Frenetic Ramblings

[beca-mitchell]

brittany snow fans how are we doing

[tara-to-a-t]

Literally only watched this show bc of the preview that showed her kissing a woman and then was pleasantly surprised by all the other scenes.

Side note - it’s been way too long since I’ve kissed a woman and it’s rude alleged/self-proclaimed straight woman, Brittany Snow, has kissed a woman more recently than I have… even if it was for professional reasons.

[fuckyeahpikacha]

HOLY FUCK I JSUT SAW KATRINA LAW. SHE WAS AT MY AFFILIATE JIU JITSU ACADEMY IN LA WHILE I WAS TRAINING

[fuckyeahpikacha]

OH MY GOD SHE'S BACK FOR THE EVENING SESSION. I'M GONNA TRAIN WITH KATRINA LAW AND I HELLA OUTRANK HER

[fuckyeahpikacha]

lol what the actual fuck is my life. I was doing jiu jitsu drills with my gf (who, btw, fell on the floor laughing cuz I was flailing so hard) and our Sensei came over and was like, "hey girls, this is Katrina, I want her to work with you cuz you're a brown and a black belt. Katrina, they own one of our affiliate schools and they're really good." and then fucking leaves KLAW with us to drill and WHAT THE FUCK IS MY LIFE. so I don't have a clue what to say and I'm like JUST FOCUS ON JIU JITSU, CHA so I'm trying to get her to do the triangle correctly and what the fuck. just what the fuck.

she left us after 2 drills cuz another woman walked in so our sensei came back over and partnered KLaw with her.

[tara-to-a-t]

lol I wish I could’ve seen you fangiring. So happy for you to have this wild experience!

[thelesbododo]

I'm watching a show and I fucking can't

She does the thing. She does the fucking thing

Also, I love how the actresses just decided that their characters were in love.

[tara-to-a-t]

I miss this show so damn much. And these two beautiful idiots talking about their characters and the show and the love there and I just…. Still looking for my HG. A decade later. Ugh.i need a rewatch but it’s spooky season so maybe in November.

[aenslem]

Myka... I'm sorry. About what? WAREHOUSE 13 || STAND

[mooingwithmidnight]

Most of the Bering and Wells being undeniably canon (aka the actresses telling us they did this on purpose) I’ve seen came from Joanne Kelly but damn Jaime Murray was equally as invested

They’re really making me feral oh my goddd

[tara-to-a-t]

Man I miss this show and who I was when I was first watching it… and how easy it was to interact with the cast on twitter. (Those who were on it anyway.) I miss Jaime. Glad she’s out living her life, being happy and whatever but dang. I miss seeing her on my screen and her snark and her hugs. Lady is tiny but will hug you as if her life depended on it. And lord knows there won’t be another small con she goes to like shore leave when I last got to meet her. That big show that shall not be named that she did after Warehouse ruined any possibility of that happening -.-

[beca-mitchell]

WHAT YEAR ARE WE IN

[tara-to-a-t]

Not really involved with the Swiftie world but every time I see Dianna’s face I’m just reminded of how attractive she is and it would be super awesome if she did date women. I wouldn’t have a shot in hell but it’s nice to imagine a world where Dianna is queer. (She’s also super talented. She’s more than just her looks I know. But I tend to forget I find her attractive since I failed to realize that during the Glee years. I was too busy being obsessed with Jayma.)

[flanaganfilm]

Hey Mike! Can you tell us your experience getting HUSH made? I know you’ve talked about how you and Kate both risked a tone making that film for a multitude of reasons & and that people like Blum and Macy were taking a huge risk + I think you stated that if it went bad, you thought it would be the end of your feature career. (Not trying to quote you or anything, but just jogging from my memory of podcasts you’ve been on). Would love to learn more about that awesome film!

Thanks!

Welp, the thing about the WGA strike is that this is where all of my writing energy is going, so get ready for a LOOOOONG post!

THE SHORTEST PITCH OF MY CAREER

Back in the fall of 2014, my career was in its infancy. Oculus had only just come out in April, and while Before I Wake was complete, it wasn't yet released (it actually wouldn't be released for several more years, and that's a whole other story). So I only had Absentia and Oculus under my belt, and as far as in the industry was concerned, I had only made one "real" movie.

Kate and I were dating. She played Marisol, the primary "mirror ghost" in Oculus, and we would often talk about how and if our growing relationship would work if we continued to collaborate professionally. Was it possible to strike a balance there? We loved working together and we loved being together, was there a way to really do both?

One night we were out on a dinner date (I'm almost certain it was at Delphine in Hollywood, but I'm not 100% sure [Update: Kate proofread this post and says it was]) and we got to talking about independent films. About Absentia, which she had seen before we worked together on Oculus - about how sometimes, when there weren't opportunities out there for you, you had to roll up your sleeves and make your own.

I was a director who only had one "real" movie released, my second film was trapped in limbo, and I was terrified I wouldn't get another chance. Kate was a struggling actor who was not considered for any big roles. We were both struggling financially, both lived hand-to-mouth, were mired in debt, and wanted something to truly break us into the industry we'd fought to be a part of for so long. The question kept coming up - how do we take control of our careers?

