We're recording. It's rolling. So is it rolling? You guys ready? Yeah. Okay, so let's pause that. Yeah. David, let me know when you're good. David, I like. Yeah. Okay. So Sean Sharma here with Table Reep Podcast, sitting with Selena Warren and Marissa Reed team. S&M! We're like, who? We just did our session recording The Jew Who Saved Christmas, a hilarious comedy, instant Christmas classic. Hope you really enjoyed it and wanted to give you all just a glimpse into where this wacky fun story came from. So please, how did you even conceptualize The Jew Who Saved Christmas? Well, I was raised Catholic in Selena's Jewish, so we always kind of wanted to do a Hanukkah Christmas hybrid. So that's originally what sparked it. And then I think there was this thing for Hulu called, Hulu does something called Huluine and they do a Christmas, a holiday version of that. So we had to come up with a bunch of ideas for shorts and we had a short idea about Santa going to the wrong house. And like, what if it was a Jewish person's house and what would their reaction be? And we were like, oh, they'd want to go with all the way. So we were like, how do we get a Jewish person to go with Santa to deliver Christmas? We're like, gotta drug them. Something we really pondered and struggled with a little bit when we first started writing this story was like, what's the takeaway? What's the message? Because we didn't want it to be like Christmas is better than Hanukkah or that Bernie's missing out on something. So we really wanted to make sure the message was kind of not holiday based. And we thought it was fun to see Christmas through a grown woman's eyes, but with kind of that childlike wonder. That's great. For people who don't know the story of Team SNM, just briefly, how did you meet and then how did you get into writing? Because you're both actors and you both began primarily as performers, right? Yeah. I was Morris's RA in college in quotations. We went to AMDA, American Musical Dramatic Academy. We were tap dancing and Lea Tards mostly. And drinking. So I got fired as an RA and Morris got kicked out of student housing and then we became best friends and we're like, we make great decisions together. And then we were both acting and we saw the future of our careers in the hands of other people. And we were like, this can't be sustainable. So we started to write our own material. And that's kind of how we started. And the first thing we sold happened to be like pretty quickly after we started writing together and that was 4SUM. 4SUM was a four season? Four seasons on YouTube originals. Well, great. So then how many scripts have you written in total? Oh my gosh. I've never actually tallied it up, but I'm guessing we write both TV and features. I would say maybe 20. 20, yes. Wow. Around 20. 10 of each. So what was it like for you today to just focus on being performers? It was so fun. It was a dream. It's hard for me because I never can just focus on being a performer. But it was a blast. Everyone did such an amazing job. So it was just a fun, joyous, but I'm constantly like circle that line, remember that for later, rewrite that. It's never quite relaxed. So how Bernie is Selena? Or how Selena is Bernie? I'm not quite as much of a mess. Well, I don't think I am as she is. But we both are afraid of flying. We're both Jews. I have smoked a little weed in my life, but I wouldn't say in like a pothood. But I would be this exact same way if I went on Santa's sleigh. And I'm exactly Sotnik if you're wondering about that. That's me to a T, fully based on me. But you know, getting aside though, is there a character that you feel is like very Marissa in the piece? Um, maybe more Eve, I would say. Yeah, like bringing the Christmas. We have some fun banter like that and bringing the Christmas spirit to it. So what was the like thought behind having a song in the middle of this piece? Well, it was one of the miracles we thought up. And naturally, we had to go all out and we were at a coffee shop, Republic of Pies shout out. And we just started writing it and singing it into our voice memos. And then Jason Curry, our friend who is a composer, came on board and composed this original song and it became what it is. So for anybody who's like looking for a Christmas film like this, would you call it a Christmas movie? I would say a Christmas Hanukkah hybrid. Okay, yeah. So for anybody who's like, okay, this is great. What's the vision? Do you have like a budget in mind? Is there any kind of like? She's expensive. She's expensive. Although you could there is a world in which like we were talking about making the shorter selves as a proof of concept and there's a world in which you do like green screen sky with like a sleigh. There's like a fun cheaper version. But I think this is like a 20 million and above feature. It feels like a theatrical or like a Netflix Christmas time release. We really envision the elves as being CGI, which of course automatically ups your budget and you know, they're going all across the globe. So a lot of locations. But this fit. Yeah. And there's a lot of like, you know, special effects and stuff that happens. So what was the you had the comps in the trailer, which is it was elf meets bad Santa. Okay. That's right. What rating do you think this is PG 13? Yeah, I think the weed automatically kind of makes it edgier. People tend to hear weed and they're like, uh oh, it's going to be like pineapple express you, which it really isn't, you know, we just like legal just because it's not federally legal. Yeah, it's really funny. It's not something we thought as being super edgy. Even an elf, you know, he gets drunk in the mail room. And we kind of just viewed it like that. But there's still is a stigma on it. Just because it's not legal everywhere. So what for you is the message of the film that everybody needs help that you have to accept help in order to get better, you can't grow without collaboration. So like Santa needed Bernie to go on this journey to like, be refreshed and see Christmas through the lens and Bernie needed to accept all her family's help and Santa's help and