This continues the archive of retired or unproduced IP, and the stories that accompany them.You can click on the buttons to download the scripts and pitches, using the code CFX to open the locked PDF files.
You’ll find that the link here takes you not to a script or a pitch, but to the Subterranean Press page for a Hard Case-style novella titled The Next Thing You See When You Die. Here’s why:
Risen was a pitch that I made as part of the development deal I had with Bruckheimer TV, back when we were making Eleventh Hour for CBS. I’ll be honest, out of all the material we discussed it was the one I really hoped they’d go for. But after two tries I backed off and we went with something else, which in the end the studio didn’t like. But that’s another story.
This one stayed with me and the only way to shake off the spell was to write a spec pilot. No one wanted it, no one was waiting for it, I just needed to do it. Nothing much happened until Simon Maxwell at Red Arrow read the script and fell for it. He took Risen to MIPCOM in Cannes and pitched it hard to a number of potential partners. I was in Lisbon picking up the European Science TV Award for my Silent Witness when I learned that we were moving into a deal with ABC Signature, a production arm of Disney’s ABC Network (and yes, it was just as exciting as that all makes it sound).
Things moved fast. Notes and rewrites with Signature VP David Marko made the script tighter, better, without changing anything of its essential character. I developed a 13-hour series arc and took steps to renew my 0-1 visa. We were lined up for a summer slot, a time of year when the pressure and the competition for new shows were felt to be less intense. For production I’d be working with Henrik Bastin’s Fabrik Entertainment, makers of Bosch. We just needed ABC President Paul Lee’s signoff and we’d have our green light.
The call came from David. He began with, “Steve, it’s not good news.”
As I understood it, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment had a show for which he’d been seeking one of the prized winter network slots, without success. So they’d lowered their sights and gone looking for a summer slot, and Paul Lee gave them ours.
When I advise new writers that they must learn to bounce, this is why.
I’m still gripped by my concept, still won’t let it go. So when Subterranean’s Bill Schafer asked if I might have an idea for a 30,000 word novella, I had a ready reply. Stories want to be told.
And now I have another one that I can tell. About the time I was bumped by Steven Spielberg.
The British and American iterations of Eleventh Hour were radically different experiences for me. I quit the UK show a week before shooting began, after a long wrangle over the difference between research-based drama and junk science. I’m not sure which was the last straw; the dialogue rewrite of my material by a novice, or the proposed ‘race’ between me and two other writers to get to a finished script for the last available slot on the show I’d created. I made that one easier for them by narrowing the field.
The show as broadcast received a damning review from former Chief Government Scientific Advisor Robert May in the Times Higher Education Supplement. Lord May cited the ‘clunky script’ and the melodramatic misrepresentation of the science, and I dropped him a line to tell him I agreed on both counts.
The script here is the one that I delivered for the UK with my dialogue intact, and concerns a trail of heartbreak in the attempt to achieve the first human clone. It’s an achievement long sought by a succession of fringe figures and self-publicists, outliers to the scientific community, and I saw it as representing the masculine urge to exercise control over reproduction. But in rewriting me, they made my Bad Science Guy a woman.
And that, I thought, was that, until a couple of years on I had a call to get myself down to London and meet with KristieAnne Reed and Jonathan Littman of JBTV. Jerry Bruckheimer had bought the format rights; slow as I am, it took a while for me to grasp how much they wanted me on board. What followed showed me how your worst experiences can so often lead to your best.
