Tag Archives: zombies

Will and Bobby Wrote Something: Part Three

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Click here to start Will and Bobby Wrote Something from the beginning!

As I mentioned, Bobby and I wrote a second script for The Dead Don’t Walk, which is a prequel of sorts to “The Alley,” which I posted last month.

We decided at some point that we should probably show an alternate story, which would set up the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, or at least show what happened to a particular group of people when it all started. Matt Battaglia (our artist) sat down with Bobby and myself and together the three of us tried to hatch out a story.

Ultimately we ended up with the idea of office workers having a party when everything goes to hell. I’m just going to jump right into it.

Click here to read the second script for The Dead Don’t Walk, titled “The Office.”

With this script, we end our explanation of The Dead Don’t Walk where we began. At the end of this script we create the image of Gray sitting at the base of the tree, which I posted back in Part One . That image also functions as Gray’s starting point before the events that occur in “The Alley,” and further show his stoic, world-weary attitude when surrounded by chaos (we also end with a president named “Jeremy Button,” for some reason. Stupid).

Just to summarize this project: I love The Dead Don’t Walk. I wish we hadn’t accidentally ripped off The Walking Dead, and I wish that Bobby and I had just gone ahead with our plans to pitch that show.

It’ll remain locked up in a vault for the time being, though, or rather it’ll remain posted publicly online until the day that we decide to bring it back. Who knows, it’s not impossible.

So that ends The Dead Don’t Walk, and now we move on to the third show that Bobby and I ever created.

It is by far the most out-there concept we’ve ever come up with.

Here’s the story of the show Edinburg Falls.

Knowing that we couldn’t use The Dead Don’t Walk as a show to backup our comedy series, Bobby and I had to come up with something new. We still didn’t want to create a second comedy show, and our attempt at horror failed, so we landed on an idea for a mystery series.

We decided at first to feature a writer as our main character, who, at the urging of his editor, goes away to the small mid-west town of Edinburg in an effort to creatively recharge himself.

Bobby and I had long conversations about what should be wrong with the town. At one point ghosts were involved, at another point a murderer was at large, and then ultimately we landed on a genius (I’m serious) idea: Edinburg would be the origination point for American folklore.

Bobby and I went online and studied every kind of American monster we could. At first we assumed we’d find a lot of monsters like Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, and the Bogeyman, but mostly all we found were interesting creatures with laughably bad names, like the Squonk.

Regardless, we found enough intriguing monsters to make it worth our while, so we started writing. We created a first episode where our hero, terrified by prophetic visions brought on by monsters, tries to leave. As he reaches the towns limit, a wall of stone appears to rise from the ground, locking the town of Edinburg away from the rest of the world.

Bobby and I laid out a general concept that would take us through five seasons of Edinburg Falls. We explained where the monsters came from, we explained what happens to our characters, and most importantly, we explained the flabbergastingly dumb reason why the wall of stone appeared.

I’ll leave the full treatment until next month (which pretty much lays out the entire show), but until then, take a look at this drawing I made of the town, and see if you can find the horrible explanation for the town’s isolation (and also read a little bit of insane background):

Click here to view the Edinburg Falls town diagram.

That’s right, a wall of stone didn’t rise out of the ground, the entire town sank into the ground, because (seriously, we wrote this), the town of Edinburg is resting on the head of a giant screw.

More about Edinburg Falls over in Part Four! Click here! Or take a quick detour by checking out spec script we wrote for Arrested Development in Part Three.Five!

Will and Bobby Wrote Something: Part Two

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To go back to Part One: click here!

How incredible is it that the name we came up with for our zombie TV show sounds like a weird bitter retort to “The Walking Dead?”

The Dead Don’t Walk.

How amazing is that?

“‘The Walking Dead,’ huh? You know… the dead don’t walk. Morons.”

As stupid and crazy as all this sounds, I still 100% stand by The Dead Don’t Walk. I love the name, I love the concept, and I love our version of zombies.