like, learn a new lesson about herself to grow. And allow Eve to kind of push her into this next step of her life, this next phase of becoming a flight attendant. You can't have like reward without risk. So what's, I mean, for each of you, so maybe Marissa will start with you. What's a moment in the writing that you're particularly proud of, like a joke that you particularly love for a moment that you're proud of? Well, I especially really loved writing all of the elves puns, like all the Christmas puns were so fun. I laughed at every one of them. We had like in the notes section of our phone, a list of just every Christmas word or phrase we could think of. Those were really hard. And even sometimes we'd have to like come back and be like, we'll have to figure it out because we can't spend two hours thinking out this pun. But those to me are super fun. I especially loved Fat Christmas Ham. How about you, Selina? What's the moment that you're proud of? That was going to be my answer because we're the same person. But another really fun part was the song and collaborating with Jason to get the song and thinking of like a melody that felt both Hanukkah and Christmas and that's, we're, you know, musical theater majors. So that was really fun to do. What's your writing process like working together? Well, we physically write together, like we sit together. We pretty much talk out loud the story. We'll say the dialogue as if we're the characters and we just workshop aloud. And I would say I usually type. We collaborate. We'll sit across from each other and collaborate on final draft so that we both can see everything changing live. And then every time we finish a scene like Marissa said, we'll reread it out loud. So it's basically like a second draft before we move on. Yeah. So we're both like saying the dialogue out loud as we're writing it and then rereading it too. And we usually write at a coffee shop and we do like to be out, have some activity around. We don't do well just like sitting in our apartment. We get distracted. We do better earlier. So we usually start at like nine o'clock. We'll ride our bikes to eat your blood moving to get to the coffee shop and then work for about four hours and then a break and then maybe another two, three hours on. And we try to like put, we try to map out what we're going to write before we write it so that we'll know when it'll be done as opposed to just being like, we'll just take our time and enjoy it. Like we're like, we're going to do four cards a day to get this done by X-Tate. How has your writing process evolved or changed over the course of what has it, as long as it's been the last like 15 years or something, 15 years? Yeah. How long has your writing process evolved? You know, it's funny. I feel like it hasn't shifted too much other than the fact that we used to sit side by side and now we sit across from each other. And like hopefully it got, we've gotten better as writers. Yeah. Our process has always been pretty similar to what it is now. I think we're more, we outline much more heavily now. Like I think our outlines used to be like, this kind of happens and now we know every beat and what the theme is before we go to write the script. How have you maintained like a good working relationship over all this time? Well, we're best friends first and family. We love each other. We've been through so much together. So I think at our core, that's most important to us. So we always, I mean, like, like Selena said, we ride our bikes and as we hop on our bikes to ride away, we say like, I love you. Good job. We end pretty much every day saying that to each other. And we get annoyed with each other and we'll be like fighting for an idea. But like we always, we either will be like, okay, you can have this one and like come back to it later and be like, do I was, I just annoyed in the moment. Do I really care about that one wording of something? And you never really do. So it's like, I think compromise and like letting the other person have a moment. We're both really good at being like, I'm not going to fight this battle. Yeah, we get in collaborative or creative fights, but we for the most part share our brain and it's like, like Selena said, we come back to it the next day. We know we were fighting over, but we don't even necessarily remember who was fighting for what side. So it's like, we don't let creative fights get us in real fights for them for the most part. I don't think we've gotten in very many actual fights that stemmed from a creative debate. What do you think the value is of table reads of having your scripts read? Do you do them as part of your process? Every script. We'll have a table read. We see so much value in table reads because you know, we read the scripts out loud just the two of us, but if we, we wrote it. So if someone else is reading even just the stage direction and they're fumbling on it, it's apparent that it's probably not written in the most organic or natural way of saying something. You can tell jokes aren't hitting. Like the Ned Flansery blah, blah, blah, Vontras. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, okay, maybe that one's hard. Or like even after, after you have a read through people have thoughts and notes and like you'll hear things. We usually have an assistant come like a writer's assistant come. Someone we're mentoring, someone we're teaching from school come and do check marks. Every time something gets a laugh, we write comedy and then we'll go back through and we'll look at pages and be like how many laughs per page and does it start to lag, you know? So it's like a joke punch purpose. And also people have ideas and notes that make your script. Collaborating, that's why we're partners, is the most important piece of, I think, any creative endeavor. So a couple other things on my mind. One being one of the things when we first met that was so inspiring and motivating for me and something that I think is more important than ever is the idea of not waiting for someone else to give you permission to be a storyteller. And especially with the industry contracting with some of the