All Things Alice: Interview with Bad Hats Theatre

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 Fiona Sauder, Landon Doak and Victor Pokinko of Bad Hats Theatre join me as my guests! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview. For the full transcript with exclusive content, please join our private Circle community.

Thanks for being on the show. I’m always excited to talk to other creators who have used Alice as a muse to tell stories.

I want to talk about your theatre company, Bad Hats. Tell me the story.

Bad Hats started in 2015. It was co-founded by me and an artist named Nicola Atkinson. And over time, through making work with friends that we’ve met through the community or school, we started to figure out how it was logical for this group of people to run a company. Everyone found their place in Bad Hats over the years and now we’ve got a cohort that spends all its time figuring out how to make space for writing and producing new musicals. Many of these are adaptations, likeAlice in Wonderland. The name Bad Hats came from a friend of mine in Ottawa. Their name is Megan and I bought us matching hats. Megan’s head is very small and the hat kept falling over their eyes and they kept going, “Bad hat. Bad hat.” Bad Hats Theater just had a ring to it. We just ran with it and it became an umbrella under which now all these fine folk sit with me.

The other cool thing that we realized in recent years is that Bad Hat is a British-ism for sort of a bad egg or shit disturber, which suits us. We all started as actors, primarily and we grew into various roles, writers, composers, producers, directors, and music directors. But we’ve always been interested in shifting the paradigm within the industry and doing things a little bit differently.

Interestingly, you mentioned everybody started as actors, because, when you’re an actor, often you feel out of control because you’re waiting for somebody to give you an audition. It’s a very vulnerable place to be over a long period. I too started as an actor and was looking to empower myself by writing stories and suddenly that opens up a doorway to something else.

Fiona, you’re the writer, so you adapted Alice in Wonderland, and Landon and Victor, you both composed the music. The show is a contemporary spin on Wonderland that takes us down a rabbit hole with Alice, a girl with a lot of questions. What is your contemporary spin on Alice?

We had done a production of Peter Panthat was very successful and ran for many years in Toronto, and around Ontario and is being licensed across Canada now. That was a flagship production for the company. Following that we knew we wanted to tell another story that could feel like it fell in sequence, after Peter. We felt like Alice was a character of a slightly older age than the story we had told with Peter so we blindly picked up the book, knowing some of the general pop culture stuff everybody knows about Alice and knowing the lore and fame and global adulation for the book. We didn’t know when we started what the spin would be. I had read it, making furious notes, and I remember when Landon read it for the first time, they called me on the phone, I said, “So what are your impressions? Where do you want to go with it? What do you want to do?” And the first thing Landon said was, “Have you noticed how many question marks there are on every page?” It’s true. Alice is a girl who cannot stop asking questions. She’s in a strange place but particularly her curiosity and curiosity as a central focal point of the books drew us in.

I was thinking maybe we can set this in a place that begs questions and has a lot of questions in the fabric of our beginning. And at that exact moment, I came around the corner onto my street and there was a little children’s school desk sitting on the sidewalk. I told Landon, “I gotta go. I have an idea!” So, I picked up the desk, brought it home, and I sat with it, and thought we should set this in a classroom. So that’s what our story does. It’s a contemporary classroom. Alice and her classmates have been given a homework assignment that Alice is really struggling with and she, unlike her classmates, can’t help but ask questions about all the things around her. She’s banished to the corner of the classroom and she sees a rabbit out the window in the schoolyard, and the story unfolds.

Bad Hat Theatre group sitting in school desks on stage for their performance of their unique adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Each actor is a student, raising their hands from their desks.

It’s an “all about you” assignment and one of the questions she’s asked is, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Everyone in the class has their own answer but Alice says, “How can I possibly decide? There’s so many things that I could be.” So she’s scribbled 1000s of answers – fireman, dentist, doctor. She finds it a bit unfair. It’s a really amazing commentary on the school system. What business do we have asking a nine-year-old or a 12-year-old what they want to do for the rest of their life? And extrapolating that further, what business do we have asking high school students to make giant decisions about their future education? So that’s the struggle that she goes through, which leads her down the rabbit hole, literally and figuratively.

That’s really interesting because Alice has been read by multiple generations and it’s captured a large part of our shared imaginative history. When there are creators like yourselves, who can plumb the zeitgeist of what’s going on and come up with a theme.

What were you hoping your show would add to the Alice cultural canon that you have pulled from to come up with this story? What would you want people to take away?

I think with all art, one of the best, and maybe the only thing we can do is offer a piece of ourselves. In this, we all felt like we wanted to write something that was for everyone but also to heal something that felt like it was out of tune in ourselves. I think all of us who wrote the show wrote something we felt like we needed, which was a reminder that as we peek into adulthood, in our show Alice is peeking into adolescence. But for us, we felt like we were peeking out of that into a set of rules, responsibilities, and expectations that we’d heard about in our youth and now were ours to action as adults and leaders in an arts organization and just people trying to move through the world. We were at odds with some of those rules, and some of those responsibilities.

This idea that we can’t go and reinvent ourselves. I’m not just saying change your hair, but change what your values are, change your job, change your lifestyle. We felt a bit stuck, even though we’re in this bubbling, constantly changing arts sector. We still feel that and so we felt like we needed to give ourselves, as well as our audiences, a reminder that we are forever peeking into potential new versions of ourselves. It’s not that adolescence starts and you have to become this new, complete version of yourself, and then you’re 20 and this needs to happen now and then you’re 30 and you have to have answers to these questions. It’s good to have questions for the entirety of your life. You can continue to reinvent yourself as you grow.

And with all our shows that are for all audiences, we take the things we knew as kids and try to give them back to the elder generations that are in the audience. So kids feel seen when they come to our shows and the more adult audiences that bring the kids feel like, “Oh, I used to have that wisdom. Where did it go?” That’s a lot of what the purpose is.

I was going to ask you, Landon, because, in the mission statement, you talk about getting back to that childhood curiosity, that childhood imagination, which is where so much great creativity comes from. How do you access that part of you to come up with either your performances or the music that you write?

I think to be a successful artist, you always have to hold on to that part of yourself. There’s a reason children are so imaginative and children. I think it’s because we come into the world as creative and imaginative beings but pretty quickly, we’re told we have to start to become something and our options become increasingly limited the older we get in terms of who we can become or the way we’re seeing in the world. Just being an artist at all, you have to fight to keep that part of yourself alive. As Fiona said, when we were creating the show, in our version, Alice is peeking into adolescence, and we were peeking into adulthood. For example, when we were working on Peter Pan, we were all right out of school. We didn’t have careers yet, or reputations, we had everything to gain and nothing to lose. But after the success of Peter Pan, stepping into writing Alice, it was sort of our sequel and we were going, “Can we do this again? What happens if we fail?” Our version of Alice is reminding ourselves as creators to do what Alice does in the play, which is to keep asking questions, rather than just trying to answer all of them. Because questions are a place where creativity can flow and thrive and answers are a place of absolutes. It’s a definitive place when you have an answer to something. There’s less room to grow. There’s not really somewhere to go when you have the answer to something. But a question is such an open door.

The original is about a young girl who’s on her way to becoming a proper young British lady. So I don’t think we needed to retell that story, but you can translate that story to any young person having to become anything. Being able to step into a version of ourselves is such a wonderful opportunity we all have but it can also be really limiting. There’s something, specifically about music, a lot of musicians will know the four chords in any key and how many successful pop songs are built off of the four chords. Well, as a musician today, I won’t let myself write a four-chord song, because I know that’s basic or that’s amateur or that’s been done so often. But when I was younger, before I knew my music theory, I would play the four chords and feel like I had just come up with the greatest hook of all time, because I wasn’t aware I had been writing a four-chord song. I think there’s a reason a lot of the most famous pop songs in the world were written by teenagers and by young people because I think when you become an older musician, you judge that type of work, and you go, “It’s been done. I can do better than that. I can find something more interesting to listen to.” But sometimes the simplest is best and I think that’s why children and young people create some really amazing art. It comes from that place of discovering something new for the first time, and not knowing that there’s somewhere else to go yet.

Image of 3 actors from Bad Hats Theatre group, performing Alice in Wonderland. They are jumping on the stage with the White Rabbit leading two others in a song and dance number.

After Peter Pan, which is a huge story that’s been around almost as long as Alice, how do you confront the anxiety of failure? It seems that what you are saying is you remind yourself about asking yourself questions, as a device to move the creative process forward. Is that true for all of you?

I would say so. I think what resonated for me, and what Landon was just saying reminded me, was the naivete you have when you write a first draft of something is bliss. We often say “first thought, best thought.” Then we’ll go through drafts, drafts, and drafts and then someone will go, “What if it was this?” And we’ll be like, yes. And then we’ll go, “That was actually how it was when we began, which is interesting.” You write a first draft and you feel good about it. Then the hard part comes when you have to take it apart and make it better. It’s not impenetrable, but it feels good to have it feel good for the first time.

In terms of the anxiety, that’s a good question. You can only do the next right thing, right? If I zoom out and think “How will this feel on opening night a year from now and people are seeing it for the first time and those people saw us do X Y, Zed art before and have X Y, Zed expectation?” You could go down a rabbit hole very quickly. But you have to go back to focusing on the micro, “Do I like this line? Is this funny? Does the music want to come in here? Or here?”

You just have to put one foot in front of the other and the joy that we have is that we’re all really good friends, and we laugh a lot. We’re really lucky. I spend most of my days working with these goobers and we have a wildly fun time and we get to put a lot of ourselves in the piece. You keep going and hope for the best and I think we have to make room for artists also to fail. We have to be allowed to make bad work and I think that’s something that we’ve learned. Post Alice, not because Alice was bad, it was a huge success, but I think the pressure in a way only grows and we’ve only just now started talking about how it’s okay to fail forward. My dad used to say a B.B. King line, “You better not look down or you might not keep on flying,” which I think is a good one. If I look down at what’s possible in the darkness of what could go wrong, or the way I could fall, I will. But I think it’s also okay to go, “If I do fall, it’s okay. I’ve got all these people who will catch me and I’ll catch me and you need to learn.” There’s gonna have to be darkness and lightness in the process.

There’s the adage, “You have your whole life to write your first novel, you have your whole life to write your first play.” Peter Pan, there was no expectation. No one knew who we were. Personally, there was a lot of fear of failure regarding the sophomore project. We do other things outside of these major productions, our mainstream flagships. We do a lot of other things. We have development programs, we do smaller plays, and we do workshops. But Peter Pan was a big thing and suddenly people go, “When’s the next one ready?”

We have the extreme privilege that our work has been programmed time and time again, which doesn’t happen very often. We managed to do several runs of Peter Pan from 2015 to 2019 and that afforded us visibility and presence in the landscape while being able to work on Alice, whichwe started working on in 2018 and premiered on stage in 2022. Now we’re doing little rewrites, and we’re coming back for a remount and we’ll do little rewrites before we do it again in 2024. We have two stops planned for 2024, so it’s nice that we have this time to make iterative art. But we weren’t rushed to do the thing. Honestly, the pandemic helped. We suddenly felt we had the time with it. We could actually put forward something worthwhile with a message.

If I can add one more thing about the fear as an artist, there’s an element of mindfulness. You have to practice just not looking at it and giving it too much of your attention and energy. It’s the same thing as having the thought, “Am I going to make rent next month?” That’s only so useful to actually helping you make rent next month because sometimes the anxiety and the fear can just become debilitating. Sometimes the pressure can prompt you into creativity but sometimes it can actually inhibit creativity.

As Fiona said, about how much we make each other and ourselves laugh within a creative process, it’s important to lean on those moments. Because, when the pressure is out there and opening night is on its way, and you’re thinking about all the important people coming to your show, it can be a debilitating thing. It’s true and it’s the reality but I find it’s just often not that useful to give it too much attention. So, I really just try to practice not looking at it. The other thing is, when I was a younger artist, I didn’t think too much about what other people thought. I just knew I was making myself and my friends laugh and that was enough. Then in this process, at the beginning, you start thinking, “What are people going to think? Are they going to like it? Is it going to be as good as next time? Can we maintain this status we’ve risen to?” Again, I find that fear just gets in the way and the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve been able to go back to that youthful place of just trusting my taste and trusting the way I make my friends laugh in a room and I’ve just gotten better at trusting that if I like something chances are other people will probably like it, as well. I’m an audience member. I consume a lot of art. So, my taste must count for something.

Still image of actors on stage, performing Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for the theater. This is Bad Hats Theatre, on stage with chess board lighting, with a red hue.

This relates to something that you had mentioned, Frank, about Lewis Carroll’s, “Who am I?” thesis. Our director has been with the piece for a very long time since we started writing in 2018. Her name is Sue Miner. She was in the interview for the job and we said, “This will be the project, these are the requirements.” And she said, “This is all fine. As long as I can stay Sue, I can do anything.” That’s something that resonated with me a lot and I know it resonated with Fiona as well. It inspired a lot of that element of saying that it doesn’t matter who you want to be when you grow up, as long as you stay you, as long as we as artists stay ourselves in the creation of it, you can get through anything, and you can push through any barrier. The ultimate answer to who we want to be when we’re older should just be ourselves.

Landon, you mentioned that Lewis Carroll wrote his piece as a reflection of Victorian England. This is a question for all three of you. Why do you think it is that Alice in Wonderland still resonates with audiences today? Why is it that you can take something that was written 150 years ago, and put a spin on it? What is it about that story, do you think?

I do actually think there is something to be said for the ’60s and ’70s psychedelic drug experimentation era, the hippie movement, and the Beatles. I do think the Caterpillar sitting on the mushroom smoking a hookah and the Mad Hatter play into it. I don’t know if that is Lewis Carroll’s intention but it seems that the hippie and psychedelic culture has taken Alice on as an icon.

That’s true. For the 60s, Alice is a reflection of the decade of the era. The music, in particular, speaks to that.

The Matrix took Alice and made it about the internet and falling down that rabbit hole and tech. Each decade reimagines it, which is the great thing about some of these stories, they can be retold so they have meaning for a contemporary audience. As your play or your musical is doing with your theme that is personal to you. As you said earlier, it’s a reflection of who you are and that becomes part of the canon.

Fiona when you were writing, were there themes coming from the original that you said “These are universal themes of identity or logic.” For me, the world is so illogical and facts are no longer facts so Alice is the archetypal story of illogic and it seems relevant now.

I think you hit the nail on the head that the universality exists in Alice receiving a world that is a mirror of the real world, and its illogical aspects. Why is time counted the way that it’s counted? Why does the sun come up over there and go down over there? What is gravity? Why do our door handles open this way? I think her changing sizes and all the things that happened physically to her when she’s in this world have so many nods to how a person moves through life. How do they move through the world? How do we fit into society? Your life can be one way and you get a phone call, you get information, and then you’re in a completely different universe.

I read somewhere that essentially, the Hero’s Journey is, the Hero sets out on his quest, completes the quest, comes home, and everything is changed. Whereas the Heroine’s journey is the Heroine sets out on the quest, comes home, and spends the entire journey trying to get back to how it was before to level the playing field. Alice, especially in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, comes out at the end and goes, “Oh, that was strange,” and then continues on her way. I rebelled against that a little bit. I felt like I needed to make a hero. The gendering of this is so silly and dated but in terms of those two structures, I wanted to have things changed for Alice when she got home. This is only to say that I think there’s a quest-like nature to it that has just as many heinously illogical things that everyday life has had in all the decades that this story has been popular. Life’s been nonsense since it was written so I think we keep going back to these things that make us feel a little bit seen and make us feel like our frustration with the structures of the world and the rules of the world are reflected to us.

Image of Alice, running across the stage. This photo is taken from Bad Hat Theatre's unique adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

I agree with that. I also agree with the idea that her adventure is a quest. But she’s so passive in the original and asking questions helps give her some agency, but she doesn’t have the traditional or classic Hero’s Journey. That also bothered me, which was one of the reasons I wrote The Looking Glass Wars.

But let’s get into the music because Landon, you brought up the Beatles and “I Am the Walrus,” which is a classic song that was inspired by Alice. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is another one. There’s so much music in culture that is inspired by Alice. There’s something about the poetry of music that lets artists explore these themes and allows Alice to be a muse. What kind of musical influences have you had for your show?

I heard some artists talk about influences and how early on in your career as a songwriter you’ll just hear the influences. So, when I was a younger songwriter, you’d hear a lot of the Beatles, a lot of traditional musical theater, a lot of pop punk, a lot of Green Day. You’d hear one of my songs and go, “That sounds like this Paul McCartney song or that sounds like this Green Day song.” Then the more influences you gather as an artist, the more you can’t actually hear those specific artists and those specific influences, and instead my artistry gets to be at the forefront, which is an amalgamation of all these different influences. But I do feel now like there’s a little bit of a Landon Doak style. Now I collaborated on the music with Victor, and Victor has a background in a lot of classical music, actually, and we have very different tastes. Although David Byrne is definitely a crossover, which is definitely a whimsical flavor.

The ’60s-70s psychedelic movement is a massive influence on the type of music I write. I’m definitely a Beatles fan but I’m a Paul McCartney fan, first and foremost. I think he’s one of the greatest songwriters of all time. So that’s definitely an influence on my writing. I also listened to a lot of musical theater and I listened to a lot of rap and R&B, as well. So this show, I guess, would span from pop to folk to a little bit of R&B. Then, Victor is a really accomplished pianist. Typically, as a songwriter, I sit down on the guitar, but there were times when Victor would play piano. He would start playing something and I would say, “That! Take that part and loop that over and over again,” and that would be the impetus for me to write a certain song in the show.

But you could write albums upon albums from this text. There’s so much poetry. Lewis Carroll touches every theme and idea under the sun. There are a lot of different styles of music in our show. My influences are the main influences you’ll hear so it’s some version of contemporary pop, folk, and musical theater. I find a lot of contemporary music these days is blending what we perceive as genres and so you’ll hear a lot of that in the show. Victor did a lot of the instrumentation. I typically write the chords, the melody, and the lyrics. But Victor was the one who really steered the ship about what instruments are going to be where and what instruments are going to make up which song. We use these instruments called melodica, which are little pianos that you blow into that’s got its own kind of whimsical sound.

The reason that this instrumentation is so important is because these are actor-musician shows. Everything on stage is being played by the actors singing the song, so you might be noodling on the piano and you jump off, you play the dodo for a bit, and then you jump back on the piano, or you go over to the electric bass and whatever.

As Landon said, I’m a classical pianist. I also was a concert tuba player and brass player. So I played a lot of that in my previous life and then I decided to ditch music and become an actor, and then it all worked its way back. The reason I was laughing about David Byrne was just that I find his music so funny, profoundly so. I love the themes of home that he brings into everything he writes, but one of the reasons that we got drawn to David Byrne as an influence of the show is Landon and I were really interested in the idea of time in music when we started writing this. That was the first launch point, we were performing Peter Pan one day, and Landon and I were backstage and we just started jamming right before one of our entrances, talking about what we can do with time and music, how do we make that come across? A lot of those ideas were pushed to the side by the end of it because you need to make it palatable as well. You can’t have this disjointed strange, amelodic stuff happening on stage. But David Byrne is someone who I really admire for his ability to manipulate time without anybody realizing it.

The most “out there” one we went with was the Tea Party song, for which I wrote three songs in three time signatures and overlapped them over each other. Which was one of the most sadistic things I’ve ever done. The band is like, “I can’t believe you make us do this every night.” Everyone’s just sweating the whole time. But it is one of those pretty insane and counterintuitive songs, which we eventually wrote lyrics overtop of and remarkably it worked well.

But to go back to the instrumentation, I didn’t want anything that sounded too normal. I didn’t want it to be the classic pit band on the side. I wanted it to feel whimsical and we found these melodicas, which are functionally speaking the keyboard side of an accordion with a hose or just a little trumpet mouthpiece that you blow into, and it blows air through it in a similar way that the bellows of an accordion would work. It gives you this kind of “whah” sound as the reeds themselves are in dissonance. We liked these little instruments because they were portable and they were so squeaky, honky, and strange, while still producing enough sound to be able to actually orchestrate with. So we have piano, bass, and these three melodicas. For percussion, we have a cajon, which is a drum box on wheels that zips around the stage and then we have a clarinet and a trumpet, as well.

The great thing about it is Fiona is the queen of this cajon and it’s literally flying around as she’s ripping on the drums and then she passes it to someone else and someone else sits down and starts going. It’s a really fun and accessible way of presenting these kinds of musicals because families and adults and kids and whoever comes to see it, are watching us have an insane amount of fun.

Photo from Bad Hat Theatre's production of Alice in Wonderland, during a musical number. The White Rabbit is playing the melodica, while Alice is standing on her desk, presumably singing a song.

That sounds genius. I think anybody listening after that description would want to run out and see this show.

Because you’ve talked about lyrics, are there some lyrics that you can share with us that capture the theme of your show?

I love all of the lyrics of this show. The first lyrics of the show are always really important. What is the first thing we get to hear? The first thing we hear in our show is the clock ticking, giving the audience a sense that something’s gonna happen. But the first thing that Alice sings is “I can’t help but wonder why don’t others wonder too?” It’s this big ringing question in her of, “I can’t stop my brain from being curious about everything.” Why is it called noon and also called 12 o’clock? Why don’t the other times have names? And why don’t we say we tuck our pants into our shirts instead of our shirts into our pants? She sees things and she has these branches of questions that come off of it. Our proposal is that this is true for everyone. We’ve just trained ourselves not to ask them. We’ve gotten really practiced at it and we need to unpractice it.

That’s terrific. It’s very expressive of what you’ve all been talking about. Is there a song that people have latched on to that they sing on the way out?

There are a lot of styles in the show so depending on what you’re into, you might latch on to something different. The Queen song where we first meet the Red Queen, it’s the Red Queen in our version, and the song starts, “What’s it gonna be? What’s it gonna be Alice? Since you gotta be, what’s it gonna be Alice? You could be a queen, you could be a queen, Alice. You could be free, you could be a queen.” It’s this hip hoppy song that really gets stuck in people’s heads.

Two of my favorite numbers are the opening number, which we call “Curious,” and the closing number, which we call “Questions”. They book end the show really well and they’re two sides of the same coin. Alice starts in a place where she is curious, and you’d almost think the natural place to end a show would be “Answers”. But it’s not. It’s “Questions”. The show ends with this open-door question mark with Alice inviting her class and the audience to not actually answer those questions and to remain in that curious place. There’s a recurring line in the first song, “I’m not curious, I’m not interested/It doesn’t matter/It doesn’t even matter.” It’s Alice talking to herself to try and beat away that curiosity but by the end of the show, she’s embraced it. It’s actually after a run-in with the Caterpillar, who tells her that you don’t need those answers and you don’t need to figure out who you are until you aren’t who you were, then you are who you are and that changes you will learn,” is a lyric the Caterpillar sings and by the end of the show, that final song starts, “Do you have a question? Go ahead and ask it.” That’s the note we leave the audience on.

The White Rabbit and the Red Queen from Bad Hat Theatre's on-stage play production of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

That’s very powerful. I really like that. You guys have worked on a lot of fantasy with Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland and I know you have a Chronicles of Narnia story coming up. Why do you think certain stories or music can stand the test of time? Especially these fantasy stories?

These three stories 100% spoke to the times they were written in but they are universal in terms of the mirror they put up to society. It creates a beautiful canvas for a few reasons. The first is recognition. People know when they go into Alice in Wonderland, they’re going to experience the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar, and the Queen of Hearts. So you can take that and subvert it. You can really ask the audience to see those characters and those moments in different lights and reflect on their own lives in that way.

I also think one of the reasons these fantasies especially endure way longer than contemporary stories is because technology is not as prominent a factor in those stories. Technology in the sense of swords and shields or in the sense of clocks, absolutely. But these aren’t people sitting on their cell phones or their laptops. There’s a universality to it because it is not rooted in time. Even though Narnia is set post-World War II, it’s also in a different world and in a different time. Even though Alice was written in the 1860s, you can translate it because Wonderland is out of time and place, similar to Neverland in Peter Pan, which was written in the early 1900s. With each story, you’re transported away from regular life.

As Victor said, fantasy allows you to imagine a multitude of life experiences and a multitude of timelines in the same human experience. I love how Star Wars phrases it, they start everything with “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” To us, it looks like the future but Star Wars is technically set in the past, just in a different galaxy. Those types of worlds, they have no timeline and they exist in a different dimension.

Stories last because the human experience hasn’t changed that much. Since the beginning of time, we were all these little biological beings who have this innate sense of love and then we’re at war all the time. So being a human is this weird little equation of the amount of time I have and the love I need to feel or give, and what to do with that love in the amount of time I have. I think that’s been true of the human experience forever and that’s never going to change. Pop culture references, history, politics, and our values as people do change but when you set a story in a fantasy world, you take it outside of that stuff. You take it outside of time, but the fundamentals of being a human are going to be the same no matter what dimension or period you’re in.

I agree. I think these universal truths and emotions bind humanity and the stories reflect that. It doesn’t matter when they were written because, at its essence, it’s about the human experience. Love and reinforcing certain values that we all aspire to is evoked over and over again in these stories and it doesn’t matter what era you’re in because you’re telling that same universal truth.

When in your life you interact with a specific piece of art also matters as well. We may have seen Alice as a Disney film when we were young or we read the book. I read Peter Pan in grade 11 and I remember going, “Oh my god, this is the story for me right now in this moment of my life.” And then I read it again and again. I think of each person as a tuning fork and we each have a note. Then when you pick up a piece of art, whether you listen to a song, look at a painting, or read a book at a different age of your life, it goes in harmony with that tune, your pitch, in that moment of your life in a different way than it will when you’re in your 60s or when you were five years old. The spirit behind all our shows is inspired by the idea that we can present this piece of art and it’s going to be in harmony with people of different ages throughout the audience in different ways but everyone is going to blend and make a chord together.

That’s the whole reason that when stories enter the public domain, folks like us take those and reimagine them to be relevant for a contemporary audience.

I find it interesting how many times we’ve used “down the rabbit hole” today or you said, “Oh, I’m gonna use that pond again.” I don’t know if people realize that Alice in Wonderland is literally the most quoted book in the world, except for the Bible. By far, “down the rabbit hole” is Lewis Carroll’s biggest contribution to the English language, and most of the time we use that metaphor to mean a time suck of some sort. But we also use it to mean a guilty pleasure. “I’m down the rabbit hole of whatever show you’re watching.” So, what rabbit holes of guilty pleasures do you enjoy separately from your work at Bad Hats?

I’m in a nature rabbit hole. I’m very fortunate that my family has a little cottage out in the Kawartha Lakes and it feels like a rabbit hole. You’re right about this “down the rabbit hole” thing. It’s something we all say all the time, and it feels like you’re down a thought loop. You’re stuck in a hole that you need to somehow find a way out of. But it’s interesting that in all three stories we’re adapting, they all go through a magical portal at some point. This is common in a lot of stories but in Peter Pan, Peter takes the Darling children out the window and they end up in Neverland. In Alice, they obviously go down a rabbit hole and end up in Wonderland. In Chronicles of Narnia, they walk through a wardrobe and end up in Narnia. Anyway, my rabbit hole is the woods, escaping the city of Toronto and disappearing into this magical place I’m in.

