The Odyssey odyssey, part 26

We remain a virally infected household. I'm in the long tail-end phase of this cold, but Kimmie, after a convalescent weekend spent largely in bed, still coughing her way through the late-middle stage. She'll be off work for another day. Thanks to you readers who have wished us good health.

Back to The Odyssey.

At the risk of sounding whiny, writing a good script is hard. If you have any trouble believing this, I can only suggest that you try it. I speak from experience--not only my own as a writer, but also, during 1991, as a paid reader of scripts for CBC Drama in Vancouver.

The good scripts I saw there were notable for their rarity. As I recall, there were only three, maybe four, scripts that actually aroused my enthusiasm and generated a positive report from me. Two of those wound up being produced--one by the CBC as a made-for-TV movie, the other as an independent feature film. This tends to confirm Robert McKee's contention that good scripts do indeed get produced. He thinks it's a myth that there are all kinds of great scripts out there, lying in drawers, gathering dust because Hollywood and the film business are too schlocky to produce them. Truly good scripts do get produced--eventually.

One of my favorite stories in this vein is of the script for An Officer and a Gentleman, written by Douglas Day Stewart probably in the late 1970s, and, in my opinion, one of the best movies of the 1980s. Stewart had written other scripts for hire, such as The Blue Lagoon, but this script was done on "spec"--speculation, an industry term for a script that is the writer's own idea, written for love and not for pay. The idea is that you write the script, then sell it and get paid.

Stewart himself was an alumnus of the aviators' school in Puget Sound, Washington; it was a world he knew intimately. The phenomenon of local blue-collar girls' trying to catch Air Force officer-husbands in the 12 weeks of the training program was real. He created the character of Zack Mayo, the cocky, lone-wolf martial artist who signs up in search of somewhere he can belong, and by the time he was done he knew he had a winner. He'd written a great script, and he knew it.

He thought, "If I can't sell this script I might as well give up, because nothing makes any sense."

He started peddling the script, but couldn't get anyone to bite. Why? It was the late 1970s, and no one wanted to do another "war" movie. The decade had seen the production of movies like Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now, and, although everyone thought the script itself was good, all the studios were "warred out".

Stewart was frustrated, because as far as he was concerned, it wasn't a "war" movie--it was a love story that happened to be set at an Air Force training academy. There was no combat; the action never left Puget Sound.

He kept shopping the script. Eventually somebody bit: it was Lorimar, producers of the hit TV series Dallas. They hadn't made a feature film before, but they were jacked on the script and thought it could be a winner. Lorimar bought the script and set about making the movie. It went on to be one of the biggest hits of 1982.

As a writer, one of my favorite parts of the Officer and a Gentleman story was how the filmmakers had decided not to bother shooting Stewart's final scene, which was when Richard Gere, in his officer whites, strides into the pulp mill where Debra Winger works and carries her out while her coworkers cheer. Apparently Taylor Hackford, the director, and others, thought the scene too corny and didn't want to shoot it. Stewart begged them to just try shooting it--to see what it would be like. He was just able to talk them into it. It proved to be the "money" scene in the movie and was probably responsible for half of their total box-office take.

My point: it was a good script and it got made, despite unfavorable headwinds in the current production climate.

Warren and I were challenged with the task of coming up with 13 great episode ideas for season 1 of what was then still called The Jellybean Odyssey. We'd only written a few scripts in our lives up to that point. This was a huge task.

In a way the task was all the larger because we were inventing a whole fantasy world. Writing a cop show or a courtroom drama provides certain automatic parameters on what you might write about. This was wide open, and for that very reason created anxiety. When you can do anything, what do you do?

For inspiration we got ourselves a copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales and of Robert Graves's telling of The Golden Fleece. Although our show was called an Odyssey, Warren and I felt that Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece might provide a more workable story-template, perhaps because in Homer's epic so many of the adventures involved fantastic monsters--and we weren't planning to do a "monster" show. I've already described how our character Jay started out as Jason, and was shortened to Jay after we always abbreviated his name as the letter J, and referred to him as such. Jason had a definite goal, he had his crew of Argonauts as our Jay had his companions on the journey, and he had specific episodic adventures en route to the fabled Golden Fleece at Colchis on the Black Sea. As we ventured on our own voyage of creation, this was our security blanket.

The stories we read did spark discussion, but in fact we did not wind up using very much from the texts. Gradually it became clear that our fantasy world could not be a place of random episodic adventures ("geek of the week" as we called it). We had to give our world a structure and a purpose; it had to be designed and built, in some sense, as an obstacle to Jay and his wishes. It had to be systematically opposed to him somehow.

Because Warren and I shared an interest in world problems and political philosophy, we tended to talk about these things and get excited about adapting these ideas to our show. Gradually the idea of kids running a kind of authoritarian police state began to emerge. What could provide more conflict and danger for our hero than that? At the same time, what could be more creepy and more comic than the idea of teenagers running a police state? We loved this idea.

In some ways the real test of our series idea was episode 2--the equivalent of a recording artist's "sophomore album" or a novelist's "sophomore book". If you have a great first CD or book, you're under huge pressure to replicate your success with your second effort. Most artists who make a big splash with their first effort fail at their second. We didn't want this to happen to us--and, I'm pleased to say, it didn't.

To be continued...

running late

It was already 6:00 when I woke up. Apparently the alarm had gone off at 5:30 as usual, but I had slept through it. Kimmie, for her part, now still deeper in the headcold that has invaded our house, had fallen back to sleep.

Bottom line: we're running late. As I look for tasks that I can push aside in order to catch up on my day's productive activities, the blog-post looms large. Perhaps I'll pick up the thread again tomorrow.

