Bryce Zabel's FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

"Chasing a Dream" on Hallmark Channel

You know hard it must be to run a four-minute mile?  Now imagine doing it when you're still in high school, nobody supports you doing it and track isn't your sport in the first place.

That's the scenario we've set up for Cam Stiles in our Hallmark Channel film, "Chasing a Dream" which airs this Saturday at 9pm (8pm in Central time).  It's about a high school senior who runs a "sub-four" when nobody thinks he can or should, but he does it anyway.  It stars Treat Williams as the reluctant father/coach and Andrew Lawrence as the obsessed athlete/son.

 

Jackie and I wrote it originally as a project I would direct as an indie film but the WGA strike intervened and we sold it instead.  So, with the caveat that we wrote it, but did not direct, cast or produce it, we still think it came out as a very decent piece of family entertainment.

Here's a great article from Runner's World, written by long-time editor (and Boston Marathon winner) Amby Burfoot.  It includes the text of an interview he conducted this month with both Jackie and me and shows incredible respect for writers.  Go, Amby!

Here's another bit of coverage from Track and Field News.  This has a good bit of background on the mile race, and the four-minute-mile record.

Here's the Hallmark URL with a newly cut trailer.

Here's a look at the promotional video from the film.

Sub-fours in high school actually happened a few times in the 60s, then not again until Alan Webb did it in 2001, and not since then.  Over many years and incarnations, "Chasing a Dream" evolved from "Sub-Four" to "Finish Line" to "Miles from Nowhere" to its final Hallmark title.  One thing that always stayed the same was that the original runner was named John Van Horn in tribute to Bryce's close high school friend who died at the age of 18 in a car crash but is still remembered and missed.

Finally, because things always change (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse) from "the page to the stage," here's a draft of our original screenplay, when it was known by its original title, "MILES FROM NOWHERE."

Download MILES-Zabel

For fun, if any of your runners would like to vote in our Movie Smackdown! poll pitting "Prefontaine" against "Without Limits," then CLICK HERE.

M.A.N.T.I.S. - TV's First African-American Superhero

 Call Me ... the MANTIS! 

I guess it's only appropriate that a week after President Obama historically took office, distributors would get around to releasing "M.A.N.T.I.S." on DVD because it, too, can claim to be an African-American first, starring actor Carl Lumbly in the title role of a scientist/superhero.  The series ran for a season back on FBC over a decade ago.  I received the WGA "Developed By" credit on the series and served as "Co-Executive Producer" and thought that now, for the record, a little trip down memory lane might be in order.

"M.A.N.T.I.S." was the first TV series where the powers-that-be gave me the keys to the car and said I was in charge of the writing staff. This was back in 1994 when I was coming off a successful first season of the "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" series. Sandy Grushow was in charge of FBC-TV back then, and he’s the first guy who said I was seasoned enough to be in charge of a budget of $1.4 million per episode and not blow it.

Anyway the deal was, "M.A.N.T.I.S" had started as a two-hour pilot, written by Sam Hamm ("Batman") and directed by Sam Raimi ("Spiderman"). The two Sams had a disagreement with Fox about how the series should go (they saw the series as an alternative world with an all-black cast and Fox wanted it to be a super-hero who was black in a regular American city), and walked away from their own project. Fox still wanted to do the series but somebody needed to make the changes and run the show. Both Hamm and Raimi were extremely gracious and understanding in the transition, nothing was made personal, and the series lived and (almost) prospered. 

More on DARK SKIES

To fans of the NBC series that aired in 1996-1997, I have some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is that it's been a very, very frustrating year trying to get the DVD (or Blu-ray) release of those 20 hours of TV. As many of you know, SONY was set to release it last year, changed their minds at the last possible moment, told fellow creator Brent Friedman and myself that if we could find a DVD company to release it they would help facilitate it.  Well, we found three.  They liked the idea, the series concept and the fact that plenty of fans still want to see it released.  Each time we got cautiously optimistic.

All of them, when it came time to budget the project, however, backed out when they realized the sheer amount of period music that we had incorporated into the series and factored in the cost of licensing against what they perceived as the upside of sales.  To have so many people saying "We love this project but we're not going to take it on" was heartbreaking and frustrating.

Brent and I aren't ready to say that's the end of it, but it's the end of the beginning.  We're probably more disappointed than any fan out there.  We're very sorry to report this.

