Hey! It's your old friend Patrick Walsh! Remember me? I used to run a writing column here with the ingenious title "The Write Stuff?" (Check out all 25 previous posts here.) I answered your screenwriting questions, offered advice, and conducted interviews with film and television writers? I look like Brad Pitt, but with better abs? There you go. You remember. Anyhoo, when last we spoke I had been staffed on the FX comedy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and I'm still there. It's a dream job, and I intend to share my experiences on the show with you closer to the season premiere in September. But for now I want to tell you about a great way for you (yes, you!) to break in to the big time: NBC's Writers on the Verge program.

If this seems like a shameless advertisement, know that it's only because I myself am a graduate of the program and I absolutely loved it. I am NOT doing this because I am receiving money from anyone at NBC. (Though Lord knows if NBC would like to give me some money, I will gladly accept it. You hear me, Zucker? GLADLY.)

Now then. You've got questions. I've got answers.

Today we speak with comedian/actor/writer/director Michael Ian Black. Black's hilarious credits include MTV's The State, Comedy Central's Stella, and the cult classic Wet Hot American Summer. He's probably best known to the general public as being the standout quipper on VH1's "I Love the (Insert Decade Here)" specials. Black's latest project is Run Fatboy Run. He wrote the original screenplay for the film, which was directed by David Schwimmer and stars Simon Pegg, Hank Azaria, and Thandie Newton.

Cinematical: Would you tell our readers a bit about Run Fatboy Run?

Michael Ian Black: Sure. It's a lovely and funny romantic comedy about a guy who has never finished anything in his life who decides to run a marathon.

Cinematical: What inspired you to write the film?

MIB: I wanted to write something a little more mainstream than what I am normally known for. I had just written two screenplays that were more left of center and I wanted to challenge myself to try to write something that I thought would be a little more accessible.

Cinematical: Are you a marathon man? Why do people do this to themselves?

MIB: I've never run further than a couple miles. I have no idea why somebody would subject themselves to the agony of running for twenty-six miles. Particularly if they've got a car.

Hello everybody. You've probably been wondering where I have been the past few weeks. Wringing your hands, gnashing your teeth, drinking heavily. Constantly hitting "refresh," waiting for an update. Even if you haven't, just play along for me. I'm a needy man. Thank you.

When I started this column -- your #1 source for writing tips, advice, interviews, strike coverage, and life lessons -- I hoped the nice little hook would be that I am a writer trying to make it big myself. Well friends, after a year and a half of short-term gigs, false starts, near-misses, and one big ol' crushing strike -- my writing partner and I have finally crossed over. We just got staffed as writers on the FX comedy "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." It's a genuinely hilarious show, and one of my favorites on television. I couldn't be more excited.

And so "The Write Stuff" takes an interesting turn. I'm not going to have as much free time now, so it won't be a weekly thing anymore. But I would love to keep the column afloat with semi-regular interviews and Q&A. Please keep on leaving your questions in the comments or at my personal site. I'll get to each one eventually.

(Note: I'm stepping in for Patrick this week, but fear not -- our beloved Patty Walsh will be back next week with another installment of The Write Stuff.)

At 26, Gustin Nash was an aspiring screenwriter working in a Burbank mall -- hanging with a bunch of kids (what he calls the "mall sub-culture") -- watching movies, and looking to his father, a psychiatrist, for advice on the future. One night, while down in the dumps and unsure of his path in life, Gustin's father told him to make a list of things he wants to accomplish and next to each write down, "You can do it." Later on, in bed, Gustin dreamt up a new character -- one that, no matter what life threw at him, would always remain optimistic and open-minded. Thus, his tenth spec script was born ... and he called it Charlie Bartlett.

Little did he know at the time, but Charlie Bartlett would become Nash's first produced screenplay. And not only was the film made (with a cast that includes Anton Yelchin, Robert Downey Jr. and Hope Davis), but it's also heading to a theater near you this weekend. Cinematical spoke to Gustin about writing Charlie Bartlett, working alongside director Jon Poll on set and what it's like to watch your baby land on the big screen for the first time. Additionally, since I'm such a rabid Youth in Revolt fan, I also asked Gustin (who penned the adaptation) what we should expect from that film when it eventually hits theaters.

It's the end of the strike as we know it, and I feel fine!

Yes, writers across America are heading back to work today. The strike started on November 5th of last year, and has lasted over three months. The WGA and the AMPTP have been building toward a conclusion for a couple weeks now, so the wrap-up doesn't come as a huge surprise. Still, it sure is great to see an official announcement, isn't it?

