Whether he thinks so or not, in a very short time Bryan Fuller has come to be renowned as a creative genius. Its hard to dispute that claim when hes created one show, Dead Like Me and co-created Wonderfalls with Todd Holland. Both shows will be remembered for a long time and Star Trek fans will ooze their jeans for years to come because he wrote for Deep Space Nine and Voyager.
Wonderfalls was on FOX for only for four episodes last year but the DVD set includes nine unaired episodes, a documentary on the making of the show and has commentary on many different episodes by cast and crew.
Wonderfalls is the story of a young woman played by Caroline Dhavernas who even though she has a degree in philosophy from Brown University has decided to live in a trailer and work at a tourist gift shop in Niagara Falls. Her life takes an unexpected turn when tchochtkes start talking to her and as she starts listening she changes people's lives in unexpected ways.
Go to FOXs website to buy the DVD set of Wonderfalls
Daniel Robert Epstein: Im a fan of Dead Like Me but I had never seen Wonderfalls until I was sent the DVD.
Bryan Fuller: Which is why we were cancelled.
DRE: What does having reluctant and obnoxious main characters do for the show?
BF: I think most people are reluctant and obnoxious so for me it grounds it in reality.
DRE: What I noticed is that it helps remove a cheesiness aspect by having the main characters make obnoxious comments about their actions and the things going on around them. It removes the viewers chance to make fun of the show because the characters are already making fun of it.
BF: There is definitely that and I think Jayes behavior would be anyones behavior in that situation. Shes a snarky character so shes going to be snarky about the things that she encounters in her life. When tchochtkes start talking, let the snark reign.
DRE: I watched the documentary thats on the Wonderfalls DVD set and I was surprised that you and Todd Holland said that this was god talking to Jaye.
BF: It depends on how you define god. I think I define god much more loosely than most people because I have a lot of problems with the specificity of the definitions of god. For me god is something that is greater than you. It could be consciousness or even the fact that we are alive and walking around. Those things are awesome to me and awe inspiring. Its a mystery worthy of worship. But as far as god as the white man with the beard and the robes that sits in heaven and punishes you when you are bad, I think thats really fucked up. I cant get behind that in any way. When I say god I mean a force in the universe thats bigger than me, thats all I know and I cant quantify it.
DRE: Are shows like Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me, an attempt to explain god to yourself or do you have a very clear idea of what he means to you?
BF: See I cant even get behind the capital H E of it all. Its just a thing that we dont know about and we have no understanding of. But I think everybody who has a brain realizes that the space between their ears is infinite and not five inches wide is sort of godly to me. Its just so big and complex but probably so simple at the same time. I dont think it has anything to do with communion wafers, heaven or hell but I think there is something going on that is bigger than us. I dont need to know any more than that. I dont need to know the end of the book before I get there. With Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls there is an active spiritual element to those shows that is hard to define with the standard religions that we have available to us. Im not pro-religion or anti-religion but Im just pro-respect for life.
DRE: What religion were you raised with?
BF: I was raised with some fucked Catholic shit.
DRE: And thats why you are the way you are.
BF: [laughs] I remember when I was a kid and I was like eight or nine. There was this priest at church and he was saying how people need to be contributing more to the basket and blah blah blah. He also said how there needs to be a section of the church for the people who dont contribute and it wouldnt have lighting, speakers or heat. My nine year old brain said Thats fucked up and not Christian. It all just rang so wrong so I had to pick out the things I liked about religion like being kind to your fellow man and respect life, and then leave it at that.
DRE: Do you practice any organized religion now?
BF: No not at all. I havent set foot in a church in eons. I made my mother cry when I was in college when I told her I didnt believe in the god that she did. Its too many rules that I dont apply. Im not big on rules unless they have a good purpose.
DRE: Why the Viewmaster motif in Wonderfalls?
BF: Its the kind of kitschy tourist flare of Niagara Falls and it sort of went along with the wax lion you would get at a zoo. Its something that has a nostalgic charm to it. It just felt they were in the same grocery aisle of nostalgic charm [laughs].
DRE: I think a lot of what hooks you into your specific audience is that there is certain hipness to your work whether its the camera moves or the obnoxious characters. Is all that stuff conscious to you when youre creating a show?
BF: The first responsibility of a television writer is to write a show that they would watch themselves. Im just doing what I would want to see. Im generally a happy person but I definitely have a pissy side so each of the characters brings out a trait in the writer and magnifies it.
DRE: Ive never watched an episode of Star Trek: Voyager but Im going to go out on a limb and say it wasnt your hipness that attracted them to your writing.
BF: The Star Trek thing was really interesting because it was my first gig and I got it out of their open script submission policy. I simply wrote a script and submitted it. They liked the script, didnt buy it but invited me to come in and pitch. I pitched the same story and it sold. Then I sold another and they gave me a story to rewrite then I got hired based on that. What Star Trek did teach me was structure and story breaking skills. Eventually it became frustrating because that structure and that type of story telling is so specific that it can be suffocating.
