out with the old, in with the more complicated

Back to the routine of regular life. Kimmie prepares to head off again to the office, out into the still-gray weather that also characterized our week of vacation here at home. I too will try to return to full productivity.

Of course, I kept up with my reading and my notes over the vacation. To me those things are not mere duty, but what I do for pleasure as well. For better or for worse, I'm not in the situation of Stephen King, who did his actual creative writing 365 days a year because that was what he enjoyed. For whatever reason, and to whatever end, my approach is much more deliberate.

Early in our week off our old television packed it in. It had been an excellent set over all--a Sony, about 24 inches I think, that I got in 1990 on a rent-to-own basis because I was unemployed (oops, I mean a full-time TV series creator). A couple of times in the preceding week the set had switched itself off and then on again in the middle of a program. On Saturday night (June 1), just as we were starting to watch our weekly movie (The Bridges of Madison County in this case), it switched itself off and I could not get power restored to it. We wound up watching the movie on my new laptop, the sound tinny and faint from the speaker even with the computer close to us, resting on top of the coffee-table.

The next day we headed to Future Shop in Park Royal to look for a new set, and wound up buying one--or rather a whole system, since to be fully high-definition-ready it seems you need not just a TV set but also a digital set-top box, and ideally also an expensive HDMI connecting cable to carry the signal between them. The price of all this was about double the maximum amount I'd regarded myself as prepared to pay.

But when it comes to technology purchases, or indeed anything that I really want, I don't like to scrimp. If I only buy a TV every 18 years, I want to get one that's near the front of the technology, not at the rear, so the thing can last.

We went for it. The package consists of a Sharp 32-inch LCD flat-screen television with a Motorola set-top box that includes a 160-gigabyte hard drive for recording programs. The TV is plenty big enough, since we sit quite close to it (I think of a saying my father used to invoke from time to time: "white man build big fire, sit far away; Indian build small fire, sit close".) And the picture and sound are excellent--a leap beyond what we had, for sure.

There are some negatives. The new system is complicated to use--two more remote-control units. And the user's guides that come with the units are poor. Indeed, the Motorola guide is laughably inadequate. The page on using the video-recording feature is simply a list of features, with not one word on how to use the thing. Easily the worst user's guide I've ever seen. If I were interested in chasing copywriting work, I'd write Motorola and offer to write a better one.

Robin, who already has a digital flat-screen TV, wondered why we need a set-top box. Doesn't the digital signal just come through the cable into the TV, as on hers? Our salesman insisted that we can't get a full high-definition signal without the set-top box, so we got it. But as to precisely why that is, I don't know--and my user's guides certainly won't tell me. So, as ever, I'm taking matters into my own hands: I shopped for and bought a book on digital TV from Amazon.com a couple of days ago. I'll wait for that and hope it straightens me out--or at least that I can tell Robin why we sprang for a $650 piece of auxiliary equipment to go with our new TV set.

Meanwhile, TV is very enjoyable again. This past Saturday we watched Apollo 13, the next title in Paul's 90s Festival, and it came across powerfully on our new screen.

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 16

A subtle but important turning-point arrived for our proto-series, The Jellybean Odyssey, when, in a story meeting held, as was now usual, in the glass-encased meeting-room at the new Omni-Films suite in Gastown, the CBC drama executive David Pears declared that Hart Hanson's rewrite of our pilot script did not have the "Jellybean" feel.

This meant that Pears was acknowledging that there was a special, unique quality to the writing--maybe perhaps especially shown in the kid dialogue--that Warren Easton and I brought to the script that gave it its distinctive and unique style. Now Pears wanted to roll back to our last draft, and get Warren and me to do whatever further tinkering was required. I don't recall now whether Hart was himself present at that meeting, but whether he was or wasn't, this could only have been felt as a slap in the face to him. The story editor in a TV show represents "management" as far as the writers are concerned, and to be undermined or cut off at the knees by management is painful and abnormal. It's a stab in the back--or maybe in the head, from above.

Of course, from the point of view of me and Warren, the creators, Pears was only stating the obvious. As the show's creators, we knew it best and understood exactly how to create its special "flavor". Hart, although he was one of the best TV writers in the country, had not in fact been engaged to rewrite our script because he was a better writer than we were, but because he was part of management's own picked team and therefore would be more ready to take direction from the network. The show's creators, who had suffered and starved for two years now in "development hell", would not simply take orders from the network; we cared deeply about the show and would push back when we felt the executives were demanding things that would make the show weaker and less original. In simple terms, Warren and I were not on the network payroll (were hardly on any payroll), and did not see ourselves as "reporting to" the CBC or its executives.

