From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. One of the things I've always said about the shows is good to have friends do the show.

I'm not talking to a friend who haven't seen in about 30 years.

Do we still qualify as friends after 30 years?

I guess apparently we don't.

I thought we did.

I'm clearly mistaken about that.

No, no.

I'm very happy to see you again.

Well, I'm happy to see you.

My guest is Jack Firtel for the Jams and Theaters. James in theaters. He runs the Encore series of New York City. And of course, he's here for this

terrific book he's written, The Secret Life of the American Musical. First of all, it's great to see you.

It's great to see you. And I can't believe that this book is so wonderful. But one of the things you

talk about in the book we just were talking before we got started is when you're trying to get your

start as a screenwriter. You had told there's one text that was sacrosynced in terms of understanding story.

The life of the American.

Yes, right.

This was many years ago when I was writing a movie.

My intention was to be a screenwriter, and I turned out to be a terrible screenwriter, but I didn't know that at the time.

I was 24 years old.

And I got a job writing, of all things, a werewolf movie.

And I wrote, I didn't know what I was doing, really, but it was the cinematographer named Michael Chapman, a great cinematographer,

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