PLUME: Jumping back a bit, when did you make the decision to venture to LA?

BALABAN: There was never a venture to L.A.

PLUME: So you’ve always operated out of the Midwest and East Coast?

BALABAN: Yeah. I mean, the truth is, I don’t make a big distinction in my mind between New York and L.A., because it’s all a telephone call, and what difference does it make from which room you’re calling, is my philosophy. I’m in Los Angeles a large amount of the time, because there are more executives there, frankly, and you just have to have meetings there. And I love LA. I’m actually very happy there. I had set up a series this year, at Fox FX, that I created and produced and directed and was in, with some of my pals from Best In Show. We did the pilot twice – we started at NBC, then Fox FX picked us up, then we had months in between of working on it, and we’re still sort of waiting on a bit of a tenterhook. It’s unlikely we’ve been picked up for our first 13 episodes, but it’s actually not over yet …

PLUME: Well then, as opposed to moving, when did you transition into the film part of the entertainment business?

BALABAN: I forget what birthday it was – probably somewhere in my late ’30s… my wife gave to me, as a present, a little short film that she had written. My wife is just a brilliant writer, and always has been. I met her in college in a writing class, and she was always the best one. We’ve done some work together, we used to write pilots together early on in our relationship that we sold, and did very nicely at. Then, she has just gone on to have a nice career – it will be better when they make some of these movies, but she’s worked for some of the best people, I think. She worked for Barry Levinson, developed a movie for him, and did a movie for Penny Marshall, and now is working with a wonderful French director, Jean Jacques Beineix, and she just is really, really talented. So she wrote a birthday present for me, a short film, and I went out and made the short film on my own dime – it didn’t cost very much. I really was able to do this, because I had made a decision after Prince of the City, in which I played another one of those vile, disgusting people who destroys other people. I went to Sidney Lumet. about whom I was just incredibly impressed with everything about his filmmaking, and as an actor – as a character actor, especially – you get to encounter dozens and dozens of other directors. Which, if you were just a director, you wouldn’t really get to see how these other people are working. People say, “Oh, actors sometimes make good directors, or make the best directors.” I don’t necessarily agree with that, but I do think that actors who become directors have something up on other directors, sometimes, which is they’ve seen a million other people working, and you’ve observed other techniques and you’ve seen, literally, other styles of behavior and attitude and temperament on a set – which, you know, you would never know about if you were just a director directing that movie. So anyway, after Prince of the City was over, I asked Sidney Lumet if I could apprentice myself to him and follow him around for six months, which I did on a movie called Death Trap – Christopher Reeves and Michael Caine and Diane Cannon. It was just a great movie to observe on, because it was rather play like. There weren’t millions of locations like there had been on Prince of the City, and there was much more opportunity for me to observe what was happening. Sidney was extremely generous with his time, with his willingness to just – I didn’t want to get in the way, and I tried to be invisible for six months. It wasn’t that hard, but I worked at it a little bit. Sidney was always saying, “Oh no, ask questions!” And he was always coming over to me and saying, “This is why we’re using that lens. This is why this shot is so difficult to achieve, because of X, Y, and Z. This is why I’ve made the set this way.” It was like 40 years of film school wrapped up in six months. It was just an amazing experience – and I had been to film school. I mean, I had majored in film production for a while in New York University, although I eventually was an English major and a Sociology minor. But I did take film courses, and I was always interested in it. This was major immersion of the best kind, and when it was over my wife wrote me this birthday present, and then that was sort of the beginning of my shifting, splitting off my energies to directing and then producing – because of that. The film had gotten some awards, I immediately got a pilot to direct for a series called Tales from the Dark Side that went on for years and years, and the pilot was nicely done, and it was successful. It was very well written. I didn’t write it, but it came out well. I started getting jobs. I directed my first movie, called Parents, with Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt and Sandy Dennis. A strange movie about cannibals in 1958… it was metaphorically autobiographical, oddly enough.

PLUME: It was very Midwestern.

BALABAN: Well, that’s me.

PLUME: You also did an Eerie, Indiana episode…

BALABAN: Yeah, I directed about four or five Eerie, Indianas. I have this strange little sidebar career as an episodic television director, which comes and goes. It’s not something I pursue often, and then every once in a while I have a flurry of them. In the last couple of years, I ended up doing about 10 hour episodes of things. I’m going to do some again next year in between other things. I just did a Twilight Zone episode. It’s something that I really enjoy doing, but I can’t get booked on it as if it were my principal career, because then you can’t do anything else. It’s not something – it takes me away from home and takes my focus away from my development activities, both in television and in movies, and in theater. My life is constantly pulling me in both directions. In one direction I’m “performing,” whether it’s as a producer or a director or an actor. In the other direction, I’m planning and plotting and creating, and trying to do stuff that will happen in two or three or four years. When I’m doing one, it’s very, very hard to do the other. It’s hard to mix them up. It’s like your left and your right brain having to be there at the same time. It’s really hard.

