STRANGE LUCK Fox Summer Press Tour July 13, 1995 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Karl Schaefer (Creator and Executive Producer) D.B. Sweeney Frances Fisher Cynthia Martells Pamela Gidley (Stars) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- QUESTION : How much of "Eerie, Indiana", the show, not the city, do you feel there is in "Strange Luck"? SCHAEFER : I think a lot of it. I think some of the same world view sort of comes to this show. I see life as really unpredictable and interesting and scary and weird and beautiful and sexy. And I think all those things are going to come to this. And that same kind of twisted sense of sensibility. Not quite the fantasy aspect that we had in "Eerie, Indiana", but I think a lot of that - the way Marshall was against the world in "Eerie, Indiana", I think Chance is a little bit against the world here, trying to find his way and figure things out. QUESTION : I'm curious too, about the idea that he is a plane crash survivor and has this gift now, if we can call it a gift. Or strange luck or whatever. Jeff Bridges in "Fearless". I think of that character. He had - he felt that he'd been imbued with this certain something that he was suddenly impregnable to anything. What was it about that aspect, specifically, this character surviving a plane crash that kind gave you the idea to give him that background? SCHAEFER : Well, I think, unlike the Jeff Bridges' character, Chance doesn't feel impregnable. I mean, I think just the opposite. When he goes up onto the roof to talk the woman out of commiting suicide, he knows he could get hurt. He is not armed with that sort of defense mechanism that we all go through life with - of thinking bad things don't happen to me. Or that wasn't a woman screaming I heard, that was a cat meowing. I think he is stripped of that, but still feels an incredible responsibility. Because he survived a plane crash, he believes he's in this time and place for a reason. And the reason must be to intercede in the situation. If he is in a bank and it's being robbed, his world view says, "I survived that plane crash to be at this time and place at this moment. That must mean I need to interject myself in the situation". It's sort of that kind of obsession that he has about having survived, which I think is a key part of this character. QUESTION : Is he going to be torn between two women? MARTELLS : Three. SWEENEY : At least. GIDLEY : Thank you. MARTELLS : Thank you. QUESTION : Well, I didn't see a romance blooming with the third woman, but maybe three or four. But is he going to be - is that going to happen? SCHAEFER : Yeah. I think the key thing about this show is anything is possible. We really tried to set the parameters up so that we can go anywhere and do anything. We're going to have a lot of fun with this. And we've got a wonderful cast to do it with. I don't think D.B. would let me get away with anything short of that. We're going to explore all those possibilities. QUESTION : D.B., guys who are in TV series want to get out of it and be movie stars instead, 'cause they say it's so much work to star in an hour-long series. 'Cause you had the movies, you could have kept making movies, what interested you in doing this? Did you really want to jump into a series like this? SWEENEY : I wasn't looking to jump into a series at all. It wasn't even something I was entertaining. One of my agents said to me, "You don't want do a series, but you really have to read this script". And I got a hold of Karl's script and I read it and thought this is a great character and it's limitless possibilities here. I think that whatever sort of barrier there was being a TV actor and being a movie actor was completely eradicated by Jim Carrey now being the highest-paid guy in Hollywood. Three years ago, he was a supporting player on a TV show. Not to mention George Clooney and Anthony Edwards and Rob Morrow and - FISHER : Tom Hanks. SWEENEY : Yeah, I mean, it just goes on and on. I looked at this as a good opportunity to maybe be a sort of as a veteran ballblayer getting traded to a team with a chance to win the whole thing. And I think that if CBS or ABC or NBC had come to me, I would have said, "That's okay, guys. Maybe when I'm 50". QUESTION : Frances, can I ask the same question to you? You've been in some very high profile movies the last few years and obviously you have come to TV also. Did you plan to return to series work at this point in time or was it just the offer happened to come up? FISHER : I don't plan anything. It's the same thing with my agent. She called me up and she said, "I know you don't want to do a series, but I think you need to read this script because there's something in it that's different. It's not just your regular run-of-mill material for television". I read it and I agreed with her, and I enjoyed all the different changes that the pilot had in it and I also looked at tthe character and thought that there were limitless possibilities with her. And that would be an interesting place to be right now. QUESTION : Seems like a really hard character to play because he himself doesn't know his own back story. Do you find it difficult to do? SWEENEY : No, I think that's one of the great liberating things about this character and it's one of the joys to play it. Not only do I hae these three beautiful talented people to react to every week, but the structure of the piece is that anything can happen to me. The most boring scenes that I've ever been in as an actor are the ones where from the first and second line of dialogue, you know where the scene is going to end. In this case, that burden is completely removed from me. I don't have to worry about creating something of interest to then react to. There will always be something going on that I can react to and I think, as