An Interview with Writer/Actor/Podcaster Michael Swaim

One of the best features of Scriptophobic is how it has allowed me to talk to such wonderfully intelligent creative minds, such as Graham Skipper or the Video Palace duders. However, I have not been as excited to share with you an interview as I am this one. I discovered Michael Swaim the same way most people did, through his comedy videos. Hilarious as all can be, I actually found myself drawn to him as a creator because of discussions he was involved with on the Cracked and the Kurt Vonneguys podcasts. This is to say the scope of this interview is particularly broad, ranging from creativity to metaphysics and from horror to history; don’t worry though, Screamwriters, there’s plenty of goodies along the road ahead from advice to philosophical consideration on creativity and the creative’s role.

Like all of our interviews here on Scriptophobic, I started by asking Swaim if he could put his career path and creative history into words. Not surprisingly, he had a plethora of the runes for us. “Creativity, and escape through creative thought or activity, has been my primary coping mechanism from a very young age. This set me firmly on the path to one day write and star in an internet sketch about having sex with a pumpkin, but as a tender young D&D home-brewer, such grand visions were far from my mind. I’ve always been most attracted to artistic endeavors that stretch the bounds of imagination, and was naturally drawn to sci-fi, fantasy, horror, folktales, and other tales of the supernatural. My favorite stories are those that push my mind’s eye to work overtime, and those that make good fodder for philosophical or metaphysical insights on the nature of being, or of people, or of death, or of infinity, or whatever. In more concrete terms: I wanted to write science fiction short stories professionally. That is not a real job anymore. Then I wanted to write and draw comic books (graphic novels really, nothing serialized or spandex for me). The writing I was good at, but the drawing became too tedious for my limited attention span. I also had two portfolios stolen at San Diego Comic Con on consecutive years, and took that as a sign.”

“I went to college as a Theatre and Creative Writing double major, not knowing exactly what I wanted to do with those skills. No one would cast me in department shows, so I decided to write and direct my first play so I could cast myself in it. I played Zeus and I got to throw a lightning bolt! I found I enjoyed the writing part even more than the performance part, and veered into putting together quarterly sketch reviews, hopping on the then-burgeoning internet sketch troupe train, and assembling a team from there. Many of the folks I have worked with routinely over the last decade have been with me from the beginning, when we were shooting Those Aren’t Muskets! Sketches as class assignments for our theatre classes at UCSD. After that, the career has taken on a course of its own, and that course has been richly rewarding, but also entirely focused on comedy. Although I’ve gotten pretty handy with a punch-line from the years of practice, I still consider myself, at heart, a soul that should have been born in the late 30’s and sat alongside Vonnegut, Ellison and Bradbury, hammering out pay-for-play magazine short sci-fi and chain-smoking the day away. That would have been fun. Instead, another fun thing happened, more suited to the timeline in which I have been thrust… my troupe was absorbed, en masse, by Cracked.com, where a majority of us then worked until we were all laid off, again en masse, some 11 years later. I briefly tried to sell myself as a working playwright, but was informed that that’s no longer a real job either. Shortly thereafter, I founded Small Beans, the current outfit I head, which allows me to do exactly what I want creatively, as long as it’s zero-budget. So, the exact opposite of what it was like working for Cracked. And as a wise man once said, ‘then it’s now, and I don’t what what happened.’”

Having mentioned Those Aren’t Muskets!, I had to ask about one of my favorite videos on the internet to date: Tech Support. Uploaded in 2008, Tech Support is one of those videos that I showed everyone and anyone I knew (and subsequently judged them based on their laughter). I really wanted to know if it was as fun to make as it looked. Swaim’s answer was a little disappointing but also makes clear one of the disconnect between the viewer and the creative that made a particular work of art: that of the relationship to the material itself. In answer to my question, “I don’t remember! At this point we’re 400-some videos deep, and I can honestly say the actual physical production of the pieces has become something of a comfortable blur. I’m sure making Tech Support was fun, because doing creative work is almost always fun for me, and collaborating with a like mind like Abe (the Director of that sketch) is always a game played in that Artspace, on that metaphysical plane, that I enjoy immensely. Almost as much as editing the videos afterward, which has in the fullness of time proven to be the most enjoyable aspect of putting a short together, for me. Writing is an escape, but it takes a lot of mental effort to open that door to the Writing-dimension. Performing is more of a social and problem-solving exercise. Editing is like a door to the Art Dimension was left standing open for you, and all you have to do is sit down in front of your box and start finger-painting with the footage.”

