Burn the Negative

This week on Sound, Light & Frequency, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman finally open the file on a Hollywood story they have kept private and closely guarded for nearly three decades. It begins during the making of Dark Skies, their NBC alien-invasion series, at the exact moment when their dream job became a corporate pressure cooker. What followed was not just a normal network/studio battle over notes, wardrobe, or story points. It was a behind-the-scenes collision between UFO mythology, Hollywood power, franchise ambition, and two writers trying to protect the creative heart of their own series while realizing that forces far larger than they were had suddenly taken an interest.

For years, Bryce and Brent stayed quiet because the stakes were real, the players were powerful, and the consequences could have ended more than a television show. Now, as part of their commitment to tell the full Sound, Light & Frequency story with transparency, they lay out what happened chronologically, carefully, and with the receipts they still have. It’s inside-Hollywood drama at its strangest: aliens, secrecy, studio politics, men in black, and a story so wild it sounds like fiction — except it happened to them. And once you hear it, you’ll understand why it has never been told publicly before… until now.

To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi, I'm Bryce's Able. Thirty years ago, Brent Friedman and
I were living the dream. We were shooting a big
budget NBC pilot about a nineteen sixties alien invasion. And
then one day, while I was on the set, I
got a call from a studio executive who had a
demand that made no sense. He said, our show's majestic
field agents, who were called in our script men in Black,

(00:22):
could no longer wear black suits because he said, the
studio's feature division was gearing up to produce a new
movie comedy called men in Black with a famous producer
and a hot director. So I pushed back. I was
telling him that the men in black had been a
part of UFO lore for decades, going back to even
the nineteen fifties, and I'd already used the term in

(00:43):
script and on screen before in three separate TV series,
including one two hour movie. The response I got, though,
was not a debate. It was a threat. And this
is what he said, and it's a quote, get your
actors out of their black suits today, or we will
shut down your production and burn the negative. Now, what

(01:05):
follows in this episode is a chronological document based account
of how that one phone call mushroomed into a full
blown corporate meltdown, complete with many non negotiable demands that
went far beyond wardrobe and into the creative heart and
the very existence of our series in the days to come.
We were told that scenes must be cut, entire concepts
would be abandoned, key relationships changed, and even dialogue deleted.

(01:30):
In the hour ahead, Brent and I will explain why
we stayed quiet for three decades, how close we came
to losing the show and possibly our own careers, and
how we ended up forced into a costly compromise, including
an extraordinary eleven day reshoot of our already approved two
hour network pilot. It still gives us chills to think

(01:50):
about what happened that day back then. But today we're
going to tell the story anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Don't go away.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
I'm Brent Friedman. Have you ever wondered if there's a
secret connection between Hollywood and UFOs?

Speaker 1 (02:27):
I'm Brice Abel and you're listening to sound, light and frequency.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
For thirty years now, we have not talked publicly about
the story. You're going to hear in this episode, and
when you hear the details, you'll understand why.

Speaker 4 (02:40):
But what we told.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Ourselves when we agreed to do this podcast that you're
listening to, is that we would finally and forever tell
the entire story of what happened, the good, the bad,
the anomalous.

Speaker 4 (02:51):
So here we go.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
It's a tough episode to do, Brent. I've been dreading
even showing up for this.

Speaker 3 (03:12):
One, I know, and it's been a long time that
we've been sitting on this. I know we've probably told
the story to our inner circle family and friends, but
now that we're actually going public with it, there's part
of me that still feels, why are we poking the bear.
I'm sure people are going who's the bear? You'll find
out there's actually a couple bears in this story.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
You'll have to guess about the bear. Listen, this is
our point of view. I think that's the thing that's
most important to make clear. It's our point of view.
It's what people told us, it's what happened to us,
it's what we experienced. Okay, if we speculate, we'll tell
you we're speculating. But mostly we have the receipts. We
actually have memos that were written contemporaneously. We have conversations

(03:55):
that multiple people were witnessed to those kind of things.
You get a couple of things out of the way
right up top. It's no secret that our show Dark
Skys was produced by Columbia Television, which at the time
was a subsidiary of Sony, and that will become important
as we go on. Our intent is to tell the
story as we manage to live it. The thing I

(04:16):
most want to make clear to people right now is
we ain't looking for a fight. This is thirty years
on three decades, thirty years this year. We're storytellers. This
is a true story, and since we made these contemporaneous notes,
we feel confident in telling the story about what happened.
And I guess we just have to get on with it.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
And as you mentioned, Dark Skies was set up at
Columbia Pictures Television, which also has another division under Sony
called TriStar, And at TriStar there was a movie in
production while we were in production, and it was called
Men in Black.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
We're going to try to tell this story chronologically because
it's kind of complex and complicated and all that. We
want to make it clean and simple, so as we
get to it, the best scene setter would be to
just state for people that haven't been watching or listening
to the podcast all along. Dark Skies was an NBC
television series. We were in production on it in November

(05:17):
and December of nineteen ninety five in Washington, d C.
And then in Los Angeles, and that's where I got
the phone call that we talked about earlier. So just
to be clear, at that point where all this starts,
it's just a pilot. There's no backup scripts, there's no
network order. We just got our fingers crossed. We're just like, hey,
let's hope this works out. Our pilot's dailies and the

(05:40):
evolving rough assembly of our film were happening in a
Sony editing room, and apparently there were multiple editing suites,
and that's where the story begins.

Speaker 4 (05:49):
In a way.

Speaker 3 (05:50):
We can go on record as saying that two names
we need to name were the director of Men in
black Berry, Sonenfeld, and one of the producers, Steven Spielberg.
It was an ambulance production, and I think the inciting incident,
which we've used that term before, of all of this
was that well, Dark Skies was in post production in editing.

(06:13):
As Bryce said on the Sony lot next to that
post production facility. Men in Black was in post production,
and it just so happened that one day Barry Sonenfeld
heard some of our editors talking about the show. He
thought it sounded interesting. He asked more about it, and
when he heard what the storyline was, he immediately demanded.

Speaker 4 (06:34):
To see footage.