PLUME: What’s your preference?

BALABAN: Both. I like both of them. I can’t have one without the other, so I’m always in a bit of a struggle. Also, I write a series of children’s books for Scholastic… They’re little novels for kids who are kind of seven to twelve, or whatever.

PLUME: The McGrowl novels… I’ve heard very good things about them…

BALABAN: Well, I’m really enjoying it enormously. I just like doing it, and the reception it’s getting is very satisfying, and fun to see that you’re actually connecting – because I’ve just finished a two or three legged little book tour, mostly involving children. It isn’t one of those things where you go and appear on television shows – you actually just go to people’s schools and go to their book fairs and their clubs. Which is very interesting because, as a writer, not too frequently are you thrown – I mean, you are at book signings at Barnes & Noble – but you’re not usually sitting in assemblies of 300 eight year olds who are asking you questions about the writing process and specifically your book. It’s a real insight into the impact that one has, when you do something like this. It’s very surprising.

PLUME: Well, what are the challenges of that form, as a writer?

BALABAN: I think it’s the same as everything. I don’t think it’s any different from anything else that I’m trying to do. I’m trying to basically fulfill something, you know? I know my general thing that I’m trying to do, and I’ve sort of loosely sketched it out. Then I’m trying to get inside of it, and do the best version of it that I can. It’s a question of really spending time with it. You can’t short circuit the process. To me, I can’t. I’m sure other people can, probably. But just like acting, I have to do my homework, I have to think about my characters, I have to daydream, and then I have to spend enough hours sitting in front of the computer so that it starts to happen by itself. I can look back at some of these things, and it’s only a children’s book … I mean, it’s the best literature I’m capable of writing at the moment – for children, anyway. But I’m not saying it’s a classic. But I am saying that I look back on it sometimes and I go, “Gee, I wonder why I thought of that?” Or, “I wonder how that happened?” And my favorite parts of it are when it seems to have a life of its own. It finds its own tone, and its own style, and it’s inventive and it’s fun – I mean, for me it’s inventive, anyway. I look back on it, and I sort of don’t remember, “Who did that? I don’t remember doing that.” Well, that feels good when that happens.

PLUME: Do you enjoy the fact that it’s a continuing series?

BALABAN: Well, yes, tremendously. Just when I think, “Oh, I can’t think of anything else,” it’s the third book, and how many times can you write about these people. And there are 180 pages – granted, the print is large, but it’s not just a few sentences and a few beautiful pictures, it’s actually a book. And what I’m finding is, the fact that I spend more time with it is almost – at this point, anyway – it’s a little easier, because I sort of know everybody better. The one thing I have trouble with is remembering continuing smaller characters. I’m always having to drag out the first book to find out who the local policeman is, and I can’t remember some of the teachers’ names and things. Because I do a lot of other things, and it’s like, “Oh, now I’m writing the book. Who’s the homeroom teacher? What does she look like?”

PLUME: The running gag is the characters change every book…

BALABAN: That is true, by the way. The way this thing happened was, it began life as a movie that some people were interested in along the way, several times, but it never quite got made. Suddenly, through a series of circumstances, Scholastic read it and said, “Well, we don’t want to do it as a movie, but we think it could be the genesis of a children’s series that we would be very excited to have, because it fulfills all of our demographic needs.” Obviously, they want to sell books, but it’s also – the way they sell books is by having things that kids like reading, which is a wonderful thing, because obviously the best way to encourage reading is to have kids like to read. So they sensed that there were some things about the movie that would be very appealing to kids – boys especially, although girls like it equally as much, but it’s much harder to get little boys to read. Just statistically, I suppose. So they came to me, and together we sort of re-tooled the premise of what was going to be a movie. The dog went from being a robot dog that the little boy actually builds, to being a golden retriever who’s real, but then has a run-in with this veterinarian and ends up becoming a bionic dog – although he looks like a perfectly regular dog. So it turns out, one of the needs in order to have a series – or my series, anyway – I needed to create a bad person. In this case a bad two people, who appear in every book and they get defeated by the heroes. This little boy comes with his dog, McGrowl, and their friend Violet. They live in a happy little Midwest – here we go again – community, like Parents or whatever, and there’s this force of evil in the town that nobody recognizes. It’s an evil person, who since the time he was little has been plotting to destroy the world, starting with his little city of Cedar Springs. He wants to take over the world, he’s a maniac. He never gets terribly far, and he’s not terribly frightening, because this is for seven to twelve year olds, and you don’t want to make them have a bad time. Although we want them to be a little scared in a fun way, and have some suspense. In every book, the premise of the bad people is that they’re masters of disguise and you never know where they’re going to come from. So in book one, you are not wildly surprised to find out that the veterinarian is not really the veterinarian, it’s the bad people. They sent the real veterinarian on a trip somewhere, and they took over his practice so they could dig for oil in his back yard and get enough money to start mounting their campaign to take over the world. That’s the first book. In the second book, you just have no idea who they’re going to be, because I made them be two friendly, happy people, and then you’re surprised all of a sudden to find out that they’re the bad people, and they’ve actually wormed their way into the kids’ lives. In the third book, I have a twist on that twist. It’s fun, because they’re completely different every book, and yet eventually they revert to their nasty selves, all the time.

PLUME: There certainly seems like there’s been a resurgence in recent years in reading, with today’s kids.

BALABAN: Yeah, well, Harry Potter certainly is responsible for a vast amount of it.

PLUME: From Scholastic, as well…

BALABAN: Yeah, that’s Scholastic, as well. Lemony Snicket is one of my favorite children’s books …

PLUME: Yes, by HarperCollins, I think.

BALABAN: He’s a writer also, for Scholastic. I don’t know, maybe he doesn’t write that series for them, but he writes other things for them, because I saw him at my convention last year … five author’s had to get up and talk, and I went, “Oh my gosh, I’m on a podium with Lemony Snicket,” although that’s not his real name. I thought, “Maybe this book will really be something, if I’m on a podium with Lemony Snicket, and also the woman who wrote the Babysitter’s Club (Ann M. Martin), and I’m up there, and this is very exciting.”

PLUME: And how long do you see the series continuing on?

BALABAN: Thirty or forty years. I’m joking, but I’m not.

PLUME: So, it’ll eventually morph into the McGrowl Mysteries…

BALABAN: Well, there are little mysteries in them, yeah. I mean, I’m only doing six of them now. “Only,” he says. Number three will be finished in January, and then a year later number six will be finished. It’s like three a year, or two and a half a year. Then after that – the demand is increasing. The second book is already selling to book clubs more than the first book did, so there’s reason to think that by number six, this could have spun into one of those series that goes on for a long time, and I’d love that if it did.

PLUME: And in an ironic twist – when is the movie planned?

BALABAN: Well, the movie is being shopped right now – and it’s a two-pronged approach, one of which is you shop it. You send it, you make people aware of it. The other approach is, if the book keeps growing organically the way it seems to be doing, it could get to be the kind of thing where the movie has to get made, because there are too many people who know about it. You know what I mean? It could get to be that successful, you know – in my wildest dreams, anyway – that movie studios have to make the movie, because kids are clamoring to see it. I did a book tour at a children’s school in New York, called The Town School, which was a lovely little school in the East Side of Manhattan, and was encouraged by these thousands of little children who were reading it, and drawing pictures of the dog. In their library, they had 18 copies of the book, because they can’t keep it in circulation. It won the award as the most popular book in school. These things… it’s not like a movie. Movies can’t usually grow. Well, My Big Fat Greek Wedding did, but that was also because it was brilliantly marketed and a very entertaining movie at the same time. With movies it doesn’t happen that much. There is not that much word of mouth with movies, because it’s too expensive to keep the movie in the movie theater while you wait for it to build. It gets replaced the next week by a bigger, fatter movie. But in these books – especially in the series world – it occupies a small corner of a shelf at Barnes & Noble, it gets bigger – by the time you’re on the third book, you now have your own shelf. Then you get your own poster, then the people who read the third book want to go back and read the first book, then the sixth book comes out and suddenly they publish the whole thing as a set in a very cute box with the dog on it. You know, it has a lovely way of being around long enough, so that if six children like it this week, 20 children will read it next week.

PLUME: Then it becomes a generational thing.

BALABAN: It could be. I’m actually contemplating writing a junior version of it, because at these book tours when I was signing and going around, a lot of 4 year olds were like, “Would you sign my book?” and they’d hand me a piece of paper and I’d have to write McGrowl on it and sign it and everything. I thought, “They can’t really read this.” It’s a little grown up if you’re five years old, this book – for most five year olds, not for everybody. I thought, “Why don’t I write a smaller, gentler picture book of the same thing, and then when they get older, they’ll encounter the character that they used to know.” This is my plan – my plan to take over the entire world of publishing.

Continued below…

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