Sam Catlin is a TV writer/producer on the AMC drama "Breaking Bad". Before that, "Canterbury's Law" on Fox and "Kidnapped" on NBC.
He also wrote an independent movie "The Great New Wonderful" starring Maggie Gylenhall, Tony Shaloub, Will Arnett and Stephen Colbert. Originally an actor, Sam graduated from The Tisch School of the Arts in 1997. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two kids.
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Sam Catlin Interview with Joshua Fardon
What inspired you to write Sea of Terror?
Just a lifetime of social anxiety. I come from a shuttered WASP family, the dying strains of a once fruitful generation of Boston Yankees. And I’ve found that most of the people in my family prefer long walks with their dogs to spontaneous human interaction. So I get a tinge of dread about any new social interaction. When I first moved out to Los Angeles and was dating my then-girlfriend/now-wife - who’s not that way, she’s very outgoing and socially well-adjusted – she dragged me along to a lot of new experiences and a lot of new people. Which ultimately was great – it’s one of the reasons why I married her. But there was also a lot of dread. And I think at the time, I was unemployed. I had come out to Los Angeles as an actor, so I didn’t really have anything that I felt proud of and I didn’t have any status.
Did you start writing as a result of acting, or did you always want to be a writer?
No, I was an actor. I went to graduate school at NYU and trained. I’d spent maybe two or three years in New York – I had an understudy role on Broadway, I had a couple of things I did in Shakespeare in the Park, a few other off-off Broadway things and several regional plays.
There’s something about the anxiety in the play that seems endemic to Los Angeles.
I feel like as I’ve gotten older it’s more commonplace than I initially thought.
Did a lot of people come up to you after the show and say “I feel this way all the time?”
No. But I was surprised at how uncomfortable people felt about it. I mean, I guess people identify with the discomfort. I just took these little banalities of fear and pumped them up into something mythic.
This play was written after 9/11 – and there’s a whole new level of anxiety we have as Americans which we didn’t have before.
During some iterations of this play, I actually talked about 9/11 and the fear of the Other.
What is the “Other?”
The alien. Some kind of unseen unstoppable force that's coming for you. There's something inexorable about its progress over you. You know, the guests that are coming over, they’re very alien, in a literal sense. They really aren’t human beings.
What do you mean by that, they’re not human?
Well, they’re not. I always pictured them as lizards or something. Encased in skin.
What is Doris (one of the guests) doing when she goes offstage to the bathroom? Is she really drinking the toilet water? I guess we're not supposed to know...
I guess it's the coy writer thing to say, “what do you think?” But, in my mind, I don't know exactly what she's doing, but there are times when she might be drinking the water, you know, absorbing the protein strains. It's a kind of rape that's going on. These people dominate us in different ways, with the food, or with hurting the kid.
A lot of the anxiety in the play is subtextual - it's not explicitly stated. When you write, do you lay out everything explicitly and then go back and change it – or do you just sort of hear it that way as you're creating it?
I think I hear it that way. There are unspeakable things that are so intense or vivid or horrifying that you can't articulate them. There's a scene missing in Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter talks to Mulitple Miggs throughout the night and tells him something that makes Miggs swallow his own tongue – out of anxiety or terror or whatever it is that would cause another human being to swallow his own tongue. The scene is unwritable. There's no scene that you could write that would be as terrifying or as vivid or as plausible as the unwritten scene. So I think of that scene a lot as the ultimate in economy. It's like using negative space. It's not showing.
There's a veiled threat in the room, and sometimes you can put your finger on it and identify it, but sometimes you can't and that makes it scary. Like that sound Doris makes.
Which would always make me laugh... So disgusting.
You were in the original production of this play as an actor...
It started as a one-act.
What part of the play was the one-act?
The first act.
So it was just Ben and Alice dreading the guests coming over.
And I thought that was it. You know, I thought we can't ever meet them; they can't ever satisfy our apprehensions. But, I enjoyed the characters so much, that I decided to go ahead with it.
We see how apprehensive Ben and Alice are, and you think it's neurosis and paranoia, but when the guests arrive, it turns out they're absolutely right. It's like a Paxil commercial without the Paxil. Speaking of which, why does Ben watch so much television?
It's like a security blanket. Something safe that he can control. In another play it would be alcohol. He's also watching women's golf, or something stupid like that. So it's really just mindless consumption.
And then there's the Christopher Cross CD they're obsessed with finding. I'm going to state the obvious, but is it the song “Sailing”? The play is called Sea of Terror.
I never made that connection. I don’t think.
But when at the end of the play, when Ben finds the song and puts it on, he's finally decided to do something about the guests. There's an offstage confrontation, then Danny walks back onstage with a cut on his face and Doris says “there's blood.” Then the music starts and Ben re-enters as a new man. It's like the play is saying the only way you can settle this kind of anxiety is through violence. It's not a question of “just be yourself” because Ben tries to be himself and people piss on him for it.
Yeah, they have to be handled.
I mean, it's a dark statement, but it's also very funny. Did you find yourself laughing as you wrote this play?
I did. In fact, when I was acting in it, I would laugh. I have a problem with corpsing – which is a theater term for laughing onstage. It's nervous laughter. And my wife was in it and my dear friends Pauly and Amy. It was so much fun, but I really had to work at not laughing. But you have to enjoy what you write, or you wouldn't keep writing.
You've written successfully for a lot of different mediums. Can you talk about the differences and similarities?
Writing plays is easiest. I don't think there's a lot of people writing plays right now with the hopes of somehow getting rich or even making a living at it. So, if you're going to write a play, you may as well write something that's personal and interesting to you. It's mainly listening to the characters' voices and seeing what they say, what they want to do.
In TV and scripts, which is how I make my living, it's very hard. It's one thing if you're an actor and you're bored and you don't have anything to do, so you tap away at your computer writing a play. It's easy to be free. But when you're part of an industry which has rules, it's harder to be spontaneous.
Film and TV are governed by structure. You have to know where it's going.
I write a lot of pilot scripts. Those are tricky because you have to introduce the characters, to get the show off and running, but you also have to have the DNA, the essence of a hundred episodes. When you write a pilot, you're introducing the world, the tone. You can't just pull it out of your ass. You're not just writing one story, you're writing all the stories.
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All Connotation Press plays are presented online to the reading public. All performance rights, including professional, amateur, television and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved. If you are interested in seeking performance rights to a specific work contact the Drama Editor, Joshua Fardon.
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