Meanwhile, wish us health.

The Odyssey odyssey, part 25

Fall 1991. The pilot episode of The Jellybean Odyssey was produced and ready. The network, though officially never forthcoming with praise (well, except for their own ideas), seemed pleased with it and certainly intended to broadcast it, but not for several months.

This was alarming. Why? For one thing, if the network intended to await the ratings of the broadcast pilot before making a decision to pick up more episodes, then we'd be looking ahead to another year before we could start making--or even writing--new shows. This was bad for two reasons.

One was that our stars were 11-year-olds, growing fast. Every extra month that slipped by without making more episodes allowed them to grow visibly older. If the network really dawdled before deciding to order more episodes, Jay would have sprouted several inches and had his voice change between the pilot and episode 2. The network never showed the least sign of caring about this factor. We knew that if it came down to it, the network might wait two years, order more episodes, then, when told the kids had grown to adult size in the meantime, shrug and move on to some other show.

Another problem with delay was financial. Warren, who was trained as a cook, could get "disposable" jobs readily enough. He was also single and lived (wisely) in humble rental accommodation. I was married and carrying two mortgages plus a personal loan, much of this debt at a high rate of interest. Kimmie was working full-time, but I had quit my job in September 1989, and two years later had exhausted all my savings. I had written a story treatment for my would-be kids' feature film, My Dad the Butler, but the Foundation to Underwrite New Drama had opted not to fund a first draft, closing off that possible revenue source. I was still earning $150 a week for writing reader's reports on other writers' unsolicited script submissions to CBC Drama in Vancouver, but this was nothing like the income I needed if I were to meet my obligations.

Meanwhile, Warren and I, to survive, had drawn advances from Michael Chechik against future work on the show, and had tapped that well as far as we could. To keep my living situation going I juggled, I scrimped, I borrowed. As worries piled up, I would think back to my interview with Sarah Scott Simonson, the psychic I had consulted in 1990. She predicted that I would undergo such a period of financial juggling and dodging, but that it would end well, with my TV show being picked up and revenue coming in. She had counseled me to keep juggling and not to give up.

I didn't plan to give up, not unless I absolutely had to. But in the meantime the uncertainty was creating stress in my marriage. Kimmie was increasingly worried that we were going to lose our house, and all I could offer in response were faith-based assurances that it wouldn't happen--I wouldn't let it happen. And I wouldn't: if it came to the crunch, I'd get out there and start delivering pizzas or doing whatever it took. But neither of us had ever taken on such large financial obligations before, and Kimmie was a worrier by nature. She was doing her bit, but by itself it wasn't enough. I had to contribute. Sometimes the tension was too much and we fought. I had faith in the project, but it was a tense time, much of which I spent with my gut in some kind of knot, and lying awake at night.

Week after week dragged by. The CBC was silent as the Sphinx. Michael Chechik at some point asked CBC's head of programming, Ivan Fecan, about how things looked for an episode order, and Fecan responded, "If you want an answer now, the answer's no"--his way of pushing back against being rushed.

Week after week. October. November. We'd hear rumors of network movement. The new budget year was coming; they'd have to sort out their spending for the coming seasons. Surely soon we'd hear...

Maybe they were going to wait till after the pilot was broadcast after all, effectively turning out would-be groundbreaking TV series into a one-off half-hour, like "What's Wrong with Neil?" All because we were new and untested and unimportant compared to their flagship efforts, like Street Legal. We'd made a good half-hour, but we were small fry, newbies, unknown. We didn't matter.

December.

Offhand I'm not sure of the exact day, but it was probably Friday 6 December (not Friday the 13th--surely I would have remembered that!) that I got a phone call from Michael Chechik in the afternoon. He excitedly reported that he'd heard from the network, and they had ordered the rest of the scripts for season 1 of The Jellybean Odyssey to be written.

Yes!! This wasn't an actual order for episodes to be produced--but from the writer's standpoint it was the next-best thing, since it meant more work and more income. Also, even though buying scripts was relatively cheap for the network, they wouldn't be doing it unless they had a good idea that they were planning to go ahead and order season 1. In short: it was the best news possible.

I immediately passed the news on to Kimmie and Warren. And Kimmie and I decided to meet for a celebratory drink when she'd finished work. We met at Sailor Hagar's, a neighborhood pub close to ICBC head office (Warren may have been there too--sorry Warren, don't quite recall). In the standing-room-only bustle of the Friday afternoon, end-of-week celebration, Kimmie and I drank a pint and savored the exultation and relief of having survived a kind of desert crossing together.

Something I had long wanted had now actually, that day, come to pass: I was a guy with a TV series. We were giddy with excitement and happiness. Never before--or since--had I felt that I'd so thoroughly earned a celebratory pint of beer. What a relief.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 24

This cold has proved to be tenacious and full of fight. It set the agenda for our household through the Easter weekend. I'm slowly but steadily improving, coughing my way out of it. Kimmie, who thought she had dodged it by prompt and vigorous dosing with vitamins and echinacea, finds herself sinking fully into it--just as she returns to work.

Back to my story of The Odyssey.

With our pilot episode rescued by the expert film editing of Jana Fritsch, the rest of the postproduction elements fell into place during the fall of 1991 and the show was finished. Our producer Michael Chechik engaged North Vancouver composer Michael Conway Baker to score the film (he had also scored our first production, "What's Wrong with Neil?").

I don't recall exactly where or when I saw the finished product, a videocassette of the edited, scored, sound-mixed show ready for broadcast. It was probably in the conference room of the Omni-Films suite in Gastown, and it was probably with my cowriter Warren. But I do recall my reaction:

Wow.

