J Allen Williams Of Parallax Studio On How To Create Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories
An Interview With Ian Benke
Never talk down to your readers. It’s easy to do when we, as writers, get deep into the weeds of our sci-fi technology, terminology, and convoluted time travel scenarios wrought with plot holes.
Science Fiction and Fantasy are hugely popular genres. What does it take for a writer today, to write compelling and successful Science Fiction and Fantasy stories? Authority Magazine started a new series called “How To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories”. In this series, we are talking to Science Fiction or Fantasy authors, or an authority or expert on how to write compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing J. Allen Williams.
J. [Jeffrey] Allen Williams is an American animator, writer, producer, actor, musician, and director known for creating the independent science fiction interactive computer game “Darkstar: The Interactive Movie.” His current project is the sci-fi feature film MEAD, based on the 1972 underground comic book “Fever Dreams” written by Jan Strnad and illustrated by the late and legendary comic artist Richard Corben.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share a story about what first drew you to writing over other forms of storytelling?
I was one of those kids that moved around a lot, 16 schools in 12 years, so I spent a lot of time on my own left to entertain myself. I began writing stories by the age of 11 or so and started with my own primitive comic books. I was inspired by the comics I read at the time and was completely hypnotized by the work of Richard Corben in the Warren Magazines, his own Fantagor underground comics, and eventually Heavy Metal. When I was accepted into the Kansas City Art Institute in 1980, I told them I wanted to be like Corb and make movies from stories of that genre. They replied, “Nobody will EVER make movies from a comic story.” I fought my instructors each and every day to keep my creative integrity riding along my own set of rails, resisting their obsession to change my path or discourage me altogether. Despite interference from my professors, I acquired technical expertise in design & animation that came in handy later. My writing teacher Rush Rankin was the best of the bunch, he allowed me to explore my odd little ideas and gave me good grades. I discovered much later from Corb’s wife Dona that Richard had the exact same struggle at that same school 20 years previous to me in 1960, the year I was born. One thing Rich and I shared in common is that nobody was going to distract us from our personal vision of who we were, and what we wanted to create.
You are a successful author. What 3-character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
OCD helps a lot. In some ways it’s your worst enemy, and in others it is a superpower. My mind is always clicking away like some kind of crazy, off-beat clock, generating ideas for material, how to execute them, and ever pushing me forward no matter how difficult the project. OCD makes you doubt yourself, lowers your self-esteem and ego down to a point that you focus on what matters. You never blindly trust yourself, causing you to question why you are making a creative decision, forcing you to go over and over your narrative keeping it honest to your original idea and vision. The downside is it keeps you awake at night, it’s hard to shut off my brain sometimes.
Second, I devour everything I see. When someone asks a content creator who their influences are, they usually fall short from the truth. Sure, Corben was a massive asteroid that collided with my creative soul early on, but I think the true answer is “everything.” I believe a writer or film maker is even influenced and impacted by things they don’t particularly like, guiding them away from those ideas and toward what truly interests them. Defining your direction and staying on your own personal path is important.
Third, it’s all about work ethic and devotion to the craft. I’ve known many creative geniuses in different genres that never really completed anything. They had the spark, but not the drive. I spent about a decade on “DARKSTAR,” five years on “EVERYTHING” the film, and six years on “MEAD.” And these were projects that much of the work was done completely by myself wearing many hats. Sometimes 12–16-hour days that lasted for months at a time. And during these productions I was running my Advertising & Marketing business, so if I did not consider all these things my life as it were, I wouldn’t have had one. Writing & Producing is hard work, and the rewards take a long time to come around, and sometimes they never do. You have to be okay with all of that.
Can you tell us a bit about MEAD/the interesting and exciting project you are working on? What are your goals for this project?
