First Draft Episode #255: Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair
June 30, 2020
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Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair are the comedians, actors, and screenwriters behind TV shows Best Friends Forever and Playing House. Jessica can be seen on the Netflix comedy Space Force, and Lennon starred in and directed episodes of Bless This Mess.
Sarah Enni: First Draft is brought to you by Highland 2 a writing software created by John August screenwriter and cohost of the Scriptnotes podcast. Also a guest on this very podcast his episode is fantastic. And after talking to John and listening to hundreds of episodes of Scriptnotes, I heard him talk about developing this writing software, and I decided to give it a try. I just finished writing a first draft entirely in Highland 2, and I'm obsessed with it.
Here's why I love Highland. It's so simple, but it's still really powerful. There's one navigation sidebar, and within that sidebar, you have tons of different tools at your disposal. You can drag bits of text in there that you might want to come back to later, or you can monitor your stats like word count and page count, or new words and new page count.
The main screen where you write is this simple, endless scroll of plain text. But with just a few keystrokes you can add notes to yourself in-line without them showing up in the final, automatically formatted version of your book. And you can export into many formats, including as a Word doc. Highland 2 is clean, beautiful and organized, which is to say it didn't distract me it just let me get in there and focus and write.
I highly encourage you to go check it out. You can find it @Highland2.app. That's Highland and the number two dot app. Or you can also find the link in this episode's show notes. And if you do try Highland and enjoy it, let me know, I'm so interested. I was tracking my progress on my first draft in the Instagram story feed. You can go in there and see, you know, my struggle. But Highland was the number one thing that people asked me. Everyone wanted to know what the software was that I was using, and this is it. So go check it out.
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week, I'm talking to Lennon Parham, and Jessica St. Clair comedians and actresses who together created, wrote, and starred in the TV shows Best Friends Forever and Playing House. Lennon can be seen most recently co-starring in and directing episodes of Bless This Mess. And Jessica is currently co-starring in Space Force, the Netflix comedy from Steve Carell and Greg Daniels.
I loved what these two had to say about the Anne of Green Gables litmus test, writing themselves into Best Friendship, and how writing and starring in their first show landed each of them in the emergency room.
Everything we talk about on today's episode can be found in the show notes. First Draft participates in affiliate programs, notably bookshop.org. That means when you shop through the links at FirstDraftPod.com it helps to support the show and independent bookstores at no additional cost to you.
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Track Changes has been appearing in your feed for a minute now. That's the mini-series within First Draft that gets into everything you don't know you don't know about book publishing in the U.S. We get into Publishing 101, Agents: Who They Are, What They Do and How to Get One, and selling your book from the perspective of both the author and agent, and in the most recent episode from the editor and publisher's point of view.The next episode, which drops June 11th, will get into how authors get paid.
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Okay, now please sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with Lennon and Jessica.
Sarah Enni: Hi, Jessica and Lennon. How are you?
Jessica St. Clair: Good!
Lennon Parham: We're good.
Jessica St. Clair: How are you doing?
Sarah Enni: I'm doing okay. In pandemic adjusted terms doing quite well.
Lennon Parham: Yeah exactly. Everything is perspective right now.
Sarah Enni: Exactly. Just to get started and so that all the listeners know whose voice belongs to who I would love for you to introduce yourselves.
Jessica St. Clair: Yes. Hi, I'm Jessica St. Clair and I will be the one that's screaming into your ear phones and Lennon, my best friend...
Lennon Parham: I'm Lennon, Parham. And I might feel like a calming Southern witch to you.
Sarah Enni: Now everybody has a great visual for the voices. I like that.
Jessica St. Clair: Exactly. Exactly.
Sarah Enni: I'm so excited to talk today and we're gonna kind of touch on all kinds of stuff about you two as performers and as writers. But I like, on my podcast, to start way back at the very beginning. So we can take turns, but I'd like to hear from each of you about where you were born and raised.
Jessica St. Clair: Go for it Len.
Lennon Parham: Okay. I was born in Atlanta proper. We lived in a little house in Tucker, Georgia. And then we moved when I was about four to Gwinnette County, which was expanding at the time and very suburban, very like the definition of suburban. And it was a great place to grow up and lots of woods to run around in. And icy rivers to dare each other to cross. In Georgia, that means you're definitely gonna fall through. Yeah, lots of free time. Jessica makes fun of me cause I'm a latchkey kid, but I was an only child, both my parents worked. So I spent a lot of time alone, which I think has a lot to do with why I am the way I am. Jessica?
Jessica St. Clair: And I was raised on the mean streets of suburban New Jersey. It was a very idyllic suburb, very much like the town that we based Playing House in, or the show that we wrote together. And very funny people from New Jersey. Everyone in New Jersey has a very good sense of humor, I think because we're the butt of so many jokes. So that was a really great, I really loved growing up there. And I feel like my sensibility of having to be scrappy and kind of make your own way in this big, bad world that is entertainment, I was very much trained for that.
Sarah Enni: I like to ask my guests about growing up, how reading and writing was a part of life for you.
Lennon Parham: I don't really remember. I mean, I guess I remember escaping into worlds, like both Jess and I were rabid fans of Anne of Green Gables and those novels. I also read Lois Duncan (author of I Know What You Did Last Summer, Stranger With My Face, and Who Killed My Daughter? The True Story of a Mother’s Search For Her Daughter’s Murderer), which was, usually basically, like there was a tween girl who knew everything and figured out all the stuff.
Jessica St. Clair: Like Encyclopedia Brown type of situation?
Lennon Parham: No, it was darker. It was like thriller. It was like a tween thriller about like a girl who realizes there's another girl wearing her face or something.
