Shawks Retrospective
by Ed Anderson
Summer of 2000, when a fresh faced Loren Hoskins first described the stage comedy sketch that he had created to me, Sam Niemann, and Kennon James in an 800 square foot office space on the roof of the Horse Brass Pub in Southeast Portland. Hoskins was at that time a member of the "3rd Floor Maximum Capacity Comedy" troupe in Portland, Oregon. The initial meeting was to interview Hoskins for the position of writer. Hoskins introduced the character of Randy in our conversation, and all thought it was hilarious. We watched some tapes he had of the act on stage which were weird, but really funny. (yes, back in the latter 20th century we used to watch things on video tapes)
So without having to consider it at all I told Loren that I wanted to develop it into a cartoon series and he agreed to co-create it with me. He was given a full time position as writer, a desk and I believe a tangerine iMac. (or was it Lime green?) So for the next several weeks we went through the heady and wonderful phases of creation when you get to pull out all the stops and push the Bull into the creative china shop. We went all around the block and up and down every street in the world of "Shawks", pushing and pulling ideas, it was free and fun with no client, network, producer or anyone else to answer to but ourselves,and we had a blast with it. I will always remember the two years we had working on Shawks, holiday Force, and The Bottle, they were the best times I had as a working animator.
Now 9 years later, I have what looks like a TV deal. A lot of people ask me about the timeline, and how it all worked out, when they thought the series was long forgotten in an ever expanding internet universe. I was working at a job I took in the Spring of 2004 working for an interactive TV company here in Portland. As I did that job, I noticed that despite the fact that I had made only one episode of the show in over two years, here I was still receiving fan mail, emails, reasonably amazing web traffic, and the continued sales of merchandise. More and more calls started coming in about licensing offers for broadband phone companies in the Spring of 2005, European and American companies were very keen on new content, and Shawks was on the list. I decided the interactive TV gig was coming to an end, and moved my attention to creating new episodes of the Show. I talked to Loren, we worked a deal for him to write a ten part series of shorts that I would market on the iTunes platform. Loren wrote the "Survival series as well as three additional scripts for fuller 5-6 minute web episodes. The production began Spring 2006, and despite shoestring budgets and personnel shortages, the 10 part series debuted in October of 2007.
However, in the Summer of 2007 I decided to prescreen one of the podcast shorts at the Platform Animation Festival here in Portland. Mostly just to see if anyone liked it. I enjoyed showing the episode, it was only one of about three times I had ever sat in on an airing of the show in front of a live audience. Later that week, because I am an intenible schmoozer, I attended the rap party fully intent on reinforcing the stereotype that animators, artists and TV Execs drink more than longshoremen, sailors, and cops. At the rap party I was again impressed that Shawks was known and appreciated not only by teenagers and unsupervised 7 year olds, but professional animators and people with JOBS liked it too! I decided after a rousing conversation with a well known LA producer who shot a whole truckload o' sunshine up my butt to take the series to the Television Animation Conference in Ottawa later that Summer, and try and sell it to TV. In 2001 we had gone down this road with Film Roman, but we didn't know what we had back then. We had just started the show, and were still finding the characters as well as the audience, and Film Roman couldn't sell it, primarily because they tried to sell the show to too young an audience. This time I knew exactly what it was and how to sell it. The TAC was productive, I went away with a huge hangover, several studios and three networks showing genuine interest. The US network was the most aggressive and fast moving, but after only 6 months, there was a shakeup at the top and all my faithful execs bit the dust, pink slips for them and the door for me, same old story, nobody wanted to be associated with a project that was not their own. Boils down to fear basically, instead of reviewing the shows currently in development, an executive whose afraid of failure will try to exercise any "demons" that may still linger in the corners of the office, and kill any project associated with the dearly departed, avoiding the the possibility of being associated with a success or failure that he is not solely responsible for. The European and Canadian networks were still inline though, and they didn't back down. Nearly two years later, and despite progress toward a deal, and written contracts currently being finalized, to date nobody has mad any shows or any money, except the lawyers. I am definitely making my son go to law school, he would never go hungry.
I freely admit that experience has made me very cautious of counting chickens, I am never very optimistic about this business. But I will admit that it seems very possible that the deal will go through. Frankly, between you me and the rest of the universe, getting the deal done may be the easy part. Fact is, I have always had my doubts that any network animation executive living today has the perfect combination of intelligence, creativity, and the cahones to back it up when he or she has to stand up for the show in front of the big boys. There's really only one measure of success that really matters for me, and that is will the show be something that I can proudly claim to have been a part of. So I go forward optimistically, as I prepare to witness a new beginning for the show and I am excited by the possibilities that it offers.
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