Terence Winter
Appearances
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
more people than the Iraqi army at the time, I think was the, the statistic. He had a bar in my neighborhood. So by osmosis, I just kind of knew those guys. I also just became fascinated with crime and criminals. Actually, somebody asked me this, like, what was the first thing? And it sounds quaint now, but it was the movie Oliver.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I loved the idea of being part of that gang of pickpockets that was like, I wanted to be the, I wanted to be the awful Dodger. Oh, yeah. That looks so cool to me. And right around that time, I read Abby Hoffman had this book called Steal This Book. Of course. Yeah. Which was my Bible. And it was the first time I was like, oh, wow, you can scam shit. And then the sting came out.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And I was like, oh, my God, using your brain to psych people out and get what you want. And I just became fascinated with the idea of using psychology or psychology. human nature to sort of, you know, get my way through the world. And I just sort of became that guy and that kid, you know, who's always, even to this day, my initial instinct, if I'm presented with a problem,
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I always think of what's the way to scam my way through this. And I go, yeah, you can just pay it. You can just pay the bill. You don't need to do this. Right, right, right. But that's right where I go. What lie do I tell to get? And I go, that's you from when you're 15 years old. Wow. It was so ingrained.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I think so, yeah. When I saw that pilot, my agent at the time sent it to me. And, you know, like most people, I thought, opera? What is this? And I don't even think I finished watching it. And I was, like, trembling. I was like, I know these guys. I know these people. I know how they talk. I know how they think. I called him up. I said, you've got to get me on this show.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Yeah. And yeah, that I love. I love that stuff. And it's like all the fun of of the mafia with none of the danger. Yeah. It's like I say why people ride roller coasters. It's like you feel like you're about to die, but you're not actually going to die. How exhilarating. So writing about it, you know, was much preferable for me.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Yeah. I mean, I was given a book by HBO called Boardwalk Empire about the history of Atlantic City. And they said, maybe there's a TV series in here. OK, the history of Atlantic City. That sounds great. But on the way out the door, they said, oh, Martin Scorsese is attached to that book. And I was like, oh, OK, well, that's a different story. I will find the TV series in here. You're right.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
So I started reading and there was a chapter about this guy named Nucky Johnson, who I later fictionalized as Nucky Thompson. But Nucky was the corrupt treasurer of Atlantic City during the prohibition era, where, you know, you have a corrupt politician in charge of a city on the eastern seaboard where all the alcohol comes through.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And suddenly overnight, he was friends with Lucky Luciano and Arnold Rothstein and Al Capone and everybody else. I went, this is the series, this guy, this era. And I was like, I love the 20s. You know, that snappy, fast talking 1920s stuff. I've always been fascinated with that kind of dialogue.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
The era, you know, was also interesting to me, too, is that even though it's 100 years ago, it still felt modern. People dressed in suits. They went out to restaurants. They talked on the telephone. They drove in cars. You know, it still felt cool. It still felt like accessible. It wasn't like 10 years earlier where it felt like, you know, Downton Abbey. But this was modern.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
You know, you could wear some of those clothes today. Yeah. And I said, wow, this is such a great setup. And it's really not really been explored in TV or film. So when I went to meet, I'll call him Marty because I know him and I know it sounds douchey, but... That's his name. When I went to meet Marty, when I went to meet Mr. Scorsese, and believe me, that's what he called him initially.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
He was like, oh, this is great. I've never done anything in this era before. So once he gave me the blessing, you know, we were off to the races and then, you know, the real work started. I had to, you know, we had a protagonist who was like 50 years old in 1920. So I was like, okay, so he was born in 1870. So... What books did he read? What was his pop culture references?