Michael Conway Baker's music added another dimension to the production. I remember watching act 3, in which Jay is suspended over the swimming pool in a modified shopping cart, being interrogated by Flash, bully leader of the self-styled "swimming-pool club". An argument breaks out between Flash and his number-two man over whether to dunk Jay in the pool or not. Michael had put in a kind of percussion cue, like bamboo drumming on skulls or something, that gave it a primal, Lord of the Flies-ish quality. Meanwhile, Jorge Montesi, the director, had given the scene exactly the same kind of edge and menace he would have given to a late-night adult crime drama. The result was hair-raising--it was fantastic. We had taken kids' television to a new place, created a new kind of show--and here was the proof unspooling right in front of our eyes.

As the final shot craned up over the deserted, toy-littered road of the Burrard Indian Reserve, and the three reconnected friends Jay, Flash, and Alpha set off to seek Jay's father and home, with Michael's major chords suggesting a new, hopeful beginning, I felt sure beyond any doubt that we had a winner. Warren agreed. We were amazed and of course proud that something we had written had been turned into a show so good.

It had imperfections, of course, but that's inevitable. In the main, the story takes off, grabs the audience, and doesn't let go. (A year later, our story editor in development, Hart Hanson, who was now also a professor of creative writing at UBC, invited Warren and me to talk to his screenwriting class. To the best of our ability we answered questions about writing and dealing with story editors and the network. Then Hart put in the videocassette we'd brought to show people act 1 of the pilot. When act 1 was finished the class was over and Hart went to switch off the TV, but his class, glued to the set, waved him away--they wanted to keep watching.)

Even David Pears, our local CBC exec, was happy. No grousing about the infamous scene 49 now. After screening the pilot for himself he was able to say with an enthusiastic smile: "It's a 23-minute feature film!"

And the network in Toronto? I believe they were happy with the pilot. They were probably expressing worries about whether the show was "kid" enough--whether kids would be able to follow the jumps between different worlds. This had been a big concern of theirs all through development, and the occasion of much tweaking and rejigging of minor points for Warren and me--work we found to be needless fussing with irrelevancies.

I decided to do a little market test of my own. My stepdaughter Robin, age 10, was in grade 5 at the time--right in our target audience range. I asked her teacher, Mr. Wiet, whether I might screen our pilot for the class to get their response. He welcomed the idea and we set up a date.

So one wintry day I went up to Ridgeway Elementary School a few blocks away with my videocassette, and after a brief introduction by Mr. Wiet, I turned over my cassette, the lights were dimmed, and the kids watched the show.

They were spellbound. Apart from giggling at a couple of the humorous moments, they watched silent and rapt. The only disturbance was caused by the audiovisual-nerd kid in charge of the remote. Because he wouldn't stop playing with the remote, he stopped or paused the episode a few times while the show was going. His classmates and teacher were remarkably tolerant of his fooling around; I wanted to slap him in the head. As I expected, there were no comprehension problems, there was no puzzlement in the audience. They knew perfectly well what was going on every moment. Indeed, some kids were muttering things like, "he's in a dream--why not just imagine a gun or something?"

Afterwards I answered a few questions, but soon I was walking away again with my cassette. I felt perfectly confident that I was carrying a hit show in my hands.

To be continued...

taking a sick day

My efforts to ward off a headcold have had only limited effect. As part of my low-pressure, slow-motion, taking-it-easy approach to self-nurturing through the illness, I'm leaving off on full blog-posts until I'm feeling sharper again.

Meanwhile, I'm still working: researching, highlighting, typing--all in a kind of gentle mist. Unplugged from routine in many ways, I'm actually fairly productive this way, but only at things that don't demand too much mental processing power.

Thanks for checking in.

The Odyssey odyssey, part 23

A dark and rainy Monday morning. I realize now, as hoarse cough settles into my chest, that I'm fighting a cold. And fight I will!

It was (I think) September 1991; the main filming for the pilot of The Jellybean Odyssey was done and our show was in "postproduction"--essentially all those things done on a film after the cameras have finished shooting. Primary among these was editing.

Omni-Films had started out as a producer of documentaries and corporate films. Their first feature documentary, Greenpeace: Voyages to Save the Whales, had garnered Michael Chechik a Genie. Our script "What's Wrong with Neil?" was their first foray into drama. "The Fall", the origin episode for our new would-be series, was their second. The expertise of the film editors that Michael had worked with hitherto had therefore been in documentary-making, a type of filmmaking that arguably is even more dependent on good editing than drama, since documentaries are often "scripted" or built or "discovered" in the editing room.

The editing team for our show was composed of excellent editors who had come from documentary-making. And the first cut of the episode was proficient, correct, followed the script, used the excellent footage shot by the director Jorge Montesi--but the story came across as flat and slow-moving. I recall watching an early rough cut of the episode, my excitement at finally getting to see the result of our efforts on a TV screen, and my growing feeling of unease and letdown.

"My god," I thought, "was our script no good after all? How could we have added more zip, more pace to our story?"

I had a bleak feeling that we had not written the script as well as we should have, and that somehow this failure had not been caught or corrected in all the many readings and story meetings over the past two years. It was a terrible thought: our show was less good on film than it was on paper!

Warren and I were depressed. We weren't as good as we thought we were--and neither was our show. And here I'd quit my day-job.

