THE CUNCHPIT

Gillian Anderson & David Duchovny by David LaChapelle (1997)

This all day

VERY IMPORTANT HOUSE UPDATE.

Jenny and I get asked a LOT about the state of the show we were developing. Short story is it didn’t get picked up as a series. It’s one of those things you deal with as a creator, putting years of your time and life-force into a thing, almost four years for us in this case. It’s never a good feeling agonizing to make something different and see how seemingly easy it is for things that are easy sells with no identity beyond “It’s like that OTHER show” to slide through the process.

They bought the rights to Very Important House before shelving it, so we can’t do anything with the idea unless the  rights are bought back for the kind of money neither of us have just sitting around. It’s one of the worst feelings as creators because a shelved idea of ours is still alive, like Frolie and Grampa are trapped in cold storage at a place that has no desire to do anything with them.

This isn’t any kind of condemnation of the studio or the people we worked with. We had some good people behind us, some bad, but attitudes and climates change over the course of so many years at a studio, and what started with desires to try new things, over time, recedes into more conservative thinking. The products of that sort of atmosphere might be successful, but they’re not memorable in the way I like to make things.

A studio pouring money into development is not a favor done, it’s a necessary part of what keeps things in operation. Ideas are the lifeblood of the system, and the creators sacrifice something just as valuable as money: their time and dedication to a project that takes them out of circulation for years at a time while not necessarily having a job that could be considered at all safe and secure. The best outcome of a situation where the studio decides the idea simply isn’t a good fit for them is one where the idea doesn’t die but survives on with the creator who still believes in the idea. To come out of the end of that process, years later, and not even own the rights to a thing the studio doesn’t want to produce, well, it’s heartbreaking.

As much as it is the nature of the business, it should not be the norm.

We’d still love to see VIH get made, we think it’s badass. We really do! We think seeing even the TINY amount of it come to life that we did was amazing. Since then, we’ve moved on to work on other projects separately, but we still  hear Frolie and Grampa yelling in our heads.

Oh, if anyone has half a million dollars they want to give us to get the rights back so we could get the show made some other way, please leave a garbage bag of money behind the dumpster behind the donut shop.

I think Jhonen summarized our experience really gracefully here. We still love you Very Important House.

Man, this is gorgeous!!!! Loving the stuff this small studio is putting out.

Ghostbusters (1984; Ivan Reitman)

Announcing the Invader Zim #1 Newbury Comics variant by J.R. Goldberg! http://bit.ly/1BHUvMN

Here's my Zimmy cover variant! Woooo!

So I’m playing Dying Light and thinking, sure, this game’s got some problems, but one thing these guys got down is the hyper-real physics. This happened last night and I had to make sure this wasn’t real life.

you make my black heart sweat