'Banshee' was kind of a lark. I was getting paid pretty well to write movies no one was making - and so I decided to try my hand at TV and get paid much less to actually get something produced.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
'Banshee' was interesting because it was on cable, and it didn't have commercial breaks, so it read like a movie. Not only because of that, but it was a pretty interesting style, and I hadn't read a show like this.
We all like going to the dark side of things; we all like dipping into worlds that we don't know anything about, or hopefully don't know anything about. I think 'Banshee' gives people a chance to do that pretty safely because we all know there's a solid buffer between the show and reality.
The thing that fascinates me is that the way I came to film and television is extinct. Then there were gatekeepers, it was prohibitively expensive to make a film, to be a director you had to be an entrepreneur to raise money.
I liked 'Scream of the Banshee' because it was a real challenge. I thought, 'How am I going to pull off this character?' But, I also thought, 'Oh, man, I'm going to go for it.' He's got all the defects of character that an actor loves to play. So, I had a really great time.
Most of my work had been in theater, and I was jumping not just into television but 'L.A. Law,' which had all these megastars in it.
I was a novelist first. But in the mid-'80s, I did work in television for ten years. And yes, that was frequently the reaction to my scripts. People would say, 'You know, George, this is great. We love it, a terrific script, but it would cost five times our budget to shoot this.'
'Banshee' is the story of a man who gets out of prison, tracks down his long-lost love, and tries to reclaim what was stolen from him years earlier by assuming the identity of a sheriff. I guess you could say it's an explosive action drama - sit down, strap in, and enjoy the ride!
I like how steady the work in television is. Films, they're hard to come by. They're elusive. I've done a couple, independently financed. You do them, and maybe a few people will see them.
I wasn't really interested in doing television. I don't have that much ambition. My agent, Eileen Feldman, has all the ambition for me.
There were very, very large sums of money that I made when I was very young - 15 million published works and a great many successful movies don't make nothin'.
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