Screenwriter Nick Zayas on writing for a Star Trek series, grinding in Hollywood, meeting your heroes
This episode was a long time coming; screenwriter Nick Zayas and eighth grade basketball MVP Mike Beltrán have been friends since kindergarten. Nick has been living in L.A. for the last 16 years or so, where he spent years working for movie producer Scott Rudin before making a tansition to writing for TV, including series like Major Crimes and Star Trek: Picard (to name just some of the work that comes up in this conversation).
Nick and Mike also talk about how Miami is portrayed in movies and TV; the time Nick met Jon Favreau and embarrassed, then redeemed himself; their matching childhood haircuts; and whether Hollywood’s professional culture is a healthy one or in need of change, especially for young talent.
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Transcript
Nick Zayas: The craft is the tool of the art or rather the craft is the vehicle of the art, right? At the end of the day, I have to know how to physically write a screenplay. I have to know the craft of the screenplay. You have to know how to write a scene, not even just formatting, but how to construct a scene, how to construct a story, how to write something that actors can perform, et cetera, but in understanding the craft in putting in your hours of becoming a craftsman, then can the art speak.
[theme music]
Michael Beltran: Welcome to the first episode of Pan Con Podcast of the calendar year 2022. And I'm just, it is such a sight to see Nick talking into his ball tickler again. It is. I am absolutely. I am ecstatic to be back. I am fucking wow. Wow.
Nicolás Jiménez: You're feeling that...
Michael Beltran: this is the first podcast I think we've ever done on a Saturday.
Nick Zayas: Oh yeah?
Michael Beltran: That just proves how important you are.
Nick Zayas: Oh, wow. That's nice.
Nicolás Jiménez: You're a big deal.
Nick Zayas: I appreciate that.
Michael Beltran: Yeah. And our guests today, I'm going to introduce the guest, my good friend. Friends, since we were seven years old.
Nick Zayas: Oh, probably maybe five or five. Kindergarten is five.
Michael Beltran: Kindergarten. We met in kindergarten. We had matching haircuts. We were the best of friends. And now at a very old age, at a ripe age, we are still friends. My friend, Nicholas Zayas, everyone.
Nick Zayas: Hi everyone.
Michael Beltran: We still don't have any sound effects because Nick is cheap as fuck. So I'm just going to keep on just we're good.
Nick Zayas: We're going to have to distinguish the Nicks here.
Michael Beltran: I'm just going to have to keep on. Mr. Jimenez.
Mr. Jimenez and Nicholas Zayas. Welcome to the show, Mr. Zayas.
Nick Zayas: Thanks so much, man.
Michael Beltran: Nick shockingly is actually a listener of this podcast.
Nick Zayas: Yes. I was telling the other Nick earlier that…
Michael Beltran: It's Mr. Jimenez.
Nick Zayas: Mr. Jimenez. I was telling Mr. Jimenez earlier that Pan Con Podcast got me through a lot of the worst of quarantine in Los Angeles, because there was something very cathartic to hearing. Whoa, chef Mike almost fell over.
Michael Beltran: I've fallen!
Nick Zayas: We almost lost Mike.
Michael Beltran: Nick set me up for failure. I got it.
Nick Zayas: Oh thank you so much that there was something very cathartic about hearing chef Mike, just rant and rage every week about the intricacies of, the the hard things that happen when you're trying to keep a restaurant open during a pandemic. And for some reason, your rage felt very cathartic to me.
Michael Beltran: I love that. Yeah. My rage is a lot of people's rage, I think.
Nick Zayas: I told Nick that you're like the Rush Limbaugh of of chef podcasts.
Michael Beltran: Wow.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: I don't know if I'm flattered or incredibly insulted. Nick, let's cheers to the first day of 2022.
Nick Zayas: I know, man, let's do this
Michael Beltran: I am several cocktails deep, already. We just finished a service. Not just okay. Cause I'm several cocktails deep. It's been quite a long day and I'm very excited to sit with my good friend. And actually I have a small story before we get into your life story, which I was part of some of your life.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: So this is during quarantine, I believe. And I'm pretty stoned. I'm sitting on my couch and if you listen to this show enough, you know that I'm a scifi guy and I'm a Trekkie. And the previous time Nick had visited Ariete with his parents, which I love dearly. They're two of the sweetest people that you will ever meet was probably a year and a half prior to that.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. It was in 2017.
Michael Beltran: Wow. Wow. You said, I'm writing for this like little scifi show, we're working on it." It's like I said, "oh man, that's cool. Scifi show."
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: Didn't tell me anything else about it. So I'm sitting on my couch, pretty stoned. I watched an episode of Picard. It was a great. Then it says, who wrote the episode and it says, Nick Zayas. And I go, wait a second. I pause it. I rewind it. I watch it again. I go Nick Zayas. Like that's like a, not a common name.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: And so I remember I took a picture and I know there's three hour time difference. So I was anticipating that you're awake and I sent you a picture and I go, "Hey, fuck face. Is this you?"
Nick Zayas: Oh yeah.
Michael Beltran: And you were like, yeah. And I'm like, what the fuck do you mean? You wrote an episode of Picard and you didn't fucking tell me. And then your response was a pic, a picture of the back of Patrick Stewart's head.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: He was sitting in the chair in front of you on set. And I was pissed. I was pissed. I am because I'm a Next Generation fan. Very deeply. I grew up on that show. I still watch it. Cause it therapeutically puts me to sleep. Engage, always just go right. The fuck to bed.
Nick Zayas: Total comfort.
Michael Beltran: And then my friend that I've known for fucking over 30 years wrote a show with this guy. That's a fucking legend.
Nick Zayas: Yeah, man. It's a dream come true, dude. It's crazy.
Michael Beltran: It's my dream come true. And I nothing even happened to me.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. That's funny. Yeah, man. It's funny. Cause actually, I think it was 2018 probably when I saw it was probably like a Christmas in 2018 or something. Yeah. My experience working on Star Trek is interesting. So I worked on Star Trek: Picard for the last two seasons.
Michael Beltran: There's only two seasons.
Nick Zayas: There's only two seasons. There's going to be a third, but but I couldn't join them for the third.
Michael Beltran: Okay.
Nick Zayas: But there's something fascinating in working on Star Trek and telling people that you're working on Star Trek, which is you start to discover how many people are Star Trek fans. I have this theory that within any group of five human beings in the world, at least one of them is a star Trek fan. And you won't even know it.
Michael Beltran: I believe it.
Nick Zayas: You just say, oh, I'm working on Star Trek: Picard and the most random people, their eyes will light up. And they're like, and everyone has, this deep, especially in our generation, this deep emotional connection to why they're a Star Trek fan. For me, I watched The Next Generation with my father, my grandfather and my uncle, like every Saturday night. Cause we had Saturday night dinner at my abuela's house. And then the guys would retire into the other room and we'd watch Next Generation.
Michael Beltran: Amazing.
Nick Zayas: And there's something to the characters. Jean-Luc Picard being this like the safest human being that you could ever like, feel that if Picard is your captain, you, for some reason you suddenly feel safe.
Michael Beltran: You're safe.
You're good.
Nick Zayas: And I just remember, my dad is like a a bald guy kinda like Patrick Stewart. So I remember being a kid and just like transposing, like Picard to my father, like thinking of like, when I see Jean-Luc Picard, I would just immediately just like project my father onto that character, so lots of people have these very deep, nostalgic, emotional connections to this series in that character. And it's been a pleasure to see people's eyes light up working on the show. Now, then it's also terrifying when it's you and a laptop. And you're like, I'm about to write an episode of Picard. I'm about to write the episode of Picard, where Jean-Luc Picard steps onto a Borg cube for the first time since.
Michael Beltran: Heavy.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: That's heavy. We know we've lost so many people have already tuned out.
Nick Zayas: Goodbye.
Michael Beltran: The other four, you said one of out of every five, the other four have tuned out and they're not even paying attention.
Nick Zayas: I bet you, we have a Star Trek fan in Salina, Kansas though.
[ad break]
Michael Beltran: Nick, is your sister a fan of Star Trek?
Nicolás Jiménez: She was in the same boat I was, she watched all of it.
Michael Beltran: Yeah, but she didn't like it.
Nicolás Jiménez: She was exposed.
Michael Beltran: She was exposed. And like the idea of Jean-Luc Picard getting back onto a Borg cube like that. That is I'm petrified of that.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: Can't lose him again.
Nick Zayas: Yeah, no, definitely. It was yeah, it was fascinating to go back and rewatch First Contact and those great Star Trek movies. And then every episode that start that Picard was in where he went onto a Borg cube. And we knew that he was going to be meeting up with Hugh, who was played by Jonathan del Arco, that character from I, Borg, which is one of my favorite Star Trek episodes ever. And just being like, I'm going to bring these two characters together and I'm going to put card on a Borg cube. And now this is my responsibility and I'm just some guy sitting in my apartment and Los Angeles. And I got to walk my dog in two hours and maybe I should go to Starbucks. And then, but then for some reason, I've got the keys to drive this billion-dollar franchise around the block, it's like somebody tosses you the keys to a Rolls Royce and then take it around the block. And like, all right, here we go.
Michael Beltran: It's also like Star Trek fans, very similar to Star Wars fans. There are different type of fan.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: Usually, but they are similar in their dedication to being a fan.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: And me as much as I love star Trek growing up with it, I'm a fair weather fan in comparison to the real Star Trek fans.
Nick Zayas: Oh, sure. Yeah.
Michael Beltran: Like the real Star Trek fans are fucking like, they know things that I could never know and I will never know. And I'll never take the time to know and they know them all.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: It's like a lot of stress.
Nick Zayas: Oh yeah. And they'll call you out on it.
Michael Beltran: Oh, for sure.
Nick Zayas: Oh man. We had this person on staff named them Kirsten Beyer and she's written a lot of Star Trek novels and she was like our Star Trek expert on the staff to just be like a walking encyclopedia of the canon.
Michael Beltran: I want to talk to this person.
Nick Zayas: She's cool. She's really cool, man.
Michael Beltran: Set it up. Come on, Nick. Let's go pick it up.
Nick Zayas: But yeah, the fans are devoted and there's people who have I even, I mentioned my deep emotional connection to it. There's millions of stories of people who have their own deep, like it's tied to their identity. People who speak Klingon, people who just you know, and people who just adopted the ethos of Starfleet too. Like people who, I recently just recently I found a copy of Gene Roddenberry's show bible for next generation. Now a show bible is something that a writer in TV writes toward the beginning of after they write a pilot for a show, which lays out like these are the characters, these are the kinds of stories that will go on over many seasons. And these are the themes that we're going to discuss. And reading Gene Roddenberry's bible for Next Generation is astounding because you see so much just like a philosophy toward how human beings should interact. Whether it's the prime directive or whether it's, going boldly to seek out new knowledge, and then you have Picard to be this emissary, right? He is our re representative of our human race, going out there and meeting these aliens and these other peoples, and then trying to do the right thing.
Michael Beltran: Star Trek and so many of these scifi things are just really a story that's supposed to be similar to a story we live. We all live every day.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: It's supposed to be similar to our regular everyday life. It's just a very space oriented version of what we live every day. So it's like the idea of Star Trek is in essence, meeting new people, accepting new people, accepting like a difference of opinion or a difference of where you come from and then trying to find a commonality and trying to be friends.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: That is if you want to bring it down into dummy terms what star Trek really means, that's like The Next Generation. That's what it meant. That's pretty much everyday life, and I think, my dad's a big scifi guy, so my dad has all the seasons of Star Trek, Next Generation, all the Star Trek, everything still in VHS at his house.
Nick Zayas: Wow.
Michael Beltran: You walk in and it's just a fucking, it's a sh it's a bookshelf of just VHS is he doesn't even own a VHS anymore, but he still has him. And when I tell him like, Hey dad, these are readily available on Netflix. His response is what's Netflix, so it's okay, I don't know what we're doing here. He's he just knows he go watch it at a certain time anyways. Yeah. But, it's it's very interesting to star Trek fan. So I could only imagine the pressure that it carries to write for a show like that. And then to tell Trekkies that you're writing for a show like that. It's I would never tell anyone that I'm a writer for that show.
Nick Zayas: It's fascinating because yeah, you feel the sense of duty to do it but then also at the end of the day as a writer, your job is to also do something new and cool. Like I got him, like I have to do something new and different and cool as an artist, and so part of what we try to do in the room on Picard, especially season one, is to push the envelope and really challenge Picard. Like we did not want to do like a nostalgia fan service, like stroke fest of the character. And Patrick didn't want to do that either. Patrick wanted to be challenged as an actor and as a character.
Michael Beltran: Man. And I would give up so many things to sit down and have a conversation with that guy.
Nick Zayas: He's a lovely guy. He's fantastic.
Michael Beltran: Other than the fact that he's Jean-Luc Picard, he seems like he carries a lot of knowledge. Maybe it's cause he's bald and he's got like a perfectly bald head.
Nick Zayas: And the British thing helps. It's yeah, like I'm not going to lie.
Michael Beltran: To automatically sound much more intelligent.
Nick Zayas: Like any British person that comes to Los Angeles, just slays, like every, it's something about there's something about British people existing in the United States where we just give them immediate oh, you're smart or, oh, you're,
Michael Beltran: no, I can only imagine that you being from Miami and going to LA probably is not the same.
Nick Zayas: No. And I don't even have that much of an accent. Like maybe even just.
Michael Beltran: You don't carry an accent anymore.
Nick Zayas: I don't have, I don't have the bro. Hey, how are you bro? Hey bro bro, like, how are you bro? Bro, it's like, Miami bro.
Michael Beltran: Before we continue about like your career. Let's talk about Let's talk about kindergarten.
Nick Zayas: Let's talk about St. Theresa Catholic school.
Michael Beltran: Oh no. How I got kicked out in the third grade.
Nick Zayas: I never knew that you got kicked out. I knew that one day you weren't there.
Michael Beltran: That did happen. No, I didn't like necessarily... they didn't kick me out. They were just like, we'd very much like it, if you didn't return for fourth grade.
Nick Zayas: Wow. But what happened? Tell the story.
Michael Beltran: I don't know. I don't really know.
Nick Zayas: Was it grades? Did you punch somebody? What happened?
Michael Beltran: I mean, I punched a lot of people were kids. Yeah. I punched a lot of kids. I got into a ton of fights when we were young. Fuck from like kindergarten to third grade, what is that? It's five to what?
Nick Zayas: Four years? Five to basically 10, 10 or nine.
Michael Beltran: I got in a ton of fights. Yeah. My chipped tooth that I have is still.
Nick Zayas: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I don't remember like listeners, I know that chef Mike puts on this, like this tough guy routine.
Michael Beltran: Here we go.
Nick Zayas: But don't be fooled. He wasn't the bad boy of first, second and third grade. He was a lovely guy with a better mushroom haircut than I ever had.
Michael Beltran: I, and we're going to get into the haircut now, Nick and I had matching haircuts and I don't really recall his, but I recall mine and it was fantastic. I had a fantastic mushroom haircut when I was child.
Nick Zayas: I was jealous.
Michael Beltran: I w I was much more blonde than I am now.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: It was like blonde. Dirty blonde ish. And that definitely went the fuck away. And like we had, I had fantastic hair, you had fantastic hair. That changed.
Nick Zayas: Boy, did it change quickly. Puberty hit me, I started losing my hair.
Michael Beltran: Yeah, but you're crushing it now.
Nick Zayas: I am a walking spokesman for the wonder of Propecia.
Michael Beltran: Are you?
Nick Zayas: Yes. Also known in generic terms as Finasteride. I've been on this shit since I was like 18.
Michael Beltran: Shut the fuck up.
Nick Zayas: And you know what? It works.
Michael Beltran: It's half your life, right?
Nick Zayas: It is half of my life. If I can't have children at some point one day, it's because there must be a side effect of taking Propecia since you were in high school.
Michael Beltran: So you've been using basically a hair product to keep your hair thick since you were 18.
Nick Zayas: Yes. And I actually think it's worked because I'm 36 now. And people say you got a good head of hair. I'm like, thank God.
Michael Beltran: I've never, I still have a lot of hair.
Nick Zayas: You do.
Michael Beltran: That's maybe not like it. This is finely coiffed hair.
Nick Zayas: Thank you. Thank you.
Michael Beltran: Your hair is finely coiffed.
Nick Zayas: My God. You have no idea how much of a compliment that is. Cause I've had I've had I've had un complejo about my hair.
Michael Beltran: No shit.
Nick Zayas: Ever since I was a kid.
Michael Beltran: We're getting so deep and we're talking about kindergarten.
Nick Zayas: I know. No seriously though. I hated my mushroom haircut. It got in my face and I always thought it looks wrong.
Michael Beltran: Really?
Nick Zayas: Yeah, dude.
Michael Beltran: I really didn't give a fuck.
Nick Zayas: And then here's Mike Beltran with his perfect mushroom.
Michael Beltran: Yeah.
Nick Zayas: And his devil may care attitude.
Cheers.
Michael Beltran: We only live once, I was 10. I was a wild child.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: So we went to kindergarten, middle school. We didn't go to middle school together. Went to middle school in Miami, went to high school together.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. Columbus.
Michael Beltran: We both went to Columbus graduated in 2003.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: We're dating ourselves super hard there. We, almost at our 20 year reunion, yeah?
Nick Zayas: Jesus. Yeah. Next year it's 20 years.
Michael Beltran: Next year.
Nick Zayas: How did that happen?
Michael Beltran: It's a lot. It's a lot's happening. And then what happened after high school?
Nick Zayas: So I graduated from high school and I knew since I was like 12 or 13, I knew I wanted to do TV and movies. And so I graduated from high school and I went to Florida state to go to the film school specifically to go to the film school.
It was between Florida state and NYU. And then I visited and I got into the film school at NYU and I visited NYU and I was like, you can get very poor going to NYU. Yeah. It was expensive and I knew that having to be scrappy and be a college student and pay for your own films and NYU that's when Florida state is offering me to go there for free.
And there was a thing called Florida prepaid that I don't even know if it exists anymore,
Michael Beltran: does it Nick? Mr. Jimenez?
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: It does? Mr. Jimenez says that it still exists. Prepaid college still exists everyone.
Nick Zayas: Yes. The program to pay for your kid's college, as they're growing up. Anyway, so I went to FSU practically for free. I didn't get into the film school my freshman year, but it doesn't start until your sophomore year. So you have this one year as a freshman to try and get in for when it begins next year to transfer in, and during that year, my freshman year at Florida State, I hung around the film school. I volunteered on a film student sets. I made friends with the faculty and I just worked. And I wrote an essay and had an interview and I got in and then I went to film school and it was a it was a great experience. An interesting experience. Yeah, man.
Michael Beltran: Explain why interesting.
Nick Zayas: So film school, if you're listening to this, listener.
Michael Beltran: Okay. Break down film school what are we doing? Are we writing? Are we producing or do you pick an avenue to go into?
Nick Zayas: So at Florida state, I was in the BFA program, the bachelor program, and that program is very much a general, like you do everything, you write your own films, you direct your own films. You're you have to be cameraman for a film. You have to hold the boom. You have to be a grip. You will do everything by the time you're out of there.
Michael Beltran: What is a grip?
Nick Zayas: A grip. All right so a grip.
Michael Beltran: It sounds super naughty.
Nick Zayas: A grip is a person. A grip is a person on a film set that carries things. Basically they set up they set they don't set up lights, but they set up the rigs to like, hold the lights. They set up any rigging for the stage. Any anyone that has to, anybody has to be physical muscle.
Michael Beltran: Blue collar work.
Nick Zayas: Blue collar, union work, everything in Hollywood is union work. I'm a member of a union. I'm a Writer's Guild. It's a bit of a bougie union, like I'm not carrying anything other than my laptop, but,
Michael Beltran: fuck you guys.
Nick Zayas: Hollywood is a.
Michael Beltran: You struggle by yourself, bitch.
Nick Zayas: Hollywood is a, is actually more of a blue collar. Like the people that actually make the movies, it's more blue collar than you think. The electricians, the grips, the costumers, the set designers, the set decorators, the painters, all those guys takes a lot of people to make a TV show or a movie.
And it's kinda, it's beautiful. I had the really these days, the privilege of working on a TV show for six seasons and there were 21 episodes a season that was a show that was a show called Major Crimes, which was on TNT. It was a spinoff of The Closer, but man when you know that you have year round employment in Hollywood and you're doing 21 episodes a season, and you know that you're getting like two season orders at once, like lots of people retired after that show. Like it's not very often in Hollywood that you can get like steady employment. It's not nine to five, it's more five to nine than nine to five. But but the job security is great and I don't even think that exists anymore.
Michael Beltran: The world of television has changed completely, right?
Nick Zayas: Change completely. So you asked what's cool about film school. What was great if you're listening to this listener and you're wondering like, should I go to film school? No one listen to this. But if if you're wondering if you should go to film school the answer is maybe, I don't know, but I I got value out of it because film school is all about learning how to work with people, there are 30 kids in our class, and these are the 30 students in which you have to make your project and their project and everyone's project. So you quickly have to learn how to collaborate and filmmaking is all collaboration. And so you learn a lot of valuable lessons on how to work with people that you may not agree with. And you may be creatively, completely different people with strong opinions, but you have to work together. I know. Yeah. And so that was cool and interesting. And you get to run around with a camera. What was great about Florida State is that they pay for all the equipment. Even the film.
And I think I was like the last class. Yes. The Florida state Seminoles. And I I know nothing about the football, so.
Michael Beltran: Yeah. I got it.
Nick Zayas: So I am neutral. I don't give a shit. But I think I was even the last class to shoot on film, which was fascinating because now you just do everything digital with video, but we actually had to load film and shoot on super 16, which was great. So anyway, but I was in film school for about two and a half years. So I graduated December of 2006 and then it was immediately like, alright, now's the time let's go. Let's go Los Angeles. Let's go make our dreams come true. So I my 2006 December.
Michael Beltran: Fuck man.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: It's a long time ago.
Nick Zayas: It was a long time, yeah, this January is 15 years that I've lived in Los Angeles.
Michael Beltran: Wow.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: You look like you're from Los Angeles.
Nick Zayas: Thank you. What is it? Is it the loafers?
Michael Beltran: Well, the loafers with no socks for sure. Which I bag on him every time I see him for that. And then it's the shirt, the buttons and the things. They only sell those in on the west coast. Yeah. And it's also the jacket that's not needed.
Nick Zayas: I know, but it goes with the outfit. As a 14 year old, like one of the movies that created my personality, it was the movie Swingers. You ever see Swingers? Right. Yeah. That movie hit me hard as a 14 year old. So yeah, so I I made it a goal to live my swingers life in Los Angeles. And now I do, I hang out at the 101 coffee shop where they shot the movie. I go, I'm friends with jazz musicians. I go to listen to, swing music and I wear retro inspired clothes living the dream man.
Michael Beltran: Isn't it interesting how things that we've grown up with that we admire shape who we are as adults. Whether it's like things that we read, things that we watch, things that we listened to. Like it's, I think it's fascinating, like how that influences us from a young age to like our older age. And then you like dial back to that when you get older and you like check back and yeah, I still like that shit.
And you still fucking go back to it. And it's find that intriguing because even though we evolve, we still know that thing that we really much I find that super interesting about humans in general.