Being a fan of horror films, I’m familiar with a lot of different versions of zombies. Without a doubt, the most well known and accepted versions of zombies are the ones from Night of the Living Dead. Prior to that, zombies weren’t shambling cannibal corpses, but were rather sort of mindless voodoo victims, carrying out someone’s orders.

George Romero (the writer/director) somehow redefined the word “zombie” for all time. There have been other revisions, however.

From the Return of the Dead (separate franchise) series, we get the “braaaaaiiiins” zombies, from the 28 Days/Weeks Later franchise we get the “not-a-zombie” Rage Virus victims, and there are countless examples of running, screaming, plotting, talking zombies.

There’s no denying that you can’t improve upon the original Romero zombies. They’re too perfect. They’re like the iPad. Apple somehow figured out the formula for a perfect tablet. It feels right and competitors are still playing catch-up.

Romero’s zombies feel right.

Bobby and I decided right away, without any discussion on the matter, that the original Romero zombies were what people wanted to see. The shuffling, mindless, hungry, angry reanimated corpses of loved ones.

We did, however, realize that to just take those zombies and build a show around them, while cool, is not ours. That’s not our idea. That’s just plucking characters out of one situation and putting them in another. Alternatively, that’s Bobby and me grabbing a 2 hour movie by it’s beginning and ending, and stretching it into a 13 episode TV show.

Bobby and I created a version of zombies similar to the Romero’s, but we added the potential for an explanation. We added new weaknesses, and also new strengths.

The treatment we cooked up for The Dead Don’t Walk is interesting, but it’s also overlong and a little batshit, so just read this portion of it (I’ll post the full thing at the end, for those curious), where we explain what our zombies are (notice that you can zoom in or click the arrow to help when reading):

It’s a little clumsily written (get used to that), but the facts are great:

They’re blind. The survivors learn to take advantage of that weakness. The monsters can still sense light (like you can even when your eyes are closed), but because of that blindness, their other senses are hightened. Every sound could be the signal that gives you away. They can smell you enter a room. If you’re careful enough, you can travel right through a street filled with them. The Dead Don’t Walk would have been filled with moments of quiet tension. Uncertainty. We’d get face-to-face with our monsters.

Enough of this, I’ve definitely made my point. The Dead Don’t Walk was an interesting show that we came up with way to late (and again, no one knows who we are), and clearly I still love it. Maybe you’ll like it, too, and so without further delay, here’s a brief script Bobby and I wrote. The only character from this story that would appear in the final show is Gray, who you can learn a little more about in the full treatment I’ll post a link to at the end of this post. It’s not a full episode, it’s just a little 15 minute story that establishes the world and the tone. I hope you enjoy it:

There you have it. “The Alley.” In case you didn’t realize why Gray (I might hate this name now) didn’t help them at the end, he was afraid that the sound of his gun would give him away to that third group of monsters. Already being exposed under that street light, he couldn’t risk it. I’m not sure if we made that clear, though it makes perfect sense. Anyway, as I said, here’s a link to the full treatment, where you can learn a little more about him and a whole lot about people that you’ll never get to see:

The Dead Don’t Walk – Treatment

Thanks for reading, guys, I hope you enjoyed. I’m really pretty excited that we can sort of put these old scripts to some use. They’ve just been sitting on a hard drive, and in the back of my mind, for a long time. Please feel free to comment or email us with your thoughts of not only The Dead Don’t Walk, but also this whole Will and Bobby Wrote Something endeavor. You can get us at WillandBobby@gmail.com. Also feel free to follow us on Twitter (@WillAndBobby) and like us on Facebook.

Next week we’re going to wrap up The Dead Don’t Walk. There’s one last script (a companion piece to “The Alley”), and maybe I’ll give some more info about where the plot of the show would have gone. Maybe.

Click here to go on to Part Three!

Will and Bobby Wrote Something: Part One

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On WBKE, Bobby and I have made reference to different scripts that we’ve written, and on the banner of our website, we call ourselves writers, but none of our writing is available anywhere (aside from bullshit about being fat/going bald).

From around 2005 to 2011, Bobby and I were co-writers on a number of different concepts, none of which ever went anywhere. Most of them were awful, some of them had merit, and all of them are completely unrealistic right now.

