Pilot Error: "Killer App"
Okay, so technically this qualifies more as an installment of Pilot Error Revisited, since the first portion of the piece was actually written in May 2013, but since penning that original version, I’ve done two interviews that make it worth reviving, and to my way of thinking, the new material makes it worth calling it just a straight-up Pilot Error piece. That said, I’m still going to clarify what was written when…
This first part originally made its debut on the late, great Antenna Free TV in 2013, as you can probably tell from the reference to a certain Amazon series in the opening paragraph…
Garry Trudeau is probably jumping for joy right about now, what with Amazon having decided to give his pilot, Alpha House, a series pick-up. The Doonesbury creator hasn’t always been as fortunate with his TV endeavors, however, though he does seem to have lucked out when it comes to people dwelling on the one we’re discussing today.
Back in 2009, I interviewed Stephen Lang, who at the time was doing a round of press to help build excitement about the soon-to-be-released Avatar, but—as with more or less every interview I’ve ever done—I spent as much time talking with him about his past projects as I did the film that brought us into contact in the first place. Although we inevitably chatted about things like Manhunter, Gods and Generals, and The Men Who Stare at Goats, the topic that I found most fascinating was his answer to my question about his favorite project that he’d worked on over the years that didn’t get the love he thought it deserved.
“Well, I did a picture with Bob Altman called Killer App, which was a pilot for a TV show, and it was a great role, and it was a really cool thing...and it never aired,” said Lang. “I think it had a lot to do with…well, Garry Trudeau wrote it, Bob produced and directed it, and Bob was, y’know, very tough with the network, as I recall. And it never got on. And that was a real blow, because that was a role I could’ve played for a long time. I loved working with Bob. It was about the computer world. It was set up in Seattle, with computers happening, and I played Jann something, who was the head of Voratech, which is, like, this huge company. And then there’s these other guys who have a company called SpriteCom, and they’re kind of the cool techies, and there’s a battle between them and I’m me. I’m going to eat them alive, that was the idea. And Sally Kellerman was the voice of the computer!”
As you already well know, I’m endlessly intrigued about pilots that never made it to series, particularly when they involve names either in front of or behind the camera that would seem to make them slam dunks for pick-up. Now, I don’t know about you, but to my way of thinking, something created by Messrs, Altman and Trudeau would seem to qualify for that category.
Even weirder than the fact that Killer App wasn’t picked up, though, is just how deeply it’s fallen into obscurity. I mean, we’re talking not-even-on-IMDb obscure*, which is almost unheard of for a pilot that was actually filmed, especially when you consider that there are projects that haven’t even gotten beyond the discussion stage that already have IMDb pages. Fortunately, there are still plenty of references to the project online, and when you put them all together … well, it still doesn’t really explain why the pilot wasn’t picked up, but it does at least give you a little more insight into what it was all about.
*It was added to IMDb in 2015.
First of all, for those who aren’t aware of how the Altman/Trudeau collaboration got started, it stretches back to an HBO mockumentary miniseries called Tanner ’88, which starred Michael Murphy as a Michigan politician on a quest to score the nod to be the Democratic candidate for President. Critics loved it, but viewers didn’t glom onto it quite as readily, so HBO didn’t green-light a continuation of Jack Tanner’s story, but Altman and Trudeau managed to reunite with Murphy in 2004 and do a four-episode sequel for the Sundance Channel entitled Tanner on Tanner.
In between the Tanners lies—you guessed it—Killer App.
It’s odd to watch a pilot with so much buzz and such a tremendous shot at success slowly but surely go down the tubes without ever making it to series, but anyone studying the Hollywood trade publications and tech-friendly magazines and websites got a heck of a rollercoaster ride as they watched the saga of Killer App, a drama—or, as Computer Business Review called it, a soap opera—which would have revolved around an Internet start-up company trying to get off the ground.
The project was produced by Donald Kushner and Peter Locke, whose company’s website described Altman and Trudeau as having “joined forces to develop a one-hour pilot soap, Silicon Valley, produced through Kushner-Locke for ABC,” then said that “the pilot led to a series entitled Killer App.” I’m sure the company knows what was produced for whom, but in the end, it was actually Fox who picked up the ball and ran with the development of the show. Sandy Grushow, then the president of Fox Television, described the show’s creators as being “each among our country’s most insightful provocateurs,” adding, “We’re very excited to work with them as they turn their sights toward Silicon Valley.”
