Interview [Part 1]: 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 debuts this Wednesday, July 9 at 9PM EDT/8PM CDT. 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 1, we delve into Mickey’s background including the first of two independent movies he wrote, directed, produced and acted in back in the Midwest:
Scott: I couldn’t be happier for you, especially for someone who reads my blog. It’s always exciting for me when a GITS reader achieves success.
Mickey: Oh, absolutely. Listen, you and I are fans of the same things, like the Aristotle “Poetics” series. I just really try to internalize that kind of stuff for myself to make it part of my DNA as a writer. So yeah, I always love reading your blog and you’re such a champion of writers. I appreciate it. I know what you do helps, I can tell you that.
Scott: So let’s go all the way back. Where did you grow up and how did you find your way into writing as an interest?
Mickey: I grew up in a very small town in Ohio, in Southern Ohio kind of right on the border of Kentucky in West Virginia. It’s called Ironton. It’s not particularly the place which you think would breed a lot of writers. Actually there are some…like Kentucky’s Poet Laureate, this guy named Jesse Stuart was from right across the river from where I was from.
As a kid I was really into movies and TV. I kind of remember back almost as far as being five years old, and wanting to be an actor, wanting to do shows and singing and things like that too. I grew up doing a lot of plays and musical theater.
Then when I was in high school, I did all the school plays and a lot of community theater. Then I went to school for musical theater at a conservatory of music in Cincinnati. But along the way, like I said, I was always a movie fan. I was always very into TV. I had a lot of movie friends, where we would go, watch the same thing over and over.
I remember, we had one theater across the river from us, which was the Ashland Midtown Cinema, and they had three screens, basically, for most of the time I was growing up, until I was in high school. When something would come there, like E.T. would play there all summer long [laughs], really like for two months.
I would see those things over and over again, and by the time I got to college that was the first time I’d ever seen an independent film. There was a theater called the Esquire Theater that was not far from where I lived in Cincinnati, and it was an art house. It was right at the time they were showing El Mariachi, Reservoir Dogs, Brothers McMullen, and Clerks.
Those were movies I was reading about where these guys were making them for thousands of dollars, not millions of dollars. Like I said, I was going to school for musical theater, and by the time I left college, I really had an interest in writing and to some extent directing as well, because of being exposed to that kind of independent film.
Scott: That begs the question, how did you learn the craft of screenwriting if your background was more in theater?
Mickey: I found my way into the writing through acting. In our musical theater program, we had a class called “Audition Techniques.” One of the assignments was to write your own monologue for an audition. It was kind of a challenge to say, “Look, when you’re in New York and you’re auditioning for a season of shows, you may have to craft something personal to you and so give it a shot.” I remember going up and doing my monologue and it really being a hit. It was one of the first times I thought, “I actually maybe have an instinct for this.”
I think sometimes writers ‑‑ I’ve had this for a long while ‑‑ have a natural ear for dialogue. I think it just came from speaking dialogue onstage for at that point, almost 20 years. I found my way into it through acting, and then by the time I left college, I wanted to be a writer as much as I wanted to be an actor. Then I moved to Chicago right after college, and I just sat down and started writing.
I wrote my first full‑length screenplay at that point in Chicago over one long winter. I remember I printed it out and I read it through, and I thought, “Wow, this is really terrible.” And I threw it away. [laughs] I actually literally, I think, even that night threw it in the trash, and thought, “I’ve got to start all over again.”
I learned myself the hard way just from doing it over and over again. I read a ton of books and I read a ton of screenplays and I watched a ton of movies and I just kept writing. It took me years and years to get good at it.
Scott: That first screenplay, what year are we talking, when you’re in Chicago?
Mickey: I moved to Chicago the fall of 1995, so I probably finished that script maybe January of 1996.
Scott: Jumping ahead, you wrote and directed a movie called The King of Iron Town. That’s where you grew up?
Mickey: Yeah, yeah. The town I grew up in is called Ironton. At some point they squashed the two words together and dropped the W. Iron Town was my way of slightly fictionalizing it a little bit.
Scott: That’s 2004, so the process of writing that first screenplay in 1995 to 2004, what are you doing? Reading books, watching movies, writing scripts?
Mickey: Absolutely. I think those are the three keys. It’s reading, writing, and watching. Until you get to the point where you can actually get in the editing room, and that’s another whole phase of learning. But yeah, I started like everybody did. I bought the Syd Field book. I was a big fan of David Mamet’s, so I read a lot of his stuff on writing.
And I probably wrote, between the time of that first screenplay and the time I wrote The King of Iron Town, there was probably another seven or eight screenplays there in the middle, and a couple of plays. Then I think when I was 28…I actually wrote The King of Iron Town…I think in 2002 is when I actually started filming it.
And I wrote it over a period of…I had the idea. I went to the Toughman Contest, and the final bout were these two brothers, these two heavyweights, and it wasn’t exactly the kind of fight that everybody was hoping to see. There’s all that drama. You think, “Ah, two brothers in the ring.” It ended up being not that great a fight.
I went home and I was like, “Man, what would have led to the fight that I really wanted to see, where two brothers just brought all their troubled family history into the ring together?” I wrote it pretty quickly because I did that thing that Robert Rodriguez said in “Rebel Without a Crew,” “Write around what you have.”
So I wrote a story that not only was set in my home town, but I knew I could shoot in my parents’ back porch or I could shoot in…my uncle has a basketball court in his yard. Or I could borrow these certain cars or these motorcycles.
I really wrote around the elements that I had and then told a story about a place and a people that I knew really well.
Tomorrow in Part 2, Mickey shares some of the lessons he learned in making two indie movies, laying the groundwork for his script “Extant”.
Go here for the official CBS “Extant” site.
Go here for the “Extant” Facebook page.
@Extant_CBS
“Extant” premieres Wednesday, July 9 at 9PM EDT / 8PM CDT.
Mickey is repped by WME and Energy Entertainment.
Twitter: @MickeyFisher73.
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