Transcript: Writer’s Voice Interviews with Ken Krimstein & Harry Abrams

How Einstein Found a Piece of the Truth Behind the Appearance of Reality:

The difference between superstition and science is real. Even if we're fated to not be able to understand it, it should still work. And that's why Einstein at one point, when he thinks he's got this, he writes to a friend and he says, I think I found a piece of the truth.

That's cartoonist Ken Krimstein.

We talk with him about the remarkable meeting of the minds between Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka in Prague before either man was famous.

His new graphic book is Einstein in Kafka Land, How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe.

Then we talk with veteran Hollywood talent agent Harry Abrams, who represented stars like Liam Neeson and Jennifer Lopez about his memoir slash how-to book, Let's Do Launch.

That's all coming up on today's Writer's Voice, in-depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.

Thanks for joining us this hour on this station and at writersvoice.net.

I'm Francesca Rheannon.

Ken Krimstein clearly has a thing for illustrious German Jewish seekers after truth of pre-World War II Europe.

In 2018, we spoke with him about his graphic biography, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, A Tyranny of Truth.

Now he's come out with a brilliant look at how Einstein solved the problem of gravity, examining that story through the lens of Franz Kafka's emerging approach to literature in the early 1920s.

Both men were in Prague at the time, and, Krimstein says, both were searching for the true truth.

Kafka was an insurance salesman who had just written his masterpiece, The Judgment.

Einstein had just taken a job teaching physics in Prague because he couldn't get a job in Germany.

That's because his formulation, E equals mc-squared, was too controversial in his native land.

Out of the relationship between the two men, largely speculated but with a basis in fact, Krimstein has spun a fascinating tale about inspiration, iconoclasm, and the search for the ultimate truth.

Ken Krimstein, welcome back to Writer's Voice.

Well, it's great to be here again.

So, this was a really interesting book.

Einstein in Kafka land, how Albert fell down the rabbit hole and came up with the universe.

It had a decidedly surrealistic tint to it.

Yeah, well, have you checked out the theory of relativity lately?

It's pretty surreal, but thank you.

I guess surreal, super real, hyper real.

I went to Prague when I discovered this strange synchrony I mean, could you believe that Albert Einstein when he was a nobody and Franz Kafka when he was a nobody bumped into each other in this sort of last year in Prague.

And then by the end of it, Einstein had solved what he said I had solved gravity.

You know, I try to solve finding a parking place and Kafka had really broken the code of his first kind of masterpiece, The Judgment, which many people call.

So I was like, what happened?

How did that happen?

And they, did they actually know each other?

So this, there's this writer named Reiner Stock and he's a German biographer and he's taken three volumes in over 1500 pages.

And if Reiner Stock says they met, I agree.

And so that we know that on May 24th, 1911, Einstein gives a talk to all the people in Prague who are really like, who is this guy?

And Kafka's there with all his pals.

So Stock says it, I go with it, you know?

Okay, that's great.

So let's go back to the beginning.

First of all, you have a narrator in this book that is a skeleton.

Tell us about this narrator and why you chose this kind of graphic rubric, this character to tell the story.

Okay, why?

Let me just unpack it a little bit.

So I wanted to have a voice narrating it because I had, it was kind of complicated.

I had two sort of protagonists and there was a lot to cover.

And as I was saying, I visited Prague during a little lull in the pandemic and it was completely empty.

In fact, one of the people who told me to go there, a professor said, you've seen Prague as empty as it's ever been since Einstein was there, you know?

It was amazing.

And they have this fantastic 600-year-old clock tower that towers over the old town.

And it's one of these things where the little guys walk out and ring bells and all this stuff every hour and it gets, people come to look at it.

And the character that rings the hour is a skeleton.

And the skeleton is really interesting looking, of course, it's a beautiful clock, but he's looking, he or she, because we, I don't know, is looking at the building where Kafka and Einstein used to meet at these salons, which was called the Unicorn Pharmacy.

And there was a woman with the incredible name of Bertha Fanta who hosted a salon that had everyone from theosophists, like Madame Blavatsky and Steiner, to writers and musicians.

So he's looking, he or she, the skeleton, is looking right at it.

So I figured what a better person to, they saw it all for 620 years or something.

That's amazing.

And when you say Steiner, that's Rudolf Steiner of the Waldorf School movement.

Yeah, yeah, Steiner.

And I mean, I learned so much about this fascinating salon and Prague at this era in time before World War I. But Einstein, what struck me when I was going through this, because I tend to look at people as people and then their discoveries afterward.

