By Brianne Hogan.
Al Kratina and George Mihalka. Image by Jeanette Kelly
The days of the video store might be dead in real life, but it’s alive and well in the dark comedy TV series, 24 Hour Rental.
Okay, maybe “alive” and “well” aren’t the most appropriate adjectives to describe a show that follows a former Mafia boss named Tracker, who now runs a sordid video store as a front for a host of petty crimes.
In a nice twist of irony, the show about a video store is now available for viewing on a streaming service: Hulu recently premiered the 13 episode series on Oct. 30 for your binge-watching pleasure.
Creative Screenwriting caught up with the series writer, Al Kratina, and showrunner/producer, George Mihalka (My Bloody Valentine), to chat about the show’s seedy roots, writing an unlikeable character, and the freedom of writing a pilot that you believe will never be picked up.
24 Hour Rental
Al, what was the inspiration for the show?
Al: It’s not a terribly exciting answer. I worked at a video store and I did a lot of amphetamine. [Laughs.] Actually, that’s just partially true. I did work at a video store and saw a lot of stuff and lived in Montreal where a lot of things happen in front of your eyes when you’re on your way home late at night. So all that kind of helped inspire what you see in the show, which is pretty much what happens in a video store when you have had a traumatic brain injury.
This is one for George: what drew you to the project?
George: What I really liked about the project was I always have adored gangster movies. That whole genre has always been one of my favorites. And the idea of being able to make a gangster series where we are not going to make it about gangsters but make about the genre, and parody it, and make it into a conflict satire excited me. And Al wrote such a great pilot episode, and we just needed to make it happen. So we went out to make the pilot and from that we were able to make the series.
Al: One of the things we tried to do with this, as part of the piranha aspect, was to play with the gangster anti-hero. If you watch a lot of these crime shows, there is a lot of these bad people who become heroes, like Scarface. The movie is a cautionary tale. This is about a guy’s rise and fall, but he’s treated like Rudy. So we wanted to take the idea of an anti-hero, like when you watch Silence of the Lambs and people root for Hannibal, and we wanted to see if we could take a bunch of characters that are entirely evil and entirely unlikeable, and make the audience root for them. So that was sort of the creative driving force with the satirical aspect of the show: to take a gangster anti-hero and make you root for him while making him as unlikeable as possible.
George: We decided that no one should have any redeeming social or moral value whatsoever.
Al Pacino as Tony Montana in Scarface
Well, actually, that touches on one of my questions. As a writer, and showrunner/producer, how do you keep a character like Tracker as someone the audience wants to root for? How do you do that?
Al: I think from the writing aspect, that was both the challenging part and the fun part. That was the balance we were trying to strike. We didn’t always get it in early drafts. There were hits and misses. If our goal is to make you root for a completely unlikeable character, then that’s a challenge.
What we found worked, ultimately, was to keep all those unpleasant aspects of the story because that’s what helps drive the story – the mistakes that Tracker makes, all of the comedy comes from these characters being terrible people – but, also, if you give them something that they want – a goal that the audience can recognize and empathize with – then that will make them a lot more likeable.
So Tracker might have terrible qualities, but as a viewer, hopefully, you know what he wants. He wants to regain a life that he lost, to climb out from this pit that he dug for himself. The fact that you give them an understandable goal, then you can sympathize with these characters more and you can get away with a lot more.
George: Also the idea of surrounding him with even more evil and nastier people. So, all of a sudden, he doesn’t look nearly as nasty and evil. And, obviously, this has a lot to do with the humour in the show. And it’s the performance, too. At the same time that these characters are bad, we play them in a way that they are regular folk. It’s always this tension between the way the actors play the characters and what the characters really stood for.
Romano Orzari as Tracker in 24 Hour Rental
So, there’s the satirical aspect of the show and then there’s the gangster component. As a writer, how do you keep that balance?
