Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan and Stephen Romano Discussions from SAW to Black Light

This is Abby Normal and I am joined by author Eileen Magill. Today we are asking questions of Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan and Stephen Romano the authors of the new book Black Light.

Abby: Every October for the past 4 years we've seen a SAW movie from Patrick and Marcus.This year you've teamed up with a new writer, Stephen Romano, to give us a new, awesome character, Buck Carlsbad in a book called Black Light. Before we talk about your new book, Black Light, I'd like to get a little background on all of you.

Abby: Patrick and Marcus - how did you two meet? I see you both lived in Illinois and then went to University of Iowa.

Patrick: Me and Marcus met at the University of Iowa, I guess in our sophomore year. We both worked in movie theaters. I worked the cool, old movie theater called the Angler that had a balcony and all that. Marcus worked at the lame rival mall theater that had like five theaters that eventually ran us out of business.

Marcus: No comment!

Abby: Yeah, but now your movies are probably shown at his theater.

Patrick: Well, yes... what happened was that the Angler was only split into 2, so we got two movies, and Marcus's was split into 3, I think. I moved out to LA first, even though we started school at the same time, Marcus took 5 1/2 years to graduate, and then he came out shortly after. You ended up moving into my old apartment, so that worked out pretty good.

Abby: Patrick and Marcus: After your extreme success, how did you end up bringing in the multi-talented Stephen Romano in for Black Light.

Patrick: Well it just poured out in prison!

Marcus and I had this idea for Black Light. It was originally called The Collector, but we had this movie called The Midnight Man that the studio said "you need a new title," and we used The Collector. So then we had to come up with a new title for what eventually became Black Light. That story was originally a script idea that Marcus and I had and we began speaking to this editor named John Schoenfelder at Mulholland Books. He's like, "you've got to meet this guy, Stephen Romano. He's right up your alley. You should work with him on this." And we did. Stephen read some pages that we had, and he liked them. That's when we started going back and forth, and realized that we sort of had the same sensibilities. That's where it began.

Eileen: Stephen Romano, your career spans a great deal of areas: writer, producer, director, editor, composer, illustrator... with all of those talents, which do you enjoy the most?

Stephen: Writing. Writing is my one true love, my first calling. My second is a musician. I was a musician when I was much younger. I was in a band. I bring a lot of that rock and roll sensibility to my writing. That helped a lot with getting into screen writing. You develop a style that is quick and punchy and kind of macho. It gets the point of stuff in a much faster, much grittier way than you might otherwise get in another format or with other disciplines. But yeah, writing is the thing that I was put on this earth to do. And I know I was very fortunate to get involved with these guys.

Abby: Your movies have probably caused the most screams and nightmares for horror fans, along with putting a lot of your fans in therapy... Have any of you ended up in therapy?

Patrick: Yeah. We're all in therapy right now!

It's funny. We've all three read certain reviews that say, "He must be insane." Marcus and I live in LA, and the horror community is actually pretty tight knit. You see the same people at same premiers, and it's the nicest bunch of folks. We've sort of theorized that we all have a release for these stresses, and that's perhaps what keeps us all on an even keel, you know? So these are the most normal people you'd ever meet.

Abby: Thank you, because for years I was with the Academy of Science Fiction Fantasy and Horror, so I appreciate that.

Marcus: Absolutely. I think SciFi/Horror, what they do is they delve into the possibilities that are sometimes darker and nastier than any true life we could imagine. So I think for the horror fans, for the SciFi fans, it's always looking at a life that could be possible but isn't necessarily your own. Whereas, the comedy, is almost always 100% too good to be true, and it seems to be a false representation of anything that could be, so it must be born of some sort of absolute blindness.

Abby: Do any of you decorate your yard for Halloween?

Patrick: You wouldn't believe it. When I was a kid, I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, which is a not small town. It has a community-type vibe to it and Halloween was a huge thing. When I moved to LA in '97, I was in a neighborhood where there wasn't any of that, really. But a few years ago, with my kids now, moved to a remote community of LA, and I didn't know when I moved in that I now lived in one of the biggest Halloween trick-or-treating areas. It's because one block over from me all of these Imagineers from Disney live. They have access to props and such, and they build these amazingly elaborate Halloween exhibits. And it's like house after house constantly trying to one-up each other. And people bus in their kids to this area. And so it's like the first year it was like go big or go home. These people are running electricity, lights and sound, smoke and you wouldn't believe. So it's a big deal where I live.

Marcus: There was one group of 10-17 kids all with a rehearsed rendition of "Thriller" that would go in cycles for passersby.You could enter the realm of fright if you liked to earn your candy at the end. I have to buy at least a minimum of 1000 pieces of candy because there are so many people coming by. So you know those huge bags that you get at Costco and you're like, "I'll never use this." I have to buy like 10 of them.

Stephen: My house looks like that all year round. That's a slight exaggeration, but my home is actually covered from one end to the other in all sorts of horror and science fiction memorabilia, so if you walk into my home, you'll see posters from everything from The Phantom of the Paradise to Alien to A Battle Beyond the Stars and Wizards and whatever. It's just nuts. I have one entire wall in my house that is devoted to memorabilia from a science fiction Italian movie called Star Crash. It is actually, believe it or not, my favorite movie of all time. I live and breathe this stuff. I kind of walk it like I talk it. So every day is Halloween at Romano's house.