Nick Zayas: Even just as artists, cause as artists, we constantly have to mine, mine the field of our own soul and our memory and our lived experience.
Michael Beltran: Mine the field of our own soul.
Nick Zayas: Yeah man. You like that?
Michael Beltran: That is, that's a t-shirt.
Nick Zayas: I'm a member of the writer's guild.
Michael Beltran: That's our first t-shirt of 2022.
Nick Zayas: That is union work right there.
Michael Beltran: Got it. Got it.
Nick Zayas: But yeah man, but it's true. Like when I sit down in front of a computer to write a story, the audience, and you know this because you're a chef, the audience, whether you're tasting, a steak or whether you're watching a film, the audience has has a smell test where if it smells bad, they spit it out, so if you're watching a movie or a show and something feels like bullshit, like that wouldn't happen, immediately the audience is that's bullshit. Like a human being would never say that this would never happen.
Michael Beltran: But there's also movies now that are created to be bullshit. Nick, label some of these movies that you watch with the nuns fighting velociraptors and shit. Mr. Jimenez, please chime in. Yeah. But it's built to be bullshit.
Nicolás Jiménez: But it's comedy it's. You're not talking about parody.
Nick Zayas: No, I think there is an artistic space for camp and kitsch and absurdism like Sharknado, like people love Sharknado. You know.
Nicolás Jiménez: What he's talking about for example is VelociPastor. VelociPastor.
Michael Beltran: Aren't we doing a viewing at your house?
Nicolás Jiménez: Yes.
Michael Beltran: This is open to the Pan Con Podcast public at Nick's house. Here. Come here, take my mic. It's fine.
Nick Zayas: Please tell me that somebody says clever girl at some point in VelociPastor.
Nicolás Jiménez: VelociPastor is the classic story of a priest who traumatized by the brutal death of his two parents, goes on sabbatical and while on vacation has an encounter with a vaguely Asian martial artist.
Nick Zayas: Vaguely Asian. Not racist at all.
Nicolás Jiménez: And ends up impaled or otherwise injured by an ancient, magical dinosaur claw. When he finally comes to in the morning it turns out that he has a new life as basically like the incredible Hulk, except instead of Bruce banner and big green guy, it's a mild-mannered priest and velociraptor. Spoiler alert. Our hero in this film ends up in a war with a gang of drug traffickers who are actually working with the Catholic church to get people hooked on drugs specifically so that they have to come back to the church.
Nick Zayas: Is there Coke in the Eucharist? Is that what's going on?
Nicolás Jiménez: No, they're just slinging drugs and hoping that people go pray about it later.
Nick Zayas: Wow. Where do you watch this shit?
Nicolás Jiménez: This is on Amazon. We're going to, there, there will be a, there'll be a very illegal film series to raise money for important causes in my backyard, but not before we kick off this film series with a movie I'm very excited about called Llamageddon, which is about a Lama that comes from outer space and goes on a killing spree. Thank you very much back to you, Mike.
Nick Zayas: I don't think, I don't think that's the industry I work in, but.
Michael Beltran: Somebody wrote it.
Nick Zayas: Somebody wrote it.
Michael Beltran: Probably part of your union.
Nick Zayas: No, I don't know. That sounds like a lot. That sounds like Canadian non-union work.
Michael Beltran: Canadian.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. That sounds like Canadian non union work.
Michael Beltran: They're nice people, eh.
Nick Zayas: Nice people.
Michael Beltran: Yeah.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: All right so.
Nick Zayas: Where were we?
Michael Beltran: 2006.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: You move. What's the first thing that happens? Are you like by yourself in a corner and you're just like writing in a notepad and you're like, I need a home? Like what's happening?
Nick Zayas: No, that does not happen. That's not a thing.
Michael Beltran: That's all movies?
Nick Zayas: Yeah. You'll like this, cause it's all about the hustle, man. So two weeks before graduation, I had this book called The Hollywood Creative Directory. Before there was I dunno, before everything was really on the internet and you can grab everything, there was this book that the Hollywood community used to put out, which was like a phone book, of just the production companies in town, in Los Angeles. I went through this book and I found all the production companies that made the movies I loved and I'd cold call them, I just call them two weeks before graduation and say, Hey, I'm graduating soon. I would like an unpaid internship at your company. And now mind you, this was back in 2006, when you could actually do that. You can't really do that anymore. There's been a crack down on unpaid internships, which frankly is justified. I had a conversation with Nick at the bar earlier where we were,
Michael Beltran: mr. Jimenez.
Nick Zayas: Mr. Jimenez where I know, I don't know what I would've done. I don't know if I were entering the industry now, necessarily what I would do. But back in the day I took an unpaid internship. I'd call these places. I'd say, look, I love your movies. I'd like to be an unpaid intern. And then you hopefully get hired and that, like you're only going to do it for a couple months in the hope that they hire you to be an assistant or some other entry level job, and so I called a couple places and I got an unpaid internship with Scott Rudin Productions.
Michael Beltran: Wonderful article.
Nick Zayas: Oh yeah. So I sent Mike the Hollywood Reporter article. We'll get to that. I don't even know how much I can say I'm still held under an NDA, but but at the time.
Michael Beltran: We got juice here!
Right. Yeah.
Nick Zayas: So I got an unpaid internship with Scott Rudin in his LA office. And I also had one with George Clooney's company, Smokehouse. That was only for a couple months, but here I am 21 years old moving to Los Angeles working in George Clooney's office every Tuesday and Thursday.
Michael Beltran: How stressed was your mom?
Nick Zayas: My mom was stressed and yet thrilled because she's wanted nothing more than for me and my sister to achieve our dreams because in her mind, we're both geniuses, and the world is just waiting for our genius.
Michael Beltran: My mother says the same thing and God bless is she wrong.
Nick Zayas: And so my mom helped me, find an apartment and stuff like that, all through Craigslist and whatnot and calling people in LA. But but I think she was happy that I was going out and finally doing the thing that I've been wanting to do for eight years since I was a kid. And then before I know it I'm working in Scott Rudin's office in LA and for the casual listener, Scott Rudin is a legendary movie producer. He produced The Firm, Clueless, Sister Act, the Addams Family movies, and then coming to the 2000s, he did, There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, he produced The South Park movie. On Broadway, he produced Book of Mormon. He produced Fences with Denzel Washington. He won the Oscar for No Country For Old Men. The guy is one of the greatest movie producers that ever lived. That being said, he also has a reputation of being one of the worst and hardest bosses in the film industry.
And Harvey Weinstein was like the Wario to his Mario, but where Harvey Weinstein was a, sexual abuser, Scott was not that he was just a incredibly demanding and difficult boss. They've made movies about him. They made the movie Swimming with Sharks, which was partly inspired by him. And a lot of like The Devil Wears Prada, I think was inspired by Scott as well because Meryl Streep made many movies with Scott and everyone knows Scott, and so when I watch The Devil Wears Prada, I'm like, yep. I've lived that before, just with more just with more screaming, that being said my unpaid internship eventually became working as an assistant for Scott.
Michael Beltran: Can I ask you a question?
Nick Zayas: Yeah, go ahead.
Michael Beltran: We won't dive too deep cause you have an NDA and we can't, we can't go deep, but how old is Scott?
Nick Zayas: Now? He's probably 60 or something like that.
Michael Beltran: Do you think that the time that he came up in the industry, it was probably very different?
Nick Zayas: Oh brother. Yeah. He came up, he didn't even go to college. I think he didn't even graduate high school. At the age of 15, he was working for like the angriest New York theater producers at the time, at the age of 24 or 26, he was like the president of production at Fox. He was the executive on Die Hard,
Michael Beltran: best Christmas movie of all time.
Nick Zayas: Definitely. And
Michael Beltran: Merry Christmas, Nick, merry Christmas, Mr. Jimenez.
Nick Zayas: He and Joel Silver. And like Amy Pascal, they all like worked together back then Hollywood was a wild west, and he worked for Larry Gordon as a producer. And I think Larry Gordon and Barry Diller. And these guys are massive, not only producers, but media moguls, and they're probably not the easiest people to work with.
The ecosystem of working in Hollywood was wild west and hustling, and and I think our day and age right now, the culture is having a conversation of is this type of work culture safe and is it right? And all I know is I took the job of working for Scott Rudin because I understood because it was legend and known that if you work for Scott, and if you last six months to a year, you can get any job after that.
And I worked there for four years and I can tell you that every meeting I've taken up until this year, when these articles came out every meeting I've taken, everyone wants a Scott Rudin story, everyone wants to know what my experience was and I gladly tell them, and I know that like working there I was a part of some sort of like Hollywood legend, and I think this year, and with all these articles have come out in the Hollywood Reporter, people are having the conversation of is this abuse of your assistants is this ecosystem of, you're lucky to have a job, if you just buckle down and work for difficult people, you will earn your place.
Is that a valid? Is that even a valid like philosophy for a work environment? And I think that now as a culture, we're saying like, no, it's that it's an unsafe work environment. But I'll tell you at the time when I was coming up, like that's just part of the ecosystem, and so it's a systemic problem more than just one individual.
And I would tell myself look, I'm worried. I'm going in the office at 6:00 a.m.. I'm leaving at 8:00 p.m.. I'm working for a very talented, but very challenging movie producer. And I could be working for another asshole who is making shitty movies. But right now I'm working for a difficult boss. Who's making the next Coen brothers movie, the next David Fincher movie, the next Wes Anderson movie.
Michael Beltran: The real question to that is do you think that he was programmed from how he came up to treat people a certain way?
Nick Zayas: Yes. I think he is a product of his environment and I think he is a product of the ecosystem. And I think that people in the generation.
Michael Beltran: We're not talking about Harvey Weinstein.
Nick Zayas: No Harvey Weinstein raped people like Scott Rudin never raped anybody, but Scott Rudin was a, he was a very challenging boss and in the articles, there are allegations and stories of, and yes, he, throwing things and of course yelling at people and whatnot. And there are reports in those articles of the times, in which he actually made contact and hit somebody with the cell phone he was throwing or whatever,
Michael Beltran: you shouldn't make contact. Always go up against the wall.
Nick Zayas: Always throw thing against the wall. Yeah. But but at least working there when I was there, you I knew that going in, it's like I made the deal. The whole movie Devil Wears Prada is about this, so if anyone is,
Michael Beltran: I need to watch this.
Nick Zayas: I've never a great movie.
Michael Beltran: I've never seen this movie.
Nick Zayas: All movie, the devil wears Prada as Anne Hathaway knows.
Michael Beltran: Mr. Jimenez, have you watched this movie? Parts, Nick is saying that Mr. Jimenez is saying that he has watched parts of The Devil Wears Prada.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. And Devil Wears Prada is a great movie, but it's all about like you, if you understand that you are working for a very difficult person, but if you survive long enough, then people will, it's a medal that you can wear, and so for years I wore my four years at Rudin as a medal. And now sometimes it feels like you, it feels like I want a medal to a war that never should have been fought,
Michael Beltran: I don't know. I feel a certain way about that.
Nick Zayas: But the people I worked with there, the people I worked with at Rudin, everyone there had a wonderful sense of humor and there are people that I've worked with again and again, throughout the years, people that were my interns that I hired are people that I've worked with.
There's a woman who I hired to be my intern, who is now producing a movie that I'm writing, and I think working there attracted a lot of talented, ambitious people who then went on to do wonderful things. And I don't know, it's kinda the people you're in the trenches with. That being said the last year I've been grappling with the fact that, yeah, it probably was not, it was not a great work environment. Like Hollywood maybe, but,
Michael Beltran: but did you learn from that environment?
Nick Zayas: I learned everything from that environment. It was Hollywood boot camp.
Michael Beltran: Was it that bad?
