Alaska: The Satchel Boy from John August on Vimeo.
Thinking about director [Kim Manners](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/kim-manners), I wanted to share a scene of his I really loved from the 2003 pilot for Alaska. Kim loved a gunfight, and I felt lucky to watch him put it together.
As a wrap present, Kim gave me Connie’s crayon drawing, nicely framed. It’s hanging in my office, over my TV.
Director Kim Manners passed away on Sunday. He was a staggeringly prolific television director and producer, whose many credits included Supernatural, The X Files and the original Charlie’s Angels. He also directed the pilot for Alaska, which is how I met him. I liked him instantly. He felt like a cowboy, which made him the perfect guy to shoot a show about the wild frontier.
“Two cameras, no waiting!” he’d holler with delight as he found a spot to grab a simultaneous close-up. After a take, he’d glance over at me. Did I want another take? I could always find something I’d tweak, but Kim was smart enough to understand that TV doesn’t dick around getting everything just so. You make your days so you can make your show.
The series didn’t get picked up, and everyone went their separate ways. Yet of all the directors I’ve sat next to, I probably learned the most from him over those twelve cold days and nights in Vancouver. I regret not having the chance to tell him that.
By the accounts I’ve read, he was doing what he loved quite close to the end. That’s something we should all get. My sympathies go out to his family and the folks at Supernatural.
[Other places](http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117998904.html?categoryid=13&cs=1) are suddenly reporting it, so I might as well confirm the news: I’m writing a big-screen version of Preacher,
an adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. Sam Mendes is attached to direct. Neal Moritz is producing for Sony Pictures.
To answer your first four questions: there’s no release date, no cast, no locations, no nothing. I’m writing a script which could become a movie if everything lines up correctly. So here’s hoping. It’s a terrific project that I’m excited to be writing.
I was happy to get such a strong reaction since [posting](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/the-remnants-in-full) the pilot for The Remnants. Every few days, we get a surge of hits as new sites link to it. A fan even set up [Draft The Remnants](http://drafttheremnants.com) to get people to pledge their love.
For something that’s been sitting on a shelf for a year, it’s really gratifying.
Viewers had a lot of questions, so I’ll do my best to answer them here.
It’s actually not about zombies.
===
When I pitched the show, I described it as a cross between The Office and The Stand. Something Very Bad has happened, but we’re focusing on the survivors and their dysfunctional attempts to reestablish normalcy. Like Stephen King’s book, there are good people and some very bad people — but they’re not the living dead.
I completely understand why viewers might expect some shambling corpses. Mia claims that she’s “not one of them,” and former group member Stan apparently “went Jurassic Park.” The bad people, “them,” are truly scary — but also incredibly organized and sneaky. Think fascist.
Think V, not Z.
In the final scene, Mia and Josh both admit they don’t really understand what happened. That’s important.
MIA
I don’t know if the world got invaded, or if this is something we created ourselves...
JOSH
It’s nano-technology from the future.
MIA
Really.
JOSH
I have no idea.
The correct answer is an amalgam of all three.
How did you get that cast?
===
I knew Ben Falcone and Justine Bateman, so I wrote those parts with them in mind. Ze Frank is a friend of producer Matt Byrne, and I had a hunch he could act. So I wrote the part hoping he’d do it.
Robert Ulrich, who’s been my casting director on several projects, graciously agreed to help me find actors for Chas, Mia and Wallace. You’d think that given my credits, it would be easy to get people in to meet and/or audition, but several agencies simply refused to send their actors out for a web series. ((Props to William Morris and ICM for taking us seriously.)) I deliberately hired people with a writing or improv background, because I knew from shooting Part Two of The Nines that I’d need to let people veer far off the script in order to get the feel I wanted.
Because Justine is very active in SAG, she got us to test out their new web series agreement, which basically allows guild actors to work on experimental projects like this for less than scale. From cast to crew, everyone got about $120/day.
How long did you shoot? How much did it cost?
===
We shot three pretty easy days, with most departments getting a day to prep and a day to wrap. With six actors and a fair amount of improv, I didn’t want to feel rushed. We shot two cameras (the HVX-200) most of the time, generally gunning the same direction for a wide and a close-up.
All in, the show cost $25,003. Depending on your perspective, that’s either expensive for a web show or mind-blowingly cheap for television show. We paid for locations, permits and other details a scrappier web show would just ignore. And we had more crew. Some web shows are literally just the actors and a guy holding the camera. We had 15 people. We were more like an indie feature, but without trucks or trailers.
We could have done it cheaper. Of the $25,000, more than $17,000 went to pay people, and a lot of those folks probably would have worked for free. But I didn’t want to do anything I couldn’t replicate for a series of 10 episodes. You can’t ask someone to work for 25 days for the love of their craft.
I saw the pilot as an experiment not just in storytelling, but production. I wanted to it to be sustainable.
Why isn’t this a web series?
====
There are at least five answers, all of which are obstacles.
* **The lack of a major advertiser who wanted to sponsor it.** That was the original goal: to find a company that would promote the show as hard as we would promote their product. Pringles is sort of a placeholder. We could swap that out for almost anything: Coke, Ace Hardware, Duracell.
* **Actor availability.** Every actor in The Remnants works a lot. The writers’ strike was a major reason why so many great people were available. And no, I’m not wishing for an actors’ strike.
* **My schedule.** I don’t know when I could do it. I haven’t announced the post-Shazam projects I’m working on, but trust me, I’m really busy with features. Doing ten episodes of The Remnants would be three solid months of work.
* **The lack of a viable business model.** A series of ten similar webisodes wouldn’t cost that much (maybe $300K), but there’s still no model for how investors could get their money back. If I thought there was, I’d pay for it myself.
* **My ambitions.** I need to write another movie to direct. The more things I put in front of it, the longer it pushes off that goal.
All this said, I’ve been thinking a lot about The Remnants, and have mentally moved it from the “Impossible” to “Unlikely” box.
What happened at the Grand Canyon?
===
Something so awful it still gives me nightmares.
(That’s the answer I gave actresses when they asked that question in auditions.)
The Remnants from John August on Vimeo.
