16 June 2010
Posted in Writers - Chip Johannessen
"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation." - Jean Kerr
What: When a non-licensed private eye, or self-employed researcher as she prefers to be called, and two of her subjects all land in jail, the police have their hands full untangling the who, why and whither of what happened.
Who: An avalanche of misunderstanding careens downhill all because Louise Child decides that she must take extreme measures to get the tuition to send her daughter to St. Vivian’s; something she deemed a necessity as soon as her 14 year old daughter Lumen started dating Hector, the “homie” who took Lumen to visit his cousin at the County Jail for their first date. Louise’s big idea was to follow a cheating husband, obtain the proof of his infidelity, and offer it to him on a platter (or in this case, on plate imprinted with the photograph of his tryst, as the photo shop was running a special) in exchange for $3,678 – the tuition at St. Vivian’s – at his place of business, a law firm. Only this cheating husband didn’t bite.
Husband: Who are you?
Louise: Friend or enemy. It’s up to you.
Husband: What do you want?
Louise: Four grand would include the negatives. Not just the plate.
Husband: Forget it.
Louise: Ok, $3678, but that’s my bottom line.
Husband: I’m not paying a cent.
Louise: How do you think your wife would like that?
Husband: Ask her.
Louise: That’s what I’m threatening to do. Is this going too fast for you?
Husband: Don’t you get it? It would be a relief?
Louise has hit a wall.
Husband: I don’t love her. I don’t know if I ever did. At this point… I just want to be free.
Outside the Husband’s office, a few office workers look up at the sound of muffled shouting.
Husband (OS): Tell her, you sicko!
Louise (OS): Tell her yourself!
Bam. The door flies open. Louise stands in the doorway, looking back into the office.
Louise: Where do you get off calling me names?!
Louise turns now, sees that people are watching. She steams through the reception area where.. an immaculately groomed woman watches with the others, dressed for shopping, not the law. It’s HEIDI, observing with keen interest as Louise stops by the receptionist’s desk on the way out.
Louise: (to receptionist) Do you validate parking, or is the whole operation cheap?
Heidi, the observer, is the wife and therein lies the source of the pebble that causes a tsunami of an avalanche. Heidi begins to trail Louise, intent on finding out what had just transpired, inadvertently stumbling upon the incriminating plate lying on the front seat of Louise’s car. As related to the police detective taking Louise’s statement…
Louise feels bad, but not bad enough to blame herself.
J.D.: Did you tell her what her husband said?
Louise: Of course not. I wasn’t out to destroy anyone, all I wanted to do was pick up a little tuition money. She was never even supposed to see the plate. And she wouldn’t have except she’s so damn helpful. I mean… she’s Heidi.
J.D.: I know.
Louise: No, I mean she’s Heidi. The little Austrian girl. With the braids. In the book.
J.D.: Never read it.
Louise: She thinks everything will be ok as long as she’s nice. If her grandfather’s a monster, or the old lady down the street is crippled, she just pumps out a little more Heidi love vibe and voila, everything’s fine. She lives in this… fairy tale, refusing to acknowledge anything is actually bad, convinced everything depends on her constant giving. So she ends up this slave, endlessly worried about everyone else, but afraid to ask what I want…
Heidi, the innocent in all of this, had continued to trail Louise, kicking loose some more rocks and accelerating the avalanche. Daintily breaking into Louise’s residence, a double wide near the beach, she cheerily informs Louise’s heretofore clueless daughter that she’ll soon be attending (Heidi’s alma mater) St. Vivian’s, causing Lumen to go ballistic, call her mother to tell her that she’s decided to run away to Tijuana with Hector and get married, an idea that does not sit well with Hector, allowing Heidi to find out Louise’s location and report it to the police in a 911 call in which she states that Louise is armed and dangerous. Arriving at the site where Louise was working on a paid surveillance job just as the police arrived to take a vigorously protesting Louise to jail for resisting arrest, Heidi, somewhat remorseful for her own actions, decides, unasked, to continue the surveillance for Louise, discovering the true intentions of Louise’s subject, presumed to be a philanderer, and inserting herself into his “job” at which point both Heidi and the subject are arrested on a much more serious charge than resisting arrest. And it is at jail that Heidi and Louise reconnect.