Kate talked about her affection for Wait Until Dark with Audrey Hepburn, and I talked about my desire to curb my reliance on dialogue and explore purely visual storytelling, like Brian Henson's masterful episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes, or the iconic episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which was titled "Hush").

I told her about an idea for a scene that I had, something that had been itching at me for a few months. It wasn't a full story, just quick vignette: a character is cooking in a kitchen. In the background, we see someone else slam up against their door, banging on the glass and begging to be let inside, but our protagonist can't hear them - perhaps because they're deaf, perhaps because there's some kind of supernatural interference. Behind them, we see a ghastly thing form out of the shadows (I'd thought maybe this was a story about a demon, or a maybe a witch) and kill the poor victim against the glass while our hero goes about their business, oblivious to the danger. And as the poor victim's body fell, the horrible creature would turn its attention to the oblivious protagonist in the kitchen.

We kicked the idea around over our meal, and at some point Kate asked if the scene would work in a slasher model, and the figure was a man in a mask instead of a supernatural entity. Then, believe it or not, we started talking about Die Hard. By the time we ordered desert, we had the basic structure of the movie scribbled down on a napkin, and I remember stepping up from the table and calling my Oculus and Before I Wake producer Trevor Macy from the restroom hallway to tell him about it.

The movie would be called Silence. It would be our version of Wait Until Dark, only instead of a blind character (played by Audrey Hepburn), Kate would play a deaf woman living alone in the woods who found herself stalked by a masked killer. We'd try to shoot the movie with almost no dialogue, and we'd write the script together from start to finish. And Kate would star.

That's why this movie existed at all... as a vehicle for her. Because we believed that if no one else will cast you as the lead of their film, you should create your own opportunity.

(Now, it's worth mentioning here that we later took some heat for not casting a deaf actress to play Maddie. Honestly, it simply wasn't something that had occurred to us at the time - before Maddie was ever conceived as a character, this movie was a vehicle for Kate. That's the only reason it exists. We created it together specifically to launch her career as a leading lady. No one else was ever going to be considered for that role.

In the years that followed, we've listened to the criticism. We meant no offense, and actually - naively - thought we were doing something positive for representation by creating this strong, deaf protagonist. We hired and collaborated with a deaf consultant throughout the process, who was happy to work with us and thought the character was really exciting. Kate studied ASL for months, and we believed we were doing something good for the deaf community. We were surprised by the criticisms, and forced to reexamine the whole thing after the fact.

If I had to do it over again, I would still cast Kate - again, the whole point was for her to help create her own breakout opportunity - but we likely would have conceived the character differently. If we made the movie today, Kate would still play Maddie Young - we just might have made her able to hear.)

Because this was designed to be a starring vehicle for Kate, and a very experimental movie for me, we knew we'd have to do it on the cheap. Kate's only feature film credits at this point were her small part in Oculus and some roles in smaller Indies. But she had co-created this movie, and her casting was not negotiable - it just meant we'd have to make this as inexpensive as possible.

Trevor Macy had produced Oculus and Before I Wake and we'd had a great experience together (he would eventually go on to produce everything I've made since Oculus). At this stage in the relationship, though, we'd had two successful creative experiences, but only one movie had been released. Fortunately, he liked the basic pitch. He wasn't sure he'd want to be the only person on the hook for a movie like this, and he echoed that he'd support Kate in the role only if the financial risk was mitigated, but he was on board.

My next call was to Jason Blum. Jason had come aboard Oculus at TIFF and helped get that movie distributed, and since then we'd talked about a few potential projects (we'd make Ouija: Origin of Evil later this same year). I went to Blumhouse with my hat in my hand to pitch Jason on this idea.

The pitch was simple - Wait Until Dark with a deaf protagonist, high suspense and almost no dialogue. I said it was for Kate to star, and for us to co-write. He didn't balk at that either, just said "well that's okay but you know it's gotta be for a certain price." I agreed, and told him Trevor had said the same.

"Great, let's do it," he said, and got up. It was the fastest pitch meeting of my career - I think it probably still is. I was in there for less than five minutes.

He stopped in the doorway on the way out. "Wait, buddy - tell me one thing. Does she live?"

"Of course," I said.

"Great, let's do it," he said again, and he was gone. He would co-finance with Intrepid Pictures, and Jason and Trevor put their heads together to sort out the details.

When they called to commence us on the script, Trevor had other news. "Martin Scorsese is making a movie called Silence, by the way. You're gonna need a new title."

WRITING HUSH

Kate and I started writing immediately, but it was one of the most unusual writing processes I've ever experienced. By this point, we had just moved in together and were sharing a small rental in Glendale. We spent the first few weeks role-playing various scenarios. I'd go outside, Kate would lock the doors, and I'd look for different ways to get into the house or to mess with her, and she'd react and look for things she could do inside to gain an advantage.

I can only imagine how this looked to the neighbors.

We'd then sit together and write down what worked and what didn't, and started cultivating a list of strategies and set pieces that would become the building blocks of the movie.

Once we had a solid outline and had identified about a dozen set pieces that we thought would be exciting, we decided to get out of the house to do the actual writing. This led to two writing trips: the first as a "staycation" in a hotel in West Hollywood, where we locked ourselves up for about a week to generate the first draft.

