What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

FULL PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
AMY: Today we have two guests. Blair Breard is an award-winning executive producer. She got her start in indie film, producing for John Sayles, and also produced films like I Shot Andy Warhol and Margot at the Wedding. As an executive producer for television, she’s worked on things like Better Things and Scenes from a Marriage for HBO with Jessica Chastain, and The Other Two for Max.
Our second guest is Kristin Newman. She’s a television writer and producer with over two decades in Hollywood. She got her start on That ‘70s Show and has gone on to write and produce things like How I Met Your Mother, Chuck, Gallivant, and Only Murders in the Building. But more importantly — or I should say most importantly — she is also the author of the bestselling memoir What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding, which is what this episode is all about today. So, Kristin, Blair, welcome to Films Not Made. It’s great to have you guys.
AVI: We’re excited that you’re here to talk about this project. This started as a memoir, I think back in 2014. Kristin, do you want to tell us what motivated you to write the book — the spark of the idea, all of that?
KRISTIN: Yeah, so it’s a comedic travel memoir. It ultimately tells the story of my life, but through different trips that I took in my twenties and thirties. I had been avoiding marriage and kids in my thirties because I got so addicted to travel — solo travel, especially. It was back in the days of network TV, where you had spring hiatus every year, and I was on That ‘70s Show, writing on it for seven years. So I got these springs off every year to travel without having to look for another job. And that started it. Then it became such a part of my sense of self and identity that I found that if I was with somebody around February or so, I would really need to break up with them by March because I didn’t want to bring them with me.
AVI: You were on a schedule.
KRISTIN: That’s kind of what was happening. And I had two boyfriends in my twenties, so I really was only single for the first time in my thirties. That was when all of my friends started to get married and have babies. So I kind of found myself doing this thing alone. That was my life, and everybody had been saying, “Write these stories down,” but I didn’t really have a take on it. In the middle of it, it just felt like travel brag or something. I mean, you’re a writer, so of course you should be writing about it. I should have written it down, but mostly I just wrote That ‘70s Show and then I traveled. I didn’t write my own thing. I was just like, if I am writing when I’m not working, then what am I writing about? I have no life. So I would go live.
And then I met my now-husband. I started to write some essays — David Sedaris-style travel essays about some trips I’d taken — and it just turned into sixty pages and all of these stories. So it was time to get a TV job. And so I slapped a piece of paper on the front of these three essays and said “Excerpts from the upcoming memoir, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding,” and sent it to UTA. And they were like, “You’re writing a book.” And I said, “No, I just wanted to make it look official.” And they said, “I think this is a book.” They sent those chapters to a book agent who was like, “Yeah, it’s a book.” So then I pitched it and got a bidding war and sold the book. And then I had to write the book.
AMY: Did you have a deadline?
AVI: Can I have your agent?
KRISTIN: Yeah, it worked out great. And they wanted — you have an interesting job, so please write about your job. So I was writing about my job and my job heartbreaks in ways that I hoped would not keep me from getting more jobs, which is obviously part of today’s conversation as well.
So I wrote the thing, I went to therapy, I forgave myself for all the things I did wrong so I could be super honest — I wanted to make sure it was honest. That was good, and it was a great experience. And it released the week I got married, crazily. So then we went on what we called my honeymoon junket, where we did a little book tour with my new husband.
BLAIR: “We’re going to Des Moines on our honeymoon.”
KRISTIN: Yeah, where I’m going to read about being with other people.
BLAIR: He went to one event — Rachel Dratch and me in New York. It was all very cool. And he’s like, “Love you, support you, love it. I don’t need to hear it acted out. I’ll just meet you in the hotel room afterwards.”
KRISTIN: So we did that. The book came out, and I was working at ABC at the time and had a couple of overall deals at Disney, and they wanted the book and they wanted me to adapt it. And I was like, you will ruin the book.
AMY: They wanted you to adapt it as a TV show?
KRISTIN: As a show. A TV show. Yeah, always. What I wanted the book to be was a picture of a different way to live your life — your timeline as a woman, your thirties — and not be a train-wreck-style story about a woman who was being wild and opening herself up to the world and not doing what everybody else was doing until she sees the light and at the end does. I wanted years of that life to happen, and the series was never going to end with her getting married and having a baby. It was not going to be that. So that was all really important to me. And so I didn’t do it as a movie. I just tried to figure out what to do with it for about eight years. And then the COVID lockdown happened and my overall deal was done and they didn’t renew it. And I was depressed and thinking, what’s next? And so then I just spec’d the book. I just made a TV pilot in six days. I just wrote it.
