David Isaacs will be making his first trip to the area for the Sedona International Film Festival in two weeks.
Some of his work includes shows like “Mad Men,” “Cheers,” “M*A*S*H,” “Frasier,” “The Simpsons,” “Almost Perfect” and more. The majority of his early work was with his writing partner and entertainment guru, Ken Levine.
Isaacs has won three Writer’s Guild of America awards, one for best episodic comedy for the “Cheers” in 1984 and again in 1992. Then in 2009, he went on to win the best drama series for “Mad Men” season 2. He also has won an Emmy in 1982 for Outstanding Comedy Series for his work on “Cheers.”
Isaacs will be one of the few workshop presenters at this year’s festival. He also helped with selecting the winners for the SIFF 2022 Screenplay Competition Winners.
SIFF begins Saturday, Feb. 19.
In preparation of the festival, Isaacs answered questions to Sedona Red Rock News in a phone interview.
Q: What was the most exciting part for you to accept coming to the Sedona International Film Festival?
A: “They invited me to come and talk about film and television. Basically how to get a grasp of your idea for the purposes of selling it into the marketplace. And I’ve always heard great things about that area, hiking and the mountains and everything. I’m very excited to see it.”
Q: What will you focus your workshops on?
A: “TV has sort of taken over a lot of ground that film used to cover, and we’re all sort of binging and watching these longer stories. And so I thought I’d talk about the most important thing when you’re selling is for you to grasp the theme of what your movie is or your television show is. In other words, how best to express what the heart of the series or the movie is. And that’s always the best way to kind of get your project across.”
Q: You’re currently a professor at the University of Southern California, as well as chairman of the John Wells Division of Writing for Screen and Television and co-chairman of USC Comedy. What brought you into teaching full-time?
A: “Well, I started teaching in 2007, and I’ve been on mostly sitcoms my entire career writing on shows. I was under contract at Paramount for about 20 years, working on a lot of different things. And that era was sort of coming to an end. You could sort of feel that the change is coming in television. And I could look at the mirror and know I was getting older, so I was sort of feeling like I didn’t want to be in writing rooms anymore with long hours and everybody’s 20 or 30 years younger than you. And I want to obviously keep on writing. But things are starting to change in my life …So I decided to fill my time in other ways.”
Q: How do you believe streaming services like Netflix have changed the way TV writers need to approach the job?
A: “The thing that changed it probably most drastic the idea of the short order you’re only doing about eight to 10 episodes, maybe as many as 13 …. So you really have to kind of manage your career a little bit more carefully. You can’t depend on a longer season which of course means more money, so that’s probably the toughest thing now. You can’t necessarily go from one show to another. I find that it’s made it a lot more challenging and a lot more piecemeal work than it was, especially television back in the ’80s and ’90s.”
Q: You’ v e worked with so many different shows and characters over the years. Do you have a favorite character that you wrote or worked with?
A: ”I would probably say Frasier [Crane from ‘Cheers’ and ‘Fraiser’]. I love working on that show, all the characters in that show, but I loved it because he was such a sort of complicated comic character. The humor was sort of at a higher level in its own way of sitcoms. So I’m so fond of it because I wrote that character across two shows across ‘Cheers’ and when they spun off into ‘Frasier’ ….”
Q: After many years writing sitcoms, you switched into drama. Was that due to a preference for drama over comedy?
A: “It’s just sort of just how things have evolved. Matt Weiner, who I worked within ‘Mad Men’ is a great writer. And he brought me on because it’s sort of story to story. I ended up learning more from that than I think he even got out of me, in a sense. And lucky enough, it was just like my first drama that I really worked on, but there’s a lot of comedy in it in its own way.”
Q: How were you involved in the Screenplay Competition selection this year?
A: “They asked me to read the pilot scripts, sort of evaluate them, then choose which one I thought was the strongest of the four of them. It was fun to do and they were really good. I have to say it was not an easy choice. But the one I chose I thought had great potential.”
Q: What is your favorite TV sitcom currently?
A: “Boy, that’s a tough one. There’s not much … it’s ‘Ramy’ on Hulu. I love that show. I just think it’s what sitcom should be now, which is kind of really exploring some issues that are not just sex and dumbed-down stuff.”