Jessica St. Clair: You know, Lennon and I are best friends, but we also have daughters who are best friends, they're six and Lennon's just turned seven. And they have the same taste in like, Lennon's daughter is obsessed with spooky things already into Harry Potter. And I had to try to find an emergency exit to the Harry Potter tour in London because she had gone because she knew Sariah liked it, but she was like, "I gotta get out of this tour, it's too scary!" It makes perfect sense that you were reading that Lennon.
Lennon Parham: Yeah. And I'm trying to think like what else I might've been reading. I think I read Julie of the Wolves. I think that anything that felt... That was the story about a girl who basically gets separated from her family and learns to live by observing wolves. And I don't know, maybe there was like a connection. I mean, all of these are girls that feel a little bit like outsiders. Like they don't feel completely seen by the people around them. And they have like super powers that nobody understands. I'm sure that connected for me.
As far as writing, I remember writing, I remember not liking it, but that people liked what I wrote. If that makes sense. I remember thinking, "This is hard, this is boring." Like, "Why am I doing this?" And then people were like, "Well, this is really good." I'd be like, "Ugh! I don't ever want to do it again." You know?
Jessica St. Clair: That's how we feel now.
Lennon Parham: Yeah, exactly.
Sarah Enni: I was gonna say the self critic, I think, starts early with a lot of creative people.
Lennon Parham: Oh yeah. What about you, Jess? What'd you read?
Jessica St. Clair: Well, I don't mean to turn this into an Anne of Green Gables podcast, although I wouldn't hate it if it did become that.
Sarah Enni: Please! Nothing would make me happier.
Jessica St. Clair: Wait! Are you a redhead Sarah? Am I seeing that?
Sarah Enni: No. My mom is more ginger than I am. Although it's growing in with who knows what? But I think it's reflecting some stuff off the wall.
Lennon Parham: Okay. Cause you do look like an auburn tint.
Sarah Enni: Well, I always wanted to be after reading Anne. I mean, I was obsessed.
Jessica St. Clair: Oh yeah. And it's funny, I used to use Anne of Green Gables as like a litmus test. So if I was courting a friend, you know, and I was like, "What do you know about this book?" If they were like, "Oh, I'm obsessed." I'm like, "Okay, we'll be best friends." And if they were like, "Mm, I wasn't really into it. I was more into..." Like, whatever our version of Twilight was. I was like, "Uh-oh, see you later."
Lennon Parham: Sweet Valley High or something.
Jessica St. Clair: Sweet Valley High. I mean, believe me, we all, we all...
Lennon Parham: I read those too.
Jessica St. Clair: We all dipped into Claudia Kishi and her exploits.
Lennon Parham: Why do you remember only Claudia Kishi?
Sarah Enni: She was the cool one.
Jessica St. Clair: She was the cool one. But yeah, so I loved books, but I loved especially books about the olden days. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austin (Emma and Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen), all of those. And I still keep them, like a total freak, on my bedside. So reading to me, I was a really nervous kid and reading to me was really calming. So I do that every night before bed, that was, you know, we didn't have TVs in our rooms, all that stuff. And so I still do that. If I get stressed out, I have like a go-to book about France. That's my new obsession, or not new, but I read constantly about people who move to other countries, which makes Lennon very nervous. Cause she's like, "What are you not telling me?" Now I'm stuck here apparently.
But my dad was an English teacher before he went into business. And so books were really important to him and writing was especially important to him. So that was a huge part of my life. Like before I handed in an English paper, my father would make me do like 18 drafts. And I would sit on the screen porch with him and we would go over how I could strengthen it. I mean, it was so annoying, but I have to tell you that work ethic, and I had some tremendously amazing English teachers at my high school. I don't know. They had just a very strong English department.
And I really do feel like that helps Lennon and I. Because we are extremely perfectionistic when it comes to our scripts, it takes us a really long time to write one. But once we turn it in, we're pretty confident that it's pretty damn near perfect, to us anyway. But we get a lot of calls like, "Where's the script?" And it would seem like we're not doing work, but like we're...
Lennon Parham: We are, we're doing it.
Jessica St. Clair: But it takes us a long... Our process is very intense.
Lennon Parham: We don't want to turn it in until it's really good. Cause I don't want to get notes cause we turned it in too early. Or cause it's not polished, you know? Or cause the rhythm's off, or one scene's too long, or the whole thing's too long. You know what I mean? Like nobody wants that. And we used to do that in our episodes for Playing House too. I mean we would go back over like, we'd get a writer's draft and again, it takes forever. It's a lot of stuff on our plate. We always would go back over with a fine tooth comb and make sure that every word coming out of everybody's mouth was exactly what we wanted.
Jessica St. Clair: I think what's cool. I was thinking about this the other day. I don't think you realize when you're younger, that everything you watch, you know, from like the bad Three's Company episode to Anne of Green Gables to seeing Gilda Radner on the VHS tape that you rented from Video Video, all of that contributes to what you end up writing as a grownup. And especially Playing House, BFF, and then our latest movie we just finished, which will be for Gina Rodriguez. But it's about a girl who gets transported back in time to the olden days.
It's really so much fun to see our childhood fantasies and get money to kind of put that on the screen. And sometimes, like we had a last name in this movie and I was like, "hold up." Like right before we turned it in. And I'm like, "I'm pretty sure that's the name of Emma's nanny who gets married in Jane Austen's Emma." And it was like, "Nope, that was Westerfield not Westerhouse." I'm like, "Okay, good. We're good."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And honestly, to your point, that's exactly why I asked that question. I do find a lot of times that when people talk about what they are obsessed with, the ages of 12 to 15 in particular before you start driving and start really identity shaping in this whole other way, you're just like... at least people who end up being creative, are voracious intake. Watching every movie, reading every book and then kind of mulching over that into their creative lives, often, I feel like. And I do want to ask, with you two in particular, how performing became a part of your life.
