Stephen J. Cannell

Still I’m not a guy that looks back very much. I just finished a new novel and now I’m working on a screenplay. You can’t sustain yourself with the stuff you did in the past.

We found the script which was written by a guy named Mitchell Gould who is also a really good stuntman. When we talked to him about making the movie he said he would call in favors with all his friends and to do the stunts. It was a great deal on that level. We thought the script was very clean so it didn’t require a lot of rewriting.

We’ve worked with him a few times. He’s an amazing actor but our initial idea for that character was that he’d be like a guy from WWE Smackdown with big muscles all over him. We even had artwork drawn up with the character as a weightlifter type guy. But we just couldn’t cast it. We kept bringing guys in and we didn’t feel that they were scary enough. They were large and menacing, but they didn’t have that spark of insanity that we needed. So I was sitting in a casting meeting one day and I said, “Let’s just go the other way and bring in the creepiest strangest guys. They don’t have to be big and muscular but they do have to play really evil.” We read a whole bunch of guys and Billy was the one we picked.

No, I haven’t and the reason is that when I was doing television most of it was not horror. There were a few things that were science fiction horror but it wasn’t a staple of television. Maybe there were would be one a year and that was before cable got so popular of course. Also I got locked into the cop action adventure mode because you get classified by your hits.

I thought Saw was amazing.

It was very clever, very dark and very disturbing. I thought The Grudge was a really good movie. I can’t list you a hundred of my favorite horror movies because I don’t go to very many movies in general. I wake up at 4:30 am to write so I end up watching them at home.

I think it’s a wonderful thing for actors, writers and producers. There is a whole new market that can actually sustain the budgets of these films.

Whenever we make a picture we hope to get it into the theatre. But if you don’t have Tom Cruise, it can be difficult. Also anything can go direct to video if it gets a bad test audience, so there still are no guarantees. It’s a hard game in this low budget market to get anybody to release theatrically. Certainly Saw and Cabin Fever were made in this budget range. Those got good releases so it’s possible.

Yes and no. Some people I’ve worked with before and others were new finds for me. You try to get people who know how to do this kind of project. You don’t go to old friends if they don’t have the chops to do it.

It’s exactly what it is; it has its own set of problems. I hired a director I’d never worked with before, Scott Ziehl, but I looked at a lot of his previous work. For Demon Hunter he did a really good job of keeping us on schedule and shooting good film. We tried to isolate out our action sequences and our CGI where we needed it. When I made The Greatest American Hero pilot, no one thought we could the flying look good because the Superman movie had just come out and that flying cost a million dollars. My whole budget on the two hour The Greatest American Hero pilot was about two and a half million dollars. No one believed that we could fly him on that budget. But I sat down with the director and we figured out how to do it for a tenth of what the Superman movie cost. That’s part of what you have to do, you have to figure out new ways to solve problems with the budget considerations. You don’t ever want to have your viewer look at something and think it looks cheap or cheesy. There are a few things on every picture that I wish I could do better but we’re always trying to give you the best quality.

I would go everyday, first thing in the morning. Then I’d usually hit the set again on the way home in the afternoon. I don’t usually haunt a set unless there’s some reason for me to be there. But I always have another producer on the set for my behest.

It depends on what it is. I have a lot of careers, I’m an actor, I’m a TV host, I’m a writer, I’m a producer, I direct sometimes. I’m now being considered to host a TV series, so I’m having meetings on that. Those are very different from the ones when I’m producing something that I bought or written. Now I’m basically contributing opinions as talent as opposed to being the guy who is going to solve the problems. Even though I’m used to running a studio or being in charge, you can’t go in as talent and start to act like you’re producing a show. Sometimes when I get scripts as an actor I go, “oh boy, I’m not sure this dialogue is right. I could sit down and rewrite the dialogue but that isn’t what they hired me to do.” Then I have to sit down and figure out how to make it work. That’s the challenge of being an actor.

I don’t want to talk about that yet because I never talk about things until they are real. I’m working with a company that has a lot of credibility and they’ve come to me and asked me to host this thing. I’ve done things like that before. I hosted a show called U.S. Customs Classified for a year. It is fun.

The meetings are all different. I met with a very big actor yesterday for lunch to talk about a project that he and I might do together. We’d never met before so we wanted to feel each other out and see if there was a chemistry between us. That was the lunch. Something may come of that, it might not, you’re pushing a lot of agendas forward and you’re not sure often which ones are going to happen.

Yes, especially with that award. Normally I’m a little skeptical of awards, even when I’m winning them. Maybe it comes from my learning disabilities and I was the kid that always had to stay after school. When people are awarding you, you think “Who are you kidding?” But this one is nice because of the people who received it before me like Steven Bochco, Larry Gelbart, Rod Serling. When you look at that list of writers, they are some of the best that ever worked in television so I’m very flattered.

I’ve been trying to stay out of television because I did so much of it. I did over 42 shows and that’s a lot of television. Not all of those were hits but a good percentage of them were. When I sold my studio in 1995 I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t go back. That’s when I decided to become a novelist and I just finished my thirteenth novel. I’ve been doing these low budget movies which are really fun for me, because unlike television, there’s very little interference. There’s something nice about doing a script where everyone agrees upfront that is what they want to make. Sometimes I might put it through a couple rewrites but we basically agree that this is a script we all want to do. That makes it so that there isn’t a whole lot of arguing over the material. Unlike a TV series where every week a new script comes in and the network has an opinion. Admittedly some scripts are better than others. Anybody who ever produced a TV series will tell you have your weak episodes. But all the second guessing doesn’t produce the best result. I understand if you’re a network executive being frustrated because you’re sitting in the back seat watching someone else go the wrong way. Some people are really good at being able to deal with that frustration and be positive forces to help your show go where it needs to go. Others are very destructive because of that frustration.

I did a pilot for TNT last year which was really edgy. They came to me and wanted me to do something so I pitched them a serial crime show called The Dark but it didn’t get on the air.

It’s going slowly. I’m not sure how close we are but at least there’s interest in getting it to where we want to go. I want the movie to be ten times better than the series. If we’re going to make a movie it’s got to be its own thing. It can’t be a copied version of what the series was. We’ve got to bring the idea into today. It needs a different tone than the series which was like Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.

It was the lunacy of the comedy. An anvil hits Wile E. Coyote on the head and he shakes it off. That’s what it was with The A-Team. We crashed helicopters and the guys walked away. It was ridiculous! But that was the tone of the show. I don’t want to do the movie that way.

I think he’s a brilliant writer and director and it will hopefully be everything we all want it to be. If anyone can do it, it’s Michael. He has my utmost respect. I know him but we’re not golf buddies or anything like that. But I’m such a huge fan of what he does.

I want to. It’s been a slow process, I won’t lie to you.

Coming along, same with 21 Jump Street which is at Sony now. We’ve got a script I actually like and we’re going to move forward pretty quickly. [Alias writers] Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec wrote the script and I’m producing it with Neil Moritz. I feel pretty good about that one.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck