Recent Takeaways / Stage 32 & Netflix Webinar (11 minute read)
Happy Friday!
The past couple of weeks have been a bit of a blur. I’ve had a bunch of general meetings, a meeting for a potential co-showrunning job on a really fun show with a group of people I dearly love, the first pitch for my “warring factions of public domain characters” series, and another pitch to a studio, adapting a short story to series.
On the feature side, I turned in a pitch to my reps for a modern, romantic thriller take on another public domain story. I got a few first impressions from them and did a rewrite.
In addition to all of that I taught a webinar for Netflix and Stage 32, I wrote a promo video script for our immersive audio company, I wrote a short film for my friend John Lawson to direct for the Easter Seals Disability Film Challenge, and I took part in a panel for Houston Space Center with SciArt Exchange founder, Jancy McPhee, and astronaut, Nicole Stott.
I can’t tell you how much my new organization system helped in keeping those projects straight. Offloading some of my brain to Evernote has allowed me to move between them easily without much ramp-up needed and it’s helped me to schedule my time. Truth be told, I stopped doing the daily Rundowns and Recaps after the first week. It just wasn’t sustainable so now I just do them as needed or when I get a few minutes to get organized.
Since January 1st I’ve done an enormous amount of work just to get to the point where I’ll get paid for more work. Between the jobs I went up for and didn’t get, a number of passes on my feature spec, and a recent pass on my series about those public domain characters, it seemed like these past few weeks have been a never ending stream of losses.
But I’m happy to report… I took a big step toward a win this week. There's still a long way to go, but the project is super cool and the only way it could be more up my alley is if it was about a writer from Ohio named Mickey Fisher. I’m excited to tell you the story behind the story, which starts with a friendship forged all the way back in 2006.
It’s been said many times but it bears repeating: one of the best things you can do when you’re starting out is to network laterally. Find your peer group, the people who are working at the same level as you, support each other on the way up, keep in touch, even if it’s lunch or dinner every year or two. And, celebrate their wins!
Because I’ve been all over the place creatively I thought I’d give you a few quick takeaways of things I’ve tried or learned over the past couple of weeks.
After I read that short story submission I reached out to the executives to do a brief “fact finding” call before I went in with my take. Part of that is because of the nature of adapting a short story into thirty plus hours of a series. There are so many different ways it could go I wanted to drill down just a little bit on what they loved about the story, have a conversation about tone, and gently test the waters on a couple of big ideas. Short stories are a bit of a Rorschach test, it’s easy for everyone to envision a different angle or tone. Talking for 10-15 minutes on that pre-call helped me set my compass for fleshing out an actual take.
In my generals I’ve been asking about the number of seasons people are talking about in their pitches. Should I still be thinking about an engine that can run 5-6 seasons or should I take into account that shows on Netflix rarely go beyond three these days? What I heard was, “As long you’re not pitching us a six-episode limited series we’ll be pretty excited.” It’s not impossible to sell them but it is a lot harder.
I’ve heard from a number of producers on the feature side that streamers want “go projects,” scripts that are ready (or very nearly ready) to be shot and talent attached. It doesn’t sound like there’s a real appetite for buying something, pulling it apart in development, and putting it back together again. For a spec script your best bet is high concept, high-level execution. Which is... aways true?
Common requests I’ve heard over the past few weeks: action, thriller, psychological thriller, elevated sci-fi, “Two minutes in the future.”
Short stories are hot. I’ve read a few of them for potential adaptation, including the one that I met with the studio about this week. The ones I’ve been sent either have a really strong conceptual hook or a character drawn in bold strokes. As an experiment I did a search for “short stories” on Deadline to see the most recent deals. I wanted to see if I could spot those common denominators. TWILIGHT ZONE all-star Charles Beaumont was a recent example.
Joko Anwar To Direct ‘Fritzchen’ For Village Roadshow; Michael Voyer Adapting Charles Beaumont Story — deadline.com Joko Anwar is adapting the Charles Beaumont short story 'Fritzchen' for Village Roadshow.