Jessica St. Clair: Okay. So I always loved comedies. And I did find a Gilda Radner VHS that changed my life when we saw it at a sleepover and everyone else had fallen asleep and I was like watching it on repeat. But I will say about my town, it was very much homogeneous. If you had a freak flag, sort of keep it hidden just in case nobody liked it. So I didn't really let my freak flag fly fully until I got to college. And I was in the musicals in high school, but I was put in the way, way back, like if there was a piece of scenery, I was placed behind it. I was told by my drama teacher in high school like, "Do not purse this as a career."
For me, I was like 16 years old, and everyone else was singing Les Miserable's Castle on a Cloud, but I was trying to see how I could perform The Ladies who Lunch, like something Elaine Stritch would do. And everyone's like, "Who is this freak?" So anyway, I went to college and I saw this improv group the Otter Nonsense Players, that Jason Mantzoukas was a part of. And my now husband, Dan O'Brien, and Rodney Rothman, who's this phenomenal writer, comedy writer. They were all in it.
And I was like, "Oh my God!" That's when the light turned on. I was like, "This! This, I want to do." Not as a career, mind you, because my parents would have been horrified. But I was like, "This is what I want to do." And I auditioned on a whim with this girl across the hallway who said, "Will you come with me?" And I was like, "Oh, I'll never get this." And I was wearing a pair of pleaded stonewashed jeans and a big beefy tee that said like, "Whatever!" On it or something, and my Tretorns. And I got into that group and that sort of changed the trajectory of my life because Jason Mantzoukas became my first writing partner.
I followed him to the UCB (Upright Citizens Brigade) like a little sister. He was like, so horrified. Everywhere he was, I was just like right behind him. But my road to performing was very rocky because it was not something that anybody in my family, my Irish Catholic family, had done. Conan O'Brien was the only Irish person that anyone could name check, had remotely made a career at this. So I had to kind of keep a normal job at CNN, which is crazy. I was terrible at it. And then at night, like Superman, I would perform at night at the UCB.
And it's so crazy with the theater closing in New York, which it's not really a close because they'll get another space really soon. But it's just funny cause we've been thinking a lot about that time in our twenties, you know, becoming comedians. And back then, nobody had an agent, nobody even knew how to make a living at it. We just sort of were all trying to make each other laugh. And that was an amazing time. We certainly were at the UCB at the right time and the right place. So that's what I did. I horrified my parents and then I eventually made them proud.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And Lennon I'd love to hear from you. And then I have questions about how you kind of found each other in those earlier performing days.
Lennon Parham: I remember wanting to perform early on. I was really obsessed with like, Who's Line Is It Anyway? , SNL. I dressed up like SNL characters (Coneheads SNL skit and movie) for at least three or four Halloweens, the Wild and Crazy Guys.
Jessica St. Clair: That's a hot costume. That's a sexy costume. It's gonna get you a lot of dates.
Lennon Parham: Yeah. I didn't get laid until my mid-twenties okay? So, I wasn't aiming for that, I should say. I think I did, I just kind of found whatever performance opportunity... Like I did Odyssey of the Mind, this thing called O.M., which was sort of creative problem solving with a bunch of wonderful weirdos. You had to do like a seven minute play and build all this stuff yourself and put it up and perform it and take it down in like this main stage competition.
And then they also had a thing called Spontaneous, which was like on-your-feet problem solving, which I think is basically like the basics of improv, that I was really good at and I loved. And then I was in the marching band, so I performed... Like I was also in as many plays and musicals as I could get my hands on, but I always felt like, I wasn't on the very back row.
Jessica St. Clair: You were like second to last.
Lennon Parham: I would volunteer too much for them to do that, I think, or something. So I ended up in most things, and I assistant directed something, I remember. But anyway, it wasn't until college, I went to college for theater and met Jack McBrayer who was a senior when I was a freshman. And we would mess around during work study.
And I remember feeling with him what I would later feel when I would improvise. And like all my superpowers were kind of being used, you know? So I was attempting to go to grad school for theater and stuff like that. And it just was not panning out. So I did Teach For America instead and then moved to New York and then found Second City and then found UCB. And then the rest is sort of history.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I want to ask about those early years before you guys started writing together. I think, from what I've read Lennon, you put on a one woman show and I heard the reason, one of the reasons that you wanted to try to do that, was to show people how you could be used in other projects or in Hollywood generally.
Lennon Parham: Yeah. I mean, I wasn't intending to show people that I could write, really. I was just trying to show people all the fucked up stuff that was happening in my brain. And that like, "I may look like a normal calm human. But in reality, my sense of humor is so whack and wild and dark." And the show had like Freddy Krueger murdering a little girl in it. There was a Solid Gold dance character who is teaching a kindergarten dance class, trying to recruit parents and overdoes it with wine. She's drinking a Capri, I mean, she's smoking a Capri cigarette. I mean, it's just insane. There was a dude who was hitting on a girl at a bar.
Jessica St. Clair: A Lithuanian.
Lennon Parham: Yeah. It just was so...
Jessica St. Clair: A pool player.
Lennon Parham: I think I just wanted to show, again, I was also trying to get on SNL at the time. But I wanted to show people kind of what to do with me and that my range went way beyond what I look like. And yeah, that was my only intention. And also I think it ended up being to like strengthen that resolve that I have, that I am enough alone, and that my sense of humor and my voice is important in the world. And that I should share that.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And I want to ask about it in more detail when we start talking about BFF and Playing House, but I'm also interested in that you kind of were leaning into characters, cause that's a sketch show, what you're talking about, right? A one woman play, a series of sketches. I mean, did you enjoy writing for yourself? What was that process like for you?
