March 17, 2026 • 52 mins
Rusty Austin was a reality TV show producer for over three decades and is now the author of six published books, including an illustrated children’s book series.
Rusty broke into Hollywood as a freelance electrician on dozens of movies, including Terminator 2. After a few years, he decided to give up movies because everything in the lighting and grip department weighed no less than 50 pounds.
He then spent 35 years producing reality TV shows like: Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, Big Brother, Survivor, Nanny 911, COPS, and Hell’s Kitchen, which he worked on for 16 seasons, and from which he retired in 2018.
His books include: Baseball’s Unlikely: A Constant; Dave and Me; and four children’s books: The Carrot Is Orange, The Unicorn Has One Horn, Beware The Grizzly Bear, and An Awesome Bird: The Pelican. I’ve read An Awesome Bird: The Pelican, and can tell you it’s a wonderfully charming compendium of Rusty’s short and sweet poems about lots of different animals set against whimsical artwork created by middle schoolers from Cathedral City, CA. If you have kids and are looking for a truly entertaining and educational book, I highly urge you to check it out.
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Steve Cu (00:00):
On today's Story Beat.
(00:02):
Yeah, like I said, we like to say with scripted,you write the script and then shoot the show. With
reality, you shoot the show and then write thescript. And that's kind of how it works. So you
just, you have to just hone it down and hone itdown and hone it down. And you start with 400
hours, you get to 300 hours, you get to 200 hours,you get to 100 hours, you get to 50, you get to
20, you get to 10, you finally get it down whereyou need it. And that's, that's a big, that's a
(00:23):
big part of it is just, just having the time andthe mental acuity to be able to hone that down and
really focus on what you need.
This is Story Beat with Steve Cuden, A, uh,podcast for the creative mind. Story Beat explores
how masters of creativity develop and producebrilliant works that people everywhere love and
(00:44):
admire. So join us as we discover how talentedcreators find success in the worlds of imagination
and entertainment. Here now is your host, SteveCuden.
Thanks for joining us on Story Beat. We're comingto you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh,
(01:05):
Pennsylvania. My guest today, Rusty Austin, was areality TV show producer for over three decades
and is now the author of six published books,including an illustrated children's book series.
Rusty broke into Hollywood as a freelanceelectrician on dozens of movies he was including
Terminator 2. After a few years, he decided togive up movies because everything in the lighting
(01:28):
and grip department weighed no less than £50. Hethen spent 35 years producing reality TV shows
like Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, Bigbrother, Survivor, Nanny, 911 Cops, and Hell's
Kitchen, which he worked on for 16 seasons andfrom which he retired in 2018. His books included
(01:50):
Baseball's Unlikely, A Constant, Dave and Me, andfour children's books, the Carrot Is Orange, the
Unicorn Has One Horn, Beware the Grizzly Bear, andan awesome Bird, the Pelican. I've read An Awesome
Bird, the Pelican and can tell you it's awonderfully charming compendium of Rusty's short
and sweet poems about lots of different animalsset against whimsical artwork created by middle
(02:14):
schoolers from Cathedral City, California. If youhave kids and are looking for a truly
entertainingly educational book, I highly urge youto check it out. So for all those reasons and many
more, I'm greatly privileged to have the multitalented producer and author Rusty Austin join me
on Story Beat today. Rusty, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me on. And It's a beautifulafternoon.
(02:36):
Well, that it is. Um, so let's go back in timejust a little bit. At what age did you become
interested in show business? Why the moviebusiness? Why tv?
Well, I was a. Dropped out of high school when Iwas about 15 and became a roofer. And I did
roofing for about seven years and it was goodmoney and fun. But then I started looking around
(02:58):
and I realized that anybody that was a roofereither moved up or they used up their body. So I
didn't want to go down that road anymore. So Iwent back to film school, which I graduated from
in uh, 1988. UCLA film school.
UCLA undergrad. Undergrad or grad undergraduate.
Uh, I got a BA and I did movies for a while. I wasin the lighting and grip department and I realized
(03:21):
the same thing again. Everything is just way toomuch and it's too hard on your body. So that was
just at the beginning of reality TV where Cops wascoming along and Survivor and whatnot. And I just
kind of rode that wave all the way through tillnow.
So. All right, you uh, started after schoolsomehow in being a gaffer basically, right?
Rus (03:40):
Yeah, electrician actually.
Electrician. And so how did you get to that? Imean what led you to doing that in the first
place?
When I was at ucla, I worked in the equipmentoffice and so we would check out to the students
all the lighting and all the cameras. And Ilearned how to do all the technical stuff with the
Nagras and like that. And so I just happened tohave a know a person that knew a person that knew
(04:04):
a person that got me on the uh, uh, on thelighting crew of Terminator 2. And that's kind of
how I got started.
Got it. So you, you were working in the cage inMelnitz Hall?
Uh, exactly right. In Mellon. Yeah.
I haven't told you, but I uh, am a graduatestudent of ucla, so I get it.
Oh good. Yeah. So you remember Melitz, with allthe very well that rooms on the second.
Floor and very well. It's been a couple of years,there's no question.
Rusty Austin (04:27):
Yeah, me too.
So then how in the world after you realized, well,your body's not going to take this very heavy
lifting work, how did you transition then intoproducing tv? That's a big leap.
Well, I was again, I had met a guy in film schooland he got a job on a show called Real Stories of
the Highway Patrol, which was a very early onreality ride along show, kind of a competitor to
(04:50):
Cops. And he got me on that as A scriptsupervisor. And I did that for a couple of seasons
or a season or two. And then, uh, the nighttimeonline supervisor got laid off or didn't come
back. And so they gave me the nighttime job, whichwas like a 3pm to midnight shift. And so I did
that for a few years on various shows. And thenfinally one day I just said, I'm not working
(05:12):
nights anymore. And I didn't work for six months.
And then somebody finally called me for a day job.
And from there it just kind of took off and I was,I was like a more of a post producer really. I did
oversee, like the gathering, uh, of the tapes andthe editing and the music. And I would be on set
for some of the stuff, but mostly I would do thepost production for like, you know, four to six
(05:33):
months after, after shooting.
Steve Cuden (05:35):
So.
So you weren't really a producer, uh, that createdepisodes or anything like that?
No, it's post, uh, producer for, uh, realityshows. You're more of a, like a. Well, we like to
say for a scripted show you write the script andthen, uh, shoot the show. And for reality, you
shoot the show and then write the script. So whatwe do was, you know, we go through 400 hours of
(05:55):
footage to find that the 45 minutes that worksbest for TV.
So explain that a little bit for the listeners whodon't know what you just said. We. When you are a
post production supervisor on a reality show,you're gathering a lot of information before you
know what that episode is gonna be, right?
Uh, sort of. We produce it. Like for example, Iwas on hell's kitchen for 16 seasons and we made
(06:18):
sure when we cast the show, we get 12 people thatcan't cook a lick and four people. So, you know,
going in, who's gonna be the four finalists?
Are you saying that you're casting a reality show?
Yes. So you pick out, um, oh, you get, I don'tknow, a thousand reels on the Internet of people
that want to be on the show. And you kind of, yougo through it and you go through it and that takes
(06:39):
a few months of pre production. And you go throughit and you pick out people and then you rent the
studio and set up the stage. This is per housekitchen and set up the whole kitchen and
everything. And each show has a dinner service andhas a team of producers that go through and figure
out what they're going to serve at the dinnerservice and what the punishment and the rewards
(07:01):
are going to be in like that. And so those are,those are like associate producers. And then I'm
part of that whole thing to just kind of go alongto make sure that everything's going to work out
in post production. And then, uh, for Hell'sKitchen, for example, we shot a 400 to 1 ratio. So
you have 400 hours of tape for one hour of TV.
Wow.
So you spent, you spend the first three monthsjust transcribing everything and looking at it and
(07:25):
going through it and comparing it with what youthought you were going to get and what you
actually got. And you're always surprised bystorylines that you didn't think were going to
exist that turned up. And sometimes you lose astoryline that you had planned on and come up with
a better one, but you can't.
Actually plan it out. You don't tell thecontestants what to do, they're doing what they
(07:46):
do.
No, it's real in the sense that they're not fedlines or anything, but it's not real in the sense
that we set up the situations. So for example, ifthey're going to Las Vegas for whatever, they're
going there for a challenge, we would set that allup.
Mhm. And you cast people, I guess, correct me ifI'm wrong, you cast people that have certain
(08:12):
types.
Yes. So we try to get, for, uh, Health Kitson, forexample, we had eight men and eight women. And you
try to get some introverts and some outgoing andsome people that quite frankly are not very nice
and you know, you don't get a lot of time withthem. So you have that. We have a whole casting
department that kind of knows, has a real feel forit. And after, you know, I was on it for 16
(08:35):
seasons, I think it's still on now in season 25.
And so you get a real feel for it.
One of the reasons why they cast people who are,as you say, not so nice is because the only thing
that really holds up in storytelling and you aretelling stories with these people, the only thing
that holds up really is conflicting. And so youneed people who are conflict makers.
Yes. You have to have conflict in every scene,every minute of the show. It has to have
(08:59):
something. Even the softer, more slowed downstuff, they're still dealing with conflict.
What kind of tools or, uh, devices did you use tokeep track of everything 400 hours? What'd you do?
They have a thing called an Avid, which is adigital, uh, editing system that has a one
ginormous big server that holds all the, all the,all the footage is digitized to that server. So
(09:25):
every Avid station can access all the footage thatthey need. And so the first part of the. Nowadays,
it's all done electronically, but back when I wasdoing it, you had to hire a team of about 15 or 20
transcribers to come in and just transcribeeverything. And that took a couple months to get
all that done. And then as they were doing that,they would give it to the associate producers, who
(09:46):
would look through it and start to tag what theyliked and what they didn't like. And they would
also have access to all the footage so they couldactually watch it. Um, it's just. It was all done
with computers. And when I first started out, Iwas on, like, Real Stories, and then I was on Cops
for a while, and that was all on tape. And youwould have to dub one tape to another tape to get
into a format, to get it into the edit bay. And sothe producers would watch a VHS tape, which you
(10:12):
would make, and the editors would use the betatapes, which were the source tapes, which were
better quality than VHS.
If you have 400 hours of material and even ifyou've had it all transcribed into some written
form, that's a lot of stuff to remember. What waswhen, where, why and how. How do you do that?
Well, there's, um, on every show. So in Hell'skitchen, there were 16 shows, and every show would
(10:36):
have four associate producers, two supervisingproducers, and one executive producer. So what's
that? Seven producers on each show that would keeptrack of all that stuff. And my job was actually
to hire all the editors and keep track of all theediting and also watch all the shows to make sure
that they make sense and the stories work.
(10:57):
Did you ever. 16 years you did that. Did you everfind, like, it was so crazy that you, uh, were
going to tear whatever hair you had out?
Yes. And I'll tell you a story about that. I wason a show called Nanny911 Before Hell's Kitchen,
right? And what happened with that show was therewas a British show called Super Nanny, and ABC and
(11:18):
Fox got in a bidding war over Super Nanny, andABC1 won the bidding war. And so Fox says, the guy
at Fox, Fox executives or something, but he says,okay, we're going to do nanny 911, and we're going
to get it on the air before Super Nanny. So Iliterally, anybody that walked through the door, I
would hire him and put them to work. And it justwent around the clock. And I discovered if you
(11:40):
work three weekends in a row, that's 26 days in arow. And it's just m brutal. Yeah. And generally
when I finish a show like that, a season likethat, I sleep for about two weeks.
Because you're basically not sleeping at all.
No. Well, it's a 247 operation. So the graveyardshift from midnight to 8am you're lucky to get 30
(12:00):
to 40% of what you get done during the day. Andthat's just something you live with. Because the
Fox executives are saying, give us the show, Giveus the show. Give us the show. And you're like,
well, if we can get 30 to 40% farther down theroad by working all night, that's what we're going
to do.
What do you think, in your experience makes a goodreality show good? Why does it work and why don't
(12:21):
they work?
