Who's in Charge of the Chaos of "Wicked" the Movie?
I’ve done almost every job on a film set, from a day-player P.A. to directing and producing a short film. I’ve held an umbrella over the camera while getting soaked on a cold, rainy day in Chicago and wrangled a dog in a New York City park on a beautiful spring day. So trust me when I say that the most difficult job I’ve had on set is script supervisor (also called continuity). It’s one of the lesser known positions amongst the general public but no film or television set could function without a good scripty. It’s a conduit between production and post-production, the nexus of all information on the shoot.
The script supervisor has three main duties - ensure continuity, log every take with notes for the director and editor, and ensure everything in the script is captured during production. You’d be surprised how many times chunks of dialogue or crucial parts of story are forgotten about in the chaos of set life. The shooting log is essential for the editor and director, the notations of every variation in each take contributing to an efficient post-production process. And continuity? Well, remember when a Northern Ireland coffee shop got some unintentional product placement on Game of Thrones?
However, the best way to fully understand the work of a script supervisor is to take a deep dive and do a case study of an individual project. Luckily, we have a treasure trove of documents from Frank Beddor’s 1998 psychological thriller Wicked. This collection of notes and photos provides an excellent insight into life as a script supervisor.
The script supervisor on Wicked was Dina Waxman, a set life veteran who has worked with such directors as Michael Mann, Spike Jonze, Wong Kar Wai, and John Frankenheimer. She has written and directed seven short films and has served as a scripty on over one hundred commercials, two TV series, and 12 films, including David Fincher’s iconic 1999 action thriller Fight Club starring Brad Pitt.
On Wicked, Waxman worked closely with costume designer Sara Jane Slotnick (Alpha Dog, Loving) and wardrobe supervisor Jim Hansen (Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2) to produce a thoroughly detailed catalog of each actor’s wardrobe pieces for every day of shooting. From more general items like the types of outfits or the number of wardrobe changes to the more minuscule details such as if an actor’s wearing any jewelry or the way their shirt tucks into their pants. It is all noted, photographed, and indexed. It is a painstaking amount of work and requires a mind that is simultaneously able to hold both the minute and larger picture in equal importance at the same time.
There are a few reasons why this obsessive level of detail is required. Scenes will often be shot out of sequence and your director and cinematographer may choose to start with the end of the scene rather than the beginning or return to a scene later in production or during reshoots. You will also need to reset for each take and each time the camera moves. The actor’s costume needs to be the same as the other shots because if you have a shot where your actor's sleeve is up and that sleeve down in the next angle, your film is going to look pretty amateurish. Your editor and director need shots that link up to produce a cohesive cut.
The Wardrobe Continuity log above contains all the information needed to identify what is being shot. It lists the shooting day, the scenes being shot, what is happening in those scenes, and what the actor, in this case Julia Stiles, who won Best Actress at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival for playing Ellie, wears in those scenes. This is designed so costume, props, camera, anybody, can take a quick look and get all the information they need. On the flip side of that document are polaroids of the actor in those costumes, giving the crew a visual they can match when resetting the scene. Quick note about the photos, script supervising can sometimes seem like you’re shooting behind-the-scenes content. You will take so many photos. You’ll think to yourself, “Am I taking too many photos?” and then realize you haven’t taken nearly enough. Thankfully, in 2024, scriptys use their phones so there aren’t any polaroids to come unstuck and slip out of the binder.
The scenes chronicled above call for Ellie (Julia Stiles) to wear a “cotton sleeveless nightgown” in Scenes 47-50 with a cardigan over it for Scenes 51-53. In the first polaroid, it’s noted that the nightgown is buttoned up and Stiles is wearing a ring on her left thumb and a blue and green bracelet on her left wrist. Those items are also marked on the photo itself. The second photo, where Julia Stiles is wearing the cardigan, also notes the placement of the ring and bracelet, even though you can’t see the jewelry because of the sweater’s sleeve. Why does the actor have to wear the ring and bracelet even if you can’t see them? Because, during the time frame in which these scenes take place, it wouldn’t be realistic for the character to have removed her jewelry. So if she lifts her arm during the scene and the sleeve falls down, the audience will notice she’s missing her ring and bracelet from the previous scene. This would take them out of the story and threaten to compromise their ability to suspend their disbelief, which is essential in any type of film viewing, but especially with Wicked.
For the third polaroid, the most important element is that Stiles will be wearing the same outfit in nonsequential scenes. The scenes take place during different times of the day and in a few different locations. If she got changed during lunch or they shot a different scene in the afternoon that required a wardrobe change, this snapshot ensures that the costume department can get her back into wardrobe quickly, efficiently, and accurately. This leads to a smoother set where the cast and crew can fully focus on character and story instead of the location of the main character’s turquoise blue Hawaiin.
You’ll notice that the log above contains much less information than the one shown in the previous section. However, the scenes represented here are infinitely more complex. Why? Well, if you guessed the blood, you’re absolutely correct. Blood and gore are super fun to work with but it’s a complicated, stressful business. First, there are the safety considerations. The fact that blood is being used on set generally means the actor or stunt double will be required to perform a stunt involving violence. In Wicked, for example, this sequence called for Ellie to be struck in the head with a heavy object and for Lawson Smith (Patrick Muldoon of Starship Troopers and Melrose Place). The safety of the individuals involved in the stunts is paramount and a lot of effort and concentration from everyone on the crew goes into making sure they’re safe.
The second reason special effects work such as blood can be challenging for crews is because blood is a continuity nightmare. How do you ensure the blood on the set and the blood on the actor’s costume match angle to angle, take to take? The answer - lots and lots of pictures. The pictures above are essential to ensuring continuity with lots of moving parts that usually require multiple setups to capture. The first photo would’ve been taken either before or after the camera started rolling so the crew could match their positioning and the amount and placement of blood when setting up another shot. The second photo specifies the blood droplets on Stiles’ shirt, allowing the crew to ensure they can replicate the pattern if they need a new top. The third polaroid specifies the position of Stiles’ clothing in a specific shot so the crew can once again match that look in subsequent set-ups. Working with special effects often makes for a high-pressure environment given the lost time and higher costs that can be a consequence of a mistake, so the script supervisor needs to be flawless in their documentation.
The position of script supervisor is a multi-faceted, sometimes stressful position that requires constant communication with every department. For a film like Wicked, requiring several specific costumes and detailed special effects work, Dina Waxman’s work contributed to an efficient set, allowing the actors and directors to craft an engrossing thriller that captivated audiences at Sundance and launched Julia Stiles’ career.
You can watch Julie Stiles’ breakthrough performance in Wicked on the following streaming platforms: Amazon, YouTube, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, Plex, and Tubi.
An itinerant storyteller, John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.
RADIATION AND RABBITS: THE PARALLELS BETWEEN “FALLOUT” AND “ALICE IN WONDERLAND"
Remember when video games were good? I know good games come out all the time but take my blanket statement at face value for a second. Recently it feels like every triple-A developer is just rehashing old games and not taking any risks. I remember a better time, a time when big studio games felt like a labor of love and not a cash grab. For me, there is no better example of a game studio that used to be amazing but has fallen from grace recently than Bethesda. Their Fallout series is a perfect example of this, Fallout3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4 were amazing games, probably some of my favorite games of all time. It seemed like they could do no wrong. But everything changed when the micro-transactions attacked… Today, Bethesda is run by greedy little piggies who have no idea what their player base wants and just continually re-releases their rapidly aging catalog of hit games with minor graphical updates so they can continue to charge the consumer full price for ten-plus-year-old games. At one point, many moons ago, they created and released fun and creative games, and the Fallout series, for me, was their peak.
For those of you who have never played any of the Fallout games, it’s a first-person and/or third-person role-playing game set in an alternate, retro-future timeline of America. In this timeline, EVERYTHING is nuclear-powered, and I mean everything. Televisions, microwaves, cars, robots, and there is even a soda called “Nuka-Cola” which is radioactive. Well, when everything is nuclear-powered, it’s pretty easy to assume that every single country in the world would probably have a sizable stockpile of nuclear missiles as well. That assumption is correct, and unfortunately, those countries decide to nuke the shit out of each other. I guess we only see that America was nuked but I’m going to assume that we responded before we were reduced to radioactive dust. Isn’t mutually assured destruction wonderful? The thing is, some people were prepared for this nuclear armageddon, they had “insurance.” The insurance was that they had paid to be locked into giant underground vaults. These vaults were built to ensure the survival of the human race in the event of nuclear war and they are set to open once the surface is habitable again.
In the Fallout games, you play as a “vault dweller” who, for one tragic reason or another, has decided to leave their vaults and enter into the unknown surface above. The exception to this case is Fallout: New Vegas where you actually play as, what is essentially, a vengeful mailman. Regardless, while one would assume that the surface is a barren landscape after the nukes, that is anything but the case, people survived, but they did not thrive. The surface is full of mutants (both human and animal), raiders, religious knights in power armor, mad scientists, and much more, all battling for control of the wasteland in an attempt to fill the power vacuum that was left behind when every government ever fell. From there, what’s left of the world is your oyster.
That overstuffed paragraph is a brief overview of the world of Fallout. I’m honestly barely scratching the surface here. With a story that rich, it’s only natural that after the massive success of HBO’s The Last of Us T.V. adaptation, other studios would want to cash in on the video game television show hype. I’m sure we won’t get tired of it… Well, Amazon adapted Fallout into a television show, and let me tell you, it’s awesome. The Fallout show follows three different characters whose paths intersect but for the sake of this blog, I’m mostly going to focus on Lucy MacLean played by Ella Purnell. Lucy is a vault dweller whose family has lived in the vaults for many generations. Well, something happens that I don’t want to spoil and she has to leave the vault. There she faces the wild world of the radioactive wasteland that was once Los Angeles.
If you haven’t figured out why I’m writing about this show on an Alice in Wonderland-themed website by now, it’s time to realize you might not be as smart as you think. I’ll put it in terms you can understand. Woman lives in a world where things make sense to her, goes in a hole, and enters a world where everyone is crazy and must learn rules to keep her head. Fallout is Alice in Wonderland. Replace a rabbit hole with a vault door, the whimsical nature of Wonderland with the wildness of the Wasteland, and the Jabberwocks with Deathclaws, and boom it’s the same story. People even lose their heads in the show too. Now, you might not be completely sold on this fact but lend me your ears, or I guess eyes in this case, and by the end of this blog, I will have you shoving this fact down people's throats too.
I’ve already given an overview of the Alice character, Lucy, but I want to go a bit deeper before tackling the other characters. Okay, I said there wouldn’t be spoilers but I lied skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want any… One.. Two… Three… Spoilers, the first person Lucy meets perfectly sets the stage for my argument that she and Alice are the same character. Lucy meets a person living on the surface who is trying to use a machine that will extract water from whatever is put in it. This person is struggling to use said machine because when he puts sand in the hopper, only sand comes out. Which is a problem we have all had. In his mind, the machine is broken, but to Lucy’s logical mind, dry sand can’t be turned into water. Their interaction mirrors many of the interactions Alice has in Wonderland. Where Alice explains that something a Wonderlander is doing is “illogical” to her but the Wonderlander finds it perfectly logical. After Lucy and the Wastelander’s brief interaction, the Wastelander asks Lucy if she wants to marry him because she gave him water. Not in a hyperbolic way, he means it. He even shows all the great stuff he has to offer, like his sand. In his mind, this is a perfectly reasonable question to ask.
I lied about the spoilers ending here, go to the next paragraph to truly skip the spoilers… Another example of the Wasteland essentially being Mad Max: Wonderland is in a scene where another character, Maximus played by Aaron Clifton Moten, saves a man who is about to be killed by another person. On the surface, it seems as though the would-be killer is a crazy person. It turns out that the victim he had rescued, who claims to be a “scientist” was having biblical relations with the “aggressors” chickens. Killing someone for fraternizing with poultry is pretty logical. There is a choking the chicken double entendre joke opportunity here but that’s too blue for me to say… Hey, don’t get mad at me, you’re the one who came up with it in your filthy minds… How is this Alice in Wonderland related? Well, I would argue that this scene is meant to establish the madhouse that is the Wasteland and those who inhabit it. The man who was trying to protect his birds even says the fact with an air of exhaustion in his voice, as if this isn’t the first time this has happened and probably won’t be the last. It’s just the world he lives in. Maximus has grown up on essentially an army base his whole life so the wilds of the wasteland to him are just like the wilds of Wonderland for Alice. Things just are the way they are because that’s how they are.
The Fallout television show doesn’t just share a lot of similarities with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it also has characters eerily similar to other Alice-related IPs. Take Cooper Howard a.k.a. “The Ghoul” played by Walton Goggins. First, because I have to, a “Ghoul” in the Fallout universe is a human who has been exposed to high levels of radiation, causing their flesh to melt. Due to their appearance, they are essentially second-class citizens. The terrible hand they have been dealt is compounded due to the radiation affecting their minds as well, all ghouls are slowly going feral and without constant medication will eventually become essentially human-shaped animals that kill and eat anything that moves. Well, Cooper Howard is a bit of an antihero in this show. He’s survived in the Wasteland for hundreds of years and knows the rules of this world and how to navigate it. He’s a badass bounty hunter who’s honed his fighting skills living in a harsh environment. Nothing surprises him and his gruff exterior shields a tormented past. He instantly reminded me of a character created from the mind of my overseer, Frank Beddor. That character is Hatter Madigan, Frank’s version of the Mad Hatter. While Hatter Madigan is an elite member of the Millinery, in the Looking Glass Wars novels, he wanders the globe looking for Alice. Wherever he goes, tales of his epic deeds follow. Much like The Ghoul. Plus they both wear long coats.
If I haven’t sold you on the fact that the Wasteland is Wonderland, Lucy is Alice, and that Fallout, whether the writers of the games knew it or not, is quite similar to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I have one final thing to drive my point home. Let's look at the mysterious antagonist of the Fallout T.V. show, Lee Moldaver. I haven’t finished the show yet and my internet is down at the moment, but from what I’ve gained from the six episodes I have seen, she is a powerful woman whose name alone strikes fear into the hearts of those who live in the Wasteland. Just like the Red Queen/Queen Redd does in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
When a piece of media is so popular and transformative to storytelling as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was, it’s not hard to notice similarities in all the media that comes after it. The basic premise of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the perfect foundation for a fantastic story. If done correctly, like the Fallout series, it’s a recipe for success. Due to this, it’s easy to see why Alice has endured for as long as it has.
Jared Hoffman graduated from the American Film Institute with a degree in screenwriting. A Los Angeles native, his brand of comedy is satire stemming from the many different personalities and egos he has encountered throughout his life. As a lover of all things comedy, Jared is always working out new material and trying to make those around him laugh. His therapist claims this is a coping mechanism, but what does she know?
All Things Alice: Interview with Jake Curtis
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have the hilarious and talented Jake Curtis join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Welcome to All Things Alice Jake Curtis.I'm interested in your creative journey as a young writer and how one comes to their creative process and aspirations. Where did it all start in terms of writing? Were you someone who loved to write in school?
Jake Curtis I've pretty much always done some kind of performance thing. I come from a big family of writers and artists who are all too loud for their own good. So growing up, you had to learn to talk fast and talk loud.
FB Was that at the dinner table? Or was that all the time?
JC Twenty-four seven. We used to say that everyone was unconditionally loved, but not everyone was unconditionally liked.
I came to performing and writing from improv actually. I started doing a lot of improvised comedy when I was 12-13 and it was huge for me because I'm quite an anxious person in general. I’m an analytical person. So the chaos and acceptance that has to come with improv was pretty huge for me. There's no second draft. There's no planning.
FB There's no getting out of it. I thought improv was the most terrifying concept I'd ever heard of. I'm not going to get up on stage and then somebody's going to tell me some little story and I'm supposed to go from there. I admire the chutzpah at 12. But I suppose at 12 it's like sink or swim. So much stuff is going on at that age.
JC I was a big lover of live comedy shows. England, especially then, had a really vibrant live comedy scene. Going up to the Edinburgh Fringe at young ages, you see all these shows, and at first, I became obsessed with the idea of an audience. I think that was always the bit that gripped me. It's not so much the glitz and glamor of a million followers, but it was getting to watch these people who can walk into a room with 20 people and just connect with them and entertain them for an hour. I've always approached writing from an entertainer's perspective. We're all dancing monkeys making something fun. So I did improv for years and it excited me and I got to go around the world and do shows in Canada and the US.
FB So there was something more structured than you getting up there as a young person and doing something in front of the class. Were you part of a troupe?
JC I was part of a troupe called School of Comedy, which is an amazing company in the UK that gets professional sketch writers to come in, but then they have a troupe of kids to perform the sketches. We did shows up in Edinburgh for two years we would perform around the country at festivals and comedy gigs. That was an amazing experience because we were very much treated like we were a part of a professional show. Like we were an asset and a commodity and a member of the troupe. They were lovely and respectful. But also it was like, you have an expectation. There are people out there who have come to see a show and you are the people to deliver it.
FB How many shows would you do a day?