No Meaner Place: Oil and water never mix until an emulsifier is added, and apparently jail can act as that emulsifier. Johannessen has written a wonderful buddy Pilot framed in dislocated flashback so that the viewer is constantly kept guessing as to chronology. The story telling timeline is so incredibly original it disorients the viewer/reader, enhancing the screwball nature of the action allowing the viewer to watch Louise and Heidi develop and grow over the course of the interrogation. I so thoroughly enjoyed the way in which Johannessen told the story and allowed me to watch the balloon swell until it exploded. Using the framework of (the detective) J.D.’s interview of Louise to gradually reveal snippets of the story in a seemingly haphazard order that do not yield the whole picture until the very end when the characters find their common ground. We knew from the beginning, or at least from the first moment we met “oil” and “water” that a partnership would be borne of the cynic and the eternal optimist, but the journey getting there was like a drive through the Huntington Gardens when everything, including the corpse flower, was in bloom.
Life Lessons for Writers: Can’t women be buddies? Apparently not, as far as television is concerned.
Conversation with the Writer:
Neely: I can’t tell you how excited I am to be talking to you. You are one of my favorite writers and were such an elusive “get.”
Chip: I was so pleased you liked the script because I like it a lot too.
Neely: You have such a broad range of work in television, starting with “Beverly Hills 90210” and most recently with “Dexter,”
Chip: I’m running “Dexter” right now. I’ve taken it over from Clyde Phillips who ran the first four seasons. The episodes I’ve been working on haven’t aired yet. The opportunity to do “Dexter” coincided with the end of “24” so I came over here. Manny Coto came with me from “24”; he’s fantastic.
Neely: Is Melissa Rosenberg still on “Dexter”?
Chip: No, she’s gone. I tried to get her to stay around but she’s busy, obviously.
Neely: I know. I don’t know how she managed it before, what with the “Twilight” movies and all. What about Wendy West?
Chip: She’s still here.
Neely: I’m a big fan of Wendy’s also and will feature one of her scripts in the upcoming weeks. “Dexter” is just a fabulous show and one that I watch it faithfully, although I prefer to let them build up on my TiVo so I can watch them all at once; I have a tough time waiting a week for a resolution. I think most of us associate you with darker shows such as “Millennium,” “Surface,” and “Moonlight.” Certainly “Dexter” fits into that category, as did “24.” Didn’t you also work on “The X-Files”?
Chip: I had a deal at Fox, but I mainly worked on the show called “Millennium,” which was the second Chris Carter original series to air. It came after the third season of his big hit “The X Files.” I only did one episode of “The X Files” so I didn’t really work on the show. But we all worked in the same physical space because it was all 1013, Chris Carter’s banner. I first saw “The X Files” when I was working on 90210 and I really didn’t like it all that much. It seemed to be lacking in emotion. But my feelings changed. I now think of the pilot of “The X Files” as a gold standard for everything because it was so clear what Chris was trying to do. The entire series was set out in that first 47 minutes. Oddly enough I pitched “Private Eyes” as “The X Files” of the heart. You had a skeptic and a believer.
Neely: You also did a stint on “24.” I guess my point is that you are not known for comedy, although I did note one episode of “Married with Children” on your filmography..
Chip: That was first episode I had produced after I did “Rugrats.” You know, if you want to have people actually like what you do, that’s a great show for it. There's nothing like having a five year old go “Oh I loved your episode of “Rugrats.” Although I had written for the Harvard Lampoon in college, I have a hard time with that kind of comedy.
Neely: That’s news to me because “Private Eyes” is hilarious. Even though you’re seeing it as “The X Files” of the heart, this is very comedically based.
