How to Learn Creative Thinking from the Creator of MacGyver Lee Zlotoff
Welcome to a brand-new episode of the Ronny Leber Show! This week, we’re thrilled to bring you an exclusive conversation with the iconic creator of MacGyver, Lee Zlotoff! 
Dive into the world of creative thinking and storytelling as Lee Zlotoff shares his fascinating journey and the secrets behind his success. 
Starting in New York, Lee cut his teeth writing for soap operas, learning the craft of storytelling and character development. His journey from studying Greek philosophers to becoming a renowned writer in show business is nothing short of inspiring! 
In this episode, Lee delves into the importance of stories in our lives. He reveals what makes a story truly captivating and how his experiences as a dialogue writer shaped his career. 
Discover the “3.5 secrets” of being successful in anything, as Lee shares his insights on the power of proximity to influential people and the lessons he learned while navigating the vibrant world of Hollywood.
Networking, a crucial skill in any field, especially in entertainment, is also a focus. Lee talks about the power of effective networking and how it can help you reach your goals. 
Tap into the power of your unconscious mind for creative work. Learn how Lee’s life-changing phone call led to the creation of the TV series MacGyver, a global phenomenon that redefined creative problem-solving. 
“Anyone can be a MacGyver!” Lee encourages us to embrace our inner resourcefulness and creativity. He shares how to become a ‘multitool’ yourself, utilizing your skills and talents in innovative ways. 
FULL INTERVIEW:
“I made a TV movie in Tunisia and a Tunisian TV crew shows up and says ‘Uh well what else have you done?’ and I said ‘Well I wrote the show MacGyver’… ‘[Surprised Gasp] You created MacGyver??’ and I said ‘Yeah, why? What’s the big deal?’ They went ‘You don’t understand, this country stops when that show is on.’ I said you’re kidding me. They said no, no… It turns out the same was true in South America, the same was true in some of the Norwegian countries, the same was true in some Asian countries, the same is true in Europe.
The world would just stop when MacGyver was on. After that interview I would walk down the street in Tunisia, men would come out of their shops to shake my hand. Women would come up to me on the street with children and say ‘Kiss this man.’ I said ‘What are you talking about?? It’s a television show.’ Okay, it’s MacGyver… it was like sacred to them and I’m going what is this? MacGyver is a child of mine but I don’t take credit for what it became, because it grew up and did it all by itself. I just happen to be the father.” – Lee Zlotoff
RONNY LEBER
Hello and welcome to the Ronny Leber show where every week we bring you fascinating guests with inspiring stories of success and overcoming obstacles from the World of Sports, Business and Entertainment. To support this channel please subscribe, turn on the notification bell, and hit the like button so that we can deliver you the best content possible.
Having started his career in New York writing dialogue for soap operas he made the leap into the action-packed world of television in Los Angeles California. There he created an iconic TV character that, to this day, is the embodiment of creativity, resourcefulness, and resilience. And be aware, equipped with a gum and a paperclip, he can save the world… an award-winning Storyteller, Creator, and Visionary he has inspired millions to think outside the box. He created a TV show that went over seven seasons with 139 episodes and two TV movies having been broadcasted in over 70 countries. I’m more than happy to have him on the show today. He is simply the creator of MacGyver. Joining us live from Santa Fe, New Mexico: Please welcome and give a big hand to Lee Zlotoff – woo!
LEE ZLOTOFF
Thank you Ronny, pleasure to be here.
RONNY LEBER
Thank you for being here, and today we’ll not only dive here into the one of the most iconic TV characters that ever came to life, but we will also tie into all the learnings and thinking outside the box, being resourceful, also being resilient and also what you can take with you in your everyday life. But before we actually get into all of that, when you look at your life today Lee and think back at your journey, was that what you had imagined as a kid?
LEE ZLOTOFF
[Laughs] Well I certainly didn’t imagine this, you know. But I guess I was kind of always a storyteller and somewhere along the line it became clear to me that television was the medium really of information, culture, and development in the world. And so when I was in college I thought it might be interesting to go into television. I had obviously no idea that I would necessarily be successful or that I would create an iconic character that then became a word in the dictionary. I mean you don’t sit down and plan on that, it just sort of happens… but it happened to me. I couldn’t be more grateful and gratified that the character of MacGyver has spread around the world and become a global meme and encourages people every day to see if they can solve the problems that they’re facing, so there you go.
RONNY LEBER
Oh that’s very beautiful, that’s a very beautiful entry actually and a very beautiful start, and we’ll actually dig deeper now. Going back a little bit you already said in college you studied liberal arts in St John’s College in Annapolis Maryland, and back then you were discussing philosophers like Plato, Homer, Aristotle, and through that I read that you learned to think outside the box. How did then actually, from the Greek philosophers. did you get into Show Business?
