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Posted:
07:34:32 on September 16 2002
By: Steve Krutzler
Dept: TrekWeb Features
Written for TrekWeb by Michelle Erica Green, edited by Steve Krutzler
As half of the father-son production company Piller^2, Shawn Piller develops and produces television shows and features with prolific TREK writer/producer Michael Piller. Shawn currently serves as executive producer on USA
Network's THE DEAD ZONE. Piller got his start writing on Michael's STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, co-writing the episode "Journey's End" before writing the VOYAGER installments "Death Wish" and "The Q and the
Grey."
A graduate of the University of Southern California's prestigious film
school, Shawn has worked on several other projects with his father and has produced several television pilots while their company was getting off the ground. TrekWeb spoke with Piller, Jr. to get an update on the second season of the their hit cable series THE DEAD ZONE and some insights into his own Hollywood career.
TW: All right, young man, have you stopped smoking yet? Your father said on his web site that he held your smoking responsible for DEAD ZONE's delayed pickup for the second season.
SP: Oh god, I'm standing outside right now having a cigarette. No, I have not quit yet. When we got the official pickup the other day, I said, 'Oh god, I have to quit smoking now!' I gave myself a deadline of my birthday, which is October 5th.
I've gotten a lot of e-mails forwarded from concerned fans. It was very funny -- that's my dad. If you've seen our logo...
TW: 'You're grounded'? How much is that really the two of you?
SP: That is our M.O. Usually we agree at the end, but it's through the process of the disagreement that we come to the truth of whatever it is we're disputing. It's all fun and games till someone gets hurt! It's a family business, in that with Lloyd Segan, the other executive producer, his wife is a pretty big feature producer and she is part of the company as well. Our casting agents, Eric and Shawn Dawson, are brothers. We pretty much only want to be in business with other people's families!
TW: Eric is Roxann's husband, right? It sounds quite incestuous, especially with all the Trek people. Is Joe Menosky still there?
SP: Joe Menosky is actually helping out Brian Fuller on DEAD GIRL, that Showtime series, and I think towards the end of our season, he's going to come back to us and do a couple of scripts. He loves the show and we love him.
TW: DEAD ZONE does not seem to be typical genre television, with all the violence and chicks provided for the young male demographic.
SP: And hopefully it will never become that. As long as Michael and I are doing it, it won't.
TW: What's your role in the day to day production?
SP: I'm the creative producer. I'm the facilitator and executioner -- I make sure the vision gets realized in the production, I make sure that all the directors are up to speed. I have a partner up here, Robert Petrovicz, who's the guy who says, 'You can't afford that!' And I say, 'What about this, then?' And he says, 'You still can't afford that!'
Pretty much at the beginning of last season it was just Michael and me, and we did four scripts, which ended up not being shot in that order. It was the pilot, episode two, "Netherworld" and "The House." This season we have a writing staff. I'm only in the writing room when I'm in town, so I get e-mails and I get story documents.
TW: Will you be writing for the show this season?
SP: I don't know whether I'm going to have time to actually write a story! I get to write in every episode -- I get to write jokes and rewrite scenes, I'm always writing on the set. But to answer your first question, I am the guy on the set who does that. Luckily toward the end of last season, as we started to build our staff, we started bringing up the writers to be on set, which then freed me up to prep the next episode or be in the editing room.
It's really a luxury, I've heard, to have a writer on set. It's a blessing and a curse. The directors love it when it works for them, but when you say, 'You can't really do that,' then they hate having the writers on the set! And it comes back to me, and I have to say 'You're right' or 'You're wrong' or 'You're both right, but let's try something else.' Usually I say 'You're both right.' I try not to say 'You're wrong.'
Pretty much the buck stops with Michael, and if I can't solve a problem I'll send it all the way upstairs. But usually I can handle it. If it's a huge franchise question, I will check with Michael.
TW: You call him Michael, not Dad?
SP: I've always called him Michael. He married my mom when I was eight, and adopted me when I was fifteen. It's very funny because my biological father, who's a very cool guy, works for NASA.
TW: So you can call him when you're doing STAR TREK. I know you did the two Q episodes for VOYAGER -- how did you get started on NEXT GENERATION?
SP: I did one story, really. A girlfriend of mine at the time had just graduated film school at USC, and I was just starting at USC. She was about to go back to waiting tables when my dad offered her an internship -- a paid Writer's Guild internship that after the six weeks, you get a pitch. I was in my first semester of film school and obviously a huge STAR TREK fan, but I hadn't really thought about writing STAR TREK. It was kind of my dad's job. I was more into features; I had never thought about working in TV.
