Interview [Part 4]: 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 last night and will air 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 4, Mickey talks about how “Extant” went from FADE OUT to a series deal with CBS.
Scott: There are a lot of interesting themes at work in your pilot script. One of the key ones is, “What does it mean to be a human? What constitutes being a human?” Could you talk a bit about some of the themes that you were interested in exploring in “Extant”?
Mickey: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a scene early on where the character John is delivering this lecture on Humanics and is presenting Ethan to the board of directors. He gets into those conversations back and forth with one of the board members about, “What is human? What is really the nature of a soul?” Things like that.
That was probably my favorite thing to write because it represents a lot of what’s going on in my head and heart a lot of the time. That question of, “Are we just the end result with a bunch of information and our experiences, is it that? Or is there something divine there, is there something created by an omnipotent force?”
All of those questions are questions of the human condition. I was able to pull all that out for myself in that scene. It was great because when Greg came on board, the first time we met, the things that we really connected with were those big scenes.
He keyed into it right away and I was so excited to find somebody that was as excited about those things as I am.
We worked the whole time to really keep infusing those and to look at it through this prism of, “How do these stories and storylines and certain scenes relate back to that scene and ask that question of, ‘What does it mean to be human right now and how do we preserve that when everything is changing around us?’”
Scott: Those themes and dynamics you have in the script, as I was going through it, science fiction, A.I., family, mystery, conspiracy, the fact that Steven Spielberg ends up involved in this project, in some ways it’s like the perfect Spielberg story.
Were you thinking when you were writing it, did you have any Spielberg fantasies or was that not even at all in your realm of possibility?
Mickey: That was so far beyond my realm of imagination at that time that that would even be possible. All of this was beyond my wildest imagination. My real hope was that it would get me a job on staff somewhere that would just be good enough to get me in the door.
If it was just good enough to get me a manager then that would have been great. That would have been a victory for 2013. When I signed with the agency and the first thing they said was, “Let’s take this to the very top, for this kind of story let’s take it to Steven Spielberg,” it was one of those moments where I was stunned. I said, “yeah, that sounds great.”
I hung up the phone and I just sat there thinking, “Oh my God. There’s a possibility that he’s going to read this thing.” I have to say that even though I hadn’t thought of it when I started looking at it I go, “Man, there really are some of these things that I think that would resonate with him.”
Then I realized that it’s because I’m of a generation that was really programmed by his movies in a huge way.
Scott: Well, particularly because he’s playing in a movie theater all summer when you were a kid.
Mickey: Absolutely. Raiders, like that, I know we saw Raiders at least two or three times in the theater. My dad’s an early‑adopter guy, so we had a VHS player and I know we bought the $80 VHS copy of E.T. when it finally came out and that kind of stuff back then. So yeah, my friends and I were watching Goonies over and over again and all those Amblin movies. A lot of my imagination was programmed by that guy.
Scott: Let’s step back in time here and move to the mechanics of how this got into the situation it is now, where it’s being produced as a CBS series. I wrote a blog post on May 24, 2013 about your script.
At the time, everybody I knew in Hollywood was talking about your script, it was generating a lot of heat. You had multiple agencies pursuing it, multiple buyers pursuing the project, not only as a TV series, but I believe Warner Brothers was talking about making it a movie.
How did you get from typing FADE OUT on that draft to the point where the entire focus of Hollywood is you?
Mickey: Oh my gosh. Just you saying that made my heart contract a little bit. The funny thing is, I typed it out, finished, it and I put it on the shelf for a year. Because I finished it, and then that summer Prometheus came out. I probably finished it in, say, April. Then I went to see Prometheus, and it had development of the sort of miraculous birth theme.
I thought, “That’s it for that script. That’s been done so recently now, and on such a huge scale, that this’ll never fly.” Again I thought, “Well, it’ll be a good writing sample.” I put it on the shelf, but in March of last year, when the TrackingB TV pilot competition came around, I pulled it out again. I thought, “You know what? This is my best shot at a concept like this. This is the best thing I’ve written, the thing I’m most proud of. So I’m going to enter it.”
I entered the contest, and then toward the end of March, I got a call from the guy who runs the contest. He said, “You’re one of our five finalists. We’re going to try to find you some representation, so you may start getting some calls and emails from managers.”
Then a few days later, on that Saturday, I got a call from Brooklyn Weaver. He’s a guy I had been reading about for years. I’d been reading all the way from when I was a semifinalist in Project Greenlight 2, 10 years ago or whatever. He called late on a Saturday evening and said, “Look, I think I can change your life with this script.” He’s like, “If you sign with me ‑‑there are no guarantees, because the business is what it is.” He’s like, “But I think we can do a lot with this.”
I signed with him and a couple weeks later, it had gotten around town and I had a couple meetings with different agencies and I ended up signing with WME and then from there, the next day was when they sent it over to Amblin.
Scott: I know Brooklyn and when I went live with that blog post, he emailed me and said, “Hey, that’s a great post” and as a result of that, I went on Twitter, found you, and you actually sent me an email. If I can just quote the part of it, you said, “So much of this experience has been surreal. I haven’t been able to shake the feeling it could all go away like a dream, but being on GITS had the opposite effect. It made me feel like it’s actually all happened and I might be around for a while.”
Mickey: [laughs]
Scott: Do you remember that experience of moving from unreality to reality?
Mickey: Yes. It’s so funny. The news hit on my 40th birthday, which was on a Wednesday. We were selling the show straight to series on CBS. It was like everything exploded that day. I had hundreds of messages and phone calls from friends and family and people and all the team. It was a great feeling about it.
Thursday it died down a little bit, and then Friday morning, after months of constant calls and emails, things like that all day long, on Friday morning my phone was dead quiet. By Friday afternoon, like one o’clock, nobody had written back, nobody had called me from the team or anybody. I told my girlfriend. I was like, “I think I got fired already. I don’t know how it happened, because I think I’m already off the project, because…”
So I emailed Greg, the showrunner. I said, “Is everything OK? Did I do something?” He must have thought it was so neurotic. He’s like, “It’s OK. This is one project. Everybody else has a bunch of other things that are going on right now. Enjoy the quiet. But everything’s good.”
But even then, two days after we sold it, there was a moment where I thought, “That’s where the train ended.” Now that I’m deep in ‑‑ I’m in the office right now. 10 minutes from now, we’re going to start working on the story for episode 13, for the finale, which I’m going to write. So it feels a lot more real now and pretty cemented.
I still come at it every day like, “This may be the only great thing I ever do.” I try to treat it like it could all go away at any second still and just be grateful for it and to work hard and pour everything into it.
Tomorrow in Part 5, Mickey talks about the strategy of presenting “Extant” as a ‘limited series’.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Part 2, here.
Part 3, 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.
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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