INTERVIEWS

How Z Nation Writer Held the Zucker Brothers to Ransom

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By Matthew Reynolds.

Karl Schaefer may not be a household name, but the veteran writer, producer and showrunner’s moniker has graced the screens of countless households for more than 20 years, from his (tragically) short-lived cult creation Eerie, Indiana to genre favorites The Dead Zone, Eureka and Ghost Whisperer.

Schaefer’s latest is the post-apocalyptic thriller Z Nation, which follows a band of survivors making their way across the zombie-infested landscape of the future United States.

We caught up with Schaefer during a rare break in his hectic production schedule. In the edited conversation below, the TV insider shares details of his legendary Hollywood writer’s enclave, why outlines are often bulls–t, and how sending a ransom note to Airplane! producers Jerry and David Zucker landed him his first job.

Movies were usually the first choice for ambitious writers and directors looked to start a career, with television often a distant second. Now TV seems to be the starting point. Have you noticed this shift?

It’s kind of a golden age of television. There’s a lot of jobs but also a lot of people looking for them. And it’s very competitive, and the general quality of the writing is very high.

TV is a lot rougher – I mean content-wise. Much darker and edgier. There’s no standards and practices anymore, really, anywhere. All the notes you will get are toughen it up, make it meaner, make it gorier. It’s much more candid and there’s a lot more shock value to it. You’re really looking to engage viewers are on a different level. TV used to be about making viewers comfortable and inviting your characters into their living rooms. Now it’s the world of the anti-hero – you want to get caught up in these characters, but they’re bad!

Even Z Nation is the most violent thing I’ve ever written, intentionally so. But it also has a lot of social satire, sex. Crazy human behavior.

Z-Nation

Z-Nation

Talk about your informal writer’s co-op, The Fourth Floor, initially paid for through your contract with former NBC President Grant Tinker’s production company. How in the world did you pull that off?

When I first started working for Grant Tinker I had an office in an old historic building on Hollywood Blvd. that was in terrible shape but in a gorgeous old building, right out of a Philip Marlowe novel. You could get space in that building for 23 cents a square foot. At the time, I told Grant Tinker, if you would give me money to cover the rent I would throw new writers into the building and we would see what would happen.

Over the next 10 years, I had offices that I gave away either cheap or free to new writers or older writers who were looking for a cool space to work. For the money people would normally pay for an office with a staff on a lot, I had this old building. A lot of people came through there, like Steve Gaghan (Traffic) and Alexander Payne (Election) and Jose Rivera (Motorcycle Diaries).

But your investment paid off in unusual ways.

Well, what happened to me on my first show TV 101, (CBS, 1988-89) was, when the show got picked up, instantly the next day there was literally a stack of scripts – back when they sent physical scripts – that was like three feet high. There must have been a hundred scripts there.

I went through a lot of negotiation and phone calls and haggling to get my staff of writers I was going to hire. I went home on a Friday night, saying okay I’ve got offers out to all these eight experienced TV writers. And I came back Monday and an agent I was dealing with took the entire staff that I had put together and walked them over to Moonlighting, which had just hired a new showrunner. So I woke up on Monday I had nobody.

So I went back to the offices that Grant Tinker helped me fill with new writers- people who I had run into up there, and I just hired a bunch of people I had run into up there that I knew were good. So just about everybody on my first staff was inexperienced.

How do you transition from the solitary pursuit of writing to managing a roomful of different voices? Is it difficult?

I really enjoy the writers room process. Even on Z Nation, the show I’m doing now, twenty-something years later, several of the people who were in that first room are still in my writers room, some are brand new. None of them are people who would watch or write a zombie show, and that was intentional, to do something different. So I’ve got a born-again Christian, a crusty old Catholic, an atheist, a young Buddhist woman, a young African-American fan boy.

