MattBrady
07-18-2006, 09:29 AM
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/movies/ScrewonHead/Amazing_Screw_on_Head_pic3.jpg" align="right"><i>by Daniel Robert Epstein</i>
Bryan Fuller is a television creator on par with J.J. Abrams and Chris Carter. Even though both of the series that he created, <i>Dead Like Me</i> and <i>Wonderfalls</i>, were critically acclaimed neither of them have broken through to a major mainstream audience. Here’s hoping that luck changes with Fuller tackling his first comic book to TV project, the half hour cartoon adaptation of Mike Mignola’s <b>The Amazing Screw-On Head</b>. Fuller has cast some high quality talent as the voices behind the heads. Paul Giamatti as Screw-On Head, David Hyde Pierce as Emperor Zombie and Patton Oswalt as Mr. Groin. Fuller has kept very close to the look of the comic even enlisting Guy Davis to design some of the show and Dave Stewart to help create the color palette.
<b>Newsarama</b>: What do you think of Sci Fi putting <i>The Amazing Screw-On Head</i> pilot online?
<b>Bryan <b>BF</b>:</b>: It’s very bizarre and it’s cool. It’s the first time they’re doing anything like this so it can be as unsettling as it is exciting because you’re the guinea pig. If the experiment goes good for the guinea pig then you’re a happy guinea pig. But if the experiment goes bad for the guinea pig then you don’t want to be the guinea pig.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Have you been checking out the survey?
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/movies/ScrewonHead/Amazing_Screw_on_Head_pic1.jpg" align="left"><b>BF</b>: I checked out the survey. I’ve actually filled it out several times. I hope other people do too, only if they’re doing it in a positive way. I don’t know what any of the results are or when they’re coming in or how they’re going to be compiling all that stuff. It’s all mysterious. I’m curious to see how positive it has to be in order for them to order a series and what exactly their expectations are.
This was a pet project of Mark Stern who is in charge of development at the Sci Fi Channel. He’s been championing it for several years. He showed me the comic back when we were doing this remake of <i>Carrie</i> for NBC in 2001. He asked me what I thought about it then and then cut to three or four years later and here we are finally finishing the project. But Mark was always the one who was forcing it along because I think a lot of his peers and superiors at the SciFi Channel were scratching their heads. They just didn’t get it. They didn’t understand the world. It was a little too bizarre, a little too absurd and they didn’t understand where it would go as a show or what the audience would be. I think Mark’s enthusiasm for the project and that he kept at it is what got us to SciFi Pulse.
<B>NRAMA</B>: How many episodes are there right now?
<b>BF</b>: There’s just the pilot. They ordered three backup scripts, but they tested the show and the results of the testing were really mixed and not necessarily positive. It was a tough show to test. This is such a different world and such a different world and color palette for animation. The humor is almost British and Monty Python-esque that I think at the initial viewing they didn’t quite know what to do with it. So they decided to test it out with the SciFi Pulse to see if they could get a reaction from sci-fi audiences, which tend to be more techno-friendly.
<B>NRAMA</B>: How involved was Mike Mignola?
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/movies/ScrewonHead/Amazing_Screw_on_Head_pic4.jpg" align="right"><b>BF</b>: He wasn’t really involved. When we first started working on the show, his whole edict was “make it look like the comic book.” Then after we had finished the show and given him the pilot he said, “Well, I started to watch it but it looked too much like my comic book so I didn’t want to watch it.” As far as I know he hasn’t even seen it yet.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Was writing this much different than writing live action?
<b>BF</b>: No because I approached the show as if it were live action. I was writing the script in the style that I would write a live action script. It wasn’t until we actually got into the process that I was like, “Oh my God, live action and animation are two totally different writing styles. One is more subtle, one is less subtle.” It was a really interesting learning experience because I was working in a medium that I had never worked in before and I was treating it like the medium that I was familiar with and come to find out that they really are two different things.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Why are they so different?
<b>BF</b>: You can’t get away with a lot of subtlety in animation because it has to be right there and easy to see because in live action you can sell a line with a minor expression or a shift of an eyebrow and that isn’t going to be communicated as well in animation. You can’t work as much in the minutia in animation as you can in live action.
<B>NRAMA</B>: When we spoke a couple of years ago you said [<i>Eight Crazy Nights</i> director] Seth Kearsley was going to direct, but Chris Prynoski ended up directing.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/movies/ScrewonHead/Amazing_Screw_on_Head_pic5.jpg" align="left"><b>BF</b>: We went down that road; we thought it was going to happen and then it didn’t. The show just got going in such fits and starts. It would get rolling and it would stop and then it would start up again and it would go for a little bit and then it would stop again and there would be no communication. There were so many times along the development process that I assumed that the project was dead because there was so little communication. I think that had a lot to do with the head people at the network not knowing what to do with the project.
