Gen Con, Day 4

Gettin' all Guillermo at breakfast

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Gen Con. Day the Last. I promise, I'll try really hard to keep this post in non-mammoth territory.

For the first night of the con, we got a decent night's sleep. Which means we slept well past the hall opening, and didn't arrive until the day was half over. Sundays at cons are sad. Numbers are often down, and continue to go down as people leave during the day to fly back to wherever they hail from. The fact that the con is ending is on everyone's mind, the same feeling you get on the last day of your vacation, or pretty much any Sunday when it's back to work in a few hours. What made it worse was that I was just getting used to the con. Which is how it always happens. But it's still depressing.

Sunday's sales were good, just slightly less than Saturday. All in all, over 1,200 Dorkness Rising DVDs sold at Gen Con -- the first four days it was available. On top of that, Margaret Weis Productions sold somewhere between 80 and 100 copies of the Demon Hunters Role Playing Game. We've never had numbers like that a at a convention. Never. And that's not counting pre-orders on Paizo's website, or what Netflix ordered. By the way, if you add Dorkness to your Netflix queue, it will tell you there's a "very long wait" to get the movie. =)
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As the day wound down, I got my promo copies of the DVD to swag for con goodies. The haul wasn't bad -- a coupl'a boxes of D&D minis, a wonderful little board game called "Key Largo" ... and a TON of Legend of the Five Rings cards from John Zinser, president of AEG. L5R is my favorite collectible card game of all time, hands down. The interactive storyline and fan devotion to their particular factions are unmatched in the CCG world. I've been off the stuff for a few years, pretty much since we moved to Cali. But with Nathan moving down in a couple months, I may have to get back into the game. Can't let the Crane prance around the courts of the Empire while the Crab die on the Great Carpenter Wall.
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Wifey poses with Jen Page, who was banished from the con

after someone left a cold iron charm outside her room. BOOM! Elf joke!

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At four, the hall closed, and the convention hall staff started processing the corpse of the convention. The carpets between the booths were rolled up, the banners above them taken down. Quickly, efficiently, the cold concrete bones of the convention center poked through what moments before had been the center of the RPG universe. And will be again next year.
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The trip back to L.A. was blessedly uneventful. We said our goodbyes to the few DGs hanging around an extra day and vamoosed to the airport. Mercifully, Air Tran's computers were working for the return trip. From the L.A. park and ride, Don and Cindy gave us a lift back to our apartment -- our car still being dead -- and dropped us off shortly after midnight. We have yet to completely unpack.

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So ... yay for Gen Con! We can finally get back to regular life. Until next week, when Don and Jeremy and I head up to Seattle for PAX.

