Crusoe Region 2

This one sneaked by without my hearing about it... the full season is now available on a Region 2 3-disc set, presumably replicating the content of the Region 1 release.

Which will mean no DVD extras, which is a pity. NBC had a behind-the-scenes crew covering just about every aspect of the show's making, and their material generated a healthy number of featurettes for the Crusoe section of the NBC website. Almost none of which I got to see, because the video streams would only play for US users.

Apart from an initial week of meetings where all of the writers got together with the producers in Power's London office, nearly all my work on the show was done from my study in England by phone, email and internet feed. I was in constant and regular touch with producer Jeff Hayes on the island sets (actually a stretch of the Nature's Valley coastline in South Africa), with the Power team in London, and with the NBC and Universal execs in Los Angeles. I saw auditions via video link and we conferenced for notes calls with sometimes as many as eight or nine people on the line.

I never even got close to visiting our South African locations, which could have been useful. I'd have taken a more practical approach to the way I structured the treehouse scenes had I realised that the base and the platform were separated by a number of miles, and a simple dialogue between Friday on the ground and Crusoe on the deck required a complete crew move!

I did get to be a part of UK location scouting in and around York, in a unique approach that was mostly born of necessity. They'd had a couple of Canadian guys working on scripts and a bible, and that hadn't worked out as hoped. Their take on it was close to the book and not the balls-out, gung-ho adventure show that NBC had been promised. Time was now short but then along came the WGA strike, halting all progress; as an outsourced production Crusoe wasn't actually a struck project, but I didn't want to spend the rest of my career explaining as much and so I only came on board when the strike had ended.

Now the clock was really ticking. All we had was Defoe's novel, Power's pitch to NBC, and some brilliant visual concept work from production designer Jonathan Lee. So here's what I proposed, and how it worked out; firstly, before anything else was written, I'd write the full hour's worth of flashback scenes for the whole season. We'd shoot those and then, as the crew was relocating to the South African base, I'd complete and deliver the pilot. Somewhere along the way, the pilot specification grew to a double episode; by then I was well into it and could see that my script was going to be way over. So I was blase about the challenge, and didn't let on that the extra length was actually the solution to a problem.

But the York production date was looming, and preproduction had to begin before the material was actually written. So armed with only an outline and a rough idea of what I was going to do with it, I went out with the team and we looked for places to match the story. In the bar of the Royal York Hotel each evening, we'd go over what we'd seen and I'd improvise and elaborate on the outline, so the team could take away specifics and start doing their jobs. Exploiting the best of what we'd seen, shaping the unwritten script to avoid pitfalls, getting the best out of that fantastic city and some wonderful old houses in the surrounding countryside. As they set to work, I went home and did the same. I have to tell you, it was one of my best writing experiences ever.

As I recall, we pretty much took over York for the May Bank Holiday. They closed down York Minster for us, cleared out all the seating, and let us bring in an enormous crane. We closed the Shambles for a morning. We filled the streets with extras, horses, dogs, goats, and cables. Miles of cables. Not to mention large numbers of Women of a Certain Age craning for a glimpse of Sean Bean.

(There are more pictures from the York shoot in this earlier post.)

Then everyone headed for the sunshine and I stayed behind. Except... heading to the Southern hemisphere meant heading into the South African winter. During those first weeks of shooting, I'd see the uncut rushes coming up the line with our shirtless heroes framed against the sunset on some glorious beach... with the last few seconds of the shot revealing a crew in thermals and puffer jackets, their breath misting in the cold air.

So maybe I didn't miss out too much. And frankly, with the pressure of shooting, there was no time for me to make the journey. It was an experience, all right; my first time working with an American network.

It was a bumpy ride. But so's the Indiana Jones jeep adventure in Disneyland, and people queue up for that.

The Brimstone Boys

More from The Hollywood Reporter on developments in the US version of Eleventh Hour.