Chip: I don’t disagree. It’s a total comedy. I just meant that the conception for the series was that it was all about the possibility and the impossibility of romantic attachments. To have someone who was a skeptic and someone who was a believer and put them into this mixing bowl; that was going to be the substrate for these investigators. These were going to be personal stories that they would unearth.
Neely: When did you write “Private Eyes” and where did it come from within you?
Chip: It came from a couple of places. First, there’s Virginia, to whom I’ve been married a long time. She and I have spent a lot of time talking and writing together, although I think the only thing we were credited on together was an episode of “Millennium.” But she’s the person whose judgment I trust and who I show stuff to. Then it came out of a combination of being very interested in using “The X Files” as a pilot idea; I wanted to apply that conceptual clarity . Virginia and I talked about this a lot.
Neely: Were these characters modeled on anyone or anything, or were they created out of whole cloth?
Chip: They began as abstractions in the same way that Mulder and Scully probably began as abstractions – one a skeptic and one a believer. And then they kind of filled in. Heidi, for example, became “Heidi” after a conversation with my daughter’s Godmother, Jennifer Brancato. Jennifer said, “She sounds like Heidi.” And she talked about her as the character in the book Heidi which I used in the script. She talked about how my Heidi was this bill of goods that is sold to all women when they're still little girls. You have to love more; you have to be more positive; you have to be this self sacrificing object that tries to improve the universe at your own expense. That was the lesson of Heidi the book character and that’s when my character became Heidi. Louise, I think had more sources.
Neely: I remember that you were very surprised that I had read the script and wanted to know the circumstances. At the time, in 2007, I was trying to keep current on showrunners for David Kelley and did some research on whom I hadn’t read and you were one of the writers at the top of that list. I called your agent, Elliot Webb, and asked to read something original by you and had to pry this out of his hands.
Chip: Elliot was very protective.
Neely: I adore Elliot. I couldn’t believe he gave me such a hard time given Now he’s a producer, but I miss him as an agent.
Chip: I love Elliot. I used to go to his office just to listen to him do deals. Now my agent is Ted Chervin, one of Elliot’s former partners before they sold the agency and joined ICM.
Neely: I adored your concept, the characters, the writing, everything about it, but mainly I was blown away by the structure, the way you used disjointed chronology to tell the story. What was your inspiration for the framework, something that so enhanced the comedy and made the journey as much fun as the characters? I had never seen it before and this year is the first year I’ve ever seen it on screen. It’s used in “Good Guys” on FBC and I can’t help thinking that the writers must have, at one point, seen how you used it in “Private Eyes.”
Chip: I should take a look at that show. I initially pitched this to Nina Tassler, who’s always been very nice to me. She liked the idea of opening up the CBS shop to more female-oriented shows that she thought could be interesting. She said let’s do this, but she also said that the one thing she wanted was for the police detective character to be introduced earlier than the way I had pitched it. That became my problem, but it was the thing that ended up making the story so good because it was what made me do the framework. I usually hate framing devices or storytelling gimmicks but I really had no choice other than to do it this way if I was going to bring my guy up earlier. My normal feeling was that this kind of structure would take all the drama away, but this was a comedy so it actually helped it enormously. Nina is the rare person who gives you a note that makes your life difficult but actually helps in amazing ways. So it really grew out of that request, well actually it was more than a request, it was the one requirement she had. So the storytelling grew out of that. And it turned out to be a lot of fun, especially in the way we establish Louise as an unreliable narrator in that series of slightly different versions of her story. It all happens pretty fast. It was all a blast.
Neely: It’s such a great buddy show, but I tried racking my brain for examples of female buddy shows and the only two I could come up with were “Thelma and Louise” and “Cagney and Lacey.” I suppose “Sex and the City” is one because at the end of the day it is about female bonding. Can you think of any other examples?