Notionally we reported to Michael Chechik, the producer. But Michael was the first to admit that he was not bringing a personal creative vision to this series; that was our job. We thought of the ideas, and we wrote them. And right now, this show didn't exist in any other form but writing. At this point, Warren and I were the show. Michael valued our vision of the show and also the way we wrote, and was not inclined to pass on whatever pressure he might be getting from Pears to make us change this or that. At most, if he was getting any such pressure, he would tell us about it candidly and ask us what we thought we should do about it. In his hesitant, questioning, but fast-talking way, he would work through how to respond to the latest network demand or request.

In any case, somewhere in here, probably spring 1991, the CBC took the big step of ordering the production of the pilot.

After pumping nickels and dimes into the writers to output scripts for two years, this was the moment of committing to bigger money. The pilot episode of The Jellybean Odyssey would eventually cost about $500,000 to produce. Even though, in the Canadian scheme of television production, the CBC's share was only 1/3 of that, it was still significant money, and took everyone a large and hard-to-revoke step closer to producing a series.

Of course we were ecstatic. It had been three years since the production of "What's Wrong with Neil?". Now we were having another original show produced, entirely of our own creation, and, with a continuing series riding on the outcome, the stakes were much higher.

Now, after sitting in endless story and network meetings, and advancing small sums to keep the writers alive, Michael would get to put on his producer hat properly and make a show. It had to be done carefully, since many staffing decisions now, such as casting, would have consequences for the continuing series. He had to find a team that could make a show worthy of all the creativity and effort that had gone into its creation.

But summer 1991 was coming on, and Vancouver was a lovely place to shoot film. Once again we could enjoy the pleasure of visiting film sets close to home to watch busy people shoot the lines we had written. As far as I was concerned, we'd more than earned it.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 15

With the arrival of 1991, Warren Easton and I were again tinkering with the pilot script for The Jellybean Odyssey, and with the other scripts we had written (I believe by that time we had also written the next two episodes, "No Fair", in which our hero Jay is "tried" by a kid-tribunal in his new fantasy world for being "different", and "Out of the Woods", in which he becomes involved in a conflict between a Robin Hood-like band of "outlaw" kids and the quasi-police state of the distant and mysterious Brad).

Warren and I were eager to explore these overtly "political" scenarios of our kid-world, and deliberately turned toward issues of justice, power relationships, and civil administration, shown in the distorting (but clarifying) mirror of our fantasy-kid-land which we called the downworld. While I can't be sure, I believe that this path satisfied CBC head of programming Ivan Fecan's wish for a "relevant" show with a "sociological mission". Our show definitely was not simply "a bunch of kids running around doing stuff".

However, the new tinkering with the material was not bringing us much extra revenue; that had been tapped long since, along with some advances against future work for our show. With my two mortgages, I was heading deeper into debt and had to find a way to scare up more income. Kimmie was of course still working full-time at ICBC; I, the big-time TV creator, was bringing in next to nothing.

One place I turned was to the CBC itself. I found out that the new junior drama executive in Vancouver, Linda Coffey, was responsible for reading and responding to unsolicited submissions from would-be scriptwriters, and that she retained a few readers to go through the projects and write brief reports on them. Probably after one of our Jellybean Odyssey meetings, I asked Linda whether I could maybe be one of her readers.

Linda, recognizing my predicament, readily agreed, and in March 1991 I received my first sheaf of scripts from The Wall: a set of shelves at one end of her office, covered with submissions. From then on, each Friday I would drop off my reader's reports (these documents are called "coverage" in L.A.), pick up a fresh set of scripts, and collect a check for $150 at CBC's payroll counter.

(The scripts I read, by the way, were almost all shockingly bad--not even the least bit professional.)

Another effort I made to keep body and soul together was to approach a newly formed scriptwriting fund set up by the Canadian pay-TV channel called First Choice (the fund was called the Foundation to Underwrite New Drama, or "FUND"--cute, huh?). I'd heard a radio interview with someone who had attended a school for butlers in England, and was now the butler of a rich American family. This had intrigued me, so I looked into the school, and came up with an idea for a kid's movie that I called My Dad the Butler, about a divorced dad who attends such a school and winds up as the butler to a female pop star. While the star visits Vancouver to record an album, the butler's 13-year-old daughter tries to reunite with him--an impossibility in his new post, or so it seems...

