Today is a good day to be a horror writer, whether in print or comics. If your work gets picked up by a cable network, you are on your way. Robert Kirkman made it big with his comic The Walking Dead, perhaps the most popular show on the planet. Kirkman wisely signed on as a producer. Now Blake Crouch is doing the same thing with the Wayward Pines show. Based on his novels The Pines (2012), Wayward (2013) and The Last Town (2014), he is now a producer and writer on the show. I don’t know if this is a sign that agents are getting better at writing inclusion clauses or if TV executives are just finally getting that, yes, the original writer just might be an asset to the show. In the past, it wasn’t so. Take Jeff Rice for instance…
I’ve always wondered how Jeff Rice was involved (or not) in the creation of the Kolchak saga and why he didn’t use the show as a launching pad to a career as a popular horror writer. Reading his interview in a copy of Marvel’s attempt at a Famous Monsters type magazine, the very enjoyable Monsters of the Movies #1 (June 1974), I found the inside story on his novel The Kolchak Papers. The TV rights were sold even before the book, with Richard Matheson scooping up the screenplay job before Rice could (and winning himself an Edgar Award for the task). Titled The Night Stalker (1972), theTV movie was a huge ratings winner, setting records for that time. It was followed by a second, admittedly repetitious, but popular, The Night Strangler (1973) and then Kolchak: The Night Stalker, the poorly regarded TV show of twenty episodes.
Read the rest:
https://www.michaelmay.online/2015/09/jeff-rice-and-kolchak-guest-post.html
