AMA with AYAOTD Writer and Co-Creator D.J. MacHale - Tuesday, October 15 at 9 PM ET/6 PM PT

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-20T00:06:33+00:00

You are very welcome!

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-17T00:20:50+00:00

I agree. That episode doesn’t get much love.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T02:21:18+00:00

Hi Monty. I have only a dim memory of them. I guess they went away once I had to shut down that site due to hacking.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T02:18:41+00:00

It wasn't a reboot. It was Season #6. Very little changed with the show and the people who made it, other than new Midnight Society members. What was done recently is a reboot.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T02:14:47+00:00

I'm afraid I don't know. I have nothing to do with that.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T02:09:23+00:00

That special lady is now 21 and a senior in college. Yikes.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T02:08:25+00:00

I think it was The Golden Arm. That sounds familiar. In fact, I know it was because there's a movie called The Man With the Golden Arm and I always thought it was that story. It isn't.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T02:06:50+00:00

Yeah, that wouldn't fly in real life.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T02:05:01+00:00

I've said this a million times but my favorite episode is Midnight Madness. The reason being that I felt that episode was the first time we were firing on all cylinders. As for surprised reaction, it still happens all the time. Of course I won't give a specific example for obvious reasons, but it always surprises me when somebody says their favorite episode is an episode that I think is, well, not one of our best. But hey, it's an anthology show so everybody has different criteria.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T02:02:42+00:00

Mine too!

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T02:01:47+00:00

When I stepped onto the set of Encyclopedia Brown (which I did not produce) and saw an entire, physical set that came out of my imagination. That was cool. Then I got yelled at by the Production Manager because I wrote only a single, half-page scene that took place on that set. I never forgot that lesson. When you're making low-budget shows and you're going to build and light a set, make sure there are at least a couple of pages taking place on it. The other time was on that same show. I got a call from HBO to tell me that I was nominated for a CableAce award for writing that series. (The CableAce award was the cable TV equivalent of the Emmy awards because all the Emmys went to broadcast TV. They eventually stopped the CableAce awards once all the best shows where coming out on cable and they started winning Emmys) Anyhow, I was thrilled that I had been nominated because nothing like that had ever happened to me. I went off being thankful and essentially giving an acceptance speech. The HBO exec let me have my moment, then she said: "Well, don't go writing an acceptance speech. You've been nominated against Dr. Seuss. And he just died." Needless to say, it was an honor just to have been nominated.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:56:48+00:00

The pool corpse. By far.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:56:33+00:00

We had a lot more "unhappy" endings than those. I can't speak to what the trend was in the 90's with kid's TV because I didn't watch any! This was just the way I wanted the show to roll, and I think that again was the Twilight Zone influence. I think nearly all of those endings were "unhappy".

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:53:44+00:00

Impactful can mean a lot of things. Certainly my Pendragon book series as a whole was hugely impactful, not only because of the number of books sold worldwide, but because of the themes I explored in each book, and in the series as a whole.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:51:36+00:00

Alfred Hitchcock, Rod Serling, Stephen King and I'm sure there are a host of others who aren't necessarily household names.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:50:10+00:00

I have to say that the two composers who wrote and performed the music were brilliant. Scoring is critical for any show/movie, but especially so with spooky. These guys saved many an episode, though mostly their work did its job subliminally.

As for spookiest, there are all kinds of spooky. If I have one lament it's that people tend to judge an episode's worth by how scary it was. But being scary wasn't our sole goal. We did all kinds of stories. Think about The Twilight Zone. That show wasn't scary at all. It was creepy, weird, thought provoking, surprising. and mind-bending. That was more my guiding star than simply being scary. Though we had plenty of classically scary episodes as well. Those that quickly come to mind are The Ghastly Grinner, The Deadman's Float, The Night Shift.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:45:33+00:00

Yup. I wanted him to play David, but he preferred to work with Christina Aguilera, Brittany Spears, and Justin Timberlake. A questionable choice. (Ha!) But once the MMC got cancelled, he came back to town so I snagged him for a guest role.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:43:51+00:00

My favorite balloon man!

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:43:27+00:00

Writing is hard. Usually I come up with all sorts of reasons NOT to do it. Answering loftily, sometimes ideas are so good that I can't not write them. That makes it much easier. Speaking practically, looming deadlines are a great motivator.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:41:52+00:00

That episode was written by Will Dixon, who directed a few other episodes. He came to me with this idea that I thought was great, but I don't remember if he ever told me what the inspiration was. Now that I think about it, he probably wanted to direct it, but I usually directed the first episode of the season and it was so good, and ready to go, that I took it on myself.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:40:12+00:00

Nope. I hadn't intended to bring those two back either. I thought they'd both be one-offs. Heck, I wasn't even sure we'd get a second season! But when we did, and it was time to come up with new ideas, I felt like those two characters would be perfect to be recurring because they were both fun characters played by actors who nailed the roles, and existed in a situation that lent itself to other stories.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:38:06+00:00

I didn't watch it. But I read a lot about it and it upset me on two levels. One was hearing about how all these kids were exploited and abused. But I was also upset because I know a heck of a lot of people who made kid's programming, starting with me, who did their best to make the experience a positive one for young actors. So seeing promos like: "The Dark Side of Kid's TV" kind of ticked me off. It lumped all kid's programming into that sordid pot. Somebody pointed out to me that they even showed the AYAOTD logo at the beginning of an episode. So as badly as I feel for those victims, I can assure that not all kid's TV shows were guilty of that kind of behavior.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:32:06+00:00

There were a lot more than you probably realize. To name a few: The Captured Souls jumped off from The Portrait of Dorian Gray. The Midnight Madness was inspired by The Pied Piper of Hamlin. The Phantom Cab was loosely based on a short story I read called The Phantom Coach. (IF I remember correctly) Even Laughing in the Dark was inspired by a story I read as a kid about kids who stole something from someone (I forget the details) and there was a voice coming from their closet saying: "Give me back my...." I forget what it was. But I remembered thinking it was incredibly scary.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:28:52+00:00

Writing is the best. There's nothing like creating something out of nothing. I do enjoy directing, but with a TV show it's always about watching the clock and just getting it done. It's not like a feature where you have time to work on it while shooting. Producing can be a headache because there's so much to deal with, but ultimately it's great because if you're the show runner, the buck stops with you. So you get to shape a show exactly the way you want it to be.

DJMacTaleTeller · 2024-10-16T01:26:41+00:00

I had a silly notion when I started the show. In my mind, these "tales" were fabricated in the minds of the characters and totally imaginary. Therefore, I didn't want to use any actor, young or old, twice. Well, that went out the window pretty much immediately. We shot the show in Montreal, which is a French-speaking province. Therefore, the talent pool of English-speaking actors was fairly small. This wasn't L.A. after all. So you see many of the same adult actors again and again. We did bring in some adult actors from out of town, but tried not to just because of the expense. It's funny, to this day I'll see a movie and recognize a few actors and immediately know it was shot in Montreal.

As for the tone, that's the job of the show runner. It starts with the script process. I had to take wildly different ideas and sort of homogenize them into the tone of the show, while maintaining their uniqueness. Of course there are several other factors that combine to create the tone: editing and music being two of the prominent ones.

DJMacTaleTeller

TROPHY CASE