Unsurprisingly, Wired seemed the most ecstatic about the show’s possibilities. “It will bring the self-absorbed crowd targeted by Robert X. Cringely’s Triumph of the Nerds to the precocious demographic that favors FOX’s animated sitcoms,” the magazine gushed. “If done right, it’ll be more Charles Addams than Scott Adams.”
[In the same piece, there’s a quote from writer Brent Schlender, who provided the treatment for the series, saying that Killer App would “humanize dweebs and high tech’s already mythical figures.” So, basically, it would’ve beaten The Big Bang Theory to the punch by almost a decade!]
You can’t say Altman and Trudeau didn’t do their research: they apparently spent a considerable amount of time touring Silicon Valley, including “a visit with Apple Computer’s once-and-future CEO Steve Jobs — who agreed to lend the production computers and software — Macintosh computer designer Andy Hertzfeld, and a visit to Xerox Parc.” And it paid off, too: as of 1998, Variety, which reported that FOX had ordered not only a pilot but also six additional scripts, was assuring its readers that Killer App’s “pickup chances are high” for midseason.
That, presumably, was before FOX actually saw the pilot, which they rejected. They did, at least, request that Trudeau take another shot at it. Sadly, in an August 2000 Wired interview with Trudeau, Killer App is referenced as “having recently been killed by Fox for the second time,” though it’s optimistically described as “being shopped to HBO, among others.”
What makes the Wired piece particularly notable, however, is its revelation that the second iteration of the pilot — which was both recast and retooled, with one change apparently being that its setting was shifted from Silicon Valley to Seattle — was also done without Altman, instead moving forward with Tom Fontana, late of Homicide: Life on the Street and Oz, at the helm. As of that writing, Trudeau and Fontana were reportedly hard at work “honing” the pilot, with Trudeau putting a positive spin on the FOX fiasco, explaining, “”We were disappointed for about 5 minutes. We saw all winter how hard they pushed to make it more of a FOX show, with pretty kids jumping into bed with each other. We now feel less pressure to do the kind of show that FOX feels comfortable with.” This time, the setting of the pilot jumped from Seattle to Manhattan, but however it may have ended up under Fontana’s watchful eye, HBO wasn’t interested.
There’s no word on why Altman parted ways with the project after the first FOX pilot, but whatever the reason, there clearly were no hard feelings between director and writer, since history shows us that they reunited for that aforementioned Tanner miniseries for the Sundance Channel. But what happened to their Killer App pilot? Or any of the Killer App pilots, for that matter? To my knowledge, there’s only one clip of the project that’s ever turned up online, and it’s not even a clip, really. It’s just the opening credits.
A few years ago, I interviewed Jamie Marsh, who appeared in the pilot, and he was clearly still bummed about the experience on several levels.
“It was one of those disappointments you deal with as an actor, (but) the worst thing about it was not getting to work with Bob Altman as much as we expected,” said Marsh. “I’ve been trying to get a VHS copy I had of it posted on YouTube, as Kathryn Altman gave me permission. Unfortunately, Bob showed it to FOX before it was color corrected and totally finished, so we never even got to see the final finished version. But we all thought we were going to be on a hit show for a couple of weeks at the end of 1998. And it did deserve to have a chance. That’s Hollywood.”
Fast forward almost a year and a half to October 2014, when I actually had the opportunity to interview Trudeau for Indiewire. Of course, I wasn’t going to miss a chance to ask him about Killer App, and as I’d expected, merely broaching the topic kind of blew his mind…
I’m guessing you don’t get asked about this very often, but… how was the experience of working on Killer App, the pilot you did with Altman a few years later?
