I find the David Benioff and D.B. Weiss rise fascinating. Weiss had about 0 experience working in TV and movies. Benioff had written a few movies, including Spike Lee's The 25th Hour
But HBO had confidence in them, even after their disastrous pilot.
I thought a lot about their rise when Apple was introducing Apple TV+, and they were rolling out big names. It was all about big shiny names -- Steven Spielberg! J.J. Abrams! Reese Witherspoon. But while they've all been successful, the success of Game of Thrones came from nobodies.
I mean, say what you want about how terrible the final seasons have been, but they are responsible for making it a hit series, especially with the people they hired. Yes, George R.R. Martin wrote the novels, but they were considered unadaptable. And in others' hands, they might be totally different.
Anyways, I was thinking of them while reading a recent profile of the third wheel, Bryan Cogman, in Vanity Fair.
It offers good insight in their working process, and strengths and weakensses.
I'll post the article below:
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/05/bryan-cogman-game-of-thrones#~oQuote:
More than 10 years ago, Weiss and Benioff had finally convinced both HBO and Martin that they were the right pick to turn Game of Thrones into what they called "The Sopranos meets Middle-earth." But they had a problem: neither of them knew the first thing about TV. Luckily, Benioff knew someone who didhis nanny's husband.
Once just another Juilliard-trained actor struggling to make it in Hollywood, Cogman first caught Benioff's eye with a script about, well, struggling actors trying to make it in Hollywood. Fed up with jobs that include a telemarketing gig in the Valley selling toner cartridgesa job that theater nerd Cogman describes as "like Glengarry Glen Ross, but worse"and with watching former classmates like Lee Pace and Anthony Mackie smile down at him from 14-foot billboards, the then 28-year-old Cogman was attempting to re-write his way out of a familiar story of Hollywood despair.
Benioff, best known at the time for well-received novels such as the one he adapted into the 2002 Spike Lee movie 25th Hour, liked what he saw but didn't have a job for Cogman yet. So he called in a favor to his childhood friend NBC Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman and landed Cogman a job as the executive's assistant (there were two others) and driver. Cogman nearly wrecked Silverman's car on his second night behind the wheel.
"You're a terrible driver," Cogman recalls Silverman saying, "but I like hanging out with you." Perhaps in an attempt to protect the paint on his other cars, Silverman eventually got his driver a writers'-assistant job, fetching coffee and the like, on an NBC show: My Own Worst Enemy,which ended after just two months, in December 2008.
However short-lived, the show was an education for Cogman in the basics of breaking a story for television. When Weiss and Benioff snapped up Cogman as their own assistant, they set up shop in a dingy suite of now demolished offices on the former Pickford-Fairbanks Studios lot and asked the guy who thought he was just there to fetch lunches where they should start.
"I got my marker and David sat in his chair and Dan sat in his," Cogman remembers. Without any other staff hired, the three of them went to work figuring out how to introduce TV audiences to the scheming Lannisters, the honorable Starks, the looming Wall, Daenerys Targaryen and her three baby dragons. "None of us knew really what we were doing. No one was really bothering us or telling us we were doing it wrong. We cooked up Season One, the three of us in that room in the winter and early spring of 2009."