Everybody adds something different to it. There’s always the person in the room that nobody really likes that seems to throw out these weird ideas that never really land, but then every script they get two or three great ideas in. Then there’s the guy who will pitches 100 ideas and he’ll get three or four good ideas in. It’s about managing chaos.

Omri Katz as Marshall Teller in Eerie, Indiana

Omri Katz as Marshall Teller in Eerie, Indiana

Early on, you created Eerie, Indiana, (NBC, 1991-92) an influential cult hit whose idea seems almost commonplace now but was all new then.

It still has a lot of fans. Jose Rivera was a writer who was sent over to me. At the time he had an idea for a kind of high school horror show, an anthology sort of like The Twilight Zone.  We tried to sell the show, but the problem was, we didn’t have recurring characters. At the time I was working on a show about a kid who was a sort of modern Tom Sawyer, who made everything into a much bigger deal than it needed to be, to add some drama to his life. So we put my character into his show, and came up with Eerie, Indiana together. And we did like 19 episodes before they caught up with us (laughs).

We were making a show for a network that didn’t exist yet – if only Nickelodeon had been doing original programming then. Today that show would have been much more successful because it would have been easier for an audience to find it. We were on Sundays at 7 pm. At the time, if you didn’t see it air in prime time that was it. We had a lot of fans, but the network moved our time slot something like four times. They just couldn’t find us. Today I think it would have been a slam dunk. I still get residual checks. It’s still out there in the world, playing very heavily someplace.

It’s on Hulu.

And I’ve got the $1.98 to prove it.

You’ve created shows from the ground up, but you’ve also come onboard shows that were already up and running, such as The Dead Zone.

It was an odd situation because Michael Piller, who created The Dead Zone based on the Stephen King book, had come to creative loggerheads with the studio and network executives. So I was hired as showrunner, with the not-quite-fired but-in-essence fired previous showrunner hanging around as an executive producer. I was sort of the network’s guy coming in. I did really well but I was like the last guy who tried to open the jar that nobody could open, after everybody had tried.

It was a tough challenge. There’s a lot of history there that you have to buy into. It’s all people management; it hardly has anything to do with writing. You have to manage personalities; they’re going to be paranoid about you coming in, it was somebody who was probably beloved who just got fired. The best thing to do is come in and listen at first. Size up everybody’s strengths and play to those strengths, make them feel like their voice is heard and that this it’s going to fun. Because making TV is just way too much work, way too much work, to just wind up with a TV show at the end of the day.

The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone seems like it was right on the cusp of what you see a lot of today – a major property that existed in a previous form, whose mythology was expanded perfectly into an episodic show.

Jeff Wachtel was a brilliant executive. When he started out at USA he had no money to develop anything. And he knew the best stuff never got made; the best pilots written every year never went into production. So he would just sit back and buy a bunch of pilot scripts. The Dead Zone started out developed by ABC at the time, was passed on there and USA picked it up. It was a low-budget for the time, but we made a really slick show out of it.

It was up to me to come up with the season arcs. What they had done with the first two seasons before I came on was to follow the book. After that they needed to come up with new ideas. And that’s what I think my forte is: coming up with fresh, interesting ideas that actually turn into good episodes; that’s what’s hard to generate for the third season of a show.

We didn’t have money to hire a staff for an entire season. I had to hire writers for only a short period of time, so I had a rolling staff. Then our lead actor for the season arc was only available for a few episodes, so we had to shoot out of order for different cast and different writers. We had to break the whole season and write episodes out of order. It was like four-dimensional chess.

If you’re the showrunner, you’re like the Google of the show. You’re the one person who talks to everybody. You talk to the network, you talk to the actors, you talk to the fans. Everybody has an agenda but you, your agenda is just the show. And at some point, if you’ve got a 13-episode season, you’ve got all thirteen episodes going at once, but none of them are finished. You’re breaking story on episode 13 when you’re editing the first episode you’ve shot, and all the episodes in between are at various stages of production.