Nick Zayas: That's a very hard question to answer.
Michael Beltran: I lived a lot of very difficult, tough years in the kitchen. You know, were they the best work environment? No. Are they what society considers like, what it should be today? Absolutely not. I would never exchange it for anything. I find them invaluable like they're... Those years are what created what I do now. And yeah, they were fucking tough and they sucked and I've been mouthy my entire life. So yeah. I don't know. I feel like the culture and the idea of like work ethic now is very weird because it's like, we want to work, but we don't really want to work. We don't really want to learn. We don't really want to be called out. Now there's a way to do it that isn't entirely like super fucked up. I've worked for chefs that are like mental manipulators.
Nick Zayas: Emotional abusers.
Michael Beltran: Like attack you personally. And that's not cool. Like you can go fuck yourself, I remember I had one chef that I told him like, hold on time out. Gabe!
[ad break]
Nick Zayas:
Yeah. It's hard. I totally understand the the hustle and grind mindset, and I think it's necessary. And especially if you're in an extremely challenging industry, like restaurants or like Hollywood, but it wasn't until years later that I learned that there are some places you can work at in Hollywood where you won't get yelled at that. We don't have to be mean people just to make a movie, and I was like, oh shit, really? You can actually live that way. But I will say, I think I do have an embedded anxiety from my years working there. And I think the last year, especially after the articles came out in the Hollywood Reporter about about Scott, I've had to grapple with how much I carried with me of the anxiety of working there.
But that being said, I chose to be there and I knew exactly what I was getting into. It's like agreeing to go for a running of the bulls
Michael Beltran: would you take it back for anything in the world?
Nick Zayas: I can't. No. And I can't say I did, but I will say that some people weren't it attracts a certain type of person that has the right attitude to live in that, right? I, for a person like him, I was I understood him and I respected him and I was able to roll with him, but there are other people that aren't like that. I knew. A big thing about what spawned the article is the fact that one of the guys I worked with while there committed suicide last year, and his twin brother has come out and said part of, one of the biggest reasons why this young man killed himself was because of his anxiety and his time at Scott Rudin was a big detriment to that. And it shook me to the core because I was friends with this guy,
I understand now that that maybe it's not necessary to have such a high stress work environment when the work itself is high stress enough. It's a complicated issue because I never saw myself as a victim.
Michael Beltran: I dunno I've never seen myself as a victim either. I've seen myself as a product of super hard work. But also like the other side, right? The mental mind fuck manipulation. Like I never stood for it. I would tell people to go fuck themselves. I don't care, call out my work. Me as a person. I know who I am. And like my personal life don't ever use that against me. And I think that's, you gotta draw a line in the sand. And I think that like nowadays I find people have a harder time drawing that line in the sand, and it's fucked, it's I don't know, as like a boss, I find like a very, it's like a weird kind of like juxtaposition of who you should be. Because you came up to be who you are through a certain thing.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: And not saying that you yourself would mimic that, but you learn that way.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: So then you show that way. It's David McMillan always said he was like, be a shepherd, not a viking, and I say that shit all the time. It's but I struggle sometimes. Like the Viking in me comes out like super hard, because all we care about is excellence. All we care about is like the truth of what we're doing, the standard that we uphold the, there's a lot of like passion and it's the same thing. Any creative is very similar. Any craftsmen, any artists that they're very like, serious about what they do.
So then when you have to give what you do to other people to execute several times in a day, it's I can only imagine as someone that writes you say it a certain way in your head.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: And then you see someone else say it differently and you're wait, but that's not how I imagined it being said, you know what I mean? I, that I don't know. Is that how it would come off?
Nick Zayas: And like I said, filmmaking is collaborative process. What I wrote doesn't mean anything. If the actor can't say it, and more than that, if the actor can't perform it. And everything that I write has to one day be performed by an actor and that actor's job is to make it truthful,
Michael Beltran: do you ever write something with an actor in mind?
Nick Zayas: Yeah. Like when you work on staff of a TV show. Yeah, exactly. So like you're sitting there at home ...
Michael Beltran: That's an easy job, patrick Stewart you're talking about a legend.
Nick Zayas: Yes. It's kinda you know how the music should sound in your head, and so you do your job to do it. Like you have to copy it. A lot of working on a TV show is being a mimic, like this characters are established, the actors. And you know how the characters speak and so you do your part. But there's something interesting of the experience of writing the episode and then being on set and having to watch the actors bring it to life. And the best actors will be the first ones to say I can't perform this cause this isn't, I can't say, tell this guy to come. I can't say the line this way, because the way we've staged it, the guys in another room, so I need to change the line. And it's oh yeah, that's true. Actually, you know,
Michael Beltran: Can I tell you a funny story just cause like I'm not an actor, I'm not a TV person at all, but I told you, I did that show with Ludacris this year.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: So obviously it was for a very cookie cutter programmed situation, and it was for Food Network and Discovery+. And Ludacris was great. Like all the people were great, but then sometimes they were like, we really would like for you to say this and I'm like, I just can't fucking say that.
I just I just can't, I can't fucking do that. And they were like, what do you mean? I'm like, yeah, I would never say I, I would laugh if you had me say this thing. And they were like, really? I'm like, oh yeah, I will fucking laugh. If you asked me to say this. And they were like how would you say it? I was like, I'd probably say it more like this. And they're like, cool. Then just say it like that. I'm like, all right, cool. Then I'm just going to say it like that.
Nick Zayas: That's great.
Michael Beltran: And it was like, it was, so it was such a weird experience for me because I had never been in that scenario before. And Nick and I hang out, this is our second time hanging out since you've been in Miami. So like I told you the other night I did the show on Hulu and that was like very organic. And it was like, like just say whatever you feel. And that show was like, great. It was more, much more personal and like organic, perfect word. This one was programmed it's for a certain type of person, a certain type of individual. The only reason I did it is because I thought it showed a different side of who we are, and so the idea of someone telling me what I should say yeah. Was crazy to me.
Nick Zayas: Suddenly you're acting, you're not just, and I was like,
Michael Beltran: I remember I tried to say some of these things that they had me say, and I literally laughed. They were like, why are you laughing? I'm like, cause this shit sounds stupid. It sounds so fucking dumb, and they're like we need to say something like that. I'm like, I dunno, I'll say it different though. This doesn't make any fucking sense to me. So that was a very interesting experience for me.
And I can only imagine like on a much more, I think focused level of this is a show and this is actual acting how that would feel.
Nick Zayas: Well I'm just about, I'm about to make your night because I'm going to compare you to Patrick Stewart, like Patrick Stewart, we do the same thing, right?
Michael Beltran: I'm fucking honored! Nick, we got to do this, man, we can do it. I'll fly wherever I'll fly, wherever it, whatever it takes.
Nick Zayas: So for that moment you were an actor because an actor, if they'll look at it and be like, if they say I would never say this, then you as the writer on set and be like, okay, let's figure it out. Like, how is it bullshit? And what's great is that the best actors are the smell test, because if they know an audience will call bullshit, then they're going to call bullshit first, the actor's role is to make something truthful, so if he says I'll never say this, okay, maybe I should say this. Okay. That makes more sense than me. I can play that. I can inhabit, I can make that work. Know. So a lot of being a writer on set is having to have those conversations with actors, two minutes before we're going to roll when they want to change the line and suddenly we have to make it work, that's when, and that's the part of the job that I really love. I love being on set producing the episodes.
Michael Beltran: Let's talk about this. Major crimes.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: Six years?
Nick Zayas: Six seasons.
Michael Beltran: Yeah. Is that years?
Nick Zayas: Yeah. It's practically years. Yeah.
Michael Beltran: Okay. And then from there, what's the next step?
Nick Zayas: I was an assistant for Scott Rudin for four years, and then. Oh somebody's singing Sweet Caroline at the bar nextdoor.
Michael Beltran: This is the first time we've actually actually done a podcast on Saturday and during a wedding and during a wedding. You could write a story about this.
Nick Zayas: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Recording a podcast next to a wedding after party. But so I was an assistant for Rudin and then I wanted to become a writer and I knew that working in TV was a way to work your way up. So I became, I got a job as an assistant to the showrunners of The Closer with Kira Sedgwick in their last season, knowing that it would become the spinoff, which is Major Crimes, starring Mary McDonnell. And I worked as an assistant to the show runner for a couple of years. I had written a movie script during that time, waking up at 6:00 a.m., writing until 8 before I had to go in the office. And I showed that script to my boss. He saw I could write. And then he put me in the writers room as a writer's assistant. And then I eventually became a staff writer and I wrote four episodes for the show over six seasons. So when that show was ending, I'd gotten a TV agent. I'd gotten a manager and when the show ended, I finally went out to the town for the first time.
Michael Beltran: My dog has a TV agent, has a manager. This is crazy.
Nick Zayas: I got a lawyer and I have a movie agent now because I sold a movie back in 2018.
Michael Beltran: Mind fucking blown. That's a long way since mushroom cuts in kindergarten, man.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. So in 2017, 2018 with these new reps, they take me out to the town basically. You go out to the town. And you do, what's known as the water bottle tour because you have all these general meetings with different companies and you go and you get the free bottle of water and you meet with them and they say, what kind of movies do you like to write? We really enjoyed your script.
Michael Beltran: I love that name. Water bottle tour.
Nick Zayas: Yeah, the water bottle tour.
Michael Beltran: I'm gonna use that again.
Nick Zayas: These days after the pandemic, it's all on zoom. So you don't get the free water anymore.
Michael Beltran: Fuck off.
Nick Zayas: I will say the water at Amblin entertainment, Steven Spielberg's company, excellent water. It's the best damn water. And boy does he have the nicest offices I know.
Michael Beltran: Ship it!
Nick Zayas: Or Spielberg. If you can hear this, I'm here.
Michael Beltran: Man. Steven Spielberg. You're out there, man. You're great.
Nick Zayas: He's a Pan Con Podcast fan.
Michael Beltran: Yeah. He's one of the 22.
Nick Zayas: Loved West Side Story. Big fan. Can't wait for your next movie.
All right. So how did you land on Picard?
So my old boss from Major Crimes, James Duff was an executive producer on Star Trek: Picard. And he brought me on with a couple of other writers for the first season.
Michael Beltran: Is he staying on for three?
Nick Zayas: No, he was only there for the beginning of season one, but he was one of a, all-star team of executive producers. So my bosses on season one of Star Trek: Picard, were Alex Kurtzman, who was a writing hero of mine, I read all his scripts with with his writing partner, Bob Orci. They wrote the Transformers movies. They wrote the show Fringe. There were writers on Alias.
Michael Beltran: I love Fringe.
Nick Zayas: They were like, the highest paid writers for awhile.
Michael Beltran: Fringe is an amazing show.
Nick Zayas: I fucking love Fringe.
Michael Beltran: French is such a good show. Fuck man. People just don't give Fringe enough credit. And like the fact that you just brought it up and it's just I spent a lot of time on Fringe. That is such a good fucking show.
Nick Zayas: Such a good show. So here's a Hollywood dream come true. In 2008 when I was working for Rudin, there was no other show that I wanted to work on than Fringe, so I actually interviewed to be an assistant to one of the writers on one of the head writers on Fringe and I didn't get the job, but then flash forward to I don't know, six years later, I am now a writer in the writer's room. And my bosses are Alex Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman. Academy Award-winning Akiva Goldsman. And they were the producers of Fringe. And so I couldn't work for them as an assistant, but now I got to be their colleague in a writer's room writing an episode of Star Trek. Life happens that way.
Michael Beltran: Beast.