Members of the WGA voted on the issue, and the decision was a landslide. 3,775 ballots were cast, and 3,492 of those voters checked "yes." That's a total of 92.5% in favor of ending the strike. So, a few holdouts -- 283 to be exact -- but by and large Guild members are very happy with the new contract. The official ratification of the deal is slated for February 26th.

WGA East President Michael Winship announced that "We're (now) receiving a percentage of the distributor's gross, which is very real money, as opposed to what people refer to as creative or Hollywood accounting."

At last, there is some light at the end of the WGA strike tunnel. Meetings are scheduled in New York and Los Angeles this Saturday, and the purpose is to convince Guild members that the contract WGA leaders have been hammering out with the AMPTP is worthy of bringing the now three month-old strike to a close. The WGA's 10,500 members will vote on the issue, and if they approve, WGA leadership could send its members back to work as soon as Monday. The strike won't officially be over until the decision has been ratified -- likely two weeks, but the Oscars would go on as planned, new television episodes could be scripted, and the TV pilot season might be salvaged.

Living in Los Angeles, all I hear is strike talk. I was told this weekend that the strike would absolutely end yesterday. Didn't happen. I was told several times that it will definitely be over by Friday. That's not going to happen. Now I'm hearing next week for sure, and this official Saturday meeting would seem to support that. But it's not a done deal by any means. Late Monday, WGA negotiating committee chief John Bowman sent an e-mail to Writers Guild members that read: "While we have made important progress since the companies re-engaged us in serious talks, negotiations continue. Regardless of what you hear or read, there are many significant points that have yet to be worked out."

In other words -- the finish line is in sight. But there's no guarantee they're gonna run through it.

It's Day 87 of the Writers Guild Strike. Informal meetings are taking place between the WGA and the AMPTP...that will hopefully lead to official meetings. (Doesn't it seem like there should be more effective means of conducting business than meeting to prepare to meet?) The Directors Guild recently cut a deal with the AMPTP, and many hope the WGA will follow suit. Others don't feel the DGA deal is reasonable. National Screen Actors Guild Executive Director Doug Allen and SAG President Alan Rosenberg just sent an e-mail to members of SAG criticizing the DGA deal, and claiming they would not accept similar proposals. Then DGA President Michael Apted criticized SAG for their criticisms. Scripted television production in Los Angeles has officially stopped. Everyone seems to want an end to this madness in time for the Academy Awards, but tensions seem to be just as high as they ever were.

The strike has brought about a lot of interesting and insightful comments from Cinematical readers. As I've mentioned before, the comments we get here at the site range from "UR gay!" to thought-provoking discussion. We read 'em all, and appreciate (most of) them greatly. I thought this might be a good time to highlight some recent strike talk from our readers, and to encourage even more. Whether I agree with all of these opinions or not, it's great to see an important issue like this being discussed.

John Orloff got his break writing two episodes of the Emmy-winning HBO mini-series Band of Brothers. His latest script is another true-life tale -- Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, just out on DVD. Heart focuses on Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie), a reporter whose husband Daniel, an American journalist, was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan. The script just earned Orloff an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Screenplay. The awards will be held on February 23rd.

Cinematical: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

John Orloff: I still don't know whether I want to be a writer! I went to UCLA Film School, and I had a great writing teacher who thought I had a particular skill in that department. So I kept taking that teacher for the whole time I was at UCLA, kept on writing. At the end of it I was 22, it was the late 80s, and people weren't really hiring young writers, so I started to work in advertising. Spent about ten years miserably working in commercials, until I met a woman -- who is now my wife -- who was working in the business as a development exec at HBO. And she was bringing home all these screenplays, and they were horrible! Just awful! And these people had agents, and they were working. So I pitched my wife a non-fiction movie that I had been thinking about writing for ten years, with the incredibly commercial idea of a sixteenth century English melodrama. It was actually about the Shakespeare authorship issue -- who wrote the plays? I wrote the script and had the misfortune of writing it two months before Shakespeare in Love came out. But I sent out this script, trying to get an agent, and did finally get "hip-pocketed" by an agency.

Cinematical: And that script eventually got you your big break with Tom Hanks -- pretty decent guy to start out with, no?

JO: Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, yes! The most important thing that happened out of the Shakespeare script was that Tom's company was among the readers. They liked it, and I met with Tom about another project, but every time I sat down with him I would ask if he had hired writers on Band of Brothers. I'm a huge World War II buff, and I think I eventually just wore him down. He finally asked me to write a script, and I wrote one episode. He was very happy with it and asked me to write another. So, that was my first paying gig.

Spyglass Entertainment (The Sixth Sense, Shanghai Noon) is the latest studio to make an interim, independent agreement with the Writers Guild of America. Spyglass joins David Letterman's Worldwide Pants, Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner's United Artists, Media Rights Capital, and The Weinstein Company. These interim deals basically mean that the studios will agree to the WGA's demands during the strike, and in exchange they can do business with members of the Writers Guild.

