Me Me Me

On my last two days in Germany, I managed to overcome my jetlag and sleep like a normal person.  Alas, now I’m back in L.A. and my internal clock is completely screwed up. I fought to stay awake until 10 pm last night (though I had could easily have gone to bed at 8) and awoke at 3:30 this morning. I spent in hour in bed trying to get back to sleep before I gave up and decided to catch up on 10 days of mail. Now I’m feeling as if I’m on sinus medication…kind of zoned out. This is going to be a long day.

This article about Action Concept and some of the work I am doing with them appeared in the Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday:

Character counts on German TV
Joha’s ‘car crash company’ shifting focus to U.S.-style drama fare

By Scott Roxborough

COLOGNE, Germany — Veteran German producer-director Hermann Joha began his career as a stuntman and built up his company — Action Concept — with high-octane action series that were long on car crashes and short on plot.

But now Joha is trying to pull off a stunt that is the corporate equivalent of a 180-degree turn at top speed on the Autobahn.

With such U.S. series as "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," "House" and "Monk" outracing local productions in primetime, Joha has sent his company back to the shop for retuning. He has brought in Los Angeles-based media consulting group Media-Xchange to conduct its famed Writers’ Room workshops to teach German scribes how to deliver U.S.-style character depth and complexity on a deadline.

"When we started, it was enough to just have great stunts, that pulled in an audience," Joha said in an interview. "But that’s not the case anymore. Now you can have the most amazing special effects, and the viewers don’t care. What they want is a great story and great characters."

MediaXchange has hosted two Writers’ Room sessions for Action Concept this year, and four more are planned for 2007.

The investment already is paying off. Joha is in advanced negotiations with Sony Pictures Television International to produce a new action series developed during the first German Writers’ Room session. The concept — a Dirty Harry-style U.S. cop heads to Berlin and raises hell — came from Writers’ Room coach Lee Goldberg, a regular scribe for such shows as "Monk" and "Missing." The series has been given the working title of "Hurricane in Berlin."

"Hurricane" will be Action Concept’s first English-language series, the first produced using a U.S.-style writers’ room and the first specifically designed for an international audiences.

Goldberg, who has signed a one-year, first-look development deal with Action Concept, will act as executive producer and showrunner on the series.

"This is really a radical move for Action Concept," Goldberg said in an interview. "You have to realize, this used to be the ‘car crash company.’ What Hermann is doing is trying to position them as the ‘writers’ company,’ producing series of a quality that can compete with U.S. shows in Germany and internationally."

Joha is even applying the company’s new approach to his most prized possession: the long-running Autobahn cop series "Alarm for Cobra 11." The show, which kick-started Action Concept in 1996, will stage a major relaunch in March; Joha is retooling the series to give the cop-and-cars show more depth and backstory.

The new "Cobra 11" also will feature a fresh face: German star Gedeon Burkhard, known to international audiences from the cop-and-dog series "Kommissar Rex," one of Germany’s most successful TV exports.

"The new show will have more multiepisode story arcs, something we never used to do. All our shows were self-contained, one-episode stories," Joha said. "The main character is much more complex.

"We knew we had to revive the show if we wanted to keep it fresh after 10 years on the air," he said. "We were planning a relaunch anyway, but we sent our regular ‘Cobra 11′ writers to the Writers’ Room to teach them a few new things. And it’s worked. We’ve just finished the pilot, and I have to say, it is the best thing we’ve ever done."

I am off to Germany again on Wednesday to work with my good friends at Action Concept and won’t be returning until Dec. 16.  So don’t be surprised if my postings here are sporadic. I am in the midst of writing a two-hour movie/pilot that will be shot in English in Berlin. If all goes well, it could go into production as early as this February. So I am off to do some pre-production work and meet with the German network that’s involved.  I’ll tell you more about the movie…and some of the other projects I’ve been working on… if and when they get closer to your TV, movie theater and computer screens (I am also involved in a very exciting, major web project that blends gaming and scripted drama in a new way).

You may have noticed I don’t talk much here about my TV and feature work.  Frankly, I don’t like to talk about specific projects that I am writing until they are in production…and there’s actually going to be  something for you to see. Speaking of which, Bill Rabkin and I wrote an episode of the USA Network series PSYCH that will be airing some time in January…

The second part of Chris Wells’ Q&A interview with me is now up at his site.

There’s a two-part Q&A interview with me up on Chris Well’s Learning Curve blog. Here’s one of the questions…

WHEN CREATING A MYSTERY, DO YOU START WITH THE PUZZLE AND THEN WRAP THE CHARACTERS AROUND IT, OR THE OTHER WAY AROUND?

I
always start with the characters and the obstacles they are facing. I
ask myself what situation can I put these characters in that will
really test who they are? The mystery almost always organically comes
out of that question. If the characters have nothing at stake in the
mystery, if it doesn’t put them in conflict with others and with
themselves, then who is going to care whodunit?

I’m sorry you haven’t seen me much around here, but I am currently in Cologne, where I am writing, teaching, pitching and going on helicopter rides (my friends at Action Concept love their helicopters). Over the weekend,  I was taken out by an experienced race car driver to Nurburgring,  where we drove a BMW M5 on a winding track that’s  considered one of the most demanding in the world.  When I say "we drove," I mean I sat in the passenger seat while he sped at 240+ km around unbelievably tight turns.  I loved it. I thought it was incredibly exhiliratiing. Unfortunately, before I got my turn at the wheel, the car completely crapped out.  Somehow we managed to blow the transmission. We had to push the car into a parking spot, where we waited three hours for a tow truck to take us back to the nearest BMW dealership. It was great fun anyway and I got to see a lot of cool cars. Speaking of cars, I also visited the Daimler-Chrysler HQ in Stuttgart, which was fun, too.

But the best part of my trip so far has been all the conversations I’ve had with German writer/producers and network executives. I think I’ve learned as much from them as they have from me. The exchange of ideas, methods, and philosophies about writing, showrunning,  and the television business has been every bit as exhilirating for me as my high-speed race around the track.

I am leaving today for another two week stint in Germany, where I will be teaching for The Media Exchange and doing some consulting work for Action Concept, the country’s leading producer of action shows and movies (you’ll be hearing a lot more about them, and the work we are doing together, in the coming months). I’ll try to report back here occasionally…but don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me much. Note: While I am away, I am holding all comments for approval before posting them. When I return, I will deactiviate the comment-moderation.