Lennon Parham: I would come up with an idea and I would get it written and I would, sort of what we do now, I would re-improvise it in my living room and find things that I liked and rewrite it, and rewrite it, and rewrite it. And then I would put it up, just a three minute thing, at a midnight show or whatever. And see what worked, what didn't work, record it, redraft, do it again. Wigs were critical as we all know [chuckles]. I don't remember liking it. Again, I don't remember liking the process. I remember liking the finished product and doing it, and the process of doing it, but not the pre-process of writing it.
Sarah Enni: Jess, I want to talk about how you have been writing because you were writing with Jason. So you had been in kind of a writing partnership. Do you mind talking about how that came together and what made you want to tell a story with another female writer?
Jessica St. Clair: Right. Well, as I said, I followed Jason to the UCB as his like annoying little sister. And then, much to his horror, we were placed on the same team. They didn't know we knew each other. And we had had the same dynamic, literally, since the first scene I ever did with him my freshman year in college. Literally the same exact dynamic. It never grew, it never matured. It was always the same. So anyway, we had a blast on stage together and neither of us had agents or any idea of how to make any sort of a living.
Sarah Enni: Actually, before you go on, I just want to hear you describe the dynamic cause let's just not assume that people listening know exactly.
Jessica St. Clair: Oh, okay. No, you wouldn't know it really, because we just did stage shows together. It would be like, we used to call it... it's not like Beauty and the Beast, but it sort of is like that. Because he's like this insane maniac and then I'm just like this... You know, a good example is we had a sketch show, two sketch shows. The first one, which was called I Will Not Apologize, was like a series of scenes of kids and parents in this suburban town. So he grew up in a similar environment to me outside of Boston.
And one of the kids was this kid called The Watcher. And he was one of those weird kids who wore a hooded sweatshirt so all you saw were his weird bug eyes. And he would record the gossip of everybody in like a ledger. And I was this popular girl that was on the outs with all my friends and I was forced to have lunch with him. And then as the show goes on, we end up falling in love. Like these two people should never be in the same room, but they're drawn to each other, like a moth to the flame.
That was like every one of our characters. And I would play versions of myself most of the time. So I'm most comfortable playing a version of myself. He'd be the one in the wig, you know, and like a ladie's bathrobe, that was not really my thing. And then our second show we did was called We Used To Go Out, which was people used to think that Jason and I had dated for a long time, simply because why else would a man and woman ever choose to write together unless they were sleeping together? So we wrote a show about our fictional breakup.
And so we did that and then Jason wanted to focus more on writing screenplays. And I was sort of doing more acting at that time. So I was like, "Okay, we're gonna take a break." And I had a secret dream, always, that I wanted to write the types of shows that, much like Anne of Green Gables is my comfort reading material, shows like Gilmore Girls, I Love Lucy, Kate & Ally, these were all shows that were extremely comforting to me. My girlfriends have always been a huge, huge part of my life.
I've always had a "true bosom friend" to quote Anne and Diana, always in my life since the time I was five years old. So I wanted to write that story, but I never ever in a million years imagined I would find somebody who also wanted to do that. There were so few women, really. It's funny to think about it now cause there's so many more. But when we started, there was not very many girls at the UCB. And if they were, we were often put on different teams because there were so few of us they would kind of spread us around the different groups.
And so, I knew of Lennon, but I never got to perform with her. I would just kind of see her across a crowded basement and wonder what she was up to being there. That's something, obviously terrible, had gone on in her life that would have led her to this downstairs smelly basement, which of course now we miss terribly. And then when I came out to LA, there were a lot of tears, a lot of missing New York. I didn't have any girlfriends out here yet.
And Lennon came out for a pilot season. I came to see her show. Again, it's like what you were talking about with Jack McBrayer, when I performed with Jason, there's this like magic. And I felt that just watching Lennon's show. I was like, "Oh my God! I feel this person. I want to devour this person whole." You know? I want to wear her face as my own face.
Lennon Parham: There you go Lois Duncan, Stranger With My Face.
Jessica St. Clair: I wanted to make Lennon my friend. And I always felt, from the very beginning, like when you meet the person you're gonna marry, you think like, "Oh, I've known this person all my life." That's how I felt with Lennon. So then we got together actually at the urging of our agent and manager, which is insane. And we got together and kind of started talking about what kind of shows we'd want to do, or what ideas. And the thing we remember the most is how much we laughed.
I mean, it was so effortless at the beginning. Just like laughing, laughing, laughing. And I came home and I told my husband like, "I want to write with this person for the rest of my life." But that's how passionate I feel about certain people. And it scares most people. And he said like, "Whatever you do do not tell her that. That's so strange." Like, "You're coming on too strong." And I don't know if I ever did tell you that, Lennon, until you were too far in.
Lennon Parham: I think you did. I think the first thing you did was say that. I think the next time we saw each other you were like, "This is it. This is it. I hope you like doing this cause this is it for you." And in my mind I was like, "I like doing this, but I have my own will and can do whatever the fuck I want, you know that? But I also want to be here."
Jessica St. Clair: Yeah. And that's been our dynamic. Lennon and I have also had the same dynamic from day one.
Sarah Enni: And this is so interesting. So I write and I've taken improv and performed a little bit, but I am always so curious to pick the brains of people that write and perform and especially write for themselves. So I'm interested in the fact that you have the same dynamic right from the get-go. And also that, Jessica, like you said, and I've heard you say in other interviews that you kind of play versions of yourself and aren't as interested in going nuts with character, but Lennon it seems like you do kind of dig that. And in Playing House we've all seen many a beard or funny costume. So I wonder how you found the rhythm or the types of stuff together that you were interested in writing?