In my mid-20s I figured out I wanted to be a television writer because I was watching an episode of Deep Space Nine and I suddenly just got it. I saw the code and realized how they tell stories. I never fancied myself being anything but a Star Trek writer because I was such a Star Trek geek. I had all the action figures and everything. It wasnt until after I did Star Trek that I figured out I wanted to do more than this. During the last year of Voyager I sat down with my agent and asked if I should write a spec script of West Wing or Angel or something original. I told him about Dead Like Me which at the time I was calling Dead Girl. He said I should write it because he could sell it so I wrote it on spec and then my agent sold it within a few months.
DRE: Thats wild.
BF: It was a very cool circuitous series of fortunate events.
DRE: Wonderfalls was cancelled after four episodes. Is there anything that you feel you contributed to the show not finding an audience?
BF: I think it was just the general tone of the show. The notes we kept getting from the network and the studio was that the main character was not likable. Our argument was that shes intensely likable because shes like girls this age. She has cynicism because if you interact with anyone in their teens and 20s you will find that they have a tremendous amount of cynicism. One of the things that FOX did was all this research on, what Gen-Y is today?
DRE: Was it like the article that Bianca wanted to write in episode two?
BF: Yes. At our first meeting when we got picked up they gave us this thing they downloaded from the internet about how these girls feel. It was so mechanical and intellectualized. It had nothing to do with feeling whatsoever but more about parents trying to figure out why their little girl is such a bitch. It was interesting because networks really want to pigeonhole their audience in such a way that it covers all their bases and sometimes they cover them so much that you cant see them.
DRE: Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
BF: Im really proud of the show. The first week after the cancellation I was such a mess and really upset. I was sending little wax lions and writing letters to every network trying to get the show picked up. We came close at Lifetime but what screwed us there was that the studio was talking about releasing the show on DVD so it didnt make sense to a studio to put out a show that was going to be on DVD by the end of the year.
DRE: An unfortunate series of events.
BF: It all sort of worked out in the end and what I am happiest about with Wonderfalls is that within those 13 episodes there is a beginning, middle and an end so you leave that universe with some satisfaction.
DRE: Why do studios hire people who have done these smaller projects someplace else, that have these unique voices and then are surprised when that new show isnt super successful?
BF: I think everybody wants to take the gamble that it will turn into an X-Files. They did the same number on our show that they did with X-Files. They didnt believe in the show, they slapped it on Friday nights at 9 and it never dipped below the ratings expectations because they were never that high. Then X-Files collected an audience, so they want shows to be a breakout hit. We were told by FOX that Wonderfalls was their best reviewed one hour show in the history of the network. Television is not all that different from movies in that if you have a product you want people to be aware of you have to launch it. ABC launched Lost and Desperate Housewives like summer movie blockbusters. Most networks will choose one or two shows to get behind and spend that money on. Wonderfalls was not one of those shows because they didnt think it had those things that would appeal to a mass audience. It wasnt boobies on the beach. I wish they had got behind Wonderfalls a tenth of how they got behind North Shore. They didnt see the commercial appeal because our main character, while stunningly beautiful, was a bit of a tomboy. She was never in dress and although you did see her perfect stomach with a bare midriff. With the advertising, we werent like Dont you want to fuck Caroline Dhavernas?
In retrospect maybe if we had sexed her up a bit more but that would have been a choice that wasnt in the right direction. As it is I dont have a lot of regrets with the show because Im very happy with most of the episodes though there are one or two that are a bit weaker. But for the most part the studio let us do the show we wanted to except for the lesbian stuff.
DRE: Like what?
BF: There was a lesbian scene with peanut butter that was hot but tasteful. They told us, Take that shit out! It was odd because they are fine with chicks kissing on reality shows or Fastlane but when it came to having a respectable lesbian mature relationship that wasnt being played for jokes or exploitation they had a problem with it. We would get all these letters from the studio that said, under no circumstances could these womens lips touch.
DRE: Were you overeducated and unemployed as Jaye Tyler has been described?
BF: No I actually never made it all the way through college. I went to USC film school but I couldnt afford it so I had to drop out. I started temping and I did it for five years before I got my first Star Trek writing gig.
DRE: I was watching Wonderfalls and its so wild that I just couldnt believe it ever got on a major network. This is a show that makes Dead Like Me seem normal and thats a compliment. Was the fact that it was such a bizarre show, known amongst the actors?
BF: I think they got that it was special and it was great working with this cast because they were so enthusiastic about the work. Actors arent always enthusiastic about what theyre doing. On Star Trek: Voyager, Robert Beltran would be mocking the dialogue and the writers on the dailies. Wonderfalls was a situation where everyone was excited about reading the scripts. It wasnt about going through it and counting lines but what story was being told. It was special in that way.
DRE: What made you decide to cast William Sadler as a nice father type?
BF: He just came in to audition but he is a nice guy. For the audition he had written a Republican folk song so he performed it for us. It was better than anything I could write in that regard. He just got the wink of the character and how we were sending up the right wing family with a crazy liberal daughter.
He was such a delight to work with because hes done it all and its really interesting to talk to him about his career. I love talking to him about the roles that were harder for him. He said that his role in The Green Mile was really difficult because he was the father of the murdered children. He said preparing for it was the worst experience of his life because he had to sit there imagining his children dead all the time. He didnt like being in that place but thats the kind of actor he is.
DRE: Have you had a chance to see him in Kinsey yet?
