Interview: Tor Valenza

My conversation with a Hollywood screenwriter using his storytelling skills to advocate for solar power and the Earth’s well-being.

I’ve known Tor Valenza for over two decades. We met in L.A. as working screenwriters and have stayed in touch over the years as each of us followed our creative paths. I wanted to do this interview because not only because Tor is a friend, but also to demonstrate how writers can use their skills in a variety of ways. In Tor’s case, he is the host of a scripted podcast which uses solar power as a hook, both for dramatic purposes, but also to promote an alternate power source for consumers. Here is that interview.

Scott Myers: You have a background as a screenwriter. Could you describe what that experience has been like?

Tor Valenza: I think I’m not alone when I say that my experience as a screenwriter and a television writer was terrific and terrible. I was very lucky in the beginning of my screenwriting career. Six months after graduating from college, I’d written a spec dark comedy/thriller called Rules of the Road that made it to Leading Artists, which would later become UTA. At the time, I was working in the Culver City Studio commissary, and one of the agency founders wanted me polishing the script full time so that he could send it out. I said I had to pay the rent, so he paid me a little more than my commissary salary against the sale to quit so that I could write full time.

That kind of faith in me and their generosity was an example of the best of my Hollywood experiences. I always had great agents, and I was also fortunate to develop scripts with some amazing producers and directors — John Landis, Dean Parisot, Joe Dante — and Dodi Fayed, who was more famous for being in the car accident with Princess Diana than for producing Chariots of Fire — or optioning Rules of the Road for two years.

So, there was a lot of Hollywood sparkle, for sure, and there were times when the writing, people, and jobs just came together so easily. … And then there were the times when it seemed like nothing went right. Somehow, I got stuck in development hell and the scripts didn’t move forward or sell. Seems like it was always feast and famine. I know I’m not alone. Talent is one thing, but you still have to pull together the right package, the right budget, the right schedules, and the right champions to get a film or pilot made. That’s why I ultimately got into TV. With TV, you have to write and produce something every week. The cast, budget, and schedule were set. You wrote, the executive producers, “the room,” and cast and studio sometimes rewrote, but something got made. That was very satisfying, and I made a great living for a while. But then I got a greenlight for my passion project with a major director, and I dropped everything. Six months later, my green light turned into a red light. Bad luck? Bad timing? Who knows? But it was very frustrating, and I started looking for other careers.

During the WGA strike of 2007, I saw a double feature of an Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car, and I got inspired to focus my communication skills on promoting solar power. In a way, it was going back to my first passion. I was fascinated by solar power as a kid. In high school, I wanted to be a solar engineer until I took calculus, chemistry, and physics. Judging by my grades, I realized I was NOT going to be a solar engineer, so naturally… I went to college and majored in film. In any case, I’ve been professionally using my writing skills to help get solar to be mainstream since 2009.

Scott: There are plenty of ways to plug into the alternate energy world. Why did you think that writing would be a beneficial skill set to help specifically grow the solar energy industry?

Tor: By the time I decided to use my writing skills for solar in 2009, solar technology was mature, but the marketing and communications weren’t. That time period was the dawn of social media, email marketing, blogs, podcasts, YouTube. Everyone had a media empire embedded in their iPhone, but the solar industry was still doing very traditional advertising and press releases and direct mail. As an experienced visual and dialog storyteller, I thought I could help solar companies to tell their stories, not only to the press, but directly to consumers via social media strategies.

I took some basic solar courses and voraciously read the solar trade magazines. When I felt confident enough, I started my solar marketing blog about how the solar industry needed to adopt more modern communication tools, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, video, and getting our success and technology advances in the news. My company’s mission statement is “Be bold for solar. Stand out and educate.” The blog had a bold voice that resonated with solar CEOs and marketing VPs, and that got me jobs consulting with large solar companies about how to modernize their communications, brand, and lead generation.

I’ve made a steady living doing that non-fiction writing work. Solar is definitely getting some non-fiction attention today, but not so much in pop culture. For example, the U.S. solar industry hit a milestone of five million solar installations last in May, but you wouldn’t know that watching fictional TV or films or reading novels. When solar is shown, it’s mostly in science fiction. It’s not even in the background of characters’ homes, let alone part of a plot.

So that’s when I decided to combine my fiction writing skills with my solar writing skills and started my Probably True Solar Stories podcast. My idea was to show how solar is part of our lives and pop culture today with fun contemporary fictional stories — not solar stories in outer space or as part of a climate doom and gloom future.