The script was very unconventional to read. It came in at a little over 70 pages and read almost like an instruction manual. Because there was so little dialogue, each scene was written as a basic blocking. There wasn't much use for prose - this was just action.

There was a little fun bit of trivia at the start of the script, where Maddie's character is writing a book. We didn't know what to do for that, as we'd have to hear portions of it read aloud in the movie, so I opted to use the manuscript for an unfinished novel I'd been trying to write for years. I'd also tried to do it as a screenplay, and even a TV pitch. It was called Midnight Mass, and I figured I'd probably never get to finish it, so might as well give it to Maddie Young.

Her novel, Midnight Mass, and her characters (Erin and Riley) would fill out the early scenes. (I still get a kick out of seeing Samantha Sloyan, who would later play Bev Keane in Midnight Mass, holding the book, talking about how much she loved Erin and Riley. Bullshit, Bev.)

The script was well-received by Trevor and Blum, and there was a suggestion that we might want to open up the story at a certain point and involve another character.

We decided to take a field trip to do this next pass on the script. So in November 2014, we went to the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, and stayed in the infamous room 217 - the same room Stephen King stayed in when he conceived The Shining.

It was a wonderful and inspiring place to write, and we came out of it with a finished script. The new character we added was Sarah's boyfriend, a neighbor, who comes to Maddie's place looking for her. It results in a scene inspired by the scene in Die Hard when John McClane meets Hans for the first time.

We named the character "John Stanley" - a combination of the character John McClane, and the Stanley Hotel. Michael Trucco would play him in the movie.

The most controversial part of the script was a lengthy sequence in which Maddie imagines several possible outcomes, and we see them play out as she talks to herself in her own mind. There was concern from the producers that this would knock people out of the movie.

I fought hard for it, not only because it was a great sequence, I thought, but because it was also a test run for the very narrative device that I wanted to employ if I ever got to make Gerald's Game, which at this time was a dream project.

The compromise was that we'd shoot it both ways, protecting a version of the movie where we never venture into her thoughts.

We never did get around to filming that other version. ;)

The great John Gallagher Jr. tries on his mask for the very first time

PRODUCTION

Production begin in March, 2015. We shot in Fairhope, Alabama. This was also where we shot Oculus and Before I Wake, so I was very familiar with the area. The cast and any non-local crew stayed at the Grand Hotel in Fairhope, which was under construction at the time, so I remember it being really damn loud.

We cast John Gallagher Jr to play The Man, and John was delighted for a chance to play a bad guy. People often ask me if there was a backstory created for this character to explain his motivations - there was, and Kate, John and I are the only people who know it. I like it that way.

For Sarah, Maddie's doomed neighbor, we cast Samantha Sloyan. She and Kate were best friends, and Kate really fought for her. It was my first time working with Sam, and I was so blown away by her talent that I remember telling Trevor we'd be working with her again as soon as possible. Later, she'd play Leigh Crane in Hill House, and then show the world what she could do as Bev Keane in Midnight Mass. But for now, she was only here for a few days to get brutally murdered.

Sam, John and Kate - right before we cut all of John's hair off.

We had a shoestring budget, which was expected, but still quite the challenge. We shot the film sequentially, which was a new experience for all of us. It meant our first day was a daylight shoot, our second was a split, and then we were only shooting nights.

Crew call was about an hour before sunset, and we knew it was time to wrap because the sun would rise and it would be impossible to carry on. We got as far as we could each night, and we shoot six day weeks... so it ended up being an 18 day shoot, six day weeks, night for night.

It was absolutely surreal and disorienting.

The exhaustion was very real. We'd shoot all night with no sense of time, and then the sun would rise and we'd trundle back to the hotel, where we'd collapse all day while trying to drown out the sound of the construction. Then the alarm would go off in the late afternoon, we'd trudge out of bed, and head back to set.

This was particularly tough on Kate. She was in every single scene, just about every single shot, so she never got a single break. And we were shooting so fast, she would finish a set-up and just sit down on set for five or ten minutes while we set up the next one. It was relentless.

She also did her own stunts. We couldn't afford a stunt double, so everything you see in the movie is Kate. As the shoot went on, it took its toll. A lot of the exhaustion and bruising you see on Kate in the movie is very, very real. This movie kicked the living shit out of her.

Michael Trucco as "John Stanley"

The set was REALLY cramped, and our stunts were very low-tech.

This might look like a domestic dispute, but we were just blocking the final fight while John was getting his contacts put in.

This was the slate for the very last shot of the movie, an MOS insert shot (very anticlimactic). Kate asked to hold the slate. And you can really see how exhausted she was.

We packed up and got ready to return to LA. A lot of our crew already knew what they were doing next - another low budget movie was coming to Fairhope, and Blumhouse had loved a lot of our crew. Just about everybody was going to roll over to the next Blumhouse movie, also shot on a modest budget, and by a first time director. The gang at Blumhouse had been very impressed with what we had done on such a low budget, and how efficient and talented our crew had been. They hoped to move a little of that luck over to this new film, and support its burgeoning director.

That movie was Get Out, and that director was Jordan Peele.

As a huge chunk of our crew buckled up for that movie, we wished them well and went home.

POST PRODUCTION

The movie edited very quickly - we didn't really have many options. In fact, I'd been editing while we were shooting, doing a rough assembly to make sure we had everything we needed. By the time Michael Trucco showed up on set to play John, he asked if he could see pictures of Sam Sloyan (who played his on-screen girlfriend), as they'd never met, and Sam was already back in Los Angeles.