Garry Trudeau: Uh, no, I don’t get asked about that very often! [Laughs.] Killer App is kind of a sore spot, because I have to take full responsibility for it never really coming to anything. We were offered an opportunity to do that for Turner, and they were going to give us a whole season without a pilot…and genius Trudeau decided, “No, I’d rather take my chances with a network, because I’ll just reach a bigger audience.” And Bob Altman just was not a good fit for network television. It had a very cinematic vibe, and it just wasn’t what they were hoping it would be. And it’s a shame, because we were a little ahead of the curve on that: Betas and Silicon Valley were still 16 years away! And then the tech bubble burst in 1999, and everyone said, “Well, it’s just as well. No one would want to watch the show now!”
I’ll be honest: I wouldn’t even know that the show existed if I hadn’t interviewed Stephen Lang a few years back.
Oh, yeah, Stephen! Boy, believe it or not, we never met! I was on the set intermittently, but we just never overlapped. But he was fantastic. I gather he had a good experience. He liked working with Altman.
Yeah, actually, the reason it came up was because I’d asked him to cite a favorite project he’d worked on that didn’t get the love he thought it deserved, and he said, “Well, I’ve got to go with this pilot called Killer App.”
Oh, how nice of him! Yeah, y’know, it’s heartbreaking, that comedy, because I wrote four scripts, and I was ready to go! [Sighs.] Anyway…
Fast-forward again, this time to just this past week, when I interviewed Brenda Strong and—to bring this full circle—asked her the same question that I’d asked Stephen Lang way back in 2009…
Do you have a favorite project you've worked on over the years that didn't get the love you thought it deserved?
Brenda Strong: Hmmm... I'd say the project that didn't get the love it deserved was actually a Robert Altman pilot that I did called Killer App.
I have actually written about Killer App.
[Legitimate surprise.] Really?
I'd have to dig up the piece, but, yeah, I talked to Stephen Lang about it at some point, and I even had a chance to bring it up in an interview I did with Garry Trudeau.
Yeah! So Killer App was a pilot that Garry Trudeau wrote. First of all, that's blue blood right there, so being able to do something with him was amazing. And Robert Altman, as you know, is a maverick in our film industry, so working with him was a phenomenal education. And because of the way he shoots, he likes capturing lightning in a bottle, so what he likes to do is set up the cameras to be recording, and every single person having a wire, so that he can choose where to focus the camera at any given time. You may be in the background, thinking you're just a background actor to a scene that's happening, but if you're having a dialogue with another actor that he thinks is interesting, he'll turn up your volume and have the camera rack focus to you. So it's constantly an evolving creative pool. You feel like you're doing a play. So we all thrived in that environment.
Obviously, Stephen Lang has a lot of experience doing plays. He did A Few Good Men on Broadway with Aaron, etcetera. Ming-Na Wen and I became friends on that show, Jacqueline Obradors and I became friends on that show, Tobias Mehler ended up living at our family home for years and years... It became quite a tight set. And part of that I contribute to how Bob runs a set. He runs it like a family. One of his sons was the art director, the other son was A Camera. So every day after we'd be filming, we'd go back to his and Kathryn's room and we'd watch dailies, and we'd watch each other's work. And that way we could support each other, feel like we were part of a collective experience, we'd have appetizers and just sit around and laugh and talk...
So it was really disappointing when 20th Century decided not to have it continue. But I think Bob really wasn't used to working in television, with the kind of pace that it requires and the kind of executive collaboration that it requires. I think he just wanted them to buy it, and he wanted them to let him direct every episode. He wanted them to buy 26 episodes, he would direct them all... [Laughs.] And they're, like, "Uh, we can't do that on this schedule. We need to have different directors coming in and out." And he's, like, "Yeah, that's not what I want to do." So I think it was that he didn't want to collaborate with them the way they wanted to collaborate with him, and it just didn't quite hold together as a pilot. It felt a little too longform. He didn't know how to capture these characters and get them off and running. So it was just one of those sad things that didn't continue. What did Garry say about it?
That he was disappointed, but that he was resigned to its fate, basically.
[Sighs.] Yeah. I think Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana wanted to resurrect it and recast it, and they tried to with Garry, but I don't think it ever saw the light of day. But, you know, it was ahead of its time. It was before all the dot-commers. It was before Silicon Valley. It was before all of that. They really had a finger on the pulse of something that was going on.