PART II: Why I hate the show JUSTIFIED, even though I have never watched it, and never will.

Okay. Before I finish this story, there’s a little clean-up required. A couple of you pointed out that Part One might be construed as taking a shot at the Clay City police department in general and Chief James T. Kirk in particular for their interaction with the Justified reps, which is not at all what I intended. I apologize for not being clearer. I’ve got no reason to impugn James – he always seemed like a good guy to me and I’ve no reason to think he’s anything other than a good Chief, too. That’s worth saying.

I stand by the “O.J. is innocent” story, though.

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As promised. Back to Sewerville.

Like I was saying in the last post, my friends got an audience at the F/X network and pitched them the story of Sewerville. While this is happening, I am back here in Lexington, KY, oblivious to all of it, until one day I get a phone call from my friend telling me about his meetings, and asking if I would be interested in pursuing The Mountain as a television series.

Of course I was interested. This was in 2007, seven years after I first came up with the story, and by then I was interested in pursuing just about any route that would get the story to a bigger audience. If someone had offered to put it on with a college drama class I’d have jumped at the chance. I actually even considered adapting it into a play and trying to get a slot performing locally with mostly my friends in the cast, none of whom have any acting experience that I know about., not to mention the fact that I have zero experience a) writing a play or b) directing a play.

(We actually did do this when I first started writing the script. We read the opening scene in the living room of my apartment, with Daxon Caudill playing the key role, and quite well I might add. Maybe someday…)

So we worked on developing Sewerville as an F/X show. Notes and drafts went back and forth and after a few weeks, we had a basic episode-by-episode synopsis for the first season (12 episodes in all), and a script for the pilot. You can read the pilot here – if you’ve never read a screenplay, the red text and asterisks in the margin signal revisions made along the way – and you can read the synopsis here. I’m putting them out there for the same reason I wrote the novel. No need to keep it hidden in the desk forever. And who’s going to steal it now, anyway?

By the way, the script is rather salty. If you are sensitive to that, this is me saying I’m sorry in advance. I just let it go and figured that if they cut 95% of the profanity the show would still have the most cursing in TV history, which in itself would be worth at least a little bit of notoriety. The Scarface method.

Aside from all the cussin’, now that I’m reading the pilot script again for the first time in a few years, I’m reminded of all the things I liked about it in the first place.  The story features all of the darkness and family drama that eventually wound up in the novel Sewerville, and also – especially – the hazy, dreamlike memories that later became such a big part of the book. It’s these moments that I think helped move Sewerville away from the toothless hillbilly stereotypes that have dominated so many Hollywood representations of the Appalachian region in shit like Next of Kin and The Beverly Hillbillies. Moments that would have made Sewerville the series seem different, like this:

 

Overall, I was pretty happy with our work. I figured that if F/X was intrigued enough with the idea to ask us for a pilot script, then the script I wrote would not disappoint.

That’s when the notes started rolling.

Over the course of a year and half, we got notes, suggesting one change or another. Most of them weren’t really that major, so I was happy to oblige. The thing is, by that time even at my (very) low level on the food chain, I knew that when you gave people your script with the hope that they would put up the money to give it life onscreen, those people wanted input. That input meant they gave you notes.

Sometimes the notes were valid, and sometimes they were awful. If I thought it was valid, I had no problem making the change, because after all, that’s just constructive criticism. You know – everything for the story. If the notes were bad… well, usually there were enough good notes that you could use those, show you were paying attention to the input you’d been given, and that would mostly satisfy. Occasionally a producer or other reader would be truly married to an idiotic idea and you’d have to plead your case, but really, that didn’t happen to me that often. Most of the people we worked with in trying to get Sewerville made for TV or film gave us legit ideas to consider.

Anyway, back and forth we went for something like a year and a half.

Characters came and went, plot points changed, but overall the basic story remained the same. We made incremental progress, but it was progress just the same.  And like I said, I’d been working on this thing off and on with different folks for seven years now, so I was used to moving at a snail’s pace.

After a few months, we were given word to try telling the whole thing from a female perspective. Supposedly, F/X was by that time looking for series with strong female leads. In hindsight, I should have known that was the beginning of the end, but at the time I just figured it was one last hurdle, hopefully the final hurdle, and an opportunity to get creative.

We did that.

And it sucked.

Personally, I think I write good female characters. (Maybe everyone who writes female characters thinks they do it well.) I was “raised by women” as the saying goes, and ain’t ashamed of it one bit. My mom and her sisters taught me a hell of a lot about this world, and they still do, every day. Between mom and my aunts and my sister and two first cousins who are just like sisters, my brother and I were often surrounded by women and you just can’t help but learn something about them in that situation. Or so I’d like to believe. And of course, eight years ago I met my wife, and she’s perfect, so that helps, too.