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
What was happening in 1920? There's the war. World War One just ended. He had all these guys coming home. Women just got the right to vote. Prohibition itself. What were the movies? So it's like a ton of research. You know, also, how do people actually talk? I'm sure they didn't all say 23 Skidoo every five minutes. Do the Charleston was like every time you ever see anything in the 20s. Yeah.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
everybody's doing the fucking Charleston. I was like, did they do, is there any other songs written between 1920 and 1930? And it's funny. I mean, I wanted to do a thing where, you know, it was like that Nucky at some point says, if I hear the Charleston one more time, I'm going to kill somebody. And it actually didn't come out till 1924 anyway. So we didn't even touch on it until way late.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
But yeah, it was just sort of, once I started doing the research, it was just fascinating. Not, not just all the other stuff, but the prohibition stuff itself was so eyeopening. In terms of the history of how it how it even came to be. And then what a disaster it became. You know, the single biggest thing that made criminals millionaires overnight. And it was like outlawing turkey sandwiches.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Right. Most people didn't give like, wait, what? I've been drinking beer my whole life now. I can't do it. Fuck you. I'm going to keep doing this. And just so many failed consequences of that law.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Yeah, it was a perfect storm. I mean, yeah, you're at war with Germany and now suddenly, you know, coleslaw is Liberty cabbage and hamburgers are Liberty sandwiches. And I mean, I think half the brewers got shut down. And I got where it came from. You know, there were... It was alcoholism was devastating.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
You know, the cliche is the dad, you know, got paid on Friday and then you didn't see him and spent all his money at the bar. And, you know, and your family went destitute in days before social programs or even before AA was a thing, I guess. So there was a real it was a real problem.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Not at all. Not at all. If we were to cast the real we were to cast somebody who looked like Nucky Johnson, Jim Gandolfini would have actually been perfect. Nucky was a big, burly, bald headed guy.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
You know, it started with Marty. You know, we said, all right, who are we going to get to do this? And, you know, I said, well, this is what the real guy looked like. And Marty said, well, no one's ever heard of this guy, which is also funny because when I went down to do my research in Atlantic City, the real Nucky between like 1910 and 1930 was hands down the most powerful guy in Atlantic City.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Everybody knew him. Nothing moved without Nucky. And when I went down initially and talked to old timers and people, have you ever heard of Nucky Johnson? No, never heard of him, never heard of him. After the show, oh, yeah, Nucky, my uncle worked for Nucky. Suddenly everybody knew who he was, but nobody knew who this guy was. So Marty very correctly said, it doesn't matter, we can cast anybody.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And then he just said, well, who? Let's just name actors we like. Ed Helms. Yeah, Ed Helms was not available. Not available. And I said, well, Steve Buscemi. I always love Steve. And he goes, oh, I love Steve Buscemi. And we rattled off a couple of other names. And then he's like, all right, whatever. And a couple of days later, Marty called me up.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
He said, I can't stop thinking about Steve for this. And I said, yeah, me too. I said, isn't that crazy? He says, yeah, yeah. And it's funny, even Steve, when I called him, he knew he was in the running. And when I called him to tell him he got the role, I said, Steve, you know, we're really excited. We want to offer you this role.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And he said, hey, look, you know, it was really just an honor to be considered. And I said, Steve, No, we're giving you the role. And he's like, what? Because I've been preparing myself for two weeks to not get this. I didn't even hear you. I didn't even let that register. I said, yeah, no, you got it. We're doing this. And he's like, holy shit. Oh, wow.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And then, of course, you know, he went on, you know, I think he won the Screen Actors Guild a couple of times in a row and Emmy nominations. And, you know, people just loved him. He totally sold it and pulled it off. Obviously, he's Steve Buscemi.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I loved all the wardrobe stuff, the hair stuff. One of the things I loved was a little detail that in somewhere in 1916, the Gillette company invented the safety razor. Up until that point, men shaved themselves with a straight razor. So facial hair was a big thing. So a lot of guys had beards and mutton chops and all these crazy, everybody had facial hair up until 1917.