I told him I could do better than that - I let him watch the assembled edit of the movie, just about up to his entrance.

It was a good thing post was so fast, because we dove immediately into prep on Ouija: Origin of Evil for Blumhouse. I'd spend all summer prepping that movie, and shooting all fall while Hush tried to find its way to a distributor. Because we shot Ouija in Los Angeles, I could easily attend some of the test screenings we were having for Hush. It tested through the roof, and the audiences were bombastic at the end. I really thought we had a theatrical hit on our hands.

THE COLLABORATION OF MY LIFE

Having not only survived creating a movie together, but truly enjoying the experience of collaborating in all aspects of our lives, Kate and I figured we absolutely had to get married. Just about a year after we wrapped, we did.

Trevor Macy, producer of Hush and now my partner at Intrepid Pictures, officiated our wedding in February, 2016.

AFTERMATH

In March 2016, a month after our wedding, Hush had its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival.

Jason Blum, Kate, me, and Trevor

I'll always be a little bummed that we sold the movie to Netflix. I've been fortunate enough to see this movie in a packed theater on just a handful of occasions, and it was such a wonderful theatrical experience. You can hear a pin drop for long stretches, punctuated by bursts of applause as Maddie claws moments of victory out of her situation.

But man, that little movie did everything we ever could have hoped it would. Kate's performance got excellent reviews, as did the movie itself. It remains my highest rated feature on Rotten Tomatoes, sporting a Certified 93% Fresh rating.

When it came time to cast The Haunting of Hill House, I wanted Kate to play Theo Crane. And I know for certain that if Hush did not exist (and had it not performed so strongly for Netflix), they never would have let me cast her.

Hush was, in every way, my last truly independent film. It was the closest I've felt to making Absentia. Kate and I had dinner one night, a spark was lit, and we had to will this little movie into existence every day for two years.

For the last seven years, it's been available on Netflix. Their license agreement ran out in April this year, and we decided to take it somewhere else, based in no small part to Netflix's (unimaginably short-sighted) refusal to support physical media releases. The idea of this movie vanishing forever into the bowels of Netflix's content grinder was just a little more than I could handle. We are exploring our options for a new distributor now, and will announce our plan shortly. But I look back on Hush with an enormous fondness. It was one of the most difficult shoots of my life, strictly logistically speaking, but it was driven by passion, determination, and total collaboration with my very best friend in the world.

[flanaganfilm]

Mr. Flanagan, I’d like to ask a question and I deeply hope that it does not offend or upset you. I am strongly considering canceling my Netflix subscription due to their new password sharing policy. However, Midnight Mass is one of my favorite shows of all time and I know it isn’t available on DVD, and I’m also profoundly anticipating your take on my favorite Edgar Allen Poe story. So I wanted to ask your take on people accessing your work through, uh, other means. If it’s something that’s offensive to you or will harm you or the other people who work so hard on these shows, I’ll happily keep my Netflix just so that I can keep supporting your work. I respect you far too much as an artist to do otherwise.

Again, I really hope I’m not upsetting you by asking this question. Thank you for everything, and I hope you’re having a great day!

Hi there - no offense taken whatsoever, in fact I think this is a very interesting and important question.

So. If you asked me this a few years ago, I would have said "I hate piracy and it is hurting creators, especially in the independent space." I used to get in Facebook arguments with fans early in my career when people would post about seeing my work on torrent sites, especially when that work was readily available for rent and purchase on VOD.

Back in 2014, my movie Before I Wake was pirated and leaked prior to any domestic release, and that was devastating to the project. It actually made it harder to find distribution for the film. By the time we were able to get distribution in the US, the film had already been so exposed online that the best we could hope for was a Netflix release. Netflix stepped in and saved that movie, and for that I will always be grateful to them.

However. Working in streaming for the past few years has made me reconsider my position on piracy. You could say my feelings on the matter have "evolved."

In the years I worked at Netflix, I tried very hard to get them to release my work on blu-ray and DVD. They refused at every turn.

It became clear very fast that their only priority was subscriptions, and that they were actively hostile to the idea of physical media. While they had some lingering obligations on certain titles, or had partnerships who still valued physical media, and had flirted with releasing juggernaut hits like Stranger Things, that wasn't at all their priority. In fact, they were very actively trying to eliminate those kinds of releases from their business model.

This is a very dangerous point of view. While companies like Netflix pride themselves on being disruptors, and have proven that they can affect great change in the industry, they sometimes fail to see the difference between disruption and damage. So much that they can find themselves, intentionally or not, doing enormous harm to the very concept of film preservation.

The danger comes when a title is only available on one platform, and then - for whatever reason - is removed.

We have already seen this happen. And it is only going to happen more and more. Titles exclusively available on streaming services have essentially been erased from the world. If those titles existed on the marketplace on physical media, like HBO's Westworld, the loss is somewhat mitigated (though only somewhat.) But when titles do not exist elsewhere, they are potentially gone forever.

The list of titles that have been removed from streaming services is growing quickly, quietly, and insidiously.

TV Has Always Disappeared. This Feels Different.