Still, Sewerville from a woman’s point of view – that sucked. Was it the idea? I don’t know? The writing? I don’t know. But it was something. We batted that back and forth for a few months.

Then nothing.

After that, I didn’t hear about Sewerville for a while.  This didn’t surprise me, since the last few years had seen plenty of times where I didn’t hear about it for a while. I just let my friends in L.A. do their thing, knowing they would call when the time was right. You can drive yourself crazy waiting by the phone and by then, I was master of not doing that.

At some point, Leslie and I were at a movie theater. I don’t remember the exact location and I have no idea what film we were there to see, either. All I know is that the pre-movie ads started playing and right there in front of me unspooled the first preview for Justified on F/X.

Leslie was actually the first one that realized what we were seeing.”They stole your idea!” she said. I wasn’t far behind her, though, and just buried my face in my hands.

I knew they hadn’t stolen my idea – after all, Justified is based on some Elmore Leonard stories, the first of which dates to the early ‘90s – but as soon as I saw the trailer I also knew exactly what happened to our show. F/X had kept us in development while they were developing Justified simultaneously, making sure that we couldn’t take Sewerville to another outlet and perhaps beat them to the punch with a gritty, morally gray show set in Eastern Kentucky while never having any real intention to put our how on the air.

This is actually not uncommon.  Television is a business and networks have to protect their interests. If you’re F/X and you’re going to air a violent crime drama set in the rural South – a risky prospect at the time, regardless of how successfully it turned out —  which one are you going with: Elmore Leonard’s Justified, or Aaron Saylor’s Sewerville? Well, who the fuck is Aaron Saylor? Exactly.

So I don’t hold any anger about it. Actually, I do hold some anger, but I try to think about things in a cold, logical, objective way and keep myself from losing my mind at a bitter young age. Like I said, it happens. It happened. Time to move on.

In this case, I moved on by writing Sewerville, the novel. I don’t work much on screenplays anymore, either; I’ve gone back to prose, where I can control 100% of the story and not have to worry about budgets or notes from others. I can write the story my way and live with results. I’ve published a collection of shorter works with my friend Kevin Hall (Lost Change and Loose Cousins), and later this year my next book Adventures in Terror with Jasper Bohanon gets released into the world. After that, I’ve got a few other things working, and sooner or later I’ll get back to the long-threatened Sewerville: Book II, which expands the story into the corrupt halls of state government and interstate drug trafficking.

Mostly, the F/X stuff with Sewerville is buried behind me. It comes up every now and then and I just laugh. “The book is way better,” I’ll say. (It’s true, by the way.)

But this week, seeing that photo of Justified invading the very place where I grew up, that just sucked for me. I have to tell you that.  It sucked for me hard. But now, I’ve written about it, you’ve read about it, and I feel better. By the way, this story in two parts is far and away the most read posts on both Sewerville.com and my Facebook page. Thank you for indulging me.

People seem to compare Sewerville to Justified a lot. They mean it as a compliment and I honestly take it that way. Still, it’s a pinprick at my soul every time. I appreciate the positive associations, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit they make the bile rise in my throat just a little bit.

It’s a Me problem. I get that.

Do I hold anything personally against the makers of Justified? No. (Would they notice, even if I did? No.) Timothy Olyphant could well be a swell guy. Hell, I like his work, especially in The Crazies and Live Free or Die Hard, which seemingly everyone else hated. Elmore Leonard’s dead now but I always like his work, too. The Justified gang that visited Powell County aren’t just a bunch of assholes, either; they don’t know me and as far as I know they don’t anything about Sewerville or its brush with their network. They were just doing their jobs. I may have felt it like a swift kick to the taint, but still, they were just doing their jobs.

To repeat: I am not here to crush the show. That would be stupid, like farting into a jet engine; it might make a little noise but ultimately the only thing it’s gonna do is burn my ass. All I’m here to do is explain something that hit me yesterday, when that innocuous photograph came across my Facebook news feed. I have been open about the fact that I’ve never watched Justified, other than the few minutes of footage that played in that theater a few years ago, promoting the series debut.

As the title of the post says, I’ve never seen the show, and I never will see the show. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch it, though. Have at it. Maybe it’s great. But to quote Pulp Fiction, sewer rat might taste like pumpkin pie, but I’d never know ‘cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker.

Done.