We met with Michael and the local CBC execs to talk about the show. We all agreed that it wasn't firing on all cylinders. It was hard to put one's finger on what exactly was not working, but one thing that stood out was the climax of the show. This was the section in which our hero, Jay, is dropped from a modified shopping-cart into a swimming pool, and remains submerged there for a long time, apparently drowning, while in the upworld his "real" self is undergoing the crisis of his head injury, with his quickly rising intracranial pressure threatening to kill him quickly. We had written intercut shots to an electronic monitor showing his pressure level, and it goes into "alarm" mode when a critical threshold is crossed. Somehow the pace here seemed slow and unexciting, even sleepy.

David Pears, the CBC executive, took the problem in hand. He personally supervised a recut of the show's climax, probably using a CBC editor in a CBC editing suite. A couple of days later I saw the result: a much tighter, snappier, more gripping climax. I felt jubilation--and a jump of hope.

Indeed, I was so excited and glad that I went into Pears's office (he'd left for the day), wrote him a personal thank-you note, and left it on his desk.

Soon Michael was looking for an experienced editor of drama to do a recut, and found one in the person of Jana Fritsch, who had been working on the CBS series MacGyver starring Richard Dean Anderson, which was also produced in Vancouver. Jana (whom I never met) did a whole new edit of the pilot.

Michael slotted the resulting videocassette into a VCR for us writers to watch. What a difference! I was intrigued to see how Jana had handled the material. She cut frequently, most often to show characters' reactions to what was happening or being said in the scene. It created a fast-moving feeling in which the characters were involved with the story. Next time you watch a drama, pay attention for awhile to how it is edited: notice when the camera cuts to characters' reactions. The characters may simply be watching what's going on, but their involvement in the scene brings the audience's involvement. Good directors always film these "reaction shots", and good editors use them creatively to knit scenes together and give them flow and feeling.

When I saw Jana's recut of the pilot I felt I'd seen a whole new show--and a damn good one. There was our script after all! There was our story--the edgy, fast-paced adventure we'd put on the page! We had written it! Jana Fritsch had been able to tell it with pictures.

Now I knew we had a winner--we all knew it. Even David Pears was happy. No mention now of the "tension-blowing" scene 49. Scene 49--Jay's climactic encounter with his mother in a mist-shrouded warehouse--was in there, big as life, and delivering the full goosebump-inducing effect it was intended to have. What a relief. After two years of struggling to get this thing made, what a relief.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 22

I first became involved in filmmaking with my friend Brad in grade 7. He (or I suppose his mother) had a Eumig 8mm home-movie camera. (Video-production equipment in those days--1972--was large, expensive, and existed only in professional studios.) With this fantastic resource in his possession, Brad was keen to make films, and so was I.

We did some short films and some animation on Brad's Eumig, but ran up against the problem that to make something more than the most rudimentary film, you had to be able to edit the film. Later, as we got into junior high school, we were delighted to find that the school owned a new, high-end Canon super-8mm film camera. Goodbye Eumig--this was what we wanted to make movies with now.

Our real opportunity came in grade 10 in 1975, when, as the final big assignment of the year, our English teacher told us to form groups and create an audiovisual or other media project of some kind. Fantastic! Here was our chance to get our hands on some school time and equipment to make a film!

Brad and I jumped to it and started writing a film script. It would have to be silent, of course--movie sound technology was far beyond our reach--but we could do a lot with silent film.

Brad wanted to do a story around a strange, mysterious instrument that had belonged to his late father, who had been a marine electrician of some kind. Labeled a "field strength indicator", it was a fist-sized gray box with a needle-dial, a single rotating knob, and an extendable antenna like on a portable radio. We didn't know what it was--it was just a device of some kind. As far as we knew, it didn't actually do anything. But from this prop grew a story which we called, imaginatively, "The Device", a Cold War satire told from a Keystone Kop perspective. To give our Cold War story bite, our device needed to be a secret weapon of some kind. We hit on the idea that whoever held the weapon could simply point its antenna at some object, twist the knob, and that object would simply disappear--disintegrate, vanish. This relatively simple movie effect could be done in-camera, and also gave us a plausible Doomsday Weapon for our story.

Fantastic! This would make a cool story--and we already had the prop!

Excitedly, Brad and I spent hours and days in his living-room, scribbling lists of shots on sheets of looseleaf, unfolding our complex satirical farce. At age 16 I was (co)writing my first film script. I didn't know it at the time, but writing a silent movie is perhaps the best scriptwriting training, because it forces you to think of how to tell a story purely with pictures--and this remains the key skill of the scriptwriter, even one who has dialogue at his disposal.

There was no typing; our finished script was a rumpled sheaf of looseleaf pages of scribbled shots, crossings-out, and marginal notes. Armed with this, we innocently undertook the shockingly difficult task of producing our own 30-minute movie. With our friend Tim, who had a job and therefore money, as our third producer, we spent weeks on various locations around the city, mainly in parks, shooting our madcap farce (which ends by "disappearing" planet Earth when a little kid points the device at the ground). Indeed we never finished filming by the end of the school year, and had to show our teacher Mr. Ryan our script and all our raw footage so he could give us a mark.

We pushed on filming through the summer, and continued to work on postproduction in our off-hours when we started grade 11 in the fall. We didn't actually finish "The Device" until we were most of the way through the school year.

One of our production expenditures was to buy editing equipment for super-8mm film: a viewer with two hand-cranked reels for film, and a splicing block that made precision cuts to the film and allowed us to splice lengths of film with transparent editing tape. Finally we had the tools not only to shoot a film, but to assemble it.

Setting up our editing bench in Brad's spare room (which also housed his piano), Brad and I gradually put together the film, adding scenes and sequences as they were filmed and developed. Getting some coaching from my father, we set up our editing room with proper gear such as a board with pins on which to hang strips of film, using a lined wastebasket to hold the tail-ends of longer clips. We cut and recut, winding and rewinding the emerging scenes to view them on our little viewer--the first audience for our growing movie.

