Traveling Psychic Supper Club ™

Ok, so this is going to be probably a super long post.  But I think it’s interesting and I hope that you do too, and if you stick with me all the way to the end I think you’ll be happy or at least maybe get it.  If not you are welcome to tell me it sucked in the comments section below.

So if you read this blog you know I’m psychic and blah blah blah.  But I don’t write about most of the crazy amazing stuff that happens to me on here because so much STUPID CRAZY AMAZING stuff happens that involves other people that I don’t know what I can write about and what I can’t.  But I picked up Nick Offerman’s book Paddle Your Own Canoe – which is fantastic, if you haven’t heard about it, well its really good.  It’s really fucking good.  And what I’m getting from this book is – tell your story.  So I’m going to start telling my stories.  And that may involve a little cussing, Mom, sorry about that, just skip over those words.  But these are my stories and sometimes they involve other people, some of whom you may have heard of.  So this is one of them.

OK, jeez where do I start?  Well, a while back a director, David contacted me because he had come across the Supper Club on as he said, the Interwebs.  He was putting together pitches for a network that had to do with food, I’ll leave it at that, and was I interested in putting something together.  Well, I was so we did.  The main people involved with the supper club at the time, David and his Production Partner Andrew – both just stellar, top notch guys, who I loved then and love now, we got together and put something together and then David went to pitch it, and it didn’t stick.  Something I’ve learned about TV in my experiences with her, is that TV is a fickle bitch.  What she craves and desires one minute, is thrown to the wayside the next.  ACTUALLY, sometimes she tells you what she wants to your face, petting you and coddling you and caressing you the whole time, while speaking with a forked tongue to the SIDE and telling someone else, while petting and coddling them – that she wants  something completely different.  Yea, it is what it is.  I don’t take it personally.

So although that network wasn’t down for it, David said, hey, we have something here.  So let’s do this let’s keep going.  So we did.  An amazing benefactor came literally out of nowhere, and from right beside me at the same time, to provide the cash to self finance this project.  For that I am eternally grateful, and this person knows it.  This person is pretty freaking special to me, that having nothing to do with the large pile of cash.  So we shot some footage here around Austin and had an amazingly fun time doing it, and it was all like a dream.  And I kept saying, is this real, is this really happening, going to happen, etc.  But we kept going and it was awesome.

So then we had all this footage, and David was doing his part, and Andrew was doing his part, and we were just waiting.  This was over the summer, David and I would talk on the phone, he would tell me what he had, I would tell him what was coming in about it, and we would go from there.  When I say “coming in” I mean psychicly.  So David was telling me all the people he knew in the industry, and who he could show this to and should he and I kept feeling like the person to show this to is someone you will meet socially.  I was like, who have you met recently, at a party or something like that?  And he was like, well, I just met this one guy, but he works for the Weinstein Company, but they wouldn’t want this, they mainly do film.  But I was like, no I don’t care about that, but this is the guy to show our stuff to.  Just do that and he’ll have the right input.  He’s Our Guy.  For now.  So some more time went by, we waited some more.  And David did his thing, and Andrew did his thing.  So somewhere in there, David did show Our Guy – and he liked it.  And that felt good that the guy I thought was our guy liked it.  So here is something that happens a lot in TV that I found out.  People – meaning production companies – pitch show ideas like crazy, all the time.  Like, they make up an idea and just pitch it, to see if it sticks.  And they pitch constantly, like 20 ideas at a time.  I found out more about this at RealScreen – a conference I’m going to talk about later if you stick around you’ll see that word again.  But so David was showing this project to Our Guy and he said something about us being real psychics, this was a real group, that really met for Dinner and discussion, and I don’t think anyone who had seen this footage before had known that.  I mean, I just assumed that people knew it because I didn’t know anything about this business at the time.  I think they thought that this was a made up scenario with actors that someone had thrown together and shot some scenes.  But the scenes we shot were actually all stuff we really did, or based on real experiences we really had had.  So I think that was like, totally off the page of how things normally happen so Our Guy at the Weinstein Company was like, oh, I didn’t know these people were real, I want it.  Well, That’s how it seems to have happened at least.  Either way, we signed on with The Weinstein Company.  Holy Shit.  Like Martin Laurence says in Bad Boys –