When titles disappear without warning, the whole streaming space starts to seem less stable.

So to answer your question - today, I am very grateful that my Netflix originals are available through - uh - other means.

The issue of password sharing is a different one, but suffice to say I do not blame you one bit for considering canceling your subscription.

I still believe that where we put our dollars matters. Renting or buying a piece of work that you like is essential. It is casting a vote, encouraging studios - who only speak the language of money - to invest more effort into similar work. If we show up to support distinct, unique, exciting work, it encourages them to make more of it. It's as simple as that. If we don't show up, or if they can't hear our voice because we are casing our vote "silently" through torrent sites or other means - it makes it unlikely that they will take a chance to create that kind of work again.

Which is why I typically suggest that if you like a movie you've seen through - uh - other means, throw a few dollars at that title on a legitimate platform. Rent it. Purchase it. Support it.

But if services like Netflix offer no avenue for that kind of support, and can (and will) remove content from their platform forever... frankly, I think that changes the rules.

Netflix will likely never release the work I created for them on physical media. I've tried for years, but have met with the same apathy throughout.

Some of you may say "wait, aren't The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor available on blu-ray and DVD?" Yes, they are, because they were co-produced with Paramount. Paramount retained the physical media rights for those titles, and were permitted to release them (though they had to wait a calendar year after their launches on Netflix). I'm so, so grateful that Paramount was able to release and protect those titles. (I'm also grateful that those releases include extended cuts, deleted scenes, and commentary tracks. There are a number of fantastic benefits to physical media releases.)

But a lot of the other work I did there are Netflix originals, without any other studio involvement. Those titles - like Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, and the upcoming Fall of the House of Usher - along with my Netflix exclusive and/or original movies Before I Wake and Gerald's Game - have no such protections. The physical media releases of those titles are entirely at Netflix's discretion, and unfortunately Netflix has made their position clear.

There was a brief, shining moment when Netflix told me they were going to release a "Flanaverse" (man I hate that word) blu-ray set - I was very excited. But as abruptly as they had told me they were going to do it, they retracted their offer with a casual, dismissive "oh, never mind." There was very little context offered, simply that the company had changed its mind and weren't interested in physical media for my stuff after all.

My movie Hush recently disappeared from the platform, and is currently not available anywhere in the world. That's a slightly different situation, as the reason it disappeared is that Netflix's license agreement ran out, which gave us the opportunity to shop it to new homes - hopefully homes with more support for physical media (and you better believe that's exactly what we're doing right now). But that's a fortunate case - Hush was not a Netflix original. A lot of my other work is, and we'll have no such opportunity to extract them. As a result, I've gone looking for archival copies of Midnight Mass (and some other work) for myself. And that led me to some "bootleg" blu-rays created by people who operate through - uh - other means.

The result is that I now have three copies of Midnight Mass on blu-ray in my collection. The quality is excellent. The people who created these even went through the trouble to make animated menus and cover art - and I have to say they're quite good. I found these online, it wasn't difficult, and it wasn't expensive. I'm told the quality of torrent sites is pretty great. And honestly, at this point, given Netflix's position on the matter... I'm very glad they exist.

At the moment, Netflix seems content to leave Before I Wake, Gerald's Game, Midnight Mass, and The Midnight Club on the service, where they still draw audiences. I don't think there is a plan to remove any of them anytime soon. But plans change, the industry changes - hell, I've watched the executive structure at Netflix change so many times since I got there I don't even recognize the company anymore.

The point is things change, and each of those titles - should they be removed from the service for any reason - are not available anywhere else. If that day comes - if Netflix's servers are destroyed, if a meteor hits the building, if they are bought out by a competitor and their library is liquidated - I don't know what the circumstances might be, I just know that if that day comes, some of the work that means the most to me in the world would be entirely erased.

Or, what if we aren't so catastrophic in our thinking? What if it the change isn't so total? What if Netflix simply bumps into an issue with the license they paid for music (like the Neil Diamond songs that play such a crucial role in Midnight Mass), and decide to leave the show up but replace the songs?

This has happened before as well - fans of Northern Exposure can get the show on DVD and blu-ray, but the music they heard when the series aired has been replaced due to the licensing issues. And the replacements - chosen for their low cost, not for creative reasons - are not improvements. What if the shows are just changed, and not by creatives, but by business affairs executives?

All to say that physical media is critically important. Having redundancy in the marketplace is critically important. The more platforms a piece of work is available on, the more likely it is to survive and grow its audience. At this point, if a studio refuses to make them available, I am fully on board with any means that protect and archive the work, and to make the work available to an audience outside of that platform's exclusive base.

As I said, things change - my overall deal at Netflix ran its course, and I'm now at Amazon, who have a somewhat different perspective on physical media. Their business model is not built entirely on subscribers; far from it. I'm hoping very much that the work I create with them will meet a different fate, and be supported in a different manner.

As for Netflix, I hope sincerely that their thinking on this issue evolves, and that they value the content they spend so much money creating enough to protect it for posterity. That's up to them, it's their studio, it's their rules. But I like to think they may see that light eventually, and realize that exclusivity in a certain window is very cool... but exclusivity in perpetuity limits the audience and endangers the work.

All to say that if you decide to cancel your Netflix subscription, that's entirely your choice - I'm not here telling you to cancel it, or to keep it, for that matter. On that point, I am utterly agnostic.