BF: Its on my list but I heard he was fantastic in it. Evidently it was a lot heavier and darker before they cut it because he told me they cut out some shit in there with him fucking babies.
DRE: Did he tell you the story of his nude scene from Die Hard 2?
BF: No!
DRE: If you go on his official website you can download the clip of him at a convention talking about it. Apparently he didnt know he was going to be nude until the day of when [director] Renny Harlin told him so.
BF: Was he comfortable with it?
DRE: I think up until then it was the biggest check he had ever gotten up.
Two episodes into watching the show, my fianc gets up and goes Thats the woman from Mommie Dearest!
BF: [laughs] A friend of mine was asking me if I was fag enough to ask Diana Scarwid about Mommie Dearest and I said, no but I was definitely fag enough to ask her about Psycho 3. She sort of stared at me when I went Remember when you pushed that nun down the bell tower at the beginning? She just said, stop talking.
DRE: Psycho 3 isnt that bad plus Anthony Perkins directed it.
BF: It isnt a bad movie but I am such a big obscure horror movie fan.
DRE: Me too!
BF: Yknow Katie Finneran was in the remake of Night of the Living Dead.
DRE: Yeah, she was the girlfriend of the kid that shot the gas pump and blew it up.
BF: Right, way to go asshole [laughs]. If anyone has ever been in a horror movie then Im all about it.
DRE: Tim Minear came from the Joss Whedon camp where he worked on Angel and Firefly. How was it working with him as executive producer/writer?
BF: I learned a lot from Tim in terms of story structure and just how to run a show, like working with the writers and doing rewrites. There is a lot that I learned from him that Im walking away from Wonderfalls with so Im eager to apply a lot of those things on the next show.
DRE: What is the next show?
BF: Im still on my deal with 20th Century Fox so I am doing a pilot for NBC produced by them. Right now its called The Assistants but that title may change. Basically its about the offices of the Dr. Marty show which essentially is a fictionalized version of Dr. Phil if he were Bill O'Reilly. Its about the assistants that work in that office like Dr. Martys assistant, his lawyers assistant, his financial advisors assistant and a tabloid publishers assistant. Half of the assistants are trying to save Dr. Marty from himself while the other half are looking to exploit him. Its about ambition and what you do for ambition set in this heightened environment. I think there is a great opportunity to skewer what is happening in the media. Take a look at Bill OReilly, here is a guy who has a history of active misogyny in business meetings. He did this stuff with his fellow employee, but who knows what her role was in all of that, but the bottom line is that this guy is an asshole and he got away with what he did. So its sort of how that would happen from an assistants point of view.
DRE: Is it an hour long show?
BF: Yes its an hour long comedy. In fact its being developed by the comedy people at NBC, not the drama people, because they are very excited about exploring a new format. I think hour long comedy is the genre I like to do because you can do some absurdist stuff but you can get away with it because youre grounded in emotion.
DRE: How did the cancellation of Dead Like Me affect you?
BF: It was unfortunate on one hand because it was such a great cast and crew. Then on the other hand it was closure to a really painful experience dealing with MGM as a studio. Its one of those quintessential life experiences because its beautiful, ugly, painful, rewarding, proud and humiliating. The relationship between MGM and Showtime was a love/hate one so I was constantly being caught in the middle of how each one saw the show. I would get calls from the network without the studio on the phone telling me to do things and vice versa. Then they wouldnt confer with each other. I wasnt blameless for the difficulty because I would question them a lot. It was really hard to navigate but there were so many fantastic things about doing it such as it being the first show I created.
DRE: Would you try to pit them against one another to try to get what you wanted?
BF: There was definitely plenty of opportunity for that but it was so sticky and messy that it was hard enough to keep everything straight by being honest. It was definitely one of the coolest experiences of my life because I got to make a show that I created but there wasnt a lot of trust on the studios end for me because I didnt have experience. MGM wasnt allowing me to hire the people I wanted to hire and they were forcing their MGM people on me. I would come along and say that this guy was incompetent and they thought I was being a big uppity dick. I could have handled that a lot better but there was definitely a lot of bad behavior on the studios side.
DRE: Were you able to get closure for the show?
BF: Not really. I just sort of got closure with the experience. I talked to a couple of the cast members afterwards which was healing in a way because I was struggling to make the best show under those circumstances such as having no budget.
One of the difficulties came out of the fact that I had just written the remake of Carrie for MGM. That was a show that they had completely underbudgeted to the point where we couldnt even afford to do the prom. Their reasoning was that we saw the prom in the original so we didnt need to do one now. I was like Are you fucking kidding me? We ended getting several million more to do the show as scripted and the same situation happened with the Dead Like Me pilot. We had a certain amount of money so I figured we would cut the script in half then shoot that. Then the network got involved and told the studio they had to give us more money. For the studio I think there was some kind of punishment involved because since I had gotten my way on Carrie remake and I had gotten my way on Dead Like Me. That vindictiveness came out in the form of seriously underbudgeting Dead Like Me to the point where it became really impossible to produce. If you look at the first season of 13 episodes of Dead Like Me there are two clip shows which is unheard of. Our budget was so small that to make it to the end of the season we had to do two clip shows.