JC When we went up to Edinburgh, we would do a show every day for 30 days or for 21 days, which is the length of the Fringe. You're on a full run there. Then, generally, you'd have a week with a couple of shows or a little run at some theater and then a couple of months without a show. But we were working and it gave you this idea of having to accept how the audience reacts. I think a lot of writing classes and creative media share the message of “Oh, you've got to tell the story that's yours. You've got to find your soul or your calling.” That’s wonderful and people need to be told that, but I think it does sometimes remove the audience from the question. It tells you to find the thing you think is funny, but I love performing to live crowds because you're reminded even if you think it's funny, it doesn't really matter that much if they don't. We’d go into shows where we had sketches that had been written for us and that killed five shows in the last five shows. But you deliver it and the crowd doesn't like it. You can either just say, “Well, this is my schedule and I'm gonna keep going,” or you can try and change it on the spot, try and work out what this crowd needs from you and the show.
FB Obviously, when it's going well, it fuels you and you can charge ahead and you will take chances and it's invigorating. When there's a lull or you feel like the audience's leaning back and they're not engaged, for me, I had a sense of panic when I was doing some plays. I went, “Oh, it's one of those.” I would get into my head on the negative side and trying to find a way out of that into the next moment and being present was difficult.
JC I've done shows that have bombed and kept bombing. Sometimes you're in the mud and you've got to stay there. In those shows, I would just try and make as much eye contact with the people on stage as I could. You don't have to look at the crowd, right? And I’d try and tell myself, “I'm here having a good time with my friend, not bombing and ruining these people's night.” But generally, with the crowd, I always took that as a challenge and it's a challenge you can win. Especially with comedy shows, people want to come out and have a good evening. Now working as a writer, all these decisions you make are fueled by “We think these markets might want a script that looks like this.” I hate all of that because it's not real. You're like, “Oh, maybe I can do it. I'm a technician.” But when you have a crowd, it's you and them. It's head-to-head. My panic mode was usually monologuing. If I'm getting stressed, I'm just gonna keep talking and I'm gonna keep going until I hit something. I'm gonna move faster. I'm gonna go through more ideas until you find a little inkling of a laugh and then just grip onto that for dear life.
FB Is that what you did with your family? Is that what the competition was, people gripping on for their lives to find a little kernel to be heard?
JC One hundred percent. You’re waiting at the dinner table like, “Come on. Someone mention dog. Someone mention dog.” Someone brings up the word dog and you’re like, “That's interesting! Listen to what happened to me today. I went out and I met three dogs.” You’ve got to take your time when you have it.
FB Wow, that must have been hard to even get the food and drink down. That’s a diet in itself.
JC When someone else starts monologuing, you speed eat. I just loved the immediacy of improv and the presentness and the engagement. For me, the joy of making art is making it for a specific person or specific people.
FB You were making art in that moment. There wasn't a committee telling you, “I think this joke will work or that joke will work”. The audience is telling you instantaneously, which you don't get when you're writing a script for television. That’s amazing because you're basically writing on stage as you're going.
JC It forces you to engage in the truthful fact that the majority of art is just people observing other people and enjoying it. There's this top tier of if you can write a sentence so good it is etched into history. If you're gonna write “to be or not to be,” go for it. But the majority of art isn't the cleverest thing you've ever heard. It's some people watching, reading, whatever, some other people and trying to enjoy it, trying to have a good time.
FB It’s the connection to the human experience which is why it's interesting you're describing your family because so many stories are about the dynamic of family and it's very relatable. So when you tap into something like that you're going to engage the audience in a meaningful way. Your family dynamic sounds really exciting and really competitive and that set you up with the mindset of “I'm being creative all the time, not just when I’m improvising. But my whole family is creative.” Did you have actors in the family? You said writers?
JC In the immediate family, we have a lot of writers. My sister's a writer, my dad's a writer, my little brother's a writer. My mum was a TV presenter in the 80s, which was cool. She used to do little practice things like she’d be playing songs in the car and, in between them, she'd be like, “Okay, you could introduce this one.” I'd have to be like, “And this next song coming on is a smooth hit from Lionel Richie,” and try to time it to the intro to the song. It was all just fun. Then in the extended family, they're also very loud. I have like 30 cousins on my mom's side and we have actors, we have everything. It was just a general feeling of trying to have fun trying to push yourself. I thought if I was going to be able to make a career in the arts, it would be partly from muscle growth. How many reps can I do? How many different art forms? I spent so long doing comedy sketches, I don't do those anymore, but the experience all of it filters into everything else I do.
FB Is comedy the genre you've started to really hone is comedy, whether it's television or film?
JC Comedy is definitely where I lean. That was where all my experience came from in improv. I think these things are muscles, especially comedy. I think people often underestimate how much of a muscle comedy is because people are so naturally funny. But it is a very different thing, being funny to four friends than writing something that can slot into a specific scene in a specific script.
FB It's completely different. When you're with your friends and you're saying it out loud, it can come or go. But when you write it down, people can judge the rhythm and the cadence of it. Somebody's got to perform it to really nail that cadence. It’s a lot different putting it on.
JC I sometimes hear writers, who are great writers but haven't done comedy, saying, I think I might, for my next script, just do a comedy.” That's great and maybe it'll be amazing but I think the reason I'm good at comedy is, I hope, twenty percent something natural in me but I did a hundred appalling improv shows before doing a hundred mediocre improv shows before doing fifty decent ones. I have so many scripts that are so bad and so unfunny, so many files on my phone, stand-up gigs, improv, and freestyling. This is the thing I've done the most and I'm still mediocre to okay.
FB It's the 10,000 hours. It's the failing over and over. I don't know if people realize what a gift that is, as the learning part of the process. When you talk about great comedians and you see their shows, if you see multiple shows, they are so specific night after night. They're hitting every one of those beats. They're so worked out. It's kind of remarkable how specific they are from performance to performance.
JC That was a part of why I felt so lucky getting into comedy so early and the fact that my family did treat it as a serious pursuit. I was able to go through a lot of that education and a learning phase while I was at school. Because I think it can be really daunting if you go through life and you hit 24-25 and you go, “Oh, maybe I want to do comedy.” It's a six-year path to being kind of fine.
FB Starting at 12 and starting to perform, it's not dissimilar to sports. If you do it at a young age, it's so inherent by the time you get to your late teens. It’s instinctual but you need all those reps. Starting that young, the filters are off and so you're just doing it. It’s not as if you're 24 and you want to do comedy for your career and you wonder how that's gonna work out. I think that makes a big difference. With your family being so into all the arts, did you find that to be really nurturing or is there a competitiveness or an expectation you feel moving forward?
JC Not so much. There's a competitiveness in my family anyway. I'm one of four kids and we all do very fairly similar things so there's a bit of a jostling. But no, I think it was very much, “If this is a path you want to go down, go down it.” Me and my siblings do similar stuff but it's different. My sister writes incredible feminist literature I couldn't write and my little brother writes very dark, edgy films I also couldn't write. It wasn't as much of competitiveness but it was more of “This is a legitimate career and a path you can take. If you're gonna go down it, take it seriously and put in work, put in the hours. We will drive you to the classes and pick you up but you've got to put your practice in and put your head down.” It wasn't treated as a fanciful thing.
FB With a lot of creatives, the family or the parents treat it as a fanciful idea and not dependable.
JC I remember one time when I was 16 we had these national tests and I did really well on the physics one and I suddenly got this brain wave of, “Wait a second, could I be an engineer?” I was like, “Oh my god, this is a radical thought. A steady paying job, career development.”
FB Nothing like my family.
JC I’d become the black sheep.
FB You're working for Intel.
JC It would be bizarre for them. It was always something I just appreciated and kept going and kept trying to see where I could go. I did a lot of improv. I got to do some shows I loved. I got to do two 50-hour-long shows in Canada with the group Die-Nasty, which was a great experience. It was really COVID that ended that portion of my life. I was already writing a lot by then but when COVID happened all improv obviously shut down. More than most industries improv took a really big hit. It turned out the improv theaters weren’t the people with big financial stores and genius financial skills. So improv took a really hard hit there. Then I just dove fully into writing. I've always enjoyed performing as an act for myself, but needing to get my face out there was never a priority. So I really tried to dedicate myself to screenwriting as a way of building a career I would enjoy.
FB Why did you move from the UK to the US? Was that for educational or opportunity reasons?
JC I was living in the UK until I was 19 and then I moved to Chicago to go to Northwestern University and study film there. I made the decision entirely based on improv. In the UK, I was doing what is known as Chicago-style improv, which is long form. Chicago is the mecca of that with Second City and the iO. So I Googled best colleges for improv and some dudes' blogs came up and at number one he had Northwestern and the Titanic Players. I went great. I applied to two schools. I applied to Northwestern and then I applied to Yale because no one in England had heard of Northwestern. So I thought, “If I can get into Yale and reject them, then I'll tell people I chose Northwest.” Then Yale rejected me so it wasn't a great plan. But yeah, I went for the improv and it honestly was amazing. I was in this group, the Titanic Players, run by Mike Abdelsayed. It’s an amazing, incredible organization. I got to do so much improv at Northwestern. It wasn't the worst decision.
FB Then you had the city so you could go to Second City and you could see some of the best improv in the country. You were getting your fix for sure.
JC A hundred percent. I go to do shows downtown and they brought in guest improvisers to teach workshops. It was an amazing experience.
FB Also, it's a great city when you're twenty-one years old.
JC I don't regret the decision at all. I love Chicago so much. Oddly enough, of everywhere in America I've been it's the place that most reminds me of London. So I felt quite at home there. Lovely people, lovely food, and some of the best improv in the world.
FB Who were some of the people that inspired you in terms of your comedy?
JC The first people were a lot of English comedians and stand-ups that I doubt people listening to this podcast have heard of but there are people like Daniel Kitson and Tim Key. These incredible people who would just do one-person shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. Partly due to the financial situation, one person shows basically dominate and it's amazing because it’s so personal. I love these very personal stand-up shows. Moving to Chicago, TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi are like the greatest duo in Chicago improv history. They've been doing the same show for 35 years. They are genuine masters and are so grounded and confident and know each other so well. But honestly, my biggest inspiration was watching American sitcoms. That was kind of why I wanted to come to America. I grew up watching The Office, Parks and Rec, and How I Met Your Mother. All these shows. For one, they’re so phenomenal and they also made America seem so cool. I was like, “This is great. I'm just gonna go to America and meet all these beautiful people and date them. It'll be great and everyone's funny and the sun's always shining.”
FB Did you discover that?
JC I discovered it was exactly like that. I have not been sad a day since I arrived in America. No, it turns out they're a little unrealistic at points.
FB So moving to LA, what was the transition here?
JC So COVID happened and I was in Chicago and I started writing more. I only had a year left on my visa and I didn't know if I could stay in the country. So I thought, “If I have a year, I should go to LA, the ‘City of Dreams.’” So I moved to LA and I got a job working for a motivational speaker, which was a weird experience, especially during COVID.
FB Why was that weird?
JC There was a point where I was locked down in my house and seeing no one. Except once a week, I would drive to this guy's house, set up a camera, and he would motivationally speak at me for one or two hours. All of his stuff is just down the lens of the camera so I was going from total solitude to this man rambling about the meaning of life, and passion and purpose. Then I was going back to my tiny, empty house, and editing more videos of him talking about the stuff. It was just a bit of a jarring experience, but a wonderful one.
FB Did any of it stick for you?
JC It definitely got in there. It's definitely deep in my subconscious. I can still hear his voice if I close my eyes. But I was doing that for a year and then I was working on my writing, but I felt like I needed more training, especially because so much of my experience had been in performance and live comedy. So I ended up applying to grad schools to do a master's in Screenwriting. I got into the American Film Institute, and ended up going there, and that was one of the best decisions I've ever made.
FB How was Ed Decter? He introduced us and having him as a professor, what was the takeaway, the one thing you have been able to put into action?
JC Two things come to mind. Because I think the first, which was something I really loved from watching Ed, was where you can get to if you put all this time into screenwriting. I had so many examples of these great improvisers I'd seen who have this, it seems like a superhuman ability to improvise. You drop them in a scene and they know where to take it and where to go. It was seeing those people initially that made me want to do improv. I think it was amazing coming to AFI, all the professors who teach there have to also be working writers in LA. Ed Decter, who I was lucky to get in my second year, is a very prolific writer and has written so much stuff in so many genres. We were a class of six writing six very different scripts and watching him have immediate feedback for every single type of script, which ninety-nine percent of the time was immediately correct, was an amazing thing to see.
We talk about scripts so often like they’re hyper-personal, the story only you could tell, but if you get a really good screenwriter they know the direction a script should go from reading it. Getting to see that up close and getting to see someone be able to latch on to a story someone's trying to tell, work out the key elements, work out what's going to translate, work out what's not translating, and immediately know a direction to go in. That got me excited and inspired because I think it can be depressing as a writer to think your only option for success is writing your soul's calling. That's wonderful. I hope to one day write a film that is me in a bottle but that's a scary prospect. Going to AFI gave me much more of an approach to what a working writer looks like, of what a functional writer looks like, of someone who just gets the job done and who knows what a script needs.
FB Ed has written a lot of sitcoms. That's where he started. So he has experience in sitcoms but the scripts he's been writing lately have been adaptations of various kinds of mystery novels. He has a broad range of genres that he plays in. A couple of the latest crime dramas he's written were really startling to me, because, we obviously did There’s Something About Mary together, but also he's done so many sitcoms. So I can understand why you guys would have bonded. Also the experience of seeing him jump from genre to genre and script to script, I had a similar experience. We put a little mini-room together that he ran to break The Looking Glass Wars novels as a television show. Seeing him run the room was also another aspect of television production, writing, and development that I hadn't seen before. That was unique for me because I hadn't had that experience of taking my novel, breaking it up, and saying, “Okay, here's where we have to get to for the middle of the season. Here’s where we're trying to get to at the end of this season. Okay, now, let's reverse engineer it and figure out the best opening.” It was pretty exciting.
It was not dissimilar to what you did with my world. I asked you to write a lore story and this idea came from you and a number of other young writers that I was introduced to from AFI, who play all these different kinds of games, Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. I looked at all the lore stories that go along with those games and I thought, “Well, I want that.” So you wrote this story, The Brother’s Wilde, which I'd like you to talk about. It’s a lore story, a prose short story. You did an outstanding job. Really brilliant, beautiful job. You used aspects of my universe and you made them feel fresh to me, which was like Santa Claus showing up.
JC It was a wonderful experience for me because I've played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons for a long time. I love that world and the high fantasy genre, but it never felt like something I was allowed to play in for actual creative work. That was my treat on the side at the end of a long week. So getting approached to write something in a world of high fantasy that already exists and writing backstories was such a treat for me. It felt like getting to my fun times for work. But it was also an odd process. I've never really written based on other people's worlds before and other people's work. So that was interesting and fun getting into that and trying to see how much I could stretch. The odd thing for me was when I got into it, I was very excited. I'd written out all these plot points and the beats and I was confident in the story. Then literally as I opened up the Word document, I remembered I hadn't written prose in like seven years.
FB Be careful what you wish for.
JC I’d forgotten it was a completely different art form. I got ready to open up Final Draft and then I was like, “Oh God!” It took a little bit of adjusting. The part I forgot was you can't refer to someone by the same name every time in prose. In the script, someone is their name and it does not change ever. But I was suddenly deep on synonym.com, “I can't say ‘the great warrior’ again”. The mighty fighter, heroic hero, I was going deep into my vocabulary to try and switch something up. It was an exciting thing to get to work on. I think especially because Alice is a world that is so rich throughout culture. It’s kind of a bedrock piece of story. There are things I brought into the story that are pieces from Dungeons and Dragons. There's a lot of Alice in Wonderland lore baked into Dungeons and Dragons like Vorpal swords and Jabberwock. It didn't feel like building on something completely new. It felt like being given a chance to play in a world that is so familiar.
FB As a Brit too, Alice in Wonderland is probably the most famous piece of literature that you would have grown up with, right? So I can understand that and also the idea that Alice is everywhere. Of course, it makes sense it's in Dungeons and Dragons. You took what was familiar from Alice's Adventures, Lewis Carroll's work, you took elements from my world, but then you brought this brother story together. Tell us a little bit about that part of the story, because you did often reference your younger brother.
JC I have two younger brothers who got amalgamated in the story. I always try to start from a place of relationship because I think that gives you the most fuel for a story and is the part you can’t retroactively put in. If you tell me this story needs a bigger fight scene, I can go do that at the end. But if a story isn't built around a relationship, it's tough to slot it in. So I wanted to build The Brother’s Wilde around a relationship. I was looking at the House of Cards, which was where we wanted to focus the story, and I thought brotherhood made sense. It’s this military organization and the brotherly bond felt like it made sense. I have two brothers who I fight with a lot. So that made that track.
