Character Development

An Interview With Lee Eisenberg ’91

How did Lee Eisenberg get his start in Hollywood? It’s right out of a movie and it goes like this:

When Lee was an undergraduate at Connecticut College, he knew a guy who moved out to Los Angeles to become a writer. Lee had never heard of anyone attempting that as a career. After graduation, he was unsure of what he wanted to do, so he decided that he would try to go down that road. In 2000, Lee was living in Los Angeles, unemployed and bouncing among temp jobs.

He gets a call from his former babysitter in Needham.

Former babysitter: I’m working on a movie and they need another production assistant. It’s just for two weeks. Are you interested?

Lee: Yeah! What do I need to do?

Former babysitter: They’re going to call you in five minutes.

Five minutes go by. Lee gets a call.

Someone from the studio: Do you have a car? Do you have insurance?

Lee: Yes, yes.

Someone from the studio: Great. When can you come by?

Lee: Later today.

Someone from the studio: Come in a half hour.

Lee drove to the office and the two-week temp job turned to a four-month gig. The movie, Bedazzled, starring Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley, led to an initial “in” at HBO and the first optimistic inkling that Lee might make a go of it.

“I really wanted to be a writer,” recalls Lee. “I had been writing TV show samples, hoping someone would read them and realize what a genius I am, but it wasn’t happening. For years, I was fetching people coffee, picking up people’s prescriptions, and helping people move. I was really just doing a lot of grunt work. Then, finally, I started getting a little bit of traction. My first success came when I was hired on a show called JAG which was a military/courtroom drama.” The position turned out to be short lived which Lee describes as “devastating” after years of waiting for a true breakthrough position. Over the next several years, other jobs began to materialize giving Lee connections and accomplishments on which to build.

Lee’s story is quite different today. The catalog of his achievements, awards, movies, TV shows, podcasts and plans is as remarkable as it is eclectic. Lee shares, “I like to have a lot of plates spinning and have my hands in a bunch of different projects at once.” Lee founded his most recent company, Piece of Work Entertainment, in 2019. The team currently consists of a development executive, an assistant and Lee himself. “We’re always kicking around ideas and sharing articles with one another. We have big ideas and lots of projects under development. The more successful I’ve become,” he adds, “the more people come to me with things. Our development executive is always reading like crazy. We look at books, magazine articles, podcasts.”

At the moment, Lee is knee deep in “a mixed bag” of multiple productions ranging from an imaginative account of Harry Houdini’s life replete with time travel, a fictional piece on Martha Stewart and an unconventional romance story about a man who opts for single fatherhood in his late forties. “I definitely do a lot of producing, whether it’s my own projects or other people’s,” Lee says. “I just love sitting in the room with other creative people, throwing around ideas and stories, making each other laugh, telling incredibly personal stories from our past and seeing how that might resonate with what we’re working on. My favorite thing is to brainstorm with writers and creatives, just trying to come up with something.”

First and foremost, though, Lee considers himself a writer. As a child, Lee wrote a lot of short stories. His parents saved much of his writing from Schechter. “I had something of an imagination. I was obsessed with TV and movies growing up. I did sports and all sorts of things, but I loved getting taken away and being transported to another world. As a kid, I didn’t even know that was an option as a career. I obviously understood that there were writers and there were actors. But, it seemed so abstract coming from Needham.”

This sense of spending time with an intriguing character or being whisked away someplace still drives Lee’s decision-making in choosing projects. He served as a cowriter and showrunner for Little America, a widely lauded Apple TV+ series highlighting the American immigrant experience in 30-minute-long segments that depict and humanize the unique lives of eight individual newcomers from different countries. As the showrunner, Lee was the lynchpin of the series, responsible for the management and creative content. “I just want to feel as if I live with someone for a while,” Lee shares.

Lee is focused on another new project for Apple TV+ based on the best-selling book Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. The eponymous show starring Oscar-winner Brie Larson focuses on a female chemist in the 1950s and 1960s who starts a cooking show on television. “She is not taken seriously as a chemist because of misogyny and sexism, so this is the only way she is able to make money,” Lee explains. “The book has fantastic structure and charmed me all the way through. It’s a really fascinating story.” While Lee finds it compelling to tackle weighty topics, he resists restricting himself to a singular genre or type of writing and consistently turns to character as the main motivator in choosing and developing projects.