Uh, it goes back to the conflict between thecharacters. And the more that on, uh, Hell's
Kitchen, for example, the more that Gordon has toyell at people and understand. On Hell's Kitchen,
we have a two to two and a half hour dinnerservice. We show you ten minutes of it. And the
way we've casted this show, we make sure there'speople that can't cook a lick. So he has something
(12:41):
to get m mad about. And he knows his part. He'svery good character. After about two seasons, he
knew exactly what was expected of him.
Well, obviously, he's very popular. Um, I have tobe honest with you, I watched a couple of seasons
early on of that show and then I just couldn'twatch it anymore. He was too much for me.
(13:01):
Too much. Um, I can't say that he's mellowed overthe years either.
And so the script, such as they are, are reallymade in post.
Yeah. In editing. Yeah. Like I said, we like tosay with scripted, you write the script and then
shoot the show. With reality, you shoot the showand then write the script. And that's kind of how
(13:22):
it works. So you just, you have to just hone itdown and hone it down and hone it down. And you
start with 400 hours, you get to 300 hours, youget to 200 hours, you get to 100 hours, you get to
50, you get to 20, you get to 10, you finally getit down where you need it. And that's a big part
of it, is just having the time and the mentalacuity to be able to hone that down and really
focus on what you need.
(13:42):
All right, so when you say what you need, um, I'mwilling to bet and you'll tell me if I'm Wrong.
That you know your audience well enough to knowwhat's going to work for them and what won't.
Yes. And if we don't nail that, we hear about itfrom the executive. So after 16 seasons, you
really, really know the audience very well.
(14:03):
How do you determine the chemistry between thecontestants, the cast? Do you actually bring them
in in casting ahead of time and have them workagainst each other?
Out of a thousand people, we hone it down to maybe50, and then we come in for like, interviews, uh,
personal interviews with them, hone it down to 20,and we finally get it down to 16. And like I said,
(14:24):
we try to get the good girl, the bad girl, thegood guy, the bad boy, uh, the ditz, like those
kind of character types. And you mix them alltogether and you get a mix, I guess you could call
it. And then a lot of the show also is built withmusic. You don't realize it when you're watching
it, but if you watch without music, you're like,this doesn't make any sense at all. But then you
(14:49):
add all the music and all the little stings andcuts and cymbal crashes and stuff, and it really
built on sound.
It's fascinating how the music dictates the wayyou should feel as an audience, and that's what
it's about, dictating how the audience shouldfeel.
And honestly, the head of the music, the musiccomposer, is the highest paid guy on the show
(15:09):
after Gordon, really. He lives in a mansion inCalabasas, you know, flies a helicopter around
and. Yeah, that guy's rich.
All right. Are there places where one can go tolearn how to do what you did? Is. Are there
schools for it?
I don't know that there is, because when I was infilm school, we mostly just studied film and we
(15:30):
did have a TV studio and we did some three cameratelevision. But like I said, when I graduated in
1988, that was just at the very beginning ofreality. And so, like after I. After I did Cops
and Real Stories, uh, I did a lot of different,like what we call presentations, which are like
five or ten minutes pieces that you show to thenetworks. And we didn't have any idea what we were
doing. We were just kind of feeling our way alongand. And then Survivor came along and I got on the
(15:52):
first couple seasons of that, and that was reallythe first reality competition show where you had
those kind of characters pitted against eachother.
Because prior to that you were working on realityshows about things that were happening in the
field.
Yes, Cops, we did Cops. And we did a show about ahair salon, I remember, for a while, and that was
kind of interesting. But, you know, how far canyou go on a hair salon, really?
(16:14):
But then along comes Survivor, and that's now acompetition, a game show, basically.
Yeah. And like I said, I was. I was a postproducer on that, but that was a show where they
had. We were still shooting tape, and so theywould take the tape and put it on a boat and send
the boat out to the ocean and transfer it toanother boat and bring it back into port and get
it on FedEx and fly it to us in Los Angeles. Oh,my goodness. And the fear was always, oh, my God,
(16:38):
we're going to drop all the tapes in the ocean.
And that's the end of the. Of this show. But gotthrough it, and never. It never happened that way.
We never lost a tape.
What did you learn from Mark Burnett?
He was two or three levels above me, but I learneda work ethic. You have to do whatever it takes to
get it done. So if you have to work, like a lot oftimes when we were outputting or getting ready to
(16:59):
give a show off to the executives, I would notleave at the end of the day until I actually had
it in my hand and into the Courier's hand. Becauseif you leave and you leave the editors or the
associate producers or whatever still working onit, you get a call the next morning. I never got
the show last night.
I want the listeners to pay very close attentionto what Rusty was just talking about. There is
(17:23):
something that's happened. I know from teachingfor a while. There's something that's happened in
today's, uh, students and people that want to bein the business that they don't want to work those
extra hours for whatever reason. Some do, but alot don't. It takes whatever it takes to get the
show done.
And especially when you're first starting out, youwant to just. Just always have a smile and a good,
(17:46):
positive attitude. You never want to be negativeabout anything because we're all working too hard
to put up with any negativity at all. We all have.
None of us are any happier about it than any ofthe rest of us, but we know it has to be done. I
guess that's how I'd put it.
So it's a, um, stoic attitude as you go in.
Yes. You really need to just put your head downand grind through the week and get through it. And
(18:11):
the other thing about it, the season of Hell'sKitchen, this too shall end and you'll get to
sleep for two weeks.
Would you say those are the fundamentally mostimportant lessons that you learned from Survivor
was you just put your nose to the grindstone andgo, yes.
And Cops was pretty cut and dried to daytime andafternoon shift. But Survivor was the first 24. 7
(18:35):
show I worked on and realized there's alwayssomething. It doesn't matter what it is. We're
always worrying about the next tape coming fromthe ocean, from the port, from the FedEx or
whatever. And the music guy is late with themusic. And then you're in the edit bay, and
there's footage that, you know, that you havethat's missing that you got to go find, and that
actually, uh, that problem kind of went away a lotonce we started digital editing. But when you had
(18:56):
tape, sometimes a tape just didn't get digitized.
And the producer will be telling you, I know weshot this, but it's not. It's not in the system.
So then you have to go find it.
So explain how the digital world changedeverything. Not just. I'm not talking about the
editing world. We know that pretty well. I'mtalking about how did that change the direction,
uh, of things, as you didn't need to ship tapesonto boats.
(19:19):
Yes. It made it both easier logistically andharder creatively, because all of a sudden, you
could shoot 400 hours. Nobody cared. With tape,they were always like, well, we only shot 12 tapes
today, so that's, you know, 12 hours. But withdigital, you can say, well, we're going to shoot
150 hours today. And we have, uh. Like with Hell'sKitchen, we had robo cams all over the dorms and
(19:42):
all over the Kitchen. And so all that stuff was on24 7. So it all had to be gone through. And then
just the editing and the producing of it, of thewriting of the show was much easier with
everything all in one server.
Well, and are they able to then upload thingsthrough the. Through the satellite now nowadays?
They are, yeah. Um, when I. When I retired back in2018, we were right on the cusp of still using
(20:07):
disk drives, but they were just getting into solidstate disk drives that held all the footage on
them that you could just. You could upload to thecloud and download. And we had a thing called
Media Silo, which was one of the very firstsystems that actually did that.
And you're saying that you had discs that thenstill needed to go onto a boat?
Yes. Uh, well, Hell's Kitchen, we shot in LosAngeles. So we just, we collected the disks, but
(20:30):
if, you know, somebody was shooting in the junglesof Borneo, they would have had to have shipped the
disk back. So, like, 20, 15, 16, 17 was just thestart of getting everything, uh, directly to disk
and up to the cloud.
What would you say were the. You may have alreadysaid it, but I'm just curious. Is there any one
single thing that repetitively was the mostchallenging thing you.
(20:51):
Had to get through the transcripts and getting.
Getting everybody their footage in a timely mannerso everybody can work. Because you can't just
shoot the show and then lay everybody off and thencome back and do post. You've got to just keep
going every day, every day, every day. And so thechallenge was to figure out what to prioritize to
get done, because you can't do everything at once.
Obviously. You don't have the manpower, theresources.
(21:12):
Do you. Do you ever miss the grind?
I do not miss it. I miss my friends. I had a lotof good friends. Sure. As far as your grind goes.
No, I'm glad to be retired.
I get it. Uh, the grind can grind you sometimes,that's for sure. And there's been a theme
throughout your entire career, which I findfascinating, that you've gone into things to get
(21:33):
away from causing harm to your body. And then youalso. Then at the end of your career, you were
also in a grind on your body, but it was more timethan physical labor.
Yeah. Uh, there's probably a quote that goes alongwith that. Something like the Morse, things change
the more they stay the same. That's kind of what Ilearned. But it was an easier, uh. I won't say it
(21:54):
was easier. It was just different.
What do you think you learned at UCLA that youapplied throughout your whole producing career?
Uh, uh, ucla, we learned the whole thing againabout getting it done in a. On a deadline. Because
at ucla, you had. It wasn't. It wasn't. It wasquarters, not semesters, and quarters are 10 weeks
long. And so you had. The first thing we did, wehad 10 weeks to make an 8 millimeter film, and
(22:17):
then we had 10 weeks to shoot our. Actually, I dida student soap opera at ucla. Funny story. We had
to pitch it to the faculty committee. And, uh,you've taught, so you know how faculty committees
are. So they argued and argued and argued forabout three hours and then dissolved and never
said anything to me. And so I was in the lobbywith my. With my faculty advisor, and he said, I
(22:42):
don't know what to tell you. And I said, well,screw it. We're just going to do it. So we did
you.
By the way, you've aged yourself a coupledifferent ways in the show already, but you really
aged yourself by saying Super 8 film. That's adead tip. That was a while ago.
That was our first. That's what they calledProject one and you had to do it with no synced
(23:05):
audio. So it was all visual storytelling. And thatwas. That class was a lot of fun. Although the way
they did it was you had to take 12 hours to take afull load and the project one was only an eight
hour class. And so you had to take. I uh, think Itook philosophy or psychiatry or something else.
And it was just, it was just nuts for 10 weeks.
But again, this too shall pass.
(23:27):
Well, that's, uh. Yeah, that this two shall passis exactly the way you got to think about a lot of
things in life. But in particular when you're.
When you're on a show, even when you're on a showfor 16 years, you know there's going to be a back
door. You know that all those things are shortlived. Even again, if it goes on for years. Almost
nobody works on a show for an entire career of 40or 50 years because they don't exist. So unless.
(23:51):
Unless it's like a news show, perhaps. Sometimesthat can happen.
The Simpsons. The Simpsons is a perfect example.
All the guys that invented the Simpsons were infilm school the same time that I am, and they're
all still working on it. I wasn't in the animationdepartment though, but they were.
But how rare is that? That's really rare.
It's uh, a once in a lifetime, one in a thousand.
(24:12):
I don't know. That's one reason I stayed on hell'skitchen for 16 years was because the way the money
works is you work for about five years and yoursalary doubles and you work for another five years
and then it goes up again and again. And at my ageI just decided, this is it. I'm going to just ride
this out as far as I can and get as much money asI can put away, which was great.
So also a very important point for those startingout in the industry. Um, it can happen and it does
(24:37):
happen for people. I don't know if you think of itas happening for you too, but it can happen where
you get into a piece of the industry that youweren't intending to get into and you get sucked
down the rabbit hole where they keep. You're goodat it and they keep offering you more and more
Money, uh, and Step up in prestige.
(24:57):
That's the story of my life right there.
And the next thing you know, your whole career isgone, and you didn't do what you set out to do.
Although I gotta say, I worked on a few fun showsover the years, too, that weren't as much of a
grind. Like, we did a show called that'sIncredible, which was a remake of an 80s show. And
that was really a lot of fun because I got to gointo the archives of the show. So those kind of
(25:18):
things that you would discover were just. Justamazing. And I worked on another show called
Celebrate the Century, which was, uh, based on aguy named. A producer named David Wolper. Had a
film library of everything from the 20th century.
And we got to go through and watch all the oldBusby Berkeley musicals, and. Oh, that was so much
fun. Yeah.
Oh, wow. Who were your hosts on your version?
(25:41):
Uh, we had. Roy Scheider was the host onCelebrate, um, the Century, and we did one called
Legends, Icons and Superstars, which wasChristopher Lee.
Steve (25:50):
That must have been fun.
