The Dead Have Come To Life
And They're Flying Coach
Poster Concept:
Poster is dark, dark black. Imagery is Magritte-meets-‘80s-horror-flick-surreal. A plane landing on a coffin. Landing strip lights decorate the top.
Tagline:
The dead have come to life. And they’re flying coach.
Title:
DEAD AIR
Dead Air
I’ve had this idea for years. Used to spin it up for folks at the Make Out Room in San Francisco while I was pretending to be a bouncer, but really just drinking all of Marty’s beer for free and checking IDs, taking the occasional cover charge.
This was an idea folks responded to. It was so simple. Zombies on a plane.
This was before Snakes on a Plane, mind you. The zombies would come to life in the plane’s hold, which was carrying military casualties.
There was even a terrorist on the plane. He would wind up the hero.
“I know we all got off to a bad start,” went his top of act 3 speech.
And when the plane, which has lost its pilot, finally lands, piloted by said now-reformed terrorist, the ground is dark, the radio now just static. The title card comes up over the bleak, wind-rattled airfield.
DEAD AIR
I could never get the screenplay together. I fuss with fiction and I can never get the narrative to move.
I can write business plans all day long. Power through Powerpoint decks.
A basic narrative story structure, with fake people, and fake dramatic moments, eludes me.
Maybe I was never good at pattern recognition. I certainly watched enough movies to know the basic beats.
I can write the establishing shot. I can get down the basic ideas and characters.
Dead Air is a “bottle movie.” One constrained location. Simple, effective rules established at the beginning.
Internal logic is one of my favorite concepts about horror movies. In Halloween, internal logic is the only way the movie works, and it’s established by Donald Pleasance from the top:
When someone asks how, on earth, Michael Myers, who has been imprisoned since he was a child, drove away from the mental hospital, Pleasance says, in 2 clear sentences: “He was doing very well last night. Maybe someone around here gave him lessons."
That’s all you need. Logic established.
I can see all these tropes and concepts, but a blank page waiting for the story to move? I have trouble getting to the next character action.
Non-fiction? No problem.
Regardless, there I was with this movie idea. My friend Mike S. Ryan, who has produced amazing films like Junebug, Old Joy, Fay Grim for Hal Hartley, The Turin Horse for Bela Tarr, I told him the idea. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Just write it all down. Get it all out. It doesn’t matter if it’s good. You have to just get it on paper to even start to get a screenplay going.”
Good advice.
I met with my friend Sharky Laguana about maybe writing it together. I couldn’t wrap my head around someone else’s ideas imposed on my own. The first time I really couldn’t see a collaborator on a project working out. Because this idea, this story, it was mine, and I couldn’t fathom it taking any other shape, even if it had no shape yet.
Doesn’t make a lick of sense.
And so the idea foundered.
And then I saw an ad for a new video game, or video game DLC (downloadable content), rather, for the game Left 4 Dead.
NO! It couldn’t be.
Did they steal my idea? Or was it just such an obvious name, someone else was going to land on it soon enough.
And then, my late friend Doug Jones was in Montreal at Fantasia Fest and he called me. “They made your movie. I just saw it. It’s called Plane Dead.”
Plane Dead?? Who thought that was a good name?
He told the producer about “Dead Air,” how I’d been working on the idea. The producer said, “That’s a lot better name!”
The movie eventually went straight to video. As “Flight of the Living Dead.” That’s a pretty good name.
Even the producers of the great Spanish horror film [Rec], also known as Quarantine in the US, got in on the action, staging the zombie-filled follow-up on a plane.
I’ve had a lot of good ideas.
Were they all lucrative? Hell no.
Did they get finished? Some of them.
Was I able to get them into the world as imagined? Not exactly - you never do.
And the ideas that never reached maturity, what of them?
You can’t copyright an idea.
You have to actually make it. You have to do the hard work to get it across the finish line.
I remember Sean wanted to keep the idea of ‘pancake batter in a can’ under wraps because someone else would steal and run with the idea
But nobody was going to be crazy enough, like Sean is, to do the heavy lifting that it was going to take. Nobody’s going to try it until they see you having success with it first.
As the saying goes, you can tell a pioneer by all the arrows in their back.
When Kevin Arnold and I and his early team were starting IODA, the Independent Online Digital Alliance — the first aggregator of independent record labels to deal with the new issue of “digital rights” — it was such a good idea, we met with a couple folks who immediately went off and started a competitor. Just bare-ass ripped us off.