I learned that I loved editing film. When you shoot a film, often with multiple takes of each shot, there is no sense of story when you develop the raw scenes. The story emerges--or reemerges--in the editing process. Find the right points to make your cuts, and you develop a seamless, flowing story (provided it's been shot properly). We fiddled and fussed, trimming frames, taking shots out, putting them back in, and rolling the film through the viewer one more time. We discovered that we needed more or different shots, and added these to our list for future shoots. We did one such pickup shot--a closeup of a note taped inside a newspaper--out on Brad's patio while taking a break from editing.

The finished product was very good for a first effort. Although silent, the movie had a piano score composed by Brad and synchronized with the picture via a magnetic stripe on the edge of the finished film--the reigning technology at the time for adding sound to super-8mm. We got our classmate Joyce to perform most of the piano music and recorded it in the music room on the school's baby grand piano, using the school's high-end Revox audio tape recorder. "The Device" went on to win Best High School Film at the 1976 B.C. Student Film Festival, and was an audience favorite at the festival screenings. Yes: people laughed at our comedy! (The festival projectionist said to us, after screening our film, "That must've been fun to make!" We exchanged glances; we might have used the word "grueling" or "frustrating" instead.)

All this by way of saying that I developed an early appreciation for the importance of editing in the filmmaking process. In a sense a film editor is more like a scriptwriter than like a member of the production process. It makes a big difference how a film is edited, and indeed film editor is a big creative credit in the movie business, along with the writer, director, cinematographer, and composer.

Editing was the next hurdle for our TV pilot The Jellybean Odyssey, but I'm again going to have to save that for next time.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 21

I'm back at my post in the dark of a Daylight Time morning at 7:23, finishing my second mug of coffee, having typed notes from three different books. I'll push on with my story about the creation of The Odyssey.

The effort to make the best possible pilot episode had the crew working long hours and pushing the envelope every day. I remember that on the last day of filming they ran out of time and had to find a substitute location for what was also the last scene in the script: when Jay has been saved from drowning in the downworld swimming pool and has re-befriended his waking-life companions Keith and Donna in the guise of Flash and Alpha. He's got his telescope back, and he's got to get it to his father and get himself home. The three heroes set out down the road to adventure.

Filming here in North Vancouver, the crew needed somewhere nearby. The locations manager came up with the idea of filming the last shot on the Burrard First Nations reserve, a short way along the waterfront from the old Versatile Pacific shipyard. He got permission from the band, and there they went with a crane to shoot the final shot of the pilot: craning up as the three kids walk down a road that is suburban and familiar, and yet also different and hard to place. The set people put an abandoned tricycle and maybe one or two other toys on the road to add a slightly forlorn and mysterious touch. It worked perfectly, I thought.

Yahoo! Our show was in the can! On time and, well, probably not on budget--but not ridiculously overbudget, as it would be if extra filming days had to be added. (I worked on a movie once in the 1980s whose first assistant director at the end of each shooting day would raise his two hands with thumbs and forefingers touching to symbolize zeros, and declare, "oh and oh--zero days ahead, zero days behind"--meaning the show was on schedule, the state he desired.)

We had not only survived the rigors of working with the hot-tempered director Jorge Montesi--he had delivered an excellent piece of film. Because he was in such demand, I don't think he was even able to supervise a full cut of the episode beyond a rough cut before he had to leave for his next gig. But the scenes he had already put together were terrific, we thought. I remember saying goodbye to Jorge at the Omni-Film offices.

"The show looks great," I said, shaking his hand, "it's brilliant work."

"Don't use that word," said Jorge, abashed but clearly pleased. (I'd managed to embarrass Jorge Montesi!) "It was an excellent script."

With that he was gone. Getting the show ready to broadcast would be the task of Michael Chechik and the postproduction team. And it turned out that the adventure of getting our show made was not yet over.

To be continued...

and yet again with the teeth

Again I'm heading off to further dental work myself this morning (not to worry--no pain and trauma in this case). I'll pick up my story in the near future...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 20

Last week Kimmie suffered with a dental emergency that eventually resulted in her losing a lower-right molar. In the confusion and derailing of routine here, I got away from my blog. Kimmie is much better now--and is going to change dentists.

I left off talking about the production in summer 1991 of the pilot episode of the series we were calling The Jellybean Odyssey. It was going well, but a nagging problem was coming to a head: the local CBC executive charged with supervising our show, David Pears, wanted a certain scene from the script removed.

In those early days, Warren and I, still ignorant of the filmmaking convention that has a script's scenes numbered only when it is budgeted by the production department, had numbered the pilot's scenes ourselves. The conflict was arising over the scene numbered 49: a scene in the climax of the show in which Jay, undergoing a medical crisis of elevated intracranial pressure that could quickly kill him, has a strange, intermediate-world experience. In the downworld of his coma-fantasy, he has just been dumped into a swimming-pool by the young thugs who have taken him captive. As the pool foams strangely and Jay remains submerged, he suddenly finds himself emerging from a different pool in a strange space--one in which his mother Val is standing nearby. In a calm, surreal exchange, she begs him to come home, and he calmly tells her that he cannot--he has to retrieve his dad's telescope. With that, he plunges back into the water, to be pulled out of the swimming-pool back in the downworld, and saved from immediate death in the upworld.

Just about everyone liked scene 49. Warren and I, the writers, certainly liked it. Michael Chechik, the producer, liked it. Jorge Montesi, the director, liked it. The only one who didn't like it was Pears--and he made it clear that it had to come out.

