It’s a shame, too, because had ABC exhibited a bit of courage during the just ended 2005-2006 television season, I think Spotnitz was poised to connect in a big way with his redo of Darren McGavin’s cult favorite Night Stalker.  Emphasizing mood and character over the more sensational horror elements (though there are plenty of monsters knocking about in all ten episodes), Spotnitz was trying to make something soulful in the Mann style, and though the show never hits its stride (again, ten episodes), it’s always interesting and, at times, genuinely frightening. 

I had the opportunity to chat with Spotnitz on the phone the other day, and he was refreshingly candid about the development of Night Stalker, network politics, and how the show’s elevated budget might’ve contributed to its demise.  We also discussed his in-development big screen remake of The Star Chamber, John Fante and, yes, a potential second X-Files movie.  If that sounds interesting to you, have at!

I think the smartest thing you did was to go with a lead who couldn’t be more different in appearance and personality from Darren McGavin. 

I wish I was that smart from the beginning.  I went through weeks if not months of trying to figure out how to do it with somebody more like Darren McGavin, and it’s sort of a long discussion about why I ultimately didn’t go in that direction, but among other things I came to the conclusion that it would be a mistake to do it like Darren McGavin did it because of the comparison; I would be bound to suffer by comparison.  Nobody can do Darren McGavin better than Darren McGavin.  And there were a number of other issues about the idea of a TV series having a lead in his fifties who’s looking back on his career and trying to get back into the big time that didn’t quite work for me.  It was sort of a long process that lead me to going in a different direction than Night Stalker had gone before.

Having a fifty-year-old lead in a TV series – would that be a problem for the network?

You know, if you cast the right guy you could probably get away with it.  If it was Ted Danson or John C. Reilly, which are both people I thought of.   Or Bruce Campbell.  But I was a big fan of the original Night Stalker TV movies and I watched the original series as a kid, and I re-watched them all when I was trying to figure out how to go about it now.  And I realized that it worked great in the movies to have a guy in his fifties looking for a story that would catapult him back into the big time, but it doesn’t work so great when you’re doing a weekly series, where that’s his motive, because you know what’s going to happen.  You know he can’t possibly get the story of the series would be over; it’s kind of a one-note idea.  So, the more I understood that, the more I realized that it didn’t make sense to have an older guy.  You wanted a younger guy whose future was ahead of him rather than an older guy looking over his shoulder.

I also liked the idea to have Kolchak tormented by a tragedy in his past.  The way you use that gives the show a bit of soulfulness. 

Thanks.  That sort of came about as part of the same process of discovering what worked and didn’t work about the original.  Before, he had no personal connection to these stories whatsoever; they were just stories that he thought would give him a job at a big paper, and it just didn’t work to sustain a TV series in my mind.  You needed some kind of personal connection to the supernatural, which would also help explain why these stories didn’t end up in the paper every week, because he really wasn’t doing it for the paper; that was just his excuse to be able to ask questions.

I was a really big fan of Robbery Homicide Division, and I was happy to see that you kept the digital camera approach.  I wasn’t sure that worked all the time on a cop show, but here it really enhances the eeriness.  Are you a HD convert?

I am a convert, but I think there are some types of stories that lend themselves more naturally to it than others.  I mean, you can use it for anything, and it’s fine for anything, but especially when you’re doing all this night photography on locations, it’s just spectacular because it’s so good at capturing light in low light situations.  You see details that you’re not used to seeing.  We’ve been watching film for so long that we’ve forgotten that, when you’re watching film stuff at night, you’re not seeing the sky at night; you’re not seeing way off into the distance like you do in real life.  For me, Robbery Homicide Division was a revelation working with these cameras, and, then, by the time Night Stalker came along it was not that difficult a connection to make that these cameras would be really appropriate for it.  And they had a new generation camera at Panavision called the Genesis, which I was all over.  Actually, with the pilot, we were the first TV show to ever use that camera; I think there were only three in existence at the time, and the others were all down in Australia for Superman Returns.  Then when we went to series, I fought really hard to get them so we were all an all Genesis show.

Now, did that knock the budget up?

