Arrow excutive prodcuer Marc Guggenheim recently interviewed his wife, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. showrunner Tara Butters and her co-executive producer Michele Fazeka, for The Hollywood Reporter. In the conversation, Guggenheim compared notes with Butters and Fazeka on working for DC Entertainment vs Marvel Studios. Here are a few, choice snippets from the interview:
Guggenheim: Do you consider Agent Carter's eight-episode order a blessing or a curse?
Butters: It's a blessing. Having eight episodes where it's not eight with the possibility of more, you know there's only going to be those eight and you're not going to have to hedge your bets and say, "Well, maybe we'll have a few more episodes that we'll have to fill out." You know the beginning and end of the season and can plot it out in a smart way. As long as you stick with it, and you're not a slave to it, you can move things around — and things do move around or better ideas come up but that makes it a process where you're not scrambling to come up with, "What's the next show?" You can actually spend time making it better and getting into the thematic, character stuff as opposed to just churning out a script because production is breathing down your neck.
The Agent Carter showrunners confirm that there are indeed plans for the Agents of SHIELD miniseries to continue for additional seasons if the ratings prove strong. They also confirm that Marvel Cinematic Universe characters, besides those previously announced will show up on Agent Carter. Naturally, they declined to identify who those character(s) are but that's to be expected given Marvel's tradition of secrecy.
Butters: What is DC Entertainment like?
Guggenheim: DC is actually pretty chill. I will say [Arrow and Flash showrunner] Andrew Kreisberg and I tend to be the gatekeepers in terms of what's a secret or trying to keep spoilers from leaking out. DC never really dictates stuff to us. We're self-policing, and we always apply a story that I had heard about Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Spoiler alert: In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the Enterprise was blown up, and when Paramount cut the trailer, that scene was in the trailer. [Producer] Harve Bennett and [director-star] Leonard Nimoy went to Sherry Lansing — the head of Paramount at the time — saying, "That's a huge moment for us, we don't want that in the trailer." And Lansing replied, "Well, do you want people to be surprised or do you want them to go to the movie?" We use that as a barometer [on Arrow and Flash]. We're not militant but there are certain things that are absolutely secret. There was a pilot printed on red paper, and I read everything on my iPad and have a scanner on my desk for these purposes. I scanned in the script and red paper script scans in perfectly fine.
Guggenheim fields another question about how involved DC Entertainment is with the production of each Arrow episode. Said Guggenheim:
We have these semi-regular meetings where throughout the season we'll take them through the next chunks of episodes and say, "These are the big 10 pulls, here are the big moves that we're making." We plan the season out all in advance, so at the beginning of the season they know where the midseason finale is going to be, who's going to die and who's going to become a superhero. That's usually when we discuss which characters from the DC universe we want to bring in and which ones we can bring in. Obviously DC has a lot of different projects both in TV and film and we want to make sure that we're not stealing characters slotted for other avenues. Episode by episode, they're on all the studio notes calls and the calls for the cut. The only time we actually get notes are in the script stage. They actually produce a handy little document for us that is usually no more than two pages long with notes and thoughts. It's very democratic and offered for our consideration. We always say we'll take a good note from anywhere, and usually their notes are really quite good.
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