The Making of a Franchise: Article Two
Words by: David Rutsala
Published/Contributed by: Hector Morgan
From world championship skier to stuntman to actor to producer, Frank Beddor had faced many challenges in his life. But nothing had prepared him for the challenge he was about to face: One of the most daunting tasks of them all … writing a novel.
Like all writers, Beddor struggled. Especially at first. But, like all successful writers, he found his own unique way of facing the writing challenges and succeeding.
And he did it by doing what successful people do. He asked himself a simple question:
What have I done that’s similar?
And many answers came. Some of them we’ll encounter in the following. And we’ll also see why Frank Beddor wasn’t like many who have thought about writing a book. He was that rare person who finishes that book … successfully.
“The Work: Writing Book One”
The memories are still fresh. Both the pain and the pleasure. It’s right there. Real and vivid. Frank Beddor remembers writing “The Looking Glass Wars” like it happened last week.
“Some days you’re just pondering where a chapter might go, and then you sit down and go, ‘Okay, I’ve figured it out.’ And it just flows from there.'”
But he didn’t get there overnight. And he didn’t get there without a lot of pain, sweat, and tears. And the writing veered from being a positive to a negative experience.
“Some days it was my lover and some days it was my ghost.”
Still, the drive to write entered his life more with the seductive allure of a lover, than the supernatural pull of a ghost.
After releasing “There’s Something About Mary”, he was sitting on top of the world. A path clearly laid out for him. More movies, discovering more talent, a lot of lunch meetings at the Ivy or dinners at Spago. The producer’s life. The life of a few. The dream of many more.
But Beddor wanted something else. Something more. And then along came the idea. The kind of idea that comes along once, maybe twice in a lifetime. An idea too good to hand over to someone else.
“I started with a few ideas I had. Waiting for the one to show itself.”
And “The Looking Glass Wars” did just that. But it started small.
“I just had the kernel of the idea. And it was this: What if you didn’t go down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, but you came up the rabbit hole into our world. What was that like?”
But with that tiny kernel great things grew.
Frank Beddor owns several properties in the Hollywood Hills. But lives fairly modestly, with his two children, in one of the smaller ones. But one of its most attractive features is a patio effortlessly transitioning into grass which stretches down to an out-building where his assistant works.
On sunny mornings, he starts his day on the patio with a coffee and a copy of the LA Times. He still prefers the print edition.
He’s often joined in this morning ritual by deer, wandering down from higher elevations, or cutting across from Griffith Park. Small lizards can be seen skittering across the grass. And occasionally a bobcat makes his way onto the land.
It’s not surprising that here his mind can wander to Wonderland. This landscape encourages dreams of fantastic landscapes and limitless worlds.
But now he has a process. A way to create … to write. But, in the beginning, everything was new to him.
“I was obviously inexperienced in doing something on my own. And I didn’t want to talk about it in case it didn’t work out. So, I just did it in private. Worked on it, shared it with my girlfriend at the time. Didn’t tell my family about it. Because they would have thought I lost my mind. Especially after having a big hit movie.”
But he plunged in head first. And, quickly, he became lost in the writing process:
“I found myself thinking about thinking about the book a lot and trying to solve problems,” Beddor recalls. “I started writing some scenes and then I would write myself into a corner, and think: This doesn’t make any sense. I don’t have a mechanism to move her from one place to the other. What would that be?”
But often even this process didn’t work.
“There was a lot of stopping and starting. I’d start something and I go back and I write some chapters and think they were pretty good. And months later I’d go back and I’d read them and they seemed horrible. And there is a lot of that going back and forth.”
And this continued for some time. Some nights, he’d have animated discussions with his girlfriend about the book over dinner. Other nights, the book would give him nightmares. He’d wake up in a cold sweat, wondering if it was all a waste of time. A waste of his energies.
In the midst of all this, he had an epiphany. Why not apply some of the tools he’d learned about developing projects as a producer to the process of creating this book? So, he hired the artist Doug Chiang.
Beddor felt that Chiang, a highly respected conceptual artist – who’d worked on such films as “Terminator 2: Judgement Day”, “Forrest Gump”, “The Polar Express” and the “Star Wars” prequels – could help him visualize Wonderland.
First, he asked him to sketch the Card Soldiers.
“I was having a hard time imagining how they would be flat and unfold and what they would look like,” says Beddor, remembering the struggle. “And he broke that logic by saying they’re just going to flatten up. And then unfold on the pieces. And when I saw the image, I went, okay, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to describe exactly how it works. And that idea set me free.
This new freedom excited him. He hired more artists. And this collaboration with artists forced him to look deeper at the world he was creating. The artist would ask him questions like: What does the Chessboard Desert look like? Or: What makes the sand black and white?
This process made the writing of the book feel more like making a movie. And approaching the book this way made him realize that even if the book didn’t work, he was still creating something of value.
“It will be the foundation for developing a movie or television show. I have created a template and some world creation for a screenwriter to take and do it as a movie,” notes Beddor. And this process also worked as a “psychological” trick. Something that helped Beddor move forward on the book. And not worry about whether or not it got published.
“It allowed me to write a good book. Because I wasn’t worried about it being a good book.”
Plus, movies were rooted in who he was.
“My first language was cinema. I never wavered from that.”
But the writing process changed him. It even changed his daily routine. Because before he started writing the book, his life was very different.
“I was taking lunch meetings or doing dinner meetings. Things that you do as a producer to cultivate relationships. As soon as I started working on the book, and I was writing pages, I stopped doing that. I stopped taking lunch and stopped taking dinner meetings. I would just work on the book.”
Frank Beddor was becoming a writer.
“I started to enjoy the process of creating the book more than the producing side, and I felt like I was supposed to capitalize and I wasn’t doing the best job capitalizing.”
But the proof really came in the writing. Something happened when he hit Chapter Ten. He knew this was it. He was in it for the long haul.
“That was the defining moment for me,” recalls Beddor. “It’s just this need you have. I needed to finish the book. I don’t have a choice. I’m going to finish it.”
That was the moment when it became real. When the stakes got raised.
“Because you’ve said it, even if you’ve only said it to yourself … ‘I’m doing this.'”
That’s how it all began. At a moment of triumph, a new path was blazed. A path as uncertain as any Frank Beddor had ever taken. But it would lead him to one of the most exciting periods of his life. Join us in future chapters, and become part of that journey.
But buckle-up. There will be turbulence.
Sourced photo
David Rutsala, raised in a literary family, has worked for over a decade developing film, television and publishing properties for most of the major studios, networks and publishers. His films have played across the globe, including at prominent venues like the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance, the Berlin Film Festival and Cannes. The New York Times called DAYS OF GRACE, a film he co-wrote, “flashy and entertaining, but also earnestly concerned with the collapse of trust and integrity at every level of society.”
