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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 8, No. 17 |
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Whatever Happened To: DARK CORRIDORS: THE TV SHOW? |
where is it anyhow?
of TheColumnists.com
Long-time readers of the DARK CORRIDORS section of this website certainly may remember reading that I became involved with a proposed television documentary for PBS called "Dark Corridors: The Curious History of Mystery."
So whatever happened to it? Did you miss it? Was the name changed? Was that an April Fool's gag?
Well, the easiest explanation is that I've been deeply involved in learning just how long it sometimes takes for an idea to come to life in the world of television. In this case, for instance, we're in our ninth year of waiting for the right tumblers to fall into place.
Here's the short version of how this all came about and where it is now:
When the management and production people at PBS station KTEH in San Jose, Calif., learned I was planning to retire from my job as TV Editor of the San Jose Mercury News and syndicated columnist for Knight Ridder Newspapers, they asked if I would be interested in helping them develop a PBS documentary that would tell the story of the mystery genre and how it had evolved over the years.
When I left my job in January of 1999, we began discussions that ended with me signing a contract with KTEH to write and be co-executive producer of the documentary we called "Dark Corridors: The Curious History of Mystery." By the time I was under contract, I'd launched the Dark Corridors portion of this website, which began on Dec. 1, 1999.
Through the early stages of planning, I worked with television producer Danny McGuire, an acclaimed TV director and producer who had made several productions for the PBS network. He was then KTEH's executive producer, in charge of all their original programming.
My concept called for telling the story of the mystery from the time real detective bureaus began in police departments in Europe and Edgar Allan Poe wrote "Murders in the Rue Morgue," the first fictional work to feature a detective. I thought it would be interesting to trace the major trends in the genre from the gentleman detectives of England and the hard-boiled private eyes of America through the dark noir movement of the 1930s and 1940s to the modern fixation on heavily-detailed forensic detective stories.
I also felt it would be highly entertaining to have some of the best modern mystery writers appear on camera to "walk us through" the stamping grounds of their literary detectives and for us to round up literary experts to do the same for the writers no longer with us, such as Poe, Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
We all agreed this was a winning approach and PBS program executives showed great enthusiasm for the project. I went to work and soon completed preliminary storylines or "treatments" for TV programs of either two or three hours in length. We envisioned it as a "pledge week" special for PBS stations.
Then we decided to videotape a pilot, showing how we might approach the subject, using well-known mystery writers. McGuire and I flew to Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2000 with a video crew and videotaped numerous interviews with people attending the Malice Domestic Mystery Convention there. We edited them into a "presentation" reel that featured parts of my interview with best-selling author Tami Hoag and Daniel Stashower, Edgar-award winning biographer of Conan Doyle.
Just before we did this pilot, McGuire was hired away from KTEH and went to work for San Francisco's KQED as a production executive. He completed the directing of the pilot with me, but the editing and post-production work was done at KTEH while he started his new job.
At that point, we were ready to make a formal agreement with PBS and start the process of finding the underwriters for the program. That's when top management changed at PBS and the new regime decided mystery programming was being watched by an increasingly older audience. They lost interest in all things relating to mystery and soon even the long-running "Mystery!" anthology series, made by WGBH, the Boston PBS station, was hanging on by its fingernails.
Facing a hostile climate at PBS and still without an executive producer to replace Danny McGuire, KTEH put "Dark Corridors" on the shelf. My first attempt at a TV program had been put in "turnaround."
But McGuire remained interested in "Dark Corridors" and launched discussions at KQED about backing the show there. I asked for a release from my KTEH contract, received it with the blessing of management there and began re-conceiving the program for KQED. I concentrated on making the concept "skew" younger, hoping PBS would notice that TV's top programs at that time, "CSI" Crime Scene Investigation" and "Law and Order," both were mystery/crime shows.
Though "Dark Corridors" passed several stages at KQED, the station finally decided it would cost lots of money that might be better spent developing locally-oriented programs. The project seemed dead again. Meanwhile, I moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Washington state.
But Danny McGuire still hadn't lost his interest in "Dark Corridors" and asked me if I would be willing to work with him on developing it on our own, as partners, producing the program through his private company, Spirit Productions. We felt it could go to a number of cable networks if PBS wasn't interested. I agreed and we went to work on it all over again.
Here's where we are at this point: I've done another rewrite of the basic treatment and we've applied for a writing and pre-production research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). We've budgeted the program in the area of $3 million and to be 2-3 hours in length. My rewrite this time underscores the humanity aspects of the story. For example, how English culture, where private ownership of guns is difficult, shaped the direction of mystery in the United Kingdom; how ethnic groups are portrayed in mysteries, etc.
Part of that approach meant we had to hire academic consultants to help beef up the social and literary core of the program. We've hired four, all of them published authors: Mary Hadley of Georgia Southern University, who writes mysteries under a pen name and is the author of "British Women Mystery Writers"; LeRoy Lad Panek, an English professor at McDaniel College and author of two recent books--"Reading Early Hammett" and "The Origins of the American Detective Story"; Thomas C. Renzi, an administrator and instructor at Buffalo State College, and author of "Cornell Woolrich: From Pulp Noir to Film Noir," and Julie H. Kim, English literature teacher at Northeastern Illinois University and editor of the book "Race and Religion in the Postcolonial British Detective Story."
Danny and I arranged a strategy session with Hadley, Panek and Renzi last summer in Baltimore, Maryland (Kim was in Europe at the time) and I received a great deal of input from them on the story treatment before submitting it to the NEH. They are a great bunch and I look forward to working with them soon if we go into production.
Our grant application will be either approved or denied sometime in June. Meanwhile, McGuire has retired from KQED to devote full time to this and other independent productions and we've been making arrangements with fundraisers, accounting companies to handle the grant monies and companies expert in developing ancillary deals like CD Roms, books, DVD sets and other ways to maximize the profitability of "Dark Corridors." I've registered an internet domain for our project, which we'll activate if we get the NEH grant.
I've been acquiring digital copies of all the film clips we'll want to use in the production and making tentative arrangements with mystery writers to work on camera. Among the writers I've met with who have shown interest in being part of the program: Robert B. Parker, P.D. James, Elizabeth George, Val McDermid, Laurie R. King, Rita Mae Brown.
If we receive the grant this June, I'll immediately go to work on the final teleplay, hoping to finish by Nov. 1, in time to make the next round of full production grants by NEH. In the meantime, we'll seriously go after other backup funding, start locking down people for on-camera work, negotiate for an on-air host and make a serious new approach to PBS before trying elsewhere.
The anti-mystery management team has now left PBS and things are looking up there. Before leaving KQED, McGuire produced the new series of Cousteau specials for PBS and they were phenomenally successful. And I'm now the television columnist for Mystery Scene magazine, which certainly won't hurt my credentials any.
So, after nearly nine complete years of trying, "Dark Corridors: The Curious History of Mystery" now seems closer than ever to becoming a real TV program. I hope the next time I bring you up to date on this, we'll be going into production at last.
©2007 by Ron Miller.
This column first posted April 23, 2007.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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