The Devil’s In The Details (Part I)
Jon Cooksey and Ali Matheson Discuss The Collector

By Robert Falconer, HNR Senior Editor

With the scarcity of indigenous Canadian television series, it’s gratifying to witness the birth of a new one-hour drama in Canada, particularly when it embraces many of the motifs we recall fondly from classic anthology shows of the past, such as The Twilight Zone. As a tale of one man’s journey to seek redemption against odds set by the Devil, The Collector manages to pay homage to those classic series of yesterday, while still blazing (sorry, couldn’t resist) its own path.

As the series gets ready to launch its second season, I sat down to chat with creators and executive producers (and husband and wife) Jon Cooksey and Ali Matheson about their experiences in the industry, the creative path that led to the origins of The Collector, and the state of television production in Canada. (As a special treat for readers, the interview also features some exclusive, as-yet-unseen photos from The Collector’s upcoming second season.) Robert: Jon, tell us when you first became interested in writing and producing. Did you always have a passionate ambition to be in this field, or was it something that you just happened to fall into?

Jon: I started writing disturbing short stories when I was about nine, which I think was my way of processing what had happened in my life up to that point. If my daughter started writing stories like that I’d take her to a psychologist [laughs], but in my case nobody appeared to think it was too unusual.

Anyway, writing was really the only thing that interested me, and I hid it until I was 27. At that point a friend of mine from college wormed his way into the business by writing a spec script…and of course I had the classic reaction: “Well, I can do that!” So I wrote a couple of feature scripts—and made minimal progress—and then Ali and I met on a blind date. Ali already had her career, writing for shows like Moonlighting and working in animation…stuff like that. So we started writing together, and one thing led to another…

Robert: Were you working in another capacity at this time to make ends meet?

Jon: I was a business manager at a Special Ed school for the first three years that Ali and I were together. I was extremely conservative, so I stayed in my day job virtually to the very end. Eventually, I finally took a chance and quit that job. We ran through the last dime of our money before we started getting some gigs on sitcoms. Though writing is what I love to do, we also started gathering some producing duties on the sitcoms.

Robert: Shortly thereafter you both began working on Rugrats. Tell us about the move to the animation industry, which is obviously set up quite differently from live action drama.

Jon: Yeah, the animation industry is structured very differently. Writers are over “here,” and everything is controlled by the animation directors and artists. So Ali and I eventually said, “Look, we know what the inflections on the voices should be, and we know best how to cut the radio plays.” We started to push our way in more creatively, and it all just came from saying, “We’re the writers and we know what it’s supposed to be…

Ali: Well, we said it a little nicer than that.

Jon: [Laughs] Yeah, we did. But ultimately we earned their trust, we befriended them, and we all made each other’s stuff better. In the long run it worked out fine, and we were given a gift by Lee Gaither at the Disney Channel, who decided we were the people to produce So Weird, which was a kind of teen X-Files. Originally they absolutely didn’t want us. At first they thought we weren’t “real” writers, only animation writers, notwithstanding that we had done other things—but that’s how they saw us. But we insisted, so Lee sent us to Vancouver with no live action producer’s experience—other than what we’d gotten on the sitcom—and then handed us over to producer, Larry Sugar. Larry allowed us to do the things we were good at, and taught us what we needed to know. After a couple of years, we got to the point where we weren’t making too many blunders [laughs] and that helped to cement our relationship with Larry.

Robert: Ali, your father is, of course, Richard Matheson, considered one of the more gifted authors and screenwriters of the past several decades. [Editor’s Note: Richard Matheson’s screen credits are voluminous—multiple episodes of the original Twilight Zone, multiple episodes of Night Gallery, the Star Trek TOS episode, “The Enemy Within,” Amazing Stories, The Outer Limits (1995) and the feature, What Dreams May Come (based upon his original novel), to name but a few.] Tell us a little about your dad’s early influence on you creatively, and how you became interested in writing.