That’s great. Very true to the original.

I was actually counting earlier and by the time you mentioned how many times we’d said down the rabbit hole, the count was six. I feel like you should have a counter on the podcast because I’m sure this happens every time you interview anyone. But I don’t know if I could pinpoint one exact thing. I’ve been going on this pretty fantastic journey through British panel shows. It’s comedians on really inane talk shows that are all just about playing stupid games together or who’s lying or doing trivia because they love pub quizzes and trivia. You wouldn’t think it’s that entertaining but it’s that British wry humor and there’s a sort of a circuit so you see them go from one show to another and you kind of follow your favorite ones. I’ve honestly found a guilty pleasure in watching all of these shows, Would I Lie to You?, QI, 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, and Taskmaster.

That’s definitely a rabbit hole and you have a rabbit picture on your wall. So you’re really hitting the theme heavily.

My answer is pretty boring. I’ve been knocked down a puzzle rabbit hole for the last year. I just can’t stop doing puzzles. It’s funny that you said things that aren’t Bad Hats and the sad truth is that most of my time is spent working at Bad Hats or for other companies I freelance for so one of the only things I can do to stop myself from working is to sit down and have to go, “Where does this line or match up with another line?” It’s just a busy thing for my fingers and my brain. Often another positive but unfortunate result of that is it allows enough space in my brain for new thoughts to come in and I get back up and get to my computer and I start writing other things. So, it’s a breeding ground for all kinds of stuff.

Two people holding umbrellas, and dancing upon a multi-colored circle. From the on-stage play: Alice in Wonderland by Bad Hat Theatre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

I always ask this question and, as you guys are all performers who have done Alice, it’s probably going to be much easier for you. But, if you were a character from Alice in Wonderland, would you be, and what part of your personality is best reflected in that character?

I relate pretty hard to the characters I play in the show. My primary character is Tweedle Dee, opposite Landon’s, Tweedle Dum. I relate in the sense that those two characters represent our relationship really well which is just playing off each other and constant tomfoolery. It feels like I get to run around in a playground that I built with my best friends. It feels very true to my specific relationship with Landon. If I was a character in Wonderland, it’s hard to say. On different days it’s different people. Sometimes I feel like I get a bit White Knight-ish. But I do really relate to the characters in the show, there’s a reason we kind of wrote them for ourselves.

I think what makes these characters in the book, not just in our version, but in the book so relatable is that none of them feel like full people. They all feel like aspects of all of us. Like Fiona said, on different days, I probably relate more to different ones. We played Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, who, in our version, are constantly saying the phrase, “Let’s go!”. They’re these two characters who have a positive outlook on everything and are really jacked up on learning stuff. They’re the first people in our version who Alice stumbles upon who aren’t telling her what she should do and how she has to do something. They’re open to anything that can happen and they think, “Let’s go learn a thing, and let’s go on an adventure.” I think Fiona and I, as artists and as creators, on the days where we get a little too cerebral, and we’re looking for the answers, and we’re looking at the fear, you’ve got to adopt that Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum, attitude of, “I don’t know the answer, but let’s go look that place.” We also play the Mad Hatter and the March Hare opposite each other. There’s sort of this duo-ship that we get to play with.

I would say, I want to be the Caterpillar but I think I’m often Alice, living in this place of questions and dealing with the anxiety that that place can cause. But I would want to be the caterpillar who, like Alice, is living in a place of questions, but is so at peace with not having the answers.

I think if you want to hit it on the head, White Knight was my first response. But it’s funny because there’s the original book and then there’s the adaptation we’ve done. Your listeners don’t necessarily know the adaptation we’ve done but Fiona has fused Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in a lot of ways. So Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum are in our version of Alice, even though it’s not in the original adventures, we’ve combined them in that way as well. It’s almost hard for me to say because I feel now I’ve experienced this stage version more than I’ve experienced the book. So, my perception of reality is a bit skewed in that sense, but I do see parallels between myself and both the White Knight and the Dodo. I also relate to the Mad Hatter as portrayed in our show. The concept behind it is Alice stumbles into a dinner party and it’s all adults talking. It’s the idea of what someone younger might feel like witnessing the most inane adult conversation.

“How are you? I’m busy. Oh, me too. So busy. So busy. Isn’t that hard? Oh, it’s so hard.” Just complete nonsense as she’s trying to chime in and they go, “Why don’t you sit here at the kids’ table and they continue with their inane banter. I’ve become that a little bit of my life. I send Fiona memes a lot of being like, “How are you?” “Busy, busy.” And she’s like, “This is just art imitating life imitating art imitating life. So those three are my go-to.

Those were excellent answers and it’s been such a pleasure chatting with you. I’m going to say that my takeaway is the creative energy the three of you have. There’s a synergy to what you’re trying to accomplish that comes through. It’s a really beautiful thing to see and to witness and listen to. I think my audience is going to enjoy this episode immensely and I know that they’re all going to want to see your show whether it’s in person or if you put it on film one day, we all hope to see your Alice in Wonderland.

Thanks so much for having us on. It’s such a delight to get to go back and think about the source material since we’ve lived with it as an adaptation for so long. It’s such a great universe to get to play in and we’re really lucky to have gotten to go there and that people liked what we did in the sandbox of Wonderland. I do hope your audiences can find their way to Toronto in the winter to see it at the Soulpepper Theatre in the Distillery District. If not, I have a hunch it will be around for years to come in different locations. So, look out for us.

It is great to get back to the source material. I haven’t thought about this for a long time. I have a newfound appreciation for one of the babies I made. So, thanks for giving that to us, Frank. And thanks for having us.

FB Enjoy your rabbit holes and thanks again.

Photo of Bad Hats Theatre ensemble cast for their production of Alice in Wonderland. 9 cast members are standing on a stage, in costume, looking through window pane frames. 3 members of the cast are holding musical instruments, including a bass guitar, a melodica and a cajon.

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All Things Alice: Interview with Curtis Clark (Part Two)

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 the pop culture zeitgeist. As an author that 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?”

It is my great pleasure to have Curtis Clark join me as my guest! Read on to explore part two of our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community!

You’ve had to learn the art of pitching so instead of writing all these things on spec you can take that next idea now that you have some doors to knock on and some folks to talk to.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. When I first became a writer, I didn’t even think about pitching. I’m not a performer. Then I go to San Diego Comic-Con with you and I’m watching you drop into this well-polished pitch with strangers who are just walking up to your booth and in 15 seconds they know what the world is. I was like, “Well, shit, now I gotta learn how to do that.”

I was pitching Amazon the day the strike happened. We were doing it over Zoom. I would prefer to go in a room and shoot the shit like you and I are now, find something to riff back and forth on, get excited, get the notes, get out, and go to town. That’s not the way it is anymore. Now it’s over Zoom, they’re on mute and they’re gonna sit there for 30 minutes, nod their head and you’re gonna hope they’re not reading their email. It sucks. But you have to do it.

It’s a lot harder to connect personally, because of the lack of proximity to each other and feeling that transference of energy that goes back and forth in a pitch, especially when it starts going well, and you’re building that momentum.

My reps will send me the mandates the studios send out, “We’re looking for this, this, and that. By the time you get to them, they don’t want that shit anymore. Honestly, where I’m at now with the way that I do development, I don’t even think about the market. You can’t time the market. You’re not going to be there when the market wants what it wants right now anyway, and so you’re almost better off trying to develop what’s not in the marketplace or what the markets aren’t buying. By the time you’re ready to go out with a project, it literally could be a year or two from when you conceived of it. Who knows what they’re gonna want? Everyone wanted Ted Lasso last buying season. Guess what? A bazillion Ted Lasso’s hit the market. So, if you’re going with Ted Lasso next year, you’re dead. It’s not gonna happen.

Image of the coaching staff from the Apple TV+ series: Ted Lasso. With characters left to right: Coach Beard, (Brendan Hunt), Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) and Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein).

But in five years, it might be perfect timing. Your script, Run, could fall right into place. It’s unknowable.

I have a project right now that is a deep-cover espionage story set within the Alt-Right. It’s already a tough subject matter. It’s a limited series. The script is great. Probably the best writing I’ve ever done. It hasn’t left the shelf because the timing is not good. January 6 is still in everybody’s mind.

It’s too close.

But by the time it got made it would be two or three years from now. So, who knows? It’s so tough that way. For me, the feeling of it being such a strong sample is that even if it doesn’t sell, it’s going to do good things for me. Well, I don’t want to hear that when we’re not able to send the script out. So, you’re telling me I have this possible golden ticket in this drawer, but “Hey, just keep it in your wallet for a little bit longer, pal.”

Well, isn’t that why you’re writing a graphic novel? Tell me what your what you’re working on.

There are two things I’m working on right now. One is this graphic novel called Ender’s that I co-created with this guy named Nathan Reed. It’s essentially about contract killers for the dead. It’s about this guy named Ender Endless and he’s given a second chance by Death, which is more of an entity and not a person. Death isn’t good or bad death, it’s a construct. So, they go around the world and they end Wayward Souls, people whose souls refuse to leave Earth because they were wronged or their lives were unjustly taken. The job of Ender is to either satisfy the Wayward Soul by being possessed by them and empowered, then go and take care of the guy who unjustly killed them. Or if that soul festers too long on Earth, they’ll manifest in flesh as monsters. They’re ticking time bombs and the whole point is they gotta keep Death’s books clean. Death doesn’t care if they go up or down river, just as long as there aren’t too many of these Wayward Souls on Earth because then a living death could happen where the dead rise. The story isn’t about a zombie apocalypse. That’s the White Walkers of the story. It follows Ender Endless and the discovery of who he was because he has no memories from his life.

I love the tone of comic books because you get action and you get quippiness, and you get funny stuff. But with the modern indie books and the movement that comics have been on in the last 30 years, the writing’s gotten so much better. It’s TV-quality writing. You get to do a lot of drama. We’re talking to an artist who was nominated for a Hugo and we like him because my biggest thing is how well the artist gets their characters to act. He has a traditional style, but his characters are very expressive. I love expression in comics because it’s fun. So hopefully we can get him. I’ve written the first two issues and I’m gonna write three more on the contract. Then, if it’s successful, I’ll probably write more of it.

So, you’re doing individual issues, you’re going to release those first, in very traditional terms, 23-26 pages?

We’re doing it the way Image does it because that’s the publisher we want to approach. You did the first Hatter comic through Image. It’s creator-owned so we’ll get to keep the immediate rights to it. The idea would be to single issue publish the first five issues and then Image would collect it as a trade paperback and sell it that way. That’s how they make their money. That’s the route we want to go. But we have to get an artist on board and we’ll do the first five pages with the couple of scripts, and then we’ll talk to publishers that way. We’re not going to spend all the money doing the art for all five books if we don’t have a publisher.

Part of the pivot is because I couldn’t sell that in Hollywood if there wasn’t a comic book first. The market is too risk-averse. If you have original ideas, you’ve gotta go to a different medium first. It’s the same reason I’m writing a novel now. If I were to write that as a spec script, there’s no way in hell it’d get made as a $100-120 million epic that’s not based on anything. So, I have to write it as a book.

But at the same time, it’s deeply satisfying to write and create something and have it be a thing, whether it’s a book or a comic book. If it turns into a movie, that’s great. But, when I wrote The Looking Glass Wars, I was like, “Okay, if this could just be a book, and certainly the first comic, will people even look at this?” Once I got Ben Templesmith for the first comic, I thought, “Oh, people will see it and want to check it out because of Ben Templesmith.” It’s similar to Hollywood. But the thing I realized that was so satisfying is, no matter what happened, I haven’t made anything out of The Looking Glass Wars and it’s been 20 years, but I don’t care. I love the world and the sandbox I play in every day.

Book cover for Frank Beddor's "Hatter M: Far From Wonder, Volume One" with co-authors: Liz Cavalier, Ben Templesmith, and Sami Makkonen. The main character is standing in an archway, throwing his blade-rimmed hat into a brawl between police and workers.

That’s the thing for me, especially for the first book, that it’s just gonna be me and the audience. I have to get a publisher in place. My reps and I are putting the submission together. I’ve written the first 20,000 words, the first five chapters, and there’s a prologue. I’ve had the prose evaluated – it walks and talks like a book and it’s done pretty well, in terms of the quality of the writing. But the thing I’m excited about is that it’s not going to take 150 people and $600 million. It’s not even going to require the input costs of a graphic novel.

I just wrote a blog post today about the editor, Cally Poplak whom I met 20 years ago when Egmont in the UK published my book. I was really struck by her editorial letter, which was incredibly extensive. She said she had the pruning pencil, and she had something for all 358 pages of the book. It was completely daunting and whenever I go to schools, I show some of the pages. It’s the only time the English teachers get excited.

For me, it goes back to that unicorn thing. When I first read Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” I assumed that the book went from his mouth to the page. You often don’t think about the role an editor has in getting the story to that place. So that gave me confidence, knowing that I don’t have to be perfect.

Book Cover for Frank Herbert's "Dune", featuring a cartoonish night sky, with 2 moons and multiple waves of sandy dunes in red, yellow and orange hues.

But you mentioned Frank Herbert and basically, all people named Frank who write are pretty natural and don’t have to work that hard at it.

And all people named Curtis are donkeys. But with editors, they’re not trying to do what writers do when they read, which is, “This is what I would have done.” They’re trying to make it work.

My editor said, “This is your book, and if you don’t want to take this on, don’t take this on. These are really suggestions.” She was so smart in giving me ownership and having great editorial advice and ideas but never losing the thread that this was my book.

It’s way different than Hollywood.

That’s the whole point. It’s not just about writing a book so I can get a $150 million movie made. It’s writing a book because it’s an amazing experience and it’s mine. No matter what happens, it comes from my mind and my imagination. Then if what was in your head translates to the reader, and the reader tells you, that will blow your mind. Then they dressed up as characters and then they got tattoos and you’re like, “Okay, how did that happen?”

I have one character in the book that if anybody gets a tattoo, I know exactly who it will be. But I can’t spoil that character because he’s fun. But I agree with everything you’re saying. It’s the most fun writing, in some ways, that I’ve ever had because I’m not thinking about anyone other than myself. Whereas when you’re writing a comic, you’re thinking of the artists. When you’re writing for television or film, you’re thinking about the executives and a million other things you don’t want to think about, but you have to.

I had this discussion with my friend Brian Hanson, who has an MFA and has directed movies. I was like, “I have an unpopular opinion, I actually think prose is easier than screenwriting.” He goes, “You’re out of your mind.” But I said, “No when you’re writing prose, you get to do all the jobs. You’re the sound designer, you’re the actor, you’re the director, you’re the writer. You get to write all the senses. The issue with screenwriting is people overwrite way too much because they’re not used to the economy of words. It puts you in a box. It was liberating to do prose. I’m not saying I’m great at it, but I had a great time doing it. Also, the way you can get yourself out of trouble and make a scene work is so much different because you have the character’s thoughts, whereas with a screenplay, absolutely not, unless you do a voiceover.

As you said earlier, all three, prose, screenwriting, and comic books are very different. All three require a different skill set. I would imagine that when you finish this book and you’re on your fourth book, you’ll look back at that first book and go, “Wow, I could have done such a better job.” I certainly feel that way. But you’re in the moment and you have the skill set that you have and you have the imaginative power that you have. You create the thing, you put it out there, and you hope people receive it in the way that you intended.

It’s called Paragons, but I don’t know when it’ll come out.

And you’ve written 20,000 pages and tell us, is it Y.A., is it adult?

It’s the older end of Y.A. Ages 14-17.

How many pages? What are you thinking for word count?

It’ll probably be close to 100,000 words. I know a lot of Y.A. is around 80,000 words but for a lot of Science Fiction Fantasy, you tack on some words because of the world-building. So, I’m shooting for somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 words.

Yeah, I’d say 80,000 words is a very good mark.

We had a conversation about this book and I still take some of the things you said to me and have built them into how I’m building the world in terms of the age of the protagonist and making sure that all of the “good stuff,” is in the first book, meaning you only have one chance to hook them. I’m trying to be as aware as I can be from a seasoned writer’s perspective and knowing what I know from being in Hollywood, but to your point, this is the first time I’ve written a novel.

It really falls on the prose. With a screenplay, you can have somebody rewrite it. With comics, the art can be the thing that shines and people will buy it. But with prose, it’s absolutely the words on the page.

I wrote a test chapter because I was worried about if I could even do it. I was having full-blown impostor syndrome because I’ve done screenwriting and that translates pretty easily to comic books, but prose is a different animal. So, I did the first chapter and the feedback was, “What’s gonna happen next?” I thought that was a sign I should write what happens next.

That’s very funny because my editor said to me, “Frank, you’ve clearly done all of the research. You clearly have this whole world in your head. You clearly know what their backstory is. But the readers don’t really care. They only want to know about what happens next.” That one stung a little bit.

It’s like the City of Gods pilot I wrote. There was so much, “Check out all this cool stuff in this world that I’m going to do.” Then the feedback was, “Hey, man, that’s exposition.”

I thought that was a really cool world. You might want to revisit that.

I’ve thought about it. But the thing I got was that Greek mythology is a little dusty. That’s the word they like to say. Then the next thing you know, Dan Harmon is doing a Greek gods adult comedy.

It depends on who’s writing it. When Frank Scott did The Queen’s Gambit and started with the young girl version for the entire pilot and then cut ahead in the second episode, it was a revelation. “Oh, you can do that?! I’m gonna revisit The Looking Glass Wars.”

Book Cover for "Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins. Image features the title and author on a black background with a golden sparrow holding a shield and arrow in an attack formation.

Meanwhile, Alyss starts when she’s a kid and then becomes a teenager. The one thing I’ll say about the transition from screenwriting to prose that I do think is somewhat beneficial is the knowledge of structure. You were the one who sent me The Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins is a screenwriter and every single one of those chapters is – cliffhangers like hell. So, of course, the reader is compelled to read the next chapter. Next thing you know, you’ve read the book in three days. Anytime someone tells you, I read this book in three days, you think, “Oh, that’s good.” Hopefully, I’ll be successful in baking that into my style, where, because of my screenwriting background, it’s well-paced with good cliffhangers.

I think people describe my book, the people that liked it anyway, as being very cinematic as well as a page-turner, which was really important. It’s something I focused on because, with middle-grade kids or young adults it’s so important to engage them and to continue that engagement.

My biggest concern with what I’m doing with this book is that I may have aged up too much. I’ll be curious to see what happens when we go to publishers. If they say, “Hey, this is written a little too old.” It’s written at about a seventh-grade reading level, which is the target reading level for casual prose, but the worry is that it’s coming from the mind of an adult too much. I’m a little worried about that part of it.

It depends on the vocabulary you’re choosing, but it’s not knowable until you put it out there. I didn’t know that there were children’s publishers, Y.A. publishers, and middle-grade publishers when I wrote The Looking Glass Wars, which is why if I had known that I wouldn’t have had a seven-year-old, 13-year-old, and 18-year-old in the same damn book. But that was the way I saw the story so I just wrote it and then I got passed on all over the place until Cally came along.

But then it became a New York Times bestseller, so I guess it proves you correct.

Thanks to my editor.

I want to talk about influences and imagination. In your bio, it says that you “spent your youth spun up in a tornado of comics, novels, films, television, and games.” In terms of your style of writing, and in terms of your choices of stories to tell, what were your top influences?

I read tons of sci-fi and fantasy: Ray Bradbury, Dune, Neuromancer, Dungeons and Dragons novels, Magic the Gathering novels, Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. I really liked this series called Coldfire Trilogy by Celia Friedman. That was a different take on fantasy because it was human beings landed on another planet and our technology didn’t work, so we’re forced to go back to a feudal situation. I like that kind of setup. Those books really inspired me, but I read them when I was a teenager. I was doing this stuff when I was five.

I have older cousins named Travis and Rob and they took me on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign at our cottage in Fife on Lake Michigan when I was like eight years old, I begged them to do it. It was amazing. I couldn’t believe I got to make a character and they were in the story. My cousin was the one telling me the story. John August, the writer, does a podcast with Craig Mazin, and someone asked him, “My kid is interested in writing. What should I do? What’s the best thing I could do?” His answer was, “Have him play Dungeons of Dragons.” You’re in charge of the story and it’s also social so your kids aren’t alone all the time. They have an audience in front of them to interact with. So, I played Dungeon and Dragons, Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, and Shadowrun, the second version, which is one of my personal favorites. I played other fantasy games like Harp and then Magic the Gathering, which is a little bit like The Looking Glass Wars because it also has fantasy elements, science fiction elements, steampunk elements, and cyberpunk elements blended together. It’s big, broad worlds that go between different planes of existence. Those were the big influences.

In terms of comics, I grew up reading my older brother Peter’s comics, and God, I got lucky. That was the Chris Claremont X-Men run, which is the Dark Phoenix Saga and The Morlocks. I got to read a bunch of that stuff, which really affected me. Zany books like Groo the Wanderer and the Marvel What the–?! books. I read a bunch of really bad comics in the 90s. It wasn’t a great time for comics, to a degree. But that’s where it all came from.

Marvel Comics "X Men" by Stan Lee. This is the 30th anniversary of the Fantastic Four cover, featuring virtually every X-Men Character that existed at the time.

So, a serious nerd-dom coming out of farm life in Michigan where you got inspired because you’re reading Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons novels alongside some of the great sci-fi writers in history.

I’m not equating them as being as good.

But you can go back and forth. That’s a love of it. That’s a love of the world creation aspect of it.

There are some great stories out there. Final Fantasy VII has a storyline that follows a character named Cloud Strife and the bad guy’s name is Sephiroth. It’s this really crazy epic about cloning but when I was playing that game, when I was 10-11 years old, I’d never seen this type of story before. Even though maybe there was a better version of that story somewhere else, it got to me through games. You look at all the stuff that’s being made in television now and you can see all of these people were influenced by their childhoods in the 80s and 90s. Some of that is through gaming. Look at how successful gaming movies have become.

Video Game Cover Art for Final Fantasy VII. Originally released on Playstation 2. White background of a guy holding a large sword, looking towards a castle in the far distance.

Finally, there are writers who understand how gamers see the worlds they interact with.

It took a while for the industry to take those stories seriously but, moving forward, that’s going to be a huge part of movies because the gaming industry makes more money than movies do.

Which is why I think Netflix is trying to get into the game business and probably Amazon as well, but it’s a different animal. I think they will have a hard time. Again, it comes down to creators who have unique visions. I gotta give it to Warner Brothers and Mattel for creating Barbie and letting Greta Gerwig run with that thing, make it her own, and transform the business. It’s pretty remarkable to have that movie alongside Oppenheimer.

The thing about Oppenheimer is, you have to go see Christopher Nolan movies because he’s a writer/director and a lot of his films are original. I know, Oppenheimer is historical, but I’ll go see any Christopher Nolan movie because it’s creator-owned, based on his original idea. But with Barbie, what a bet. Now hopefully, they realize it’s not a bad way to do it. Look at Phil Lord and Chris Miller, though. They were probably the only ones who had that take on The Lego Movie, where at the end, you find out the kid was playing with the dad’s Legos. Holy shit, you’re telling me that’s what’s been going on the entire time!? That was all in a kid’s mind. I’ve watched my son, who’s five years old, do the same thing. He’s basically doing The Lego Movie. Lord and Miller had the smartest take you ever could have had on that movie.

Still image of hand-drawn characters from "Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse" with Miles Morales as the main focal point of the image.

That was genius. I love Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Those two movies, the way they were expanding the Spider-Verse was really inspiring. That’s something I wanted to just touch on a little bit because I’m looking to refresh and reset The Looking Glass Wars and we’ve had a lot of conversations about time travel and how time travel could play itself in this world. I had a template for the stories that I wanted to create first and then the last two were with you, Crossfire and Underfire. Now that there’s been a few years I’ve started thinking about time travel and multiple dimensions and the multiverse, and how I might be able to reintroduce Hatter through a portal that’s not just into the time in which he’s living but fractures off into different times and different storylines.

How do you see time travel in fiction, in graphic novels, or in movies? What is your take on the most effective way to use time travel in storytelling?

The answer is very carefully because it’s an absolute can of worms. They can do something to the stakes, which you see in the Marvel movies, for example. Now, suddenly, “What really matters?” When you do time travel, you have to create a set of rules that don’t undermine your stakes, and you have to create a set of rules that, when you’re done with time travel, you’re done with time travel. Because if it’s always there, nothing matters. You have to create a moment in time in your world, it can be for 10-15 years, but you have to know before you start how you’re going to button it up correctly because nothing is worse than when time travel comes in and jumps the shark.

If done correctly, it’s great. My favorite time travel thing is in Looper when Bruce Willis says to Joseph Gordon Levitt “I don’t want to sit here and talk about fucking time travel! We’re gonna be here with abacuses and whiteboards.” That’s the whole point. The second you start to explain time travel, some nerd like me will go, “No, I don’t think so. This actually doesn’t work.” You need to use it in a fun way. Where it’s like, “Hey, we’re doing time travel. Okay? But we’re not doing this forever and the things that you’ve watched before still matter.”

Otherwise, it’s like the first season of Westworld in which they just kept killing these people and the people kept coming back. Why do we even care? It’s the same reason why they finally have stopped bringing Jean Grey back for a while in X-Men. She’s gonna die, but it doesn’t matter and she’s just gonna come back. It’s like a soap opera that way. You have to be really, really careful with the way you do it because your audience deserves that the things they read before still matter,

That is why I like Quantum Leap, Doctor Who, or 12 Monkeys. All three of those did a really good job in terms of using the time travel device to keep the stakes fresh and allow an expansion of the story. Then it’s about how clever you are inside of the device of the time travel.

You introduced all the Card Soldiers characters in Crossfire and Underfire, where did you get the inspiration for those? You have some really great characters in there.

We talked a little bit about G.I. Joe, but honestly, I really viewed it like a game. So, to me, it’s a class system. In Dungeons and Dragons there’s knights, wizards and sorcerers, rogues, and that kind of thing. So, we have a pickpocket. We have an explosives expert. A lot of times, when you’re dealing with a Dirty Dozen-type scenario, these people are going to have, at least for the first story, a dominant personality tick, because you’re not going to get the underbelly of all of them. We don’t know why Gamble loves explosives. We don’t know why Engels was in jail. We didn’t why the character Rue, who didn’t make the team, was a pickpocket.

Character art by Curtis Clark, done for Frank Beddor's graphic novel and book series: "The Looking Glass Wars". This image features 7 of the characters, hand-drawn on white paper.