Michael, in his nice, accommodating way, kept trying different ways to cajole Pears into accepting scene 49, all to no avail. Pears warned him not to waste budget filming that scene, because it was not going to wind up in the finished show.

So, with the show in production and scenes actually being filmed, the argument was coming to a head.

One morning we were to have a supposedly decisive meeting on it right in the suite of CBC rooms being used as the production office for the show. Pears wanted to put the scene behind us once and for all.

Just before the meeting I decided to prepare a presentation. I went to the art department to beg a sheet of chart-paper and a felt marker, and drew a decision-table, using some of my business-analytical skills cultivated in my work at ICBC. I listed the positive and negative features of scene 49 in a kind of cost-benefit analysis of using the scene in the show. Armed with my chart, I went into the meeting, held in a tiny little office, and, pinning it to the wall, made my pitch for scene 49.

I took each of the reasons that Pears had given for why the scene should be cut and countered them with positive reasons why it should stay. Pears thought the scene would be confusing for the audience--they wouldn't understand what was going on. And he thought, most of all, that it "blew the tension" of the whole series--that it short-circuited the goal of the series by having Jay come into contact with his mother. Now it would seem that they had a secret deal or understanding that they were both complicit in his being unconscious.

I argued that the tension was not "blown" at all; the "meeting" of boy and mother was happening in some unconscious, emotional realm in which they simply expressed their connection and love for each other; it was a spiritual scene, with a weird, symbolic setting to emphasize the fact. The kid audience would in no way be confused by it; they would understand immediately that this scene was happening in a special space relating to the life/death urgency of Jay's situation. Scene 49 did not ruin our show--it made our show!

As I made my pitch, I noted that Pears enjoyed the presentation. He seemed to like the creativity of using an analytical chart to sell the scene, and liked being the audience of such a pitch. He smiled. But it was to no avail. Scene 49 blew the tension of the whole series, and would have to go.

Pears's words to Michael: "Pay me now or pay me later--it's not going in."

We on the production side just couldn't accept this. My fear was that in the press of production, scene 49 might become a "luxury" scene that, if we ran short of time or money, would not get filmed. But Jorge had made up his mind on it.

"I don't care what they say," he said. "I'm shooting that scene and I'm cutting it in."

Just to be sure, I showed up to watch the filming of it. Scene 49 was scheduled with other scenes shot down at the abandoned Versatile Pacific shipyard a short walk from my house. When I went on the set, they'd constructed a special pool in a dilapidated, World War 1-era fabrication building. The effects people pumped the space full of mist, and Jorge shot a very powerful and poetic scene. He understood the scene perfectly and nailed it on film. They did two or three takes of Illya Woloshyn emerging from the still pool, each time with crew on hand to immediately fish him out, towel him dry, and blanket him warmly. The scene ended up with Val, played by Janet Hodgkinson, standing on an old staircase, repeating her last words to Jay before he went into the ravine and fell: "Watch out for weirdos."

When I saw the scene on film I knew it was dynamite. To cut this scene out of the show would be an instance of the worst kind of network interference--a deliberate step toward making an extraordinary show mediocre. It was the climax of the climax--the heart of our show! Imagine wanting to cut it out!

As was customary, Jorge supervised the first edit of the show, and put in scene 49. Would the network really make us rip it out?

In the event, talk about cutting out scene 49 subsided. We, the filmmakers, didn't bring it up, and neither, anymore, did the network. I suspect that what happened was that Angela Bruce and the executives in Toronto liked the scene, and overruled Pears. I was just thankful that we'd got it on film.

The film looked great over all: imaginative and filled with "edge". Jorge had brought a nice, adult-network look to our kids' show. The next problem was getting it edited into a workable story.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 19

Despite some bumps and anxieties along the path of preparing to produce the pilot of our would-be adventure-fantasy series The Jellybean Odyssey, things progressed quite well and soon, sometime in summer 1991 (August, I think), filming actually began.

The director, Jorge Montesi, though temperamental and hotheaded, knew what he was doing and took pains to get the show looking and feeling a certain way. Indeed, it was because he cared so much about the product that he was sometimes difficult for people like me--that is, those who did not actually report to him, but had more of a "staff" relationship with him--to deal with. After all, if someone who reports to you disagrees with you, it's easy to resolve: "do as I say--now."

Jorge was proficient, effective, and creative. The crew was also very skilled and enthusiastic. Often we heard that people loved the show idea and the script, and they went out of their way to give it their all.

Warren and I were pleased and relieved that the tree-fort-in-the-ravine idea that we'd written would be filmed after all. Indeed, the locations manager had found a perfect ravine in a park in nearby Lynn Valley--exactly what we'd had in mind when we wrote the script. The park authorities allowed the crew to build a tree-fort in a tree there--as long as they didn't use any nails, screws, or other fasteners that penetrated the bark of the trees! They ingeniously came up with a sophisticated tree-fort high above the ground, all made with non-penetrating bindings.

One sign that Jorge was serious about shooting the script as written was the fact that he actually used a crane-shot that Warren and I had written in (scriptwriting texts tell you not to put camera angles and such in scripts, on the grounds that that is "directing on paper"). But we felt this had a clear story purpose: a crane-shot going up the tree to the tree-fort, to show how high it was. Thus we hear the dialogue of the boys in the fort before we finally see them--after we, the audience, have "climbed" the tree to get there.

I think they could not get a real crane into the ravine, so the crew rigged a bosun's chair on a pulley hanging from high up, and they pulled the cameraman, Trig Singer, up by a rope while he did a handheld shot on the way up. Scary--but he seemed completely calm. The boys had to be cued to get into motion at a certain point, moving along the homemade catwalks high above the ravine floor. It took a few takes. I was delighted that the crane-shot went in, and felt that it was a sign that our show was going to be special.