But I will say that if you do cancel it, I am profoundly grateful that my work is available somewhere else. And if you take advantage of that, that is absolutely, positively, unequivocally fine with me.

[tara-to-a-t]

I love when this man speaks because it comes from such a heartfelt and informed space. He’s a creator but also a consumer. He fuxking gets it.

I immediately bought dvds of bly and hill house when the Netflix news broke bc they are my faves but not everything is available on physical media like that. And it’s bullshit. I’m no huge dvd/blu-ray collector but I’ve got a decent amount of physical media bc I grew up on it but also bc even before this fuckery, I did not trust streaming platforms to keep things available forever. It’s why I do not typically “buy” digital copies of media. Bc if you read that fine print, that shit can be taken away from you’d despite “buying” it. I’ll take a physical disc any day.

Also I was just telling a coworker about Hush and how great it is but he can’t watch it now bc Netflix removed it and it’s currently not available anywhere else. I’d buy it on DVD and lend it if I could but that’s not an option bc these companies and studios and whoever else are just money grubbing weird myopic assholes. The art and the fans and the love of the media doesn’t matter to them. It’s all about making as much money as they can while they’re alive to squander it… and none of it trickles down the those actually making the media that people want to pay for.

So… tying this in to a union rant. I may not be WGA but I am a current union worker. And I support them just like I did back in 2007 and ITSE when they fought recently. And I’ll support SAG/AFTRA so actors can get their streaming money when it’ their turn for contract negations.

Those who do the work deserve their pay/dividends. Fuck this stock holder nonsense I stfg. There is no such thing as limitless returns or infinite growth. And AI can’t fulfill all roles. Pay the people their due and make the art available for purchase and viewing.

What good would the Mona Lisa do locked in an unlit basement where no one could enjoy it? Put the shows and movies on the platforms and in physical media and let people enjoy the hard work and heartfelt energy the artists put into it god damn it. Our lives are miserable enough. Don’t make art inaccessible to those with limited financial means.

[flanaganfilm]

Good day Mr Flanagan. please what does "the rest is confetti" mean to you and in the context it was used in hill house??

Okay, here we go. Buckle up for a long read.

To answer this, I've got to explain a little bit about what was happening and where I was when I sat down to write episode 10 of The Haunting of Hill House.

Hill House was not a fun shoot. The picture above is from very early in production, when I was still chubby and happy.

It was my first foray into television. I was absolutely terrified that I'd mess it up. So I'd opted to direct all of the episodes myself, figuring that - if nothing else - I'd have no one else to blame if it went south.

It was the most grueling professional experience of my career. The shoot was by no means a smooth one, every day was an uphill battle from a budgetary perspective, and between the three giant production entities involved with the production, I spent a lot of time fighting over the creative and logistical elements of the series.

I began losing weight. I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

By the end of the shoot, I had dropped almost 40 lbs.

I was very depressed. Every day was a battle, and for the first time in my career, I wasn't excited to go to work in the morning. We were fighting for basic resources, fighting for the show we wanted, and even fighting amongst ourselves by the end. It was grueling.

We hadn't written all of the scripts when we started production. I believe we had finished through episode 7, but the rest of the scripts had to be finished while we were already shooting.

We'd mapped everything out in the writers room, and I had great support on the other episodes, but I was writing the finale solo. I'd thought I'd be able to juggle it with everything else. I quickly fell behind.

I finally got to the script about halfway through production. I'd work on it between takes at the monitor, and then get home to our tiny rental house in Atlanta, where Kate was waiting with our baby son. (One of the rare bright spots of this shoot came when Kate found out she was pregnant about halfway through production. We even named our daughter Theodora, in honor of her origins.)

I'd typically fall down from exhaustion when I got home, but I had to push through it and work on the script. My weekends were spent shotlisting and prepping for upcoming episodes. We didn't have enough time to stay ahead of prep, so every available day was used for that... I went three months without a single day off at one point.

I'd sit up late staring at the script. I was in a dark, dark place. Overwhelmed, exhausted, and feeling like I lived in an eternal present. Each day bled into the next and it didn't feel like there was an end in sight. That feeling of unreality was heightened because we kept returning to the same sets, same locations, and even the same scenes throughout the 100 shooting-day production. Stepping back into the exact room we had shot in days or weeks or even months ago made the whole thing feel absolutely surreal. Making moves is always an non-linear experience, but this one felt particularly so... it was like the days of our lives were happening to us all out of order.

I remember feeling something like despair creeping into my daily experience on the show. And I remember dwelling on that when I got into the scene work of episode 10.

As I worked through the draft, I recall that despair coloring a lot of what was on the page. My filter was breaking down. There's a monologue at the beginning of the episode where Steven's wife Leigh (played by my dear friend Samantha Sloyan) spews out a torrent of eviscerating insults about Steve's value as a writer. That is just me vomiting onto myself. She was voicing all of my deepest insecurities about myself at the time, and of what I was doing with this series.

She says "Is anything real before you write it, Steve? The things you write about, they're real. Those people are real, their feelings are real, their pain is real - but not to you, is it. Not until you chew it up, digest it, and shit it out onto a piece of paper and even then, it's a pale imitation at best."