Because I have to assume a position of complete ignorance of anything that ever happened afterward, as a historian, like they just know what they know.

So Einstein's marriage is breaking up.

His wife is Serbian.

He needs to get a raise.

He can't even teach high school in Switzerland.

And he gets offered a big job in Prague, which was a German colony, I guess you could say.

Kafka's just working in the insurance company and loving it, by the way.

So, contrary to everything we hear about how miserable he was, he was actually doing workers' comp insurance, which was the dot-com of its day.

Because as industrialism expanded, you didn't want your employees to get injured.

And he loved it.

He was a do-gooder.

And he was an obsessive lap swimmer.

So I kept finding out all these things that I didn't know.

And when I went to Prague, that was the third character that maybe adds to what you call surrealism of the story.

Because how did it happen?

How did two people who are just like us, really, I mean, just family or whatever, end up coming up with these scary, powerful thoughts?

This was the question I faced.

So let's talk about Albert Einstein.

Why did he end up in Prague and what was he trying to do there?

Well, Einstein ended up in Prague because he couldn't get a job teaching high school in Switzerland because he was too much of a bad boy.

Even though he had what they call the miracle year of 1905 and came up with E equals MC squared, not everybody believed in it, believe it or not.

He was, people were attacking it.

Some people believed in it, but it couldn't be proven.

It was like some of the stuff we probably have now with string theory and things like that.

No one could understand.

And the German university in Prague saw the potential and they, quite frankly, they doubled his salary.

They put him in a new apartment that had electricity and an elevator.

And hey, you know, I'll take the gig, you know.

What was he trying to do there?

Well, you know, a lot of things.

I tend to look at the people first.

So he's trying to save his marriage.

He's trying to raise his kids.

He's trying to, he's a very ambitious person.

He's trying to get up on a ladder to maybe get back somewhere.

But he's, his E equals MC squared thing, which wasn't complete.

It didn't solve some of the questions that, about gravity that Newton had posed and that weren't right.

So there was a lot of physicists in this time trying to solve this problem.

And Einstein felt the heat on his tail, I think a little bit, and he wanted to get this thing solved.

So I had a hard time understanding some of the physics in this book.

Me too.

And that's just a reflection on me because I have never understood.

I've read lots and lots of books that are for the lay audience about physics, and I just, I don't get it.

So I wonder if you can explain what it meant to Einstein to solve the problem of gravity.

What is the problem of gravity?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I, like you, you know, as my mentor, Sam Gross said, Ken, you're a cartoonist, cartoonists know everything.

But I really didn't know everything.

So I had to learn a lot of this.

But, you know, we take gravity so much for granted and all animals do and everything.

It's like, you know, and when you delve into it, it's really, really strange.

Like why, you know, Newton asked the question, like what holds the moon to the earth when there's not a wire, you know, it's just space.

So if you kind of just really strip it away and look at it, it's a very, it actually, and from all the reading and studying that I've done, it's still one of the biggest problems in physics because it doesn't play well with electricity.

And the big things that were happening at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century was, you know, we're getting electricity, you know, Edison and all this.

Einstein was fascinated with both of those problems.

And the thing is, one of Einstein's, and I had to try and understand this, and when I did it, did the book, and like you, I've seen every Einstein, you know, TV show on Nova they ever did.

And I didn't want to do this with the old, there's a train and a flashlight shining in two directions.

Quite frankly, I could never understand that.

So I had to figure out in my own way and without being too complex, and this is really one of the strangest things, Einstein gets credit for or did figure out that the speed of light is really strange.

Light is really strange.

It goes the same speed, whether you're coming toward it or you're going away from it, it's always the same.

So the one thing, we think that the thing that's like time is the thing that's always the same.

And Einstein said, no, light is the thing that's always the same.

And that's really, really hard to wrap your head around.

And it raised a problem.

Okay, Albert, yeah, maybe, works great on a train that's going at close to the speed of light and not speeding up or slowing down.

But we're not all on trains.

Just go, everything's going all over the place.

And that was what he had to make that play well.

He had to fix it.

Newton, so Newton, our good old Newton, the Apple guy, he made a couple of mistakes.

And he just said, Newton had a quote, which I, in a letter that I found and it's in the book.

And he said to a friend, anybody who thinks they can solve the problem of gravity is out of their minds or something to that effect.

So Einstein meets him in a fantastic scene and says, well, in that case, Sir Isaac, I'm out of my mind.

But Isaac had left some holes.

He said that if the light of the, I'm sorry, I don't want to get too advanced here, but I'm trying to.

So if light has a speed, they figured out light, light isn't infinite, it has a speed.

So if the sun went out, then the tides, Newton said the tides in America and the world would instantly collapse.

In other words, there'd be nothing.

And Einstein said, no, no, no, that would mean light would have to travel faster than the speed of light, and it's not instant.

And Newton was just like, well, don't bother me, my stuff works.

So Einstein had to figure that out.

And it forced him, he had adversaries and it forced him to dig deep.

And one of the things that I was fascinated, what a character he is.

I mean, my goodness, I mean, he's funny, he's dirty, he's sweet, he's peaceful, he's unbelievable.

But he was persistent once he got something into his head.

And I fell in love with the way that he tried to fight his own demons.

And I had to show this.

And in fact, from reading a lot, I think that Einstein, the man, particularly when he was young, had two big questions that scared him like crazy.

One is, what if I'm wrong?

Like, what if this is wrong?

Then I'm really gonna be messed up.

But the one that I think in my own estimation that even scared him more was what if I'm right?

Because if light is this and his theories are right, there's no such thing as force.

Everything just bends.

It's a wacky, insane thought.

And what a thought to have birthed in your mind.

And I thought, wow, how did he do that?

And I went and did some reading.

And I'm sorry, I'm giving you such a long answer, but I found a quote from him after he won the Nobel Prize.

And by the way, he didn't even win the Nobel Prize for his greatest discovery, but that's another story.

But somebody asked him, why did it take you so long?

You kind of had the idea when you were in Prague, but you still had to work out math and stuff like that.

And he said something like, this is his exact quote, it's not so easy to free oneself from the idea that coordinates must have an immediate metrical meaning.

Or in other words, it's not so easy to realize that there's no there there.

I can agree.

This is Writer's Voice.

I'm Francesca .

We're talking with graphic artist and author, Ken Krimstein, about his latest book, Einstein in Kafka Land, how Albert fell down the rabbit hole and came up with the universe.

This is so interesting and putting the physics aside, because I think probably, you know, many people may not understand the physics, but you're really talking about a philosophical question that is behind the physics and one that, in which you bring together both Franz Kafka and Albert Einstein.

And that is, you have a scene between them in which Kafka says that he's looking for the same thing that Einstein is, which is to find the true truth.

Well, what is the true truth?

It almost implies, some of this almost implies that they threw out the truth.

Okay, well, A, if I knew the true truth, you know, you're not paying me enough for this interview.

For this interview.

But what I think it is, and I've been obsessed with sort of the, you know, my first book was about Hannah Arendt.

And there was a sort of pre-World War II, way pre-World War II in Germany.

They did not shy from asking the big questions.

And they just, I think it was, they wanted to know what was behind the behind.

Like, it's not enough to know that gravity works like this.

It's like, why?

It's not enough to know that like stories and people exist with each other.

Now I'm speaking of Kafka, but it's like, how does it feel?

How does it feel to be alive?

They were pushing beyond.

And as I started to explore, you know, how weird if you actually take a look at what they're saying, they're saying that our perceptions are valid.

They're good.

But there's another layer behind our perceptions, which is also good.

But guess what?

It's beyond our comprehension.

That was the space they were playing in.

I thought of it as modernism or expressionism because I love art and I was an art history major.

And I know what was going on at that time, you know, they were, and so who are kind of sort of the bad guys in the background a little bit?

Aristotle, you know, the Greeks, Euclid, the people who said the world is, I mean, they weren't dumb.

They were by any stretch genius in every way, but they kind of didn't know about electricity and they didn't know about a lot of the things that these people knew about.

And that reappraisal of an acceptance of what is behind, what, you know, Kafka said something to the effect of, you know, there's a truth out there, but we just are doomed to never know it.

And that was the conundrum, you know, the guy waiting to go into the castle and he's just endlessly waiting, endlessly waiting, endlessly waiting.

And then, you know, it's true.

There's a reason it's happening.

And Einstein, you know, with like, whoa, the universe is expanding, you know.

What?

How could everything expand?

But they're like, I don't know, our wetware between our ears.

So I say, I've been saying that like, Einstein changed the cosmos from us to infinity and Kafka changed the cosmos between our ears.

And somehow they're both, it both happened at this time in this mystical, magical outpost of civilization.

I lovingly call it the Cleveland of Europe.

And by the way, I love Cleveland.

That's so interesting, you know, as you were talking, it reminded me almost of, it seems to almost come out of what I know of romanticism or even Gnosticism going further back.

I mean, Gnosticism is always saying there is a there behind the reality.

Although it purports to discover that reality.

And Romanticism, I think, does the same thing.

And, you know, I think these are European tradition and it may be very much like Eastern tradition.

I don't know, you know, that says that there is, I guess Shakespeare said it, there's more in heaven and earth than is- Ramped up in your philosophy, Horatio, I believe that's one of my main quotes that I keep thinking of, absolutely.

And, you know, I just read a book that I thought was, you know, it was kind of Kismet, which I sort of believe in a little bit, at least in the Preston Sturgis version of it.

But it's some old, something or other, a guy from a physicist from Sweden.

And he sort of says, why should it be that our wetware, you know, our, I mean, obviously the brain is the most complicated thing, but where is it written that our tools that we have as human beings should be able to explain, you know, everything that's real?

And I think this, the difference perhaps is, or the thing that I was playing with is, where does the faith come or the hope come or the courage come that allows you to go outside the circle, but not do something that's just superstitious, do something that is the true truth, which even means if we can't understand it.

So for instance, on a very basic level, we know that there's a thing called x-rays, but our eyes can only see a certain very, very small.

And, you know, it's interesting when I went to a Comic-Con, I was speaking at Comic-Con a couple of years ago in San Diego, and I had never been before.

It was amazing.

And the biggest, most crowded, more than Game of Thrones or anything that people wanted to get in, was what's up with the James Webb telescope?

The truth is stranger than fiction.

And that's cool.

And we can't fully know it.

We can't know it in a way that it's like one plus one equals two.

It's more like one plus one equals rabbit.

As Lewis Carroll so aptly discovered.

So there's a lot going on.

And I hope that I made it the, actually to bring up Carroll in the Kafka land.

I mean, it was fantastic, but it also had an arc and I had to limit it.

But look at the kismet-ish things that come up.

When does Einstein's contract start?

April 1st, April Fool's Day, 1911, he travels.

It kind of made sense, you know.

What's also interesting is he was looking, he was planning to photograph an eclipse.

So the day of that eclipse that he planned for and scraped together the funds for to go to Russia to witness so he could discover how gravity bends light was the day that World War I began, commenced, and the person that he had sent to go and photograph it was arrested as a spy.

So that gave him two more years to actually correct the math that wasn't quite correct.

So that's a kind of kismet as well.

It is, I say, he dodged a bullet, but so did his colleague who was released, but that's absolutely true, yeah.

So this is in the coda.

This is after, outside the scope of the actual story, but I had to put it in there because gravity, there's a physicist, I read a quote, and this Demetrius Saltus, and he said something, and I wish I had it exact, but it's in the book, it's something like, something about gravity causes events to tilt in its way.

So yeah, on that day, Freundlich was the guy, an astronomer, and he gets arrested.

So that's 1914.

The next full eclipse that's gonna be photographable is 1919, and there's a whole story.

It's after the war.

A British guy, Sir Arthur Eddington, sends people to the Azores or wherever they sent them, and lo and behold, once Einstein fixed the math, which he did, it was exactly right, as he predicted it.

And within one day, Einstein became an Einstein.

His proof was there.

He had to prove it.

And this also, you know, you ask the difference between science and where does science end and superstition begin?

And it's been a long human process, and unfortunately, a lot of people who say, oh, you know, the earth isn't in the center of the universe.

It's the sun.

You know, they get in trouble, to say the least, or Galileo or others.

But science can actually enhance, like the fact that we don't know, but it has to be provable in a way.

And I think what, I know it sounds all, it sounds kind of contradictory, but there's a difference between there's weird stuff happening and there's weird true stuff happening.

I'm just saying that for the first time, but it sort of seems like the difference between superstition and science is real, even if we can't understand, even if we're fated to not be able to understand it, it should still work.

And that's why Einstein at one point, when he thinks he's got this, and again, I'm looking at his letters and he's such a fabulous writer.

He writes to a friend and he says, I think I found a piece of the truth.

And wow, he didn't say the whole truth, but a piece of the truth.

And I think that's enough.

Not only is it enough, but it really is a truer definition of science because science is always seeking to know more about something.

And in fact, things that are scientific have been disproved over and over and over.

I mean, that people thought it was a certain way and then they discovered that there was more to the story.