Speaker 3 (06:36):
Being a big director, he was shown footage and that
set everything in motion.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
And that's what we were told by the Columbia executives.
We weren't in the editing room ourselves. I've never talked
to Barry Son Andfeld about this, or Steven Spielberg, and
I've not talked to about this. This is what we
were being told on our end. That phone call still
chills me. As I said earlier, the executive said, and

(07:01):
I think it bears repeating because it really goes to
our state of mind bred at that time where he said,
I remember I was arguing Men in Black nineteen fifty
six and Gray Barker and all this stuff, and he said,
let me put this in words you can understand, which
I thought was a pretty funny run up to it.
But then he said, get your actors out of their

(07:22):
black suits today or we will shut down your production
and burn the negative, which that's as close to being
erased as you can. That's like nineteen eighty four. It's hey,
this never happened. Had they done that, dark skies wouldn't
have ever existed, would have just been nothing. So we
did make some early adjustments while we were in production

(07:43):
on the pilot to the black suits. We weren't using
black suits anymore. We put our people into a multiple
of suits green, blue, brown, and gray and whenever possible,
not too dark a gray though, but whenever possible. We
also put them in military use uniforms. That was something
that we made an initial adjustment. And given that this

(08:05):
was during the pilot, we thought, or we hoped, that
was the end of it, that, Okay, they had a
problem with just our black suits, maybe we can do that.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
They had a problem with the visuals, but they also
had a problem with the fact that in our pilot,
based on historical references, we called our men in black.
We said those words in the pilot, and we had
to change those words. And I remember going through an
intense asking everyone on the writing staff, what are some

(08:36):
other names we could come up with for men in black?
And ultimately, after a long set of lists. We ended
up settling on cloakers.

Speaker 1 (08:45):
We did that in February, So just imagine the timeframe
this is all going down, being shot in November December.
By February, we had moved to our new offices out
in North Hollywood, all right, and we were out there.
We had received an order from NBC for six backup scripts,
and we hadn't actually turned into The Dark Sky's pilot yet,

(09:06):
but we were told at that time, under no circumstances
could our guys be in black suits, nor could they
be referred to as men in black, all right, that
was the clear thing. So that's why we did call
them cloakers, and so literally we had to do fine
replace on all the work that had ever been done.
Every time there was a men in Black, it became
a cloaker. Now what's ironic about this, I think, is

(09:29):
that the Men in Black feature film, at least they
say it was based on Lowell Cunningham's comic book. I
believe it was a Marvel comic book, and that comic book,
by the way, says quote based on the Men in
Black conspiracy theory. I don't know what people are arguing
about if anybody's got a beef about this, it would
probably be the guys from the fifties that first coined

(09:51):
the phrase men in Black. So then a couple of
interesting things happened during all this.

Speaker 3 (09:55):
While this is happening and we're making these concessions, I
had a meeting on a film project at TriStar. I
will not name the executive, but I had that meeting
because he was such a fan of the Dark Sky script.
He wanted to meet me and talk about other projects.
Now again, this is an executive at TriStar where Men

(10:17):
in Black is being made into a movie. He's read
our pilot and has no problem whatsoever. In fact, he
loved the script.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
I had the same situation happen at approximately that time.
At that time, while Brent was having that TriStar meeting,
I got hired by Amblein, of all people, to write
a video game called Ghost in the Machine, is about
a piece of alien technology that changed the world. And
in April of that year, I had a meeting with
Steven Spielberg. All right, they sat me in his office

(10:47):
waiting for the meeting about Ghost in the Machine to happen,
and then he came in and I think I've even
said this on one of our previous episodes. He shook
my hands. He seemed like a really nice guy and
he said great to see you again, and I'd never
met him, but I thought that's pleasant, that's pleasing. And
then he slapped me on the back and goes big
fan of dark skies, and I was like, you could

(11:08):
talk about it, or you could just say thank you.

Speaker 4 (11:10):
I went with the second option.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
I said thank you, and it was a fine meeting
and the dark guys didn't come up again. So actually,
around that time, I think probably both you and I
were thinking, Okay, this was just about the suits. Just
the color of the suits, that's the problem.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
Yeah, I think about this time I honestly felt like, wow,
we had dodged a bullet. And looking back on it now,
I think, why was any of this happening? Because I
think the producers of Men in Black had unique leverage.
Their movie was being made at Sony and our TV
show was being made at Sony, and they didn't want
any competition for the idea of Men in Black being

(11:47):
out there in film or television, and so they used
their leverage, which makes perfect sense, and we had to
We had no choice. We capitulated, we changed the color
of the suits and the name men in Black, and
we were going on with our line thinking everything was fine.

Speaker 1 (12:01):
I wasn't happy about it, to be quite candid, No, because,
like I said, and I'll be specific, by the time
we were being challenged about daring to have men in
black in our scripts, I had done the official Denial
movie for the Sci Fi Channel and it literally in
the script talked about men in black and there were
guys in dark suits in it. Then I went and

(12:22):
was working for Lois and Clark over at ABC on
the Warner Brothers lot, and I did a couple of
episodes for with Superman in it where the men in
black were after it and they're called in the script
men in Black. Nobody had any problem at Sci Fi Channel,
nobody had any problem at Warner Brothers. And then the
show that I was working on when you and I
first met was Mantis, and we did a story about

(12:43):
men in black.

Speaker 4 (12:44):
So that's just my experience.

Speaker 1 (12:46):
That's a free television series and a movie with men
and black in them. So I was a little myf
that we were being told this on this very important
creative vision of ours. Just to put things in perspective.
About a month before I had that meeting at Amblin
with Steven Spielberg and the gang on the video game,
our completed pilot had been turned into NBC, and so

(13:07):
we were working on these six backup scripts. But now
they saw our film and we were told that even
if it didn't go to series, they were going to
air the thing the next August. So that was all
good news. But at the same time that was happening,
we were also told that Columbia was bidding out the
colorization of all the black suits still existed in the pilots.

(13:29):
So in other words, we had gone to blue, black, gray, brown,
and military uniforms, but there were still some black suits
from some of the previously shot scenes, and they were
going to pay to I think it's rotoscope.