This was the mindset I was in for a lot of the shoot. The writing became a reflection of a lot of that turmoil, and I knew who I was referring to in that monologue - I was talking about my family. I was talking about how much of their lives I'd used as building material for this show. I was talking about the fact that I'd lost two loved ones to suicide, and seen what it had done to my mother in particular. And I knew I was using - possibly even exploiting - those people for this series.

There's a lot of despair in this episode. The Red Room, as we conceived it, was a place that would feed upon those emotions. Grief, sadness, loss... those were the real ghosts of our series, and where our characters find themselves at the start of the finale. They're being slowly digested - eaten alive - by those feelings.

So finally, it came time to write Nell's final scene with her siblings. I knew from the outline we'd constructed in the writers room what this was supposed to accomplish - she was supposed to be their salvation. She was supposed to take all of these feelings that we'd been wrestling with and finally provide catharsis... finally say something that would free everyone.

I remember sitting with a blinking cursor for a long time. The Crain siblings had just turned and seen Nellie standing by the door, and suddenly were able to hear her speak. But what should she say? What would I say? What would I want someone to say to me?

What she ultimately says lays bare a lot of what I was thinking about when it comes to grief. It exists outside of linear time, much as I felt I existed at the time. That sense of eternal present, that sense of a nonlinear eternity of moments and memories - it all came out in her speech to her brothers and sisters.

I remember feeling, looking at my insane present and looking back at my past, how strangely overwhelmed I was by memories. That I wasn't experiencing time in a straight line, and hadn't been for a while - for the better part of a year, I'd felt more like I was standing in a whirlwind of moments. "Our moments fall around us like..." Nell said, and I recall sitting back and trying to find the words.

"Rain," for certain, but there was something too uniform about that. The moments of life as I experienced them weren't that orderly, they weren't that small. They didn't fall the same way. Some sailed by, fast and unremarkable, while others lingered in front of me, twisting and stretching. So it was a good word, but not the right word. I left it on the page though.

"Snow" was my next attempt. Better, in that I imagined the snow blowing in the wind, swirling and dancing and feeling more organic. More chaotic. More like life. But for some reason, the word that stuck with me, the word I felt Nell Crain would connect with was...

"Confetti."

And that was because I was thinking not of Victoria Pedretti at this point, but of Violet McGraw.

Violet played Young Nell, and I wondered what she might have said if she experienced time this way. As an adult, Nell was despairing. Nell was overwhelmed. But as a child... there was an innocence to the word. There was a joy to the word.

I imagined moments falling around her, this little girl with the big smile and the wide eyes. Her moments would be colorful. They would be of different shapes and sizes, some falling fast and some falling slow, flipping and turning and dancing in the air, independent of the others. Sparkling, whirling, doing lazy summersaults as they sauntered down to Earth.

I thought of myself, and of the members of my family. I thought of those we'd lost. I realized what I hoped for them, and for us all, in the end... was to look upon that mosaic of experience, that avalanche of days and minutes and moments... and to smile with some of the joy we had as children.

And this, I thought, was something that gave me hope. This gave me a glimpse of some kind of salvation for them. This was also how I hoped my life might seem if I was a ghost - a cascade of color and light and shape and movement, something I could dance in.

So Nell smiled and said... "or confetti."

It stuck with me. The rest of her monologue gets heavy again, and gets to the real point of the show - the point of the whole series, if I'm honest - and that's forgiveness.

I figured the only thing that would let the Crain children out of the Red Room was to be forgiven. I thought of the losses in my own family, and I thought of what I wished for my mother and for my aunts and uncles and cousins and I tried to pour that into her final words.

"I loved you completely, and you loved me the same," she said, "that's all." And this was the point I wanted the most to make. That at the end of our life, if we can say this about each other, the rest doesn't matter. The rest is that rainstorm, or that blizzard, that fell around this one central truth, and maybe built itself in piles around it, to the point we lost sight of it along the way.

And I thought again of that little girl, and almost as an afterthought, wrote "The rest is confetti."

I liked the way it sounded, but I was insecure about the line. I almost took it out, in fact. I remember asking Kate to read the scene and talking about that last line with her. "Is it too cute?" I wondered. She was on the fence. "Depends on how it's acted," she said, and I figured she was right. We could always take it out if it didn't work. The scene could end with "I loved you completely, and you loved me the same. That's all."

Why not shoot it and see what happened.

I turned in the script, we published it quickly so that we could start breaking it down and prepping it. And the next morning I was back on set. I'd deal with episode 10 when it came down the pipe again, sometime in the coming months. We had a lot of shooting to get through before I had to worry about it.

I recall Netflix asking me to cut a lot of that monologue, and I remember them also having questions about the "confetti" line. I pointed out that it didn't cost us any extra to shoot it all, it was only words, and fought to keep the script intact.

Ultimately, they insisted I make a series of cuts on the page. I begrudgingly agreed, but left Nell's speech alone. I made superficial cuts around it, throughout the draft, and even considered changing the font size to fool them into thinking it had gotten shorter (I ultimately was told I wouldn't fool anyone and not to risk starting a war). But Nellie's final goodbye stayed intact.

It must be said - Victoria Pedretti SLAUGHTERED this scene.

