Interview [Part 2]: 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 tomorrow: 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 2, Mickey shares some of the lessons he learned in making two indie movies, laying the groundwork for his script “Extant”:
Scott: Going back to those days when you were attending the Esquire Theater and seeing independent films for the first time, you were talking about El Mariachi, which I think the budget was $7,000.
Mickey: Yeah.
Scott: I looked on IMDB and The King of Iron Town has a budget of $10,000, so I’m guessing Rodriguez must have been something of an inspiration for you?
Mickey: Yeah, absolutely. The IMDB figure’s a little low. I think by the end we spent probably $30,000 on it [Iron Town]. Because after all the post stuff and things like that, too. I think that he had his transferred to VHS and edited it all. I know there were a couple steps that he skipped that I didn’t.
As I was writing The King of Iron Town, I was reading that “Rebel Without a Crew” book. It’s so inspirational for somebody at that stage. It got me at the right time, at the right point of my ambitions, when I could really do this and I hadn’t because I had been an actor.
Even when I got out of school, I was still doing summer stock and I was working with actors at the time, so I knew I could draw from my actor friends and hopefully convince some of them to come and work for free, basically for the experience and to hang out at my family’s house.
It was a big family affair. My parents cooked. They were basically the catering and the craft services. And my grandma would cook these huge, elaborate meals for the cast and the crew. So yeah, that book was a big inspiration to me about how to do it in that style.
Scott: What were you doing to support yourself financially at this point?
Mickey: I was still doing some shows as an actor. I was doing a little summer stock. Anything and everything that I could. I was pretty much living the life of a working actor in some ways, too, because a lot of odd jobs I was doing…by this point when I started shooting, I was also teaching. I always liked working with kids and I had started some children’s theater programs and things like that, too.
I actually had moved from New York back to Ohio to shoot the movie. So I was teaching some afterschool programs for kids and things like that in acting and playwriting, filmmaking. And gosh, just a lot of other odd jobs. I drove cars. My cousin owned a car dealership or managed a car dealership in Ironton, and so I would drive to other dealerships and pick up cars and bring them back. It was just any and every odd job I could do to make ends meet.
Scott: That first movie, The King of Iron Town, what are some of the lessons you learned from that?
Mickey: I learned a huge lesson in the editing room. Once you edit the movie, there’s all that stuff that you write that eventually gets cut. The character pulling up and getting out of the car and walking into the house. The first cut of the movie we watched was so long. The rough cut felt almost episodic in a way, too. You have the scene, as the scene would play out ‑‑ a really long beginning, middle, and end.
The first thing I learned was that. Exactly what you said about the script for “Extant” is that by the time I got to writing that after the years of making my own movies and stuff, I just wrote down to the barest, most minimal effective things I could. That’s a lot of what I learned from being just in the editing room and making that.
But I’ll tell you, most of what I learned was just about myself and about dealing with challenges and dealing with adversity and really pushing it through. When you’re doing something like that, if you’re the writer and the director and the producer, you’re acting and stuff too, you’re the first person on and you’re the last person off and nobody’s going to make you get up in the morning and work on your movie.
Nobody’s going to get up and make you send out postcards to distributors or make the packets or to go make another round of cuts in the edit and stuff like that. It really becomes like you have to drive yourself.
The same thing is true as a writer, when you’re on the outside of the industry like I was even just a year ago, where nobody was going to make me get up and take my laptop or notebook to Starbucks and write. So I learned a lot that way, too. It was a lot of self‑discipline.
Scott: You followed up with another film, Summer Nuts, which was released in 2006, about a group of actors from a small town summer stock theater who form the worst softball team in the history of the sport.
Mickey: Yeah [laughs].
Scott: Evidently The King of Iron Town didn’t dissuade you from this process, so how did you end up doing Summer Nuts?
