Episode Details

A shy kid who could only express himself on the page spent 15 years chasing a screenwriting career, then self-published a horror novel Hollywood had passed on, and it changed everything. Meet Tom Hanada, who writes as T.J. Payne.

Tom is a working screenwriter and TV writer (Motherland, Little House on the Prairie, and the Duffer Brothers series on Netflix, The Boroughs) and co-host Chris Hanada’s brother. He taught himself screenwriting in Rob Reiner’s edit bay, took 15 years to earn his WGA card, and is honest about how the path really works: why the assistant, not the star, is your way in, and how a genuine six-year friendship landed his first staff job.

He also unpacks the best writing advice on the show: why pitching is an archaic ritual you still must master, what “voice” really means, and how his self-published novel Intercepts, a script his own reps buried, found a grassroots audience, sold well over ninety thousand copies, and got picked up by Penguin Random House. Plus a clear-eyed take on AI: it can do 95 percent of the job, but the last 5 percent is where the soul is.