BLAIR: Kristin sent me the book, which when I read, I laughed out loud. You know, usually when you’re reading something funny in your brain, you’re sort of like, “That’s funny, that’s funny.” But I was cackling out loud. And it was so easy to see, and it was so easy to hear her voice. So part of our idea was that this is the anti-COVID project. This is a book that gives you everything that we cannot do during COVID, which is travel and have sex with strangers.
AVI: Exactly.
BLAIR: So we were like, we have to find the perfect timing where it’s not like, “Oh my God, it’s too scary to do something like that,” to make something like that, but it is actually wish fulfillment for everybody.
AMY: Oh my god, for me, for sure.
KRISTIN: Yeah, and hard to figure out how to shoot it, because it was still — it was before the vaccine when we shopped it. And so we took it out and everybody was pretty full up on their own things. And so it’s obviously sold to Disney — like in the end, they got to have it, but just without paying me an overall deal.
I was also simultaneously working on Only Murders in the Building season one, which was also Disney. So they really got all my time and energy just for much less money than they had been paying me before.
AMY: So when you were shopping it, were there any “almost” meetings, besides Disney?
KRISTIN: I don’t think so. I think it was just lovely meetings that they just didn’t buy it, which was a surprise. I think because so many people had tried to get the book for so long, I thought there would be a lot more options. And there weren’t, honestly.
BLAIR: It really was in that time period, after [COVID] where you thought you could sell a lot of things, especially if you have a writer like Kristin whose so experienced and has such an incredible track record. And I’m always generally able to get in the rooms for a pitch. The two of us were a pretty good combination but it was in the time period where everything had shut down and no one was sure what they wanted to spend money on. They had bought a lot of stuff that didn’t go during COVID. And, you know, we had a hundred thousand conversations about, should we stop, should we go, should we not? And ultimately we did. And all the meetings were great. The book is a huge bestseller. It’s in how many languages, Kristin?
KRISTIN: Five languages. Thirty reprints or something.
BLAIR: And so many people just out of the blue say, “Oh my God, I love that book. I read that book. I saw it in a hostel when I was traveling.”
AMY: So you have a built-in audience.
KRISTIN: And an audience that’s especially like women 18 to 40 — your book has a built an audience, which is what people wanted. That being said, I wrote it as a half-hour streaming project. So we were pitching to comedy teams, and I think that also hurt. When we sold it to Freeform, they were like, add ten pages to make it a forty-one-minute-long, quote-unquote one-hour for Freeform, so you can have double the budget and it’s easier to sell internationally. Which is what we should have done [before].
BLAIR: It was also — to their credit — the executive said, “I don’t know how you show this story in a half-hour network show, which is really twenty-two minutes, when we’re looking at travel and landscapes.” And I actually thought that was one of the smartest things that happened — they said this needs to be longer.
And it already felt like — I think Kristin would agree, that even the pilot felt like it was barely going to fit. So that was quite great. And I think we also felt that with Freeform, we were going to get their growing-up audience of women.
KRISTIN: Which is what they said they wanted.
BLAIR: Which is what they said they wanted. And so even though Freeform had a sort of patina on it in a way, I think we were like: women, girls growing up, female audience, female everything — let’s just lean in and Hulu the next day, we were just let’s lean into that and embrace that, and not feel like, “Wait, Freeform isn’t really the right platform for this,” because Kristin’s voice is pretty spicy.
KRISTIN: Yeah, but that being said, it’s a network that is primarily watched by women. And so we felt like they really will be somebody who will back a woman’s voice and a woman’s story that is not — as I have heard pitched to me over and over again as what the platforms are looking for — “women in peril.” Women in peril is a big thing that people like to see women doing on television. Women living their lives is not…
AVI: It’s not perilous enough.
KRISTIN: What are they running from?
AVI: Everything in life isn’t perilous enough for women, apparently.
BLAIR: Who’s going to save women?
AMY: I’m in peril every time I leave my apartment.
