ONE-HUNDRED

LegalDispatch 100

May 31, 2024

Howdy.

Well, here we are. The one-hundredth edition of this humble newsletter.

Accordingly, I’ve tried to make this week’s dispatch a little longer/special. We’ll see if I’ve achieved that.

But most importantly, I’d like to thank all of you for making this lark of mine an actual, viable thing. Thanks as well for all the words of appreciation and encouragement you’ve sent along the way. You keep me — and this newsletter — going.

WORK UPDATE

A short week, but a busy one. I’m nearing the finish line on PROJECT MARBLE and things are feeling good. Also delivered the outline for PROJECT ATLANTIC and we’ve closed a deal for a pilot script for PROJECT CYCLONE.

In addition, I’ve written up a pitch for another TV thing that I feel like I teased many moons ago as PROJECT BOTTLE. It’s a bit of an unusual swing, a drama that is designed from the ground up to be extremely cost-effective but nevertheless compelling. Supposedly that’s what the market is looking for. We’ll see.

I’ve also been working on that project that I teased was in a medium that I’ve never worked in before. That slight description vastly understates just how cool this one is and, at the moment, it’s so super-top secret that I asked the interwebs for two random words so that I could give it a project codename free of whatever clue I might subconsciously embed in it. So, meet PROJECT SKETCH KNIFE. Hopefully, I’ll at least be able to talk about who this is for shortly.

NOTICE & COMMENT

David Banks wrote:

Thanks for the shout out! However I’ve retired and I now work on digital restoration projects. Examples are posted on Bluesky. That said I freely share my comic cover design files with people who request them for their binding projects.

I stand corrected. David’s retirement is a major loss to the comic book community. His binding work was wonderfully inspired. David, I’m wishing you nothing but the best.

Over on Twitter (no, I will not call it ‘X’), @FinerPointsGeek asked:

First and foremost, there can be no discussion of casting for the Arrowverse that doesn’t start with Casting Directors David Rapaport and Lyndsey Baldasare, who were there from the start to the bitter end. They were the ones who found Stephen, Grant, and Melissa and made sure that those were the very first auditions placed before producers.

But to answer your question, the two roles that first spring to mind are that of Dinah Drake (Arrow) and Zari Tarazi (Legends of Tomorrow), albeit for different reasons.

The casting process for Dinah Drake actually went down to the wire. It took us forever to find an actress we were happy with, but once we cast her, the network said that “we could do better.” Personally, I wasn’t so sure. Not with the very small amount of time we had remaining until production. But then Juliana Harkavy became available at the literal last minute, came in, and blew us all away.

Zari was challenging in a very different way. I originally thought that the role would be incredibly difficult to cast on account of the fact that we insisted on a Muslim actor to play this important Muslim character. But as I recall, Tala Ashe came in to audition relatively early in the process and won the role in the room. I think I turned to fellow showrunner Phil Klemmer and was like, “That was a lot easier than I expected.”

Thanks for the great question. I hope I answered it to your satisfaction. For fun, here are the costume designs for both characters

Speaking of Twitter, @drhickmanzx asks:

Another great question. Having just mentioned Zari from Legends she immediately springs to mind. And having mentioned Legends, I would be immensely tickled to see the comic book incarnation of Beebo. (But that goes for any incarnation of Beebo, I suspect.)

The truth is, it’s always fun when a character you’re involved with in one medium makes the leap to another medium. Speaking of which:

THERE MUST BE SOMETHING IN THE WATER…

In the previous LegalDispatch, I mentioned how a character I’d co-created for Young X-Men made the jump to animation with X-Men ‘97. Well, there must be something in the water because CBR.com just came out with an article about the character, delving into how I made a meal out of a throw away moment in Joss Whedon and Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men run.

If you’re so inclined, you can read about it here.

NEWS 12 LONG ISLAND

The reason I didn’t put out a dispatch last week was that I was returning to my roots on Long Island — specifically, Bethpage, to film a segment in connection with News 12’s Summer Book Club Series where In Any Lifetime has been chosen as a selection.

News 12 is the nation’s largest, and most watched regional news network, reaching 3.3 million homes through top cable providers, with 680,000 unique streamers in the New York designated market area, and is accessible to subscribers of Optimum, Xfinity, Spectrum, Service Electric, and Fios.

It’s all part of the publicity push we’re doing to raise awareness for In Any Lifetime. You can preview the first chapter by clicking here. If you like, I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering.

HEROES CON

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be headed to Charlotte, North Carolina for Heroes Con, a convention I’ve wanted to attend for a long time. If you’re interested in tickets, you can find out more by clicking here.

HOW TO MAKE ART THAT CONFRONTS THE DARKNESS (OR NOT)

My friend Cole Haddon, through his most excelletn 5AM StoryTalk Substack, recently published what he calls a “choral” article with 20 or so creatives talking about how to be creative in these challenging times that we’re living in. I’m sharing with you because it’s immensely insightful despite the fact that I’m one of the creatives interviewed. Check it out below.

5AM StoryTalk

How to Make Art That Confronts the Darkness (Or Not)

“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” – Stanley Kubrick “Fuck it.” -Most everyone else If you’re a regular reader of 5AM StoryTalk, then you know very well how seriously I take art. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the foundation on which our civilization is built. It can distract and entertain us, it can serve as a mirror to reveal who we truly are as individuals and as a society, and it can even inspire cultures to change. Today, as the world outside our windows grows bleaker and more hopeless, it has seemed to me as if artists have never been more necessary to combat this encroaching darkness. And yet, when I discuss this belief with other artists, I quickly discover there is no unanimity about the matter…

7 months ago · 22 likes · 2 comments · Cole Haddon

FROM THE VAULT

I wanted to include something special for the 100th edition and a conversation I recently had with another writer reminded me of this.

My second gig in the TV business was working on Law & Order. During my third (and final) season on the show, I wrote what I consider to be my single best script for the franchise.

Unfortunately, it never aired. Never went into production.

The premise of the episode was based on, well, almost every other episode of Law & Order that came before it. Especially back when I was working on the show, it was immensely common for the detectives to arrest the wrong suspect at the end of the “cop half” leading to the prosecutors to have to determine the true culprit in the “lawyer half.”

This happened with enough regularity that I started to wonder, “what would happen if Sam Waterston’s character, Jack McCoy, the ‘main’ prosecutor discovered that he’d put an innocent man on death row?”

The resulting script, titled “Convictions” to refer both to the defendant’s improper conviction and the conviction McCoy had to show to get it overturned, was about to begin pre-production when one of the show’s producers whispered a little something in Dick Wolf’s ear. (Dick is the creator and Executive Producer of Law & Order.)

Something like a day or two before prep was to begin, word came down from on high that Dick was killing the episode. Apparently, he didn’t believe in the story’s premise that defendants are unjustly convicted occasionally. And in those purportedly rare instances when someone goes to prison for a crime they didn’t commit, justice has still been done because they were probably guilty of some other crime.

And so the script was consigned to languish, un-produced, on my computer’s hard drive. If you’re interested in reading, you can do so on my website.

LegalDispatch

ONE-HUNDRED

LegalDispatch 100

Discussion about this post