Pilot Error: J.J. Abrams's ANATOMY OF HOPE, Anthony Russo's COURTROOM K, and more
When I was attending the TCA press tour on a regular basis, they’d occasionally have cocktail parties where everyone in attendance was a writer or a director, and on the occasions when they did, I’d use the get-togethers as an opportunity to quiz some of these folks on various pilots they’d done that hadn’t made it to series.
These…are some of them.
Rod Holcomb on Silverfox (1991) and Bounty Hunters (2005)
You worked on a pilot with James Coburn called Silverfox, but it never went to series. Do you have any thoughts as to why?
Well, first of all, you're working with an icon - James Coburn - but one who was sort of in the waning hours of his career. I think they kind of put him into a situation where it was like doing his old action films, which was very tough to do. You know, his hands were kind of arthritic at the time, so we had to be careful about how we shot it and how we had to do it with doubles and things like that. But he was such a game guy. And he was really funny, and he really knew how to turn the lines, which I thought was really the character. But I'm not so certain that we ultimately put him in the right vehicle. I think that's probably what happened with that. I think the story was okay, but I think that when you're trying to revive the something that he was really well known for early on in his career, when he was younger... I think we all kind of hoped it would be a successful revival, but...you never start off to make a bad pilot. Circumstances just kind of take us into the wrong place sometimes.
I think in retrospect we probably could've given a lot more thought about the casting. And I think the concept probably was correct and right for him, but I'm not so certain that the timing was right for the project at that period of time when we did it. I don't think America was ready to go back there. I think they wanted to go forward, and they were, like, "We've seen it." So I think that was it. But I had an unbelievably wonderful time working with him. He was an absolutely charming guy. The scenes he did with his ex-wife were wonderful. He brought back that great charm that he was so good at in the '60s. So he was really delightful from that standpoint. I have nothing bad to say about him. I just think, really, that - as it is with a lot of pilots - casting is absolutely imperative. If you look at the ones that I've done and that a lot of other people have done... Well, look at The West Wing, or E.R., Wiseguy, or even The A-Team. Or more recently, The Closer! It's about the ensemble. It's really hard to get those people doing it all together. And when you do, if your stories are okay and they're working, then you've got a chance.
Is there any pilot in particular that you've worked on that was really just a complete heartbreaker when it didn't get picked up?
There was one thing I did that I really liked: Bounty Hunters. I was doing a pilot with a feature director not long after that, and he looked at it and called me up and said, "Jesus Christ, this is great, Rod! It's like a little feature!" And I said, "Yeah, but they didn't pick it up." And the line went quiet for a really long time, and then he finally says, "God, I've gotta get out of this fuckin' business." [Laughs.] I said, "Well, it happens to us as it happens to you!" And this was a guy who's done marvelous things, like the original Superman. So he knew what he was doing. Unfortunately, in television, there's so many variables. It's, like, now we're looking at tentpole movies and how they're dying because people are tired of seeing the same thing over and over again. Well, you don't know when that's going to happen. It's all about timing. So if you get something in that's like E.R.... Everybody had seen a hospital show, and then all of sudden something new comes on and they say, "Wow, I've never seen that before!" Well, they have, but...it's just different, that's all. And with a good cast.
On that front, Bounty Hunters... I mean, you had me from the words "Robert Forster."
Oh, yeah, he's great. And Lauren Holly was excellent, I thought. So they had some really good casting. And it was funny! It had a lot going for it. I really liked it.
Bob Greenblatt on Heat Vision and Jack (1999)
There was a show that I actually produced, which was a pilot for the Fox network about 15 years ago, and it's called Heat Vision and Jack. Directed by Ben Stiller, written by Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab, it starred Jack Black, and Owen Wilson was the voice of the motorcycle. Because it was about a guy who's fused with a motorcycle. It was brilliant, it was ahead of its time, it was so funny... No one knew who Jack Black was at the time. But we made it for the Fox network, and it just totally eluded them. And I just think of the talent that we had involved in this thing, and it was such a shame that it didn't get picked up. Now, if I had to think about pilots I made as a network [executive] that I didn't pick up... I don't know. There may be some. I'd have to think about that. I wish I had a good answer for that.
Look, you gave me an answer involving Heat Vision and Jack, and that is always acceptable.
[Laughs.] I'm glad you knew about it! Because it's, like, this underground thing, it's never been released... Somebody told me that someone was selling it on the internet, but Fox should've put it out and sold it!
What do you think about the trend of people putting their pilots on YouTube?
I don't like it. I mean, if it's a pilot that's going to go to series, then obviously it should be put on the air when it launches, but if it's a pilot that didn't go forward... There's usually some good reasons for it. But it's a free country. I don't know how some of these people get the rights to do it. I guess they have to ask the owner of the pilot. We did a pilot with Sarah Silverman, and she put hers up, and...it's fine. But ultimately it's really flawed, I think, for a lot of reasons, and I'm not sure, if I was her, I would've wanted to put it out there. But what do I know? But she had to get Fox's permission to do it, because Fox owns it. But the great thing about pilots is, you can bury them if they're bad. [Laughs.] Most everything else has to get released. Films... They cost so much, it's hard to just bury a film. You can release a bad movie and they won't go see it, but you still put it out. Pilots, though, you oftentimes never see them. They're just buried.