AMY: So this is a little different than our usual Films Not Made, where we talk about films that get developed, pitched, ad nauseum, go through script notes, and never get made. But this one actually went into production. So what happened next? You guys — Blair, you’re making a budget, you’re talking about casting.
KRISTIN: Well, first of all, we lost our director. What happened was —
AMY: Before you started!
KRISTIN: Before we started.
AVI: If everyone’s got their bingo card out, you can punch that one —
KRISTIN: So everybody made their deals and it took a while. And then the deal was made, and then Susanna Fogel got two of her movies greenlit that had been backed up from the year of shutdown.
AVI: Everyone’s getting work.
KRISTIN: So she was gone.
BLAIR: Part of the story of not getting films made actually really interfered with us trying to get a TV series made, because Susanna, who’s an independent filmmaker, this was her baby, her project. And she left, which left us a little bit out in the cold. And also, with all the buyers and Freeform — when we sold it — she had been part of the equation. So we lost some time there. We had to find another director. So then we went into the casting process, which was kind of the same thing — them going, “This person, this person, this person.”
AMY: They tried to cast a man in the lead role.
KRISTIN: Yeah, right. Exactly. Just, you know, everyone’s busy. So that was really difficult and challenging.
AMY: Who was their top choice? Can you tell us?
BLAIR: Well, we made an offer to an actress. Should we say? Yeah. We were very excited about Meredith Hagner. Everybody was excited. I was like, “Would die for her. Amazing.” And had a great meeting. But she didn’t want to do Freeform. She literally passed because it was Freeform.
KRISTIN: It was a little bit like low, small cable to most people. Like, eighty percent of the people I’d tell it was on Freeform would say, “What is Freeform? Is it a maxi pad? I don’t know what it is.”
KRISTIN: It does sound like that.
AVI: It’s both.
KRISTIN: It’s not a great rebrand. As we now know, it’s dead. So yeah. So we kept looking and looking, and they just kept saying, “These are the five people we’ll say yes to.” And we went back into the pile and we’re looking, and I think Chelsea was like number sixty or something on the list. But we looked at her again, and there was something that we all — which was really Kristin and myself and our two casting directors — all went, “Wait, something’s here.” And we were like, “This show is going to make her a star. She is Kristin as an actress, as a younger person.”
AMY: Isn’t it incredible when you see that and know that? I produced a film called Secretary, and we had this young actress Maggie Gyllenhaal come in, and we were like, “We think there’s something, but she’s — we can’t fund the film on her.” And then she would come in — she auditioned for us like three or four times — and we were like, “We’re just going to go for it. We just have to.” You know, when you just know, you just know.
BLAIR: We knew. And it felt like that with Chelsea — Chelsea Frei — who was tremendous. And then they said, “Go make your pilot.” And we went to Latvia.
AMY: Riga? Were you in Riga?
BLAIR: We went to Riga, which is a phenomenal city. But when we were shooting there, there was a full COVID lockdown. We had a curfew. We were done by 8 p.m. You had to stay in your hotel from 8 p.m. till 5 a.m. the next day.
AMY: And you had to do all the testing every day?
KRISTIN: Yeah, like all that stuff. It was very experimental, very draconian testing where it went way, way up your nose and also in your mouth — sometimes in that order. And there’d be the person smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee while they did it.
AVI: Was it a government official doing it?
BLAIR: Plus the Disney official. Plus a Disney official who was constantly with us.
AMY: So you were you shooting Latvia and Riga for Russia? Or were you shooting Latvia for Latvia?
KRISTIN: No, it was for Russia. I wrote about my — the pilot episode was about a trip I took with my best friend and her mother to Russia for their first time since they had immigrated when my friend was three. We went when we were like twenty-eight and had this very wild time, and there might have been a boyfriend at home. So in the pilot, the character realizes she needs to live her life, comes home, breaks up with the guy, and determines to live a bigger world.
We did chemistry reads with kind of romantic partners from LA between Chelsea and the men we were auditioning. And there were actors in Russia. And Disney was like, you obviously cannot have whatever Sputnik vaccine — that’s not going to do it. You cannot have Russian actors. Absolutely not. There are three vaccines they can have. We have to see all kinds of documentation. Like, no, no, no.