With so much narrative complexity moving in on what used to be more formula-driven shows, have we drifted away from show bibles?

Every show is different. You have to do all that bible work anyway, even if you don’t write up a formal bible.

I don’t like doing too much written work before you get to the script. For my money I would rather have a writer break a scene for the first time in the screenplay format. I don’t like really detailed outlines first. An outline is a narrative sales document that you bulls–t your way through to get the network to say yes. And I don’t want people breaking their scenes for the first time in a form that’s not visual and not the script. The first time you think it through, it’s hard to unthink that. If you’re breaking an idea down in an outline, to try to sell to somebody, that may not be at all how the scene should really be.

How has the process of breaking in to the business changed in recent years?

It used to be that everybody who wanted to break into TV would write a sample episode of Cheers. Nowadays people want to read original material, they want to read a pilot. If you look at it from the agent’s point of view, a young writer comes to you and he’s got a good sample Modern Family, well, there’s probably a good 500 Modern Family samples out there. And if he sells you, in success, they’re still never going to make that episode.

But if you write a pilot script that is great, a feature script that is great, and original, those things can be worth seven or eight hundred thousand dollars. And here is someone who is a self-starter, who can generate original material. That person is way more valuable than someone who is demonstrated he can be a cog in the wheel.

And I don’t know anybody whose agent got them their first job. If you’re waiting around for your agent to get you your first job you’re going to be unemployed a long, long time. The fact that I was able to sell a script on my own without an agent made agents go, well this guy’s going to do half the work. He’s not going to be sitting around waiting for me to figure out a way to break through – he’s going to break through and I’m going to chase behind him and make deals.

The Cast of Cheers

The Cast of Cheers

How did you get your start?

I grew up here in Southern California, in Downey. I was editor of the school paper, I worked in a photo studio. I went to USC film school on a state scholarship, back when you could do things like that. I wanted to be a cameraman.

When I got out of school, I wrote a script called What I Did To The President’s Daughter that I sold by direct mail. I got a book called Who’s Who in Hollywood that had mailing addresses for producers and the movies they had made. I selected 100 producers who had made some form of romantic comedy and sent them a mailing that included a one-sheet with kidnap lettering and a postcard that said, “Yes, send me your screenplay, I haven’t discovered anybody all day,” or “No, I don’t want to read your script even if it’s the last one on earth.” I was just looking for a job as a reader; I didn’t think I would sell the script. And I got like 20 postcards back, to my surprise, and I followed them up with the script. This was around 1985, and it got me around the unsolicited material wall. Once they sent the postcard back it became a solicited piece of material. I guess the cover letter I sent convinced them I wasn’t insane.

That script was bought by the Zucker brothers, who did Airplane! and Kentucky Fried Movie. That was the first script that I sold.

That’s a remarkable origin story!

Yeah and it was harder to do then, too. There wasn’t a good mail merge program like there is today. (But) the script was good and it had a catchy title that lent itself to that kind of a crazy mail campaign. At the time I don’t think anybody had done anything like that. It was before the Internet, basically. It was super labor intensive.

The thing I’ve learned over the years is that having any kind of a plan puts you ahead of 98 percent of the people. The ugly truth is that it’s really a sales job. You’re always selling: you’re either pitching a script, you’re pitching yourself to an agent, you’re pitching your fellow writers on a TV staff, you’re pitching the director to direct it the way you wrote it.

It’s sort of a given that your script better be good. Getting in the door doesn’t do you any good if the script’s no good.

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Matthew Wade Reynolds has been a writer, journalist and Hollywood development executive for most of the waking hours of his adult life and all of the dreaming hours of his childhood. <br> <table> <tr> <td><a href="mailto:Matthewwadereynolds@yahoo.com"><img src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/email.png" style="height:25px"></a></td> <td><a href="mailto:Matthewwadereynolds@yahoo.com">Matthewwadereynolds@yahoo.com</a></td> </tr> </table>

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