It sure did.  It was a big, passionate fight on my part to the studio, because, of course, they don’t want to spend any money they don’t have to spend.  These are sort of hard things to quantify when you’re talking to people who are looking at the bottom line.  “I mean, what does it matter?  You’ll still get the script shot?”  But I really believe people have a response to images that are new, that they haven’t seen before.  Whether they think about it or not, you’re feeling that something is different.  I was pretty passionate about that, and, happily, I won.

But I’m also wondering, having this enhanced budget as the show was struggling to survive, if you would’ve been willing to back off on the look of the show just to keep it going?

I don’t think in terms of our life on ABC that it made any difference.  It was a question when we got cancelled, and could we go to another network.  And then it was not practical because we had to designed the show not just for the cameras, but it was virtually all locations.  Almost every day we were out on different locations in the city of Los Angeles, which is very expensive.  So, it wasn’t practical to take it to a cable network, for instance.

This is a great Los Angeles show.  And that’s something you share in common with Michael Mann, who shoots the hell out of L.A.

The reason I did Robbery Homicide Division wasn’t so much to do a cop show, because I wasn’t dying to do any show after having done X-Files for eight years.  But because Mike is such a visionary, I really couldn’t turn down the chance to work with him.  He understood what these cameras could do, and used them to their maximum effect.  He has such an incredibly keen aesthetic sense, and his use of locations is extraordinary.  It made a big impact on me, so I was eager to use these cameras and to take advantage of all the amazing locations we have in the city that, oddly enough, are not photographed as much as you think for all the filming we do in Los Angeles.

Were there any holdovers from the crew of Robbery Homicide Division on Night Stalker?

Actually, not as many as I would’ve liked.  There were a number of people on Robbery Homicide Division that I would’ve loved to have worked with again, but they had all been snapped up.  Same with a lot of X-Files people that I had worked with, so I was forced to find a number of new collaborators.  But we ended up having an extraordinary crew, and it was a very happy working experience.

You hear so often that these shows take a lot of time to find their audience, and there doesn’t seem to be a willingness to give a show any kind of time if the ratings aren’t there.  Going into this, was that something that worried you?  Did you know going in that you only had so many shows to catch on or else you’re screwed?

Yes.  (Laughs)  Completely.  We had enormous obstacles to our success, starting with the time slot.  As soon as we got picked up, it was like, “Oh, good news:  you’re going to be a series!  Bad news:  you’re going to be on Thursdays at 9 PM opposite CSI!”  And that’s probably one of the worst time slots you can get.  And, then, over the course of the summer as we were going into production, we discovered that the network wasn’t going to buy any paid advertising for us whatsoever.  So, the only comfort we took was that we had a great lead-in in Alias, which hopefully would bring a lot of eyeballs to our show.  Finally, when Alias went on the air, as you probably know they had a really disappointing season; they didn’t get the audience they used to get.  And as the research later showed, the audience they did deliver wasn’t compatible with our audience.  So, when you don’t have a good time slot, you don’t have any paid advertising, and you don’t have a good lead-in, it’s very tough to succeed.  And I made the argument pretty strongly to the network that, “Look, this is a really strong show.  You’ve got a lot of assets here.  Look at these other things as reasons why it’s not performing in the ratings.”  And I really believed that argument was persuasive and that it would prevail right up until the day we got cancelled.  That’s my take on why the show didn’t succeed.

Even then, did you feel like you were being set up to fail?

Well, we certainly weren’t given a lot of help.  When that’s your set-up, you would hope that the network would realize that those are tough circumstances to succeed in.  And there were a lot of people at the network who did agree with my arguments and were pulling for the show.  It’s such a competitive environment, network television right now.  They are so pressured to come up with instant hits because their advertising dollars are bleeding away every week that they don’t have a certain number.  It’s very tough for them to stick with something.

Do you feel like you’ve got Night Stalker and Kolchak out of your system, or do you feel like there’s another life for it?

You never know.  I think the odds are remote that it would come back.  I had spent so much time thinking about it, and had such a full world that I wanted to explore, that I would love to do it if there was a chance to do it, if there was some way to do it.  I’m not expecting that it will find some afterlife, but you never know.

Well, I was thinking about maybe developing a feature.

Aside from Joss Whedon doing that with Serenity, it’s so rare to find anybody interested in