Gen Con, Day 3

One of the realities of convention life is that you're going to have to share your room. I've roomed with my fair share of snorers. Brian was neither the loudest nor most obnoxious of these. He was, however, the hardest to wake. The whispering didn't work. The yelling didn't work. The crossing-over-and-nudging didn't work. What did work was the violently-shaking-the-bed. The snoring stopped after that, but I only netted about four hours of sleep -- the bare minimum to function the next day.
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And sadly, the first thing I did the next day was miss Tracy Hickman's fan-favorite event, one of the hallmarks of the convention, the Killer Breakfast. Every year, Tracy runs a Dungeons & Dragons campaign from the front of a ballroom and mows through hundreds of player characters in about two hours. There are no survivors. It's not if you will die -- it's when, and how violently. If you can survive the Killer Breakfast for more than 30 seconds, that's commendable. I think Christian set a record with two minutes. I was looking forward to getting killed in front of hundreds of fellow gamers myself, but sadly, that wasn't in the cards.
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No, I was at the signing table -- the only Dead Gentleman at the table, I might ad -- nearly getting trampled by the new herd of gamers thundering towards the Wizards booth. Seems today's promo was an exclusive Hero Clix miniature. Watching the gamers galumph across the floor, I imagined a small tile-based board game called "Con Rush." In this game, players would compete to grab as many con promos as possible from different booths before their character died from a massive coronary.
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BELOW: Signing my future away. That's John Frank with the Joker grin.
Saturday is typically the biggest day at Gen Con, but sales-wise, it didn't take the crown away from Thursday. By the end of the day, Paizo had sold 250 Dorkness DVDs. They'd also completely sold out DVDs of the Director's Cut of The Gamers and Dead Camper Lake. Haven't had that happen for a while.
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The signings held steady througout the day. And in the middle of them, I signed the option agreement with Epic Level Entertainment for the next Gamers film, The Gamers: PWNed. I've been working on the script for the last couple years. It's set in an MMORPG, so the budget will be significantly higher than anything Dead Gentlemen's ever done -- hence Epic Level holding the reins on this one. We're pretty excited about it, expecially coming off the momentum of Dorkness. John Frank and Cindi already have meetings set up. If I have to miss Gen Con next year, I hope it's because we're knee-deep in PWNed.
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I left the hall at five to get a nap in before the Big Screening that night. This would be the sole evening screening of Dorkness Rising at Gen Con, at 10 pm. And for me, the film would not be complete until I'd seen it screen with a Gen Con audience. The first Gen Con screening was two years ago, in '06, but due to a family tragedy I had to leave before the premiere. So I had a lot emotionally tied up in this screening. I needed it. I needed to be there, to see it in front of an audience. The Comic Con screening was great, but it was no Gen Con crowd.
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Gen Con expected a massive turnout, so they gave us two ballrooms to screen in. It was the same setup as last year: seating for a thousand, with a large central screen and two smaller side screens at the halfway point where the halls met. We posed for pictures with fans as the line outside the hall grew, and grew, and grew -- we couldn't go in, because the live table reading of Knights of the Dinner Table was just wrapping up. The DGs trekked in when they finished, and then, predictably, things started to go wrong.
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Remember the big central screen? Apparently, the con decided we didn't need one. All we had were the two small side screens -- and half the chairs in the place were past those. So we had two ballrooms, but one we couldn't use because it didn't face the screens. Also, hundreds of people stayed over from the KoDT reading for our screening, so the back seats were already pretty much full before we'd opened the doors to the folks in line. This did not bode well.
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So the doors opened, and we explained to the attendees that the side screens were all they got. Folks filled in the back, and angled their chairs towards the screens, splitting right down the middle at oblique angles. That was weird -- watching a 600 member audience crammed into half the space, facing opposite directions.
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Screening to the left!

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Screening to the right!

Stand up, sit down, fight fight fight!

And so our screening began. We led with the trailer for Midnight Syndicate's The Dead Matter, directed by our buddy Ed Douglas. It's a truly original (and rather jump-inducing) horror movie. Don and Jeremy and I got to see it at GAMA back in April in Ed's hotel room, with Ed narrating the effects and scenes that weren't fully finished. We enjoyed the hell out of it, and that wasn't even the final version. So the trailer screened, and as we watched, we thought "Huh. They did the trailer in black and white. Odd choice for a movie in color."

But of course that wasn't the choice, as we discovered when we loaded the Dorkness screener -- the projector was stuck on black and white. So we abruptly stopped the screening to howls of protest. I pondered how quickly a friendly audience could turn into an effigy-burning mob. We powwowwed (it's a word) with the con's tech guys, and fixed the color in record time.

Then we noticed the aspect ratio was off -- the projector was projecting in 4:3 instead of 16:9 (fullscreen instead of widescreen for you non-dorks). The projector was chopping the sides off the image. The loading screen even read "ed Gentlemen presents," with the option to "Play Mov." We circled up to toy with the projector ... and that's when the chants of "Play mov! Play mov!" started. So we just took the aspect ratio hit and played the mov.

I sat down with Wifey in the dark, in the midpoint between the differently angled crowds. Here it was, my Gen Con screening. Please, dear God, let it not suck.