MEAD is a new feature film based on the underground comic book story illustrated by Richard Corben and written by Jan Strnad entitled “To Meet the Faces You Meet.” It all began when I was twelve years old after I discovered a Richard Corben underground comic by the name of “FEVER DREAMS.” At the time I was experimenting with animation with my grandfather’s 8mm home movie camera doing clay dinosaurs and Laurel & Hardy tribute films with a rotund friend of mine. After reading the comic I said out loud to myself “Someday I’m going to make a movie out of this.” I had no idea that Richard and I would meet a couple of decades later and work on many projects together. I discovered that he lived just three hours north of me in KC and had gone to the same college as I. In 2016 I cleared the decks in my studio and began work on a two-minute demo to prove to myself that I could pull off a feature film from Richard and Jan’s comic story. I sent the demo to Richard, and he loved it, that’s when he introduced me to the original writer of the comic, Jan Strnad.
I’d already written out the full screenplay that expanded a 16-page comic with only three characters to a nearly two-hour fully fleshed out world. I expanded the short story and populated it with additional characters and situations within the narrative. Pre-production and casting began as Jan joined me in punching up the words on the page with fresh ideas in a very fun and productive collaboration. Jan is a 20-year Disney veteran working on projects like Darkwing Duck, Goof Troop, the Aladdin film Return of Jafar, and has also penned many Star Wars graphic novelizations. He had severe PTSD after years of mistreatment by the Disney suits, so I really had to earn his trust as we got to know each other during the co-writing process. I think he’s a better writer than I am, but be that as it may, we were a great team and I’m very proud of the script we produced together.
We muscled through Covid-19, amassed a tight budget to produce a complex independently produced animated film, cast stars to play the parts (Patton Oswalt as MEAD, Robert Picardo as Admiral Gillette, and Patrick Warburton as Timmy the Wunderbot), and hired a crew to begin a three-week principal photography schedule. The entire film had been completed prior to filming actors — minus the actors of course. We used these animated sequences as reference to meticulously shoot all of the scenes with characters, a tedious and unique process I developed myself. “MEAD” is the only film in history to use live-action actors encapsulated in a 100% animated world. Some films have come close, Tron, Sin City, The Last Starfighter, Cool World, Sky Captain, and the World of Tomorrow — but ours stands alone in its execution.
In spring of 2022 after completing post-production editing of MEAD, we signed an agreement with Vision Films, choosing them out of a field of about 30 potential distribution partners. Since then, we have been working on pre-marketing, marketing, distribution strategies, promotion, and release strategies. In May we debuted the film at the Cannes Film Festival, then on August 6th Robert Picardo hosted a theatrical premier at the historic Orinda Theater in California, and immediately after that, a two-night theatrical event was launched in Missouri — Richard Corben’s and my home state.
The official release date was August 9th when it was released on most major VOD and cable outlets in the US and Canada. The DVD/BluRay physical product will be available on major on-line retailers in early September 2022, also from Vision Films.
Wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. How do you define sci-fi or fantasy? How is it different from speculative fiction?
There is a grey line between all of those genres really, and I think an author has latitude to define them freely as they develop their story. I’ve heard a lot of debate regarding this issue, usually because somebody online posts in a sci-fi room with horror or fantasy comment and they get flamed. There is so much fan vitriol these days, much of the hate aimed at Star Wars from Star Wars fans. I don’t get it. My love for fans is rock solid, but to some I just want to say, “eat your popcorn and shut up.”
My previous film “Everything” is one of those narratives with an ambiguous definition of genre. It’s about the angel of death deciding to make deals with people who don’t want to die, and it nearly always goes horribly. It’s not really horror, not really suspense, but kind of. Not sci-fi. I guess it aligns best with the fantasy label, but it’s nothing like Lord of the Rings or other fantasy films. When describing it I usually fall back on the “Twilight Zone” vibe, and that makes me wonder in what pigeonhole most people would stick Rod Serling or Richard Matheson. As an anthology, it navigates the different sensibilities gracefully, but often it’s not that easy to define what the hell they emulate genre-wise.