Incompetence is a strong word to use because I have to take blame for my role in how things went down but MGM sucks. Im openly gay and I had an argument with a guy who works at Showtime over whether Rebecca Gayheart is beautiful or not. I was like Shes a fucking supermodel and the Noxzema girl, what are you talking about? He would say How do you know if women are attractive?
DRE: Thats the stupidest thing I ever heard.
BF: That was the tenor of the production conversations. Then after I left the show they made the gay character on the show straight. There was a whole storyline set up in the Dead Like Me pilot that began when Georges dad at the funeral gets a hug from this guy. George sees this and thinks Thats an awfully long hug for two adult men. Then there was an episode down the road that was going to have George discover that her dad is having an affair with one of his male graduate students and what she realizes is how much more valuable the life that she lost was because she actually shouldnt have existed because her dad is gay. When I left they had him fuck a girl. That was heartbreaking and the biggest kick in the nuts from the studio. But it wasnt entirely surprising considering their behavior up to that point.
DRE: I got to speak to Callum Blue recently. He said that you are such a genius that it seems like you are on acid all the time.
BF: Im occasionally stoned on the marijuana but thats as deviant as I get as far as substances. I think its that weird things interest me. Weird shit comes out of my mouth which may seem like genius to some people but its just weird.
DRE: I read you are doing an animated series based on Mike Mignolas comic book The Amazing Screw-On Head. When did you first read that comic?
BF: I first read it because of [Carrie producer] Mark Stern. We became really good friends during Carrie because we would hang out in the hotel room and gossip like hens. He became the executive VP of program development at Sci-Fi Channel so he sent over the comic book and told me to take a look. I read it and thought it was fucking brilliant.
DRE: I love that comic book.
BF: Mark asked me what I thought about adapting it and I said I would do dirty things to clean people to get a chance to do that. Its such a great universe to go play in but there wasnt a huge amount of support for it at Sci-Fi. In fact of the four executives and [President of Sci-Fi Channel] Bonnie Hammer, two said that they didnt get it and the other two were like, lets go for it. Bonnie Hammer was the tie breaker; she said that she didnt really get it but she trusted us as being more of the demographic for Sci-Fi Channel than she is.
I did an outline, wrote a script and I got notes from Mike Mignola because I very much wanted to make him happy. The initial draft of the outline did all those things the network wanted in terms of relatability because its a very weird universe. So I came up with some stuff and Mignola hated it because it wasnt the comic book. After my Dead Like Me experience I told him I respected that. Mignola is a fantastic artist but hes not a television writer so hes got to trust me in that area but I think that trust was very hard to come by with that first draft and outline. I had all this backstory with Lincoln fighting Screw-On Head and Mignola was like, dont do that. So I scaled that way back. There have to be some changes to make it television friendly because the story style and the structure of the comic book is so absurdist that people would watch and not understand. Now Emperor Zombie used to be Screw-On Heads manservant so there is this subtext of servitude. I also beefed up the triangle between Emperor Zombie, Screw-On Head and Mr. Groin. Also the vampire chick used to be Screw-On Heads girlfriend before Emperor Zombie turned her into a vampire and turned her against him. I wanted to show relationships so that when these people are in a room together its not just weird people in a room but weird people who have relationships with each other.
I want to be very careful with him and make sure he knows that he created show and I am honoring that creation as opposed to taking it in directions that are completely opposed to what he was trying to do with the comic. Then I did another draft of the script, I got more notes from Mike Mignola so I did his notes and now I am waiting for notes from the studio. As soon as thats figured out I imagine we will start casting.
DRE: Do you know who will be directing it?
BF: We talked to a director named Seth Kearsley about directing it, hes not signed but he is the guy we want. I wrote the script as if it were a Monty Python sketch. So I imagined a lot of the characters talking with that Monty Python cadence and Seth totally got that. Were all really intent on having a really unique feel to this series, like a western anime with a Monty Python vibe. In fact, there is a lot of dialogue I took right out of the book.
DRE: I know Mignola was executive producer of Hellboy and Guillermo Del Toro kept as close to his style as he could and he was the character designer for Disneys Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Are you planning on handling out Mignolas drawings to the artists who will be doing the show?
BF: Mignola is as involved as he possible can be. A lot of the character designs and drawings are done because we want to stay close to the comic book. There is some adapting to do and there are new characters that arent in the comic so hopefully hell be designing those. He wants to do that but its just a matter of his schedule. Were also talking about getting Dave Stewart, who does the color palette for the comic, to do the palette for the cartoon. Its all about bringing the comic book world to life.
DRE: Do you know how many episodes youll be doing yet?
BF: No, not yet. What has to happen is that Sci-Fi has to give their next round of notes. Also they arent a big network that spends a lot of money on their shows so what happened is that Jason Netter, who is executive producing this with me, found some Korean financing so we could do a nice production of the show. Sci-Fi will get to air it and then this Korean financier gets money from the DVD release. The whole series is about the real history so you start off with a historical event then you tell the real weird story thats not in books. After the pilot I have some ideas for future episodes like something with President Harrison, who died from the flu one month into office, it turns out he didnt die from pneumonia. The fluid in his lungs was part of a genetic experiment to give him everlasting life so he could be president forever but instead it turned him into a frog creature so now he lives at the bottom of the Mississippi and launches an attack on the nation with his frogmen.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Wonderfalls was on FOX for only for four episodes last year but the DVD set includes nine unaired episodes, a documentary on the making of the show and has commentary on many different episodes by cast and crew.
