The Demon-Haunted World
Sci-fi, studio executives, and you. A primer on plowing through the crap.
      by Kay Reindl

Sure, your screenplay's way better than End of Days, but do you have Gabriel Byrne?

Each year, the Scriptwriter's Network presents a day-long series of seminars called Breaking the TV Barrier. These seminars feature writers, producers and agents at all levels of experience, speaking on structured panels on such topics as what to expect on your first job, getting an agent, navigating between comedy and drama, and the popular pitching seminar. The Scriptwriter's Network provides a valuable service to those with questions and also to those who already have the answers. I highly recommend it. But what about those questions that aren't easily answered, and if you are predisposed to horror, science fiction and fantasy, should you expect your experiences to be different? On some levels, absolutely. On other levels, whether you write genre or high school angst, there's no difference at all.

There are no hard and fast rules in the TV or film business. Even less so, it seems, if you choose to write genre material. An executive who gets a show like Friends might be flummoxed by Farscape. On the plus side, your work can copiously reference Alexei Panshin, Philip K. Dick and the DC universe with wild abandon... and not be considered derivative. This is good for you, but kinda sad at the same time, don't you think? Shouldn't a TV or film executive be familiar with all genres? You'd think so, but this would rob you of your amazement when a producer speaks glowingly and knowingly of Asimov. If you write fantasy, horror or science fiction, you may hear one or all of the following things.

THE FOLLOWING THINGS: A LIST

Don't be too clever. Because movies and television are designed to reach a large audience, the dreaded word "mainstream" crops up all too often. What this means is, you must attempt to reach every member of your key demographic. If it's the WB, that demo is twelve to thirteen-year-old girls, so consider yourself lucky you're aiming for the fourteen to fifteen-year-old boy demographic. Er... you know what I mean. Reaching each member of a key demo is impossible. And there's no doubt that in attempting to do this you will be insulting the audience you seek to entertain. For the most part audiences aren't stupid, the jackholes who didn't support Freaks and Geeks but still whine about how wretched TV is being the exception. What you're generally dealing with is one of two things: Either an executive or a producer is trying to second-guess the audience, or the executive or producer just has no clue. You can't fight the second one.

Your beloved genre project is only as good as the last genre project. If you have a paranormal thriller, it will be compared to The Sixth Sense. And if you have a supernatural thriller, it will be compared to End of Days. Unfortunately for you, The Sixth Sense was a hit and End of Days was an embarrassment. What?! you say, that makes no sense! Remember, most executives don't have a great deal of experience with genre material and one gets the impression that if genre material went away for good, several executives would breathe a huge sigh of relief. If you didn't know any better, you'd think there had never been a ghost movie before The Sixth Sense. But upon watching the movie, it's clear that the film's gifted writer/director had seen Poltergeist and The Changeling, two movies that were apparently purged from our collective memory when The Sixth Sense was released.

The X-Files: TV's 800-pound gorilla.

As for the flip side, End of Days, if a genre movie is considered a failure for whatever reason, all subsequent movies like that will be considered failures, including your beloved genre project. This is maddening but given the fact that nobody knows exactly what will make a hit and what won't, to the executive making the decision it's as good a reason as any. If your beloved genre project is a horror movie, in particular a teen horror movie, you're swimming upstream. The good news is that the solid success of Final Destination has executives and producers saying they're looking for a different kind of horror movie. The bad news is two-fold. One, every studio seems to already have a burgeoning horror franchise and two, the exec may know he's looking for something different, but he has no idea what that is.

Maybe you've decided that your beloved genre project is more suited to a series. The problem with genre material and television is and will continue to be (apparently until the end of time) that 800-pound genre gorilla, The X-Files. When X-Files became a hit many genre fans cheered, although there's still a legitimate debate about whether or not X-Files is a genre show. The cheering stopped when people realized the success of X-Files meant genre projects would get even less backing than they did before. To TV critics, the world of cool, hip genre TV began when X-Files premiered in 1993. For some critics the world began a few years later, when they actually caught on. Because of the success of X-Files, every genre show is considered a clone. (Although Star Trek, truly genre in every sense of the word, appears to have put itself in a little box and doesn't seem to count.) Either genre shows feature aliens (Dark Skies and Roswell), conspiracies (VR-5, Nowhere Man and Strange World) or they're shot in Vancouver. You just can't win. Unfortunately, this also handicaps the writers and producers who made the show the hit it is. These folks can't get a break because their work is distinctive, and TV critics who think writers are interchangeable accuse these people of ripping off The X-Files, when in fact they're ripping off themselves. See? There's no end in sight. Even Chris Carter is handcuffed by his own show. He could go run Daddio and critics would wonder why he can't do anything different than X-Files.

This thinking leads critics to summarily dismiss the genre, and the audience follows suit. There's so much stimulus out there, from network TV to cable to the Internet and even to PlayStation, that the audience has to trust someone to warn them away from crap. And too often, that someone is a TV critic. It makes me wish that the truly excellent TV critics and knowledgeable genre critics were a little more vocal on the matter. This year, there are some surprisingly excellent television pilots. These will be discussed further in an article that I fully expect to be a rant on the unfairness of the fall schedule. Network presidents, take heed -- I am willing to be pleasantly surprised by your choices. So how do you avoid being called an X-Files or Buffy ripoff when you clearly aren't? Well, you can't. So suck it up. Because if you try, you're anticipating the response and you're going to severely compromise your beloved genre project.

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