The Bitter Script Reader Revealed!
By: Scott Myers
Tags: Hollywood, Screenwriting, Writing, Screenplay, Business

You launched your blog about the same time I did some 12 years ago. What inspired you to begin The Bitter Script Reader blog and why your decision to be an anonymous blogger?

This was early 2009. By that point I’d been a reader for three and a half years, plus the two years I worked in development. If memory serves, I’d been saying for a year or two that I should write a book about screenwriting from the perspective of a script reader. At that time there were a ton of How To books, and Save the Cat was making a huge splash, but I had an angle that no one else had cornered yet… or so I thought. At some point in 2008, I saw exactly that sort of book on the shelves at Barnes & Noble and felt like I missed my window.

But I’d also seen a number of people who had gotten opportunities to write for TV (or at least get their foot in the door) after they became known writing ABOUT TV. This included a couple people at Television Without Pity and a few Star Trek reviewers I followed. At about the same time was when I discovered Amanda Pendolino’s blog about being an aspiring TV writer and realized, “Hey, maybe this is a different way to reach the audience I thought I’d reach with my book.”

As to the decision of being anonymous, it just seemed like the best way to avoid a lot of headaches. Obviously there was the temptation to spill some dirt in the name of getting eyeballs on my writing, and it seemed dangerous to put my real name on it. But really it was more about I didn’t want anyone to tell me “you can’t write about that.” I figured if my bosses didn’t know I was writing, they couldn’t tell me no, and if the people reading it didn’t know who I was or where I worked, then there’d be no way anyone could claim I was reflecting badly on my employers if they DID find out I was writing this.

When you’re at the assistant level, you’re afraid anything you do will come back to haunt you. I just didn’t want to write a critique of a film or TV show and then two years later have it brought up in a job interview as a reason not to hire me. Having said that, I didn’t engage in cheap shots. I didn’t commit anything to the blog I wouldn’t stand behind if someone brought it up to my face. But when you’re at the level I was at, you don’t want to give someone even a tiny reason to discount you.

I never wanted “Guess who *I* am!” or “Guess where I work” to be any kind of draw for the blog. That seemed cryptic and gimmicky to me. I reasoned that if I DIDN’T become a big tease over that, no one would be terribly interested in trying to figure it out and there’d be no thrill to “unmasking” me. Nearly a dozen years later, I think I’m proven right on that count.

By the way, this is why I was able to sniff out Mystery Exec as a big fat fake as soon as his whole persona was “Betcha can’t figure out who I am!” Someone who was legitimately who that guy claimed to be would never have comported himself like that.

Oh, man, that whole “mystery” thing. Check out my blog post for a quick trip down memory lane. Plus, the original: Mystery Man on Film. But no one played with anonymity fire more than you did … and I’m talking about The Puppet where we could hear your voice and see an approximation of your appearance. How did that come about?

A friend of mine whose job involved online analytics came to me with the information that How-To YouTube videos were becoming popular and since YouTube monetization was pretty good at the time, it might be a viable extension of the Bitter Script Reader brand to do some videos. That led to the obvious dilemma — how do I appear in videos without revealing my face? I think “What if we did it with a puppet?” was my idea, and honestly I think the videos were a lot more interesting without my boring face in them.

The Puppet

I wish I’d found a way to be more clever with those videos, but writing is an inherently uncinematic subject. The interviews were fun to do, even though that meant I was spending upwards of an hour hiding under a table while my guest desperately tried to engage with a large head of felt.

You posted a lot of articles in the early years of your blog, then that decreased over time. Was that by choice or necessity? Related to working your way into and through the writers’ assistant universe?

It’s a lot of things that coincided at the same time. I had the experience of writing a blog post and then going through my archives to find I’d written an almost identical post a few years earlier. It’s one of those things where you start to run out of things to talk about and that happened to coincide with my first Writers PA job, so I’m sure that was factoring in.

And right after THAT was when my wife and I had our son, so THAT gobbles up a lot of time. There was a brief resurgence in 2017, when I realized I was more interested in doing deeper dives and longer series. That’s where my 16 Great TV Shows and my 13-part 13 Reasons Why series came from. For a while it felt like I was going to transition into that, but I got another job in TV and by then I was focusing more on writing, so the blog became a casualty of that.

Also, this was around the time I realize there were people who knew me very well on Twitter who had no idea I had a blog. Or there were some who knew about the blog, but hadn’t visited in years and had no idea I was mantaining it. All of that led me to the attitude that I was done writing just to maintain a three-times-a-week routine and I’d only post to the blog when I had something substantial to say. For the quick takes, Twitter seems to scratch the itch that I got from some of the shorter blog posts.

I think in general, blogging has been replaced by Twitter. It’s a shame, because I miss having written longer pieces, but I don’t know when I’d have to time to be posting the way I was during the first six years of the blog.

This is how long Bitter has been blogging — pictured here reading actual script with three-hole punch paper.

Speaking of Twitter, you have maintained an active presence there (@BittrScrptReadr) with 50K+ followers. How valuable do you think social media in general and Twitter specifically is for aspiring writers? How important has it been for your career advancement?

Twitter is the number one thing that I did for my career. Jeff Lieber, who was the first person to take a chance on me and hire me as the Writers’ PA on NCIS: NEW ORLEANS, was someone I met on Twitter. Matt Federman, who gave me my first writers’ assistant job on BLOOD & TREASURE, was someone I met on twitter. Even Greg Berlanti, who ultimately was responsible for me being hired as the writers’ assistant on SUPERMAN & LOIS, was someone I first connected with via Twitter.