LEE ZLOTOFF
Well [laughs] I guess that’s a good question but part of it was there in my first answer to you… we were reading the great books of the Western World. St John’s is a very unusual program. It’s not like you have courses and you decide which courses you want to take. Everybody takes the same four year set course. Everybody reads the same books and you discuss History, Literature, Philosophy, Mathematics, Science, Language… And it occurred to me while I was there that these are the great books that sort of form the basis of what we call Western culture. Okay, and I thought about it and I said well where are the great books of the future going to come from? And it occurred to me that that might be television not necessarily books… and so I thought it might be interesting to go into television to see where our global cultural sort of progression would both come from and how it would develop. Because I’ve always kind of been a natural Storyteller, I thought maybe if I could write, that might be a good way into the business, and It turned out that it was. I wrote a screenplay when I was in college and found my way to New York, got a job as a secretary on a soap opera–
RONNY LEBER
Before we get to that actually, before we get to your getting a job in New York… When you were going through all those philosophers and those ancient books and basically let’s say the foundation of the Western World stories and everything, how it was already thousands of years ago brought down, was this also something where you created your own ability for storytelling where you saw maybe some patterns, or this is how a great story is crafted, or how did you learn your skill of telling a story?
LEE ZLOTOFF
So here was the interesting thing about that educational experience: Even though we were all reading the same books, the goal was to really come up with your own understanding of what those things meant. We didn’t have professors because they didn’t profess at us. We had what were called tutors and since all the classes were seminars you had to read the books and then you had to come to the seminar and have ideally something intelligent or interesting to say about it.
And so one of the things you learned at that school was you learned to speak, you learned to listen, which is a rare skill these days believe it or not, you learn to read carefully, you learn to write, and you learned to think for yourself. Because it wasn’t about what everybody else said, it was about: what did you think about this particular thing? You also learned how to ask questions.
You discovered that asking the right question was somehow even more important than having the right answer, because if you didn’t ask the right question it almost didn’t matter what the answer was because it wasn’t going to get you anywhere. But if you could ask the right question, that might open up a whole line of dialogue or inquiry that nobody else or you hadn’t thought about.
So and obviously reading the great stories The Iliad, The Odyssey, the Aeneid, Dante, all these magnificent stories you began to understand what made a story good. It needs a beginning, it needs a middle, it needs an end, but really what is the story about? Which is different than what happens.
Young writers come to me all the time and they say I have a story and I say great I say what is it about and they go well this guy does this and I say no you’re telling me what happens. What is the story about? Is this a Redemption story? Is this a Revenge story? Is this an aspirational story? You know… what is the story really about? So I definitely learned that in school.
RONNY LEBER
Wow that’s fascinating actually just piggybacking on that idea, because stories are basically the medium how before we actually wrote down things as Humanity we already were telling things generation to generation through stories. Why are stories so important? I mean you have a great story, and you have created many great stories, so on the one hand… Why are stories so important? On the other hand… What makes a great story?
LEE ZLOTOFF
Okay, so why are stories so important? The truth is Ronny, that humans are a narrative species and by that I mean: every other species we know of has some form of communication. Plants give off chemicals to communicate to other plants that there’s a stressor in the situation. Every species we know of communicates. The only species we know of that tell stories are humans. If you think about it, every experience we understand as humans is in story form. Why do you wear the clothes you wear? Why do you drive the car you drive? Why do you take the job that you take? Because it ultimately fits into a story. I mean think about it for a second: there are 10,000 models of cars in the world. A car has four wheels and an engine… Now it could be an electric engine, or a gas engine, but you need a little one, you need a bigger one, you need an even bigger one, or you need a truck. We’re done aren’t we? No – if you’re going to spend so much money on an item,you have to buy into a story. ‘BMW the ultimate driving machine…’ ‘Love is a Subaru…’ Ronny I am not an expert on love but I’m pretty sure love is not a Subaru.
But you need to buy into a story. Why do you use an Android phone as opposed to an iPhone? They all do the same thing, right? ‘Oh but I’m an Apple person’ … ‘well no I’m an Android person.’ What difference does it make? It’s a story. Every religious experience, every spiritual experience, every relationship you enter into is a story. You think the story is going to go one way and then someday you wake up and you go oh this is the person I thought I was going to spend my life with but it’s not working out the story has to change.
So stories are important, because Ronny, if you want to change anything either in the world or in yourself, the first thing you have to do is change the story. You get enough people to buy into a new story, you’ve changed the world. You buy into a new story for yourself, you can change yourself.
RONNY LEBER
Wow wow okay so you actually sold me the idea that stories are important. I was already sold before but that even put the icing on the cake. What makes a great story?
LEE ZLOTOFF
Well what makes a great story is as I said you sort of need a beginning, a middle, and an end. You begin with an expectation and then usually there’s conflict in a story; there has to be drama. If everything goes exactly as it’s supposed to go, it’s not a very interesting story [laughs]. You know, you go oh here’s a character and suddenly this character is confronted with a difficult circumstance, okay, uh they’re trapped, they want to be in a relationship but they haven’t found the right person. Whatever it is, there’s a conflict and then how that conflict gets resolved is essentially the ending of the story. If you don’t have a good conflict there’s no drama and then there’s nothing to hold somebody in the story. It’s very interesting by the way that we as human beings love fiction a whole lot more than we love non-fiction… On any given day on Amazon 70% of the books that are purchased are fiction books. Only 30% are non-fiction. James Cameron made a movie called Titanic, it grossed $2 Billion… he also made a documentary about discovering the Titanic… it grossed 7 million.
