Welcome to another edition of our blog Why Aren’t You Famous Yet?  For our next couple blog installments Gio and I are going to be talking about our individual pilots that we’ve been working on! Also, in case you missed it we finally dropped our proof of concept trailer that we were working on for Mean Streak! We sent it out on Tuesday and you can watch it here. Happy Friday <3

Why write individual pilots when we normally do everything as a team? Well a big goal for us as writers - besides owning our own company, making all the movies we want, and generally taking over the world - is to get into a “room.” A room is Hollywood slang for a “writers room” AKA the magical places where writers convene to give us the TV shows we all binge watch! Ultimately we would love to run our own writers room as showrunners, but we should maybe be in one or two before we do that, I guess. 

Both of us don’t necessarily feel the pull to TV that other writers do - we love writing features and we think we’re pretty good at it by this point. But it’s a TV world people! And after being told constantly that we need at least one original pilot spec script as part of our portfolio, we decided this would be a project we could tackle as individual writers. An exercise where we could really deep dive into subjects and genres that we are interested in. Of course, we still read our scripts to each other and give each other notes, because we are writing partners and best friends and the success of one of us is the success of both of us. 

When Gio and I decided to embark on this journey, I racked my brain for what I could write a whole-ass TV show about. That’s what I love about features, you write your two hours (about 120 pages) and then you type The End and it’s over! But a TV show seems like such a daunting task, a story told over numerous episodes that can rack up to hundreds of hours of TV. Luckily, just like it’s a TV world it’s also a miniseries world! And tackling a miniseries feels so much more doable to me than an ongoing series. And who knows? Big Little Lies and The White Lotus were supposed to be mini series that were so popular that they gave them another season. Which is obviously what’s going to happen to me. 

Okay enough rambling Janette, get to the point! When I was 22-years-old I borrowed a book from the library called Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys. Boys, Boys by Viv Albertine. Yes, that is actually the title. Halfway through I went online and bought my own copy, I needed to own it myself. And it is probably my most loved book I have on my bookshelf. It is full of underlines, highlights, and my own quips and observations. 

The book is the memoir of Viv Albertine, the lead guitarist of an all female punk band, The Slits, in late ‘70s England. This book is radical to me. It has a lot to do with the timing of when I read it, I was 22 when I picked up the book and Viv was 22 when she first picked up a guitar. I was at a crossroads of my life, I was trying to decide just exactly what direction I was going to take in the entertainment industry. Was I going to go the “creative executive” route, try to get a job as an assistant somewhere and work my way up, or go for broke and go all in as a writer? After reading Viv’s memoir, the choice was decided - for better or for worse I was going to be a writer. 

The idea of turning this book into something - a film or tv show - has been on my mind since the first time I read it. I even wrote an opening 10 pages for it all those years ago after I first read it. The problem is, I don’t have the rights. To the book or to Viv’s life or anything. So even if I wrote the script, what would I do with it? I shelved the idea. Until Gio mentioned that we should write our own pilots. 

I unshelved the idea of turning Clothes, Music, Boys into a screenplay and have since launched into a very fun journey. It’s very surprising to people, but I actually really love punk music and the mythology and history that surrounds it. 

Punk was a flash in the pan. A movement that burst out onto the scene, made a lasting indent on our culture, and was over within 5 years. Viv was there for it all. She saw the Sex Pistols perform to 10 people at Hammersmith College. She was the on and off again girlfriend of The Clash’s guitarist Mick Jones. She was best friends with Sid Vicious before he joined the Pistols and met Nancy. Not only that, but she was a part of one of the most influential female punk bands of the time!! The Slits are one of the few bands from that era who still sound “punk.” The Slits were not as commercially successful so their music hasn’t been tainted by the mainstream. While listening to them, you’re transported to the time of youth unrest in England when bands were a cacophony of sound and music was for everyone. 

Punk is a passion of mine in case you couldn’t tell.  

I still don’t have the rights to the book. In fact, there is a British production company that bought the rights before the pandemic with the goal of turning it into a TV show, but I haven’t heard any other news about it since. And also fuck it! I’ve been itching to tell Viv’s story for almost 7 years now. I don’t know if anything will come from this pilot, if it will ever get made. But it’s what I’m passionate about and it’s the story I desperately want to tell. People always say “write what you know” but I think it’s so much more important to write what you want and write it for you! The “know” will come through in the emotions that you inject into the characters and the dialogue. 

So that’s what I’m currently working on. Along with the dozens of other projects that Gio and I are tackling, of course. I can’t wait to keep you updated and thanks for coming along!