It didn't. I mean, sure, there were some problems. There was the aspect ratio, and the focus was a bit soft, and the audio wasn't as clear as it could be. The fans didn't care. What they cared about were gaming jokes and dead bards. Laughter filled the hall, loud and constant and appreciative. Wifey was so excited she screamed herself into laryngitis, the poor thing. The credits rolled a hundred minutes later to a standing ovation. Two, if you count the divided crowd.

So, completely high off the screening, we headed out to the most raucous party of the con: the White Wolf party. I'd been hearing about this one for two years, about the insane debauchery and the flashing bard junk in a go-go cage. So it was a bit surprising when the club we crammed into turned out to be nothing but three drab stairwells worth of suck. There was no balcony, no fresh air, no open windows -- and no air conditioning.

Now, my three great hates are crowds, heat, and noise. This party was nothing but. By the time I reached the somewhat cooler third floor -- which only felt like a sauna -- I was ready to leave. And oddly enough, so were the rest of the DGs. The party two years ago was in a different space, they assured me. This party wasn't happening. We had to get out or we'd melt.

So we headed over to the Embassy Suites with Jamie and Renae Chambers of MWP to carouse in their con pad. And that turned out to be the best party we could hope for -- friends, alcohol, and privacy. And flow the alcohol did. Tree drank Stevie under the table. Which, to be fair, isn't hard. I believe I texted "Balls 4EVER" to Cindi at one point -- Cindi, my producer. We ended the night in the loading dock outside the hotel, smoking Brian's "I'm a dad!/We made a movie!" cigars.

And it was there, in that atmosphere of effervescent camaraderie, that many of us had to part ways. Several of the guys had early morning flights to catch -- this was it for them. We hugged our goodbyes, bade our fellows safe passage back to the damp and drizzly northwest. We'd be at half-strength tomorrow on the last day of the con.

We got back to our hotel at 4 am. Brian, bless him, had felt so bad about the snoring that he'd bought us a pack of earplugs. We corked our hear-bits and collapsed under the weight of the day.

Gen Con, Day 2

Friday we rolled out of bed at 8:30 -- 5:30 our time -- and somehow managed to get back to the convention before the Exhibit Hall opened. From our table, we watched a herd of hefty gamers stampede towards the Wizards of the Coast booth. Seems the first couple hundred or so got a free convention-exclusive Magic: The Gathering card. We joked about giving away our own promos at the next Gen Con. We'd get a bunch of pine clippings, stick them in miniature bases, add little Lego hats and guns, and voila! Tree action figures! Ha ha! Trust me, it's a lot funnier if you're extremely sleep deprived.

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Jeremy procured several new Sharpies for the signings, since we'd pretty much bled our pens dry on the first day. The DVDs and RPGs kept selling in a steady stream. It was slightly less than Thursday, but we still didn't get much of a break from signing. I still hadn't had a real chance to walk the hall. And frankly, I wasn't too sore about that -- I was enjoying the hell out of myself at the signing table. Tough I pretty much ran my throat ragged yabbering with people at the booth. And despite the sucky chairs that put a vice clamp on your hips, tilted your ass back at a 45-degree angle, and would collapse if you slightly turned your body.

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At 2:30, a delegation of DGs hiked over to the Westin to give a Dead Gentlemen seminar. We had no idea what we were going to talk about. A few months back, when Don had set it up, we were pretty sure we'd have an exciting new project to talk about, to give the insider's scoop on. That project didn't so much fall apart as never came together, though, so we were without a topic as we waited to take over. But Nathan gave each of us a shot of something smooth and burny to limber us up. The seminar turned out easy and fun. We talked about where we'd come from, how we got involved in DG, what our current projects were ... and a bit of what was next, if we had our druthers. And apparently, we didn't reveal anything damning, because John Frank (perched at the back of the room) never piped up. We stuck around to snap pictures and sign some swag at the end of it.

Posing with Sophia's Sister from the DG forums. She has excellent taste.