Fiction is really more powerful in some ways than truth, even with the same information. Why? Because if I say to you ‘Once upon a time’, you go ‘Oo I’m going to hear a story I want to hear about it.’ If I say ‘I’m going to show you a documentary and tell you the truth’ you go ‘okay well now I gotta sit here and think do I agree with this? Do I disagree with this?’ It becomes a critical process.
‘The Inconvenient Truth’ that Al Gore made about climate change… one of the most successful documentaries of all time grossed over $50 million. There was a fiction film called ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ which was also about climate change. It grossed $550 million. Why? Because we’d rather be in that fiction than have to be confronted by what we think are true facts, that’s all.
RONNY LEBER
Oh beautiful, very beautiful and thank you for laying out all those hands-on examples that I believe also many people can relate to… So going back into your story you graduated from college and then you went to New York and you became a writer for soap operas. How was that? I believe you did this for around a year and also what were your learnings along the way there?
LEE ZLOTOFF
Right so I wrote a fiction script in college. Shortly after I graduated I got to New York. I managed to get a job as a secretary on a soap opera. Eventually I decided, you know I didn’t come here to be a secretary, and the producer came back late one night and I was working late and I said look I got nothing to lose here… We started talking and I said you know I think I could write this show better than it’s being written and he looked at me and he said boy that’s a pretty ballsy thing for a secretary to say and then he said do you have anything to back that up? And I said well I have this script, so I gave him the script and I figured, look – he’ll throw it in the garbage, maybe he’ll read a few pages, maybe he’ll just come in and fire me, I don’t know – but I didn’t come here to be a secretary so I’ll take my shot.
He walked in the next morning, he pointed at me and he said “YOU: In my office right now.” I thought oh man if you’re going to fire me you could just fire me right here. I walked into his office. He said close the door, sit down. Okay close the door… sit down… he looks at me and he says “I read your script last night. You got a job as a writer.” Boom – that’s how I got my first job. And then I was fired as the secretary of the soap opera but it didn’t matter because now I was writing for the Soap Opera.
RONNY LEBER
Wow actually one thing that I would like to point out here because oftentimes we believe that we or some people believe that you need to nail it on the first try… basically your first job… I’m only going to do what I really want to do and you didn’t want to be a secretary, but you brought yourself in the vicinity… you brought yourself in the proximity of the people that would make those decisions. And through actually being in the proximity and having their ear and and also on the one hand learning, but also then saying what, how can I make this is better, that’s the way how you then put yourself in the game isn’t it?
LEE ZLOTOFF
Yes you need to. I mean if you want to do a specific thing you need to ideally find people who are doing that thing and say to them how is it you do this thing because if somebody’s doing it, that means they had to learn how to do it. Well if they had to learn how to do it presumably you could learn how to do it. Okay and so all right if it’s learnable what do I need to learn in order to do this job? What I say to people who come to me, and this is true about not only the entertainment industry but there are sort of three I call them, the three and a half secrets: okay number one you’ve got to believe in your bones that you are going to succeed or you shouldn’t be doing it.
I don’t quote Yoda a lot but ‘there is do, and there is do not, there is no try.’ So you got to believe that –– I had to believe that I was going to succeed in the entertainment business or it was not the right business to be in. And then you have to do your homework, you have to do what it is you want to do. So I was writing. I wrote a script. I struggled with ‘how do you tell a story’? What’s the beginning, what’s the middle, so forth and so on… and then you have to not worry about how it’s going to happen.
This sounds crazy but you have to let go of exactly the details of how it’s going to happen. I mean we’ve all watched endless late night talk shows and the host always says to the guests ‘Well … How did you succeed? How did it happen? What Was Your Big Break?’ And they always start with ‘you know it’s the craziest story… okay I met this person and they had nothing to do with the entertainment business but they were married to someone…’ I mean you know the story always sounds crazy. How did they get from here to there? They almost always… they never say oh I knew exactly how it was going to work. I did this, I did this, I did this, and it all worked perfectly. Doesn’t work that way. So you need to believe you’re going to make it. You need to do the homework necessary so when the opportunity presents itself you’re ready to take advantage of it. And the third thing is you have to let go of the expectation of how it’s going to happen because you don’t control that. You just control what you do.
RONNY LEBER
Beautiful.
LEE ZLOTOFF
And then the half secret is you got to be part of the universe. You could be a brilliant writer, if you go sit on a mountaintop and nobody reads what you write, it’s never going to get out into the world. As you said you have to put yourself in a situation where you can connect to the people who are doing what it is you want to do. And then sooner or later you’re doing what you want to do. Eventually somebody is going to pay you to do what it is you’re doing and the next thing you know you got a job and you’re there.