Lee spent five years as writer and co-executive producer of the beloved, award-winning series The Office which he labels “[one] of the greatest jobs ever, truly.” Along with four nominations for his work on the famed mockumentary, he popped up in two episodes as a mustached employee from the fictional Vance Refrigeration. Lee sheds light on the comic process, offering that there is always uncertainty in formulating jokes and crafting dialogue. “Sometimes, we would be stuck on a line or a short scene that would be 30 seconds on camera, but we would spend three hours on it,” Lee recalls, “You parse and debate every word and just try to figure it out. What if they did this? And what if they said that? And are we looking at it the right way? I’ve seen this joke before, so how do we make it fresh? The only way I know how to write, and how to rewrite, just takes hours. You might not always even get that affirmation that what you wrote was terrible or obvious or didn’t make sense.”

Devoted to a dynamic and symbiotic style of working and writing, Lee offers, “I am not precious with my words. I feel as if the best idea will win. Ten smart people can read my script, and I might like the line from you, and I might like something from this person, and that person came up with a title. I have no problem taking all of those ideas, even if they’re not mine, and I think that’s what it means to be a good writer or producer.” Lee stresses that writing for television requires a particularly collaborative approach. “The notion that you would do it all on your own and that your idea is going to be the best every time is funny to me.”

Following The Office, Lee and his writing partner, Gene Stupnitsky, penned Bad Teacher, starring Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz, and next the coming-of-age rom-com Good Boys, both of which generated positive reviews and hardy financial revenue. Topping off these successes at the cinema, the prolific duo was churning out rewrites for studios, selling jokes to Larry David for Curb Your Enthusiasm and remaining heavily rooted in comedy.

Lee soon felt confident enough about his writing to jump in a different direction. “I love comedy and I will do another one,” reflects Lee, “but it’s really about what ideas are grabbing me. Sometimes, the only way to move out of a box is to tell people you’re no longer in a box and prove it a little bit. I’m challenging myself as a writer, and I also think that the comedy landscape has evolved a little bit. They are incredibly hard to pull off well. I don’t think anyone who worked with me on The Office assumed that I would do a business story like We Crashed, which starred Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto.” He continues, noting that the tone of Little America is a departure from his earlier work while Lessons in Chemistry has some melancholy to it. “I just want to make people feel and I think there are different ways of doing that. There’s nothing more fun than being in an audience and seeing people laugh at your jokes. I have been fortunate enough to have that happen. Then, watching We Crashed with my wife, Emily Jane Fox, who is the smartest person I know, and watching her get choked up about a scene is also very powerful to me.”

When Lee considers the relationship between comedy and Jewishness, he suggests that comedy can be a coping mechanism. “Jews are survivors. One way to survive is to joke about your situation, to be sarcastic.” He observes that comedy is also a great unifier. “Once you laugh with someone, you create an immediate connection. Sharing the same political view or beliefs might not endear you to someone in the same way as laughter does. You connect with people to entertain them and one way to do that is to make them laugh.”

True to both Lee’s gregariousness and his proclivity towards understanding someone’s character, he feels that “[he] can almost sense someone’s Jewishness based on the comedy they respond to.” He adds, “When we were growing up, so many of the comedians and the directors, and the writers were Jewish. Hollywood has such a strong Jewish presence that it really kind of shaped and molded how Jews think about the world.”

In fact, Lee often looks back at those youthful papers his parents tucked away from his days at Schechter when he was learning to express his thoughts and opinions, and writing to figure out the larger world. “I definitely excelled more in English and writing than other things.” Lee’s parents, Ronni and Amos Eisenberg, recall two of Lee’s Language Arts teachers, Donna Cover and Eileen Samuels. “Lee was always writing,” says Ronni. “These fabulous Schechter teachers were so inspirational. They forged a bond with Lee and were instrumental in his writing and future.” Ronni adds that they were initially drawn to Schechter because of Hebrew and the Jewish education, and were one of just two Needham families in the school when Lee started kindergarten.

Lee’s voice has a wistfulness and a smile in it when he characterizes the other students at Schechter as meaning “everything” to him. He remains tightly connected to many of his classmates, some of whom he has known for 40 years. “I also just loved my teachers so much. I think the education at Schechter is unparalleled. It wasn’t until I came out to L.A. that I met as many smart, kind people who had such varied interests as I met at Schechter, not through high school or even college.” That’s more than a light-hearted compliment coming from a prolific visionary himself who has achieved extraordinary success in one of the most flat-out imaginative, creative, competitive businesses in the world.