Conversations: Frank Spotnitz on His Methods of Making TV Outside the U.S.
Also, how often does he still hear about 'The X-Files'?
If you’ve been following my journey since starting Coffee, TV and Me, you know I love a good story where the expected path is not taken and big swings come into play. I’m talking about TV shows, movies, books as well as real life. (In case you missed what I’ve been up lately and how I ended up in Bangkok, my story is here).
I’ve personally taken a few leaps in my life by shaking up my geography when I moved from my hometown of South Bend, Indiana to L.A. (1995), then L.A. to New York City (2006), back to L.A. (2009) and then last year’s move to Bangkok, Thailand. Yes, each time I shook things up, life got much more interesting and in the end only got better. Not to say that there weren’t major bumps in the road along the way but do I have any regrets about taking big leaps? Never!
One of my favorite examples of someone who took a big swing in his life (as well as the lives of his wife and children) and has come out on top is Frank Spotnitz. You probably know Spotnitz from his time on The X-Files series and its two theatrical movies (1998’s Fight the Future and 2008’s I Want To Believe) as well as creating Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle.
[Full disclosure, I met Frank when I was first working as a professional organizer (you mean you didn’t know about Mess No More, my short-lived organizing company?) which lead to me being nanny to his three young children for four fun-filled years. After that, Frank remained a friend and colleague who has always been available for help and guidance in my own writing career in TV and as a journalist. In fact, when I saw him last November when I was in London, he is the one who turned me onto the world of Substack and said “You should start your own Substack.” (Thanks, Frank!)]
Thirteen years ago, Spotnitz shook things up in big way when he moved himself and his family from Los Angeles to London where he’s been running his production company, Big Light Productions, ever since. He’s brought some captivating television series to life during that time like Medici: The Magnificent, The Indian Detective and Leonardo while also working with other writers given the European way of working on television is very different from the U.S..
Those differences were just some of the topics we touched on during our recent conversation about shaking up your life and coming out on the other side with an increased understanding of the world and finding your life changed in ways you could never fathom. Let’s dive into our chat:
Looking back on that big move you did over a decade ago, has it worked out the way you thought or did you get out of it what you wanted? Frank Spotnitz: I really didn't understand fully what I was doing when I did it. And people in Hollywood looked at me like I was crazy. ‘What are you doing?’ But I say this with great respect and affection, but people in Hollywood think they're the center of the world. They think there's nothing outside of Hollywood and to leave and go someplace else just felt nuts.
I didn't fully appreciate how completely different the television industry is outside the United States, which is the biggest television market in the world. You have all these giant media companies that commission your show and they own your show. They hold the copyright to your show. And here in Europe you have to be much more entrepreneurial. The budgets are smaller, the editorial tastes are more conservative so I had quite a learning curve and I've had a few bumps and bruises along the way.
But it's been fantastic. I'm so glad that I took this journey and it's been absolutely enriching, life changing, I would say. And actually from the vantage of 2024 where Hollywood at the moment is just having a tough time adapting to the streaming world. Right now, Netflix is really the only one standing tall at the moment. I'm sure that will change but this is actually proving to be a really good place to be right now, surprisingly. But it's just the adventure of it and the enrichment you get from being in other cultures that on a personal level for me and for my family has been fantastic.
What do you think you brought from your experience in the U.S. to Europe that actually was a benefit for you?
Well, this is a great thing. When you leave your home country and you see how other people do things, then you suddenly get a perspective on your own country and your own culture and the way you do things that you never had before. As a writer, especially in terms of writing processes and values that we have as storytellers and the way we work with other writers and producers and directors, I started to realize all these really good and bad things. But many, many good things about the way American television is produced.
Unfortunately, a lot of these things are in decline right now, but the idea of collaboration, of having a writer/producer at the head of the editorial process of working in writers' rooms, there's a lot of really positive values about that that I have tried to champion here in Europe.
I've been here 13 years now, and when I started there was no such thing as writers’ rooms here. They would call them writers' rooms but they were really like story meetings. I mean, literally, I'd have a producer tell me, yeah, we had a writer. We met for two days about the entire season. That is not a writer's room, that is a story meeting. That's not even nearly sufficient.
I still run into that, but I've been teaching in Berlin now for the last 11 years at a program called Serial Eyes, which teaches writers from across Europe how to work in writers' rooms and to think about themselves as producers, not just writers. And it's been very successful. And now, while it's still a minority, there's quite a few writers' rooms happening across Europe. There's certain things that go along with that approach, whether you use a writer's room or not, that I'm eager to talk about with my European colleagues.