One of the things that we talked about before was my favorite character that I’ve made for your world, and Ovid is probably the one, but there’s this guy named Yonnish, who’s a linguistics expert in the House of Cards. I’m weirdly fascinated by that guy. No idea what he is. He’s just a throwaway gag in the book but I’m thinking, “What if that guy’s the hero of our story?” What if he goes to Morgavia and gets all the cultural norms and saves the day?

That’s funny that you say that because there are two characters in The Looking Glass Wars, two Wonderlanders. They fall into the Pool of Tears, never to be heard from again. I was like, “Oh, I should write a story about those two.”

A lot of times I feel in the stories I’ve told there’s a big canvas and lots of rules and lots of logic that has to get dealt with to keep the story moving. I like those things, but those are there already, now I can drop into the personal, internal stakes and find ways to externalize those.

Speaking of all these other characters, whatever happened with Hellia?

That’s a very good question. It’s a book that was not released so I’m not opposed to talking about it. That has a big-time travel aspect of it, as well, because basically, it turns out that Redd had a child, Hellia, that she thought she had lost in childbirth. We meet Hellia at 18 and she does not know she’s the heir to Redd and that if Alyss had never come back, she would be ruling Wonderland. At the same time that’s happening, she’s starting to come into these powers. It’s her story of figuring out how she can send somebody back in time to kill or trap Hatter and Alyss in our world so the outcome of her life will be different.

It’s The Terminator.

It is. I finished the book and I’ve been trying to decide what to do with it. There’s a lot of rewriting that has to happen. But it’s a cool idea. You’re taking the antagonist and turning her into a protagonist by the end or at least you’re showing the evolution.

It’s one of those great antagonistic motivations, where, in her mind, she believes she’s right.

To a degree, she is right. Her mother was not a good person. But everybody is the hero of their own story, and she’s the hero of her own story. Curtis, thanks a lot for forcing me to divulge a storyline that I’ve been sitting on for a very long time.

Tell me what you hope to do next. I hear the CEOs are talking and Netflix is getting involved in trying to resolve this strike. So, fingers crossed that we’ll be out there pitching and complaining about executives but making stuff happen. In the meantime, I’m gonna be working on some graphic novels. I know you are. Are you writing any television specs or pilots to be ready for when the strike’s over?

I’m focusing on the non-Hollywood stuff right now. I have four Hollywood projects that are all gonna go back live again after the strike. I have an adult animated comedy called “Down Here” that I have with this company called Mindshow. That was the one I was pitching to Amazon the day the strike happened. We’ll finish up all those pitches. I have the hour-long drama set within the Alt-Right. I have a Hallmark Christmas pitch, I never thought I’d say that, but it doesn’t have to be Hallmark. I won’t pitch it here but it’s a fun idea.

But Hallmark is great because they produce a lot of movies. I have a lot of friends who go in for the quick paycheck. There’s a quick turnaround. They have a set template for what they want. They do a lot of holiday movies.

Then I have the crime drama as well, which we were already talking to investors and distributors about, that we’re trying to shoot back in Michigan. So, I have all that stuff going on. But also, the industry is so upside down right now, that I don’t really want to invest my time on something like that until I know what I’m looking at. So, it’s Enders, it’s the graphic novel that hopefully we’ll have packaged up and ready to go to publishers with the artist in tow and I’ll finish the other three remaining scripts. That will be on the front burner and then also the novel Paragons as well. I also have a kids’ show because I have children. I think everybody tries their hand at a kid show once they have kids. But I want to try my hand at some of the non-Hollywood stuff just because Hollywood is frustrating.

The stuff you can actually get produced and share is deeply satisfying.

I find it really interesting how you’ve turned your childhood and your experience in pop culture into a job. I think a lot of folks who are artistic, whether it’s drawing or writing, they’re like your dad, “You’ll be back in two weeks. How do I make a living?” There are so many ways, ultimately, to make a living and a lot of what this podcast has to say is about that.

When I say All Things, Alice, I think now it’s All Things Imagination, and Alice is a muse for all of us. Many of us, in some way or another, are all just following, running, hoping to, you know, create our own rabbit hole and our own Wonderland.

The thing with Alice in Wonderland is Lewis Carroll kind of got there first. All the stuff that I was playing with and reading as a kid, it’s all influenced by Lewis Carroll. It’s all about the book from 1865. The entire fantasy genre and most of the children’s genre was changed forever by that book. I don’t know if he did it first, but he made it popular.

Well, on that, thank you. And we’ll talk soon, my friend. Great chatting later.

Sounds good. Thanks for having me, Frank.

Check out Part 1 of Frank’s interview with Curtis!

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All Things Alice: Interview with Curtis Clark

It is my great pleasure to have Curtis Clark 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. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.

Frank Beddor

Curtis Clark. Welcome to the show. It’s always a pleasure to chat with you, especially about story and creativity.

I am very interested in how a man who is as creative as you are – writing television shows, comic books, movies, games – made his way from a farm in the Midwest to Hollywood. Were you always a very creative kid? You knew you didn’t want to be on the farm?

Curtis Clark

You hit the nail on the head there. I have two older brothers, six and four years older, and because of that I was constantly being introduced to films that were probably not appropriate for me at that age. I was watching Terminator when I was six. I watched a movie called Black Rain, which had a decapitation scene in it, when I was not old enough to be doing that.

At the same time, my brothers were working on the farm and I just couldn’t keep up with them. I think you go one of two ways in those situations. You either get really good at that thing because you have older role models, or you get so frustrated because you can’t keep up that you do the exact opposite. I just didn’t have the same level of interest because everybody in my family was doing it and they were better at it than I was. Also, I’m the third son, so I think for my father, there was less pressure to make sure that I was also going to be a farmer. So eventually I went the opposite way. As much as I love and respect the farm, I knew it was not going to be my future.

Image of Curtis Clark, standing in a film studio behind a stand with 2 rolls of duct tape hanging from it.

Set the scene for me in terms of a dinner conversation with your parents and your brothers when you have the life on a farm. Then, this creativity, is it coming from mom or dad, both of them? Who nurtured it?

Probably my older brother Peter the most, but I’ve also had the same best friends since childhood, Mark, Bryan, and Jake. They were also very nerdy like me so we were constantly bringing new things into each other’s lives. I’d be at the dinner table with my parents and brothers, and they’d be talking about the farm or whatever and I was 10,000 miles away thinking about playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends or playing Final Fantasy, or Magic the Gathering or a comic book I was in the middle of reading.

We lived a very classic 80s-90s lifestyle. It was very standard. But then, my parents got divorced when I was 11 and everything changed. Suddenly, I was bouncing between households and all of that. I brought up my childhood friends because they were constant through all of that. They’re the thing that never changed.

Did you find yourself taking solace in these games? Because you’ve mentioned games and books but with games, you’re able to really play with your friends, and talk about the game mechanics and how it works. Books are more solitary.

When I was a kid, you weren’t playing over the internet, so we were all getting together and playing a video game or Magic the Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons. My games went with me as I switched between my parents’ houses. I’d take my PlayStation and play Final Fantasy VII. I’d take my Super Nintendo so I could play Mario Kart. I’d bring whatever book I was ripping through or my binder with all my Magic cards.

Your childhood sounds like Stranger Things. I immediately flashed on those kids downstairs playing Dungeons and Dragons. Is that what it was like?

Image of 3 characters from the Netflix series: Stranger Things, playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons. The Dungeon Master is dressed in a purple wizard outfit.

100%. We had one window in our basement and we’d cover it up so it’d be pitch black and we’d play this game called the “Dark Game.” No joke, we would make it pitch black in our basement and just feel around the ground and when we found someone, we’d beat the crap out of them and run away. One time this kid named Vic Preston was in the basement and he turned all the furniture on its side. We got so weirded out because we didn’t know what we were touching and he was hanging off a bar stool and he’d dropped down on somebody and started punching them.

Oh, that is the coolest story ever!

What I’m really curious to hear from you is how you took your passion for all these pop culture mediums and how that propelled you to want to have a career in the entertainment industry.

I don’t know that I had a great plan. I was in college for public relations and I interned at a place called the Concept Farm in New York City. I was always interested in writing, but I thought writers were unicorns. They were these things that were born. I didn’t realize it was a tradecraft. I didn’t realize that it was just hard work. That was something that I had a great example of growing up, my brother Jake, my dad, and my mom, everybody worked hard.

So I go to Concept Farm and I’m on the top floor, and the floor below is where they did the creative production stuff. I’m down there one day and I’m talking to this guy and I find out he’s the guy who writes copy for the ESPN Spelling Bee commercials. And I was like, “You’ve got to be effing kidding me! This guy?!” There was nothing wrong with him but I couldn’t believe this guy was the unicorn. This doesn’t make any sense. That was the first time I realized that you just have to choose to do this thing. Writing’s always been a confluence of all of my interests. Whether it’s fantasy, science fiction, even sports, I started to realize that I’ve always gravitated to story and characters.

Playing with my cousins, John and Ben, we’d get all our G.I. Joes and do our little G.I. Joe missions. They’d have the good guys kill all the bad guys in five minutes. I’d be over on the other side, setting all these cars up in a line, like they’re moving like a Mad Max chase. The bad guys would have killed all but one of the good guys. The good guy would have captured the robot that the bad guys had and reprogrammed him and they would have fought back together. I had just seen Road Warrior so it was like 30-minute long Mad Max fan fiction.

Screenshot of a scene from Mad Max. Features a guy wearing a metal hockey mask, speaking into a loudspeaker, with an army of post-apocalyptic soldiers and their vehicles on the desert slope behind him.

So, I met this guy at the Concept Farm and was like, “Oh my God, that’s a writer. What the heck?” I graduated with my P.R. degree then turned around and got into film school at Grand Valley, which has got a decent film program. I met with this guidance counselor and he asked “Why do you want to go to film school? You already have a degree.” I said, “I want to be a writer.” He goes, “Look, you’re gonna go to school with a bunch of 18-year-olds, you’re gonna waste a bunch of money here. If you really want to try this, you should just move to Hollywood.” So, I come back out to the car and my girlfriend, now wife, asks how it went. I told her what the counselor said about Hollywood, which wasn’t even on the radar for me. We were gonna move to this town and live near my friend, Mark. It was gonna be a fun little thing. My wife asks, “Well, what are we gonna do?” I was like, “I don’t know. What should we do?” And she just goes, “Fuck it. Let’s move to Hollywood.”

No wonder you married her. Not very many girlfriends would say, “Fuck it. Let’s move to Hollywood on the whim of a writing career.”

By the way, at that point, I had written one screenplay and it was God awful. No one should ever see this thing. All your first work should be absolutely embarrassing to you once you get good enough at something. But we drove out here and got our first apartment, our monthly rent was larger than any bill we’d ever paid before, and I started out looking for PA work, background work. Eventually I got a job at a bar and settled into a routine where I’d write six to eight hours a day five days a week and work at the bar three or four days a week at night. My wife started going back to school and we built a life that way. I met you after maybe a year and somehow I got work. It was crazy. I fell on my face over and over again and got crushed by the boulder I was pushing up the hill like Sisyphus until I figured it out.

I love doing this podcast because I know you, we’ve done some great scripts and projects together, but I didn’t know the story about what your wife said and the courage that you both showed to just hit the road, make the commitment, and see what happens.

My dad thought I’d be back in two weeks. I got my first job through a Craigslist posting actually. I was a P.A. on this short film called Burying the Ex. It was my first time ever being on set, I worked 55 hours in three days for no money. I laid in an open grave, pressing up on a box like I was a person coming to life. I talked to a guy at the graveyard and distracted him so that we could do pickup shots in places we were not supposed to. The police almost put me in handcuffs because they didn’t understand why we’re outside this restaurant late at night. Then, at the end of it, they put me in the thing, because they wanted a guy in the scene who was as tall as the lead, who was John Francis Daley. Then they made me deliver a line. This all happened in the first weekend I was in L.A. All of these “only in Hollywood stories.”

What was the first line?

John Francis Daly’s character thinks that my girlfriend is this girl he’s supposed to be on a blind date with. He starts talking to her and I walk up like a jerk, which is hilarious, because I weighed like 135 pounds at the time. But I threaten him. I’m like, “Can I help you? No, no, no. Can I help you?”

You never forget the first line.

You tell the story that you were upset with me because I didn’t get right back to you after we met. I was taking my kid to a bowling birthday party and you were working at the desk. How’d you get that job, by the way, working behind the desk at a bowling alley?

I met a guy playing basketball at LA Fitness, which by the way, is a great place to meet people in Hollywood. So I met this guy and his friend worked at the bar in the bowling alley, so the friend got me a job at the front desk. I’d bring my laptop so I could write while I was behind the desk, so when you walked in you saw me editing a really horrible script and that’s how you and I connected.

At that time, I was just getting in the mindset of, “I wonder if I can find some folks that might be interested in writing these comics that I had been considering.” I remember, almost hesitating, like, “Should I really ask him? I’m just gonna ask.” So, when I asked what you were working on, and you told me, there was just something authentic. Maybe it was the Midwest vibe that I picked up on. That started the conversation and, you tell the story much better than I do, because I didn’t know what was going on in your mind until you wrote that blog for me, which was very funny.

I needed mentors. I needed access. I needed all sorts of things. I didn’t know my elbow from my ass. So, you came in and we talked back and forth and you gave me a business card. I was like, “Holy shit, a business card!”.

That’s what’s so funny to me. Just your reaction now. I remember having business cards, but no one gives out business cards anymore. It made me chuckle that the business card was the thing that ended up, as you called it, leveling up.

Business cards were my existence because there’s no ladder with this industry. Nothing makes sense. There’s no one way to do it. So when you get something tangible, when someone says, “Hey, man, call me, that is sometimes all you have to be like, “I’m not wasting my early 20s. I’m not moving away from my family who I love.”

There are tons of people who come out here to do a thing, say they’re gonna do it, and never do it. They’re here for like 10 years and they turn around and leave with nothing. It’s like the sirens in The Odyssey. It was a way for me to be like, “Hey, you’re you’re working. You’re trying.” I could talk to you know, people back home and say, “I just met so and so and I’m trying to do this thing.” The reason I was mad at you is because I dropped off a comic book I was working on at your office, which was at the Samsung building. First, the building looked like this giant castle. I’m thinking I’m going to climb the stairs to the castle because the wizard is up there. So I go up the castle stairs and I get to your office and I put my hand on the door handle, thinking “I’m gonna charm the shit out of this guy.” It’s locked. You weren’t even in the office that day. So, I had to slide the comic book underneath the door with a note like “Bowling alley guy says hi.”

Image of the old Samsung building in Los Angeles, California. Where Frank Beddor once had an office and Curtis Clark stopped by to drop off a comic book he had written.

I remember that too. “Oh, fuck, the bowling alley guy actually followed up.”

The worst part about that was I just slid it under your door and that was it. So the reason why I was getting frustrated is because early on, you’re clinging to these opportunities and I had run fast and hard in the wrong direction. Because when you’re starting out, especially, there’s so many bullshitters. This goes back to Eagle, Michigan. I grew up in a small town. My dad was a businessman, hired locals and worked with a bunch of landowners. Everything was a handshake. If you didn’t do what you said you were going to do, you were screwed because it would destroy your reputation. It could not be more different in Los Angeles. I didn’t understand that someone could lie to your face and not do what they said they were going to do.

That was shocking to me as well, because my father was exactly the same way. It still startles me. I still underestimate the need for the deep set of paperwork.

With you not getting back to me, it was probably the exact same time that a bunch of other things weren’t working out. To any young writers listening to this: That’s totally normal. Don’t be deterred. But what I did next is also totally normal. I kept following up. At one point, I told myself, no joke, that I’m not following up again. Because I think at that point, I just had other people not get back to me. But I followed up one more time and you emailed me back in like three minutes. It wasn’t like, “Hey, man, I got it. I’ll get back to you.” You said something like, “Come into my office, I might have a job for you.”

I had read your comic book and really liked it. Then I thought, “I’m gonna hire this guy. This could really work out.” Then, you came into the office, and we started chatting. Did I ask you at the time if you were a fan of Alice in Wonderland or what your introduction to Alice was or if you had any interest?

No matter what you would have asked me, I would have said yes. I don’t remember. But, at that point, I knew who you were and what you were about as best I could from the internet and from buying one of your books.

Where does Alice in Wonderland fit, if at all, in the games and books you were reading growing up? It doesn’t sound like you’re kind of story based on the action and Dungeons and Dragons. But I could be wrong.

I was aware of it. I saw the Disney cartoon. I knew the characters. I’d seen the Tom Petty music video. I was aware of its presence in pop culture but I wasn’t the type who was gonna get a Cheshire Cat tattoo.

I think we did talk about it because I could have an answer for either way. If you loved Alice, I could say you’re gonna love my book. It takes a spin on it and it tries to honor the original but carve out its own space. If you didn’t like the original or you weren’t aware of it, my book is a whole new world with jumping off places from Alice in pop culture.

Of course you have two takes, you’re a good pitch man.

The deal with the comic was you can take as much time as you need, you can pick the story, so it’s going to be your creativity. Here’s all I need. I need Hatter in the story. I need to feel like I’m into it. I had no idea that I was going to get a sports story. I certainly didn’t think I was going to get a baseball story. What piqued my interest was how you were going to introduce Hatter into a baseball story with any logic at all. But you did a very good job of him finding his way onto this team and him demanding to know where the lost princess was and the coach or one of his teammates says, “You’re gonna have plenty of time to talk to your female fans out there. Just get dressed.”

Hatter’s mistaken for some schmuck who played on a team. He looked like the right fielder.

The thing was you played into the fish out of water, but in a little bit of an awkward way for Hatter. He’s used to being this imposing figure and if anyone threatens him, he’s going to take you out. That’s the usual set up, we’re going to meet Hatter, somebody underestimates him and then he shows his skills. But in your case, you’re introducing the American pastime and he’s a fish out of water the entire time. He’s just trying to keep up. I absolutely loved it.

It was my wife’s favorite thing that I had written up until that point. She liked the end of it, where he doesn’t find her but he sees how the crowd is so into baseball and thinks, “If this can exist on Earth, maybe she is safe.” It captivated the audience’s imaginations. So, I had a little button on it that was pretty cute.

You seem to be pretty enamored with spies and heist movies because we did two heist movies together as well as the Crossfire graphic novel. I love that book so much. The cover, by Vincent Proce, is spectacular. Inside, Sami’s tone and color palette is really spectacular. You did a really great job on the paneling, and pulling out moments of action and suspense, which goes to this question that I’m asking you about heist movies and spy thrillers. Where did the inspiration come from?

The thing about them is the genre. The wonderful thing about genre film is also the thing that some people hate about it, which is that it can be somewhat formulaic. But when you can get into the meta of it, then it becomes a lot of fun. The second of the two heist films we did is, I can’t give too much away as neither of us own it, but it’s telling the audience it’s one heist film, and using all of the structure to subvert the audience because it’s actually another film. That’s what I really like about genre. We didn’t get to do as much with that in these books, because we were introducing so much stuff, but we did enough of it. The thing I really liked about the films we did was it gives you a different set of tools, because the audience has such specific expectations. It’s the type of film where they want to out think you, they want to be ahead of it. But you can trick the audience and play their expectations off them and it’s a lot of fun.

Still image from Crossfire or Under Fire graphic novel. It serves as an extension of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland universe. Written by Frank Beddor, and Curtis Clark.

What I liked about the second story we developed is the father-son aspect of it and grounding it in something very universal. It’s especially the tension between a son trying to live up to the expectation of a larger-than-life father figure who’s very good at his job.

You did a great job. You’re really good at genre. You’re also really good at world creation. Understanding your background and the games that you were inventing on your own, it’s self evident, having worked with you now, why you’re so good at that. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to work with you on Crossfire and Under Fire, there was a lot of story to get out and a lot of concepts that I wanted to set up. But the revelation of Crossfire was the character that you came up with, Ovid, who is a former milliner turned spy. We used to call him the James Bond of Wonderland.

You had done such a great job with the books, but there were a lot of pieces of Alice in Wonderland, a lot of characters that you hadn’t placed in your world yet, such as the chessmen, the house of cards, the Griffin character.At the same time, you’re also expanding to the Borderlands and Morgavia and all of these places. So to me, that was fuel on the fire. But, with comic books, you have a limited amount of real estate, so it’s challenging that way. I think each one of those chapters could have been its own book, to be honest.

I agree with you, but I also agree that it was challenging. I also agree that we probably put more in both of those books than we needed to but I found what you did successfully was dropping in on the page. With comic books, you might get the stamp of the location and then there’s the dialogue bubbles, and then you’re like, “Okay, where’s this going?” You really have to be mindful of the art and how the panels are helping communicate the story, and what’s between the panels so that it sparks the reader’s imagination and you did that really successfully.

It’s a different muscle than screenwriting. Comics are not screenplays and screenplays are not novels. All of it has to do with pacing and they all have their own limitations so it can be challenging. In the case of Crossfire, the scope, especially in the last chapter, where the invasion is happening, there’s like 10 different fronts and you’re dealing with the pawns and there’s all these different places. With Alice, you’re gonna jump from scene to scene, whereas the chapter with Ovid, it’s basically P.O.V. from him. And also, for Sami, it’s not always the easiest thing in the world to have these big macro pullback shots when you’re trying to establish so much in one static image, whereas, in a movie, you’d be panning across, and you’d be punching in on all of these things. So it’s just a different story vehicle.

What was great was, you set up the stakes. We got the stakes from Alice’s husband. We’re using Borderlands and we’re introducing the tribes, which we’re actually putting into action, which was awesome. Then we understand where Alice is at and then when you drop into Ovid, the reason that chapter is so effective is because it’s smaller, it’s character driven. It’s his relationship with somebody in our world. So you still get the balance of being in Wonderland and going back to our world. It mirrors what I did in Looking Glass Wars. Then at the end, you still pull off this epic battle that plays into when you were a kid, doing the Mad Max stuff. I’m seeing all these muscles working in this book. In Under Fire, we had a lot less real estate and, again, you did a really good job of focusing on the House of Cards, and giving us the Dirty Dozen team of card soldiers and giving them all particular specialties.

That was one of my favorite things. I thought of the House of Cards as a fantasy version of G.I. Joe. It’s not just a direct translation of G.I. Joe but the idea of them each having their own rank, number, and symbol, they clearly could be specialists. So it developed from there, the idea that you deal yourself the hand you need to win the game. That’s what the House of Cards is. The customization of that is like a good video game selection screen. That’s where it comes from. From my childhood, there was an actual G.I. Joe video game side scroller where you had five different Joe’s, and it was like, “Okay, I’m gonna use this Joe on this level and use that Joe on that level.” It just made too much sense to me that that’s what the House of Cards would be. Then when you said you wanted to do The Dirty Dozen, it was like, “Oh, yeah, let’s slap a bunch of misfits into this whole thing and go from there.”

Hand-drawn colored pencil and pen character designs for Crossfire, a sci-fi fantasy action graphic novel, comic, TV series, video game, or movie. All are holding weapons of some sort and dressed in tactical gear.

Then we started to think about all the stories that we could build out from there and it became endless, like G.I, Joe, or Magic the Gathering. The graphic novel definitely has that game mechanic too.

100%. I don’t know where the level of success with it in terms of comics would have to be, but it’s already a game in my head. It’s Magic the Gathering meets G.I. Joe. You have this paramilitary element and then you have the customization of building a deck like Magic the Gathering. That should show through with the work I did on the graphic novel. I would play that game.

The thing about working with you on this, and even in this conversation, is I get really excited. Let’s keep building this thing out. There’s such a strong story engine, and the characters, and the world creation aspects that you brought to The Looking Glass Wars really expanded the possibilities. Not just in Crossfire and Under Fire, but you also assisted me with Hatter Madigan: Ghost in the Hatbox. I was starting to think about what four year school life at the millenary would be like you just put your hand up, “I’ll run with that. I have a few ideas.”

I wrote a 30 page curriculum, freshman to senior year with two undergraduate years. The thing that’s cool about that is I did all that work, but maybe only 15-20% of it made it into the book, and a lot has changed. But that’s how it works. That’s why you do the development work. It starts to take on a life of its own.

You wrote a script called Run, which you’ve written a lot of scripts, and we’ve all written a lot that’s still in a drawer somewhere, thank God. But Run was a really great calling card for you. Why don’t you tell the listeners about that script and why it was a door opener.

When I was younger, I was looking for someone to give me some guideposts when it came to writing. Starting out, I had written some stuff that wasn’t great. I had written some stuff that was okay. I had gotten some jobs and I just worked my butt off, but I didn’t have that great sample. I was getting by on work ethic and passion but then just failing. I needed something that was professional. I needed a business card. Something that ticked all of the boxes. So I read as many science fiction features as I could find and I said, “This is going to look exactly like those.” That’s what I did on the page. That was Run. And sure enough, that ended up being the script that got me my rep. That is the script that got me working with some larger people out here.

The funny thing about it is, it’s never gone to buyers. I polished it not that long ago and cut 20 pages out, because I’m better technically now. But it was a very simple idea. It was about two androids on the run with their seven year old daughter who doesn’t know her parents aren’t human. That’s it. That’s the movie. It’s sci-fi, but it’s a family movie, a four quadrant film. It’s PG 13. It works internationally. I got close with it one time. A person who had a deal with Fox wanted Fox to buy for them but there was a competing project. It’s still a good sample, but I’ve moved beyond it in terms of being a writer.

Stay tuned Part 2 of my interview with Curtis in which we talk more Looking Glass Wars, his passion for sci-fi, and the new graphic novel he’s working on now.

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All Things Alice: Interview with Ricky Romero

It is my great pleasure to have Ricky Romero 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. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.

Title card for All Things Alice Podcast, with Frank Beddor and guest: Ricky Romero. Ricky is shown standing in front of some art he has made featuring Alice in Wonderland and The Looking Glass Wars characters: Alice, Queen Redd and The Mad Hatter.

Amazing Art Discount!

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I’m excited to have you on the show and to meet somebody that I’ve never worked with. I have had a lot of guests that I’ve worked with before and now I’m starting to branch out. I love the tone of your art. I referenced it and you thanked me and here we are.

That was an honor, man, seeing you drop that post. I saw your name and it sort of rang a bell. I was like, wait, I know this name. Oh my God. Yes! The Looking Glass Wars. How can I forget? So, I’m honored to be on.

Thank you very much. When did you pick up the books?

Probably around 2008. I read all three of them. I read the third one, ArchEnemy, right after it came out. After I’d read the first one, I was like, “I got to see what happens.” Then I sped through the rest of them.

Thank you. It’s such a nice compliment. It’s been a while since I wrote a prose book so to get a little feedback at any time, especially this long after the publication is very satisfying.

They’re a lot of fun and just really engaging. The queen that I draw a lot is, without a doubt, influenced by Queen Redd from your books.

A cartoon art print by artist, Ricky Romero. This is a colored pencil drawing of the white rabbit in a forest. Inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland book and body of literature he inspired.
Artist rendering of a playing card suit holding a spear. Made by artist, Ricky Romero. This is the 8 of hearts and is one of Queen Redd's army from The Looking Glass Wars, by Frank Beddor.

