As a child in England, David Hewlett was a big fan of Doctor Who. A young man, he became a self-taught computer whiz, happy to nut away at his PC in Perl and play with dancing one’s and zero’s. These days he attends sci-fi conventions around the globe, attracting legions of fans who clamour for his autograph. In his rare down-time, he writes screenplays, less Perl.
You see, Hewlett has joined the pantheon of his childhood heroes, taking on the role of brilliant ‘and he knows it’ astrophysicist Rodney McKay, a cult favourite on Stargate: Atlantis. The show, a spin-off of America’s longest running sci-fi series Stargate: SG-1, is winding up a third season, with Hewlett a major drawcard for its surging popularity.
But the actor’s otherworldly success was borne of a hard slog familiar to most practitioners.
After leaving school to pursue his love of acting, Hewlett logged over a decade worth of impressive miles on the North American independent film scene, teaming with highly-regarded Canadian directors like Vincenzo Natali and William Phillips along the way. Some of his best-known work includes playing ‘code-monkey‘ Grant Janksy on the Canadian series Traders, and ‘architect’ anti-hero David Worth in Natali’s mind-bendingly original Cube.
Now, a new role beckons. On hiatus from shooting Stargate in Vancouver, Hewlett wrote and directed his first feature film with the aid of producer and real-life fiancée, Jane Loughman. A Dog’s Breakfast was shot on HD for under a million dollars and stars Hewlett, his actress sister Kate, Stargate: Atlantis alumni Rachel Luttrell and Paul McGillion, and Stargate: SG-1 veteran Christopher Judge. It also stars his dog Mars, who gives the film its title, and provided — in a roundabout sort of way — the inspiration for the project.
“Ahh yes, from mutt to screen,” Hewlett chuckles, recalling his first encounter with the infamous pooch. “Jane and I had arrived in Vancouver and were starting to feel settled. We had some free time so we thought maybe we should go and do something for someone, somewhere. And we heard that alot of the pounds needed dog walkers, foolhardy people to take their dogs around in the elements just to give them a chance to get out of their cages once in a while.”
“So we show up at the pound, and we arrive in time for Mars to come barreling out of this horrendous rain storm, dragging this poor volunteer behind him. She’s covered in mud and he’s just going crazy. He actually ran straight up to us, then sat on my feet and ignored me. I was completely smitten.”
Mars was about to be euthanised because of a problem with his hips, so Hewlett and Loughman intervened and adopted the precocious pup.
Meanwhile, the actor was toying with script ideas for an independent film.
“I think I ended up writing about three scripts before we got there; totally different tones,” he says. “There was a horror, a psychological drama… and Jane, ever the pragmatist, would take a look at each and say, ‘that’s great — if we had a million dollars.’ So we thought, let’s make a list of things we don’t have to pay for. Give me the elements and we’ll build a story around that. And there’s nothing cheaper than Hewlett’s.”
The end result was a “good old-fashioned, family murder”, in which Mars figures prominently. Hewlett plays Patrick – hapless, but happy with a life that revolves around his dog and the gentle torment of his little sister Marilyn. Then sis’ brings home her new fiancé Ryan — the “sky-jockey” heartthrob of sci-fi soap opera Starcrossed (in one of several affectionate winks to Stargate fans) — and Patrick snaps. Ridding his life of Ryan becomes an obsession, and if Mars can be unwitting accomplice, so much the better. Only trouble is, Patrick was never very good at life, so how will he fare with death?
For his part, the marked mutt rose to the challenge. “Mars was the quintessential star,” writes Loughman online. “He loved being on set, made friends with all the crew, did just what we needed, when we needed it… and all for cookies and a tickle behind the ears!” “He’s such a primadonna,” chides Hewlett.
Although the award-winning actor adores a good horror flick, he wanted to keep the audience for his directorial debut in their seats because of great story telling and performance, not white-knuckled terror. “I love those kind of movies, but I didn’t want to make a film that was, uncomfortable. One that alienated its audience.”
“I wanted to make a Pink Panther movie, you know? One that’s naughty, but never dirty. Dark, but not nasty.”
“And comedy comes from a release of tension, so there has to be some kind of threat of something going wrong.”
Helping things along were Stargate producer John G. Lenic, cinematographer Jim Menard and other crew members from both Atlantis and SG-1.
“The Stargate people were so great,” enthuses Hewlett. “These guys could be getting paying jobs, but there they are standing around in the freezing cold, on this property we were shooting on, with a nearby river rapidly encroaching.” He also cites Natali and Phillips, who he’s worked with on several occasions, as inspiring influences.
Though he’s always harboured an interest in writing, Hewlett says he never really thought about directing, per se. “It’s the old cliché right? What I really want to do is direct. I never wanted that.”
It’s more about creative restlessness. All the more so, he insists, when you’re gainfully employed as a performer.
“As an actor it’s very easy to settle. I actually think it’s really important to keep moving. Especially as an actor, the further you move along in your working life — anything you can do to stand out in this industry is valuable.”