Back in the hall, things were a-rockin'. Sales of Dorkness Rising DVDs hit 350. Paizo actually sold out of the Director's Cut of the original The Gamers. And over at the Margaret Weis Productions booth -- our friends foolish enough to produce an RPG with us -- the Demon Hunters Role Playing Game was the top seller. They even had to reorder, or so I'm told. Whatever the case, we saw many, many copies of the RPG. And Nathan somehow did not run out of the tree-related puns he kept scribbling on people's Cobbler's Crystals pages..

For dinner, we met with some of our favoritest people in gaming: Cindi Rice of Epic Level, our parner production company; Dave Williams and Ed Stark -- who still can't tell us about the awesome new MMORPG they're developing, on pain of death -- of Red 5 Studios; and Sean Reynolds of Paizo, who played the Inquisitor in Dorkness Rising and made it very clear he was going to steal my wife. We all ate way too much at Buca di Beppo and developed new and creative ways to tell each other to shut up.

We ended the night at Champions because we promised Jamie Chambers, the brain behind the Cortex RPG system, that we'd attend MWP's karaoke night. This was something they did every year at Dragon*Con -- where they'll be when we're up at PAX in a coupl'a weeks -- and it was time to inflict the tradition onto Gen Con. Now, karaoke isn't something I automatically put into the good times column. I've only done it a few times myself, and from what I remember of it, it's not what I would consider a raucous activity. I had to change that opinion rather quickly. It was, to put it mildly, the most fun I'd ever had at a Gen Con party.

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The MWP folks broke the ice, and the combination of being with friends and cheap alcohol loosened us up. Wifey and I performed "Barbie Girl," and switched the male/female parts on the last verse. I barely made it through "A-Ha" -- nailed the high notes, though. The people kept pouring in, packing the place, and as the space shrank and the collective body temperature rose, the spirits spirits kept a-rising. Things exploded when, up on the big screen, Michael Phelps won his seventh gold medal by .01 seconds.

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BELOW: The karaoke crowd busts a move.

It was the most animated I've ever seen a karaoke crowd. We were all laughing, dancing, singing backup, even acting out sketches -- like when Don, with about six Manhattans in him, climbed up and sang "Thunderball" from the fourth Bond film, and we improvved scenes from Bond films in front of him. My personal big diva moment was when I kicked it old school and did Young M.C.'s "Bust A Move." I was twelve again, but a much, much worse dancer. The night ended four hours later with the DGs doing Chumbawumba and me proving yet again the degree to which I cannot dance. Alcohol definitely played a part.

But by far the best (or worst) karaoke performance of the evening belonged to Cam Banks of MWP. Cam is a native New Zealander, an Aussie-hating Kiwi through and through. So when "Land Down Under" started up, we all looked on curiously -- and then couldn't look away as Cam murdered the song with cold blooded glee. It was hilariously terrible, wonderfully bad, ironically cringe-worthy ... a musical act of war. Good on you, Cam.

And so day two ended, and with it half the con, at about 1:00 am. Plenty of time to rest up for the big events of tomorrow: namely Killer Breakfast, and the big screening of Dorkness Rising.

Wifey poses with Jeremy and Nathan,

who's about to get his damn hand off my wife

Gen Con, Day 1

Gen Con! The grandaddy of the gaming conventions, the center of the tabletop adventure universe. We first attended in 2003, when the Dead Gentlemen and The Gamers were complete unknowns. By the end of thate con, we'd sold 400 DVDs and met a gaggle of gaming celebrities we now call friends. And we'd also been asked the question we'd be getting for the next five years: "When's the next one coming out?"
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The answer was five years. Five years from conception to copies for sale. Photography began in January of 2005, and we premiered the making-of documentary (which is on the DVD) at that year's Gen Con. Finally, we had an answer to "When's the next one coming out?" And, of course, our answer was wrong. Repeatedly. In 2005, we knew it would be out in 2006. In 2006, we thought it would be out in 2007. In 2007, we hoped our fans would not drag us out of the con and burn us at the stake. But thankfully, mercifully, Anthem Pictures -- our distributor -- gave us a definitive answer on "When's the next one coming out?": August 14, 2008, at Gen Con.
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So it was with profound relief and unmitigated excitement that our party of six departed for Indianapolis last Wednesday night. We'd be catching an 11:15 pm red eye out of LAX. Things got off to a great start when my car didn't. Start, that is. Engine wouldn't even turn over. And it's not like it had been running fine not six hours earlier. But before the panic could set in, wonderful neighbors Matt and Jessica gave us a lift to the rendezvous point. We arrived at the airport with two hours to spare. What a relief. We should have no trouble from here on out.
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We promptly waited to check in for an hour and a half. Apparently, Air Tran's computers were down. So they decided to lift our spirits by playing the check-in line version of musical chairs, where they wait for you to get to the front of a line and then tell you that, ha ha!, you've been in the wrong line the entire time! Yaaay! An hour into waiting, we got to start over at the back of the line. An hour and a half into waiting, we'd moved a total of negative ten yards. The one good thing about the bottlenecking at the check in line was that there was no line at security. We got to the terminal right as the boarding was ending, and moments later were in the air. Now, we'd been going since seven that morning, so were looking forward to getting some sleep on the plane. That wasn't exactly in the cards. See, Air Tran loves the air conditioning. They also, in their peculiar form of customer service, provide no blankets. So we got to shiver our way across three time zones in the middle of the night. I think I passed out for a stretch or two from sheer exhaustion. Never flying Air Tran again, that's for sure.
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We arrived in Indianapolis at 3:00 am, right as the sun was rising at 6:00 am Eastern Time. The light triggered the "It's morning! Time to get up!" zones in our brains, and gave us a bit of a much-needed boost. Which immediately deflated when Enterprise could not find our rental car reservations. So Don shuffled us onto a shuttle to Budget, and reserved a pair of vans via his blackberry en route. Not long after that, with our spirits high, we rolled up to our hotel, which did have our reservations. But we would not be allowed to check in until 3:00. Oh, and you can't leave your bags here, either. So no showers, no change of clothes, and as a bonus, we got to lug our luggage around all day. Let the hatred flow through you. Soon, your journey to the Dark Side will be complete.
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After a massive breakfast at a waffle house -- a waffle house, not the Waffle House, as we learned to our disappointment -- we met up with the DGs already in town and trekked to the convention center. Once we got into the Exhibitor's Hall, everything would be okay. Once Gen Con began, all the suck of the last eight hours would be erased. So it was no surprise to me when, after picking up DG's con badges, we discovered that Gen Con had forgotten one for me. Which is understandable. I mean, I only wrote and directed the damn movie [/mini-rant]. We did have a badge for Matt DeMille, though -- DG's production designer, the same Matt who gave us a lift when our car wouldn't start -- but he was unable to attend the con. A little Sharpie action made the badge mine.
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BELOW: Monday's signing line at the Paizo booth