Wonderfalls is the story of a young woman played by Caroline Dhavernas who even though she has a degree in philosophy from Brown University has decided to live in a trailer and work at a tourist gift shop in Niagara Falls. Her life takes an unexpected turn when tchochtkes start talking to her and as she starts listening she changes people's lives in unexpected ways.
Go to FOXs website to buy the DVD set of Wonderfalls
Daniel Robert Epstein: Im a fan of Dead Like Me but I had never seen Wonderfalls until I was sent the DVD.
Bryan Fuller: Which is why we were cancelled.
DRE: What does having reluctant and obnoxious main characters do for the show?
BF: I think most people are reluctant and obnoxious so for me it grounds it in reality.
DRE: What I noticed is that it helps remove a cheesiness aspect by having the main characters make obnoxious comments about their actions and the things going on around them. It removes the viewers chance to make fun of the show because the characters are already making fun of it.
BF: There is definitely that and I think Jayes behavior would be anyones behavior in that situation. Shes a snarky character so shes going to be snarky about the things that she encounters in her life. When tchochtkes start talking, let the snark reign.
DRE: I watched the documentary thats on the Wonderfalls DVD set and I was surprised that you and Todd Holland said that this was god talking to Jaye.
BF: It depends on how you define god. I think I define god much more loosely than most people because I have a lot of problems with the specificity of the definitions of god. For me god is something that is greater than you. It could be consciousness or even the fact that we are alive and walking around. Those things are awesome to me and awe inspiring. Its a mystery worthy of worship. But as far as god as the white man with the beard and the robes that sits in heaven and punishes you when you are bad, I think thats really fucked up. I cant get behind that in any way. When I say god I mean a force in the universe thats bigger than me, thats all I know and I cant quantify it.
DRE: Are shows like Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me, an attempt to explain god to yourself or do you have a very clear idea of what he means to you?
BF: See I cant even get behind the capital H E of it all. Its just a thing that we dont know about and we have no understanding of. But I think everybody who has a brain realizes that the space between their ears is infinite and not five inches wide is sort of godly to me. Its just so big and complex but probably so simple at the same time. I dont think it has anything to do with communion wafers, heaven or hell but I think there is something going on that is bigger than us. I dont need to know any more than that. I dont need to know the end of the book before I get there. With Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls there is an active spiritual element to those shows that is hard to define with the standard religions that we have available to us. Im not pro-religion or anti-religion but Im just pro-respect for life.
DRE: What religion were you raised with?
BF: I was raised with some fucked Catholic shit.
DRE: And thats why you are the way you are.
BF: [laughs] I remember when I was a kid and I was like eight or nine. There was this priest at church and he was saying how people need to be contributing more to the basket and blah blah blah. He also said how there needs to be a section of the church for the people who dont contribute and it wouldnt have lighting, speakers or heat. My nine year old brain said Thats fucked up and not Christian. It all just rang so wrong so I had to pick out the things I liked about religion like being kind to your fellow man and respect life, and then leave it at that.
DRE: Do you practice any organized religion now?
BF: No not at all. I havent set foot in a church in eons. I made my mother cry when I was in college when I told her I didnt believe in the god that she did. Its too many rules that I dont apply. Im not big on rules unless they have a good purpose.
DRE: Why the Viewmaster motif in Wonderfalls?
BF: Its the kind of kitschy tourist flare of Niagara Falls and it sort of went along with the wax lion you would get at a zoo. Its something that has a nostalgic charm to it. It just felt they were in the same grocery aisle of nostalgic charm [laughs].
DRE: I think a lot of what hooks you into your specific audience is that there is certain hipness to your work whether its the camera moves or the obnoxious characters. Is all that stuff conscious to you when youre creating a show?
BF: The first responsibility of a television writer is to write a show that they would watch themselves. Im just doing what I would want to see. Im generally a happy person but I definitely have a pissy side so each of the characters brings out a trait in the writer and magnifies it.
DRE: Ive never watched an episode of Star Trek: Voyager but Im going to go out on a limb and say it wasnt your hipness that attracted them to your writing.
BF: The Star Trek thing was really interesting because it was my first gig and I got it out of their open script submission policy. I simply wrote a script and submitted it. They liked the script, didnt buy it but invited me to come in and pitch. I pitched the same story and it sold. Then I sold another and they gave me a story to rewrite then I got hired based on that. What Star Trek did teach me was structure and story breaking skills. Eventually it became frustrating because that structure and that type of story telling is so specific that it can be suffocating.
In my mid-20s I figured out I wanted to be a television writer because I was watching an episode of Deep Space Nine and I suddenly just got it. I saw the code and realized how they tell stories. I never fancied myself being anything but a Star Trek writer because I was such a Star Trek geek. I had all the action figures and everything. It wasnt until after I did Star Trek that I figured out I wanted to do more than this. During the last year of Voyager I sat down with my agent and asked if I should write a spec script of West Wing or Angel or something original. I told him about Dead Like Me which at the time I was calling Dead Girl. He said I should write it because he could sell it so I wrote it on spec and then my agent sold it within a few months.