It didn't necessarily invalidate.

I mean, just as you mentioned Newton.

I mean, Newton's physics works very well in our observable world, but maybe not so well in the world of Einstein.

Yeah, and I think it's a cry, and this book that I read recently, he said, humans are not machines.

And math isn't, math is the best we can do, but nature just goes, you know?

And now that we're facing AI, it's a great tool.

I always said the greatest invention in human history after the easy pass was the invention of a shopping bag.

A bag, what a great, who invented the bag?

You don't have to carry all this stuff.

AI is an invention, and it's very, very helpful, but it's not life, it's not humanity.

And science, what this guy said in the book is that we do the best we can.

And Kafka, the boldness of Kafka and the weirdness of Prague was like, there are no boundaries.

Art, they talk about STEM, science, technology, whatever, and steam when you put art into it.

And these two guys, Einstein was an artist and Kafka was a scientist of, I'm gonna put actual experience on paper.

Is that literature?

I don't care.

Wow, well, the book is Einstein in Kafka Land, how Albert fell down the rabbit hole and came up with the universe.

It's just terrific as has been this conversation.

Thanks very much, Francesca.

It has been a lot of fun for me.

Ken Grimstein is a cartoonist, author and educator whose work appears in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Go to writersvoice.net to hear our 2018 interview with him about his book, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt.

Next up, an iconic Hollywood talent agent.

Stay tuned after the break.

‚ô™ Is string theory right ‚ô™ ‚ô™ Is it just fantasy ‚ô™ ‚ô™ Caught in the landscape out of touch with reality ‚ô™ ‚ô™ Compactified on S5 or T-Star S3 ‚ô™ ‚ô™ Space is a pure void, why should it be stringy ‚ô™ ‚ô™ Because it's quantum, not classical, non-renormalizable ‚ô™ ‚ô™ And the way you quantize to encounter infinity ‚ô™ ‚ô™ You see, quanta must interact via paths we understand ‚ô™ ‚ô™ Using Feynman diagrams, often they will just repeat ‚ô™ ‚ô™ Then they will just rebound, but now and then they go another way ‚ô™ ‚ô™ A quantum loop, infinities will make you cry ‚ô™ ‚ô™ Unless you can renormalize your model, a very old Spermion ‚ô™ ‚ô™ Spermions, Spermions, and all other states of matter ‚ô™ That was Bohemian Gravity by A Cappella Science.

Welcome back to Writer's Voice.

I'm Francesca .

Go to writersvoice.net to find more great content as well as how to subscribe to our free podcast.

In the cutthroat world of Hollywood, where many seek fame and fortune, but few attain them, talent agent icon Harry Abrams stood out for his reputation of integrity and fairness.

That's something that can be claimed by anyone, I suppose, but when I attended a book launch party for his book, Let's Do Launch, it was filled with people who had known and loved him over his 60-year career in the entertainment industry.

The affection was palpable.

Let's Do Launch is a memoir of that long career, but with a deeper interest than just telling a personal story.

Abrams focuses on some key lessons he wants to share with anyone intending to start a business, become an actor, or work as an agent.

Be true to yourself, maintain your integrity in your dealings with others, and above all, support and nurture your clients.

It's advice he imparted to such talent as Jennifer Lopez, Liam Neeson, and Chris Burke, who played Corky Thatcher on the ABC television network series, Life Goes On, and who went on to become an important advocate for people with developmental disabilities.

Let's hear my conversation with Harry Abrams, who, despite pushing 90 years of age, is still sharp as a tack.

Harry Abrams, welcome to Writer's Voice.

Glad to be here.

Now, this memoir, Let's Do Launch, a Hollywood agent dishes on how to make your business and career take off.

It's kind of a combination memoir, how-to book.

Why did you want to write this book?

The inspiration for this book comes from my many years before I sold my business.

I sold my talent agency about five or six years ago, but I was doing it for 60 years, and I would encounter people periodically who said to me, Harry, I'm unhappy with my career path.

I'd love to get in the entertainment industry.

Do you have any ideas or suggestions for me?

So I wrote this book because people would then say to me, I don't have any artistic talents, but I know a lot about business, and I'd like to get in the entertainment business.

And so I said, well, the best way to get in the entertainment business is to start at a talent agency, and we'll move on from there.

And because working at a talent agency teaches you all about every aspect of the show business.

And so that was the inspiration for writing the book.

And so it goes chapter by chapter on how to build a business in entertainment.