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Suddenly that was the safety razor came out. So young people, started looking at facial hair as, oh, yeah, that's your dad. That's your grandpa. So we somewhere around season two, I would start seeing young people with mustaches in the crowd of extras or on the show. And I mentioned it to our hair person a few times. And I mentioned it to our extras casting person.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I said, do not send me any young men with facial hair. And it kept popping up and it started to drive me crazy. So I actually got the yearbook from Princeton University of 1922. And I went into the hair department and I said, find me one man in this book with facial hair. And there was not one college student that had a mustache or a beard in 1922.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I said, that's the level of accuracy we need to have here. And they did. I had the A-plus team of every department head, hair, makeup, wardrobe, music. It shows. Production design, just crazy details. Yeah, you can tell. You know, like wardrobe is like, you know, what drives me crazy, if you see a show set in 1920, everybody's dressed like it's 1920.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
You know, I don't know about you, but I have, you know, I have guest jeans from the 90s probably that I still have. Actually, my wife has called me on shit like that a couple of times. Like, you've got to, you know, you've got to get rid of it. So not everybody dresses like it's 2024. Most people don't.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
You know, if you're really hip and maybe you're in New York or L.A., maybe you do, but you sure don't. And if you're a working class guy in Atlantic City, you dress like it's 1893. Yeah. You know, so I needed we needed a smattering of that. And everybody took such pride in it, too. I remember even once a big debate about a chain link fence.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
You know, I didn't even bring it up, but a production designer, he said, you know, we had a chain link fence somewhere. And he said, before you say anything, yes, they had chain link fences in 1920. They were invented in 1905. I was like, OK. Take it easy. He goes, I didn't know myself and I had to check this out. But yeah, they had chain link fences back then. So yeah, like stuff like that.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
In the book Boardwalk Empire, Nelson Johnson fictionalized a meeting between the real Nucky and a woman from the neighborhood who came to ask to get her husband a job. And he said, this is the kind of thing Nucky would do. You know, people worked in the hotel business in the summer months. It was great. But during the winter, people were out of work.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And if your husband, you know, drank and didn't have money, you know, you were going without food. So He talked about a little fictional encounter between a neighborhood woman, Nucky, and Nucky would give her $50 to tide her over for the month, whatever. And I said, that's interesting. That's an interesting relationship. I wonder who that is. Who is that woman?
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And then I, you know, I just took it from there. Like, OK, what if what if he's interested romantically and what if her husband is a creep and he beats her up and Nucky gets rid of him? And where does that go? So that became Margaret. Jillian Darmody just came. You know, I knew Jimmy Darmody was coming home from World War One.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And this was, again, one of those happy or not happy accidents of prohibition. World War I ended and you had a lot of disenfranchised soldiers coming home after horrific experiences overseas. And I think most Americans, even to this day, have no idea how incredibly brutal World War I was. Trench warfare and just absolutely just horrific. Guys,
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
living up to their up to their waist in filth and rat infested water and, you know, just shooting at each other. And for no they didn't know why they were there, but it was really horrible. So a lot of these guys came home and chemical warfare. Oh, chemical. Yeah, absolutely.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And, you know, and a lot of guys came home in our character on the show, Richard Harrow, who is the guy with the half face and the mask, you know, played by Jack Houston. And That was the first time that, you know, battlefield medicine got to the point where you could keep people alive. And well, because it was trench warfare, there were so many then inordinate amount of facial injuries.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Guys would poke their heads up from a trench and boom, get half of their face blown off. Normally, you know, 20 years earlier, you're dead. But now battlefield medicine got to the point where you could keep those people alive. So those guys are coming home alive. So thousands of guys are coming home with facial injuries, literally like half their face blown off or your jaw blown off.