DRE: Thats wild.
BF: It was a very cool circuitous series of fortunate events.
DRE: Wonderfalls was cancelled after four episodes. Is there anything that you feel you contributed to the show not finding an audience?
BF: I think it was just the general tone of the show. The notes we kept getting from the network and the studio was that the main character was not likable. Our argument was that shes intensely likable because shes like girls this age. She has cynicism because if you interact with anyone in their teens and 20s you will find that they have a tremendous amount of cynicism. One of the things that FOX did was all this research on, what Gen-Y is today?
DRE: Was it like the article that Bianca wanted to write in episode two?
BF: Yes. At our first meeting when we got picked up they gave us this thing they downloaded from the internet about how these girls feel. It was so mechanical and intellectualized. It had nothing to do with feeling whatsoever but more about parents trying to figure out why their little girl is such a bitch. It was interesting because networks really want to pigeonhole their audience in such a way that it covers all their bases and sometimes they cover them so much that you cant see them.
DRE: Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
BF: Im really proud of the show. The first week after the cancellation I was such a mess and really upset. I was sending little wax lions and writing letters to every network trying to get the show picked up. We came close at Lifetime but what screwed us there was that the studio was talking about releasing the show on DVD so it didnt make sense to a studio to put out a show that was going to be on DVD by the end of the year.
DRE: An unfortunate series of events.
BF: It all sort of worked out in the end and what I am happiest about with Wonderfalls is that within those 13 episodes there is a beginning, middle and an end so you leave that universe with some satisfaction.
DRE: Why do studios hire people who have done these smaller projects someplace else, that have these unique voices and then are surprised when that new show isnt super successful?
BF: I think everybody wants to take the gamble that it will turn into an X-Files. They did the same number on our show that they did with X-Files. They didnt believe in the show, they slapped it on Friday nights at 9 and it never dipped below the ratings expectations because they were never that high. Then X-Files collected an audience, so they want shows to be a breakout hit. We were told by FOX that Wonderfalls was their best reviewed one hour show in the history of the network. Television is not all that different from movies in that if you have a product you want people to be aware of you have to launch it. ABC launched Lost and Desperate Housewives like summer movie blockbusters. Most networks will choose one or two shows to get behind and spend that money on. Wonderfalls was not one of those shows because they didnt think it had those things that would appeal to a mass audience. It wasnt boobies on the beach. I wish they had got behind Wonderfalls a tenth of how they got behind North Shore. They didnt see the commercial appeal because our main character, while stunningly beautiful, was a bit of a tomboy. She was never in dress and although you did see her perfect stomach with a bare midriff. With the advertising, we werent like Dont you want to fuck Caroline Dhavernas?
In retrospect maybe if we had sexed her up a bit more but that would have been a choice that wasnt in the right direction. As it is I dont have a lot of regrets with the show because Im very happy with most of the episodes though there are one or two that are a bit weaker. But for the most part the studio let us do the show we wanted to except for the lesbian stuff.
DRE: Like what?
BF: There was a lesbian scene with peanut butter that was hot but tasteful. They told us, Take that shit out! It was odd because they are fine with chicks kissing on reality shows or Fastlane but when it came to having a respectable lesbian mature relationship that wasnt being played for jokes or exploitation they had a problem with it. We would get all these letters from the studio that said, under no circumstances could these womens lips touch.
DRE: Were you overeducated and unemployed as Jaye Tyler has been described?
BF: No I actually never made it all the way through college. I went to USC film school but I couldnt afford it so I had to drop out. I started temping and I did it for five years before I got my first Star Trek writing gig.
DRE: I was watching Wonderfalls and its so wild that I just couldnt believe it ever got on a major network. This is a show that makes Dead Like Me seem normal and thats a compliment. Was the fact that it was such a bizarre show, known amongst the actors?
BF: I think they got that it was special and it was great working with this cast because they were so enthusiastic about the work. Actors arent always enthusiastic about what theyre doing. On Star Trek: Voyager, Robert Beltran would be mocking the dialogue and the writers on the dailies. Wonderfalls was a situation where everyone was excited about reading the scripts. It wasnt about going through it and counting lines but what story was being told. It was special in that way.
DRE: What made you decide to cast William Sadler as a nice father type?
BF: He just came in to audition but he is a nice guy. For the audition he had written a Republican folk song so he performed it for us. It was better than anything I could write in that regard. He just got the wink of the character and how we were sending up the right wing family with a crazy liberal daughter.
He was such a delight to work with because hes done it all and its really interesting to talk to him about his career. I love talking to him about the roles that were harder for him. He said that his role in The Green Mile was really difficult because he was the father of the murdered children. He said preparing for it was the worst experience of his life because he had to sit there imagining his children dead all the time. He didnt like being in that place but thats the kind of actor he is.
DRE: Have you had a chance to see him in Kinsey yet?
BF: Its on my list but I heard he was fantastic in it. Evidently it was a lot heavier and darker before they cut it because he told me they cut out some shit in there with him fucking babies.
DRE: Did he tell you the story of his nude scene from Die Hard 2?
BF: No!