And, well, it's not only in entertainment, how to build any business.

The second inspiration for writing the book was obviously for an artist, an actor, a writer, a director, someone who wanted to learn how to move themselves forward.

Let's do launch, teaches them the steps on how to move forward.

So those are the two inspirations for writing the book.

And you write this book, you write that kind of how-to really embedded in your own story.

It's filled with all these great anecdotes, very entertaining to read, about you.

So you went from very humble beginnings in the industry in the mailroom at MCA, and now I've forgotten, what does MCA stand for again?

It stands for Music Corporation of America.

It was the largest talent agency of its kind for many, many years, until it bought Universal Pictures, Universal Studios, and they had to get out of the talent agency business.

The MCA did, and so they went and stayed in motion picture and television production.

And another talent agency, which was the William Morris Agency, emerged as the number one agency.

At the point that the book opens, you have just been betrayed by your business partner and friend, Noel Abramoff.

First, tell us what happened, and then tell us what you learned about the industry and about yourself.

What happened was he and I worked together at MCA.

He was senior to me, about seven or eight years.

He'd been working at MCA for some time, so he knew a lot about the talent agency business.

I trained under him when I got out of the mailroom.

I went to work as his assistant, and we became very close.

And as time went on, not only was I an assistant, but he elevated me to become a full-time talent agent at MCA in the area or the department of the agency that he worked in.

And so he was a mentor to me for a long period of time.

And we were together for a good 10 or 12 years.

And MCA then went out of the talent agency business and when Lou Wasserman, the owner of MCA, bought Universal Pictures, Universal Studios.

And so I said this was a great opportunity for he and I to go out on our own.

It's interesting because this was a long case, took two years.

They were being sued, MCA was being sued by the other top two competitive talent agencies because they felt that MCA was a monopoly and they were buying, Universal Pictures was buying all of its artistic talent, its actors, its writers, its directors from the parent company.

So they sued because they felt it was a monopoly violation in the Sherman-Clayton Antitrust Act. And it took them two years to prove it.

And it was during Jack Kennedy's administration.

Robert Kennedy was the Attorney General and he came down with a decision that said after two years of investigation that they were correct, the people who were suing were correct and that MCA would have to get either have to stay in the talent agency business or stay in motion picture television production.

And MCA and Lou Wasserman chose to stay in motion picture television production or that they were also in the directive that came from Robert Kennedy's office.

All of the agents who worked for MCA, there were over a thousand of them worldwide at the time.

They all had to be offered jobs and Robert Kennedy said that you can't fire or terminate your agents, you have to offer them all jobs at Universal Pictures.

And 95%, even more than 95% of the agents then chose to work in motion picture and television production.

I was offered the opportunity as was Mr. Ruvalov.

And we decided we'd go out on our own, open up our own business because we had a whole group of clientele in our particular department and we can start immediately and that's what happened.

And so we were together for a long period of time.

However, what happened was that he was in Los Angeles, I eventually opened a New York office, I was based in New York and he quite frankly was not spending as much time after several years focusing on the growth of our talent agency.

And so I came back to Los Angeles to work in the Los Angeles office and I confronted him on that subject.

And what he decided to do is he called a meeting of the board of directors.

The board of directors of Abrams, Ruvalov and Associates at that time consisted of myself, Mr. Ruvalov and a woman who was our bookkeeper, Dorothy Stewart.

And they decided, the board of directors decided to terminate me and let me go so to speak.

And it was then at that moment in time that I decided to open my own agency calling it Abrams Artists Agency.

And that's how I began.

And it was a traumatic experience for you because you sued him, it went on for years.

There was a settlement that he didn't pay and then he appealed and all through it, it was really a shocking experience for you and a difficult one.

But ultimately you turned it to your advantage.

So what lessons did you learn from that experience?

I guess I'd always been entrepreneurial myself.

I always felt I wanted to be in my own business and started way back when I was 10 or 11 years old when I had a newspaper route and then had a street corner where I sold newspapers.

And I was an entrepreneur in those days.

I actually employed two kids from my block, from my street to work for me after a year or two of building up that business.

Anyway, I was always someone who was basically wanted to be on my own.

And so that was what motivated me and inspired me to go and try it on my own.

And I spent 60 years building that business and I was successful.

And some of those lessons that you talk about in the book, actually, I had in mind more than the entrepreneurship, but the moral lessons you took from it.