So we found this guy, Dima. And he and Chelsea had a chemistry read that we felt uncomfortable being in. The room was melting, it was too much. So this kid took a train for thirty hours, went to one of the other Baltic nations, stayed with an ex-girlfriend for the night, got a shot, had to have a video of himself getting the shot and a piece of paper signed, and I think a phone call with the Disney lawyer — and then took the train back so he could be in his play the next day in Moscow. And it got done. Everyone was like, “Do whatever it takes to get this man.”
AVI: It’s like a James Bond movie.
KRISTIN: Yes, so we got him. And we all go to Latvia and here is Dima. And we find this incredible actor to be the best friend’s romantic partner. And the four of them are just like a house on fire. The two women fall into best-friend love. Everybody’s chemistry is amazing. We’re all running around with bags over our heads all day while we’re shooting. The schools were shut down, the whole thing was shut down, everything was shut down. Three months earlier, if we had the original director when we were going to shoot — sunshine, open, great. But now it’s November and it’s a complete all-country shutdown. But it’s joy. Like joy happens.
BLAIR: Well, once they saw the pilot — because the pilot was so perfect. For me, I think it’s the best pilot I’ve ever produced. It was magic. Everything worked. So then what happened is that Putin invaded Ukraine, and then Disney said, “We can’t promote a show with girls having fun in Russia.” And I think Kristin and I —I was crying on the phone.
KRISTIN: We cried, for months.
BLAIR: But we were saying, “People don’t fall in love with politicians. They fall in love with culture.” We argued ourselves silly, and they said, “Too bad. You have to do another pilot.”
AMY: But the series was still greenlit?
BLAIR: The series was still greenlit. But we had to do a new pilot.
AMY: And they would pay for it, right?
KRISTIN: But it was only a third of the pilot, because the pilot was: they’re in LA, they decide to go to Russia, there’s the trip, they come back from Russia, they’re in LA, and at the end of the pilot she leaves for her first solo adventure in Argentina. So we just had to lift out Russia and I stuck in Iceland. Not easy. Not easy.
AMY: So you have a new pilot. And then you go to Argentina and you shoot the rest — ten episodes total?
BLAIR: Ten one-hour episodes total, in four countries: Latvia, Iceland, LA — its own country —
AMY: It’s a country.
BLAIR: — and Argentina. And we finished shooting in Argentina, I think two weeks before the strike.
KRISTIN: Two weeks before the writer’s strike.
AMY: Before the writer’s strike.
BLAIR: Yes before the writer’s strike. We had editors in LA, so post was up and running.
KRISTIN: Everything had at least a director’s cut.
AMY: All ten episodes?
KRISTIN: All ten episodes have director’s cuts. And I had done network cuts, many multiple rounds of network cuts for five of them, and two more I had producers’ cuts for.
BLAIR: We had everything in the can. But Kristin was put in the horrible position that so many creators, directors, and writers were at the moment, which is: do you continue to edit as a showrunner, or do you work in solidarity with your colleagues and shut down post during the strike? There were people who — I think like Ryan Murphy kept working as a showrunner.
AMY: Can explain that? Can you unpack that a little bit for our audience?
AVI: Yeah, why would a writer’s strike affect the editing and the finishing of the series?
KRISTIN: So the Writers Guild position — which was not a law; they couldn’t say that it was officially scabbing to edit — but their position was that it was, and that editing is writing. And specifically for my show, it was a voiceover show. Like my original pilot was an hour and twenty minutes that I had to cut down to forty-four. The way you do that is with a lot of voiceover. And so you have to write.
BLAIR: And a lot of showrunners were talking about the dilemma of what to do in this moment. And Kristin you wrote something quite beautiful about it as well.
KRISTIN: Because everybody was, “What are we all doing, what should we do?” And I wanted to publicly post that I wasn’t going to edit, so that other showrunners would just know what we were all — you know, here’s what I’m up to. And I was like, “I feel uncomfortable finishing while people are not working.” And I even said thank you to Freeform for pausing it all and not trying to finish it without me — like they were valuing the right things and I appreciated that. And so I was trying to be really careful. That got photographed by somebody and was on Deadline the next day.
BLAIR: That’s right. That’s what I was referring to.
KRISTIN: So it got very public, very fast.
AMY: So you couldn’t change your mind.