You also fail you know… [laughs]
RONNY LEBER
Of course because we’re going to get into that in just a moment actually. You did this for about a year, writing soap operas, and what I read was then you decided ‘Okay there’s got to be something else besides learning how to write dialogue’ which is what you took with you as well. You moved across the country you went to from New York to Los Angeles, and there you thought okay I’m gonna do more on TV? Or how was that? And also how were the early struggles? Because it was not like hey I’m here and everybody’s just lining up to get you signed…
LEE ZLOTOFF
So my wife and I at the time were talking about having children. I did not want to try and raise children in New York City for a whole variety of reasons. So that meant we were going to move to a suburb. I went, well if we’re moving to a suburb we might as well move to Los Angeles. There are going to be more opportunities for a writer like me in Los Angeles than there were in New York even though I had been writing for a soap opera in New York. I knew no one in California. I mean, I knew no one – virtually no one in the business, and my wife said, well how are we going to succeed if you don’t know anyone? I said well we hardly knew anybody in New York so you know you just have to believe. So we got out there and of course I had things to write and you start to, you know, you look for whatever opportunities you can. One of the first jobs I got when I was in LA was as a script reader so I would be given a script… because producers are given scripts all day long and they don’t have time to read every script, so they often go out to a service and say okay I got paid per script to read the script write a synopsis and then generally write you know did I think it had commercial appeal. Okay, that was a great, great first job to have because the vast majority of the stuff I read was terrible I mean really terrible and you went my God! I could do better than this on my worst day! So it was very encouraging, in that I had no idea that there was so much bad writing out there [laughs].
RONNY LEBER
Also tying back actually to your college days when you were learning from Plato, from Aristotle, and from all those greats, but you learned some structure – and here also you learned on the one hand you saw what’s out there, you got to learn the market and also you got to learn how not to do things and probably also some pinnacles in there… or some pearls where you may have said well this is actually quite nice isn’t it?
LEE ZLOTOFF
Yeah so one of the great things my college education gave me was it taught you how to learn anything. Because you were confronted with this book, and you’re told this is a great book, and it has stood the test of time, and you had to read it and say why is this a great book? What is, you know? You’re banging your head against these things and believe me you know you read some of those philosophers like Emanuel Kant and you know it’s four pages before you get to a verb, you know it’s kind of like… this is not easy stuff! So you look then at any given situation you’re in and you go, what really makes this whole world tick? How does the entertainment business really work? And there’s the way it looks like it works and then there’s the way it really works. And by looking at the way it really worked which was, turns out, secretaries and assistants were really crucial because they were the gatekeepers. And so I would befriend the secretaries and the assistants. I’d stop by, I’d call them up, and I’d say listen I’m a writer and they go – ‘Oh we don’t we don’t accept…’ I said “I’m not asking for you to give this to your boss… You sit in that chair all day and I know you have to read scripts, would you be willing to read my script and tell me if it’s any good? And I’d bring him a cup of coffee, or I’d bring him a muffin, and so I got to know lots and lots of assistants and secretaries and gatekeepers. And lo and behold… eventually some of them would read my stuff and go, you know this is really good! I read scripts all day and most of them are terrible, yours is pretty good. So I’d say well if you think it’s good enough to share with your boss that would be great. I just kind of networked until opportunities began to present themselves. Lo and behold in the same week I was offered writing jobs on two different television series and I had to make a choice. The good news was I made a choice and suddenly I was a paid writer.
RONNY LEBER
Before we get into that and it’s brilliant because I just want everybody to get your strategy… because you mentioned networking. To really build a network and to really define whatever industry you want to get into… who are the gatekeepers? Who are the people who are actually pulling the strings in the back and finding the secretaries or the people who you need to get to in order to get to the people who then make the decision? But there is always somebody up front, and that’s brilliant.
LEE ZLOTOFF
So yes there’s always a gatekeeper. If you think of it as a story you go well I’m not going to get to see the king or the dragon or whoever it was unless I get past the gatekeeper. So why don’t I just sort of focus my attention and energy on who the gatekeepers are and maybe one of them will lead me to the king or the dragon or eventually the gatekeepers get promoted, you know, and they’re the people who are then sitting in the king’s chair and so you knew a gatekeeper and you treated them with respect when they were just an assistant or a secretary or whatever, and they went you know I remember that guy he treated me with respect. He didn’t treat me like a doormat and his writing was really good. Let me find out what’s happening with him… and I get a call or my agent would get a call and say hey is Lee available? Is Lee busy? The next thing I know I walk in and go ‘Oh my God look at the job you have!’ and they go ‘Yeah, sit down I want to do something with you.’’ Crazy but there you go.
RONNY LEBER
Wow and at some point of course you get more influential and so on and then then you might actually know some Kings to stay in this paraphrase, and then of course it’s easier to get connected from one to the other… but in the beginning to build a network you really need to go through the gatekeepers to make your way up. So you got your first, let’s say a contract or paid job as a staff writer right?
LEE
Yeah.
RONNY LEBER
What does a staff writer do? Basically you produce episodes of shows, right?