Netflix & Stage 32 Webinar
A couple of weeks ago I taught a webinar for Netflix and Stage 32 on writing a sci-fi show for streaming television. It starts with the basics, coming up with a concept, thinking through the core elements of your sci-fi series, through planning your characters arcs, world building, and more. I used a lot of examples from recent genre shows to make my case, everything from YELLOW JACKETS to PEACEMAKER to DARK. It was a lot of what I've been talking about here distilled into three hours and its free:
Stage 32 Next Level Education: Netflix + Stage 32 Present: How to Write Sci-Fi Scripts for Streaming Television — www.stage32.com Mickey Fisher teaches you on the topic of Netflix + Stage 32 Present: How to Write Sci-Fi Scripts for Streaming Television. SEE FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS BELOW Netflix and Stage 32 have partnered on an exclusive global education series in an effort to democratize the wor...
The Kickout
I haven't talked about the crime novel much this year because I found myself scrapping a lot of it and going back to square one. Crisis of faith. Anyway, I got back to it recently and didn't hate this chapter:
Last year Glenn Gattrick invited Lonnie over to his place in Silverlake to see his prized possession, a pristine Bally’s Skateball from 1980. “Designed by Claude Fernandez. Four flippers, three pops, two slingshots. One spinner, one kickout. But here’s my favorite thing.” He pulled the plunger back and let it go. Lonnie watched the ball glide through a crossover to the orbit on the upper left side to start the game. Elegant and smooth.
Glenn poured them a couple of pilsners from a microbrewery in the neighborhood while Lonnie examined the machine. It was everything he loved about the hobby. How the artwork on the backglass immediately took you to another time and place. The cool guy in shades doing a cool move on the skateboard. The seventies van in the lower left corner. The woman in the white tank top. Exactly what Lonnie imagined California was like when he was a kid. When you look down through the glass at the playfield it’s like you’re seeing into a whole new universe. Some of it’s familiar, some of it doesn’t make any sense. The rules can be confusing. Then you pull back the plunger, shoot the ball through that crossover and it’s just fucking chaos. The ball gets bounced around by the pop bumpers, goes flying toward the outlane drain before you can react. You can see the shots, you can see the drops, but you can’t quite hit them, at least not with any consistency. Before you know it the game is over and you’re out a quarter.
But then you try again.
You start to see the angles. You get a little more control of the ball. You settle into the flippers. You hit the drop targets a few more times. At some point, five or six games in, you get into the flow. The world makes a lot more sense. Not only that, you’re part of it. You’re a citizen of that universe. You can anticipate the ball’s movements, knowing when to slap save, when to nudge it off course in the middle. When it settles into the kickout you can feel it in your gut, that little jolt of electricity right before it gets launched back into the action again. Given enough time you can master any game.
Three hours of Skateball and a dozen dead soldiers later Lonnie was sitting on Glenn’s patio under a string of Edison bulbs, watching Glenn smoke a joint which Lonnie declined. A nickel bid at Lucasville forced him to develop a heightened survival instinct that bordered on paranoia and weed cranked that feeling up to eleven. Beer mellowed him out though and ever since moving to LA he got accustomed to the good stuff, not the Pabst Blue Ribbon the guys in the forty-dollar, pre-distressed trucker caps were drinking. The redneck shit he grew up with. Fact, his papaw drank so much PBR that Uncle D had one of the ladies in the neighborhood crochet a cap for him using aluminum circles punched out from the cans. Lonnie didn’t see a need to drink that horse piss now, not when you could throw a rock and hit a great brewery nearby. Lately he was into Belgians, Tripels and whatnot.
Glenn exhaled a cloud of smoke that hung like marine layer under the Edison bulbs before dissipating in the cool night air. There was a laid back groove by Kruanghbin playing on a bluetooth speaker. Low rustle of leaves on the avocado tree providing a sonic bed underneath. Lonnie said, “You got a nice little oasis here.”
“I got it right after the housing market crashed. It was just good timing.”
“Were you ever an actor?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“That’s why most people come to LA, right? Get in the movies? Plus you got a certain look. You’re comfortable in front of a crowd. You like dressing up in character.”
“You mean the mod suits?”
“Yeah, the Beatle boots and shit.”
“That’s different. Acting is pretending to be somebody else. The mod stuff is me dressing how I feel on the inside. That’s the real me. The character is who I am the rest of the day.”
“If that’s who you are inside why don’t you do it all the time?”
“Because it’s memorable,” Glenn said and stubbed out the roach in an ash tray on the picnic table. “Sometimes it’s in my best interest to not be so memorable.”
“What does it matter if you’re a driving school instructor?” Lonnie had his suspicions about Glenn but he didn’t want to push it too hard. He suspected it’s why the man asked him over in the first place, figuring they’d get around to it eventually.
Glenn said, “The driving school is just one part of the business. I also do a little courier work on the side.”
Lonnie smiled and said, “You’re a bootlegger.” When Glenn hesitated Lonnie said, “Don’t worry, I’m not a cop.”
Glenn said. “Trust me, I’ve been around enough guys who’ve done time to know that.” Now they were both able to relax a bit, finding common ground. Glenn said, “Do you mind me asking? If it’s too personal —”
Lonnie waved it away. “Couple bids for armed robbery.”
Glenn’s eyebrows went up and stayed there. “How’d you get caught?”
“Zigged when I should have zagged.”
Glenn laughed. “Hey, even Muhammed Ali got caught with his chin out a couple times.”
Lonnie said, “That’s right,” before he drained his beer and sat back in the chair, thinking through the angle of Glenn’s hustle. “The driving school is smart. Who’s going to suspect that? You see two people in a beat up four door. “Caution, student driver” sign on the top. I bet the cops don’t even see you anymore.”
“They steer clear of us, just like everybody else.”
“So which came first?”
“Teaching. I got in an accident a couple of years ago that messed up my back. Health insurance wouldn’t cover my pain management so I found what you might call an independent distributor for my pharmaceuticals. One day his car broke down at my apartment. I took him on his rounds in my work car, he gave me a cut. It was a good setup but it wasn’t sustainable. When you’re an addict, you know, you get in this cycle where you wake up, you figure out a way to get money so you can get high, rinse, and repeat. I didn’t have to worry about getting money or pills, it was built into the job. But I was killing myself, for real. So I got clean, in the meantime word got around about my service. Once I started charging actual cash I had more money than I knew what to do with. So I bought this place and the pin to go with it.”
Lonnie said, “You mind if I ask a personal question?”
“Shoot.”
“How’d you get clean?” He’d been thinking about these questions a lot lately, about whether or not it was possible for a person to change their nature, or if we were all just bound to keep falling into the same old patterns over and over again. Circles and cycles and shit.
Glenn said, “I am here because I have no refuge, finally, from myself. Until a man confronts himself in the eyes and hearts of others, he is running. Until he suffers them to share his secrets he has no safety from them. Afraid to know and be known, he will know neither himself or another. He will be alone.”
“What is that?”
“I learned it at a twelve step program. I say it every morning to remind me of who I was when I was using. I was lying to people, all day, every day. It starts to isolate you. When it came down to it I didn’t like the pills more than I disliked being alone.”
Lonnie said, “Right on.”
The playlist switched over to a retro track, the song starting off with jangly guitars before the drums kicked in. Female singer. Merry Clayton, maybe. The man had good taste in music.
Lonnie’s thoughts drifted back to Glenn’s side hustle. Glenn could see him smiling, the string of bulbs reflecting in his pupils. He said, “What is it?”
“The driving school isn’t the only genius part,” Lonnie said. “It’s the driver, too. When the stakes are that high, who do you want behind the wheel? You want somebody who knows every rule in the book. Somebody with nerves of steel after being in a dozen accidents.”
Glenn laughed and fired up the joint again, said, “Try twenty-seven. Last time the EMT took my pulse right after. She said I might as well have been sitting on the beach with a margarita in my hand, I was that relaxed."
Lonnie finished his beer and slammed the glass on the table with a little authority. He said, “You ever think about robbing a bank?”