Chip: Oddly enough I was talking to Wendy West about this and she mentioned “Thelma and Louise,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “Cagney and Lacey,” “Sex and the City,” “Kate and Allie,” and “Absolutely Fabulous.”
Neely: There you go. So at this stage of the game, do you think that female buddy shows are too far “out of the box” and if so, why would that be?
Chip: I had never thought about that as a reason “Private Eyes” didn’t go. It seemed pretty clear to me that it was the PI franchise that made them nervous. I think the fact that it was two women made them just that more nervous. And the subset of cases that I really wanted to tell would be about human relationships. This was clearly not going to be a murder mystery every week.
Neely: I really hate to be one of those women, but this is the second really excellent female buddy pilot I’ve written about that didn’t get picked up. Somehow “They” don’t seem to be afraid to try any one of a number of lame male buddy series – and it continues in that vein with the pickups of “Franklin and Bash,” “The Defenders,” Hawaii 5-0” (yes, it’s a buddy show), and “The Good Guys.” I guess it’s just female buddy shows. One has a much greater chance of a pick up if a woman is teamed with a man, as in “Castle.” Could there be an estrogen (rather than “glass”) ceiling? There certainly is no limit to the amount of testosterone on the tube. You’ll never know if a female buddy series will succeed if you don’t try.
Chip: In defense of “Hawaii 5-0,” anything with Alex O’Loughlin is worth trying. I worked with him on “Moonlight” and he’s pretty great.
Neely: I guess CBS is hoping this will fall into the category of “the third time is a charm.” I must say, though, and I did say it in an article I wrote for Baseline Studio System, I liked the pilot script of “Hawaii 5-0” and I’m actually looking forward to seeing that pilot. It’s a very expensive, but really good action piece. On paper it works and if CBS doesn’t spare the expense it will work on screen. My impression of Alex O’Loughlin is that he’s a heart throb and may be too soft to play Steve McGarrett. It might have been better (and they would never have considered this for any one of a number of reasons) to cast Scott Caan as Steve and Alex as Danny. I could very well be wrong.
Chip: Yeah, they wouldn’t do that. But honestly, I love Alex O’Loughlin. He might be a little soft, but I have to say that in “Moonlight” he had this impossible task and he really delivered amazingly well. He had to show a lot of colors when he transformed into this aggressive vampire. He was great. He’s a real actor, that guy.
Neely: He is very watchable but CBS has to find the right show and “Three Rivers” certainly wasn’t it. Alex did not sell well as a organ transplant surgeon. But getting back on track, one thing that I have to say to network execs is that you’re never going to know whether female buddy shows will work if you’re not going to try. Keep in mind that the female buddy shows we mentioned earlier are 10 to 30 years old and still have resonance.
Chip: What was the other female buddy pilot that didn’t get picked up? I think it would be interesting to read that.
Neely: It was called “Soccer Moms” and was by Donald Todd.
Chip: But really, in terms of “Private Eyes,” at the time that I wrote it I think the whole idea of a private eye show helped do it in. There weren’t these comedic cable PI shows like “Monk” with quirky characters. Executives were a bit squeamish about the franchise. They thought “man this could be either really good or really embarrassing.” And I think that’s why they pulled away. CBS was going toward more hard boiled cop franchises. When I first wrote this, it was about the same time that the “CSI” shows were getting picked up. The networks had an idea of the kind of cop investigative shows that they wanted to do. The typical Les Moonves-type story is the strong guy and the women around him; going out and doing all these great team stuff. “Private Eyes” wasn’t that.
Neely: That does fit into the “girl thing” or rather “anti-girl thing” I was talking about. Interesting also that a few years ago I was talking to Elisa Roth who was at NBC at the time (and was in on the meetings for “Private Eyes” and loved this script) and I asked her what they were looking for in a pitch. She said they were uninterested in any kind of PI shows, especially those that referenced “The Rockford Files.” Ironic, isn’t it, that one of the pilots that NBC produced this year was a remake of “The Rockford Files.” I guess they’re back in the PI business. Lucky for everyone associated with “The Rockford Files” remake that it didn’t get picked up to series. No one would have survived the collateral damage on that one as the original stars are icons and the original writing staff included David Chase.