Another big item in the pilot was the fall itself. The show's stunt coordinator was the veteran Vancouver stuntman Bill Ferguson. The fall would be done by his own son, who was about 11 years old himself. I watched Ferguson and his team prepare the stunt--they were there for hours while main-unit filming was being done elsewhere. Ferguson's team prepared a large collapsible cushion beneath the tree-fort, I don't remember the materials used now. I do remember that they prepared the stunt with great care. When time to film came, they had at least three cameras running on it. I was impressed by the courage of the young Ferguson, and by the concerned and close-knit teamwork of the stunt crew. It went well, and we spectators burst into applause.

Another exciting part of filming was the hospital scenes of the upworld, when the unconscious Jay is taken to emergency. For this, a real intensive care unit (ICU) was used at Eagle Ridge Hospital outside Vancouver. Sadly, this newly built hospital had never had enough funding to be able to actually operate its state-of-the-art ICU; it had only ever been used as a film set! So the location was real, and those were real nurses moonlighting as actors who whisk Jay into his bed for treatment.

As a writer, it's very gratifying to be on the set when your script is being produced (at least, it usually is, in my experience). You've done your part already; you've suffered and sweated. Now others have to do their bit, and they stride around with colored copies of your script, all marked up with their own technical notes. The actors carry "sides"--miniaturized pages of script, each actor only with the pages containing his or her lines. I ate the snacks, chatted with Michael, who was also more or less an onlooker at this point, and generally enjoyed the status of being an "above-the-line" member of the production--that is, one of the main creative positions, as opposed to the technical and craft positions that constitute most of a film crew.

Filming was going very well. But there was a dark cloud on the horizon. There was a controversial scene in our script, which our local network executive David Pears had decided he didn't want in the show.

But that's for next time.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 18

Television executives, for all their collective narcissism, arrogance, and power-lust, are actually hero-worshippers and groupies at heart.

Currently, here in Canada anyway, at least at the CBC, they worship a mythical hero called Show Runner. Show Runner is a writer-producer with the godlike power to make good TV drama happen, and above all to solve problems in the hurly-burly of producing episodes. Show Runner can write and fix scripts, and also respond to the needs of production. By applying supreme expertise both in writing and production, generating brilliant scripts while also barking orders at the production team, Show Runner squares the circle of Creativity vs. Business, saving network executives from the crippling anxiety of wondering what they'll actually get after they've ordered episodes for a series. "How will we get out of this mess?" "Don't worry--Show Runner will save us!"

The cult of Show Runner had not yet appeared in the early 1990s, when we were struggling to get our half-hour epic, The Jellybean Odyssey, produced. At that time, network hero-worship was more likely to be aimed at the cult of Director. Director was a hero who, like the later Show Runner, also made excellent TV episodes happen. He did this by applying his mysterious and unifying Vision to the script--a text which had already been perfected through network input. A Romantic figure, he led the TV production team through the alchemical process of transmuting the script into a Wonderful Episode.

For the pilot episode of The Jellybean Odyssey, the demigod Director chosen by the CBC was Jorge Montesi, a Chilean expatriate with a background in documentary filmmaking who had recently risen to semi-stardom directing episodes of serious TV drama for both American and Canadian networks. While the choice of director was notionally the province of the independent producer, Michael Chechik in our case, the CBC advocated strongly for Montesi, and made it clear that choosing someone else was going to be a tough sell. They liked Montesi, and wanted him to direct our pilot.

Michael, eager to please, said sure. In swept Jorge Montesi, who was indeed a Romantic figure, with his long dark hair, expensive leathers, and authentic Latin machismo. Bold, temperamental, and quick to confront, Jorge took hold of the production and set out to give it his stamp.

Personally, I liked the idea of a high-powered TV director making our origin episode. It expressed the seriousness of the network's intention, for one thing. For another, I liked the idea that Jorge was not a "kid" director, but a maker of relatively hard-hitting adult crime drama for such flagship shows as Night Heat--a favorite of Warren's and mine. That was all to the good.

But Jorge was a handful. He gave orders--he didn't take them. To his great credit, he didn't seek to make script changes. He liked the script and intended to film it. But that meant that he had to establish his presence stylistically--with the look of the show. I remember being part of the locations survey, a preliminary tour made of potential locations selected by the locations manager. One of the scenes we'd set in a lacrosse box. When we got to the lacrosse box chosen by the manager, Jorge was disgusted, and therefore angry.

"There's nothing here to shoot!" he said. "It's just a parking lot! It's a crap location--get me somewhere else."

This put him into a bad mood. He challenged many location choices in the script. He wanted to put Jay and his mother Val into a lovely heritage home (all these locations were in North Vancouver, close to where I live). Warren and I tried to protest that this wasn't right--that the working-class widow would not have such fancy digs. Jay should have an ordinary house. But Jorge didn't want to be shooting bland, featureless garbage.

The survey culminated at the old Versatile Pacific shipyard just down the hill from my house: a set of derelict industrial buildings dating back to World War 1, right on the waterfront.

"Why do they need a tree-fort?" said Jorge, who liked the postindustrial desolation of the site. "Why can't they have their club in an old warehouse?"

"Jay's a suburban kid," I said, on the defensive and the unelected front-man for the original vision of our show, "not part of an inner-city street gang."

"Why not?" he challenged me.

"Well," I stammered, "that's just the vision of the show. It would change everything to make him an urban street-kid. He's not written that way. We've got the other episodes to consider. This is a series, after all."

