MEET THE MAKER

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Meet the Maker Paul Rudnick, “Coastal Elites” screenwriter By Benjamin Lindsay

THE MORNING OF MY INTER-

view with writer and executive producer Paul Rudnick, a new press release pops into my inbox: “Netflix’s ‘Social Distance’ to star Danielle Brooks and others.” Added to the pile of series like NBC’s “Connecting…,” Freeform’s “Love in the Time of Corona,” and HBO’s buzzy special presentation of “Coastal Elites,” which Rudnick penned, an answer to how production can safely continue during the COVID-19 pandemic is slowly taking shape.

“I think people are becoming very inventive because people are yearning to work, and people need to work, and people need the jobs,” Rudnick posits. “We’re trying to figure out a way to keep the industry going as best as we can, and so I was so Issa Rae in “Coastal Elites”

grateful and so thrilled to have this opportunity [to film ‘Coastal Elites’]. Everyone involved had a sense of working under duress and a sort of goodwill toward the project; when you’re working on things in wartime, you cut out a lot of nonsense.”

“Coastal Elites” is certainly one version of cutting through the nonsense. Comprising five monologues from Bette Midler, Sarah Paulson, Issa Rae, Dan Levy, and Kaitlyn Dever playing caricatured iterations of the titular stereotype, Rudnick’s script, filmed entirely in quarantine via webcam, is his way of commenting on the times we’re living through. He says that filming with director Jay Roach in this way and with top-tier talent, while “very exciting,” was simply a product of circumstance. He began writing the monologues a year ago, long before the word “coronavirus” was seen splashed across daily headlines. The piece was originally meant for the theater (Rudnick is also at work writing the book for the stage musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada”), and began as a response to our current political moment, as so much of our greatest art is.

“Everyone I knew on every side of the political divide had been having a four-year-long panic attack,” he says. “Everyone was angry and heartbroken and passionately concerned for the future of the country, so it reached a point where I couldn’t not write about it. The characters were—and this is my favorite kind of writing—insisting on being heard. And so I pretty much just surrendered.”

Without a commitment to be in-person for a New York stage run (and with a commitment to everyone’s health and safety), the special’s cast, miraculously, came together with similar ease. “We made a dream list, and we got all of them,” Rudnick says.

Reflecting on the writing process of “Coastal Elites” and the rest of his acclaimed résumé across film, TV, and theater, Rudnick leaves our interview with some parting advice for those who want to write their own work: There’s a good reason for first drafts.

“Don’t worry your work to death,” he advises. “It’s so different for every artist, but get it on the page. Then you can look at it; then you can rewrite it; then you can hear it. Your words are not as precious as you might imagine. And that’s something that I think is true throughout the rehearsal process as well. It’s not pure gold.

“Here’s the most insane and valuable piece of advice: Sometimes stupid people can have great ideas, so listen to everyone. There’ll be the brilliant people; there’ll be the Jay Roachs and a cast like this where you think, Oh, my God, write it down! But I’ve also been in a room where I’d think, That’s an idiot. You just shut up. And then I hear them say something, and I go, ‘You know what? They’re actually right.’ You have to swallow it and just slap yourself and say thank you. Don’t overprotect yourself.”