But then I was interested in this idea of the houses and I loved the thoughts of the personality types associated with the houses. Me and my brothers are very different and if we're gonna have two brothers in the story, let's put them in two different houses. Let's have them hate each other for the very reasons that make them unique. If we're trying to expand the House of Cards we've got to bake it into the DNA of the House of Cards. So I wanted to build around there. Then I came up with these characters who are half brothers from a philandering father, who they both hate and there’s no love between them. At that point, it started to feel real to me and it started to feel fun. It felt like playing because you built this world and we have this amazing world of the House of Cards which has these rituals and dynamics built in. It was such a gift to build these two brothers who hate each other and try to give them a situation to learn why they need each other.
FB You were tasked with an origin story, an early origin story of the House of Cards. They send card soldiers on missions and when they send people on missions, they decide what kind of hand they're going to deal. So you came up with the idea of “A Hand in History.” The Brothers Wilde is the beginning of the card soldiers going on these various missions when they're tasked with saving the queendom or battling a competitive state.
JC I loved the idea of basing it around hands that are chosen and selected because that plays into the joy of Dungeons and Dragons and these old fantasy novels. It’s the idea of “The Party,” the troop. Every story is based around who was selected to go on this journey. That's what's so beautiful in a lot of these adventure stories, including Alice in Wonderland, it's not the adventure that's enticing, but it's the uniqueness of who's gonna solve the adventure.
FB The skill set they have and seeing how they're challenged when they use their skill set with these various obstacles. That’s the Dirty Dozen idea.
JC I think that's where a lot of modern fantasy and films go wrong. They put a lot of their energy into these big set pieces, these big boss fights with CGI characters. They put a lot of time into the obstacles when actually the thing we care about is the people solving them. In The Lord of the Rings, you care about Frodo, you don't care that there are nine Nazgul. That's what makes Alice in Wonderland so beautiful, and your novels, they revolve around the people going through them instead of the giant nature of the battle.
FB It’s fantasy but you need to be with the characters and with Alice, it's so identifiable. It’s a “Who am I?” journey, and she finds agency in who she is and pushes back against the illogical world that she finds herself in. But it's also very amusing. When were you introduced to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?
JC I couldn't say an individual date because, especially in England, it was just a part of culture growing up. My earliest memories were of my mum and my dad reading me the book. I must have been 10 or 11. The 1951 film was something I watched a lot. I love animation. I write a lot of animated stuff. The specificity of the visuals and the tone baked into that film was a real inspiration for me growing up.
FB Why do you think it's lasted so long? You said it was in culture and this is generations after it was first introduced. Every generation re-interprets Alice. How do you view Alice in Wonderland?
JC I think the reason it has lasted is there are so many ways you can connect with it. It is such a beautiful human idea, the girl who falls through the looking glass and gets swept away on an adventure. The part I really gripped on to from a young age was the world-building. It was the idea of this world that works, that makes sense. It doesn't feel like someone who's picked, “Oh, this would be a fun scene. This is a fun character. That would look good.”
It lives and breathes like a world. Something that really drew me to it is I think a lot of world-building goes dark, “It's a grungy forest with scary people in it.” Then obviously some other world-building goes saccharine and we're in heaven. I love the feeling in Alice that there's a danger to the world but there's a wonder to it as well. There's a whimsy and a seriousness. The world feels like it shifts based on the situation, like ours does. There's no one thing to it. I just love learning more about the world, learning about the characters who inhabit it, the places to go, and being able to build this kind of escape.
FB I love the whimsy and the silliness of it and it reminded me of another book, The Phantom Tollbooth, which was one of my favorites growing up because of the silliness and the use of language. I really identified with that aspect of Alice. Many people think of it more as more a nightmare because of getting big and small and being stuck in a place where there's no logic.
JC The lack of logic, I love. I know quite a lot of people who I would identify as crazy people. They would as well. We have a lot of fun mental health issues in our family. I always grew up with this acceptance that nothing's gone wrong. There are crazy people who exist in the world and that's fine. I think Alice, in a youthful way, takes that on the story. It accepts there are people who are going to make some weird decisions and that’s okay.
FB It really does capture that. In terms of pop culture, you mentioned Dungeons and Dragons and the references in video games, I've noticed there’s a huge through line of Alice. In almost every game I've ever seen, there's some Alice component. Do you have a favorite Alice in pop culture item that you like?
JC I enjoy Dungeons and Dragons. I love the video game Borderlands, which has a lot of Alice imagery. I think my favorite is probably the Batman: Arkham Asylum graphic novel, which I just love. It’s this beautifully illustrated graphic novel about Batman going into Arkham Asylum and gradually losing his sanity. It’s very inspired by Alice in Wonderland. A lot of the villains in Batman already are. There's very much these threads of madness and the Mad Hatter.
Even the Penguin, there's all this imagery that lines up. So you have this beautiful graphic novel of him just going progressively mad, surrounded by Alice in Wonderland motifs and imagery. That’s what feels so special about Alice in Wonderland, it can be drawn for inspiration for something light for a younger audience but it could also be drawn for a very dark and disturbing graphic novel. And it works the same. It’s just beautiful. I think that's what happens when you're able to create something that taps so deep into a human level. It means you can use it in so many different ways.
FB A lot of stories now are based on IP because people like stories that are familiar and told in an unfamiliar way. On the business side, there's a recognizable aspect for the marketing. I know this is not lost on you because you're working on an animated series that's based on Edgar Allan Poe, but your spin on it is a little different. Can you talk about that?
JC I've been working for a couple of years on a series called A Raven in the Woods. It’s a reimagining of Edgar Allan Poe. I loved Poe as a child. I loved the language, the poetry, the darkness, and, similar to Alice, the acceptance of madness. That’s where they meet in the middle. Poe, like Lewis Carroll, doesn't treat his mad characters as nothing. They’re just his characters. They’re not irrational. They are just who they are and they are to be dealt with.
So I loved Poe and felt there was something so visual in his language that would pair well with animation. He writes in this incredibly emotive, twisted world that I thought could be best represented by animation. There are a lot of great live-action adaptations but they're all dark and gloomy rooms, which is technically accurate. But when you're reading Poe’s work, it doesn't feel like a dark gloomy room, it feels like a twisting shadow and peering lights. I thought it worked well with animation but I didn't want to do a direct translation. Similar to how you engage with the Alice world, I wanted to bring the feeling and the parts of Poe that I love into a new story that worked as a standalone piece of animation for kids. It shows a young Edgar Poe trying to get his brother Allan through the woods before Allan is turned into a raven. Allan's cursed and as they move through the woods, a lot of the people in the woods have gone mad. There's a curse on the woods and there's a big, mysterious overlord. A lot of the “mad” people speak in rhyme and speak in poetry.
It’s this adventure through the woods and the logic in my head was that this was the real-life adventure that inspired the later Edgar Allan Poe to write his stories. He actually wasn't very creative at all; he was just mining from two weeks he had as a kid. It’s got a lot of the characters and the elements and the moments of his work, but it's its own story about a kid trying to deal with a lot of the themes that come up in Poe. Themes of fear, how to overcome that, and how to deal with yourself and the world when everything feels mad.
FB Not dissimilar at all to Alice. I think that's really relatable and answers the question we often get from executives “Why now?” Given how chaotic the world feels, it's great to deal with stories that are realistic to the anxiety that kids feel, whether it's the various wars they're reading about or the climate and the fact that there's nothing they feel like they can do about it. I've noticed that with my kids. So stories that are thematically similar to what you're talking about answer that question of why it's important.
JC Thank you. I think we need this stuff. We live in a chaotic time and our art needs to reflect that. Thankfully, we're not the first people to have lived in a chaotic time so there are lovely things from the past.
FB We’re also trying to get grounded in what's real. One of the things about Alice in Wonderland, if you look back on it, the question is “Is this a dream? Is this real?” Trying to parse out reality versus fantasy, facts versus fiction, which we're dealing with a lot of late. That sounds like a really exciting project.
JC I'm working with a producer, Rick Mischel, who's wonderful, and we've teamed up with TeamTO which is a great French animation house.
FB They're terrific. I love their animation.
JC They’ve been amazing so far. Wonderfully French, which has been a great treat. On one of the first calls, the head of finance was just sitting 10 feet away from the camera stroking a cat. I was like, that's the kind of stuff we need. We're working with them and a director called Christian De Vita, who's an incredible director. He’s done a lot of Wes Anderson and Tim Burton stuff. We're working on putting together a packet for it and then going out and trying to sell it. It's been a great, great process and hopefully, it will lead somewhere.
FB Fingers crossed. We'll want to check back in with you and certainly have you on the show when you need to promote it because it's coming out.
I'm curious about the romantic comedy genre. I would imagine that you know something about that and that it's been lacking. It's one of the staples and one of my favorite movie genres. Why do you think we've lost that?
JC It’s a really tough question. My dad has made a lot of romantic comedies. That's his bag. It’s tough. I feel like there's very little to be learned from him because the truth about him is that he is literally the sappiest romantic person in the world. It is one hundred percent genuine. That's how he talks, thinks, and breathes. But I think it's a really tough thing. One thing, it's a genre that needs to keep changing. Action is action, and you need to develop it, but honestly, action holds up. But both romance and comedy are things that develop as humans develop. If you are romantic in the way people were romantic in the 1950s, you'll probably get arrested. If you tell jokes that were funny in the 50s, you are not getting laughs, I promise. I think these are things that need to keep being pushed and reinvented because, with both romance and comedy, it’s the feeling of something new. The feeling of being in love is, “I've never felt like this about a person before.”
FB What about the formula of the meet-cute and the tension of “clearly they’re not getting along”?
JC We got used to the formulas. I think you can get used to the formula for an action film and it doesn't lessen it. But to me, When Harry Met Sally, feels radical. It’s weird. It cuts away to things, it's skipping time. I think romantic comedies have to feel unique because it should feel like meeting a person who's shifting your life. When we get used to the tropes, they can still be good if you want to make The Notebook. That’s proper romance. But I think with a romantic comedy, it has to feel fun and it has to feel fresh. That takes reinvention.
I think we're in a weird spot at the moment where no one's quite cracked it in a while. We're all just really familiar with the tropes. Everyone watched these films, everyone started acting like the people in these films. There are all these people pretending to be leading men from romantic comedies in the 90s, and 2000s. They're all on dating apps and it's horrible. When you go on a dating app you see 200 people's perceptions of who they are as a romantic lead. You watch everyone label themselves as the Hugh Grant type. Or, “I'm just a witty guy,” or “I'm the Billy Crystal, he doesn't care.” These things are so played out. You've got to find a way of making something feel weird and fresh and new. But that's really tough when we work in an industry that doesn't like taking chances on fresh and new stuff. Also, let's be real, romantic comedies live and die on the stars, on the chemistry. It’s tough to get a weird, new, fresh take that two stars are willing to sign on for and they happen to have chemistry. I think it's a really tall order.
FB I agree with that. With all the dating apps, trying to find a way to make that at all romantic seems to be an impossibility. But also, somebody will do it and it'll break out and maybe there'll be a fresh take on it. But to your point, we have all sorts of other genres that people are spending more time on. I just miss the chemistry between two stars. The Notebook is something my daughter has gone back to and it works because both male leads are equally appealing. So she really has a dilemma that you can buy into. But that was based on a novel that was highly successful.
So the kinds of movies your dad wrote, were his own ideas, right? They weren't based on anything, your dad had a romantic idea. For example, your dad wrote Notting Hill, which was one of my favorites. There's an ongoing joke with my stepkids because whenever they say, “What should we watch?” I'm like, “Well, what about Notting Hill?” I've been saying it over and over and over so many times that they're dead. They look at me like, that is the dumbest joke ever. But it's a good movie. The chemistry between the two leads is so amazing.
JC I remember once asking my dad, “Did you know when you were writing these films that ended up being big hits, that they were going to be hits?” He said, “Absolutely not at all. I really didn't feel it. I just wrote and tried to stay passionate about it.” Then he paused and went, “Actually not Notting Hill. I was sitting at home and I thought, ‘What if a movie star fell in love with a random guy?’ And I went, Oh, that's a hit.’”
FB Also, you have Julia Roberts at the height of her stardom with that smile that would just crush anybody. Then you have Hugh Grant, who's a very contained performer and when those two come into contact, it's gold. It's wonderful.
JC I think one thing that's worth looking at is that romantic comedy is being explored in other mediums successfully like the Amazon show The Summer I Turned Pretty. It’s a smash hit for a younger audience and that's a rom-com, essentially. Even looking at someone like Taylor Swift, her songs are romantic, amusing, and comedic at points and that has gripped people. Obviously, people want these kinds of things. I think it'll just take someone breaking a new way of doing it in movies.
FB Certainly in television. My daughter keeps telling me “Dad, it's one girl, two guys. That's what you need to do. Just focus on teenagers. Two guys, one girl. That's the formula.” She's watched all those shows you've talked about.
You have a funny story about your grandmother knowing the Liddells, Alice Liddell, which you have to share with us. That’s the first time I've come into contact with somebody whose family member knew the literal muse forall things Alice, for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,for my books, for your writing The Brothers Wilde.
JC It’s a bizarre and wonderful story. My grandmother, my mum's mum, Lady Jill Freud, is an amazing woman. She's 96 or 97 right now but World War II broke out when she was little, six or seven. She was living in London at that time with her family and they knew London was going to be bombed ruthlessly. So the British government enacted this thing they called “the evacuation,” which was an insane thing to happen. It could never happen nowadays. They literally took every child in London, took them to a train station, put a number around their neck, and put them on a train somewhere. They literally just shipped them off. When they arrived at these stations, people from the local towns came to the station and just went “Yeah, I can take two,” or “I run a farm, I can take two young boys to work there.” These kids just got rehoused for what was, at that point, an indefinite period of time.
So my granny was sent to Oxford and taken in by this family, the Butlers. Mrs. Butler was 100 and wasn't allowed to know there was a war on because they were worried it would scare her. But the house was run by these three Butler sisters. Two of them were university professors and they were three unmarried older women. They had been three of the kids that Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson, had taken down the Isis River in Oxford when they were younger. He'd done these long boat journeys down the Isis and he would read them stories every night. He would come up with stories and a lot of his early things were first tested out on these little girls. So my grandmother lived with the Butlers and they had these toys from their time with Lewis Carroll he had actually made by hand. He was a great craftsman and he had made these toys.
So every Sunday afternoon, my granny would be allowed to go into the drawing room and play with these Lewis Carroll's toys. It was this incredible time in Oxford where all these great writers and poets and people who were allowed to not fight in the war for academic reasons would write. So she lived with the Butlers and she met Alice Liddell. Alice was close with them and would come over and she was this sort of enigmatic figure known and revered around Oxford. She had tea with J.R.R. Tolkien. By her memory, he was a friendly guy.
So it was just this amazing time she was around Oxford and absorbing it. But also it was a time of war and chaos and people dying. When she talks about it it's this very mixed feeling of this beautiful time but so underpinned with fear.
FB Was she there for the entire war?
JC She was there for the entire war pretty much I believe. She was there for five years of the war. By the time the war ended, she was 16-17 and had been at C.S. Lewis' house for a bit and she stayed on to manage his estate for another year or two, I believe. Then at the end of that, she was accepted into RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but couldn't afford to go and C.S. Lewis paid for her entire education. He covered it and she went on to become an early movie actress.
FB What an amazing story and an amazing life.
JC At that time in Oxford, there were so many incredible people, incredible minds all talking to each other. These were discrete authors. They all knew each other and they had writing groups.
FB Could you imagine those writing groups? Wow, that would have been intimidating.
JC “Yeah, I don't know if this White Rabbit character is really working for me.”
FB “I don't think a closet is where you want the kids to go through. No one is gonna buy that.” The video you sent me of your grandmother, what's that from?
JC She’s an incredible woman with incredible stories. A few years ago, I sat her down and we talked through her life and everything she'd done. It was a really wonderful experience. It was something I wanted to do, obviously to have the footage, but also it is such a privilege to get to talk to someone who's lived through wars and everything. I mean, ninety-seven is a lot of years.
FB You’re very fortunate in terms of being surrounded by so many creative minds and creative family members and having a template on which you can base your creative aspirations. It's been really delightful to listen to you articulate what you've experienced so far, in your life and I really, I really appreciated you working on this project. I didn't know you very well and you delivered. I think our listeners are really going to enjoy hearing this.
JC They're good, fun people. There’s a quote from a Madness song written on our wall at home that says, “There's always something happening and it's usually quite loud.” That summed up our family well.
FB That's great. I hope you'll come back when your show is produced.
JC Thank you so much for having me. This was such an absolute treat for the day and just fun to get into all this and chat about comedy and things
This is Marco Arizpe, Lead Game Designer at Automatic Games, and occasional blog writer for Frank's wonderful repository of All Things Alice. Recently I have been hard at work developing an exciting table top card game set in the expansive wonderverse of The Looking Glass Wars. In doing so, I have studied the wide world of Alice-Inspired games.
No stranger to daring battles played out among friend & foe, the enduring legacy of chess & the versatile deck of cards lend their imagery to some of Wonderland's most iconic characters. The vivid familiarity of Lewis Carroll's creation manifests continually in this medium. However, there are many varieties of games, some with more familiar rules & pieces, while others go a little mad along the way.
