Vanity Fair really delivered the goods today with a "first look" at The Midnight Club TV adaptation, including an interview with Mike Flanagan, some comments from Pike, and a bunch of tasty tasty pics with commentary from the show's creator. Some choice tidbits:
[In college, late 1990s]... Flanagan wrote a screenplay, and even drafted a business plan, offering friends and family a chance to invest their own money in his low-budget indie. Once it was all in place, he sent the proposal to Pike’s publisher. “They sent me a cease and desist letter,” he says.
We already knew the TV series will use other Pike books as the stories told to each other by the lead characters. Now we know more.
Adding numerous other Pike titles to the mix made The Midnight Club more complicated to pull off, but Trevor Macy, Flanagan’s producing partner at Intrepid Pictures, said they were necessary to broaden the scope of the series. Each one stands as its own mini-movie within the framework of the show, reflecting the mindset of the ailing kid who tells it.
[...] Among the other Pike novels that will featured are Witch (1990), about a girl with mystical abilities who tries to prevent her catastrophic visions from coming true; Gimme A Kiss (1988), in which a bullied student fakes her own death as part of a twisted revenge scheme; The Wicked Heart (1993), which follows the trail of a high-school serial killer whose preferred weapon is a hammer; and Road to Nowhere (2011), in which a heartbroken young woman running away from her life picks up two eerie hitchhikers.
Flanagan also talks about first approaching Pike via a private message through Pike's official FB page, and Pike talks to Vanity Fair about his own supposed aversion to Hollywood.
In 1996, NBC made a TV movie from his book Fall Into Darkness, which he thought was poorly done, and cut away too much of his story. “The main thing is I wanted [the books] to be adapted in a way that my fans would be happy with,” he says. “It sounds maybe conceited to say that turned me off all of Hollywood, but it really did turn me off for a long time.”
NBC wanted to collaborate again, but he says he turned them down. “After Fall Into Darkness, the network was really angry at me that I didn't let Chain Letter be adapted,” he says. And so began the rumor that Christopher Pike didn’t allow adaptations.
“People would write sometimes, but very seldom. And they would say, ‘Now, we know that you don't want anything to do with Hollywood and this and that.' And I hadn't made that decision,” he says.
The article gives us more specifics, too, about the longer arc of the show's first season, and the goings-on at the hospice. Click through for a read, it's all good stuff.