Speaker 4 (13:42):
Is that what you do to it?

Speaker 3 (13:43):
It was rotoscope, yes, and you're right. That was when
I remember the next bump in the road was a
lot of discussion about who's going to pay for this.
Is this going to go against the negative cost of
the show? Is this going to be absorbed by the
film studio. Again, It's weird because it was all in
the same family, but I think there was just some
debates internally about Okay, who's paying for this colorization?

Speaker 1 (14:06):
I knew, and I weren't making those arguments. People were
making those arguments around us. There was a production meeting
at the Sony Columbia lot where this was brought up
and hotly debated, because even the TV people were at
this point on our side about it. They were saying
to the studio, to the feature people, look, you're the
guys that want this change. We'd be happy to put

(14:27):
this thing on the way it is. The network loves
it the way it is, so why should we pay
a million dollars to fix these suits? So they were
not happy. And yet, as history will note, the feature
people did not pay for our colorization. We had that
come out of our budget. But just now to pick

(14:47):
up the narrative thrust of this thing, we were on
a fast train to getting a network show. We'd already
turned in the pilot. Everybody liked the script. They shot it,
they were respectful of it. Toby Hooper did a hell
of a job directing it. We cut it together, and
I do remember we had so much of it. We
had to cut forty seven minutes out of our original

(15:07):
cut to get to the network until that's another episode
for us some other time, but we get it into
the network. Because back in those days, it was very
important for the networks to announce their fall schedules in May.
They did that at the New York upfronts okay, and
so I remember these days. It was May ninth of
that year that NBC called and said, we're putting you

(15:28):
on the fall schedule, and I think you and I
were like, hey, not only did we dodge a bullet,
but this is so fantastic. And they also said they
were increasing our order to eleven episodes rather than six,
which they were first talking about. So now suddenly we've
got our two hour pilot, eleven episodes were going to shoot,
We're on the fall schedule, and they're going to make

(15:51):
us the lead show on their Saturday night trilogy of
three shows. So we are leading the charge. We're an
important thing. And I remember personally that I was lucky
enough to get to go to New York where they
did the upfront announcements. Warren Littlefield made the announcement and
it was fantastic. So I say all this just to
paint one picture here, there's a couple of tracks going

(16:13):
on right now, and they're going on at the same time,
but you and I are only really aware deeply about
one of them. Track one is we're on a track
for big success. We're going to have a network show
that they're going to promote the holy crap out of
and did as We've talked about, buses with our Dark
Sky's posters on them all over La, that kind of thing.

(16:36):
So that's the track we thought is going on. Everything's
going well, everything's been resolved, it's all fantastic. But the
second track that we were not being privileged to was
that Sony Columbia must have been This is a supposition
when I said we would speculate. The speculation is they
were conflicted because they were continuing to get heat from

(16:57):
Amblin about this thing, and they don't tell us much
about that, but it would certainly come to four very
soon where we would learn about that.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
The irony here is that our great achievement of being
picked up and put on the air, I think is
what set off the second act complication of our story,
which was if Amblin and the producers of Men in
Black were hedging their bets and saying, you know what,
we don't know what's going to happen with this TV series,
changed the suits and the name. Once we got on

(17:28):
the air and we had multiple episodes being ordered and
we were the star of Saturday Night. I think that
put panic in them against purely speculation, except that the
results speak for themselves, because that's when the hammer came down.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
One final thought before we get into the Hammer coming
down section of this show, because it is so strange.
In the middle of this, I'm already doing this video
game for Amblin. I get a phone call from the
feature division at Amblin, my agent does, saying they want
me to come in for a meeting about something called
the Alien Organism Project. And I said to my agent

(18:06):
at the time, are they aware of how much trouble
they're causing Columbia TV and Sony over our show Dark Skies?
And he goes, I don't know if those guys are
You want me to tell him? I said, no, no, no,
I don't want you to tell them anything about that.
He said, but should I take the meeting? And he goes,
if you're suffering any harm anyway right now, you want

(18:27):
to suffer it? Twice go take the meeting. So I
took the meeting, and in fact I did have two
meetings on something called the Alien Organism Project at Amblin
in nineteen ninety six. Is all this stuff is going on,
and the last of those meetings was June sixth.

Speaker 4 (18:43):
When it went away.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
Now I only bring that data up because what Brent
and I want to do for you folks right now
who are listening or watching, is it kind of gets
intense in July of nineteen ninety six. It's the week
from hell for me and you, Brent. It'd be wrong
to say it came out of nowhere, because we certainly
had heard the rumblings. And when somebody says we potentially

(19:05):
are going to burn your negative, these are serious threats.
These are serious things that people are saying. But let
me just paint the picture of what July first was.
July first is a Monday, so start your engines and
your clocks here. It's Monday, July first, and what happens
on that day. Something people may remember that there was
a time in the seventies when Bruce Springsteen was on

(19:27):
the cover of Time and Newsweek at the same time,
same week, and people have gone that was so unusual.
It happened again on July. First Time magazine and Newsweek
magazine each had articles about aliens being popular in Hollywood
all right. The Time one was called the Aliens Have Landed,

(19:47):
and as we've talked about before, I was lucky enough
to get quoted in that.

Speaker 4 (19:51):
One talking about dark skies.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
The Newsweek one had a cover article called out There,
and it was also about all these alien invasion storylines.
I guess the point of these two articles, and the
reason is an interesting starter's gun for this week is
both articles made the point that these showbiz projects share
common roots in the mythology of the UFO movement, which

(20:14):
is a fancy way of even alluding to men in Black,
which we possibly should at least do a little quick
sidebar before we get into the rest of July and
just explain that men in Black have been around for
a while. The first thing is one of the earliest

(20:36):
stories people always cite goes back to nineteen forty seven,
and if that sounds familiar, folks, it's because that is
the year where there were all these sightings across the
United States and the world. Kenneth Arnold cited his nine
Craft flying across Washington State that year, there were things
going on in Puget Sound, and a guy named Harold

(20:58):
Dahl said that he saw UFO in nineteen forty seven
in puge Cent which is right by where you live.