In this spirit, please allow me to bring to your attention a sampling of some of the best Wonderland-inspired board & card games you could play at your next tea party.
A card-collecting game where players cooperate or compete to create a hat collection that would make the Millinery jealous.
With a 42-card deck of seven different Hat cards to collect, a “tea table” board for exchanging cards, a dry-erase “napkin” to keep score, and a plastic cookie which is very much inedible (you have been warned.) With these delightful pieces in hand 2 players can enjoy a simplified version with 1 less card on the tea table and 2 fewer hat suits in the deck, while 3 or 4 players utilize the whole game board and have access to all 42 hats.
A turn is simple, players can exchange a hat from the board with one from the hand and place their newly collected hat in front of them, or you play a hat face-down in front of you as a “black hat.” Once all players have 1 hat in hand, they have made all their moves, and the true strategy of Hats is revealed. Your final hat is your “favorite” and if the players have favorite hats of the same style as the ones on the tea table, those hats are placed face-down and do not count towards the final score. The hats in your collection are scored based on the position of their matching styles on the tea table, your black hats counting for 1 point, and the player with the most varied styles earning that 5-point cookie previously mentioned.
Hats falls in a rare middle ground of colorful game pieces that catch the eye and a level of portability that allows players to enjoy the game out and about. Though admittedly the scoring system of Hats can be confusing initially as players get a handle on how to set up the tea table and their collection, even playing a round of Hats incorrectly still merits a good time. If you are looking to enjoy a quickly-paced game of cards with wonderful art Hats is a solid recommendation, but if you need more Wonderland read on.
Combining Carroll's vision of Wonderland and the energetic card game designed by the delightfully named Looney Laboratory, Wonderland Fluxx is a game where the rules are made to go mad.
Starting with a very basic rule set of “draw 1, play 1” a game of Fluxx begins with very little but transforms with each card played. The Fluxx deck includes New Rules, Actions, Goals, and Keeper cards, as well as other advanced card types that ensure no two games play alike. Each round players can change the rules, perform special actions, set new goals, and collect Keepers to meet those goals. All this is merely the core of Fluxx as a game before it has been steeped in the imagery and themes of Wonderland.
Between 100 different cards, there are many flavorful links between Fluxx card mechanics and the iconic tropes we associate with Wonderland, perhaps my favorite is the use of the Jabberwock as the sole “Creeper” card of the deck. In Fluxx, one of the additional types of cards that can be found are Creepers which force themselves to be played when drawn. These cards tend to be “opposites” of the Keeper cards players need to collect to win and depending on the version, Creeper cards can add further chaos to your game. The Jabberwock is Wonderland Fluxx's only Creeper which adds a level of mythic menace to the creature that I find charming.
Wonderland Fluxx is an excellent choice for a group of players who enjoy thinking on their feet and are comfortable with the rules changing at any moment. Admittedly, Fluxx as a system can have linear win-conditions as players merely need 1 or 2 Keeper cards to complete any Goal. The fluctuating variables might keep newer players away but fits the madness of Wonderland that fans of LGW would appreciate an easy recommendation.
In this cooperative puzzle game, players must use their wits please to outsmart the Queen of Hearts, which is no easy task.
Published by North Star Games, Paint the Roses has players taking the role of royal gardeners toiling under the vicious Queen of Hearts who demands that the palace gardens be arranged to her mad whims. Based on these secretive Whim Cards, players must create a garden using Shrub Tokens to give their friends clues on what patterns to develop before the Queen's ax can reach their neck. These whims come in a trio of difficulty and must be kept secret by the players, only using tokens to leave clues for your fellow players that the Shrubs on the board to lead you in the right direction. Once the planting of shrubs and clues has taken place, Players must take their guesses as to what is on the Whim cards. Guess correctly and move your gardener token along the board, but guess wrong and the Queen begins her mad march.
Now the win-condition of Paint the Roses is straightforward enough, however working to stay ahead of the Queen's ax solely on you and your teammate's ability to read each other's clues can make this game fly by or slow to a crawl. For those who've mastered the base form of this game, North Star Games has released a deluxe version which includes the Escape the Castle expansion. The deluxe version boasts 6 unique modules that introduce familiar faces to Paint the Roses to assist players in their quest.
Returning to the meat of this review, the core retail version of Paint the Roses is an enjoyable romp around the palace grounds and is an excellent addition to the collection of those who appreciate all things Alyss. Even without the deluxe version's expansions, the number of play variations available grants Paint the Roses a lifespan at your gaming table that is hard to match.
A 2-5 player game where each faction leader meets at Hatter's Tea Party to gather resources before going to the battle against each other to lay claim to Wonderland.
Set in a Wonderland where the Looking Glass has shattered and the inhabitants have lost the madness that fuels them, players have a number of options to gain allies and advantages before the battle. During the Hatter's tea party, players move around the table drafting cards to add to their army, build their tower, upgrade their faction leader, or complete Quests to gain bonuses in the various regions of Wonderland they'll be fighting over. The tea party phase can be quite involved with each of these options, but for players who appreciate a steady progression of resources & abilities, this is your time to shine. After the tea party is over it is time for a bit of warfare, going region by region players will clash based on whose forces are present while other players can wager on the outcome or complete Quests in that area. Depending on player preferences, either phase could be the thrilling gameplay they were seeking or the dreadful drag as they wait for the other players to make their move.
Like the previous entry, this is a tabletop game for the gaming group that enjoys a long game with many moving parts and a focus on gaining & controlling resources and is not quite suited for a casual night in. Visually this game is ahead of the rest, pulling from a darker vision of Wonderland with an emphasis on battle, Wonderland's War is as close to the Looking Glass Wars that is currently available. For the advanced tabletop game enthusiast, if you still have room on the shelf for some Wonderland madness, do give this a look.
From simple card play to table-creaking boards, it is clear that Wonderland remains an evergreen realm for gaming and will continue to be so for fans present and future. It can be mind-boggling to see all the various ways that the iconic characters have been incorporated into card & board games, but how the madcap thinking and imagination associated with Wonderland have influenced some fantastical game mechanics worth experiencing with friends.
Some or all of these tabletop offerings might satisfy your desire for gaming in Wonderland, we here on this side of the Looking Glass do hope you have an appetite for more.
Meet the Author:
Marco Arizpe graduated from the University of Southern California and The American Film Institute with degrees in filmmaking and screenwriting. His brand of borderland gothic horror stems from his experiences growing up in a small town where Texas and Mexico meet. Culturally steeped in a rich history of all things terrifying, Marco never fails to bring forward indigenous folklore in contemporary and fresh settings.
Anjin is Alice: The Parallels Between "Shogun" and "Alice in Wonderland"
(Caution: The following article contains spoilers for the FX/Hulu miniseries “Shogun”)
FX and Hulu’s tremendous miniseries Shogun has sadly concluded, with another season unfortunately unlikely. Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks’ masterful adaptation of James Clavell’s novel about a stranded English navigator in feudal Japan has become one of the most popular and best-reviewed shows of 2024. It was the most-streamed program across all platforms in its first two weeks of release and has earned rave reviews both in the West and in Japan, praised for its visuals, performances, and authenticity. It is sure to be a favorite during awards season. Shogun is a classic fish-out-of-water story. It is also a classic example of the Alice in Wonderland paradigm in modern storytelling. My esteemed, and hilarious, colleague Jared Hoffman touched upon these similarities in his recent blog, and we’ll go into more detail here.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the ultimate fish-out-of-water story. With no sense of what she’s getting into, Alice follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole and finds herself in a completely alien realm - Wonderland. In a land she didn’t even know existed five minutes before, Alice digests potions with body-morphing properties, takes tea with a mad milliner, and angers a decapitating monarch. Throughout her journey, she’s learning on the fly, continuously adapting to rules and customs with a variety of characters serving as her unreliable guides. Alice must adapt to survive, discovering a deep well of inner strength in the process.
Blackthorne was one step ahead of Alice when he began his journey - at least he knew the world he was traveling to existed. Portuguese missionaries and merchants had established contact with Japan in the sixteenth century. But they were the only Europeans who had ever been to Japan. In fact, William Adams, on whom Blackthorne is based, is credited as the first Englishman to reach the country. Before that, all the knowledge the good subjects of Queen Elizabeth had about Japan came from shadowy rumors and fanciful legends.
Not wanting to be late to the proverbial party like a certain rabbit, Dutch merchants funded a trading mission to Japan, of which Blackthorne was the chief navigator. He and his companions arrive in Japan exhausted, emaciated, and starving. They wash up on the shore of a small fishing village where they are swiftly taken captive by Lord Yabushige, a scheming vassal of Lord Toranaga, one of the five Regents ruling Japan and facing the threat of impeachment from the other four Regents, led by Lord Ishido. But in Japan, impeachment doesn’t just mean removal from office. It’s a death sentence. Like Alice when she stumbles into the Jack of Knaves’ trial, Blackthorne finds himself in a hostile environment. He is completely ignorant of the rules and one wrong step could mean off with his head. Or being boiled alive. Or dismemberment by cannonball. He does not help himself with his often bullish and impulsive behavior, and his ignorance of the language and culture makes his life more difficult and more dangerous.
Language plays an essential role in both Shogun and Lewis Carroll’s novel. Though Wonderlandians speak English, Alice soon realizes that their use of the language is a tad…different. Confronted by a series of confounding riddles and turns of phrases, Alice must reorient her mind to the way language is used in Wonderland. It allows her to better navigate this strange land and better understand the beings who live there. Language is a window into culture, after all.
In Shogun, one of the main obstacles for Blackthorne, who is soon given the name Anjin (Japanese for “pilot”) by his new hosts, when he lands in Japan is, obviously, he doesn’t know the language. Equally obvious, and just as problematic, is the fact that few in Japan speak English. Luckily, for Anjin, he speaks Portuguese, which is more common, but not widespread. (The show performs a clever and effective trick in depicting the language usage of the characters. Japanese is spoken as Japanese while Portuguese is spoken as English.) Therefore, Anjin has to rely on translators to communicate with Japanese lords such as Toranaga and Yabushige.
But that presents a problem, as Anjin hardly trusts those tasked with translating for him. In an early scene, Anjin is enraged at the prospect of a Portuguese Jesuit priest translating for him, correctly assuming that the Catholic clergyman will twist the Protestant Anjin’s words. It is only when Mariko, a noblewoman and Catholic convert in the service of Toranaga, becomes his translator that Anjin feels comfortable communicating. Throughout the series, Anjin learns Japanese, his fluency correlating to his cultural assimilation.
Another of the major shared themes of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Shogun is the question of identity. Who are we? What makes us who we are? How should we express and act on that identity within the context of their community? The zany, topsy-turvy, emotionally effusive Wonderland was constructed as a counterpoint to the stuffiness of Victorian society. In Shogun, Anjin experiences the opposite. While the 17th century may not have been the most emotionally progressive environment, it was markedly different from how the show depicts feudal Japan, where hiding one’s true emotions and intentions is essential to surviving the snake pit that is court politics. This philosophy is exemplified by the idea of the Eightfold Fence, a concept of compartmentalization which allows a person to perform their duties while keeping their true feelings and values intact. An intellectual safe space, if you will.
The Eightfold Fence also relates to the concept of honor and self-sacrifice exhibited by many of the Japanese characters in Shogun. Viewers see these beliefs in practice in the first episode when one of Toranaga’s vassals commits seppuku, a form of ritualistic suicide, after speaking out of turn during a contentious meeting of the Five Regents. The vassal’s actions are designed to exhibit and retain honor for himself and his family. Mariko also desires to commit seppuku because of the dishonorable actions of her father, believing her death to be the only way for her family to regain their honor. She can’t, however, due to her oath of service to Toranaga, which supersedes her own wishes.
For Anjin, who wears his emotions on his sleeve and believes in Western ideas of individualism, these concepts are confusing and antithetical to his views of the world. The preservation of one’s life above all else is paramount, especially for a freelance navigator who grew up without the privileges of wealth or station. But as Alice had to adapt to Wonderland in order to survive, Anjin had to assimilate in order to keep himself alive and reach his goal of returning home to England. What begins as self-preservation, however, turns into an honest appreciation for the customs of his new home. By the end of the series, Anjin fully embodies the beliefs and practices of a Japanese samurai, even willing to commit seppuku in order to save a village from Toranaga’s retribution.
While Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Shogun are radically different in genre, aesthetic, and the instances of men and horses dismembered by cannonball, they share a common thread in the type of story they tell. Both are extreme fish-out-of-water stories featuring characters who must assimilate in order to survive. The fact that we can actually draw parallels between a television show released in 2023 and taking place in 1600 Japan with an English children’s novel published in 1865 speaks to the staying power of stories that tap into universal human experiences.
An itinerant storyteller, John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.
All Things Alice: Interview with Eshel Ezer
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have my dear, dear friend Eshel Ezer join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Eshel Ezer, welcome to the show. I’m really excited to be talking to you today. You are a photographer. You’ve worked on There's Something About Mary, you did Wicked and worked with Julia Stiles, you did the art in Birdbath, you took photos at my first wedding, and you did a colorful piece of art for my parents’ 50th anniversary.
I have really strong memories of the There’s Something About Mary job. When I first went to the marketing department, they were really excited about the movie and there was a lot of pressure to deliver really great marketing materials. We had to have a photoshoot with Cameron Diaz, so I put my hand up and said, “Hey, I have a photographer who would be great. I believe he's worked with Cameron.” The head of marketing said, “If you can get Cameron to sign off on it, then we can hire him.” And you had done a job with her before and she was excited to work with you again.
Eshel Ezer I don't know how old she was when we first worked together but she was extremely young. She was a model then and I shot her a few times. We shot for a hair magazine, a big editorial with some famous hairdressers. It was for Modern Salon or American Salon, one of the two big trade magazines in the hair industry. They always used to do just hair, regular photoshoots. This fashion editor had a vision and we hooked up and I told her, “If you want us to do photo shoots together, let's be creative. Let's try and give another dimension to what regular hairdressers used to do.” So we came up with more of a fashion concept story and connected the hair into a bigger story with more body and action. The hair is part of a scene. I think that was the first job I did with Cameron.
We came up with a crazy scene. We shot it at a historic hotel in downtown Los Angeles. She was the star model in the editorial. It came out phenomenal. So beautiful. The hair was great. It was not cheesy or corny.
FB She is remarkably photogenic. When you see her in real life, certain angles are magnificent. Then there are other angles that sometimes you go okay, she looks like a regular person. But when you take a photograph of her or she's filmed in a movie - just stunning.
EE She's a professional. It’s not just how she looks. It's her energy. She brings something with that smile, in her eyes. She’s a free soul. A Southern California girl who got hooked up in this fashion scene when I met her. We liked each other. She loved the photos. I liked the way she was not complaining about anything. Crazy hours, lava lights, and very specific directions.
She came to my apartment on Kings Road and I did a photo for her. It was beautiful. I shot her behind one of our windows, which was an old Los Angeles window with the squares. She just looks so innocent. So I think we had this thing. My mom was visiting when I was doing that shoot. It was more than just a young model. There was a connection.
FB No wonder she was so interested in working with you. I didn't realize at the time. I knew you two had worked together before but I didn't know it was so successful. The same chemistry seemed to be there when we shot the poster photos for There’s Something About Mary.
Just to go back, she is a relentless worker and she never complained on Mary. She didn't complain when she came to that photoshoot. There was no prima donna posing at all. She just got right to it. But I remember the concern was her skin had broken out and we really needed to do a good makeup job. I thought we might not even be able to do the shoot but the makeup artist did a fantastic job and then you guys went to work. What do you remember about the photo shoot? Do you remember the shot that ended up on the poster?
EE We had a creative meeting right before the shoot at Fox. We were meeting with the head creative director, Tony Sella. We sat at his office and the advertising agency brought over 70 different layouts and you could tell that he's not flipping over anything. I sat quietly. Let them do the talking and I'll shoot it. But then Tony looked at me and said, “Eschel, what are you saying?” I didn't know how to say none of what they showed was good.
FB You were trying to be diplomatic.
EE I was. I said, “I think I know what we need to do.” But the other people kept on talking. Tony Sella said, “Guys, the photographer’s talking,” and everybody became silent. I said, “She's so innocent, she's so beautiful, and she has this incredible free spirit. We need to capture that so everybody can relate to her.” Tony Sella said, “Meeting over. He knows what he's doing.”
So on the shoot, Cameron was in makeup for three and a half hours. The makeup artist did a great job but it was killing our time. Then they wanted to have hours on styling. Then her manager said “Guys, that's it. She has to go, you have half an hour.” I said, “Let's stop it. I cannot shoot it.” We spent five hours on prepping and it's super important - hair, makeup, styling. But now I need the equivalent amount of time to shoot it. Tony Sella arrived and he negotiated with the manager. Cameron was unbelievable. She was, “Let's have fun. Let's get the best out of this day. I don't want to leave so don't tell me to leave.” Her attitude was in our favor for getting the best shoot done.