“MEAD” is no doubt Science Fiction — but many argue there are many sub-genres to be had. The story was originally written just three years after the original Star Trek series and five years before Star Wars. We can never be accused of lifting much from modern Sci-Fi or Fantasy, since the inspirations for “MEAD” are more congruent with IPs such as Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are many tips of the hat to those seminal titles in my movie, and a love letter to many more.
It seems that despite countless changes in media and communication technologies, novels and written fiction always survive, and as the rate of change increases with technology, written sci-fi becomes more popular. Why do you think that is?
There has been a massive re-imagining of all the original material we aging, dying baby-boomers grew up with. In high school nearly all of us were walking around the hallways with those bible-thick books such as DUNE or the Tolkien epics. Writers like Bradbury, Asimov, Matheson, Clark, and others have had their stories adapted, migrating into comics, television, and film for decades.
That idiot at KCAI that told me films would never be made from comic stories was, of course, woefully incorrect, and indeed those films are what dominate theaters in a post-Covid world. I won’t mention his name. Steve Sidelinger. Last day of my tenure there, he shook my hand and quipped “Mr. Williams, I am certain you will become a prolific van muralist.” Well played Steve. Well played.
Attention spans by readers have shrunk significantly since my younger days, and this has needed to be addressed by modern content creators, publishers, and distributors. I believe reading has sadly declined over the years with only audio books saving the lion’s share of the concept. Alternately, and at the same time, films have expanded from 90 minutes to over three hours, much longer than the average pee. But compared to the time it takes to read a book, even in several sessions, it seems to fit the tiny amount of time consumers are willing to invest in that form of entertainment. When I read books, I tend to binge read them. I remember as a kid reading “The Wizard of Oz” in one sitting on a rainy day. I’ve done that with “Misery,” “Rendezvous with Rama,” and many others. I’m not sure what that says about my attention span. I guess you have to have a pretty big one to do it all in one go, but then maybe not so much since I didn’t read over several days to get to the finale.
Regarding the popularity of Science Fiction. In the late 60’s a mainstream groundswell was beginning that would culminate in the success of franchises such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, and many more. But it was a slow burn. I used to get beat up as a kid for admitting I loved Trek, and all our parents thought all of this stuff was a waste of time. I think those of us that believed in that kind of storytelling when it was not cool resent the fact that now everyone is a fan. Where were you guys back in ’72? Oh yeah, beating me up at school.
In your opinion, what are the benefits to reading sci-fi, and how do they compare to watching sci-fi on film and television?
Well, of course they are completely unique experiences and often the interpretation of the material from the written page to the screen, big or small, often results in an abysmal gap between the two. For example, the Bradbury story “The Sound of Thunder” — this was one of my favorite Bradbury anthological short stories which spawned a feature film that had absolutely no similarity to its source material. Dune is another that has birthed at least three versions of the story that have nothing in common with each other, as was Lord of the Rings. It is always inevitable when a film is adapted from a novel that “fans” will compare the two, and it always seems like the gallery answer is that the book is far superior, and the movie is crap. I don’t know that’s always the case, but often I suppose that often it may very well be. To some, the entertainment that people consume has become a fashion statement, not an escape from the mundanity of everyday life as it is intended. Maybe I am wrong, but to me, (the current me and the 12-year-old me) that’s what it’s truly all about. Escape. In my case it was more about escaping from the boring human being I believed myself to be, and a less than happy childhood. As an author, I can escape that shell and ascend to something larger than life, even if for just a short time, and hopefully take a few souls with me.
I’ve always been an avid consumer of both reading and watching film. The latter sometimes has the vibe of ingesting crack cocaine compared to the former, probably a result of our parents casting such a dim view upon our kinship with movies and TV — especially if it’s Sci-Fi. They’d rather you shoot a Red Ryder BB gun in the house and put your eye out. Sometimes movies are fast food, sometimes they provide the nourishment of a full meal. And sometimes the really bad stuff is so bad it’s good. I love Ed Wood. He may not make very good films, but the guy put so much passion into it, he was the original Hollywood fanboy and his love for film was evident in every frame he shot. I’m friends with several of the folks behind Mystery Science Theater 3000, and they almost single-handedly created a culture in which the appreciation of bad films and “riffing” on them became an American pastime.