Chip: As I was thinking some more about this, I remember that I would try to get some casting attached at various times; then over the years I gave up. I also gave up TV for a while in about 2004 or 2005. I was just fed up with the whole thing so I went to law school.
Neely: You’ve got to be kidding. Ironically, most of the lawyers I’ve met left the law because they wanted to be writers; and you left writing because you wanted to be a lawyer???
Chip: I thought I wasn’t going to do TV anymore at all. But then it crept back in. I’d do a couple of semesters and then I do a TV gig, then another semester and then followed by some more TV. So I kind of kept in it and ultimately went back into it.
Neely: Did you finish law school?
Chip: Yes, I did. I graduated from UCLA.
Neely: Did you pass the bar?
Chip: I haven’t done that yet because I need two months to study and I haven’t had it. During my last semester of school I was also working on “24.”
Neely: This is the most amazing career arc I have ever heard!
Chip: Yeah, I was a little crazy. My wife Virginia was very supportive. When we were young, people didn’t think about careers so much. It’s all different now.
Neely: Who got “Private Eyes” – literally and figuratively? Did it get made?
Chip: My deal at the time was with Universal, so I worked with David Kissinger and Dan Pasternak to try to sell it to Nina Tassler. But it didn’t get made; then it languished for a couple of years until Kevin Reilly at NBC revived it; but again, it didn’t get made.
Neely: How close did it come?
Chip: I don’t know. I can’t imagine it wasn’t their best or at least one of their three best scripts that year. But I don’t think it came close. And when it was revived at NBC that was Elliot’s doing because I was always grousing to him that it didn’t go to air. This was one of those weird scripts that came out really well, and they don’t all come out like this despite what your intentions might be. So it was a few years later and I may even have been in law school at the time, when Elliot got Kevin Reilly to revive it, but I don’t think it was that serious at that point either. Actually, I do think it was what you were talking about, the female buddy thing; that and the softness of the PI genre. I don’t think it was a real contender.
Neely: If Kevin Reilly liked it or understood it, maybe the third time would be the charm there, now that he’s at FBC. You know he took another script that he liked at NBC by Ajay Saghal and had it reworked into something called “Nevermind Nirvana.” Now “Nevermind” (always my penchant for the stupid play on words) that it didn’t get picked up to series, but the timing may have been wrong because FBC was in that enviable position of having very few open slots. And unlike the other networks, I think they’ve made few if any mistakes in their pickups. I’m just thinking that if Kevin Reilly had been a fan, then maybe the time has come for “Private Eyes.”
Chip: Maybe.
Neely: Talk to Ted about it. It really depends on how Kevin Reilly felt about it at the time. This is so fresh and the framing device is so wonderful.
Chip: I have to say that if I’m going to develop again for a studio or network, I think they’ll want something more like “24” from me. I’m not saying that I can come up with something as good as “24”, I’m just saying that that’s the kind of thing they’d want from me, not something like “Private Eyes.”
Neely: You mean testosterone instead of estrogen.
Chip: Yeah.
Neely: That’s what they’re interested in from everyone, including the women. But let’s return to my obsession with the chronology setup in “Private Eyes,” the storytelling framework is very theatrical. Have you ever written for the theater?
Chip: Not really. I started writing after my rock band broke up in New York. I decided I wanted to be an actor, although I wasn’t really very good; I even got my SAG card at some point. I went to a lot of acting classes and that’s where I learned to write because I’d never done anything like that before. I started writing things for myself and my scene partners. I did scene writing but never a full blown play.