Now, I knew that I was gonna have a problem in a technical sense. It was before digital so everything was on Polaroids. I knew that the first Polaroid had to be beautiful because if the first Polaroid was horrible, she would lose it. After so many hours, she knows her limitations, and it kills your confidence. She was an actress by then she wasn’t a model anymore. We built a crazy lighting setup. I'll never forget it. We had so many lights. It had to be smooth but with contrast at the same time so it wouldn’t be boring and flat and the photo would have some depth.
I did the first Polaroid and it was amazing. Not for me but it was amazing enough for her to say “Wow, it's beautiful.” But for me, it was not and I knew I had to work on it because when you put so much makeup on and then add the lights, you’re gonna see the difference between her skin color on her neck and her face. So you need little touch-ups so it’s not gonna look like she has a mask on her face. Then you need to work with the lights and everything is going to be nice and smooth. Then Tony Sella said, “Eschel,” and he stood like an inch away from my face. Tony said, “Make all America love her.” In my entire 25-year career as a fashion photographer, I never had more difficult creative direction than that.
When we started, she started to loosen up and she felt amazing. With the direction, it was to try to get her not posing. We used the wind machine just to have the hair blowing. Nowadays, with digital touch-ups, you can do it right away. You go to the computer and say, “We have the shot.” But when it's on film, it needs to be processed. So we kept on shooting. I knew we had shots that could be the one. Sometimes the first one is the best but you just cover more. You take more film and shoot more. The bending, chin-up look, and smile is such a simple photo. I think that’s why all of America loved her. It's a simple photo, nothing looks made up.
FB It captures what Tony was asking. You fall for her because she is the All-American woman - the haircut, the pose, and the kind of whimsy that she communicated. You feel the joy of the process.
What is your technique to bring out that with models and subjects? Is it different each time? Is the physicality a big part of it? Is it about the story and trying to tap into the character? Because you're not going to say to her, “Hey, America needs to love you.” You're just going to say, “Be who you are because we love you. I love you. Everybody loves you.”
EE There is a technique. Every successful photographer has his own technique on how to connect. Throughout the years, I've learned what I have to do to create this connection. So later on, when it's show time, you get more out of the shoot than just a photo, you get feelings, emotions, and connection. What I did with her was exactly what I was doing, just on a more appreciative and sensitive level because of who she was. Our past connection, for sure, helped. And yes, the moment she knows you're not just using words when you say “You're beautiful and I easily fall in love with you.” If she knows you’re not just bullshitting her because you want to get the job done and leave which, technically, this is what happens. But it's telling a story to her. The story is so important, especially because she's an actress. The story is so important. It has nothing to do with the movie. It's the story of the photoshoot. Who's the character? What are we doing here? What are we doing together? What kind of feelings and emotions would we like to capture for her? At a certain moment, all barriers were off and something amazing happened.
FB I love that guy, Tony Sella. I remember from the first meetings when they put all the different posters up, he had a real sense of the artist. The art had a little Steve Jobs in terms of the aesthetic. I certainly did not hear that he shut down the room. Those are the talking heads. They're the same people from different departments giving notes over and over. They end up diminishing the idea by little paper cuts. But Tony recognized one, the photographer who's actually going to grab the shot is speaking, and two, once you said what you said, he cut the meeting off, knowing that you have to execute.
I remember the manager throwing his weight around and Cameron standing up because that's who she is. It was a very stressful shoot because there was a lot at stake. We knew it was going to be a successful movie and we were rushing to come out in the summer when we were originally supposed to come out in the fall. Then right at the end, I snuck in and said, “Hey, Cameron, let's do some photos.” You did the same technique on me and I have some of the goofiest photographs of all time. But there was Cameron Diaz and so they all look pretty amazing because she's amazing. So I had the glow. I printed out some where I had at least a decent expression. But in looking back at some of the stuff we did, I was going “Oh, no wonder I never printed that.” Trying to dance. It was deeply embarrassing.
EE It’s embarrassing to stand in front of a camera when that's not your job.
FB But those are some of the best photos I have of being on that movie because it was just a camera, myself, you, and Tony, there was nobody else. You nailed it. Every time I see the poster, I'm exceedingly proud of our collaboration.
EE That poster, the real size, hangs in my studio in Tel Aviv. Everybody saw that I was so in love with the movie and they’d ask, “Why do you have these?” “What do you mean why? I shot it.”
FB You shot Cameron when she was 16 and you also ended up shooting Julia Stiles for my movie Wicked, when she was 16. Both movies came out around the same time. Wicked went to the Sundance Film Festival in January 1998 and There’s Something About Mary came out in July 1998. What I discovered on Wicked was that I thought Julia Stiles was a movie star in the making. She was remarkable in the film and she was very photogenic. I told her I was going to pretend she was already a movie star and put her solely on the poster in the same way we did with Cameron Diaz. But I needed some really great photos so you and I went to work on that. Let's talk a little bit about that shoot.
Wicked is a murder mystery that takes place in a gated community. Julia Stiles basically takes over her mother's role when her mother is killed. So it's a little bit of a Lolita-esque story. We needed to find the right balance of seductress and thriller. She had some really great costuming so we brought some of that in and we went with some All-American jeans, a t-shirt, and then some nightgowns because of the dynamic with her father. It's no secret she wants to take over her mother's role in all capacities. So walk us through what it was like working with Julia in comparison to the There’s Something Mary shoot and some of the choices you thought were important to capture the essence of the film and who she is as an actress.
EE It's a totally different agenda when a person is just a model or it's an actress. You basically have to shoot for a very specific assignment with a very specific name. So it's not just to capture the beauty, “Let's make you beautiful and do it in the desert or the beach or in a convertible.” That’s how you come up with stories for editorials. When you shoot editorial, just a story and a beautiful model, then you just go and perform. She's a good model and you're a good photographer, so you create whatever you want.
When it's a movie, and it's an actress what I have to do is hit right on the complexity of the characters. With Wicked, it was like a week-long job we did in one day. I remember we shot in the studio and we went on the rooftop and we did a lot of stuff on the rooftop in many different styles. The movie is called Wicked and Julia’s the lead part so we tried to bring out the wicked part of her personality.
FB We were looking to bring out three things, the danger, the vulnerability, which you also capture, and the seductress part of it. Remember, we're talking about a 17-year-old, so it felt a little daring walking the line with her parents there. But Julia, like Cameron, was completely up for it and wanted to take a lot of chances.
EE She is, and I will never forget, extremely smart. Her IQ is way above average. Usually, we say “high IQ” for somebody who needs to go to a different profession. But, with Julia, I think it enables her to play different characters very easily. There was 100% cooperation with whatever we said and wanted to do. She was jumping in and out of different characters when we wanted to bring the softness and the purity. But then there were the twisted colors and the shadows. The wicked side.
FB Didn't you use certain filters to get some of these crazy backgrounds from the sky?
EE Many times I use colors on lights to control and get the right density. But these are manipulations of the film that I knew would bleach out skin. The photo will come out like pure porcelain with this coldness and if we're going to use the red lipstick it will pop because I knew what this manipulation of the color is going to do. It's like skin dyeing.
FB Explain to me why the film is so different in the photographs for Wicked and the technique you used.
EE First of all, there is a format difference. When you blow up certain formats you will hold the grain. In film you speak about grain, in digital you don't have grain. If you want grain you need to create. Back then, with film, different types of films had different sizes, different densities, different contrasts, and different ways the film would react to different lighting and exposure. What I wanted was to have the technique help us go all the way to the extreme. It’s mind-blowing to see her expressions combined with the lighting, the unique processing, and her look with the makeup. It changes so much. It's really mind-blowing to see because you see the complexity of the character. She has so many different sides. It's wicked.
FB Your passion for the work and the idea of creating something fresh was ever present when we worked together and now it's many years later and you have a different career but I can still feel the passion you have for doing quality work. It really comes down to this being your art.
We met years and years ago.
EE We bonded over scuba diving.
FB We bonded over scuba diving in Cozumel. Then I asked you to shoot a poster for a play I did called Birdbath. I was super nervous and really bad. I had to have a few drinks to relax and then we really got into it.
EE We got into it.
FB It took a while. But once we got into it, those images were very arresting.
EE I remember our conversations to understand the play, what it’s about, and what we would like to capture. “So the poster will show just the actors? No, that’s boring.” We wanted to try and bring something from the feeling of the play. We used overtime exposure and transparent images. Nobody does these things anymore. Now you take Photoshop and “bang, bang.” But it was incredible to create. One of the things that we did technically was, we had to have lights on the outside but we were on the second or third floor in this building downtown and we didn't have the budget for cranes with lights. We had nothing. I really think we were never prima donnas. Creative people do creative things. We had to bring lights from the windows at night and we pulled these stands and we extended the stands and we tied them to things inside the apartment. We just drove the lights from the inside of the loft and tied them with ropes so it wouldn’t fall on somebody in the street.
FB What we were doing was, on some level, illegal. Sneaking into the building. Putting up lights. Not asking for permission. Just apologize later.
EE Let’s go do it. Get it done. Beautiful.
FB You had an art show that I helped organize and Tony Scott was the first one to buy your art. Tell me that story.
EE It was a project I started during my second year in art school back in Israel. We got an assignment to shoot something in motion. So I took my brother to the beach in the Mediterranean just after sunset. I used a strobe flash and I was holding the camera and he did something in the water with the sun behind him. The manipulation of the colors of the film created magic. It was stunning. Then I had the final exam and exhibition at the end of the second year in school. Then I left Israel and went to New York to complete my studies but I kept on shooting this project.
One of the things my teacher in Israel said was, “This is beautiful. Try to see if you can get closer.” And I kept thinking, “What does it mean to get closer?” He's in the water, I'm with a camera. It's not an underwater shoot. How am I gonna get closer? Then it just kind of became a memory. But it was a project I wanted to keep on progressing. It meant something to me. It was a man's body coming out of the water. I thought, “This is what I want emerging out of the water, man's creation is from water.” The ocean is my forever love. With my old injury in the army where I shattered my back, I was physically in pain for too many decades. So there was a lot of emotional involvement for me in creating this image of a man's body coming out of the water with a lot of power, but also experiencing and projecting pain. That was the general idea. Then I had to start seeing what kind of colors I wanted to use and how dramatic I wanted to be. We shot this project every time I visited Israel for 10 years. We kept on taking pictures in the Mediterranean, but also in the Dead Sea, with crazy hours because at the Dead Sea, we had to shoot at sunrise, and at the Mediterranean, we had to shoot at sunset.
I needed the sun as a background, as my theater. As an artist, nature is a background and if you know how to work with it, you can do whatever you want with the background. You don't have to be in the studio, you can do it outdoors if you control the lights. So in the Dead Sea, the sun will be behind my model in the morning, and in the Mediterranean, it will be behind him at sunset. I needed the glow of the sun at those times.
FB Just the beginning and just the end.
EE It could be very apocalyptic. A very extreme environment. You don't see it with the naked eye. It’s the film that later sees it. So we kept on doing the project. I visited home in the winter and we used to shoot it in January or February in the Mediterranean when it's 11 degrees centigrade (52 degrees Fahrenheit) in the water and it's blowing and raining. We used to stand on the beach looking at each other, “We're crazy, right? We're not going to do it today. We are going to do it today. No, we are not going to do it. Yes, we're going to do it.”
FB You’re saying “We're going to do it,” because he's the one going in the water.
EE We were both in the water. He needed to be underwater. That was the thing my teacher told me, “Try to get close.” So I had a wide angle three feet away when he was coming out of the water, splashing water. I had my camera in one hand with the aperture, speed, and everything set according to what I wanted to achieve with manipulation of the light. In the other hand, I was holding a stove, a flash, with gelatine over it for the color that I wanted to create. He would go underwater and come out, splashing all over the place, and I had to grab the shot and move the camera away. Otherwise, it's all gonna get wet. So it was just him and me, for years no assistance.
FB And how did Tony Scott become involved?
EE That was crazy. You're artistic and you're creative, and you're an entrepreneur with the way you think and the way you see the future, and your ability to connect to different areas. We were speaking about these photos and we became such close friends, we shared things clients or friends in the business don't usually share. We said we needed to do something with these photos. They have to be seen. But I didn't want to do a regular show. I don't care about going in to schmooze the galleries. I'm a photographer. I have an agent. I have to be nice to everybody and do these political things with the ad agencies and creative directors. I didn't want to do it in the galleries. So we said, “Let's do it ourselves. Let's do two nights. We're going to use your house. We're going to show one photo. We're going to have a party. We're going to do the first night for friends and we can do the second night for industry people.” We showed one photo and we had a light table with some slides.
FB That one photo was spectacular. Remember, when you had to go blow it up, how obsessed you were about getting the grain right? Those poor people in the lab.
EE It was the biggest size back then. It was museum quality. So it will be preserved for 200 years guaranteed. Who the hell is gonna live to see if the colors stay right or not? So we blew it up and the grain just became like, “Whoah!”
FB It was part of the picture.
EE So we hung this huge thing on the wall and we covered it with a very light blue sheet. We hung it in a way that we could pull a string and the whole thing would fall. We had to have this surprise factor. Everybody walked in and there was this huge thing covered. People knew I was a photographer so they thought it was probably some picture. We waited and waited and people were anxious. We pushed it later and later we said, “People are probably gonna leave before seeing it. We have to unveil it.”
There were two important people I invited. One was a good friend of mine, an ex-model, and actress, Emmanuelle Sallet (Pytka). She was in Under the Cherry Moon, the Prince film, and she did beautiful photo shoots. She had a very famous perfume campaign in Vogue and Elle. She moved to LA and I met her at the agency and said, “Oh my god, I have to shoot this girl. Who is she?” We became best friends. I have amazing photos of her. She got married to one of the top commercial directors, Joe Pytka. Back then he was doing the Pepsi commercials with Michael Jackson. He was the biggest commercial director.
FB He’s also a wild man and really hard to work for.
EE Their story is crazy because she worked on the set with him on the Pepsi commercial and he threw her off the set and then apologized and took her for dinner. And married ever after.
FB My first wife worked with Joe and he loved her because she was so expressive. But, he was a bear to work with, though if you gave a lot, he loved you and would work with you over and over. I heard stories about anybody who wasn't in front of the camera, certainly, if you were in front of the camera, you were at risk, but anything around the camera you were definitely a target.
EE I had never met Joe before but I invited Emmanuelle and I asked her to bring him because I knew who he was. Then, I was standing next to the photo speaking with the people who gave me my first shot in L.A. Tony Lane and Nancy Donald, the co-creative directors at CBS Records. I shot album covers with them. They knew me as a fashion photographer who was shooting rock bands so they were asking me about the photo, “Okay, Eschel, we know you shoot rock bands, what is this?”
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tony Scott coming in. Tony was a friend because I worked with his ex-girlfriend, Tanya and he loved the photos. I shot crazy photos for some editorial and she brought them home and Tony saw them and said, “I have to meet this photographer.” So Tony and I became friends and I invited him and Tanya to come to our opening. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tony coming with his red baseball cap and I saw him coming closer to the photo and then stepping backwards. Then coming in again and going backward. With his heavy British accent, he said “Eschel, Eschel, what is it?” I said, “Tony, what do you mean? It's a photo”. He said “No, but what is it? Is it a photo or a painting? I cannot decide.” I said “Tony, It’s a photo.” He said, “So how did you do the grain?”
He went in and out to see the little parts of how the film was breaking. I shot it on high, extreme grain 35 millimeter film so when we blew it up that big it became like a painting. So Tony asked what I needed to finish the whole show and I said, “Well, I need money.” He said, “You'll have the money. Let's have a meeting.” So I went to meet him at Paramount, he was editing Days of Thunder at the time, and he said, “I want to do more. I want to buy it.” I said, “What do you mean you want to buy it? You can't. It’s Frank's photo.” That was our arrangement.
FB I wanted the first one. Remember we framed it and you didn't sign it? That was so stupid. I should’ve had you sign it first.
EE We're so dumb. But anyway, I said, “That's my friend's photo. It doesn't matter how much you pay.” He said, “I need one.” I responded, “Well, I'm not making another one.” So Tony said, “I need to talk to Frank. I want to buy it for Anthony Quinn’s 75th birthday.” He had just finished shooting the movie Revenge with Quinn and Kevin Costner and Tony wanted this photo for Quinn’s 75th birthday. So he flew me to New York and I printed another photo at a different lab. I killed them because they were not used to the size and the preciseness of the colors and the grain and all those things. But we printed it, framed it, and I personally delivered it to Anthony Quinn’s penthouse in New York. The son opened the door and we delivered it as a present from Tony Scott and I left and that's it. And it remained a great story.
FB I was also just reminded of the crazy story of when the two of us went to a party and we had just seen Dead Calm, which we were always talking about. “That movie is amazing! The girl is stunning!”
EE And she walks in with a girlfriend. Nicole Kidman. Our jaws just dropped.
FB Well, I had to go talk to her. I was so nervous and I started screwing that up. Luckily you were there. You were calm like, “Yeah, we saw the movie.”
EE She was so impressed that we loved the movie.
FB She was so into it because it was her first trip to America. She was stunning. She was engaging. Sweet. Somehow, I got her phone number. I said, “We should go get coffee.” She goes, “Yeah, sure. I would like to.” I’m like, “You would?!”
