TheCutPodcast: On our latest InHerShoes, stellabugbee talks to writer and CrazyExGirlfriend star Rachel Bloom about what makes a good writers’ room, “real” feminism, and the Twitter rage machine
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RACHEL: It’s really hard. The sheer amount of pages are mind boggling. When you’re writing a script or even a screenplay it’s a lot of pages, but it’s dialogue or action, so there’s a lot of spaces. You’re not filling a page in the same way with a book. You are filling pages. It’s really hard. I would say in order of difficulty … I would say giving birth is harder. Oh, wait. It was COVID. What’s the competition? No, let’s address this: It’s COVID, giving birth, and writing a book.
RACHEL: Here’s the thing: To me, it’s the perfect title because what we’re doing is a deconstruction of a trope. A lot of people say the show has a bad title. My counter is, “Okay. You’ve seen the show. What would you call it?” This is going to be only for listeners who see the show. You’d call it Lady in West Covina. You’d call it Rebecca — that’s already a Hitchcock movie.
STELLA: Yeah, I’ve seen that with the teenagers. I have teenagers and I’ve listened to their Zoom classes all day, and the teachers are extremely focused on mental health. I wish that they would play musical videos instead of classes sometimes, because it seems like a therapeutic way of dealing with some of these intense issues like the show does.
STELLA: Some people are raised bilingual, and I think of you as almost bilingual in musicals. I imagine you’re going through the world and you’re having an interaction, but in your head, you’re translating it into a musical-comedy act. Is that how it works for you? Yes, it’s feminist, but it’s also humanist. We always had empathy for every character on the show because that’s what feminism is — humanism. It’s seeing the value and the worth of every individual. What does any individual need to be happy? Women are 51 percent of the population of those individuals. There are definitely jokes on the show that I don’t know if we would make now, but that’s just more the overall culture that doesn’t really have to do with feminism, I don’t know.
RACHEL: Yeah, yeah. It’s hard to explain it in mathematical terms or even like, “Well, here’s the formula we used,” because it was always with our gut, of commenting on the thing, but also doing the thing. We did a song called “Who’s the New Guy” where we premiered this new character played by Scott Michael Foster named Nathaniel, who was this very conventionally attractive new, hot asshole boss.
STELLA: Slight segue to the idea of tribalism. I was thinking about the fact that you’re a new mom and you talk a lot in your book and in your work about the tribalism of junior-high-school life and being in and out and feeling like you can’t quite figure out your way in.
RACHEL: Well, credit where credit’s due, Aline Brosh McKenna was the showrunner of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, so what ended up happening was we were ordered to series very unexpectedly because we were a Showtime pilot that was passed on. We were being considered at the CW. Then we found out that CW didn’t like any of their pilots that came in for the fall that year. And we were being considered for fall. And then a day after [that] I heard that we were ordered to series. So we were quite behind.
RACHEL: I think that understanding when you get notes from anyone, they’re just trying to make the thing better. It’s hard a lot of times, because the people you get notes from aren’t writers, and they have so many mandates from their own bosses. “This is what we want for the network. Here’s the demos we should be appealing to.” That’s their job. It’s not their fault. So at the end of the day, people are just people.
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