“I learned that in L.A. You go to L.A. and you sit in a room and you know that 1000 to 1500 people have not got into this room that you’re sitting in, and there are still 50 to 100 people that will be in there going for the same part as you. The odds are so stacked against you … you go in for an audition for someone who’s a redheaded, vampire loving, hearse driving Mormon, and there will be somebody who is that. And they’re going to get the part over you, who are pretending to be. That was very eye-opening to me.”
So he took the risk, and “completely fell in love with the process”.
“I went into it with the end in mind, I didn’t think about what happens between ‘I want to make a movie’, and ‘the movie’s finished and I’m showing it to people’. Every aspect of it was so much more interesting that I expected it to be.”
Despite the creative satisfaction, Hewlett says he and Loughman were warned they might be barking up a fruitless tree, that no one would give them even a DVD release for A Dog’s Breakfast. So they hit on a master plan — one that’s led to a worldwide distribution deal with one of the industry’s major players.
“Jane and I are huge nerds,” he explains. “We try to apply everything to the Internet and technology. Back in the days of Cube, me being the geek, my little sister and I jumped in and started an Internet company for promoting films and television on the web. What’s funny is how hard it was to convince people to go for it back then!”
Hewlett says it wasn’t so much that the siblings were ahead of their time – more that the cultural economics hadn’t quite caught up.
“There’s not a lot of money in the Canadian film scene, and that’s what we were dealing with at the time,” he explains. ‘Effectively, it was ‘get the film shot’, and then you’re out of money.” Though filmmakers and other artists tend to put something aside for marketing these days, the point remains valid, especially when you’re dealing with content that’s heavily subsidised by government (which rarely allows for a laundry list of itemised promo costs post-production), or low-budget fare that’s doing it’s best just to get off the ground.
The actor also founded fusefilm.com, an Internet based networking forum for filmmakers.
This early work generating chatter about films online taught Hewlett a lesson that many content producers are only now processing.
“The big discovery that I had, which I was fascinated by, was that the flash and the glam means virtually nothing. After the first visit, it’s all about the information and the community.”
And community is something he has unique access to.
Superficially, it appears he and Loughman have tapped the much-buzzed ‘long tail’ of marketing, anointing existing fans of Hewlett and his work ‘squirrel minions’ and empowering them to market the film like crazy. Give them downloadable posters and they’ll put them up in their neighborhood. If you build it… and so on.
But the ‘long tail’ effect Hewlett and Loughman have generated is a more complex beast than that. Visitors don’t merely log on to a website ‘selling’ A Dog’s Breakfast to print out flyers; they read and respond to Hewlett’s gregarious blog entries about the ongoing life of the project; hang out on his YouTube channel watching clips from the film; contribute poster design and marketing ideas of their own; create and shop merchandise; lobby for local screenings of the movie (where they can connect with other fans, even Hewlett and Loughman in person), and more.
They’re invited to become flag-bearers online and off – part of a club who’s nerd-in-chief genuinely loves and appreciates their contribution, at least in part because he’s been there.
“Making films and marketing films use to be about taking a product and selling it to people,” he says. But now, “largely because of the Internet, it’s become more community based. People don’t want to be sold things on the net. They want to learn things, they want to explore. And if there’s things they’re interested in, they’re dying to talk about it. I don’t need to be sold on YouTube. I go on YouTube, I enjoy YouTube. Of course I’m going to put my clips on YouTube.”
“It’s like when I was in high school and it was always about trying to find the newest band that no one had ever heard of. Then once you found it, it was your job to get out there and tell everyone about it. I love the idea that we can do stuff and I can say, ‘I’m excited about this. If you guys like things I’ve done before, you’ll be excited about this too.’ And of course, it’s much more fun when you’re working with people than when people are working for you.”
One group you don’t need to explain this to is science fiction fans. Often marginalised by those who don’t share their passion, lovers of sci-fi are not unlike indie filmmakers – unafraid to follow their dream in the face of opposition. They also love to congregate.
“There are some people out there who are just totally unaware of the Stargate phenomenon and its massive community,” says Hewlett, unabashedly proud of his own membership. “These guys are online more than I am.”
So do fans appreciate the tight feedback loop he and Loughman have enabled?
“I hope so,” he says. “I feel guilty sometimes, because some of the postings I make are ‘guys, I really need your help on this’. I hope it is a two-way street, because I don’t want anyone to feel like I’m using them.”
One look at the Dog’s Breakfast Internet forum and you can see they don’t. Members swap success stories about spreading the Dog’s gospel, plan social gatherings around screenings of the film (some happily trekking for miles), and brainstorm new ways to support their hero. One fan who worked for NBC wrangled a camera crew and reporter to both a screening of the film and a Stargate convention where Hewlett, Loughman and team were conducting a Q & A about the project. The ‘squirrel minions’ were interviewed, as was Hewlett, and the resulting story made the nightly news (then promptly found its way onto YouTube). Another has created a mock fan-site for Starcrossed.
Eventually, MGM came calling and an international distribution deal was struck for the film. Hewlett was online in a flash to thank everyone for their help in making it happen.