I got Michael Chechik to write a letter saying that if this script got written, he'd be willing to produce it, then I sent the proposal to FUND. They responded with a go-ahead to write an outline on the idea. Yahoo! I had another project in development! This project would later go on to a story treatment, and would bring me about $8,000 or so in writing income, all told--a lifesaver. As I told Michael: "the CBC is going to be calling story meetings for our show, and I won't be able to come because I'll be delivering pizzas."

Reading other people's scripts and working on a butler story were keeping my head above water in 1991.

Another thing that happened that year was that the CBC, meaning the local drama-development exec David Pears, got our story editor Hart Hanson to write a draft of our pilot script. Thinking back, I can't quite remember the exact reason why. Was it that Warren and I were "busy" working on other scripts or outlines for the show at the time? Or was it simply a "normal" step toward getting the show ready to shoot, by having its story editor rewrite the writers' material?

For this is how TV series are done: some scripts may be written by writers on staff, in the story department, and some by freelance writers. In either case, the scripts are rewritten by the story editor--who is the head of the story department--so that they all have the same "voice" and conform to the requirements of the series, which the story editor is supposed to know better than the contributing writers. Scripts also change as shooting progresses, and the story editor normally makes those changes.

Hart was already our story editor through the development process, and had provided much valuable and friendly help, in effect teaching us important aspects of TV writing. As a writer he himself was excellent and fast. But Warren and I saw no need for anyone to be rewriting our pilot: it was already good--excellent in fact; even brilliant. We saw this as a step toward removing creative control of the series from the hands of the creators--and we didn't like it.

But no one asked us what we thought about it. We may have created the show and written the scripts, but to Pears and the CBC we were newbies and amateurs, and would have to take a backseat to the "pros" as the show got closer to production.

No, we didn't like it one bit.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 14

I think it was in about November 1990 that Phil Keatley left his position as head of CBC Vancouver's drama department and was replaced by David Pears, an executive returning west from Toronto--a move that, in CBC terms and in Canadian corporate and government terms generally, could only be called a demotion. Pears (and I call him "Pears" because that's what he called himself: when he called you on the phone, he'd identify himself by saying, "It's Pears") had been involved in the production of the then-flagship CBC drama Street Legal, often referred to by those of us in the Canadian TV biz as T.O. Law, since it was widely seen as an imitation of the highly successful Steve Bochko series L.A. Law in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Hart Hanson, the story editor for our developing Jellybean Odyssey show, had outgrown his junior post at CBC Drama in Vancouver, in demand elsewhere as a freelance TV writer, a story editor for TV series in production, and also as a professor of creative writing at UBC (whew!), and had left, to be replaced by Linda Coffey.

I don't remember now whether it was our first meeting with "Pears and Coffey", but I think it was: another summit-meeting to talk about the show, this time held, more formally, in the boardroom at CBC Vancouver. Again I (no doubt) packed my attache case and put on jacket and tie (although this time I no doubt also took transit to get there; who needs the stress?). Warren and Michael were there, of course, and possibly Hart, maybe even Phil Keatley. We took our places at the long conference table, sitting in chairs with absurdly high backs, furniture that felt like some kind of modernistic throwback to a medieval dining-hall.

We had all introduced ourselves. In fact I had met Pears years before, in the 1970s, when he had come to visit my father one day in West Van. I didn't remember anything of his appearance, only an impression of someone who thought rather highly of himself and who regarded his issues and problems as very important. Now, in 1990, he came across as an older man, short, with a long gray ponytail and drooping mustache, and very casually dressed in things like jeans, huaraches, and untucked shirts left open to the chest. If smoking had still been permitted indoors, he would have chainsmoked his way through the day.

Pears ran the meeting. His style was folksy, soft-spoken, and, I thought, rather long-winded. He praised our show and its concept, talking about the "arcs" of the series (TV-writing speak for the overarching stories that continue beyond individual episodes) and comparing this with his own experience working on Street Legal, a show which, he claimed, had A, B, and even C arcs running through it--an example of subtlety and depth. (For the record: Warren and I did not think too much of Street Legal as a show; we really did see it as a "me too" imitation of L.A. Law.)

But, although the concept and the writing were on the whole very good, the CBC execs back in Toronto, having examined the material, had discovered that it had a Flaw. And this Flaw was what was holding back the show from being as good as it could be--and as good as it needed to be in order to get a production order. If we could find a way to address the Flaw, then we could very likely have a TV show that could indeed be produced and broadcast. Pears saw his first task with this project as being the correction of the Flaw.

I should've counted how many times Pears said the word Flaw; it would have made a great statistic as part of the lore of the show. It was quite a few times. At length Pears revealed what the Flaw was that had been discovered through the perspicacity of the CBC execs: the Flaw lay in the writing of the upworld.