Speaker 3 (21:04):
It's on Maury Island is where that incident happened, and
it is just north of me.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
And that guy Dahl said he got a visit from
a man in a black suit who seemed to know
way too much and warned him to stop talking about
his sighting. So that kind of was the starting gun
for it. He didn't call them anything, but he did
say the guy was in a black suit.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
He was told not to speak of the incident. The
bad things would happen. And this was all proven to
be a hoax, or the government called it a hoax.
I should be clear here, but this notion of the
man in black was now seated into a book that
was written a number of years later called They Knew
Too Much about Flying Saucers by Gray Barker, was written

(21:48):
in nineteen fifty six, I believe.

Speaker 1 (21:51):
And Gray Barker was writing that though based on something
that happened just a few years after the Maury Island incident.
Where a guy named Albert Bender, who was the founder
of the International Flying Saucer Bureau, says that he was
visited by three dark clad men and he described them.
I love this description. He said they were like clergymen

(22:12):
in Hamburg, hats okay, and they told him to back
off his UFO research, and he did, according to his
own telling. And this has been told in different ways.
Some people say it was government officials. Some people say
it was stranger than that, extraterrestrials, people that weren't quite human.
But the point is this guy called them men in black,
I believe. And it's Gray Barker who really poured gasoline

(22:35):
on the whole Men in Black concept with that book
you're talking about from nineteen fifty six. So let's just
at least clarify this is Men in Black isn't something
that the guy that created the comic book thought up.
It's nothing you and I thought of, It's nothing that
the people who were making the film Men in Black
thought of. It's just something that was part of UFO mythology.

(22:56):
There's been entire books written about it. But in nineteen
fifty six you get that first visual depiction in pop
culture and it comes from who else, Roger Corman. Roger
Corman makes a movie called Not of This Earth, and
that's where he first puts on film the sort of
the grim uniform, if you want to call it, dark suits,

(23:18):
skinny black ties, white shirts, dark glasses, and that is
the look that will become the shorthand costume for the
whole Men in Black thing, which is actually what we
were riffing off of in Dark Skies, what I riffed
off in official denial. Lois and Clark Mantis and later
the producers of Men in Black the movie were riffing off.

Speaker 3 (23:40):
In these early incarnations of Men in Black back in
the fifties and even into the sixties and seventies, the
Men in Black had a purpose. They were dressed, as
you said, but their purpose was to muzzle any witnesses
of strange and paranormal phenomenon, not just related to aliens
and UFOs. So that's also a commonality with the original

(24:04):
Marvel comic book. In the comic book that the movie
was based on, the Men in Black investigated much more
than aliens in UFOs.

Speaker 4 (24:13):
Right.

Speaker 3 (24:13):
The film franchise ultimately went on to focus on what's
called alien immigration and that was the aliens coming and
going to Earth. But in the original source material for it,
it was really more about these people who were muzzling everything,
not just aliens, and then certainly in the actual lore

(24:34):
it was much more about that. And one other thing
that I want to throw out there is that these
were not always described as humans. There was a lot
of times when people said there was something supernatural about
their features, and they had glowing eyes and strange complexions,
and yes, they were still dressed in black suits. I
think it's interesting that our men in black JAC, we

(24:55):
got the FBI variety, we got the clean shave and
the clear cut. It would have been a much different
meeting if JC had red, glowing eyes and a supernatural
complexion and he was in your backyard. Thank goodness that
did not happen.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
Well, listen, I don't know whether there were real men
in black, extraterrestrial or government running around. I think that
there were government people poking around. There might have been
extraterrustrial people poking around. But the mythology, if you will,
of somebody following up UFO sidings and sort of warning
people go easy here, don't talk about this. That is

(25:29):
fifties Men in Black, and that is really what we
based our thing on and what other people have based
it on. So I just want to make one thing clear.
We don't hate Men in Black as a franchise. I've
enjoyed the movies, and I think we should also say
what we think about Steven Spielberg. We've said it many times,
which is we think he's a genius.

Speaker 4 (25:49):
Right.

Speaker 1 (25:49):
We are looking forward to his disclosure day. We liked
listening to his interviews when he talks about it. We've
both worked for him, right, I've worked on Taken, you
worked on other things. I worked on this other project
with him. The guy is a great guy in a
creative way, for sure. So we're not alleging he did
or did not do anything because everything we heard about

(26:11):
it came from a Columbia or Sony executive telling us
that Amblen attorneys had told their attorneys, who told them
who told us. Am I getting that right? Basically, Like
I said, we're not here to pick a fight, but
we are here to tell a story, and this is
where our story takes a weird and twisted turn.

Speaker 3 (26:30):
I think I also want to say too, personally that
on top of everything, Bryce just said ironically. After all
of this went down, I was years later hired to
work on a Barry Sonenfeld TV show called Secret Agent Man.
And I remember having many interesting creative meetings with Barry Sonenfeld,
who never once mentioned dark skies, and yet I was

(26:51):
hired to work on his show, and he was a
very entertaining guy, and I have nothing bad to say
about him personally either.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
And to finish that little riff here, I sat with
Spielberg at the Emmys in two thousand, sat with him
and Tom Hanks when they were nominated for Band of Brothers. Yeah,
a lot of contact. So there's no fistfight in a
dark alley on this thing. This is our attempt to say,
for thirty years we were a little traumatized by this.
I'm still traumatized, to be frank about it. But again,

(27:22):
the trauma is because of what went down on our end,
and I think that takes us to Tuesday July second.

Speaker 3 (27:28):
Let's drop the hammer. Drop the hammer.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
Okay, Tuesday July second happens to be the forty ninth
anniversary of the Roswell crash. Okay, so coincidence, also very true,
And everybody in the world is looking forward to the
Independence Day feature film that's actually going to be in
the theaters. That's why they're writing articles in Time and
Newsweek because you've got Independence Day coming out and X

(27:51):
Files was super popular, and we had a new series
coming out, and there's all that kind of stuff going on,
and we get told me that Columbia executives are coming
to our offices in North Hollywood because they have important
information to tell us. And I'm just kind of curious
because I don't think we've discussed this. When you first
heard that, what did you think they were coming out

(28:14):
to talk about?

