Family Guy writer Matt Fleckenstein

Not a Head of the Class fan?

[laughs] He wants to leave it in the past.

Yeah, exactly. That’s not a bad thing.

Well good.

Exactly.

I agree. I had the same reaction when I first saw the show. It’s obviously a show written for tweens but it’s written so adults can enjoy it; which is great. The more I’m on it, the more I really enjoy it. Josh has a great future ahead of him.

Yeah, absolutely.

It’s nice and it fits him because there’s really no one right now doing that kind of stuff.

I’m a staff writer.

We do, but only because Dan wanted it to be covered as a Writer’s Guild show. A lot of other Nick shows aren’t. We get the Writer’s Guild Insurance and all that great stuff. It’s a nice bonus.

Dan’s a really nice and great guy. He’s very open to everyone’s opinions and ideas but he’s also ridiculously talented. He’s had like five or six shows for Nick in the past ten years. He’s got Drake & Josh and Zoey 101 on right now, which are the number one and two shows.

It just goes to show you that someone with some real talent is not just a one note kind of guy. Anyone that versatile is always going to succeed. That’s reassuring to me. Dan is working on doing a new show so hopefully if I can stay with him and always have a job that would be fantastic.

Which is great. Everyone here is great to work with. The hours are great and everything’s been so positive. It ends in two months though.

Both. This is the last season. We’ll be done at the end of March. So I’m looking for a job.

I actually got really lucky. I started here when I was still the writer’s assistant for Family Guy. I had written an episode of Family Guy and they promised me they’d let me write another one in the spring. So once I’m done here, I get to go back there and do another episode.

It’s fantastic.

Oh really? Fuckers.

So you’re a fan of Family Guy?

Did you see the one where Brian went back to college and Peter and the guys formed their own A-Team?

I wrote that one.

Yeah, it aired last November.

Basically it was my turn to write a script. They do it in an order of hierarchy of the writers on the show. [Family Guy creator] Seth MacFarlane had the idea of Brian going back to college. There was probably five or six of us in the room and we talked about that and then we came up with the second story in the episode of The A-Team. Then we wrote out the story out together and I went off and wrote the first draft of it. Once I came back from the first draft, it was a collaborative effort again. So it starts out collaborative, it becomes singular and then it becomes collaborative. Then when you bring the script back in the writer’s room, that’s when people are throwing around jokes to help make it great.

We were just looking for something fun for the guys to do together so we had the idea of them going to an 80’s TV show convention. Then it branched off from there.

That really comes out of Seth. He’s a real pop culture guy and the 80’s was when he was most influenced by pop culture. So that’s where a lot of stuff is drawn from. It was great getting to see the guys as The A-Team driving around and destroying the town thinking they were doing good.

I started as a production assistant there six years ago.

There’s this thing that floats in LA called the UTA job list. It’s this list of all these great jobs and I saw one that said “production assistant for primetime animated show.” I was hoping it was Family Guy so I sent my stuff in and nothing happened for a while. Then two months later I got a phone call to interview for Family Guy. I went in and the woman who interviewed me I knew from college.

That sealed the deal for me.

Just a bunch of PA jobs, I was on a TV show called Rude Awakenings right before that. I probably had ten or so production assistant credits.

The biggest thing was that I had experience driving around town, dropping stuff off, using copy machines and that kind of crap. It’s not great but that’s what they were looking for and that’s what I had.

The woman who hired me knew I wanted to be a writer. So she told me that the path was to become his assistant and then the writer’s assistant. I lucked out because his assistant left town so he bumped me up to his assistant. Then we were in that weird gray zone where we weren’t sure if we were going to be picked up or canceled so they had to let the writer’s assistant go. So basically I was Seth’s assistant and then default writer’s assistant. Eventually I moved fully into writer’s assistant. So I lucked out twice.

Yeah, absolutely. Every writer’s assistant wants to be a writer. In most writer’s rooms, people recognize that. Your primary job is to sit there and type and make sure you get everything down. But if there’s a lull and you have a joke you can throw it out and hope to God that they like it. I can’t think of an early joke I wrote but I remember one from a recent episode that aired. It was at Congress and we see that it is in session. At the top of the scene a congressman says, “Alright, so the motion carries, the janitor’s new name is Sweepy.” The joke is that they’re not voting on anything important, they’re voting for the janitor’s nickname.