There’s a lot to dig through in that answer, and we’ll get to more on Abe and the Writing-dimension in a moment. But first, with another reference to the metaphysical, there was something I wanted to ask. My first published story was in the category of “metaphysical-fiction,” and readers of Scriptophobic will know I am drawn to these sorts of heady topics, so I wanted to know: What drew Swaim to the topic? “Metaphysics is, in my mind, just the name we give to the plane of consciousness on which we play our most fanciful thought-games. Philosophy, religion, and metaphysics all overlap, and the distinctions between them are fuzzy, but something they all share in common is something I also experience through Art: escape to another dimension. In this dimension, it’s extremely important that I worry about practical things like feeding myself and my bank account my actions’ effect on people around me. When I can detach my emotional state from reality, live in a realm where emotion is an underscore to thought, and not the other way around, thoughts and concepts that amuse and amaze me always seem to fill the empty space. Blossom in the absence of the mundane. In the other dimension. I don’t know if any of the frameworks I turn over in my metaphysical dimension mean anything, here, in our dimension, but I don’t think it matters. It’s just another process that I enjoy which feels like it lightens the burden of living.”

I hope readers will forgive me this little aside but this answer was fascinating to me. I myself find close ties in this answer to my own feelings and my own spirituality (which is based on quantum physics, neuroscience and Buddhism). I think that the ability to be able to detach ourselves from emotion in the first place, in some teachings becoming what they call “the watcher,” is a powerful state in and of itself. Mentioning this to him, Swaim shared his thoughts on the topic and, in doing so, used language that could describe my own depressive experiences.

“In my journey toward well-being, The Watcher or The Observer is a useful engram because, with practice, it’s always there to slide a shimmy in and pry you apart from overwhelming emotion. I used to think all emotion was helpful, and let it flood me frequently. Now I find life more navigable imagining that emotion is a healthy indicator of my outer and inner states, but too much of it can short out the circuit-board and get me stuck in unhelpful behavioral loops, self-destructive nosedives, and more woe than I reasonably ought to expect myself to shoulder. The Observer is a mental game that’s of great use to me, but I’m not sure I believe in a true duality, aside from the fact that ‘my rational self’ will often make very different decisions than my ‘emotionally reactionary self.’ Sadly, though, they are NOT separate, and all the hypocrisy, paradox, and madness is mine to synthesize into a single functioning organism. Weird gig.”

Weird gig, indeed.

Jumping back a little, I wanted to see if Swaim would expand on something he mentioned in his history. He used the words “escape through” in speaking on his relationship with creativity. I wondered if escape was something he found necessary. And, did it work?

“I think escape is a necessity for all of us, because life is mostly pain and/or boredom parceled out in random increments. During moments of contentment, or euphoric joy, you don’t tend to need an escape, but everyone inevitably finds some form of escape useful. If we’re lucky, it’s something akin to a hobby, like gardening, writing, Dungeons & Dragons, building cars, masturbation or meditation or both at once. If we’re unlucky, it’s some form of self-harm or addiction. For most of us, it’s a combination of both in varying measure. Writing, rapping, singing, playing guitar, and game design all get me out of my own head, effectively, while I’m engaged in the activity. So it’s an escape in that sense, and the plus is that after the period of escape I often have a little toy or story I made that I can play with for a while after, which is an additional escape. I write things to escape, then read them to escape, then allow myself to fall back into the read world, which is viewed exclusively through the lens of my own very limited consciousness, and hampered by bad chemicals that bring with them semi-random cascades of emotion, and those turbulent experiences often smack me in the fact with an insight or observation I can use to plan my next escape. Art would be meaningless without some connection to the realities of life, but at the same time I do view the Creative Artspace as a transcendental realm where many of our mundane concerns fall away.”

Damn, now that’s an answer. I think, building off it, there’s something to be said about how it represents the flow state as described by Csikszentmihalyi. It also struck me as quite Eastern influenced in a philosophical sense, though, as neuroscience continues, we’re seeing science backing up the teachings of the Buddha; I wondered if Swaim had a relationship with Eastern philosophy, specifically, and what his relationship with philosophy was more widely, if any particular camps brought either comfort or enjoyable thought experiments?