AVI: What was the reaction
KRISTIN: People were like, “You’re the queen of Hollywood today.” And probably Disney hated me forever. I mean, I tried to be complimentary to them about it all, but obviously it was April and it was going to come out in August. Like, it was a done deal. So I really was like, it’s going to push this. They’re like, “You’re not going to come out now till next year.” I’m like, “That’s heartbreaking, but okay.” But they’d spent fifty million dollars. It just never occurred to me that it would go away. Never.
AMY: Fifty million. Holy crap.
KRISTIN: Fifty million.
AVI: That’s a big write-down.
BLAIR: And then so — I think Kristin, just to pick back up where you left off — the strike ends on a Monday or Tuesday. I had been speaking to the studio and the editors trying to patch the hole as a non-writer producer, going, “We’re ready, we’re ready. Are the editors ready? Is post ready? Everybody’s ready.” We had everybody on standby, ready to drop in so we could hit the ground running, pick back up where we left off, and Kristin could go back to being the showrunner and creator and get it done.
KRISTIN: And then I get this crazy phone call. That summer there was the whole deal between Disney and Spectrum, which for a minute Spectrum kicked all the Disney platforms — including ESPN — off of Spectrum. And the way that they were able to make that deal was by dropping like seven or nine linear platforms from Disney’s portfolio.
AMY: I didn’t know it was that many.
KRISTIN: Which included National Geographic and Freeform.
AMY: So it was a ploy to show the loss.
BLAIR: It was a tax write-off. We’re not airing the show in order to take the tax write-off.
BLAIR: I called Kristin. Kristin was apoplectic. I mean, it was just horrible, horrible, so heartbreaking and it just did not feel real at all. Like, how could that decision be made? We were done. We shot it. There’s no —
AMY: It seems like, there’s no sense to that.
AVI: Could they still air it? Could it still get —
AMY: Or like, who has the rights now? Because your book, there had to be a purchase of the rights to the book that went to Freeform or the Studio or the LLC or whatever.
KRISTIN: I have the rights to the book, but they have the rights to all of the scripts and everything we shot.
AMY: So did you get the rights back? Or did you craft the deal in that way?
KRISTIN: So we shopped it.
AMY: Whoever you shopped it to would have to obviously pay back that cost,
KRISTIN: Or not, because they can choose to make one dollar instead of zero dollars if they want.
AMY: True.
KRISTIN: But what is confusing — to people who are in charge of things like studio finances and heads of agencies, it’s confusing to them too — is this question of: if you make a dollar, do you then have to undo that full fifty-million-dollar write-off? And also, especially given that the studio that took the write-down is Freeform Studios — we just sold it to Freeform and Freeform Studios, which is just Freeform — doesn’t exist anymore.
AVI: So it’s sort of unencumbered, if people are interested in it.
BLAIR: All we need to do is raise enough money to finish it and put it on, you know, make a website and five bucks an episode.
AMY: Youtube.
AVI: Well when we started to talk to you about it, the idea was, what if we took the original material — the book — and because the series has already been produced and is waiting for someone to breathe life back into it, why don’t we see about developing it very quickly as a feature and producing the packaging materials via our AI pipeline to see what we might come up with.
BLAIR: What is behind door number 3?
AMY: Exactly! Welcome to our show!
AVI: So what we do is we take all the stuff — we start with the script, but in this case it was Kristin’s novel — and it goes through many stages that are now fairly automated. The entire book gets broken down into certain story classifications, and then we ask it to cast the first four principal roles and help us create a pitch deck and a trailer. So we’re going to look at the pitch deck first.
BLAIR: I don’t even know if I can look!
AMY: Now we have some disclosures. Films Not Made uses AI to reimagine movies that were never produced. All development materials, pitch decks, trailers, and posters are AI generated. Any likenesses of real people are speculative and synthetic. No real actors participated in their creation. This is cultural commentary, not endorsed by any individual or studio referenced.
AVI: Just so we can describe it to people who aren’t watching on YouTube — the cover image is of a young woman who would be the main character, Casey, in what looks like Argentina.
KRISTIN: Oh for sure, she’s in front of El Ateneo, which is the famous bookstore in Buenos Aires that used to be a big theater and we shot there.
BLAIR: We shot there!
AMY: So it knew somehow.
AVI: And we’ve got the title, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding.
AMY: We have this great image of a passport that looks like it’s from the nineteen forties. Has a lot of pages. Good work.