Neely: I think there is a way to tell this story, or a story like it, on stage. The staging itself is one of the characters and much of the writing lends itself to farce, especially the subject matter. It brings to mind “Noises Off” by Michael Frayn and one of his films, a farce entitled “Clockwise.” I do think “Private Eyes” could be rethought in a different medium. Maybe film, but certainly in terms of the kind of thing you can do with stage lights as a device to indicate time and location, you might be able to think of this as a play. I love it and hate the idea that it’s going to disappear into the ether.
Chip: That’s very kind. One of the things I liked most about this was that the framing device allowed me to keep it very lively and language-driven when I wanted but it didn’t interfere with the surprisingly touching moments. I think it kept the situations sharp and not too schmaltzy. The framing device allowed me to quickly get to the different emotional spaces.
Neely: Even though, or rather because the chronology was framed in a different way, you get a deepening of the character development of both Louise and Heidi that continually grows. By the end of the pilot you thoroughly know who these people are. And as we both know, that is so much easier said than done. It is, of course, the object of every pilot or first episode that the viewer know who the characters are going to be, but it’s rare to be developed as fully as was done in this piece.
Chip: Even in terms of a show like “24” we spent almost all our time thinking of the emotional life of Jack Bauer, believe it or not. That was all you cared about and until you had a good answer to that you didn’t go anywhere. We might sit in a room for 3 or 4 months trying to come up with an emotional thru-line for him and then we could start going. That’s what it’s all about. I always hear how “actiony” “24” was, but I don’t care about that at all.
Neely: And now you’re working on “Dexter,” the ultimate character piece. Are you working on anything else.
Chip: No, I’m running the show and that’s pretty full time; actually, more than full time even though we only have 12 episodes. But come November I’ll have some time off. I was talking to Howard Gordon and mentioning how “Dexter” was only twelve episodes and he reminded me that I had come straight off of “24” so it’s really 36.
Neely: You’ve been in the business for quite some time now and have had what I’d consider to be a dream career, and I hadn’t known about law school.
Chip: It took me longer than 3 years to finish because I kept going in and out. I was always full time when I was there but I had to go in and out. But when it came time for people to graduate the year I should have graduated I started getting calls from classmates saying “I’m thinking I really don’t want to be a lawyer; I think I want to write TV.”
Neely: Why did you want to go to law school?
Chip: I nearly went when I was young, actually. I was accepted to go to Harvard Law School, but I was playing in this rock band, so I deferred for a couple of years, or however long they let me do it; but eventually I lost my slot. I had always thought about doing capital punishment work, so I got to do some of that at UCLA Law School. I was working at a public defender’s office in Los Angeles my last year and thinking of doing pro bono criminal cases.
Neely: Do you know about “Death Penalty Focus”? I think it’s an organization that you would find very fulfilling. Ed Redlich and Sarah Timberman are very involved with this group.
Chip: I know Sarah and I know of Ed.
Neely: Have you had mentors along the way?
Chip: Chris Carter for sure because I’d never been in a shop that was so story-driven. There was also a guy named Jim Wong who’s now working on a new series called “The Event” with Evan Katz from “24.” Jim’s ability to break stories was just astonishing. Chris Carter’s show was incredibly story-driven and the level of attention to detail was incredible. The amount of producer time that was spent on cuts was amazing and transformed the way TV looked. I feel very lucky to have been part of that. At “24,” Howard Gordon came out of that shop; Alex Gansa came out of the same place; a bunch of us did. It was really a level of quality and neurotic attentiveness to story, production and editing that made a big impression on me and, I think, on some other people there too.
Neely: Have there been any actors along the way that you’ve especially enjoyed writing for?
Chip: People who are leads on successful series, and I’ve fortunate to be on several, tend to be people who can make a lot of things, even the improbable, depending on the genre, work. So Lance Hendriksen was definitely someone like that. Again, I like Alex O’Loughlin; and Michael C. Hall blows me away with what he’s able to do. We’re only four days into production, but I was in Miami watching him work and it was amazing. I was on “Dark Angel” briefly and Jessica Alba was fantastic. I think all these people who are thought of as having a lot going for them – they really do.