<B>NRAMA</B>: How did you select Chris Prynoski?
<b>BF</b>: He was pretty fantastic. Also he did the whole peyote freak out scene in <i>Beavis and Butt-Head Do America</i>. That was what won him over in my heart. I felt like if you can do Beavis and Butthead going on a peyote trip in the middle of the desert I figured he could handle a zombie smoking from a giant ball.
<B>NRAMA</B>: [laughs] How far were you allowed to push the limits in the pilot?
<b>BF</b>: I just tried things. I think there are still limits yet to be explored. I am surprised that the memory hookah machine got as far as it did when I was writing it. I was like, “Wouldn’t it be fun if Emperor Zombie smoked somebody in a giant ball and that’s how he got their memories?” I wrote it hoping that it would get through and half expecting it to be pulled for some standards of practice reason and it just stayed in there.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Even though you haven’t directed yet, did you have any desire to direct the pilot yourself?
<b>BF</b>: No, I haven’t really directed and I had zero understanding of animation before we started doing the pilot. So it didn’t even come into my head that it would be a possibility because I wanted it to be done right. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to accomplish that.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/movies/ScrewonHead/Amazing_Screw_on_Head_pic6.jpg" align="right"><B>NRAMA</B>: Was casting David Hyde Pierce as the voice of Emperor Zombie Mike’s idea because Pierce also did a voice in the <i>Hellboy</i> movie?
<b>BF</b>: No, Mike had nothing to do with the voice casting. I knew that if we were going to stand any chance of making the show we were going to have to have a name brand cast. So I went to my agent and I said, “Who do you guys have in your corral that would elevate this project in terms of marketing and all that good ____?” He said “There’s Paul Giamatti” and I was like, “Oh that’s perfect.” So we went to Paul and it turns out that he is a fan of Mike Mignola’s work. He was very excited to do it so I wrote him a letter and sent him the script and the comic book but he had already read the comic book and he said “I’m in.” David Hyde Pierce was really easy to get. I just wrote a letter to all the cast members that I thought would be exciting and cool to have and everybody pretty much said yes.
<B>NRAMA</B>: How about Patton Oswalt as Mr. Groin?
<b>BF</b>: I’m a huge fan of his and he was the one where I was like “It would be great to get Patton Oswalt to do this.” People have heard of him and they were familiar with him but I was championing him because I am such a fan of his stand-up routine. I love the bit when he was talking about how much he hated Paris Hilton and he wants her to die of AIDS because she’s such a skank. I fell in love with him so I wanted to work with him in some capacity and I knew he was a comic book fan and I thought “what a great opportunity for us to work together” and he was totally into it. He was very enthusiastic and of all the cast he was the one who was the biggest surprise because he came in with such a different take on the character and his voice. He really had done his homework and came in fully prepared.
<B>NRAMA</B>: You changed some things from the original comic such as making Emperor Zombie a former manservant for Screw-On Head.
<b>BF</b>: When I read the comic I thought it was fantastic but it’s a very simple story and the characters are one line descriptions. Like Emperor Zombie is a zombie who wears a nice suit and he wants to conquer the world and that’s all we know about him. So with developing this and expanding it to a half hour format it was all about strengthening the relationships of the characters and giving them some history with each other. So when they were interacting with each other it meant something as opposed to hero versus villain. Now they have a lot of baggage to go through which makes the interaction a little more interesting. We couldn’t just do a story that’s just about these guys. We have to flesh out these characters and make them three dimensional so we added Screw-On Head having a relationship with the vampire girlfriend when she wasn’t a vampire and the whole love triangle between the zombie and the robot and the vampire was the main thrust of what I wanted to do with the series.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/movies/ScrewonHead/Wonderfalls_DVD_cover.jpg" align="left"><B>NRAMA</B>: I’ve interviewed [<i>Freaks and Geeks</i> creator] Paul Feig a number of times. Right now he’s directing a mainstream movie, <i>Unaccompanied Minors</i>. I told him that directing a movie like this is unusual for him but he said he was really tired of making really expensive party tapes. Which is sort of what happened with you and <i>Dead Like Me</i> and <i>Wonderfalls</i>. Hopefully <i>Screw-One Head</i> will go to series but if it doesn’t, this will become a really expensive party tape. Do you ever feel that you should do something that you want to do but is more mainstream?
