LA LA LAND
WHEN SHOWTIME NETWORK STOLE MY TV SERIES
PART 1 OF 2
MIKE CARAVELLA
JUNE 10, 2026
“Make Or Break”. You’ve all heard the saying. That pendulum is at the core of a TV Pilot that I wrote and filmed almost 20 years ago. LA LA Land. My LA LA Land. The Real LA LA Land. The Original LA LA Land. And I came real close to both sides of that swing with it.
Before I became the full conglomerate, one-stop shopping, jack-of-all indie filmmakers, I just wanted to do one thing. Act. At my core I’m an actor. I love acting. But the industry has never loved me. The feeling over time became mutual. As I do with everything in life, I never take no for an answer. In fact, your “no” just makes me raise both middle fingers, and figure out how to do it myself.
Leave A Comment (Not Too Dirty...)
Did that story entertain you? Then please tip this former Bartender.
Want Updates? Join our Mailing List:
Share Share That's Fair:
By 2007, after having extremely modest success booking small parts for the last few years, I felt I needed to make my own break. I met my buddy, Jason Gajda, a year earlier where we both worked at a celebrity hangout brunch spot. I bartended. Jason waited tables. Jason is a fantastic musician and his band came thisclose to hitting the rock-n-roll jackpot, so his sentiments about the industry were similar to mine. If you’ve watched Astral Plane Drifter, you’re familiar with Jason and his band because they wrote and played most of the music.
Jason and I loved to haunt all the old classic legendary Hollywood spots and eat and drink and talk movies and music non-stop. Somewhere in the middle of that, we started exchanging oceans of ideas and thinking about writing and filming on our own. A guitar player and an actor.
One lunch in the valley, Jason pitched a germ of an idea to me that I immediately fell in love with. We quickly fleshed out a 7 minute short, and I went home and wrote it. He would direct it and I would star in it.
But what do we do with it? Well… remember my buddy John, the music agent for the then William Morris Agency from our previous story? (Story #2 - Shitfellas). He offers to walk it into the script coverage department and get it reviewed. I just went, in the span of 4 weeks, from somebody who’s never written a word outside of a school book report to getting my TV Pilot script reviewed by the same team that passed on The Verdict. You know, the Paul Newman movie written by David Mamet and directed by Sidney Lumet that was nominated for Best Picture?
About 2 weeks go by. Quiet midweek night shift at the bar. Jason and I are probably doing something ridiculous like inventing a new tiki cocktail. John walks in and he’s got papers in his hand. And he’s smiling. He’s got the coverage. And the William Morris Agency listed my TV Pilot, LA LA Land, a “Consider”. There are 3 stages in script coverage. Recommend, Consider, and Pass. The Verdict was a “Pass”. LA LA Land is a “Consider”.
So what now? Most writers would just continue to hone the script, spend a year or more refining, revising… Me? I’m ready to go! We need to make it. Now! Filming Spec Pilots was still a thing in 2007. You make your Pilot episode and then shop that around instead of just the script. I’m an actor first still, so I need this show to be seen with me as the lead character, Mikey Forearms.
Gilbert hears the good news and he is all in. We came up with a plan to film it for about $10K. He said if I come up with half, he will match. Done. Jason at this point is feeling a bit hesitant to direct it by himself as the stakes escalated a little bit since our 7 minute short film idea, so he recruits a buddy of his, Marc, who had some indie experience to co-direct it with him. We would learn Marc had some skills and resources, but directing wasn’t one of them. This wouldn’t be the last time I encountered this kind of Director on one of my projects.
I don’t know how to do things small, even though my bank account says otherwise. This Pilot Episode has 25 speaking parts and 15 locations. It’s a Hollywood story. So it needs to be filmed in Hollywood. And I’m going to do it with $10K and zero experience producing. Some of the integral scenes are set in an A-List Hollywood Talent Agency/Producers Office. John gets us permission to film those scenes inside of the William Morris Agency for one day, on the weekend, when they’re closed. And he gets it for free. But, I need to have a $1 Million insurance policy for that day, which cost $3K. Having that great script coverage from WMA and also them lending us the building to shoot in gave me credibility to pull all sorts of things together for this impossible task I’m undertaking, and while that was all great, I only have $7K left. And we haven’t even started.