LEE ZLOTOFF
Yes, so my job was to write episodes for television shows. I was what was called an episodic writer. Those were dramas so they’re kind of like little movies every week as opposed to sitcoms which are like little plays every week, more or less. I mean it’s changed a little bit but that’s basically the way it was broken down. I discovered in that process, I had to write to produce an enormous amount of creative material under relentless deadlines, because once they turned on that production machine they were not going to turn it off, because they’re paying you know hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. If they have to shut down for a day because the script isn’t ready they still have to pay those people. They can’t just send them home and say oh well you know we’re not paying you today… ‘The hell you’re not paying me today! I’m on payroll here.’
I discovered in that process that the real quote unquote ‘creative writer within me’ was not my conscious mind, it was my subconscious mind and I’ll tell you exactly what I mean by that. It turned out that when I was stressed and pressured to write stuff, the best stuff came to me when I was either driving, or taking a shower. Not when I was sitting at my typewriter. Because believe it this is even predating computers okay, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth… I went, wait a minute, from St John’s, I said: ask the question, why is it that the best stuff keeps coming to you when you’re either driving or taking a shower, not when you’re quote unquote “trying to be creative”? And it turned out that we think that the conscious mind is really where it’s at because we’re awake three-quarters or more of the day. You wake up in the morning and I call it the hamster wheel, that hamster wheel of thoughts starts going all day long okay and it doesn’t stop until you finally run out of energy and put your head down on the pillow and fall asleep. Turns out your subconscious mind goes 24/7, and your subconscious mind has been with you since probably before you were born. You know how your heartbeat starts when it’s in the womb? It doesn’t start the moment you come out of the womb. Your heartbeat starts earlier – I would be willing to bet your subconscious starts earlier.
Ronny, your subconscious has recorded everything that’s ever happened to you. It is like a massive data bank. Now because we’re awake three-quarters of the day we think oh our conscious mind this is where our consciousness really is, and that subconscious thing maybe we remember a dream or something. We got it backwards. The subconscious is massive. It’s huge, okay? So if the conscious mind is this mug of coffee, the subconscious mind is the entire state of New Mexico that I live in. Those are the real proportions. So I learned that my subconscious was a much, much better creative force than my conscious mind – and in fact if I could get my conscious mind out of the process it was even better.
I’ve subsequently written a book about this called The MacGyver Secret: Connect to Your Inner MacGyver and Solve Anything because the answers we are really looking for, whether they’re in our work, whether they’re our relationships, whether they’re creative, or technical, those answers are already inside of you. You just have to know how to get to them. And the MacGyver secret requires nothing more than a pen and a piece of paper and you can establish a dialogue with your inner MacGyver subconscious higher self.
Really doesn’t matter what you call it. I know one guy who called it his big purple Jesus. It doesn’t matter. It is that part of you that knows you better than anyone else ever will and knows all of the information that you’ve ever gathered and can use it when you have a question or a problem. So I developed this very simple method of writing down the question, turning it over to my subconscious, not thinking about it, working on something you know what we call an incubation activity. I built paper models. I put a workbench in my office. I had a whiteboard and a workbench and my typewriter.
I would go to the board and say I need an idea for an episode. Instead of standing there and racking my brain for an idea for an episode, I would then go sit at that workbench and I built paper models. Build the Empire State Building out of paper. Build the Taj Mahal out of paper. Build the Vatican out of paper. I mean who needs a Vatican made out of paper? Nobody does. But, it did the same thing that driving and taking a shower did. It focused my conscious mind on something else so that my subconscious mind could work on the problem. And then after 45 minutes or an hour I would go to the whiteboard and I would say what do you have for me? And I just started writing. It didn’t matter what I wrote. I could write Mary had a little lamb. I could write what I wanted for lunch. Just literally start the act of writing. And within 30 to 60 seconds, the ideas just floated out of me, and it was like oh yeah of course he could do that and she could do this and this could happen and then that could happen and material was just there. So I became very adept at turning out good material very quickly. And so I rose in the industry very, very fast. I went from being a freelance writer to being essentially a pilot writer in like two and a half years. And MacGyver was the first pilot I wrote…
RONNY LEBER
So yes freelance writer, staff writer, and then a pilot writer. Pilot basically is for a new show to create the pilot episode like the test episode in a way, and there was one afternoon you got a call from your agent Marty that basically changed your life. How was that? Take us with you.
LEE ZLOTOFF
Okay so I had been working on a series and even though I had this great technique I was getting a little burned out and I said you know what I’m coming here and giving my best stuff to people who don’t really care about me and at that point I had a wife and two children and I said I’m going home and they’re getting the worst part of me. I said this is backwards.
So I just quit. I just said I’m not going to. I’m going to stop for a while. I’m going to regroup and rethink this whole thing. Nobody leaves a staff job from a television series… You get paid a lot of money and there’s status and no one in the show or in the company believed me. They went what do you mean you’re quitting? I went, ‘I’m not happy. I know I can do this job but it’s not fulfilling me, I got to figure out something else’ and I quit.