I’m really interested in talking to you about all of that. What’s nice about your Alice work is it’s right on brand for this podcast. But you don’t do just Alice stuff, you like taking on all things in pop culture, and twist and turn and reinvent them. What are you doing, attacking all these brands? The Little Mermaid and Alice in Wonderland, these iconic properties. Do you have beef with those properties?

I don’t think it’s so much as having a beef with them so much as it is the creative world that we live in now because of them. As an artist, you feel pigeon-holed into doing certain types of art, such as Marvel, Star Wars, etc. I follow so many artists who are just incredible but they don’t get the recognition they deserve because they don’t want to do superheroes. It’s kind of sad because when I started drawing, I had a lot of original ideas but everybody just wanted me to draw what they wanted to see from popular franchises and so I think my style was a response to that. If I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it in a bit of a punk rock, sassy kind of way. There’s no real hate. Everything I draw on is something I grew up with so I have a lot of respect for those subjects. But it just feels like, “Man, can we get some new ideas here?”

What I love about the tone of your work is, you’re taking something that’s recognizable and bringing a fresh voice and look and feel to it. I’ve a big fan of American McGee and he started with that whole dark Alice aspect. But when I look at yours, it’s framed in horror a bit but it’s so whimsical and optimistic and stylized. The Mad Hatter is just beautiful. The horror side of it comes through and a lot of people see Alice in Wonderland as a whimsical story but there are others that see it as more of a horror story with some insanity. So, there are lots of perspectives on what Alice means and how it’s represented in culture and I would say that more people are gravitating to “the darker Alice.” I can see why somebody might say that about your work but at the core of it, I see a love for the characters and a love for the world and a unique voice, which is why I wanted to reach out to you.

I would like to go through some of your artwork. Let’s start with the Mad Hatter because he’s so iconic. What were the influences for the piece and how would you describe it for the listeners? What’s the elevator pitch?

Alice in Wonderland is whimsical, but I view it more as a happy dream that slowly morphs into a nightmare. I like to draw between the lines, so everything that I draw regarding Alice isn’t specifically written in the book but it’s not, not written in the original book. So, for the Mad Hatter, my most recent picture, I drew him with a bunch of tea-themed and Wonderland-themed tattoos. It works for me as I’m drawing it because, there’s never a passage in the book that says he doesn’t have tattoos and within the confines of history, plenty of sailors were running around with tattoos. That’s the creative process for me. In terms of making them scary, I try to merge a little bit of the creepy with a character that you actually might like to meet, but probably not stay around too long, which is how I feel about most of the characters in Wonderland.

A cartoon of the Mad Hatter and the Hare, who are sitting at a table having a tea party, from the tea party scene in Alice in Wonderland. Illustration by artist Ricky Romero. A beautifully detailed pencil drawing of the mad hatter by visual artist, Ricky Romero.

Right. These are people with the inability to communicate at times or have reason and there’s rampant uncontrollable moments for lots of them. So, you never know what you might get.

The fun of the story for me is putting my own little spin on it, but I like to make sure that if you’re pairing the images that I’m doing with the story, you won’t look at the image and say, “That doesn’t happen in the book or that can’t happen in the book.” Obviously, incredible stories can be made from getting outside the story but I like to stay within the confines of the original story.

You don’t feel like you get swept up in other influences from pop culture when you’re sketching? Because when I look at his suit, with those really sharp lines and the way that his body is swayed slightly as if the wind is pushing him. That conjures lots of references to pop culture. It almost looks like he came out of a prison. That seems like a movie star from the 30s. So, you’re definitely still blending influences from pop culture that you’ve seen.

A lot of the images and pop culture elements that I do pull are dated. I live on the TCM channel. That’s my jam. I just watch black and white movies nonstop.

I also love the Alice image you did. She looks like a ballet dancer. She’s so elegant and there’s so much motion in the image. That’s what I saw at first but then when you look closely, you see that big knife. With American McGee’s art, you see the knife and the blood first but, in your Alice, I see the elegance, the ballerina, the beauty of color, and then you see this big knife. Tell me about tell me about the composition of that image and what that knife represents.

A drawing of Alice, from Wonderland with long, flowing hair and a skull. Playing cards are flying around her and a crescent moon is framing her head. By talented visual artist, Ricky Romero.

I appreciate that so much. Thank you. That one is a piece that, in particular, just came about. I don’t even really know how it came together. The blade is the Vorpal sword blade and it is a nod to American McGee because her blade in the game was a knife.

I like the image of a knife as opposed to a sword, which brings a very medieval feel to it. The knife feels a little bit crazier. Like she just grabbed a kitchen knife and now she’s gonna go through Wonderland. As far as the composition, and everything with the cards, I wanted to draw an Alice that encompassed most of the ideas of Wonderland, the heart cards, and the little caterpillar she’s facing. It takes a bunch of elements from the story and mixes them all together into one piece. She’s really that much bigger than the caterpillar because in my mind, she had just eaten a piece of the mushroom. The cards are flying around as a sign of things to come. The blade was a nod to the American McGee video game, because there’s no real mention of the blade in the first book. In terms of style, it’s an older piece so I was more experimental than I am now, especially with the character elements such as the pointy feet and the very exaggerated features.

I really love that. In looking at the Cheshire Cat hanging upside down holding a cup of tea the right way up and the scary card soldier, with that face which is all teeth. I think it’s a nod to full on horror. Talk about those two pieces because I definitely want to show these off. Describe the piece with the Cheshire Cat hanging upside down.

A detailed drawing of a the Cheshire Cat, from Alice in Wonderland, hanging upside down from a tree with no leaves, holding a red tea cup. By artist: Ricky Romero.

The Cheshire Cat is one of my favorites in the original books. He was he so confusing, so nonsensical, he was always the one to put a smile on my face. He’s always depicted as sitting on the tree but I wanted to go a little crazier so I decided to turn him into a bit of a monkey. He’s hanging now by his tail, because why not? For the tea, I thought it would be funny for him to be holding a saucer of tea and drinking it. But he couldn’t be holding it upside down. So, I created an interesting mix and had him hold the tea the right side up. Not many people notice those types of details because, especially now, you’re really only seeing these pieces on the phone. But if you look closely, I always put hidden pictures in everything.

Those easter eggs are fun. The more people that know there are easter eggs, the more people will go hunting for them. Is there a reason that you use blue or bluish gray for the Cheshire Cat? Was it an instinctual choice?

I think I used the blue just because I didn’t have any other colors at the time and I was just trying to go for the brightest color I had. Yeah, at the time I was doing those, I was running low on a bunch of different colors so I was grabbing whatever I could find. I think some of those were even painted with food coloring.

You said your Queen Redd character was influenced by my Queen Redd character in the books. Do you mean from the book itself or from the concept art that was on the cover?

From the book. For Redd it was the overall personality, but the matted hair is one visual element that definitely stood out. Because, up until that point, I always envisioned her as similar to Charlize Theron from the Snow White and the Huntsman movies. But the matted hair and the blackened teeth are really the chef’s kiss of evil.

I remember thinking, “Okay, she’s not traditionally pretty, but she’s more likes this. I like this depiction. I like the way this is going.” Another thing is that when people think of the Queen of Hearts, they envision the Disney queen. The overweight, very boisterous, unattractive queen. So, whenever I see different versions of the Queen, I’m always intrigued by how whoever is interpreting them decides to execute the depiction. Your interpretation was so far outside of how I had typically seen her depicted. She’s either incredibly normal or incredibly unattractive and mean. Then your version came along, and I thought, “Wow, she’s actually freaking evil. She’s scary mean.”

A drawing of The Redd Queen, from Frank Beddor's The Looking Glass Wars. Her red hair flowing down her face and shoulders, that looks like blood. She is wearing a pointy crown and her teeth are also sharp and pointy.

I can see that connection in your artwork. But I can also see why my concept art didn’t speak to that because there was that rub between the blackened teeth and that hair and how attractive or not attractive should she be in the concept art because I was thinking about it from a cinematic standpoint. Charlize Theron was a particular kind of model for the movie version. The concept artists I worked with for the cover art Seeing Redd did a number of iterations. There were darker ones that were rejected by my publisher and we ended up with the version that’s on the cover now. But I was always a little bit conflicted about the way I described her in the book with her teeth, versus showing that on the cover. I suppose I still haven’t sorted that out.

I’ve got my own personal horror style, but I feel like it’s a truly evil queen. The feeling I get from a lot of different interpretations of the Queen is that she’s just angry.

In terms of Queen Redd’s look, outside of the sharpened teeth and the matted hair, how did you envision her while you were writing?

I visualized the mane of red hair and then it was the dress. I had a little fantasy; I was driving in traffic and somebody cut me off. I was thinking, like, “Oh, I’d really like to do something to that person as they’re driving.” I thought, if I was a thorny rose bush, I would just reach over and entwine their whole car and find my way into the cracks of the window. So, when I went home, I started thinking that Redd should have a dress that comes to life. The dress could reach out and kill some servant or anyone she feels is not servicing her in the way she should be taken care of.

You said your first introduction to Alice was the original Lewis Carroll novel, but how old were you when you read it?

My first introduction to it was the 1951 Disney Alice in Wonderland. But the first one that actually resonated with me and stuck in my memory was the 1985 TV movie. Yes, her and her sister. I couldn’t have been older than seven or eight at the time and I was visiting my cousin when we saw it, so my parents might have had it on tape. It was just so weird. The songs and the makeup were so out there but at the same time, it was totally compelling. I remember years later searching for it and it took forever to come out on DVD. I finally got a copy of it and I remember feeling the exact same way I did as a kid. This is really weird, but I like this a lot.

Were there other things in pop culture that have weird, twisted takes on stories or preexisting ideas that you’ve been attracted to?

A lot of them that I can recall off the top of my head are all Alice in Wonderland themed. Night of the Demons, the old 80s horror movie, is like, Alice in Wonderland goes to a haunted house. The most recent Japanese Netflix show, Alice in Borderland. I think it’s really interesting how many people decide to use Alice as their source of inspiration. That certainly resonates with me because I really don’t know what it is with Alice. But something about it is fun.

Two people hugging from the second season of the popular Netflix series: Alice in Borderland

You and I have the same experience. I’m wondering if you’ve noticed when you’re working on something Alice-themed, suddenly, it seems to be everywhere. It’s everywhere every day. It’s like cars. You buy a Prius, and suddenly, everybody seems to have a Prius. It’s the same with Alice. This last political cycle, I heard “down the rabbit hole,” “we’re through the Looking Glass,” “we’re all mad here,” over and over. I was like, “Wow, was I not paying attention before?”

I feel like that sometimes, too. The world is completely taken with it. We do Alice references everyday now for everything. Every time I’m on the internet, everybody’s “I just went down the rabbit hole.”

That’s probably the most popular and often used phrase. Obviously, Lewis Carroll didn’t invent rabbit holes but as a term to refer to a portal to different place, he certainly did invent it in that respect. As you said, not only on the internet, but everywhere, people say it so casually. You wonder if they even know what the source material is.

Do you have any favorite illustrated versions of Alice in Wonderland?

When it comes to Alice illustrations, there’s a lot that misses the mark for me. A lot of them feel too fluffy, so happy. They’re great pieces of art, but it doesn’t resonate with me in terms of the Alice in Wonderland world that I feel. There are a lot of pieces that are completely inspired by one specific source, looking at you Disney. The ones that aren’t, I feel are definitely more interesting. Again, your books, American McGee, those types of things. I like those interesting takes on it, especially yours because you really went into the history and just tied it all together. It was a lot of fun to read. But in general, I feel like a lot of people concentrate on the happiest part of Alice or the dream part. Apparently, all dreams are good for them.

Because to me, the Alice piece of art that you did is not dissimilar to Ralph Steadman in terms of the lines. There are common drawing techniques you both use. Steadman’s version is one of my favorite illustrated Alice books and it put him on the map. But when I look at your Alice, you have more of a horror bent but the whimsy that Steadman creates is not dissimilar to yours.

High praise indeed. I appreciate that. Thank you.

Do you see why I made that connection?

He’s an amazing artist. I can see the connection. A lot of my initial, I’m gonna say training but I’m really self-taught, was from a lot of Disney artists and books and Steadman absolutely featured in those.

A lot of the poses and everything else, that’s from studying a lot of old Disney Animation. That was really what I wanted to do. Growing up, I was like, “I’m gonna go to Disney and I’m gonna make animated movies.” Then, as I was hitting high school, they closed their animation studios and I just floundered. I was like, “I’m not going to Disney. Now what?” But all the training I did up until then definitely influenced my line work and how I draw. People see a lot of different styles in my art. It’s not really a conscious effort to make it look like any person so much as it’s just, I sat down and I drew it.

It’s the amalgamation of all sorts of things that have come into your creative consciousness. I can see what you’re what you’re getting at with some of the animated characters, because you have slightly exaggerated proportions of the body, slightly exaggerated stances, which I really love. But it makes sense to me that some of these people were influences for you.

How does one become self-taught in drawing? Is it like writing? It’s the doing of it combined with trial and error?

I think at the end of the day, it’s just picking up the pencil and doing it. Whatever your medium is, you just have to do it and not let the failure or whatever you can’t do in the moment hold you back from what you know you’re capable of doing.

How do you view failure?

I try not to think about it at all. But, in an artistic sense, failure is the idea of drawing something to a point where I know it’s good, but I’m just unhappy with it. I look at the picture, and I just say, “That’s a fail.” It’s depressing in a way.

How does it inform the next piece or the piece after that? Or the reimagining of it? How does it affect your psyche going forward?

I have this thing I do when I draw, something I learned from Roald Dahl. I saw a documentary about him and he would write and then at the very tip, the precipice of his creativity, he would just put the pen down and walk away. He said it allowed him to flesh it out in his mind because he was just so into it that he couldn’t wait to get back to it. But because he stopped at the height of his creativity, he’s really just pouring his mind into that while he’s away. Then he comes back, and boom, he writes the rest of his Roald Dahl book, or however much he’s doing.

For me, it’s a similar thing. When I have a scribble or a sketch of an idea, that I’m really enjoying, I won’t overwork it. I’ll just step away. If I don’t do that, it’ll haunt me until I can figure out the line work. I’ve had pictures where I will go over the line work a dozen times. I’ll delete, start again, reference, start again, reference and start again. Sometimes they never even make it out. I’ve got dozens of pictures I’m never gonna finish, just because it’s not a style I can capture in the moment when I sit down to work on it. But other ones, I come back a year later, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s what I was trying to do with that.” I’ll finish the piece in 30 minutes and I’m happy with it.

A cartoon of a person holding another smaller person in their hand. The larger person has ears that are bigger than the rest of his head. By artist, Roald Dahl.

How satisfying is that? When you can actually feel happy about finishing it and then it comes really quickly? I do think that creating a little bit of space is helpful, which is why I often write out of order. I have an idea for a chapter halfway through a novel and I write that and then come back and slowly work my way through it.

The putting it down is really important. I’ve been looking at ways to adapt The Looking Glass Wars into a TV show, so I go back and revisit the story with logic that suits a different medium. I keep coming up with better ideas that would suit the TV show but also would be great in the book. I’m like, “What was I thinking back then? That this is so much better of a solution. It’s better backstory. It’s more dynamic.” It’s 10 years past its prime, but I can’t do anything about it.

I was gonna ask you about how that feels, having something that you wrote that was so great and iconic. At this point, you must look back on that and feel, obviously you’re proud of it, but you must have feelings like, “Oh, man, I wish I would’ve changed that one little sentence or what if I changed that tiny bit of a plot?” Do you feel that often?

Oh, yeah. I’m constantly reexamining and reinventing. For example, there’s a logic problem for me, and anybody that knows the book will know. Hatter Madigan goes on a 13-year search to find Alice and the moment he finds her, he goes into Buckingham Palace, fights a guard, and leaves. He goes back to Wonderland to tell everybody that she’s alive, she’s in this world, and they go need to go rescue her. At the time, I thought if I had Hatter meet Alice, he’s going to automatically bring her back no matter what she wants. So, I can’t have him confront her because his duty will overwhelm whatever her views on the situation.

Then, when I was developing the TV show it, I decided that the moment of conflict between them is so important, so how could I resolve that moment of conflict differently? I wrote a scene where Hatter gets into her study while Alice is there and she’s confronted by this person that looks like the Mad Hatter from the books, which she has pushed out of her mind. She thinks it’s one of those crazy obsessive fans, “How did you get in here? I’m going to call the guard. You have to get out.” And there’s this really intense conversation because he’s saying, “No, I’m here to save you. Don’t you remember? Your people need you. You have to come back.” And she finally uses her own logic. She goes, “Wait, so I’m your Queen? I’m in charge. You have to do as I say, is that right? I command you to leave.”

That works.

Right. It’s much more dynamic. How tortured do you think I am that I don’t have that scene in the book? How great that dialogue scene is and how much fun that would be and how conflicted Hatter would be after 13 years of losing his charge. He’s gone through so much and in this moment, she doesn’t believe him, just as no one’s believed her for 13 years.

Do people look at a piece of your Alice art and say, “Hey, this kind of captures what I think of the book. It’s not a dream. For me, it’s more nightmarish.”? Do you have comments like that?

I get a lot of positive feedback from Alice fans. I think a lot of that has to do with how awesome the Alice community is in general. Alice fans are going to be Alice fans for everything it seems, which is cool.

Alice fans love all things Alice. They keep reinvesting because artists keep reinvesting in Alice, so the Alice fans wouldn’t be investing if you and I weren’t investing in it and if it wasn’t always in pop culture. But it’s so iconic, Wonderland represents a magical place and “down the rabbit hole” represents an adventure. Alice’s character is something we’re all trying to discover. Who are we and who do we want to be? Where are we at? There are these universal themes that keep popping up and the community seems to embrace that.

I’ll tell you a story. One of the publishers that turned me down said I was gonna piss off all the Alice fans. Then somebody said I would only have the Alice fans. I said, “Only the Alice fans? Only 150 million books sold? I’ll take that.” I didn’t agree that fans would be upset. A few fans would prefer the traditional story but that just meant they didn’t know anything about pop culture. They weren’t looking anywhere other than Harry Potter.

With Alice, you approach it how you want and, chances are, you’re gonna find somebody who really appreciates the way you’ve approached it. With the newer franchises, people are so defensive about them. They don’t want them to be messed with in any sort of way, whereas, by contrast, Alice is more, “Oh, here’s a bunch of paints, use them the way you want. As opposed to, here’s your set color of paints, and you must use these pencils, and color within the lines.” I think that’s the bigger takeaway when it comes to lingering characters in pop culture.

A drawing of a personified caterpillar, sitting on a throne of mushrooms and smoking from a hookah. By artist, Ricky Romero and inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
A drawing of a cartoon caterpillar with mushrooms in the background. From the character: The Caterpillar, as seen in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Drawn by artist, Ricky Romero.

The other difference is when things are in the public domain you have license to do anything you want. Then, inside of a world, the Batman world, for example, if you give the reins over to a filmmaker, as they did with Joker, you’re going to get something that stands on its own, that’s original and quite different. But the more you try and adhere to the formula, the more the formula dissipates over time, and you burn out on it. Then you feel frustrated because the thing that you love so much starts to fade. With Game of Thrones, I’ve watched it multiple times but I always stop at season six because seasons seven and eight are so frustrating.

I read the Game of Thrones books around the same time that I was going through, like I was telling you earlier, my last book-reading phase, and I enjoyed every single one of them. Then the show came on and I was just ecstatic about it. The first few seasons, I couldn’t tell enough people to watch it but then as the show was closing out, my Game of Thrones just went on mute.

It completely cratered. But if you read the novels, you really understand why, because the novels are so precise and so set up for episodic for television.

Yes, and they’re so expansive. I don’t even know how you can even fit all of that in a television season. You don’t get enough hours.

But structurally, the books set up in much the same way as the television show so it was very noticeable when they didn’t have a book to finish out. At that point, it was guesswork and they didn’t have the roadmap. From that standpoint, what you’re talking about where there’s a burnout in franchise creation and exploitation of IPs, I agree. But, when somebody is a creator, and you can give them license, like Peaky Blinders and Steven Knight, that’s been going on for years and years. I believe he writes all the episodes and there’s a tone and a consistency. It’s stood the test of time, so far.

I think if left in the hands of creators, we would probably get much more entertaining products. But the problem is that it’s not entirely in the hands of creators at this point. Even within the realm of Marvel, if they would just take the reins off and stop forcing everything to be a certain way, the results would be much more enjoyable. I would love to have more standalone comic book movies. This was a great comic book story; we’re going to make the standalone comic book movie. The next comic book movie, if it’s going to be the same character, it doesn’t even have to be associated with this one because that first standalone story was its own piece of greatness. But everything has to be tied in and it starts to wear on you. I loved comic books growing up but at this point, I fall asleep in comic book movies.

I’m with you. I love the new Spider-Man, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, as well as the first one. But we have James Gunn running DC now, so we’ll see what happens. Fingers crossed.

Fingers crossed. Indeed.

Do you have kids?

I do. I have twin 16-year-old daughters.

Have you ever used them as inspiration?

Oh, yeah, all the time. They are actually my models for my Alice character. I use their hairstyles. Anytime I need any sort of a reference pose featuring any sort of female characters – “Come over here.”

They’re good kids. I think every parent feels the strain of teenagers without a doubt, for sure. You just have to look outside of the family to see how good your own kids are. I look at what other teenagers are going through and how other parents are and it makes me feel like okay, I’m not doing so bad. This is great.

Originally, you wanted to be an animator for Disney. There are a lot of other animated companies, did you pursue that? How did you land on this medium? Is this a career that’s sustainable or is it something you do with another job?

In terms of the Disney thing, I started my family early.

How old were you when you had the girls?

I was 22 so, after they were born, I concentrated on the family. I always did want to try and do something else. After the whole animation thing I thought maybe I’d want to direct movies. But ultimately it was, “Do I really have time to spend away doing this sort of thing?” You can’t start a family and then just run out and attempt to achieve stuff.

That’s a complicated time to be pursuing a career because basically, your entire 20s would be experimenting to figure out where you’re going to land so that you can do the thing you’ve explored in your 20s during your 30s, especially if it has to do with entertainment, because it’s so all consuming. For me, I was much older when I had kids. Then when I had kids, I realized I didn’t have nearly as much time to write, so I decided to write late at night, as opposed to all day. But at 22, you have to make some even more definitive choices. And having two beautiful girls, they’re telling you what choice you have every day.

Exactly. I did the family man thing and I don’t regret it at all. But in the time that I was doing that I worked on my art on the side and it was floundering. That’s the best description for it. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do for a long time. I felt like I didn’t want to just draw because I didn’t want to be a starving artist. That’s not fun.

How did you solve that?

I became a starving artist. I just powered through and I got a little bit of a following. I’m still mystified as to how I ended up with as many people who enjoy my art as they do. I appreciate the hell out of it. It’s so cool, but I’m still dumbfounded as to how it happened.

What are you working on now? What can we look forward to?

I’m working on the Alice in Wonderland illustration. It’s gonna be a slow process because every single one of these Alice pictures that I’m doing is poster size. Literally 20 something by 20 something inches. They take up a good portion of the wall and drawing those digitally allows you to zoom in to millimeter sized areas, if I wanted to throw in that level detail, which I occasionally do. So that’s going to take me the better part of the year, to finally get those out. I estimate that for the first book, it would take me about 60 to 80 pictures to fully illustrate it to the point where I would be happy, and that’s including looking back at the earlier pictures and reworking them.

A group of playing cards spades, who are covered in blood and surrounded in a heart shape, by Queen Redd's soldiers. By artist, Ricky Romero.

I want to know about the role that the power of imagination has in your work, because in my novels, imagination is a real power source. I often like to look at quotes from interesting creators or thinkers or philosophers about the idea of imagination. Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” which is so interesting because you need both, but you need that spark. When you think about imagination, what do you think about?

Imagination for me is anything that is so outside of the normal that it seems crazy. I don’t really imagine day to day life. That’s not imagination to me. Imagination is when you’re sitting there and you’re like, “There’s a bird. But what if that bird suddenly transformed into something crazy, like a human with a bird head, and then it just started running?” That’s the type of imagination I enjoy. It’s a very surreal type of imagination. David Lynch is one of my favorite directors. He’s got that very weird, scene-to-scene, “What’s going on?” feeling and then he zooms in on an insect eating something.

It’s a very weird juxtaposition something really imaginative and something very real. Now they’re going to clash and I’m going to show them to you very vividly.

It’s been great chatting with you and it’s been a pleasure getting to know you and learning about your process. Thanks for taking the time to be on the All Things Alice show. You’re the perfect guest with everything you’re doing and we’re gonna be rooting for you to get that illustrated book out. Where can people find you?

Thank you. It’s @mrrevenge on Instagram and the website is mrrevenge.squarespace.com. We have a handful of limited Alice prints on the site and if you sign up for the newsletter, you’ll get more info and sketches and all sorts of other stuff.

Awesome. Thanks for coming on the show!

For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice, please read our blog and subscribe to our podcast!

All Things Alice: Interview with Christopher Monfette

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?”

It is my great pleasure to have Christopher Monfette 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. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.

FB:

Chris Monfette, I’m happy to have you on the show. The title is All Things Alice, except it’s really turned into a podcast about pop culture and creativity.

You’re deep into Star Trek: Picard. I’m curious where you left off with the show, given the strike, and what your state of mind is. Are you on the picket lines?

CM:

We were lucky in terms of Picard because Patrick Stewart had only wanted to do three seasons. They knew going into it, because I didn’t come in until the second season, that it would be three and out. So there was a really unique structure to Picard where it was handed off from showrunner to showrunner for three seasons in a row. The novelist Michael Chabon had developed the first season with Akiva Goldsman and was the vision and the showrunner.

In Season 2, they had brought in Terry Matalas, who was my showrunner for 12 Monkeys, and Terry brought me. Because of the crazy pandemic pandemonium, rather than Terry taking the reins completely, season two was split between him and Akiva. Terry didn’t really get the keys to the car until season three, which is really the season that we feel we were allowed to do the kind of Star Trek we signed up to do, and really tell the story that we were longing to tell. And I think we did it really well. I’m very proud of what we did and what our team accomplished and I think folks have received it really well. It’s been really embraced critically; the fans seem to have loved it. I feel like we checked all the boxes and took the right path with that season.

What’s interesting is it started to air concurrently with all of the strike talk. It was very strange. In one half of your brain, you have all this anxiety about, “Oh my God, am I not going to work? How long is this going to go? How am I gonna pay my bills?” Then, the other half, it’s constant praise from the internet being like, “We love this. This is great week after week. This episode is better than the last episode!” There’s this weird feeling of getting all of these rewards that you hope for as a writer at the worst possible time. You can’t put them to use. There’s no show to springboard to right now. I can’t leverage this into selling my own thing or going to work for some show I dreamed of working for.

FB:

That’s very entrepreneurial of you to think, I need to leverage success. That’s a big thing in Hollywood, but at the same time, given there’s the WGA strike, there are a lot of folks that don’t have that reinforcement of their work every day. That must be a nice little buffer against the reality of a strike. Are people jonesing for a season four? Is that a possibility?

Featured image for the Star Trek streaming series: Picard. Thisi has a drawn or painted version of the main star, Patrick Stewart's Picard in front of a space background with the starship Enterprise and other outer space elements in a light blue and purple hue.

CM:

Just to be clear, it’s not so much leveraging, it’s wanting to continue doing the thing that we love doing, telling stories.

Coming off of season three, there’s been real fan fervor. Terry, in the press, pitched his vision of how Picard could go forward, sans Patrick Stewart, and move into a series that he called in his head, Star Trek: Legacy.

The fans picked up on it and really started demanding it. There’s a petition, a lot of online momentum, to make that show a reality. We’ve never been in a position where we’re more poised to springboard into something like that and to convince Paramount and CBS that it should be the next Star Trek adventure. Yet, we just can’t. All the writers are hungry to get back in the room and tell more stories in this universe with these characters. But everything’s on pause right now.

FB:

There’s all that uncertainty of when the strike is going to be resolved but then, it’s the worry of, have you lost that momentum from the fans to use their enthusiasm to hopefully convince Paramount to move forward. Fingers crossed it’ll work out.

CM:

I think we can get there. I’m hopeful. And if not, this will resolve itself. There will be other shows and entertainment is not going away. But, the strike is a fight worth fighting.

The strike is very interesting because there are several tiers of writers. Some writers are new to the industry and just got their WGA cards. Some writers are pre-WGA. Some writers have worked, for quite a while, but are not paying their bills off of WGA credits or are staffed on shows. Then you have the middle tier of writers who go from show to show and are also developing. They don’t have other jobs. I’m one of them. This is how we pay our bills. Then you have a whole upper tier of writers, the Ryan Murphy’s, the J.J. Abrams’, the super producers, and even just the very hyper-successful showrunners who have overall deals or have had incredibly successful shows. They can financially weather a six-month or eight-month strike in a way that other writers can’t. It’s rare when you can get all three of those tiers, who have varying degrees of urgency, to agree that this is a fight we have to win, and we have to stick it out no matter how much it pains us to do that. And I think we’re doing it.

FB:
It seems the middle is holding, which is going to be important. One of the issues is staffing and what the writers room looks like. From 12 Monkeys to 9-1-1 to Picard. How would you describe each one of those shows in terms of how many writers were on staff versus the arguments surrounding the strike about making sure that there are staff writers that are learning their craft and moving the show forward?

CM:

I’m of several minds about it. I’ve been fortunate enough to work on shows, whether it was 12 Monkeys, 9-1-1, or Picard where we had eight to 12 writers in the room at any given time. We were really blessed to have full rooms certain seasons, but we never had an empty room. All the shows that I’ve worked on really benefited from all of those voices creatively. I’ve always said this in interviews, Terry Matalas, especially in 12 Monkeys, and Picard really has a talent for conducting the orchestra. He knows how to staff a room of writers, each with unique strengths, and then knows how to get them to play off of each other so that there’ll be certain writers who are better at the comedy, there’ll be certain writers who are really good with the big sci-fi 35,000 foot ideas. Other writers are dialogue people, and we’ll all write and rewrite each other’s script and it’ll be better for everybody’s contributions. Whereas something like 9-1-1, for example, you’re assigned an episode, you write the episode, the showrunner polishes it, then production tells you what’s too expensive, and what’s not expensive. It’s less of a symphonic collaboration of voices because it’s a little bit more episodic with the case-of-the-week structure. So that was a really unique experience as well.

But in all of those experiences, you had the benefit of 8, 10,12 different minds sitting around a table pitching ideas that all complemented each other and ultimately made the work stronger or made the episodes more interesting.

Now, I do totally support the idea of individual auteur writers/directors who have a story to tell they feel can only be told in their unique voice. You look at Aaron Sorkin, you look at Noah Hawley, creators who have very unique and specific voices and visions. I feel there needs to be room in the conversation for singular auteur creators to be able to create, but I do think that to protect the vast majority of shows that really do benefit from the collaboration of voices, there should be a minimum room number so that ultimately the producers can’t reduce what we do to a UK model, where scripts are freelance and you can’t ultimately pay your bills.

If Taylor Sheridan has to put up with a room of three writers sitting around, he’s free not to use them, he’s free to write every script, he’s free to use them for research or to pop in now and then and ask for an idea. Otherwise, let’s just subsidize them showing up to work and eating snacks, and leaving at night. But I do think there does need to be a minimum room size to support what we’re doing in the long term. The amount of shows that have those singular visions are so few and far between compared to the vast majority of the rest of the industry that this is a hill worth dying on.

FB:

But also, isn’t it the idea of these mini rooms that you’ve been putting together, where they’re not officially assured it’s moving forward, and yet you’re doing the same work that you would have been doing if it was greenlit? That seems to be a major problem.

CM:

Yeah, we need to get more clarity and definition on what constitutes a room, the length of the room, and the population of that room. I think mini rooms started as a potentially interesting idea. Before we greenlight this thing and bring in 10 people, the showrunner wants to bring in two or three of their closest collaborators and really figure out what the thing is before we dive into it. The principle is unique and interesting. But the problem with that model is, all of a sudden, it was, “Okay, well, if you think you can get most of it done with three people in 10 weeks, why are we going to give 10 people and 20 weeks? So the burden falls on too few writers, who then aren’t allowed to go to set, and aren’t allowed to amass that experience and learn how to produce.

I certainly ascribe to the theory that so much of what we’re talking about stems from a lack of smart, creative producing in Hollywood today. When streaming became a thing 10-15 years ago, when it was a kernel of an idea, the thought was always, let’s take the mid-budget movie ($50-$90 million) and amortize that budget across 10 episodes versus two hours. We’ll be able to dig into the character and we’ll tell more story, I don’t think it was, necessarily, this level of spending a billion dollars on The Lord of the Rings IP was the initial thought. When you’re making these big spends that equate to what you spend on a theatrical mega-budget summer blockbuster, you can’t possibly recoup your costs. We’re at a point where shows are spending so much money that they don’t have to spend.

I look back at my time on 12 Monkeys, where I went and lived in Toronto for 18 months, and produced seasons three and four, back-to-back with Terry Matalas and a handful of other writers. That is a unique and rare experience. We produced a time-travel show where the protagonist was going to different times every week and it often looped back on each other. There’d be something in this episode that didn’t pay off for 10 episodes. We crashed a time-traveling city into another time-traveling city. We had spectacle and production value and we did it for $2.7 million an episode. We were really smart about how we produced it because we understood when to go abroad, how to cross-board episodes, how to work with actors, and work with each department to get the most bang for your buck. That is not something we would have been able to do if we didn’t have writers who were emboldened and taught and instructed and had the experience of learning how to keep those costs down so that we didn’t have to do it for $5-10 million an episode when we could do it effectively for less than three.

I think we have to empower power writers to learn their trade and to become good at that aspect of this industry. The more you can keep budgets down, the more that we can keep studios from having to freak out about their bottom lines and having to take content off platforms. The more we can keep writers working, the more shows we can produce for the same amount.

FB:

The notion of streaming coming in was that they were going to buy their way into the market. In the same way, Amazon sold books and lost money, but took a big piece of that business, when Netflix came along and spent a lot of money on House of Cards, they bought their way to the top echelon of Hollywood and continued to spend, and everybody jumped on. Now, of course, the market’s been saturated.

What’s going to be desirable, I would think from a studio standpoint, is finding folks like you and that team that did 12 Monkeys and trying to produce shows for more reasonable costs with broader storytelling and hiring more writers and empowering them.

CM:

I also think there’s an interesting thing going on from an audience perspective, too. You’re seeing it with the box office reception to The Flash or even Indiana Jones, for example. Spectacle is so available on every platform. You can go see a billion-dollar, Lord of the Rings fight sequence on TV. Also, the stakes in big-budget, blockbuster IP-driven stories are the end of the world, the destruction of the universe, and the collapse of the multiverse. There’s no respite from these artificial ridiculously high stakes that you can never top.

It’s never been more important for writers to get in there and say, “Look, you don’t have to do a $250 million Avengers movie, where the fate of the world hangs in the balance again. Maybe you can do three $100 million Avengers movies, where the stakes are more emotional and more personal, but the concept is still really high.” What’s Ocean’s 11 with the Avengers? You can find all of these touchstones to make movies that still have all this stuff in them that audiences love, but are more creative about the story, the emotions, and the themes. You can make them cost less too and then the audience will feel like they haven’t seen this in the eight other things.

The one Marvel show I responded to the most, and this isn’t a criticism of any of the shows on their own, but I really liked She-Hulk. Because the stakes weren’t like, “Oh my God, this is the end of the world!” It was, is she going to find happiness? Is she going to find contentment? How is she going to navigate this strange, unique thing that has happened? And how could she do that and keep herself and her family and her friends together? It was written cleverly and warmly and it probably didn’t cost $300 million to make. I found it really refreshing and really original. You need writers more than ever to tell you how to take all the great ingredients that IP gives you and execute them at a high concept level at high quality for less money.

It’s not superhero, or I.P., or blockbuster fatigue, but there’s a certain level of stakes fatigue like we’re telling the same story over and over again.

FB:

People are looking for a fresh take. I remember when The Joker came out and it was so dark and so interesting. I did not expect that it would be so successful.

But the great thing about television is, there are so many options. I saw on Twitter, you mentioned Drops of God. I’ve been watching Drops of God along with Hijack on Apple and that’s a really unique, interesting story framed in a way that I never would have expected a story about wine and vineyards to be framed.

Image of 2 people staring each other down, with a table of 3 people looking onwards, judging them. A large portrait of some important man looms just out of focus in the background. From a TV series Drops of God

CM:

I loved it. It’s so beautiful and unique. It’s the perfect way to lean into this thing that streamers are looking for now, which is, wanting to make one thing that can serve a bunch of audiences. It figured out a way to tell a French story and a Japanese story in an American way that allowed any of those audiences to plug into it and yet it was emotional and visually interesting. It’s one of my favorite shows this year by a mile because good writers figured out how to execute it well.

FB:

It’s a great example of writers having a voice that AI could never replicate. Also, that idea of the multicultural. They have the same thing going on in Hijack, which is pretty exciting.

CM:

That show speaks to what we’ve been talking about. We’re gonna build one set, we’re gonna spend our money on that. Then we’re going to tell a seven-episode story. That’s a fairly financially responsible way to make television and if you can execute that at its highest level, I don’t think audiences will find themselves wishing for $100 million on screen. I think they’ll be captivated by what they’re watching.

FB:

Your story and your career trajectory are interesting. You started as a journalist. Was IGN your first gig?

CM:

I began my career in PR and marketing. I was always a nerd growing up and my first real gig in that universe was working for Microsoft and launching the Xbox 360.

FB:

You said you were a nerd. Were you taking your interests and saying, “How am I going to figure out how to work at a cool company that does games?” For those people that are coming out of college and thinking about being in the business, you need a first step. What was your strategy?

CM:

Growing up, I always knew that I loved reading, writing, and video games. I loved books. I was a big genre nerd my whole life. I was going to Fordham University in New York, which doesn’t have a phenomenally strong film program but they do have a good communications program and decent screenwriting classes. But that was never going to tip the scales for me so I started writing for the school paper. I didn’t have any money but I still wanted to play video games and listen to music and read comics and I realized I could call companies and ask to review products they’ll send to me for free. So, I really embraced this idea of journalism as a way to get paid to consume and do all the things I love doing anyway and write, as well.

The second strategy that I figured out was that I was going to get more value from internships than from the actual classes. So I started interning for a lot of the same people I was asking for stuff from. I was an intern for Fox’s marketing and PR department. Then I went to Sony and then DreamWorks and I tried to learn as much about the industry as I could and make as many contacts as I could. So, when I got out of college, I was equipped to go do marketing and PR. It wasn’t necessarily my dream, I wanted to be a writer, but it was adjacent to the things that I cared about. After a couple of years, eventually, the journalists I was working with every day said, “Hey, you can make more money over with us playing the video games and watching the movies and critiquing them than you can shilling for them on a PR site.”

I’ve always said to anybody who asked me because there is no one path to success in this business, that the most you can do is put yourself where lightning can strike and cover yourself in as much tinfoil as you can. That’s really what I was doing in the early years of my career. I went from college to that one job which led to another job that was a little bit closer to what I really wanted to do. Then, while I was at IGN, I was able to make all these great friendships and relationships with producers and actors, which five years later paid off with my first staffing gig. There wasn’t a grand master plan, it was a selfish desire to get paid to be the thing that I had been my whole life, which was just a genre nerd.

FB:

How were those internships?

CM:

They were all basic internships, all unpaid. The college only asked you to do one, but I did three, just to learn and grow and make those relationships and I liked doing them.

My first job as an intern was going to the entertainment section of hundreds of newspapers and seeing if there was an article about something our company had done, physically cutting it out, putting it on a piece of paper, and photocopying it. Then I’d put a book together and make 100 copies of that book and distribute that to everyone. That wasn’t a particularly rewarding job but I became very close with my boss and over three of those internships, I came out with a pretty complex understanding of how the business works.

FB:

You also wrote a novel while you were working at IGN, as I remember.

Image of Clive Barker and the main character from the Hellraiser series: Pinhead.

CM:

It was a short story. When I was at IGN, I got to meet Clive Barker, who had always been a hero of mine as a kid. I was doing an interview with Clive and we were talking about my upbringing and my love of his work and he goes, “I don’t think you’re a journalist. I think you’re a writer. Pick something of mine and adapt it. I’ll give you the rights.”

He mentored me and I did two movies for his production company. I never made a ton of money, but they were great opportunities to get my start and take my writing to the next level. Through him, I got to do a Hellraiser graphic novel that was eight issues long and this Nightbreed story. It was one of the centerpiece stories at the heart of this collection they were doing. A bunch of great authors were contributing short stories and novellas to a collection based on his Nightbreed universe. That was a joy. He was the first major personality with a reputation in the industry to take me under his wing and see my potential and try to nurture it.

FB:

I remember you wrote an episode of Hatter Madigan for me around the same time. You had pitched me the story of Hatter in the Wild West in Death Valley.

But you come across as the kind of person that has a lot of story engine inside of them. How do you see yourself as a writer in terms of your strengths?

CM:

My story is unique in the sense that I grew up loving video games, comic books, and all the nerd stuff that a lot of really terrific genre writers grew up with, but my uncle was a theater guy. He introduced me to writers like Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Arthur Miller. So, I became a fan of really finely honed, character-driven dialogue. I was also fortunate enough to be a teenager in the Miramax years, the rise of the independent movie, where there were all these amazing writers like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh, with hyper-specific voices were being allowed to make these really interesting films.

Then you had someone like, I know that circumstances have made the name a little passe at this point, Joss Whedon came along and took all this really sharp, stylized, amazing dialogue and applied it to genre storytelling. These people can be talking as cleverly as someone in a David Mamet play or an Aaron Sorkin drama.

I like to think that’s where I bring value to a room. I can do the big swing 35,000-foot sci-fi concepts but then also more granularly, do a great scene with really crackly dialogue and sharp character work. I’ll never write a broad comedy. I’m not funny. We had a writer on Picard, Cindy, who’s tremendously funny. I could never do that and I’m in awe of that kind of talent. But dialogue writers were really my biggest influence in film and TV coming up.

FB:

I studied acting for a short time under Stella Adler and one of the things she required was for you to study playwrights like David Mamet and understand where they were coming from so you could really grasp the work. I think I learned more from playwrights and the economy of storytelling and the necessity for great dialogue to make things work. It’s satisfying as an actor, but I was really fascinated with their backstories, the reason they became writers, and how these plays came about. That was very influential to me in writing The Looking Glass Wars.

CM:

No one will ever accuse me of writing a scene with naturalistic dialogue. There’s no right or wrong here but I know a lot of writers who want their characters to talk the way people really speak. I’m 180 degrees in the opposite direction. I love words and I want my characters to use those words as best as they possibly can and in the most inventive combinations. I look at shows like Succession, and I’m just in awe of the way they’ll take a simple idea and wrap it in the bacon of this incredible verbiage. Or Steven Moffat on Doctor Who, who has this amazing crackerjack, very twee kind of dialogue, or Amy Sherman Palladino has this machine gun rat-a-tat-tat of words. I really love the mechanics of constructing a sentence with wordplay and rhythms in a way that other writers don’t find value in because, for them, it’s about making the scene as human as possible and as relatable as possible. For me, if I go to the theater and I see a truck turn into a robot, I want the dialogue equivalent of that. I want to go see entertainment in a way that I don’t experience in real life. I want to see people talk at a level I wish I could talk at. That’s my jumble of influences.

FB:

With the story you wrote for me, the first thing that I read was Hatter’s interior dialogue. That’s how the story opens. I thought you were able to get into his head and be very poetic at the same time, and then set the story up for a classic villain who underestimated our exceedingly talented and deadly hero who is “the other”.

The dialogue was very poetic and not all that realistic. I think there was a line where the bad guy said, “You have a six-shooter?” because he wanted to draw on Hatter and Hatter responds, “Yeah, it’s under my hat.”

Pages from Hatter M: The Nature of Wonder Volume 3, by Frank Beddor, Liz Cavalier & Sami Makkonen. Hatter wearing his long blue coat fights cowboy bad guys -- in a standoff.

CM:

I remember when you first introduced me to your world, Hatter was the character that I plugged into immediately because I am such a Doctor Who fan and I’m so deeply influenced by it. Hatter Madigan and Doctor Who are nothing alike but they are these lone heroes unstuck in time and they have the flexibility to find themselves moving through their narratives in these nonlinear ways. There’s something I’ve just always liked about those kinds of stories, whether it’s Sam Beckett and Quantum Leap, or Doctor Who. These characters want, in a weird way, what everybody experiences. They just want to go from Point A to Point B to get the thing that they so desperately want, but because of the way their life is structured, they can’t get there that way. There’s something beautiful and lonely and interesting, whether the character is as serious and action-focused as Hatter or as whimsical as Doctor Who. I’ve always loved those kinds of stories.

FB:

I was quite rigid in the story structure with Hatter, not in terms of dialogue, but in terms of following historical events, so that it would feel like the audience could really suspend disbelief in terms of the notion that this was a real place. But in exploring television, and exploring the idea of doing this as an ongoing show, conversations I’ve had with you and other people was, “Why doesn’t Hatter go through a portal to our world in 1871, why shouldn’t you have him time jump and start to create that fish out of water in all sorts of times, and have that contemporary lens?” It’s a really interesting idea, getting into The Looking Glass Wars through Hatter and his time in our world. I just haven’t quite been brave enough to pull the trigger on that, because I keep thinking, “Where’s Alyss in this? Would I be cutting back to Alyss? Or would I just simply leave her until this series runs its course for three, four seasons, and then introduce Alyss and expand it?

CM:

You’ve quite purposefully created a world that there are 10 ways into. You could choose any of those and they would be wildly successful approaches.

FB:

I don’t know if they’d be wildly successful but maybe if you helped me out, they would be. But I’m exploring that. You and I worked together when we did that mini room to explore the structure of The Looking Glass Wars TV show. The Queen’s Gambit hadn’t come out and I thought it would be interesting to start the show where you have a cold open of the adult character and then you would use the first episode to tell the origin story. But I still think that most people who read The Looking Glass Wars hook into Hatter. He’s the most popular character.

CM:

Hatter, in some ways, is the wish fulfillment. We all wish we could be as cool as that character and as composed and as strong and stalwart. I always loved Alice in the original books because she’s so driven by a sense of curiosity and discovery. I think we all are. We all in our own lives come to a rabbit hole and wonder what’s down there. And it’s, are we brave enough to jump or not? Curiosity, especially for writers, is the best quality you can have. The most important quality you can have is to wonder why and to wonder what and then to go chase those things and experience them and manifest those things in your own life. I think what you’ve done in your fiction is to expand upon that. You have these two central characters and one is about curiosity and discovery and then the other is very much about loyalty. He is on this mission, experiencing this other world, but it’s with an almost singular purpose to get back to where he’s from. He’s not interested in shedding that purpose to discover and consume and learn. He just wants to blaze through the world. I think there’s a little bit of all of those characters in everybody.

FB:

Though, the wish fulfillment and blazing ahead, in terms of doing a series, would probably get a bit old if he wasn’t able to have interior difficult problems, that he’s failing, and how that affects his search and his personality and these obstacles that he comes across.

You brought up the word curious. In my book series, I always use imagination. What do you think about the combination of curiosity versus imagination to ultimately create something?

CM:

I think imagination is just an extension of curiosity. Curiosity is standing in front of the rabbit hole and imagination is picturing what might be down there and the reality is, whatever you’ll discover when you jump.

I have traveled more than this but, maybe you’ve never been to Europe before and you’re curious about it, and you want to break out of your American view of the world. So you get your passport and you go to Europe, and you taste the Netherlands and you see Paris and you see Italy and you experience all these wonderful cultures and foods. Imagination is taking that experience and saying, “Okay, what if that happened in a fantasy world? What if that happened in a sci-fi world? And you’re able to write those stories better because you’ve empathetically, as a human being, shared that same degree of experience in your own set of contexts and life.” The key is coupling that sense of real empathy for what is out there in the world and then applying imagination to it. Curiosity and imagination are inseparable.

FB:

There are levels. It’s also research and curiosity, immersing yourself in whatever that thing is that you’re interested in, and then trying to imagine what you’re going to create and then working on creating that. It’s all a part of this zone that we’d like to get into where those two come together and give you some inspiration.

CM:

I think some writers can do both and some writers have made wonderful careers out of doing one. Certain writers have their things. Carl Hiaasen will always write books about Florida. He knows one thing and he’s gonna drill down until he’s explored every nook and crevice of the one thing that he knows well. Other writers will say, “Well, I want to experience the world and I’ll go write that.” Both are fine because they’re driven by a curiosity to understand either many new things or better understand the one thing that you find yourself around. It takes the same quantity of imagination to tell the smallest, most granular story as it does to tell the biggest, most fanciful.

FB:

Were you introduced to Alice in Wonderland through the novel, the Disney movie, or something else?

CM:

Through the books. Growing up, my grandfather always really encouraged me to read. He would go to yard sales and tag sales and people would just throw books out on their tables for a quarter. So my grandfather would always come back from the sales with a paper bag of books that he found for me. A lot of those books were older. Doc Savage novels, which still predated me by 20-30 years. So, at a pretty young age, I was reading John Carter of Mars, old Doc Savage books, and pulp stories that he would pull from these tag sales. Eventually, he brought home a really beautiful hardcover version of Alice in Wonderland. I can’t remember exactly what age I was but I remember it being really formative for me. I really enjoyed it and then I think the animated versions came after that.

My experience with Alice was unique in the sense that my first visual of it was whatever I made up in my head. I wasn’t cobbling it together from cultural reference points.

FB:

Which most of us are doing now because it’s so deeply seated in culture. Have you seen it much in television? I see images of Alice popping up. I think it came up in Stranger Things.

CM:

It’s gotten to a point now where you’re like, “Yeah, okay, we get it.” It’s a staple but if I hear “White Rabbit” as the soundtrack to a given scene ever again it’s, “I get it, guys.” Alice is a universal story in the sense that every story, whether it’s Star Trek or Lord of the Rings, it’s the hero’s journey. We’re leaving home, we’re going to a strange place where we’re going to find out things about ourselves and that change in us will allow us to complete our journey and hopefully come home. That structure of storytelling shares inherent DNA with Alice so it makes sense that it pops up everywhere.

FB:

Do you have a favorite? Whether it’s a song or a movie or any piece of art of Alice that resonated with you along the way?

Illustration from the graphic Novel: American McGee, Alice. Based on characters from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, or just Alice in Wonderland. This is a painting of Alice sitting at a table, having tea with the Mad Hatter.

CM:

The American McGee Alice games because I like horror a lot. It was great to see someone step in and do a darker, horror-driven take on these things. I like that game quite a bit and there’s been talk ever since it came out about there potentially being another so it gets refreshed in my gaming zeitgeist every couple of years. I remember that making an impression upon me in terms of one of the first adaptations of that material that was really interesting and cool and visual and unique and spun it in a way that it wasn’t just telling the same story. It was telling a different story from a different point of view, which I liked a lot.

But I’m of the opinion that the best adaptation of Alice in Wonderland has yet to be made. I go back through all the various ones that I’ve seen, and I don’t think I love any of them. The Disney ones, whether it’s the Johnny Depp one or the original, they’re so polished. I’m waiting for Guillermo del Toro to try it or Tarsem Singh, or a filmmaker who weirdly uses practical and CG in an interesting way because so much of Alice to me is tangible. Other parts of it are very painted and illustrative. None of the other adaptations I’ve seen get the balance that I’ve pictured in my head for so long.

FB:

It’s also a struggle, because she’s 13, and it’s seemingly episodic. Everybody that’s done a take on it, including myself, tries to find a structure that allows the reluctant hero story to play out in a way in which you can suspend disbelief and buy into it.

CM:

Stranger Things is an Alice in Wonderland story in a weird way. We went into the upside down, and they cast those kids young and they made it work.

FB:

But in television, you have a little bit more opportunity, and certainly, when you have a show, and even movies that have both young characters and adult characters, you have those four quadrants. That show can be nostalgic as an adult and it can feel completely fresh for my 13-year-old.

CM:

There’s a weird Ouroboros effect with these IPs. With Alice, the book is published and it comes into the zeitgeist, and it inspires all these other works. There is an Alice in Wonderland quality to all of these other different stories that are being told in different genres. It gets absorbed into the zeitgeist in other ways, whether it’s a poster in the background or a music cue that nods to their roots in Alice. Then, eventually, it comes back around to, now we want to remake the thing that inspired all the things that inspired us to remake it. Do we remake it using all of the iconography of the things that it inspired? Do we use the visual language of all of the different iterations? Or do we have to find some new visual language to tell that story again? Because otherwise, it’s a song that’s singing itself.

That’s what you’ve done so well with creating your world. You found another way into it, that visualizes it differently and contextualizes it differently. It feels like Alice without feeling either too dissimilar or too similar. I think that’s what you guys have been doing brilliantly in your world.

FB:

Thank you. I’ve been trying to push outside of what people know as Wonderland. Whether it’s bringing Wonderland to another culture, another timeline, or expanding the geography of Wonder nations. I’m looking to expand with other writers and other voices who can see the world in a way that, having done this for 20 years, I might not be able to do or see. It’s been interesting and exciting to talk to other creators about handing over the universe and saying, “What would you do with this?”