Lennon Parham: Well, I think initially we were just like, "What would be fun?" Like, "What's making us laugh?" The first thing we ever wrote was a pilot for HBO and we sold it, we did like a week of pitches, and they paid us to write a pilot, which was I think at the time just mind blowing. And then we spent, again, HBO is slow and so are we. So it was the first thing we'd ever written so it was like a year and a half of that, of going back-and-forth.
Jessica St. Clair: And that's way too long. Like if you broke it down...
Lennon Parham: Remember Christy said... but Christy said that it would take that long. Cause also we would turn it in and we would wait like months.
Jessica St. Clair: But if you broke it down hourly, we were making 0.05 cents on the dollar, an hour.
Lennon Parham: Like how much time we'd spent writing you mean?
Jessica St. Clair: Yeah. We'd never done it before.
Lennon Parham: No, I mean you had.
Jessica St. Clair: I mean, right. But I'd never really written a full... I guess I had done that too, but I don't know. We hadn't written together. It's not like we went to like grad school for writing.
Lennon Parham: Yeah. But we didn't like, I mean, we wrote it. We would lean on Jess's husband, Dan, who's a playwright and has a degree in writing. And like, "What's conflict?" And all that stuff. I mean, again, both of us were just like, "Well, you know, in like Laverne and Shirley, they just are in a prison." Like, "Why do we need to have like ABC story?" You know? So a lot of it was like, "Oh, what does Save The Cat Say?" Or, "What happens in our favorite episode of blank?" And we would just kind of learn up on our feet, what's working and what's not working.
And our first pilot was about these two best friends that were living together right across the river from New York City in Jersey. That they were so close that it was like holding both of them back. But that ended up being kind of sad, I think, ultimately. Because we were working towards getting them apart, I guess. Right? So the trajectory of that would have been kind of sadder. And so what ended up with Best Friends Forever and Playing House, was it was about people who know... one of the improv rules is like, it's always better if the people know each other really well already.
So they know each other really well. They live in separate places. They're forced back together for various reasons. And we get to be there when that comes back to life, that friendship. And the friendship is almost like a character itself. And it changes everyone around them. And it also, I think for both of us, our best friendships also hold us accountable to our true selves.
So a lot of times when we get back together with friends we haven't seen in a while, or our good girlfriends that we've had all our lives, they're like, "But remember you said this 20 years ago that you wanted to direct and now you're directing. That's incredible." And then I burst into tears, you know? So it's like we wanted these women to be that for each other.
And that these relationships were as important as the husbands and the boyfriends and the parents in their lives as well. We didn't necessarily set out to do that. But that's what we realized through the process.
Jessica St. Clair: I think also, at UCB as much as The Herald, which is like a long form improv format, can be very heady, like very intellectual games being played. The thing I would take away from my teachers at the UCB was start from what you know. So even if you're playing, let's say an astronaut, be somebody you recognize. Act the way a human that you know, or you are, would act in that moment. So for me, I felt like we were always coming up with, "What are we dealing with in our lives?"
So for instance, in BFF, we were getting married and how was that impacting our relationships? And then when we wrote Playing House, we were both, Lennon was about to give birth. I was three months pregnant in the pilot that we were shooting.
Lennon Parham: When we shot it, yeah.
Jessica St. Clair: We were dealing with all that nervousness around becoming new mothers. And then what would it be like to be mothers? And so that's been, I think, something that has made it easier for fans to connect to our work, because we're usually sharing a lot of very personal feelings. The circumstances might be different.
Lennon Parham: The specifics, yeah.
Jessica St. Clair: Yeah, the specifics. But what's weird is that Lennon and I were not best friends when we started writing, but in writing about best friendship, we became best friends. And then we would write about our real relationship, you know, like our real friendship.
Lennon Parham: Cause the dynamic that Jess and I have in real life, I mean, we hype it up and we exaggerate it for television, but the dynamic that we have in real life and just moving through our normal problems and family, all that stuff is the same relationship that you see on screen.
So it wasn't, we didn't really have to go searching for like, "What do we do best?" That's just how we are together.
Jessica St. Clair: And then what was even weirder was then when I got sick, I got cancer, Lennon took care of me because she is my best friend. And then we wrote about that. So we wrote ourselves into a best friendship but then had this insane thing happened to the friendship. And then we wrote about that and replayed actual real scenes that had happened in our lives, which was bananas.
That's why I think when people are like, "It seems so real." I'm like, "It is real." Like, "Yes, that happened."
Sarah Enni: There's so much there. I kind of want to go through BFF to getting to Playing House and then ask about that. About playing your real self and it's always so interesting to me where you kind of... We talk about this with memoir writing, right? It's your real story, but also you get the opportunity to kind of make it worse, better, combine characters, all that. It's like the beauty of it.
But I want to ask about BFF because it was you guys learning how to write together. And I did read that you had a pretty intense work ethic that sent you both to the hospital. So I want to ask about the actual like day-to-day, how did you write? And then how did you kind of learn when and how you needed to pull back?
Lennon Parham: Basically, I decided to move to LA because all my work was starting to be here while we were writing our HBO show, both Jess and I were on sitcoms, like one season of sitcoms. And my show got canceled within 24 hours after finding out that HBO was passing on our script. And also, we had already turned all of our notices in that we were moving, so it was happening. And when I came out, then we basically, we were furiously coming up with like, "What's the next idea?"
We came up with that. And then when I was out looking for an apartment, we went around to production companies and pitched it. And we ended up working with Scot Armstrong, who was on Jess's famous improv team called Mother, and Ravi Nandan, who was his partner at the time. And that led us to getting a blind script deal with NBC.
