First Draft Episode #194: Abdi Nazemian

Abdi Nazemian, TV writer, producer of films like Call Me By Your Name, and author of Like a Love Story, The Authentics, and The Walk-In Closet, talks about discovering gay icons in the time before the internet, putting all your obsessions in your work, crying in coffee shops, and writing about history from an emotional standpoint, so we can repeat the best of it.

Links and Topics Mentioned In This Episode

• Abdi’s daughter has a PJ Harvey poster in her bedroom, which makes her the coolest seven-year-old on the block

• Archie comics were what turned Abdi into a voracious reader

• Andy Hardy, Christmas, and movies from the 30s and 40s were some of the Americana that made Abdi drawn to the U.S. culturally

• Tahereh Mafi, author of the Shatter Me series, A Very Large Expanse of Sea, Furthermore, and Whichwood (listen to Tahereh’s episode of First Draft here)

• Old TV shows like I Love Lucy were deliberately sexless

• Judy Garland and Joan Crawford were two women who had public personas, but were hiding their interior lives. Abdi was drawn to that as a young, closeted gay man

• The book How to Be Gay by David M. Halperin dives into how certain films and people become gay icons

• Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele (33 ⅓) by Amy Gentry, a book that dives into the making of Tori Amos’s iconic album

• One of Abdi’s first jobs was as an assistant in the company founded by director Alan J. Pakula, director of Sophie’s Choice and All the President’s Men, among other films

• Abdi spent so much time reading scripts in his first jobs, he achieved Malcolm Gladwell’s theory of becoming an expert after spending 10,000 hours doing a thing (which Gladwell outlines in his book, Outliers)

• Abdi is obsessed with Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, and feels that Maupin’s books have had the most influence over him as a writer

• Reading James Baldwin makes Abdi “want to do something else,” because Baldwin is so intimidatingly good

• Sarah suggests writing a couple pages of your finest Flannery O’Connor rip-off and see how it feels to mimic someone else’s voice

• Tehrangeles is the word for the huge community of Iranians in Los Angeles

• Alessandra Balzer was Abdi’s editor for The Authentics, and he knew he wanted to keep working with her

• Abdi shares a quote from Hedwig and the Angry Inch writer and star John Cameron Mitchell about putting your obsessions into your work

• The home.html">Act Up movement was pivotal to drawing attention to the AIDS crisis

• Right from “Lucky Star,” Madonna’s first song and video, Abdi was obsessed with her

• Two O.J. Simpson-focused films: O.J. Simpson: Made in America (documentary), and The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story is a good example of Abdi’s dedication to revisiting history

• Truth or Dare, the documentary about Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition tour

• Some queer works that Madonna led Abdi to explore include the historic documentary Paris is Burning, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, known for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Talk to Her

• Abdi is obsessed with RuPaul’s Drag Race

• Mommy Dearest is one of the films that RuPaul supposedly gives contestants before they come on RuPaul’s Drag Race

• Abdi is a huge fan of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, a 12-week program of creative exercises meant to unblock

• Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, the Netflix series based on the massively popular book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

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Every Tuesday, I speak to storytellers like Veronica Roth, author of Divergent; Michael Dante  DiMartino, co-creator of Avatar: The Last Airbender; John August, screenwriter of Big Fish, Charlie’s Angels, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; or Rhett Miller, musician and frontman for The Old 97s. Together, we take deep dives on their careers and creative works.

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