Interview [Part 5]: Mickey Fisher, writer, “Extant” (CBS Series)
A little over a year ago in May, I wrote about this:
Amidst the hustle and bustle of the Hollywood development world — movies and TV — nothing shifts the tectonic plates of The Biz more than a spec script that gets people salivating over it. It’s also a time when writers can learn an awful lot about the buying pulse of Hollywood.
Such is the case right now as Hollywood froths over a 56-page spec TV pilot “Extant” written by newcomer Mickey Fisher. Background from TheWrap [emphasis added]:
Mickey Fisher, an unknown and unsigned writer until recently, has film studios drooling over his script “Extant” for weeks. There’s just one twist: it’s not a film script.
Fisher wrote “Extant” as a TV pilot. It’s a one-hour sci-fi drama about John and Molly Watts and their son, a human-like robot named Ethan. Molly, the space-traveling wife, is also pregnant with a baby that is part human and part alien. The family intrigue deepens in subsequent episodes.
Multiple agencies sought to sign the writer after reading the script, and WME won out. WME and manager Brooklyn Weaver, who discovered Fisher, sent the script around to the studios who are hot to trot for a high-concept script mixing sci-fi and familial drama.
“Everyone is freaking out about it,” an agent at a rival firm said. “It’s ‘A.I.’ as a TV series.” [emphasis added]
There’s more:
Warner Bros. still made an offer to acquire the project and turn it into a movie, according to multiple individuals inside and outside the studio, but now the studio is talking with Fisher about acquiring a different pitch. The studio declined to comment.
WME and Weaver always harbored dreams of turning “Extant” into a TV series with Steven Spielberg producing. They are halfway there: Amblin TV, which produced “ER” and “The Americans,” is developing and packaging it. It remains unclear if Spielberg will take a credit, though his involvement would make it even more attractive to networks.
Here is Mickey Fisher. Apparently he is a Hollywood outsider. He writes a spec TV pilot script. It turns the town on its head. Now he has interest from movie studios. TV networks. Perhaps “acquiring a different pitch.” Steven Freaking Spielberg.
What happened? Not even 14 months later, this:
Mickey Fisher’s spec TV pilot “Extant” has become a CBS series [13 episodes] which debuted this week and airs weekly on Wednesdays at 9PM E/8PM C. And yes, Stephen Spielberg is one of the show’s executive producers.
It turns out Mickey is a longtime fan of Go Into The Story which made it easy for me to reach out to him for an interview. We had a great hour-long conversation which I am happy to share with readers in 6 parts this week.
Today in Part 5, Mickey talks about the strategy of presenting “Extant” as a ‘limited series’:
Scott: How much rewriting took place on the pilot script versus what they shot?
Mickey: Not a ton, and I think that was the benefit of the people that responded to the script itself. I was very fortunate to be with a team of people who really felt like it wasn’t something they wanted to pull apart and rebuild from the ground up. It was something they wanted to protect. I got lucky with the guys from Amblin and with Greg, with Spielberg and then the network and the studio.
I think everybody had the sense of it, like “Let’s keep the thing that people are responding to, and let’s change as little as possible.” In fact some the stuff we were changing really was just to set up other things in the series, in the season that were coming down the pike. So it’s very similar to the original version of it, but it does reflect a lot of the collaboration that came afterwards.
Scott: Let me ask a question, because you mentioned that as you were writing the script and you were fleshing out in your mind some of the elements of the story universe and the larger thing, how much of that have you worked out? Do you have an end point in mind or is this an evolving thing?
Mickey: I worked out a lot of it. I had a lot of big ideas coming into it and I think that’s part of why it did get to stick around. But I felt like I had a vision for it and I was able to communicate that, and then when Greg came onboard, he and I worked together all last summer before the pitch, working out some of the bigger ideas and more storylines and building the world out a bit.
Then when we hired the writers we did the same thing. We came up with an end point for the season and then possibilities for the future. It’s not a show that…a lot of the answers to the central mysteries, we’ll get this season. But it’s a story world that’s designed to evolve and change, and there’s not one specific end target or one central thing that you figure out and it’s over.
So yes, our hope is that it can continue to grow and change. Because a lot of what’s happening in technology or what’s happening in the world right now, we can do the thing that sci‑fi does best, which is take that and use it as a jumping‑off point to explore those questions in a dramatic way.
Scott: Here’s a comment from Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment in one of the articles I read. She says, “’Extant’ is a very original concept with layers of humanity, mystery, and surprise that reveal itself throughout the script. Our partnership with Amblin for ‘Under the Dome’ showed that viewers respond to high‑quality event programing in the summer.”