That whole collaborative effort, whether it was working with you in the room, collaborating on a graphic novel, and now working on a game, it’s very exciting to have a world that is big enough with a bright enough canvas that attracts other creators.

Cartoon illustration of Mumbatton East Indian Spider-Man, as seen in the latest installment of Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse.

CM:

Even looking at something as recent as Across the Spider-Verse. Even just that little section where they dip into Mumbatton. For 10 minutes of the movie, we’re going to show you what Spider-Man through an East Indian lens looks like. There’s a lot to explore there and you realize, even just telling the same story with a slightly different aesthetic, or cultural view, gives it all these new layers. It’s not just a quick glow-up. It gives it a real depth. I could have spent two hours in just Mumbatton alone learning what that kind of Spider-Man story would be like. It’s great that you give other authors voices to explore these things from other angles because there’s a lot to find there.

FB:

I know you have a lot of original work. You’re obviously on this big show but you’ve written a lot of pilots. I know before the strike, you were pitching projects. Tell me where you’re at with some of your original work. I remember you did something called The Survivors.

CM:

I had a run there where I would write these pilots that I would send to my reps, and they would go, “Yeah, no, I don’t think anyone wants to do anything with that.” Then, a year later, some other version of it would be huge. I had written a script called Survivors, back in 2014, which was about a support group for the survivors of various horror movie scenarios. At the time, I was patting myself on the back for having such an original idea. But my reps were like, “Oh, this is a little meta. I don’t know if it’s gonna work, blah, blah, blah.” Years later, how many seasons deep are we into American Horror Story? Also, there’s a terrific novel called Final Girl Support Group that came out a few years later that touched upon the same concept.

Still to this day, the pilot that I’m proudest of is a restaurant drama. It’s about two brothers who couldn’t be more different, forced to come back together after the death of their father. But, at the time, my reps were like, “Nobody wants a food show.” Now you have The Bear.

All you can do is write what you’re passionate about writing and keep writing, which is the problem I’m struggling with now. The strike is such a stressful time that it tempts you to take a break. You think, “I’ll put my pen down because I can’t do anything with what I make anyway, or blah blah blah.” But that muscle can atrophy. So, you have to pick up the pen and work at it every day.

I’ve got a horror feature I’m working on now, which I can’t say too much about. But every day I go to write it and I kind of shake my head and think, “Why am I this insane?” This idea is crazy. Hopefully, there’ll be some life in that at some point. Terry Matalas and I have a number of things on deck that we’d like to do, and hopefully, we’ll be able to do once the skies clear and the strike is over. We have a retelling of Phantom of the Opera that we’ve been wanting to do forever and we’d love to find a way to make that happen. Terry certainly wants to keep on exploring the world of Star Trek and hopefully, the powers that be will let us do that. It’s writing a new pilot, writing a new feature, and then hoping when this all resolves itself, we can get back in a room because that’s really where I love to be. I love sitting in a room with smart people coming up with cool stuff.

FB:

In the room we put together you always were the first to jump in almost every time.

CM :

It’s ‘cause I’m obnoxious.

FB:

Yes, you are very obnoxious, which is such a superpower. I wish I was a lot more obnoxious having witnessed you jumping in but you were a driver of the room. It was super helpful to be fearless in sharing an idea that people could jump on and start to riff off of so you need that. It’s no surprise that you’ve gone from show to show and that you and Terry have a strong partnership and understanding.

CM:

I’m starting to believe this, and maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like it has a lot to do with having worked on a time travel show. Because when you’re working in time travel, not only do you have to have these big creative sci-fi ideas and couple that with emotional character-driven ideas but you have to think, “Well, if we do this, then it undoes this because it goes back in time so that wouldn’t work.” Your brain teaches itself to iterate really quickly, to have a really good idea, explore it, realize if it contradicts something else in the time travel, and if it does, throw it out and go back because you can’t lose the time. Then if it works, great, go to the next idea.

I found that a lot of the writers who came from 12 Monkeys have all described entering subsequent rooms and feeling like they’re going faster than everybody. They’ll pitch 10 things and maybe other people in the room have pitched one and they feel like the asshole, like, “Oh my God, I am bullying my way into the room? Am I being too loud? Am I pitching too much?” And I think it’s just because we’ve taught our brains to iterate and calculate the math of a story beat in multiple timelines, and it makes your brain faster. It really is a testament to the more you do this, and the more you do it with great people who challenge you, the better you become. You can take half of your idea and half of their idea and make something that’s better than either idea. It’s an amazing feeling. There’s nothing I love more than working with great writers.

FB:

I have had a delightful time chatting with you, reconnecting, and talking about the business and your career, and fingers crossed for the strike and fingers crossed for this new idea.

CM:

Thank you for having me. I always love reconnecting with you and it’s great to be able to have a long-form conversation and really dig into it. This was a blast.

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All Things Alice: Interview with Fernando Del Rosario

It is my great pleasure to have Fernando Del Rosario 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. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.

FB:

Let me first tell people what it is that you do because you have a company called Concept Zombie. I’m going to read from the homepage because I think it’s pretty great. “Concept Zombie is a ‘Yes we can do that!’ creative company. From creative problem solving of art direction and design to strategic media buying, Concept Zombie has the ability to scale up or down depending on the opportunity at hand. The contagious and positive mindset of the company along with a tenacious and unrelenting work ethic, is in the core of the founder Fernando Del Rosario. Every single person on the team embodies these two traits: a positive mindset and work like your name is Elon Musk or J.K. Rowling mentality. How can we creatively help you? And we can’t wait to make something awesome for you.” Tell me about that statement and how that embodies you as the founder, because it always starts from the top down. How do you instill that in your employees?

FDR:

A little bit of my background, so I am the youngest of four kids. I was born in the Philippines and when I was 11, my mother took all four kids on our own from the Philippines to the United States. Detroit, Michigan, specifically because the Philippines and Michigan are so similar. But it was one of those moments where you just hit that fork in the road. Sometimes that fork in the road is forced upon us. My mom decided that she would risk it all and move us here for a better life for all four kids. We ended up renting a house and my mom was smart enough to rent a house in between the border of Detroit and Grosse Pointe. The reason for that was because the Grosse Pointe school system was much better than Detroit’s. I learned photography, graphic design, illustration at the high school level, and I don’t think I would have had that opportunity if we had lived in Detroit proper. So, that was a launchpad for going to art school.

But all that being said, I was having a conversation with someone a while ago, they asked, “Why do you work so hard? Why do you strive for so much?” I thought to myself, “I could just be ‘average’ or just do what is needed but I could have done that in the Philippines. I could have been just average in the Philippines and really saved my mom the headaches and heartaches and money-aches. This wasn’t cheap and we started from the ground up. I literally have the American Dream of being able to have these opportunities in front of me and taking advantage of it. That’s the first baseline, I guess you might call it. From there, I was a company man. I did what I was supposed to do. Go to school, get my degree, get a job, do well in that job so that other companies would want to work with me, and so I moved up the ranks.

FB:

Was that a mindset that your mom instilled in you? Was that a predetermined path that she thought, or you thought, because you’re an immigrant, this is what you do and then did you turn it around and become more entrepreneurial? How do you separate from those two paths?

FDR:

It’s a little bit of both. I remember having a conversation with my older brother when I got into art school, and I wanted to do it full time so I could be done in four years. He said, “Why don’t you just go part time and get a job so you can help out the family?” And I looked at him and, “Why don’t I just double down, finish this in four years, and get a job so I can help the family even more?” The mindset of finishing school and getting a full-time job with benefits was certainly instilled in me. But you’re right, there was that entrepreneurial bug that was always inside of me. But to go back, I did that route of going from one ad agency and design firm to another and about eight or nine years into my career, I was learning all these wonderful things but I was afraid that I wasn’t going to retain any of it. I thought, “Okay, the best way for me to hold on to all the things I was learning was to turn around and teach it to someone else. Fortunately, the Art Institute of Orange County had just opened a campus and they were looking for people to fill the classrooms. They took a risk, gave me a one class a quarter, and it just kept on going. I’ve been teaching for the last 21 years.

What’s interesting is that it really started to fuel more and more of my entrepreneurial spirit, because I was basically creating a pipeline between the colleges and the universities and into the industry. So, depending on where I was at, I would hire my top-level students, or give them connections to the people and agencies that I know are looking for employees. Fast forward to, after doing that for a good 15 years, I became freelance and I started to acquire more clients and I started to hire my students. That’s how I started to build my company. So, to go back to your original question, how am I able to kind of relay the mindset of this top layer down? Well, I actually went backwards. I’m bringing in from the student level because I’m teaching them this kind of mindset and this kind of work ethic, and the people that are really getting it and really subscribing to it, those are the ones I’m bringing into the company.

Fernando Del Rosario smiling in front of a white wall of inspiring quotes written in different fonts, with black lettering. Quotes by Thomas Edison, Michael Jordan, Henry Ford, Will Rogers and more.

FB:

That’s very clever. On your website, after your homepage, you have a Mindset page with a very nice photo of you, when you were a little bit younger, less gray hair, very dashing. It’s a page with a lot of very amusing, but helpful quotes. One of my favorites is, “I can accept failure. But I can’t accept not trying.” That’s a Michael Jordan quote. I’m a huge fan of Michael Jordan but he has a few other quotes that I think are just as good if not a little bit better and I’m going to share two of them. “The key to success is failure.”

The reason he succeeded is because he didn’t think about the consequences of missing the shot because he’s so present in the moment. As a creator yourself, as a writer, when you’re lost in your art or you’re lost in your writing, everything calms down, everything gets quiet. You can call it the zone, call it whatever you want, but it’s that state of mind that lets you start to create and find your imaginative power. I thought that was a great way to articulate the mindset for somebody who’s just coming to your website, and you want to present how you think about the work at hand and how your employees slash students think about the work at hand.

FDR:

Absolutely. The other quote I also like is, “I will fail my way to success.” This is an ongoing game we are all in, there’s not an end. End is when we’re six feet under, right? It’s an absolute long game. When we find those moments of flow that you were talking about, that Michael Jordan talks about, those are just so golden. I make most of my artwork in the middle of the night at one to four o’clock in the morning. I’ve figured out, at least for me, that is the easiest and fastest way for me to get into flow state. I know my phone isn’t gonna ring. My email isn’t gonna ding. I’m not gonna get buzzed.

FB:

We met in 2015 through my friend PJ Haarsma when I was looking for somebody to do a logo for Hatter Madigan: Ghost in the H.A.T.B.O.X. You invited PJ and I to one of your shows, and your artwork is comic book pages that you have taken out and collaged in your own way on big panels or surfboards. We went to a gallery opening of your artwork, and I took photographs of all of them, and I said to myself, “One day, I’m going to ask him to create a piece of art using my Hatter Madigan artwork from Ben Templesmith, which as you alluded to, happened just a month ago. But the artwork itself, when you’re cutting out the particular pages and deciding what’s going to be in the frame, I think the audience will now be able to imagine in their mind taking hundreds of pages of comics, and then reassembling them into a piece of artwork that looks from a distance like it has an interesting symmetrical vibe. But then when you come in close, you’re picking and choosing, is it an action shot? Is it a thought bubble? Go through the process as you’re describing it, so listeners understand what that art looks like.

FDR:

I love the way you just articulated that because it’s very reflective of the art that I create, because from a distance, you see this giant piece, whether it be a ray, or whether it be this circular piece, whether it be a couple of star lights that is coming together. It brings you in from a distance. As you get closer, the art changes because you start to see the details of it. So, your experience of how you see the art from 10 feet away is completely different from how you experience the art from two feet away.

FB:

And every time you look at the art, especially when you step up, your eye is drawn to another aspect of it, which leads you to another pattern of seeing the artwork, which is why I find it so mesmerizing.

FDR:

Yeah, it gives me joy. I feel like I’m able to accomplish that when I’m in the zone and I’m in the flow undistracted, where I’m able to intentionally put together these moments where it draws you to different places.

A shelf with objects on it and a symmetrical comic book art piece by Fernando Del Rosario of Concept Zombie.

A black and white photo collage of symmetrical comic book art pieces, drawn and arranged by Fernando Del Rosario of Concept Zombie.

A wall of comic strips, placed in a symetrical manner by Fernando Del Rosario of Concept Zombie.

FB:

Let me ask you something about imagination and what role it plays in creation and art. In my book series, imagination is a big deal. Imagination is a power source. It’s a magic system. One of the reasons that I landed on imagination was people would often ask, “How did you come up with that idea?”

One of my favorite imagination quotes is, “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will.” That’s George Bernard Shaw. I get really excited about sharing this with listeners – the idea that it’s right there, you just have to act on it. You just have to trust it and you have to be willing to fail.

FDR:

Imagination is obviously one of my favorite words as well, but it’s a double-edged sword. It’s so inspiring and so motivating but at the same time, I dare to say, it’s so freaking scary. It’s sometimes debilitating.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at a blank canvas and everything is clear as day in my head on what that idea looks like but after that imaginative spark, after coming up with a concept, now you have to execute it. And that shit is scary, in so many different ways and on so many different levels. I’m not immune to doubt, uncertainty, or fear. That is very much prevalent in every step of the way.

FB:

As this is a podcast about Alice in Wonderland, let’s talk about Alice as a muse for imagination and creativity, because Lewis Carroll’s Alice has managed to stick around for over 150 years, and we’d be lucky if our artwork was around for 20 years.

What are your thoughts on that? Alice is in all parts of pop culture, so when you’re designing, you must have come across Alice for an ad or a commercial or a reference. Give me one of your early introductions to Alice and any ways you’ve used Alice in your professional life.

FDR:

Just like many hundreds of kids, Disney was an integral part of growing up, specifically watching Disney movies. But Alice in Wonderland was not interesting to me as a child. As I look back on my relationship with the Alice in Wonderland story, as I got older, I could relate to Alice herself specifically about going down that rabbit hole and suddenly being transported into this magical, crazy imaginative world. That scared me as a kid. It wasn’t until I developed some maturity and grew some courage that I really got into the storyline of it and better understood the themes. But I felt like I had to mature into it, because it scared the crap out of me as child.

FB:

I’ve told the same story over and over, which is, my grandmother’s name was Alice and Alice in Wonderland was her favorite book and also my mom’s favorite book because of it. So, when I was 10 or 11, while you were lucky enough to be reading Marvel and DC, I was reading Alice in Wonderland and I was just not interested in it. I wanted some real excitement. I wanted more of a heroic character, and she seemed to me to be very passive. But like you, when I went to college and I reread the book, I started to really appreciate thematically what it had to say about who are we, and about that journey. I started off disliking it and part of the reason that I wrote The Looking Glass Wars was because it’s sort of a revenge. I said, “Mom, I’m going to write a book that my 12-year-old son is going to enjoy.” It’s still a queendom where women are in power and Alice is the lead character. It just needed some cool characters to support our lead female character. That’s how Hatter Madigan was born and I thought he’s got to have a cool weapon of some sort. I let the 12-year-old who wanted to exact some revenge come up with the 12-year-old version and override the 20-year-old version who wanted to enjoy the literature aspects.

After seeing your artwork, I hired you and your company to come up with a logo and a look for the teenage Hatter Madigan. I’m really curious because you sent me 20 different versions, there were all sorts of ways that you articulated Hatter Madigan. You asked me a whole bunch of questions at the beginning. You read a bit. I gave you some ideas. I told you who the character was. How did you synthesize what you were asking of me?

FDR:

I imagine it as a filter. I love asking questions. You might have just a one-word answer or you might have a paragraph of an answer. But the way my brain and my creativity works are I get all that information from you, it runs through this synthesizing or filtering, and I’m such a visual person that it comes out as icons, as images, logos, and shapes. I remember one of the designs that I did where I looked at the hat which, obviously, is an iconic piece of imagery. I looked at the way that hat is shaped, and taking the name Hatter Madigan and finding the font that is tall and fits within the shape of that hat. But then the brim of the hat, I first sketched it straight, but then I took the concept of blades, and I did a simple curvature to showcase the blades. Because to me, the word blades and the word sharp translate into this kind of curvature, like a knife. That’s how my brain processes things.

FB:

You’re talking about the piece that was the final and it was my favorite. It is a hat form and the blade is a very thin line. It’s not a literal hat. It’s more of a design element. Then you put Hatter Madigan in the middle so they were stacked on top of each other. There was one where you had “Hat” and you had a little diamond in between. The “H” was small and the “T” got big and on the other side it was the “T.E.R.” and then in the middle it was “Hatter” and then you Hatter the person as the “I” for Madigan and I really liked that one as well. But I love what we landed on with the hat. It was like unwrapping the perfect Christmas present. This is exactly what I wanted. Thank you, Santa Fernando for delivering.

FDR:

Part of the mindset for me when it comes to showing different orientation of an idea, we live in a time where there are so many different ways to showcase creativity. I don’t know what might inspire you. You might look at a logo and think, that’s not right for the book or for the publication, but that would be a killer T-shirt or a great poster. I’m going to give you all of it because I never know what’s going to inspire you and your publishing company.

FB:

The next thing that we worked on, which I believe you had a student work on for you, was the card soldiers. I’ve been interested in doing a deck of cards with card soldiers, for obvious reasons, and each one of the card soldiers would be represented by each one of the suits and each one of the numbers. So, if you had a two of spades, you’d see a card soldier with two spade insignias. We needed to figure out how the design of that would look so I came to you. I believe the person I worked with, who was amazing, she was a student, right?

FDR:

Amy Johnson. Amy’s great. She was a student at the time. She went through the whole process of it. She was a student who became part of my nonprofit agency that works with small local businesses, all pro bono, and it’s an opportunity for students to get their feet wet. Then, from there, I hired her onto Concept Zombie and she did some work with you and did some work with a handful of other clients. Now, she’s moved on to the design department of Skechers up in L.A. So, it’s a nice process that I’m able to provide.

A playing card layout featuring characters from the Hatter M. graphic novels and the Looking Glass Wars.

A close-up of a card of spades, in black and white. Design of Looking Glass Wars characters by Ferndando Del Rosario.

FB:

Her design is very elegant. She came up with some really spectacular ideas, within a limited framework, so I first thought, but then she sent these designs, and I realized that it was unlimited. I’m going to figure out a way to finish this playing card project. It’s one of those projects that I started and haven’t had the bandwidth to finish but I really appreciated you putting her on the show.

There are two questions I ask all my guests: 1) What is your favorite iteration of Alice in Wonderland? 2) If you were a character from Alice in Wonderland, who would you be and why?

FDR:

My favorite iteration of Alice in Wonderland is actually The Matrix. If you remember, the marketing and advertising for The Matrix was absolutely brilliant. There were five different trailers and none of them explained what the movie was and I remember, to this day, sitting there in the movie theater with my wife and about 30 minutes into the movie we both looked at each other like, “We have no idea what this movie is about.” Then the fight scenes came on and she leaned over to me and said, “You’re squeezing my hand too tight.”

That leads me to my answer to which character I find most relatable. It’s Alice/Neo. It goes back to that sense of fear I experienced as a child. It sounds like I use the word fear a lot in this conversation, because I am very cognizant of the fact that people can look at the how I’ve lived my life, my career path, and my creativity and easily say, “Man, Fernando, you’re so brave. You’re just not afraid to take that risk.” If anything at all, no, it’s actually fear. It’s so prevalent but, in spite of that, I still do it. If anything in some ways, because of that, I do it. The connection with the character of going into that whole new world and meeting all these crazy people and building relationships with pretty much every single one of them. From the people that are being helpful to the people that are trying to take off her head. I can’t help but relate to that.

FB:

It’s really been a pleasure. Thank you, Fernando, for taking the time. It’s been great fun.

FDR:

Thank you back, Frank. It’s been a privilege for me to be able to share my stories with you and your listeners. It’s such a pleasure to have this conversation with you.

FB:

All right, brother. Lots of love. Talk to you later. Thank you.

For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice, please read our blog and subscribe to our podcast!

ALL THINGS ALICE: INTERVIEW WITH KEN FRIEDMAN (PART TWO)

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 that 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?”

It is my great pleasure to have Ken Friedman join me as my guest! Read on to explore part one of our conversation, and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.

All Things Alice Podcast cover photo title image. Frank Beddor interviews Ken Friedman, NYU professor, director and screenwriter. Background image is from the Robin Williams Film: Cadillac Man.

FB:

Welcome to the show, everybody. This is Part II with director and screenwriter Ken Friedman. I had such a good time chatting with him in Part I that I invited him back to talk more about moviemaking, all things Alice, and The Looking Glass Wars.

Hey, Ken, thanks for coming back for round two.

KF:

My pleasure.

FB:

So, let’s talk about movies and starting out. A lot of times people get their breaks because they make independent films, and the independent films have a voice, and they go to Sundance, they go to film festivals. Then they find themselves in Hollywood and they’re trying to make the jump to more commercial ideas.

How do you advise your students in terms of the stories they choose, the subject matter, and the process?

Image of a cowboy, wearing a cowboy hat, standing next to a pretty horse. Intent of image is to show some beautiful cinematography in The Rider, by Choe Zhao.

KF:

Well, as a tenured professor of writing at NYU Tisch Graduate School of Film and Television, I get to work with really smart, really bright, and really interesting students. We want to help them find their voice and express their voice, not give them a template to the voice that’s going to make their career happen. If they’re interested in money and celebrity, there are better places to be than Tisch Grad Film. They can go to Stern Business School across the square if that’s what they’re interested in.

Being successful and famous either happens or doesn’t happen. If that’s your goal, you’ll have a better chance getting there making films that are totally personal. I think this business value new voices and new ideas. I think if you write to a commercial end, you don’t have a chance to really establish yourself as an independent voice.

I talk about Chloe Zhao a lot because I worked with her early on, but she had a vision. And she made two low budget films for $60,000 each. Songs My Brothers Taught Me and The Rider, which is one of the best movies I’ve seen. Eventually she got her chances to make bigger films. But that was an outcome of her personal expression, not an outcome of her business design.

FB:

That means you believe what Mark Twain said, “Write what you know”?

KF:

I think that’s become a bit of a cliche. And one I’ve probably used. Certainly, you can write what you know. But you can learn what you don’t know. I did a television show called The Grid, which was about terrorism and counterterrorism, and we had characters who were terrorists.

Now, what do I know really know about what happens in the life of a human being who decides to be a terrorist and kill as many people as they can? I didn’t know about it. I certainly wasn’t sympathetic to it, my family having been on the wrong end of things at times. But it was a world I could find out about. We talked to ex-terrorists. We talked to politicians, lawyers, and clerics living in Arab countries and who have different points of view about Islam, politics, and culture. But what really helped me was reading novels written by young Algerians and young Tunisians about growing up in those countries. You could really hear their voice in those books and understand how things can go so badly wrong in somebody’s life that they would choose that path.

Robin Williams with a mustache, holding his hands up. From the Movie Cadillac Man, Fran Drescher is standing behind him, also with her hands up, looking scared.

FB:

Let’s talk about Cadillac Man. Tell me about working with Robin Williams. What did he bring to it? Did he improvise a lot of dialogue? Was he collaborative on set?

KF:

It was a great situation. Robin, early on, came to me and said, “The reason I’m doing this film is because I love the script.” But of course, who wouldn’t want Robin to do his stuff? He’s funny. He’s insightful. But he was smart enough to say, “I don’t want to mess up the story. I don’t want to change the story and change the character.” So we agreed we’d get one take as it was written in the script and then open it up to improv.

But, even more than that, we had table reads of the script in the weeks just before shooting. So if they improvised during the table read, I’d make a little note – This is a good idea. That was a bad idea. That night, I’d go back and update the pages. So I’d rewrite the dialogue as we rehearsed to reflect when they came up with good stuff.

FB:

It sounds like a great experience. I don’t remember you having the same experience with Johnny Handsome.

Image from Johnny Handsome, a 1989 feature film, starring Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin and Elizabeth McGovern.

KF:

Well, it was difficult until it happened. Chuck Roven had a book called The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome and he liked the idea of the book but little else. It had the potential for a really good character. He was born with deformities and shunned by society so he gravitated towards the criminal world, where he became a master at coming up with bank robberies. So, the movie starts with him double crossed during a robbery and he’s thrown in jail, where the people who betrayed him have him killed so he won’t talk. Except he doesn’t die. In the hospital, he volunteers to join an experimental program where he’s physically transformed through surgery and cut loose. The question is, what’s gonna happen to him? Is he going to try and get revenge or is he going to focus on the woman he’s fallen in love with?

The first drafts of the script were really good. But then we went through three or four different directors and producers and the script was getting to the point where it was satisfying too many people. But Chuck finally took it to Walter Hill and he decided to go with one of my earlier drafts.

Working with Walter Hill was one of my great professional experiences. He knew everything about movie history and had worked with many of those people. He was a great guy and great to worked with.

FB:

And Mickey Rourke, how did that come about?

KF:

I had a very good relationship with Mickey. I don’t know how he was brought onto the picture but he did a great job in the movie. Like a lot of movie stars, he didn’t like to speak a lot of dialogue, so we pared the dialogue down. Considering the history of the character, he would be very kept in and closed, not used to speaking, so I think Mickey’s desires to cut the dialogue helped.

FB:

Mickey was remarkable. He was one of those actors that had a stretch where he was so compelling to watch. Not since maybe Brando, was I so drawn to an actor.

KF:

We got Mickey at his height. It sounds strange, but he and I played racquetball several times a week during production. Never talked about the movie, though. Whatever internal stuff was going on, he used it in the character. He didn’t use it in his life.

FB:

Who won in racquetball?

KF:

Generally, I did.

FB:

So when you adapt a book that’s not very well known, you can really take the ideas or theme and go somewhere that might be different from what the intention of the book is. What’s your take on when you’re working on something that’s well established?

KF:

There are times where I feel I want to work with the author, if they’re available, and I want to interpret their story cinematically. I don’t want to make it my story.

With Heart Like a Wheel, which is about drag racer Shirley Muldowney, I liked her and she was still active in her career so I felt like I had a responsibility to her. If the book is out and people are reading it and I like it, then I’d like to work with the author but also write it in a way that was readable. The readability of a novel is different than the readability of the script. But, I always went for the greater truth. Who was this person? What was at their core? Not, what happened on August 15? So for Heart Like a Wheel, we’re adapting real events in her life but interpreting them cinematically to try and get underneath Shirley Muldowney.

Image from Heart Like a Wheel, a 1983 movie, starring Beau Bridges, and written by Ken Friedman. Images shows 2 women standing near a movie camera, with 1980's hairdos and clothing that was symbolic of the era.

FB:

I found it really challenging to find a structure for The Looking Glass Wars when I was working on it as a movie property because of the age of the protagonist. Alyss starts at seven and then we see her at 13 and then she’s a 20 year old. It takes place over 13 years and there’s a lot of territory to cover in a two or two-and-a-half-hour movie. I was never really able to separate myself from the material in a way that would find the truth of the character until you and I started talking about it as a TV show. Because as a television show, that 13 year span and that life that Alyss had in Wonderland, then in our world, and then back in Wonderland, made a lot of sense over eight episodes.

