Okay so I made a post a week or so ago about HBO passing on Manly after my brother and I gave the pitch of our lives that we prepped for about 3 months. I was genuinely bummed about the rejection, even though I’m used to having my pitches go nowhere. I felt like HBO Max would’ve been a great platform for us, as opposed to VRV which had initially given us a handshake deal to make a series that went immediately down the toilet after they got bought by AT&T. I’ve been rejected by Fox, Disney, Cartoon Network, Netflix, Quibi, and various other places. None of it really bothered me as cultures change within these companies and you can always go back and try again when executives move around. <\/p>\n
I also half expect these people to say no to me or me and my brother, just because the ideas we present are sort of wild. I don’t believe either of us have the magical charisma to convince money people that we can absolutely produce a hit. I myself am too prone to self flagellating. The process of coming up with ideas is more often than not, based around being extremely tough on myself. It’s not some easy breezy thing where I’m gifted with an overflowing mind. I have to wrench out the ideas by tapping into some primordial part of my consciousness. I call it “talking to God” and so when I communicate this process to non-creative people I think they get turned off that I’m not whisking them away on my freewheeling idea ride. My ride is more like stone square wheels laboriously turning. I furrow my brow and look inward when I try to communicate. When an idea appears to me it feels like a heavy revelation and I try to convey that power. The effect that has on money people usually feels like, “Woah bro where’s the funny?”. <\/p>\n
HBO Max giving us the “no” stung a bit. I guess because for some reason I felt like things were aligning. It felt like there was some magic aura surrounding this meeting. Justin felt it to. He felt certain it was going to happen, which in turn bolstered my hope that this would be the next project I work on. This is out of character for me because I have an aversion to the idea of Hope but I’d allowed myself to get roped in which then increased the suffering of my ego. <\/p>\n
A week went by and I got around to talking to my new manager guy. I’m working with a manager now because he called me out of nowhere and said he wanted to help me get shit made. I’m pretty big on saying “yes” to these moments so now I have a manager. The bonus to this arrangement is it takes the weight off my shoulders of having to sell myself to money people. I hate selling myself and I have a generally low respect for money. Apparently this makes for bad selling myself. So now I have a guy for that. Anyway a week went by and I called him to talk about it. I vented for a while and we just made a resolution to keep grinding. A minute after we hung up, he called me back and told me he’d just gotten a text that Sony was excited to meet with me about Smuggle Brothers. <\/p>\n
Okay so I had pretty much given up on Smuggle Brothers. I even went so far as to steal my own idea and turn it into Jesus 2 so I wouldn’t have to buy back the rights from Cartoon Network. Now I’m in love with the idea of Jesus 2 and Sony wants to meet with me about Smuggle Brothers. Well alright so now I’m gonna put Jesus 2 on pause for a second until I find out what Sony wants to do. Worse comes to worst I can just change the characters of Sunday and Monday in Jesus 2 and have them flying a different style ship. It could almost be an alternate reality of the Smuggle Brothers universe or like a weird companion piece. Not hard to fix. <\/p>\n
I looked through my old Smuggle Brothers bible yesterday and wrote down some notes on how I would change it. I was surprised by how many fun ideas were in the bible. I couldn’t remember writing half of it. <\/p>\n
A lot of this pitching stuff feels like an analog for purgatory. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why I see so much mental illness in Hollywood; dudes in gas masks standing on cars with katana blades making instagram videos, looking like they’ve got a layer of dust on their cammo sweatpants. Weird shit. Certain parts of Hollywood feel like a low budget Rammstein video. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Okay so I made a post a week or so ago about HBO passing on Manly after my brother and I gave the pitch of our lives that we prepped for about 3 months. I was genuinely bummed about the rejection, even though I’m used to having my pitches go nowhere. I felt like HBO […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5051"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5051"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5053,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5051\/revisions\/5053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}