#(using lots of small samples is obvs not at all unique to them

[buchanan-video]

We Made Hay (10 Years Since The Cows Came To Visit)

It was 2009 In Manchester, when I put a record onto my turntable called ‘BBC Introduces, Pennies From Heaven Soundtrack’ and found ‘Make Hay While The Sun Shines’ by Billy Merrin. I was working on an LP of my music which was not going great. Then all of a sudden I had a wave of inspiration. I sampled the track into a beat, but got stuck on the lyrical content. I knew the beat was good, I also knew that this track had to be about my hometown of Church Stretton in Shropshire. After a few weeks mulling it over I called up my pal Will Betts who had previously provided me with some guitar from his own set of songs. As we were talking, the seed was planned. What if this was a stupid video featuring all of us being gangster farmers? The deal was set, this project had the green light. I called around people and set a date to film.

I got my friend from uni Chris Breen to come and run the camera which we did not return after a shared coursework project. I gave him the most detailed brief of ‘just point the camera and press record, we will do the rest’. Prior to filming, I had scouted locations and knew where I wanted to film. I managed to persuade a friend of mine who I worked with at CO-OP if I could use her partners farm for filming. We also persuaded local land lady Wendy who very willingly give up her beer garden at The Ragleth Inn, located in Little Stretton. The rest of the locations were just made up on the fly, shropshire is a beautiful location, so the background did a lot of the work for us. 

Filming

I remember driving up to meet Will and his brother Jon on the morning of the filming. At this point I felt sick with nerves, I just wanted to film and get it over with, the clouds were gathering and rain was predicted all day. A few weeks before we had all recorded the song and were keen to make the video. The lads were fully keen and into the concept. When I met them, all I saw were flannel shirts, jeans halfway up one leg, pitchforks, spades and a whole lot of 90’s hip-hop attitude all rolled together, It was perfect. The filming was everything it needed to be. We all fully committed to the flavor and let rip. No holding back, no surrender. All my prior concerns about the weather, not being able to pull it off or have enough time, evaporated.

Once filming wrapped I started editing all this stupid shit together. It took form, we all laughed and that was that. We had done it, made a video which we found funny. We laughed about how we were Shropshires ‘Goldie Lookin Chain’ and how if people in the town got to hear / see this they would not be best pleased as some of the stuff in the lyrics are not all roses about our hometown. We put the video up on YouTube and then washed our hands of it. Little did we know that some mad shit was brewing.

SY6 Rises

After its online release, I kept seeing it being shared on Facebook by friends etc. The usual narrative is that this happens and then it drops off a cliff. To our surprise, people found this thing funny as well. People seemed to be proud to see their hometown and shropshire laid out, claiming ‘I’m From the SY6’ and sharing it with pride. A couple of us went down to the local (Bucks head) thinking we were going to get some heat from the video but instead people loved it, we were small time celebs in Stretton. This all kept going and going, things took a life of their own. One evening I was sat around talking with a few of the boys and someone mentioned they knew a guy who knew a guy that could maybe get us to open for ‘Goldie Lookin Chain’ when they passed through Shrewsbury. Never going to happen, or so we thought. To our surprise...we did, we opened their show! That night I signed a pair of boobs, a task that is a lot harder than TV and film make it out to be. Things were nuts and funny as hell. We were not a band, we had one parody song. The thing is, I made music ‘for real’ and my back catalogue and new music had no DNA of SY6 at all, but to me this did not matter. 

Shropshire VS Yeo Valley

Six months after the release of the video, I was at work. I got a call from someone saying ‘did you see it’ I was like ‘no what? What you on about? - ‘They ripped you off?’. Turns out an advert from Yeo Valley Yogurts used the same gimmick as us, rapping farmers. A concept not exactly unique to us, we did not own that idea, so I thought nothing of it until more details came out. They had some shots lifted directly from our video, a lead guy in a red shirt (not as good looking obvs) and some of the same gags. I know it could have been a coincidence but to the conspiracy theorists out there, there is some evidence to suggest this was not the case. I had previously called up Muller dairy before the video was released, I wanted to check that we could used the Muller brand and also try and flog the video to them for marketing. They passed (but sent me  £10 voucher). 

