Surfing the search engines the other night, I came across this interview. Considering how mercurial (woah, big word) the internet is (do you sense a rant building up for later?), I thought I better archive it here.
~Shadow
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Carlos Coto's New Fox Show, `Freakylinks,? May Cement Him As A Home-grown Horrormeister.September 24, 2000|By Hal Boedeker, Sentinel TelevisionAs a boy in Central Florida, Carlos Coto started his screen career. For a homemade film about a disembodied hand, Coto maneuvered the rubbery central figure across a couch. Instead of book reports in high school, he turned in little movies.
"I'd grab my dad's Super 8 camera, shoot and cut it into a story, then show it to my friends," Coto said. "I hope now I can have 18 million friends down the street. If I have only 6 million, I'm not going to stay on the air."
Coto, 34, is a co-executive producer of FreakyLinks, a Fox drama to debut Oct. 6.
The series was created by Gregg Hale, producer of The Blair Witch Project, and Blade screenwriter David Goyer. FreakyLinks focuses on a Central Florida Webmaster (played by Ethan Embry) who learns that his supposedly dead twin brother may be alive.
An early episode will be a Coto script about subterranean monsters in New York. "The network wants a Friday night scarefest with a fun tone," he said in an interview from Los Angeles.
"It's less dark than Blair Witch. It's more like Ripley's Believe It or Not. You will always leave the episode wondering if it was real or imagined." The series will air in the time slot where The X-Files became a TV favorite.
Though set in Central Florida, the series films in Los Angeles, where a variety of backgrounds can be faked. But there's an advantage to having a Central Florida writer on the show, and Coto said Cassadaga is tentatively the setting of episode six.
Coto, a 1984 graduate of Bishop Moore High School, came to his job after four seasons on NBC's The Pretender, where he started as a staff writer and ascended to supervising producer.
"I learned television from top to bottom," he said. "The creators gave me a great break. I found a mentor in Tommy Thompson." Producer Thompson, who grew up in West Palm Beach, worked on Quantum Leap and seaQuest DSV.
But Coto cites brother Manny, a writer-director, as his main inspiration. Manny directed the film about the disembodied hand and graduated to features such as Dr. Giggles.
Working in newspapers also helped Carlos Coto cultivate his screenwriting. After graduating from the University of Miami in 1988 with a double major in film and English, he worked at The Miami Herald for almost four years.
He said the secret to writing is, "Don't wait for inspiration. Go chase it. It's what you have to do in television. Every eight days you have to have a new script. Television is a monster. It must be fed."
But the jump to Los Angeles was overwhelming at first. He worked for a short time on a CBS Saturday morning cartoon, but his two episodes never aired because the network revamped the show.
Then he didn't have a job for two years while he wrote seven movie scripts that were "half-read and passed around town," he said. He later wrote puzzles for the interactive game Spycraft and helped tell a story that could sustain 40 hours of play.
After an agent urged him to write a sample script, Coto penned an ER plot that won him notice. Soon after, he wrote an episode of the newspaper drama New York News with Mary Tyler Moore and Madeline Kahn. It too never aired, but everything changed when he landed at The Pretender.
"When you get out here, you're brainwashed to think you want to avoid television," he said. "Once I got in, I realized it was like the pace of newspapers. The writer is king in television. The writer in movies in interchangeable."
Coto said his family helped him nurture his dream. His parents, Dr. Manuel and Norma Coto, came to Central Florida from Cuba in 1961 and still live in Orlando.
Coto's wife, Yadi, worked for a bank and supported the family while he struggled to launch his career. They now have two daughters, ages 4 and 1.
"Growing up in Central Florida grounded me," Coto said. "It's a great place to witness real life. What's real is important even when you're doing a show about subterranean monsters. If the characters aren't real, you won't care that they're being chased by eyeless humanoids."
Copyright 2010 Orlando Sentinel
Taken from this
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