an actor, you can do your best work when, instead of having to initiate some kind of a momentum to then deviate from, you can just react to the thing that the script has presented for you to react to. QUESTION : I'm curious about the style of the program. Even though it's clearly contemporary, there's a strange sort of anachronistic feel to it that adds to D.B.'s character's sense of isolation, whatever. Kind of a noirish thing. Is that deliberate? SCHAEFER : It was very deliberate. I think the show is kind of low tech by design. There's so much cyber space, internet - I think people are a little tired of that. And this is about people and reality. Nothing happens in this show that couldn't happen in the real world. It just happens with more frequency to Chance. And I think the noir style just lent a kind of that dangerous world that he moves through and that unpredictability and the shadows and the darkness of it. The style was definitely something we went for and are going to continue with. Absolutely. QUESTION : Karl, will this be a companion piece for "The X-Files"? The creative aspect of the show was a single show. But in terms of being a companion on Fridays to "The X-Files", obviously Fox has been aiming in that direction to want to find a show that will do it for that night. Clearly, you couldn't pick your time slot, but did you have any thoughts about where this might be placed, when you were developping it? SCHAEFER : When I went to Fox to pitch it originally, the thing I started out with was - I said, "You guys have created an audience that I think I can write for; that is very demanding and likes an ambiguous world and doesn't like everything tied up in a neat little bow at the end. And pays attention to detail. And is a little bit paranoid and into strange". And I thought thatt would be the perfect audience for this show and the type of stuff that I write. Oddly enough, since that time, I've met Chris Carter, and he and I grew up ib the same neighborhood here in Los Angeles, in Bellflower, California. He lived about a mile from me. He's a year older than I am. And the fact that the two of us are on the same lot in Vancouver making two shows about sort of strangeness of life... I don't know what was in the water back there but evidently it affected both of us. I think we'll be an excellent companion piece for that and we're really looking forward to it. QUESTION : Karl, how much of the series' focus is going to be on Chance's search for Eric? SCHAEFER : It's going to be a continuous thread but not necessarily hit on in every episode. The show is not going to be serialized. He won't be following a clue from week to week. At the end of the next episode, there's a plot device where he's - the Westin character has run a story about him in the paper and the search for his brother that's going to result in a stream of clues that come in that we can use to pick up the story line when we want to. But it'll be very occasionally. The parameters are really open as far as storywise what we'll be doing and whether or not we continue with that. QUESTION : Ms. Martells, what's it like, the transition from stage to a television series? I mean, after "Two Trains Running" did you decide that you didn't want to stay in New York anymore? What brought you to Los Angeles and a series? MARTELLS : "Trains" was such a fantastic experience for me, to be a black woman. SWEENEY : Are you black? MARTELLS : I am. We didn't discuss this afterwards because, you know, that's one of the episodes coming up, we're going to let that out there. SWEENEY : I need to get the scripts. MARTELLS : Yeah, I know, I know. But I've got, like, I've got ties that you don't, so. To be on Broadway and have all that happen to me, the way that it did, I couldn't see that happening again, within the next five years. So I decided that next step was definitelyLA. And LA was definitely - my dragon, you know. I had to go slay it. And got here the day before the earthquake. And so it's been - SCHAEFER : So it was your fault. MARTELLS : It was my fault, yeah. It was my fault. SCHAEFER : I've been looking for that person. MARTELLS : So I've been sort of run around ever since. And this script, this opportunity to work with such fine actors. We're, like, if you haven't gotten it already, we're like real family up here. And to be able to do what we're doing, in this venue is a real blessing. I don't know if I exactly answered your question. QUESTION : How does your character repeat every week? MARTELLS : Well, I can't speak for every week. Karl and I have yet to have dinner and money has yet to be exchange for that. But from my point of view, Ann Richter is sort of the voice of reason. But I'm not even married to that, because I think there's a little bit of that that can be claimed by all the ladies here. But she really is a heady gal. And a nonsense gal. And I think that that adds to the attraction between these two characters. QUESTION : Karl, people always say when you have a premise like this that you really have to ground the mundane operations of the story to make the outlandish premise work. I don't know if this was on purpose or not, but it just seemed like throughout the show, there was this - maybe it was dreamlike or I thought maybe it was just kind of sloppy sometimes. Things like the arrest. They think he shot two cops. And he's just kind of walking around. And when the fire happens, there's not a guard outside the door. I mean, just kind of - when you have an outlandish premise or a slightly supernatural premise, I always thought you kind of had to ground the rest of the show in a lot of realism. And it seemed like this was, I don't know, dreamlike or something. Is that on purpose? SCHAEFER : Uh, yeah, sure. (laughter) GIDLEY : Whatever! SCHAEFER : Yes and no. QUESTION : It's just how I feel.