The good news is that Frank Garcia and Mark Phillips are out with Science Fiction Television Series, 1990-2004 and it includes an excellent amount of material on DARK SKIES.  Both Brent and I talked to Frank extensively.  This is a highly recommended book for any science fiction fan.  Here's an excerpt:

Dark Skies came to light when two of Hollywood's most experienced producers met for the first time and sat down, ruminating for their next project. The discussion turned to the UFO phenomenon and that's when the electrical charge they generated became a neon sign. "It just came to us — what if we fused the two greatest conspiracies of all time together?" says executive producer and co-creator Bryce Zabel.  "We came up with the Unified Field Theory of conspiracy — who killed JFK and why, and whether Roswell was a real event or not. The essence of the series is that John Kennedy was assassinated because he was going to tell the truth about UFOs in his second term."

"I told Bryce about a very credible Washington insider I knew who had told me there was intelligent, extraterrestrial life here on Earth," says supervising producer and co-creator Brent Friedman. "That sparked some conversations about Roswell and the possibility it really occurred. And if it did, how could events like JFK's assassination, Watergate, Vietnam, etc. — how could those events have any meaning historically unless they were somehow tied to the alien truth."

With the basis of the series firing up their imaginations, Zabel and Friedman went to work. The first task at hand was to shape the "series pitch" proposal into an unconventional form to generate interest, and provoke the network executives receiving it, to immediately pick up the phone and say the words, "We're interested!"

"We started creating an ultra-classified briefing book that was meant for high-level top secret people that basically told them about the UFO cover-up and how it all happened and made the case that, in 1994 and 1995, the government was going to have to come clean and tell people what was going on," explains Zabel. "And the best way to get the public prepared for it was to do a television series about the truth, so that they could see it as fiction at the beginning and later come to understand the truth. So we were already mixing reality and non-reality in a way that I think was pretty fascinating. We did this whole briefing book before we showed it to anybody."

Here's the link to the authors' site where you can read more about the book and even order it.  Or, if you prefer, here's the link to the book on Amazon.

Frank and Mark have worked very hard to sweat the details in this book.  Check it out.  

Meantime, we'll keep thinking about how to get the DVD released.

READY TO BELIEVE: Free MP3 of Obama Fight Song!

Last January, while we were still on strike as members of the Writers Guild of America, my wife Jackie and I sat down in a Los Angeles coffee shop with our good friend, musician Cherish Alexander.

Before the coffee was cold, we decided, improbably given the time frame -- as a couple of striking screenwriters and a singer-composer -- to write, produce and distribute the song you'll soon hear.  It happened over a five day period and we released it immediately before the California primary.

So far, "Ready to Believe" has cumulatively had its video versions viewed close to 100,000 times on YouTube.  Plus, it's available on iTunes.  You, however, don't have to buy it in the closing days of the 2008 campaign.  We want you to download it for free and to send it to your friends.

It was written to stand-up for Barack to the Clinton campaign's charges claiming he wasn't ready for the presidency.  We find that the need for this song is as solidly right-on today as it was last February (only Clinton is on the team now and the argument's being made by John McCain).  It needed rebuttal then, and it needs rebuttal now. 

Please give it a listen.  Click the link below to just hear it.  Otherwise,right-click to actually... we'll say it again... download "Ready to Believe" for free.  Again, you have our express permission to download it and to give it away. 

Download_Ready_to_Believe_Song.mp3

Some have asked for a PDF of the actual lyrics.  Here you are:

Download_Ready_to_Believe_Lyrics.pdf

Here's the You Tube version:

Please also visit the web-page of singer-composer Cherish Alexander (http://www.cherishalexander.com/ready_to_believe/) where all the goodies are also available.  She and fellow producer Damian Valentine did an awesome job with this project as you can hear for yourself.

We know the hour is late but if you support Barack Obama, we'd urge you to join us and expose as many people as you can to this song.  Especially Obama volunteers.  We've received a good deal of email from campaign workers who thought it was like an anthemic "fight song" for the cause.  That's certainly what we intended it to be.

Remember to vote.  Even if the polls say he's ahead, you have to vote.  Take nothing for granted. 

Still fired up and ready-to-go for Obama!

Cherish Alexander, Jackie Zabel, Bryce Zabel

WGA Makes Deal - Gives Awards - We're Celebrating!

Talk about everything happening at once...