It was fun. Yeah. The Superstars thing was fun,too, because we got. We went all the way back to
the 20s. We did, like, George Gershwin, and we,uh, did Michael Jackson, which was a big thing. He
sent us a big bouquet of roses that was, like,could barely fit through the door. So that was
pretty cool.
So I am curious after all of that, how in theworld did you get into writing books and books for
(26:14):
kids?
Yeah, what happened was long about 2014 or 2015.
And you probably remember this. There was a guythat did a story on Facebook called Go the F to
Sleep, which was kind of the first viral thingthat happened. And he told a million copies. And I
had been writing these little short poems aboutanimals just as a hobby and for about a year
(26:34):
before that. And my friend said, you know, youshould put these in a book. And so I did. And when
I write my poems, uh, I try to make them alwaysbetween three to five lines and 12 to 15 words. So
they're very short and sweet.
Well, now let's back up a step. How did you startwriting poems?
I don't actually recall. I just. I just. Facebookhad just kind of gotten started back then, and I
(26:56):
was just casting around for something to do. AndI've always kind of been a writer my whole life.
And so I thought, well, these are kind of fun. Iwrote a poem about a porcupine, and I wrote a poem
about, Beware, uh, the grizzly bear, he'll giveyou A scare. Unless it's a female, then she will
and fell. I started putting those onlines, and Igot positive feedback from all my friends, and
that's how it kind of came about.
(27:17):
So you've been a writer your whole life. Did you,uh, take writing classes at UCLA or elsewhere?
Uh, I took a screenwriting class and wrote acouple of scripts that didn't get sold. And I've
kind of been writing short stories my whole life,which I kind of pulled together in my book Dave
and Me, which is a memoir of my friend Dave, whodied young and we kind of grew up together and so.
(27:39):
But you were applying your, um, lifelong desireand skills to write?
Yes, and I actually, when I was in high school andin early college, I was the editor of the school
newspaper.
Steve Cuden (27:53):
Oh, wow.
So I did a lot of writing that way, and then itdoesn't seem like it, but there is actually a lot
of writing on reality tv. Even though you'rewriting from video, you just have to write it. It
doesn't just come naturally.
S (28:06):
You're still telling a story.
Rusty Austin (28:07):
Yes, absolutely.
And so your storytelling skills had to have beenvery valuable. Uh, really valuable on a show like
a Hell's Kitchen or Survivor.
I think that was a big part of why I wassuccessful at it, was because I had that. That
background in the newspaper stories. And you knowhow with newspaper stories, you gotta. You gotta
hone it down and hone it down and hone it down.
You don't have the luxury of a novelist that canjust write 300 pages. A newspaper story is, you
(28:31):
know, 1500 words. If you're lucky, 500 words,mostly. So.
Yeah. And that's a very good skill to have as ascreenwriter as well.
Yes, absolutely. Because especially withscreenwriting, you get 120 pages, maybe. And of
those pages, 60, 70% of the page is actuallyblank. So you better be able to hone it down.
(28:54):
Um, that's correct. And brevity is the soul of witstill. So. Yeah. The more that you're able to
whittle it down to its essential, as long as it'scolorful and terse and entertaining, then more
power to you if you've got a good story to tell.
Although the guy that won the Nobel Prize thisyear wrote a novel that was 467 pages long, and it
(29:15):
was all one sentence.
It was one sentence. I did not know that. Wow.
I love that kind of stuff. It took me 10 years toread Ulysses, uh, by James Joyce, and he was like
that, too. He would write a three, uh, pages thatwas all one sentence. And you have to go back and
read it like three times to figure out what theheck he was about. Talking. Talking about.
I. I must confess I have never read any JamesJoyce, much to my chagrin. But I have heard things
(29:39):
like just what you just said. And I thought, do Ireally want to read James Joyce? I don't know.
It's very dense. And the reason I, I got into itwas because we were on. We were going on a
vacation to Ireland one time, and I thought, huh,huh, I should find out more about this. And the
funny thing is, their main claim to fame is JimJoyce, James Joyce. There's like, statues and
tours of his neighborhood and the bars, and it'samazing.
(30:01):
How much they venerate that he's. He's renowned,you know. Uh, but again, he also has this
reputation for being, uh, verbose.
Verbose. I would call it dense. It's very dense.
And I'm actually glad I did read, even though itdid take me 10 years. The reason it takes so long
is you read three or four pages, you go back andread them again. Um, you go back and read them
(30:23):
again, then you think about it for a month or two,then you go back and read the next 10 pages. At
least that was my experience.
I like reading a book and being done. That's justwhere I come from. Let's talk about your book, An
Awesome Bird, the Pelican. Uh, it clearly is notwritten like James Joyce. Very short and sweet and
very easy to, uh, um, digest quite quickly. Tellthe listeners what An Awesome Bird, the Pelican,
(30:50):
what it's all about.
Well, with that book, what happened was I had beenmaking a donation on a website called
DonorsChoose, which is like a GoFundMe forteachers. And a teacher wanted to buy poetry books
for her. I think they were seventh graders at thetime, sixth and seventh graders. And so I gave
them like, a couple hundred dollars for that. AndI started talking to her, and she said, well, why
(31:14):
don't you come in and read your latest book? Whichat the time was the Unicorn has One Horn. And so I
figured I'd come in and read for about 10 minutesand the kids would get all fidgety and, um, and,
um, you know, bored and. But it was the opposite.
I read the book, and they were just wrapped thewhole. For the whole hour. They loved it. And so I
asked the teacher, I said, you know what? Whydon't we get these kids to illustrate my next book
and awesome Bird the Pelican. And she was all forit. And so they would do the illustrations every
(31:38):
Friday for about an hour. And that took about sixmonths. And we got all the illustrations together,
and I had to choose the best pictures for thepoems because I only had 44 poems, but there was,
you know, 87 kids. But just to make up for it, Iput in sections of just pictures. So every kid
that actually did a picture got in the book. Andthen I had to make a deal with it with the Palm
(32:03):
Springs Unified School District lawyers to do it.
And so what they made me do was I gave each kid$20 on a bag of chips. And then as royalties come
in, I've been kind of donating to the school, butthere's no contract for it. It's just something
that I do well.
Ste (32:19):
So how old were these kids?
They were seventh and eighth graders. And some ofthem were so talented, like this one kid, his name
was Andres. He drew a picture of a scorpion withpen. And the teacher said he didn't even use a
pencil. He just used a, uh, pen. So he didn'terase anything. He just drew it right up. And it's
an amazing picture.
Well, most of the pictures are very whimsical, andthey're very colorful, and they're a joy to look
(32:45):
at. Um, they are clearly not. Although I shouldn'tsay that. But they generally don't look like they
were drawn by professional artists, which makes iteven more enjoyable to look at.
They're very whimsical, like you said. And you canreally tell that it's not done by one professional
artist, but by a whole group of kids. And I'm veryproud of that, actually. I had a really good time
(33:06):
with those kids.
This concept of going to a school and having thembasically become your illustrator. Uh, a whole
bunch of kids become your illustrator. I thinkthat's probably a first. I'm not sure that's ever
happened before.
I know, right? And that was in 2023. So that'sbeen about three years. And I actually hadn't
talked to a teacher for a while, But I had some ofthe royalties built up. So I just talked to her
(33:28):
the other day, and we might do it again.
And so now you'll have an industry.
Yeah, I guess. I mean, uh, I do readings at a lotof the local schools, too, not just that school.
So maybe I could do another school. I don't know.
Why. Why would you, in the first place, think thatthat would then appeal to an audience of kids?
(33:48):
Because it's kids.
Well, uh, I'll Tell you another thing about mybooks. Uh, if you notice, I put a do it yourself
section at the back of every book.
Steve Cuden (33:55):
Yes.
And the kids love that. I get more feedback aboutthat than just about anything. And so I figured,
why not give the kids a chance to show what theycan do. And, uh, it really turned out well, I
think.
All right, so do you think of your poems ascomedic or serious and educational? How do you
think of your poems?
Well, all the above. Um, like I wrote a poem, ah,the dog likes a truck and that's a fact. And he'll
(34:22):
ride all day, front or back. And so I put a tea atthe end of the back. So that one was a humorous
one. But I try to always do something about howthe animal lives or what it has. Like I wrote a
poem about a caiman which goes, the caiman has amembrane that nictitates do better underwater. See
her days. And I figured for kids, they're going towant to know what nictitates mean. First of all,
(34:43):
it's fun to just say it. Ah, nictitates.
I want to know what nictitates means.
And what it is. It's a membrane that goes overtheir eye that protects them when they're
underwater. And all amphibians have it. But I tryto do that with all my poems. And like I said, I
try to make them no more than three to five linesand no more than about 12 to 15 words so that you
can go through them quickly.
Well, I didn't count the exact number, but itlooks like there's maybe 40 or 50 different
(35:07):
animals.
I, ah, do about 44 to 50 animals on each book.
And there are a number of them, not, not a lot ofthem, but a number of them are animals I've.
Never heard of before. And I try to do that too.
And the way I research that is when I'm on theInternet and there's something about an animal on
Facebook or whatever I'm on, I'll just grab ascreenshot of it and save it for later. Right now
(35:30):
I think I've got a thing called a serval cat. Andthere's a amoeba that lives in Lassen Volcano
national park that broke all the records for heatbecause it lives in. It lives in a 250 degree
environment which they had never thought possibleuntil they discovered that last year. So I want to
write something about that.
What is an Egyptian Uromastyx?
That's a lizard that only lives on the Nile. And,uh, I forget where I probably Saw that on Facebook
(35:56):
at some point. Uromastyx.
Steve Cu (35:58):
And what's an axolotl?
An axolotl is a Mexican salamander that has kinduh, of a lion's mane. And the funny thing about
the axolotl is the kids loved it. I had moreaxolotls because the teacher, she let the kids
draw whatever they wanted. And so I got like, youknow, 25 axolotls and two prairie dogs. But the
(36:20):
kids just love the axolotls. And the toucan wasthe other one. They did a lot of.
Well, so how did you guarantee that all theseanimals would be drawn?
Uh, I just played the numbers. 80 kids, I figuredthey would somehow get it done and they did. And
in fact, one of the animals, which is the mollusk.
The mollusk will undulate under the sea. And ifyou want to see it, that's the place to be. And
only one kid did a mollusk, so I had to use his.
(36:41):
But it was fine. It was a good picture, I thought.
So then how did you decide which of the animalswould be in the do it yourself section? Because
you assigned the animal.
Those are ones that I try to. I think in this bookI did a rhinoceros. Uh, I try to get animals that
kids.
You did a rhinoceros, a duck billed platypus, aladybug and a tarantula.
Yeah. And so those are all animals that I'm surekids are fascinated by. Right.
(37:04):
When you developed the book, did you have a rhymeand a reason, no pun intended, a rhyme and a
reason as to the order of animals as you producedit?
Sort of. Because if I had birds, I'd want them tobe five or six or seven pages apart, one bird to
the next. I think I did an eagle and a toucan anda chickadee and. And like that. So you try to
(37:25):
spread it around that way. And then I pick myfavorite poem and make it the first poem and make
that the title of the book. So my poem about thepelican was an awesome bird, the pelican, um, he
holds in his beak his food for the week.
So you just answered a question I had for you,which is, how did you decide the pelican was the
title of your book? It's because that's yourfavorite animal.
(37:47):
That was my favorite poem, actually. Yes. Andactually, beware the Grizzly bear was just called
that because that's the first poem I ever wrote.
Wow. So when I first received the book, before Iever read it, I thought the whole book was going
to be About a pelican.
About a pelican, yeah, but it isn't.
It's about all these many animals. And so how manyof these animals did you already know enough to
(38:10):
write about or how many did you in fact need to doresearch on?
I would say about half. So the other half I didyour research. And also for the kids because they
haven't heard of a lot of them. They needed tohave access to the Internet so they could call up
Wikipedia or whatever and see a picture of theanimals so they knew what to draw.
And did you spend a lot of time with them, talkingto them before they started to draw?
(38:32):
I would come in about. Well, uh, like I said, thefirst time I came in for an hour. The second time
was about a week later. I came in for an hour andthen after that I'd come in about once a month
just to see how they were doing. And it literallytook six months for them to. Because she would
only have work on it for an hour on Fridays.