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And then they had to get into society. So there was an artist in New England, a woman who was a sculptor, who thought, I wonder if I could do like a half mask to match their face. So these guys could at least go out in public, go out at night and just go. And that's where that character came from. But again, it was just these little details in the research.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Yeah. Yeah. Who fascinating character.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Yeah. I mean, the one thing I loved is that when Prohibition ended, she went to work for a wine company. It's like and even like she wasn't averse to having a drink herself. But it's like once she became like, OK, you know, I'm doing this. She was really staunchly trying to enforce those laws. And of course, her bosses were just unbelievably corrupt.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Harry Daugherty, Warren Harding, that whole administration was just like, you know, you can't. And that's another thing that just surprised me about the era. You know, again, it's, you know, the idea of corrupt politicians. These guys were selling shit right out of the White House.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I mean, you literally, you know, there were bootleggers who were showing up at the Capitol with suitcases full of stuff, selling it, you know, selling their stuff to congresspeople. And like you could buy anything you wanted from Harry Daugherty and his guy, Jess Smith. And just another fascinating relationship. So.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Yeah. And a real guy. Right. Yeah, I mean, the more we would research this, the more incredible it became. Another detail, too. Al Capone's brother, one of his brothers, moved out to the West and became a sheriff. And he was like a cowboy sheriff who would arrest bootleggers. Yeah. And we're like, we've got to get this on the show. And we could never work it in.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
But it's like just these little odds and ends. You're like, holy shit, this actually was real.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Or George Ramis, too, another one, like one of the craziest stories you hear about, like an incredibly successful defense attorney becomes like the biggest bootlegger ever and then loses everything, goes to jail, and then his wife dies. Completely steals all of his money in conjunction with a federal agent who she has an affair with.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And then he gets out of jail and then murders her and then is found not guilty by reason of insanity. He represented himself with a temporary insanity plea. And it's like, if I made that up, you'd be like, come on. And this absolutely all happened.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Yeah, he's like, yeah, why would you think you'd have to do that? But, yeah, I mean, I guess it's the same principle now. Like, you go, okay, well, I don't care how you earned your money. Even if it's illegal, you still have to pay taxes on it. Yeah, exactly. And that's, I guess, how they get, you know, they get Al Capone, you know, for tax evasion.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
It's like, I know you said you were a furniture salesman, but you've got a million dollars here, so okay. Yeah.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I grew up in Marine Park, Brooklyn, which is an area that I usually have to describe by its proximity to other neighborhoods in Brooklyn that people have heard of. You may have heard of Sheepshead Bay, which actually was a an integral neighborhood in terms of prohibition because boats used to come right in there. And that's kind of near Coney Island.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I'm not a victim, I'm a survivor.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
So, you know, basically blue collar family, blue collar neighborhood. I actually started to be an auto mechanic in high school and that didn't stick. I took a detour into the deli business, eventually figured out that I needed to go to college. eventually went to law school, practiced law for two years, hated it.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
So I have to assume formulas two through five were varying degrees of how bad is this going to be? Formula 4 is like diarrhea. That's not enough. We've got to really get blisters. Formula 5 knocks you out for like a week. Yeah, exactly. Formula 6, you're dead. Formula 6, you're not drinking anymore.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
So, you know, I was very aware of the fact that bootleggers would incorporate, sometime it got to the point where they'd mix turpentine, they'd mix wood alcohol, you know, all of which, you know, into their shitty, you know, home manufactured stuff. And that was killing people and making people blind. Sure. There was a rash of people who went blind.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I think it was in New York City, like 18 people over the course of a weekend who all drank the same bootleg alcohol. I'm wondering now if was that some of the stuff that the government was actually now sneaking into the criminal, like how were people getting government poisoned liquor?