They went to Steve first but I think he was going to be working on another book and he just didn’t have time to do the comic books. So they talked to me and Seth’s current assistant. Seth’s assistant ended up doing something else so all three comic books fell into my lap. I was excited that Seth saw enough in me to give me that opportunity to do it.

Basically the comic books are a hybrid between a traditional comic book and what Steve wrote with the guidebook [Family Guy: Stewie's Guide to World Domination]. 30 pages or so will be a Family Guy story. Then another ten or 12 pages interspersed throughout the comic book will be Stewie’s Hundred Ways to Kill Lois. Then the next is going to be a Peter guidebook and then Chris or Brian.

I read those a while ago and I had the same reaction.

The biggest thing was when I wrote a lot of the book and then found out that we can’t portray any celebrity likenesses. So we can’t take a random shot at a celebrity or spoof a show that’s on the air. Which is a lot of what Family Guy does, so that was the first hurdle to get across. But in the beginning it was hard because Family Guy’s famous for taking a joke and letting it go on for so long. I tried to do something like that and realized that three pages of working the same joke was a lot when there is only 42 pages. So it was difficult at first to get over those things but I really tried to keep a lot of what makes the show great. I tried to keep the very intense physical humor. I’ve maintained the cutaways to jokes and the flashbacks and movie and TV references as much as I could without portraying celebrities. But I guess people are just going to have to read it and see what they think.

I know a little bit and obviously I’m learning more as I go along. I’ve heard people complaining about breaking up the comic with prose so I’m going to put a nod or two to that. Hopefully that will satiate some of those fans, calm it down a little bit and let them at least acknowledge that we know we’re not doing a traditional comic.

I was a bit of one as a kid. But I never really got that into the world. With writing them I’ve really come to enjoy the process and the limitations. You have to restrict things to one panel, so you have to write things as clearly as possible. It has become loads of fun.

I turn in the script and that goes through publishing. They pass it on to FOX, and their standards chief and their legal people go through it. Creatively I know stuff is being passed to Seth. Before I wrote it I called him and went over the basic story just to make sure he was onboard with the story I wrote.

It is pretty much all going to be stand alone stuff. That’s what Seth’s most comfortable with. I originally wanted to do things that I thought we would never and could never do on the show. I was going to take the three books and make it three acts of the show and in the first one everybody dies. Then we’d follow them through the afterlife when they’re stuck in purgatory or whatever. I had this whole thing mapped out and I talked to Seth and he said we would never do this on the show so I changed the story. But it’s all basically stand alone things. We’ll carry over certain jokes but it’s not going to advance anything.

Yeah, it has been. I have to write three episodes and take out half of it to keep it in the panels but I can’t do anything drastic or crazy and make it as palatable for fans as possible. It has taken longer than I expected it to and I just pray to God it’s worth it.

Yeah, I think that’s what their goal is. After they publish all three issues they will collect it in a bound book. I know the original notion is that they want someone who is not a comic book fan to pick up this book. I’d love to do book signings like Steve’s been doing. He said it was a little weird at first, but also lots of fun.

Well, first of all I’m 27.

[laughs] I just want to work, man. I want to have a job.

But I’ve actually been lucky enough to work on all different kinds of shows and I love it all. I would love to go back to Family Guy. But I would also love to do live action. I wrote a pilot last year that was live action. For TV I like doing comedy no MFer what form it’s in.

We took a couple as well but that was about it. It really never bothered anybody. It’s all just been seen as rivalry and I think a little jealousy. Their ratings and popularity are dropping a little bit. With our show, clearly the fans spoke up and really loved the show. I know that Seth talked to some of the people over there and they say it’s all in good fun so that’s how we’re taking it.

[laughs] Nice.

He loves it, right?

I think Seth talked to Mike and he said how much he liked the show. I think it’s great that the pot shots from both sides get people talking about the show.

I grew up in Buffalo, New York.

I went to Syracuse University.

I was at the communications school. TV, radio and film, focused on writing.

It was comedy. When my brother and I were growing up we were always shooting stuff with our friends with our parents’ camcorders. My brother and I loved Naked Gun so we did this Naked Gun spoof trilogy, cleverly titled The Clothed Bullet. We would put on my Dad’s old suits and fight on the roof. We loved doing it and then I realized I could do it as a career. So I went to college and here I am now. I came out to LA with a woman who is now my wife. We have 15 month old son and another coming at the end of May.

I’m done at Drake & Josh here in the middle of March. I’m actually going to talk to producers this week. I’m definitely going to write another episode of Family Guy, probably in April. Then from there I’m hoping they will bring me on full time.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck