I finished my latest pilot yesterday, The Monkey Planet. It’s an animated show about monkeys. On a planet. Do you want to read it?
I’m extra giddy about finishing this one. Partly because it took me more than twice as long as usual to write it. But more so because this show’s based on a 150-word micro-story that I wrote eight years ago for a Pittsburgh literary organization called The New Yinzer. (You can read it here.) That story in a way started me down a path that led to me helping to run The New Yinzer, where we eventually published two books. More importantly TNY folks became some of my best friends, and I co-created and sold my first pilot with one of them.
I don’t know why those three paragraphs stuck with me for so long, and I’m surprised at and proud of what they’ve become. It’s smart and funny and kind of gross, and I really hope someone wants to make it.
Maybe the most exciting part of all this is that at this very moment concept art for the show is being whipped up by the extremely talented illustrator and guy who hangs out with my parents, Wayno. Wayno just came off a week’s run on Dan Piraro’s comic Bizarro, and he’s already finished sketches for the six lead monkeys. Dare I say they’re even better than the one I drew on the title page? Such a psyching I have on to see the finals.
Anyway, email or tweet me if you’d like to read the script. I cut two holes in it, but you should be able to get the gist.
So back in 2003 The New Yinzer asked me to contribute to a series of promotional postcards, each of which was supposed to have a complete story by a Pittsburgh writer. Due to budget constraints or a bad clam or something, it turned out that all 500 postcards were printed with my story. They were then distributed at various events and pretty much without exception thrown into the sewer and forgotten forever, especially by me. Until now! I present, for the first time in non-postcard form, that story:
The Monkey Planet
The monkeys have their own planet now. On the monkey planet, tiny pygmy marmoset guards try to ward off strangers by displaying their white genitals. Spider monkeys, perplexed and tripping over their prehensile tails, struggle to dig an underground transportation system. Black and white colobus workers operate the ancient machinery that the monkeys found abandoned. Their long fur gets caught in the gears, and the casualty rate is high.
It’s not a very good system on the monkey planet, really. But they’re just monkeys, after all, and most of the smart ones stayed back on Earth, where, unlike the monkey planet, the ground is not composed of burning hot diamond shards, and there are no acid-spewing volcanoes, nor any monkey-eating beasts with twelve mouths, twenty grabbing tentacles and the ability to teleport.
Kindly keep the monkey planet a secret. But if you see any lemurs, please tell them: it’s paradise.
I finished my latest pilot yesterday, The Monkey Planet. It’s an animated show about monkeys. On a planet. Do you want to read it?