So -- exhausted, irritable, hungry, and marinated in my own travel sweat -- I finally got to the booth. Dead Gentlemen Productions didn't have a booth this year; we were occupying a corner of the Paizo booth, set aside for cast and crew signings (Paizo is DG's game industry distributor). I meandered over to a rack of Dorkness Rising DVDs by the register, dozens of them standing at attention in matching shrink-wrap -- and all the bad feelings, the annoyances and the petty inconveniences, just melted away. Here it was, after five years of wondering if it would ever come out. Here was our movie for sale. And it wasn't just for sale on the rack. It was already up on Netflix and Amazon (though Amazon seems to think it's some soft-core porn starring David Duchovny -- what's that about?). And from what Cindi told me, pre-orders for those two and others have already exceeded any other film Anthem's ever done. Hearsay, yes, but the good kind. The kind I'm going to repeat here.
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So the hall opened, and the fans descended on the booth. Eight hours later, the hall closed. Sales were good.
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And by good, I mean they were flying off the shelves. We (and by we, I mean Paizo) sold just under 500 DVDs. To put that in perspective, the most DVDs Dead Gentlemen had ever sold at a convention were 400. We smashed that record by a hundred in the single day. And the rate of sale was more than one DVD per minute -- 497 sales in 480 minutes of hall openness. Paizo only brought a thousand DVDs, and it was evident by midday that at least half of that would be gone at the end of the day. So Don sent an email to Chuck, president of Anthem, saying we needed another 1,500 DVDs. A minute after sending that email, Don's phone rang.
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I was sitting two seats left of Don when he got the call. The following dialogue transpired, near verbatim:
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DON: Hello?
CHUCK: Are you shitting me?
DON: What?
CHUCK: Are you shitting me?!
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Don assured Chuck that no, he was not indeed shitting him -- we needed more DVDs. Immediately. So Anthem overnighted reinforcements to Paizo for Saturday. With luck, we wouldn't sell out on Friday. Or with luck we would, depending on your point of view. It's really hard to convey the enthusiasm and excitement of the first day of the con. We saw hundreds of fans, many we recognized and many new. One group even showed up in costume as their own chapter of Demon Hunters: a nephilim, a were-rat, the Dark Gray Ninja, and Bernard, the knife-wielding, eyepatch-sporting potted plant. We bled most of our Sharpies dry.
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After the hall closed, we grabbed a quick bite at Champions before heading over to an IMAX screening of Midnight Chronicles by our friends at Fantasy Flight Games. I wish I could review it, but I can't. I'd been awake for 36 hours when the screening began, and exhaustion + darkness + comfy chair = Matt falls asleep. Thank God the soundtrack was louder than my snoring. What I remember of the movie was very cool and looked great, but I couldn't tell where plot ended and bizarre fatigue dreams began.
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We got back to the hotel -- and finally checked in -- just before midnight, and hit the bed at roughly 800 miles per hour. Despite Brian's truly Olympic performance at snoring, we managed to get enough sleep to function the next day. Because the con had just started, and there was still a long way to go.
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Don meets his doppelganger

Pitching Hopjockey

I've been staring at the screen for a few minutes, trying to figure out the best way to intro this one. And it's a long one. I ran enough sample openings in my head, basically different versions of "Everyone has that project they've wanted to do forever," but grammatically correct. It's because I want a good entry for this one, a strong and memorable one, because this is the project I've wanted to do forever. And though it's admittedly a long shot that it will ever get made, it's never been closer to actually happening.
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Okay, before I go any further: you can find the most up-to-date version of Hopjockey -- with info on the show and a rockin' teaser trailer -- on its website, www.hopjockey.com. Click on the couch if you dare. Also: I've had to be deliberately vague with names and places we've pitched. That's out of respect for the people we're working with. But I assure you it's all true.
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Okay, on with things.
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Hopjockey's roots go back to when I was an undergraduate. It was born out of mono and insomnia, a quirky science-fantasy comedy adventure with a skewed version of the hero's journey. It started with a college student much like myself waking up drunk and naked on another planet, with no idea how he got there. I wrote a couple of short stories for the Dead Gentlemen website, and tried working it into a screenplay, but couldn't figure out how to make it work. There was no ending, see. Just an ever-expanding, dimension-hopping adventure with increasingly odd characters and settings. The only way it could work, I discovered, would be as a comic book (I can't draw for shit), a series of novels (I suck at prose), or a TV show (which I didn't know how to write. Yet).

The logo from the old DG Hopjockey page
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When I found out I'd been accepted to AFI, I set a goal for myself. By the time I graduated, I determined, I will have written a Hopjockey screenplay, whether as a feature or a pilot. In my first year, I wrote a pseudo-pilot, Hungover in Paradise, and submitted it as an AFI thesis film. It was resoundingly rejected. Nobody understood the story, what was going on. But the script did attract the attention of a couple producing fellows from my year, Sean Hoessli and David Freid. They both liked what they saw in the that script and wanted to produce the project. Except there was no project at the time, since it didn't make the cut.

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In my second year, I took another stab at scripting the story. I was taking Writing for Television at the time from the incomparable D.C. Fontana. So I attempted a 2-hour TV pilot, with D.C.'s help. And under her mentorship, the story finally came together. She showed me how to take the fantasy and adventure I loved and make it sing in a weekly format. She showed me how to make Hopjockey work. And with her help, I met my goal -- I finished AFI with a complete Hopjockey pilot.

