Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Martin Olson. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Martin, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Alright – so having the idea is one thing, but going from idea to execution is where countless people drop the ball. Can you talk to us about your journey from idea to execution?

I’m a comedy writer. I was one of the lucky ones since I didn’t have to go through the crucible of the sitcom format to establish a career.

I started writing for and with comedians in Boston. When they became successful, they hired me to write on their TV shows and films. When you are hired directly by the star of a series or special or film, you are one of the lucky ones who side-steps the trappings of showbiz. You don’t have to start with an agent or pitch yourself and can just be a creative idiot and not worry about the politics of showbiz, which, like the corporate structure, is hierarchical.

My Hollywood writing career started writing for a friend who happened to be one of the craziest comedians at that time, Bobcat Goldthwait. He did a sort of satire of a comedy act, presenting himself onstage as a madman who just happened to be able to spout well-crafted, subversive jokes. Bob is also a wonderfully encouraging person, and I was lucky that he hired me to write for his HBO specials.

Since HBO was at the top of the prestige ladder at the time, I was also lucky to get the best agent possible, Annette Van Duren, who had worked for the big agencies and then had formed her own independent agency as a literary agent. Because of her, I’ve been one of the lucky comedy writers who have been working steadily from job to job ever since. She protected me from the pitfalls of conventional showbiz and I was largely able to work with my comedian friends, many of whom became famous.

As for selling my ideas and making money, I learned the secret of pitching story ideas from my neighbor in Los Angeles, Ronald Shusett, who had written the sci-fi films Alien, Total Recall, Minority Report and many others. Since his projects had such innovative premises, he told me exactly how he had pitched them to studio executives. His secret was not to pitch the whole story. You had to keep your pitch brief because the exec you pitched to would have to pitch it to the studio head, so it was largely a verbal process. So he told me he pitched the opening premise and the characters, and then said, “And here are some scenes from the second act.” Then he would pitch the craziest most visual and most memorable scenes he could think of. Then he said he would briefly pitch a traditional wrap-up to the story to balance out the craziness of the scenes he pitched in Act Two. He also told me that he would spend a lot of time on his leave-behind document after the pitch, making it as concise and well-written as possible. He advised me to “over-deliver” on the written leave-behind so the executives knew you could write well.

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

Since I also write songs, I quickly learned the value of pitching song in my scripts and gradually became known for songwriting as well. This was fortunate, since songwriting is very lucrative. So I was able to benefit from two of the most fun aspects of being a writer, writing both comedy and songs. Specifically, since I’ve written about four hundred songs for TV, many of them were for Disney Studios. Disney translates its shows (and songs) into twenty different languages for worldwide distribution. So I was at the right place at the right time.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

In my spare time, I write comedy books. The first books was called EnCYCLOPAEDIA OF HELL, published by Feral House. It uses the archaic spelling of “encyclopedia” because it is supposed to be an ancient book written in hell by demons about every aspect of mankind. It turns out that hell is overcrowded, so the purpose of the book was to educate demons about the strange stupidities of human life, to make it easier for the demons to invade earth and take over, taking advantage of earth’s land mass to accommodate the burgeonign demon population. However, the devil and his demons are just as stupid as human beings, so their invasion, although totally successful, was a crazy one and made for a good story. Luckily, the book was funny enough to be optioned by Warner Brothers Studios. At the same Time I created a simple Facebook Page for the book, using many of the ridiculous jokes and and stories from the book. To my surprise the craziness of the book page attracted almost two hundred thousand fans. As a result I was able to publish the sequel, THE COnQUEST OF HEAVEn, in which the demon army, building on the successful invasion of earth, launch a preposterous invasion of heaven in order to kill God and take over the universe. As a result the book series has become popular and helped me attract more readers who enjoy “outsider” comedy, like the books of Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Kurt Vonnegut and Jorge Luis Borges. Presenting idiotic ideas in a straight-faces, believable manner is at the heart of my satirical books and, luckily, been fairly successful and makes the writing process a lot of fun.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

I guess you could say that my songwriting was originally my secondary profession. But through the years songwriting has proven to be as lucrative as my comedy writing career. So I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to have two careers that are equally as fun and often play off one another. What was my biggest learning curve in my field? I think there were two main lessons for me. The most important things were to try to always remember to value the fun aspect of my job, and going hand-in-hand with that is the importance of trying to be respectful of everyone in the workplace, especially those with vastly different approaches to comedy and to writing. Having fun and showing respect whenever possible seem to be the main things in common with the successful people I know. It’s just as important to maintain a good quality of life as it is to have a successful business.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.martin-olson.com
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/encyclopaediaofhell
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@EncycOfHell/videos
• Other: My comedy books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Martin-Olson/author/B005DQUP88n