In other strike news, the Academy Awards will be picketed by the WGA if a deal is not reached by the February 24th ceremony. (And since there are currently no negotiations even scheduled, that seems unlikely.) The WGA recently granted a waiver allowing a couple of writers to work on the NAACP Image Awards, but the Academy Awards will receive no such waiver. WGA West President Patric Verrone says, "The Guild examines each request like this individually and no decision is easy. Our ultimate goal is to resolve this strike by achieving a good contract. Because of the historic role the NAACP has played in struggles like ours, we think this decision is appropriate to jointly achieve our goals."

If you have been watching The Daily Show (or as Jon Stewart now calls it, A Daily Show) since its writer-less return, you've likely noticed the show has lost a lot of its zing. Stewart is a very funny man, but he can't do it all by himself. And if he's up there winging it as the host of the Oscars, it could be a mighty awkward evening. Now, there's no way the Oscars will crash and burn like the Golden Globes did. Even stripped down, I don't think anyone could have anticipated the fiery train wreck that is Billy Bush -- the guy makes Ryan Seacrest look like Johnny Carson. But if the threat of a far crappier than usual Academy Awards ceremony -- traditionally Hollywood's biggest night -- doesn't bring the strike to the end, I keep hearing this thing could go on for a very long time.

This is a bummer, man. A big ol' bummer. Let's hit up some Q & A:

This week on The Write Stuff, Cinematical speaks with David E. Talbert, writer and director of the new comedy/drama First Sunday. The film stars Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan as friends in a desperate situation who decide to rob a local church. At the church, they find a lot more resistance than they bargained for, in the form of Loretta Devine, Chi McBride, and Katt Williams.

Cinematical: Are you excited about the movie coming out?

David E. Talbert: Oh man, I'm wearing my wife out! We've been riding around looking at these billboards. Every time somebody tells me there's one that's popped up, I gotta go and find it.

Cinematical: You got your start as a playwright, and you've been doing that successfully for 15 years. Did you always want to be a writer?

DET: No, I was a radio announcer when I was in college and after. Somewhere in there, I had a breakup with my college sweetheart and I started writing "Somebody done somebody wrong" poems. And I was writing and crying and listening to Al Green every night. Then one night my Al Green record scratched, and when it scratched, I started reading those poems and I said "Wow, these aren't that bad." From there I wrote a long-form play and I put it away until about five years later when I saw the play Beauty Shop. I saw how much audiences were going crazy over it, and that's when I got bit.

I made a couple of New Year resolutions for 2008. The first is to murder less. I'm not going to stop murdering entirely, of course, I've got to be realistic here. But I definitely intend to decrease the amount of murders I actively participate in. My other resolution is one that I'm sure every other writer made -- I vow to write more.

Cut to this morning when I found myself staring at a blank computer screen for an hour in a post-holiday haze -- stubble adorning my cheeks, sweet potato fries clinging to my midsection, alcohol swishing around my brain, and one eye on the brand new Seinfeld Complete Series Box Set I'm dying to curl up on the couch and watch. Not helping my motivation is Variety's coverage of the WGA strike, which keeps throwing words like "standstill," "hostilities," and "vacuum" at me. Sigh.

So since I can't help myself, I'd love to try and help some of you. Let's open up the mailbag. I recently got a series of questions from "Eric," and I'm going to answer a few of them today. Eric asks...

The Bucket List stars Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two terminally ill men who escape from a cancer ward determined to complete everything on their "Bucket List" -- a list of things to do before they "kick the bucket." The film, directed by Rob Reiner, was just named one of the Ten Best of the Year by the National Board of Review. Cinematical spoke with the film's screenwriter, Justin Zackham.

Cinematical: You sit down to write The Bucket List, do you ever dream that you're going to get Rob Reiner to direct, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman to star...

JZ: Of course not! I'd have to be an idiot! Not even close. I wrote it with Morgan Freeman's voice in mind, somehow thinking maybe I'd find a way to get it to him. But no, nothing like this.

Cinematical: And how did you get it to these huge names? What were the steps that brought this movie to the screen?

JZ: I went to film school at NYU. I did a TV pilot that I wrote and executive produced in New York with Paul Sorvino years ago. And then I came out here (Los Angeles) and was dicking around for a while. I made Going Greek, which was a very sort of crappy fraternity comedy that I did back in 2000. I wrote, produced, and directed, and that took so much out of me that I spent another couple years dicking around. And then I just sat down one day and wrote my own "Bucket List" just to kind of get my head organized. On that list was like "Get a movie made by a major studio, marry the perfect woman," all that kind of stuff. A lot of the stuff on there wound up in the movie. I had always fantasized about going to the Pyramids, the Great Wall, I've always been sort of obsessed with the whole notion of Everest. All those things were on it, and I just stuck it on a bulletin board.