I have to tell you, the trade press is where most of my information is coming from. Any direct involvement I might have had in the production was precluded by the exclusivity clause in my Crusoe deal, made within a couple of days of the WGA strike's end; all progress on 11thH had been suspended during the strike period and when the Bruckheimer TV people called ICM to check my availability... well, unfortunately, I wasn't.

I have heard that the pilot show has been shooting and that it's going well.

And I've been told that I get a decent show credit, despite the press coverage that continues to position me lower in the food chain than that 'unnamed Granada executive'.

Anyway, the latest coverage suggests that the creator/producers of the short-lived but influential series Brimstone are being brought in to serve as series showrunners.

Brimstone starred Peter Horton as a dead cop earning his ticket out of Hell by hunting down each of 113 escaped souls. It had texture and energy and was probably too dark for US mainstream TV. Reaper pretty much steals the premise and, being more lightweight fare, has survived better. But Brimstone was the superior show.

Here's what the Reporter says:

In an indication that CBS' pilot Eleventh Hour is headed to series, Sleeper Cell creators Cyrus Voris and Ethan Reiff have been tapped as executive producers/showrunners of the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced drama.

"Hour," from Bruckheimer TV, Warner Bros. TV and Granada TV, is based on the British limited sci-fi series and stars Rufus Sewell as a special science adviser to the government who, with his feisty female bodyguard Rachel (Marley Shelton) in tow, saves people from the worst abuses of science.

CSI visual mastermind Danny Cannon is directing the pilot from a script by feature scribe Mick Davis.

"Hour" has been rumored to go to series since September, when CBS picked up the pilot with a penalty said to amount to a 13-episode production commitment. On the potential series, Voris and Reiff will serve as exec producers alongside Davis, Cannon, Bruckheimer, Jonathan Littman and a Granada executive.

"Hour" falls under Voris and Reiff's overall deal with WBTV. It also extends their relationship with Bruckheimer and CBS. Earlier this development season, the duo penned a treasure-hunting drama for WBTV and Bruckheimer TV, which landed at CBS with a put pilot commitment (HR 8/16).

On the feature side, Voris and Reiff recently penned the spec Nottingham, which sold last year in a seven-figure deal to Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment and has Ridley Scott attached to direct and Russell Crowe attached to star. The two also wrote DreamWorks Animation's upcoming Kung Fu Panda.

Voris and Reiff, who also created and executive produced the series Brimstone, are repped by WMA, Field Entertainment and attorney Dave Feldman.

My understanding was that the series would be getting a new title. But I'm not sure how much longer they can leave it before the old one sticks.

Those Cancelled Golden Globes

“Sadly, it feels like the nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school are trying to cancel the prom. But NBC wants to try to keep that prom alive.”

Lost, in Transition

You know where I came across the pilot episode of Lost? The one with the graphic plane crash and everything? It was part of the in-flight entertainment on a Virgin Atlantic service to the US. I mean, it didn't bother me, but, you know...

Apparently eight episodes of the new season were shot before the WGA strike closed down production. The ABC network has indicated that they'll be shown rather than held back, but hasn't yet said when.

Season three ended in a cliffhanger that neatly flipped the show on its head and refreshed the premise, which I thought was no mean feat. Lost is a show that plays a risky game; tantalise and satisfy but while tantalising more, on and on, with continuous invention and a continuing danger of viewer burnout. Just like on a plane ride, viewers can bale out in mid-flight but there's little-to-no chance of picking up new ones.

We baled early, but only because we found its form of transmission (5 breaks, ignoring the designated act endings, with the same sponsor bumpers repeated with throw-the-remote regularity) unwatchable, and so bought the US complete-season box set and watched that at times of our own choosing.

I'm not saying that Lost is the best thing ever, but when it's good, I do like it. It plays like a feuilleton - constant invention and distraction with the sense of a Big Scheme even though the big scheme itself can only have a vague shape in the creators' minds, and is being defined in the writing rather than designed in advance. And with the sense that anybody could fall into a volcano at any time.

(I know what they've said. That everything's been planned all along. Arse. Even the guys who sold 24 didn't know what was going to happen until they were into production.)

For me it can never end successfully with a make-sense-of-it-all revelation, any more than The Prisoner could... it's all about dread and uncertainty and wondering about what's on the other side of the door. As Stephen King points out in Danse Macabre, the moment you actually open the door all that wonder condenses down into whatever's there.

The only good ending I can imagine is s something like, they find a box that's the answer to everything, look inside it and go "Wow." Like the moment in Lost in Translation where Bill Murray whispers something to Scarlett Johannsen that makes everything OK, and we all have ideas about what it might have been that are unique to ourselves, and which are best not shared. Some people won't have that... a quick Lost in Translation Google shows messageboards with people wanting tips on how they can boost the soundtrack enough to hear what Murray says.

In the meantime I'll endure the dull touchy-feely stuff and bad dialogue ("You okay?" "I was looking for you." "Well, you found me.") for the high-concept elements I'm getting a kick out of, and a trust in the astuteness of makers who know to throw in a good kit-off moment or a bit of mud-wrestling when everything flags.

But this business with the box set permanently altered our attitude to series TV. It's been a liberation. Now disc is our first-choice viewing medium, something I could never have imagined.

Who Needs Them Golden Geese Anyway?

The Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan has written this astute analysis of the changing face of entertainment distribution, and the failure of the networks' negotiators to grasp where their industry's going.

She writes, To put it bluntly, the corporations that control the entertainment industry need to wake up. In the digital age, content creators matter more than distributors.

Unless studio executives begin to view the people who create films and TV shows as their partners, not pesky contractors, it’s the executives who’ll be writing the “death warrant” for the industry, contrary to a blustery statement one anonymous executive made to the New York Times Dec. 1...

As Scott Collins of the LA Times wrote in a recent piece on the growing power of showrunners, “viewers don’t watch networks. They don’t even care about networks. They watch shows. And they don’t care how they get them. That takes a lot of power from the networks. And it hands it to showrunners.”

Ryan points out that the AMPTP is repeating the mistakes of the record industry, which would seem to echo something that yerblogger wrote in this post:

Downloading is going to be the dominant delivery system of the future, no question about it. But the AMPTP's entrepreneurial hardwiring is preventing it from coping with the change... when you let that happen in any field, something different arises and leaves you behind.

Read the full Maureen Ryan article here.

WGA Strike: International Day of Solidarity

The strike called by The Writers Guild of America to secure a structure for future revenues from digital media continues.

Today sees demonstrations of support in London, Toronto, Montreal, Paris, Dublin, Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth.

My favourite story so far is of the homeless person on Hollywood Boulevard holding a handmade sign that read, Bums Support Writers.

Despite attempts to engineer a myth that all those involved in the action are pampered and wealthy, most non-industry people seem to appreciate the principle that the writing generates the money.

And on the wealth thing... the writer's economy is a mosiac of paid work, past work, and speculative endeavour that tends to horrify most people used to the relative security of steady employment. I once saw an American TV scribe chill an entire room when he was asked what happened to those who didn't ascend the ever-narrowing ladder to showrunner heights.

"You fall off the face of the earth," he said simply.

UPDATE:

Read James Moran's first-hand account with pics, and the report from The Writers Guild of Great Britain.

The WGA Strike and the UK Writer

Thursday's Variety carries this article suggesting that American producers have been scouting the UK media scene with a view to using the services of British screenwriters to supply them with material during the WGA strike.

Some people have interpreted this as a unique opportunity for a British writer to 'break in'.

Others - like, people with half a brain and a sense of history - have noted what a CV-killer this could turn out to be.

You think it could be your entree to the US TV industry? Think again. The showrunners and staffers are all out there on the picket lines. Once the A-listers move back in you'd be the Gollum of the business, pelted with stones and driven off shrieking from any place where the work's being done.