The upworld, as I've mentioned, was the term we gave to the parts of the show set in the world of waking life--the world where Jay lay unconscious in his coma, watched over by his mother and his friends Donna and Keith. Warren and I had wanted this world to have as much impact, if possible, as the downworld of Jay's fantasy-adventure. We wanted to be gritty and real with how comas actually happen--their real effects and symptoms, and the real methods of treating them, when done in the advanced and creative ways then being developed. We wanted the audience to have to work as hard to follow the upworld coma-therapy adventure as it would to follow the downworld adventure. We didn't want a "cute" or soap-opera-type coma; we wanted to do real coma--scary coma--and dish that up to our kid audience. Why not? They're only one skateboard-accident away from the same situation, after all.

It appeared now that this vision was not flying with the network--anyway, not with David Pears. The next push of rewriting would involve mainly our upworld stories.

After the meeting, Warren and I felt a bit depressed about Pears's assault on our upworld, but agreed that it could have been worse--an assault on the downworld story. After all, when a new executive comes in, they have to make their mark somehow. It seemed the core of the show was being left intact. Pears's enthusiasm for the show idea seemed genuine, and I believed that he saw it as a show that could and would get produced. So it would be worth the extra effort. He had not come to kill it.

Another thing: when I met Pears before the meeting, I immediately recognized him as the figure described to me by the psychic Sarah Scott Simonson: short, egotistical, powerful. We would have to watch out for him. Not that there was a lot we could do, besides say, "yes sir, yes sir, three bags full..."

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 13

The upshot for Warren and me of our meeting with CBC's head of programming Ivan Fecan was that we had to do more work on our would-be series, The Jellybean Odyssey, before he would give us the go-ahead to produce the pilot episode. I don't remember exactly what that extra work was, but I believe it may have been at this time that scripts for the next two episodes were commissioned, and no doubt we had to beef up the other episode ideas further and flesh out the proto-series-bible. Scripts are cheap; the network wanted more security in the project before actually causing film to be shot.

As Phil Keatley, the executive heading up CBC Vancouver's drama department, expressed it after one of our meetings there: "This show, if it goes ahead, is going to cost something upward of a quarter-million dollars an episode. They're going to say yes slowly."

So the result of the big meeting was disappointing in the sense that we didn't get a green light for making the pilot, but it was good in the sense that the project was alive, and indeed Warren and I got a bit more work out of it and could look forward to some more script fees. There was hope that we could turn the work around quickly and get the pilot into production for the summer, when the good filming weather would be here.

But within a couple of weeks of the meeting, I fell sick. At first I thought it was simply a cold, but I acquired a high fever that I couldn't control, and was diagnosed with pneumonia. I spent most of February 1990 lying on my sofa, reading, drawing the snow piled high on my back balcony, watching TV, and climbing slowly and weakly up to bed each night.

This was a setback. But I don't know whether it was a decisive setback in the sense of (apparently) killing any sense of urgency in the network to develop our series. However, for that reason or some other, this is what appeared to happen. Warren and I came to understand more exactly what Hart Hanson, our story editor, had meant early on when he referred to "development hell".

I'm trying to think of how I would define and characterize development hell. First of all, development hell is experienced primarily by writers, and secondarily by producers. The hellishness consists in doing seemingly endless revisions of existing material--long past the point when you've cashed your last check for writing it--and waiting long, long times for feedback from the network, all with no guarantee that the project will ever, in the end, actually be picked up. With no production date even tentatively in mind, the senior network executives, who are all earning six-figure salaries in any case, can let the project float along while they mainly attend to more pressing concerns.

Warren and I met here at my house to work. Often we would walk down the hill to have lunch at Fran's Cafe--a cheap Japanese-Canadian diner near the foot of Lonsdale Avenue that we dubbed the Development Diner: where writers in development could afford to eat. Neither of us had a real job--at least I didn't--although I did have two mortgages plus a personal loan to finance the purchase of my house three years earlier. Money started growing tight, and Warren and I were driven to borrowing money--that is, getting "advances" against future work--from our producer Michael in order to keep going. (He had a sideline of selling real estate.)

Spring passed. Summer. The long days and beautiful filming weather started to fade, still with no breath of confirmation from the CBC about whether they would be wanting our show or not. The writers tightened their belts and looked ahead to another winter.