And so we could kind of write whatever we wanted. And it was kind of like the little pilot that could, right Jess? Every step of the way it was like nobody could believe that it kept going. Like, nobody could believe that we were having a table read. I mean, NBC changed hands, like the president of NBC got fired and they hired a new guy. And so all the incoming pilots were not his idea. And so it was such a long shot cause everybody that was beloved of our show, was gone.
Jessica St. Clair: Then they were like, "Hey, we gave out all the real money to other pilots. But we literally have basically like $10 if you guys would like to shoot a couple minutes of it and show us what you think it would be." And we were like, "Well, that won't work because our pilot and all of our episodes are like mini movies." And that really is because that's what we were referencing, you know? Like these romantic comedies and we would always tell these arcs. So, much like other shows, other sitcoms, nobody changes.
In our shows, it's a little bit more like an hour long, in terms of everybody is growing and starting the season one way and ending in a totally different place. So in that sense, shooting a little teaser where we put on a bunch of wigs, was not gonna cut it. So we took that $10 and we said, "We're gonna shoot a full pilot on this."
And we flew an eight-year-old girl to New York City and shot without permits on the streets of New York, Brooklyn.
Lennon Parham: And somebody's house that we did.
Jessica St. Clair: Somebody's house. We begged, you know, we had these amazing actors, Adam Pally played the original Joe. He was on another series.
Lennon Parham: He was waiting to find out about Happy Endings, if it was gonna get picked up to series.
Jessica St. Clair: He didn't even ask, he just did it. We shot the set of this beautiful, beautiful brownstone, cause we have always had such clear ideas that we want the places that are in our show to be idyllic, not fake, but look like your dream version of, you know, a little cozy New York apartment. That was legit a stage that I believe many, many porns have been shot on. Like so many horrible things have happened on this stage and we had to strip it down, all it had where the bare bones, cause it would be like, if you had like, you know, quote unquote, the perfect scene...
Lennon Parham: It was like a slumlord apartment. That's what it felt like. We walked in and there was one room that was decked out to be like, I don't know, there were just a bunch of stuffed animals and it was really terrifying. It was terrifying.
Jessica St. Clair: Somebody had their way with them. But then, we've always hired these extremely passionate people for whom maybe this is their first shot to be like that head of the set design or whatever, or the head of wardrobe. And so, anyway, that was a really amazing experience cause they were shocked that we did all of that on such a little amount of money. But that's sort of the UCB kind of mentality is you just, you know, you make the most of what you're given And also it's like every shot could be your last.
I think that's how we've always felt. We are little freaks that have come to the table and we don't have the same... I mean, listen, my hair? Yes. I have the hair for network television, I always have. But that's it! Do you know what I mean? That's all I have. And Lennon has phenomenal teeth!
Lennon Parham: That's not true. Don't talk about my teeth.
Jessica St. Clair: But together... I mean, who knows?! So we were like, "We gotta leave it all on the floor!" And we did and it worked. Once you show people you can do things for very little, they're like, "Great. Keep doing that."
Lennon Parham: "Do it again." So yeah, so we got picked up from that pilot. We were, again, the last show picked up out of all of them. And everybody else is getting picked up to series for like 10 or 13 for like millions of dollars an episode. And they were like, "We're gonna have you shoot six, cause this is how much money we have left over." So five more. And, "You're gonna have this small amount of money to do it." Basically.
So we had a tiny writer's room. We didn't know how to build a staff. We hired one kind of high level person. And then our friends, basically, or recommendations of our friends. And one guy that spent a couple of days with us and a couple of days with New Girl.
And it was just like, again, we didn't know how to delegate. We didn't know how to set healthy boundaries. We were there every Saturday and Sunday. We were doing extra work and fixing other people's mistakes so that no one knew that our show had any problems, which is insane cause every television show has problems, right? Or even having to do a rewrite would've been seen as a negative thing. It wouldn't have been, but we didn't know that.
All we knew was that we wanted to present a perfect finished product. And so we did. We wrote them all. We shot them all. We edited them all. We were super bossy during our photo shoots. And during that process, I never saw my husband. Jess never saw her husband. Jess injured herself on a vintage antique stove. She ran too fast in espadrilles, and slammed her vagina on the edge of a stove and had to be iced down. During the edit process, in between going from our LA shooting to New York shooting, I basically broke out in really bad hives all over my back. And then they were treated by an onset doctor and then three days they came back even worse.
And so I ended up two nights in the ER in New York City while we were shooting. And then Jess also ended up in an urgent care IV situation cause she got food poisoning from a Sunday when we were there rewriting something and she ate like bad pasta or something.
Sarah Enni: I just want to hear in general, I know your writing process is unique in how you actually get to scripts. So if you don't mind just kind of talking me through that.
Lennon Parham: So we get a really amazing writer's room on a TV show, or if it's a movie it's just the two of us. And we break it. Like we really, really break it. So that takes a long time to come up with the full characters and the why we're telling this story, what we want to say with it, what we're hoping to explore. And then we break it structurally and do like a really, really, really super detailed outline.
If it's a writer's room, then we will spend maybe two weeks almost, breaking larger arcs for the character. Cause like we said, we like our characters to learn something and change. And then once we, if someone else is writing it, they'll take it off and write an outline and then they'll have us improvise for scenes that they feel they need our help for.
And if it's our script, we improvise the whole thing. Like the cold open, if it's the two of us and a terrible photographer, we will, for instance from Playing House, we'll act out our parts and also his part. And we'll take turns and we'll rewrite and we'll do basically different takes where we're rewriting in between each thing. Somebody transcribes all of those improvisations. And then we use that as our sort of rough content to go through, to make our first draft.
And we do what we call circle takes where we go through together, side-by-side and say, "Ha ha, we like the way this happens. Oh, this is an interesting way to enter the scene." Circle it. And then we start a new document where we actually start writing. And then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.