Of course by then you know I had a lawyer, an agent, a business manager, and initially they went ‘Oh, great Lee! We’re all behind you, take care of yourself’. But after a certain number of months, they go hey you’re not making us any money here buddy because we only make money when you make money. So my agent came to me, and this must have been six months after I had just sort of gone off on my own, and he said listen: I got a job for you. I said Marty, we’ve been through this. He said ‘No no just listen to me. I got you a job writing a pilot and I got you more money for somebody who has never written a pilot before… and I went what are you talking about? He said well you kept saying no… that’s when I learned that the more I said no, the higher my price went.
I wasn’t trying to raise my price Ronny, I just didn’t want to keep doing it. but every time a project came my way and Marty called me and I said no the price went up. And he said Lee, I have got you. I said well what is the project? He said who cares what the project is. I told you I just got you more money for somebody who’s never written a pilot before in the history of Television. You got to do this for me, I will come to your office, I will get on my knees, I will beg. I went all right, well, what is it? He said well it’s this new concept, and they said it’s never been done before. You don’t have to pitch it; it’s already been sold to ABC. Henry Winkler’s company and Paramount have sold the show, you go in you write it you’re in you’re out. Please I’m begging you – I said okay Marty fine I go ahead and say yes I’ll take the job. All right, great, so I take the job.
I go in and I meet with them and they say this is a brand new concept that’s never been done before. I went wow this sounds great, what is it? And so they tell me the concept and I listen and I ask a couple of questions and then I’m in this very awkward situation. And they go what’s wrong? And I said well you know guys there’s a reason it’s never been done before. They said what’s that? I said it’s not going to work.
They said what do you mean? Everybody loved it! I mean the network loved it, we love it, what do you mean it’s not going to work? I explained to them it sounds great when you say it, but since I’m the guy that’s being hired to actually do it, I have to tell you what’s going to happen.
RONNY LEBER
And just to give a little context around that because the concept it was originally, just to give a little context around that, it was the concept originally called ‘The Hourglass.’
LEE ZLOTOFF
Yes the concept was called Hourglass, and what it was was one hour of real time was going to be one hour of television time. So in other words you were watching 45 minutes essentially in real time.
So the question I asked is, oh is this a serial? Do all these hours you know each hour kind of build a bigger story? They said no they all have to be standalone episodes. There was a very successful show called 24 which did exactly that, but every show was one hour out of the day that would change the world, right? They said it’s not a serial each show has to be has to have a beginning a middle and end it’s got to be a complete story and I said, well but you’re giving away way what television and film is brilliant about, which is we can skip space and time you know you can be in New York and then you can see a shot of a plane and now you’re in you know Beijing… you can’t do that on this show because we’re tied to that clock. And they went oh well so what does that mean? I said it means every show is going to have to begin where it ends… do you understand what I’m saying?
We don’t want to see our character traveling. That’s not interesting, we want to see the character doing something, right? Yeah… I said well you got the sinking submarine show, you got the locked bank vault show, you got the mind shaft show… understand what I’m saying? You’re limiting your choices here, and I don’t think this show is going to survive. I could write that pilot, it’s one episode, but then what are you going to do three years from now? You can’t keep boxing the character into something that tight. They went oh, boy, wow, we didn’t think of that. I said I’m sorry, you know what, I don’t need to take this job it’s okay. They went no no you’re not going anywhere, we just agreed to pay you more money than anybody who’s never written a pilot before, so you gotta fix this. I went oh, okay. So I came up with one idea – Network didn’t like it. I came up with another idea. Network didn’t like that either. I came up with a third idea, Network hated it.
So I did what every self-respecting Hollywood writer does: I called my agent and I whined and I said Marty you told me I was just going to be in and out, write this and I could be pitching this for the rest of my life. He said well what do you want from me? You’re the one who told them their idea wouldn’t work… and I went, you know what, you’re right. So I got all my writer friends into a room. I said I need your help, locked the door, had every potential inebriant someone could want, and I said we’re not leaving this room till I have a kick-ass idea to get me out of this deal. I told them everything I had tried. They say well what do you have? I said I have nothing. That’s why you’re here, I have absolutely nothing. I’m blank. I’m dead. I got nothing.
And there was a long pause and one of my friends, I honestly don’t remember who it was, said great let’s go with that. I said let’s go with what? They said let’s go with nothing. I said what are you talking about? They said well look: James Bond he always gets those toys from Q at the beginning of every movie right? Indiana Jones he’s got the hat and the gun and the whip. What if your guy, Lee, goes into a situation and he’s got nothing. There was another long pause and I went… that’s it! That’s… that’s… genius! Our guy has nothing. He has to figure it out as he goes. He has to make it up as he goes along. He has to find it on the fly, and that’s the hook! Every show he shows up you know he doesn’t have anything except a bag to put stuff in, and he’s gotta make something out of nothing. Which is exactly what we just did in the room.