Written literature can be exactly the same. There are comics (sometimes called graphic novels to make them seem more relevant), and classic novels like Melville’s Moby Dick — a complete buffet ranging from junk food to caviar. Often, I prefer the junk food, most writers won’t admit that. I’m glad that comics have enjoyed a whole new world of respect. There’s a lot of crap there, just as there is in literature and movies, but there is so much amazing work in graphic novelizations that takes the written word and illustrates it in dramatic fashion. My friend Richard was the reigning king of that, along with his collaborator Jan Strnad. I’m proud, so proud to be able to call myself a collaborator with both of them.
What authors and artists, dead or alive, inspired you to write?
There was a used bookstore I’d ride my bike to, sometimes skipping school and reading there all day. The two hippies that owned it let me, even though I never had any money to buy anything. I read Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Mary Shelley, Douglas Adams and more. My young mind was very adept at visualizing mentally and photographically all the colorful worlds these authors painted, a world I much preferred to the dysfunctional world I lived in. The worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs in his “Barsoom” novels were breathtakingly fertile ground for these exercises in imagination — he set the stage and the mind goes wild. I soon realized that the images I conjured in my mind’s eye were my own, because the written word only planted the seed and provided the context. These writers gave me that incredible gift of not over-describing environments or characters, allowing me the privilege of mentally collaborating with them in visualizing my own interpretation of their world. Perhaps this is why we are often disappointed with an adaptation of a world we felt we helped build.
If you could ask your favorite Science Fiction and Fantasy author a question, what would it be?
I think that author is Jan Strnad, and since he’s not dead yet and a good friend, that is a gift. One of the best novels I’ve read for a while is his book “Dances with the Dead,” and I’d like to talk to him more about that. It’s a wonderful Sci-Fi yet real-world concept that would make a great movie. (Stay tuned?) The main question I would ask him is: How the hell did you write your main character who is a woman so correctly? I’d like to think that I know women pretty well, but I don’t think I could write from their perspective as adeptly as he wrote his main character in first person.
I’d also have a plethora of questions for the late Harlan Ellison, who was a friend of Jan’s before he passed away. I don’t think there is another author with such a strong personality and interesting personal story. I love his rants on Hollywood.
And it would be interesting to talk to Arthur C. Clark who was a real scientist and patent holder in addition to being a legendary sci-fi author. I’d like to ask him what it was like to collaborate with Kubrick — a guy who did not give two shits about science fiction. That’s what made that movie arguably one of the best films of all time. You had the science guy who wrote something from a place of astrophysics and evolution, and a Director who knew how to tell the unflinching truth of this narrative on film with the idea that “the most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent.”
We’d like to learn more about your writing. How would you describe yourself as an author? Can you please share a specific passage that you think exemplifies your style?
People ask me this a lot. Why do I write what I write, what inspired me or gave me the energy or vision to get to the end of it in one piece. I figured out the answer to that long ago while in the abyss of a huge project wondering why the hell I was doing it. There was no guaranteed payday at the end, often there were few that truly believed in what I was doing, and nearly always I was in a seemingly never-ending treadmill working on a project that had become a proxy for a real life, one that involved real people. My characters would become my friends. I had a prop of “MEAD” in my office as the end of post-production neared, and I talked to him often as I’d not seen a human being for months. I’m much better now.
The answer to your question is: “I don’t do it, it does me.”