issues that the industry is facing right now. People are, you know, even saying things like survive till 25, which is heartbreaking, because we can be telling stories every day and we can be finding ways to, you know, create our own content and build our teams that can do the things that we don't want to do or aren't good at doing. So you both did that earlier on in your careers to create Forrestum and are you still doing that today? We didn't totally do it with Forrestum. That was a traditional studio job where we pitched on an idea and they paid for it and made it happen and did all the hiring. But it surrounded us by influencers. So seeing them create their own work and also a lot of comedians like John Nalheiser who did the reading. I think being surrounded by people who make their own things, you get inspired and that definitely led us to starting to make our own stuff. But I include Forrestum in what I'm talking about because it wasn't just waiting for an audition. It was actually creating a project, whether you filmed it yourself or whether you sold it, you still took that initiative. Totally. And I feel like especially with the impact of what self-taping is done and how many more people are seen for roles and we hardly get in the room anymore and there's so little transparency around the casting process that it feels like a lottery. Every audition is now a lottery and that's not necessarily sustainable. So I'm constantly encouraging people to create their own stories, their own projects, whether they sell them, make them themselves, whatever. So I'd love to hear advice for people with that and your thoughts on where the industry is right now. Yeah, I mean it's something that we're still learning to do and getting the courage to do. I think a lot of people feel scared that if they create something it has to be perfect, you know? Or even good. Yeah, it has to be good. And we're starting to really see the value in the process and enjoying the process and enjoying the journey. And every single time you create something, you know, you're just striving to be better and to learn something and to enjoy the people that you're working with and surround yourself with a crew that you hope to work with again and again. So we see so much value in that but it is hard. I think honestly we sold for someone we were 25 years old. It was the first professional writing job we had and like Selena said, it was more of a typical studio job where our budgets, while they were small for a half hour show, they were still in the millions. And so going from that to scaling it back and being like, okay, what's a five page short that we can budget under $5,000 and film it ourselves, it felt like so much pressure going from something, you know, very glossy and clean to kind of doing it on our own. So it's something we're still kind of learning. Same with like, you know, your team, your reps giving you ideas. Like, oh, you know, it's rom-coms right now is what everyone's like. Yeah, the mandates. We really need a rom-com and it's like, by the time you write a rom-com, it's going to be something else. So like you got to do what, like go for it and like write a rom-com but at the same time, write something that you want to tell like we really wanted to do this hybrid store that nobody asked for. And also like, I would also say OWA is open writing assignments. Sometimes you get these offers for these jobs that like 40 people are pitching on that you don't own. So you have to spend a lot of time on something that you might like have been doing for no reason. But you should do that. Like you should do everything because it's a good exercise for your creativity. It might lead to something else. You could always turn it into something. And like, when you say where is the industry going, like those are the things that are getting made right now. So like in addition to making your own stuff and putting them up on stage, you're like turning it into a like, what you're doing with these read-throughs, you know, sound designing them and making it so you're listening to the movie. Like that's what you have to do is create new ways of getting your material, original material, heard and seen. And to make money, do those OWA's and do both. So how can people support you? What do you have going on that people can support? My bad. This is totally muffled. It wasn't even, it wasn't good advice. Okay. How can people support you? How can they find you and how can they support you? Um, you can find us on the gram. I'm Marissa El-Reed. And I'm Selena W. Spelled out. And we just actually wrapped, speaking of creating our own opportunities, an independent pilot that we filmed. We crowdsourced 70,000 dollars to film this pilot. So you could also check out our Instagram page for that, which is at stepfront underscore show. There it is. If you want to see what making your own, that's a show that we pitched that like nobody bought. And like, we're like, you know what, they just don't see it. We got to go make it. And also for ourselves. Like sometimes if you have something you love and everyone says no, like go make it, you never know what the next iteration of it will be. Nothing's ever dead because everyone ends up working at different companies. Like the people that said no won't be there in a year. So never say die. Since this is coming out around Christmas, I'd love to have each of you share a message for this Christmas Hanukkah hybrid season. You go first. I say, like be present. Let the present be your present. Try and like, not be on your phones this holiday season and not focus on whatever anyone else is doing and really enjoy where you are. And I say, do what makes you happy. You know, the holiday season can be also a hard time. So do what makes you happy, whether or not that's flying and being stressed out and doing everything perfect. Just literally do what makes you happy and it makes you feel cozy and eat all the good treats. I'm so, so glad we got a chance to do this together. Thank you so much for talking with us and for allowing us to bring the story to life in a way. Yeah, thank you. You're the best.