Speaker 3 (28:15):
My first reaction was, Oh, this must be great news.
They're coming out to tell us the show's been ordered
for a second season, and we're coming out to celebrate
and we'll bring some champagne. But the fact of the
matter was, I remember the tone being a little more
ominous and curt and so I don't know that I
went to, oh, no, the men in Black problem is back.

(28:38):
I just had a sinking feeling in my stomach that
something bad was about to happen.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
Okay, so I'm going to be real careful here because
this is a super important thing that happened changed the
course of our lives a little bit, and I don't
want to overreach. I want to be specific and clear
so everyone knows this meeting happened. It was extraordinary, which
we'll explain a second. That it was so extraordinary, Brent,
that during the meeting I had a yellow legal pad

(29:06):
out and I was writing furiously. I wrote everything down,
and then after the meeting, immediately after the meeting, you
and I sat down at our computer and typed up
my notes and made certain that both of us recalled
the quotes that we were putting down were So this
isn't something that we just came up with yesterday. This

(29:26):
is something that we wrote down at the time and
in fact became an important document in the days to come.
And here's the thing, these are the actual comments as written.
One of the first things this executive said was I
have just come from a meeting with a room full
of lawyers. We're trying to protect two significant assets. So

(29:49):
at this point, Brent, we know, well that doesn't sound
good because we know what the other asset is. It's
men in black, and we know we're the other assets.
So there's these two assets. This is what he followed
up with. He said we have a problem.

Speaker 4 (30:03):
Now.

Speaker 1 (30:03):
I remember looking at you when he said that and thinking,
oh no, And then he said, we have tried to
deal with it for some time, So this is consistent.
We've been off camera during most of this, right, Apparently
other things have been going on while you and I
have been taking meetings and producing a TV series and
going to New York for the announcements. Other people have

(30:25):
been talking about us. At that time, he says, we
have tried to deal with it for some time. It
has mushroomed beyond any reasonable expectations. The situation is no
longer in the realm of logic or reason.

Speaker 3 (30:40):
And by the way, that was an understatement.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
Yes, he did describe I'm not even going to name
who he described, but it was one of the people involved,
and he described that person as going insane and getting
everybody else crazed. Those are his words, not ours. But
what he meant was that the feature side was in
panic mode. And we were told by this same Columbia executive,
they're asking us to pull the plug on funding the

(31:05):
TV show. And by they, he's talking about the feature division.
They're saying we don't want it out period. And that's
a quote. Now, at that point, I was thinking, this
isn't good because they're coming back at us. But on
the other hand, cooler heads will prevail. But now we're
being told they want the show killed. Yeah, they don't

(31:27):
want it around.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
It's never going to see the light of day. That
was the essential message. And by the way, I think
it's fair to say, you and I have what we
think is a great show, but our status in Hollywood
compared to Steven Spielberg and Barry Sonnenfeld, it was nothing.
This was the ultimate David and Goliath story. Yeah, we
were a couple of kids who got lucky. From many
people's point of view, these guys wrote a great script,

(31:50):
we shot it.

Speaker 4 (31:51):
They should be happy.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
And by the way, they were trying to say, don't worry,
we're here protecting you. Yes, it's the tone, because this
guy said personally, I don't see the problem tonally. Character wise,
they are very different pieces. One is a comedy, the
other is a drama. The movie is not coming out
until next summer, so it's hard to understand what this
is about since the pilot will have aired almost a

(32:13):
year before. And I thought when he said that, yeah,
that's my point. These quotes I just read are the
executive's language, not ours. We're not paraphrasing. We're going with
quotes that were written down in the room and then
transcribed immediately afterwards. I guess now you could argue, okay,
that's bad. What happened then it got worse.

Speaker 3 (32:34):
This is like opening up an old wound. I think
that the important thing to say here is that, just
to cut to the chase a bit, what ultimately was
coming out is the fact that after all of this time,
we were essentially being accused of plagiarism.

Speaker 4 (32:50):
We were being accused.

Speaker 3 (32:51):
Of having stolen the idea of men in Black. Not
just the idea of men in black, but there were
certain things in our pilot and in our series that were,
from somebody's point of view, considered to be plagiarism theft.
And so this was no longer a matter of trying
to just appease a film studio and a studio juggling

(33:14):
to important assets. There was now fingers being pointed at us.

Speaker 4 (33:19):
It freaked me out.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
First of all, I think it's pretty obvious to anyone
who knows this and who knows the timeline here, and
it's just impossible times ten. But the executive did say,
here's a final quote for you. He said, it's hit
meltdown with the feature guys. They think their screenplay was stolen.
Their attitude is we're movie people. All of our ideas
are original. Everyone in TV just steals from us. You

(33:41):
and I had been working for Sony for years at
that point, and again all these other projects in ufology
that I'd done and that you were thinking about and whatever.
But they said, we are now talking about extensive pilot
reshoots and it affects the framing of the series. Happened, folks,
is this was a shocking meeting and they basically laid

(34:05):
this at our feet and left, and you and I
wrote down all these quotes, and then we went into
shock and uh where we were? And that takes us
to Wednesday, July third. Okay, July first Time and Newsweek
are out, Hey, it's going to be great. July second,
No Hammer comes down. July third, Independence Day is released,

(34:27):
and it is the biggest box office success in film
history at that time. So Aliens are big and everybody's
happy about all that, except for us, because that's the
day that we get told there are a number of
non negotiable demands that have been made by the feature folks,

(34:49):
conveyed by attorneys, through studio executives, through other attorneys, but
to us eventually.

