In 2017, when folks asked me when Unicornland Season 2 was coming out, the answer was simple; “when someone gives me $100K”. The original Unicornland cost $65K, of which 1/2 was savings, 1/4 was from a Kickstarter campaign, and 1/4 was in-kind and cash donations. The series won a bunch of awards, was widely featured by fancy media—NPR, Rolling Stone, Glamour—and has been watched over a million times (you’re welcome, Vimeo), but I’ve made exactly $0.
The estimated budget for the second season was higher to accommodate the fact that I now had no savings nor favors from friends and family to cash in on, and would need to meet the same standard of production while also paying the artists–including myself–a decent rather than nominal rate. The assumption was that I’d be producing it myself. I like self-producing, I’m good at self-producing, and it seemed a waste not to put hard-won experience to good use. But Unicornland was intended to showcase my work as a writer, not as a producer.
I came up with the idea for Unicornland while getting my MFA at NYU, when a professor suggested the protagonist of my screenplay get pregnant "because that's what happens to those girls". This anecdote is out of context and the script was definitely flawed, but it was 2014, and I was fairly shocked to learn "the industry" (as represented by this older male authority figure) had such a flat and limited perspective on female stories. Annie’s journey was conceived as a touchstone for women like me who’d never seen their complex needs and desires honestly represented on screen. The female-gaze, humor, darkness, and stories driven by emotional need were all key aspects of my experience of intimate exploration that fuels personal growth. Also of my writing style. Self-producing was a monumental effort, but the reach of and response to the series was extremely gratifying. It gave me a glimmer of hope that I'd proven myself, and a broad-shouldered production company might just take on the heavy lifting next time.
With post-production underway, I moved from NYC–where I’d carved out a little niche as an indie playwright–to LA where the film/tv work was. Unicornland launched in February 2017 and aside from breaking my back (which you can read about here), everything was moving in the right direction. Multiple reps reached out, all with smart strategies and a strong pipeline for selling my work. I signed with one, and we were off to the (metaphorical; see aforementioned story about breaking my back) races.
The first thing my new rep needed was a pilot for a half-hour comedy of Unicornland. I produced this quickly, along with a treatment for a full season of 8-10 episodes, and a bible of characters and settings. “What about the digital series’ second season?” I asked, curious about the impact of such an effort. My rep gave the silent nod and pursed lips I would soon come to understand as repspeak for “why is this writer trying to do our job?”. “The digital market is unstable,” they explained: “Lots of splashy disruptors with no industry experience, lots of smoke-and-no-fire contracts.” I was welcome to pursue that avenue independently, and they would certainly review any contracts that came my way (ie take 10%), but their priority was selling the half hour. The good news? They loved the script. This would, they assured me, be a cake-walk.
Over the next few months, I acquired a healthy collection of parking permits to LA’s fanciest studio lots. (I pinned them up in my office; part vision-boarding and part evil-eye totem in the storied tradition of superstitious emerging writers.) It was fun to note the correlation between Google Alerts about Unicornland press mentions popping up the same day as scheduling requests for more meetings. The fancier the media, the better the meeting. All good signs.
Now, I like meeting new people. I like open-ended conversations, especially in beautiful offices full of expensive furniture. I love free coffee, la croix, and granola bars. It was a thrilling surprise for this New York theater snob to discover the executives of Los Angeles were smarter, funnier, better read, weirder, more creative even than my wildest dreams. They were my age or younger, mostly folks I wanted to get to know better over a joint, a hike, or a book club. They all loved the series. There were female executives who assured me they’d take a personal interest in the project. There were close encounters; studios who had already filled their “commercially-viable sexual experimentation” slot. Some opposites-attract; meetings with Amblin Entertainment and Dreamworks—“your characters spoke to us…would you consider writing family-friendly stories?” There were even some tragically awkward meetings: male bros who manspread on leather sofas while probing me about the Scene. (Thematically appropriate? Sure. Excuse to talk about graphic sex at 11am on a weekday? Also that.) Like Annie, I was determined something from each encounter in this strange new world. Good, bad, ugly; it's all part of the process.
The challenge of these meetings, as I saw it, was getting fully lost in conversation then guiding us back to Unicornland. Part of being good in a room--swanky high-rise corner office and fetish club basements alike--is going with the flow: “That we’re having this conversation,” I’d swerve, “shows how curious people are about this lifestyle. You want access, to really get inside those rooms, but without the risk or the commitment.” At its heart, Annie’s experience was about love and acceptance. The form, either half-hour dramedy on network TV or short streaming episodes on Vimeo, was irrelevant. Unicornland was what the world wanted.
To be in these rooms sharing this little idea I’d pitched to my friend Nick in a bar, stolen shots across New York City for, then built a vibrant community around from scratch...felt very promising. Unicornland, once derided as a vanity project--we called it a "digital series" to avoid the amateurish stigma of "webseries"--now had a future.
And so did I.
To be continued…
