After 30+ years I can mention this now but as people who know me will tell you I worked very hard and put a hell of a lot of effort into this.
In the early 1990s I was contacted by a former Bastei editor who had seen the D-Gruppe work and had searched around but found that no one had published German super heroes before. He was working with a company that made TV shows for German TV companies -I had worked on project proposals with ARD and 3Sat ,etc. and so I knew who he was.
We had a 30 minutes long phone call (he was paying!) and the gist of it was this: two German stations wanted some programmes for "kids TV" and these would be animated (two series) and live action. I was asked whether I could provide a synopsis for an animated series as well as a trial script. I was also asked to provide character sketches and as I already had colour illoes drawn by other people no problem.
Two weeks later (remember this was all by post not internet) I was told that one station producer had said they were interested in the D-Gruppe animated series and as it would be a joint venture with two other stations they would like to see how the initial six episodes would look and for that reason "Can you come up with six scripts in two weeks?" Me "Two weeks? Yeah, no problem"
I did the basic scripts then sat back and wrote all six full scripts to fill a running time of 20 minutes in just over a week. The scripts were posted off along with extra character sketches of villains, etc. They were over the moon and so the company would do a quick 8 minute short based on the script to show the companies.
April turned to may...June...July and I knew animation took a while and things could be slow in TV so I waited until September and then sent a letter asking if any additional material was needed and how things were coming along. Nothing.
Now I rarely used the phone to make calls outside the UK and it seemed that all such calls were always to Germany. So I phoned the company and, luckily for me with my very rusty German, the woman I spoke to was fluent in English. She was also the person who was winding down the company!
It was a complicated story but the studio had used up a year's budget in seven months and I was told mainly on "meetings" (dinners and drinks -oh, the "British method") to try to sell projects. TV companies had stopped any transactions because they were alerted to problems. The fella who contacted me had left and was in the United States but had dumped and burnt everything from his office before leaving including animation cells. Sounded more like someone trying to hide something to me.
Io Maerc was another person in TV and had copies of my concept pages and scripts, etc -which was odd since everything was supposedly burnt. Anyway, as anyone who has read the series knows two characters are the head of D-Gruppe von Happe (aka Kopfmann) and Joachim (aka Goldener Soldat); I was told that a "dwarf actor and a former power builder who was 1.98m (6ft 6 inches) tall were perfect for the roles and that even if a low budget D-Gruppe would make a great live action series.
I took a dep breath and listened to more and the thing is that as you get more experienced you realise that 90% of what TV (well publishers as well) people tell you is utter bull-poo BUT you have to take a professional attitude and see what happens. It all sounded great until "We cannot offer a contract or payment until we see what the reaction is and we have production costs..."
Remember I had checked out this company and it was legit. This was what we call the "try it on" where they do not pay or offer a contract so that you can claim a kill fee. The scripts he wanted which were similar to the animated ones but more changes to make it live action would take a month to sort out and I told him that this would be me working all of that time, every day, and no income so how was I supposed to pay bills and eat: he was on a company salary after all. He said he would look into it but when he phoned me next he told me that "the bosses" (he WAS the boss) were unwilling to pay out in advance or on acceptance of scripts.
I told him that was a pit. I also told him that he could look elsewhere to get free work done.
In the 1990s I had worked on TV projects that the BBC wanted to make and to get outside funding into. The German projects would be easily changed slightly to make it also acceptable to British viewers. The producer in question asked, since I already knew German TV companies, if I could ask them to put money in as a "co-production"? I said "okay" and then contacted the German companies and two, after three months of work, stated they would be interested so once the BBC send a "cost sheet" for production funding they would do the contracts. This was all passed on to the BBC producer who said it was "great news" and that he would get back to the people in Germany directly.
A month later the German companies asked why the BBC were being quiet and not responding to messages? It turned out the producer had jumped the BBC to a better paid job and in TV no one who becomes a new producer will take on something a previous producer worked on in case it was successful as they could take credit. So the ****** had just dumped months of hard work without telling anyone.
Someone did ask about a D-Gruppe animated series around 2005 but in that case they offered a very low payment for the rights to the characters. They would no longer be mine. I said no.
There you go -that's off my chest.
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