Nick Zayas: And then the other member of the all-star team was Michael Shavonne, Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Shavonne. He's a novelist. He was one of the executive producers on Picard season one as well. And he soon became like the main creative force behind it as we went further into the season. And so I found myself this, kids sitting at these table with these fucking Hollywood heavyweights. And now I have to, keep up, it's kinda being like your rookie season in the Lakers or something. And suddenly like you have to play on the court with, Kobe and Shaq and all these great people. And you're just some fucking rookie, but you got to carry the ball as well as anyone else. That is the most sports metaphor that I can get, I'm not a sports guy .
Michael Beltran: I think you nailed it. You're super nervous to take a shot, go ahead, take it, relax.
Nick Zayas: I'm not here for sports metaphor. I'm more of the, I'm more of the mining, the field of your soul kind of guy.
Michael Beltran: So you were with Picard for two years.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. For two seasons, which was more like three years. And the second season we started writing the second season and in November of 2019, and then the funniest thing happened in 2020.
Michael Beltran: Yeah.
Nick Zayas: The global pandemic.
Michael Beltran: And we're all back.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. And the second
Michael Beltran: And then you started listening to Pan Con Podcast.
Nick Zayas: Then I started listening to Pan Con Podcast and everything changed. So we started breaking season two and the end of 2019, and then the pandemic happens. So we couldn't start rolling cameras, we couldn't start shooting. And what happens is, as a writer, you're only hired for a certain amount of time, like 20 weeks. And after those 20 weeks are up, if you still need to do work, then they can extend you. But only so much. So by October of 2020, we were still writing season two and the pandemic wasn't over. And we ran out of my time and I had to go move on to this other pilot that I'm writing for AMC. And so I had to leave them and they continued to write the executive producers continued to write and shoot season two eventually in 2021.
So now this year 2022, February, 2022 season two of Picard comes out and I wrote a draft of a episode, in 2020. But I actually really don't know what the season's going to look like when it airs, but I'm excited to watch. I know that some of the story, things that we came up with are still there, but the story changed after I left. So I'll be watching just as a fan, but I'm sure it's gonna be cool. Q is there, Q is in the story.
Michael Beltran: Oh, Q.
Nick Zayas: I know, man.
Michael Beltran: Wow. Deep Trekkies know.
Nick Zayas: John de Lancie.
Michael Beltran: Deep Trekkies know about Q. It's true. Yeah. So the next, what is next for Nicholas Zayas in the world? In the wild, with the water bottle tour that you no longer get the water bottle.
Nick Zayas: You don't get the water. Now it's just the Zoom tour of despair, the zoom tour of despair.
Michael Beltran: You ever get like super fucked because you're like, I'm just another Zoom call that they have after another Zoom call.
Nick Zayas: Oh dude, it's the worst man.
Michael Beltran: After another Zoom call. Like you can't feed me a piece of duck through Zoom.
Nick Zayas: That is such a profound thing to say. Cause you're entirely right.
Michael Beltran: I'm just like, you cannot, you, I can't feed you duck through Zoom.
Nick Zayas: Yes. And the thing is, I am an extroverted person. I need people. I need the energy of people. I need to be surrounded by people.
Michael Beltran: I saw you at Seven Seas. You were quite a delight. You were feeling the room.
Nick Zayas: Oh dude.
Michael Beltran: Of Seven Seas. Me and Nick drank till very late at night at Seven Seas, which is Miami's favorite local bar.
Nick Zayas: Can I tell you heaven is a local dive bar.
Michael Beltran: Are you saying that heaven may look like Seven Seas?
Nick Zayas: We can only hope.
Michael Beltran: You're right. If they got TouchTunes and you can control the music from the other humans in the room.
Nick Zayas: One can argue that karma in this world is merely TouchTunes credits in the afterlife.
Michael Beltran: Actually while Nick and I were drinking at Seven Seas, we hatched an entire new plot that Nick will write. He will write.
Nick Zayas: Oh yeah.
Michael Beltran: He will. And I'm a super happy I was part of it.
Nick Zayas: So the next thing I want to work on... right now, I'm writing a movie. But after that, the next thing I want to work on is a private detective show set in Miami.
Michael Beltran: Nick is a very into private detective shows.
Nick Zayas: Oh, I love it.
Michael Beltran: We talked about this a lot and like me too. That's why I love that. So we have. I dunno, it was probably like three hours, three hours, three.
Nick Zayas: Oh, it was more, we were there from, until God we were there until maybe three?
Michael Beltran: Yeah. 3 a.m. That's it's okay. You could say we were there until three in the morning. Pan Con Podcast is it's an open we're totally cool here. Yeah, it's fine.
Nick Zayas: Safe space. I'm from California. We love safe spaces.
Michael Beltran: I don't know if California loves our safe space, but I out of four hours. We talked about the show for like half of that. Maybe more.
Nick Zayas: Oh yeah, dude.
Michael Beltran: Yeah. It was great. It was great. This is a Miami show. We're not going to tell anyone about the show.
Nick Zayas: That's the problem is that I can hardly divulge the things I'm working on because the things that I hope to sell in the next year.
Michael Beltran: I love that.
Nick Zayas: But yeah, I think I can say that because I feel like I'm the only person I know that can adequately write it, which is yeah, I intend to do a private detective show set in Miami in the vein of like the great Raymond Chandler, Phillip Marlowe detectives,
Michael Beltran: in the words of a good friend of mine, there should not be a private detective from Miami that's a ginger.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: That's a ginger. Solving all the crimes of Miami.
Nick Zayas: Yes. I, the fact that all we have representing Miami in the space isNCIS or, no CSI: Miami.
Michael Beltran: NCIS is a great show.
Nick Zayas: It's a different that's a whole, I would not dare.
Michael Beltran: Do not discredit all like 15 seasons of NCIS.
Nick Zayas: But CSI: Miami, the fact that the lead character on your show is redheaded, pasty skinned, David Caruso.
Michael Beltran: Which is great.
Nick Zayas: Caruso is great. Everyone loves the one-liners, but.
Michael Beltran: With a scowl.
Nick Zayas: If David Caruso.
Michael Beltran: So it's the one-liner with a scowl.
Nick Zayas: With a scowl and he rips the glasses off. Everyone knows, the gray, I love a good pun too. Yeah. But if David Caruso walks into Versailles and is I need to question your waitress. The lady says "¿que qué?".
Michael Beltran: Like I can imagine David Crusoe walking in and everyone just stops
Nick Zayas: Who is this gringo?
Michael Beltran: They don't stop making the coffee, but they're like, who is this man?
Nick Zayas: Americano? It's, but yeah, it's like we have, every Miami show has had some fuckin' white guy as the lead. And if you are going to adequately tell a story about Miami, right? Your lead character is going to be a Latino and Spanglish is going to be the language of the show because that is the true lived experience of Miami man.
Michael Beltran: No, listen the reality of it is that no one ever shows Miami and the true light of who we really are, it's either the glitz and glamor of that fucking trashy Ocean Drive.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: Which isn't there is no glitz, there is no glamor there it's just a lot of neon. Or that. Yeah. Which is not representative of who it is. And I'll give him credit where credit's due. It's Billy Corben has really said real stories about Miami. And I think that it's showed like, this is a fucking tough town, man. It's super tough. There's so many different facets of this town. There's so many different types of people. There's so many different cultures here. It's it's crazy.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: And no one ever shows that.
Nick Zayas: No.
Michael Beltran: You only have in Bad Boys that there's that there's like a Haitian gang.
Nick Zayas: Or like now we have Moonlight,
Michael Beltran: I actually have not seen Moonlight. I know that's terrible.
Nick Zayas: Wonderful. Barry Jenkins is wonderful, but Moonlight is like the only movie you'll ever find. A movie about basically about Liberty City won an Oscar. That is significant, so that is up there in the Pantheon of great truthful Miami.
Michael Beltran: I should watch this, right?
Nick Zayas: Yes. Great.
Michael Beltran: Nick's on the mic.
Nicolás Jiménez: I'm on the mic now. I have a question for Nick, from Mr. Jimenez. In light of the fact that you do what you do, I imagine that you've been exposed to more examples of it. So even if nobody does it perfectly, who's done it best? Even if it's something that maybe people haven't seen or it's like an episode of a thing that you saw that was set in Miami. Because I imagine anytime some of my, like any time, somebody from Miami leaves Miami, everybody around them is like, Hey, look at this Miami thing, I'm willing to bet that you've been exposed to more writing and and TV and film that references Miami than most people.
Nick Zayas: You know who I thought did a great job of depicting the city of Miami was the movie Chef.
Michael Beltran: So I hate food television.
Nick Zayas: Sure.
Michael Beltran: And now I'm part of it, which sucks. I hate that. I feel like such a fucking loser for being a part of it, but Padma was a delight and ludicrous. I know you're listening. I think you are, you were a delight also. Chef and the movie with the fucking guy Burnt. Very different stories.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: So very real. Both of them.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: There were so very real. Like they were like so well done and I felt so many of both of those things. I watched those movies all the time.
Nick Zayas: So here's a great Hollywood story. They say don't meet your heroes. So like I said earlier, Swingers is the movie that formed the core of my identity. Exactly. So Swingers was written by Jon Favreau, who was in the movie, Jon Favreau also wrote and directed and starred in Chef. So it's like 2014.
Michael Beltran: He crushed it in that movie. He crushed it.
Nick Zayas: Now, Jon Favreau is one of the, one of the most successful directors ever. He did Iron Man and, created the Marvel, set the stage for the Marvel universe, so it's 2014 and I'm a fan of Chef and I know that he's doing as a promotional thing for the movie, they're doing a pop-up at Animal on Fairfax.
Michael Beltran: Jon and Vinny's place.
Nick Zayas: Yeah, exactly.
Michael Beltran: Miami guys.
Nick Zayas: Yep. Oh really? I didn't know that.
Michael Beltran: Yeah. They worked for Michelle Bernstein here.
Nick Zayas: Oh, wow. I didn't know that.
Michael Beltran: Yeah.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. Yeah. I love the, I love their their food. But so they were doing a pop-up with Favreau where they're making Cuban sandwiches outside of Animal. So I'm like, I'm going to fucking go to this. It was like 10 minutes away from my house. So I show up. I'm in line to get a Cuban sandwich. And there's John Favreau. There is the guy who wrote my favorite movie.
Michael Beltran: Should have made me don't trip. Don't trip on the actual thing that doesn't move it. Doesn't move at chef Manny, everyone. Yeah, I know. I don't know where I'd be without that guy.
Nick Zayas: So I'm at the pop-up for Chef and there's Favreau standing behind me. And I'm like, this is the guy, this is the guy that wrote the movie that shaped, it was one of the first scripts I ever read was the script for Swingers, so I'm like, I got to say something. So I go up to John Favreau and I say, Mr. Favreau, I just want to say that Swingers was a big deal for me. And as soon as I start saying it, I start regretting it.
Michael Beltran: Oh, I remember you told me the story.
Nick Zayas: Because his eyes start to glaze over.
Michael Beltran: Like I get it, bro.
Nick Zayas: He's you are the hundredth, you're the thousandth fucking young guy today to tell me.
Michael Beltran: Look at how I'm dressed, bro. I got it.
Nick Zayas: It's so money, I love your movie. And he's heard it for the last 20 years and I'm like, oh no, what am I doing? I should stop talking. And then he was like, okay. Yeah. Cool. Thanks so much. And then I was like, oh, but actually Mr. Favreau like I'm from Miami. And I thought Chef was awesome. And I thought how you showed Miami was legit. The fact that you went to Versailles,
Michael Beltran: they filmed the whole part of the movie at How Como Ayer.
Nick Zayas: I was like, the Miami part was fucking legit. And as soon as I said that, as soon as I was talking about his current piece of art, he was saying like, oh yeah, really? Oh, that's so great. Any want it. He's like we had so much fun in Miami and suddenly he was engaged. And so if you ever meet your hero, don't be a fucking fanboy.
