One of the little side trips my Christmas story took was into radio. During my time writing for "Prairie Home Companion," I had decided to turn my holiday thingie into a radio bit. Garrison Keillor does this character, Guy Noir, a private eye who gets into cases that parody the news. Well, Nick Flebber is definitely in the same wheelhouse as Guy Noir. Also, PHC loves doing holiday shows. They had certainly used Christmas themed bits of mine before, so I decided I could turn the story into a 10-15 minute Guy Noir radio adventure. I streamlined it a lot, dropped most of the characters, then switched the villain to a character I used in an old comic book/skit I drew up back when I was working at Kmart. A lot of puns, an over the top villian, Ebenzer J. Grinch (who I could easily use to jump to the climax) and less visuals. Naturally, PHC passed.
So now I have a screenplay, a novella and a radio play of the same story gathering dust on my hard drive. Typical, right? Then last year I stumbled onto an Internet posting for a radio group in Virginia running a contest for radio scripts. The On The Air Radio Players perform vintage radio shows and then once a year do an evening of new scripts. So, I pulled the script out, retitled it "The Nick Files: Lost Claus" and sent it off---
Oh, another tangent: at one point in the history of "The Kringle Project"/"Jingle Bell Blues" a "producer" got hold of the script and loved it. So much that he decided he would use his "pull" to develop it into a series as well. As it turns out, he wasn't much of a producer and the only pull he had was in his sweaters. However, before I realized that, I processed the idea of a series, putting together a pitch, outlining some future episode storylines and adding some new characters. I named it "The Nick Files"after Nick Flebber, the same film noir character who kept getting these weird cases that featured fantasy figures and legends, following the template of "The Kringle Project." I was pitching it as "The X Files" for the Nickelodeon set. So, actually I had a screenplay, novella, radio play and TV pitch eating up fragments on my RAM.
Man, this is depressing. I hope this story has a happy ending.
So now I have a screenplay, a novella and a radio play of the same story gathering dust on my hard drive. Typical, right? Then last year I stumbled onto an Internet posting for a radio group in Virginia running a contest for radio scripts. The On The Air Radio Players perform vintage radio shows and then once a year do an evening of new scripts. So, I pulled the script out, retitled it "The Nick Files: Lost Claus" and sent it off---
Oh, another tangent: at one point in the history of "The Kringle Project"/"Jingle Bell Blues" a "producer" got hold of the script and loved it. So much that he decided he would use his "pull" to develop it into a series as well. As it turns out, he wasn't much of a producer and the only pull he had was in his sweaters. However, before I realized that, I processed the idea of a series, putting together a pitch, outlining some future episode storylines and adding some new characters. I named it "The Nick Files"after Nick Flebber, the same film noir character who kept getting these weird cases that featured fantasy figures and legends, following the template of "The Kringle Project." I was pitching it as "The X Files" for the Nickelodeon set. So, actually I had a screenplay, novella, radio play and TV pitch eating up fragments on my RAM.
Man, this is depressing. I hope this story has a happy ending.