One day in September 1990 I paid a visit to a psychic named Sarah Scott Simonson. She lived nearby in Lynnmour, so I rode the new (cheap) bike I had just bought down the long hill to her townhouse. Sarah was a very pleasant, ordinary-seeming middle-aged woman who just happened to have psychic abilities. Kimmie had consulted her during a psychic fair held on the PNE grounds, and was impressed with her. I thought, what the heck--I wonder about my future too.

In her little consulting-room I asked her about my TV show: would it get made?

"Yes," she said, "it will get done, it will get shown. It will be successful. Someone's going to come along who will help it get done. He'll be shorter--a powerful person. Very direct. He'll help you, but be careful of him. There's ego there--and envy for what you're doing. Just be careful."

"All right," I said. "I will."

Elated by Sarah's prediction, I rode energetically back up the long hill, again feeling that the wind of destiny was behind me, and that our TV show would finally find its audience.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 12

The 1990s arrived, and with them my 31st birthday.

Apparently Ivan Fecan, then CBC's head of programming (now CEO of the CTV Television Network), had not read our package on his skiing trip after all, and got to it only when he returned to the office in the new year. Later in January he was planning to make a trip west to visit CBC's "regional" offices, including Vancouver. Meanwhile, via Michael Chechik, our producer, we heard an early glimmering of Fecan's response to our show: it lacked "allegory".

A meeting was set up so that we on The Jellybean Odyssey team could get direct feedback from Fecan while he was visiting Vancouver. We were to convene at the CBC building on Hamilton Street at, I think, 10:00 a.m. on Monday 22 January. I put on a jacket and tie, packed the script, proto-series-bible, and episode ideas into my attache case, and joined the other commuters driving over town to work--a most unfamiliar experience to me, who had not had to commute to a workplace since I'd moved to North Vancouver in 1985.

The meeting was set not in a conference-room, but in a "green room"--a lounge used by performers before going on to a soundstage. There was fairly elaborate security to get inside the brutal concrete mass of the Crown Corporate building (bomb threats due to their programming, possibly). I made it to the room, along with Warren, Michael, Hart Hanson, and I believe Phil Keatley (still the head of drama development in Vancouver at the time--help me out Warren if you remember differently). In came Angela Bruce, CBC's head of children's programming, tall, English, with pearl-colored hair and a cane, with her boss Ivan Fecan, a relaxed man, just a few years older than Warren and me, who had acquired quasi-Wunderkind status for having worked in L.A. with Fred Silverman, a famous TV executive. We all shook hands, Fecan dropped onto one of the modernistic foam seats, and we got going.

"I like this project," said Fecan, "it's a very creative idea. But as I read the script, I found myself wondering, what's the allegory here?"

There was a brief silence, but I'd prepared for this moment.

"We heard about that," I said, "so I looked up allegory in the dictionary."

"Don't quote the dictionary at me!" said Fecan with a laugh.

"It talks about using symbolic figures to make general expressions about the human condition--"

"I call it allegory," said Fecan, "but what I'm asking is, what does this show mean? What's its relevance? What is its sociological mission?"

A much longer silence fell on the room. Sitting beside Michael, I could sense his mouth working a couple of times, but nothing coming out. I realized that if anyone was to rise to this challenge, it should be the show's creators. I sensed that here was the crisis--the crunch. Again it was I who broke the silence. I had no idea what I was going to say.

"Our vision of the show," I said, leaning forward and sculpting something, maybe our idea, with my hands, "is not so much sociological...as intensely psychological. Here we have a kid going into the depths of his mind, and finding a world of adventure there. He can see his relationships there in a new way: his friends, his family, his missing father--relationships that everyone has, but doesn't have this chance to kind of explore this way..."

In fact, I'm not exactly sure what I said after that first sentence, but it was along those lines. My basic thrust was that the vision for the show was not "sociological"--outward, but "psychological", inward, and that this "inward" is just as universal as the the "outward". But more than that I just wanted to respond: to return the volley and stick up for the show as being meaningful and important.

With the ice thus broken, other people chimed in with their views--Angela, Hart--that the show did indeed have the characteristics that Fecan was looking for. I recall Hart sitting with a sheaf of papers on his lap, lifting through them theatrically, and saying sotto voce, "It's there--it's there already!"

At length, Fecan cut off the discussion.

"Well, it's not there yet. I don't want a show that's just a bunch of kids running around doing stuff. I think we need to see another draft of this."

With that he was up and heading for the door. In the doorway, he turned to look me in the eye, and said with a smile, "You look like a deer caught in the headlights."

He turned and left with Angela.

At that moment I became sure we had a series.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 8

"What's Wrong with Neil?", the half-hour comedy written by Warren Easton and me for the CBC anthology series Family Pictures, was aired in Canada on 9 March 1989. Kimmie and I held a broadcast party here, inviting our friends over to watch TV.