You write, Harry Abrams, you write in this book, Let's Do Lunch, that you learned how corrosive anger and resentment can be and how forgiveness is a crucial personal and business skill.

You say, I'm no Mahatma Gandhi, but I believe he was right when he said, the weak can never forgive.

Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

And I want to highlight that because I think the real key or core of your book is the way you talk about integrity and trust as being the foundation of doing anything in the business world or succeeding in the business world.

And I think that's so counter to what the dominant zeitgeist is now in the business world, you know, where it just seems corporations are just out there to make the most living and they really don't care what happens to anybody else.

So talk about the moral lessons that you derive from that experience.

I've always felt that people should be trustworthy.

I didn't take anyone for granted by any means, but I conducted and I felt that other people should be trustworthy and have good morals.

I myself should have them to begin with.

So I was always very trustworthy, very moral about the way I conducted myself and especially in the entertainment industry, which is loaded with people who are immoral, so to speak.

If you've just joined Writer's Voice, I'm talking with Hollywood talent agent icon, Harry Abrams, about his memoir, Let's Do Launch.

You know, what struck me also is that when you talk about integrity, you know, above honesty and being real with people, you're also talking about integrity with yourself and doing what you care about, what you love.

So I, you know, I think a great story that you should tell us about that is that when MCA was dissolved, which you've just spoken to us about, you put in for jobs at some other top agencies and you had to wait like a long time to hear back from them.

You were competing with a lot of other people and they just had a certain number of people on their list at any time that they would have a job for.

So you ended up leaving Hollywood, you went out to the Midwest, you got a well-paying job in a field that had nothing to do with entertainment.

And, you know, it was the right decision for you, but ultimately when you did get a chance to go back to Hollywood, you gave up that job, paid the princely sum of $125 a week, and you gave it up for a job that paid $40 a week.

Why did you do that?

My employer in the Midwest in Indiana where I was working, I'd been working for him for about 14, 15 months, waiting for my name to rise to the top of the list to enter a training program at a talent aid at either MCA or William Morris, where the pay was $40 a week.

They started you out in the training program in the mailroom, and you had to go through a series of extensive interviews, interview process, in order to even get that job offer.

I was making $125 a week working in this power lawnmower company, which was a large company that manufactured lawnmowers, and I had studied business at UCLA when I was at school, and I knew about manufacturing and production, and the man employed me, and I always wanted to get in the entertainment business.

And I was making $125 a week.

When I called to tell him that I finally had gotten this job offer to go to work at MCA, back in Hollywood, Los Angeles, he said that he lived in New York.

He said, don't make a move, don't accept the job yet.

I'm flying in tomorrow.

I'll take you out to dinner tomorrow night, and I'd like to try to persuade you, convince you to stay with me, because I really like the job you're doing.

And he flew in, took me to dinner, and he offered to double my salary, to double it to $250 a week.

And he said, but what are they gonna pay you at this job that you're interested in, back in Los Angeles?

And I said, well, $40 a week, sir.

And he said, he actually began to doubt my intelligence.

He said, you're turning a job down for $250 a week, when you're accepting another job for $40 a week?

I really am concerned about you, Harry.

And I said, well, my heart's in the entertainment industry.

I wanna get into it desperately.

I've been interested in it for the past many, many years, and I have a job offer, and I think I can make it in the entertainment industry.

So I'm gonna take the job.

And much to his dismay, needless to say.

So yes, I was determined to get in the entertainment industry.

I was determined to start working at the ground level in a training program where I would be trained as if I was going to college or university.

And that's what I did.

And I was determined to do this.

I didn't know whether I'd be successful or not, but I had a great deal of faith in my determination and my doing the right thing.

Now, another thing you talk about in this book, Harry Abrams, in Let's Do Launch, is diversity and the importance of diversity.

And there's another story that I think is attached to that that I think is really interesting.

And that is, well, first of all, you talk about the fact that when you started at MCA in 1958, there were only three female agents in the whole agency.

And I would be, I'm pretty safe in saying there were probably no black agents at that agency at that time.

And you say that diversity is really important, not only as an ethical or a moral issue, but also for the success of a business.

And you say that when there was a big strike and a lot of your actors couldn't work during the strike, you learned that lesson, that diversity was really important.

So connect the dots for us.

Tell us how you learned that lesson about diversity.

I'd always been very liberal myself, growing up in my family and I've always welcomed diversity.

I had a number of friends at university and in the military who were not the same color as I was, or I enjoyed hanging out with those people.

