John Harrison began his career
directing rock videos and working as 1st Ass't Director for famed horror
director, George Romero (Night of the Living Dead/ Creepshow).
Harrison wrote and directed multiple episodes of Romero's classic TV series, Tales
From The Darkside before helming Tales From the Darkside, The Movie
for Producer Richard Rubinstein and Paramount Pictures which won Harrison the
Grand Prix du Festival at Avoriaz, France.
Harrison has written and directed
episodes of Tales From The Crypt (HBO), Earth 2 (NBC), Profiler
(NBC), and Leverage (TNT). He has written and directed world premier
movies for the USA Network and Starz/Encore.
Harrison’s six-hour miniseries
adaptation of Frank Herbert's monumental bestseller, Dune, which he also
directed, was an Emmy-winning success in the U.S., then internationally both in
its broadcast premieres and subsequently in home video.
Harrison’s children of Dune,
another six-hour mini-series encompassing the next two novels of Frank
Herbert's mythic adventure series which he wrote and co-produced, was another
Emmy winner for the SyFy Channel.
Harrison co-wrote the animated
feature, dinosaur for Disney. He also wrote the adaptation of Clive
Barker’s fantasy novels, Abarat, also for Disney. In the Fall of ’06,
Harrison reunited with mentor George Romero to produce Romero’s film Diary
of the Dead. His action suspense thriller, Blank Slate, for producer
Dean Devlin, which Harrison wrote and directed, aired as twenty episode
micro-series on TNT in the Fall of ’08. Clive Barker’s Book of Blood,
which he wrote and directed, was released in 2009.
Between 2010 and 2012, Harrison has
continued his relationship with TNT directing episodes of the series Leverage
and, most recently, with his adaptation of the Cornell Woolrich story, Rear
Window, for Executive Producer Michael Douglas.
Harrison has written screenplays for
Robert Zemeckis , Richard Donner, Will Smith and Dean Devlin among others, and
he has directed such diverse talent as William Hurt, Julianne Moore, Tim Roth,
Annabella Sciorra, Peter Fonda, Debbie Harry, Steve Buscemi, Eric Stoltz and
many others.
He is currently in the U.K. filming
the webseries Residue.
Destiny Gardens is his first novel.
KT: You’re a successful television and
screenwriter/director/composer--what made you decide to write a novel? Is this
a story that’s been percolating for a while?
JH: Like many moments in my career, the decision to embark upon
this new endeavor called Destiny Gardens was as much accidental as
deliberate. For example, I never intended to write music for movies, but I was
the guy with the piano. So when my partners and I needed a score for our first
film, that job fell to me. That led to my doing the music for several of George
Romero’s films, and some of my own. I never intended to be a screenwriter, but
when I came to Hollywood I quickly realized that the only way I might get
directing assignments was to write my way into them. So I learned the craft of
screenwriting.
Destiny Gardens took an equally circuitous route. It was a story I had been
carrying around for a long time. Certainly not as fully developed as the novel
is now, but a story with themes and characters and moments that are all there
in the novel. I originally tried to develop it as a TV series with two producer
friends of mine, Robert Heath (Hot In Cleveland, Mad About You, About Jim)
and Mark Waxman (Beakman’s World, Sweet Justice). We never got it off
the ground, so I decided to write a screenplay and mount it as a low-budget
independent film. That, too, fell by the wayside as other work intruded.
Finally, while directing Leverage
episodes for producer Dean Devlin and TNT, I was searching for a new
project of my own to start. I kept coming back to DG. Every writer has a story
he or she can’t shake, and this one was mine. So I decided to use my time off
between Leverage episodes to see if I could finally get the entire story down.
I began by writing what I thought was a traditional film treatment but soon
realized I was, in fact, novelizing it. So I decided to keep going. Got about a
third into it before, once again, other work intruded. Some screenplay
assignments and more Leverage episodes. Work on DG was fitful.
During the Summer of 2012, though, I
finally hunkered down, and between directing gigs I finished it.
KT: Your love for your hometown of Pittsburgh permeates Destiny
Gardens. How many of the places you describe are based on real places? Was
there a real “Destiny Gardens?”
JH: Though I’ve lived in LA for over 30 and have raised my kids
here with my wife, I still consider Pittsburgh my home. It’s such a diverse and
beautiful city, and it’s where my career got started. And being true to the old
cliché “write what you know”, it was only natural that my story would take
place there. All of the primary locations do or did exist there. The Strand
bowling alleys, the street and alleys of South Oakland and the Hill District,
Forbes Field where the Pirates played. Some places are contrivances of real
locations for dramatic purpose. The Evergreen Social Club on Larimar Avenue is
a composite of several places I know, although the Larimar Avenue district (and
its reputation) really exists. The Strip District still exists, although it’s
quite a bit more trendy now than in the ‘50’s when the story is set.
There never was a Destiny Gardens,
but there was the Duquesne Gardens. In Oakland where my family lived until I
was 12. Like the fictional DG, it was an all-purpose public hall where the
hockey team played, where they had boxing matches and political rallies. It’s
gone now, replaced by rather non-descript and soulless apartment towers. The
Destiny Gardens of the book has been conjured from my memories of that building
and then moved to the Strip District where the kids in the book squat.
As with any novel, I’ve taken
certain liberties with locale, and any real Pittsburgher will recognize them
instantly. But the changes I’ve made are for dramatic purposes, and I’ve tried
to remain true to the times as much as possible.
KT: Any chance you’ll revisit the characters from Destiny
Gardens? Is there a sequel percolating as we speak?
