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Genre legend Tom Holland (Child’s Play, Fright Night) wrote and directed a web series for FEARNET called Tom Holland’s Twisted Tales. Now the series is getting the DVD treatment. We spoke with Tom about what people can expect on the DVD.
Was it always the plan to release a DVD? Originally, Twisted Tales was just meant to be a FEARNET show.
Well, they were going to try to get Walmart to release them, and it worked! Walmart took it, which, as you know, is the only major market left for DVDs. So I’m thrilled about that, but there was no guarantee. It worked out very well. The one who deserves the credit is Mark Ward at Image. It is a huge distribution. It gives it a chance to get out there.
Right. I have to imagine that the people who find it on the shelf at Walmart are not necessarily avid viewers of FEARNET.
Exactly. You’re going to get a whole new group of people who will become aware of it, who don’t watch FEARNET.
What kind of extras did you put on the disc to really make it “pop?”
We had Brian Smith and Heather Wixson - they do everybody’s behind-the-scenes - they came in and did the behind-the-scenes as we were shooting. So there is a huge amount of material there. There is a terrific amount of stuff for every episode. There is a whole separate DVD of behind-the-scenes material - I think nearly an hour.
Are you thinking about doing another season of Twisted Tales?
I don’t know. I took four Tales that I didn’t have time or money to film, and I wrote them up. They are called “Tom Holland’s Untold Tales” and they are available on Kindle Singles. So you can read read them on your Kindle.
One of the things I learned is that you have to give these kinds of things a definite length to sell these down stream, like for television. If I had it to do again, they would all be either half-hours or hours. [FEARNET] told me to make them any length I wanted. At that moment in time, there was the thinking that, over the internet, shorter would be better. I did one, “Fred and His GPS” which is only about eight and a half minutes. What I found is that if you are doing ten minutes or under, what you basically have is a monologue. It isn’t interesting enough, dramatically. I think now that the perfect form is half-hour, which is about twenty-two to twenty-four minutes when you throw in commercials. So if I did it again, I would go with half-hours or hours, but I wouldn’t do anything less than half-hours. When you go out there on the international market, they are TV people, and all they think of are series with definite time lengths.