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And then my deep, dark secret was I had always wanted to be a sitcom writer, which was something that, you know, on the East Coast in the 70s, you dare not tell your friends that you wanted to go to Hollywood and be anything.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Formaldehyde too, is when we actually did that on the show, actually showing somebody using it and anything. And it's interesting too, like this is the, people don't realize like the advent of the mixed drink came because of prohibition because the bootleg alcohol was so vile, they had to start mixing it with fruit juices and stuff.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
So all this stuff that we know today, you know, up until prohibition, it was, you know, straight whiskey, beer, you know, it was just straight alcohol.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
You know, and you do you just drank it to get drunk quickly, I guess. I don't know. There's a lot of sipping going on. But it was, you know, suddenly all the drinks that you hear about today, you know, are, you know, come from the need to make this stuff palatable. And what killed me, too, is I love the details, the lengths bootleggers would go to in terms of.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
creating false labels, getting the bottle, filling it up with alcohol. There was one detail that blew my mind that they would create a whole false crate of alcohol, put them in fishing nets, like a bunch of them, and then take the fishing nets and dunk it in the water, leave it in seawater for a couple of hours and come out.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
You know, you dump this big fishing net full of crates that say Johnny Walker or whatever it was, and there's still seaweed on it. And you go, nobody would ever think you've fake this, but the lengths they would go to to make stuff that was fake look real. You know, wow. I mean, and that appealed to the con man in me. I go, wow, what a brilliant little touch. You can still smell the salt water.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
It's obviously came out of off a boat in the ocean. Yeah, no, that's made in some guy's garage.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
But yeah, it's like, wow, that's, that's, you know, and that's, I think what people don't realize that criminals, 24 hours a day is people thinking about how to do this shit. You know, it's pretty, pretty incredible. And even the hypocrisy too, I'm thinking like, as you were talking, you know, the whole, the Catholic church, you know, it's sacrificial wine. Sure. Suddenly...
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
They had unbelievable demand for sacrificial wine. And the Jewish churches suddenly, you know, everybody was a rabbi because there was an exclusion. Like you could do it for religious things or doctors. How many doctors were running prescriptions?
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Just need another order. And then selling it out your back door. And how many, you know, neighborhood people had stills in their kitchen? You know, you could make, you know, extra money by, you know, you'd have guys like entire tenement buildings. Everybody had a little still. And, you know, you could make an extra 20 bucks a week in 1920. That was a fortune.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
That was your grocery money, I'm assuming, or more. And, you know, local gangsters would just come around and pick everything up and sell it. And this went on for years. And again, you know, all unintended consequences of this. And again, back to me, back to what the point I made before about this making millionaires out of criminals overnight.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
This is how organized crime infiltrated legitimate business. They needed a place to put all that money. And it's like, great, let's buy trucking companies, which they initially did to transport all this stuff. Then it was like, you know, let's buy warehouses, let's buy real estate, let's get into other things. And this...
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Over that 12-year period enabled them to infiltrate every other area of American life.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Yeah. I mean, up until prohibition, most organized crime was, you know, gambling, prostitution, extortion, things of that nature that were, I guess, lucrative, but not. This was just a windfall that they couldn't have even possibly predicted. And I mean, I guess I'm certainly not the first person to make the observation that the drug business today is exactly the same thing.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
No, I mean, there's so many details you brought up that I hadn't heard of. And it's it's again, it's just endlessly fascinating.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
My pleasure is so fun to do. I can't wait to hear season three. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks so much, Ed. Take care.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Because it's very difficult for me to talk with that. I do hold the record for the most uses of the word fuck in a movie, Wolf of Wall Street, which I'm very proud of. So it's very hard for me to have a conversation. So that'll slip out occasionally. Anyway, once I came out of the closet as a writer, I just said, I'm moving to L.A. and I'm going to figure this out.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I showed up here in 1991 and I just kind of plunged in and I started out, you know, attempting to be a sitcom writer and then eventually just morphed into drama that kind of had comedy in it. So I just got incredibly lucky and still lucky to be doing that kind of stuff.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I was a lawyer in Manhattan. My only ambition as a kid was I wanted to be rich because we were not. And the only two jobs I knew that could make you rich were doctor and lawyer. The doctor was out. And I remember there was a quote by Benjamin Franklin. And he said, pour thy person to thy head and no man can take it from you. And, you know, get an education, basically.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Yeah, that's a beautiful quote. I like that. Yeah, I love that. So I took creative writing and eventually I stumbled onto journalism. And, you know, again, you know, my ambition was to make money. That was what a good job was. The concept of liking your job was something, you know, you know, you just want to make money. So lawyer was the thing.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