Climate change is real, and there’s a movement to show its effects in film and TV. But I don’t think audiences want to watch stories set in a bleak dystopian future of fire, floods, famine, and hurricanes. What’s more interesting to me is showing that the world is now implementing climate solutions, so I want to show that — and its challenges.

I liken our clean energy pop culture transition to the car transition in the 1900’s. If you look at those silent films, you’ll see that a lot of the plots were around car adoption, status, and the challenges of cars breaking down, finding a mechanic, learning how to drive. Car culture was born in Charlie Chaplin films. The same was true for personal computers in the 1980s. War Games spurred a bunch of kid hacker movies and nerdy characters on TV shows. Then in the late 1990’s, The Matrix and Jerry McGuire and TV started showing audiences the modern life with cell phones. We need that same pop culture lifestyle attention for solar, EVs, and all the other related technologies that are already transforming our homes, businesses, utilities, and politics.

Q. Why is getting solar into fiction, films, and TV important?

A. For many reasons. Once again, we’re in a once-in-a-generation energy transition. For the world to succeed, we not only need communicators, but we also need 800,000 new solar and battery workers by 2030 to meet U.S. clean energy goals. That means potential workers need to see themselves in stories about transitioning their skills to solar — including writers.

We also need people, businesses, and utilities to adopt solar as fast as possible. So, we need stories about those challenges. We also need politicians and policymakers to make it easier to go solar with your home or on public land, not harder. Solar needs to fight disinformation about it not being reliable. Last I checked, the International Space Station and thousands of satellites are all powered by solar and batteries, not oil, gas, coal, or nuclear power. Solar’s also the number one new source of power around the world because it’s now the cheapest form of energy — after the project is built. Sunlight is free fuel. Utilities know that, so most of them are now choosing to build solar plants instead of gas plants. Does the oil and gas industry like that? Hell no. And that’s a story.

Probably True Solar Stories is purposely an anthology podcast to show that solar can be part of any genre, from a solar heist story to a Hitchcockian murder mystery to a political story, and yes, even a solar dragon story. Because just like lawyer stories, doctor stories, and dragon stories, solar stories are really about the protagonist’s journey, like your book. Right? They’re about how characters change or try to change or try to make someone else change.

If anyone reading this ever needs help on solar-related topics or characters, they can reach me through the podcast contact page.

Q: A fictional anthology podcast series featuring solar power. That is a unique hook. How many episodes have you created and what are your personal favorites?

A: So, far, I’ve written around 37 unique episodes, and I’m always writing more. Most of those episodes are stand-alone short stories, but there’s an 11-episode long-form story that’s my favorite because it feels the most like a TV series with a lot of fun characters with twists and turns.

That one is called “The Solar Heist, or How I Got Into the Solar Industry.” If I had to shorthand it, I’d say it’s “Solar meets Barry,” or “Solar meets The Sopranos.” It’s about two neighbors who live across the street from each other. One’s a thief and part-time magic mushroom grower. The other neighbor is a big-time solar developer that the thief admires for his legit, predictable life. But as the series unfolds and they get to know each other, the thief realizes the solar developer’s life isn’t so simple and has his own secrets.

I don’t want to reveal any spoilers for anyone reading this post, but I will say that all of my stories have true situations and conflicts that the solar industry is facing today. Also, “The Solar Heist” is NOT about gloom and doom climate change. If anything, it’s about money change and power change and political change, and of course, people change.

Beyond “The Solar Heist,” I do favor episodes that are darker — a genre I call “Solar Noir.” For example, “Murder by Solar Drone” is about a solar installer who’s using a drone to help pre-design a solar installation. As the drone is doing its site survey, the installer hears and records a gunshot that came from an adjacent ranch that’s owned by the installer’s ex-fiancé.

There’s another one called “The Caveman, The Devil’s Tools, and the Grid” about two teens who use solar, EVs, and a smart home to defeat a grid terrorist.

They’re not all dark ones. I’ve written several kid-friendly ones, including a Winnie-the-Pooh Goes Solar episode — now that Pooh is in the public domain. There’s even a Solar Dragon Story, a Solar Super Hero story, and a Twilight Zone-ish AI Solar Robot story.

If that all seems like a lot of genres, that’s my point. Solar really is all around us today — 5,000,000 installations in the U.S. alone. So, you could say that there are over 5,000,000 solar stories out there already. I’m just trying to tell the fun, exciting, and dramatic ones.

As screenwriters, we focus on movies and television, but we can use our skills to tell stories across multiple platforms. Kudos to Tor for his innovative thinking with the Probably True Solar Series. Check it out!

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Interview: Tor Valenza was originally published in Go Into The Story on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.