Yeah, but you weren't paying for it, so.
Yeah, it was great. And it was so much fun. It wasso much fun just being back at school and how much
(38:58):
it's changed and nowadays everything's locked downand you know, when we were in school, everything
was wide open, nothing like it is now. So that wasfun to see.
So. So how did you do a lot of rewriting andremoving things, moving things around and so on?
Uh, a little. I don't do a lot because the poemsare so short and sweet. If I. What I'll do is, uh,
(39:19):
I'll remove a word like, and. Or with, uh. Or I'lladd a word like the. Or something like that, or
take it out. And just like I said, I try to honeit down and hone it down and hone it down and just
get to the very essence of the 12 to 15 words.
You're back to your work. On all those shows whereyou're honing it down and honing it down. Did you
edit your own work or did you hire someone to editfor you?
Rusty Austi (39:41):
I edited it myself.
You did, and, and I believe, am I correct, thatyou self published this?
Uh, they're self published and they're doing well.
So I don't think there's. There's not near as muchof a stigma on self publishing as there was when I
first started 10 years ago.
Yeah, nothing wrong anymore about being selfpublished. There are probably more books self
published than through a publishing house at thispoint.
(40:01):
Yeah. And you know, I thought about Getting apublisher. But then I thought, I don't want to go
through all the trouble of query letters andrejections, and I'm just too old for that.
Trust me when I tell you I understand.
Yeah. And, um, because I'm retired, I'm not reallyin it for the money. So if I sell one to two to
four books a week, that makes me happy.
(40:22):
And you're doing it because you enjoy doing it.
Yes, exactly. Right. And the other thing is, uh,it's not a job. If I don't feel like writing
today, I won't write today. If I feel like writingtoday, I will. Some days I'll work for six hours,
and some days I don't work at all.
I would say if you are not enjoying what you'redoing in the arts, you might be in the wrong
(40:44):
place.
You're absolutely right about that. And, um, justto give you a quick quote, Stephen King said, the
art of riding is the art of applying the seat ofthe pants to the seat of the chair. And that's
probably true for the kind of writing he does. Butthe kind of writing I do, I can do knock through,
you know, five ones to go pawns in two hours andgo sit by the pool for the rest of the day.
(41:08):
And so how much work did it take to assemble thebook and get it ready for publication?
Yeah, I use a program called Blurb, which is forformatting the book. And it's kind of what you see
is what you get. So you go through and you canchoose a font and you can resize the pictures as
you go and choose page numbers and. And like that.
(41:30):
And then after you get that all done, uh, you buya PDF, which then you can upload to Amazon. Barnes
and Noble, actually. There's so many more onAmazon these days, Ingramsparks. There's probably
30 or 40 different places that you can upload yourbook and sell it through. And I only got through a
few of them.
Are they available in brick and mortar stores?
You have to order it from Ingram Sparks. I don'thave any kind of a distribution channel for that.
(41:54):
You can go on and order it.
Well, yeah, that's right. You can go to almost anylegitimate bookstore and order almost any book.
Uh, but because you don't have a distributionchannel, uh, you're not sitting on bookshelves
somewhere.
No. And, uh, I don't think I'm in the point in mycareer where I could have a warehouse full of
(42:15):
10,000 books to distribute all over America.
No. And you wouldn't Want to have that? What's thepoint? And your books are all print on demand, I
assume?
Yeah, yeah, that's what we call it. It's calledPrint On Demand Business Model. And like I said, I
don't need to sell a million. If I sell 2, 3, 4, 5a week of each title, that makes me happy.
Sure, sure. Do you get feedback from anybodythat's read them?
(42:38):
Yes, I did. I have on my website, rustyaustin.com,i have a section of just all the reviews and the
feedback that I've gotten. And you get a lot ofit.
Uh, so what do you do? Where do you go forinspiration? Does it just come to you, or do you
do something to make it happen?
It'll come to me. Like, I was driving out in thecountry one time and I saw a herd of sheep. And so
(43:01):
I wrote a poem right away in my head. The ram willram you so too that you if either finds itself
with nothing better to do or, like I said, I'llsee an animal on the Internet. Like, I read about
a frog called a pedophile. Amuensis.
Steve Cuden (43:16):
Yes.
Which is the world's smallest frog. It's smallerthan your thumbnail. And so I wrote paedo fraud.
Amuensis is hard to rhyme. It's just a tiny frogwith the name sublime.
Now, in some cases, there are multiple panels on asingle animal. Now, I'm not talking about, ah, at
the end, where there's lots of them that are, uh,without poems attached. Uh, um, for instance, the
(43:40):
penguin gets two panels. Why is that?
Yes. Uh, I just felt that the drawings with twopanels, one panel just wouldn't really do the
color and the lines justice. So I try to stretchthem across two panels. It's the same drawing, but
only across two pages.
Do you think that there's anything that, um,you've done. Do you do a little marketing or
(44:02):
whatever that helps you to stand out amongst themassive amount of competition there is in the
children's book field?
Well, sort of, because locally I do as manyschools and I've read at the Barnes and Noble once
or twice for Children's Hour. And so that's thekind of stuff I do. I haven't gone national. I
mean, I suppose, like, I don't know if I'd want totravel that much, to be honest with you. Uh, I
(44:27):
kind of like being a homebody, so. But, yeah, I dothat stuff locally a lot.
You get out and at least give an experience to theaudience about what's in the book.
Yes. And I always make sure at every reading thatI point out the do it yourself at the end. And
honestly that's the thing I get the most feedbackabout is do it yourself. So I'm glad I thought of
that.
(44:47):
Yeah, indeed. Uh, are there things that you. Ifyou were going to do another book, are you
planning to write any more books?
Yeah, I'm working on one right now called the TwoHeaded Snake. Which is. The Two headed snake wants
to turn left but needs to turn right. And hebetter decide or I'll be here all night.
Are there things that you will do in this nextbook that you've learned from your previous books
that you want to repeat and things that you knowthat you won't do again because they didn't work
(45:12):
out so well? Anything like that?
Yes, there's some, there's some animals that just,just don't really lend themselves to the, the
process. Like every kid knows what a horse is. SoI don't know what to write about a horse. Um, I
did write about a giraffe in the first book. Thatwas fun. And kids love giraffes.
Well, I mean, now Rusty, a horse is a horse. Ofcourse. Of course. Unless of course the horse is
(45:34):
Mr.
Rusty Austin (45:35):
The.
St (45:35):
The fabulous talking Mr. Ed.
Right. Yeah, I guess, I guess there's really noanimals that I wouldn't broach if you put it that
way. So, um, one thing I have, have really workedhard on though is like I said, the honing down and
getting rid of the circular thes and ands andwiths and buts.
Sure. Well, that, that's making it tighter.
Yes. To making it tighter. Yes, exactly.
(45:57):
What do you use when you're out on the road roadto capture your thoughts? Do you say it into your
phone? Do you write it down?
I, I put it into my phone as soon as I can becauseotherwise I'll forget it. Like the poem about the
U. I forgot that and remembered it several timesbefore I had a chance to write it down. And I
honestly don't know if that's the way I originallywrote it or if that's just the way I remembered
(46:19):
it.
And, and you don't draw yourself, do you?
My first book, I had the Beware the Grizzly Bear.
I had my nephew Graham do it and he did it on, uh,I guess it was like a Commodore 64 maybe something
that he had left over when he was a kid, a superold computer. And I really like the way it turned
out. Um, like you said, it's not, it's not A realprofessional look, but it is whimsical and fun.
(46:44):
Well, in the case of what you're doing, it shouldbe that it doesn't want to be slick and refined.
No, I agree. It's, it's, it's, it's too, uh, toocomplicated. If you get a professional artist and
all that, and then they make it so slick. And Iprefer to be much more raw, I guess you would say.
Well, it, it, it's not crude. It is, it is, uh, ithas, it's full of energy and it's youthful and it,
(47:12):
it's, it's fresh. And the truth is, in some cases,not all of them, but in some cases, if you took
that work and put it in a frame into a museum andput a famous artist's name on it, everyone would
think it was museum quality.
In fact, some of the pictures the kids did, uh, Iput in frames and put on the wall just because I
(47:33):
like them so much.
So I want to talk to you for half a minute aboutcollaboration, because your whole career has more
or less been collaborating, including now whenyou're working with kids in a school and teachers,
you've been a collaborator throughout your entirecareer. And producing TV in general is a highly
collaborative job.
If you ever watch a TV show, the credits at theend, there's hundreds of people, and that's what
(47:55):
it takes.
My question to you is, what makes a goodcollaboration work? How do you make collaboration
work? What makes it happen?
It's communication. Everybody has to talk toeverybody and know what everybody's doing to make
the deadline. Because if Joe's off doing his ownthing and he's still going to make the deadline.
But I don't know what, I'm going to worry about itbecause I'm thinking we're not going to make the
(48:18):
deadline. But if he just tells me, yeah, I've gotto have this done in time, then I don't have to
worry about it. One less thing on my plate.
So in other words, it's that the old saw about.
It's like a marriage in the case of a producer.
It's a lot of little marriages.
It is. And you always have to give more than youget, or at least it feels that way when you're
(48:38):
doing it.
Oh, that's a great way to say it. You've alwaysgot to give more than you get.
Rusty Austin (48:42):
Yeah.
Steve Cuden (48:43):
And not mind it.
Everybody probably feels that way, but that's justhow you feel when you're doing it.
So, uh, even when you're the boss, even whenyou're over a crew, you've got to give more than
you get.
And a big. A big part of my job as a producer wasjust protecting the people under me from the. From
the crazy people above me. There are some nuts.
Oh, people. Well, that's fun.
(49:04):
What would you say was the biggest disaster thathappened to you, uh, throughout your whole career?
And how did you get out of it?
One thing that particularly stands out, and I'mglad you give me the opportunity to tell the
story, is we were on 9911, and we were justdesperate, desperate, desperate to get it on the
air. And it was going to air on a Wednesday night,and the Wednesday before it was going to air, all
(49:26):
the power in the studio went out. So we had tomove the whole operation up to Burbank and work on
it up there for five days. And then the power onthe studio was going to come back on at midnight
on Friday or 12am Saturday. And so I calledeverybody in for a meeting at quarter to 12 into
the lobby, which we literally was lit up by thestreet lights outside the lobby and candles. And
(49:52):
some of those people was their first day. And I'msure they all thought, this guy's completely
black, or what am I doing here? But we got it onthe air and we made it.
And as they say, the show must go on.
The show must go on. And the other thing I sayabout editing is you never finish editing. You
just run out of time.
Well, uh, that reminds me of Lorne Michaels famousadage about Saturday Night Live. You don't go
(50:17):
because you're ready. You go up because it's
11 (50:20):
30.
That's exactly right. And I don't know if you'veseen that movie about the birth of Saturday Night
Live, but it was. It was really good. I reallyenjoyed it.
So last question for you today. Uh, Rusty, thishas been an absolutely marvelous conversation. Can
you. You've already shared with us a tremendousamount of really excellent advice throughout the
whole show. But I'm wondering, do you have asingle solid piece of advice that you like to give
(50:43):
to those who are just starting out, or maybethey're in a little bit trying to get to the next
level?
Yes. And it's a Winston Churchill quote which saysmost of the work of the world is done by people
that don't feel very well, and you're going tofeel sick every day. You go in sometimes, and a
lot of times a director, he's be the guy throwingup in the corner, you know, because those guys
have really the most pressure of all. I think justsmile on your face and a positive attitude will
(51:07):
get you through so much, so much in your life.
I couldn't agree with you more. That's a, uh,great way to say it. And I think that that's
extraordinarily valuable advice, and I thank youfor saying it.
And it's simple, too. It's like, you don't have towork at it. You don't have to think. Well, you
have to work at it. You don't really have to thinkabout it, though. You just have that positive
attitude and that smile and you'll go far.
(51:29):
But it doesn't cost you anything.
It doesn't cost you anything. And you can learn itin school or you can learn it outside of school.
You don't have to go to college for that kind ofthing. Going to college definitely helped me get
my head on straight about deadlines and whatnot.