DRE: If you go on his official website you can download the clip of him at a convention talking about it. Apparently he didnt know he was going to be nude until the day of when [director] Renny Harlin told him so.
BF: Was he comfortable with it?
DRE: I think up until then it was the biggest check he had ever gotten up.
Two episodes into watching the show, my fianc gets up and goes Thats the woman from Mommie Dearest!
BF: [laughs] A friend of mine was asking me if I was fag enough to ask Diana Scarwid about Mommie Dearest and I said, no but I was definitely fag enough to ask her about Psycho 3. She sort of stared at me when I went Remember when you pushed that nun down the bell tower at the beginning? She just said, stop talking.
DRE: Psycho 3 isnt that bad plus Anthony Perkins directed it.
BF: It isnt a bad movie but I am such a big obscure horror movie fan.
DRE: Me too!
BF: Yknow Katie Finneran was in the remake of Night of the Living Dead.
DRE: Yeah, she was the girlfriend of the kid that shot the gas pump and blew it up.
BF: Right, way to go asshole [laughs]. If anyone has ever been in a horror movie then Im all about it.
DRE: Tim Minear came from the Joss Whedon camp where he worked on Angel and Firefly. How was it working with him as executive producer/writer?
BF: I learned a lot from Tim in terms of story structure and just how to run a show, like working with the writers and doing rewrites. There is a lot that I learned from him that Im walking away from Wonderfalls with so Im eager to apply a lot of those things on the next show.
DRE: What is the next show?
BF: Im still on my deal with 20th Century Fox so I am doing a pilot for NBC produced by them. Right now its called The Assistants but that title may change. Basically its about the offices of the Dr. Marty show which essentially is a fictionalized version of Dr. Phil if he were Bill O'Reilly. Its about the assistants that work in that office like Dr. Martys assistant, his lawyers assistant, his financial advisors assistant and a tabloid publishers assistant. Half of the assistants are trying to save Dr. Marty from himself while the other half are looking to exploit him. Its about ambition and what you do for ambition set in this heightened environment. I think there is a great opportunity to skewer what is happening in the media. Take a look at Bill OReilly, here is a guy who has a history of active misogyny in business meetings. He did this stuff with his fellow employee, but who knows what her role was in all of that, but the bottom line is that this guy is an asshole and he got away with what he did. So its sort of how that would happen from an assistants point of view.
DRE: Is it an hour long show?
BF: Yes its an hour long comedy. In fact its being developed by the comedy people at NBC, not the drama people, because they are very excited about exploring a new format. I think hour long comedy is the genre I like to do because you can do some absurdist stuff but you can get away with it because youre grounded in emotion.
DRE: How did the cancellation of Dead Like Me affect you?
BF: It was unfortunate on one hand because it was such a great cast and crew. Then on the other hand it was closure to a really painful experience dealing with MGM as a studio. Its one of those quintessential life experiences because its beautiful, ugly, painful, rewarding, proud and humiliating. The relationship between MGM and Showtime was a love/hate one so I was constantly being caught in the middle of how each one saw the show. I would get calls from the network without the studio on the phone telling me to do things and vice versa. Then they wouldnt confer with each other. I wasnt blameless for the difficulty because I would question them a lot. It was really hard to navigate but there were so many fantastic things about doing it such as it being the first show I created.
DRE: Would you try to pit them against one another to try to get what you wanted?
BF: There was definitely plenty of opportunity for that but it was so sticky and messy that it was hard enough to keep everything straight by being honest. It was definitely one of the coolest experiences of my life because I got to make a show that I created but there wasnt a lot of trust on the studios end for me because I didnt have experience. MGM wasnt allowing me to hire the people I wanted to hire and they were forcing their MGM people on me. I would come along and say that this guy was incompetent and they thought I was being a big uppity dick. I could have handled that a lot better but there was definitely a lot of bad behavior on the studios side.
DRE: Were you able to get closure for the show?
BF: Not really. I just sort of got closure with the experience. I talked to a couple of the cast members afterwards which was healing in a way because I was struggling to make the best show under those circumstances such as having no budget.
One of the difficulties came out of the fact that I had just written the remake of Carrie for MGM. That was a show that they had completely underbudgeted to the point where we couldnt even afford to do the prom. Their reasoning was that we saw the prom in the original so we didnt need to do one now. I was like Are you fucking kidding me? We ended getting several million more to do the show as scripted and the same situation happened with the Dead Like Me pilot. We had a certain amount of money so I figured we would cut the script in half then shoot that. Then the network got involved and told the studio they had to give us more money. For the studio I think there was some kind of punishment involved because since I had gotten my way on Carrie remake and I had gotten my way on Dead Like Me. That vindictiveness came out in the form of seriously underbudgeting Dead Like Me to the point where it became really impossible to produce. If you look at the first season of 13 episodes of Dead Like Me there are two clip shows which is unheard of. Our budget was so small that to make it to the end of the season we had to do two clip shows.
Incompetence is a strong word to use because I have to take blame for my role in how things went down but MGM sucks. Im openly gay and I had an argument with a guy who works at Showtime over whether Rebecca Gayheart is beautiful or not. I was like Shes a fucking supermodel and the Noxzema girl, what are you talking about? He would say How do you know if women are attractive?