So wait.  Now I think you may be saying, this bitch just put Ryan Gosling in the title to drive traffic to her blog.  Fuck her.  No dude, I’m getting to that part.  So settle down.  So we had come on with Weinstein, and I just started thinking about Ryan Gosling a lot.  And I like Ryan Gosling just fine, but I was thinking about him a LOT.  More than I should have been for some reason.  I mean, more than was normal.  At this point I had gone to Boston with a couple of members of the Supper Club, Susan and Lacey and the whole time I was there, I was listening to Dead Man’s Bones – which is Ryan Gosling’s band.  And they are brilliant.  I am actually mad that RG won’t get it together and make another album, I love this one so much, but that’s neither here nor there, I mean he’s got his own life going on so whatever.

But every night I was in Boston, I didn’t sleep that well – and that’s a whole other story, but every night I listened to Dead Man’s Bones while trying to go to sleep.  Then out of nowhere it hit me, he was supposed to do the music for the show.  The show we didn’t even have edited together yet, that we weren’t even pitching yet, yep, that was it.  Even if it was just him and Zach, the other guy in the band hitting a kids xylophone with a tiny cobbler’s hammer while humming, he was the one to do the music.  Yes, I know this is crazy.  And yes, I do know Ryan Gosling is an A list celebrity.  And he would never do it, but like I didn’t care.  I called David and told him this information.  He was like, uh, Deb, I’m not sure about this.  Are you sure?  and I was like, yep.  I don’t know how you are going to make this happen, but I know you will do what needs to be done and let’s go from there.  So God Bless him, he did.  He contacted RG’s agent about him doing the music for the show.  He even sent me the emails about it.  I was like, THIS IS FREAKING NUTS!! HA HA HA My director is talking to RYAN FUCKING GOSLING’S agent about my show.  Well, they exchanged emails at least.  She very graciously and sweetly replied that that wasn’t really in the vein of RG’s direction right now, so no he wouldn’t be doing it, but thank you for thinking of him for the project.  It didn’t happen, but I don’t care, I love that story.  And now RG keeps tapping on my brain again, I’ve been thinking about him for the past couple of days, randomly, actually not so randomly, but that’s for later in the story.  Either way, I didn’t just use Ryan’ Gosling’s name to drive people to the blog, and we didn’t get him for the music, but it fits in with the bigger picture anyway.  So, where was I…

OK so Weinstein had the project now, was editing it, and we were waiting.  I mean, I was doing my own thing here, don’t get me wrong, but we were waiting.  Then everything was edited together into a sizzle – this is what they use to pitch your show or idea to the big wigs.  And they did, seriously, it was crazy.  Top folks over at the Weinstein Company were pitching my idea, I even heard that Harvey himself was talking about it over lunches – LUNCHES for GOD SAKES with Execs.  This still blows my mind.  So the top people in the top tiers were handling my project.  And that was pretty cool.  So all this pitching was going on and we were getting information about it, and all the time, there was something scratching at the back of my head that the timing wasn’t right.  I didn’t listen to that little scratching, I just kept on keepin’ on because I was like, hey little scratch, you aren’t there.  So we kept going.