Mickey: We shot The King of Iron Town on film. The biggest change was…it’s not like we were making our money back or had a huge windfall from The King of Iron Town. So I said, “If we do this, we have to shoot it on video. And if we’re going to shoot on video, then let’s make it part of the style.”
I had seen the British version of “The Office,” and it was my favorite thing for a while. So let’s do a documentary‑style comedy. As we were making it, it became kind of huge over here too, because of the American “Office,” then “Parks and Rec.” It’s such a genre unto itself now.
But there were the Christopher Guest movies, like Waiting for Guffman and those kind of things too, which as theater people, you’re obligated to be a fan of. But yeah, it didn’t dissuade me at all. The one thing it did, I thought, “We have to do it in a shorter time frame. And we have to shoot it on video. It’s all going to be cheaper. Let’s do something fun. Let’s get all our friends together.”
It was based on a somewhat true story. I was working in a summer stock theater in college and I was on the worst softball team in the history of the sport [laughs], a bunch of actors from the softball team. And my friend Stephen Colella, who plays the coach in the movie, is actually the guy in real life who organized this whole team. His heart was in it, he’s a really competitive guy, and it was heartbreaking for him every week to watch guys who were not athletes at all.
And we would show up to play teams that were guys from pipefitters’ unions or whatever ‑ these big, burly guys that had probably all played sports in high school. Then we were bringing in guys who spent the year tap dancing. [laughs]
Scott: That’s an interesting jump from these two movies. One’s a drama. One’s sort of a mockumentary. Then this leap to “Extant”, which is not only changing genre — it’s a sci‑fi family drama — but also changing platform from movies to TV. How did that happen, where you evolved from what you were doing with those two films and then moving toward writing the pilot script “Extant”?
Mickey: Genre‑wise, I had a job for about five years straight writing and directing full‑length plays for this theater in Kentucky called Jenny Wiley Theatre. They hired me originally because they wanted to do a Halloween show…to do a big show for schools and for general audiences and the original show was “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
They hired me, but the first thing they said was, “We don’t like the script that we have. What we want to do, we know we want to do “Legend of Sleepy Hollow’”.
They knew I was a writer and a director and I think that was kind of why they brought me in. I said, “Give me a chance to write an adaptation for you and then we’ll see how it goes.” I did it and it was a big success. Before it was even over, they said, “All right, what do you want to do next year?”
Personally I was like, “What if we do “Frankenstein”? Nobody does “Frankenstein’”. So I adapted and directed a full‑length version of “Frankenstein.” Then we did “Dracula.” So three years in a row, it was getting more and more successful. By the fourth year, I said, “Let’s do something original. We know we’re building an audience. We know they’re going to come back, because they know this slot is going to be something fun and something special, so let’s do an original. Let’s take a chance.”
They did it and it was even better than the last. That was a ghost story. It was a sort of paranormal haunted house story on stage. Then for the last one we did another original in “Dracula in Tombstone,” which is basically Dracula versus Wyatt Earp. We were riding the wave of all those mash‑ups at the time.
So for five years straight, I was writing all these genre, appraising this all, and that’s the stuff that I always watch anyway. I’m the first guy in line midnight on Thursday to watch the newest superhero movie or the newest big sci‑fi movie or things like that.
Except for the last six months which I haven’t been able to see much of anything, typically anything that had aliens or had tights and capes, I was there opening night.
When I moved out here [Los Angeles] three years ago with the idea of breaking into television and I knew I wanted to be a staff writer and start creating my own shows and stuff because there’s so much happening on television.
I still wanted to write features too, but it just felt like TV might be a good way to break in because there might be more jobs there. I just sat down to learn to write a pilot and I did the thing that they always tell you to do as a writer which is the best advice which is to write the show you’d want to watch.
It ended up being a melding of these themes and ideas and these sci‑fi tropes grounded into a family story and that’s exactly the kind of show that I would want to watch on TV.
Tomorrow in Part 3, Mickey discusses the origins and development of the story for the “Extant” pilot script.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
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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