Ali: Well, I was definitely brought up in an environment that showed me writing and producing from the get-go. My father’s career was very active when I was young, and I was taken to various sets and met various people. Certainly the ambiance, the milieu of writing, all the excitement of the creation was something I saw from the very start. I actually was a professional singer for a couple of years, and wasn’t interested in doing writing as a career in the beginning. Writing probably became more interesting to me as I decided that singing—or singing decided for me—that it wasn’t going to be a career.

Anyway, my brothers were very successful writers and had worked on various TV shows, and I finally decided that I was tired of being broke and watching my brothers succeed…so it was potpourri of things.

Robert: What shows did your brothers work on?

Ali: My older brother was under contract with Stephen J. Cannell Productions. He’d worked as a producer on shows like Hardcastle & McCormick and The A-Team. My younger brother had done Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures. I really was intrigued by all of it, and I think it was just sort of inevitable for me, like being part of a pack of wolves.

Robert: How did you build your early reputation as a writer?

Ali: I got involved through spec material and working with a partner and just sort of doing what was necessary to get us both started. We worked with animation and live action, and the first break came with Moonlighting, which turned out to be a very successful series. The producer, Glenn Gordon Caron, was a really great guy to work for; very talented, very helpful, and taught me a lot about writing and action and all of that stuff.

After my writing partner and I went our separate ways, I met Jon. Ironically, my writing was very linear when we met. He was incredibly helpful and I was blown away by this “business manager” having so many intriguing ideas.

I’m very interested in “production,” because I’ve seen first hand that producers have more power to implement their vision. Too often as a writer, you write something great then hand it over to the powers that be, and who knows what will happen to it. More than once I saw my father go through some “disturbances” in that regard, and seeing that my brothers were able to do a lot through production, I began to really enjoy the daily aspects of the entire process. I think Jon, on the other hand, is more of a pure writer. Me, I can find 101 things to do that do not involve sitting in front of a computer [laughs].

Robert: Your dad was good friends with a number of well-known writers and producers, including Rod Serling. What was it like growing up with those sorts of influences, and in your estimation, have they had an effect upon your writing?

Ali: Well, I was very young at the time, so it’s not like they were sitting me on their knee saying, “Ya know, chickadee…” But they certainly read us stories, and I remember Rod Serling coming up and reading me bedtime stories on a couple of occasions.

It was like a salon atmosphere, because a lot of interesting and talkative people would come and visit the house. They would always smoke and drink and sit in the living room, and my father would often play the piano. It was a very interesting, stimulating environment, and meeting individuals like Vincent Price and Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff, I definitely picked up that this was a provocative world.

Robert: Did your father encourage you to become a writer/producer…or quite the opposite?

Ali: My father always has been supportive in terms of whatever I wanted to do. He thought I had a really good voice and we had a shared love and interest in classical music. When I was young, I was the one he took to concerts at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

But he was very supportive, because in this business he well understood the ups and downs that can accompany one’s career. In my family, the vicissitudes of a creative life are the “norm.” There were times when my family had money—and we could do x, y and z—and there were times when my mom would say, “We don’t have any money,” and that’s just how it was. It’s the other “normal” people—like chartered accountants, for example—I don’t know what they do. I don’t necessarily understand the “real” life; I only know this.

Robert: Jon…what about yourself—any particular individuals or bodies of work that influenced your writing style?

Jon: Well, my tastes were always “dark.” By the time I was ten, I’d read all the way through H.P. Lovecraft. In fact in Eighth Grade I remember my teacher gave me back a report I’d done and said, “Edgar Allan Poe’s dead, long live Jon Cooksey.” When I was 12, my dad took me to see Hellhouse and it just FLOORED me. I was struck by the fact that with all these weird supernatural things going on in the picture, it all boils down to one little thing: this ghost that’s caused all this havoc hates the fact that he’s short. It struck me that it all came down to this one little human thing. And I think that’s reflected in The Collector, because all the horrible things that may happen in an episode usually come from some simple human desire or foible.