Now, some people seemed to think that Yeo Valley and Muller were connected somehow, I have no idea, nor did I really care that much. However, people seemed to care a whole lot more than me. There was an online petition that was launched to take the Yeo Valley video down and a rumoured boycott. The Sun newspaper even called me up asking to cover the story because they got a tip off, Shropshire had our backs! None of this actually amounted to anything. One thing is, Muller is not even based in shropshire (probs one of the may reasons Muller passed on the video in the first place), so the Muller lyrics in the video are redundant, we did not know this and thought they were based in Shropshire. Dumbasses. 

Legacy 

As the years rolled on, people wanted more of the SY6. We did an ill advised 2nd video for a fruit and veg company which I am not a fan of and then left it as that. People wanted us to do something to mark the ten years. We kicked about the idea of doing something but to be honest I was never fully sold, it’s nice to dream about it but it wouldn't be the same. You need those careless times, and the vibe we all had when we all lived close, the gags were effortless to make, the tone was easy. I look back on this time foundly, I have a video of myself and my friends being idiots, that's all I wanted. 

[gregwhite]

SOLD A SHOW

So a writing career is kind of made up of two jobs: getting staffed on other people’s shows, and selling your own shows in the hopes that one day you will be the one doing the staffing. I’ve been lucky since getting my first writing job in 2009 to basically be employed on other people’s shows on a fairly consistent basis, with only a few notable gaps*, but I hadn’t had much experience selling shows. 

I had pitched a bunch over the years, and I’m still very fond of a lot of them. One of them was called Lesser Gods (pitched with character designs by my very talented board artist pal Will Patrick)--it was set in the realm of the gods, and followed the Zeus character’s degenerate son as he is exiled into a life ruling the lesser gods, aka the gods nobody cares about (there was the god of smooth jazz, and so on). Very fun show, but I don’t think I pitched it very well. Then there was a show called Slice, pitched with Six Point Harness, which was more of a King of the Hill sort of tone set on a crappy public golf course. The show began when this slummy golf pro’s somewhat estranged daughter, a local government employee, is hired to make the golf course profitable, which basically makes her her dad’s boss. Another show I really loved, but I don’t think it really connected with the folks we took it to. 

And on and on and on. 

Then in 2015, I had partnered with Alex Bulkley at Shadow Machine (a great man, and a great studio) on another animated show of mine called Robot Daughter (my agents made sure my DreamWorks deal allowed me to pitch and develop to outside buyers). The premise of RD was basically Terminator meets Girls. A small-time inventor is kidnapped by the Russians (it’s always the Russians) and forced at gunpoint to create a killing machine for them, which he does, but he ends up developing paternal feelings for his creation, so he takes it on the run, slaps skin on it, and tries to hide it in plain sight by enrolling it in high school, passing it off as his teenage daughter. The joke of the show was that for this death machine, capable of anything, high school is a lot more complicated and confusing than actual war. It was funny and vulgar and we sold it to MTV. That was the first time I really felt truly confident in a pitch, where I could just talk about the show without little note cards or anything. It was just “here’s the hook, here’s what the show’s about, thanks for listening.” It was a good lesson in not only how to pitch, but also what to pitch. There are some things that you take out that you feel sort of like, “Yeah, this is a show more or less” and then there are things you take out that feel like, “Oh, this is definitely a show.” That isn’t to say they follow a template, quite the opposite, but that there’s something that just feels right about it. 

I wrote a pilot I’m still really fond of (it’s become a sample my agents and managers use quite often) but ultimately MTV decided, after buying our show, that they didn’t want to do animation anymore. Fair enough. It was a throwback to sort of that Liquid Television era of MTV, and in the end it wasn’t enough to convince them that animation was where it’s at. 