Anyway, at the end of her six weeks, she had her pitch, and she said, 'I don't know how to write STAR TREK. I have no ideas.' Well, I had a million! So we went in and pitched an Indian episode, which turned into "Journey's End," the one with the Traveler.
TW: The one where Wesley went off with him, and he hasn't come back since.
SP: No he hasn't, and I actually talked to Brannon [Braga] about it, or maybe it was Ira [Behr]. We spoke about bringing the Traveler and Wesley back, but they weren't sure how they felt about that at that time. Brannon throws great parties, so I always end up at his parties and he always ends up at mine. He's very cool.
I was always a huge fan of NEXT GEN and obviously DEEP SPACE NINE and VOYAGER. I've been up here working pretty much the while time ENTERPRISE has been on, so I've pretty much missed it -- I saw the pilot, which I liked very much, and I would love to do something on it, but hopefully we're going to be doing so many DEAD ZONE episodes that I won't have time.
TW: How many years at this point are you looking at?
SP: I think at this point we're trying to keep shooting as much as possible. It looks like right now we're doing 13-episode seasons, and that may change -- they may decide to double-run it, or they may decide to shoot two seasons in one year, so we may end up shooting 26 episodes. As we're planning it now, any time we can shoot and have scripts, if the ratings are doing well, we'll keep shooting and making episodes.
TW: How are you working in terms of the arc story, plotting it out over the long term? I heard that Greg Stillson is appearing in the finale, so you're at least broaching the plot from the novel.
SP: I don't want to give anything away, but he definitely shows up in the finale. Sean Patrick Flanery plays him, who is awesome. You've got to find someone who's as good as [Anthony] Michael Hall, who can hang on the same screen with him as a villain, who's equally charming and likeable and as good of an actor but completely the opposite from him as a character. I think we completely lucked out with Sean Patrick Flanery.
I think we're going to extend it and play with it, but I don't want it to seem unfulfilling, where we build to something and just peter out and bring it back and have it be this writer-convenience crutch that we use. I really want it to be an organic story that we use, and we're eager to see where it goes. Hopefully the season finale begs more questions than it answers. And then the relationship with Purdy...it's going to be like he has two sons, two guys that he's overseeing.
TW: Is your vision of Purdy as someone who's pretty sincere in his beliefs, or is he one of these guys who's managed to rationalize his own megalomania -- a televangelist without the spiritual core?
SP: I think he's the first. I don't think he's the kind of guy who could rationalize something on a conscious level. If he knew he was doing something wrong, he wouldn't do it. So if he was justifying, it would be so deep that he wouldn't be conscious of it at all. He truly believes he's very spiritual, he thinks he's a good man, although people of power always believe somewhat that the end justifies the means, and power corrupts. But I think he is, as much as he is the adversary, he sees himself as the hero, someone who is striving for good.
A big part of it is performance -- he got it. [David Ogden Stiers] always says, 'It's all on the page, I just do it,' but the truth is, he brings it off the page and makes it real and allows us to do a lot more than we could with a lesser actor. I would like to have him more than we had him last season. The show was evolving, the storyline was just spreading its wings, and after the season finale, it became more clear how integral he was to the series.
TW: Have you got any favorite shows?
SP: "Enigma," which is a Joe Menosky script, is one of my favorites. It was sort of offbeat of the kind of stories we'll do. It was very precise in its filmmaking in that you had to go from time period to the present day, and all the transitions back and forth, we worked on for hours, just to make sure it was really tight.
"Monsters," the one coming up by the same director, which is sort of based on the Salem Witch Trials, is more of a bigger free-for-all. There were so many people to cover, these huge crowds. I think Michael Robeson did a great job with that.
TW: What appealed to you about working on DEAD ZONE? Are you a Stephen King fan or was it just where the company was going?
SP: I'm a huge Stephen King fan, and I'm a huge fan of his non-genre stuff. He's also this writer who has a rock and roll band, so I'm a fan right there. STAND BY ME is one of my all time favorite movies. Everything from SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION to all of his short stories that were made into films. People forget -- they think 'Stephen King = horror,' and forget that he's probably the most prolific writer of our generation or the past generation. Forget about sales, just the sheer numbers. It's an honor to even be in the game playing with one of his early works. Of the genre stuff, this is one of my favorites.
