Making a Production Company is Just Making Something Up

Green Bay, 1992: Dreams Come From Wherever

Imagine yourself in a small Wisconsin town with a gigantic football team’s stadium looming over your consciousness at the age of 11, having decided you were going to make movies. What do you do? Mostly, honestly, you try to figure out how to hook two VCRs up to one another, and hopefully one of them has a jog-shuttle on the front, and you spend a lot of fucking time debating the merits of SVHS.

I’ve had a hard time caring about what I know is called the “Nepo Baby” conversation out there in the zeitgeist because I— like most people I know involved in the making of film and tv as adults— grew up so far away from any access whatsoever to Hollywood. It was so far away as a possible thing that I gave up even dreaming about it before I turned 14. Yes, I did kid things; I went to the library and read biographies of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and I figured out how to write them letters, and I even got a response from someone at Amblin, although its arrival was more a nail in a coffin to any hopes I had of making films. That coffin’s nail was driven down thirty years ago, and it remained sealed for twenty years…

Fiction, though, was another matter. I could write a story on a legal pad and only needed a pen. I didn’t have to call my friends and rally them for another “project”, I didn’t have to act (I turn into a stone golem when I try to act), but maybe the most important thing— I didn’t need access. I didn’t need to know a person to even get started on writing something; I didn’t need to send a letter out explaining who I was and hoping someone would like what I had to say; I didn’t need to be born into something or have a family friend to even bother. I could just… make something up. There wasn’t a destination or even an intended audience. My audience, I don’t even think, was even myself. I just wanted to make something that wasn’t there before.

There are a thousand relevant stories between those moments— say, for example, the time I was attempting to “do special effects” by throwing my father’s Sony Hi-8 Camcorder as high into the air as I could and catching it, but then dropped it, and snapped off the viewfinder and shut down my entire operation for months— and sitting here right now from the offices of Tractor Beam, the production company I started last year with my producing partner David Eisenberg (an editor of Station Eleven, Watchmen, The Leftovers, Lost, and many other shows), Steph Goldman (a young producer I met in Toronto, who cut her teeth roving the sets of countless shows in that city as its TV boom took off), and Hilary Flynn (a writer-turned producer whose taste and critical perspective was already shocking when I met her at 25, soon after she’d arrived in Los Angeles), but what remains exactly the same between then and now is this: the biggest secret inside of Hollywood is the same secret that I was grappling with back in Green Bay in the 90s; the only way to do something is to make it up completely. You don’t need institutional support to carve out what you want to carve out for your professional life; instead, you need to entirely make it up. What’s hardest about that, I think, is learning how to tolerate the feeling of risk, but even worse, the feeling of shame and even derision that comes at you when you decide your path is DIY, in some way, and will not be underwritten or amplified by the Intense Power of a Pre-Existing Institution. The system is such, right now, that making anything at scale requires partners, and in fact the quality of what you make goes up if you know how to work with those institutions. It’s not straightforward. But for my money, if you’d like to invent a path for yourself, you have to invent an institution, too.

I think it was working on Station Eleven that most clarified this idea for me. On a more superficial level, I had already been through enough cycles of TV-making to realize that the “auteur” stance of a showrunner was a busted proposition, long-term, and whatsmore, it didn’t actually make the best version of a thing. But in a much deeper way, Station Eleven reminded me that all of our institutions— all of them up to the governments of nations themselves— are DIY operations that someone made up along the way. Usually what went along with the formation of those institutions was a collective of people in agreement, and honestly, some modicum of military power. But it’s all made up: banks, the transit system, the internet, the power grid, the canon, the culture. Even nations.

The best things I have ever made up were things made up for the right reasons. Any time I’ve ever tried to write a short story to get it into a particular magazine— creative failure. Any time I’ve ever taken a job for money— creative failure. Any time I’ve ever started working on something hoping to win an award, or even the love of the people who encountered it— creative failure.

This is why I always think of my third book, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, as my best book, by far. I had had some success with writing fiction with my first two books, but they were driven largely by some insatiable ambition about literary success, or trying to be a Well Regarded Writer, or somehow shooting down a path I had imagined up about myself when I was a kid. Be Famous. Be Well Regarded. But when I got to Chicago after graduate school, I met a whole community of different kinds of artists. DIY kids, people who put on shows for 3 people, art kids who were just doing it for whatever, and it reminded me much more of the feeling of making movies as a kid, with my friends, when I was 11. What’s the point? I have no idea. But the thing came out better when there wasn’t one.

The best example I have of this state of consciousness mattering— I’ll just call it the “I Don’t Know What I’m Doing But Whatever” state of consciousness as you orbit an artistic project— is a short story I wrote called “No Sun”, which was in The Universe in Miniature in Miniature. I had the idea for it walking down Damen in Chicago one wintery slushy day, and I didn’t even think about where it would fit in our where I would try to publish it… I just went home and wrote some of it, and then the rest, and then the rest. It was an unusual story for me, because of the way it ended; I had all sorts of hangups about endings and how I didn’t know how to do them, but I ended it with an image of a bird in a box, and though I didn’t really understand what I was doing with that ending, it felt exactly right, so I left it.

I did get that story published, and it ended up in my next book, but it’s not like it set the world on fire, or anyone particularly noted it. Still, it always felt good, and felt like me, and I always liked it for that reason.

Cut to six years later, and I’m sitting at lunch with Damon Lindelof, meeting him for the first time about whether or not I get to come work on The Leftovers. I had submitted that story instead of a script as my sample, because the execs at HBO thought it would be a better sample for him. He was notoriously hard to even get to an interview with… I had gone through four or five other meetings just to get to the lunch. I was incredibly intimidated. I ordered a cheeseburger. We started to talk about The Leftovers, and a number of Damon’s ideas for the future of the show, but eventually he brought up the story, and after a thoughtful bite and swallow, he goes, “How does it feel to write the perfect ending of a story?” He was talking about the bird in the box, and I felt this sudden strange teleportation back to that walk on the sidewalk, and simultaneously to sitting at the keyboard, not understanding quite why I was ending it that way. And I got the job.

People make up things for a lot of reasons— mostly to make money or amass power— but I think it’s important for artists to always retain at least a portion of their “I don’t know”ness in whatever they’re doing. Whether or not it’s wise to admit that comes down to the context and the moment. But I don’t think anything that ends up successful has a comprehensive and complete map before the journey begins. You need to keep the fuzzies, a few “There be monsters here” clouds, if it’s gonna turn out right. How could that not be true? You made it up, anyway, and you probably didn’t know why.

+++by the way! If you’re a paid subscriber, you can listen to me read “No Sun” below! It’s from my 2012 book The Universe in Miniature in Miniature.