We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Eric Schabla. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Eric below.

Eric, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry.

Historically, the theatre and film/tv industries have been separated by tradition, geography, economics and plenty of other factors. But the pandemic unified them in an unexpected way: fear. We artists were mostly unemployed. Social media and its distortions took an outsized presence in our lives. Isolation made us question our role in the culture. Then, as storytelling media came limping back from the brink of ruin, artists and administrators nurtured some unhealthy coping mechanisms. Conformity — blend in with the herd to avoid being swallowed whole. Projection — I’m not afraid, you are. Denial — this isn’t scary, it’s actually for the best. This last sentiment would eventually prove to be true. Out of crisis, opportunity was born. As an actor and playwright who had almost exclusively worked in theatre, I moved to Los Angeles in 2021, just as the pandemic was ending, to dip my toe into the world of Hollywood. Ironically, the last play I worked on before the move – a production of Larissa Fasthorse’s ‘Thanksgiving Play’ – was never performed live. It was simply filmed and broadcasted to its audience. This would’ve been unthinkable a few years earlier. Theatre people are superstitious. They hold their traditions close. But for lots of institutions, the merging of theatre and film/tv practices was a matter of survival.
When I got to LA, I was heartened to see the cross-pollination in full swing. Playwrights working in television, film directors headed to broadway, etc. The global health crisis had shaken something loose. But even with a fair wind and some arts experience, Hollywood can feel impenetrable. I got my first foothold in the tv/film world adapting foreign language dubbing scripts for Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+. Not exactly glamorous. What got me the job? Definitely not my midwestern reserve. It was my background in theatre. Even then, it was clear something was changing. Creative exchange between storytelling media was becoming not just fashionable, but necessary.
In case the pandemic wasn’t enough, the twin Hollywood strikes (WGA & SAG-AFTRA) exerted even more pressure on an already strained system. Now, the future (surprise surprise) is still uncertain. There’s plenty of fear to go around and, as the great screenwriter William Goldman said, “nobody knows anything”. But the good news is, certain walls have come down. Shows like Succession and Atlanta are the strange and beautiful children of an era in which rigid aesthetic distinctions are fading. But lasting change is always elusive. Artists can only continue to resist fear and conformity.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ve always been interested in the function of language, but I also grew up in the midwest and spent a lot of time around people who work with their hands. Somehow these coalesced, and I was drawn to dramatic literature. In particular, I was captivated by plays with challenging, muscular language. As a young person I took theatre training pretty seriously (probably too seriously) and was fortunate enough to work professionally as an actor while still in high school. I attended the University of Minnesota/Guthrie Theatre B.F.A. Program, a conservatory-style school with a strong liberal arts component and an emphasis on classical drama. We studied under the auspices of the Tony Award winning Guthrie theatre, with a stint abroad at LISPA and Shakespeare’s Globe in the UK. It was an immersion in all the writers who appealed to me as a young person: Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, etc. But it was also a time when the institution was diversifying, questioning its definition of “classic” and rethinking the boundaries of canon. Though I was extremely single-minded during the this time in my life, it was here that I accidentally discovered writing. I had a wonderful playwriting teacher, Dominic Taylor, whose wisdom and encouragement were vital to my growth. As I emerged into the profession and started acting, writing remained a parallel creative interest. A nomad, I hopped from city to city. Wherever the work was, I went. I had a few poems published in minor literary journals and magazines along the way. After a few years of moving every three months, I was exhausted. More than that, I was struggling with a lack of creative agency. I had things to say, things I couldn’t quite express as an actor. Just before the pandemic hit, I finished my first full length play and managed to put together a public reading. It was a revelatory experience. The piece was far from perfect, but it held the attention of 100 people for two hours. They even laughed at the funny bits. It was intoxicating. In the wake of the pandemic, the theatre industry was in crisis. I knew it was time to pivot. I cobbled together a few short films and writing samples and decided to move to LA, where I began adapting dubbing scripts for foreign film and television via Netflix, Amazon and Disney+. Shortly after I arrived, I applied to the American Film Institute, the number one graduate film school in the world according to the Hollywood Reporter (a dubious honor, to be sure). I was accepted. I’m now a second-year MFA Screenwriting Fellow at AFI. The training is rigorous, the hours are long, but it’s a privilege to be here. In particular, I’m deeply grateful for the mentorship of Kevin Kennedy, Cami Delavigne and Anna Thomas.

It’s hard to describe in abstract terms what motivates me as an artist. Maybe there is no organizing principle in my creative life. I know I want to keep a foot in both worlds: theatre & film/tv. But I often don’t know what story I want to tell until I’m telling it. That said, I do know this… we live in a highly polarized time, and one of the best things artists can do is represent opposing truths. We can offer audiences a chance to reckon with contradictory feelings or thoughts. We can criticize absolutism and conformity. We can be curious. We can be humble. We can hold our convictions lightly. We can take the work seriously, but not ourselves.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The raw material for any kind of artistic work is observation. So, contrary to stereotyped depictions of artists as cloistered introverts, it’s really a vocation that pushes you out into the world. You get to collect experiences, feelings, little mundane dramas. Emerson wasn’t kidding when he talked about the “transparent eyeball”. You can’t be very effective as an artist if you’re living a purely reflective life, rather than an absorbent one.

There’s another component to this. The sculptor Auguste Rodin was, for a while, the mentor to a troubled young German poet named Rainer Maria Rilke. One day, Rilke was tortured with writer’s block and asked Rodin where he found inspiration for his sculptures. Rodin said, “I look at something until I see it.” This might sound glib, but I think what Rodin meant is that, for an artist, external reality has to be encountered patiently and openly and with the ego in check. Then you bring to bear the particularity of your own experience in the process of observation and… voila. You’ve got Eternal Springtime.

So, that’s the best part about being an artist. You get to spend your life looking at things, looking at people, until you see them.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

Careers in the arts are rarely linear. My brother is a pilot, and there’s a very clear ladder to climb in that industry: cadet, second officer, first officer, co-pilot, etc. No such ladder exists for the freelance artist. It’s not unusual for even the most successful creatives to have periodic stretches of unemployment, or to maintain a “side hustle”.

I once worked part time in an upscale horse stable while understudying for a production of Romeo and Juliet at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. I was young, maybe 23, and just so happy to be working in theatre at all, let alone at a prominent, Tony Award winning venue like CST. So, during the day I’d groom thoroughbreds and shovel shit, then take the train down to Navy Pier at night and rehearse some Shakespeare. All in a day’s work.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ericschabla.com
• Instagram: @ericschabla