Al: It’s tricky because the balance you want to strike, as funny as you are trying to be and as satirizing you want to be – as I mentioned before, we are trying to satirize the glorification of the anti-hero – all that stuff is well and good, but that doesn’t drive the story. So the Mafia elements, the crime elements, those are what drive the story. That’s your backbone, your spine. The satirical elements and the comedy adds richness, it helps make the point you are trying to make on a larger level, but the spine is Tracker’s journey through that crime world. We generally start with, “What’s the story?” “What’s driving this series?” So everything else, you build on top of that. The satirical element is laid on top of that.
Kate Ross as Sarah in 24 Hour Rental
The show features some pretty out there storylines. What inspires the stories you come up with? Are they based on personal experiences?
Al: [Laughs.] Perhaps I was being a touch flippant earlier. The video store elements are based on my experience. The video store where I worked at had a really unique balance of cult sensibilities and high art sensibilities, as well it as being primarily funded by pornographic rentals, so you had this interesting mix of clients, and all the clerks were film students. So that’s where my personal experience found its way into the series. It wasn’t a crooked store by any means!
The interactions with the clients kinda worked itself way into the show, but the criminal aspects were things we just made up. We took scenes from crime movies we liked and warped them and mutated them and took things that we had heard about or seen. The neighborhood where I lived in Montreal had a bunch of meth dealers, so we took all of that stuff, and then George has a rich history of hanging out with no good people right, George?
George: Well, I was a showrunner and director on a television series in Canada called Omerta, which was sort of the precursor to The Sopranos. I had the opportunity to meet a lot of the actual members of the family in Montreal. It became almost a mark of honor for these people to come and be extras on the show. These people become folk heroes, not only in Quebec and Montreal, but also in the Godfather community.
I got to know a lot of people and get some interesting insights into that. So, what Al and I would do while we were brainstorming and writing stories, was to take some of the anecdotes I had heard and compare our favorite scenes in our favorite gangster movies, and then say, “Okay, how can we twist that and parody that to fit within the arc of Tracker’s world, and how Tracker is going to get out of his dilemma?”
Omerta, La Loi Du Silence (TV series, 1996)
What was the writing process like between the two of you?
Al: The writer’s room was George and I in a hotel room for a week, banging out the outline. We wrote the stories together and came up with the outline of each episode over the course of a week. Then the writing came afterwards, after the outlines. Then, after that, we made a bible. And then once we got the green light, I stayed in my office – well, my room filled with action figures — and wrote all the screenplays from there.
George: After we wrote the story outlines, we got the green light, Al would write an episode. I would look at the episode and make certain suggestions, then Al would go onto the next episode.
He would deliver an episode a week, which is an amazing feat. On his day off, we would tweak and improve the notes on the previous episode. Over the ten weeks, a two and half month period, I was able to deliver 10 half-hour shows. And then within another two weeks, we had notes from producers – very little notes — and almost no notes from the network, and I was able to incorporate those. So in close to three months, we had final-approved thirteen episodes that we could go off with, which I don’t think has been done before.
One of the reasons we were able to do it that way was because – it’s one of things that was developed in Quebec and now people are doing it in the United States also – is have all your episodes ready before you go on set. That way, you can afford to prep each episode properly. Then, once we had the actors cast, we had table reads, which Al would listen to the dialogue, maike notes and adjust certain things that would sound better or play a joke better, or tailor the scene to a new and better location we found. It was an easy and smooth process that Al and I had.
Michael Biehn as Buzz in 24 Hour Rental
Al, I read that you wrote the pilot as if it wasn’t going to get picked up. Does that free you up as a writer?
Al: [Laughs.] Yeah. I mean, for once my pessimistic outlook on life worked to my advantage. I assumed, up until the cameras started rolling, it wasn’t going to happen, mostly because of the story we wanted to tell. So, yeah, it was really freeing I was like, “Okay, I will write whatever I want, or whatever we decide we want to do,” and thankfully, George has the same mental issues as I do, so we were on the same place in what we wanted to do with the show.
I didn’t imagine we would get made, so I just put whatever on the page. And, now, it got made and people decided it was okay and they wanted to make it. And like George said, I was somewhat removed. All of the notes went through various layers before they got to me, but we got little notes over the course of all thirteen episodes. I got two notes, and other than that, I don’t remember getting any other notes. So, somehow, writing like it wasn’t ever going to get made, worked.