EE For us, she was the star of Dead Calm. For her, we were the Hollywood people and she had no clue how to get around in Hollywood.
I met her again maybe a year later. I shot this little commercial in Miami and then we drove up the coast to Daytona where Tony Scott was shooting Days of Thunder. It was the weekend they did the Daytona 500 scene. Nicole and I had lunch together on the set and Tom Cruise was there.
FB I talked to her two or three times trying to set up when we could get together because she had a hard out. She was leaving on a Friday and I'm like, “Okay, let's try and figure out when we can get together.” She goes, “Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not gonna be able to get together with you. I'm doing this movie Days of Thunder and I'm flying down Florida and Tom Cruise is in it.” As soon as she said Tom Cruise, I thought, “That's it. Tom Cruise is going to fall in love with her.” Easiest prediction I've ever made.
EE On the set, Tom had a flu or something and then a few days later Nicole had the flu and everybody knew that they were dating.
FB That's funny.
EE Insights from Tony Scott and his second assistant director, Scott Metcalfe.
FB You also do really beautiful black and white photographs. You were kind enough to come to Minnesota and shoot black-and-white photos of me and Sandra prepping before we got married. Then you took a bunch of photos at the wedding.
EE I used a red filter to get the clouds to pop like crazy. It makes the blue skies extremely dark and the contrast with the white clouds is just unbelievable. It enhances the contrast on the skin. You look amazing, bro.
FB That’s what 20-year-old skin looks like.
You also did a photograph in Minneapolis with my two brothers, Steven and David, and my sister Michelle. We wanted to have a photo as a gift for my parents for their 50th anniversary.
EE We flew together to Minnesota to shoot it and I had to dig through your siblings for their characters. Who is what? Where is the complexity? Of the four siblings, there is a reason why each one of you is doing what you're doing. There is a reason why she's on the sofa like a princess in the front. We worked and we used this technique again so her skin has the same tone as Julia in the Wicked photos.
FB Completely different from what you did with There's Something About Mary but it's a style and a technique that you have used throughout your career.
EE It was important to bring out the personality. I remember the conversations with each one of you. You look like a Hollywood producer.
FB I still have that jacket. I wore it two days ago.
EE That’s crazy. It looks good. There is a reason why he's jumping in the air. The one you blew up was the one where his legs are spread out and he looks like an X-Wing. The skies are brighter and you can see the branches. With this brother, we did some with the helmet on.
FB Yes, but my mother would have lost it. She could barely accept that three of us were not smiling, at least Michelle was smiling. My mom hated photographs where the kids weren't smiling but to your point, it does capture an essence.
EE It was a very, very unique, exhausting job to understand the characters.
FB You have to deal with somebody else's family. Can you imagine?
EE It was a great experience. Everything we did was with a lot of fun and joy.
FB Then remember you came up for the Seattle Film Festival and shot PR for Wicked.
EE There are shots of Julia lying on the carpet, right? We had to show her and Patrick from above. They can be in any magazine.
FB Do you miss it? You're no longer shooting photographs but I'm really struck by the level of professionalism, passion, and artistry, as if we just did this two weeks ago.
EE It was a major part of my life for 25 years. But the fact it has been doesn't mean the stimulation is not sustained. It didn't fade. It faded as a profession because I didn't want to do it anymore. I got tired of doing it and, at some point, I didn't see the purpose anymore.
FB Also a big physical toll on you.
EE Crazy physical toll. Big toll on the family. It got to me that I would have to take pictures for the rest of my life if I was gonna make a living. I felt enough was enough. I was in the studio shooting cosmetic catalogs or swimwear catalogs and most of them were always artistic. There was a photo I took in Africa with an American model in a bathing suit holding a cheetah out in the wild. It looks like theater and it’s beautiful. But I started asking myself, “What is it for? What's the purpose?” It's a catalog and a catalog is for people to buy. So it's not really the art of generating something for others.
FB We all transition. We all have to evolve.
EE I even felt that at some point, most women around the world are not models. When I take pictures that extreme, “Does it do good to women or bad?” I got to a point where I felt it was bad.
FB People are not that perfect.
EE Nobody's that perfect and nobody can be reached or touched like this. It was also the feeling of, when I'm on the set, I know what I want to get and I can get it. Because technically I know what I'm doing. But also emotionally, I know what I'm doing. I know how to talk to the models to get the sensuality or the feelings and emotions I want to get. But when the job is over, I'm done. I walk away. It left emptiness and I needed to move on and do other things.
To be able to build two good careers is not easy. It’s hard to do one over a lifetime but it's not over yet. So who knows where we are going? I'm in the middle of a very exciting career that I have become very good at and it's great to have these different colors inside as a person.
FB We're really taking a step back to a period of time that was really creative for me. I produced two movies back to back. A lot of other opportunities came along through producing those movies and you were right there and I was listening to you and your aspirations. Then I transitioned into writing The Looking Glass Wars series and all the art that came with that. Hopefully, the artistry continues even if the medium changes.
EE We’re such good friends and we've been friends for decades and it's crazy. No matter how many years go by, we stay so close. But it has always been your level of understanding the business, but also having the creative eye, and the sensitivity to judge and know what's good, what's not good, what you're looking for. So seeing your artistic side inside your creative way, also as a businessman, I think made it very nice for us and easy for us to connect, because we could speak about things.
FB It’s about choices. When you're making creative choices, some are elevated, you hope they're elevated, but you're still making a choice. So when you point to this one photo, where I put a dot and you put an “X” was because we both went, “Yeah, that is a choice.” We want to use those choices. We've had a lot of creative choices. Whether it was There’s Something About Mary, working with Julia for Wicked, doing Birdbath together, or something very personal like my first wedding.
EE It's funny, my oldest son is sitting next to us and hearing stories that he has never heard before. I have to tell you we always had crazy laughs and hit it off together on a crazy level with where we could go as friends.
FB You were my first male friend, my first guy friend, that I felt was an intimate relationship in the sense of, I'm letting my guard down. That is where the artistry comes from, the vulnerability. We're making choices, some good, some bad, and we did that for very many years. To your point, coming back here and having this conversation is crazy. So thank you for spending some time with us and sharing your stories and creativity.
EE What a great idea. It was fun being here. Thank you.
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"Percy Jackson" and "Shogun": Disney and Hulu Have Gone Down the Rabbit Hole
If you have been outside in Los Angeles within the past couple of months you may have noticed billboards advertising that Hulu is on Disney Plus. The ads are quite simple and smart, they consist of a Disney quote that in some way is related to a character from a show on Hulu along with a picture of said character. Some of them are quite good like this one. Where the full title of the show helps complete the quote. Like this ad using a song from The Jungle Book and The Bear (Fun fact: The Jungle Book character who delivers that line/lyric is actually a bear).
Some of them are okay. This Lilo and Stitch-Family Guy ad isn't the best but it gets the point across:
And some of them feel like they really ran out of ideas. I mean Darth Vader's quote from Star Wars and American Dad relate enough, I guess, but it feels like a rough draft that somehow ended up getting approved. I imagine some Disney exec being like, “We need a Star Wars quote on the ad to remind people we own everything. I don’t care if it actually is a good ad.”
But there was one that inspired this whole blog, involving the cast of Only Murders in the Building, and, you guessed it, an Alice in Wonderland quote:
So, what am I getting at here? Why did I feel the need to write a whole blog about ads? Well, I didn’t. But I’ll be honest, I’m struggling with coming up with a segue to my main point here…so…something something, down the rabbit hole of the television renaissance. Yeah, that works.
Television has been pretty awesome recently. I mean, these four billboards are all shows I watch or have watched in the past. Family Guy is a staple of adult animation. It is a member of the holy trinity, which as we all know is: The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy. Seth McFarlane's other hit show American Dad is, in my opinion, his best show to date. I almost named my cat after Roger the costume-wearing alien who lives in their attic but my girlfriend was worried since Roger is not a good “person”, my cat would be bad. We settled on naming him Archer, after the world's greatest secret agent Archer, from the FX series Archer. She agreed on the name since she had never watched the show.
Of the live-action shows featured in the ads, as an ex-line cook with a panic disorder, The Bear really does nail the mayhem of a kitchen and the insane people destroying their bodies to make the delicious food we all love. I genuinely love this show. My only critique is, every now and then, it becomes a montage of Chicago intercut with food porn. Only Murders in the Building is a fantastic spin on a whodunit starring two comedy gods, Steve Martin and Martin Short.
While I could make the argument that all these shows have aspects of Alice sprinkled throughout them, I’ve got something better for you. Not just one Disney Plus/Hulu show, but two, truly do parallel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The first is Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the show based on the extremely popular young adult fiction series of the same name. The second show is a bit out of left field, but trust me, it’s got Alice in its DNA. Before you read what it is, I want to give you a second to guess. That is, of course, if this blog's title does not give away what the surprise is. Okay, you got one? Good. You’re wrong, it’s Shogun. While you ponder on this, I’m going to talk about Percy Jackson.
The fantasy series follows twelve-year-old Percy Jackson, who has always struggled to fit in and learns the reason for his inability to integrate into twelve-year-old society is that while his mother is a normal human, his father is the Greek god Poseidon. Alright, so what does that have to do with Alice? Well, Percy, like Alice is thrown into a new world, one with unfamiliar and sometimes absurd rules that he must learn. Along with this, there are fantastical creatures and trials he must overcome. Gods are trying to kill him, but since Greek gods are more like a giant royal family on top of a mountain, one could make the argument that it’s like Alice's trial with the Red Queen screaming, “Off with her head!” At the show's beginning, Percy follows Pegasus to the roof of his school, which is not dissimilar to Alice following the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole.
Alright, now let’s get after Shogun. First off, let me just say, this show is amazing. It is truly peak television. It’s a fictional story based on historical events that happened in 1600s Japan. The show was developed in 2015 but came out just this year. While I could make a point about studios not jumping on this sooner and wasting their time, I will instead mention that if this is the direction we are headed regarding television, we’re in pretty good shape.
Shogun follows John Blackthorne, an English pilot (navigator) of a ship who ends up stranded in Japan. In this new world, John ends up being a bargaining chip/key for success between the five political rivals who are sharing power until the underage emperor reaches sixteen. Besides being about an English person, at first glance, this show does not share a lot with Alice. But when you truly dive in, there are many parallels. The most obvious is a person ending up in a new world with completely different rules and practices. John does not speak Japanese, leading to many times when he is confused as to why something is happening. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice has to accept that something is happening because it is simply the way it is done in Wonderland. Due to John being taken prisoner and used as a bargaining chip, there are many moments where he has no choice but to do what his captors/hosts instruct him to do. For many portions of the show, he is just along for the ride. Forced to experience the good and the bad of a new culture he truly knows nothing about, like Alice who, every now and then, just must do as she is told. When she questions what is happening or tries to do things as she has been taught, there are consequences, such as with the Red Queen.
Another thing that is not a parallel per-say but I do want to point out is that Alice has to worry about the threat of decapitation from the Red Queen. Many of the people in early 17th century Japan also had to worry about losing their heads. I think in the first episode of Shogun alone, three people are decapitated. One of which being from seppuku. The biggest difference in character between John and Alice is that John wants to get home to England almost immediately, whereas Alice wants to go home at the end. I guess that’s not the biggest difference between the two characters. We could start with the basic difference of John being a grown man whereas Alice is a young girl… Look, all I’m trying to say here is that Lewis Carroll’s writing has influenced modern storytelling so much that it’s almost imperceivable anymore. I don’t think the original writers of Shogun even realized there are remnants of Alice sprinkled throughout their series. Same with Rick Riordan when he wrote the Percy Jackson series. Alice is just modern storytelling. It was the first to start these tropes and I don’t think we will ever see them go away because, as you can see, the tropes seem to be a winning formula.
Jared Hoffman graduated from the American Film Institute with a degree in screenwriting. A Los Angeles native, his brand of comedy is satire stemming from the many different personalities and egos he has encountered throughout his life. As a lover of all things comedy, Jared is always working out new material and trying to make those around him laugh. His therapist claims this is a coping mechanism, but what does she know?
Dream into Nightmare: "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" and Lewis Carroll’s Monster
Black Mirror was released to rave reviews in 2011, establishing itself as one of the most popular and well-regarded shows of the 2010s. It has helped repopularise the anthology format and has earned an avalanche of awards and nominations, including eight Emmy Awards. Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi series branches into a variety of genres but mostly lives in the dystopian space, fitting with the parameters of speculative fiction. Black Mirror frequently utilizes technology and media to comment on current social issues and has been lauded for its near-Simpsons level of prescience. Just Google China’s Social Credit System, Waldo, or David Cameron and a pig. (Fair warning for that last one).
In 2017, Brooker and executive producer Annabel Jones teamed with Netflix, which now distributes the series, to develop an interactive episode. The project eventually grew into a feature film released in 2018: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Set in the 1980s, the film stars Fionn Whitehead as programmer Stefan Butler, who is adapting a fantasy “choose your own adventure” book into a video game titled Bandersnatch. An exploration of free will, the film blends post-modernism, comedy, and horror with a heavy dose of Philip K. Dick to give audiences a unique experience in which they control the direction of the story. With 150 minutes of unique footage and multiple “choice points,” Bandersnatch offers viewers over one trillion paths they can take within the film, mirroring (pun not intended) the game being developed in the story.
Alice aficionados are sure to recognize the nod to Lewis Carroll in the title. The reference is actually twofold. The film took its title from Bandersnatch, a video game developed by Imagine Software that was in turn inspired by Lewis Carroll’s creation. The game, however, was never released due to the company’s bankruptcy in 1984. But what is a bandersnatch? And how does a creature created over 150 years ago for a fantasy novel and a nonsense poem relate to Brooker and Jones’ sci-fi psychological thriller?
Lewis Carroll’s bandersnatch is a monster that appears in his 1871 sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, as well as his 1874 poem, The Hunting of the Snark. The beast is described as having a long neck, snapping jaws, ferocious, and extremely fast. In Peter Newell’s 1902 illustration, one of the earliest depictions of the beast, the bandersnatch appears in cartoonish fashion with the body and head of a lion and pointed ears, horns, a dog’s nose, and human hands. Its home is in the world behind the looking-glass, and in The Hunting of the Snark, it is encountered after the hunters cross an ocean.
The overzealous Banker is the first unfortunate soul to cross the bandersnatch when he leaves his party (mistake number one). Carroll writes, “But while he was seeking with thimbles and care/A Bandersnatch swiftly drew nigh/And grabbed at the Banker, who shrieked in despair/For he knew it was useless to fly.” The Banker tried to bribe the beast (mistake number two) but the bandersnatch had no use for the Queen’s currency. He “... merely extended its neck/And grabbed at the Banker again.” The monster continued his assault: “Without rest or pause — while those frumious jaws/Went savagely snapping around —/He (the Banker) skipped and he hopped, and he floundered and flopped/Till fainting he fell to the ground.” The Banker was saved from a painful and ignominious end when the rest of his party caught up, their numbers causing the bandersnatch to flee.
As with all of Lewis Carroll’s creations, the bandersnatch has had a substantial reach in pop culture, inspiring artists, and undergoing numerous reinventions over the past century and a half. In Anna Matlock Richards’ A New Alice in the Old Wonderland, written less than 25 years after the beast’s first appearance, the bandersnatch is given extremely long legs and the ability to fly. Fantasy and sci-fi author Roger Zelazny describes his hissing bandersnatch as walking side-to-side and leaving a trail of steaming saliva. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland reimagines the monster as a large white beast with elements of a bulldog, snow leopard, and bear with rows of razor-sharp teeth. The Shadowrun tabletop role-playing games gave the bandersnatch the ability to mask both its appearance and body heat. It seems that the bandersnatch has popped up in as many different iterations as Alice herself.
But what does this have to do with Black Mirror: Bandersnatch? A clue may be found in the musings of Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), a successful game designer employed by the company that agrees to fund Stefan’s game. In a conversation with Stefan, Colin opines about the darker meaning of Pac-Man: “He (Pac-Man) thinks he's got free will, but really he's trapped in a maze, in a system. All he can do is consume, he's pursued by demons that are probably just in his own head and even if he does manage to escape by slipping out one side of the maze, what happens? He comes right back in the other side. People think it's a happy game. It's not a happy game, it's a fucking nightmare world…”
The theme of a dream turning into a nightmare dominates Stefan’s arc in the film. His passion project, the story that connects him to his dead mother, turns into a real-life nightmare during the development process, driving him to insanity and violence. The bandersnatch, in all of its iterations, is depicted as a beast of incredible ferocity. Its frumious jaws promise destruction with every snap. Its blazing speed and considerable strength make for a formidable adversary. It’s a representation of danger and pain. The term Wonderland is often used to describe something fantastical, amazing, astonishing - a dream. The bandersnatch makes a wonderland a nightmare.