In a gestalt of artistic and commercial intuition, promoting his creation is a natural extension of Hewlett’s creative process – an experiential ‘add-on’ for the filmmaker himself, as well as the audience that enjoys his work. And technology, long a part of his life, seems a logical way to do it.
He wishes more artists would embrace this symbiosis.
“It’s so overlooked by people. Filmmakers are so desperate to get their films made, and then they go ‘phew, ok great, what’s next’. But there’s a whole other side to the story, and that’s just as fascinating as the pre-production, production and post-production of a project. I love seeing it all the way through, because it’s a business, and I love running it like a small business. I know business is still a dirty word for a lot of filmmakers, and yet, that’s the way it works. What’s the point in making something unless people are going to see it?”
Not every actor, filmmaker or artist can be an Internet entrepreneur, but the proliferation of low-cost soft and hardware means content making and distribution outside traditional industry engines is a real option for many.
What arguably sets Hewlett apart from your average band who parlays their MySpace clips into a record contract is the sense that he’s the one wagging Dog’s long tail. Duly deferential to the work his “squirrel minions” and MGM are doing for the film, it’s never in doubt that he and his producer remain custodians of their product. For some creators, the end goal is access to the industry gates. The suits who’ll do the selling for you once you’re in the coveted door. For this thinking performer turned auteur, it’s both more interesting and more useful to fuel separate components in aid of a big picture that stays his own. Hewlett understands and respects what these networks can accomplish, and he doesn’t need the marketeers to tell him how the ‘bits’ fit. It’s more innate than a ‘long tail’ – it’s a bunch of like minds spruiking something they think is cool, because it feels like the right, fun thing to do.
“You find your audience, you find out what they’re interested in, then you create product for that audience. Not to make it sound too mercenary, but that’s the reality. You need to know who’s interested in your stuff before you make it so you know how much to spend on it. If you’ve got four people who are going to watch it, you’re not going to spend a million dollars. If you’ve got a million people wanting to watch, you can spend something more.”
Hewlett draws comparisons with his beloved world of science fiction, recalling an early reading of William Gibson’s pioneering ‘cyberpunk’ novel Neuromancer in which citizens plug into a collective consciousness tuned to the desires of the masses. It’s Gibson’s “matrix” v.1 that Hewlett gravitates toward, in life, and art. “There’s something strangely magical about the idea of there being access to this giant brain made up of everyone’s input,” he says. “Take something like Wikipedia. Sure people come in and vandalise it every few seconds, but then someone else arrives to fix it.”
It’s also in step with theatre and filmmaking at its most egalitarian. “It’s like Fringe Festivals in a way,” suggests Hewlett. “The idea of a theatre festival where everyone gets a chance to put on their show, money is relatively no object, and it’s all promoted en’masse. You get some amazing stuff coming out of that. Of course, with the good comes the bad, and I think the real future of the Internet will be in systems that filter.”
While the analysts debate the significance of this paradigm shift in the way we make stuff and talk about it, Hewlett’s mind is on how it can serve the stories he wants to tell, and those who might enjoy them.
“There’s a real opportunity in that shared space, to ‘brand’ yourself (for want of a better word), and what you do,” he reflects. “I mean, it’s always worked that way to some extent. You go and see a film with Sean Penn in it because you like his work. Or Sam Raimi, or some other director you want to see because you feel you know their stuff and there’s the expectation that you’ll enjoy this too. Is there a massive revolution? Yes, I think so in the long term, but this has been going on for years, it’s just a matter of using it appropriately.”
Hewlett says he’s been particularly thrilled with the response of MGM to his squirrel marketing. In an age where the old-guard of content-producers are fighting to stay relevant it seems one of the oldest is willing to give Hewlett’s giant brain a test drive.
“We sent the film out to a few different places, but from the start we thought, if we have to sell them on the Stargate angle they’re probably not the right distributors for us.”
“When we went into MGM we were totally straight with them. We said, this is a small film, this is the way we think it should be promoted, and they were totally behind it.”
“They’re so interesting to work with, because they’re such an historic studio. They were there at the beginning of this; you walk down their corridors and you see Oscars dating back to the first Oscars. They’re use to dealing with their James Bond’s and their Rocky’s, which are these giant engines that I can’t even begin to comprehend. And while all that’s going on they were meeting with us about our little movie and were happy to talk about YouTube, fascinated by it even. I’ve been incredibly impressed. If the big studios start acting like little Internet companies then I think everyone’s going to benefit from the stuff we’ll see coming out of it.”
Hewlett has hardly seen the last. Since we spoke, Breakfast‘s invented melodrama Star-Crossed has been picked up as ‘real live’ television series by NBC Universal, set to air in 2007 on the Sci-Fi channel. The art-imitates-art-imitates-life show will follow the antics behind the camera at a long-running sci-fi space soap and will be written by Hewlett, drawing on his experiences in cult TV and regular dialogue with fan culture.
He and Loughman sent off the finished pilot this week. Both will be in London tomorrow as guests of honour at two sold-out screenings of A Dog’s Breakfast for lucky “squirrels” who nabbed a ticket online with a show of typically “web-crashing support”.
Visit Hewlett and A Dog’s Breakfast online at www.dgeek.com