A note on animation for a sec. While I love it, I never intentionally decided that I was going to do primarily animation, it just sort of happened this way. And when it comes time for me to pitch something, the ideas I get most excited about take place in alternate universes and other realities with gods or animals or robots as protagonists. At this point, I just go with it. But on the selling side of things, a lot of studios and networks don’t really know how to approach animation. Is it its own thing? Can it exist alongside live-action shows? It’s a weirder, more niche thing to pitch it seems. I don’t let that really influence what I pitch or write, but it’s worth noting. 

Anyway, moving on. At the end of 2015, I was rewatching The Sopranos, and one episode ended with this beautiful Nick Lowe song called The Beast in Me and I became a little obsessed with it. Just the notion of this roiling monster living inside someone (basically all of us to some degree) and the person not knowing exactly how to deal with it struck me as particularly profound. It also made me think of my dog, Louie, a little wonderhound schnauzer, and how he seems to contain all these amusing contradictory traits. One minute he’s trotting along next to me, docile and obedient, and the next minute he’s vomiting blood and shrieking at the sight of a squirrel or one of his SACRED ENEMIES (pugs and other flat faced dogs). 

So with this in mind, I wrote a script for a show called The Beast in Me. It was basically, what if Bambi decided to get revenge on his mother’s killer, but in doing so, gets sidetracked and wanders off into a nearby city and gets a job at a data entry office. The show was very dry and odd and absurd, and was sort of just about this fox character learning what it means to become human (he gets a job, makes friends, experiences love, etc). I sent it to my managers at Principato-Young, as I often do, with a very self-satisfied note: “Hey! Here’s another script! I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done!” When we connected, they were less enthused than I (I get VERY enthused about things), but they said that there was something about the revenge aspect of this show that struck them as interesting. I recall one of my managers saying, “It feels more like a Western.” It was the end of the year, and I was leaving for the holidays, but they told me to fiddle around with it to see if maybe there was something there. 

So I went home to Jersey for a few weeks, and thought about it, and when I came back in January of 2016, we started talking about this idea weekly. First it was a change in the setting, from present day Hudson Valley to the 1800s Dakota Territories. And it needed a tone shift. So I made it about The Fox, now this sort of bizarre combination of a sweet, sentient animal who is at the same time violently hungry for revenge and yet weirdly naive about the world in his absolute dedication to his personal code. And he’s out there traveling with a Chinese immigrant who is searching for his own family, and this murderous crack shot Molly, who dreams of becoming the first female US Marshal. And then it needed a villain, so we rewrote history and made it Chester A Arthur, who we portray as a lunatic American Hitler with no moorings in reality. He murders James Garfield to snatch the presidency, and by the time The Fox discovers who killed his mom, the task is clear: kill the dictatorial president of the United States. (Who knew this would be so satisfying to write post November 8...)

So it took us quite a while to really land on the tone and the serialized nature of the story and to make sure it functioned as a bizarro drama and not just as a disposable joke machine comedy. And so by September of 2016 the adults started setting up pitches for us, and we basically spent 2 weeks or so in the early fall pitching once or twice a day. The pitch felt very good from the start. I knew the show very well, and was very passionate about making this show (basically, it was me doing Tarantino/Miyazaki fan fiction). Plus, the pitch was fun to do. I liked talking about it. I liked telling people about our alt Chester A Arthur. I liked walking them through five seasons of serialized storytelling. And this was a big difference. In the past, I worried so much about hitting certain talking points in the pitch, that I never really considered whether or not I even liked the words I was saying. This time around, the metric was: what is the detail in each section that I can’t wait to get to? No notes, no pages, just go in there and tell these people about our strange story. 

And it worked! This combination of a weird but familiar thing, and a straight forward telling of something very strange ended up resulting in two offers. One from a streaming channel, and one from FX. FX was always the target in our heads in terms of the tone they aim for, and the kinds of stuff they put on the air, and so we were pleased to be able to go with them. Then the adults started doing the deal stuff, and I went home for Christmas again. 

