This week on Films Not Made, we hang with writer, director, storyboard artist and voice actor Conrad Vernon (Shrek 2, Sausage Party, The Addams Family) and comedian Harland Williams to talk about their not-made animated film Roadside Attraction — the true story of Mulligan the golf ball statue and Betty the blueberry statue, who stare at each other across Route 66 for 50 years before Mulligan becomes the first statue in history to move for love. Jeffrey Katzenberg (DreamWorks) greenlit it on the spot. But since the Gingerbread Man from Shrek and the Pee Drinking Cop from Dumb and Dumber are guests on Films Not Made, you probably deduced that Roadside Attraction is not coming to a theater anytime soon. We do have lots of stories, laughs and original sketches from our talented guests. This is a story about the strongest emotion in all of humanity: love.

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Harland Williams https://www.harlandwilliams.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harlandwilliams/?hl=en

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/HarlandHighwayPodcast

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@harlandwilliams

Conrad Vernon Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conniev711/?hl=en

Conrad Vernon IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0970447/

Before Sideways swirled its way into a Pulitzer-caliber wine country classic, screenwriter-novelist Rex Pickett wrote Repairman — a script about a coin-op laundry repairman with fetal alcohol syndrome, a checkered past as an accidental arsonist, and an unshakable code of honesty in a world full of people skimming, scheming, and selling out.

Rex is the novelist and screenwriter behind Sideways — the book-turned-Oscar-winning-film-turned-stage-musical-turned-Latvian-train-show — and the author of numerous screenplays exploring the messier corners of California life. Long before wine country made him a household name, Rex was sending Amy email dispatches about a script loosely inspired by his brother.

On this episode:

- The wild true story of how Repairman almost got made twice — first with Gil Bellows attached to direct, until a surprise phone call from Christina Ricci that blew up the whole deal

- A nearly-greenlit $2.5 million, 35mm production at First Look — derailed when the studio asked to cut Rex's co-director from the deal

- Why Rex still considers Repairman one of his most personal scripts, rooted in his real-life brother, Hack

We run Repairman through our AI pipeline for a new deck, a Paul Dano–heavy casting board, and a trailer that doesn't quite land — then pitch it live to our AI exec Finn, who calls it "a quietly brutal portrait of what decency costs in a rigged world."

Could it get made now? Listen and find out.

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What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

Featuring Kristin Newman & Blair Breard

Ten episodes. Three countries. One completed $50 million series — shelved by the network as a tax write-off the week after the 2023 strike ended.

TV writer Kristin Newman (That '70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, Only Murders in the Building) and award-winning EP Blair Breard (Margot at the Wedding, Better Things, Scenes From A Marriage) sit down with Amy and Avi to finally tell the story they couldn't tell while they were still hoping to resell it.

We're talking: a pilot shot in Latvia under full COVID curfew. A chemistry read that, in Blair's words, made the room melt. A Freeform rebrand that confused everyone. And a finished, fully produced, critically promising series that the network quietly wrote off and walked away from.

This one actually got made. Which, it turns out, can hurt more.

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Kristin Newman site

Kristin Newman imdb

Blair Breard imdb

Blair Breard site

Filmmaker Joe Maggio joins Amy Hobby and Avi Zev Weider to resurrect The Fall, a dark comedy about a moral Niagara Falls attorney whose life spirals out of control after he commits a terrible sin and is unexpectedly rewarded with everything he ever wanted. The project, originally conceived as an existential drama inspired by Kafka and Joe's vicious, domineering grandmother, almost became Joe’s breakout film during the early 2000s Indie Boom.

We are also joined by Tom Hall, Artistic Director of Montclair Film, who lends his expertise as a film festival programmer and "walking encyclopedia of film" to assess the project's concept and casting.

Joe shares the incredible saga of The Fall’s near-production: from writing the script on his honeymoon and securing his dream lead, John Turturro, to the painful collapse of the deal. John Turturro perfectly captured the chaos, calling the process like "holding on to the horns of a bull and I'm wearing roller skates".

We present Joe with a modern pitch deck for The Fall—complete with Paul Dano as the lead and a hot take from an AI film executive—forcing Joe to confront his “biggest regret” and consider if the bittersweet film that was not made is now ready for its resurrection.

Tom Hall's Back Row Manifesto https://backrowmanifesto.substack.com/

Joe Maggio's Incidental Films https://www.incidentalfilms.com/

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Host Avi Weider walks you inside the actual workflow behind the AI trailers we make for every guest — shot by shot, prompt by prompt. From Claude Code to GPT Image 2 to Kling to Premiere, nothing is theoretical here. And it's constantly evolving. This is what it looks like when the tools meet the timeline and you're still trying to make something that feels like a real movie. We're showing you how we use AI as a tool to finally see the films that never got made. Here's what that looks like behind the scenes.