Speaker 3 (34:56):
One of the things you wrote down contemporaneously is before
or these demands were sent to us. One of the
executives said, these are the specifics which need to be addressed.
You will probably be shocked and dismayed by what they are. Wow, Okay,
I can't wait to see these demands. Okay, here they are, folks.
These are the non negotiable demands. That's pretty amazing to

(35:20):
even have demand the word demand used, let alone non negotiable,
because again, no crime had been committed here. These are
just two projects that are at the same studio, drawing
from a mutual UFO backdrop. So now crime had been committed,
but crime had been accused and we were the accused. So,

(35:40):
in other words, for us to get off the hook,
we were told these changes would need to be made. Yes,
we could not have a government secret organization operating outside
the law. So therefore Majestic twelve and are pilot gone.
No organization could be in Washington, DC could not have that.
No secret entrance could be used in other words, we
had an elevator in the halls of Congress that took

(36:02):
you down to Majestic twelve. Nope, could not have that,
could not have a public hub of transportation. We are
also told we would have to lose the mentor relationship
between our main character, Frank Bach played by J. T.
Walsh and our main character John Loanguard played by Eric Close,
which was an older guy bringing in a younger guy

(36:23):
to the organization.

Speaker 1 (36:24):
We were told we couldn't have an autopsy. Yeah, we
couldn't have an autopsy. Our patient zero in our pilot,
Elliot Grantham, who was a farmer, Nope, couldn't be a farmer.
Could not have a farmer in the show back, could
not wear an artifact around his neck, which is where
he wore the Roswell artifact that Loanguards stole and then

(36:45):
gave to RFK, who gave it to JFK. Bach cannot
show Loanguard a collection of still photos of UFOs. Bach
cannot say the line I'm a figment of your imagination
and Loanguard's narration about Majestic being above the line had
to be cut, so non negotiable.

Speaker 3 (37:02):
Go make those changes.

Speaker 4 (37:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:04):
In the midst of all of this, there was a
secondary track going on of how are you guys going
to defend yourself because you've been accused of some serious crimes.
And while we may actually spend the money to fix
all of this, wouldn't you guys be responsible for these costs?
This is only happening because of what you've done. And

(37:25):
so there was a point where Columbia Television went from
being We're on your side, we're trying to help you,
to you guys better lawyer up. And that was the
next step in our adventure was how in the world
do we fend off this attack?

Speaker 1 (37:41):
That was a meeting that we were called into after
these non negotiable demands at a studio executive's office where
those things were said. And I'll tell you what the
answer was, folks. You folks probably remember that Brent and
I have told you about how we sold Darkskuys with
a big briefing notebook. We went back to what we
knew and we created a new briefing notebook. It's pretty big,

(38:03):
as you can see. It says Dark Skies summary of
events supporting documents relating to the creation of a UFO
government cover up television series, and boy oh boy, we
had to get into it. And I'll tell you something.
It's easy to make light of it now, but there's
nothing to be made light of. But we went through
these non negotiable demands, and I'm not going to be

(38:24):
so defensive. I have to defend every non negotiable demand.
But for example, the idea of the autopsy, there's an autopsy.
First of all, Independence Day has an autopsy scene, which
was just in the theaters. Nobody was after them. Fox
had an alien autopsy TV special during this time, which
was a huge thing. X Files had autopsy scenes Galore

(38:46):
Scully did autopsies right, and I had an alien autopsy
in my official denial film. So the idea that somebody
can tell you you can't have an autopsy scened odd.
But this meeting that you're describing, we were told that
we're in serious trouble. Who's going to reimburse the money
to the company if we have to take the show
down because of you. It's time for you to lawyer up.

(39:08):
So we had to suck it up. We had to
hire a litigator of our own, and that litigator is
what caused us to do this notebook that person said, look,
this is an existential threat to your livelihood if this
is allowed to stand and the studio does not produce
your TV series and potentially sues you guys for the

(39:30):
cost of production and gives and tells NBC that the
show they picked up and were promoting could not be
on TV. Now you're going to be in all the
trades and it's going to look like you did this.
I remember a time when we were making these notebooks
and it was like two in the morning, and we
were sitting in my office and we were not feeling

(39:50):
happy because we knew that we were a big fat
target was painted on us and people were coming after us.
And it wasn't fair, wasn't right, it wasn't honest, it
wasn't anything, but it was happening. And I remember we
started to say, what are you going to do when
we can't work in Hollywood anymore? And I remember saying
to you, I used to be a TV reporter. I

(40:12):
can probably go back. Maybe I can go back and
do that. I'll never forget what you said. You said,
why would a TV news organization hire a guy that
had been fired from his job because he got in
a fight with Steven Spielberg. I literally at that point
was thinking, maybe I can get a job as a
costco manager or something. And I don't know what you
were I can't remember, though, what were you saying you

(40:33):
would do if we got run out of town?

Speaker 3 (40:35):
I was having much different fears. We need some context here.
Number one, this was my first TV show. You had
already had a thriving TV career, and so this was
my first big break in Hollywood. I had some independent
films made, but here I am, but nothing has aired yet,
and now the whole thing is being killed before it's

(40:55):
even off the ground. And I was thinking, I don't
know if they give us a bill for a couple
million dollars, I don't know how much money Bryce has.
Maybe he can pay his half. I cannot pay mine.
I had only been married a couple of years earlier.
We finally bought our first house, so I'm already thinking
I'm going to lose the house. I'm not going to
have the money, so I'm going to jail. I don't

(41:16):
need a job. That's the one thing I have over Bryce.
Bryce is going to have to figure out how to
keep working. I'm going to jail by the way. The
other part of this is they did shut down the
show to deal with all of this. They put production
on hold, and this was our job twenty four to seven.
For about a week, we lived in this hellscape, and
I remember having nightmares about jail. So this was as

(41:39):
you said, it's interesting and fun to tell the story now,
but at the time I had gone from oh my goodness,
I've arrived to I'm going to jail for the rest
of my life like that was. It was a roller
coaster ride.

Speaker 1 (41:58):
I had a ten year old, in eight year old
and a four year old and your father. Now, of course,
you know the responsibility that carries your job is to
make sure.