Mick Garris on Lost in Oz (2002)
Lost in Oz was a pilot, but they chose to do... Oh, what was it called? It was some DC female superhero trio that they went with instead, and...it did not do well. Birds of Prey, that's what it was called. But they wanted only one of the two fantasy shows, and they chose Birds of Prey over Lost in Oz. But Lost in Oz was a blast. I loved doing it. That's where I met Melissa George, who did Bag of Bones with us later.
Obviously, it wasn't a straightforward adaptation of the Oz mythos, but what was it?
It was modern day. It was contemporary. It referenced the old story. And a lot of the characters from the [L. Frank] Baum books are in it. So it is actually an adaptation of the Baum books. It just was coincidental that we made it in Australia with an Australian actress playing it with an American accent. [Laughs.] But, yes, that was a failed pilot that I really think deserved better. I've only done... Well, I've written a pilot with Clive Barker. I've definitely written stuff before. But I've only directed two pilots: one was for The Others, the Steven Spielberg series, and the other was Lost in Oz.
What was the Clive Barker pilot? I'm not familiar with that one.
It was Spirit City U.S.A. It only was a script. It never went beyond the script phrase. It was a story that we came up with together. He had the idea, and then we worked on it together, and I wrote it with him in London. We did it for ABC, but we never got it off the ground.
What was the concept?
The concept was... I'd better not say. It might be something he's still pursuing! [Laughs.] And if he is, I would love to do it with him! But if he says it's okay to talk about it, I'm happy to talk about it!
Two quick things:
1. Regarding Spirit City U.S.A., it turns out that both Barker and Garris had no problem talking about the pilot at the time they were actively pitching it, so if you want to read a little more about it, you can find details right here.
2. As it happens, I had a chance to interview Melissa George not long after this conversation, and when I asked her about this pilot, she had a slightly different recollection about why it never went to series. “Part of Lost in Oz [not being picked up] was actually my decision,” she revealed. “It was weird, because my contract lapsed. They picked it up, they wanted to do a second episode, but my contract lapsed, and by that time I didn’t want to move back to Australia. I was living in America, and the show was shooting in Australia. So, y’know, it was partly my decision. But what a show! What a concept!”
Nelson McCormack on Global Frequency (2005)
I'd love to talk about Global Frequency. First of all, have you actually seen the pilot?
I have not. In fact, I'm beginning to feel like I'm the only person who hasn't seen it.
Well, it's out there. You can download it. It somehow leaked to the internet. I had nothing to do with it.
If it helps, I am familiar with the source material.
Oh, it's a great comic book. And it was a great idea for a TV show. It was basically X-Files meets Alias, and this great wish fulfillment of "wouldn't it be cool if we could pull together the greatest people on the planet to solve an important problem every week?" That was my very first pilot, and the one thing I learned after that is that you've got to be very vocal and strong about any feeling that you have at the script level and any feeling you have about the casting. Now, pilots - unlike any other form of filmmaking - is such a committee. So the director is, like, 1/32 of a voice, or maybe 1/16 of a voice, when it comes to these massively important decisions. And being as it was my first one, I probably allowed things to slide that I would now.
I felt instincts about things that weren't quite there in the script, but everybody else loved it, so I was, like, "Maybe I'm the one who's not seeing it. I'll go along with it." The casting choices, I was not happy with at all. There were better choices that came into the room and auditioned for all of us, and I thought they were brilliant, and the other people just didn't. And there's a part of you that just wants to grab them and say, "Can't you see?! Why can't you see what I just saw? Why is that?"
That's part of the problem with pilots: because it's such a committee process, there's no unified director's vision driving the whole thing through. Because there's so much money on the line and so much potential future for the network if the show goes ahead, everybody wants to have an ownership of these choices. But if they see it differently, or if there's some aesthetic reason why a guy's hair color or eye color doesn't work for them, they get dinged when they're the perfect guy for the part. So I learned a lot on that failure, and as I tell my children, sometimes failure is the best teacher in life.
Can you speak to some of the people who you wanted in the pilot without disparaging the ones who were actually selected?
Well, they're all working, and they're all doing great on shows now. Because it was sooner or later going to be their time. But one of the guys was Mike Vogel, who's on Under the Dome now. He was just a kid back then. This was before he'd done anything really notable. This was before Cloverfield or anything. There was just something raw and real and natural about him. But The CW network has a sort of brand, a certain aesthetic quality that they want to aspire to. And that's their choice. Part of the heartbreak of being a director sometimes is that it doesn't say Nelsonwood on the hill. It says Hollywood. Someday, if it does, then I can make that decision. But until then, you've got to play ball.
How interactive was Warren Ellis in the process of making it? Was he around?