So I had another professor, journalism professor named Jerry Schwartz, who was a managing editor at the Associated Press. And I asked him to write me a recommendation for law school. And he did. He wrote me this glowing recommendation. He gave it to me in a manila envelope. And he said, there's another letter in there for you personally. And that letter said, please don't go to law school.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Please be a writer. And I was like, holy shit. This is the second adult who's told me I'm a good writer.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Actually, I should. It might have saved me a lot of time. Meanwhile, all my friends who became auto mechanics were making a fortune. And they all thought I was the biggest idiot in the world, Joe College. I'm already now in the whole student loan-wise from NYU. And I said, all right, there's only one way forward, and that's the law school.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
So I did that, went at night, worked for Merrill Lynch during the day as a legal assistant to one of the lawyers who counseled the trading people, and graduated. Got a job at a big Manhattan law firm, passed the New York bar, the Connecticut bar. And my first week there, I realized I had made a grave, grave error. I hated it. I didn't, I just couldn't give a shit about any of it.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Within about a week and a half, I was sneaking out during the day, going to movies, bookstores. I just, two years in, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I just didn't want to go there. So it was really, you know, it was very, you know, really- Yeah, yeah, it was great. I had everything I thought I wanted. I had an assistant. I had an office. I had a diploma written in Latin.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I was like, holy shit, look at me. I'm a lawyer. And was that, did you go to NYU Law School also? No, I went to St. John's Law School, which is the Harvard of Queens. Sure. And I was in the top 5% of the bottom third of my class. So I was very proud of that. Again, it was like, I wasn't even thinking in terms of, are you happy?
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And, you know, it was, I was like 29 at this point. And I had that moment like, OK, you were going to either jump out a window in 10 years from the depression of working somewhere you just don't like. And you'll never be good at this because you don't like it. What do you want to do when you wake up in the morning? And I was like, all right, well.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Maybe I'd be a salesman, you know, because I like to bullshit. And I was like, all right. And there's a little voice that said, come on, it's not salesman. What is it? And it's like, all right, well, an ad copywriter. Maybe I could do that. And then even the voice like, come on, go deeper. And then it's finally I want to go to fucking Hollywood and write sitcoms. And.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Once I said that out loud, it was like everything changed. But then I thought, all right, well, I remember this bit in Mr. Saturday Night with Billy Crystal, where he talked about the idea of you're either living room funny or you're really funny. You know, you can be funny with your friends. And yeah, I'm the funniest guy in the group. Can you do that for real?
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And I thought, all right, well, I think I can. And I thought the fastest way to figure this out is write my own material and do stand up. And if I can get people to laugh, then I'm legit. I wasn't particularly interested in being a stand-up, but I wanted to see, am I crazy or am I funny? Or I really am funny.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
So for a couple of months, right around that time, I was doing stand-up at Catch a Rising Star. And this is what year? The comic strip.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
Yeah. Oh yeah. And it was interesting too, because it was like this young woman named Sarah Silverman. Sure. Holy shit. Chris Rock was still around, you know, I was, well, these are the real deal, you know, and I was doing open mics and watching these people and going, oh man, you know, like a young Sarah Silverman was just great to see that. And then to watch her career after that was great. Wow.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
You know, I did OK. You know, I get on at two in the morning, the three people. And it's OK. I said something. They laughed. Great. That worked. This worked. And then once I once I said, OK, I'm not crazy. Then I was like, all right, I'm doing this.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And for anybody who's never done it, I mean, you know, it's funny if you think like they say, like one of the biggest fears people have is speaking in public. Yeah. Speaking in public with the agenda of also trying to get people to laugh. Yeah. Is like and it's funny you do a bit or you say a joke and people don't laugh. It's like getting punched in the face. Oh, yeah.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
It is like it is no sound louder than people not laugh. Yeah. They say you think they're going to. Yeah.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I did not know a soul. I literally sold everything I had. I was not in a relationship at the time. And I just showed up here on May 8th, 1991. I got a room in a horrible SRO hotel. It was actually in MacArthur Park. And now I was like, all right, I have to figure out. So I went down to the Writers Guild and this was just complete luck.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
They had a list of new agents or young agents who were actually looking for clients. And on that list was a guy I went to law school with who sat four seats away from me. Wow. And his name was Doug Viviani. He's not an agent, so don't call him. But I called him and I said, what are you doing? He said, are you an agent?
