$#*! My Dad Says Creator Justin Halpern on Proving Himself, Conspiracy Theories and His Dad's Writing Career

Like a lot of pilots this season, you recast one of your leads. Can you talk about what happened with Ryan Devlin?

Yeah, he's a really good actor but it just didn't end up being the right fit. Sometimes, an actor just doesn't fit with the person they are playing off of. Sometimes, there is just something that is not quite working, and it was nothing that Ryan wasn't doing right. He's a really good actor and he will go on to have a really successful career, but it just didn't fit 100 percent the way that it should have. Unfortunately, we had to recast it.

When are we going to start seeing your dad on the interview circuit? I've heard that he's pretty reclusive, but can you think of any circumstance in which he would agree to be interviewed?

<span

class="pullquote right">I think the only way my dad would do an interview is if he got to meet Stephen Hawking. I bet if they could arrange for him to meet Stephen Hawking, he would do the interview. It's funny -- my dad does so much for me already but he doesn't do these interviews. I don't want to force him to do anything, but there are all these people asking us to sit down with them, and I could definitely sell way more books if he did. We've gotten offers to do cool shows like Nightline, Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel. [Laughs] But he thinks if he does one of them, he will get hounded to do a million of them. He hates talking to reporters but talked to them accidentally a few times.

Oh, really?

Yeah. My local news station in San Diego showed up at my parents' house one day. They knocked on the door and he opened it and it was like a full camera crew. He said, "Hello" and they were like, "Do you know your son writes stuff about you?" My dad said, "Yeah." Then they asked, "Well what do you have to say about that?" And he shut the door in their faces. That was on the local news.

Have you been approached about doing a $#*! My Dad Says movie yet?

When I first sent out my book proposal -- which is what got the networks and people in LA interested in the first place -- people starting calling and asking if I had thought about this as a movie. So that is the first idea anyone had for us -- we would go into meetings and execs would pitch a "really touching coming-of-age movie" and I said, "I don't think that would be a good movie. I am not the writer for that movie. I don't want to write that." So we stopped taking those meetings and after that, I started batting around the idea that this could work as a TV show.

Have you seen any of the internet conspiracy theories out there that you actually came up with the quotes for your Twitter feed and that your dad was just a clever gimmick?

I have seen conspiracy theories that CBS and Twitter collaborated on the feed knowing that they were going to release a book and create a television show. It's funny, because when I was living with my dad, I was hanging out with him for, like, eight hours a day. We would have these long conversations that would go on for hours before he would actually say one funny thing. People say it's fake and there is nothing I can really say to convince them otherwise. And it doesn't help that my dad won't do interviews. It's a little better now that he has accidentally talked to a few reporters and he was at the pilot taping so some people know he is real.

What I will do, though, is sometimes he will say a paragraph and and I will take the first and last sentences and squish them together to make it 140 characters or less. Lately, since I'm not around him, I use something he said to me, like, five or ten years ago.

Are you sitting there with a notepad when you are talking to him?

[Laughs] No. At the end of the day, I still want want to have a good relationship with my dad. He is actually one of my good friends, so it would suck if our relationship took a backseat to my career.

Did your dad like the pilot?

He did, but he had some trouble with certain things. He had some notes for me. In general, he really liked the show, but there were a few things he did not like.

What were some of his notes?

Let me think... He had a couple really good ones. Oh yeah. He told me, "You made the main kid too much of a pussy."

Ouch. Your avatar basically. How did you respond to that?

I just said, "OK thanks. We will try to work on that one, Dad."

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