AVI: And a paper boarding pass,
KRISTIN: And a little espresso. A very small coffee, a non-American-sized coffee.
AVI: The logline, we asked it for a logline and a pitch. The logline is: “A sitcom writer who spent a decade turning heartbreak into passport stamps and foreign love affairs, must finally face the question she’s been outrunning. Was all that freedom just the longest way home?” This is the romantic comedy about what happens after you run out of continents. And the comp it puts there is Fleabag meets Before Sunrise.
AMY: The look — the genre is “sun-fade passport romanticism. Every frame looks like a photograph from the best day of a trip you’re already nostalgic for. Oversaturated highlights, golden haze, Kodak Portra warmth that feels borrowed rather than owned. The color shifts with geography, but the light stays consistent — warm and slightly blown out, as if seen through the window of a departing plane. Argentina pushes warmest; airports stripped to institutional sodium. The beauty has a shelf life built into every frame.”
KRISTIN: That’s basically what we did. Ben Kasulke and Becca had I thought this had a beautiful idea — to shoot the LA parts in it in regular TV frame, and then anything traveling was in a big move aspect ratio.
AMY: I love that.
KRISTIN: It was cool. It made the frame, it literally got bigger as her world got bigger, and she would always be smaller in the frame. And in TV land in LA, she was more trapped by it all. And we colorized everything warm whenever we were traveling anywhere. The production design and wardrobe colors were really vivid. And in LA it was more like her version of LA — blown out, kind of too bright.
BLAIR: But not fantasy LA, not gorgeous, dreamy LA — just uck.
AMY: You’re working on a TV show LA. You’re driving on the 405 LA.
KRISTIN: That’s right. It’s Van Nuys. It’s too hot. It’s too bright.
AMY: Then we have casting.
AVI: First up, Casey. The image here is of the first choice, which is Maya Hawke. That’s the AI pick — three choices, with a one-word description.
AMY: “Incandescent.”
AVI: Katherine Newton — “disarming.” Or Rachel Sennott.
AMY: I don’t know Katherine Newton that well. I do know she’s from my hometown Orlando, Florida but that’s about it. Do any of these ring true to you?
AVI: She looks like she’s having a good time.
KRISTIN: Neither of us brush our hair.
BLAIR: She looks like she’s in Argentina.
AVI: We do ask it to generate the image in situ of the film.
BLAIR: That’s amazing.
AVI: Next up is Juan — “quiet Argentine gaucho whose devastating honesty forces Casey to see her own pattern for the first time.” Is that even true to the plot?
KRISTIN: I don’t know about pattern so much. A little bit, a little bit. But certainly the devastating honesty, the sweetness — like, that’s this guy. Not smouldering. He’s almost a priest and he had that kind of lighter-than vibe.
AMY: The next actor is Lorenzo Ferro, who is actually Argentinian — he’s the only one who is actually an Argentine.
AVI: Apparently “smouldering”.
AMY: Oh Xolo’s in Cobra Kai, apparently.
AVI: People love that show.
AMY: Yeah, he’s like big. I don’t know that show.
KRISTIN: My husband does because he’s like from the 80s and the valley.
AVI: Next up we have Hope, the best friend.
AMY: Ayo.
KRISTIN: She’s great. I love her. I’ll take Ayo.
AVI: She’s the best friend who answers every sobbing airport phone call for a decade without once saying, “I told you so.”
AVI: After casting, we get some storyboard frames from the supposed film. It looks like Casey just — at a dance club, hands over head.
BLAIR: I mean, it kind of looks like our show.
KRISTIN: Truly.
AMY: That’s amazing.
BLAIR: It really does.
AMY: It didn’t see the show.
AVI: We did not show it the show — or anything like that. This is strictly from the novel, the style, and the casting.
AMY: So we have Maya Hawke looking forlorn in an airport, an empty airport somewhere.
AVI: It’s COVID.
KRISTIN: There was just a bomb scare of some kind
AMY: And we have Maya Hawke looking out the window of an airplane. She’s landing, maybe back in LA.
KRISTIN: She doesn’t look happy about it. I think she’s definitely coming home.
AMY: She’s returning to her work. Then we have a big, happy table at an outdoor dinner with steak, candles and red wine.
BLAIR: That looks like one of our last days.