And not much happened.  A year went by.  Something I also found out about the TV industry is this – it moves freaking FAST.  And what is an amazing idea one minute, is yesterday’s empty pizza box the next.  And that’s just the way it is.  You don’t stay shiny for long.  So all this amazing energy and…nothing.  Within seconds we were yesterday’s news, old hat.  So we waited.  Then January came.  That’s when RealScreen is – this big reality TV conference that happened in DC this past year.  I was talking to Andrew and mentioned in passing that something big was coming at the end of January.  I don’t know anything about RealScreen, wouldn’t have had any reason to know about it.  But Andrew stopped and said, Deb, do you know what happens in the end of January?  And I was like, no, what?  And he said, RealScreen.  And I was like, OK.  What’s that?  Then he told me and I was like, I need to be there.  We’ve got to get me to RealScreen.  And they did.  These guys that believed in this tiny idea, and some other outside/inside forces that I knew about too, made it happen.  This was it.  This was our last ditch effort to make this happen.  And we gave it our all.  We did everything we could do, we met some Freaking AMAZING people while there, I met Chris, a member of the team that had been looking at my face all these hours of editing, who felt he knew me, which was surreal, and he was awesome!  I met Our Guy at Weinstein face to face, and loved him just as much as I always had.  I met so many people in the industry, producers, talent (I was considered “talent” while there with my Supper Club colleague, Kelly, who was also there to represent us – “talent” that cracked me up.)  We were all co-creators on this crazy ride.  And it was a crazy ride.  Sometimes Kelly and I would just look at each other and be like W – T – F.

While I was there I was reading the whole time, the psychic never sleeps…and I was picking everything up, the crazy energy being projected from the pitchers, the producers looking to sell a show, the deflection of this energy from the execs, Just this super whirl of energy, hope, confidence, and deflection, the denial of one idea, the picking up and dusting off, then the running back into the fire with another.  It was crazy and fun, to see from the outside.  Everyone was there with a million ideas, and I realized, wow, we are here with ONE.  One idea.  we were like little kids walking into the world cup with a street ball under our arms.  Underdogs.  To THE MAX.  But it was perfect.  We did it too, our people pitched to their people, that stuff was out of my hands and I was glad.  I was there for the experience, to promote my show, but a larger experience grew from that, and I met some people that I was meant to meet, one in particular who is a crazy super big wig producer – I heard him speak in the morning to a massive audience and just OWN it, then heard him speak later that day to a smaller audience, of which I was a part – and just holding each person there in the palm of his hand, I walked right up to him afterwards and asked him to join me for a beer, because I just wanted to KNOW this guy,  Not because of TV, but just because he’s amazing.  Well, we didn’t have a beer then, but did later on that evening, actually it was drinks not a beer, shots that were named AFTER him at this big party we were all at with all these crazy executives.  (I drank one shot and that was enough).  We had an amazing conversation that has led to a wonderful friendship.  And I treasure it, and it has nothing, nothing to do with TV.  I love it when that happens, when you are led somewhere for what seems one reason, but something even more special and important grows from it.  That’s where the real meat is.  Oh btw, this producer, you may know some of his work, he does a little show about fishing boats that you may have seen, it’s been on for about 10 years now.

So, maybe now you are asking, well what happened to the show????  Well, nothing.  Wait, not nothing.  More like Nothing and Everything.  We had this amazing experience, this wild ride, got hooked up with the top tiers, and got exactly what we were supposed to from it, and it has it’s place in time and in our lives and it’s done.  What we put together and pitched, doesn’t even exist anymore, in the way it was then.  It’s grown, and shifted, and moved into something else.  Some people have left, and many more people have come in.  And it’s still growing and becoming more and more amazing.  And it’s not over.  No way, not for a long shot.  But it’s mine, and I own it, and I’ve gotten everything back to move this forward on my own with the PHENOMENAL people that are involved now, and more are coming to it every day, this tiny idea.  This makes me incredibly happy – this crazy, crazy ride.

So I’ve been reading Nick Offerman’s book, and I just picked it up and started reading a chapter I  thought I would like, which mentions Ryan Gosling a couple of times.  And like I said, I had been thinking about him again for some reason.  That wasn’t making it past me…so I got to the last page of the chapter, and turned the page.  The next chapter was ACTUALLY the one I had gone to read, so do you see what I’m saying, I read the wrong chapter by accident.  By beautiful, crazy accident, which wasn’t an accident at all.  The chapter I actually read was Finding Swanson, about how Offerman went through all of these crazy experiences and auditions, and how he got to Ron Swanson.  And how if he had taken any of the ones that he didn’t get, he wouldn’t have gotten Ron.  And who else was MADE to play Ron Swanson, but Nick Offerman?

It shows me again, how everything fits into the perfect place at just the right time.  Thank you, Ron Swanson.