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch uses the iconography and qualities of Lewis Carroll’s bandersnatch to represent the danger of obsession. Like how Pac-Man is all-consuming and driven by demons, obsession breeds darkness in its host, manifesting in violence and pain. The bandersnatch is the physical manifestation. It is ferocious and merciless, savagely snapping around and devouring its prey. Over the years, many have reimagined Carroll’s Wonderland as a nightmarish realm, an assault on sanity. The same thing is happening in Bandersnatch, where passion and potential are twisted into a ferocious beast bent on destroying all in its path.
An itinerant storyteller, John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.
"Alice in Wonderland" in "The Way Home" and What to Expect from Season 3
“‘Who am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle.” Alice had just grown to the size of a giant, frightening the White Rabbit, which motivated her to ask this soul-searching question in Chapter Two of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s something we constantly ask ourselves throughout our lives, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. One of the primary reasons Alice in Wonderland continues to captivate audiences and inspire creators is because it deals with universal questions of identity and personhood. In most respects, characters in every story undertake a journey of self-discovery and Alice’s odyssey through Wonderland is a perfect model for artists. From The Matrix to Alice in Borderland to Poor Things, there is a long history of films and TV shows that have used elements of Alice in Wonderland to tell their stories.
One of the most recent series to use Alice as direct inspiration is the time-travel family drama, The Way Home. The Hallmark Channel original recently finished airing its second season in March and work is already underway on Season 3, slated to premiere in 2025. The Way Home follows three generations of strong and independent women (Andie MacDowell, Chyler Leigh, and Sadie Laflamme-Snow) who “embark on an enlightening journey none of them could have imagined as they learn how to find their way back to each other.” Season One begins with Kat (Leigh) and the aptly named Alice (Laflamme-Snow) returning to Kat’s hometown of Port Haven in rural Canada to live with her estranged mother Del (MacDowell). Alice’s adjustment to her new home takes an interesting turn when she falls into a pool on Del’s property and discovers it’s a portal for time travel.
Does that sound familiar? Maybe reminiscent of a young girl falling down a bunny’s burrow in a fantasy novel written under a pseudonym by an Oxford mathematician and photographer? Well, don’t worry, if you think it sounds a little like Alice in Wonderland, you haven’t eaten any “magic” mushrooms. The similarities are by design.
Speaking recently to Variety, co-showrunner Alexandra Clarke, who runs the series with her mother Heather Conkie, said, “As we started looking at this show and the concept, it became so much clearer to us how oddly echoing it all was to the book, and we sort of thought well, if it’s there, let’s use it. It’s a story about a girl that literally falls down the rabbit hole into a whole other world and is trying to make sense of what she’s seeing and of her adventures there.” Clarke and Conkie, along with creator Marly Reed, were reinforced in their choice of inspiration when the first books they saw on a trip to a discount bookstore were Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. “We thought, ‘OK, that’s a sign,’” said Conkie.
Clarke, Conkie, and Reed used the theme of self-discovery in Carroll’s novel to influence their Alice’s arc. In Season One, they send her down their rabbit hole to the Wonderland of 1999, where she encounters her mother and grandmother, learns about the trauma keeping them apart in the present, and explores the type of person she wants to be. Like Carroll’s Alice, The Way Home’s Alice finds herself in a strange world where previous norms are upended, requiring self-exploration as well as exploration of the environment in order to navigate this unfamiliar place.
Using the past to jumpstart a coming-of-age story is an excellent mechanism that brings to mind another of Alice’s lines. After the “Drink Me”/”Eat Me” scene in which Alice dramatically shrinks and grows, she comments to the Caterpillar, “It’s no use going back to yesterday. I was a different person then.” This is an astute insight about the importance of moving forward and not being stuck in the past. Yet The Way Home shows it is useful to go back to yesterday if the person or people you’re observing are your mother and grandmother, discovering the different people they were in the past. In The Way Home, Alice’s insights into the issues that drove Kat and Del apart directly relate to her sense of identity and how she grows as a character.
For Season Two, Clarke, Conkie, and Reed looked at the second installment of Carroll’s Wonderland canon and based Alice’s journey on Through the Looking-Glass. Clarke said, “The way it begins is her looking through a mirror into this other world and wondering what’s there and hoping it’ll take her back to Wonderland. It does, but it’s a wonderland that’s upside down and reversed. Everything good is bad and everything up is down and if you actually look at Alice’s journey in particular through Season Two, that’s exactly what happened. We made a really big point throughout the season of having her be on the outside looking in, which is exactly how Alice who was in that book.”
Again, the creative team behind The Way Home identified one of the core themes of Alice’s experience in Carroll’s novel and transposed that onto their Alice. The feeling of being on the outside looking in is common to all teenagers and a large portion of adults. Even within the context of family, younger people often feel ostracized to a certain extent due to their ignorance of events and experiences before their time that still color the relationships between older family members. This unresolved trauma drives wedges between all generations and, if left untreated, can doom relationships. In The Way Home, time travel provides the mechanism through which Alice and Kat can learn from that trauma, allowing them to heal in the present.
Alice in Wonderland will also play a large role in the upcoming Season Three, though its influence may be more general than direct. “I think the thing we’re going to kind of try and do this season is looking at the two books as a whole as a set and what to sort of glean from the two of them and who owns them. And the themes of them will still be a huge part of our show,” said Clarke of their approach to next season. She went on to say, “...the trips that Alice takes, the trips that Kat takes, they’re always going to different wonderlands and different worlds for very different reasons.”
This idea of using “different wonderlands” to address certain aspects of a character’s development echoes Carroll, who tailored the Wonderlands Alice visits to reflect her emotional maturity. It’s a beautiful example of character-driven storytelling, where the character defines the world instead of vice versa. As The Way Home ages into its third season, it’s clear that the show’s creative brain trust has a firm grasp on how to continue the development of their characters they so wonderfully executed in the first two seasons. What is also clear is that 159 years after its initial publication, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland continues to directly influence storytelling, continually reaffirming its position as one of the most influential works of art ever made.
An itinerant storyteller, John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.
All Things Alice: Interview With Jared Hoffman
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have the hilarious and talented Jared Hoffman join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Welcome to the show, Jared Hoffman. I'm happy to have you on. I wanted to chat with you about your background and your aspirations. My friend Ed Decter was on the show and he was your professor at AFI. He called and suggested we work together, which has been a fantastic collaboration because you bring a unique sense of humor to the blogs that I don't have. Whenever somebody has a unique voice, I always like to exploit it for as little money as possible and I feel like I've done a really good job with you. But it turns out that I pay you more for blogs than anybody else.
Jared Hoffman I'm glad you've also said that now so that everyone can resent my blogs.
FB I wanted to go back to your pilot because it was a very funny take on high school, which is a genre I've played around in a little bit. Tell me about your experience at the American Film Institute. I'm imagining they said to write something personal or meaningful, something you know a lot about. Is that why you wrote that pilot? Or was there something you were working out that you didn't work out with your therapist?
JH I'm always working stuff out with my therapists. That's an awful process. But in my first year at AFI, the things I wrote weren't necessarily personal things. Everything I write has some kind of personal flair to it but there was no real connection. And there was no “Why are you writing this?” It was mostly just, “Oh, I liked the idea. It seemed like a fun thing to chase.” But when I was going into year two, I realized that while I had samples that I liked, there was nothing I was really proud of besides a spec script I wrote, which is only useful for writing contests right now. They’re not used at all in the industry anymore. Unless you write a 9/11 Seinfeld episode.
FB Do you mean that in terms of television or that you can't sell a spec script?
JH A TV spec. I've noticed the term, for some reason, keeps changing but in my first year, we had a TV comedy writing class and a TV drama writing class. I wrote a Big Mouth episode. We were writing an episode of an existing show. That was really the only thing that I was like, “This is good.” It was the only thing that was actually based on any kind of truth about me. Once that clicked for me, it was like, okay, everything has to be incredibly personal for it to be good, at least at this point in my career. So going into my second year, I knew I had to write something personal, specifically for Ed's group because Ed wanted us to have some ideas coming in.
Ed handpicks his group based on what everyone else has written and because of their personal stories. Ed's awesome and he's very aware of what will help you find success in the industry in the sense, especially as a young writer. I could write some crazy fantasy, high-concept thing that has nothing to do with me and it'll end up in the pile of high-fantasy concept things that a bunch of other new writers have and no one's gonna take a second glance at it.
FB Right, right.
JH Ed wanted a paragraph pitch on what you wanted to write about. Also, I knew Ed before going to AFI. He's actually the one who convinced me to apply to AFI. I remember in the first class he said, “Just so you know, Jared is friends with my daughter, proceed.” Then John, one of your assistants, pitched an idea about a knight because he has a history background. I think he got to the second sentence before Ed interrupted him and said, “No to all of that.” Then we just went to the next person. I was like, “Oh, cool. You said that we know each other. That's great. Now everyone hates me.” I think Ed only passed two out of the six ideas to go on to the next steps. It took people weeks to get past even the idea phase to the beat phase of the script.
I always said, “Ed bullied me into writing well.” He didn't really bully us, but sitting in the beat phase was probably the most frustrating thing ever for everyone in that class. Everyone was just like, “I just want to figure it out on the page.” And Ed was like, “I don't want that. That's not how this works.” I came up with an idea based on my therapeutic boarding school when I was 16 and the idea was a kid starts hearing the voice of Christ, but he's basically at a place where if you were to say that you'd end up in the padded room. So it evolved from back to my original high school. I'm not going to say the name but it was a madhouse. I have really fun stories about that place. It was an all-boys Catholic school and everyone was weirdly really close and very touchy when there were no girls around.
FB That’s scary territory for me for a couple of reasons. One, I went to an all-boys Catholic school for my freshman year of high school and then St. Margaret's, an all-girls school, merged with mine. I'm going to go back and just quickly take issue with the notion that Ed was bullying you because that's what my kids say. I have a senior and a sophomore and they talk about their teachers being bullies at school. I said, “You are being teased. Bullying at school is when you come home bloody or the gym teacher has a paddle with little holes in it or you get hit on the hand by a nun. That's bullying, not somebody teasing you for making a stupid comment.”
JH Oh yeah. It was not actually bullying. I remember, after the first class, when almost everyone's ideas were shut down, most of them weren't something that was going to stand out. I remember someone said, “You're gonna be alright because Ed likes you.” I go, “Oh, no, Ed knows me. That just means he has my cell phone number and he's going to call me and tell me to fix things. I have more classes.” He was a great teacher. I really wanted him. It’s known that Ed is one of the harder teachers at AFI and some people were afraid of that. I dropped out of college, so when I was at AFI, I kind of felt like the dunce. But it was like, “I'm here. I'm paying all this money. This is graduate school. I don't want the easy teacher.” There were no easy teachers at AFI but I would rather have someone who would force me to be better.
FB It’s not just being tough on the story and tough on the writing. It's the preparation for life in the business. I'm curious now that you're out of school and you're trying to make your way in terms of selling your projects. The pilot I read that you wrote at AFI was such a great concept. What have you learned from Ed? What was unexpected as you're going through this as you’re going down this path of trying to get projects, meeting with producers, writing spec scripts, and trying to get jobs?
JH The most unexpected thing was a vast majority of people who go to AFI don't outline, and I was one of them. That's how I can tell if someone is serious about writing. I'll be like, “I've been outlining for the past couple of weeks”. And people are like, “Oh, I don't do that.” You don't have to but it'll be better if you do. So that’s one thing I learned, how important the outlining phase is.
I grew up in the film industry. I always say that I'm nepo-adjacent. My father passed away 17 years ago and my mom was a makeup artist. All of those connections more or less dried up in one way or another. I've gotten this far in the career not for lack of trying to use the connections that I gained through my family but, actually, the only success I've found has been through connections I fostered myself. Or being lucky enough that Ed is friends with you. The only reason he found out that we lived close to each other at the time was because I was late to class one day and the gate wasn't working. I sent Ed a picture and he immediately goes, “Is Frank your neighbor?”
FB That’s funny. I didn't know that.
JH Navigating the industry has been really interesting coming from my perspective, especially growing up in it and seeing how it worked as a kid and now trying to figure it out on my own with how much it has changed. There would be times when they would just be like, “Okay, so this is something that isn't done anymore.” Just trying to figure out what is actually useful. One of the shocking things is how much truth there is to a lot of the jokes about the industry in shows and movies. I had a meeting and I learned that someone doesn't read. I was just like, “Oh, I thought that was not real. I thought that was a joke.” Right? But, they don't read. Someone else reads for them and tells them. I was like, “What? How can they make any good decision?” Well, they do. I guess, at this point, they're in a part of their career where they don't have to read. Or, something else I realized is you have to write a lot of “Thank You” letters. I'm not the best at writing thank you letters. I've always found them to be a little kiss-ass-y.
FB I haven't received any myself.
JH Sorry, Frank, I have yours in the mail. I promise.
FB In school, I'm assuming there were pitch meetings and learning how to pitch and how has that translated to you? Talk about the ways you're trying to get out into the world and take meetings. When you do have opportunities, what happens? I know you had a meeting for that game you love so much, Warhammer.
JH I didn't have a meeting for that actually. I asked my manager, “Is there any way you could get a meeting for this?” She said, “I’ll look into it.” She emails me back the next day and goes “You don't have a sample for this.” Warhammer is high fantasy and sci-fi and very serious. All I have are jokes. She said, “I can send your stuff, but I'm gonna look stupid doing that.” I was like, “Yeah, no, that makes sense.” Now I'm trying to push the fact that I’m helping you with The Looking Glass Warslore.
FB You're so into the lore of Warhammer. It’s the idea of “Get me a meeting because I am so deeply seated in that world. I get all of it. I have the books. Let me just tell them all the great things about it. If nothing else, they're going to feel good about their show coming up.” Yeah, exactly.
JH Exactly. So my manager and I made a deal. I'm going to write a 10-15 page sample based on that universe. Luckily, there is no shortage of stories in that universe that I can take inspiration from. I'm gonna give that to my manager. I was hired to write a treatment for a producer over the holidays and just finished that a week ago. So now I’m finally able to sit down and write my own stuff again. There are a lot of things I want to get done because right now I only really have one sample that's being sent around to get meetings. Luckily, it's the sample you read that won me the AFI contest as well. So I'm going to send that to her to have a little bit more leeway getting in the door. But I believe, with Warhammer, they're actually making a movie first.
FB So they’re not putting a room together, which is what you would be ideal for.
JH Exactly. I believe they're going to make a show based on how the movie does. It's Amazon, MGM. Henry Cavill, and then Games Workshop, or maybe Citadel. So I’m just trying to navigate that. I've never written something specifically to get a job.
FB It’s a very good idea. Because it's hard to know what's going to work and everybody will say, “That's never going to work. This is how you have to do it.” But there's no rhyme or reason to it. If it's a good piece of writing and it connects and it's about the subject matter, people will respond to it. I've told the story a million times about the World War II feature I wrote. It’s about the skiing and climbing troops who fought during World War II. I wrote a treatment, a short story, and I thought would be The Dirty Dozen on skis. I knew nobody but ended up getting it to Kennedy/Marshall and getting a deal at Paramount. By the way, I sent a letter. Everybody really laughed at me. That's when there was snail mail.
JH I feel like with email now, it's become really easy to ignore emails.
FB It’s like vinyl. It’s nostalgic to receive a letter.
Where does the writing talent come from? Your mom's side, your dad's side, or both of them? Neither?
JH My dad passed away when I was nine. He only was a dad. I never got to know him as a person. That being said, my mom does say I am a lot like him. I've always been someone who likes to tell stories and luckily I've had a very interesting 27 years here so far. Or at least interesting enough to get adults’ attention. When I was a kid, I always wanted to talk to adults and have them actually pay attention. I realized the first time someone really paid attention to me was when I said something funny. So, starting from that, I was always trying to crack jokes. I was never a class clown. I talked a lot during class, but I was never the funny kid at school. I was always good at getting essays done. Everyone else would always be like, “I've been working on this essay for a while. How are you?” I would say, “I'm gonna write it tonight.” And I’d do well, depending on how good the spelling was which, as you know from reading my work, is not good.
FB Even with spell check. So I don't know what you were doing way back then.
JH Here's the thing. I'm so bad at spelling that spell check has no idea what I'm getting at. But I would turn in these essays and get passing grades. Then I realized if I spent a little bit more time on it and got better grades, I was going to go to college. I didn't feel like I was ready yet. So I took a gap year and I lived in Indonesia for a while. I went through a program that set me up with families to live with, but one part of the deal with the program was I had to write articles about what I was doing and stuff like that. I remember reading other people's articles and I thought, “Oh my god, what?” I just watched a South Park episode last night where they’re in San Francisco and everyone is smelling their own farts because they’re so pretentious and so smug.
But I was reading these articles and thinking, “Who are these Hemingway wannabes with their flowery language? You went for a walk.” So I started teasing these other articles in mine and they got attention. I would tease the reader. I was like, “Why are you reading this?” I wrote one where I said, “This is about cars. If you don’t like cars, don’t read this. I don't care.” I'm not going to talk about brindled dogs. I still don't really know what brindle means. That was when I fell in love with writing funny, sarcastic things.
