like that is a thing that I’d seen a lot before in these kinds of shows. And initially, I was like, oh, I don’t want any framing device. And then there’s just so much. It’s like you need to be oriented in what’s going on. And I really wanted to go back in time.
I wanted to go back to her childhood and I felt like in order to do that, the audience needed to know where we were going a little bit, like in order to kind of have the patience to be with her throughout the Beijing sequence and college and all of that, that we needed to sort of know where it was going. And part of the resources that Rebecca Jarvis had given our writer’s room was just the 10 hours of deposition footage that she had that I did not watch all of, but I think Amanda did.
But I watched a lot of it. And then poor writer’s assistant had to watch all of it and sort of document it. But it was really fascinating to me as just the form of a deposition video, I think is really interesting. That camera just unrelenting on a person, no cutting away, for hours and hours and hours with one size shot. It just felt like this kind of fascinating microscope on a person. And so I got excited by that and I got excited by not showing the people questioning her, just really trying to commit to showing just her face on camera.
Melissa Silverstein: So I want to talk a little bit about Amanda and how she was able to just really embody this woman in a way. It was spooky. Spooky, good. And her evolution, as Elizabeth and you see those moments and you use this device where she is trying to convince herself that she can do it at times.
It’s like when she’s in college and she has to talk to herself in the mirror for language that she could communicate with people. And I’m watching the scene and I’m like, feels like this woman is on the spectrum in some way. Like she has some issues about human to human contact. And I was wondering, I don’t know if she’s been diagnosed or anything like that, but that seemed to be a really interesting follow through for this.
Liz Meriwether: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting.
Melissa Silverstein: And so talk a little bit about that.
Liz Meriwether: Yeah. First of all, Amanda, it’s the kind of performance as a writer you’re just like dream about because she elevates it. She lives like she’s living in the character. And especially you asked about the tone. I went through my journey with the tone, but I was so nervous about when we started shooting, because I knew that’s when the tone… What’s the cliche? The hits the frying pan.
Melissa Silverstein: The shit hits the frying pan.
Liz Meriwether: The shit hits the fan. The shit hits the frying.
Melissa Silverstein: Did you do it in order? Was it in chronological order that you shot or no?
Liz Meriwether: I mean we block shot the first four.
Melissa Silverstein: Okay.
Liz Meriwether: But most, we tried to do it as much in order as possible just for everybody’s sanity, but yeah. I mean she understood the tone just intrinsically. She’s one of those actresses who can hold space for comedy and drama at the same time, which I think is so rare. And she never let you off the hook as an audience. She always keeps you feeling for her, but at the same time, constantly on your toes. You’re not sure like what exactly is going on in her head. And I always thought the main engine of this show is going to be who is this woman, who is this woman. So if she had kind of offered a simple explanation with her performance, I don’t think people would be interested in continuing to watch eight episodes of it.
Melissa Silverstein: Right. No.
Liz Meriwether: She was such an incredible part of the process. And wait, what was the other thing you asked me about? It’s so interesting.
Melissa Silverstein: I was asking about Elizabeth’s kind of not being able to deal with people.
Liz Meriwether: Oh, connect. Yeah.
Melissa Silverstein: Connect.
Liz Meriwether: I really didn’t want to give her any labels or diagnoses.
Melissa Silverstein: Of course.
Liz Meriwether: For many reasons. I’m not a doctor and I think it can be distancing. I think it’s easy for people to put labels on other people and then feel like they are not at all connected to that person.
Melissa Silverstein: Right. But I connected with it more. I mean I was just trying to rationalize. All of us are really trying to understand this woman.
Liz Meriwether: Yeah.
Melissa Silverstein: She is a unicorn company, a unicorn person. And I think that’s part of the fascination.
Liz Meriwether: Yeah. I’m so glad that you picked up on the connecting thing because that was another important emotional through line for me in creating the series. I felt like the box, the machine, I mean, the way that I understood it as a non-scientist was this person who wants to connect with other people, who is actually just builds a box in order to do it.
Melissa Silverstein: Right.
Liz Meriwether: In some ways. I mean it’s very primal looking at people’s blood and telling them what’s going on in their body. And yeah, I don’t know. I was so fascinated by the box as a metaphor for her attempt to connect with other people in the world. So I’m so glad you picked up on that because it was one of the things that I really thought was fascinating about her.
Melissa Silverstein: Yeah. I really want to understand a little bit more about how you handled the fact that she was a girl. She’s a girl and talking to these older dudes who are super rich, pitching this thing that doesn’t exist. And on the one hand, them being fascinated by her and then also them being able to kind of manipulate her, but also this whole masculine way of being a leader in Silicon Valley.
Like Larry Ellison said, “Did you fire anyone yet?” And she was just like, “Why would I fire anyone?” And then automatically being like, “Oh, I’m supposed to do this.” It was like how she was supposed to be, because she didn’t have the tools. This is the constant thing is she might have had a great vision, but she did not have the tools to figure out what she was doing.
Liz Meriwether: Yeah. Yeah, I think she didn’t have the tools in ways that had nothing to do with her gender, meaning like she didn’t finish college. She didn’t get-
Melissa Silverstein: Right. Doesn’t know how to sink yet. All those things.