My projects have all had the distinction of taking years and years to complete, so I have to be very particular as to what airplane I decide to jump from. Most would worry about the parachute, oddly I don’t ever do that, there is no exit strategy after I jump, and if I ever considered one, I would never take the leap to begin with. The idea has to mean something to me, and often I don’t know what that is specifically. It has to be something firmly in my own wheelhouse, something close to me, something I fully understand and can produce with my skill set, and something I believe will move people. It’s important to me to affect the emotions of my audience. I knew “MEAD” was a good film when it made people cry at the end. If you do that, especially near the end, you know you kept them entertained and that they care about your character’s pain. And if the audience cares about them, they care about you as the author.
Truly anything I have ever done has been an exercise in healing low self-esteem. George Carlin once said that his class clown persona was to get all the kids in his class (and the teachers) to say, “Oh, isn’t he cute?” I received little approval from adults when I was young in the 60’s, it was a different time in American history when people were so pessimistic, kids were to be seen and not heard, and nearly anything that interested me was forbidden. My mom regularly had comic book burnings, referred to Star Trek “Star Trash,” and discouraged me from participating in such a worthless endeavor such as writing, drawing, or making my little movies on 8mm. At the time I did not feel like I was a strong human being, but in retrospect, I must have been a boy of iron and steel because despite negative input from external sources and my own internal doubt, I never, ever stopped doing that thing I did.
Another positive result of that journey is that I am a warrior when it comes to encouraging young people to create. I had the pleasure of being a Creative Director at Missouri State University and was surrounded by such refreshing, young creativity. So many teachers talk “at” their students and don’t listen to the artist within. They are hungry for approval more than they are guidance. The seed of inspiration begins to grow at a very young age. Adults need to learn how to allow them to grow into the unique, amazing individual that is already inside of them.
Based on your own experience and success, what are the “Five Things You Need To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories?” If you can, please share a story or example for each.
- Originality is key. It’s tempting to regurgitate or emulate a successful IP for many reasons, and that needs to be avoided. You expect Hollywood to do that, they are in the business of making money, not art, and who can blame them? Hopefully, the art will come from those like us that create — if the bean counters will trust us. Originality is synonymous with risk. That’s why you see so many sequels and knockoffs, they are safe. It’s not easy to get a publisher or movie studio to put money behind your unique idea, and that means it has to be good and marketable. In their lifetimes Van Gogh and Mozart were not celebrated as they are now, in fact both were discouraged and criticized for their uniqueness and the very core of what made them geniuses. It’s easier to be commercial, please everyone, and consign yourself to being a hack. Try not to be a hack, your idea should be worth fighting for. You know you’ve done it right if it is difficult for you to compare to anything else when asked what your project is similar to.
- You will suck at first. Get used to the idea. Few come out of the egg Stephen King or Steven Spielberg (and neither did they). Most of us that have been doing this a long time look back at some of our work as “blackmail material.” My friend J. Elvis Weinstein of MST3K once said to me “fake it ’til you make it”. That’s a great way to look at it. It doesn’t mean you build some elaborate self-mythology and lie about your abilities, it’s more about the idea of projecting to yourself internally that you have what it takes to endeavor upon a growth process, a journey in which you have projected a personal path of success. You should project confidence on the outside, even if you have profound self-doubt inside. The suits won’t believe in your talent unless they think you believe in it.
- Write what you know, write truth. They say an actor’s performance, above all, must project honesty. Well, how can they do that if the words you write for them are bullshit? To compel emotion and suspend doubt in your vastly upside-down sci-fi world, it has to be believable even in the context of the unbelievable. The easiest way to do that is to write from what you know and understand. It’s like when you tell a lie, the more elaborate it gets and outside your wheelhouse, the more difficult it is to maintain it. Too much to remember, too much to make up as you go. If you are a passenger on a plane and you start telling a stewardess the lie that you are a pilot to impress them, you’re in deep shit when the pilot has a heart attack, and she runs to you to land the damned thing. You’ll notice Stephen King often uses Maine as a location in his books, and if you notice there is quite an authenticity regarding the geography of his stories because it’s his turf. Sometimes that may feel off to a writer because we think everyone comes from our mental and creative place and will find it just as mundane as we do. Sometimes our characters may seem unoriginal because we base them on someone or something we’re familiar with. Understand as a writer that your inner thoughts and experiences are often unique to your audience, and it’s your job to make it so. Sure, you’re writing about Lovecraftian tentacled aliens and wormholes in space, how does that come from what you know, right? Just tell the truth and write about what you know while making up crazy shit. Otherwise, you’d better be good at research. Don’t tell your readers you are a pilot if you’re not or your plane will crash and burn.