FB You did an amazing job. You did what you just described in the blog where we played around with the upcoming movie Wicked, the musical supposedly, and my movie, Wicked, that I made years and years ago starring Julia Stiles. One of the things I was asking you to do is do a comparison of the two trailers. But what that morphed into was the idea of having a musical come out, but hiding the fact it’s a musical in the marketing for the film. You did a very, very good job, very sarcastic and funny. I really love that piece, which people can read on the website.
I wanted to go back for a second because I wanted to tell you a little story. You didn't mention your dad's movies. I don't know if you know this story. Years and years ago, these two filmmakers came into my office and they showed me five minutes of a horror movie.
JH I have a feeling I know where this is going.
FB I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” I can't remember exactly what I was thinking at the time but I definitely knew I wasn't going to have the money to help them complete it, which is what they were looking for. Years later, I met Oren Koules. who was a producer and was interested in something of mine. We went into his office and he told me he had just produced this movie, and it turns out he produced it with your dad and a guy named Mark Burg. It turned out to be the first Saw movie, which has gone on to be probably the most successful independent film series of movies. Do you have any recollection of your dad making Saw?
JH It’s burned into my mind. They shot the first Saw it in two-ish weeks. It’s wild. I believe the total budget was $1.4 million but the shooting budget was actually only $800,000. The extra $600,000 came later for marketing. I remember my dad telling me a little bit about the movie. I was six or seven. I remember going on set. It was shooting somewhere in Burbank on this tiny little soundstage. I just remember the brick. The outside was brick. Before going in there, I remember my dad sat me down in the car and said “I'm shooting a horror movie. There's gonna be a guy in the bathroom.” The police station was right behind the bathroom and then there was a bedroom. It was all very tiny, shared walls.
FB Minimal sets constructed to maximize the production values and minimize the cost. Your dad, Oren, and Mark saw more than I did. Boy, do I regret that decision. I should have put my house up and thrown down the cash for that.
JH I remember my dad saying, “There's a guy on the floor and you can see his brains and there's a big pool of blood. Then there's two guys chained up.” I was there when they were shooting the scene where Cary Elwes cut his foot off. I was sitting behind the monitor watching it. I was so interested. As a kid, that could have been potentially scarring. But the thing is, I was so interested in how they did it and how they made it look like he was doing these things that it didn't freak me out. I was much more interested in how they were hiding the fact he still had his foot. The only thing that scared me was Billy, the doll. Everything else was not scary to me. And there was a toilet that was filled with gross stuff.
FB Dolls are always the scariest.
JH I'm seven. I'm a boy. I thought that was the funniest thing in the world. My dad's making a comedy. I was on that set a lot growing up. I think James and Leigh were younger than me now when they shot that.
FB The director, James Wan, that guy has gone on to do some huge movies.
JH He's everywhere. James and Leigh wrote it. James directed it and Leigh acted in the first one. I remember my dad having a meeting with James once. James was so young and he came to our place and I was so little. I was like, “Cool, this is a guy to hang out with.” My dad was gonna have a meeting with him and I was like, “No, you're coming with me.” I dragged his hand and we just hung out.
FB He seemed like a high school kid when I met him.
JH He was in his early 20s when he shot that, so yeah, younger than me now.
FB Exactly. In the short, they had a few scenes which were really great.
JH The scene in the short was the bear trap scene, which is now very famous. Oren is actually the body that Amanda has to get the key from, which is kind of funny.
Before Saw, my dad worked at Disney and I remember we went to Australia because he was shooting George in the Jungle 2.
FB That's a better movie for a six-year-old.
JH That set was amazing. George’s treehouse was fully functioning and I got to play in it. For a five-year-old at the time, that was fun. There were trained birds. It was a great time. I remember when Saw became what it was because it always felt like a little movie that could. It was shot in two weeks. Then there was a newspaper article and my dad was in the newspaper. This is when being in the newspaper was still a big deal. They misspelled my dad's name. He had two G's for Gregg. I remember it just all kind of changed, overnight, it felt like.
FB It was a sensation. The box office performance was a big surprise. Now, micro-budget horror movies take off all the time but Saw just came out of nowhere. It’s rare that a couple of producers and a manager would throw their own money into it, which was a ballsy move. It's one of the rare success stories where the original creators still own their own creation.
JH It’s really an amazing thing. It's one of those things that just doesn't happen. It's wild. I have so much love for the Saw franchise. Even though they're not getting a Pulitzer, they're just fun. I think that's something people want, just something enjoyable and kind of crazy and out there.
FB Over time as they tried to heighten the gore factor it was called torture porn. Which is legit, on some levels. But as the franchise evolved, they've found ways to develop more interesting storylines. The visceral thrill of that first one was extremely intense. Have you written any horror?
JH I've written one horror sample. It’s okay. It's not the greatest thing in the world. I do love horror, just as a genre. As a comedy writer, people always say horror and comedy are two sides of the same coin. I think there is always a pull for me to write horror and I have some more ideas that I'm going to play around with soon. Horror doesn't get as much awards love, except recently, thanks to Jordan Peele and Ari Aster. It's starting to get taken more seriously. People are starting to realize horror isn't just for teenagers. It can tackle really serious topics in an approachable way. It’s the same with comedy. If it’s done correctly, it makes serious topics approachable. It also makes it feel like you're not being hit over the head with a message.
FB You’re right. Jordan Peele really elevated the genre with his movies. They’re really enjoyable and scary, but they have something to say, which is great for any genre. That distinguishes it. Then you have a broader audience where people are like, “Hey, there's something else going on here.”
JH Exactly. I think have to trick people into listening if you really want to say something. We're inundated with information. We're inundated with people posting on social media about something happening somewhere and how you should care about this thing. It’s almost like a care fatigue after a certain point. Everyone's always telling me to be upset about something. If you really want someone to listen, you have to kind of trick them. If you're posting it on social media, the only people who are going to listen are the people who follow you. They're following you, most likely, because they agree with you or they're friends with you. You’re not really saying anything, anyway. It's just shouting into an echo chamber.
FB Which is why storytelling is so powerful. You want people to be entertained and captivated but at the same time, it’s your chance to say what you want to say. If you do it subtextually they're going to feel it. It's going to be communicated because you've felt it and thought it when you put the words on the page. Then if you make the film or the TV show in a way that lets that subtext come out, people are going to get what it is you're trying to share so badly.
This is a podcast about Alice in Wonderland so I'm curious, before you started working for the Frank Beddor Wonderland Factory, what was your experience with Alice in Wonderland growing up or in pop culture?
JH I mentioned my dad worked at Disney when I was a kid. So I had all the Disney VHS tapes. My initial introduction to it was the Disney animated movie. I've mentioned it in some of the blogs that I've written, Alice in Wonderland is not pop culture, it is pop culture. It's become a part of our language. Before I started working with you, I didn't actually notice it as much. I would notice it if there was a specific reference or something like that. But through working with you, I’ve seen how it's just everywhere. It’s to the point where people don't even realize that it is an Alice in Wonderland reference. It’s been really intriguing and eye-opening to me. I feel like I took the red pill.
FB One of the first blogs you did for me was Alice in Wonderland in politics. I don't know how many cartoons I've seen with Donald Trump as the Red Queen saying, “Off with your head!” They use “down the rabbit hole” in these political cartoons. They often talk about the Mad Tea Party. They’ll put a lot of political people around the Mad Tea Party and start cracking jokes about the absurdity of what they’re doing. So to your point, it's the perfect reference in that context. But then you might go over to music and you'll get a Taylor Swift song that's talking about a breakup and there will be lyrics about stepping through the looking glass and going down the rabbit hole of love. It really is everywhere. I love that blog you did and I know that that was one of the early initiations into, “Oh my god look at all this Alice stuff.”
JH I remember when I turned that in to you, my first thought was “Okay, I just got this job and now I'm gonna get fired.”
FB What was it about the blog that made you think that?
JH In the introduction, I made jokes about how you were keeping me in a cage and forced me to write these blogs. Or how you were beating the blogs out of me.
FB Because we had just started and you were making fun of me.
JH I thought, “He's either gonna get it or he's not gonna want to work with me anymore.” But I figured, “Well, this is my style of comedy.” I do love writing these blogs. They’re a lot of fun to write. They're always interesting to come up with and I always can go on some weird rant.
FB Sarah sent me links to all of your blogs so I could reread them. We haven't been working together that long but it's such a big body of work already. I think it’s 16 or 17.
JH I have a file just called “Frank” on my computer and it has folders inside of it to break up all the different things that I've done for you.
FB You’ve done a series of blogs comparing IPs, the clash of the IPs. You've written about Alice in Wonderland versus Star Wars. Alice in Wonderland versus Lord of the Rings. Alice in Wonderland versus Harry Potter. You’re very funny in those because you're writing it so you're the judge, jury, and executioner. You're like, “Oh, I think Alice wins this one.”
JH I think I mentioned in almost every single one of them, “This is an Alice in Wonderland-themed website. Who do you think is gonna win?”
FB Tongue in cheek for sure. It's interesting because you think about the impact of Star Wars, which is so deep with publishing, theme parks, video games, TV, and of course, films. But then you look at Alice in Wonderland and you talk about how it’s been around 150 years, how it’s one of the most quoted literary works, the phrases that are used every single day. It’s a fun way of letting people compare and contrast Alice to other properties and enlighten them as to how much their favorite stories last and are in our pop culture. It's the lasting impact that is so remarkable about these particular stories. What do you think it is about these stories, as a writer and somebody who wants their stories to live on? What do you think it is about some of these genres and stories that allow them to last for so many years?
JH I think specifically with Alice in Wonderland, it's political satire.
FB On one level, for sure.
JH But it's also political satire that's a children's story, as well.
FB It's also a fantasy.
JH It's also fantasy. It's imaginative. It’s the perfect storm. It has just a little bit of everything to keep any kind of reader interested. As I was saying that, I was thinking of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies like My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. Those movies’ audience ranges from kids to grownups. It's because it has a little bit of everything. They're a little scary. They're a little funny. It’s enough to keep everyone entertained. That’s the most important thing at the end of the day, that we create entertainment. If you manage to capture someone's imagination and take them on a journey successfully, it'll endure the test of time.
When I did Alice versus The Lord of the Rings, it was interesting because the Tolkien estate owns the word “Ent.” Just think about the words that were created. It’s the inventiveness of it. What was Tolkien on? It’s the same thing with Lewis Carroll pushing the limits of the human imagination. Putting something that inventive onto paper draws people in no matter what. Same thing with Star Wars or Dune.
FB It seems to me that these stories communicate and tell a story that feels fresh, but are grounded in something familiar. Star Wars did that. The Lord of the Rings really did a deep dive and made you feel like you're in an alternative world. Harry Potter in the same way. Alice in Wonderland, Carroll was writing it for himself. That's the best kind of work. There are so many genres of publishing now, whether it's picture books, young adult, or middle grade. It just goes on and on. It’s all in these categories and then it's okay, “What do I want to write? Where does it fall?” Somebody else tells you where it falls but if you write from the heart and it’s something you care about, hopefully, it comes through.
JH I think that goes back to what we were saying in the beginning. They were writing for themselves. The Lord of the Rings was actually a bedtime story Tolkien would tell to his kids. It comes from a place of not telling a story because you think that there's going to be an audience for it. If it's good enough, an audience will come. It doesn't matter.
These are worlds that very creative people have managed to invent, and through that, other people were like, “How did you come up with this?” I think that's why they've managed to endure, it’s just the inventiveness. With Star Wars, even though the story beats are ancient, it's the world that drew people in.
FB They're classic though, the reluctant hero. That’s a classic trope. How you tell that story is the most important thing and Lucas told a reluctant hero story in a way that no one had ever seen before.
JH Exactly. At AFI, they said there were only really six stories. Man versus man. Man versus the World. Man versus Nature. If you boil every story down, there are actually only six. It's just how you tell all of those six.
FB By the way, you've not only written blogs for me, but you've written some lore short stories set in The Looking Glass Wars universe. I knew you were a little bit nervous about writing prose when you first started because your mom told me you were nervous.
JH I was nervous about writing prose. Because my writing style is not that of a proper essay writing style. Those who have read my stuff will completely understand. I like to write like I'm talking to you or you're in on the joke with me. So when I was writing these lore stories in the universe that you've created from Alice in Wonderland, there's a lot of whimsy but there's also some seriousness to it. I wanted to treat your material with the respect it deserves and give you a good product. I was nervous, but in the end, I was really proud of what I came up with. When you called me and said those nice things when I'd sent it to you, I was like, “I have no idea.”
FB I genuinely really, really loved it. The stories are meant to go along with a card game and you're deeply seated in the tabletop and gaming world. You've also been very helpful and instrumental in helping shape that game along with Sarah my producer's partner Marco, who's taking the lead on creating this tabletop game. These all have this kind of collective energy, especially all of you writers from AFI that I've been introduced to and trying to shepherd, between the lot of you, some product that I can make some money off of.
But it’s really trying to shepherd that creative, collective team energy to create this game. It's really enjoyable to have fresh ideas and creativity and have it all come together for a reason. So your lore stories are for a very good reason. That’s to broaden the world of The Looking Glass Wars and the Card Soldier premise. I've really enjoyed it and you've done a fantastic job. But before I let you go, I'm going to ask for your favorite Alice reference in pop culture, if you have one. It can be the Disney animated film, because your dad worked at Disney, which is a pretty cool job if you're a kid, for sure.
JH As a kid, but now as an adult, I'm like, “Oh my God, my poor father.”
FB If you were a character from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, who would you be? And why?
JH Well, probably the March Hare. I think he’s interesting. I remember as a kid I always thought, “Who's this rabbit sitting next to the Mad Hatter, who's just as crazy?”
FB I don't think you hear about the March Hare as much because that's how crazy the Mad Hatter is.
JH Exactly. And it’s not necessarily an Alice reference, but my favorite thing I've written a blog about was the 1999 Alice in Wonderland TV movie with Gene Wilder as the Mock Turtle. When I first got the job here, I wanted to pitch a joke article that was, “I took LSD and watched Alice in Wonderland so that you don't have to.” But after watching that movie, I don't need to even pretend to do that because that movie is just so jarringly weird. It’s so odd and interesting. The cast is insane.
FB Whoopi Goldberg is the Cheshire cat. In that blog, you were casting the remake version, which was funny. So people should check out some of your blogs on frankbeddor.com. Do you have any projects you're excited about?
JH It’s just a bunch of things that are in the works.
The treatment I was hired to do, I don't know what I can say about it. Lots of comedies coming, which I'm very excited about. One is inspired by when I went to college for five minutes I joined a fraternity and I was just thinking about hazing. So it's a comedy about hazing. The whole idea is there are those coed fraternities and they're technically educational fraternities but are not educational. There's an honors fraternity, which is coed. They’re not about throwing parties and all that stuff but the idea is that a kid who has just joined passes away and it looks like a hazing death. So they have to hide the body and it turns out all the fraternities on the campus have also killed. They’re like, “Oh, no, we kill a kid like every year.” The best example would be a comedic Pretty Little Liars set on a college campus. There are these idiot frat bros and then this honors society becomes cool because someone's died.
FB It’s a send-up of that culture. I'd like to read that. Sounds like a fun read. You could do a version of this that is not that far away from your dad's movie.
JH Hazing still exists even if they say it's not legal. But to me, I've always just found it hilarious, to an extent. Obviously, the kids that are legitimately torturing people are messed up. But you could turn that into a thriller. There was the movie Goat, which starred Nick Jonas.
FB Also maybe focus on the reason people connect in that environment and the longevity of those relationships.
JH My old roommate went to a very big party school and he’s talked about the hazing he went through. I do think that there is some kind of bonding experience. “We made it through.” It's that kind of hypermasculinity stupidity. I think, to an extent, guys like going back to caveman brain every now and then.
FB My son is at the age and he's looking for colleges and we’ve been talking about certain schools and I’ve said, “This school, you definitely have to be in a fraternity because the whole social structure is based on that.” He’s not into that but a lot of people do it and a lot of people have lifelong friends from it. I suppose you might be right about that.
JH That being said, there were a lot of times when the guys I was in the fraternity with would say, “We’re brothers.” I would go, “No, you guys are my drinking buddies.” There are a couple of longtime friends that I did make but there were people I didn't like here. It’s interesting to look at fraternities. The people who take it really seriously, it’s kind of weird. I was straight up when I joined. I was like, “I'm here because this is how I can get into parties.”
FB Good luck with it, let me know when I can read it. In the meantime, you're writing a blog for me so I'll expect it shortly. already. I think writers who are entering the business write in the mediums that they're offered. You've taken this opportunity to write these blogs and I'm really proud of the work that you've done. Seeing it collectively is impressive. I hope we continue but maybe we can transition into some television work and make both of us a little bit of cash eventually.
JH That'd be fantastic. Thank you for not only having me here but for even taking a chance on me and hiring me. John and I and maybe five other writers from AFI are the only ones who are actually writing. It’s hard. So I appreciate you taking me on and giving me almost too much freedom with the blog.
FB I'm realizing that now but yeah, live on the wild side. So thanks for coming on, man. It's been a pleasure to hang out and to talk.
JH This was great. Bye.
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