We were saying our guy, our guy, and they said okay what are you going to call this character Lee? And I said well we’ll just call him guy and they went nah nah nah that’s too on the nose. And I went okay… well in those days McDonald’s the hamburger chain was blossoming and they were putting on their restaurants 50 million sold, 100 million sold… They eventually stopped doing that I think because they thought people would figure out how many cows is 100 million hamburgers… But anything that was wildly popular got a “Mc” in front of it. USA Today the newspaper came out it was called McNewspaper so I said hey why don’t we just call him McGuy and they went man it needs to be three syllables Lee. Okay… McGuy… MacGuy… how about MacGyver?
All right, it’s like, that’s a kinda Scottish name – they’re frugal and flinty people you know? And they went “MacGyver… yeah we like the sound of that!” That’s how MacGyver was born.
RONNY LEBER
And not a lot of people know that it’s actually Angus MacGyver which is even more Scottish.
LEE ZLOTOFF
Yes, well, the first name I gave him I think I originally called him Stace, but everybody just called him Mac and then at some point when the show was running they said let’s give him the first name of Angus. ‘Okay I don’t care what you call him’ you know, I mean at that point – listen I wrote that pilot in record time. I mean once I pitched the idea and they went ‘well that sounds interesting,’ I went home I swear to God I think I wrote that pilot in 10 days or less because it’s like man I don’t want them to change their minds because I’m done pitching this thing. So I blasted through that pilot, they read it, and the next thing I heard was: We’re making the show. I go… what?! And there you go.
RONNY LEBER
Wow so how was that? Because you actually didn’t continue with writing all the episodes. Did you just write the pilot? Or did you also write some other episodes? Also how was that feeling for you then when you saw what actually grew out of MacGyver? Did you watch all the episodes? Was there a favorite episode? How was that for you to see this evolve?
LEE ZLOTOFF
They asked me if I wanted to stay with the series and for a variety of reasons I didn’t want to stay with the series and I appreciated the offer. So literally, Ronny, all I wrote was the pilot. I wrote the first episode of MacGyver, and this show became a hit because of Richard Dean Anderson, the writers, the producers, the actors… I mean they did a great job. It was not high-end classical TV, it was an action adventure show. But that concept of figuring it out on the fly, really, and I took away the gun, not for some moral thing. I took away the gun because if he doesn’t have a gun he’s going to have to figure out another way to solve the problem. It’s not just shooting back. We’ve all seen the movies where the bad guys have machine guns and the good guy has a pistol, ‘boom! boom! boom! boom!’ and they all die, and it’s like wait a minute come on… So if we took away the gun, he had a Swiss army knife, he got some duct tape, and the answer was he couldn’t shoot back. It wasn’t about guns, it was about using his brain.
So the show goes on and the next thing I know it’s running year after year, and then I learned that it’s been sold all over the world. At one point I made a pilot TV movie in Tunisia of all places, and a Tunisian TV crew shows up and says uh, well, what else have you done? And I said well I wrote the show MacGyver. ‘[Surprised Gasp] You created MacGyver??’ and I said ‘Yeah. Why, what’s the big deal?’ They went ‘You don’t understand, this country stops when that show is on.’ I said you’re kidding me, they said no no it turns out the same was true in South America, the same was true in some of the Norwegian countries, the same was true in some Asian countries, the same is true in Europe.
The world would just stop when MacGyver was on. After that interview I would walk down the street in Tunisia, men would come out of their shops to shake my hand. Women would come up to me on the street with children and say “kiss this man” I said “What are you talking about?? It’s a television show,” okay it’s MacGyver… it was like sacred to them and I’m going what is this?
So here’s how I think about that now that I’ve had some time to think about it. It’s like look, you have a child, the child grows up and does something wonderful. Are you proud of them? Of course you’re proud of them. It’s your child. Did you do it? No. I didn’t do it Ronny, okay… I gave them a blueprint, I gave them you know the outline so to speak. But I didn’t make MacGyver a phenomenon. The world did. They embraced his character because they said you know what? He does what we do every day to survive. Because most people in the world don’t have all the advantages and privileges that we have in the west. It’s better now than it used to be, but you know back in the 80s there were a lot of second and third world countries and they went, we identify with this character.
Number one: He doesn’t use a gun, we don’t have guns. Okay, yes we love Rambo, and we love James Bond, but this guy is like us. He figures it out. Number two: Macgyver was kind of… he always had a sense of humor and humility. He was always the smartest guy in the room… he never acted like the smartest guy in the room. He wasn’t putting other people down. When everybody else went ‘oh my God we’re all going to die’ he goes ‘wait a minute let’s just take a step back, think about what we got, and maybe there’s a way to figure this out and we can all survive…’ So MacGyver is a child of mine, but I don’t take credit for what it became, because it grew up and did it all by itself. I just happened to be the father.
RONNY LEBER
Very beautiful, very beautiful… on your website MacGyver.com it says “There is a MacGyver in everyone, and anyone can be MacGyver.” On the one hand what does that mean? On the other hand, how much Lee is in MacGyver? And also how much MacGyver is in Lee?