By the time we got around to filming it, things had never been worse for the production. There was almost nothing left for a lot of us. Tensions were sky-high, resources had been exhausted completely, and we were all ready to give up.

Filming in the mold-ridden Red Room was depressing, morose, and led to a lot of arguments and unpleasantness. The room itself just felt gross, always, and we were in there for days at a time. The last thing we had to shoot in there was Nellie's goodbye.

Victoria came to set having to push through pages of monologue, and she did so with captivating bravado. I recall being teary-eyed at the monitor watching her work. And when we finally made it to the last line, I watched her deliver it with... a smile. A sincere, innocent, longing, joyful smile. A smile informed by the sadness, grief, and loss of her own situation, of her own life... but a smile that finds forgiveness and grace after all. Pedretti knew how to say the line, and how that word would work.

And as she said it, I knew it would stay in the show.

Over the years, that sentence has become something of a tagline for The Haunting of Hill House. I'm always a bit mystified and touched when I see people approach me with the line on T-shirts, or even tattooed on their bodies.

I started signing it with autographs back in 2020 after enough fans asked me to. Now it's my go-to when I sign anything related to Hill House.

The line, for me, represents a lot of things.

It's about the insane, chaotic, non-linear experience of making that show. It's about trying to find and hold onto joy, even in the grips of despair.

It's about the way the moments of our lives aren't linear, not really, and how we may be unable to understand them as we exist in their flurry. It's about finding hope, innocence and forgiveness in the final reckoning.

And it's about how, outside of our love for each other, the rest is just... well, it's fleeting. It's colorful. It's overwhelming. It's blinding. It's dancing. And, if we look at it right, it's beautiful. But it's also light. It's tinsel. It flits and dances and falls and fades, it's as light as air. The rest is the stuff that falls around us, and flits away into nothing.

It's the love that stays, though.

[tara-to-a-t]

Leave it to Mike Flanagan to get me back on this site/app and reblog something.

I flit in and out of here occasionally and reblog my gay shit but fuck… teared up reading this. Had to share. I’ll follow you across all the social media/entertainment mediums, sir. Love your work and love the way you share your thoughts and the behind the scenes bits and just… all of it. Cannot thank you enough for all you’ve given your fans through your work. Ah-mazing.

[cinemapix]

WAREHOUSE 13 | 2.07 “For The Team”

[maiagaru]

It’s how I live my life.

Joanne Kelly. Clexacon Bering & Wells Reunion, 2021.04.17.

[pagets-archive]

We’re gonna follow up on that at a later date.

[pagets-archive]

#myka’s smirk tho #never forget

[mfangeleeta]

NEVER FORGET THE KNOWING SMIRK. 

[fuckyeahpikacha]

#ahh the knowing smirk #which is pretty much the same one the Joanne has when she answers definitely scissory 

#like she is imaging her own little Bering and Wells fanfic in her mind  

[via crazycat9449]

[jeanmoreaux]

sometimes self-care is consuming a piece of media for the 174th time

[bearie]

i feel like literally any woman could infiltrate and take down elon musk's empire by being nice to him and telling him he's special

[tara-to-a-t]

I mean yeah but it’s like… really hard to fake that level of sincerity.

[fandomfairy]

I love how after the horrible last season, the cancellation, the fucked up pyka ending, moving on to new fandoms, meeting new people to fan and stan with, and the basic passing of time; someone brings up Bering and Wells in the negative and we’re all in like HEARD YOU WERE TALKING SHIT!

[winged-mammal]

[webgeekist]

[rustyliver]

#they come into oUR WAREHOUSE#spouting some bs about the plight of the platonic heterosexuals#tracking homophobic dirt all over our beautiful rainbow floors#nope get outta here before you slip in all the gay  (via ddatrw)

[racethewind10]

(gif  source)

[deathtodickens]

Hail Myka. Most Holy Agent & Lover of our Lord Jesus H.G. Christ Amen

[racethewind10]

#pray the gay will stay

[saunteringvaguelydownwards]

*hands out Twizzlers* Take this and eat of it, for it represents the Holy Rope that binds our fandom together, e’en as our pairing was bound together.

*hands out apple juice* Take this and drink of it, for it is the juice of the holy fruit, which shall be poured out for us in forgiveness of our sins, as the Warehouse forgave Helena’s sins in her hour of sacrifice.

In the name of the Apples, the Puzzles, and the Holy Rope, gay-men.

[cookie-sheet-toboggan]

baptise me in the holy purple goo that falls from the warehouse pipe system above. Jo bless me. Jo bless you, gay-men

[deathtodickens]

What was wrong with us.

[massivenerdywarehouse]

Bering & Wells AU: The first (and last) time Syfy tries to tell Myka and HG that B&W isn’t canon.

[nuttydame]

5 reasons to reblog old Bering and Wells posts

Reason 1:  Reawaken the fandom; we’re always ready to get sappy with each other by yelling at each other for being assholes.

Reason 2:  Encourage the creation of new content!

Reason 3:  So I can quit neglecting my Fandom Archaeologist duties.

Reason 4:  To warm up for the 2nd Place Party and the Bering and Wells Gift Exchange.

[tracybering]

OH BUT NUTTY, WHAT ABOUT THE FIFTH REASON??????????? 

[nuttydame]

THERE IS NO REASON 5.

[racethewind10]