Scott Neustadter likes to stay busy. Along with his writing partner Michael H. Weber, they have worked on several projects over the years, including a original script for their 2009 breakout film “500 Days of Summer,” followed by screen adaptations for such books as “The Spectacular Now,” “The Fault in Our Stars,” and “The Disaster Artist,” which earned them an Academy Award nomination in 2017.
With “Daisy Jones & The Six,” based on the Taylor Jenkins Reid novel, Neustadter says he found his dream job.
“This was one of those projects that I had a huge affinity for and kind of wanted to see to the end.”
But he admits that after working on Amazon's smash-hit, limited series for five years, he needs a little rest.
“it feels like [I’m] coming up for air for the first time in a while,” he says, “and [then] hopefully find the next thing to do quickly.”
For now, Neustadter talks about his early career, getting into writing book adaptations, and the making of “Daisy Jones & The Six,” the story of a fictional 70’s rock group, by the same name of the novel, bearing a certain resemblance to Fleetwood Mac. With the mandatory sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, the story follows the band’s meteoric rise and sudden fall.
Early career
Neustadter’s first job out of college was at Tribeca Productions – a film and television production company co-founded in 1989 by actor Robert De Niro – where he started as an intern. He then moved up the ranks to script reader, story editor and ended his tenure as its director of development.
His writing partner, Weber, started there as a summer intern as well, and eventually became De Niro’s assistant. During that time, Neustadter recalls Weber getting tired of him complaining about the scripts he was reading and encouraged him to write one himself.
“I just didn't think I had the confidence to pull that off, and [Weber] said, ‘Well, sounds like all we have to do is write a terrible script,” Neustadter recalls. During lunch breaks, they would go up the roof to write together.
After parting ways with Tribeca, Neustadter moved to England to attend the London School of Economics, where he also found himself in a romantic relationship. Through a series of emails between Neustadter and Weber talking about the failed relationship, they came up with a first-draft spec script for “500 Days of Summer.”
“We were proud of it, but I was definitely a little embarrassed by it,” he says. “It was way too close to home, way too personal.”
Neustadter then thought it was time to give the entertainment industry another shot. He moved to Los Angeles and decided to work in television, starting at the bottom. With his resume highlighting his work at Tribeca and a Master’s from the London School of Economics, he landed a job as the assistant for Nina Tassler, the head of Drama Development at CBS at the time.
“She’s certainly an amazing person, but I was the world's worst assistant. I had never been an assistant before. I had skipped that step, which I didn't tell anyone, obviously,” he recalls.
Within six months, Tassler fired him. “It was either show people this script, or move back home to New Jersey with my parents,” he says. “I had no choice, and we got really lucky that people liked the script.”
With the spect script at hand, he could secure meetings, but not close a deal because it had a “difficult concept.”
“A lot of people liked it and said, ‘We're excited to talk to you in the future when you have something commercial to sell us,’” he says.
Eventually Neustadter got a break. Fox Searchlight bought “500 Days of Summer” and brought in music video director Marc Webb to make the 2009 comedy-drama featuring Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Grooving with book adaptations
After the success with the highly original “500 Days,” doors began to open. Initially, Neustadter and Weber tried to come up with their own original ideas, wrote a few specs and sold some, but they didn’t get made.
Then, the duo came across Tim Tharp’s book “The Spectacular Now,” and decided to try to adapt the book “as an experience,” since they hadn’t done one before.
“Both Weber and I love to read,” he says, “we love that book and really loved the opportunity to do like an R-rated, coming of age drama.”
It was another movie Neustadter felt they were fortunate it got made, and from that moment on, he says they realized acquiring someone’s intellectual property was less risky.
“If [the studios] know there's an audience out there already, and they've spent some money, they're far more inclined to progress to production than if it's your original idea. That's a big gamble,” he says.
He adds, “I think delayed gratification is a hard thing that nobody wants to do anymore. It has to happen right away, and it has to kind of pop immediately [because] they're worried that the audience doesn't have patience.”
The genesis of “Daisy Jones & The Six”
Neustadter says that people who know him know that he’s a “big music dork,” so film producer Brad Mendelsohn sent him this “very Fleetwood Mac inspired” unpublished manuscript for “Daisy Jones & The Six.”
“He thought that was something that I would enjoy reading,” Neustadter recalls.
He had not heard of Taylor Jenkins Reid at the time, but about 100 pages into the novel, he texted his wife Lauren Neustadter – who had been hired to run film and television at Reese Witherspoon’s production company Hello Sunshine – to see if she had seen the project. Since she hadn’t, he suggested she should buy the rights, and maybe they should work together.
“I was very privileged to get such an early look at it,” he says. It was 2017, before “the book was a thing.”
About 10 years earlier, Neustadter had met Witherspoon at a lunch get together, and during a conversation he shared that his dream project was “something with the making of ‘Rumours’ by Fleetwood Mac,” a story he was obsessed with.
“We spent the rest of the lunch talking about Stevie Nicks and our mutual love for that music, so I kind of knew that this was going to be up [her] alley, too. And I was right,” he states.
But Witherspoon was on vacation, so Lauren sent her a copy to read because she knew it would be competitive and she wanted to get the rights to the book.
Once the novel was published, Witherspoon made it her Reese’s Book Club pick, becoming a best-seller. “It was all sort of because of the passion everyone had for the material,” he explains. “It was a book that I think we knew was going to be something special.”
Pitching “Daisy Jones” to Amazon
Neustadter recalls Witherspoon and his wife thought Amazon would be a great place to set up the project because of its across-the-platform opportunities.
After they met Amazon Studios’ chief Jen Salke to talk about the project, Neustadter and Weber wrote a pilot on spec, like a “series bible” of what they thought the show should look like. Then, his wife sent Salke a “happy weekend email” containing a copy of the book, the script and the bible and set a deadline.
“On Monday, [Salke] called and said, ‘Don't show it around,’” he recalls.
She enthusiastically greenlit the series and Neustadter was hired to develop it.
Casting Riley Keough
When Neustadter and the production team first met Riley Keough, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, to play the lead character Daisy Jones, she told them she wasn’t musical. She could sing in the shower or in the car, but didn’t think she sounded great.
So they sent her to the show’s musical directors’ studio, who put her on a microphone for the first time and told her to belt it out. They reported back that she was not trained but had “this brand new, raw voice…something really special.”
Neustadter remembers looking at his co-showrunner Will Graham and saying “maybe this could work.”
“She had to do it all and was totally up for the challenge and willing to put in the work,” he says.
Creating the music
To create the album “Aurora” to be performed by a band that doesn’t exist, Neustadter says the series executive music producer Blake Mills enlisted Phoebe Bridgers, Jackson Browne and some other major artists who happen to be friends to co-write songs for the show.
While Mills was producing Marcus Mumford’s solo album, he asked if he could write something for the series during their breaks. They came up with lyrics for “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb),” which Mumford then sang in duet with country singer-songwriter Maren Morris.
“I think it was a little bit of writing a character, which I'm sure they found very fun,” Neustadter remarks. “And every day we would get incoming music from Blake was like the greatest. We'd stop everything and just listen. It was such fun, especially for someone like me.”
Leaving doors open
While “Daisy Jones & The Six” is a limited series, with a concrete beginning, middle and end, Neustadter says he is open to talk about expanding it.
“I've always felt the best ending will answer all your questions, but then ask maybe new questions, and so this sort of leaves a few doors open and avenues to explore if there's an interest,” he says.
“Daisy Jones & The Six” is now streaming on Prime video.