On the same night that the WGA leadership presented to the membership the details of a tentative deal that looks almost certain to end the strike this week, the Guild also announced the winners of the "Writers Guild Awards '08" and PANDEMIC, a screenplay I co-wrote with my wife, Jackie, actually won the "Long Form Original" category! 

This odd merging of events happened because, pre-strike, the Writers Guild Awards were scheduled for February 9.  Once the strike was on, all attention had to go to that, so the black-tie and gown festivities were sacrificed.  A simple posting of the winners on the web-site was substituted. Then, as fate would have it, the tentative deal came together this past week, and the membership meeting got scheduled for -- you guessed it -- February 9!

Who cares?  Jackie and I are thrilled that the long nightmare of a strike is almost over and with a deal that seems to be reasonable, if not everything we'd want.

"Pandemic" was a Hallmark miniseries, four hours, that was, as the award states, "original," meaning that it was not based on any pre-existing material. It's a number of interlocking stories about an unexpected strain of Avian flu and how an outbreak in Los Angeles leads the military quarantine of the entire area. In its struture, it's a bit like "Crash" with microbes.

On a personal level, Jackie and I are so honored because this award comes from a panel of writers who actually read the scripts instead of watch the movies.  We think it's humbling to be among the honored screenwriters who demonstrate why the work of writers is valuable and worth fighting for at this critical moment in the WGA's history.  Here's to everyone going back to work in the days ahead!

WGA coverage
Daily Variety coverage
Los Angeles Times coverage

Download a PDF of the PANDEMIC screenplay - Click Here

The Crow Flies and the Skies Darken

Just returned this week from the San Diego Comic-Con where Mark Dacascos and I had a signing session for the new 5-DVD set of "The Crow: Stairway to Heaven." It would be more accurate to say that Mark had a signing session and I sat with him but he's such pleasant company and a good friend so who's complaining?

I just listened to our audio commentary on the DVD set last night and really thought it came out great (although I must train myself to never say "you know" again).

There are plenty of goodies for Crow fans on this beautifully mastered set released by Arts Alliance in association with TV Guide. One favorite is the show gag reel produced when we were going out of production for our wrap party and needed to laugh because it beat crying. The DVD set also has some show dailies and other extras like the pilot script.

Now for the sad part...

At the same time as the "The Crow" was making such a splash, however, I returned from Comic-Con to find out that the powers-that-be at the DVD division at SONY -- which had told me and confirmed to me several times that the "Dark Skies" DVD set was coming out in October -- have apparently changed their minds. The e-mail I received simply said: "There are no plans at this time to release.  The music costs to clear for home entertainment made this very expensive to consider."

To all of you "Dark Skies" fans who took my word that it was coming out and are now disappointed, all I can say is that I stand at the head of that line. But when the people in charge send you e-mails that confirm specific release dates, that's usually good enough to talk about. I am as let down as you are. Probably more so.

What's funny about this is that in my very first communication with SONY about this, I anticipated the problem and offered to work with the "Dark Skies" music supervisor to identify expensive music and to find substitute tracks. We would have done that gladly. No one even responded to the offer so I assumed they had things well in hand.

Still, one for two ain't bad... I'll let you know if things change (although I will be much more skeptical)... for what it's worth...

Crow DVD Released Today

The five-DVD box set of The Crow: Stairway to Heaven was released today by Arts Alliance America. Yes, you can buy it now!

It includes a two-hour audio commentary that series star Mark Dacascos and I recorded a few months ago, plus our show's "gag reel" which is pretty funny. Credit for pulling it all together goes to Marylou Bono of Arts Alliance who really fought hard to see that the quality was first-rate.

Mark and I will be at the San Diego Comic-Con this Friday, available to sign the DVD from 2:00p to 4:00p. If you're in the convention center, stop by and say hello. We're going to be upstairs at the convention center in the Sails Pavilion, AA4. Contact person for that event is Lynne Hillman of Arts Alliance.

Watching the episodes on the DVD set with a fresh set of eyes, the thing I am most proud of is how we were able to move the story and the character ahead and paint on a very large canvas. When you view the episodes in order, you'll see that Eric Draven goes on a dramatic journey after he returns from the dead. He's not the same guy in the last episode that he was in the first.

Duke Out: Would You Watch?

Over the weekend a disciplinary committee disbarred disgraced prosecutor Mike Nifong for his leading role in the disastrous and dishonest prosecution of three Duke University lacrosse players who he falsely accused of rape last year. Even Nifong agreed that his punishment fit his crime.