"Not yet it isn't!" said Jorge, with a menacing look.

I was terrified that the show was going to be suddenly transformed into something entirely different, purely due to directorial whim. Later Michael would tell me that Jorge had been a political prisoner back in Chile.

"Yeah, he told me all this stuff," said Michael, "that they'd tortured him--put electrodes on his testicles! I didn't know what to say!"

"Wish we had a set of those," I said.

But here at the locations survey, some other point of disagreement came up, and Jorge snapped. Maybe I'd suggested some way that something could be filmed, in order to get around some perceived problem. Jorge turned on me.

"Don't tell me how to direct! I'm responsible for this show! My name's going on this thing!"

He had his finger in my face. Michael and the locations manager looked on in embarrassed silence. I didn't say anything--it would only have been a sarcastic remark, in any case. I'd created this show and had worked on it for two years; he was a hired gun who'd been on it a week.

I left and walked up the hill to my house. I crawled up to my bed, lay down, and wished I'd never heard of television.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 17

With the approach of summer 1991, The Jellybean Odyssey, the half-hour pilot first written by Warren Easton and me two years earlier, ramped up for production. Under the terms of the Independent Production Agreement of the Writers Guild of Canada, when the actual filming begins, the writers are entitled to the balance of their total fee, which is calculated based on the budget for the film. For a relatively high-budge half-hour such as ours, this would ordinarily mean a payment of several thousand dollars, but Warren and I had had to tap the producer Michael Chechik for advances against this over the previous year or so, and therefore there was little or no extra fee for us. We had to keep other sources of income alive.

But now there was the excitement of preproduction, including the casting of the show. Michael engaged the CBC casting director Sid Kozak to cast the show, and Michael and Sid thought it would be a good idea for the writers to be present for the auditions of the major parts. Now this was what I called fun: I got to sit in the little office used as the audition-room with Michael and Sid, while nervous actors waited outside to come in and read lines from the script. A video camera was set up to record their performances.

The auditions took place over a period of days or maybe weeks. Soon I realized that Sid wanted me to explain the roles to the actors, so I had to come up with ways to describe the characters quickly so that the actors, who had never seen the script, could find a way to interpret their lines. Most of the auditions were by kid actors from the Vancouver area, although there were a couple of auditions sent in on videotape by Canadian actors living in the U.S.

For the first time, we got to hear our Jellybean dialogue spoken by actors. This was a thrill, but also a humbling learning experience, since dialogue and little jokes that had seemed brilliant to us, the writers, sometimes came out flat and lame from actors who didn't really get what we were trying to say. The key with dialogue, as we learned over time, was to keep it simple and keep it short. Don't count on anybody "getting" what you're trying to do.

So many kids read for different parts, and they were all so different from each other. Their personalities brought vastly different qualities to the different characters. The part of Jay Ziegler, of course, was central. Which kid to choose? Should our Jay be tough and cocky? Wily and shrewd? Innocent and cute?

Warren and I reviewed a lot of auditions on tape with Michael and discussed them at length. Of course, it was not just our decision--the network had to approve all the main casting choices for continuing characters. But we should come up with who we thought was right, and be prepared to defend that to the network.

As I recall, the easiest pick among the three main kids was Tony Sampson as Keith and Flash. He came across as burly and a bit gruff, but also had a sensitive, expressive face and could bring nuance to a performance--he could act. It often wasn't clear with kids whether they were really actors or just cute moppets and models. Tony was a good-looking kid, but not a cutie-pie, and he could deliver a performance and also take direction.

Jay was a tougher choice. From early on Illya Woloshyn was a leading contender, if only because he was so telegenic with his attractive appearance and liquid brown eyes. But to us he was firmly in the "innocent and cute moppet" category--and Warren and I weren't sure that's what we wanted in our adventuring hero. I believe Warren was especially skeptical that such a doe-eyed hug-muffin could carry our adventure show.

And yet the camera liked Illya very much, and his innocence and cuteness made him seem vulnerable and kind of tugged on the heart-strings: you'd want this poor lost kid to find his way home. But was he too nonassertive?

We hemmed and hawed. I think the network liked Illya, who was already a working actor and had some decent credits. Eventually, maybe after some call-backs, he was cast.

The part of Donna and Alpha, the lame girl who becomes Jay's spunky and able-bodied female sidekick in the downworld, was another tough choice. Among the many girls who came in to read, Ashley Rogers (as she was then known) seemed among the least likely: young, small, and with Coke-bottle glasses. But she was relaxed and confident, and apparently had said, before coming in to the audition room, that she was going to get the part. She was a "real" little girl, and very natural on camera.

She was very different from girls like, say, Vicki Wauchope, a beautiful blonde who lived in California and who sent in an audition by videotape. Her mother, who had made the tape, had taken the trouble to shoot Vicki wearing a leg-brace and using crutches, to better simulate the character Donna. She represented the option of going for "star"-type casting for the role.

I remember talking over the auditions with Michael while we were on a CBC soundstage for some reason. Against all probability, we were inclining toward Ashley, up against a field of slightly older, prettier girls--she would be, as I put it, a "more creative choice". We all liked her. I'm not sure whether the network had reservations about her, but anyway, she was the one we wanted to cast, and eventually the network accepted our slate of actors.

The Jellybean Odyssey pilot was now cast, and we had that strange feeling of reality that comes when the characters in a script, who so far exist only in one's imagination, now suddenly have bodies and voices--without knowing it, we had been writing about these people; who knew? For better or for worse, this was going to be our team.

With the cast in place, our show was now almost ready to go before the camera. The next big hire: a director. Here the network had definite opinions. More on that later.

To be continued...