And so, um.
Well, Rusty, Austin, this has been a fantastichour on stage Story Beat. And I can't thank you
(51:49):
enough for your time, your energy, and yourwisdom. I thank you kindly.
It's been great. Thanks again and again. It'srustyaustin.com. gotta get my plug in.
And so we've come to the end of today's StoryBeat. If you like this episode, won't you please
take a moment to give us a comment, rating, orreview on whatever app or platform you're
listening to. Your support helps us bring moregreat Story Beat episodes. Story Beat is available
(52:15):
on all major podcast apps and platforms, includingApple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio,
TuneIn, and many others. Until next time, I'mSteve Cuden and may all your stories be
unforgettable.
On today's Story Beat.
(00:02):
Yeah, like I said, we like to say with scripted,you write the script and then shoot the show. With
reality, you shoot the show and then write thescript. And that's kind of how it works. So you
just, you have to just hone it down and hone itdown and hone it down. And you start with 400
hours, you get to 300 hours, you get to 200 hours,you get to 100 hours, you get to 50, you get to
20, you get to 10, you finally get it down whereyou need it. And that's, that's a big, that's a
(00:23):
big part of it is just, just having the time andthe mental acuity to be able to hone that down and
really focus on what you need.
This is Story Beat with Steve Cuden, A, uh,podcast for the creative mind. Story Beat explores
how masters of creativity develop and producebrilliant works that people everywhere love and
(00:44):
admire. So join us as we discover how talentedcreators find success in the worlds of imagination
and entertainment. Here now is your host, SteveCuden.
Thanks for joining us on Story Beat. We're comingto you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh,
(01:05):
Pennsylvania. My guest today, Rusty Austin, was areality TV show producer for over three decades
and is now the author of six published books,including an illustrated children's book series.
Rusty broke into Hollywood as a freelanceelectrician on dozens of movies he was including
Terminator 2. After a few years, he decided togive up movies because everything in the lighting
(01:28):
and grip department weighed no less than £50. Hethen spent 35 years producing reality TV shows
like Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, Bigbrother, Survivor, Nanny, 911 Cops, and Hell's
Kitchen, which he worked on for 16 seasons andfrom which he retired in 2018. His books included
(01:50):
Baseball's Unlikely, A Constant, Dave and Me, andfour children's books, the Carrot Is Orange, the
Unicorn Has One Horn, Beware the Grizzly Bear, andan awesome Bird, the Pelican. I've read An Awesome
Bird, the Pelican and can tell you it's awonderfully charming compendium of Rusty's short
and sweet poems about lots of different animalsset against whimsical artwork created by middle
(02:14):
schoolers from Cathedral City, California. If youhave kids and are looking for a truly
entertainingly educational book, I highly urge youto check it out. So for all those reasons and many
more, I'm greatly privileged to have the multitalented producer and author Rusty Austin join me
on Story Beat today. Rusty, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me on. And It's a beautifulafternoon.
(02:36):
Well, that it is. Um, so let's go back in timejust a little bit. At what age did you become
interested in show business? Why the moviebusiness? Why tv?
Well, I was a. Dropped out of high school when Iwas about 15 and became a roofer. And I did
roofing for about seven years and it was goodmoney and fun. But then I started looking around
(02:58):
and I realized that anybody that was a roofereither moved up or they used up their body. So I
didn't want to go down that road anymore. So Iwent back to film school, which I graduated from
in uh, 1988. UCLA film school.
UCLA undergrad. Undergrad or grad undergraduate.
Uh, I got a BA and I did movies for a while. I wasin the lighting and grip department and I realized
(03:21):
the same thing again. Everything is just way toomuch and it's too hard on your body. So that was
just at the beginning of reality TV where Cops wascoming along and Survivor and whatnot. And I just
kind of rode that wave all the way through tillnow.
So. All right, you uh, started after schoolsomehow in being a gaffer basically, right?
Rus (03:40):
Yeah, electrician actually.
Electrician. And so how did you get to that? Imean what led you to doing that in the first
place?
When I was at ucla, I worked in the equipmentoffice and so we would check out to the students
all the lighting and all the cameras. And Ilearned how to do all the technical stuff with the
Nagras and like that. And so I just happened tohave a know a person that knew a person that knew
(04:04):
a person that got me on the uh, uh, on thelighting crew of Terminator 2. And that's kind of
how I got started.
Got it. So you, you were working in the cage inMelnitz Hall?
Uh, exactly right. In Mellon. Yeah.
I haven't told you, but I uh, am a graduatestudent of ucla, so I get it.
Oh good. Yeah. So you remember Melitz, with allthe very well that rooms on the second.
Floor and very well. It's been a couple of years,there's no question.
Rusty Austin (04:27):
Yeah, me too.
So then how in the world after you realized, well,your body's not going to take this very heavy
lifting work, how did you transition then intoproducing tv? That's a big leap.
Well, I was again, I had met a guy in film schooland he got a job on a show called Real Stories of
the Highway Patrol, which was a very early onreality ride along show, kind of a competitor to
(04:50):
Cops. And he got me on that as A scriptsupervisor. And I did that for a couple of seasons
or a season or two. And then, uh, the nighttimeonline supervisor got laid off or didn't come
back. And so they gave me the nighttime job, whichwas like a 3pm to midnight shift. And so I did
that for a few years on various shows. And thenfinally one day I just said, I'm not working
(05:12):
nights anymore. And I didn't work for six months.
And then somebody finally called me for a day job.
And from there it just kind of took off and I was,I was like a more of a post producer really. I did
oversee, like the gathering, uh, of the tapes andthe editing and the music. And I would be on set
for some of the stuff, but mostly I would do thepost production for like, you know, four to six
(05:33):
months after, after shooting.
Steve Cuden (05:35):
So.
So you weren't really a producer, uh, that createdepisodes or anything like that?
No, it's post, uh, producer for, uh, realityshows. You're more of a, like a. Well, we like to
say for a scripted show you write the script andthen, uh, shoot the show. And for reality, you
shoot the show and then write the script. So whatwe do was, you know, we go through 400 hours of
(05:55):
footage to find that the 45 minutes that worksbest for TV.
So explain that a little bit for the listeners whodon't know what you just said. We. When you are a
post production supervisor on a reality show,you're gathering a lot of information before you
know what that episode is gonna be, right?
Uh, sort of. We produce it. Like for example, Iwas on hell's kitchen for 16 seasons and we made
(06:18):
sure when we cast the show, we get 12 people thatcan't cook a lick and four people. So, you know,
going in, who's gonna be the four finalists?
Are you saying that you're casting a reality show?
Yes. So you pick out, um, oh, you get, I don'tknow, a thousand reels on the Internet of people
that want to be on the show. And you kind of, yougo through it and you go through it and that takes
(06:39):
a few months of pre production. And you go throughit and you pick out people and then you rent the
studio and set up the stage. This is per housekitchen and set up the whole kitchen and
everything. And each show has a dinner service andhas a team of producers that go through and figure
out what they're going to serve at the dinnerservice and what the punishment and the rewards
(07:01):
are going to be in like that. And so those are,those are like associate producers. And then I'm
part of that whole thing to just kind of go alongto make sure that everything's going to work out
in post production. And then, uh, for Hell'sKitchen, for example, we shot a 400 to 1 ratio. So
you have 400 hours of tape for one hour of TV.
Wow.
So you spent, you spend the first three monthsjust transcribing everything and looking at it and
(07:25):
going through it and comparing it with what youthought you were going to get and what you
actually got. And you're always surprised bystorylines that you didn't think were going to
exist that turned up. And sometimes you lose astoryline that you had planned on and come up with
a better one, but you can't.
Actually plan it out. You don't tell thecontestants what to do, they're doing what they
(07:46):
do.
No, it's real in the sense that they're not fedlines or anything, but it's not real in the sense
that we set up the situations. So for example, ifthey're going to Las Vegas for whatever, they're
going there for a challenge, we would set that allup.
Mhm. And you cast people, I guess, correct me ifI'm wrong, you cast people that have certain
(08:12):
types.
Yes. So we try to get, for, uh, Health Kitson, forexample, we had eight men and eight women. And you
try to get some introverts and some outgoing andsome people that quite frankly are not very nice
and you know, you don't get a lot of time withthem. So you have that. We have a whole casting
department that kind of knows, has a real feel forit. And after, you know, I was on it for 16
(08:35):
seasons, I think it's still on now in season 25.
And so you get a real feel for it.
One of the reasons why they cast people who are,as you say, not so nice is because the only thing
that really holds up in storytelling and you aretelling stories with these people, the only thing
that holds up really is conflicting. And so youneed people who are conflict makers.
Yes. You have to have conflict in every scene,every minute of the show. It has to have
(08:59):
something. Even the softer, more slowed downstuff, they're still dealing with conflict.
What kind of tools or, uh, devices did you use tokeep track of everything 400 hours? What'd you do?
They have a thing called an Avid, which is adigital, uh, editing system that has a one
ginormous big server that holds all the, all the,all the footage is digitized to that server. So
(09:25):
every Avid station can access all the footage thatthey need. And so the first part of the. Nowadays,
it's all done electronically, but back when I wasdoing it, you had to hire a team of about 15 or 20
transcribers to come in and just transcribeeverything. And that took a couple months to get
all that done. And then as they were doing that,they would give it to the associate producers, who
(09:46):
would look through it and start to tag what theyliked and what they didn't like. And they would
also have access to all the footage so they couldactually watch it. Um, it's just. It was all done
with computers. And when I first started out, Iwas on, like, Real Stories, and then I was on Cops
for a while, and that was all on tape. And youwould have to dub one tape to another tape to get
into a format, to get it into the edit bay. And sothe producers would watch a VHS tape, which you
(10:12):
would make, and the editors would use the betatapes, which were the source tapes, which were
better quality than VHS.
If you have 400 hours of material and even ifyou've had it all transcribed into some written
form, that's a lot of stuff to remember. What waswhen, where, why and how. How do you do that?
Well, there's, um, on every show. So in Hell'skitchen, there were 16 shows, and every show would
(10:36):
have four associate producers, two supervisingproducers, and one executive producer. So what's
that? Seven producers on each show that would keeptrack of all that stuff. And my job was actually
to hire all the editors and keep track of all theediting and also watch all the shows to make sure
that they make sense and the stories work.
(10:57):
Did you ever. 16 years you did that. Did you everfind, like, it was so crazy that you, uh, were
going to tear whatever hair you had out?
Yes. And I'll tell you a story about that. I wason a show called Nanny911 Before Hell's Kitchen,
right? And what happened with that show was therewas a British show called Super Nanny, and ABC and
(11:18):
Fox got in a bidding war over Super Nanny, andABC1 won the bidding war. And so Fox says, the guy
at Fox, Fox executives or something, but he says,okay, we're going to do nanny 911, and we're going
to get it on the air before Super Nanny. So Iliterally, anybody that walked through the door, I
would hire him and put them to work. And it justwent around the clock. And I discovered if you
(11:40):
work three weekends in a row, that's 26 days in arow. And it's just m brutal. Yeah. And generally
when I finish a show like that, a season likethat, I sleep for about two weeks.
Because you're basically not sleeping at all.
No. Well, it's a 247 operation. So the graveyardshift from midnight to 8am you're lucky to get 30
(12:00):
to 40% of what you get done during the day. Andthat's just something you live with. Because the
Fox executives are saying, give us the show, Giveus the show. Give us the show. And you're like,
well, if we can get 30 to 40% farther down theroad by working all night, that's what we're going
to do.
What do you think, in your experience makes a goodreality show good? Why does it work and why don't
(12:21):
they work?
Uh, it goes back to the conflict between thecharacters. And the more that on, uh, Hell's
Kitchen, for example, the more that Gordon has toyell at people and understand. On Hell's Kitchen,
we have a two to two and a half hour dinnerservice. We show you ten minutes of it. And the
way we've casted this show, we make sure there'speople that can't cook a lick. So he has something
(12:41):
to get m mad about. And he knows his part. He'svery good character. After about two seasons, he
knew exactly what was expected of him.
Well, obviously, he's very popular. Um, I have tobe honest with you, I watched a couple of seasons
early on of that show and then I just couldn'twatch it anymore. He was too much for me.