Neely: What made you want to be a writer and what brought you out here in the first place?
Chip: My rock band blew up.
Neely: What was the name of your rock band?
Chip: It was called “The Same.” So I had to figure out what I was going to do, which didn’t necessarily mean being a TV writer. But Virginia (we weren’t married then) was in San Francisco and I was in New York City and so we compromised on LA, never having been here. I just somehow ended up writing TV.
Neely: What did you play in the band and do you still play?
Chip: I was a guitarist; but not very much any more. Our keyboard player, who was my college roommate, does all the music for the Coen Brothers – his name is Carter Burwell.
Neely: Oh yeah, I know that name. He was your keyboardist?!
Chip: Yeah. It was our band.
Neely: I have to say, you’ve both gone off in very different and very successful ways. How did you get involved in TV.
Chip: Kind of what I was saying about the acting stuff. That’s how I learned to do it. Then I saw that a lot of the people I knew from the “Harvard Lampoon” were writing half hour comedy and actually getting paid for it, which made me think that is might be possible for me. It is hard to get going in it, but I was fortunate to meet Elliot Webb and a woman named Cathy Carr, who was at Wolf Films at the time. I didn’t do anything at Wolf Films but Cathy made me feel as though there was hope. Eventually, well actually pretty quickly, things worked out.
Neely: Any advice for young writers trying to make there way through the morass?
Chip: I’m on a WGA board now and it’s changed my perception of things a bit, in a good way. I grew up in Detroit and a few years ago I would always say “it's like Detroit in 1973” or “it’s like Detroit now.” I felt television was a dying industry filled with a bunch of dinosaurs because broadcast TV has had some major problems. But now I actually think it’s a great thing to do and TV is very vibrant. When I started it was very clear what you did to get into broadcast TV – how you got an agent and wrote some spec scripts. It’s a much wilder thing now but that’s good. Earlier everyone had a fairly similar way in which they got their first staff job or their first script sale, or whatever it was. Now there are just a million more ways to do that. I think it’s fantastic. That’s not exactly advice so I guess my point is that my advice three years ago would have been “why would you possibly want to be in this dying industry?” But I think I was so wrong; I think it’s a really good place to be.
Neely: So what’s next for you? Any pilots on the horizon? How about features?
Chip: I do have one pilot idea that I’m trying to do with a friend named John Brancato who writes features. A few years back, I was lucky enough to produce something for ABC in Rome where I got to live for a year (around 2004), even though it ended up being rather difficult because we went way over budget. That’s when I thought that if I can’t have fun writing TV in Rome, I should do something else and that’s when I went to law school. But I’m really eager to get back to working overseas again so I have something I want to do with John. We haven’t written it yet but we know what we want to do and that we’d be able to produce it overseas.
Neely: Any features?
Chip: No… I wish.
Neely: What was the name of the project you did in Rome?
Chip: “Empire,” by a guy named Tom Wheeler who just got a pilot picked up to series at NBC called “The Cape.”
Neely: I know. I’ve been chasing him for months, since the beginning because the first article I wrote for the blog was his spectacular script entitled “Captain Cook’s Extraordinary Atlas.” I’ve always felt that it should have been done as a book series – it would have been the next Harry Potter.
Chip: Tom’s an incredible writer. He loves that fantasy/adventure genre and he’s so amazing at it. When we did “Empire,” sitting with Tom and his brother Bill, who’s a feature writer, and a woman named Sarah Cooper, it was the most fun I’ve ever had writing.
Neely: I can’t thank you enough. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this script for years, so thanks so much for taking the time.
Chip: Howard Gordon and I did a pilot called “Ultraviolet” a while back. . Our main female character was named Neely, which I thought of as short for Danielle. Is that true for you?
Neely: No, but we’ll go into that another day (or maybe not). Thanks, Chip. I’m looking forward to this season of “Dexter.”