Back when you were writing movies, they were such a driving force in pop culture. Now it seems to be in television, unless you’re in the Marvel Universe or DC Universe. How much of your teaching at NYU has switched from writing for film to writing for television? And what’s the difference in your approach with your students?

KF:

To begin, a good story’s a good story. I was responsible for developing the TV part of the program because I had just done television. The Grid was my next-to-last job before I went to NYU. At the time, I was really plugged into the TV world, and how to develop ideas into long form stories.

Now I’m back to teaching in a slightly different position of being head of thesis writing, and working with people on their long form stories. Sometimes TV becomes a feature or a feature becomes TV. It depends how many characters and what the story is. I think that the way people should develop their projects was different at the time that we talked about Alyss’ great potential, and it still has it, as a TV series. I look at the ways in which to tell the story differently now.

Image from the Queen's Gambit, starring Anya Taylor Joy. Here she is in character, playing chess.

FB:

I was very excited after I saw the Queen’s Gambit, especially the first episode. It used to be that you couldn’t start with the young kid and stay with the young actress or actor because the audience would get behind that person. But it was seamless and Scott Frank did an amazing job.

KF:

The limited series is still the most intriguing television work to do as a writer because it has an end and it all fits together. I love series that are open ended but in terms of the writer expressing themself in this medium, the limited series is great.

FB:

In terms of deciding on a project, one of the things you said was, “What’s the show?” What do you mean by that?

KF:

What’s the experience you’re meant to have? I think the document, whether it’s a treatment or character descriptions, or verbal pitch, you’re trying to describe what the series is going to deliver.

FB:

I remember you saying to me, you’re selling the environment of Victorian England and Wonderland. You’re selling what happened. What happened to Alyss being exiled. Then you’re selling the situation this girl find herself in and then you’re developing the story arc of how she’s going to navigate those worlds.

KF:

She came from Wonderland, escaped the coup, and was dropped into Victorian England. I still feel that’s a compelling character that I want to watch. I really want her to find herself and now that she’s found herself in the real world, can she go back and find herself in the fantasy world?

FB:

The imagination was also something you landed on. The theme is in the book and you always encouraged me to land on that in the TV show. That thematically it’s about creativity and a creative person who’s being denied in a repressive place, but they have all this potential. Thematically, it’s “Who am I?” And this is her journey to find her way home. So it’s also got a little Wizard of Oz to it.

Well, that was a fantastic conversation, Kenny. Thank you.

KF:

It was fun!

Check out Part One of Frank’s interview with Ken Friedman!

For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice, read our blog or subscribe to our podcast!

All Things Alice: interview with Ken Friedman (Part One)

All Things Alice Podcast, interview with Ken Friedman, NYU professor, Holllywood feature fillm writer and director who has worked with Harrison Ford, Robin Williams, Peter Markle, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and more. Interviewed by The Looking Glass Wars author, Frank Beddor.

FB:

You know, we we met years ago when I was living with Peter Markle, the director of the masterpiece, Hotdog: The Movie. Peter directed the film. I did the ski stunts and turns out that he’s also from Minnesota, and we moved in together in a duplex on Wooster Street. What I remember most vividly about first meeting you is how you came into the apartment and completely ghosted me. You walked right past me, sat down with Peter and started talking about the film you two were co-writing, Youngblood.

KF:

I remember going to Peter’s to work on the script for Youngblood and, by that time, I was already enthralled with skiing. You showed up after me and I was doing some editing with Peter. So, you were just an interloper. I probably had somewhere else I wanted to be other than working with Peter and you further delayed things until I was informed that you were a champion skier and, at that point, I decided that I was gonna get to know you better!

FB:

At the time of Made in U.S.A., I was an aspiring actor and you had written and were going to direct this movie. My friend Nancy was the assistant to your girlfriend, Sally, who was the casting director. So, you guys all asked me to come in and read for this small part in the first 10 minutes of the film, with not that much dialogue. The way that you wrote the script was unique because you wrote the action description in first person. It was the liveliest script I’d ever read because all the dialogue was from the character’s point of view. Tell us the premise of the film because it feels quite contemporary.

Movie Poster for Made in USA, written and directed by Ken Friedman. Starring Judith Baldwin, Lori Singer, Marji Martin and Frank Beddor.

KF:

Before I wrote the film, I was going back and forth between Los Angeles and New York a lot. I did a lot work with different producers and directors on both coasts. So I was on a flight to New York and I was reading an article in Newsweek magazine, about a place called Centralia, Pennsylvania. There was a coal fire under the town and the description in this article said, “The streets glowed red at night.” I said, “I gotta see this, it sounds like Hell on Earth. I gotta go.” So I rented a car in New York and drove to Centralia, which is about two and a half hours from New York. Sure enough, there were red spots on the road, fumes arising from the cemetery, and caved-in houses. It was really interesting. There were hundreds of small coal mining towns that were established in the early 19th century. The people lived on top of the mines and the workers would go down and go into the tunnels. It was deep mining coal and during World War II, the need for coal was great but he restrictions on mining were so expensive that they began using cheaper coal from New Mexico and Arizona, and these towns died. There were slag heaps of open coal and tunnels everywhere. On Easter, 1981, a fire broke out at the Centralia town dump. There were only 30 people left living in the town, mostly widows of miners that had died of black lung, so there was no real urgency from the authorities to put out the fire. For two years, the fire burned, and it found a seam of coal near the surface and charred its way down. Eventually, the charring down of the coal fire found the open tunnels full of oxygen, and it exploded. There were miles and miles, 1,000-2,000 feet below the town, that were now cooking like a barbecue. That’s where the fumes came from and that’s why fire that sometimes found its way up to the surface, which would create sinkholes. It really was Hell on Earth.

FB:

Hell on Earth and also a preview of what we’re experiencing now with climate change.

KF:

I wondered when I went there, what happens to people who grew up in this town? No jobs, houses falling apart, no work. I began to think of the social contract. That thing that we all signed up for. That if we don’t run traffic lights, we don’t beat up people without reason, if we follow the rules and follow the law, society’s part is to give us a house, a wife, two children, a picket fence, and a dirt bike to play with on the weekends. But these people didn’t get their end of the social contract so they grew up sociopathic. I wanted to take these two eighteen-year-olds from this town and send them across country. Wherever they would go, would be another environmental disaster and another group of people not offered the social contract.

FB:

What were some of the other towns that weren’t offered the social contract?

KF:

The TCDD contamination in Times Beach, Missouri. Radiation from uranium mining on the Indian Reservation in New Mexico. It was my idea that if I’m going to shoot this, I didn’t want to do a documentary, but I wanted to document. Part of the concept was that we would shoot in all these locations that were damaged environmentally. We had hazmat suits. We had pregnant people who couldn’t be on the set. But we really went in there. We couldn’t even take our own vehicles when we shot at Times Beach. We had to use the special vehicles they had for a couple of families that totally refused to move. The characters visit all these locations, basically trying to get laid. That’s the only thing in front of them. Along the way they meet a girl from Times Beach, Missouri whose whole family die of cancer. She was not offered the social contract so she was psychopathic. That’s Laurie Singer’s character and she leads these guys into greater and greater criminal activity, making them test themselves and see how far they were gonna go.

FB:

Great concept. I remember the cinematography was just absolutely stunning. One of the main assets of the film.

A person and person lying on a blanket in the desert. Taken from the 1987 movie: Made in USA. Directed by Ken Friedman.

KF:

Yeah, the juxtaposition of the beauty of America with the destruction.

FB:

Such a great message. Such a great film to shoot. Can you share how you got started or what inspired to write?

KF:

I was 11 years old. My father was a businessman but wanted to be a writer. My mother wanted me to be a psychiatrist. Everybody in my family were psychiatrists so, even at 11 years old, I knew I was destined to go to med school to become a psychoanalyst. I use to get cramps when I was writing with a pencil. I just hold it too tight. So my parents got me a Smith Corona electric manual typewriter and I began tapping out stories. For whatever reason, I was never shy about showing stuff. It’s still that way. Criticism didn’t didn’t bother me a whole lot. I wrote these stories and some of them are really quite good. My parents thought writing was a good thing and they got me an electric Smith Corona clamshell typewriter, which made things even faster and better. It started out at Clark University and I flunked out of there and got drafted, and would have been on my way to Vietnam, but I began seeing a shrink. My parents weren’t going to allow me to be drafted no matter what. Going through analysis when I was 19 years old put me in touch with what I liked to do. I liked to go to movies and I like to write and “click.” I had gone from Clark to Nassau Community College to Hunter College to NYU, determined that I was not going to be a psychiatrist.

FB:

You found something that you love.

KF:

I still feel the same way now teaching it mostly right. I never considered it work. It’s fun. Making movies is fun. If you want to be rich, go to Stern Business School.

FB:

So what was it like at NYU with Oliver Stone and Scorsese as your teacher and Ben Kaplan, who became a good friend of yours as I remember?

KF:

Marty had a class, before he made Mean Streets, and he was picking up extra money teaching. At the time, he was just this little guy jumping up and down with more enthusiasm for movies than anybody had ever seen. We had this class, and we didn’t know what the class was, and he walked in and he showed one great American genre film a week. The Big Heat, Sweet Smell of Success, Only Angels Have Wings. Howard Hawks, John Ford, Hitchcock, all the great auteurs. The most inspiring moment was Wild Bunch, which is one of the great films.

A movie poster for The Wild Bunch, starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien, Warren Oates, Jamie Sanchez, Ben Johnson. As shown in a NYU class, taught by Martin Scorsese.

FB:

You’ve worked with me as a consultant on The Looking Glass Wars and helped shape the direction originally. We talked about it as a movie – What’s the structure? Who are the characters? What’s the character have to say? What are the character’s obstacles? What’s the character’s story?

KF:

It was fun to talk story with you and Liz Cavalier and some of the other people. I was thinking about it on my way over here that your inspiration, from my point of view, was to take a black and white story and colorize it. That Alice grew up in the Industrial Revolution in England and that was a real world with political problems and good guys and bad guys. The world that’s been created before in film. And that, you know, stark and gray and, and true to Lewis Carroll’s world, but also Frank Beddor’s world of Wonderland, a place in color. Without industry, but not without struggle, not without competition, not without good guys and bad guys. It was another version of the time and the fluidity of characters being able to move from one world to another was what sets your books apart.

FB:

When I was making The Looking Glass Wars into a TV series I wrote a short amalgamation of the books and the graphic novels to have in the bible and I made a few changes. I thought nobody would ever read it because it’s way too long. However, you really appreciated the content and said it would serve me one day. Now, it doesn’t serve me in the sense of selling it but it certainly serves me when I talk to other creatives and they want to have a quick overview that gives you a beginning, middle, and end without reading 15 books. I wrote it in prose style and I gave each of the characters there are five or six pages, and I gave each one of those to you. You read them very quickly, and were enthusiastic and gave me great critiques on them.

KF:

It’s still in the teaching I do, and I’ve been teaching at the grad program at NYU for 17 years now. Character, character, character.

FB:

It’s one thing if it’s a movie. It’s another thing if it’s a TV show. And if it’s a TV show you have time and that’s why people tune in, they want to see the character’s struggles, the obstacles, the release. The world gets them in, but the characters keep them coming back. So, I want to acknowledge and let you know how much I appreciated that feedback because now I’m proud of writing those stories but at the time they were driving me crazy.

KF:

I feel the passion for the story you’re telling when I read your books.

FB:

I’m going to jump to four of your movies that I’m really interested in hearing how they came about. White Line Fever was an early movie. I know you worked on The Fugitive with Harrison Ford so I’m curious about that. Also, Cadillac Man with Robin Williams, who’s amazing. I quoted a couple of his lines from Good Will Hunting at my wedding, so I’m a fan and then I remember some crazy stories with Mickey Rourke in Johnny Handsome. But, let’s talk about The Fugitive first because that was one of my dad’s favorite movies. He loved Harrison Ford at the top of his game.

Harrison Ford, starring in The Fugitive. 1993 action movie, co-starring Tommy Lee Jones, Jullianne Moore, and Sela Ward. Movie poster featuring Harrison Ford running.

KF:

I had just come off of Johnny Handsome and Cadillac Man. So, I had written two movies within one year that had major stars with major releases. I was hot. With The Fugitive, they were having trouble getting a script out of it. Walter Hill was directing it and Alec Baldwin was starring but they didn’t have a script yet. But Alec had committed to do it. Walter was going to direct it. I’d done Johnny Handsome with Walter. And Chuck was producer of Johnny Handsome, so he and Walter and I were kind of a team. And we came in to the big, big, big budget film and took over the writing directing of it. Walter was one of the greatest screenwriters in Hollywood history. I learned more from him about writing than from anybody else. And so we came in as a team. We had a little different take on the movie, but about 23 minutes of the film came out of that partnership. We wrote two different drafts and there were probably three or four writers who did drafts before us and three or four writers who did drafts after us. But when we made it, 23 minutes remaining in the movie came from the Walter, Ken Friedman, Chuck Roven version. This is an interesting story, because it’s how films get written and I tell the story in my class.

We had to take meetings with a producer and Warner Bros., and everything was good. Train crashes. Harrison Ford gets away. He’s on the run. Tommy Lee Jones comes in as the cop and says, “He’s been on the run for six minutes and 20 seconds, can’t go more than a mile in this direction” and put out a circle. But Harrison Ford manages to escape. He’s a doctor, and goes into a clinic, sutures his own wound, and continues his escape. But, Tommy Lee Jones goes after him. They have a couple of close calls, then you find out they’ve caught the fugitive. But the guy they caught is somebody else who escaped from the train and Harrison almost gets away but of course they find him again. At Niagara Falls, and he’s going to jump in the falls and die. Harrison Ford says, you know, “I didn’t do it”. And Jones says, “I don’t care”. And that whole section of the movie, we wrote, I wrote a lot of the dialogue. And then the cops reconnoiter, and how they’re going to find him. And that’s where we parted ways.

We were lovers of the TV show. We did not make it a revenge picture. The big problem with the film, I felt how can this rich, powerful, handsome guy allow himself to be found guilty of a crime he didn’t commit? He would’ve had the best lawyers. Why didn’t he put up any defense? Because, in the TV show, which dealt with the same problem, he had a shitty relationship with his wife and she was an alcoholic. He worked overtime just to get away from her. So, one night, he stays at the hospital when he doesn’t have to and that’s the night when the one-armed man kills his wife. So, he’s feeling guilty. He feels that he needs to pay for the crime so he chooses not to defend himself. This is the story as we saw it, and what we worked out with Alec and Walter and Chuck. They were thrilled. They didn’t mind that change to the character.

Harrison Ford, with his hands up. Tommy Lee Jones is behind him, holding a gun. A scene from the movie The Fugitive.

FB:

You have great stories. We’re going to have you back on the next episode and I can’t wait to hear about all your other films!

KF:

I’ve had hundreds of people come through my writing classes at NYU, so I talk about this stuff. And always love to share some of that.

FB:

It’s a gift and thank you for sharing your gift today.

Check out part two of Frank’s conversation with Ken Friedman!

For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice, please read our blog and subscribe to our podcast!

All Things Alice: Interview with the Creative Team of Mad Hatter The Musical

It is my great pleasure to have Vincent Conner, Michael J. Polo and Victor Valdez join me as my guests! Read on to explore part one of our conversation, and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.

FB:

Gentlemen, welcome to the All Things Alice podcast. However, for today, I’m going to change it to “All Things Hatter” because we’re going to be talking about your very exciting musical, Mad Hatter: The Musical. I’m going to ask each of you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what your role is in the musical. I’ll start with you, Vince.

VC:

I am the co-creator of Mad Hatter: The Musical. I am responsible for the book. I wrote the story and have been working, since 2018, on building the show. I was the original director of the piece at the London workshop and now I’m stepping into the role of the Mad Hatter in Montreal.

MP:

I’m the composer of Mad Hatter: The Musical. The thing I’m most proud of creatively is the synergy and the creative input that we all have in our collaboration more than anything.

VV:

I am a songwriter on the show and, as Mike said, once the boys got the show going and knew where the story was going, I inserted myself into the project. Their backgrounds are mostly in classical opera while I come from Latin America. I’m originally from Venezuela where I grew up singing pop ballads and that’s what I thrive on so I added that pop sensibility to their classical sensibilities, which is what makes the music very, very different and very, very cool. Also, I’m joining the cast in Montreal as one of the lead characters. Her name is Yola. I’m a Cheshire Cat, which is why my hair is kind of purple-pink right now.

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FB:

Before we jump into the whole process, let’s give the listeners the elevator pitch.

VC:

I’ve always been fascinated with the character of the Mad Hatter. As time has evolved over the past 100 years, I think my fascination is also a joint fascination with other people. I’ve always gone down the rabbit hole myself of what his backstory was and so this is a story of a crippled man from boyhood who finds his way to Wonderland. In our post-COVID world, we have a lot of archetypes of Mental Health Awareness wrapped up in the musical and we tend to be in this place in history where we’re fascinated with this idea of the villain.

I didn’t want to make the Mad Hatter a villain, but we played with the idea of him being an antihero, making human mistakes, just as anybody would. Because hatters used mercury back in the Victorian period the Mad Hatter suffers from mercury poisoning, which is in large part why he has become mentally unstable. But there are many different levels of the story. You could take it from the fantasy of Wonderland versus the realism of a man going insane.

FB:

Does the musical go back and forth between our world and Wonderland?

VC:

Yeah, we go back and forth between the turn of the century London and Wonderland. Just as Lewis Carroll uses the rabbit hole, or the looking glass, as a way to travel to Wonderland, we use the Mad Hatter’s hat as a portkey.

FB:

That’s so clever. The hat makes perfect sense. So, what is your story behind the story? I’d also like to know how each of you became involved.

MP:

Vince and I started working together in 2016. Vince was the director, and I was a production coordinator and director, and producer on a show that we did together called Madame Butterfly. Then in 2018, Vince and I started working in Vienna, Austria. We were running education programs primarily in the opera sector, and we started to branch out. So, we went to London in 2018 in an effort to build a new program called the London Summer Music Theater Academy. We booked the theater, we booked the hotel, we booked the rehearsal space, and then we were looking for a show to do.

We were calling MTI looking for rights to do a show, and we couldn’t get granted anything, but we had booked everything in preparation for a 2019 production. We were on a bench in London, and he said to me, “I have a great idea.” And I said, “What’s that?” He goes, “Mad Hatter.” I said, “Mad Hatter, what?” He said, “We’re writing a musical.”

It became quite a journey, as we led into 2019 with the original production, which was very much a student-led workshop with a full ensemble, in a West End theater. It was not only a way for us to work creatively, but then after the production was done, we all said, “Wow, maybe we should pursue this even further.”

It, creatively, forced us to work on a way to identify that this story might actually have a tremendous impact, not only on the audiences that well-received it in London, but that it could potentially expand into other audiences and become a significant work that can compete with many other existing shows.

Mad-Hatter-the-musical-original-poster-theater-ad-all-red-with-silhouette-of-man-and-child-both-wearing-top-hats-overlooking-London-England-creepy-spooky

FB:

Can you walk us through the process? Why do musicals usually seem to take a very long time to come to fruition? What are all the factors that go into getting it ready to put on its feet?

VC:

Let’s first start with how our path is a little different than the normal path. One of the questions was, Why does it take so long to get to Broadway? Or why does it take so long to get to La Jolla? It can start in a few different ways. Traditionally, what happens is a producer who’s produced a musical before will cultivate a creative team. They’ll put together a book writer, and a composer that they like, and begin to generate a story. Over the next three to five years, they’re developing the story through table reads and workshops where they will begin to add equity actors and try to elevate the piece after each hearing and continue to grow it into a product that is then commercialized and sellable so the producer can raise the $20 million it takes to get to Broadway. That’s why it traditionally takes so long.

In this case, Mike and I have the study abroad programs in Vienna, which is an education program with the business model: If you want to be a classical musician, we’re going to bring you to one of the classical meccas, which is Vienna. It’s very similar to London if you want to study musical theater. We sensed this hole in education and we wanted to be at the forefront of changing that horizon and so we got this idea to write a musical and as producers we have already created a space for it.

So, we luckily have built the asset, so that now going forward, the London Musical Theatre Academy is going to be for new musicals where we’re actually developing new work right now aside from Mad Hatter. I think we’ve found a way to help musical theater, not only with our show but in general to bring awareness and to bring new projects to life.

FB:

What you’re saying is you’ve created an infrastructure as creatives, producers, and educators, which allows your musical, and hopefully other people’s musicals, to find their legs and be developed without the traditional process of the Broadway producer.

VC:

Actually, seeing the show, as a creator, was one of the first times in my life that I knew that I was a part of something bigger than myself. It was a very profound moment in my history as a creative. Since then, we’ve had a New York presentation, which is a very traditional step in development. That led us to now, our next step, which is going to be a full orchestra concert, where the music gets to be the hero, in Montreal next week. That is a non-traditional step. We did the industry presentation, and we did a workshop in a non-traditional way, but it’s all connected to the next step, which is really cool.

Curtain-call-of-actors-singers-musicians-for-Alice-in-Wonderland-Mad-Hatter-the-Musical-Frank-Beddor-All-Things-Alice-podcast

FB:

Your concert with a full orchestra, you said that’s unusual?

VC:

It’s unusual because there haven’t been many musicals that have been performed with a full orchestra. It’s typically after a show has been on Broadway for 20 to 30 years sometimes. It’s an honor, because Alexandre de Costa, fell in love with the score because of the pop sensibility mixed with this romantic classicism. Our music has a timeless quality that also feels very relevant to today but it also has a sense of nostalgia that translates really well to orchestral music. Oftentimes in my elevator pitch, I’ll say, “If Wicked and Sweeney Todd had a baby, that’s what Mad Hatter is.”

FB:

Let’s focus on the music because we’ve been talking a lot about the orchestral aspect of it but just give us some highlights of some of the different songs and what you’re excited for people to take away from this work.

VV:

One of the things that has been super exciting is seeing how the music has evolved from the beginning up to the final arrangement. For example, the opening number, “Pelt to Felt”. In the song, we learn the process of hatting and how they use the pelts from the animals and use mercury to make the felt to make the hats. It’s so insane. There’s no other word to describe the music. It sounds so amazingly insane. It’s very easy to get into the feeling of the show just from that first number.

I’m very proud of this song called “Out of Sight” that I got to write for the wife of the Mad Hatter. It’s a song about how she and the children see the father figure go crazy, and not be the same person that he used to be and how that shifts the dynamics in the family. It’s a beautifully heartbreaking song of a mother, singing about how she knows her children are seeing their father change in front of them and not for the better. Mike has done a ridiculous job orchestrating. It’s going to be such a tear-jerker. I’m so excited to see people cry.

VC:

We use different mediums of musical genres. We have “In a Mood” with the three Cheshire Sisters and it’s complete jazz, and then we have the Mad Hatter, who has an operatic pop sensibility versus the Queen of Hearts, who is very much on the operatic side. Then we have Mary Beth, the Mad Hatter’s wife, with Yola the Cheshire Cat being extremely musical theater belt. So, we were able to explore different varieties, but still bring the continuity of that melody that makes it all feel familiar.

FB:

I’m curious from a book writing standpoint, where you’re trying to connect the story through the songs where the songs take you from Point A and advance the story yet the book has to be so well written, so the audience can follow the beats and the conflict with the characters. Can we talk thematically about the lead character and his story arc?

VC:

So, where does the story end? We end up at the tea party. That’s where I really wanted to end the story. You hear one of our most memorable melodies from “Will You Be My Wonderland?” and we see Alice and there’s a blackout. Literally, people gasped in London, and we had standing ovations, so it was that surprise effect because there isn’t really much mention of Alice at all, except I did give the Mad Hatter a daughter and her doll’s name is Alice.

But, in terms of the story, we were able to approach this from the idea of building an ark. We didn’t say, “What’s going to happen with the Hatter and only the Hatter?” We said, “Okay, I think that we need to do a quartet with the family.” So we actually decided we wanted to do a quartet before we turned it into the dinner scene, which was how we created “Papa Please,” which ended up being a very Sondheim-y number in the show, where we see conflict happening between the Mad Hatter’s children and then we see the Mad Hatter’s aggressive behavior towards them. Just hinting at the chaos after he has been selling hats all day and working with mercury and all those types of things.

In our story, the Mad Hatter’s mother was a ballerina and his father was a hatter. Historically speaking, it’s in between upper and lower class so I wanted to show that by giving these occupations to these two people who would be in between classes. We explore him not being able to sell any hats and there’s generational trauma that we find out about in the overture, in that the Hatter actually wanted to dance like his mother but his father cripples him so he can never dance again.

We explore this with Mary Beth, the Mad Hatter’s wife. There’s this beautiful duet called “Relax, My Dear,” where she’s trying to let him know that everything’s gonna be okay, and he’ll sell hats tomorrow. They have this beautiful tender moment where they actually dance but he falls because he’s crippled and he can’t hold himself. That triggers a downward spiral of being haunted by his father’s hat, which contains the portkey to Wonderland. Then we explore him being very depressed in London versus finding a sense of freedom and utopia in Wonderland, where he regains his ability to dance again.

We wanted to have the psychedelic effects of Wonderland be explained by something which, in our show, is the Wonderland Crystal, which creates the Wonderland Elixir, which, if consumed, connects everybody as almost a communion. But it also makes you feel the effects of Wonderland. In this case, it heals the Mad Hatter and he’s able to dance again.

To make a long story short, Wonderland is a sense of freedom and utopia for him and then it’s taken from him when his hat falls off. The backstory is that the Mad Hatter’s father did some bad things in Wonderland, and so the Hatter is being punished for his father’s mistakes, so this idea of generational trauma comes back and there are multiple reasons why the Hatter goes insane. Then he does whatever he can to get back to Wonderland, including murdering somebody, so we have this interesting juxtaposition between “off with your head.” We have the Queen giving that energy and then the Queen doubles as the demon that haunts the hat, basically punishing the Mad Hatter.

FB:

The idea that he’s dealing with something that horrific and difficult, and he goes to Wonderland, where he regains his legs and his ability to dance again, it’s a beautiful reflection of what Lewis Carroll was writing about, which was identity, self-expression, and self-determination.

The dancing part of it is really important because it’s the emotional part that you can just feel as you’re describing it. All the other themes that you’re talking about, about all the other characters that come into it, are going to give it richness. But what’s going to make us cry is when he starts to dance, and we’re relating to him trying to find his identity.

MP:

Vince, it might be nice if you share with Frank the moment where Hatter almost imitates his father because I think it’s one of the most pivotal moments of the show.