JH: I’m not sure I’m ready to answer that. I will admit that
Veronique has left a door open just a crack when she tells her grandkids that
Patch “went away” for a while after the time at Destiny Gardens. But as Patch
quickly adds, “Well now, that’s a complicated tale for another time.” And I’m
not sure I’ve been told that tale. Yet.
KT: Concept to finished manuscript, how long did it take you to
write Destiny Gardens?
JH: Again, the concept for the book had been percolating for
years. And since I wrote DG in fits and starts, it took about a year. But if I
actually calculate the time during which I only worked on it and added that up,
maybe six months.
KT: How different was the process of writing a novel from the
process of writing a script?
JH: Interestingly, not that much. At least for me. Yes, of
course, the format is totally different. A good screenplay must always end up
as a presentation of visual moments. And mine are notoriously terse. A
screenplay must always live in the present tense. Backstory, internalization,
the detail of setting, of mood, of character’s motivations and behaviors, all
of these have to be shorthanded and passed off to other creative (hopefully)
collaborators who can read between the lines and bring them to life.
Having said that, when one reads a
really good screenplay, one can sense that the writer has already done that
work in his mind. It’s there in the subtext. The story can’t move forward, the
characters can’t behave the way they do without endless attention paid to those
details in advance, even if they never end up on the page.
So from my experience, it’s only the
form that is different, not the process. It’s all story-telling, after all.
KT:
Many of your films have been horror or sci fi, is there a genre novel in your
future?
JH: Entirely possible. That is if I can find the right story in
which to invest that kind of time and energy. The project I’m presently working
on could be one. It’s a supernatural thriller, and I actually wrote a good
portion of the major story as a novel before I got diverted into the cinematic
version we’re now developing. Because there is so much interest currently in
the transmedia approach to material, I think there’s a good chance I’ll return
to the book version.
KT: Speaking of the future, tell us about Residue. What’s
it about and where will it be shown?
JH: I mentioned the current intrigue with what’s coming to be
known as transmedia. That is, the simultaneous presentation of IP across all
platforms, literary, graphic, TV, film and most importantly these days, the
Internet. My producers at Matador came to me early and suggested this approach,
but they didn’t want to co-opt the original idea that I had pitched and that
they’d optioned. They asked if there were strands of the mythology that could
be developed initially for the web as a means of jumpstarting the project. They
believed something like that could be fully financed for production now if I
could find a way into my story that way.
Well as soon as you hear the words
“we have the financing” in this business, you damn well better jump through
whatever hoops to get going.
In this case it was easy for me to
conceive of a prequel story to the one I had originally pitched which I could
write according to the smaller confines of the budget Matador had in mind. As I
mentioned above, I had invested a lot of thought already in backstory, in
characters that would never be seen but had set things in motion etc. So it was
relatively easy to imagine a full story built around them, and that’s what
we’re doing.
So, at present Residue consists of several parts: an initial 10-chapter web series
of 10-minute episodes (“Paramentals Rising”), which will then comprise a
full-length movie for DVD and VOD. This will hopefully excite enough people to
carry on into a full-blown TV series (Residue,
“Dark Pursuit”) with ‘digital extensions’ expanding on key elements of the
story’s mythology and characters that can be accessed on-line, or in graphic
novels or even books.
Can’t hurt to dream, can it?
KT: Could you see Residue as a novel? A traditional
television show? A film? All of the above?
JH: All of the above. I think this is a growing trend these
days. Especially in the areas of genre material.
KT: There’s a lot of talk these days about the impending doom of
blockbuster movies and network television. Do you share that pessimism? Or do
you think the industry is simply undergoing a paradigm shift in the way it
delivers entertainment?
JH: I’m both pessimistic and optimistic. (But hey, I’ve always
been a ‘cake-and-eat-it-too’ type personality). I would hope that the
collective dreaming we all know and love as “the movies” will never completely
vanish. There are some stories for which the big screen is the only way to
appreciate them. Can you imagine “Lawrence of Arabia” on your Iphone!? The
problem is…will anyone be brave enough to make such a film anymore?
My argument with current thinking is
that studios and distributors can’t seem to figure out how to monetize anything
marketed to audiences that aren’t small children or the 14 – 30 year old
cohort, mostly boys. Creatively this well is starting to run pretty dry. We find
more and more extravagant and hypnotic ways of devising spectacle, but the
storytelling that holds it up is getting threadbare, repetitive, and
increasingly meaningless. So guys like Lucas and Speilberg predict fewer movies
at massive budgets that are sold for Broadway-type ticket prices. That would
seem to imply that our future movie-going is destined to become an elite
experience one enjoys on tourist holidays to LA or New York or even just to
one’s downtown. In my humble opinion, this will shrink audiences even more.
I see TV slightly differently. Two
developments have actually contributed, I think, to the improvement of
television programming (and, ironically, to the dire straights the movies are
in). First, the evolution of home entertainment centers and things like DVR
which make the viewing experience so much more customized and enjoyable. The
second is the proliferation of ‘channels’ that want to do original programming.
These create competition, for talent, for ideas, for eyeballs. And I have no
problem with the fragmentation of the audience. Why not have a lot of choices?
Why not be able to find the kind of programming that appeals to you? “TV
Everywhere” is going to become the norm because that’s they way young people
view the world. “I want it when I want it on whatever device I happen to
have at hand at the moment.”
I’m not smart enough to know how
studios and producers will monetize this. But I’ve no doubt incredibly smart
people will figure it out. Some of it will be advertising, some of it will
subscription, some of it will always be free. As long as there are consumers,
people will figure out a way to get them what they want. To me, that presents a
lot of opportunities for creatives.
Buy Destiny Gardens here
Find John on Facebook
Follow him on Twitter:
@harbrobeanboy
Connect with him on his website
View his credits on IMDB
Watch the Destiny Gardens
trailer here
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