(13:01):
Too much. Um, I can't say that he's mellowed overthe years either.
And so the script, such as they are, are reallymade in post.
Yeah. In editing. Yeah. Like I said, we like tosay with scripted, you write the script and then
shoot the show. With reality, you shoot the showand then write the script. And that's kind of how
(13:22):
it works. So you just, you have to just hone itdown and hone it down and hone it down. And you
start with 400 hours, you get to 300 hours, youget to 200 hours, you get to 100 hours, you get to
50, you get to 20, you get to 10, you finally getit down where you need it. And that's a big part
of it, is just having the time and the mentalacuity to be able to hone that down and really
focus on what you need.
(13:42):
All right, so when you say what you need, um, I'mwilling to bet and you'll tell me if I'm Wrong.
That you know your audience well enough to knowwhat's going to work for them and what won't.
Yes. And if we don't nail that, we hear about itfrom the executive. So after 16 seasons, you
really, really know the audience very well.
(14:03):
How do you determine the chemistry between thecontestants, the cast? Do you actually bring them
in in casting ahead of time and have them workagainst each other?
Out of a thousand people, we hone it down to maybe50, and then we come in for like, interviews, uh,
personal interviews with them, hone it down to 20,and we finally get it down to 16. And like I said,
(14:24):
we try to get the good girl, the bad girl, thegood guy, the bad boy, uh, the ditz, like those
kind of character types. And you mix them alltogether and you get a mix, I guess you could call
it. And then a lot of the show also is built withmusic. You don't realize it when you're watching
it, but if you watch without music, you're like,this doesn't make any sense at all. But then you
(14:49):
add all the music and all the little stings andcuts and cymbal crashes and stuff, and it really
built on sound.
It's fascinating how the music dictates the wayyou should feel as an audience, and that's what
it's about, dictating how the audience shouldfeel.
And honestly, the head of the music, the musiccomposer, is the highest paid guy on the show
(15:09):
after Gordon, really. He lives in a mansion inCalabasas, you know, flies a helicopter around
and. Yeah, that guy's rich.
All right. Are there places where one can go tolearn how to do what you did? Is. Are there
schools for it?
I don't know that there is, because when I was infilm school, we mostly just studied film and we
(15:30):
did have a TV studio and we did some three cameratelevision. But like I said, when I graduated in
1988, that was just at the very beginning ofreality. And so, like after I. After I did Cops
and Real Stories, uh, I did a lot of different,like what we call presentations, which are like
five or ten minutes pieces that you show to thenetworks. And we didn't have any idea what we were
doing. We were just kind of feeling our way alongand. And then Survivor came along and I got on the
(15:52):
first couple seasons of that, and that was reallythe first reality competition show where you had
those kind of characters pitted against eachother.
Because prior to that you were working on realityshows about things that were happening in the
field.
Yes, Cops, we did Cops. And we did a show about ahair salon, I remember, for a while, and that was
kind of interesting. But, you know, how far canyou go on a hair salon, really?
(16:14):
But then along comes Survivor, and that's now acompetition, a game show, basically.
Yeah. And like I said, I was. I was a postproducer on that, but that was a show where they
had. We were still shooting tape, and so theywould take the tape and put it on a boat and send
the boat out to the ocean and transfer it toanother boat and bring it back into port and get
it on FedEx and fly it to us in Los Angeles. Oh,my goodness. And the fear was always, oh, my God,
(16:38):
we're going to drop all the tapes in the ocean.
And that's the end of the. Of this show. But gotthrough it, and never. It never happened that way.
We never lost a tape.
What did you learn from Mark Burnett?
He was two or three levels above me, but I learneda work ethic. You have to do whatever it takes to
get it done. So if you have to work, like a lot oftimes when we were outputting or getting ready to
(16:59):
give a show off to the executives, I would notleave at the end of the day until I actually had
it in my hand and into the Courier's hand. Becauseif you leave and you leave the editors or the
associate producers or whatever still working onit, you get a call the next morning. I never got
the show last night.
I want the listeners to pay very close attentionto what Rusty was just talking about. There is
(17:23):
something that's happened. I know from teachingfor a while. There's something that's happened in
today's, uh, students and people that want to bein the business that they don't want to work those
extra hours for whatever reason. Some do, but alot don't. It takes whatever it takes to get the
show done.
And especially when you're first starting out, youwant to just. Just always have a smile and a good,
(17:46):
positive attitude. You never want to be negativeabout anything because we're all working too hard
to put up with any negativity at all. We all have.
None of us are any happier about it than any ofthe rest of us, but we know it has to be done. I
guess that's how I'd put it.
So it's a, um, stoic attitude as you go in.
Yes. You really need to just put your head downand grind through the week and get through it. And
(18:11):
the other thing about it, the season of Hell'sKitchen, this too shall end and you'll get to
sleep for two weeks.
Would you say those are the fundamentally mostimportant lessons that you learned from Survivor
was you just put your nose to the grindstone andgo, yes.
And Cops was pretty cut and dried to daytime andafternoon shift. But Survivor was the first 24. 7
(18:35):
show I worked on and realized there's alwayssomething. It doesn't matter what it is. We're
always worrying about the next tape coming fromthe ocean, from the port, from the FedEx or
whatever. And the music guy is late with themusic. And then you're in the edit bay, and
there's footage that, you know, that you havethat's missing that you got to go find, and that
actually, uh, that problem kind of went away a lotonce we started digital editing. But when you had
(18:56):
tape, sometimes a tape just didn't get digitized.
And the producer will be telling you, I know weshot this, but it's not. It's not in the system.
So then you have to go find it.
So explain how the digital world changedeverything. Not just. I'm not talking about the
editing world. We know that pretty well. I'mtalking about how did that change the direction,
uh, of things, as you didn't need to ship tapesonto boats.
(19:19):
Yes. It made it both easier logistically andharder creatively, because all of a sudden, you
could shoot 400 hours. Nobody cared. With tape,they were always like, well, we only shot 12 tapes
today, so that's, you know, 12 hours. But withdigital, you can say, well, we're going to shoot
150 hours today. And we have, uh. Like with Hell'sKitchen, we had robo cams all over the dorms and
(19:42):
all over the Kitchen. And so all that stuff was on24 7. So it all had to be gone through. And then
just the editing and the producing of it, of thewriting of the show was much easier with
everything all in one server.
Well, and are they able to then upload thingsthrough the. Through the satellite now nowadays?
They are, yeah. Um, when I. When I retired back in2018, we were right on the cusp of still using
(20:07):
disk drives, but they were just getting into solidstate disk drives that held all the footage on
them that you could just. You could upload to thecloud and download. And we had a thing called
Media Silo, which was one of the very firstsystems that actually did that.
And you're saying that you had discs that thenstill needed to go onto a boat?
Yes. Uh, well, Hell's Kitchen, we shot in LosAngeles. So we just, we collected the disks, but
(20:30):
if, you know, somebody was shooting in the junglesof Borneo, they would have had to have shipped the
disk back. So, like, 20, 15, 16, 17 was just thestart of getting everything, uh, directly to disk
and up to the cloud.
What would you say were the. You may have alreadysaid it, but I'm just curious. Is there any one
single thing that repetitively was the mostchallenging thing you.
(20:51):
Had to get through the transcripts and getting.
Getting everybody their footage in a timely mannerso everybody can work. Because you can't just
shoot the show and then lay everybody off and thencome back and do post. You've got to just keep
going every day, every day, every day. And so thechallenge was to figure out what to prioritize to
get done, because you can't do everything at once.
Obviously. You don't have the manpower, theresources.
(21:12):
Do you. Do you ever miss the grind?
I do not miss it. I miss my friends. I had a lotof good friends. Sure. As far as your grind goes.
No, I'm glad to be retired.
I get it. Uh, the grind can grind you sometimes,that's for sure. And there's been a theme
throughout your entire career, which I findfascinating, that you've gone into things to get
(21:33):
away from causing harm to your body. And then youalso. Then at the end of your career, you were
also in a grind on your body, but it was more timethan physical labor.
Yeah. Uh, there's probably a quote that goes alongwith that. Something like the Morse, things change
the more they stay the same. That's kind of what Ilearned. But it was an easier, uh. I won't say it
(21:54):
was easier. It was just different.
What do you think you learned at UCLA that youapplied throughout your whole producing career?
Uh, uh, ucla, we learned the whole thing againabout getting it done in a. On a deadline. Because
at ucla, you had. It wasn't. It wasn't. It wasquarters, not semesters, and quarters are 10 weeks
long. And so you had. The first thing we did, wehad 10 weeks to make an 8 millimeter film, and
(22:17):
then we had 10 weeks to shoot our. Actually, I dida student soap opera at ucla. Funny story. We had
to pitch it to the faculty committee. And, uh,you've taught, so you know how faculty committees
are. So they argued and argued and argued forabout three hours and then dissolved and never
said anything to me. And so I was in the lobbywith my. With my faculty advisor, and he said, I
(22:42):
don't know what to tell you. And I said, well,screw it. We're just going to do it. So we did
you.
By the way, you've aged yourself a coupledifferent ways in the show already, but you really
aged yourself by saying Super 8 film. That's adead tip. That was a while ago.
That was our first. That's what they calledProject one and you had to do it with no synced
(23:05):
audio. So it was all visual storytelling. And thatwas. That class was a lot of fun. Although the way
they did it was you had to take 12 hours to take afull load and the project one was only an eight
hour class. And so you had to take. I uh, think Itook philosophy or psychiatry or something else.
And it was just, it was just nuts for 10 weeks.
But again, this too shall pass.
(23:27):
Well, that's, uh. Yeah, that this two shall passis exactly the way you got to think about a lot of
things in life. But in particular when you're.
When you're on a show, even when you're on a showfor 16 years, you know there's going to be a back
door. You know that all those things are shortlived. Even again, if it goes on for years. Almost
nobody works on a show for an entire career of 40or 50 years because they don't exist. So unless.
(23:51):
Unless it's like a news show, perhaps. Sometimesthat can happen.
The Simpsons. The Simpsons is a perfect example.
All the guys that invented the Simpsons were infilm school the same time that I am, and they're
all still working on it. I wasn't in the animationdepartment though, but they were.
But how rare is that? That's really rare.
It's uh, a once in a lifetime, one in a thousand.
(24:12):
I don't know. That's one reason I stayed on hell'skitchen for 16 years was because the way the money
works is you work for about five years and yoursalary doubles and you work for another five years
and then it goes up again and again. And at my ageI just decided, this is it. I'm going to just ride
this out as far as I can and get as much money asI can put away, which was great.
So also a very important point for those startingout in the industry. Um, it can happen and it does
(24:37):
happen for people. I don't know if you think of itas happening for you too, but it can happen where
you get into a piece of the industry that youweren't intending to get into and you get sucked
down the rabbit hole where they keep. You're goodat it and they keep offering you more and more
Money, uh, and Step up in prestige.
(24:57):
That's the story of my life right there.
And the next thing you know, your whole career isgone, and you didn't do what you set out to do.
Although I gotta say, I worked on a few fun showsover the years, too, that weren't as much of a
grind. Like, we did a show called that'sIncredible, which was a remake of an 80s show. And
that was really a lot of fun because I got to gointo the archives of the show. So those kind of
(25:18):
things that you would discover were just. Justamazing. And I worked on another show called
Celebrate the Century, which was, uh, based on aguy named. A producer named David Wolper. Had a
film library of everything from the 20th century.
And we got to go through and watch all the oldBusby Berkeley musicals, and. Oh, that was so much
fun. Yeah.
Oh, wow. Who were your hosts on your version?
(25:41):
Uh, we had. Roy Scheider was the host onCelebrate, um, the Century, and we did one called
Legends, Icons and Superstars, which wasChristopher Lee.
Steve (25:50):
That must have been fun.
It was fun. Yeah. The Superstars thing was fun,too, because we got. We went all the way back to
the 20s. We did, like, George Gershwin, and we,uh, did Michael Jackson, which was a big thing. He
sent us a big bouquet of roses that was, like,could barely fit through the door. So that was
pretty cool.
So I am curious after all of that, how in theworld did you get into writing books and books for
(26:14):
kids?
Yeah, what happened was long about 2014 or 2015.