Michael Beltran: Get him on the show.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. Let's get fucking Johnny Favreau on the show. And also Mr. Favreau, if you're listening, I'd love to meet you again.
Michael Beltran: Actually talk like friends, one time.
Nick Zayas: I've got some scripts for you to read.
Michael Beltran: Like in that movie, I feel a lot of emotions when I watched that movie, even still. There's three food movies I feel emotions: Ratatouille still.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: Oh man. So heavy. Chef and Burnt all three of them The Big Night also very like cult following The Big Night, but I don't know. And Thomas Keller was involved with, I'm pretty sure all three of those.
Nick Zayas: Really?
Michael Beltran: Yeah. He was involved with the food part of all, three of those.
Nick Zayas: Fascinating.
Michael Beltran: Yeah. Keller is a legend. It's interesting. Like when you meet you like your heroes or whatever, I'm pretty sure I've said this story before, but I'll say it again. I happened to meet one of my heroes through my own, like arrogance and like very like disdain for talking to humans. When I was cooking at an event and I was making one of my dishes or whatever, like someone kept tapping me on the shoulder and I was just like, I don't like talking to people and it was Dario Cecchini's wife, which is his translator. And he's like the most legendary butcher of all time. And she was like, Dario would like you to know that this is one of the best foie gras dishes he's ever had. And I turned around and I was like, fuck me. Okay, cool.
Nick Zayas: Wow.
Michael Beltran: This is crazy. I'm going to go fuck myself now. This is this is a lot for me to digest while I'm feeding 500 people at the same time. Okay.
Nick Zayas: Dude.
Michael Beltran: That was cool because he tried my food and he really enjoyed it.
Nick Zayas: Fuck.
Michael Beltran: And he's a fuck. That guy is a fucking legend man. Legend.
Nick Zayas: I'll say that both of you and I have been grinding for a while, right? Like we've been grinding away for a while.
Since mushroom cuts.
Michael Beltran: Yeah.
Nick Zayas: And it feels great when the universe gives you the fucking pat on the back once or twice, man.
Michael Beltran: It's interesting though, because you have to acknowledge the pat on the back.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. You have to be, you have to take, you have to take the compliment.
Michael Beltran: The grind makes it very tough to accept a compliment.
Nick Zayas: Part of what makes overachieving, ambitious people work is this feeling that we should never be satisfied because we're always trying to work towards some sort of perfection, but you, but man, for your mental health, you've got to take the compliment when it comes. You got to say, thank you when it comes, man.
Michael Beltran: What a trigger word, mental health? We won't dive into mental health cause we'll be on here for another hour. But so we talked about what's after Picard.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: We've talked about what's current.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: Let's talk about your, like I'm fascinated that a good friend of mine lives has lived in LA for 15 years.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: 16 years.
Nick Zayas: 15 years, 2022.
Michael Beltran: Do you not? Do you miss Miami? Are there not times are there, like I lived in Virginia for four and a half years and every day I pined for like the things that made me like connected to our, I don't know who we are and like so many things. It, I could only imagine 15 years removed coming back for a couple of weeks. Like how that feels.
Nick Zayas: Yeah, man. So it's funny. Cause like the leaving Miami. At least, even just leaving Miami and being in Florida State for about three years in Tallahassee gives you a perspective and an appreciation of the city. There's lots of people who grew up here and never leave and they don't know what the rest of America is they think they live in America.
Michael Beltran: I don't think they appreciate here as much as they should.
Nick Zayas: Miami is one of the most unique American cities. It's like nowhere else in America. And you can be born here, live a whole life and die, and think you live in America and not realize there's a whole other country out there. There's a whole other country that doesn't speak Spanglish and doesn't know what a croqueta is. And doesn't know how to play dominoes.
Michael Beltran: You can't go to the corner and get a cortadito and a croqueta and a pastelito, like outside of Broward.
Nick Zayas: Anywhere north of Broward.
Michael Beltran: Yeah. Like you can't like once you leave Broward, it's it's actually, yes, it's different.
Nick Zayas: It is the Americano America.
Michael Beltran: They're giving you bisquits with apple butter. For you they're giving you matcha and other things. Matcha and some kind of like super healing thing.
Nick Zayas: And overnight oats and those sorts of things, imagine the genius that came up with overnight oats.
Michael Beltran: I know. It's so smart. I'm just going to set this bitch up and I'm going to come back tomorrow and be done.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. And it's $14 in a Mason jar. It's like cold brew. It's day-old coffee.
Michael Beltran: Cold brew is delicious. I'll double down on cold brew.
Nick Zayas: So look, there's a part of me that is from the moment I was born. I wanted to leave Miami. As a kid, there's something about being a writer that just always makes you feel like an outsider. So I'd watch all this TV as a kid growing up. And what I saw on TV looked nothing like where I was growing up. I wanted to live in this fantasy of America, which was, Full House, Family Matters . Step-By-Step.
Michael Beltran: What a legend Bob Saget is. Right?
Nick Zayas: Brilliant comedian filthy comedian. Yeah. Danny Tanner is a filthy human.
Michael Beltran: I know, cut it out.
Nick Zayas: That was Dave Coulier, but still.
Michael Beltran: Oh yeah. That's right.
Nick Zayas: Somewhere. Dave Cooley's ears are burning. It's like somebody talking about me.
Michael Beltran: Finally, it's been a decade.
Nick Zayas: It's so funny, but there was a part of me growing up that was just like, I don't want to be here. I don't want to be in Miami. I want to be in whatever world exists on the movies and TV shows that I live in, and that was the escapist in me. And so I always wanted to leave and it took me going to Florida State and living elsewhere to be. Oh, wait, I actually appreciate where I came from. Even if I never felt comfortable in my skin, in this city that I grew up in, like I never had, I always never wanted a Miami accent. I don't know. Maybe it's a whitewashing of myself. I don't know. I struggle with these things,
Michael Beltran: yeah.
Nick Zayas: But I always wanted to leave and move onward, and then I live in Los Angeles where I always wanted to live. And over the years, especially after a pandemic in which stuck in quarantine, every experience has become virtual, you can't eat duck over zoom. So social interactions, work entertainment is all through a screen. And so you end up going crazy and you start being like, what in life is real. And me, like I said, as an extrovert, I need people. I need to feel life happening. And so more than ever this past two years, I felt a need to what I call is touch the soil, I'm like I have to get back in touch with whatever is real. So I came back here in June and I'm back here now just trying to center my ground myself again and be like, this is Miami.
I've come back here to get back in touch with my roots. And I think now later in life, I I've come to appreciate this place and what's real. And now I want to talk about the place I came from.
Michael Beltran: I think when you reach a certain level, like you want your roots, you want to make them not special, but you want to share them with the world.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: And I think that's part of my journey that I've when Ariete opened, Ariete turns six, January 14th, 2022.
Nick Zayas: Congratulations.
Michael Beltran: Thank you. I think that after a year and a half or so, like I felt like I needed a purpose. The place needed a purpose and that was the purpose: to give the roots like their due.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: And I think it's paid off and we've been super blessed, but you don't know until you leave.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: And you also don't know until you feel like you're up against a wall. Like we, I think food in Miami has been up against a wall for many years. There was like a wave of great chefs. The mango gang and some before them and some after them too, but it was like this wave up against this ideology of what the rest of the world looked at us which is what you were talking about, which is, like you look at the show about Miami and it's a ginger guy that's walking into Versailles and everyone's who is this man?
Yeah.
Nick Zayas: If CSI, Miami goes to Versailles, usually it's just, pink flamingos and neon signs,
Michael Beltran: so there's no like cutthroat real, like showing of who the city really is. And we all grew up in it and we all grew up in like very ideal situations. And there was a lot of people that didn't grow up in ideal situations. And there was like, there's a lot of parts of Miami that are super fucked up. And there's lots of stories in Miami that are super fucked up and they haven't really been shared. I think that in the last five years, they've been shared more than they have in the previous, but I think that's what, like where I found purpose was connecting the Cuban-American culture to progress, which I don't think has happened.
And I don't know it's a vulnerable place and it's a good place to be because vulnerability makes you work harder.
Nick Zayas: Yes. And as an artist, vulnerability is the key to making anything of artistic merit. Like at least me as a writer, I've come to a place where I've stopped being in the place where I want to imitate the things I've seen. And now I actually want to tell the stories of who I am, the stories that only I can tell.
And you, as an artist, all you have is your instincts, your taste, and the story you want to tell.
Michael Beltran: It's so interesting, right? Because like now, as my career has grown and like where I'm at now, like I look at my team at Ariete we, it's a table of collaboration and we all talk collectively about food and so on and so forth, which I love. And sometimes they talk about food and they come up with food and I'm like, but what makes this, who we are? You have to draw it back to what this place means. Eliminate you, me, yourself. All that. Eliminate that. Who makes it what makes this us? And it's a very, it's a very difficult thing. And then you come up with 10 things on a dish and, then, like I tell them like draw seven of them off. Is the dish the same? Is the foundation of the dish and the meaning of the dish the same? And it's it's it's crazy. It's really. Not a lot of people understand like what it takes to be that creative output to tell a story, and your whole job is telling a story. I think that we struggle a little bit more because people are just trying they're hungry and they just want to be satiated, yeah. But in essence, we're telling a story.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: And I think always for things that matter, there's a story attached to them because there's depth to it. There's like a meaning to it. It, when you eat it, it tastes different because there's a reasoning behind this.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: If you eat our foie, like it's delicious. But when you know the story, it's other worldly.
Nick Zayas: Dude, a chicken soup that you get from Campbell's chicken soup you get from Winn-Dixie is different from the chicken soup your grandmother made for you when you were sick one day when you were a kid.
Michael Beltran: You know, it's funny. Like yesterday it was new year's Eve. And we had consomme on the menu with like tortellini and it was beautiful. And I was telling my chef here I was like, this reminds me of chicken noodle soup, even though it was fish, but it was like, reminds me of chicken noodle soup like that my grandmother made.
He's yeah. We've always talked about that. We should revisit that. And I love that conversation. I love the openness of that conversation. I love like being able to have that conversation because it's people that get it.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: It's people that like, yeah. It's a very interesting time in our room right now because there's a bunch of monsters in there.
Nick Zayas: How
Michael Beltran: they're savages so good at their job. So talented. They're so young. They don't even know how good they are and they will be better than me, and that's what I want.
Nick Zayas: That's good.
Michael Beltran: And it's it's so interesting, right? Because there's only one other time in my career that I've visibly and like emotionally felt it. And it was back years ago when I worked for Norman that I knew that everyone in that room would be a chef of their own thing.
Nick Zayas: Oh, that's great, man.
Michael Beltran: And they all are now. They all do their own thing. They're all in charge of their own thing. They all do their own food and they're all exceptional at what they do. And it's I know that everyone in this room right now will do the same thing. It's just different now because I'm there instead of being part of the room, so it's it's it's cool to see. And I feel like I'm in some kind of duality, like the way a writers' room works would there would be some kind of similarity to that?
Nick Zayas: Yeah, man. When a writers' room works well, when the people that are in that room are great. And when the person who's running the room, the showrunner really knows what they're doing. It's the best job in the world. For me, it's my favorite thing in the world to be in a room. And all we do is pitch ideas for a story.
It is so much fun. The six seasons I was on Major Crimes. It was just a great time. We laughed so much. We share more meals together than we did with our families. You know what I mean? It's the best job in the world when it works? A lot of crappy writer's rooms are because, maybe the showrunner is a egomaniac or a monster, or like the vibe is it's a toxic workplace, but when it works well, it's excellent. And I think I think that shows in the work, artists coming together to work together on a project is sometimes it's greater than the sum of its parts. And that's the goal,
Michael Beltran: do you find writing to be an art or to be a craft?