One British agent is quoted as saying, "I don't know that any writer would want to be seen as a scab."

To be honest, I'm not sure how substantial these rumours are. On a sheer practical level, no British writer could step in cold on an American project and immediately start delivering to specification. The writing of American drama is a highly structured and goal-oriented team procedure. It's like A E Van Vogt's spaceship factory - a complex facility that can spit out a completed starship every ninety seconds.

The Nature of the Beast

Given that I'm a zillion miles from the action and not even an American writer, this isn't the place to come for front-line news on the WGA strike.

But what's going on out there is an important and necessary step in evolution that's going to affect us all, and we'll be feeling its effects sooner rather than later. Evolution is usually a long and slow process. But occasionally you get a vital adaptation being jump-started by some one-off event.

I reckon this strike is one such event. What's on the table is a necessary reconstruction of our industry's business model. Not the usual selling and distribution issues but the behind-the-scenes, vital-essence, imaginative gruntwork sector on which the entire citadel of entertainment endeavour is raised.

We're in a business that absorbs, develops and exploits new technologies with astonishing speed. But when it comes to the rightful channeling of income from new technologies, caution, delay, and outright avoidance are suddenly the orders of the day.

I'm not going to add my voice to those who portray the AMPTP as an organisation of mendacious, avaricious, unprincipled limbs of Satan (although I'll make an exception for anyone driving through the picket lines with obscene gestures at those whose inner lives provide the entire foundation for their own livelihoods.)

I'm not rushing to criticise because there's no point in despising the entrepreneurial class for simply doing what they do. It's the function of an entrepreneur to pay as little for a creator's work as they can possibly get away with, and to sell it to a customer for as much as they can possibly charge. And then to hold on to as much of the difference as their long arms can carry. That's the nature of the beast, and most of the time it suits us for them to be active and out there.

They'll give writers a fair deal on emergent technologies when they have to. Otherwise, they won't. Any more than you or I would feed unnecessary coins into a parking meter or pay more than the cover price for our daily newspaper.

Many's the producer for whom I've written and rewritten a proposal with no payment, my only recompense being the shrug he gives when the broadcaster turns it down. The system works that way because it can. He knows that if he tries the same thing with his electricity supplier, the lights will go out. His landlord will evict him. His broadband supplier will cut him off. So them, he pays in full without a second thought.

With that mindset, why address the shift in the revenue stream from traditional media to newer technology-driven systems if you don't have to?

The writers' strike presents the entrepreneurial sector with the necessary You Have To.

For that reason alone, the AMPTP should be grateful to the WGA. Downloading is going to be the dominant delivery system of the future, no question about it. But the AMPTP's entrepreneurial hardwiring is preventing it from coping with the change. By requiring them to cope, the WGA are enabling them to move forward.

The alternative would be a slow, steady, spreading rot of disaffection and inefficiency. When you let that happen in any field, something different arises and leaves you behind.

I'm not in the WGA, but I'm a former Northern Chair of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain and we're affiliated. Here in the UK we already have a basis for participation in download revenues, but it's in everyone's interests to see the principle made universal. No WGGB member will provide material for American production, and no non-member should be thinking of it either - try it, and when the dispute ends you'll be shut out of the US market for life.

I've been involved in three strikes in my time, and none was entered into lightly. One I can't really count; it was a building workers' strike and I was a student on a vacation job, so I wasn't putting my livelihood on the line the way that the real workers were. But I was also an ACTT member involved in the long ITV strike of 1979, and when I launched off as a freelance writer and joined the Guild in 1980 - partly as a result of the taste of the life that the ITV strike had given me - I was asked to withhold novelisation rights to my Doctor Who scripts as part of a campaign that led to UK publishing's first Minimum Terms Agreement.

OK, so it wasn't exactly the Gdansk shipyards. But it did bring a change for the better.