So the idea of event or limited series. I saw a quote, too, where they said, “We love the idea of season two of ‘Extant’ being the sequel to this.” Doesn’t sound like your typical TV series.
Mickey: Yeah, the idea of it being a limited‑event series, and we’re aiming to tell one big story over the course of the season, and to leave enough that we have someplace to go in season two. We’re not going to hold back any guards in the hopes that we’re going to get a season two. It’s not going to be one of those things that people get to the end of and feel ripped off that they didn’t get the answers that they were looking for. We think like that, too.
So we’re playing it both ways, and hopefully if it’s successful enough, we get a season two. There are plenty of places for us to go and we have ideas for that. But yeah, I think just for the nature of the thing, because it is so big and relies on a lot of moving pieces that there’s no guarantee with it. We’re going to put it all on the table and hopefully wrap up in a big, satisfying way and then give people the idea, “Oh, this is where they could go.”
Scott: Have you been getting any sleep at all?
Mickey: [laughs] Yeah, very little. I’ll tell you the hardest times for me…I don’t know how the crew does it, because I’m such a wimp about production. I wrote episode nine and I was on set. They’re long days. You’re there at seven in the morning and then you’re wrapping at seven or eight at night. I was trying to write things in between and steal away on the set to answer emails and watch casting and things like that.
Those days when I’m on set are the hardest and I start to wear down. I can tell by the end of the episode that it takes me two or three days to recover. But I’m getting a little bit of sleep. The good thing is it never feels like I’m coming in to work. It always feels like I’m coming in to walk around in a surreal dream where Steven Spielberg and Halle Berry are involved. So it’s always awesome and it’s always fun.
Scott: Some craft questions for you. How do you come up with story ideas?
Mickey: It’s hard to give a specific answer because I sort of find my inspiration all over the place. My first movie was inspired by going to my very first Tough Man contest, my second movie was based on a true story that I lived, so many of my others have started with the idea of a single scene or kind of character. I tend to have a flash of inspiration and then carry the idea around in my head for a long time, in some cases a couple of years or more, and along the way I’ll scratch down a few bullet points or sketch out some dialogue for a scene and eventually the ideas that demand to be written win more and more. What I’ve never really been able to do is have an idea one day, sit down and type FADE IN and just go.
Scott: How important do you think the story concept is to the overall strength and commercial viability of a screenplay or original TV pilot script?
Mickey: My girlfriend tells this story a lot these days. Shortly before writing “Extant,” I was telling her that I needed to start following through on my more “high concept” ideas. When I moved out here and I knew I really wanted to take a shot at breaking in I wrote the show I would want to watch rather than the smaller niche ones I felt like I could make on a micro-budget and ended up with a show that is a double high concept. I had a really good feeling when I entered the contest that my logline (astronaut goes to space on a solo mission, doesn’t come home alone) would catch someone’s eye and at least get them to read the first few pages. That’s really the first battle, getting someone to open the script or tune in, so I think the more unique or exciting the better.
That being said, there are so many avenues for serialized storytelling these days that (call me naive) really good writing can trump a lot, even commercial viability.
Scott: How much time do you spend in prep-writing (i.e., brainstorming, character development, plotting, research, outlining)? Which of the aspects of prep do you tend to devote the most time and focus to?
Mickey: I used to never outline in a real way, it was mostly just brainstorming and bullet pointing ideas for scenes and figuring out what the characters wanted until I had enough of a foothold to really sit down and write. I typically wouldn’t start until I knew at least a solid beginning and the end. I won a screenwriting contest early last year that The Writer’s Store sponsored called The Industry Insider Contest, where they pair you with a mentor to write a feature script and my mentor, Kay, had me do extensive outlining. It was really smart the way she went about it and I treated it like it was a studio job, following her notes and really doing the work and it paid off. For the show, we outline every episode, scene by scene, for our producing partners and the network, so I’m in the habit of doing it now. I may eventually crave a more free-wheeling approach again one of these days but for now it helps. Now when I sit down to write the script I know scene by scene who wants what and why and all the basic questions of the drama.
Tomorrow in Part 6, Mickey shares some thoughts about key aspects of the craft of writing.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Part 2, here.
Part 3, here.
Part 4, here.
Go here for the official CBS “Extant” site.
Go here for the “Extant” Facebook page.
@Extant_CBS
“Extant” airs weekly on Wednesdays at 9PM E/8PM C.
Mickey is repped by WME and Energy Entertainment.
Twitter: @MickeyFisher73.
Mickey has agreed to answer your questions, so if you got something for him, please post in comments.
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