Eileen: My friends in the Final Fantasy 11 game want to know: Do you feel that you need to keep writing to a certain standard because of Tobin Bell/Jigsaw?

Marcus: Tobin Bell, with Jigsaw, took that ball and ran. He had handwritten notebooks that piled as high as his knees full of different philosophies. Anything that he could come across, anything he could put through John Kramer's filter. So every SAW entry would be a different branch. He never repeated himself, yet the philosophy was always intact. It would always be a little further in the next installment. He would find some tidbit, a sect, a belief that he could personalize and add another layer to a character that offered infinite soil to grow mayhem, and at the same time, a little bit of Karma.

Eileen: How is it for the three of you to collaborate on a book? Who did what?

Patrick: We've all sort of been in screenwriting, which is always collaborative, and the best idea wins, so we've already been trained not to be too prejudiced about anything. So when this started, we were always batting around ideas, and whoever came up with the best one, that's what went on there. It went back and forth on the material. But we had a very abbreviated amount of time; we didn't have time to screw around at all. I think that actually help to a certain extent because it just made us all move, move, move, and it worked out great. I think this all started with our initial conversations where we all understood sort of what this character should be, what he was all about. Stephen lives in Texas, in Austen, and he was like, "hey, he should live here." Marcus and I had been there a bunch of times, and, you know, "hell, yeah" and then it just all sort of clicked pretty well.

Abby: A lot of writers make fiction out of fact: What elements of truth are in the story?

Patrick: It's all based on... it's true.

Stephen: It's all people that I knew, and they're dead now. I have them buried in my back yard. That's another thing about Halloween that's really bad around my house when people come over and the ghosts really mess with them.

Marcus: The thing about Black Light, wholeheartedly, each of us wanted to offer a glimpse of hope that there's something beyond our time here. We wanted to fill it out with all shades. Nor would it be a place that's either good or bad, either you go down or you go up. There's a place in the middle, just to the side of us, where the unpunished, the punished, and those that are just wandering in between vacillating are set in. And if the journey is terrifying well, of course that's possible. It's also possible to have a rough day, a great day, or something in between. But I think that it is a comfort in knowing that there is somewhere to go. And with that, the character of Buck is the tour guide. And ultimately, I think, between those pages, is just something that the supernatural always does: it reassures us that we have a place out of time waiting for us.

Patrick: Plus, there's a lot of interesting little details along the way, you know, things that are interesting to use as writers that Buck either becomes obsessed with has an interest in. That's always fun to put in there, too.

Stephen: And then there's the technology, I mean literally, the train technology is theoretical at this point, but it was based on the research we had done. The Mag-Lev technology does exist. And that was something that Patrick and Marcus had researched initially because they wanted it to be a high-speed bullet train that the action took place on. I sort of ran with that saying, "Why don't we make this thing go real fast? Why don't we really put it in the future a little bit, and that way, it's even more terrifying, there's more at stake." It's more like a Die Hard kind of scenario. It kind of takes it's idea of it being an action movie with a horror backdrop, well one step forward, a multi-layered thing with it.

Marcus: Of course, the trouble with a lot of the horror movies is twofold. Why don't you call for help, and why don't you just run out of the house? So this time, yeah you can call anybody for help, and they'll pick up, but there's no way they can catch you. And you can't run out of the house, because you'll burst apart. So you better face your demons...cuz they're right there. They are giving you hell!

Eileen: The triangle of former maximum-security prisons in the California/Nevada area - is that something that really exists?

Marcus: Oh no, we made that up, that's complete BS.

Eileen: Well that explains why I couldn't find them.

Marcus: Well, you know, in any story, you want to present something as authentic as possible. And I think when you write in Buck's voice, you know, you have to sort of talk it like you own it, and so hopefully we did. I think it's probably a good endorsement of the book that you went and looked it up.

Stephen: We could have just said it was in Death Valley, which is cute and all, but we tried to up the stakes a bit. It's literally a death valley as opposed to death because it's hot.

I don't want to give away too much of the book, but originally, the ghosts that were in that area, we were defining them as characters. So like, these are the 10 worst people you're ever going to encounter. This one killed 15 kids so when Buck encounters that guy, it's like "Whoa!" We sort of tapered back on that a little bit.

Marcus: We did, but it's still there. He fights the Blackjack Nine, and they're the worst guys out there and they're under the command of Blackjack Williams who is someone to be reckoned with as well. We had to give him a place to come from, and it all ties into the plot. And hopefully, if you're good enough at making this stuff up, people will buy it. And apparently you did.

Abby: You did an outstanding job on this book. Will we see more of Buck Carlsbad in future novels? Or will we see him on the silver screen?

Patrick: With the first question, if there will be more books, sort of depends on how many books sell and such. As for a movie version, we are moving forward on that. A producer named Mike de Luca, who does everything from The Social Network, Money Ball to Drive Angry. He's a genre guy. He used to run New Line when he was a very young man. He's come on as a producer, and we are currently moving forward.

Abby: We both enjoyed your book immensely. Eileen: Yeah, it kept me up at night!

PMS: Thank you!

AN: Right now you're heading to the New York Comic Con?

PMS: Yes, we are.

Abby: We will let you go so you can get to your panel at the Comic Con. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us

With that, we will fade into The Black Light…