And you probably remember this. There was a guythat did a story on Facebook called Go the F to
Sleep, which was kind of the first viral thingthat happened. And he told a million copies. And I
had been writing these little short poems aboutanimals just as a hobby and for about a year
(26:34):
before that. And my friend said, you know, youshould put these in a book. And so I did. And when
I write my poems, uh, I try to make them alwaysbetween three to five lines and 12 to 15 words. So
they're very short and sweet.
Well, now let's back up a step. How did you startwriting poems?
I don't actually recall. I just. I just. Facebookhad just kind of gotten started back then, and I
(26:56):
was just casting around for something to do. AndI've always kind of been a writer my whole life.
And so I thought, well, these are kind of fun. Iwrote a poem about a porcupine, and I wrote a poem
about, Beware, uh, the grizzly bear, he'll giveyou A scare. Unless it's a female, then she will
and fell. I started putting those onlines, and Igot positive feedback from all my friends, and
that's how it kind of came about.
(27:17):
So you've been a writer your whole life. Did you,uh, take writing classes at UCLA or elsewhere?
Uh, I took a screenwriting class and wrote acouple of scripts that didn't get sold. And I've
kind of been writing short stories my whole life,which I kind of pulled together in my book Dave
and Me, which is a memoir of my friend Dave, whodied young and we kind of grew up together and so.
(27:39):
But you were applying your, um, lifelong desireand skills to write?
Yes, and I actually, when I was in high school andin early college, I was the editor of the school
newspaper.
Steve Cuden (27:53):
Oh, wow.
So I did a lot of writing that way, and then itdoesn't seem like it, but there is actually a lot
of writing on reality tv. Even though you'rewriting from video, you just have to write it. It
doesn't just come naturally.
S (28:06):
You're still telling a story.
Rusty Austin (28:07):
Yes, absolutely.
And so your storytelling skills had to have beenvery valuable. Uh, really valuable on a show like
a Hell's Kitchen or Survivor.
I think that was a big part of why I wassuccessful at it, was because I had that. That
background in the newspaper stories. And you knowhow with newspaper stories, you gotta. You gotta
hone it down and hone it down and hone it down.
You don't have the luxury of a novelist that canjust write 300 pages. A newspaper story is, you
(28:31):
know, 1500 words. If you're lucky, 500 words,mostly. So.
Yeah. And that's a very good skill to have as ascreenwriter as well.
Yes, absolutely. Because especially withscreenwriting, you get 120 pages, maybe. And of
those pages, 60, 70% of the page is actuallyblank. So you better be able to hone it down.
(28:54):
Um, that's correct. And brevity is the soul of witstill. So. Yeah. The more that you're able to
whittle it down to its essential, as long as it'scolorful and terse and entertaining, then more
power to you if you've got a good story to tell.
Although the guy that won the Nobel Prize thisyear wrote a novel that was 467 pages long, and it
(29:15):
was all one sentence.
It was one sentence. I did not know that. Wow.
I love that kind of stuff. It took me 10 years toread Ulysses, uh, by James Joyce, and he was like
that, too. He would write a three, uh, pages thatwas all one sentence. And you have to go back and
read it like three times to figure out what theheck he was about. Talking. Talking about.
I. I must confess I have never read any JamesJoyce, much to my chagrin. But I have heard things
(29:39):
like just what you just said. And I thought, do Ireally want to read James Joyce? I don't know.
It's very dense. And the reason I, I got into itwas because we were on. We were going on a
vacation to Ireland one time, and I thought, huh,huh, I should find out more about this. And the
funny thing is, their main claim to fame is JimJoyce, James Joyce. There's like, statues and
tours of his neighborhood and the bars, and it'samazing.
(30:01):
How much they venerate that he's. He's renowned,you know. Uh, but again, he also has this
reputation for being, uh, verbose.
Verbose. I would call it dense. It's very dense.
And I'm actually glad I did read, even though itdid take me 10 years. The reason it takes so long
is you read three or four pages, you go back andread them again. Um, you go back and read them
(30:23):
again, then you think about it for a month or two,then you go back and read the next 10 pages. At
least that was my experience.
I like reading a book and being done. That's justwhere I come from. Let's talk about your book, An
Awesome Bird, the Pelican. Uh, it clearly is notwritten like James Joyce. Very short and sweet and
very easy to, uh, um, digest quite quickly. Tellthe listeners what An Awesome Bird, the Pelican,
(30:50):
what it's all about.
Well, with that book, what happened was I had beenmaking a donation on a website called
DonorsChoose, which is like a GoFundMe forteachers. And a teacher wanted to buy poetry books
for her. I think they were seventh graders at thetime, sixth and seventh graders. And so I gave
them like, a couple hundred dollars for that. AndI started talking to her, and she said, well, why
(31:14):
don't you come in and read your latest book? Whichat the time was the Unicorn has One Horn. And so I
figured I'd come in and read for about 10 minutesand the kids would get all fidgety and, um, and,
um, you know, bored and. But it was the opposite.
I read the book, and they were just wrapped thewhole. For the whole hour. They loved it. And so I
asked the teacher, I said, you know what? Whydon't we get these kids to illustrate my next book
and awesome Bird the Pelican. And she was all forit. And so they would do the illustrations every
(31:38):
Friday for about an hour. And that took about sixmonths. And we got all the illustrations together,
and I had to choose the best pictures for thepoems because I only had 44 poems, but there was,
you know, 87 kids. But just to make up for it, Iput in sections of just pictures. So every kid
that actually did a picture got in the book. Andthen I had to make a deal with it with the Palm
(32:03):
Springs Unified School District lawyers to do it.
And so what they made me do was I gave each kid$20 on a bag of chips. And then as royalties come
in, I've been kind of donating to the school, butthere's no contract for it. It's just something
that I do well.
Ste (32:19):
So how old were these kids?
They were seventh and eighth graders. And some ofthem were so talented, like this one kid, his name
was Andres. He drew a picture of a scorpion withpen. And the teacher said he didn't even use a
pencil. He just used a, uh, pen. So he didn'terase anything. He just drew it right up. And it's
an amazing picture.
Well, most of the pictures are very whimsical, andthey're very colorful, and they're a joy to look
(32:45):
at. Um, they are clearly not. Although I shouldn'tsay that. But they generally don't look like they
were drawn by professional artists, which makes iteven more enjoyable to look at.
They're very whimsical, like you said. And you canreally tell that it's not done by one professional
artist, but by a whole group of kids. And I'm veryproud of that, actually. I had a really good time
(33:06):
with those kids.
This concept of going to a school and having thembasically become your illustrator. Uh, a whole
bunch of kids become your illustrator. I thinkthat's probably a first. I'm not sure that's ever
happened before.
I know, right? And that was in 2023. So that'sbeen about three years. And I actually hadn't
talked to a teacher for a while, But I had some ofthe royalties built up. So I just talked to her
(33:28):
the other day, and we might do it again.
And so now you'll have an industry.
Yeah, I guess. I mean, uh, I do readings at a lotof the local schools, too, not just that school.
So maybe I could do another school. I don't know.
Why. Why would you, in the first place, think thatthat would then appeal to an audience of kids?
(33:48):
Because it's kids.
Well, uh, I'll Tell you another thing about mybooks. Uh, if you notice, I put a do it yourself
section at the back of every book.
Steve Cuden (33:55):
Yes.
And the kids love that. I get more feedback aboutthat than just about anything. And so I figured,
why not give the kids a chance to show what theycan do. And, uh, it really turned out well, I
think.
All right, so do you think of your poems ascomedic or serious and educational? How do you
think of your poems?
Well, all the above. Um, like I wrote a poem, ah,the dog likes a truck and that's a fact. And he'll
(34:22):
ride all day, front or back. And so I put a tea atthe end of the back. So that one was a humorous
one. But I try to always do something about howthe animal lives or what it has. Like I wrote a
poem about a caiman which goes, the caiman has amembrane that nictitates do better underwater. See
her days. And I figured for kids, they're going towant to know what nictitates mean. First of all,
(34:43):
it's fun to just say it. Ah, nictitates.
I want to know what nictitates means.
And what it is. It's a membrane that goes overtheir eye that protects them when they're
underwater. And all amphibians have it. But I tryto do that with all my poems. And like I said, I
try to make them no more than three to five linesand no more than about 12 to 15 words so that you
can go through them quickly.
Well, I didn't count the exact number, but itlooks like there's maybe 40 or 50 different
(35:07):
animals.
I, ah, do about 44 to 50 animals on each book.
And there are a number of them, not, not a lot ofthem, but a number of them are animals I've.
Never heard of before. And I try to do that too.
And the way I research that is when I'm on theInternet and there's something about an animal on
Facebook or whatever I'm on, I'll just grab ascreenshot of it and save it for later. Right now
(35:30):
I think I've got a thing called a serval cat. Andthere's a amoeba that lives in Lassen Volcano
national park that broke all the records for heatbecause it lives in. It lives in a 250 degree
environment which they had never thought possibleuntil they discovered that last year. So I want to
write something about that.
What is an Egyptian Uromastyx?
That's a lizard that only lives on the Nile. And,uh, I forget where I probably Saw that on Facebook
(35:56):
at some point. Uromastyx.
Steve Cu (35:58):
And what's an axolotl?
An axolotl is a Mexican salamander that has kinduh, of a lion's mane. And the funny thing about
the axolotl is the kids loved it. I had moreaxolotls because the teacher, she let the kids
draw whatever they wanted. And so I got like, youknow, 25 axolotls and two prairie dogs. But the
(36:20):
kids just love the axolotls. And the toucan wasthe other one. They did a lot of.
Well, so how did you guarantee that all theseanimals would be drawn?
Uh, I just played the numbers. 80 kids, I figuredthey would somehow get it done and they did. And
in fact, one of the animals, which is the mollusk.
The mollusk will undulate under the sea. And ifyou want to see it, that's the place to be. And
only one kid did a mollusk, so I had to use his.
(36:41):
But it was fine. It was a good picture, I thought.
So then how did you decide which of the animalswould be in the do it yourself section? Because
you assigned the animal.
Those are ones that I try to. I think in this bookI did a rhinoceros. Uh, I try to get animals that
kids.
You did a rhinoceros, a duck billed platypus, aladybug and a tarantula.
Yeah. And so those are all animals that I'm surekids are fascinated by. Right.
(37:04):
When you developed the book, did you have a rhymeand a reason, no pun intended, a rhyme and a
reason as to the order of animals as you producedit?
Sort of. Because if I had birds, I'd want them tobe five or six or seven pages apart, one bird to
the next. I think I did an eagle and a toucan anda chickadee and. And like that. So you try to
(37:25):
spread it around that way. And then I pick myfavorite poem and make it the first poem and make
that the title of the book. So my poem about thepelican was an awesome bird, the pelican, um, he
holds in his beak his food for the week.
So you just answered a question I had for you,which is, how did you decide the pelican was the
title of your book? It's because that's yourfavorite animal.
(37:47):
That was my favorite poem, actually. Yes. Andactually, beware the Grizzly bear was just called
that because that's the first poem I ever wrote.
Wow. So when I first received the book, before Iever read it, I thought the whole book was going
to be About a pelican.
About a pelican, yeah, but it isn't.
It's about all these many animals. And so how manyof these animals did you already know enough to
(38:10):
write about or how many did you in fact need to doresearch on?
I would say about half. So the other half I didyour research. And also for the kids because they
haven't heard of a lot of them. They needed tohave access to the Internet so they could call up
Wikipedia or whatever and see a picture of theanimals so they knew what to draw.
And did you spend a lot of time with them, talkingto them before they started to draw?
(38:32):
I would come in about. Well, uh, like I said, thefirst time I came in for an hour. The second time
was about a week later. I came in for an hour andthen after that I'd come in about once a month
just to see how they were doing. And it literallytook six months for them to. Because she would
only have work on it for an hour on Fridays.
Yeah, but you weren't paying for it, so.
Yeah, it was great. And it was so much fun. It wasso much fun just being back at school and how much
(38:58):
it's changed and nowadays everything's locked downand you know, when we were in school, everything
was wide open, nothing like it is now. So that wasfun to see.
So. So how did you do a lot of rewriting andremoving things, moving things around and so on?
