Interview [Part 3]: 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 tonight: 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 3, Mickey discusses the origins and development of the story for the “Extant” pilot script:
Scott: Let’s talk about “Extant” which you wrote as a spec one‑hour TV pilot and it’s going to debut on CBS on July 9th [tonight] at 9:00 PM Eastern.
Here’s how CBS describes it on the Facebook page for the series, a very minimal description, but it gets right to the concept, “Astronaut Molly Woods went on a 13‑month solo mission. She did not return alone.” That’s almost like a tagline in a way.
Apart from the sort of general ingredients and the fact that you were interested in this type of material, sci‑fi type thing, what was your original inspiration for “Extant”?
Mickey: Going way back, like let’s see three to four years ago, even before I moved out here I had started thinking of it as a one‑person play. It was going to be a guy stuck alone on a space station who…coming across these ghosts of his past.
Then that movie Moon with Sam Rockwell came out and it was somewhat similar, it had similar elements to it, so I had to put it on the back burner for a little bit. Then when I moved out here and I started working on ideas for a new pilot, that idea came up again.
I also got to a point where I knew that I had been short‑changing my female characters a bit. Like a lot of male writers I just typically favored the people who had my voice and that kind of thing. I thought, “Let’s take a look at that and see what it would be like with a female astronaut.”
I knew that the idea ultimately was about…Drama is about an ordinary person in an extraordinary situation. This would have been about an extraordinary person in an impossible situation. I was working from that idea and I wanted to use a female astronaut and then she comes across ghosts from her past.
Then I thought, “What if she comes back pregnant, basically, carrying something in her womb?” Once I had that idea, that sort of twist on that I knew right then it was bigger than a movie. I knew it was going to be something I would want to tell over 13 hours or so, and hopefully more. That’s really how it started.
Then the idea of her having a family at home and her husband who was an inventor, a robotics assistant, who would have already created this prototype for this thing called a Humanic which was a very lifelike robot who becomes over time like their son. Then it just became about this extraordinary individual with this extraordinary family.
Scott: It went from you having this idea of doing a one‑person play from a male perspective, of this guy on a solo space trip. Then the notion came up when you were thinking about a pilot, switching genders of the protagonist. And then this idea of ghosts from the past. Then the pregnancy thing. Is that the evolution of the process?
Mickey: Yeah, that’s basically it. It was over time. I’m one of those people that I carry things around in my head for a long time and I’m always carrying a notebook, or something, and I’ll jot down a couple of ideas or a couple of bullet points and I’ll kick it around for awhile again.
It took a long time for me to get to the point where I had enough flash of inspiration to sit down. Then when I did, I wrote it in the space of a month, probably. Where I was working out, not only just writing the pilot but fleshing out the world and coming up with a lot of details and things that still exist.
Scott: There is a key element, this idea of Molly, played by Halle Berry, returning home and finding she’s pregnant. Is that an homage to Rosemary’s Baby, was there inspiration from that or was it just out of the blue?
Mickey: It’s really funny. It wasn’t a conscious inspiration. But certainly after the fact when I looked at it there were elements that were similar to it and it played a little bit of a role in our story.
Once I started talking about what I realized too, and certainly once Greg [Walker] came on board as the showrunner, we were talking about how the interesting thing about this is that it’s a Trojan horse to get into these different topics.
Because there is a little bit of the Rosemary’s Baby, but there’s also like the conspiracy theory kind of stuff, like, The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, and those kinds of things. Then there’s the stuff that were inspired by our big blockbusters, created by like Close Encounters.
There are all these elements that you can find in a wide variety of films. The thing that I found that was exciting to me was that a lot of it was from this golden age of ’70s cinema too, or late ’60s, ‘70s.
Scott: It’s a really unique story universe in that you’ve got all these different component parts. She’s pregnant, you do have these conspiracy theories at work, you’ve got this 10‑year‑old son, Ethan who is a Humanic, half‑human, half‑robot, mysteries and whatnot. It seems like what you did wasn’t like, “I’m going to consciously try to meld all this together,” it’s like you went with the characters and the story world evolved out of that.
Mickey: Yeah. Absolutely. It really became for me, and that was one of the first questions people asked me. They were like, “Why did you decide? Most people would have chosen either the alien baby or the robot‑child story, the AI story, why did you put them both in the same thing?”
To me I was really just writing about a family. That’s where I went from was writing these personal relationships and the story world evolved around it. But I was conscious to want to create a world or story where it could grow and change and there was this bigger thing out there.
Also, people, just from a practical level of being able to relate to other interesting stuff and things to keep people compelled to first lean forward and then to hopefully to keep tuning in.
Like, in the graft that you raised, Yasumo, but now it’s Yasumoto, the Yasumoto character and things like that too and setting up a mystery as to who this guy is and what is his agenda in all this. Yeah, it really did just start along the lines of really grabbing in this family and characters and then building out from that.
Scott: I read some interviews on “Extant” and Greg Walker, the showrunner, said, “This deals with a lot of familiar themes that are rooted in a family story.”
The script itself, you made a conscious decision, I mean potentially it’s like a big science fiction movie, it’s like what Spielberg talks about, pondering the fate of humanity, yet the script starts off with a very domestic feel, the opening is soft in a way.
Was that a conscious point on your part to say, “I really want people to understand that this is a story rooted in family”?
Mickey: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a little bit of showmanship in it too in wanting to just keep people turning the pages. Because that’s one of the things and you hear that advice all the time when you’re a writer and you’re trying to break in, “You’ve got to keep people turning pages.”
To me it just made sense. It was almost like getting people into a world that feels very familiar and then given a little twist. Like the dad changing out the kid’s collar cord. Things like that where it feels very domestic and then there will be this one element and hopefully it will just keep pulling people forward into the story.
Some of it was by design like just shameless…Put in there to help me too. But the idea was definitely always to want to put this in a familiar world that has all these extraordinary elements to it.
Tomorrow in Part 4, we dig more deeply into the inner workings of the “Extant” pilot script and series.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Part 2, here.
Go here for the official CBS “Extant” site.
Go here for the “Extant” Facebook page.
@Extant_CBS
“Extant” premieres tonight: Wednesday, July 9 at 9PM EDT / 8PM CDT.
For an interview with Mickey, showrunner Greg Walker and series lead Halle Berry, go here.
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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