And I felt that if I was going to enter into the talent agency business, I had to be open-minded about the type of talent that I would represent as well.

And in fact, you hired actor, musician, and Down syndrome advocate, Chris Burke, who played Corky Thatcher on the ABC television network series, Life Goes On. That was quite a forward-thinking thing to do at that time.

And Chris has been a very important voice for the Down syndrome community.

So what were your thoughts when you took him on, when you signed him on as a client?

There was a television pilot, an hour show, that had been conceived at Warner Brothers Television Productions, and it was called Life Goes On. And it was about a mentally disabled young man who actually had Down syndrome.

I was in the position of placing talent, artistic talent, to work in television pilots.

And we had a youth or children's division of our agency.

And in that children's division was this young man by the name of Chris Burke, Christopher Burke.

And Chris had Down syndrome.

And I put him up for the job and went all the way along with him on the way through the interview process and the approval process.

And Warner Brothers finally selected him and offered him the job to be the central part of this show.

And Chris Burke was fantastic.

He was a highly functioning Down syndrome child.

He had a band, he had a group, a musical group where he played.

He was very, very smart.

He was terrific.

And that's what the show was about.

He had a mother and father and a sister.

They're family.

That was what the show was about.

Life goes on.

And he became a spokesperson for Down syndrome and mentally challenged young people around the world.

And so he'd go to conventions in different parts of the world.

And he would appear there and he was a spokesman for Down syndrome.

And he became very famous as a result of it.

The show was on for, I think, about five years.

And I was very proud of it, needless to say.

Now, another thing is you are unusual, I think, for a business leader, a CEO of a company, to be pro-union.

But you say in the book that you are pro-union.

And as you were finishing this book, Let's Do Launch, the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes were going on.

And you quote George Clooney saying at the time that the strikes were an inflection point in our industry and that change is required.

So what are your thoughts on changes in the industry, you know, with the advent of AI and streaming?

These are things you talk about in this book.

What do you think is the kind of change that is necessary?

And what are some of the lessons that you learned over your long life as the head of a talent agency that you feel are important to remember?

Well, strikes or work stoppages are common, not only in the entertainment industry, but are common in all industries.

It's the nature of our, goes on in the United States of America.

Labor is entitled to pay a certain amount for their services.

And if they're in an industry where there are multiple people doing the same thing, they form a union and they bargain for better wages, better working conditions.

And that's what happens in the entertainment industry.

In Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA, those are the two main unions that deal with actors or performers.

And also in the Writers Guild, the Directors Guild, those are specifically dealing with artists who are either writers or directors.

They have a right to earn a living wage and after three years of contract employment, they have a union contract, they have the right to renegotiate.

And I was always in favor of that, needless to say, because certainly I wanted a clientele to have earned more money, not only as a result of my renegotiating their contract, but if they were gonna work at Screen Actors Guild or Writers Guild Minimums, they had the right to earn more money for their services.

So I've always been on the side of labor and ever since I started in the industry, in the talent agency industry, I've always been in favor of it.

So it's just something that's in my soul.

And your book is, Let's Do Launch, it's highly entertaining.

Harry Abrams, thank you so much for talking with us here.

You're welcome and I'm delighted to be your guest.

I really enjoy it.

I've had a lot of interesting experiences and there are great tales and great stories within the book.

Harry Abrams, you can find his book, Let's Do Launch, a Hollywood agent dishes on how to make your business and career take off at amazon.com. ‚ô™ music playing ‚ô™ We have just a short time left for this episode of Writer's Voice, enough time for another poem by Palestinian poet, Mossab Abutoha.

As regular listeners know, when time permits, I've been reading selections from Toha's poetry volume, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear.

The plan is to read from the book until a permanent ceasefire in Gaza is agreed to.

Hopefully, that will happen long before I've had a chance to read all the poems from the book.

Here's Memorize Your Dream.

Close your eyes and walk on the ocean.

Dabble your hands in the water and catch the words of your poem.

Write the words upon the clouds.

Don't worry, they will find their land.

Open your eyes in the night.

The sea is no longer blue.

Look around, and from the falling raindrops, choose your punctuation marks.

Put on your swimsuit, dive deep down, and search for a title for your epic.

Embark on your moving homeland, your boat.

Go to your bed, and in your sleep, begin to memorize your dream.

That was Memorize Your Dream by Mossab Abu Toha.

That's it this week for Writer's Voice.

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I'm your host, Francesca . ‚ô™‚ô™‚ô™ you