“I’d always been a big fan of the written word, from childhood, in different mediums,” says Maurice Williams. “Whether it be youthful song writing or my undergraduate degree in journalism. There’s just beauty in the creation, the alchemy of having nothing and then you have something, about writing.”
In this case, the something from nothing is Entergalactic, an animated series about Jabari, a streetwear-clad artist on the cusp of success. The story is based on a location as much as it is a person, inspired by Kid Cudi, along with Williams, Kenya Barris, and Ian Edelman.
“If I go all the way back, Maurice and I share this, which is why we make great partners, I think growing up as a TV kid, watching movies with my brother while our parents worked, I think even beyond that, it was growing up in New York City, going to public school and riding a bus and subway at a young age, you realize the greatest character studies are in your backyard, ” says Edelman.
Edelman packed many of these stories in his 2010 series How to Make It in America. The HBO series followed a group of 20-somethings living in New York City, and featured Bryan Greenberg, Lake Bell, Luis Guzmán, and Kid Cudi. “I wanted to tell stories about kids I knew who were leading interesting lives that were not the conventional movie, movie. We had a different way of looking at the world.”
A Writing Collaboration
Because of this show, Williams jokes, “I met Ian way before Ian met me.” He continues, “When I was in graduate school, studying Shakespeare, Pinter, and Chekhov, I remember being the only cool kid in the program. And what I mean by that is what Ian and I call ‘Downtown Kids.’ There’s a breed of people and culture now and there was nothing like that in La Jolla, California. Then I saw this show on HBO and I was like, ‘That’s it, that’s what I’m trying to describe.’”
“We both grew up playing basketball. I’m a decade older than him,” says Edelman, “but there are generations of creative kids who, the same creative sauce was sprinkled on all of us. So I sat down with him, Kenya Barris and Kid Cudi, and I hate to say it, but it was just effortless. Some things are really hard, but Entergalactic, at least for us, was born under a lucky star.”
Logistically, all of this really started in a jean shop. “I was working in a jean shop, about to move back to New York, and I started talking to this writer named Doug Hall.” Through a conversation on storytelling, Hall decided to introduce Williams to Kenya Barris. “I owe the opportunity to Kenya very much. Luckily, he’s the busiest man in Hollywood and he gave me some opportunities to work on some ideas.”
When Kid Cudi came in to pitch an idea to Kenya Barris, Barris called up Williams to tell him a little about the idea. “I got on a plane that night and showed up to the office the next day, ran into Kenya, and tried to act like I hadn’t been thinking about it all night. We talked for an hour and I wrote something like a live-action anthology that would use some of Kid Cudi’s bigger songs to make a tributary kind of story about New York City.”
An Expanding Idea
The idea started getting bigger and bigger. Kid Cudi liked the idea and made three songs early on in pre-production. As things got bigger and bigger, the production price tag also went up since they wanted to shoot all over New York City. At this time, Netflix suggested perhaps making it animated. The screenwriters were not interested in the idea, but that weekend, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse came out. “I think with Spider-Verse, we learned that animation is not a genre. It’s a medium. It might actually transcend more than live action.”
Maurice Evans. Photo by Monica Schipper/ Getty Images for Netflix
Early on in the project, Williams says he was going off on a “10-minute filibuster” at Kenya Barris’ production company while Edelman listened patiently. Then, at the end, Edelman spoke up and said, “You’re the guy. I’m just here to help.” He adds, “I thought that was indicative of the process, just support from every angle, from Ian, from Scott (Kid Cudi), from Kenya, and the other writers in the room. Everyone was cool to take the ball and run with it.”
“Given that nobody on the creative team had worked in animation before, it was a process of discovery,” says Edelman. “Luckily, Kenya has incredible resources and relationships, so when they called me, they had already spoken to A-list animation minds. That was, for sure, a separate journey. There was the script and that was Maurice, Scott, then me. Then there was animation which we can guide and shape.”
“Early in the process, we said, ‘We are writing a show to animate. We are not writing an animated show. We went about it that way. The story has to hold up if we were shooting it downtown. We were responsible for how it felt. The feeling — [from Kid Cudi’s music] — is thematically what we were trying to do and we didn’t want to lose that in animation.” Director Fletcher Moules came in to teach the writers everything he could on animation.
Learning Animation
“So the animation style came from trying to do two things at once. We wanted for it to feel real, so you get lost in it, so it could be live action or not. But Fletch saw that this show had this artistic element to it. Every frame is hand-painted. This is animation talk, but instead of moving on ones, like Pixar, we wanted to move on threes and fours, which is why it feels like it’s jumping across your screen. But after two minutes, it visually educates the audience. The style comes out of that.”
“You saw this in Spider-Verse,” says Edelman. “When Miles wore Jordan 1’s, it sort of changed culture, right? And, Maurice sat frame by frame to make sure the wardrobes were draping the right way. That is a level of detail that creates authenticity and art. It defines an animation style. Sometimes, it’s the small things. Forget the renders. His jeans look like this, not that. The sum is greater than the parts, so the humanity hits harder as a result.”