The only thing left in Nifong's public humiliation will be the books and the movie that may come of all this. I'd love to write the movie of this slow-motion disaster. In fact, I tried as hard as I knew how to do exactly that.

First, the background: the TV movie business isn't what it used to be. The networks, for all intents and purposes aren't interested anymore, leaving the form only to the cable outlets and even that territory isn't taking up the slack.

The Duke non-rape case was a good example. Ten years ago this might have been the perfect "ripped-from-the-headlines" film. It's got it all. He said-she said. Sex (or no sex). Athletics. Class struggle. Strippers. A good villain. Ruined lives.

So, as the story was breaking last year, executive Jonathan Eskenas from the Orly Adelson Company and I said to ourselves, "Damn. There's a movie there."

As a consequence, I wrote this one-page treatment. You can read it for yourself if you want by clicking the link below to download the PDF file.

Duke Out, TV Movie Treatment

We called around. Almost everybody passed in the concept stage. We got one actual pitch, at ABC. The executive we talked to understood the idea, he liked it even, but they passed, too. They just weren't sure...

Too damn bad. I look at the date on that treatment. June 5, 2006. Almost exactly one year ago. That means, being as fast a writer as I am, that I'd have jetted off to Durham for a few weeks, nosed around, read everything, and would have had a first draft by the end of August. We could have been in pre-production in September, shooting in October or November.

If ABC had bought this pitch, they would have had a movie in their hands for this May's ratings sweeps, and they'd be re-airing it this week with the Nifong hearing. Tell me that people wouldn't watch that. We'd have tacked on an ending reflecting the current reality, but it would have been compelling television and I'd be willing to bet that such a movie would have won its time slot.

But the networks are out of the TV movie business. I'm not sure that's wise.  Sounds as clueless as Mike Nifong...

Maybe the feature people will think differently.

The "Pandemic" Crystal Ball: Quarantine, Selfishness & TB

Over the weekend, "Pandemic" aired on the Hallmark Channel across the United States, both Saturday and Sunday night. My wife and I wrote the screenplay which tells the story of a passenger who dies on a plane flight from Australia to Los Angeles of a bird-flu type of illness, infecting his fellow passengers, causing a quarantine first of the plane, then the entire city. And, without revealing the ending completely, the ending resolution has something to do with TB.

Today comes word from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about a case involving a U.S. citizen who traveled on two international flights, probably infected his fellow passengers with a rare form of TB (XDR-TB) which was recently defined as a subtype of multiple-drug resistant tuberculosis. It can be fatal. In any case, Here is the story as CNN reports it today.

As with all TB, the disease can be spread through the air. "In this case, the infected patient traveled on two trans-Atlantic air flights and, in doing so, may have exposed passengers and crew to XDR-TB," the agency said.

"A federal quarantine order has been issued and CDC is currently collaborating with U.S., state and local health departments, international ministries of health, the airline industry, and WHO (World Health Organization)."

Sometimes life imitates art and vice-versa. The Fox News article has a couple of other similarities. For starters, the man who carried the disease has been put in respiratory isolation.

"I don't recall us doing this since 1963," said Gerberding. "We want to balance personal liberties with public health and, because this organism is so potentially serious, especially to those who have reduced immunity, our responsibility is to err on the side of caution."

Imagine, by the way, if he wasn't the sole incident but was one of thousands and thousands who needed this level of care or isolation. The other thing is that this particular passenger doesn't appear to have been very concerned about anybody else's exposure.

"The patient felt his personal agenda was highly relevant to him," she said. "The CDC was not aware he was traveling. We were surprised the patient left the country."

This is very consistent with the story we told in "Pandemic." We had a character, Jack Hendler, who felt his work as a Brentwood real estate agent was more important than public safety and broke the quarantine, becoming a "Typhoid Jack" across Los Angeles. All you have to do is to observe people's selfish, immature and dangerous driving habits around here to imagine that someone who is supposed to cool it in a quarantine would decide the rules didn't apply to them.

Should we be afraid? Yeah, probably...

Pandemic: Aftermath

Last night, after a barbeque, my wife Jackie and I sat down with our friends to watch "Pandemic," the three-hour Hallmark Channel "special event" film that we co-wrote together last year. I've already written a lot about it: you can catch up to that by clicking here or clicking here. We even got a good review in Daily Variety.

