DANGER & X-I-MENT!!

Before Kathy and I moved to California (and way, WAY before RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES) I was noodling with DANGER & X.I.MENT.  The story (originally conceived as a comic strip -- a newspaper strip (!?)) followed a government agent who was teamed with a lab chimp who, thanks to various experiments, was vastly smarter than he was (hence the glasses and bowtie).  The agent's name was gonna be 'Dangerfield' or something and the chimp of course was 'X.I' 0r X.I.Ment for short.  I thought it would be kind of fun if the story broke through fairy tales and ancient mythology and incorporated other such charcters in procedural roles, hence Agent Humpty Dumpty and Cerebus the three headed dog giving his field report.

12 Midnight... Cocktail Hour

 

A rough draft-to-final page from 12 o'Clock Somewhere.  Between the sketch and the final version I realized -- nothing speaks blood lust better than a cool pupil dialation.

ZOMBIE ROAD TRIP!

As our cross-country roadtrip continues, I thought this painting seemed appropriate.


It's one of several acrylics I did to help pitch a movie idea about monsters in a cross-country road race. Inspired by the style of the classic “Odd Rod” trading cards from the sixties and seventies, the pictures all featured the monster at the wheel, not the car they were in. Who wants to look at a car, right? I showed them to my (then) manager who was impressed, but worried, “Are all their cars going to be so tiny?”

Yeah? Right.

Years ago, back in Minneapolis, my brother Jonathan and I were part of an alternative band. Our four man rock band had the dismissive, cynical name of YEAH RIGHT, though the music we played were hardly cries for anarchy or slams against The Man. Nothing proved this contradiction better than this flyer I drew for one of our local concerts. For anyone visiting the Twin Cities, 7th Street Entry is still there, adjacent to First Avenue, home to many a great TC band. 

Our one and only video is now on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EJWdWf_Tb0

America's Deadbasket

Missed last Wednesday's blog as we were driving across the country on a road trip to Minnesota.  On the day I was to post we were at 8300 feet in the Colorado rockies with no wifi signal in sight.  From there we returned to sea level where we passed many a Nebraskan cornfield.  As a tribute to that I present a storyboard panel from my super 8 opus 'GOOD LUCK' whose shocking climax occurs in, yes, a cornfield.

12 O'Clock Somewhere BAT BAM

Three panels from an intro to the book featuring main character "Car-door" Farrabee as he explains how his motto went from the drinking man's eternal excuse,"It's five o'clock somewhere" to the book title...

...and squashes a vampire bat at the same time.

13 GRAVES!

   

Going through old files I came across these drawings I did during production of a friend of mine's pilot.  Five years ago, Joel Wyman of THE MEXICAN and more recently FRINGE fame, wrote and sold a pilot for FOX entitled 13 GRAVES.  The series was to follow a disparate band of treasure hunters as they pursued the legenary "13 graves" where Conquistador Francisco Pizzarro had buried his fortunes in stolen Inca gold. 

I had written for Joel's previous series KEEN EDDIE and though only the 13G pilot had been sold, Fox wanted additional scripts and Joel asked me aboard to assist in writing those.  13G never went to series but the pilot turned out great.  Shot in LA, Miami and Bulgaria (!) it had an amazing cast: Matthew Lillard (THE DESCENDENTS, SLC PUNK, SCOOBY DOO) Robert Forster(THE DESCENDENTS, JACKIE BROWN), Norman Reedus (THE WALKING DEAD), Billy Drago (UNTOUCHABLES, lower right) and star-to-be Eric Stonestreet (upper right) now stealing scenes in ABC's MODERN FAMILY. 

FRANKENALYSIS

 The monster first appeared onscreen in a film version by Thomas Edison in 1910  

 www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcLxsOJK9bs

but ever since Boris Karloff portrayed the famous monster in the 1931 film we have this ingrained image of the creature as this big green guy with a flat head.  Evidentally he was green because that color looked better on B&W film than yellow did.  Yellow?  See, when M.S. wrote the book she described the monster as having yellow skin (she also described his features as "beautiful" but how is that supposed to scare movie audiences?) 

As for the flat head I heard that Jack Pearce, the make-up artist on the film rationalized that taking out the brain of a cadaver would require taking the top of the skull off.  Makes sense.  Likewise, putting that brain into another skull would require topping THAT skull too... therefore the recipient of said brain, the monster, would have a topless head -- or a flat topped head.  Never mind that presumably to keep dust and bugs out, Dr. Frankenstein would have had the werewithal to REPLACE the removed skull cap, thus returning to his creation that normal "round -headed" look.

If you know of any other explanations, I'm curious to hear them.    

THE COLD WAR OF BURBANK, CA

Whenever my good friend Scott Nimerfro and I get together for dinner we either A) grouse about how crazy/unfair/ass-backwards the TV business is, or B) pitch series ideas to one another and fawn over each other's brilliance.  The former occurs when one or both of us are between jobs and the latter when we're employed and, for the moment, content.  Scott had this one great series idea that I won't present here but it takes place in the model for Suburbia, USA -- Burbank California in the late fifties.  Revolving around the lives of aerospace designers and their homemaker wives, you throw in the local top secret flight design lab, Russian spies and you have a based-on-a-true-scenario series idea.  Laughs and drama, romance and culture clash against Cold War nostalgia.

 I thought, "What if it was a cartoon series?"  Hence the sketches...