#9 “The Littles were big…”

November 1983. How could it have been so long ago…and yet feel like it was yesterday?

I was alone in my leased condo, petrified. Jean had slipped a sample script for the series I was to write for under my door and I was going through it, shocked that it ran just twenty-eight pages. I was supposed to tell a story in just twenty-eight pages?! And, to boot, my teleplay would have to contain a main story and a sub-plot?!

My latest published novel – a historical saga entitled The Young Dragons (Signet) -- ran 486 pages; that’s about 650 typewritten pages. Now I was supposed to tell a whole story in twenty-eight pages?! And they were script pages – sometimes a word or two of dialog on a line!

Fortunately, I had a distraction – the sample script for the ABC television series, The Littles. The story centered around a family of tiny creatures living in the walls of the Biggs’ family’s home. Grandpa, Lucy, Tom and Dinky Little were adorable characters who go on adventures, all the time trying to avoid being captured by evil Dr. Hunter and his ferret.

How do ya not fall in love with that? I did. But what I didn’t appreciate was how rare it was for a writer who’d never written for network television to be writing for an ABC series straight out of the starting blocks.

Jean Chalopin wanted writers who could tell a great story and deliver scripts fast. He was about to get more than he’d ever bargained for…

#8 “It all happened so fast…”

One day I’m a novelist working on my next novel and the next day I’m jumping into the deep end of the pool, getting ready to write my first children’s television script. It’s an odd journey, this going from writing horror and murder mystery novels to writing for children’s TV. I knew a little about screenwriting. I’d studied it now and then and pounded out a couple of truly awful screenplays. But here I was actually hired to write children’s television teleplays!

I was fortunate – there’s that word again – because I had a mentor in Jean Chalopin. I suppose Jean was fortunate he had found me. He was looking for writers who could tell great stories and I think he liked me because I was a novelist. Importantly, our very different personalities somehow clicked. Jean was and still is one of the most even-tempered people I’ve ever known. He would remain calm standing in the midst of a Category 5 hurricane. I’m passionate, enthusiastic and over the top – our personalities were and still are diametrically opposed, except that we both have a relentless work ethic and love what we do.

I think he also liked that I was fast; always in a hurry. Being talented is important in television, but being fast is almost as important because writing for a television series is like being on a runaway train.

It would be a business marriage that worked, spawning literally hundreds of episodes of television, a lot of laughs and a friendship that’s endured for forty years.

And it all happened so fast…

#7 “I became animated…” Part 2

Okay, I hear you: “Jack was lucky to be in a building where a Frenchman who started an animation studio lived.”

But 'luck' had very little to do with it.

I’d packed up, moved to L.A. where I knew no one, and for years worked hard to put myself in the right place at the right time. That’s called ‘positioning’. In baseball it’s called ‘swinging the bat’.

Baseball... Yeah, so Reggie Jackson, Sammy Sosa and Alex Rodriguez – three of the greatest baseball players of all time -- have a lot in common. Reggie smashed 563 home runs during his career. Sammy pounded out 609 homers and Alex Rodriguez racked up an incredible 696 home runs. And each had over 2,000 hits – 2,408 for Sammy, 2,584 for Reggie and an astonishing 3,115 for Alex Rodriguez.

Obviously, they were tremendously talented baseball players. But there’s one other thing they share in common: all three are on the Top Ten List of players who have struck out the most times in baseball – over 2,000 whiffs each during their careers.

I also struck out a lot of times in my early career and I would strike out a lot more later in my career. But that’s how you hit home runs – you develop your talent, you put yourself in the right place, you swing the bat and you hope you connect.

I swung, and that night in Studio City I connected. I’d met a Frenchman who would animate me.

And it wasn’t luck.