<b>BF</b>: Whenever I go into a project I’m looking at myself as the audience member. I like to see mainstream movies as much as I do weird independent flicks and I think the main responsibility of a writer or creator or anybody who is trying to entertain people is that the creator is entertained first and foremost. If I’m writing a television show it’s going to be a television show that I would watch because if I’m writing a show that I wouldn’t watch, then how am I going to understand the storytelling.
<B>NRAMA</B>: But didn’t your <i>Star Trek</i> episodes have to fit a certain mold?
<b>BF</b>: Actually what I liked to write for <i>Star Trek</i> was a little more out of the ordinary. With <i>Star Trek</i>, the big problem was that there were so many restrictions on the storytelling and the types of stories to be told that whenever we ventured out of the box we got quickly scooped up and the lid got taped in place. So I would have been much more adventurous in our storytelling than we were allowed to be.
<B>NRAMA</B>: What are the other <i>Screw-On Head</i> scripts about?
<b>BF</b>: There’s the whole President Harrison story, which is a lot of fun. It turns out President Harrison didn’t die from pneumonia. The fluid in his lungs was part of a genetic experiment to give him everlasting life so he could be president forever but instead it turned him into a frog creature. There is a story with Emperor Zombie working with Darwin in the Galapagos to prove that the ultimate evolution is zombification. There’s a big Native American adventure where Screw-On Head discovers that after giving the advice to the Native Americans that they need to assimilate, they assimilate a little too well.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/movies/ScrewonHead/Bryan_Fuller_pic1.jpg" align="right"><B>NRAMA</B>: Would you ever want Hellboy to make an appearance in the cartoon?
<b>BF</b>: I would love it. I would love it but that’s never going to happen. We ventured into that territory with the pilot with the character that comes into the beginning with the flamethrower. We were going to have on the side of the tank, ACME of the Mike Mignola world. But we were forbidden to do that. They’re very careful not to have any crossovers.
<B>NRAMA</B>: I know they’re talking about a J.J. Abrams <i>Star Trek</i> movie. Would you ever want to be involved in a reboot of <i>Trek</i> either in movies or a new show?
<b>BF</b>: Sure, I love the <i>Star Trek</i> universe and it’s always going to have a special place in my heart. I was so excited when they released that information that he was going to be captaining the new Star Trek ship. There couldn’t be better news for the Star Trek franchise I think.
<i>Check out the official site for Amazing Screw-On Head: http://www.scifi.com/amazingscrewonhead/ </i>
Bryan Fuller is a television creator on par with J.J. Abrams and Chris Carter. Even though both of the series that he created, <i>Dead Like Me</i> and <i>Wonderfalls</i>, were critically acclaimed neither of them have broken through to a major mainstream audience. Here’s hoping that luck changes with Fuller tackling his first comic book to TV project, the half hour cartoon adaptation of Mike Mignola’s <b>The Amazing Screw-On Head</b>. Fuller has cast some high quality talent as the voices behind the heads. Paul Giamatti as Screw-On Head, David Hyde Pierce as Emperor Zombie and Patton Oswalt as Mr. Groin. Fuller has kept very close to the look of the comic even enlisting Guy Davis to design some of the show and Dave Stewart to help create the color palette.
<b>Newsarama</b>: What do you think of Sci Fi putting <i>The Amazing Screw-On Head</i> pilot online?
<b>Bryan <b>BF</b>:</b>: It’s very bizarre and it’s cool. It’s the first time they’re doing anything like this so it can be as unsettling as it is exciting because you’re the guinea pig. If the experiment goes good for the guinea pig then you’re a happy guinea pig. But if the experiment goes bad for the guinea pig then you don’t want to be the guinea pig.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Have you been checking out the survey?
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/movies/ScrewonHead/Amazing_Screw_on_Head_pic1.jpg" align="left"><b>BF</b>: I checked out the survey. I’ve actually filled it out several times. I hope other people do too, only if they’re doing it in a positive way. I don’t know what any of the results are or when they’re coming in or how they’re going to be compiling all that stuff. It’s all mysterious. I’m curious to see how positive it has to be in order for them to order a series and what exactly their expectations are.
This was a pet project of Mark Stern who is in charge of development at the Sci Fi Channel. He’s been championing it for several years. He showed me the comic back when we were doing this remake of <i>Carrie</i> for NBC in 2001. He asked me what I thought about it then and then cut to three or four years later and here we are finally finishing the project. But Mark was always the one who was forcing it along because I think a lot of his peers and superiors at the SciFi Channel were scratching their heads. They just didn’t get it. They didn’t understand the world. It was a little too bizarre, a little too absurd and they didn’t understand where it would go as a show or what the audience would be. I think Mark’s enthusiasm for the project and that he kept at it is what got us to SciFi Pulse.
<B>NRAMA</B>: How many episodes are there right now?
<b>BF</b>: There’s just the pilot. They ordered three backup scripts, but they tested the show and the results of the testing were really mixed and not necessarily positive. It was a tough show to test. This is such a different world and such a different world and color palette for animation. The humor is almost British and Monty Python-esque that I think at the initial viewing they didn’t quite know what to do with it. So they decided to test it out with the SciFi Pulse to see if they could get a reaction from sci-fi audiences, which tend to be more techno-friendly.
<B>NRAMA</B>: How involved was Mike Mignola?
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/movies/ScrewonHead/Amazing_Screw_on_Head_pic4.jpg" align="right"><b>BF</b>: He wasn’t really involved. When we first started working on the show, his whole edict was “make it look like the comic book.” Then after we had finished the show and given him the pilot he said, “Well, I started to watch it but it looked too much like my comic book so I didn’t want to watch it.” As far as I know he hasn’t even seen it yet.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Was writing this much different than writing live action?
<b>BF</b>: No because I approached the show as if it were live action. I was writing the script in the style that I would write a live action script. It wasn’t until we actually got into the process that I was like, “Oh my God, live action and animation are two totally different writing styles. One is more subtle, one is less subtle.” It was a really interesting learning experience because I was working in a medium that I had never worked in before and I was treating it like the medium that I was familiar with and come to find out that they really are two different things.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Why are they so different?
<b>BF</b>: You can’t get away with a lot of subtlety in animation because it has to be right there and easy to see because in live action you can sell a line with a minor expression or a shift of an eyebrow and that isn’t going to be communicated as well in animation. You can’t work as much in the minutia in animation as you can in live action.
<B>NRAMA</B>: When we spoke a couple of years ago you said [<i>Eight Crazy Nights</i> director] Seth Kearsley was going to direct, but Chris Prynoski ended up directing.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/movies/ScrewonHead/Amazing_Screw_on_Head_pic5.jpg" align="left"><b>BF</b>: We went down that road; we thought it was going to happen and then it didn’t. The show just got going in such fits and starts. It would get rolling and it would stop and then it would start up again and it would go for a little bit and then it would stop again and there would be no communication. There were so many times along the development process that I assumed that the project was dead because there was so little communication. I think that had a lot to do with the head people at the network not knowing what to do with the project.
<B>NRAMA</B>: How did you select Chris Prynoski?
<b>BF</b>: He was pretty fantastic. Also he did the whole peyote freak out scene in <i>Beavis and Butt-Head Do America</i>. That was what won him over in my heart. I felt like if you can do Beavis and Butthead going on a peyote trip in the middle of the desert I figured he could handle a zombie smoking from a giant ball.
<B>NRAMA</B>: [laughs] How far were you allowed to push the limits in the pilot?
<b>BF</b>: I just tried things. I think there are still limits yet to be explored. I am surprised that the memory hookah machine got as far as it did when I was writing it. I was like, “Wouldn’t it be fun if Emperor Zombie smoked somebody in a giant ball and that’s how he got their memories?” I wrote it hoping that it would get through and half expecting it to be pulled for some standards of practice reason and it just stayed in there.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Even though you haven’t directed yet, did you have any desire to direct the pilot yourself?
<b>BF</b>: No, I haven’t really directed and I had zero understanding of animation before we started doing the pilot. So it didn’t even come into my head that it would be a possibility because I wanted it to be done right. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to accomplish that.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/movies/ScrewonHead/Amazing_Screw_on_Head_pic6.jpg" align="right"><B>NRAMA</B>: Was casting David Hyde Pierce as the voice of Emperor Zombie Mike’s idea because Pierce also did a voice in the <i>Hellboy</i> movie?
<b>BF</b>: No, Mike had nothing to do with the voice casting. I knew that if we were going to stand any chance of making the show we were going to have to have a name brand cast. So I went to my agent and I said, “Who do you guys have in your corral that would elevate this project in terms of marketing and all that good ____?” He said “There’s Paul Giamatti” and I was like, “Oh that’s perfect.” So we went to Paul and it turns out that he is a fan of Mike Mignola’s work. He was very excited to do it so I wrote him a letter and sent him the script and the comic book but he had already read the comic book and he said “I’m in.” David Hyde Pierce was really easy to get. I just wrote a letter to all the cast members that I thought would be exciting and cool to have and everybody pretty much said yes.
<B>NRAMA</B>: How about Patton Oswalt as Mr. Groin?
<b>BF</b>: I’m a huge fan of his and he was the one where I was like “It would be great to get Patton Oswalt to do this.” People have heard of him and they were familiar with him but I was championing him because I am such a fan of his stand-up routine. I love the bit when he was talking about how much he hated Paris Hilton and he wants her to die of AIDS because she’s such a skank. I fell in love with him so I wanted to work with him in some capacity and I knew he was a comic book fan and I thought “what a great opportunity for us to work together” and he was totally into it. He was very enthusiastic and of all the cast he was the one who was the biggest surprise because he came in with such a different take on the character and his voice. He really had done his homework and came in fully prepared.
<B>NRAMA</B>: You changed some things from the original comic such as making Emperor Zombie a former manservant for Screw-On Head.
<b>BF</b>: When I read the comic I thought it was fantastic but it’s a very simple story and the characters are one line descriptions. Like Emperor Zombie is a zombie who wears a nice suit and he wants to conquer the world and that’s all we know about him. So with developing this and expanding it to a half hour format it was all about strengthening the relationships of the characters and giving them some history with each other. So when they were interacting with each other it meant something as opposed to hero versus villain. Now they have a lot of baggage to go through which makes the interaction a little more interesting. We couldn’t just do a story that’s just about these guys. We have to flesh out these characters and make them three dimensional so we added Screw-On Head having a relationship with the vampire girlfriend when she wasn’t a vampire and the whole love triangle between the zombie and the robot and the vampire was the main thrust of what I wanted to do with the series.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/movies/ScrewonHead/Wonderfalls_DVD_cover.jpg" align="left"><B>NRAMA</B>: I’ve interviewed [<i>Freaks and Geeks</i> creator] Paul Feig a number of times. Right now he’s directing a mainstream movie, <i>Unaccompanied Minors</i>. I told him that directing a movie like this is unusual for him but he said he was really tired of making really expensive party tapes. Which is sort of what happened with you and <i>Dead Like Me</i> and <i>Wonderfalls</i>. Hopefully <i>Screw-One Head</i> will go to series but if it doesn’t, this will become a really expensive party tape. Do you ever feel that you should do something that you want to do but is more mainstream?
<b>BF</b>: Whenever I go into a project I’m looking at myself as the audience member. I like to see mainstream movies as much as I do weird independent flicks and I think the main responsibility of a writer or creator or anybody who is trying to entertain people is that the creator is entertained first and foremost. If I’m writing a television show it’s going to be a television show that I would watch because if I’m writing a show that I wouldn’t watch, then how am I going to understand the storytelling.
<B>NRAMA</B>: But didn’t your <i>Star Trek</i> episodes have to fit a certain mold?
<b>BF</b>: Actually what I liked to write for <i>Star Trek</i> was a little more out of the ordinary. With <i>Star Trek</i>, the big problem was that there were so many restrictions on the storytelling and the types of stories to be told that whenever we ventured out of the box we got quickly scooped up and the lid got taped in place. So I would have been much more adventurous in our storytelling than we were allowed to be.
<B>NRAMA</B>: What are the other <i>Screw-On Head</i> scripts about?
<b>BF</b>: There’s the whole President Harrison story, which is a lot of fun. It turns out President Harrison didn’t die from pneumonia. The fluid in his lungs was part of a genetic experiment to give him everlasting life so he could be president forever but instead it turned him into a frog creature. There is a story with Emperor Zombie working with Darwin in the Galapagos to prove that the ultimate evolution is zombification. There’s a big Native American adventure where Screw-On Head discovers that after giving the advice to the Native Americans that they need to assimilate, they assimilate a little too well.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/movies/ScrewonHead/Bryan_Fuller_pic1.jpg" align="right"><B>NRAMA</B>: Would you ever want Hellboy to make an appearance in the cartoon?
<b>BF</b>: I would love it. I would love it but that’s never going to happen. We ventured into that territory with the pilot with the character that comes into the beginning with the flamethrower. We were going to have on the side of the tank, ACME of the Mike Mignola world. But we were forbidden to do that. They’re very careful not to have any crossovers.
<B>NRAMA</B>: I know they’re talking about a J.J. Abrams <i>Star Trek</i> movie. Would you ever want to be involved in a reboot of <i>Trek</i> either in movies or a new show?
<b>BF</b>: Sure, I love the <i>Star Trek</i> universe and it’s always going to have a special place in my heart. I was so excited when they released that information that he was going to be captaining the new Star Trek ship. There couldn’t be better news for the Star Trek franchise I think.
<i>Check out the official site for Amazing Screw-On Head: http://www.scifi.com/amazingscrewonhead/ </i>