Q&A With Jonathan Handel 

Jonathan Handel is a man of many talents, and I’m honored that Mickey Mikkelson connected us for this interview! Jonathan practices transactional entertainment and technology law at Feig/Finkel in Los Angeles independently, and is also a journalist, media commentator, and writer of poetry, scripts, stories and nonfiction.

Jonathan’s books are Entertainment Residuals: A Full Color Guide, How to Write LOI’s and Term Sheets, The New Zealand Hobbit Crisis, Hollywood On Strike!, Entertainment Labor: An Interdisciplinary Bibliography, and his latest, Who Do You Want To Be? 

Jonathan’s published script is Trump—The Musical!, and he’s written others. 

Jonathan has written for Puck and was a contributing editor from 2010-20 for The Hollywood Reporter, where he wrote over 1,400 articles. He’s appeared in the media as an expert over 1,600 times. Jonathan’s writing has also been published in Variety & The Los Angeles Times! 

Q: Jonathan, welcome to Book Notions! Would you like to give a brief description of each of your books beginning with Who Do You Want To Be? 

A: Sure, and thanks for having me! Here goes:

• Who Do You Want To Be? is my first kids’ book. It’s illustrated, rhymed, lyrical and diverse. A fun read, perfect for kids aged 4 to 8, adults and kids of all ages will enjoy it too. You can visit who2b.kids for more information, but here’s how the story starts:

One day my best friend

Said to me

Who in the world

Do you wanna be?

I thought and thought

And thought and said

Maybe a fireman

Cuz their trucks are red?

• The New Zealand Hobbit Crisis tells the story of a 2010 attempt to unionize actors on The Hobbit that blew up into a national crisis in the South Pacific. Warner Bros. threatened to pull the project, and the NZ currency fell on the threat as the country’s leadership scrambled to head off an economic and public relations disaster. The outcome was astonishing, and the book is a must-read for true Hobbit fans everywhere.
• Trump—The Musical! is a satirical musical written in 2016 skewering our disastrous president, the worst in my lifetime and probably the worst in all our history.
• Hollywood On Strike! chronicles and analyzes the Hollywood writers strike of 2007-2008 and the ensuing Screen Actors Guild stalemate that lasted through mid-2009.
• How to Write LOI’s and Term Sheets is a short book for technology executives that explains how to draft preliminary legal documents before calling in a lawyer.
• Entertainment Residuals: A Full Color Guide is a technical book that uses color coding to describe residuals, the complex union reuse/royalty payments that are specific to the entertainment industry.

Q: What drew you into practicing transactional entertainment law & technology law on top of writing, journalism and being a media commentator? 

A: Well, it was the reverse direction—the law preceded those other occupations. But before law, I was in tech. I started as a math and science kid in school, got into computers, and worked in tech during high school, college and for about five years after college. 

To give you a sense of it, my first high school job was as a clerk at a computer store when there were fewer than a dozen computer stores in the world. One of my summer jobs during college later became the first dot-com ever registered and my first job after college was for the company that, a decade earlier, invented email and the Internet (the ARPANET) under contract to the Defense Dept. My undergrad degree is in “applied math (computer science),” because Harvard didn’t even have an actual CS degree at the time, 1983. So, I’m pretty OG.

But I got involved in local Democratic and gay politics in Cambridge, Mass., and discovered that the city not only didn’t have a gay rights law, but it also didn’t have a local civil rights law at all. I decided to change that and spearheaded an effort for a new law. To my surprise, a City Councilor then asked me to write the law itself, even though I’d never even read a law in my life and had no legal training. I did, and then through lobbying, turned a pending 5-4 defeat on the City Council into a 6-3 victory.

That led me to go to Harvard Law School. Afterwards, I could have stayed in Cambridge—they wanted me to run for City Council and pursue a career in politics—but Los Angeles beckoned: the entertainment industry, lifestyle, weather, gay community and larger canvas all appealed to me. So, I moved West.

