Interview [Part 6]: 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 6, Mickey shares some thoughts about key aspects of the craft of writing:
Scott: How do you go about developing your characters?
Mickey: My approach to that is really messy. It’s always a combination of real life observation, imagination, sometimes subconscious theft, etc. It used to be more important to me that people like the characters. Now I just want them to be compelling.
Scott: What about dialogue? How do you go about finding your characters’ voices?
Mickey: Dialogue was the only thing about writing that came kind of naturally to me, I think because I had been an actor and spent so much time on stage speaking it. I also loved dialogue early on. When I was a teenager, before I even knew who David Mamet was I recorded the entire movie of The Untouchables to audiotape and drove around in my Camaro listening to it over and over. I spent years living in New York riding on the train and sitting in cafes just listening to people talk. I’ve also learned so much from listening to actors speak my dialogue. I think if anyone has the opportunity to get their scripts into actors hands and have them read it out loud, or even just a group of friends and fellow writers, it’s eye opening.
Scott: How would you define theme? How important is it? Do you start with themes or do they I would define them as the underlying arise in the context of developing and writing the story?
Mickey: Theme, to me, is the underlying message or question at the heart of your story, it’s what it’s ultimately about underneath. It almost always reveals itself late to me. In fact, I’m sitting here thinking about it, I don’t think I’ve ever started out to write something thinking, “This is what I want to say.” It’s almost always been that at some point I write a scene or come up with an idea for a moment and go, “Oh, THAT’S why you started writing this.”
Scott: What do you think about when writing a scene? What are your goals?
Mickey: I try to keep it as simple as possible. What do the characters want, how are they trying to get it, why now and what happens if they don’t get it. I try to think about that for every scene, whether it’s someone trying to steal a car or propose marriage and write towards that. The hardest scenes I’ve ever written, the ones I struggle with the most, are the ones that are baldly expository and without conflict.
Scott: What keys do you have to write entertaining scene description?
Mickey: I try to keep it simple here, too. I keep my prose as spare and muscular as possible and boil down to the most evocative images. That’s just my personal favorite style and I go farther and farther toward it every year. I try to keep my voice as hidden as possible. I remember watching the Reservoir Dogs blu-ray and hearing the DP talk about not wanting to reveal the presence of camera because it sub-consciously takes the viewer out of the movie. I try to do the same thing in scene description. That being said, I often cheat. I turned in a recent draft of an episode for “Extant” with one character’s inner monologue written out in bold italics in every scene, just as an experiment.
Scott: When you finish a first draft, you are faced with the inevitable rewriting process. Are there some keys you have to rewriting your scripts and if so what are they?
Mickey: [Sigh] Rewriting is such a fact of life now that I’ve begun to say that the only things certain are death, taxes and notes. I really just have to force myself to sit down and do it but I find once I do, IF I’m making it better, that it becomes an easy task.
Scott: What is your actual writing process?
Mickey: Before I was working on the show I would try to write every day for at least four hours or so. My schedule is pretty erratic though. That’s kind of my one concession to myself, I’ll write when I feel like it and not try to force an arbitrary schedule on it. It might be from 9am-2pm or 3pm in a coffee shop or from midnight to 6am at home. I love writing in coffee shops or restaurants (I’m in one right now doing this) because the noise helps me zone out. With the show I don’t have the luxury of leisurely afternoons at Starbucks or all-nighters, so I tend to write whenever I can. I did a big rewrite of the third episode in between takes while shooting the pilot.
Scott: What is your single best excuse not to write?
Mickey: Binge watching some other series.
Scott: What do you love most about writing?
Mickey: I’m addicted to the spark of creation. And I love that a writer like myself can start with a blank piece of paper and a pen and a couple of years later be standing in a real set built from something I imagined on a whim. That JK Rowling sat alone at her kitchen table dreaming up Hogwarts and now you can actually GO TO HOGWARTS at Universal Studios. I love that you can write a movie, TV or novel and that there might be hundreds of people dressing up as your characters at Dragon Con. I think there’s nothing cooler than that.
Scott: Finally what advice can you offer to aspiring screenwriters or TV writersabout the learning the craft and breaking into Hollywood?
Mickey: I think the best thing I ever did for myself was to not wait around for someone to give me a break. I kept writing, I kept making my own stuff, I kept raising my own bar and trying to get better. I entered everything I could (every reputable thing) and really tried to make my own breaks. And I’d say, to quote the movie Rolling Thunder, “You have to learn to love the rope.” I was on the outside looking in for a long time and there were plenty of times I suffered self-doubt and wanted to give up. I learned to embrace the struggle and accept that even though this was going to be a long, difficult journey, I’d be better for having tried.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Part 2, here.
Part 3, here.
Part 4, here.
Part 5, 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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