This week's podcast is a two-parter.  My guests are Wil Wheaton (ACTOR, WRITER, GAMER, BREWER) and John Rogers (LEVERAGE):

Title:  MISS UNIVERSE.  Genre:  Sci fi comedy

Humanoid aliens with an unstopable space armada dispath a delegation to Earth negotiate it's peaceful surrender or face destruction. The problem – who do they negotiate with? The delegation leader, VRAX, monitors Earth broadcast outlets but can't figure out who's in charge as he sees one talking head Fox News type show after another in dozens of languages. Then, he sees it. A ceremony in which representatives of all the countries of the Earth choose their one true leader. It's an exhausting process in which these representatives are evaluated based on their their physical appearance, knowledge and mastery of skills. They are even asked how they would solve devasting global problems, like war, famine and pet overpopulation. Finally, their leader is chosen. That is who Vrax will take his planet's offer – MISS UNIVERSE, aka MADISON BRYANT, 21, from Orlando. Her talent was jazz tap. Now, it better be saving the world.

http://tinyurl.com/couawvz 

My latest podcast is on iTunes.  This week, I'm joined by Christine Boylan (ONCE UPON A TIME) and her husband, Eric Heisserer (FINAL DESTINATION 5) to tackle a movie about a magic Rubik's Cube.  Here's the logline:

Title: RUBIK'S CUBE: THE MOVIE. Genre: Live action family comedy.

Jake, a 12-year-old boy struggling with his parents' imminent divorce, discovers something magical in the waiting room of his child psychologist. It's a Rubik's Cube that has the power to bring together (or tear apart) all the different people in Jake's life. Each color of the cube represents a different group – his family, his teachers, his classmates, his Little League team, his Boy Scout Troop and his best pals. All Jake wants to do is bring the two colors representing his estranged parents back together but each twist of the Cube has unintended conequences. (See fender bender between Jake's sister and scout leader; use of Cube to pit bullies against each other; weird collisions involving social networking (i.e. Jake's crush “friending” his mom).

Just click on the link below to play.

http://tinyurl.com/TheDowneyFiles

Welcome to my blog and the home of my new podcast.   For those of you who've been listening to the LEVERAGE writers' podcast, you only have yourselves to blame for this.  I didn't think you were going to listen to us talk about the origins of each episode but you did.  Apparently, people do want to know how the sausage is made -- at least when the sausage is a weekly television show you like a lot.

So what's my solo podcast about?  Well, to build off the sausage metaphor, it's like a cooking show.  It's me and a writer taking an idea and trying to make it into a movie or TV show in 30 minutes or less.  We'll start out with ingredients from my pantry -- the terrible, terrible movie ideas I've accumulated over the years that I am never going to write.  They're the kind of ideas I've come up with while waiting for people in bars, washing shampoo out of my eyes and watching actual terrible, terrible movies, then scribbled on whatever scrap of paper I could find.

They are not movie ideas I got from you, either looking over your shoulder as you typed your movie at Starbucks or from your finished script when it was handed to me by an agent, brother-in-law or the lady at Home Depot this weekend who saw my LEVERAGE sweatshirt and told me she had just finished writing a movie about where dogs go after they die.

So here's my disclaimer:  Any similarity between my terrible, terrible movie ideas to your intellectual property is entirely coincidental and based on the fact that we live in the same world, watch the same movies and shop at Home Depot.

With that out of the way, here's the logline for episode one:

Title:  UPSTREAM.  Genre:  Animated family comedy.


TOMMY, a rebellious salmon, is desperate to escape from his fish farm and fulfill his destiny -- the swim upstream and find love.  He's assisted in his quest by MOLLY, the Temple Grandin-like architect who designed the fish farm.  Molly's breakthrough is making her fish farm mimic the stresses of the outside world (i.e. fake rapids and mechanical bear paws that smash into the water with a pre-recorded growl).  The goal is to make the farm-raised salmon taste like their wild brethren.  Molly "gets" salmon and she can tell that none of her gimmicks are fooling Tommy.  Once he's made it to the river, Tommy has to dodge real bears and commercial fishermen to make it to Alaska and find his true spawn-mate along the way.  (See Tommy fail to convince his family they're living in a fish-Matrix; unexpected friendship with a savvy beaver; desperate swim over a dam).


My guest is MICHAEL PRICE of THE SIMPSONS.  Clink on the link below to play.

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New episodes will be posted here weekly and will soon be available on iTunes.

Welcome

Welcome to Chris Downey Industries, home of the Chris Downey podcast.  If you're a fan of rambling incoherence, interrupted by long, awkward silences, this is the podcast for you.

I will also be posting here on a variety of topics.  Come early and often.