After practicing entertainment and tech law for a while, a law firm publicist urged me to blog and set up a media appearance for me with Variety. Then, in 2007, the Writers Guild went on strike and my visibility shot up. To date, I’ve appeared in the media over 1,600 times. 

Meanwhile, so many people were reading my blogging on the HuffPost that The Hollywood Reporter called in 2010 and offered me a job as a journalist covering the entertainment unions and guilds. I was truly an accidental journalist—I had never done school or college journalism.

I did THR for a decade, while continuing to practice law, and as you mentioned, wrote about 1,400 articles at that time, or an average of three a week. My expertise in entertainment unions and guilds also led to my being appointed as an adjunct professor at UCLA, USC and Southwestern law schools.

Journalism, meanwhile, opened creative writing pathways I didn’t know I had, and I got a short story published in a gay literary magazine, and then started writing poetry, lyrics and scripts. Most of my poetry is rhymed, satirical and political, but not all. I’ve written some queer poetry, a poem about my car, poems about death, and really whatever. 

My influences are Lewis Carroll (author of Alice in Wonderland and other works), Dr. Seuss, a 60s singer-songwriter named Tom Lehrer, and a little bit of Gilbert & Sullivan and perhaps Ogden Nash and others.

Q: What are your favorite parts of writing, journalism, practicing transactional entertainment and technology law & being a media commentator? 

A: I love the diversity of what I do, the synergy between my various pursuits, the communicative aspect that they all share, the opportunity to learn new things almost every day, and the privilege to help people and sometimes touch their lives.

Q: What wisdom have you learned in your years of practicing transactional entertainment and technology law, writing, journalism & being a media commentator, do you want anyone wanting to go into those careers to know? 

A: Try to do what you love or, at least, find a livable compromise between what you want to do and what pays adequately to meet your needs. Always keep learning and remember that many skills are transferable between occupations. I was able to write a law because it turns out that writing laws or contracts has a lot in common with writing computer software. I was able to blog because it turns out that blogging in an interesting and precise way has a lot in common with writing legal briefs or memos to clients. Blogging led naturally to journalism and media appearances, and both of those led naturally to creative writing and also to teaching.

Q: Jonathan, you write poetry, scripts, stories and nonfiction which I find impressive! Can you reveal anything that you are currently writing right now?

A: Thanks! Yes, I’m working on a pair of media training books—that are books about how to interact effectively with the media. They’re based on what I’ve learned from nearly 20 years of being a journalist, interview subject and even working as a publicist for one year at Sundance. Also influential are some linguistics studies in college and high school, some computational linguistics work I did in my tech days, and tech writing and marketing writing from that same era. Stay tuned!

Q: You’ve had work in The Hollywood Reporter, Puck, Variety and the Los Angeles Times … among others! What’s it like having so many articles featured in these outlets? For anyone wanting to have work featured in publications like that, what would someone need to do to submit their work to them? 

A: There are a couple routes. One is to just start writing. Set up your own Substack and grow your readership. You never know where it will lead. Another is to submit an op-ed to your local newspaper, or a guest column to a trade magazine in your field.

Q: What was it like being a contributing editor to The Hollywood Reporter? You worked there for over a decade from 2010-2020. Do you miss working there or was it time to move on? 

A: I loved the adrenaline, the recognition and the public service. But in 2020 SAG-AFTRA, the screen actors union, wanted to become a client and ultimately made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I couldn’t represent a union while writing about them for THR simultaneously, and, in addition, there was a period of some management chaos at THR amid a leadership change. So I decided to step back from active journalism for a few years. 

My work with SAG-AFTRA ended a couple years later, and then Puck, a subscription newsletter, asked me to cover the negotiations and then dual writers and actors strikes, which I did from 2022-2024.

Thanks for the opportunity to speak with you. Readers can visit my website, subscribe to my Substack and follow me on socials (which are listed in the footer of my website), as well as learn more about my latest book, Who Do You Want To Be?, at its website.