Uh, a little. I don't do a lot because the poemsare so short and sweet. If I. What I'll do is, uh,
(39:19):
I'll remove a word like, and. Or with, uh. Or I'lladd a word like the. Or something like that, or
take it out. And just like I said, I try to honeit down and hone it down and hone it down and just
get to the very essence of the 12 to 15 words.
You're back to your work. On all those shows whereyou're honing it down and honing it down. Did you
edit your own work or did you hire someone to editfor you?
Rusty Austi (39:41):
I edited it myself.
You did, and, and I believe, am I correct, thatyou self published this?
Uh, they're self published and they're doing well.
So I don't think there's. There's not near as muchof a stigma on self publishing as there was when I
first started 10 years ago.
Yeah, nothing wrong anymore about being selfpublished. There are probably more books self
published than through a publishing house at thispoint.
(40:01):
Yeah. And you know, I thought about Getting apublisher. But then I thought, I don't want to go
through all the trouble of query letters andrejections, and I'm just too old for that.
Trust me when I tell you I understand.
Yeah. And, um, because I'm retired, I'm not reallyin it for the money. So if I sell one to two to
four books a week, that makes me happy.
(40:22):
And you're doing it because you enjoy doing it.
Yes, exactly. Right. And the other thing is, uh,it's not a job. If I don't feel like writing
today, I won't write today. If I feel like writingtoday, I will. Some days I'll work for six hours,
and some days I don't work at all.
I would say if you are not enjoying what you'redoing in the arts, you might be in the wrong
(40:44):
place.
You're absolutely right about that. And, um, justto give you a quick quote, Stephen King said, the
art of riding is the art of applying the seat ofthe pants to the seat of the chair. And that's
probably true for the kind of writing he does. Butthe kind of writing I do, I can do knock through,
you know, five ones to go pawns in two hours andgo sit by the pool for the rest of the day.
(41:08):
And so how much work did it take to assemble thebook and get it ready for publication?
Yeah, I use a program called Blurb, which is forformatting the book. And it's kind of what you see
is what you get. So you go through and you canchoose a font and you can resize the pictures as
you go and choose page numbers and. And like that.
(41:30):
And then after you get that all done, uh, you buya PDF, which then you can upload to Amazon. Barnes
and Noble, actually. There's so many more onAmazon these days, Ingramsparks. There's probably
30 or 40 different places that you can upload yourbook and sell it through. And I only got through a
few of them.
Are they available in brick and mortar stores?
You have to order it from Ingram Sparks. I don'thave any kind of a distribution channel for that.
(41:54):
You can go on and order it.
Well, yeah, that's right. You can go to almost anylegitimate bookstore and order almost any book.
Uh, but because you don't have a distributionchannel, uh, you're not sitting on bookshelves
somewhere.
No. And, uh, I don't think I'm in the point in mycareer where I could have a warehouse full of
(42:15):
10,000 books to distribute all over America.
No. And you wouldn't Want to have that? What's thepoint? And your books are all print on demand, I
assume?
Yeah, yeah, that's what we call it. It's calledPrint On Demand Business Model. And like I said, I
don't need to sell a million. If I sell 2, 3, 4, 5a week of each title, that makes me happy.
Sure, sure. Do you get feedback from anybodythat's read them?
(42:38):
Yes, I did. I have on my website, rustyaustin.com,i have a section of just all the reviews and the
feedback that I've gotten. And you get a lot ofit.
Uh, so what do you do? Where do you go forinspiration? Does it just come to you, or do you
do something to make it happen?
It'll come to me. Like, I was driving out in thecountry one time and I saw a herd of sheep. And so
(43:01):
I wrote a poem right away in my head. The ram willram you so too that you if either finds itself
with nothing better to do or, like I said, I'llsee an animal on the Internet. Like, I read about
a frog called a pedophile. Amuensis.
Steve Cuden (43:16):
Yes.
Which is the world's smallest frog. It's smallerthan your thumbnail. And so I wrote paedo fraud.
Amuensis is hard to rhyme. It's just a tiny frogwith the name sublime.
Now, in some cases, there are multiple panels on asingle animal. Now, I'm not talking about, ah, at
the end, where there's lots of them that are, uh,without poems attached. Uh, um, for instance, the
(43:40):
penguin gets two panels. Why is that?
Yes. Uh, I just felt that the drawings with twopanels, one panel just wouldn't really do the
color and the lines justice. So I try to stretchthem across two panels. It's the same drawing, but
only across two pages.
Do you think that there's anything that, um,you've done. Do you do a little marketing or
(44:02):
whatever that helps you to stand out amongst themassive amount of competition there is in the
children's book field?
Well, sort of, because locally I do as manyschools and I've read at the Barnes and Noble once
or twice for Children's Hour. And so that's thekind of stuff I do. I haven't gone national. I
mean, I suppose, like, I don't know if I'd want totravel that much, to be honest with you. Uh, I
(44:27):
kind of like being a homebody, so. But, yeah, I dothat stuff locally a lot.
You get out and at least give an experience to theaudience about what's in the book.
Yes. And I always make sure at every reading thatI point out the do it yourself at the end. And
honestly that's the thing I get the most feedbackabout is do it yourself. So I'm glad I thought of
that.
(44:47):
Yeah, indeed. Uh, are there things that you. Ifyou were going to do another book, are you
planning to write any more books?
Yeah, I'm working on one right now called the TwoHeaded Snake. Which is. The Two headed snake wants
to turn left but needs to turn right. And hebetter decide or I'll be here all night.
Are there things that you will do in this nextbook that you've learned from your previous books
that you want to repeat and things that you knowthat you won't do again because they didn't work
(45:12):
out so well? Anything like that?
Yes, there's some, there's some animals that just,just don't really lend themselves to the, the
process. Like every kid knows what a horse is. SoI don't know what to write about a horse. Um, I
did write about a giraffe in the first book. Thatwas fun. And kids love giraffes.
Well, I mean, now Rusty, a horse is a horse. Ofcourse. Of course. Unless of course the horse is
(45:34):
Mr.
Rusty Austin (45:35):
The.
St (45:35):
The fabulous talking Mr. Ed.
Right. Yeah, I guess, I guess there's really noanimals that I wouldn't broach if you put it that
way. So, um, one thing I have, have really workedhard on though is like I said, the honing down and
getting rid of the circular thes and ands andwiths and buts.
Sure. Well, that, that's making it tighter.
Yes. To making it tighter. Yes, exactly.
(45:57):
What do you use when you're out on the road roadto capture your thoughts? Do you say it into your
phone? Do you write it down?
I, I put it into my phone as soon as I can becauseotherwise I'll forget it. Like the poem about the
U. I forgot that and remembered it several timesbefore I had a chance to write it down. And I
honestly don't know if that's the way I originallywrote it or if that's just the way I remembered
(46:19):
it.
And, and you don't draw yourself, do you?
My first book, I had the Beware the Grizzly Bear.
I had my nephew Graham do it and he did it on, uh,I guess it was like a Commodore 64 maybe something
that he had left over when he was a kid, a superold computer. And I really like the way it turned
out. Um, like you said, it's not, it's not A realprofessional look, but it is whimsical and fun.
(46:44):
Well, in the case of what you're doing, it shouldbe that it doesn't want to be slick and refined.
No, I agree. It's, it's, it's, it's too, uh, toocomplicated. If you get a professional artist and
all that, and then they make it so slick. And Iprefer to be much more raw, I guess you would say.
Well, it, it, it's not crude. It is, it is, uh, ithas, it's full of energy and it's youthful and it,
(47:12):
it's, it's fresh. And the truth is, in some cases,not all of them, but in some cases, if you took
that work and put it in a frame into a museum andput a famous artist's name on it, everyone would
think it was museum quality.
In fact, some of the pictures the kids did, uh, Iput in frames and put on the wall just because I
(47:33):
like them so much.
So I want to talk to you for half a minute aboutcollaboration, because your whole career has more
or less been collaborating, including now whenyou're working with kids in a school and teachers,
you've been a collaborator throughout your entirecareer. And producing TV in general is a highly
collaborative job.
If you ever watch a TV show, the credits at theend, there's hundreds of people, and that's what
(47:55):
it takes.
My question to you is, what makes a goodcollaboration work? How do you make collaboration
work? What makes it happen?
It's communication. Everybody has to talk toeverybody and know what everybody's doing to make
the deadline. Because if Joe's off doing his ownthing and he's still going to make the deadline.
But I don't know what, I'm going to worry about itbecause I'm thinking we're not going to make the
(48:18):
deadline. But if he just tells me, yeah, I've gotto have this done in time, then I don't have to
worry about it. One less thing on my plate.
So in other words, it's that the old saw about.
It's like a marriage in the case of a producer.
It's a lot of little marriages.
It is. And you always have to give more than youget, or at least it feels that way when you're
(48:38):
doing it.
Oh, that's a great way to say it. You've alwaysgot to give more than you get.
Rusty Austin (48:42):
Yeah.
Steve Cuden (48:43):
And not mind it.
Everybody probably feels that way, but that's justhow you feel when you're doing it.
So, uh, even when you're the boss, even whenyou're over a crew, you've got to give more than
you get.
And a big. A big part of my job as a producer wasjust protecting the people under me from the. From
the crazy people above me. There are some nuts.
Oh, people. Well, that's fun.
(49:04):
What would you say was the biggest disaster thathappened to you, uh, throughout your whole career?
And how did you get out of it?
One thing that particularly stands out, and I'mglad you give me the opportunity to tell the
story, is we were on 9911, and we were justdesperate, desperate, desperate to get it on the
air. And it was going to air on a Wednesday night,and the Wednesday before it was going to air, all
(49:26):
the power in the studio went out. So we had tomove the whole operation up to Burbank and work on
it up there for five days. And then the power onthe studio was going to come back on at midnight
on Friday or 12am Saturday. And so I calledeverybody in for a meeting at quarter to 12 into
the lobby, which we literally was lit up by thestreet lights outside the lobby and candles. And
(49:52):
some of those people was their first day. And I'msure they all thought, this guy's completely
black, or what am I doing here? But we got it onthe air and we made it.
And as they say, the show must go on.
The show must go on. And the other thing I sayabout editing is you never finish editing. You
just run out of time.
Well, uh, that reminds me of Lorne Michaels famousadage about Saturday Night Live. You don't go
(50:17):
because you're ready. You go up because it's
11 (50:20):
30.
That's exactly right. And I don't know if you'veseen that movie about the birth of Saturday Night
Live, but it was. It was really good. I reallyenjoyed it.
So last question for you today. Uh, Rusty, thishas been an absolutely marvelous conversation. Can
you. You've already shared with us a tremendousamount of really excellent advice throughout the
whole show. But I'm wondering, do you have asingle solid piece of advice that you like to give
(50:43):
to those who are just starting out, or maybethey're in a little bit trying to get to the next
level?
Yes. And it's a Winston Churchill quote which saysmost of the work of the world is done by people
that don't feel very well, and you're going tofeel sick every day. You go in sometimes, and a
lot of times a director, he's be the guy throwingup in the corner, you know, because those guys
have really the most pressure of all. I think justsmile on your face and a positive attitude will
(51:07):
get you through so much, so much in your life.
I couldn't agree with you more. That's a, uh,great way to say it. And I think that that's
extraordinarily valuable advice, and I thank youfor saying it.
And it's simple, too. It's like, you don't have towork at it. You don't have to think. Well, you
have to work at it. You don't really have to thinkabout it, though. You just have that positive
attitude and that smile and you'll go far.
(51:29):
But it doesn't cost you anything.
It doesn't cost you anything. And you can learn itin school or you can learn it outside of school.
You don't have to go to college for that kind ofthing. Going to college definitely helped me get
my head on straight about deadlines and whatnot.
And so, um.
Well, Rusty, Austin, this has been a fantastichour on stage Story Beat. And I can't thank you
(51:49):
enough for your time, your energy, and yourwisdom. I thank you kindly.
It's been great. Thanks again and again. It'srustyaustin.com. gotta get my plug in.
And so we've come to the end of today's StoryBeat. If you like this episode, won't you please
take a moment to give us a comment, rating, orreview on whatever app or platform you're
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