Nick Zayas: Oh brother. What a great question. That is a question asked by a fucking artist who knows what he's doing. That is a great question.
Michael Beltran: I've been vindicated.
Nick Zayas: Because it's the same thing with being a chef is cooking a steak and art or craft?
Michael Beltran: It's a craft.
Nick Zayas: Both. It's a craft, but the artistry of what you add to it, how is your art to
Michael Beltran: It's the next level, yeah?
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: It's like when you're working, when you are working to better yourself and I guess we're in a way we're all working to better ourselves every day when you're a hustler and you you only care about like the grind,
Nick Zayas: yeah.
Michael Beltran: We all just want to be better every day. So the craft is always there. The art. That's that part of you that is triggered at a certain time, at a certain moment at a certain thing. And some artists are better than others.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: And I think that there is similarities. There is like a parallel between the two, but I think one will drop off and one will continue.
Nick Zayas: Yes. The craft is the tool of the art or rather the craft is the vehicle of the art, right? At the end of the day, I have to know how to physically write a screenplay. I have to know the craft of the screenplay. You have to know how to write a scene, not even just formatting, but how to construct a scene, how to construct a story, how to write something that actors can perform, et cetera.
But in understanding the craft and putting in your hours of becoming a craftsman, then can the art speak, then can the art come through. And yeah, there's some times like writing episode seven of season four or five of Major Crimes that's craft,
Michael Beltran: was it a filler?
Nick Zayas: Actually season five, episode seven, if you have HBO Max, you're gonna watch it. It's called Moral Hazard. That was one of my first solo episodes. Great fucking episode. I'm proud of it. Really cool. Had a lot of fun doing that one.
Michael Beltran: Not a filler episode.
Nick Zayas: Not a filler episode.
Michael Beltran: Got it.
Nick Zayas: People love that episode. I liked that episode, but, when you're writing an episode of TV, there's a lot of craft. There's a lot of, I need to make a table that looks like all the other tables.
Michael Beltran: Functionality, right?
Nick Zayas: Yeah. Yeah. But within building that table, yeah. The art is the soul of the thing. Like you have to be an artist, you have to bring with it in any story that we tell, truth, right? Because like I said, if it's not truthful, the audience will smell it, they will smell that something's wrong. They'll smell the bullshit, and all we seek when we are watching a movie or TV show is connection. We want to connect with these characters, and we want to feel this, this play this show of life, and the artistry that comes with storytelling is in making that illusion happen, it's in making it feel unique, truthful, and like maybe you learned something or maybe you've felt something, every piece of art, the whole point of art is to make you feel something, and I think that in any craft, you have to study the craft so that you can actually do the art.
Michael Beltran: Study is a huge part.
Nick Zayas: Boy, study and work. Everything is study and work.
Michael Beltran: And study. Like I encounter it a lot like kids, I went to culinary school. I studied no, you didn't study. I get, do you know who these five people are? No. Then you have not studied. Like you have you read their work top to bottom. Do you understand their throught process, why they did it, the structure of their menu and why they put it that way. And the small curve ball that they'll put in the middle or at the end or at the beginning, or why they did that. And like how they like the function of why they do what they do.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: That study is far beyond the classroom.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Michael Beltran: It's a very personal thing, like who you decide to study and how you decide to study and what you decide to study is up to you. It's the craft and art thing for me is it's always a struggle, right? Because what we do is a craft, and how we take it to the next level is an art, we want to tell a story and if you tell a story, there's an art to that.
Like you want to make people feel emotional through a meal. It's not fucking easy.
Nick Zayas: No, man.
Michael Beltran: I've watched a lot of like shitty TV. I've watched a lot of great TV. I've watched a lot of shitty movies. I've watched a lot of great movies and there's a visceral difference between the both.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: There's great storytelling and there's bad storytelling, and I have movies or shows that I go back to, to remind me of a thing. It's the same you go to a certain place to eat food because you know that it's just going to be a certain thing that you need to feel satiated. And then you go to a certain place for a certain event that you want that type of food for that type of experience for that type of event. So I find them very similar, but obviously completely opposite.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: Serious question. In the world of streaming do you find it insulting that they automatically skip to the next episode without giving credits?
Nick Zayas: I yes. I think it's a problem. I think that.
Michael Beltran: The only reason I ask this question is because I am super deep in Peaky Blinders again for the second time,
Nick Zayas: and they give you two seconds before the next one starts playing. Yeah.
Michael Beltran: It's four. I believe it's four or five seconds. And it's engulfed my life for the last like month. And I was like, I wanted to dive back into this show because I feel like I have this show has a lot for me. And I wanna just take it all in again and because we're friends every time they do that, I'm like a little annoyed. I don't know who wrote the show.
Nick Zayas: No. A hundred percent. I agree with you. I think that look, I think that the thing of, I think that some of these streamers and it started with Netflix too. I can feel it. It's sometimes feels like an assault, like a barrage of being force fed the next episode. And I understand that, yes, it will help your algorithm and it'll help you to get the person to binge watch the next episode. But I think that emotionally, after you experienced an episode after you experienced something on television or even a movie, I think it's even worse with movies. There is a comedown, an emotional comedown of when the credits roll, where you're trying to absorb the thing that you've just experienced.
Michael Beltran: You're giving like humans too much emotional credit right now.
Nick Zayas: I dunno if I just finished watching E.T.,
Michael Beltran: mr. Jimenez has thoughts.
Nicolás Jiménez: I don't think that this is Mr. Jimenez. I don't think that Nick is giving people too much credit. Although I'm making my own assumptions about what you meant. I don't think that he's saying that people see the credits and think here's the window for emotional comedown I've been looking for.
I think it just happens like there you're sitting there. It's a very lean back experience as opposed to a lean for you're very passive, which is why these platforms need that okay. We don't even want to give you the option of leaning forward. We're gonna lean forward for you and play the next episode. Absent that autoplay the next episode, if you just gave people a minute, they probably wouldn't like, they'd probably wait and have that come down. Whether they were conscious of it or not is what is how I understand the experience you're describing. I don't think you need to give people emotional credit or whatever it is.
Nick Zayas: If you've just finished watching E.T., I just feel if you've just finished watching the movie E T right. The movie ITI has like the most emotional last five minutes of any movie and the moment it cuts to the title card that says directed by Steven Spielberg, you have two seconds before they start playing I don't know, an episode of fucking Great British Bake-Off like,
Michael Beltran: I have a question for Nick.
Nick Zayas: It's a, it's an assault, man.
Michael Beltran: You were an editor for a magazine for how many years? Seven years, seven years, would you have been upset if they did not put you like plain as day as editor of that magazine on the magazine?
Nicolás Jiménez: Yeah no. I'm not arguing with what your question of whether it's upsetting. I yeah, no. Yeah. My comment has what I'm saying is that when he. Part of why it's upsetting is also because when the credits roll, it's an opportunity to process what you're doing. And you were saying, I think you're giving people too much credit and I'm not saying, I think it would be giving people too much credit if everybody was sitting and thinking, okay here's the moment I've been waiting for to contemplate.
I think that moment comes whether you want it to or not, because if you've been, if you have taken in something good part of what makes it good is that it's going to impact you whether you want it to or not. And if you just are given that moment of whatever, whatever soundtrack with a bunch of scrolling texts, whatever then. I think you'd take it. Yeah. I think you take the Miley Cyrus time, whether you read Nick Zayas' name in the credits or not, you take in Miley Cyrus and you take a moment to process what Nick put in front of you.
Michael Beltran: I'm just like, cause I'm just going back to the show that I'm currently.
Nick Zayas: How do you feel when an episode of Peaky Blinders ends and before you know it you're starting the next one do you feel like you're being rushed through a museum?
Michael Beltran: I'm also wondering if it's just cause we're friends. And I'm like, fuck, I plowed through this episode. These shows I plowed through them. I am on season five and this is not that old for me. Like we're, it's only six episodes a season, but I have thoroughly enjoyed it super well. The acting is phenomenal. The soundtrack is phenomenal. The story is funny. Everything is phenomenal about it. I relate to the show super well. I love everything about the show and fuck. I'm like thinking just because obviously we have the relationship that we have. I'm like who the fuck wrote this? Who the fuck like, and maybe, and I wonder if it's just me because of my relationship to you and my relationship to Mr. Jimenez over here too. I want to know because they are incredibly talented.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. And there's the little button there that says like watch credits. The only thing is you have to race to grab your remote control within the four seconds and then hit that little button.
Michael Beltran: Four or 5 seconds. Something like that.
Nick Zayas: But it goes by quick. Yeah. I don't know. People have complained about it and it's true. And it's, then you also wonder how much Netflix is pumping their numbers of viewership when, half the people are just like leaving it on.
Michael Beltran: Yeah. I mean that, that's the reality too of just making money. Which is a real thing, but it's also, and we've talked about this too. It also creates a different avenue for you to do things that may have not existed before, but it also creates a different type of viewership that did not exist previously because you can get into. And then it could disappear for four years and then come back.
Nick Zayas: Yeah, it's look, we're in a really interesting time now where it's and the pandemic totally accelerated it. And I don't really understand a lot of it. Like I find streaming to be a bit of a black box and everyone's really just trying to figure it out as they go. But yeah, the medium has changed where now we can have six episode seasons.
I cut my teeth on a show that was 21 episodes of season. And when you do 21 episodes of season, you can have a living wage for a year, right? When you do six episodes, a season you work for four months and then you have to find out when's the next time you're going to get a job. But even just the experience as a viewer, you watch six episodes. Then you wait for two years for the next six episodes.
Michael Beltran: What was that show that we were talking? It was like a scifi shows, a sweet tooth or whatever.
Nick Zayas: We were talking aboutBlack Mirror.
Michael Beltran: No, not Black Mirror. It was the last time you were here. Not, it was a.
Nick Zayas: Yeah I watched Sweet Tooth. Yeah.The kid with the horns. Yeah.
Michael Beltran: Yeah. The kid with the horns and shit. I was like, that's a really cool fucking show. It was a great show. And they're like, oh, when's a season two is coming. It's like when? Yeah. So I feel like it's a very interesting dynamic that we're in because we don't, it's just a different, it's a different way to watch shows. Like NCIS is 24 episodes for 15 years.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: That's a long.
Nick Zayas: It's a lot. I mean there's and there are people who though a lot of people maybe don't make. Many of those shows anymore. People still love them. The most popular show on streaming is like The Office or Friends, right?
Michael Beltran: Cult following shows.
Nick Zayas: Not even cult following.
Michael Beltran: Those are cult following shows though, dude.
Nick Zayas: Pretty big cult. Like The Office is like the most popular show in the world.
Seinfeld the streaming rights for Seinfeld was a huge deal because they know that Seinfeld is one of the biggest properties in television ever. And it's mostly because there's like for most of the shows, there's hundreds of episodes. So there's just the hours of the content and people will just put it on and live with it.
Michael Beltran: And they live with it. Yeah. It's it's like fodder in the background.
Nick Zayas: I grew up watching three episodes of The Simpsons after school for 10 years because they were on reruns on channel 29 and channel 39.
Michael Beltran: I was more like a Saved By The Bell, Family Matters.
Nick Zayas: Home Improvement was one.
Michael Beltran: Home Improvement. Oh man. Yeah. Good show. God, we just don't do that anymore.
Nick Zayas: I think there's more interesting. There's the medium is moving in a way. That's fascinating and it's very dynamic. And so I try and be a little, sometimes be a little bit optimistic about it. I'm working on a show now with with Steve Conrad, who is a wonderful writer. He's producing this pilot that I have at AMC. And Steve told me on the phone he wrote and produced the, the show Patriot on Amazon, which if anyone has never watched that show Patriot, it's one of the best shows on TV in the last 10 years.