He was super. He was very supportive during the script stage. He came to visit us onset in Vancouver, where we shot the pilot, and loved everything he saw. He was such a super fan, and I found him a great ally. And as we talked about the hope that it was going to become a series and all the stories that it could give birth to, he was a great resource for all that, because that's all he had been thinking of over the years. And it was great to sort of sense that where I saw the show going was the same place that he saw the show going, and the potential the show had and the type of stories it could achieve were the same stories that he imagined. Because he only wrote, like, 12 issues. He didn't write several seasons worth of the comic. He just wrote those twelve, and any one of them would make a great movie.
Was there ever a point where the network was, like, "Well, if you'd just change this, then we can make this work?"
No, it was pretty much a clean sweep. They were supportive, and they saw what we were trying to do, and they gave us their blessing, so we went and shot the heck out of the pilot, and...it's still a very cool pilot. It's listed on the internet somewhere as one of the 10 best pilots that never made it to series. But that's life: you win some and you lose some.
Is there any other pilot that you've worked on over the years that leaps to mind as one you wished had gone to series?
That's the big one that got away. I did do a pilot for ABC called Body of Proof, but that became a successful series. It was on the air for three years. It was a fairly straightforward procedural, but with a very interesting main character. I sort of describe it as House meets The Good Wife. [Laughs.] It had a lot of these things that I was familiar with in terms of storytelling and the types of shows I've done, but it also had a unique character. Television boils down to characters. I don't think people ultimately tune in for the plot of a show every week. It's either because you like someone or because you like watching someone you don't like.
Anthony Russo on Courtroom K (2008)
You know, Courtroom K was a real heartbreaker for my brother and I, because it was one of our favorite things we'd ever done, and...it was a great show, and we're really proud of it! Imagine: it's written by Paul Attanasio, it stars Alfred Molina as a malevolent judge who terrorizes everybody in the courtroom. That's a great example of heartbreak in the pilot process, you know? Why a show like that never made it to air is mindboggling. We've been really fortunate: almost all the pilots we've done have gone to air. It's amazing. So we've been really lucky on that level. But Courtroom K was one of the two exceptions, and that was one that made no sense.
The other exception was a multi-cam that we did. It never really had an official title other than... It was called The Justin Adler Project, after the writer. It was basically a dysfunctional family multi-cam, and it was the only time we'd ever shot a multi-cam, my brother and I, so it was our first attempt at it. Mitch Hurwitz was producing it, and... Well, again, it was a cool show and everything, and we were really proud and happy with it, but even though that one was a good show, it wasn't quite a mindboggling situation, like Courtroom K was. How the network could let that one go, I never understood.
How was it adapting your directorial sensibilities to multi-cam?
Oh, it was actually really interesting, because Mitch... You know, working with Mitch on it was easy. When we went to make Arrested Development, the mandate from Ron Howard was, "Look, guys, we want to mix up what the single-camera half-hour comedy can be. Let's shake it up and see what it can be." And that was the same thing when we approached that multi-camera with Mitch. It was, like, "Well, let's just shake it up and see if we can find something new and fun and fresh." And we did that a little bit with it. It was a little experimental, but it...more or less worked, but at the end of the day, when you're taking a chance like that and sort of experimenting, sometimes it becomes Arrested Development, and sometimes...[Shrugs and laughs.] Sometimes it doesn't quite work! So no harm, no foul on that one.
J.J. Abrams on Anatomy of Hope (2009)
I'm working on a piece on Anatomy of Hope...
Oh, really? That's amazing! [A beat.] Why? [Laughs.]
I do a feature called Pilot Error, about pilots that never made it to series.
Ah, gotcha!
Can you talk a little bit about how that came about in the first place?
I read a phenomenal script that broke my heart, one that Rafael Yglesias wrote with Tom Schulman. and it was based on a very personal story for Rafael. And I read the script, and it was very different from anything I'd done, but it was heartbreaking and beautiful and...rather dark, because of the subject matter. But it was a beautiful, beautiful script.
Do you think it was just too dark for HBO?
I don't know if it was too dark for HBO or if I somehow blundered it or if it was not quite the right thing. But I think that ultimately, from my point of viewing, the cast did an extraordinary job, the writers did an extraordinary job, I did the best I could at the time, and it didn't get picked up…and I can't tell how much of that I was to blame for!
Greg Garcia on Super Clyde (2013)
I was disappointed that it didn't get picked up. It turned out great. I mean, I could not be happier with the way it turned out. I think this show turned out great as well, as this show is more of what's in CBS's wheelhouse and really doing well. Super Clyde was single-camera, but it was also a little different. I was thrilled with it I understand that we can't really take it out [and shop it elsewhere]. I'm busy with this. But you never know if there's life at some point. I'd love to at least get it on a platform - Netflix or something - and get it out there so people can see it, because I was so proud of it, and I thought the director did such a great job, and the cast was great. So I'd love to get some eyeballs on it somehow at some point, just because I'm proud of it.
Well, sure. Plus, just the accomplishment of getting Stephen Fry onboard alone...
He was amazing. Rupert Grint was great. And it was really a feel-good thing. And as far as comedies go... It's not the funniest comedy you've ever seen in your life, by any stretch. But it was a good story, and everybody did such a great job. I was really proud of it.