When I write non-fiction or essays or journalistic pieces, the words just come to me. Sure, sometimes it’s like mental constipation and you just have to sit there and grind it out and look at the same page for hours, pulling together old notes and ruminating until you get the next sentence down.
But with fiction, I can’t get the next story beat out. I just… can’t. I’ve thought about taking a screenwriting course. About making a bet.
I think the thing is, I can write from my own perspective, inside my own head. I don’t know how to shift that toolset inside another person’s mind, especially someone I’ve created from whole cloth.
Most of the ideas I’ve had — about companies, products, projects — have been good ones. Pretty sure it’s ok to say this, at 54.
When I first moved to San Francisco, I talked at length about starting a newsletter or magazine about roots and Americana, although we called it “Alt Country” then.
Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden were the ones who launched No Depression. Great magazine, great fulfillment of that vision. Except we had never met (although I think I had run into Blackstock on the No Depression boards on AOL — it was that long ago!)
And then there was TROVR. If ever there was an idea that came about at just the wrong time, it was TROVR.
My concept was an app that used image recognition to scan the cover of a comic book, or other collectible, and give you its current value based on the title and condition. It would look up eBay and Heritage Auctions and any other online resources, and give you the current, real-world value.
We pitched this before the pandemic. After those government subsidy checks rolled in, collectibles as a market skyrocketed.
We dreamt of this before the rise of Generative AI, where this is a query, not a product!
And that app idea, Trovr? It’s called Tabi, you can download it from the app store.
Or, you can check out my very own GPT, Comic Book Value Finder, which does exactly what I dreamt of, minus the whole, sticky, revenue-generating part.
I did start my own record label, Jackpine Social Club. The name comes from the trees that are all over the north woods of Minnesota, where my parents live. I loved the idea — right or wrong — that they would only reproduce when they were literally on fire. That seemed appropriate. Lit a fire under my ass.
I did start Otter Network, with a couple friends. It started as my concept, originally, of a TV Guide for streaming television. I still believe that idea is a solid one. We even showed a very top level, senior media CEO our idea. His response? “It’s too expensive.”
Brief discursion: the representative of that very CEO - I won’t name either of their names - looked very familiar to me. This was just a few years ago. Then I realized that it was the very same fella who at one point in about 1995, having directed a movie we screened at the San Francisco Film Festival, relentlessly hit on my wife in his limo driving us across town, in front of me. Do I know how to pick them, or what?
That very same executive went and raised $4 billion for a different idea, and that company fell apart in just over a year.
We raised $6 million and eked out our survival over as many years. It’s still a great idea, and it’s still out there in the universe, waiting for the right customers and buyers. $6 million, $4 billion. I’ve heard it said so many times, it’s as easy to raise $100,000 as it is to raise $1 million.
I guess I don’t have the same contact list.
I still think about Dead Air all the time. If only to write the screenplay to teach myself how to write screenplays! So I can work out some of the other ideas that float around in my head.
I picked up Syd Field’s book about screenwriting. Probably still should just go bite the bullet and join a course. In my copious spare time.
I have a treatment somewhere for Dead Air. It has the main story beats. I know if I forced myself to sit down and just push, I could get something on paper.
But the really good ideas, they take time and patience and diligence. And not ever giving up, despite what anyone tells you.
I guess, if anything, this piece is indeed about not giving up. Recognizing the winners from the maybe-winners. Recognizing your true strengths vs your pretensions.
I’m still writing this goddamn thing, aren’t I?
Thanks for reading Are You Experienced. I’m Nick Tangborn, and I have more ideas than I can possibly ever do. But I’ve carried through on a few of them, from Otter Network to a record label, to a really weird magazine about sex I did one issue of in my 20s (Carnal Knowledge- we were trying to do the Utne Reader of sexuality).
Building stuff is the most fun, rewarding thing you can do. I don’t know about child rearing, I’m a dog dad myself.
You can subscribe to this, or tell your friends, or even pitch in some ducats, if you’ve a mind to.
I put the first part of this article into ChatGPT, here’s what it came up with:
I kind of like it!
I love when I cut an entire section out of an essay, but forget to cut out he callback image at the end. Trust me, there was a reason for that Wilco joke.
I would totally see that movie.