Speaker 4 (42:08):
Those kids are okay.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
And I thought I was doing pretty good at my
job of being a parent, and then suddenly I thought,
I'm going to have to suck it up and do
something because I can't just quit parenting. I've got these
children that need my help. So it was a tough time.
And as you said, we stopped and we used the
skills that we had created to write this notebook. And
I showed you guys what the notebook looked like, just

(42:32):
so you know. There were ten parts of the notebook.
They included statements from us, a statement from one of
our producers, the chronology of events, which was incredibly detailed
because we had all the calendar stuff and meetings and everything.
It had memos and letters, including some of those contemporaneous notes.
It had a section about the government cover up and

(42:53):
Majestic twelve and UFO literature. It had a killer section
on Men in Black and UFO literature that pretty well
laid out everything we just said about Gray Barker and Company.
It had a bibliography of UFO research that laid out
all the men in Black stuff, and then it had
a whole section of exhibits. It's a thing to behold,
although I didn't like beholding it for this episode because

(43:16):
it brought back a lot of painful memories.

Speaker 3 (43:18):
To be completely honest, the other notebook we made to
get this show sold was really fun to make. It
was a fantastic creative endeavor. This was the opposite. This
was we're trying to put something together to keep the
show alive and keep us out of jail.

Speaker 4 (43:35):
Yeah, so it was bad.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
And again, the horrific meeting that laid this challenge at
our feet was on July third, six days later, Tuesday,
July ninth, so basically a week after the things had started,
we presented this new briefing book to Columbia and Sony
and we didn't hear anything immediately, so we just went
to ground. We didn't know what actually was going to happen,

(43:59):
but we had enough that Sony's lawyers, Columbia TV's lawyers,
ambulance lawyers, all the executives, everybody had a copy of it,
and so we just held our breath, crossed our fingers,
and hoped for the best.

Speaker 3 (44:13):
And I think one of the important things to note
here is that we produced this incredible defense document binder,
and like you said, we don't hear anything at first.
I want to remind everybody that when we were presented
with the demands, they were non negotiable. But after we
presented our defense, there was some negotiations that took place

(44:34):
because we did not have to do in the end
all of those requirements or those times.

Speaker 1 (44:39):
I remember our hot shot litigator though, calling us up
and saying, hey, okay, listen, great notebook really lays out
the overwriting truth of your cause, et cetera, et cetera.
We've negotiated a compromise, So I think we were hopeful. Oh, great,
a compromise. Guess what the compromise was, folks. We had
to massively revise our script, which was already shot, already produced,

(45:04):
and already edited, already submitted to the network and ready
for air. That was all going away, and we would
have to do most of these notes that they had
laid out, most of these non negotiable demands, and when
we laid out a production schedule to do it, it
would take eleven days of reshooting.

Speaker 4 (45:25):
And we talked.

Speaker 1 (45:26):
Earlier about how we thought it was not quite fair
that we would have to pay for the recolorization of
the suits. Hey, that was nothing. They made us pay
for eleven days of reshooting.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
Now, just to be clear, and for anyone that's obviously
seen the pilot, there were things that we were able
to keep. We still have an autopsy scene, we still
have Majestic twelve. We didn't have to give up everything,
but as Brice said, we did have to make a
substantial number of changes. And this was all in the
course of trying to deliver a series for the upcoming

(45:58):
fall season. If a complete detour, and by the way,
the show had already been shut down for a period
of time where they were sorting all of this out.
So now instead of going back into producing the episodes,
we had to go reproduce part of the pilot.

Speaker 1 (46:13):
Yes, now you are correct. We did get to keep
some things, but that's because there was a secondary negotiation
that came after everybody said okay, well that'll be the solution.
Then Dark Skies will have to reshoot all kinds of things.
Then it got into the minutia. It's not even minutia,
but the details what scenes would be cut. A lot

(46:33):
of scenes had to be reshot. They wanted to reshoot them.
They don't want to colorize the suits at this point,
they just wanted to reshoot them without black suits. You
and I did, at least something I'm very proud of.
We sucked it up on the changes they were giving
us and said, okay, if we have to reshoot a
scene just to get a guy in a different suit,
let's do what anybody writer would do. Let's go read

(46:56):
the scene that we shot and see if we can
do better in some respects. We shot a few scenes
that were better, but now there is a bit of
drama here that came as if that's not dramatic enough, right,
And I'm sure you remember this very well. I was
told by one of the Columbia executives that it was
going to be my job to go with him to

(47:18):
NBC to meet with a top NBC executive and explain
to them that we were shooting all of this stuff
this eleven days because it was our idea, yes. And
I didn't want to do that because I thought that's
not honest on my part, that you want me to
own that, and I didn't want to go. But then
you and I had a conversation where we realized, if

(47:40):
I don't go to make that argument, then the Columbia
executive and the network executive are going to make the
decisions for us. And so I think we made the
decision it would be better to have me in the room.
So I went to that room. I did the best
I could without being completely a bald faced liar, which
I didn't.

Speaker 4 (47:59):
Want to be.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
I made an argument that there was going to be
some changes, but we could make him better, and the
executive from NBC looked at me for quite a long
time in silence. The room was silent. There were about
seven people, maybe six people in it very silent, and
then he looks at me and he says, h ambling, right,
And I looked at the Columbia executive and are we

(48:20):
going to fess up to this? And he nods, So
I said, yeah, another long silence. When you're in a
room with a bunch of people and it goes thirty
seconds when nobody speaks, that seems like forever. And that's
what happened. And then the guy says, you better make
it better. He used actually the F word in that sentence,
but he said you better make it better. And he

(48:40):
stood up and left. And also he made the point
to the executives, you guys are paying for this, yes,
of course, or come to the network and ask us
for a dime.

Speaker 4 (48:50):
This is on you.

Speaker 3 (48:51):
So I want to add one other detail to this,
the ending of this story, and that there was a
third track, a very small, minor track, but super important
to how this all got resolved behind the scenes, unbeknownst
to us and not explained to us or revealed really
to me until after the fact by someone that had

(49:13):
a behind the scenes view of what was going down.
NBC was aware of what was happening. Hollywood is a
small town. People talk, and it just so happens that
if you remember the story of how we sold Dark Skies,
it was bought in the room by the head of
NBC at the time, a man named Don Olmeyer, who
has since passed away, Rest in peace.

Speaker 4 (49:34):
And this was his show. So comfortable using his name
right now? Yes, okay, this was his show.