About a year later, I just came up with this quote one day, a line that's actually in the film -- "You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you." Stuck that up on the bulletin board. And then another year went by before I had the idea "What about making this into a script?" And I thought if it were about me, at the time I was about 34, it wouldn't be that interesting. So I decided to make it about two guys who had lived a full life, and they only have a few months left, and suddenly there's a ticking clock, and the things that do have real importance, at least in their minds. The story really became about the one thing neither of these guys puts on their list but is the thing they most want. And that's a best friend. I have this ridiculous process, and I wrote the actual script really quickly, in about two weeks.

Well friends, the WGA strike rages on. And on. And like the old Christmas song says: "It doesn't show signs of stopping." The Broadway strike briefly crippled New York City's economy, but it was over in nineteen days. The WGA Strike is on day #38. That's week #6. That's month #2. And there's no end in sight. We're reaching the point where people are going to start losing homes, if they haven't already.

Do you know the old joke about the aspiring actress who was so naive she slept with the screenwriter to get ahead? There's a lot of truth there. Screenwriters don't get near enough respect. That may be coming to light more now that the strike is on, but it's been going on for decades. It's gotten so bad that a lot of the huge blockbusters start filming without a completed script! Like, a lot of them.

Can you name me five screenwriters? OK, five screenwriters who don't also direct? In movie reviews, your average critic will gush about how great Brad Pitt's performance was for five paragraphs, then mention the screenplay in passing, if at all. Guess what? All those pretty words coming out of Mr. Pitt's pretty mouth originated somewhere. Directors and actors tend to get all the credit for a movie's success. Unless a movie sucks, then it's -- "Who wrote this garbage?" Where is the love?

If a movie is a salad, then the screenplay is the lettuce. You can throw all the bacon and cheese and croutons in a bowl that you want, but if you don't have a strong, solid base of high-quality lettuce? My friend, you don't have a salad. With me throwing out razor-sharp analogies like that, I think you can tell that you've come to the right place for writing advice.

Welcome back to The Write Stuff, where I've been attempting to answer a question that dates back to the beginning of time:

How do writers get jobs on TV writing staffs? Do they have to write spec scripts?

For Part One of this answer, please refer to last week's Write Stuff, where we talked about putting together a portfolio of writing samples. Once you have a good mix of spec scripts and original material, that's the time to start the process of getting an agent. I've covered agent hunting in this column before, so I won't get too deeply into the specifics, but the key is not to give up. If you think you've got talent, stick to your guns. The people who make it in this business are the ones who face countless rejections, but don't throw in the towel. Just the fact that you have completed scripts will make you more enticing to agencies. So many people in Los Angeles walk around telling everyone "I'm a writer, I'm hilarious, look at me, love me!" but they've never finished a script! So many people! People out here think they're so wonderful and talented that big cheeses should be begging for their services. That attitude will get you into trouble. Perfect your material before you even consider heading out. You want to be rich and famous immediately, you're excited, but don't start selling yourself until you've got the genuine goods to sell.

When you do have your portfolio together and land that agent, the agent will send your material to network executives and development people. If these execs like your stuff, they will call you in for a general staffing meeting. These meetings are to make sure that they like you as a person, and that you would fit in on the writing staff of one of the network's programs. If an executive digs your writing and likes you as a human being, he or she may send your material to a show runner. The show runner reads your stuff, and if he or she likes the material, he or she will call you in for a...show runner meeting. These are very exciting, because they're generally the last step before you find out if you landed on a show or if it's back to turning tricks on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Must...block out...painful memories...

Kenny asks:

How do writers get jobs on TV writing staffs? Do they have to write spec scripts? And what about talk shows? (The Daily Show, Conan) Are they recruited? How does it work? Thanks.

That's my goal right now, Kenny. I worked on the upcoming season of MTV's Rob & Big, I'm in a writing program at NBC, and I'm looking to use those credits and the connections I've made to get staffed on a network television program this year. It's a big process, so I'm dividing it into two parts. This week and next week's editions of The Write Stuff will tackle the television business.

Basically, to get a job on a television writing staff, you need to have at least one piece of original material and one or more spec scripts. A spec script is a sample script for a show that is currently on the air. You're not writing it in the hopes that the program will purchase your script. They won't, and it likely won't get to the show you wrote it for anyway. You're writing your spec to show that you can capture the feel of the writing and the character voices of any show. Every program has a show runner, and every show runner will want to read something different, so it's good to give him or her a lot of choices.

How to go about choosing which show to spec?