“Eastern metaphysics and philosophy always appealed to me, as the son of two hippies and a fan of New Age and Prog Rock. Tragic, I know. More than any kind of concrete faith — I have very little of that — it opened my mind to deeper understandings of the ways in which humans are different, and the same. To understand at a young age that the Western Identity of an individual striving amidst other individuals to serve themselves or a small core of people around them is not the only internalized working model of the world, is a powerful sensation. There are humans alive who view systems through a collectivist lens that I can’t fully fathom, because my hardware has already been set. There are other gods than these, and whether they exist in a tangible sense or not, all gods reflect ourselves, if only insofar as our relationship to them is of our own devising, and deeply revealing as a result. Our gods name our fears and our hopes, each back the systems we see to be unchanging, even if, as in much of Eastern philosophy, the only unchanging thing metaphysicians can agree upon is Change. That ‘take’ also appeals to me, because it seems self-evident. I’ve never not changed from one moment to the next … have you? [No.] Has a rock? Not really. As far as humans being the same, there’s so much overlap between the metaphysical systems at which relatively separated cultures arrive, it reminds you that we all share many of the same base needs and fears. To hear Eckhart Tolle describe ‘The Observer’ and its mental benefits resonates deeply with Buddhist thought as well as emerging psychological tenets, even if he likes to pretend he invented it himself on a bench one day.”

Let’s take a moment to pause there, Screamwriters. The section bolded above may in fact be one of the most useful pieces of information to internalize as creatives; in one sense, it suggests that everything has already been done and there is nothing new. If we all end up at roughly the same conclusion, then why do anything? For one, variability still exists, we are speaking of overlap, yes, but not a 1-for-1. But ultimately what this says is that we are all of the same kind; so what does that mean for a Screamwriter? To place it into the realm of horror, which we’ll be getting more into in a moment, this ties to the concept of “write what scares you.” Now, I have spoken out against taking this as the gold standard of how to write horror but want to consider it here. Why do we write what scares us? It’s simply: If it scares me, it might scare you. The idea of overlap goes beyond just a cultural level but reaches the individual and so by tapping our own emotions/fears/experiences we make a bid on the reader/audience, that they are as human as we are. I’ll get more into this idea at a later point, but for now let’s return to our conversation with Swaim and a point he made about the disappearance of certain jobs such as short-story writer or playwright.

In general, it seems that in order to survive as a creative these days one has to have their fingers in all sorts of different pies. I wondered if he had any thoughts on this, what I am calling a “forced conglomeration” on the part of the creative individual to survive.

“Nope! Sorry. I haven’t thought about it enough, which is probably indicative of the effect my need to conglomerate many different jobs into a career is having on the Creative. I work about 80 hours a week, every week, seven days a week, so I don’t have time to think about the fact that today’s creative marketplace is probably the reason I have to do that, or how to go about dismantling that system. Unfortunately, to dismantle a system, you need someone with experience in dismantling systems. All I know how to do is write and perform, and even as a writer/performer trapped within a system and a marketplace, I don’t feel I have the breadth of knowledge needed to make an observation more substantive than, ‘yeah, it would be nice to have health insurance, and everyone I know in this field does seem to be desperately poor and yet also forced to live in the most expensive cities on Earth and work five side-jobs to make rent… I hope whoever dictates the formation and evolution of economic systems amidst a globalizing marketplace is on top of this shit.’ To be honest, my concerns about the death of the Natural World usually come along and sweep those concerns away pretty neatly.”

While Swaim did not feel he was up to the question, we will be touching on it in the future, Screamwriters.

In the meantime, let’s get into some horror, shall we?

Earlier, the name Abe got mentioned as the director of Tech Support. Abe would be Abe Epperson. Alongside credits for directing many of the videos for Cracked, Abe was also the cinematographer for the feature-length horror-comedy, Kill Me Now (2012). Swaim wrote and acted in it, so there is no surprise, considering his career, that it was horror fused with comedy. However, I wondered if he had any plans to work within horror without the added comedy label?

“Abe and I both are enthralled by horror, and would love nothing more than to pen a straightforward (but not straightforward, if you follow me) horror flick. I think comedic elements work really well in horror, but Kill Me Now stars a bunch of SNL alums and is a comedy first and a horror second. I’d really enjoy writing something that was horror-forward, but right now I write comedies because they’re the only things I’ve ever sold and I’m hoping to sell more things. If you want a taste of what horror means to me, find my short story The House With No One In It.”

I know that personally, I’d love nothing more than to see a Michael Swaim horror movie (and I’m keeping my fingers crossed, big guy); guess I’ll just have to sit my ADD ass down wait a while. Not complaining though, the comedy work that Swaim produces is top notch and written with an indelible sense of charm. Earlier, he had used the terminology of dimensions in regards to writing and creativity. To me, this implied that he had a clear understanding between the different steps of the creative process (brainstorming, writing, production, post). In many pieces of advice on writing, we see this idea of the different ‘hats’ the creative wears and the importance of separating them. Did he have any advice on delineating between these roles in our creative projects? Or perhaps his own thinking stood in contrast to this concept?