- Don’t get too hung up in science. Though my favorite sci-fi film is “2001: A Space Odyssey”, and Arthur C. Clark is arguably one of the most scientifically grounded writers who ever lived, keep in mind that you are first and foremost a storyteller, not Bill Nye the Science Guy. Sagan wrote “Contact,” a story that clung precariously to known science, but he pushed the idea of “what if” to the very edge of astrophysics and the potential of alien life.
Most films break the rules. Artificial gravity on a starship without a centrifuge. The constant breaking of the galactic speed limit of 186K miles per second established by Einstein’s theory of general relativity (Sorry, warp speed is bullshit, it’s why we’ve never been visited by aliens). Sound in the vacuum of space with laser beams, fireballs, and explosions (We all break that one ad-nauseum). We lazily accept the idea that sci-fi creates a world that is technologically advanced as our excuse inventing these literary short-cuts, ignoring the fact that some things regarding science or technology cannot be manipulated by advances in tech in our silly little stories.
But who wants people floating around the inside of every single starship with no gravity? Who wants silent space battles? And our fictional sci-fi worlds will be very small without faster-than-light speed. Break the rules! It’s why they call it Science FICTION. Just don’t break my rule #3 and always write your own truth and be straight with your readers. You can make up crazy shit, and still write honestly.
5. Never talk down to your readers. It’s easy to do when we, as writers, get deep into the weeds of our sci-fi technology, terminology, and convoluted time travel scenarios wrought with plot holes. Sometimes we substitute substance with confusion hoping the reader will buy it. It’s fine to talk “quantum temporal flux anomalies” and such bullshit, just don’t use confusing rhetoric as a replacement for a well thought out story arc or plot. That doesn’t mean you can’t expect a modicum of intelligence from your audience, you should.
It’s marginally hypocritical that I have this opinion when Clarke/Kubrick’s 2001 begins and ends with a wildly vague concept that left most scratching their heads, and yet it’s one of the best sci-fi epics ever produced. This one expected a lot from audiences, and many critics at the time lamented it expected way too much. In this case, the beauty of the execution prompted many of us to go back and read the book or view the movie 50 times. Eventually we got it.
If Stanley Kubrick will not be the guy taking your story to the next level, you should make sure you are speaking vaguely the same language as your readers.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Entertainment, Business, VC funding, and Sports read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them :-)
Guillermo del Toro is first and foremost an artist and was deeply inspired by my friend Richard Corben. Indeed, he owns a museum-load of Corb’s original art and grew up a Corben fan reading stories like “Child,” “Den,” and probably “To Meet the Faces You Meet” — which I produced as “MEAD.” Guillermo is a master storyteller, he paints stories in vivid color, manufactures visceral imagery from a deep well of imagination, and his movies have heart. I hope he’d appreciate my execution of “MEAD” as Richard did and as Jan does. We’re close to the same age, so we share a similar journey through the ever-evolving culture of Fantasy & Science Fiction that took root when we both were wild and wide-eyed children. Above any other Director, even Coppola, Lucas, or Spielberg, I’d love to share a nice bottle of red with him.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
MEAD is available on most VOD streaming platforms [iTunes, Vimeo, Amazon Instant, YouTube, Vudu, Hoopla] and cable outlets [check local listings] across the US and Canada. The DVD and BluRay with additional, exclusive behind the scenes content, will be available on major online retailers in September.
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Thank you for these excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent. We wish you continued success.