It was an exciting, thrilling experience--another landmark in the career of the film writer: actually seeing your produced work exhibited for the mass audience. Best of all is if you're pleased with it yourself, and have a chance to be among that audience while they're watching it. Everyone I've ever seen watching "What's Wrong with Neil?" has agonized with the hero when his tender love-note is yanked away by the class clown and read mockingly to his peers. People cringe (but in a good way). Then, through the rest of the show, they laugh and are engaged with the story.

The elation was much like what I felt at the 1976 B.C. Student Film Festival, when a film I'd made with my friends, "The Device," a 30-minute silent 8mm Cold War farce, brought much laughter to the audience composed of our competitors and their families ("The Device" won our category of Best High School Film). All that work--and there was plenty--finally pays off: you get to sit back and enjoy the audience's enjoyment of the show. You can't beat it.

Later on, when The Odyssey was in production, our story editor at the time, Hart Hanson, who was already a very successful TV writer (and is now a writer-producer in Hollywood of shows such as Bones and Joan of Arcadia), said that he had not yet had that experience. Working as a "hired gun" on other people's shows, he was making lots of money, but never had he written an episode that he felt he could call up his relatives to urge them to tune in and watch.

For Warren and me it was the opposite: we weren't making much money, but we were making shows of our own, that we felt good about inviting people to watch.

"What's Wrong with Neil?" was one of the best of the 16 half-hours produced for Family Pictures. That's not just my opinion: it was one of only three of the shows that was bought by the BBC for broadcast in Britain, and it also was accepted for competition at the Banff Television Festival that June. Incredibly, "What's Wrong with Neil?" was selected with four or five other shows from around the world to compete for "Best One-Off Drama Under 60 Minutes"--a category that included shows like a one-hour British drama starring Alan Bates and Maggie Smith. Our little CBC half hour!

Michael Chechik, our producer, was very pleased and excited. He too wanted to land a series to produce, and talked up the idea of using "What's Wrong with Neil?" as a pilot for a series. Audiences loved it and the network was happy with it--why not make more?

Warren and I were chilly to this idea. We didn't see "Neil" as a series. The North Vancouver boy faking "cholera" as a way of dealing with humiliation in front of his peers made for a great half hour, but the family situation and the characters were not otherwise special or interesting enough to power a series. No: we didn't want to just opportunistically try to stretch our half-hour idea into a whole series, which we felt would not distinguish itself from the pack. We wanted to offer something special, unique--something with lots of "wow" factor.

"We need to have an idea that's a series right from the start," we said.

We already had come up with the boy-in-a-coma idea in December 1987, but because I was worried that the idea was too dark for TV--especially for kids' TV--we were sitting on that and working on other ideas to run by broadcasters. Thinking it would be cool to do serious, adult, one-hour television, we were tinkering with a couple of ideas.

One, tentatively entitled OR Suite, was engendered by the fact that both Warren and I had worked (as janitors) in Vancouver hospitals. It was to be a behind-the-scenes show about the surgeons, nurses, orderlies, and other workers that make up the special team of people in a large hospital's OR suite. (Just a couple of years later, I was to start watching ER on American network TV--a massive hit.) We liked this idea and spent time creating characters and trying to determine a point of view for the story.

Another idea, which we called Paper Tigers, was about a big-city newspaper. We liked the idea of writing about hardbitten, hard-drinking journalists, even though here we didn't have personal experience of the news business. We fiddled with the idea, trying to jazz it up by adding supernatural elements, even.

Michael was willing to pitch just about anything we came up with. I recall putting together the proposal package for Paper Tigers just before I left to do a one-month meditation program in Colorado in April. We were the writers and producers of "What's Wrong with Neil?"--surely someone would want a TV series from us! We wanted to strike while the iron was still at least fairly warm.

However, when I returned from my meditation program in May I learned that no one wanted our Paper Tigers project. We needed something else. Michael said that what the CBC wanted was a show for kids--it had been looking, and not finding. Could Warren and I come up with something in that line?

Warren and I no doubt did the equivalent of look at each other significantly. Was prime time ready to watch a whole TV series about a comatose boy?

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 7

Warren and I knew we wanted to create a TV series about kids--showing their world without any adults. This was essentially what Charles Schulz achieved with his Peanuts comic-strip. You never saw an adult in Peanuts, at most only a child talking with an unseen and unheard teacher, or referring to a parent. But those situations were rare. Schulz's universe was child-only, and this gave it much of its distinctive quality. Schulz dealt with universal and adult themes, but from an exclusively kid perspective.