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Musician and playwright Natalie Weiss has come to resurrect her children's show concept, DJ Natalie's Neighborhood, which she pitches as “Pee-wee’s Playhouse meets Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood set to a DJ beat”. The series is rooted in her real-life, viral "Baby DJ School" and features Natalie as the host alongside her zany puppet roommates in a magical Brooklyn apartment, including Ms. Hay Hay, the glamorous horse diva, and LD the glow worm lighting designer. The core premise is teaching kids musical concepts and ASL to solve everyday problems.

Despite getting her foot in the door with top-tier executives at networks like Netflix and Sesame Street, Natalie learned the industry was shifting away from adult hosts in favor of child protagonists. The executives "wanted sanitized boring Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood".

Natalie got a renewed sense of purpose, leaving her energized, as she states, with a "total fire under my ass. I just want to work on this again."

Come to the playhouse "where beats are dope and life is good."

https://www.natalieelizabethweiss.com/
https://www.instagram.com/djnatalienyc/

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#DaveedDiggs #DonaldGlover #BillyPorter #AyoEdebiri #AliWong #KeeganMichaelKey #StephenRoot
#FilmsNotMade #DJNataliesNeighborhood #BabyDJSchool
#NatalieWeiss #KidsTV #PuppetShow #UnmadeProjects #KidsMusic #IndieFilm #ChildrensTelevision
#PeeweesPlayhouse #MrRogersNeighborhood #Brooklyn #MusicEducation #ASL #PodcastLife #HollywoodDevelopment #WhatIfWeMadeItNow #HollywoodStories

Adam Schartoff of Filmwax Radio is a veteran nearing 900 episodes interviewing everyone from Gus Van Sant to Werner Herzog. Filmwax began in 2011 as a small film series in a Brooklyn bar, quickly evolving into a podcast by 2012.

Adam, Avi and Amy discuss the biggest challenges in getting a film seen, changes in distribution, incorporation of AI, and working from the heart.

We asked his dream guest: Jim Jarmusch, the ultimate New York indie filmmaker he’s been "orbiting" for 15 years. Put that wish out there! Find Adam’s terrific archive at FilmwaxRadio.com.

Dan Mirvish, co-founder of Slamdance, comes on to talk about the unmade film that haunted him for years. Stamp & Deliver was a darkly comic postal western — think No Country for Old Men meets Office Space — and it got closer than most. Sets were built in Austin. Brittany Murphy auditioned. Ed Asner and Peter Fonda were in. Neil Young was going to produce and score it. Then 9/11 happened.

We go through the whole story, run the original script through our AI pipeline, and give Stamp & Deliver the trailer it never got and still deserves. Our film executive Meredith also stops by with notes — and sounds exactly like every development meeting you've ever sat through.

If you love indie film, hollywood stories, development hell, and the ones that got away — this one's for you.

https://linktr.ee/atomicfondue
https://substack.com/@danmirvish
https://www.danmirvish.com/Stamp-Deliver
next film, Atomic Fondue (still raising money!)
https://www.danmirvish.com/Atomic-Fondue"

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#FilmsNotMade #UnmadeFilms #DevelopmentHell #StampAndDeliver #PostalWestern #Slamdance #IndieFilmHistory #DanMirvish #IndieFilm #IndependentFilm #FilmHistory #AIFilmmaking #GenerativeAI #AITrailer
#FilmPodcast #HollywoodStories #Screenwriting #MakingMovies #MovieTrailer

It's been over 25 years since Matthew Rhys first read the script of The Amateur Pornographer. This project broke the heart of writer-director Christopher Monger.

In this special Backlot episode, actor Matthew Rhys, along with Ian McNiece and Meryn Williams Davies, share and read two scenes from the original screenplay. Chris and producer Ted Hope are in the room, reinvigorating the passion behind the script and desire to bring this Welsh film to life.

Christopher said, "Seeing Matthew Rhys and Ian McNeice and Meryn Williams Davies read a couple of scenes made me both happy and sad.  Happy in that, yes, I think it is a good script; and sad because, no, it did not get made. When I re-read Amateur Pornographer I was filled with the excitement I had when writing it."

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Christopher Monger, a Welsh native, was fresh off the Miramax release of his film The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain starring Hugh Grant. His next project was to shoot in a small town in Wales, and producer Ted Hope felt it was a sure thing. The Amateur Pornographer was nearly made with a young Matthew Rhys and later got traction at HBO, with one note: Could the film be set in the United States instead of Wales?

Christopher Monger IMDB

Ted Hope’s Substack “Hope for Film”

Check out our curated Letterboxd List for some New York mid 90s indie classics to go with our Ted Hope-Good Machine vibe.

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