DRE: Thats the stupidest thing I ever heard.
BF: That was the tenor of the production conversations. Then after I left the show they made the gay character on the show straight. There was a whole storyline set up in the Dead Like Me pilot that began when Georges dad at the funeral gets a hug from this guy. George sees this and thinks Thats an awfully long hug for two adult men. Then there was an episode down the road that was going to have George discover that her dad is having an affair with one of his male graduate students and what she realizes is how much more valuable the life that she lost was because she actually shouldnt have existed because her dad is gay. When I left they had him fuck a girl. That was heartbreaking and the biggest kick in the nuts from the studio. But it wasnt entirely surprising considering their behavior up to that point.
DRE: I got to speak to Callum Blue recently. He said that you are such a genius that it seems like you are on acid all the time.
BF: Im occasionally stoned on the marijuana but thats as deviant as I get as far as substances. I think its that weird things interest me. Weird shit comes out of my mouth which may seem like genius to some people but its just weird.
DRE: I read you are doing an animated series based on Mike Mignolas comic book The Amazing Screw-On Head. When did you first read that comic?
BF: I first read it because of [Carrie producer] Mark Stern. We became really good friends during Carrie because we would hang out in the hotel room and gossip like hens. He became the executive VP of program development at Sci-Fi Channel so he sent over the comic book and told me to take a look. I read it and thought it was fucking brilliant.
DRE: I love that comic book.
BF: Mark asked me what I thought about adapting it and I said I would do dirty things to clean people to get a chance to do that. Its such a great universe to go play in but there wasnt a huge amount of support for it at Sci-Fi. In fact of the four executives and [President of Sci-Fi Channel] Bonnie Hammer, two said that they didnt get it and the other two were like, lets go for it. Bonnie Hammer was the tie breaker; she said that she didnt really get it but she trusted us as being more of the demographic for Sci-Fi Channel than she is.
I did an outline, wrote a script and I got notes from Mike Mignola because I very much wanted to make him happy. The initial draft of the outline did all those things the network wanted in terms of relatability because its a very weird universe. So I came up with some stuff and Mignola hated it because it wasnt the comic book. After my Dead Like Me experience I told him I respected that. Mignola is a fantastic artist but hes not a television writer so hes got to trust me in that area but I think that trust was very hard to come by with that first draft and outline. I had all this backstory with Lincoln fighting Screw-On Head and Mignola was like, dont do that. So I scaled that way back. There have to be some changes to make it television friendly because the story style and the structure of the comic book is so absurdist that people would watch and not understand. Now Emperor Zombie used to be Screw-On Heads manservant so there is this subtext of servitude. I also beefed up the triangle between Emperor Zombie, Screw-On Head and Mr. Groin. Also the vampire chick used to be Screw-On Heads girlfriend before Emperor Zombie turned her into a vampire and turned her against him. I wanted to show relationships so that when these people are in a room together its not just weird people in a room but weird people who have relationships with each other.
I want to be very careful with him and make sure he knows that he created show and I am honoring that creation as opposed to taking it in directions that are completely opposed to what he was trying to do with the comic. Then I did another draft of the script, I got more notes from Mike Mignola so I did his notes and now I am waiting for notes from the studio. As soon as thats figured out I imagine we will start casting.
DRE: Do you know who will be directing it?
BF: We talked to a director named Seth Kearsley about directing it, hes not signed but he is the guy we want. I wrote the script as if it were a Monty Python sketch. So I imagined a lot of the characters talking with that Monty Python cadence and Seth totally got that. Were all really intent on having a really unique feel to this series, like a western anime with a Monty Python vibe. In fact, there is a lot of dialogue I took right out of the book.
DRE: I know Mignola was executive producer of Hellboy and Guillermo Del Toro kept as close to his style as he could and he was the character designer for Disneys Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Are you planning on handling out Mignolas drawings to the artists who will be doing the show?
BF: Mignola is as involved as he possible can be. A lot of the character designs and drawings are done because we want to stay close to the comic book. There is some adapting to do and there are new characters that arent in the comic so hopefully hell be designing those. He wants to do that but its just a matter of his schedule. Were also talking about getting Dave Stewart, who does the color palette for the comic, to do the palette for the cartoon. Its all about bringing the comic book world to life.
DRE: Do you know how many episodes youll be doing yet?
BF: No, not yet. What has to happen is that Sci-Fi has to give their next round of notes. Also they arent a big network that spends a lot of money on their shows so what happened is that Jason Netter, who is executive producing this with me, found some Korean financing so we could do a nice production of the show. Sci-Fi will get to air it and then this Korean financier gets money from the DVD release. The whole series is about the real history so you start off with a historical event then you tell the real weird story thats not in books. After the pilot I have some ideas for future episodes like something with President Harrison, who died from the flu one month into office, it turns out he didnt die from pneumonia. The fluid in his lungs was part of a genetic experiment to give him everlasting life so he could be president forever but instead it turned him into a frog creature so now he lives at the bottom of the Mississippi and launches an attack on the nation with his frogmen.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
I have since fallen in love with it and am even more pissed off at stupid corperate TV america that they would steal two great shows!
meh..using "Even though" is not bad grammar. I don't frankly care, it communicates and it's how people phrase that typically.