Film and Television

Flying Without a Pilot

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TV Writer Paul Guyot tells all about the demise of his TNT pilot THE DARK, which he wrote and produced with Stephen J. Cannell and that was directed by Walter Hill. So what went wrong?

Who knows what happened – you can speculate and Monday morning
quarterback forever – but the bottom line was once the thing was shot,
edited and presented to the network, the original script and story just
wasn’t there. The first thing the network said when they saw the cut was "Where’s the script we bought?"

Now, I’m not saying it was awful. I don’t love the finished product,
but I will say that, overall, I’m happy with about 70% of it. These
days that’s not a bad percentage. But it was that other third that
killed us.

A few years ago, we shot a two-hour, back-door pilot on DIAGNOSIS MURDER starring Fred Dryer as the Chief of Police of Los Angeles. The co-star was an unknown actor named Neal McDonough, who has since gone on to star in BAND OF BROTHERS, BOOMTOWN and MEDICAL INVESTIGATIONS (as well as a three-episode arc on MARTIAL LAW for us). The pilot was called THE CHIEF.

Since DIAGNOSIS MURDER was, itself, a spin-off of JAKE AND THE FATMAN (which itself was a spin-off of MATLOCK), Fred Silverman demanded that we do at least one pilot per season imbedded in an episode of the show. 

ChiefopThis is a cheap way to make a pilot and allows the studio an opportunity to recoup their costs in syndication. You also go straight to film without all the intermediate steps in the development process. The other advantage is that the pilot will air and the ratings, if they are high enough, can be a valuable sales tool.

The downside is that backdoor pilots-as-episodes have a much harder time being taken seriously at the network because they usually aren’t developed through the usual channels and, therefore, there’s no one championing them internally at the network.  (Of course lots of pilot-as-episodes have sold… CSI:MIAMI and MORK AND MINDY are a few such examples, my book UNSOLD TELEVISION PILOTS is littered with others that haven’t, like ASSIGNMENT EARTH from STAR TREK and LUTHOR GILLIS form MAGNUM PI)

THE CHIEF had a lot going for it. For one thing, we had Fred Dryer, a proven star with HUNTER and this role was absolutely perfect for him (and I have to say, he was great in it). For another, the two-hour pilot aired during sweeps and got fantastic ratings, ranking something like #14 for the week, a tremendous accomplishment for us. And finally, we tested the show with audiences at ASI and the scores were amazing, among the best our partner Fred Silverman (former head of ABC, CBS and NBC) had ever seen. We were sure we had a slam-dunk sale at CBS…and if they were foolish enough to pass on it, we definitely land at another next network. Little did we know…

We met with Les Moonves at CBS…and he passed. He didn’t want to work with Fred Dryer. We met with Jaime Tarses at ABC. She didn’t want to work with Dryer. We met with Dean Valentine at UPN. He didn’t want to work with Dryer.  And so it went at every network. What killed us wasn’t the execution,  the concept, the acting, the ratings, or the testing. What killed us was bad blood between Dryer and execs he’d worked with before on other projects.  Basically, we were victims of the burned bridges Dryer had left in his wake.  The television audience loved Fred Dryer, but the major network execs didn’t. Had we known that going in, we would have cast someone else as THE CHIEF. Then again, we might not have enjoyed the same terrific ratings and sky-high testing…not that they did us any good in the end.  (Ironically, CBS ended up doing a similar show with Craig T. Nelson
called THE DISTRICT. And from what I hear, Nelson was no picnic)

I’ve since had another experience like that with another star which is why, from now on, we call around about the actors we’re thinking about working with so we aren’t derailed from the get-go by burned bridges or a history of "difficult behavior on the set.

(You can read the two-part pilot script here and here or watch a five minute sales presentation culled from the two-hour movie here, just go to THE CHIEF logo and click on it). 

Don’t Hire This Spenser

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Bob Sassone reports over at TV Squad that Rykodisc is releasing the four, made-on-the-cheap-in-Canada SPENSER reunion movies  on DVD. Those crappy, flatly-directed, and exceedingly dull MOWs shouldn’t be mistaken for the underappreciated SPENSER FOR HIRE  series (and I’m not just saying that because I wrote for it).

Robert Urich and Avery Brooks were the perfect Spenser and Hawk,
the scripts were literate and intelligent, and the on
location filming in Boston added a lot of atmosphere and color. But
then the show was cancelled, and they decided to make these rather
so-so movies, and they don’t include Barbara Stock as Susan Silverman
(sorry again: Wendy Crewson and Barbara Williams just aren’t the same).
The good news? They aren’t the lame Joe Mantegna Spenser
flicks that A&E produced later, and it’s great to see Urich and
Avery together again. The bad news? It’s not the TV series.