Michael Beltran: I've never watched it.
Nick Zayas: It is excellent. Go home and watch it.
Michael Beltran: I'm into it.
Nick Zayas: Brilliant.
Michael Beltran: I need to finish BD blinders.
Nick Zayas: Yes, you do.
Michael Beltran: Okay.
Nick Zayas: For the third time or however many times he's seen the show.
Michael Beltran: The second, this is my second go round.
Nick Zayas: The Patriot's a wonderful show. He when giving me notes on my script and help me come up with a show, he said something, which was, he likes to view it as how can we move the medium of television forward and how could we do something that's never been done before? And for me, as an artist, who's also just trying to make a living to hear somebody else, try and be like, how can we move the medium forward? I'm like, oh, thank God. Like here's an artist talking to me. Here's somebody who's trying to challenge me artistically, and I think that's really cool. And he went and created one of the weirdest, most fascinating and funniest shows on TV right now that I don't think many people have watched, but is a show called Ultra City Smiths that is on AMC+ that I encourage everyone to go out and, get the seven day free trial of AMC+.
Michael Beltran: I'm into it.
Nick Zayas: Watch this show Ultra City Smiths. They have six episodes you can watch and they're all half an hour each and you can watch them in two days, but is the funniest most unique show on television. It is a modern day film noir about a fictional, like New York type of New York, called Ultra City. And it's about a head of a family who's murdered and a detective that has to solve the murder. That being said, the whole show is animated. Stop motion, animated, stop motion animation with baby dolls.
Michael Beltran: It could be with Llamageddon.
Nick Zayas: Yes, it is fascinating. And there's a musical number in every episode.
Michael Beltran: I fuckin' love this. I, this is definitely Llamageddon, worthy.
Nick Zayas: Yes. It is like Team America meets Chinatown. That is the best way. That is the best way I can explain it. And it is at both times the funniest thing I've seen on television and also incredibly moving and emotional and deep. And it's something only Steve Conrad can do. And I love the show and I want everyone to watch it. And it's insane. So when you need to like, experience something new as an artist, that's just is weird and wonderful. It's refreshing. And that's my suggestion. That's my one cool thing.
Michael Beltran: My one cool-down when I'm having like a really like shitty, like the world is shitty and I need like a cool-down from the world, you know what I go back to? The Next Generation.
Nick Zayas: Hell yeah, dude.
Michael Beltran: Always, I always, and I could pick a random episode.
Nick Zayas: What's what's one of your favorite episodes of Next Gen?.
Michael Beltran: I always go back to the first three episodes of next generation is like my favorite three episodes.
Nick Zayas: The pilot's great.
Michael Beltran: Yeah. I I don't know. It, every episode has got its own story and it's like very different and it's I don't know. And I also go back a lot to Babylon Five, which a lot of people don't give enough credit to. Babylon Five was a great scifi show. And those are like my, my, I need recess from the world.
Nick Zayas: Yeah.
Michael Beltran: So I think we've reached a point. All right. And now for the first wind down of 2022, and in 2022, we will continue this fucking thing called parting recommendations. I actually have a parting recommendation that I was shocked about just today. I went to a car show today. It was at a restaurant and the restaurant was actually rather delicious called Holy Mackerel in Fort Lauderdale. I had fish fingers. I enjoyed them very much with tartar sauce. My friends had some pulled pork sliders. They were delicious also. It was, they had the holy mac and cheese. Which was also delicious I'm I was shocked and I was very happy.
Well, you
Nick Zayas: What's interesting is that Holy Mackerel is actually the sequel to VelociPastor. It's about, it's actually about a nun that gets bitten by a fish. It's like a reverse Splash.
Michael Beltran: So good.
Nick Zayas: Holy Mackarel.
Michael Beltran: Yeah. That's my parting recommendation. The first party recommendation of 2022.
Nick Zayas: That's great. Let's see, other than the show Ultra City Smiths, which I think is phenomenal on AMC + I'd recommend the movie Licorice Pizza that I think came out on Christmas day in select cities written interacted by Paul Thomas Anderson, who's a wonderful filmmaker. He did boogie nights, Phantom Thread, There Will Be Blood. But man, I saw Licorice Pizza at the Westwood Village Theater. It was the only screen that was showing it in December. I saw it in a packed theater, full of college kids, and man, it was one of the most fun movie going experiences I've had in five years. It was excellent. I love this.
Michael Beltran: Heavy, that's heavy.
Nick Zayas: It's a great movie and it's just pure joy. And I just, I think it's great. So when it comes out, go out and see it. It's it's just a wonderful. Great. Great movie, man. So
Michael Beltran: I love that Mr. Jimenez, I'm going to hand my microphone over to Mr. Jimenez.
Nicolás Jiménez: Oh man. You're enjoying the hell out of this mic stand situation. I'm gonna recommend only I'll this is half shameless plug, half recommendation. Have you heard the episode that we did Ricardo Pau-Llosa ?
Nick Zayas: No, I did not.
Nicolás Jiménez: So I'm recommending this to anybody who hasn't heard it and is not yet tired of hearing me talk about this episode. But especially to you, Nick, I would suggest that you listen to this. So Ricardo is I know him through the Belen alumni association. He's like he's in his sixties. We're just saying, this is how we connected with this guy. And he is a an art critic. He's I think my understanding and I've never been this deep into the art world, but is like one of the most consequential critics of Latin American art of his lifetime and certainly ours.
And then he's also a poet. So he was he was nominated for a Pulitzer and most of his poetry is like inspired by art. So the reason I'm recommending this is because so much of that conversation is with this guy who was coming at it from a very different angle on what art is, the distinction or the differences in whatever where art meets craft. And then also a lot of interesting things sbout what makes Latin American art distinct from art from the rest of the world, which I think is something
Michael Beltran: that was a great episode.
Nick Zayas: That's fascinating.
Nicolás Jiménez: Which I think being from Miami as a Latin American capital in a lot of ways ends up being relatable. Like we didn't grow up in Latin America and yet we grew up in a Latin American culture that like, it makes perfect sense. And I would be curious like after you listened to it, not like it's not gonna change your life, but whether it gives you some clear, like a different perspective or like a new lens to understand how you're approaching your work differently from how other people might be approaching theirs.
Nick Zayas: Definitely, that sounds fascinating. Yeah. That's, I'll check it out.
Nicolás Jiménez: And then also not a shameless plug recommendation just cause I was listening to him on my way here. Listen to Bobby Darin.
Nick Zayas: Fucking Mack The Knife. Hell yeah, dude.
Nicolás Jiménez: Mack, the knife, but I was specifically blasting
Nick Zayas: clementine?
Nicolás Jiménez: Have you heard of Clementine?
Nick Zayas: No.
Nicolás Jiménez: It's about a girl whose father is a miner from North Carolina and but they also, for some reason I have cows that it's her job every morning to walk the cows to the mine. Why cows have to go to the mine, I don't know, but she goes over a footbridge and she's really fat and the footbridge breaks and the whole song is like this really fun song about how this fat girl named Clementine died drowning. Cause she was too fat to go over the bridge.
Nick Zayas: Is that the traditional oh my darling. Oh my darling.
Nicolás Jiménez: No, it's not that . This is much darker. It's so dark and like but the whole song is like this very fun. Like we're taking too much joy in Clementine's death. So check out Clementine. And also I saw Licorice Pizza. It was a lot of fun and I wish that somewhere online, there were clips of John Michael Higgins doing that Japanese accent it's because
Nick Zayas: Cringeworthy.
Nicolás Jiménez: That was the best.
Nick Zayas: The cringe is the point.
Nicolás Jiménez: That's the thing. That's what made it so great. And I, my understanding is that there's like calls to boycott this thing over this. Seems like the whole joke is how dumb he is.
Nick Zayas: The character is incredibly racist. And so the audience is watching a moment that is incredibly racist,
and you can see people being pissed off about it but the point, but the context and the point of it is that yes, this character is incredibly racist. That was actually a real guy. That is, oh, he's playing an actual guy who opened the first Japanese restaurant in the valley who was a fucking appropriated Japanese culture. I think that's what the scene is about, but I get the reaction,
Nicolás Jiménez: I get the reaction to the sense that I can comprehend the reaction's existence. I think the reaction is silly. Cause if that had been like, and I'm just putting myself, like to the extent that any of this is I don't know about empathy or if that had been a Cuban character, I would have thought it was fucking hilarious if it w if he was just doing like a shitty Pacino Cuban accent.
Nick Zayas: Yeah. Yeah. CC and anyone who's ever mentioned Scarface to me when I say I'm Cuban.
Nicolás Jiménez: Yeah.
Nick Zayas: So every Scarface poster at Florida State University, when I was in, yeah.
Nicolás Jiménez: I will say that was one of my frustrations with the movie was that I didn't expect for it to be as surreal and as weird as it was. And it left me feeling like I I went, and this was more a matter of like expectations and then versus how, what it ended up being. Yeah. I had gone in wanting for it to feel more like a faithful autobiographical thing. Like I was ready to learn something about this guy's weird upbringing and it left me feeling oh man, I question, whether any of this was legitimate.
Nick Zayas: It is a seventies movie as in it is inspired by the movies of the seventies. And if you watch something like The Long Goodbye, for example, or he dedicates the movie to Robert Downey, Sr like Putney Swope is a big inspiration for him. These are all impressionistic movies, right? It's a vibe.
Nicolás Jiménez: Very much a vibe.
Nick Zayas: The movies from the seventies.
Nicolás Jiménez: You can barely keep track of where we are in the movie throughout the movie. And you can tell like 20 minutes in, like the point of this movie is the vibe.
Nick Zayas: Yes.
Nicolás Jiménez: There's barely a story happening.
Nick Zayas: Crack a beer or light a fat one and watch Licorice Pizza and just chill with the vibe, man, because that was the same time. I love that movie. Yeah.
Michael Beltran: Señor Mushroom Cut Nicholas Zayas. Thank you so much for being on this podcast. Oh yeah, that's right.
Nick Zayas: Oh, the only show shameless plug I think I have is, Star Trek Picard season two on Paramount plus which episode? The February of 2022.
Michael Beltran: Which episode?
Nick Zayas: Honestly, the episode I wrote got rewritten so much that all I would say is that my contributions are probably to the general season story, as opposed to a particular episode.
Michael Beltran: I'll take it. In still says your name at the end of the fucking show. So don't actually downgrade my, how proud I am.
Nick Zayas: I have a co-producer credit, which is my first producer credit ever for the whole season. So you'll see my name on every episode. If the credits don't roll, if they don't skip you to the next episode.
Michael Beltran: Shameless plugs all the things.
Nick Zayas: I'll do a shameless plug, Chugs Diner, chugs diners. My favorite restaurant in the city of Miami. It is the only great diner in the city of Miami. And if I lived here, I would be there every day.
Michael Beltran: Thanks. Mr. Jimenez?
Nicolás Jiménez: You can follow Pan Con Podcast on all the things @panconpodcast, not pumpkin podcasts, not panko podcast. I forget what the auto transcription thing I was using recently,
Pantone podcasts it's P A N C O N podcast on all the social media things. If you want to support the thing we're doing here, it's dademag, D A D E M a G patreon.com/dademag. Give us all your money. If you're in certain tiers, you get mugs, maybe coffee. There's all kinds of shit that you can get sent to you.
Michael Beltran: If you pay you can listen to the lightning round.
Nicolás Jiménez: Exactly. There's a there's bonus content, including bonus episodes, and also subscribe to our to our YouTube channel. It makes a big difference.
Michael Beltran: Peter watched in his lair of work all the time. It's very strange. Peter is a strange man. I love him. He's a strange man. Also Columbus grad. Peace.
Nick Zayas: Adelante.