And those are just the connections that led to jobs. There’s a massively longer list of friends, acquaintances and professional contacts who all started as people I met on twitter. I just started to list them and then I realized there were so many that I’d inevitably leave someone important out and I didn’t want to hurt any feelings. But through Twitter, I’ve built real relationships — often even friendships — with creators who I’ve admired for a long time. And every now and then it leads to something cool like when Jay Faerber and I were tweeting about HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET and HOMICIDE’s Reed Diamond jumps into the conversation with some cool info we didn’t know. And THAT led to Reed saying we should grab drinks sometime. Twitter was what let two HOMICIDE obsessives grab a drink with Detective Mike Kellerman.

It’s also great for networking at Comic-Con, where I love to come upon a writer or an actor and say, “We actually follow each other on Twitter” and then see their faces light up with delight when I answer their tentative “who are you?” with “I’m the Bitter Script Reader.”

Granted a lot of this took YEARS to get to that point, but it all started with just having something to contribute to the conversation on twitter and being interesting enough that people wanted to follow me. If you’re an aspiring writer, that’s how I’d tell you how to use Twitter. Don’t be weird, don’t say “hi” just to say hi. Just be interesting. Be outgoing. Don’t expect that every engagement will turn into a connection, but if you’re a good communicator, people will take notice.

What are some keys to being a good writers’ assistant?

You need to understand what your showrunner needs from the notes. You need to realize that often you are the ONLY person in that room who’s going to be there every day — people will rotate in and out as they go off on script or to set, the showrunner will pop in and out, but YOU are the constant. That means it’s essential for you to be the historian of the show and the collective memory of that room.

On top of that, you must understand how your showrunner’s mind works. Everyone in that room is there to service the showrunner’s vision. Obviously they’re going to bring a little of themselves to the show, and flesh out perspectives outside the showrunner, but the show is always going to be in the voice of the showrunner.

Matt Federman, the showrunner of BLOOD & TREASURE, and I are very similar in how our minds work. On top of that, Matt is one of the best people I’ve been in a room with at explaining his own internal story logic. He’s very open about what needs to be satisfied in his mind for a pitch to be viable. I spent two seasons on that show and so by year two I really understood the kind of pitches he’d go for and the kind that would be dead on arrival.

More than once in season two, while Matt was out of the room, someone would come up with a pitch and I’d pipe up to say, “I don’t think Matt will go for it because…” and then translate what was missing from it. Maybe it required a character to do something that I knew Matt didn’t like. Or maybe it was close to something I’d seen Matt discard in Season one. Sometimes it was just a case where Matt had specifically said, “I’m not into this idea” earlier in the season and everyone forgot about that. What I can tell you is that more than once, I predicted that a pitch would be shot down and often the reason it would die.

Eventually, when Matt was out of the room, our Co-EP started saying about the pitch that was on the table, “I want Adam to weigh in on this before we go further because he’s usually right about what Matt will think of it.”

Be the kind of assistant that the room knows as a gut check for the showrunner.

And also read my Writers’ Assistant Rules.

You published a post on your blog yesterday revealing your identity and detailing your status as a writers’ assistant. This is all great and having been someone who has been tracking your progress over the years via email, I am happy for you… and I suspect I’m speaking for a lot of other folks in Hollywood who are in your circle of friends and colleagues. Final question: What becomes of The Bitter Script Reader?

‘ve got a post coming up where I talk about how the live read of CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS feels like the culmination of the last 20 years of my life — from watching Greg Berlanti’s work in season 3 of DAWSON’S CREEK and being inspired to create my own show in college to writing a crossover that plays with so many of Greg’s characters and has Greg Berlanti himself involved. On top of that, I’m not just working on one of Greg’s shows, I’m working on SUPERMAN & LOIS! For a guy who’s been a fan of Superman since he could read, this year has been an incredible experience. I keep saying that it feels like I’m about to die and the universe decided to grant every Make-a-Wish I could possibly have.

So what becomes of Bitter after all that? Fairly early on, any effort at treating Bitter as a “character” fell away. His voice and my voice have been merged for a long time, if there ever was any difference.

I’m not going anywhere on Twitter. I have too many friendships there. Honestly, I don’t even think I’ll change my twitter name. “Bitter Script Reader” is my branding and after a dozen years of becoming known under that moniker, changing it to just “Adam Mallinger” would probably just confuse people. I’ve maintained a separate Twitter under my real name, and that’s mostly been limited to tweets and promotions of whatever show I happen to be working on at the time.

The way I see it, if you’ve been following Bitter, Bitter’s not going anywhere. My feed a month from now will probably look the same as it’s looked for years. For the people who are JUST fans of SUPERMAN & LOIS and want to follow me for any news about that show, there’s my “real” feed.

As for the blog, I imagine it’ll be in the state it’s been for the last three or four years. I’ll post there when I have something to say. Maybe there are a few stories that I’m freer to tell now that I’m not protecting my anonymity, but in the long run, this doesn’t change much beyond people having another name to call me.

And Scott, thank you. Thank you for being the first prominent screenwriting voice who put me on the map, and for being a good friend all these years. I’m glad we’ve been able to share in each other’s accomplishments over the years.

Since I suspect this interview might lead people to unearthing this old post on your site, I want to put on record for everyone that when I emailed you as Adam Mallinger for “Movies You Made” over a decade ago, I hadn’t yet revealed myself to you as Bitter. I don’t think you knew until a few years later that this was me.

Though I’ll admit, for a long time I wondered if someone would recognize my voice in that writing and this would end up being the loose thread that tripped me up.