VC:

The moment that Mike is talking about is when the Mad Hatter gets back to London. He was rejected by the Cheshire Cat, who he had fallen in love with because he had murdered somebody to get back to Wonderland. He stole their portkey to get back to Wonderland because he had to get back to see Yola the Cheshire Cat. When she rejects him, he hits rock bottom. When he gets back to London, he is trying to make sense of what’s happening in his life and his son finds the Crystal and we see a recreation of what happened in the overture where the Hatter senior hits the Mad Hatter and now he is about to hit his son. It’s at this moment that he realizes that he’s lost his mind. He realizes that he is no good for his family anymore and he’s actually hurting them. So, he chooses to go back to Wonderland to accept the punishment from the Queen of Hearts rather than stay and bring his family harm. He’s not a villain but he’s not a hero. He’s not technically doing the right thing but it’s very complex.

FB:

Alice in Wonderland is a work that has literally given us a vocabulary to articulate the times we’re going through. You hear “down the rabbit hole” all the time, “through the looking glass,” and “Winter Wonderland.” Alice is always redefining a generation, and what’s coming out of your musical for sure, is the mental health crisis. What are you hoping your musical will contribute to the vocabulary of the 2020s? What do you guys think?

VC:

I love that in our show, Yola is being played by a man. Victor’s playing a female, which is kind of an ode to the operatic background that Mike and I come from, with men playing women’s roles has been happening since the 1600s. Suddenly, politically, it’s causing World War Three right now in the United States with what’s happening in Tennessee with drag bans. I just saw My Fair Lady, and there were men playing women and women playing men, and yet, it’s being banned in places like Tennessee right now. It’s just another opportunity for us to show, it’s not about gender, it’s about humans and emotion. This idea that fantasy can be fantasy and emotions are emotions. I love that we’re turning a few things upside down like we have the Cheshire Sisters instead of the Cheshire Cat. I just think that we’re being true to ourselves by incorporating this idea of our 21st century.

Chesire-sisters-from-mad-hatter-the-musical-3-cat-like-women-wearing-extravagant-ball-gowns-wiith-feathered-head-gear-that-looks-like-cat-ears

FB:

I’m so happy to have had this chat. Thematically, you guys have such a strong show but as people, you’re really creative and trying to share your knowledge and your education. You’re also reaching out to give folks a forum, offering them a space to learn. There are so many aspects of how you’re going through life that I think a lot of us hope and want to be able to do – be creative and give back. It’s a beautiful thing to listen to, especially through the Alice in Wonderland lens, a work that’s been so imaginative. It’s been with us for over 150 years and you’re finding a way to make it relevant now in the 21st century.

If you were a character from Alice in Wonderland, who would you be and why?

Go ahead, Victor. I’m going to ask you first just because you have the biggest smile on your face. I don’t know if it’s because you have a Cheshire Cat smile right now.

VV:

Only because it’s so freakin’ obvious. The way that Vince wrote the Cheshire Cats and the Cheshire Sisters is so fun. I love the way that the Cheshire Cats are in our show, and thinking about how they are with how the Cheshire Cat is in Alice in Wonderland, it’s so easy to see how the whole Cheshire race is so fun that I just have to be the Cheshire Cat. I just have to.

FB:

And you Michael?

MP:

Oh my gosh, I don’t know. I think maybe when I was 19, I would be the Caterpillar for sure. Now that I’m 37 I don’t know. I’ve kind of lived through every role. I think right now, I’m currently feeling like the Mad Hatter. But I think Vince is coming into it more than I am.

VV:

I don’t know, Mike, you kind of strike me as the Rabbit.

MP:

Maybe I’m the Rabbit. Maybe that’s it.

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VC:

I’ve been really getting ingrained in the Mad Hatter because I’m just performing the role, but I’m actually going to answer it similarly to what Michael said. I love this idea of the Caterpillar because it reminds me so much of my grandfather. In the book, I think the Caterpillar’s portrayed a little bit as a jerk but when I envisioned him, I think of him as more wise and philosophical. That’s really what I want to be.

FB:

Those are excellent, excellent answers. Gentlemen, thank you again, so much. This is just part one. We’re going to have more of the creative crew on and we’re going to talk more about pop culture influences, Alice, and, of course, we’re going to talk more about the Hatter. We’re gonna do a little bit of trivia about some of his rhymes and we have quite a bit more to go through. But until then, thank you for an epic morning of the Mad Hatter and your music.

For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice, read our blog or subscribe to our podcast!

All Things Alice: Interview with Nick Madonna and Lee Thomas (Part Two)

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 that 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?”

It is my great pleasure to have Nick Madonna and Lee Thomas join me as my guests! Read on to explore part 2 of a sampling of our conversation, and check out the series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.

FB:

Since my podcast is All Things Alice and it’s about the intersection of Alice and pop culture, and you guys are game experts and creators, let’s talk about games in pop culture. Right now, there’s a lot of negative buzz about American McGee’s Alice series. You’ve probably read about EA passing on doing Alice: Asylum, the third in the trilogy.

I’ve known American McGee since the first game came out and I knew the producer from Dimension who wanted to make it into a movie and I’ve always admired American McGee’s independence. He’s got a studio in Shanghai and I follow him on social media and I saw how much work and love he’s put into this property and the sequel. Yet the parent company that owns it shut it down. There was a very visceral, very emotional response that he had to it, that he wanted to step away from games, and he wouldn’t produce games.

Can you give us a sense of what that means? I don’t understand how he put so much energy into that game to wait for EA to ultimately pass. Is that a development process? What is that?

LT:

I think it’s passion. Think about how many unrealized projects there are. David Cronenberg was going to do a Bond movie at some point. Jodorowsky was going to do Dune. The individual contribution and the fuel that has taken this idea to this absolutely epic place that we as creatives could look at and be like, “Holy shit, that’s wonderful. I want to experience that.” It’s very different from a casual gamer or a casual cinema goer, going to the cinema on a Saturday night and, they’re not going to look at a poster for Jodorowsky’s Dune and think “Oh, that’s nice. I’ll take the wife to see that. That’ll be an interesting two hours.” They’re like, “No, that’s gonna be a spectacular mind-futz. I don’t know what the hell that is.” I think you have the same issue with games as well. This is driven a lot by fervent fans. Fans really cling onto authorship in games the same way they do for film.

I’m a huge fan of Tarantino films. I’m a huge fan of Peckinpah’s films. I’m a huge fan of the Sam Raimi films. To the point where I’ve watched the stuff that everyone else says is bad. There’s something in there I’m going to find that’s absolutely brilliant. I think that that type of fan exists in video games as well. I think the difference is, the sense of authorship of video games is very, very different. Oftentimes, when you’re building a video game, a lot of my lessons have always been about keeping thinking about the player. It’s less about your vision, and it’s more about their experience. It’s a weird thing to flip-flop back and forward between.

American McGee’s Alice: Asylum is huge and it looks beautiful. I can imagine it’s going to be incredibly costly to do justice to that artwork. When we have games like God of War, Horizon, and Grand Theft Auto, where you can feel everything, touch everything, open everything, look inside and around, there’s an expectation that you’re going to want to do that to anything as beautiful as some of the concept work for that third game. But it’s going to come at a cost. Even if you manage to find ways of cutting costs, work with smaller companies around the world, and find individual investors who really want to see that vision, you’re still looking at around 50-60 million dollars to get to something that approaches what that pitch material suggests. If it can get there, it’s going to be fantastic. If it doesn’t get there, it’s going to be a huge failure. With big companies like EA, or any company at the moment with a shareholder, they’re looking for quick hits and revenue. They’re looking for instant gratification or the knowledge that in two or three years, there’s at least some kind of money coming back on that investment.

I think maybe it’s just too big a project at this time to come out of nowhere. The bigger games we think about, The Last of Us, God of War, and Grand Theft Auto, quickly behind those are usually a very tight relationship with one of the big console manufacturers. Would God of War have worked without Sony? It’s impossible to say. Probably yes, at least the modern iterations that have been done in the last few years.

But it’s their console selling games. What I saw of the third game (Alice: Asylum) is that it’s a console selling game, but it didn’t have that relationship with the console manufacturers. I think that type of relationship could push the game over the edge. But I can understand why he wanted to retreat. We’ve all known and met, especially you Frank, will have met filmmakers who were banging the drum on a particular script or a particular project year after year after year, to the point where everybody in the industry is like, “Oh, yeah, I know that project.” But the public doesn’t and it just never happens for whatever reason.

There are as many games as there are films as there are books as there are albums. I think it’s just part of the process. All of us here on the call can project forward, we can look at that concept material, and we can think about what that game is. We can enjoy it. We can know it. The work that’s required to get it to be a reality is a lot and I think that maybe the appetite just wasn’t there for that.

FB:

What do you think, Nick? Have you played that game? It’s a horror game. She’s in an insane asylum with the Cheshire Cat with a crazy knife. It’s got remarkable artwork to your point, Lee.

NM:
I played the first game. I was in college when it came out. The artwork was striking and the take on this book that we all know and love was so different, and that really sucked me in and a lot of fans around the world. But to Lee’s point, this is the interesting line that I walk in my role where it’s both a business decision and a creative decision. So American McGee’s creative passion and his desire to create something and put a cap on his trilogy, that’s the thing that drove him to create this Bible and pitch it and stay on it for so long. That alone drives a creative person, you, me, and everyone in this room. There are things that we want to do and whether or not we’re being paid, we’re going to drive forward to do them, because we want to see it through. Now the flip side of that is the suit at the company who commands the Profit and Loss Statement and wants to see at least that return on investment. It’s also a strategy. EA, like many publishers these days, is looking for less risk and guaranteed hits. Whether it’s an annualized sequel or a game that’s almost complete that they can just take over publishing at the end, they’re looking for these things that minimize their risk, but maximize the profits. This is just like “Businessman in a Suit 101”, so seeing that Alice: Asylum might be five years out, it’s going to cost X number of dollars, that doesn’t always necessarily work with the current strategy, or the current plans or the current calendar. It might not fit in commercially with what they have lined up for the next three to five years. It’s really tough, because with all the passion in the world, and with all the creative juices that we can pour into something, sometimes there’s just gonna be someone on the other end that’s gonna say, no, because if we can’t fund that ourselves, we have to go to that other person who holds the purse strings, but also makes the call. I feel for American and I feel for the fans because we have a number of pitches just sitting on our server here that haven’t gone anywhere, because of those types of people or those types of situations. It doesn’t stop us from doing it again and again and again. Maybe we’re just insane. But that’s the reality of how this stuff works sometimes and frankly, it sucks.

FB:

You’re right. How many pitches have we all had that have been rejected? It’s the passion that gets it over the finish line. You’re not doing it for the money, you’re doing it because you need to do it.

But I wonder what your thoughts are on how Alice in video games continues to be reinvented. There’s that new game, Tiny Tina’s Wonderland. There’s something about Alice where every decade it’s re-imagined to reflect some idea that’s going on in culture. I’m wondering if Alice has ever been a muse for either of you, figuratively or literally, and what your thoughts are on it surviving and thriving for 150 years?

NM:

I think Lee touched on it earlier. When you’re designing a game, it’s all about the players’ experience. How do you make sure that they’re going through a world or meeting characters or coming up against challenges? How do you frame all that and make it interesting? I think there’s a direct correlation found in Alice’s journey through Wonderland and the characters that she meets and the challenges that she faces. With Tiny Tina or American McGee’s Alice or Kingdom Hearts or any of the other games that touch on this story, there’s a lot of commonality there. There’s a really great comparison to Alice’s journey but also to the player’s journey.

I think a lot of creatives connect with Alice’s journey, which is why you see it being reinvented or you see games license Alice stuff or people put Wonderland or the Rabbit or the Cheshire Cat into their games. It’s because everyone knows the fairy tale. They know the book, they know the story, they know the characters, and it’s very easy to map those steps in a video game or design process. It’s almost a surefire hit or a way to guide the player through a journey or weird and wild world that has a lot of really interesting things.

FB:

What do you think, Lee?

LT:

I think it’s the episodic nature of the structure of Alice. If you look at the Disney movie, or if you look at one of the live-action movies or any other sort of like the animated attempts, it’s usually, Alice enters a room and new things are there. She looks above, she looks below, she looks around. She tests things and then something appears and gives her a clue. She’s like, “Oh, okay, now I have some context.” I may as well have just been describing the first time you play Mario. It’s very, very similar. You jump into a room, there’s something there and it hits you, and you gotta jump on it, you get a cough. Oh, okay, this is how it works. It’s a series of rules. Also, Alice isn’t a story that any of us have encountered in its original iteration. Hundreds of years have passed before it came to my ears. It’s always been compounded.

There are rules that I now think of as Alice in Wonderland that were never really there in the original book, but over time, they’ve been included, or they’ve been done elsewhere, or someone’s done a parody. I don’t remember if that was a parody, or if it was in the original. Then you’ve got the Wizard of Oz, and it’s the counter to Alice in Wonderland. You’ve got these two girls, both in this coming-of-age period. One of them wants to get rid of all the adults and wants things her way, that’s Dorothy. Then you’ve got Alice, who’s like, “Forget the world. I want to go into my head and I want to play with my ideas. I want to play with creativity.”

It’s that precipice of becoming an adult. In Wizard of Oz, the lesson is, “Be careful what you wish for, because you might not be ready for it.” And in Alice in Wonderland, it’s more along the lines of, “Yeah. Be curious. Do ask questions. Do try these things.” When you watch the Disney version of it, it’s “Drink that, eat that mushroom, smoke that thing, take that, that’s really great.” The irony is when you encounter Alice as a child, you’re anywhere from three to seven years old, and then you get to school and school is like, “Don’t drink these chemicals. Don’t touch these bottles. Stay away from mushrooms.” So for me, Alice exhibits the lesson of don’t trust authority. Be curious, but be safe. I never stopped doing that. I don’t generally go into the woods and eat large mushrooms. That’s not a safe thing.

NM:

I feel like that’s a bumper sticker if you want to go into business: “Be curious, but be safe.” I think we could do some big business.

FB:

Currently, mushrooms are a big business that’s coming our way.

So, guys, I’ve heard this rumor going around that you’re going to be adapting this book series, The Looking Glass Wars. I know the author, and I know he’s a pain in the ass. I’m wondering how you’re going to navigate that guy to create a good game? To your point Lee, The Looking Glass Wars is not episodic. I think he wrote the book because Alice is so episodic. So he’s got the Hero’s Journey. Are you going to turn that book back into an episodic series of games? What are your guys’ plans with that book series?

LT:

This is my experience of working with creative, especially on original IP, that’s not originally a game and adapting it into the game. The adaptation process is fantastic. It’s really fun. You look at the books, the original IP, and you think about the themes and the tones and the characters and the types of things that the author is trying to tell their audience. Then, as a creative or designer, rather than strictly adhere to that and think, “Oh, I’m going to take this and I’m going to take this.” No, think about the abstract. Think about what, in a game, can cause similar things. How can I cause a player to feel the themes in this book or the tone of the book? That starts to suggest a genre or at least a principal way that you interact with the game. Once you’ve got that, then you can think about the various different systems. We’re fortunate enough that video games are rapidly proliferating. There are hundreds of different reinterpretations of genres and systems every year. So, you play a variety of different games. You see how those games make you feel, and slowly you start to have this collage of interesting abstract systems onto which the creative of the IP can be laid.

You have to do that very, very softly because the first time they come together, the creative and the system, it usually doesn’t work. But that’s okay. Because, as game designers, that’s all we do. We solve problems. We know where we want to go but we see an issue in that direction and in achieving that vision. Is it an art problem? Is it a field problem? Is it a sound problem? Is it a feedback problem? Is it a problem with the original narrative? You just have to look at these problems through lots of different lenses. Then you start to divine this loop, this sensation of like, “Oh, I do this, this happens. I feel that and now I want to do something else and something else.” That’s the traditional loop.

All games have loops and feedback to the player. Do this, that’s good. Do that, that’s bad. You learn how to divine your way through the scenario. Once you’ve got those systems, that’s the really fun part, because now it’s the back-breaking work of borrowing bits of the narrative. Can we change that? How do we push this around? What do these characters do? At that time, we talk to someone like you and your understanding of that universe is huge, way better than ours. Even if we read every single word that you’d ever written, our perspective on the world would be completely different from your perspective on it. But In that negotiation, and talking about the world and the characters and the systems, you work out how to land it and it’s very clear. It’s like an airport with beeps and lights. The runway appears, and you’re like, “That’s where we want to go.”

That’s the life of the game, at least while you’re in production. It’s not something that takes three months and you nail it. You have to go on that journey again and again, even all the way up to delivery. Then when you’re in delivery, when you’re in those final stages, it’s about putting it together. That’s the point where the creatives have to take a step back and realize that there’s lots of endless work that has to be done to get this game finished. It’s very similar in film and TV. How many times do we hear, “The director is not allowed in the edit suite,” or, “The writer has been banned from the test screening”? You have to close it down and get that game delivered. All the fun stuff is right at the start. Everyone’s friends and then there’s the tense interaction of how this IP is actually going to kind of be expressed inside of a game because it’s a very different environment to the books or the comics. In my experience, none of those experiences have been the same. They’ve always been very different. It always starts with all the best-laid plans and there’s always something that happens that changes that. I think that’s why you go back and do it again. What did I learn last time? Great. Let’s put those into play. I think it’s very easy to be precious about games. I think you have to be, but it’s one of those…there’s a famous line from a film, The Croupier. It’s “Hold on, tightly. Let go lightly.” I think that’s exactly it. When you’re in control and when you have a pen and have that authorial position? Yeah, protect it. Stand up for your ideas. But realize that when it’s time to let it go, it’s usually for a good reason. Let it go lightly.

FB:

Nick, we are all bonded by the same gentleman, Rich Liebowitz, who has been interested in my property for a long time. He’s been a friend and, back when he was an agent, he was representing The Looking Glass Wars. Rich is the person, as Lee had said, who’s the connective tissue to this conversation, and why we’re in this room. In terms of our collaboration turning The Looking Glass Wars into a video game, it’s been really interesting for me to share the magic systems and to be able to articulate the logic and rules behind the world that I’ve created and have that land as a starting point for some of the gameplay.

But when it came to the narrative, it really changed because we all agreed to start with something that’s not in the book. We wanted to give fresh story elements and bring us up to where the books start. I found that to be a very exhilarating proposition. Can you talk about why you think that impact is important in terms of the game that we’re working on, and can you also talk about how we’re piggybacking on the game design and play of Justice League?

NM:

I think you nailed it. It’s exhilarating to tell a story that isn’t a direct adaptation of what’s already there. There’s this great book series, there’s this great movie, whatever it happens to be that you’re adapting into a game. People know the beats. They know what happens. There’s almost an expectation as to how this is supposed to go. The Last of Us TV show is a great example of how they subverted some of those expectations, but also expanded upon the universe to make it new and fresh, even though they retold the first game in an eight-episode arc.

You being so gracious and allowing us to play in a sandbox that exists before the first book is that really exhilarating moment where we have an idea of where things are going but we are allowed to take however many steps we need to take to get to that point. There are a lot of different stories and really cool moments that happen in those steps. We could either take our time and do it over a number of games, or we could do it over one game. But that’s really exciting. That freedom is what makes our job a little bit easier because we’re not beholden to, here are the steps, you have to hit these bullet points, because this is what everyone knows.

During that adaptation phase, I put together this document that was full of narrative, thematic film, all these different references that were visceral and exciting, that had themes of war and brotherhood, because of some of the characters that we wanted to touch on in our game. But then I also included relatable situations, because that’s something that’s really important for any piece of media is that there’s some kind of thread, like we’re doing with Silverlake, there’s something relatable that players can understand whether it’s their first time in the world or their 100th time in the world.

So, I put together this big list full of Band of Brothers and Suicide Squad, examples of groups of individuals who come together to reach this common goal. The steps to get there might not be easy, they might not all get along, they have different personalities. There’s a lot of inner character play, and things that happen that lead them towards where they’re going, but it allows for a lot of interesting weaving that we can do on the way to that endpoint. So that adaptation process and those meetings I had with Lee early on were what led us to ask you if we were able to play in the sandbox that exists before the first game because we think we can do something really interesting here.

Those types of moments and that type of creative relationship with an IP owner, or a writer, or an artist, are the things that really help drive a great product. Because if we’re just given roles and marching orders, that really puts us in a box. It doesn’t allow us to flex and do things we think are interesting and could maybe help. So having that freedom is ultimately better for the product itself, but also better for the fans because they get something new, they get this really interesting take on this cool thing that they love that expands the universe and gives them something completely new and unexpected. That’s not only exciting for us as creatives but for a fan playing the game for the first time.

FB:

It’s a good point, that it’s not just the creative freedom that I’m trying to give to other creators. I want their voice. It’s what’s inside of you. It’s part of you. It’s who you are. It’s how you communicate. It’s how you create. If you’re a writer, it’s your voice. If you’re an artist, it’s the look and the feel. If you’re the game designer, it’s the playability. So to be able to offer that you have to let go of your own preconceived ideas and let that creativity transfer to the medium and the audience of that medium. That’s why I’m excited about collaborating with both of you. That’s why this conversation is really satisfying, because you have deep understanding and perspective, and creativity, that’s your own. That’s what you’re bringing to it. You’re hoping that you make a good decision as an IP owner, but like Justice League, like Warner Bros. and DC, handing it over and trusting that it will come back, and that communication will ultimately end up in the final product is a leap of faith. But that’s where the best creativity comes from.

NM:

It’s a big leap of faith for an IP owner and as a creative on the other side of it, we don’t take that for granted. We’re appreciative of that. Because, again, it allows us to do things that we are passionate about. We don’t want to just be this work-for-hire, paint by numbers studio. We want to do things that are really cool. We have certain things that we think would be amazing so allowing us to do that is very much understood on our side to make sure that we treat it right and we do what’s right by the property and by the owner. But to also do something cool that’s going to take people by surprise.

FB:

Let’s talk about Justice League, because Justice League has exactly that, and has some very cool, new kind of playability moments, and you’ve described to me, you’re going to take that engine and create the 2.0 for The Looking Glass Wars games.

Can you describe what those features are that players have been excited about? That you guys were nervous about or thought would work and have come to fruition? Give us a little inside picture of what you were thinking and how it turned out.

NM:

Justice League is, genre-wise, an open world action RPG. It’s a game that gives the player freedom to explore and tackle the narrative at their own pace. It also gives them agency, which is the RPG element of it all, to design and outfit their character, not only cosmetically, but mechanically, so they can play in a way that feels really good for them. One of the things that was really important in Justice League was to give players a different experience and give them the tools to make them realize that their Superman can be very different from your Superman, or my Batman can play very different from your Batman.

That was really important to us and we weren’t actually really sure if DC was going to let us do that but luckily, we were given the freedom. Agency is really important in video games. A player wants to play a game, or they want to watch a movie, because they want to implant themselves in a different world. They want to put themselves in a situation that isn’t their normal, everyday life. They want to be fully sucked into this experience. Sometimes if the player is just handed a character that’s fully formed and has all the skills and knows exactly what to do, it’s not always exciting.

For Justice League, everyone has their knowledge of Superman and Wonder Woman but we’ve given them a blank slate in terms of what that character can do and how powerful they can get and how they will play. Those decisions are really important. They actually tie very deeply into what we’re going to do with our Looking Glass Wars game. We have this war in Wonderland and we have these card soldiers and this really great system and these mechanics that you’ve given to us through the caterpillar thread and all kinds of other really cool stuff. We, in a similar sense, want to give the players this blank slate where they are stepping into the role of being a soldier in this much, much larger war that’s way bigger than them. That could be overwhelming but we know that we’re going to give them the tools to grow in power over time. Not only are they going to get stronger, but they’re going to understand the world better. They’re going to know what’s going on and that kind of agency, giving the player a choice and giving them the tools to make those choices, I think it’s going to give players a real sense of immersion. That’s something that we always strive to do in our games. As we build version 2.0 for Looking Glass Wars, that’s going to be a key feature that we’re going to really hone in on to make sure that players can step into the soldier role and be the soldier they want to be, the suit they want to be, the color they want to be. Whatever it happens to be, we will make sure they have the tools to make the choices that will give them the coolest experience that they can create.

FB:

You brought up agency and agency for characters is universal and in storytelling, it doesn’t matter the medium, the characters have to have agency that you can understand. That’s an important point and something that I really worked hard on in the novels and that I was proud of. I’m excited about this collaboration with both of you and I’m excited about finding a way forward for The Looking Glass Wars to live in the gaming space.

I have really enjoyed this conversation. Creativity, imagination, and curiosity is something that we trade in every day. So it’s nice to talk with like-minded friends and colleagues. But before we go, I’m going to ask a question that I always ask and that is, if you were a character from Alice in Wonderland, who would you be and why?

Lee, you can go first. I know you’ll have an answer.

LT:

Do you know what? It’s kind of odd and I wouldn’t normally do this. If you asked me which of the Reservoir Dogs, I’d pick some weird sort of background cat. But it’s Alice. She has agency. She has control. She can get herself out of trouble. She can get herself into trouble. It’s the curiouser and curiouser mentality of never stop asking why. Even if you look at who the original audience was – a young girl in the 1890s – never stop asking, never stop playing runs counter to the ideals of the time. I think that sense of curiosity is a big reason why Alice continues to be a tale that kids are told. I have friends with kids and they’re telling them about Alice in Wonderland and showing them the cartoons and the early films, and I think that message is still true. Be curious. Don’t accept anything just because someone tells you to calm down. Don’t accept that. That’s the worst thing you can do.

So, yes, my answer is Alice. I want Alice’s experience. I want to know what that tastes like. I want to know what being 20 feet tall feels like. I want to know what being three inches small feels like. I’m not frightened of any of those things. I think that’s the creative spirit. It’s the repetition. It’s the loops. You do it and then tell someone else and they’ll pass it on. Never stop being curious.

FB:

How about you, Nick?

NM:

Lee took the star of the show. He’s number one on the call sheet. I’m going to be lower down on the list I think. Maybe this is just my personality or how I would want to interact with the world or the power that I wish I had, but I would choose the Cheshire Cat. He’s this chaotic force within the world, this comical conniving, meddling, all-knowing character who makes life hard for everyone else.

LT:

You mean a business owner, Nick? It’s funny, that.

NM:

Yeah, it’s how these things work out like that somehow.

FB:

Earlier in this conversation, because we’re on a Zoom call, I was watching you, Nick, smile and as you were smiling I thought to myself, “I bet he’s gonna say the Cheshire Cat.”

NM:

My mischievous grin gave me away.

FB:

That’s it. That’s exactly it. So, on that, I’m going to end and thank you both. Wishing you a lot of luck on the continuing success of Justice League and wishing all of us a long collaboration on The Looking Glass Wars. Thank you, gentlemen, for hanging out with me and chatting about all things Alice and pop culture and games and your love of creativity. It’s been a real pleasure.

If you haven’t already, be sure to read Part 1 of my interview with Nick Madonna and Lee Thomas!

For more information on Looking Glass Wars & Alice in Wonderland, check out the All Things Alice Blogs From Frank Beddor