Jessica St. Clair: Yeah. So we'll literally copy and paste cause we wanted to find a way... And actually Jason and I, I wouldn't say invented it, but that's how Jason and I wrote. And that was purely because we had never written a script before and we were terrified of a blank page. But it ended up being a great way to capture the real way people talk instead of using your conscious brain while you're writing. And I think really gifted authors that you guys who are real writers, you guys know how to do that without having to act it out. But for us performers turned into writers, it was a very helpful tool.
It does take a long time, and it used to take even longer because we didn't have a staff, it was just the two of us transcribing and writing it by hand.
Lennon Parham: We would go back and like listen to the garage band tracks and Jess would write it all out by hand.
Sarah Enni: Wow. That is impressive.
Jessica St. Clair: It's so crazy. But you know it's funny, in the process of writing it out by hand, let's say, or even now reading through it, you're doing a couple drafts in your head before you even put it down on paper. So that's been great. But when we were taking forever on writing this movie, we actually sent a picture of us with our binder because the binder for the movie was literally, I mean, it was that fat, like so fat.
And then of course I went to London, cause I was in London shooting this show happening for HBO and Lennon was back in the U.S. And so we had to write virtually for the first time on Zoom. So we're no stranger to Zoom because every night at 5:00 PM in London I would log onto my workday while Lennon, it was 9:00 AM here. But I forgot the binder. And I made a terrifying phone call to my manager's assistant. I was like, "Do not tell Lennon! I don't have the binder. Just FedEx it to me!" She's like, "It's gonna cost $800." I'm like, "I don't care." Any amount of money was worth it for her not to know that I had left the binder at home.
Lennon Parham: But then she's since told it as a hilarious story, like three times. So now I do know. And this was after you had already made Joanna, make an entire copy of it to take with you. So if anybody should be upset is Joanna.
Jessica St. Clair: That's right. God bless Joanna.
Lennon Parham: That tells you how terrified she is of me, truly.
Jessica St. Clair: Literally!
Lennon Parham: That's our dynamic. That's our dynamic.
Jessica St. Clair: Like you would have thought, "Oh, what are you most worried about Jess, you just moved your family across the country? I'm most worried about getting that binder over there." I'm like, "Is there a steamer ship leaving? Just get it!" And then I was like making up excuses. I was like, "Ummmm, well we haven't gotten into our house yet so I can't work with you today." Just so she wouldn't know.
Lennon Parham: It's amazing.
Jessica St. Clair: So sad.
Sarah Enni: What's in the binder? Is that just all the versions?
Lennon Parham: It's like the worst case American Tail.
Jessica St. Clair: It's all of our transcripts of our scenes.
Lennon Parham: Yeah, and the outline too, if we've written an outline, that'll go in there.
Jessica St. Clair: Right. I think what I find is really interesting because Lennon and I aren't in this movie and it takes place in a different time, half of it. So I was convinced we wouldn't be able to do it. Cause I was like, "How are we gonna improvise as British people from the 1800's." And Lennon's like, Lennon is always like steady-Eddie. Like, "We'll figure it out." And I'm like, "This will go down in flames." Like, "We have sold something we cannot write."
And then when we first had to improvise as these people, like as the cook, or the maid... the ladies maid. Or god forbid, Lennon and I on a date being courted and having a picnic overlooking the English countryside, it was so embarrassing to me.
Lennon Parham: Not to me. Dream of dreams. Loved it. Loved every second of it. And I'm like, "Oh, which region of England would you like an accent of?"
Sarah Enni: So how does your style of writing together work over Zoom, which you did while you were in London, but you're also doing now that we are in shelter in place here in Los Angeles?
Lennon Parham: We haven't done the improvising over Zoom. But we did do the improvising over speaker phone when I lived in Brooklyn and Jess lived in LA. She prefers for us to be in the same room so that she can literally sit on top of me and make sure that I'm going up at the right pace or whatever, or like make the font big enough. So I keep it on my screen and then I screen share the script. So when we're doing drafts of it, we fully improvised everything through the end of the film and had transcripts for it. And then we were building the scenes. And we were able to do that over Zoom pretty good.
Jessica St. Clair: I thought it would be a disaster and it definitely wouldn't work. And Lennon was like, "It's gonna be all right." And then it was all right. What was crazy is that like at the end of my day, like who starts work at 5:00 PM? Like, "What am I?" Like, "Driving a big rig?" Literally, at the beginning of every work session, I would be like, "You are getting the worst of me. Expect nothing." And it would be like during dinner time. And like my six-year-old are running naked, just like, "Aaahhh!" And I push her out of the room.
Lennon Parham: But this is not, it's not any different than any other day. Cause you will be like, literally you're like, "Just so you know, I am so sorry, but I am not gonna be funny today." Like, that's how you start every work session. And I'm like, "Okay, I'll wait for the day for that to happen." That has never literally happened. And somebody's always running naked in the background of something we're doing
Jessica St. Clair: Always, always.
Sarah Enni: What was that like pitching a movie that you guys weren't gonna be in? That's so interesting to me.
Lennon Parham: Well, we came up with it, like it was actually a really nice, I think for both of us, a nice change of pace, of like deep examination of our own friendship, you know? And it was a real escape. I think the story of it is sort of a fantasy escape to the olden days. It's about a modern day woman who works really, really hard and that no matter how hard she works, nothing is gonna change. And she does a kind gesture to a beggar woman and gets basically time-traveled back to the Victorian age and in a manor house where everyone calls her Lady Anna. So it's a modern day woman back in time. Which I think a lot of us would love to be in Downton Abbey right now, not worrying about any of this mess, just like, "How do you want your English muffin?" You know?