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BELOW: The cover of the original Hopjockey bible

I optioned the pilot to Sean and Dave, my producer buddies. And literally two weeks after graduation, Sean had somehow gotten us a pitch meeting at Sci-Fi with a VP of Original Programming. We went in and clumsily but enthusiastically pitched Hopjockey to a very polite and bemused Exec. And to our surprise, the Exec asked to see a script and a bible. So we knocked out a bible in a couple weeks, sent both documents over ... and never heard from them again. A pass, which was to be expected. But hey, we'd gotten to pitch, and an Exec thought enough of it to ask for a sample. Though that might have just been a way to get us out of the room.
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Then, about a year ago, we made the connection that led to our current round of pitching -- an Emmy-award winning producer and AFI alumn (and professor) who Sean interned for. This producer, who I'll call the Heavy, is the guy who taught our class how to pitch. So his opinion carries a lot of weight. He thought the project had a lot of potential, if we could extract the true human story out of the heavy, heavy sci-fi surrounding it. We needed to ground the show in reality, he told us, make it accessible to a non-genre audience. Center it in the college experience, make the relationships the focus rather than the sci-fi. We do that, we'll have something that we can sell. So we took his advice and retooled the pilot and bible, and in a few short weeks were ready to hit the pitching scene with an Emmy-winner in our corner.
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And then the WGA strike hit.

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So there was no pitching. Not several more months. But we kept busy. We refined the pilot story again and again, making it ever more grounded. We also shot the teaser for the website. And after the strike finally ended, we were ready to go ... provided we could pitch Hopjockey to the Heavy to his satisfaction. Remember, this is the guy who taught our class how to pitch, a guy with over fifty movies to his name, so he's a bit of an authority on the pitching. It took us two attempts (we faulted on the first one), but after the second we passed. And once we did, the Heavy brought in the final member of our pitching team -- the Agent, one of the Heavy's reps from one of the top Hollywood agencies.

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A month later, our meetings were set. We would be pitching three channels, what the Agent and the Heavy had determined would be our best shots: the Family Channel, the Genre Channel, and the Network. Three shots at one-in-a-million. The Heavy and the Agent would be there with us in the room, but I would be doing the majority of the pitching -- setting out the concept, characters, and story for the show. It's what the writer does. No pressure.
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BELOW: The cover of the brochure prop from the Hopjockey teaser

Up first: the Family Channel. We had a good in there -- the Heavy already had a show in development with them. That's essentially why they were meeting with us. The pitch went well, by all accounts. But ultimately, Hopjockey wasn't right for them -- they wanted shows more grounded in reality, and the sci-fi backdrop was too much. No matter. We had two other places to go. And nobody sells a show on the first try. (Though ALIVE may prove me wrong. More on that as it happens...).

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Next up: the Genre Channel. Should have a better shot there -- if there's any home for Hopjockey, it would be at a channel dedicated to genre shows. Plus, the Agent knew the Exec we were pitching to -- they gave each other a massive hug when we met. Plus, turns out Sean knew her from the Directing Workshop for Women back at AFI. So we had a couple bits of awesome on our side going in. Our confidence was up. This was gonna be good. We met her on the fourteenth floor of the building, went into a conference room with panoramic views of the city, sat down to schmooze ...

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... and then the earthquake hit.

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The whole building shook, swaying lazily from side to side. And we had quite a view of it fourteen stories off the ground. And that's when the pitch unraveled, right before it began. The Exec was gripping the table in wide-eyed panic -- she'd lost her house in the Cal-Northridge quake, and was flashing back in a state of near-PTSD. I was pretty shaken myself (ha). In emergency situations, my dad and I tend to go into slow-motion, to go near catatonic. "You're in danger," said my brain, "have some natural seditives." The world slowed down. I lost my sense of time and space. And now I had to turn around and pitch a show to a traumatized woman.