AVI: In Argentina.
AMY: It’s the crew dinner!
AVI: If only.
KRISTIN: But we actually shot this scene — they went to one of her friends in Argentina, and her family has an estancia, so all the buddies all go out there and they have exactly this picnic basically.
BLAIR: Under string lights. Absolutely stunning.
KRISTIN: And then the dance party. We had that both in Latvia and in Argentina and in Iceland, too.
AVI: And then we do just some bios.
KRISTIN: Oh my God, what is going on with me? I look so weird. I was like, “Who’s that?”
AVI: Well, apparently it’s you. And again, we ask it to do an image of you in situ of the film.
KRISTIN: My facelift is amazing.
AMY: You’re writing some notes.
AVI: You’re a writer so apparently you’re writing in a— it looks like a day book.
AMY: Forget the laptop on the curb, you’re pounding out new pages. You’ve got like a leather-covered bound notebook.
KRISTIN: My hair has been blown out.
KRISTIN: Yeah. It’s incredible, my blowout.
AMY: It’s an amazing blowout.
KRISTIN: I just want to say — this is amazing because I don’t do all the stuff, you know, to my face. And so it’s like, this is what I would look like if I did all the things and looked like all the people who do all the things. This is me looking like everyone else. I’m definitley prettier.
AVI: And then Blair Breard —
AMY: With a little blazer! Look at your blazer!
AVI: Yeah, on set. There are cameras behind you and lights, C-stands.
KRISTIN: Do you have that outfit, Blair?
BLAIR: I actually have something like it — my IMDB photo, I think, might have that jacket and I maybe have that shirt.
AVI: It says: “Blair Breard is a six-time Emmy-nominated producer whose credits include Louie, Better Things, Baskets, One Mississippi, Scenes from a Marriage, and The Other Two.
KRISTIN: They grabbed much better credits for you than for me.
AVI: Through her company Bossy Boots, she has a first-look deal with FX Productions.”
BLAIR: Not anymore. That’s like ten years ago. I don’t have that deal.
AMY: I was going to pitch you something if you did. I’m glad to know.
BLAIR: That’s funny. That was a moment.
AVI: The closing on this pitch deck is “Why This Story, Why Now?” It says: “The conversation about women, choice, and timelines has never been louder or more confused. Every week brings another think piece about freezing eggs or having it all or the loneliness epidemic among single women. This story cuts through the noise with something radical. A woman who chose adventure, chose freedom, chose herself — and does not apologize for the decade it took to get ready for love. It is not a cautionary tale. It is not a fairy tale. It is the rare romantic comedy that believes a woman’s thirties are not a countdown. They are a curriculum.”
KRISTIN: A curriculum? Like something to do, something to learn?
AMY: That makes no sense to me personally.
AVI: I’m not sure.
KRISTIN: A guideline?
AMY: Curriculum doesn’t sound fun.
AVI: Well, maybe it’s a learning process.
KRISTIN: I like that it’s not a cautionary tale, it’s not a fairy tale. I think that gets it right.
AMY: That’s really helpful. I like that. Okay, let’s watch the trailer. Ready for the trailer?
KRISTIN: I don’t know if I am. Maybe I’ll be inspired. Maybe it’s going to be great.
[TRAILER]
“Here’s who I used to be.”
“I love you too. I also write sitcoms.”
“It doesn’t sound like a real job.”
“And it sort of isn’t.”
“We’re not a house of aspiring writers anymore.”
“At home, these words pose an impossible choice. Do you want love or freedom?”
“You have the soul of a traveler. And what real travelers know — it is better to be free than loved.”
AMY: Oh, Iceland.
“I love this. But the question that’s really been on my mind is — get your shit together. What have I done with my decade? With my thirties?”
“Girl, you really should have froze those eggs in your twenties.”
“If you want a ride to the airport — will you marry me?”
“Goucho.”
“And then the whole town came running to see the feast.”
“It’s not that I’m brave. I’m just comforted by things that scare other people.”
AMY: Oh.Look at that stamp.
“And I’m terrified of things other people find comforting.”
“Now I wish I just didn’t have to learn how to be alone.”
“Alone.”
“So — where are you off to next?”
“Argentina.”
“We met yesterday.”
KRISTIN: So scary.
AMY: Coming soon.