Now here we are, and I’m about to start writing. So far the conversations we’ve had with their execs have been very creatively satisfying. They want us to make something unique and they have been pushing me to do better work, and to consider the characters’ inner lives and all the things that are very easy to ignore. I pitched them a few pilot premises, and they were off the mark, and we’re** about to go back to them with what I think is a strong but simple premise that allows us to introduce the world and the show to an audience while still leaving plenty of room for the quiet stillness associated with the Western genre. We always said that the show was more anime than Archer. I love Archer more than anything else some days, but it’s a very quick, dialog rich show. This thing will work best in a slower execution. 

So that’s the shape of it. I wrap my very happy time at DreamWorks in a few short weeks, and then I’ll switch over to writing The Beast in Me pilot full time for a few months before seeing what comes my way next. Hopefully I can write a script on this thing that convinces FX to let us make a pilot, and then eventually get to series because I really want to spend a few years making this incredibly strange show. 

I hope to convey a few things here. One is: it’s ok if things take a while. I used to think if something wasn’t ready in five minutes or less, it wasn’t worth pursuing. But having had this experience, one that I enjoyed at every step, I’m okay with something taking longer than expected (in this case it was well over a year between conception and pitching and eventually selling). The other thing to point out is that it’s really not worth pitching things unless you’re very excited about them. This sounds obvious, and maybe it is, but I feel as though there’s enough stuff out there that nobody seems to care about. At the very least, you owe it to yourself and anybody who might watch or read your stuff to care more than anyone else does. There are easier ways to make money than selling cartoons. 

A few other takeaways from this experience: the outcome doesn’t matter. In other words, is this show more valid because we sold it? Would it have been less valid had we failed to sell it? Of course not. And yet a certain extrinsically motivated mindset would say that the opposite is true. Ignore extrinsic motivators. Be intrinsically motivated. Now obviously, you need to eat food and live in the world, so making a living is a valid reason for doing anything, but from a strictly creative point of view, this experience has bolstered my beliefs in doing good work for its own sake. Lewis Hyde would likely agree if I understand his dense writing correctly. 

Finally, this show I think taught me to be fully confident in my ideas, but also that confidence doesn’t come from blind faith, it comes from a true belief and connection to your work. I would take long walks while working on this idea with Lou, and I would play Morricone on my headphones and walk and walk for hours and let the show reveal itself to me in waves. I would then go back home and write down my impressions of what the music made me feel. It gave me a sense in the feeling I wanted to write towards. And in this process, I came to really love what I was thinking about it in terms of the eventuality of this show being made. And that made me very excited and knowledgable by the time we walked into rooms*** for our pitch meetings.

I don’t know if The Beast in Me will ever become something anyone sees, but I do know that I’m enjoying the process, and I promise you, if you can hold tight to that enjoyment, you will never fail.

*Such as the gap between April 2013 and October 2013 where I wasn’t on a staff at all...this was right before I started writing on Puss in Boots at DreamWorks and now here we are over 3 years later, still at it. Such is a freelance style career. The trick is to not let the external stuff influence your internal life. 

**I keep saying we or us because my managers are serving as producers on this, so often it’s a “we” more than “me.”

***A note on rooms and circular life paths. In 2010 or so, I was a very new-at-this writer, having just done a very short 7 episode season of a then-unaired show on Comedy Central called Ugly Americans. FX had a pilot called Duchess, later called Archer, and they were thinking that maybe the show would have a writing staff or maybe some freelance writers at some point. So I remember sitting in this room watching this pilot of theirs, just being so amazed to even be on the dance floor, and thinking how fortunate I was that things worked out as I had hoped they would. And then 6 years later, we sold The Beast in Me to FX in the same room. It doesn’t mean anything, but it does. It’s easy to let things slip by in an attempt to channel the Stoics, but once in a while it’s important to allow yourself a brief moment of satisfaction that your process is leading you down a rich and fulfilling path.