I gave my friends my standard disclaimer on projects that I've only been the writer on: I didn't cast it, direct it, edit it or produce it. Don't give me credit for those choices but don't blame me either. It was also fun because we'd used a number of our friend's names in the production. One of them, Hendler, could have been turned into a drinking contest there were so many mentions. Another friend who watched with us, Steve Friedlander, was the character played by Bruce Boxleitner. Other friends, Scott and Andie, watched as a character named after their daughter got sick, but rallied and recovered. Two other friends, Don and Morgan, had their character cut from the film, in just another cruel Hollywood reality.

One thing that was interesting is that the simplest thing in a review is to dismiss the science behind the whole thing as improbable and/or stupid (and a few reviews did try to make that point). Today, though, Doctor Joan Bushwell (if I'm not mistaken, this is a name she uses in order to keep her privacy, taken from The Simpsons) has come to our defense! She has a blog, along with other science enthusiasts, where she talks about her two passions: pop culture and science. Today on her blog, Doctor Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refugee, she writes:

As a scientist, I thought "Pandemic" had its redeeming moments. In terms of attention to scientific detail, it far surpassed my favorite guilty pleasure, Outbreak, a film that is campy-bad and injected with an Ebola-virulent bolus of laughable "science." That, and Dustin Hoffman's chewing up of the scenery are what makes "Outbreak" such a noteworthy sci-fi film for Mystery Science Theater 3000 style viewing.

As an example of "Pandemic's" details, one of the CDC-Atlanta scientists nicely explained the concept of antigenic shift that resulted in the virulence of the Riptide virus. To the writers' credit, they did not take the clichéd H5N1 route, but instead opted for a fictional (I think) strain called H3N7. The hemagglutinin piece is not fictional, and is the variant of the Hong Kong 'flu virus of the 1968 pandemic. I'm not sure about the neuramidase variant, but I liked this touch. The writers used part of a strain that already infects people readily, and applied the antigenic shift to it. This is at least consistent with a "stuck-on-the-tarmac-make-small-talk-with-your-neighbor" conversation I had a couple of years ago with a virologist from Childrens Hospital in Philadelphia when we were stuck at the PHL airport. He noted that nasty flu strains often result from antigenic shifts from those that are already transmissible among humans. He allowed as how H5N1 deserved close vigilance, but that other strains could readily be the next big thing.

Anyway, she actually writes more and you can read the whole thing by clicking on that link before the break-out quote.

Other reaction. San Diego film critic Fred Saxon (and former CNN film critic) wrote me an e-mail:

Thank you for scaring the bejesus out of me and certainly everybody who saw the TV version of your “Pandemic” script.  Well done! Having said that, let me say this: I know you’re the writers and not the directors, but please allow me to comment on the experience. It wasn’t long before I wondered if you wrote another Faye Dunaway face lift (or two) into the script. Hmmmm? If she has one more she’ll have a goatee.  And Eric Roberts, did you write that he should be so old?  Another thing, the blood looked totally fake on the plane.  Hey, what’s up with that music?  It’s going non-stop, like in “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire”, but more annoying. Could have been much more effective had it not been continuous.  I’m just sayin’...

Fred, by the way, is also a recovered stand-up comedian, if you hadn't guessed. I won't take a cheap shot at Faye, other than to say she was originally written to be an Arnold Schwarzenneger-type governor, but the music comment was interesting. About a month ago, Jackie and I got a copy of the locked cut, but without music. Completely sweetened for dialogue and background sound, though, and it actually was more compelling. Usually, I think music really takes a piece to the next level, so this was an odd experience for me.

Also, in a few places, Jackie and I ended up getting confused by our own movie. That's because we were hired to write it as a four-hour mini-series to air in two two-hour parts. That four-hour has already been seen internationally and will make up the DVD release, but the Hallmark Channel wanted one three-hour. Take away the 45 minutes of commericals and last night's airing was about 150 pages worth of film from a script that we turned in (at producer's request) at about 250 pages.

Although he may be biased, Movie Smackdown! critic Mark Sanchez sent us this e-mail this morning:

No space aliens, costumed oddballs or special effects overload. Distinct characters, a plausible story arc and a satisfying conclusion. It's a fine, attractive project because it's not like the blockbusters clogging the multiplexes these days. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, "Pandemic" offers an accessible big story that is still human-scale in its dimensions.

Well, at least it was produced. In a world where everyone has a spec script in their desk drawer, this is a very good thing.