Therapist to the Hollywood Stars

Nicolas Cage as Charlie Kaufman in ‘Adaptation.’

Therapist to the Hollywood Stars

Excerpt from Shrink Rap Radio transcript -
David Van Nuys, Ph.D. interviews
psychotherapist Dennis Palumbo, M.A., MFT

Excerpt: I think at a psychological level, I learned that for me at least, living
authentically was really, really important. And I learned as a patient in therapy that if I were going to live authentically, I was going to have to change my life a little bit.

And there was a period in my early thirties, before I went back to school, where I lived in Nepal for four months, in the Himalayas, and started meditating and did a lot of spiritual reading and work.

And what I learned was that there was a whole part of me that was deeper and more questing than was being served by my career in show business.

Introduction: That was the voice of my guest, Dennis Palumbo. Dennis Palumbo, M.A. and MFT, is a writer and licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in creative issues.

He’s the author of Writing from the Inside Out as well as a new collection of mystery short stories, From Crime to Crime.

Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter, his credits include the feature film, My Favorite Year, for which he was nominated for a WGA award for Best Screenplay.

He was also a staff writer for the ABC-TV series, Welcome Back, Kotter, and has written numerous series episodes, and pilots. He’s the author of a novel, City Wars, and his short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Strand, and elsewhere.

He provides feature articles and reviews for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, EMMY Magazine, and many others.

His column, “The Writer’s Life,” appeared monthly for six years in Written By, the magazine of the Writers Guild of America. Currently, he is a contributing writer to The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, and does commentary for NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

Dennis conducts workshops throughout the country. Recent appearances include the Family Therapy Network Annual Symposium, the Association for Humanistic Psychology; California State Northridge University, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the Writers Guild Foundation, Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, and the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and the Directors Guild and UCLA.

A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and Pepperdine University, he serves on the faculty of UCLA Extension, where he was named the Outstanding Teacher of the Year. Now, here’s the interview.

Dr. Dave: Dennis Palumbo, welcome to Shrink Rap Radio.

Dennis Palumbo: Thank you so much, David. Nice to be here. ///cut//

Dr. Dave: So then at some point, you made a transition into becoming a therapist. How did that happen?

Palumbo: Well, I’ll give you the five-minute version, but it was a long, protracted, angst-filled journey. But the short version is, I had been in therapy myself for a while, and my first marriage had ended, and I was really just so excited and blown away by the therapy process.

And I think frankly, I’d not gotten in touch with my own feelings and my own issues, and here I was in my mid-thirties, in therapy for the first time. And the first time I went into therapy, I said to the therapist, “Look, don’t get too attached to me. I’ll be out of here in one or two sessions.” And what, 16, 17 years later...

Dr. Dave: Right! (laughs)

Palumbo: (laughs) Anyway, I fell in love with the process, so I started volunteering at psychiatric facilities and clinics and going back to school, to Pepperdine, to get my Master’s.

I wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t one of those things where, oh, gee, I’m going to leave screenwriting and become a therapist. I still was working during the day: I was taking meetings and writing scripts and developing television pilots.

But I was going to school at night at Pepperdine, and once I got my Master’s, I realized, well, why don’t I just keep going? And you need in California, as you know, 3,000 clinical intern hours before you can even sit for the test.

And I thought, I don’t know if I’m going to do that, but I might as well keep working. So I went to work at a low-fee family clinic and also at a psychiatric facility. And over the years, I saw how much I loved doing this work. And then finally, one day I had a kind of road to Damascus experience.

It’s a little corny, but it’s true. I was having lunch with a producer at this restaurant in Los Angeles, and he was trying to get me interested in doing this film with him. And I kept looking at my watch, because I thought I was going to be late to get to the psychiatric hospital where I was leading schizophrenics in group therapy.

And I got out of the lunch, I’m racing down La Cienega to get to the psychiatric hospital, and I’m thinking, what’s wrong with this picture? I can’t wait to get where I’m going, and I couldn’t wait to be leaving where I was. And that’s when I realized, my God, I do want to change my life.