I hope the TV series comes out on DVD soon and not just because I’d like pristine copies of my episodes. It was a very good PI series and seems to have dropped out of syndication a few years ago.

Unlike Bob Sassone, I actually liked Joe Mantegna as Spenser a lot (and I love his readings of the Parker novels on CD) …but he was teamed with lousy actors as Hawk and, once again, the movies were shot on the cheap in Toronto with bland Canadian actors. The scripts weren’t so hot, either.  I think if they’d cast Mantegna and Avery Brooks, and shot the movies in Boston, and hired better writers (like Bill Rabkin & me!), the movies might have worked…

Tom Selleck, who did a bang-up job playing Parker’s Jesse Stone on TV recently, would make a good Spenser. So would Robert Forster who, incidentally, does a great job reading the Jesse Stone novels on CD.

Kill Bill, Kill Cinema

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I enjoyed KILL BILL.  Well, at least parts of it. Was it a great movie? No. Was it visually interesting and fun? Sure. That said, I think Ron Rosenbaum’s observations in The New York Observer are absolutely correct:

I don’t blame you if any or all of these made it impossible for you
to stay awake for the eyeball-squishing, that moment of cinematic
mastery, the true climax of the two-part, four-hour Tarantino
"masterpiece."

Still, it’s too bad if you missed it, because it was the perfect
epitome of and metaphor for what I would like to call "The Cinema of
Pretentious Stupidity." The eyeball-squishing represented the crushing
of vision by lead-footed pretension, the blinding of creativity by
referentiality. The idea that ceaseless tedious references to obscure
martial-arts movies known mainly by video-store geeks adds up to art.

I’ve heard so many defenses of Kill Bill that depend on the
apparently marvelous and unheard-of-before wonder of its
referentiality. Dude, just because you make a reference—or many
references—doesn’t make it meaningful or worth four hours of our time.

(Thanks to Ed Gorman for the heads-up on this!)

Land of the Lost

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Variety reports that Will Ferrell will star in a feature film adaptation of the live-action children’s series LAND OF THE LOST, about a father and his kids who take a rafting trip and end up going back in time to when dinosaurs walked the earth. The movie will ditch the kids and is being directed by Adam McKay, who also helmed Ferrell’s ANCHORMAN. This will be Ferrell’s third big-screen, TV series remake — he’s also appeared in STARSKY & HUTCH and the upcoming BEWITCHED.  How long before he signs up to star in MR. ED and SHAZAM?

Reality Check for Trekkies

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A while back, I wrote  about the silly campaign by Trekkies to raise the money to finance another season of STAR TREK ENTERPRISE.  The LA Times reports today that even the Trekkies are finally realizing  what anybody who has spent even a little time visiting the real world already knew — that Paramount isn’t going to ever accept money from viewers to produce ENTERPRISE or any other TV series. Duh.

But now there’s a scandal in the Trekkie universe. It turns out the folks spearheading the inane effort, led by  Tim Brazeal, were informed by Paramount at the get-go that their campaign was pointless…but the Trekkies in charge kept this communication secret.

After Paramount posted the letter on its www.startrek.com website earlier this month, Brazeal tried to
explain to his fans that he hadn’t mentioned the Paramount letter earlier
because he had made "personal promises" that he wouldn’t reveal any information
about the negotiations.

Brazeal’s rationale unleashed a torrent of abuse on various "Trek"-related
online forums, where insult and invective are fairly common. Critics poked fun
at some of TrekUnited’s colorful leaders, including Andrew Beardall, the
attorney and sometime seafood purveyor who is perhaps best-known around
Bethesda, Md., as "the Lobster Guy," and Al Vinci, a mysterious Canadian
producer and publisher who said he was spearheading talks with an unidentified
executive at the studio. In a phone interview last week, Vinci refused to
provide details of the discussions, names of other broadcast professionals he’s
worked with or the titles of his recent credits.

Brazeal insisted that he was not raising the money for his personal enrichment.
However, as the attacks continued he admitted in an online posting that he had
been arrested on suspicion of marijuana possession in 1979 and served probation
for an auto theft charge in 1983. He also confirmed to the Los Angeles Times
that he filed for bankruptcy in 1998, but added that he does not believe the
filing is relevant to TrekUnited’s mission.

Brazeal now says he just
wants his life back. "You reach a point where you have to say, ‘Reality’s
reality.’ … Paramount is just unwilling to bring [the show] back," he
said.

Pax Goes Info

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Variety reports that PAX is giving up on original programming and going back to being an infomercial network. This news is sure to rile up the fans of one of the worst-titled shows in TV history: SUE THOMAS: F.B.EYE, the adventures of a deaf FBI agent who reads lips and her hearing-ear wonderdog Levi.

03fb_eye1300The show was shot in Toronto and our casting director on MISSING was always touting actors who  delivered " powerful" or "unforgettable"  performances on SUE THOMAS: F.B.EYE like it was the pinnacle of Canadian drama.  The scary thing is, it probably was.

(Click on the photo for a larger image…and then ask yourself: Why does an FBI dog need a photo ID? Could you really tell the difference between the face of one Golden Retriever and another? And if the pooch needs a photo ID, why doesn’t she?).

The Equalizer coming to a multi-plex near you

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EqualizerBob Sassone at TVSquad reports that THE EQUALIZER is the latest TV series up for a big-screen redo.  I always felt THE EQUALIZER, about an ex-spy-turned-vigilante, was an under-appreciated series (with a great theme by Stewart Copeland). It was shot on location in NY and, as I recall, was very well written and produced (by James McAdams and Matthew Rapf, fresh off of KOJAK).   When star Edward Woodward was sidelined by a heart-attack, Robert Mitchum stepped in for a few episodes to take his place. Mitchum was so good, I was almost sorry when Woodward came back. 

Q&A With Chris Abbott

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Chris Abbott is one of the most successful writer-producers in television, with credits like Magnum PI, BL Stryker, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman and Diagnosis Murder.  She’s just written a terrific book called "TEN MINUTES TO THE PITCH: Your Last Minute Guide and Check-List for Selling Your Story."  And all proceeds from the book benefit the Writers Guild Foundation.

Tf_pitch_1She’ll be signing her book this weekend at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on April 23, 11-12, at the  Writers Guild Booth.

Why did you write this book?

Leonard Stern, from Tallfellow Press, came to me with the
idea. He saw it as the second book in
their “Ten Minutes To Success” series, which began with “Ten Minutes To The
Audition” by Janice . I liked the idea; it seemed to me I had seen
dozens of books about writing, but none about pitching and I believe they are
two distinctly different talents.

 There are a thousand “How To” books for writers on
pitching and selling scripts. What makes
yours different from all the rest?

 A thousand? Really? Honestly, I didn’t think
there was even one book out about pitching as I was writing it. I have noticed, since, one other book. Nevertheless, I’m sure you’re right,
hyperbole aside, there must be several books on pitching. Mine is different insomuch as my professional
experience is different from the other authors. I think it would be valuable to read everyone else’s book as well as
mine. But the value of mine is that it
is very practical; it is very small so you can take it with you; it has stories
from lots of successful writers to amuse or enlighten; it doesn’t take long to
read.

Before you even get into talking about pitching itself,
you pay a lot of attention to the importance of seemingly irrelevant things…
like double-checking the address, arriving very early, going to the bathroom
before the meeteing, bringing a pencil and paper, turning off your cell phone…
but they aren’t irrelevant things, are they?

 When Leonard first talked to me about this idea, it was subtitled “A Parking Lot Primer For
Wrters.” The idea was that you’re in the
parking lot, you’re ready to go pitch
your heart out, what are the things you want to remember before you get into
the office?

 So that accounts for some tips, like “going to the
bathroom”, that you might not see in other pitching books! But there is something that I hope is a bit
more profound behind the seemingly mundane ideas. For example: Are You In The Right Place? This
isn’t just about making sure you have the correct address (although without
that, you are doomed to failure); it is
also about making sure you’ve brought the right kind of pitch to the studio
that is likely to consider buying your story. Each of the ideas has its own Zen-shadow idea I think writers need to
seriously consider before even showing up in the parking lot. 

Read more

History Repeating

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TimetunnelZap2it reports that the SciFi Channel is developing a TV series remake of producer Irwin Allen’s TIME TUNNEL… a one-season wonder on ABC decades ago (Fox shot a revival  pilot in 2002 but never aired it). Then again, SciFi has had great success reviving another, decades old, one-season wonder on ABC: BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.

Hard Placement

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I saw FEVER PITCH today and, to give you an idea how involving the film was, the only bit that sticks with me was the prominent placement of George Pelecano’s book HARD REVOLUTION in a scene. It was displayed on a high school secretary’s desk, full cover forward. I wonder whether the publisher paid for this product placement, or if Pelecano is a friend of the Farrelly Brothers (who directed the movie).