A brand new sci-fi adventure is on the way from the author of After Earth and The Book of Eli. A young woman finds a map that may hold the key to saving humanity in a future where Earth has been conquered by alien invaders. It sounds like it would be cool. Gundog can't be seen in theaters. You can't "see" it, it's very much by design.
Gary Whitta said that he would have written Gundog as a spec script at the beginning of his career. Even as established as I am in my career now, I still don't understand that big expensive original science fiction from not particularly well-established writers is a nonstarter. 15 or 20 people are going to read it at each studio. All of them will pass. It's too much. The thing is original. 20 people can read a script and put it on a shelf, that's six months of my life. It's very sad. If I am going to spend that much time on something. It is going to find an audience.
Whitta had a suggestion. He realized the man behind Kick-Ass and Kingsman had it all figured out after spending some time with him. He gets the satisfaction of having his comic on the shelves the way he likes it. Whitta said that finding a bigger audience through a movie or a TV adaptation was the commercial satisfaction of the project. I think he is very smart and creative.
Whitta tried something else when he tried to make a movie out of his original idea. He had an idea for a spec script called Abomination. I knew no one would make it because it was expensive and medieval. I wrote it as a novel and it got published. It wasn't hard to push a movie uphill in Hollywood. People liked it. I think that's a victory.
Once people liked the book, it became a double win. People ask if the screen rights to this are available. Whitta made a statement. I was wondering where you were when this was a script. It is a piece of underlying intellectual property and that is how the business works.
Whitta believes that The Hunger Games is a good example of how to get a story out there. He said that no one has ever heard of The Hunger Games if Suzanne Collins had written it as a spec script. That is not the only thing on the story. The market is just that. It's a big swing and no one makes that movie because of it. What the hell is this? She wrote it as a book and millions of people bought it.
We return to Gundog. Whitta came up with the idea in 2004 as a way to tell a story about something he loves. I was wondering what I wanted to do with that. Is it possible to send it to publishers? I was wondering if this is the one where I just do it all myself for the sake of seeing. No one else is helping. It might mean that it doesn't find as big of an audience, but I like the idea of just doing it all on my own terms.
He did it with others. He recruited some of his famous friends, such as Shannon Woodward from Westworld and The Last of Us Part II and Austin Wintory from Journey, to make that piece of it shine. Whitta made the audiobook into nine-hour-long episodes, with live discussion and a post-show Q, in order to find even more of an audience. He just keeps eating that apple.
He said that there are ways around the gatekeepers now that it's possible to self-publish on Amazon. If you want to tell a story in front of an audience, you don't have to ask for money. It has been fun to try to get directly to an audience and not have to worry about anyone getting in your way.
Whitta admits that there is a big problem with this. He doesn't make a living writing novels or releasing them in audio formats Whitta does most of his work as a paid Hollywood screenwriter, a job that gives him the ability to experiment with different types of writing. He is aware that it is a fortunate place to be because he is making a lot of money and he has a following.
Whitta said that he talked to Andy about The Martian years ago and that he had a fan site. I asked what it was about The Martian that blew it up. He said he couldn't tell you. I'm not sure. He told me that The Martian wasn't the first thing he put on his website. He had other stories and built an audience. When you get enough kindling, and you finally have something that will take off, there are enough people there that will let two or three of their friends know, but you have to have that kindling to begin with.
There are probably a million books on the Amazon store that are really good, like the next Harry Potter. The next Hunger Games or Girl on the Train is out there but they don't know how to get people to read them.
There is a concept reel for The Last Starlings.
Will Whitta's presentation of Gundog be watched or read by the audience? That is still being worked on. The Last Starfighters, a sequel to the cult 1984 film, is one of the lower-budget script he is trying to get out there. Whitta has been saying for a long time that the Hollywood machine is hard to navigate.
We took it to Warner Brothers, they loved it, and they wanted to do it, but since then, we've been stuck in contractual stuff. We have been trying to understand that for a while. Right now, I don't think there's much happening with it. Gary Whitta: Gundog has a world of heroes, villains, aliens, and science fiction fans that can be enjoyed. You are able to enjoy it as you please.
Gundog can be heard on Whitta's YouTube channel as well as on his twitch account. Go ahead and subscribe to the show because it's coming very soon. Soon, the book version will be arriving as well.
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