In any event, I didn’t necessarily stick with that darkness; by the time I met Ali I was in “turgid drama mode.” Meeting her was great, because we went and worked on a sitcom for four years. You can learn to write on any show, even it it’s bad, and by the time we got back to LA we’d learned a lot about comedy, and I think we became really good comedy writers.

I think that has flowed into everything else since then…that having now returned to one-hour drama it’s still a strong influence on things. The Collector has dark comedy, but you quickly recognize that we’re not just dealing with grim, dark things all the time…and when things are grim and dark, they’re usually horribly ironic, and the Devil finds that delightful. And as human beings, sometimes we are drawn to laugh at something that is horrible.

Robert: Let’s talk a little about the writing side of the equation for both of you. How do you split the duties of writing?

Jon: For me, I find I need quiet time alone to think through whatever it is that I’m trying to accomplish. Ali and I will go back and forth with ideas though. A premise will come from somewhere, whether it’s from an outside writer or from us. Most come from us because of the way the whole process is structured—you see with Telefilm, we have to come up with premises in advance. Anyway, we’ll start with a general premise, and then if it’s related to historical stuff, we’ll do research to assure a certain level of accuracy. So, for example, I’ll ask Ali specific questions, then she’ll go off and research and surf for information. Sometimes all you need is a couple of lines, but of course it has to be the right thing.

So I’ll work for a while…map everything out, and then give it to Ali. She’ll scribble all over it and give it back to me—then I’ll give her back my responses and we’ll go back and forth like that. And oftentimes there’ll be input other than just the two of us. And if there’s long-term disagreements, that will often be solved by production, where someone will say, “Well, we can’t do this we have to cut something,” and I’ll say, “Well then maybe we should just cut the thing we disagree about.” Or, the world will just chime in and it will become painfully obvious that one of us is wrong. But Ali and I disagree enough that if we BOTH think something is terrific, then most other people do too.

Ali: We’ve been doing it this way for about ten years now, and this is what works for us. We try, as John mentioned, to come to some meeting of the minds, particularly when there might be other individuals who suggest we do things differently. We do our best not to show a divided team, because sometimes individuals will try to move in on that.

And sometimes there are things that don’t work for me, and I let it ride, but I have found that “the process” usually irons those things out. It’s rarely that something ever gets shot and we don’t find ourselves in agreement.

Jon: Our actual process is perhaps a little unusual. Our premises are what most people would call outlines, and our outlines are what most people would call polished drafts. When we turn in an outline it’s usually twenty pages long and it contains all the dialogue.

Ali: That way, if you have a problem, come and see us.

Jon: Right. And the intent of that is very much to say that in creating a show from scratch, we didn’t want to leave any confusion as to what we meant. This is the tone we’re talking about…this is exactly how it’s going to be and so forth and so on…

Robert: So nobody can misconstrue anything once you’ve gone to script.

Jon: That’s right. If you don’t like it, you’ll know, because it’s all there. The idea was that once you get to script and you’re in final draft…and the scenes are locked in…and you’ve got to cut the length…and you’ve thought about how many pages in each location and how many pages on each day—then if people come to you and say, “Well, I don’t like that character…or what this person has to say,” then it’s easier to avoid a situation that’s often difficult to deal with because there’s suddenly many more factors to consider. We would much rather get any negative feedback we’re going to get during the outline phase. So they know that if they don’t like the outline, they’re not going to like the script, because it’s going to be just the same.

For us, that’s where we do any arguing. For me, when I process a scene and decide that it’s got to involve “these three things” and it’s got to get from “here to there,” I have to write it out. It’s just easier for me that way. I write out everything—all the dialogue. Ali then has the chance, pre-script, to go over that and decide what’s not working, and then when it gets to the script stage, she’s more likely to react line-by-line.

Click here for Part II.