During the casting process, we figure having a recognizable face to put in it would help. Gilbert pitches me to call my “Uncle”, Frank Sivero (Story #2 - Shitfellas). I figured being one of my Dad’s best lifelong friends, and being a close family friend as well, he might want to help out, and so I gave him a call. Unfortunately, his proclivity for bad habits took precedence, and he responded to me with “Mikey, I’d love to help you out, but I got to get my rate.” Being that he already hadn’t worked for ten years at that point, most likely from bridges burned, I figured his rate was zero and offered him accordingly. We moved on.
This is where our director Marc’s true skills came into play. And I truly mean this. He was really helpful to the project. He had access to a bunch of locations which he got us for free. And he also had access to Robert Rusler (Nightmare On Elm Street 2, Shag, Vamp, and Weird Science to name a few.) Robert was Marc’s program mentor, and he read the script and was really jazzed about it. So between the script, and his connection to Marc, and my connection to the William Morris Agency, that all sealed the deal for him. He graciously came to work on a Spec project for Spec… (See how that works, Frank Sivero?) Rus was a great addition. He came prepared, was genuinely excited about the project, and gave us a great performance. One of my favorite actors to work with to this day.
The 5 day shoot for a 26 minute pilot episode, with insane amounts of Hollywood locations and actors, and limited crew with only $7K left for production and EVERYBODY working for free went about as smooth as you can expect for an almost completely inexperienced production. The anchor that I needed was my Director Of Photography, Joe di Gennaro. I met Joe first day on the set, and recognized right away he knew exactly how things were to be done, when Marc did not, and I leaned into him full force. He became my confidant, and remained so all the way through Astral Plane Drifter. Joe has since retired, and I will truly miss working with him.
We blasted through post-production in a month and I was ready to hit the town full force. We printed up about 200 DVD’s for me to distribute to whoever I can get it to. This was 2007 so the digital age did not fully explode yet. That would happen about 6 months after we finished with the advent of the smart phone. The quality of the image suffers a bit as compared to now. We used a really good digital camera for the time, but it all changed so very fast right after. It sounds crazy to say, but in 2007, we really were still running around town with paper scripts and DVD’s. I miss that.
I almost struck gold right away and in hindsight, this is the move I probably most regret. Remember, I’m a celebrity hangout bartender. I had a ton of people in the industry right at my fingertips everyday. I literally had just picked up my DVD’s the day before, when one of my regulars, Daniel, who was Ryan Kavanaugh, CEO of Relativity Media’s personal assistant, came into the bar. I asked him if he could walk a DVD in, and he was happy to oblige. 3 days later, Daniel called me to tell me I have a meeting at Relativity Media on Friday.
I had the meeting and it went really well. They showed genuine excitement and we spent time talking about my 6 episode arc pitch, and they offered to option the series for one year. That means they have exclusive rights for one year to get it produced and then their rights expire and go back to me if they don’t. I go back to my team with it. They don’t like it at all. The upfront option money was less than what production cost so Gilbert wasn’t happy with that. Only my name was on the option deal, so they were all really upset about that. And John didn’t get a chance to work it through William Morris yet, and wanted me to hold for that to happen. After taking that all in, and showing my loyalty to my friends, which might be my biggest fault, I decided to pass on the option. Passed on a chance to develop a relationship with one of the largest media companies in the world. I remember thinking, “I have these DVD’s less than a week and I already met with Relativity Media. I’ll sell this thing easy.”
It didn’t exactly work out that way…
LA LA Land has been up on my YouTube channel for years now. Up for so long, it goes back to the days when you weren’t allowed to post anything longer than 10 minutes. Here it is in 3 parts:
At our day job, we had a regular customer, Gilbert (zheel-bair) Mercier, who would sit at the bar and eat. Gilbert, who I affectionately called Frenchy and he fucking hated it, was a professional script doctor. I was pretty excited about what Jason and I came up with, and what I put on paper, as I never wrote anything before in my life. I never got past 10th grade English. I asked Gilbert to give it a read and give me notes.
Gilbert came back to the bar the next day even more excited than Jason and I were. “ This is fantastic!”, he said. “It should be a fucking TV series!” That’s all you have to say to me. I’m now ready to write the 7 minute short into a TV Pilot. Jason and I went back to work. Same routine, we’d brainstorm together, and I’d put it on paper. About 3-4 weeks later, we had a TV Pilot script!
Part 1 of 2