I’m going to start putting them online.

On the 1st of the month, every month, until I run out of material, come here to see a new script, treatment, or concept for the TV shows, movies, and comic books that Bobby and I (sort of) created.

The first piece of material I’m going to post is from the second project Bobby and I really put effort into. There are things that came before this, and I’ll touch on those eventually, but what I’m writing about today is a really great concept that Bobby and I unfortunately came up with a few years too late.

On Episode 12 of the podcast, Bobby and I had Mike Costa and Matt Battaglia on the show and we started to tell this story:

After Bobby and I came up with our first concept for a TV show, a concept that I still fucking love to this day, we were doing research about how to pitch a show. What we read was that, if you are lucky enough to get a meeting, you should go in to the room with not just one but two concepts. The rationale is that, if the network likes you as a writer but maybe they’re already working on a similar project (or maybe they just don’t like that first idea), they’ll be interested to hear what else you have to offer.

In the beginning of 2010, Bobby and I started trying to figure out another show to write. We had already come up with a comedy, and we wanted to branch out.

Eventually, we realized that the only genre you couldn’t really find on TV was horror. I’ve always been a huge horror-nut, and Bobby was into it, so we just had to figure out what sort of horror we wanted to do.

Vampires had already been fucked by the Twilight series, serial killers were (and are) overdone, and we’ve always been huge fans of the George Romero zombie movies (Night/Dawn/Day of the Living Dead),  so ultimately that’s what we went with.

At the time, it felt so fucking brilliant, simple, and obvious. There had never been a television zombie story! It makes perfect fucking sense: zombie movies are commentaries on society. They have a message hidden under all the fucked up biting and gore. More than that, it seemed like a brilliant idea to have a cast of characters that a viewer would grow to love. We’d show them learn about the monsters, try to adapt, have leadership struggles, and try to find a way to survive. It was brilliant. We came up with a unique, clever, new version of zombies, and started writing immediately.

We wrote a treatment, which lays out the overall concept, the characters, the threat, and where the show would go, and we wrote a short script that could serve as a bite-sized representation of the tone. Then we wrote another.

Previously with our comedy show, we’d tried to film a pilot. Realizing that it would be risky and expensive to film this new zombie show, we had an idea:

Instead of filming anything, we decided to have the script made into a comic book.

Movies and TV shows commonly use storyboards to show the progression of a scene. They’re lightly drawn representations of how the show will be shot. We just wanted to push that idea further. With a comic you could get the mood, the timing, you could show how the world would feel. I was excited. Again, this was before the big zombie-boom and it seemed like we had stumbled across television gold.

I told Mike Costa about the idea to make a comic of our script. He’s a graphic designer who had made a few things for me before, and I thought he might be interested. He suggested that I bring the idea to Matt Battaglia instead, saying that it was something that Matt might be more interested in.

I met with Matt at a bar and explained the entire show to him. I read him parts of the treatment. I showed him pages of the script, he nodded along, he was interested, and then he asked me if I’d ever heard of The Walking Dead.

He told me all about it: an ongoing horror story. A cast of characters with conflicts who grow and change. It was announced as a TV show. Based on a comic book.

Maybe somewhere in the back of my mind I’d heard that. Maybe we did inadvertently steal the concept, but I really don’t think so. I think we just had the same idea way too late.

It’s also not like we’d have made the show if it weren’t for The Walking Dead. We were (are) just two goofy guys who no one has ever heard of.

We’re not so delusional as to think we’d have been kings off the concept.

It was just a weird coincidence.

It happens.

The most fucking absurd, goofy, cartoonish, and annoying thing? The name of the show we came up with. After telling Bobby and me about The Walking Dead, Matt Battaglia agreed to  draw a potential page from the book.

I’ll post scripts starting next month, but for now, look at this amazing, simple, subtle page.

I love it.

He did a great job.

Now look at the fucking name:

The Dead Don't Walk

Feel free to leave a comment or email WillAndBobby@gmail.com about how unoriginal and stupid we are. And click here to go to Part Two!