At this point, of course, it’s about collaboration. It’s beyond what’s written on the page. “If you read what used to be six separate TV scripts before we wrote it as a one play, it’s an episode of television. There’s no element that’s different [than live action]. Fletch asked, ‘Why are we animating this?’ So we wrote on the board, ‘Why animate?’”
Why Animate?
At this point, the creatives started to think more about this question and came up with some ideas. “We treated it a little like musical theater. In musical theater, you write to the highest point of emotion and then a song comes out at that point. It’s the same thing. We took the narrative where it was going and then, with that scene of revelation, that became the animation points.”
Ironically, every answer to the question, “Why animate?” didn’t make it into the movie. “When we shifted from writing to animation, Fetch would call me and say, ‘You know that thing here, what if it looked like this?’” Fletch chipped in on animation, the writers responded about character. So when the bike ride through space came up, it was originally a bike ride through the city. “He was using the bike to get to unnatural places, sort of like Aladdin. But when we were going magical, why not just do it?”
Kid Cudi. Photo by Monica Schipper/ Getty Images for Netflix
“We come from such a grounded place,” says Edelman, “that we were like, it’s a movie so he can ride his bike from Soho to Harlem and no one will call bullshit. But Fletch is like, ‘Or he could ride to Mars because no one knows anything.’” This led to the process of working to make it particularly beautiful while also highlighting the original idea for the show and the various aspects of New York that stood out to the creators. “The specificity of those small things made the animation moments make sense.”
Edelman says, “We also had these musical numbers and we weren’t going to make musical numbers where they perform to camera. Suddenly, the gear of this animation, the beautiful surrealism, which is also natural to Scott’s music — ‘Man on the Moon’ or ‘Entergalactic’ — creatively, it was just home turf. It didn’t feel forced. It felt like something everybody on board wanted to maintain.”
Born Under a Lucky Star
As complex as this idea was in the beginning, the pitching aspects were less complex than normal. “If I’m being completely honest,” says Williams, “we had the greatest fullback ever in Netflix. They kind of hid us away. They originally told their bosses, we’re doing this music thing with Kid Cudi, so we’re pitching the whole thing out, and they hid us in the dark and left us alone. They really just blocked for us. Once they got us a yes, the names attached to it sell themselves.”
In retrospect, the writers realized they were one of the few productions that actually benefited from the pandemic as they didn’t have to stop production since they were animation. “For so long, people were like, ‘What is this thing?’ So when they finally saw it and felt something and it was moving, they were like, ‘We’re glad we didn’t ask questions earlier.’” Questions, in this regard, may have derailed or altered the project.
When Edelman gives advice to those breaking into the business, he tells them to “just keep going.” He continues, “There’s no path. There’s nothing linear. It’s a lot of luck and the best way to get luck is to keep working. When I was doing How to Make It in America, I painted with Stephen Levinson, and I would ask him, ‘How do you make it in America?’ He would say, ‘Don’t quit, don’t die.’ That’s it. Then it’s just hard work.”
“It’s the work you do when nobody is watching,” says Williams. “That’s really all that matters. That’s the only thing that ever becomes anything. How would you do it if nobody was looking over your shoulder? I’m a firm believer in just getting good. I’m also a firm believer that nobody cares. And I mean that in a good way. No one cares that you’ve got an idea. Can you execute on it? Can you at least give me the blueprint of why it can be something?”
The New Hollywood System
Williams notes he’s part of “The New Hollywood System.” He says, “If you’ve got a good idea and you can get an 800-pound gorilla partner, you can probably get it through. I’m definitely a benefit of that, but it’s a process and you have to bet on yourself. Then you have to choose the thing that is more fulfilling, for how you can get better. If you can get better, you can do anything, but if you’re terrible, people will find out sooner than you think.”
Ian Edelman. Photo by Monica Schipper/ Getty Images for Netflix
There’s something to be said about Williams seeing How to Make It in America, loving the world, the show, and not trying to contact Edelman until he had a project they could work on together. “I think the funniest thing about it is that it’s the work you do in the dark and the work you do out of adoration. I had two specs that were kind of my calling card in the business and they were quite literally inspired by How to Make It in America. They have that essence.”
“But even then, it wasn’t like, ‘Hey Ian, I’ve got an idea, let’s do this together.’ Nobody wants to do that,” clarifies Williams. “That is disrespectful to how hard it is to do this thing. It’s not rocket science and we’re not in the steel mill, but it’s hard to sit down with nothing and turn it into something, being true to your vision or thought process. So to come to someone who has done that, who has those lashes, who has been up and down the mountain, to come to them and be like, ‘I’ve got this kernel of a thing, now give me what you do.’ That’s not how it works.”
Williams continues, “You have to put your head down and you have to produce things yourself. They don’t have to be produced in the sense that it has to be shot, but I want to know that, for at least twenty-five hours, you sat in a room and stared at a blank screen to come up with something. Because then I know what I’m getting into. We had a great first meeting and then that night, he called me. That great meeting or that stance meeting is easy to have in Hollywood and I think people want the run-in more than they want to produce after that moment. For that moment, you have to have honed your taste by what you’ve done, not what you think.”
This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio version here.