We liked the idea of writing kid adventures from the kid point of view, of giving a kid adventure the feeling of bigness and importance it has for the kids involved. When adults are around, the kid world becomes small and immature.

We couldn't think of a way to make this happen--until December 1988. I don't remember exactly how the idea arose (Warren, if you're out there, you might recall), but we hit on the notion of putting our kid-hero into a dream-world. In a dream, you can set the parameters any way you like: if you want to banish adults, then out they go. But how do you keep your kid only in a dream-world?

By having him always asleep.

By having him in a coma.

As soon as this idea cropped up we saw its potential. I don't recall the exact place now--it might have been at the new suite of Omni-Films offices in a renovated warehouse on Water Street in Gastown, about four blocks from the old Dominion Building, where Warren and I used to meet for awhile after our respective day-jobs to work, nourishing ourselves with pastries I would bring from the Lonsdale Quay Market; or it might have been at Warren's apartment on 4th Avenue near Alma--but I remember the rush of excited talk.

Our hero goes into a coma and finds himself in a world populated only by kids: he's now in a permanent version of our summer-vacation reverie. But it's much more powerful, because now we can introduce adventures and problems that you don't face on your summer vacation--and there's no home to return to at suppertime. Yeah: our guy finds himself in this new, strange world, and doesn't know what's happened, where he is. He wants to go home to supper--but doesn't know where that is now, or how to get there. And of course, getting "home" will mean waking up from his coma! Yes! Of course! That gives our story another thing missing so far: a goal. Our story is about something now: our hero's quest to find his home--which we in the audience will know means consciousness!

You could do so much with this. His friends from the waking world could appear here in unfamiliar forms--they could be his friends down here, too, only he wouldn't realize that he knows them from waking life. And the "dream" nature of the show means we can bring in symbolic and mythical images or themes; we can bring in fear and horror--whatever we want! The "dream" lets us open the floodgates of imagination--we can really let loose!

Excitedly we talked. What would a kid-only world look like? How would it behave, if it were not only missing adults, but maybe were not even aware of adults--had not even heard of them? What if our hero were the only guy here who's ever seen an adult? Yes! That makes him more distinctive, more special and weird in this other world. The kids down here would have their own politics, their own "institutions", their own justice! We, the audience, would learn about it as our hero does, while he explores this strange place.

And meanwhile, in the waking world, our hero's family and friends would be watching over him, trying to get him to wake up. Stimuli from that world might leak down to his dreamworld in transformed guise.

Yes, yes--it was a fantastic idea. Exciting! But as we talked about it over the coming days and weeks, I felt a certain pessimism set in.

"How can you do a show about someone in a coma?" I said. "What network will want that?"

Warren felt that was not a concern. After all, most of the show would be in the dreamworld, where our hero would be alive and well. Yes, I thought, but comas are a downer: they're sad and depressing. We certainly wouldn't want to treat the coma as something comedic; indeed, we'd want to treat it as realistically as possible. But the more realistic we are with the coma, the more dark and un-kidlike the show becomes. So I thought. I started to feel that the idea would be a tough sell, especially as a kids' show.

Therefore, in those dark winter days of 1989, while Warren remained bullish on our boy-in-coma idea, my pessimism caused us to shelve it for the time being to try to come up with other ideas that might be more salable. Our mood was still up: "What's Wrong with Neil?" was about to be broadcast--another milestone for us. I had just turned 30, and felt I had arrived at a career I had long wanted: to be making TV shows of my own.

Warren and I kept at it, meeting in the dim, deserted, and now stylish offices of the Omni-Films suite in the evenings, talking, writing, and still, I'm sure, sometimes laughing. Eager for a series of our own, we kept hammering away.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 2

In yesterday's post I started talking about the origins of the TV series The Odyssey. Today I'll continue.

In December 1985 the Vancouver film producer Michael Chechik called me up to express interest in producing Flash Dispatch, the half-hour pilot script that Warren Easton and I had written about bicycle couriers. I recall driving through snow to meet Michael at La Bodega in the West End, not wanting to postpone the meeting merely because of the weather. I'd met Michael before of course, but things were different when the issue of a project of my own creation was on the table: I was moving to the inside of the industry, I felt.