“It depends on what final product you are striving to produce. I love film, and if I had my way most of the things I write would ultimately be presented as films, so I had to learn a lot about writing, direction, production, editing and acting. Fortunately, I had Abe to know about cinematography, or I would have had to learn that too, and I don’t want to. I did use the image of alternate dimensions, but I meant that more in reference to the way in which, when I’m Creating, I do feel Transported. That doesn’t mean the fields don’t inform each other, because they do, deeply. I have often given the advice to someone I’m mentoring: Write like an editor. Or if they ARE an editor, then I say ‘Edit like a writer.” That probably sounds like silly or cryptic advice, but it’s actually so deeply true that I’d have to write a few thousand words to explain what I mean. In life, I usually dispense that wisdom in the form of a series of conversations or collaborations, and all I can say is, if we discussed it for a good length of time, or if you both wrote and edited film and took the time to contemplate the connections between the two disciplines, it would be useful to you. Don’t indulge the usual impulses most editors do when editing. Instead, take it back to basics and try to understand the process of idea translation that’s gone from one human’s brain into the brains of dozens of others, been filtered through real life happenstance in the form of shoots, and is now up to your lone mind to make sense of again. Do be empathetic. Do connect to the writers’ intent. Don’t be afraid to recreate the world from scratch, like a novelist would. You’re working with pieces, but your control is no less than that of a blank page.”

“In the reverse, writers (and I’m talking about writing for film or the stage, not prose, that’s a whole different beast) will almost always become better writers if they take the time to imagine their words in the mouth of an actor, then on a computer screen being cut together. If you write for film, you should know what shots and cuts you are trying to impel with your words.” Size of shot based upon written description is another topic that Screamwriters can expect to see covered in the near future. “You can and should have a fair understanding of what MOST editors will do with the moment, what SOME will do, and what only a FEW would do. There’s a lot more to it and it gets more concrete and action-able, but as I said, it’s a whole course I’d love to teach or release as a book someday, not the sort of thing I can easily recap. Suffice to say, I heard once that Bruce Li often spoke of breaking a problem down, re-examining what the goal of the exercise is, and immediately coming up with radical, and yet obvious solutions no one else was coming up with. Most of the time, our projects fail because we just set out to DO it, to FINISH it, whatever ‘it’ is (‘I want to make a movie because… I don’t know, it just seems fun’), without first doing the introspective and philosophical work of asking ourselves WHY we’re doing it, what the real goals of the project are, how and why people have tackled these kinds of projects a certain way in the past, and if there might not be a new, better or more interesting way to accomplish the same goal or task. It sounds stupidly obtuse, but asking myself questions when I sit down to write like ‘Why do humans write? Why are our brains capable of transforming written language into thought? How does that ability separate us from animals? Rocks? Is it RIGHT that we should have this ability? Is it HELPFUL? Why am I sitting here feeling like I should write this story down? Are there any ways to use words to stroke the imagination I’ve never encountered or thought of before? Can I think of one now? Can I think of a way to write that might be meaningful to an animal? To a rock?’ Maybe I’m nuts. I find this tactic incredibly useful.”

A lot of food for thought in that one and whether or not you find it helpful, only one way to find out: sit down and start asking yourself some questions.

But being almost out of time, there’s one last question I had for our guest. What did he have going on now or in the near future?

“Well, our most recent spec script was stolen from us and is going into production without us attached, so let that be a warning. Hollywood is pretty much a cesspool. As for things that seem to be working out, we launched our new web series Off Hours on June 3, and we’d love it if you gave the pilot a watch! You can find out more about that at our home sit, Patreon.com/SmallBeans. Of course Small Beans procasts are varied and numerous and available on your phone anywhere podcasts are cast. As for more personal projects, I’m growing some vegetables, staying sober, learning how to make pasta from scratch, and writing an epic cycle of sci-fi poems called Novus Kotia that I quite enjoy. Last but not least, my writing partner and I, along with out of our favorite artists, have begun work on a sci-fi/horror comics anthology that we hope to start promoting in 2020. Drawing hundreds of pages of art takes quite a while, it turns out. It will be called 8, so look for that. Thanks for the opportunity to chat and your interest in my work. It sustains me.”

It doesn’t sound like that work is slowing down any time soon and that has me very, very excited.