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
He said, no, I'm a real estate attorney and a client of mine wrote a book on real estate and I use the fee to get bonded as an agent. But I don't know anything about being an agent. I said, well, congratulations, you're my agent. What are you talking about? I'm in L.A. I'm writing. I'm trying to be a writer. I need an agent.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I said, so I'm going to create the Doug Viviani agency out of a mailbox, et cetera. And we're going to get letterhead and a phone mail. And I'm going to submit my work onto your letterhead. And if I get anything, you get 10% like an agent. And he said, great. So that's what I did.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
He was like, you know, the guy on Charlie's Angels. So I did that and I photocopied all my scripts and this is back, you know, This is now like 1992. When you could do this, I would just pull up to the Warner Brothers lot, for example, and say, yeah, I'm the messenger from the Doug Viviani agency. I have some scripts I need to drop off. And I just hit every sitcom office in L.A.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And there was like 30 of them at the time. And I addressed, you know, here's my scripts to the showrunner from an agent. And now at least my scripts are in the building where theoretically, if lightning struck, I could at least have a shot.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And I don't know, about a week or so into it, I got a there's a phone message on the Doug Viviani voicemail line. And it's a woman said, yeah, hi, my name is Winifred Hervey Stallworth. I'm the executive producer of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I read Terry Winter's stuff. I'm interested in having him in maybe to pitch. So I said, oh, my God. So I called Doug in New York and it was a Friday.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
He was gone for the weekend. I was like, shit, I got to wait till Monday now. And I was like, you know what? Doug doesn't really know anything about being an agent. I'll just be Doug. And I called her back.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
This is so Donald Trump of you. Yeah. John Barron calling. So, yeah. And I have no idea what agents did or said. The only agent I ever saw was Reuben Kincaid on The Partridge Family. And he didn't seem to do much. But I figured, you know what? Let me just – I'm just going to wing it. And she said, yeah, yeah. We read his stuff. He's really, you know, talented. I said, oh, yeah. Kid's amazing.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
So does he have like one more teenage oriented script? Because, you know, Fresh Prince is kind of a teenage show. I said, yeah, he just finished an incredible episode of The Wonder Years, but I don't have a copy of it. I won't have it until. So I'm trying to calculate in my head how long is it going to take me to write a Wonder Years episode. So it was Friday. I can get it to you two months later.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
late Tuesday afternoon, if that works. She goes, yeah, fine, great. So hung up the phone and cranked out a Wonder Years episode, went in, gave it in. Now I was the messenger, I was the lawyer, I was everybody. And they had me in to pitch an idea and that became my foot in the door. I sold them on an idea that ultimately never went anywhere. But that was my first shot.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And a little after that, I got into a thing called the Warner Brothers Sitcom Writers Workshop, which they used to do. They would take 15 people from a pool of hundreds around the country and then put you through a program. At the end of it, they called me and they said, we have an interesting situation. We have a show we think you'd be great for. It's not a sitcom.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And this isn't a reflection of your sitcom writing. It's a drama that has comedy in it. And I said, well, why me? And they said, well, it's about a blue collar guy who's a lawyer who works for a big stuffy law firm. Do you think you could do that? And I was like, if I don't get this fucking job, I said, yes, basically my life story. So, yeah.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
And that was my actual first staff job as a show called The Great Defender with Michael Rispoli, Peter Krause, Richard Kiley, who is man of La Mancha. And thank God that I've been working ever since that show. Wow. Incredible.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I was not taking no for an answer.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter
I mean, yeah. I mean, I grew up when I was 13. I started working for a butcher shop that was owned by Paul Castellano, who's the head of the Gambino family. When I was 16, I worked in an illegal card game run out of a synagogue in our neighborhood that was run by a guy named Roy DeMeo, who's the subject of a book called Murder Machine. He and his crew in the early 80s killed