Speaker 3 (49:40):
This was, as we've talked about before, this was the
centerpiece of the trilogy that he was using to promote
the new Saturday night lineup. So word got to him
apparently behind the scenes as all of these other demands
and things were happening, and he, I'm speculating, must have
taken it personally.

Speaker 4 (50:00):
This was his show.

Speaker 3 (50:01):
He bought it, and now it was being changed, it
was being threatened to be canceled, and no one was
talking to him about this when he heard all of
the details, apparently because the pilot had already been delivered
to NBC.

Speaker 4 (50:14):
Yeah, he told people.

Speaker 3 (50:16):
At the top, guess what, I'm going to air the
pilot the way it was. And you can't stop blessed Oldmyer, Right,
he's our patron saint in all of this, because his
insistence that he would air the pilot is ultimately what
caused all of the Men in Black team to back
down and actually negotiate with us, right, That's why suddenly

(50:38):
it went from non negotiable demands. So it was a
combination of our excellent defense binder and also the fact
that we had an invisible hero behind the scenes standing
up and fighting the good fight on our behalf. And
that combination of things is how we were able to
actually navigate this minefield and ultimately get our show on

(51:00):
the air. And there's one last great irony I think
in all of this about what actually was released when
we made the DVD of the series.

Speaker 1 (51:10):
When I had to go in and talk to that
NBC executive, I didn't know that bit about olmar No,
none of us knew this was all in retrospect. But
hearing you stated, Brent, that explains though, why things like
the autopsy got to remain in the Dark Sky's pilot yep,
Because it was very clear that Olmayer was going to
air it anyway. So if indeed he had aired that,

(51:32):
and then that still had to be excised from what
he'd already aired it. So things were worked out not
always with us in the room. And like I said,
at the beginning of this. A lot of these things
were conveyed to us by people. But here is the
ultimate irony. If you've ever wanted to go to film
school but you thought I can't afford to go to
film school, we got a deal for you, because it

(51:54):
turns out that first cut of Dark Skies it was
the way we liked it, It's the way we wrote it,
et cetera. Then there was a second cut, which we'll
call the NBC aircut, okay, because that's the one that
ultimately got delivered to them after these eleven days of reshoots,
and that's the one that aired on September twenty first

(52:15):
of nineteen ninety six. Guess what it turns out when
they put the finally, after fourteen years, put out the
Dark Sky's DVD set, we realized I didn't know this
at the time, that when the NBC had aired their
the version of the pilot that came with all the
reshoots in it, Sony had accidentally shared the original version

(52:38):
of the pilot with all the international buyers. Okay, so
I never knew that. And then suddenly, when the Shout
Factory people get all the tapes delivered to them to
make the DVD set.

Speaker 4 (52:51):
They're like, so there's.

Speaker 1 (52:52):
Two pilots here, what are they?

Speaker 4 (52:54):
And I went, you're kidding me.

Speaker 1 (52:56):
And so that DVD set, which again has left production
in twenty twenty five, is still available as a used
thing on Amazon in places has both movies in it.
You could literally watch them both and see, that's interesting.
How did they keep the essence of the show and
still shoot eleven days?

Speaker 4 (53:15):
What changed?

Speaker 1 (53:16):
And there's a bunch of things that changed. Some of
them are even better in some respects. The second one
moves a little better in a few places, and in
a few places it's heartbreaking.

Speaker 4 (53:27):
That's how I would describe it.

Speaker 3 (53:29):
Yeah, So in the end, we got the show on
the air through a lot of turmoil, and in the
weirdest way because it was tangled up in Men in
Black the franchise. It felt like we were in the phenomenon.
It felt like we were in a fight for our lives.
This was also the whole time period where JC was
coming into play as our real Men in Black. So

(53:52):
I look back on this time and I just think
I was not ready for anything that unfolded. That was
the wildest kind of year and a half of my life.
And I feel fortunate to have survived it and obviously
made such a great friend and collaborator with you. But
as you said earlier, I still when we were researching this,

(54:13):
I felt all of that kind of queasiness, the trauma
of how close we came to losing our careers, losing
possibly everything, simply because there were two ideas that were
on a collision course heading into the public consciousness, and
one had bigger gorillas, as they say, attached to it

(54:34):
than our show.

Speaker 1 (54:35):
I hear here to all that, here's my closing thought.
One of my favorite pieces of television, Brint, is Band
of Brothers, which is ironic because it's a mini series
that Steven Spielberg produced and Tom Hanks was involved in it,
and that's why I sat with them at the Emmys
and I've seen it twenty times. And one of the
things I like about Band of Brothers is that it's
really talking about how these friendships between these men was

(54:59):
for war. Now, I'm not going to compare literally what
you and I went to as war, but when I
started thinking back on what we were going to do
for this episode, and we've talked about a lot of
things in this podcast, it wasn't the fact that you
told me about John Harrington that has forged my friendship
with you. It's not that that made me go, boy,

(55:20):
that's a lifetime friend that I got to make.

Speaker 4 (55:22):
It was interesting, and.

Speaker 1 (55:23):
It wasn't even getting dark skies.

Speaker 4 (55:25):
On the air.

Speaker 1 (55:26):
The time where we were bonded in battle wasn't doing that.
It was the week in July primarily where we had
to live through what happened, where we both knew during
that time there was nobody else on earth who can
help us out of the situation but each other. So
that my friend is the positive and the upside of

(55:50):
this whole story, Yes.

Speaker 3 (55:51):
Makes it all worth it in its own weird way.

Speaker 1 (55:53):
So maybe on our next episode we won't have to
be so serious. We'll go for something else.

Speaker 3 (56:04):
If you're enjoying this podcast, it really helps us if
you leave a rating and a review wherever you listen
to your podcast, and if you're listening on YouTube, please subscribe,
smash that like button and give us a comment.

Speaker 1 (56:15):
Sound Light and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by
Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for
Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written by Anna
Stumpf and Hamilton Lighthouser. And your hosts and executive producers
are Bryce Abel That's me and Brent Friedman. Watch the
Skies