Countdown to Launch (10 minutes)
Welcome back to the R&D Report, I hope you had a great week!
The usual reminder: these are my thoughts as I'm navigating the creative work and trying to maintain a professional career as a writer. I'm sharing tricks I'm learning and tools I'm using as I go. There's no "one right way." Take what works for you and discard the rest.
In the last newsletter I mentioned that I was back to square one in terms of development. Throughout the fall I did short rounds of producer pitches for two original projects and unfortunately I still haven’t found an enthusiastic partner for either one.
The first was a series about two best friends who decide to start a group dedicated to making the world a better place and as a joke they self-identify as a “cult.” They figure it would be a fun tongue-in-cheek marketing angle, the kind of thing that gets traction on social media. “Come join our cult! There will be snacks!”
Of course, things go south immediately and very soon they find themselves on the same path of sex, lies, and murder that actual cults go down because, per the premise of the series, we’re human beings and despite our best intentions we fall prey to basic human weaknesses like pride, greed, lust, and ambition. Dark comedy in tone, similar to many of my favorite Coen Brothers projects.
One of the things that was most exciting to me was that it was a chance to organically build the drama out of the characters’ choices and the consequences of those choices, as opposed to having a long arc where you have to stop a big bad or solve a mystery. I mentioned this in an earlier newsletter, one of the things I’m craving both as a viewer and as a creator right now is surprise. I put these characters on the proverbial slippery slope and part of the fun/suspense was going to be watching them battle their own natures as each decision led to escalating consequences.
Unfortunately, there weren’t any takers for that one. It’s out of my normal zone, there are a number of other “cult shows” already on TV and in the pipeline. Maybe there’s cult fatigue, maybe people just weren’t that into it, whatever. Bottom line, it didn’t get out of the gate.
I’ve heard the stories about how STRANGER THINGS and similar projects got rejected by everybody in town until they found the right partner but my gut was telling me to shift gears and try a different approach. I had another pitch ready to go, a genre procedural in the vein of X-FILES. There's still one company looking at it but in the meantime I started thinking about writing a new spec.
I was having trouble zeroing in on something I was excited about. I think the pea under the mattress was knowing my own viewing habits.
Because there’s a never-ending tsunami of new content I’m constantly behind. I struggle to engage even with the things I’d naturally gravitate to, like the big sci-fi epics. What gets my attention is the stuff that’s in the zeitgeist, like TED LASSO and SQUID GAME, or things that have such a razor sharp premise that it cuts through the noise, like YELLOW JACKETS. If something doesn’t grab me one of those two ways I put it on the “to watch list” that gets longer and longer every week.
Even shows based on beloved IP have struggled to get off the ground recently. Intellectual property may help grease the wheels to get something made but there’s no guarantee the core audience is going to show up and even if they do you still have to make new fans.
It’s almost like “write the show you’d want to watch” isn’t enough right now. There are so many things I want to watch, I just don't have a hundred hours in a day. What’s the thing I absolutely can't miss?
Going down that rabbit hole psyched me out a bit. It's so easy to overthink this stuff, especially when you've been knocked back on your heels. You wonder, "Am I just out of touch with what's cool? Or good?"
At a certain point you have to stop worrying and start writing.
Over the break I started searching for a new idea that would give me the chance to do something like the cult show, something with surprising twists and turns, something that would render the question of “why now” irrelevant because the underlying ideas are timeless and universal. Pride, lust, greed, ambition, love. The same fuel that powered the Greeks and Shakespeare and GAME OF THRONES.
For the past few years I’ve kept up on the latest stuff that’s going into public domain. I also look at what’s going to drop a year or two ahead so if something sparks my interest I can get a jump on cracking it before everybody else. I’ve found a few that I love but often just reading the synopses and thinking about how to put my own spin on them leads me to a whole other original idea. Maybe it will spark something for you!
There wasn’t anything coming out this year that grabbed me but it got me thinking about the long history of beloved characters, wondering if there was something I could try putting a new spin on, a la THE HUNSTMAN. With EXTANT I was working with familiar sci-fi areas of aliens and robots but I've never tried to reimagine a classic.
I landed on a collection of public domain characters who embody those same thematic ideas I’m interested in. I started playing the “what if” game, thinking through various incarnations I’d seen over the years, playing with ways to subvert them. At some point it occurred to me that it was way more interesting to put them into conflict with each other, making them act as obstacles in each other’s path.
What gradually began to emerge was a GAME OF THRONES style drama about warring factions of these characters, set in present day New York. In my early brainstorming I wrote a bit about what each character represents, what they want most of all on an emotional level, what’s holding them back from that, and how the other characters might stand in the way of their success. I could see the same potential for that organic escalation of conflict, to set up a long string of dominoes then tick the first one over in the opening scene of the pilot.
Finally I was EXCITED about climbing that mountain again.
Even though I planned to write this on spec I wanted to get it on my agents’ radar. I spent the past week writing a pitch, which meant fleshing out each character and breaking the big tentpole moments of the pilot that kick off this war. It’s a de facto story area document that I can use to break the pilot in the outline stage, if and when I get to that point. I also have a couple of general meetings that will let me test the waters. After I get some feedback I can figure out the next step.
It's not about "chasing the market" or following a trend. I'd be writing a show I wouldn't miss. I just want to know of any logistical obstacles, like if there are three similar things in the pipeline at various studios.
In the meantime I’m going to flesh out one more series idea that is essentially a modern take on a Hatfields and McCoys type story, a thriller about a car crash that triggers an escalating war between two families in a small midwestern town. I have a lifelong fascination with these stories, partly because my mom is descended from the McCoys, which I guess makes me one, too. (Another example of this kind of story is the song “Decoration Day” by Jason Isbell.)
I’m also getting submissions to look at from my reps, so I’m carving out a lot of reading time. Hopefully by the end of next week I’ll start leaning heavily one way or the other toward one of these ideas and get to the much harder part of writing the damned thing.
Either way, I'll have a couple of practical tools to share next week.
I hope you have a great weekend! If you need to rest, rest. If you need to create, create. If you need to eat pizza and play pinball then you are me.
Take care!
In case you're interested in learning about recent public domain stuff...
Jess Nevins on Twitter: "Hello! Good morning! Happy New Year, for those who are celebrating! It’s #publicdomainday, and the following is a list of the best characters from the pulps who were created in 1926 and thus fall into the public domain starting today. 1/78" — twitter.com “Hello! Good morning! Happy New Year, for those who are celebrating! It’s #publicdomainday, and the following is a list of the best characters from the pulps who were created in 1926 and thus fall into the public domain starting today. 1/78”
Act Two Podcast episode
Last week I was honored to be a guest on the Act Two Podcast with Tasha Huo and Josh Hallman. We covered all the bases, craft, break-in, business, you name it. It was a lot of fun, check it out!
Act Two Podcast on Apple Podcasts — podcasts.apple.com Welcome to the Act Two Podcast where screenwriters Tasha Huo and Josh Hallman demystify what it means to be an everyday working Screenwriter. A podcast for Screenwriters, by Screenwriters.
Yodas of the Week
Decoration Day (Live) Provided to YouTube by The Orchard EnterprisesDecoration Day (Live) · Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit · Jason IsbellLive from Alabama℗ 2012 Lightning Rod Recor...
2021 was such a great year for movies. Julie and I watched KING RICHARD a few nights ago and it's an inspiration on a number of levels.
KING RICHARD – Official Trailer — www.youtube.com “All my life I’ve been waiting for this…a Williams is going to win.” Will Smith is #KingRichard in the inspiring true story of the coach/mentor/father that b...