TW: You had read it before?
SP: I really didn't know it before the project came to us. I think I saw the movie back in the day, and I grabbed the book and tore through that. Working with Michael, it's perfect, because it has enough of the genre element to attract the fans, yet at the same time it has enough unique meat to chew on. Michael really doesn't want to do anything he doesn't completely get into and have a passion about. He doesn't need the money. He doesn't really want to do anything that he can't completely embrace and immerse himself in. Whereas for me, hey man! I need a job!
But at the same time, I have this great experience of working with all these veterans. I started out doing indie movies, then I gave Michael a feature I wrote. At that time, Michael wasn't aware of my writing skills. He read the script, and said, 'Hey, I didn't know you could write!' I had this younger voice, and the comedy he responded to, and we started selling scripts and pilots together to The WB -- we had a two-year deal there. We did about seven scripts; some we wrote ourselves and some we oversaw other writers. We did one pilot for them, DAY ONE, and then we did DEAD ZONE. About two and a half years into the company and we've got our first series, which I'm very proud of.
This show was originally for UPN. It was the year they bought BUFFY and ROSWELL, so they were basically broke. They blew their whole wad on that, and basically didn’t have enough left over to order us. We found this out just recently, when we were thinking they didn't love us, but it turned out it was just money. It's a tough business, and the executives have it tough as well; budgets are always cut and politics are always shifting.
TW: Is there anything else that you did that you really wanted to see go that didn't?
SP: DAY ONE. That was my first thing, and it was this really big sci-fi character piece that took place in the future after a meteor hit the planet. It was almost like STAR TREK, re-exploring the world of now. There was a lot of meat to chew on there. It had the humor, and it had the family -- it was the kind of thing I would want to watch, and hang out with those people every week. Like THE DEAD ZONE.
TW: Was Nicole DeBoer a conscious choice to bring in Star Trek fans?
SP: She was one of my favorite cast members on DEEP SPACE NINE. She came on the show later, and I just thought she was hot. Michael came home with the tapes and I would get to see them before they ever aired; on a Thursday night I would show up and sit down and watch. I remember going, 'Who's this? I think I'm going to go down to the set and meet this girl!' It turned out that she was married or had a boyfriend, but I always had kind of the hots for her.
And I thought she was a good actress. Up here in Canada they rerun all the shows I grew up watching, and I just saw an episode where she had the really cute, short bowl-cut hairdo, and she was on the planet with Worf and they ended up getting it on and getting back together, and she was so good. She's so different than she is on this show. I think I was the one who was initially excited about her, but for some reason I knew she was going to get it, and everyone else was into her as well, and she beat out everybody.
TW: What's she going to do next year? She said her goal for next season is for Sarah not to flip any more pancakes.
SP: Yes, we had that talk! Every week I'd be the one on the set as she was getting ready to bake something, and I'd be, 'Oops, sorry, we did it to you again!' But it was sort of organic to whatever story it was and the location and the budget and needing to service all the characters. It wasn't that we wanted her to be domestic, cooking, but at the same time, what else can you show that's family that can be on your set that you can afford to do on the television schedule? So it came down to being around the dinner table, and that was where I grew up, that was my family, or else in front of the TV, but you can't really have them all watching TV.
TW: What would you like to see next year?
SP: I would like to keep doing a broad range of stories that emulate the first season but definitely raise the bar. I like the scope we accomplished this season. You'll see that we sort of get into the Dana character and we expand all the characters so everyone's pretty well defined. Next season I know that we want to do more with Bruce and Sarah and Purdy. At the same time, we want to keep Michael Hall's evolution going, and learning about his destiny -- which is the title of the season's final episode, 'Destiny.'
TW: Do you read the feedback on the web site so you know what the fans are saying?
SP: Oh yeah. Michael has satellite, so he watches the show at 7 p.m. So by the time I watch it, he's already reading the commentary from the east coast. He starts e-mailing me before the show airs at 10, so I'm already hearing the comments when I watch the show.
It keeps evolving, every stage of the process. I'm constantly surprised. 'Oh my god, that worked,' or 'Oh my god, they blew that music cue.' The visual effects come in so late that by the time it actually airs, something may have snuck by us that somebody approved and it wasn't me. Someone approved a shot where the champagne cork pops, and Johnny touches the cork and the cork spins, and that's a total mistake -- technically, he's not allowed to interact. So I get a call from Michael going, 'Did you move the cork?' and I'm like, 'What cork?! Let me call you back!' Let's just say we found the culprit. The cork should not have spun.