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Needless to say, it didn't go well. I never recovered from the quake. The pitch was flat and lifeless, devoid of the humor we'd worked into the presentation. And the Exec hit me with questions I was just unprepared for. When those came, I lost my place in the pitch script and couldn't restart. In short, I bombed it. But at least it was memorable. Execs hear hundreds of pitches a year, and few if any of them are accompanied by an act of God.

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Afterward, the Heavy told us that you can never really know with pitches. He's had people pass on perfect pitches where he was sure he'd sold them, and had people buy pitches he'd thought he'd bombed. So you never know. Then he and the Agent, very coach-like, told us to shake it off, to put it behind us and focus on the Network pitch ... which was the very next day.

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Now, I have a tendency to internalize and overblow setbacks. So turning around from the worst pitch imaginable in less than a day was a tall order. Also, the Network guy we would be pitching to was apparently Mr. Poker Face. You'll get nothing from this man, the Heavy told us. He's a wall, the Agent told us. He doesn't react to anything in a pitch. Don't let it phase you. Now, my performance history is mostly in improv, which feeds off of audience reaction. Performing to a black hole ain't easy, especially coming off a bombed pitch. I did not sleep well that night.

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The final pitch: the Network. We met with three Execs, with Poker Face in the middle. My goal for the day -- aside from selling the show -- was to get Poker Face to crack. If I could get him to laugh or smile, that would help spin the pitch. And we'd prepped a lot of humor for this presentation, to make sure it wasn't the comedy dead zone of the earthquake pitch. We went in all ammo'ed up and ready to go.

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It could not have gone better. Poker Face and the other Execs laughed early and often. Instant rapport. The energy was up and strong, everyone was jazzed. The execs were even joking with us throughout. It felt like we were sitting around a campfire swapping stories. It was, and I'm not exaggerating, perfect. It was the best pitch of my life. Afterward, the Heavy said he'd pitched Poker Face three times, and had never seen him animated, let alone laughing. We left high and happy, dreaming of a development deal.

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Last week, Wifey and I were up in Washington visiting the family. We were just leaving for dinner when the Agent called. He'd never called before. And he asked me to hold on while he got Dave and Sean on the phone. "This is it," I thought. "We sold it. This is the call."

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Well, it was the call. But not the one we were hoping for. Despite how good our pitch was, the Network had passed. Seems it was too much of a guys' show, and their focus is entirely on the 18-34 female demographic. "You guys learned a lot, and should be proud," the Agent told us. Which was odd language, because it sounds like the pitching is over. And it may be. The places we pitched were the likeliest to buy what we were selling. We asked him what was next. Are the other places we'll be pitching? The Agent told us we'd need to talk to the Heavy about what's next. Which may be nothing.
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But that pitch we bombed? Apparently, it wasn't as bad as I thought. We're still alive at the Genre Network.

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The Agent spoke to the Exec we pitched on Earthquake Day, and she's still noodling on the project. She believes there's something there, but she wants comedy in the project -- we've been selling it as an adventure comedy -- and I was not funny during the pitch. So the Agent sent her my writing samples -- The Gamers: PWNED and the pilot to Fred, Prince of Darkness -- to convince her we could bring the funny. If we're lucky, we get another shot to pitch the Genre Network, maybe with the network's whole development team in attendance. If not, they'll pass. And if they do ...

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I don't know what's next. I can't know what's next. But I do know Hopjockey has legs. The pitching process has showed me that. The Heavy and the Agent (and the Execs who agreed to hear the pitch) wouldn't have been involved otherwise. And it's grown and changed, been retooled, and survived. I'm sure it will in whatever form it eventually winds up in.

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Whatever the case, this is my forever project. I will keep working on it until it finds its place, and until I find mine. I think it will find a home someday, whether it's on a screen for the whole world to see, or just the screen of my word processor. And you know, as long as I get to finish the story, that would be enough. And hey, D.C.'s got some ideas on where to take it as well ...

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A-walkin' a beach, like the one Sandy wakes up on.