When you're ready to turn the seed of an idea into a script, who do you share ideas with first?
Margolin: When I first mentioned this idea to my life and frequent writing partner Chloe, she very quickly said, “You need to write that next.” I trust her implicitly, so that gave me a little extra confirmation. We also have this community we’ve been fostering, a writer’s group we do every Thursday called Rock and Roll Universe, with Chloe, my producers Zoë and Chris, and our friend Sam. We bring ideas there—scripts in early stages—and get eyes on them from our trusted pals.
Worth: It's a group of people who’ve known each other for a long time. The idea behind it was to have a safe place to bring work, but also an accountability practice because sometimes you won't finish a draft if it's not for a job. When Josh brought in his first draft of Thelma, it was amazing right out the gate.
Were you working remotely as you were developing the production?
Worth: This was at the height of COVID. We did a lot of our cast read through on Zoom. A lot of prep was done on Dropbox.
Margolin: It was a great tool, especially at the moment we were needing it most. We were very cognizant of COVID throughout the whole thing because our leads are older. We wanted to make sure we kept everybody safe, so we got into a remote flow for as long as we could.
So great to hear that Dropbox helped you keep going.
Worth: It did. We use it all the time, especially for building our production file, whether it was sharing images for approval in the production design process or in collating agreements, keeping track of the legal. It definitely was a home base. A lot of my vital information is stored in our production Dropbox.
What was your most memorable day on the shoot?
Worth: Well, there's one that comes to mind. The crime scene.
Margolin: Yeah, there was definitely one day where it felt like everything was working against us. We were filming late at night on Halloween. I was in a witch's hat that Richard Roundtree did not think was working for me. (laughs) But I still decided to keep it on. We were shooting a scene in front of little P.O. box-type place in the Valley. And there was what turned out to be an active crime scene right beside us.
Worth: Really right beside us!
Margolin: Searchlights, ‘copters...
Worth: We were like, “Are we safe?” Then the cops roll up and tell me and Chris and the assistant director Justin, “You're good. Except if the SWAT team comes, we're gonna have to shut you down.”
Margolin: We're like, “Maybe we'll do the scene without any dialogue?” We went through all these kinds of backups while this thing was getting increasingly chaotic. Fortunately, right at the end of the day, it cleared. We had this very limited window. We decided we're going to try to grab the team. Richard and June both locked in the scene beautifully and nailed it. We only ended up doing one take of that. We've been describing it as sort of a buzzer beater moment for them, which was really a nice cap to an otherwise chaotic day.