Jessica St. Clair: And it was nice because I think we already learned the lesson we were writing about, which is that life is not all about work. That what matters the most is your family and your friends and experiencing the joys of life. That things just don't have to be so hard. We learned that with BFF. We learned that, in some ways, the first two seasons of Playing House, you know? And then I got sick. So it was nice to write a story about that, not something we were currently living through, but something like a fantasy of the lessons we'd already learned.
Lennon Parham: But for a Type A woman who wants to be the perfect mother and the perfect everything, which both of us do. And we really have huge work ethics where we always think it could be better. That, for us, is always an uphill battle. It's always a struggle. I mean, during this time, our work for me has been an escape, which is kind of the opposite of what's normally happening, which is 95% of my time is spent with working, and then the rest is at home. And now it's the other way around. So that's been an interesting lesson.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. And a lot of people who are using work to cope right now, I put myself in that category for sure. And how was it like to work with that long of a script and telling one story over the course of 120 pages, instead of as a TV show?
Jessica St. Clair: That felt very daunting that we were gonna have to have three acts. Yeah, we were like, "How in the world are we gonna do that?" But once we got into it, we didn't think so much about how it should be done. I think the more we have learned to trust that the story is sort of intuitive. We sort of all know, I think probably when we're born, like what a story is, you know?
And so we kind of organically come up with a story and then we go backwards. I cannot tell you how many times we go, "Oh, God check Save The Cat." I mean, like how many times you have to dig that old copy out and go like, "Wait on page 23, what's happening?" Just to check yourself and go, "Okay, you know what? That's why that feels too long. That's why act one feels heavy because we've taken 700 pages before she ever goes back to the olden days." You know? So structure is great, but I think you can get really bogged down and it can stifle the creative process if you just are trying to write like paint by numbers type of thing. And that's sort of the opposite of our problem.
Lennon Parham: I think I just kept saying, like, we wrote 26 episodes of television for Playing House, right? That's 30 minutes, or 20 minutes, or whatever. Like, we've done this, we've written many movies by now. And a lot of our shows are little mini movies that were just basically like two or one, two or three minute scenes. And now we just get to have like bigger scenes and like have exposition. Write descriptive about the English countryside, you know?
Jessica St. Clair: A lot of people don't know that Lennon could be a professional, what would I say? The scene description?
Lennon Parham: I don't know. I love it. I love it.
Jessica St. Clair: She loves just telling you what's in the background.
Lennon Parham: The horse's behind and he's close at hand and she turns swiftly and their eyes lock.
Jessica St. Clair: Oh yeah, she's so good at it.
Lennon Parham: It's the best.
Jessica St. Clair: Lennon has a really great structural mind. I feel like cause she's also has a math teacher for a dad. Her brain works a lot more logically the mine does. And I'm more like, I can like jump into the middle of a passionate scene and sort of start to act it out by myself. But I think that's been a nice balance. You know what I mean? I thank God that Lennon thinks that way because I certainly don't.
Sarah Enni: And I think that's a great thing to keep in mind for people who are interested in co-writing. Right? Is that it's about compatibility, but also about compatibility of what kinds of things you can write, and skill sets, and all that stuff. There's a lot of layers. Are you guys... we'll wrap it up, but are you guys interested in writing more movies going forward? Do you like that feel?
Lennon Parham: I did. Jess?
Jessica St. Clair: Yeah. I loved it. I mean, for us to be able... and we keep putting out in the universe like, "This movie will be made." We said to the guy, the wonderful guy at Universal who bought it.
Lennon Parham: The executive.
Jessica St. Clair: We're like, "We'll be the only writers on this." And he was like, "That never happens." I was like, "Watch." And it's true. Like at this point we'd written how many drafts? It's just been us. I think to have a movie, that's the ultimate comfort food, right? When do you throw on When Harry Met Sally? When do you throw on My Best Friend's Wedding? When do you throw on any version of Emma? You know? When you throw on Pride and Prejudice? To create something like that, it feels in some ways, so much more lasting than television. And I would love to do it again and again and again, you know?
Sarah Enni: I love that. That's fantastic. Well, it was such a thrill to talk to you guys. I do like to wrap up just with advice. So I'd love to hear advice for people maybe who are starting out and would like to write with someone for TV or film.
Lennon Parham: Hmm. I think the first thing that you need to do is practice and find a group of like weirdos, or somebody that you feel seen by, and that ultimately that makes you laugh. People that are better than you at what you want to do. Like hang around them, ride their coattails to the UCB, find ways to create with them, stuff that you're proud of and like develop that inner voice. Because you'll need that moving forward. You'll need that confidence and trust in your own voice.
Sarah Enni: Anything to add Jessica?
Jessica St. Clair: I guess I would say to myself, something I have to say to myself, which is that, and I know this sounds so cliche, but nobody is going to see the first draft. I will get stuck like on page two, and I'll want to keep combing over it until it's perfect. And Lennon will always say, "We're moving on. We are moving on." You will have time to come back and perfect it, but the most important thing, and I think it's Brene Brown who calls it "the shitty first draft." You've got to get that first draft out and you have to silence that critical voice inside of yourself that's gonna tell you to give up because it's scary. Because when it feels scary, that's when it gets really good.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that. Well, this has been such a joy, it's so fun to talk to you guys. Thank you so much for giving me all this time and I will make sure that you guys all know when it's gonna come out.
Jessica St. Clair: Okay great. Thank you!
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Lennon and Jessica. You can find Lennon on Twitter and Instagram @LennonParham, and Jessica's on Twitter @Jessica_StClair and on Instagram @StClairJessica. You can follow me on both at Sarah Enni [Twitter and Instagram], and the show @FirstDraftPod [Twitter and Instagram].
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