Liz Meriwether: Yeah. She did not have those tools. And then I think, yeah, obviously I think that her gender plays a huge part in this story. And what I liked about it was that it wasn’t simple and it isn’t like, oh, this is a story about a victim of sexism. It’s a story about a young woman who both uses sexism, uses her gender, but also is like in constant war with herself and her gender. And I found it to be this really fascinating gray area. Not gray area.
It had so many complicated aspects to it at a time when I think there’s a lot of wanting to put things in boxes and make things black and white. I just found it was very complicated as a story about gender, which I really appreciate it. And yeah, I think didn’t have a lot of role models of what a female CEO looked like or did. And then she goes to Steve Jobs-
Melissa Silverstein: Particularly in Silicon Valley.
Liz Meriwether: Yeah, exactly. And then on the flip side, her legacy is that she’s made it so much harder for female founders in Silicon Valley because now they have to distance themselves from Theranos completely, especially startups in the hard sciences, which is the hardest thing for women to break into anyway.
So yeah, I mean I think it’s a really interesting story about gender. And the episode that aired last week, the Iron Sisters episode, I wanted to kind of show three different women in science. I wanted to put Phyllis Gardner, Erika Chung, and Elizabeth Holmes side by side to look at different experiences.
I mean I think Phyllis Gardner’s coming from this older generation of scientists who had to fight. She fought for everything she had and was constantly underestimated. And then Erika Chung, who there’s so many interesting parallels with Elizabeth. Like they both were assaulted in college. They’re young women. They’re brilliant. I think that Erika is also a woman of color and comes from no money. Then there’s things that are very different about them, but the fact that it’s a young woman who is the main whistle blower to bring Elizabeth down.
Melissa Silverstein: She’s the hero.
Liz Meriwether: Yeah. To me, Erika’s story was a reason to do the show because I felt like a lot of people didn’t know just how incredible what she did is and the impact that it had on her life and her courage. I don’t know. So I guess I wanted to show these three characters in conversation with each other to show different versions of being a woman in science.
Melissa Silverstein: And Elizabeth thought that she was being a leader as an iron sister, where really she was at logger heads with all the other women who are much more iron sister in my-
Liz Meriwether: Making feminism into a commercial, like literally into a commercial, that’s from a real commercial. I don’t know. That interested me too.
Melissa Silverstein: When you had the people come in, who experienced Theranos and which also one thing I learned was I did not know it was therapy and diagnosis, which I was like, oh, that makes perfect sense. When the people who came in who worked at Theranos-
Liz Meriwether: Does it make perfect sense?
Melissa Silverstein: None of it makes sense and that’s why I’m fascinated by it.
Liz Meriwether: Okay, great.
Melissa Silverstein: When you had them come in, like all the people who worked with her, was there something that they said that you were like, like holy and maybe it made it into the show, maybe it didn’t?
Liz Meriwether: Oh yeah. That’s such a good question. I’m just trying to think back. I mean so much of what, yeah, we talked about with-
Melissa Silverstein: Like the Christmas sweaters and the clothing she wore. She was like a 15 year old.
Liz Meriwether: Well that-
Melissa Silverstein: She was like doing bra straps and I was just like, wait, what? What you doing? Put on a shirt.
Liz Meriwether: We spoke to Anna Ariola who talked a lot about clothing and telling her about Issey Miyake who was the designer of Steve Jobs’s turtlenecks. I mean, the thing that I think she had said to Anna that she was envious of Steve Job’s uniform, which I think as a woman, I completely understand that.
Melissa Silverstein: Totally.
Liz Meriwether: Just to be able to just not think about it and grab a suit or something. It’s like a dream, but yeah. I mean we spoke to Edmund Ku and so a lot of what he had talked about in our interview about the labs and the feeling in the labs and the comradery and the labs made it into the show. And then he also spoke about just when she liked you, just what that felt like. I think he described it as feeling like a shiny new toy. That she had this ability when she liked you to just kind of make you feel like the most amazing person in the world. And then she would just kind of switch on a dime and it would get, when she didn’t like you, that was just-
Melissa Silverstein: Again, mentals problems. So I just keep coming back to all these things. All right, I want to talk about one particular scene that is mind blowing. It’s the scene in Switzerland in the hotel room where they couldn’t get it to work. And duh, it only worked once. Not expected to work again and they’re doing everything like that. First thing I want to know is was that based on something real or did you-
Liz Meriwether: Yes, it’s in the book Bad Blood. There’s a description of just her in Switzerland. I think it was maybe a couple different demos and we made it into one demo.
Melissa Silverstein: Okay.
Liz Meriwether: I read it as like, okay, this is the beginning of her deciding to lie as part of the company’s policy, that it was okay. The demos are not going to be real and that’s okay. Which by the way, I think that is sort of common, but not everybody. But you know what I mean? It was like that was one of those things where you were like you could potentially say that other people were doing that too, but there was-
Melissa Silverstein: About people’s blood though?
Liz Meriwether: Exactly. I mean, no, but I think that the hotel room, there was an anecdote about just that she lost feeling in her fingers because she was trying to make it work all night and just pricking her fingers over and over again. I don’t know. As somebody who spent many an all nighter working on New Girl, I guess I kind of understood that feeling of I’m literally giving my blood to this.
Melissa Silverstein: Right.
Liz Meriwether: I’m poking my own fingers trying to get this thing to work. I don’t know. I really understood that. That always like jumped out at me and I knew that I wanted to put that in the show.