And so I ended up finishing up my internship and taking the orals and the
written, and I got licensed and retired from show business. And so...it took a
while; it was like 6 1⁄2 years because I was working at the same time.

But then I went into private practice, and at the time, everyone was saying, “Boy, you’d better specialize,” which is really true now for therapists... and I figured the thing I knew best was being an entertainment professional.

So I opened my practice, and I specialized in creative issues. And so my practice has grown now, and I have writers and directors and actors. And I’ve been very, very lucky again, you know.

I think I fill a particular niche because I’m sort of uniquely qualified in the sense that I can work with creative people and have been through almost everything they’ve been through.

If someone comes to me and says, “Gee, I’m really anxious about pitching this series idea to NBC,” well, I pitched to NBC a thousand times, so I know exactly what they’re concerned about.

And so my practice is interesting in the sense that often, people come to me because of creative issues, like writer’s block, or procrastination, or fear of failure, or whatever.

But within easily a half-dozen sessions, we’re doing family-of-origin stuff, we’re doing their relationship issues, substance abuse.

It’s sort of regular therapy with a particular bent, which is, my patients have the usual issues everyone has, except they’re struggling in one of the most difficult, arbitrary, and maddening businesses on the planet.

Dr. Dave: Yeah, let me ask you a little bit about that before we go more into the therapy. Let me ask you about your own experience when you were working in Hollywood as a creative person. What were the rewards of being a screenwriter, first of all?

Palumbo: Well, I think the rewards were twofold. Initially, when you start writing, or at least when I started writing, you think the reward is, wow! It’ll be so great to see my words on screen, to see my name on screen.

One of the particular pleasures of being on a weekly series like Welcome Back, Kotter, for example, is you would write a script, and the actors would rehearse it that week, and they would shoot it, and three weeks later it would be on television, and all your relatives would see it.

So there’s that immediate gratification. I think what happens over time when, because you’re a writer – especially once I became a screenwriter – you’re very powerless as a screenwriter.

You don’t have much control over what happens to your script, and you have to execute a lot of notes that people give you, even if you don’t agree with them.

And what happens – and it’s a subtle change, but I think it’s the one that most mature writers go through – is the gratification becomes personal.

In other words, it’s the process of writing that becomes its own reward, where you do the very best you can, and you be as truthful a writer as you can and tell the story the way you want to tell the story... and then hope for the best, you know.

You can’t control whether you’ve written a story for a man, and they’ve decided to put Reese Witherspoon in the part. You can’t control that.

But the only thing you can control is the integrity and sincerity with which you’re writing your material. And so I think what happens for most writers – and it certainly happened for me – the rewards become the work, you know, the problem solving, the being in the world of the screenplay.

And then it sort of goes out into the world, and it’s like sending your child out
into the world. You do the best you can; you hope to God things go well.

Dr. Dave: Yeah, and I can understand that. And maybe you’re alluding to this next question, which is, what were the frustrations? What was it about this job that kind of drove you crazy and ultimately out of that business?

Palumbo: Well, I mean there were a lot of frustrations. Any screenwriter will tell you that. The most striking frustration is, you don’t control your material. You see, if you’re a playwright and you’re a member of the Dramatists Guild, no actor or director or producer can change a word of your play without your approval, whereas in screenwriting, writers do not hold copyright on their material.

So from the moment you pitch an idea to a studio and they purchase it, they own it, and you’re then their employee.

And as a result, they can change it or do anything they want to with it, including kicking you off your own movie, which happens every day.

And so the frustration, I think, boils down to the fact that I believe screenwriters are the most crucial aspect of a movie, and they’re the ones with the least power and the least control.

Continued - see Shrink Rap Radio podcast #159 for audio and rest of transcript.

Dennis Palumbo's site: www.dennispalumbo.com