When you started bringing a writer's room into your offices in London or France, where you also were, what were the writers telling you? I'd say almost all the writers have absolutely loved it and can't wait for more. And they feel empowered, they feel heard, they feel liberated. It's the producers especially and some of the agents who are much more skeptical and resistant.
When I first came [to London], I couldn't get the agents to send me any writers at all to be considered the writer's room. But like I said, I've been here 13 years, I've probably had well over one hundred writers now come through my writer's rooms. And it's spread. And that's the other thing. It takes a while. You have to be part of the community here. And I have been here not only working with British and European writers, but speaking at every conference and teaching and really trying to spread the word because I think if you improve the industry as a whole, it benefits everybody. It's like a rising tide lifts all boats. And as for a long time, I was really the only American here but that's beginning to change. I felt a responsibility to share my experience and what I'd learned in Hollywood with writers and producers here.
What's changed for you in terms of the projects you look for and that you're attracted to? Well, that was one of the things I realized when I first came here, that as an American, you come from a purely commercial television culture and you are trained to find ideas not only that you love, you need to love it, but that will sell. You just know this needs to sell, this needs to reach a big audience because American television is all about making money. It's very clarifying what the goal is. We need to make money. Whereas in Europe, that's not always the case. There's a lot of shows for public broadcasters that have a cultural purpose or an artistic purpose, which I don't knock at all, but that's just not the culture I come from. I'm used to thinking about stuff that will sell. But having said that, I always want stuff that's entertaining, but it's also about something that's going to make you think.
Everything I develop I really think has the potential to be a great show. I'm absolutely convinced of it or I wouldn't bother. What I find challenging, and I'm not alone in this, is the unpredictability of the marketplace. You simply don't know what commissioners are going to do. And a lot of these people at the big companies, they have no agency. They've been given orders from high above about what kind of shows they're allowed to buy and what kind of shows they're not allowed to buy. Then that's really tough when you know have a great show. You know they know it's a great show, but because of the directive they received from somebody else, it's not going to have a life.
You can't predict what great show is going to get picked and which one's going to be passed over for reasons that seem arbitrary too often. So you keep at it and sometimes there are shows where it gets passed on and then I come back a couple years later and I try again. As you know our friend Vince Gilligan, that happened to him with Breaking Bad. That was two years before AMC picked it up. It happened to me with Man in the High Castle that was turned down by everybody in town before Amazon picked it up. So I keep knocking on doors and hoping I'll get a guess on the things that really deserve a yes.
Because as soon as you see a hit come through, whether it's something like The White Lotus or Squid Game, everybody's opinions change. So, like you said, if you have something that's been sitting on the shelf because it didn't sell the first time, a year later it may be the hottest thing because something else broke through. Exactly. So many of the buyers are chasing trends, following the footsteps of other things and making these rules that I simply don't believe in about what works and what doesn't. I believe a good show works, a show that people love is what works. And I have a lot of faith in the current process and I think a lot of the buyers don't.
You go back to Hollywood to pitch so how is your approach different now when you go back after what you've gone through? Or is it more like shifting gears from one way of thinking to another? I feel really comfortable going back and forth and feel like I have more context now. I'm meeting new people all the time, which is really exciting to see the younger executives coming up. I feel like I have more context now. I have a deeper understanding of television, not just in the U.S. but all over the world. And the current marketplace, as I said, it's really become quite an asset at the moment because everybody's looking to do television for a lower price, and suddenly I'm sitting in the right place, being in London. Because television is less expensive here and people are desperate to find co-production opportunities shows that will work for an American audience and also work for a foreign audience. And I'm pretty qualified to talk about that stuff now. And it is a learning curve to this. You can't just appear and expect overnight to understand all this stuff. I've been working with the Italians and the French and the Germans and Swedish, all these different countries now for a while and built deep relationships and hopefully a deeper understanding of what works.
How often does X-Files still come up for you? I honestly think The X-Files comes up every day, which is fantastic. I mean, it's great that it's a show that people still think about and reference. For what it was, it was really a model of certain kind of storytelling. It's not a kind of storytelling people do much of anymore. As you know, out of the 24 episodes a year we did probably 16 to 18 were standalone monster-of-the-week kind of stories and only six to eight were the serialized stories that is everything now in television. But there was an ambition and an intelligence to the show, and it influenced a generation of writers. It's interesting now though, it's been 30 years, so the young writers now coming up, a lot of them were too young or too young for The X-Files but it still has quite a legacy.
[This interview was lightly edited for posting.]
Hey, Jim. Really enjoying the read. Just noticed that in the first response by Mr. Spotnitz, the last paragraph is repeated: "And actually from the vantage of 2024..."
Love this, and hearing what Frank has been up to. I didn't know about these shows that were mentioned, only the X-Files, so I will most certainly check them out!