LEE ZLOTOFF
Okay well MacGyver was a creation of mine. So it’s asking you know as I said from my college days MacGyver looks around and says What do I have? What are the resources available to me in this situation? And obviously if your listeners or viewers want to go to MacGyver.com there’s lots of stuff to see there, we do lots of different projects. We have a MacGyver Foundation, we do philanthropic projects, all kinds of stuff. There’s a new MacGyver fiction series that we’re doing… I’ve turned MacGyver into a musical believe it or not, so you know there’s lots of ways this character continues to grow and expand.
But we are facing numerous crises right now on this planet Ronny, I’m not the first person to be telling you… we all know that. The truth is we have resources both inside of us and around us that we can use to deal with the problems we all face. So ‘there’s a MacGyver in everyone and anyone can be MacGyve’” is a way of saying he’s not just a television character… he’s you. You have resources inside of yourself, i.e. in The MacGyver Secret, how to connect to your inner MacGyver and solve anything. And there are probably resources around you that you can use to deal with whatever crisis you’re facing.
We all are MacGyvers now. We’re all going to have to take responsibility because if we wait for the leaders of this planet to fix things it’s never going to get fixed.
We’re going to have to fix it. We made this mess, we can clean this mess up. We have all the technology we need to fix things. We don’t need new technologies. We just need to take responsibility for what’s going on in this planet right now, and look inside ourselves and look around us and say what is it going to take for me to make the world a better place?
And we can do that or we can tear ourselves apart in endless wars and other destructive behaviors and that’ll be it for civilization you know?
RONNY LEBER
Wow, very very deep and insightful. As our time is slowly coming to an end, just to shift gears a little bit, if there would be one character trait or one gadget – I know MacGyver didn’t have a lot of gadgets – but what something from MacGyver that you would like to have in real life, what would it be?
LEE ZLOTOFF
Well the Swiss army knife is a pretty good start [laughs] why? Because it’s a multi-tool. So whether it’s a leather man or a Swiss army knife… But think of yourself as a multi-tool. Maybe you can only do one thing but chances are, most human beings can do a lot of different things okay? Some robots can, but most robots can pretty much do one thing: ‘I’m a robot that vacuums the floor’ or ‘I’m a robot that can walk upstairs.’ Oh, well can you tell me a story? ‘Oh no I don’t do that, you know, I’m just a robot that walks upstairs.’ Well guess what? Humans can walk upstairs (most of us), and tell stories, and vacuum the floor, you know? We are multitools.
So think of yourself… I try to think of myself… as that Swiss army knife. that multi-tool. There are lots of different blades and tools in there. What tool am I going to use to deal with this situation? What’s the smart way to do it? And taking time to stop and think about that as opposed to just reacting to everything, sometimes is the best way to proceed. Sometimes being quiet and looking at a situation rather than simply reacting to a situation is the best way to deal with it. So… multi-tool.
RONNY LEBER
Wow, that’s great! What’s one thing of advice you would like to give somebody who is either just starting out on that journey or who is on a crossroad and would like to follow his or her passion but is not really sure of if they can really do it?
LEE ZLOTOFF
Sure and this is going to sound a little crazy and controversial. I believe that everything you want is already inside of you. We tend to think it’s out there and we have to go out and get it. That’s the old you know sort of hunter gatherer mentality. It’s out there, I have to chase it down, I have to kill it, I have to skin it, I gotta put it over my shoulder, and try and get it back to the cave before some other animal takes it away from me.
We don’t live that way most of us anymore. I understand if you’re struggling to eat or keep a roof over your head or clothes on your body that’s a different circumstance, but the vast majority of the world does not spend its time hunting for food. So if you want something in the world, find it in yourself first, and then more likely than not it will show up. The thing you want will show up. But it’s not really out there, it’s really inside of you. You may say well how do I find it inside of me? Well I don’t know, go read the MacGyver Secret maybe that’ll help… but what I’m saying is switch the story. The story is what you want. It is not outside away from you somewhere else. It’s already inside of you. Find it inside of you, and then it will appear in the world, and you can have what you want.
RONNY LEBER
That’s very very beautiful. If somebody would like to know more about you or somehow get in contact what’s the best way? Where can they find out more?
LEE ZLOTOFF
MacGyver.com is the best way. there are people on the site if you want to reach out to me you can you know go to info@macgyver.com and and tell us what you’re looking for, whatever it is. But the website MacGyver.com is the best way to both see what’s going on in the world of MacGyver and to get in touch with me.
RONNY LEBER
Any last 30 second thought that you would like to leave us with?
LEE ZLOTOFF
We can fix the world. It is not hopeless. It is not over. If we can deal with something like Covid, and come up with multiple effective vaccines in one year, we can fix the world. It’s doable. Believe it, and live it.
RONNY LEBER
Thank you so much. Thank you for all your wisdom, for your insights, for sharing your story with us, and also for having inspired millions and millions of people around the world. Thank you once again, a big hand to Lee Zlotoff!
LEE ZLOTOFF
Thank you Ronny I appreciate the opportunity.
Connect & Explore More:
For deeper insights, captivating stories, and a dose of inspiration, connect with MacGyver Creator Lee Zlotoff: macgyver.com
Your Show Host: Ronny Leber: ronnyleber.com/en