KRISTIN: It’s so fascinating because it’s so good at making very realistic-looking humans and scenes and things that look like they’ve absolutely happened. But the people just don’t speak the way or move the way people actually speak and move.
AMY: They can’t act. It’s just clunky.
KRISTIN: The pace of the whole thing is unnatural and a little weird.
BLAIR: But it’s also weirdly scary. Because I feel like there are things it looks perfect. Yeah, and there were things in the trailer where I was like, “Wait, that’s like what we did. That’s what we shot. That looks like where we were.” It’s a little alarming.
AVI: Well its trained on all those photos that everyone has taken in all those places.
KRISTIN: The thing that is missing is just how humans actually are versus this messy
BLAIR: Messy. Flawed. Unexpected.
KRISTIN: And the thoughts that it puts together for the trailer don’t connect to each other. It’s commenting on things that didn’t happen. It’s not giving you a story. But it looks perfect.
That’s amazing. Thank you for doing that. What a joy it was to get to see all of that. It doesn’t make me feel like now I know what the movie is. I still wouldn’t know how to write the movie, necessarily — what to pick out from the book to turn into a movie. I know how to cut my ten episodes into a movie. That’s also my dream — if there weren’t four directors and Disney would give me the dailies, I would absolutely just cut it.
AVI: Okay, we have one more fun activity. What we like to do at the end, since we’ve shown all the packaging, is try to get a meeting with our own creative executive that we can try to get into our session and see what they think about rebooting the series as a feature.
AMY: Yeah, we have an LA executive that joins us for a minute.
KRISTIN: How wonderful.
AMY: Because I know you guys want to pitch it again.
MEREDITH [AI FILM EXEC]: Hey Amy, hey Avi. Hi Kristin. Hi Blair. Give me one second. I’m pulling up the pages and the deck. If we keep it to Argentina and make it a contained trip, the ending can carry more weight — as a look, that one lingering moment before parting that suggests possibility but doesn’t lock it down. The thing is, it’s stronger if that look is earned through shared stakes earlier. Would you want that look to feel like closure or like an open invitation?
KRISTIN: I think it should feel like possibility.
MEREDITH [AI FILM EXEC]: Possibility plays well here. If we’ve watched them in Buenos Aires go from strangers to co-conspirators, then that final look can carry a charge. You believe they might meet again, but you also buy it if they don’t. The win is letting the audience feel both. How much ambiguity are you comfortable with in that beat?
AMY: I’m going to jump in. I’m a producer. I have some questions about the financing. I’m here with Blair, my producing partner on the project. And we want to know — who are your buyers for this? Are you guys financing? What are your budget ranges? Talk to us about what you can do for us.
MEREDITH [AI FILM EXEC]: Okay, if we’re talking buyers, this is a sweet spot for streamers who want female-forward travel romance with comedy chops. Think Netflix, Amazon, maybe Hulu. Budget-wise, with multiple international locations but no heavy VFX, you’re probably in the mid-single-digit millions. Are you aiming for streamer licensing or a full negative pickup?
AMY: We don’t know.
AVI: Not sure Meredith.
AMY: I think we need go — Meredith, do you guys validate parking? Can we talk to your assistant? I didn’t even get a water. No one offered me a glass of water.
KRISTIN: That was amazing. She’s a politician. I wish I could be better at that — just ignoring the question and sticking with what you were going to say. That’s media training one-on-one.
AVI: A hundred percent. Wow.
KRISTIN: She’s amazing. That was so creepy. The way she had that kind of bored vocal fry. Like, Avi, did you give it that directive or did it just know that that’s what it should be?
AVI: Well, there are a lot of system instructions in there, but “being bored” isn’t one of them.
KRISTIN: It just knew. That was great. A super fun time.
AVI: This has been so awesome because we’ve never had something that actually got made that we’re trying to reenter into the discourse. And it’s just fantastic material. I mean, honestly. I don’t know what else we can say.
AMY: Thank you guys so much.
BLAIR: Thank you.
KRISTIN: Thank you.
AVI: You’ve been listening to Films Not Made. But if you want an even better experience, check us out on YouTube where you can see all the new materials, including the pitch deck and trailer.
AMY: And subscribe to our Substack for show notes, more about our guests, and industry insights.
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AVI: Thanks again for listening and watching. We’ll see you next time.