TW: Now it will give the writers some kind of challenge to explain why that cork spun.
SP: Blame it on the rain in Vancouver! That's the kind of stuff that keeps it interesting. Talking to everyone from our steadicam operators to the grips and the crew, everybody all the way up and down the chain, they love the show because it's different every week. We're going to 1945, or we're in the woods, or sometimes we're on the stage but it's new and it's challenging and we're winging it with the visual effects. Sometimes we get there and go, 'It's not going to work! What do we do now?' It's a roller coaster ride to see how the effects turn out, and how they appear on the air with the sound effects.
TW: I take it you don't have the same budget as STAR TREK.
SP: They're a stage show, so there's much less variables. At the same time, they've been doing it -- they have sort of an infrastructure there that has been tried and tested all these years. Ours is definitely a road show. We're doing two moves in a day, sometimes three moves, starting at one location and moving to another, packing up everything, then ending up on the stage so we can shoot till four in the morning. Then we unplug everything and go home so we can come back a couple of hours later.
We have a ten-hour turnaround. It's a credit to our production manager and my partner Robert Petrovicz. There's no one lazy on this crew. We always try to do the coolest thing. I think Michael Hall is truly the leader of the crew in energy and class. He's so grateful and he's so professional, and he's so talented. It sets the bar for everyone else. He's there before most of the crew in makeup and he leaves when everybody else leaves.
TW: And he's in just about every shot.
SP: We're going to try to fix that next season so he can have a couple of days off. We're actually going to try to budget a second unit, as opposed to just pay for it and have it not be in the budget, so we're going to have seven days and a second unit.
TW: How much of the year are you staying up there -- are you able to do other projects?
SP: You can't really base a career on 13 episodes a year, so we're definitely in development and talking about some other shows -- some other sci-fi stuff that Michael's done and a Washington-based show that was originally a feature that Harrison Ford was going to do. A time-travel piece that's kind of a twist on a piece that Michael wrote, that's one of the best things he's ever done. Lloyd Segan's a former agent and feature producer, so he keeps us very busy with meetings and deals and other titles. Michael's got a very high bar for stuff he wants to do.
TW: Have you got a personal dream project?
SP: The script that I wrote that Michael originally read, that he decided he wanted to go into business with me and make Piller Squared, is a script called GOD SPELLED BACKWARDS. That's kind of a story about me in between working with Michael and getting out of film school, about this guy who ended up making a documentary about man's relationship to his best friend. It's a very cool story about a guy and his dog. If I have time, I'm going to direct that, sometime soon. That's the one little project that always makes me laugh when I think about it.
I was at a party last week and I was talking to Chris Masterson, who did episode three of DEAD ZONE. His brother is a good friend of mine from THAT '70S SHOW, so I'm determined to get Ashton or Danny or Laura to do an episode. Look out, we're going to have one of the cast of THAT '70S SHOW, because they're all wonderful. I know the second season is going to be better than the first season, with the stories we have. I can say one thing: we're talking about doing a BIG CHILL episode where we bring back possibly some of the Brat Pack to do sort of a BREAKFAST CLUB type show. Michael Hall talks to a lot of them; he's friends with Downey and Estevez.
TW: And Rob Lowe is now unemployed.
SP: I'm seeing high school reunion episode! That would be fun -- that would break some records if we could get some of them to do it. I saw BREAKFAST CLUB in high school. My favorite movie of all time is FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF.
TW: So what's going on now?
SP: We're in pre-production and we're doing insert shots today. I'm up here recutting two shows -- the season finale and the episode right before that. We did an episode, "Dinner With Dana," that's episode eleven -- it's an analogy for, you're not just dating one person, you're dating every person they've ever dated. When you're Johnny, we took that to the next level -- literally you're in bed with all those people.
TW: I don't think I want to know how his stepfather ended up in the bed.
SP: Someone at the beginning part of the season told him that I'm a joke aficionado, so now whenever I see him, I give him a hug and he tells me a joke. Right now I want to go visit my girlfriend, Lindsay Price, who was in episode three -- we couldn't afford her but she wanted to come see me, so she did "Netherworld." I'm going to Mexico where she's shooting with Bill Paxton to see her and lie on the beach!
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