Michael's enthusiasm was genuine, and this is a huge boost for any writer, who toils mostly in obscurity and self-doubt, and very often in failure. In the world of filmmaking, the highest compliment any producer can give a writer is to form a sincere desire to produce his work. Verbal expressions of praise are only icing on the cake. So, on that cold dark night, in the dim and rather deserted atmosphere of the tapas bar, I basked in the feeling of becoming "real" (sort of like that excellent children's story The Velveteen Rabbit, if you've ever read that: in the story, becoming "real" is the dream and goal of every plush-toy).

Michael, with his electric-blue eyes, neatly trimmed beard, and rather high-pitched, fast-talking voice, expressed his eagerness to make the pilot--but of course there was the matter of getting a broadcaster interested, and funding the production. Indeed, he didn't have the resources even to buy an option on the script, a normal step in the big time when a producer wants to lock down the rights to a particular project so he can see about raising funding to produce it.

That was OK with me. I knew that Michael so far had not produced any drama; he and his two partners at Omni-Films were documentary producers, and in fact had won a Genie Award for their documentary Greenpeace: Voyages to Save the Whales. (Michael's involvement in the movie Walls was more that of a silent partner, as I understood it, rather than as a primary producer of it.) Producing a drama from scratch would be something new for them--as it would be for me and Warren. Michael's newness was one thing that made him open to looking at our work, so I was more than willing for us all to be newbies together.

Michael set the wheels in motion, and had us write (I think) another draft or two of the script, along with supporting material discussing and selling the concept for the TV series. Warren and I were invited in to meet the people at Omni-Films, a small cadre of 20- and 30-somethings operating out of a suite of offices near the top of the Dominion Building, a picturesque 1910 office tower at Hastings and Cambie that was briefly the tallest building in the British Empire (13 stories). We used the Omni word-processor to prepare final drafts of the material.

Now that we were in show business, Warren and I of course had to quit whatever pesky jobs we had and set up as full-time TV and movie writers. I quit my job at ICBC, and Warren and I took to meeting every day, first of all in a spare room at my mother's house, but then soon at our own office in the Dominion Building--a place where, it turned out, you could rent a one-room office with its own sink for $80 a month. We took an 8th-floor terrazzo-floored office facing west over roof parking-lots and looking into the walls of downtown high-rises, furnished it with a friend's old desk and a couple of mismatched chairs, chose the whimsical business name The Megavolt Script Factory, which the landlady put on the building directory down in the marble-floored lobby, and got to work.

Yes: work. What to write? We came up with and submitted show ideas for Canadian series running at that time, like Night Heat (our favorite) and Danger Bay. We started working on a screenplay, The Panda Gap, a Cold War comedy that featured the abduction of politically sensitive panda-bears. And, because we had a telephone and therefore a Yellow Pages listing, we fielded inquiries from young would-be scriptwriters who wanted to join our company. Our gross earnings for the first half of 1986: $0.

Meanwhile, Michael kept pressing to finance Flash Dispatch. There were some exciting moments. I recall him showing us a letter of intent from Jan Rofekamp, at that time a Montreal film distributor, expressing enthusiasm for the script and assuring us that if we could deliver the show, he could certainly find buyers for it internationally. We were feeling more and more "real".

An office in the Omni suite became available, and, in exchange for a continuing "option" on Flash Dispatch, Michael let us have it gratis. The Megavolt Script Factory moved up to the 11th floor, now looking east over the more picturesque Downtown East Side. It was a smaller room, and I think the sink didn't work here, but we were closer to the heart of the action. The people at Omni said that they heard us laughing all day long from the office down the hall. I don't think that that was much of an exaggeration.

As 1986 started drawing to a close, Warren and I were forced to ask ourselves whether we could afford to be professional film and TV writers. Although we did actually earn some scriptwriting income that year--we split $1,000 paid to us by a director who liked our work, and who wanted us to write a sitcom pilot for him about an old-folks' home--the writing contracts were not flooding in as we'd hoped. There was the odd producer or director who wanted us to write something for free--sorry: on "spec"--but these projects were always terrible, and we felt that if we were going to write for free, we might as well do our own material, or at least something we liked.

In short, I was going broke. I also wanted to devote more time to writing a novel I'd started, Truth of the Python, about a Vancouver hypnotherapist who accidentally regresses a client to a past life as the philosopher Pythagoras. Feeling chastened after a year as a "real" TV and movie writer, I returned to my job at ICBC in December 1986, a month before my 28th birthday. Warren stayed on for a time as the lone representative of The Megavolt Script Factory, but eventually he too had to give up the office and find gainful employment.

As for Michael, he hadn't given up on Flash Dispatch. It's just that these things take time...

And as 1987 came in, I had returned to corporate life, and the dream of scriptwriting was apparently a bust, at least for the time being.

To be continued...