Don Schechter - Storyteller for Life

0:00Welcome. You are listening to Cover to Cover, hosted by Mary Elizabeth Jackson, a show featuring lively conversations with cutting-edge authors from around the globe. From debut to multi-award-winning to inspirational, you will find a new author and book to love. Mary is a special needs advocate, educator, speaker, and an award-winning author who brings that edge to dive deep into the writing world, sharing the journeys behind the stories and tips and tools for all things in the writing world. Now, here's Mary. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Cover to Cover on the Brushwood Media Network every Saturday and Sunday noon to 1230 Eastern time. I'm so excited to be here. I've got an amazing author on today who wears many hats. He's got a lot he can talk to us about today, so I'm very excited about that. Hopefully you will walk away with some new information,

1:04a new author to love, and a new book that you go, oh my gosh, I have to buy this book. You're going to leave a nice review. That's what we require, right? Before we get started, if you're on social media, please connect with me. I love all the emails I get, the stories around the world, what you're doing, what kind of books you love, that you're inspired to read. I think that's really important. Literacy is just so valuable and important to us. Go to my website, MaryEjaxon.com. I have new stuff coming up on there all the time, and I'm like, I keep saying, I'm in the middle of writing a book about raising highly intuitive, sensitive, and path-to-kids, so HSPs, highly sensitive people. If you are one of those, then I hope that you will join me when this book is ready to read, but I'm also going to be doing some shorts out there about just that world. How do we do it successfully? How do we thrive in this world today? How do we succeed? How do we self-care? Because when you're a highly sensitive person, you have to do a lot of self-care in order to thrive. What does that mean for you? If you're an empath, are you intuitive,

2:09are you sensitive, are you all three? It's probably caused you some stress in your life. I would imagine and as a parent, you're one of those raising kids like that. The house can be a lot of drama sometimes. So we're going to talk about those things, but today we are focusing on Don Schechter, who is an entrepreneur. He's a filmmaker, writer, and professor at Tufts University. He's the author of the fourth coming novel, Ascendant. It is a speculative sci-fi thriller, which we're going to be discussing that genre and what's going on with it. This book explores the intersection of humanity and technology. The story, which Don describes as one that has been chasing him for years, I get that, understand it, serves as the cornerstone of a multi-platform universe. Okay, so I'm going to talk more about that in a minute, but he is the founder and CEO of Charles River Media, where he oversees ideas, verse slate of projects ranging from television, film, corporate, political, and non-profit

3:10communication. He's a dedicated educator and serves as a professor at Tufts University in the film and media studies program, teaching students filmmaking and marketing skills in FromScript to Screen and the art and business of crafting compelling media campaigns, which is like so booming right now. He's also the co-host of the science fiction podcast No Wind scenario, which you may have heard of any sci-fi fans around here, and his TEDx talk Overcoming Imposter Syndrome, storytellers, sci-fi and unreliable mirrors has been met with positive reviews. Originally from Queens, New York, he is a lifelong student of speculative storytelling and curtain lives outside of Boston. Thank you so much for being here Don, how are you? I am great, thanks so much for having me. That is quite a lot to read. I know, I know. I love that what you're teaching in part of the art, what film loves in our family and I've got one who just graduates who to green animation. So, we have to watch everything animated. So everything is picked apart.

4:15We, you know, I know things that I never knew before and so, you know, it's really awesome. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. So, let's just start off right now with, you know, I've had conversations about speculative fiction lately and, you know, let's just touch right now. Let's start off with your thoughts about it and sci-fi, like where things are, where they're going. Right, I mean, it's a great question and please interrupt me if I go too far down the rabbit hole. But like, as a fan, I'm a fan my whole life of science fiction. I remember being a little kid and watching my father, my brother watching the original Star Trek on reruns and being completely bored and complaining and fast forward 40 something years. And now in terms of like science fiction, people know it's like fantastical technology, aliens, something, you know, out there that's different than what we're currently with. And sort of the trope and it's a good trope is that sci-fi allows you, allows creators to comment about societal issues, but do it in a way that sort of

5:15mess the confrontation. So go back to Star Trek and the 60s conversations about race by having alien black on one side, why on the other side, fighting against someone who's white on the other side and black on the other side, right? That's the conversation. Some of what I've been looking into the last few years and I've been researching and sort of coding film and television actually, even though we're here to talk about my book, is stories in film and television and sci-fi since the end of World War II, because I've sort of identified these distinct errors of storytelling that not only like talk about the concerns of the day, but are like rehearsals for what's about to come. So there's slightly different things. So for example, after World War II, the stories that came out were about fears of atomic annihilation, right, because the bomb was just dropped. And it was fears of basically communism of like ideology coming in or like the pod people represent this taking over our youth. And that became the dominant sort of storytelling that happened then. Then you turn into the 60s and 70s and all plus through this, you get into like environmental

6:19concerns in Sola and Green. You get into like race and class with like alienation, you get into fears of like technology, the computers coming to kill us and like terminator, then you get to Y2K, which I love, that all the stories were about, there's this like invisible infrastructure we don't understand. And when the clock turns to the year 2000, it's all going to fall apart. Everybody was freaking out about it. I was so crazy when it was not. And so like the X-Files and all these stories were about the end of time because the technology is going to stop working. But we survive that. So then sci-fi start to look backwards like prequels and like how we kind of got to where we were. But that got subverted in the United States sort of by 9-11 because nobody wanted prequels in nostalgia. They wanted not to say what would happen if the apocalypse was coming. The apocalypse was here. What does it mean to be a survivor? What does it mean to survive the apocalypse that currently is happening? So it shows like I'll start galactica things like that. Kind of pivoted the conversation in sci-fi storytelling. Then around 2010 or so, you get into

7:23what where the genesis of my extended story came from was that a lot of the science fiction I was watching and reading had a sci-fi story. But the resolution of the story ended with a religious explanation. So it was sci-fi sci-fi sci-fi where you're watching a reading. And then instead of having a scientific or a mystery resolution, it was like this was all because of God and angel, a demon, whatever it was. Things like loss, for example, kind of resolved that way or even the end of Battlestar. And where we are now is what I've decided and why I'm so glad the book came out now is that we're kind of at another stage of stories where the stories aren't about any of that that came before. It's not about annihilation, it's not about environmental, I mean it can be, but I'm saying the majority. And it's not about technology killing us, basically, or the anxiety about technology. Where we are right now, our society is so consumed with the rapid pace of technological change, in particular AI, right? It used to be some new, the iPhone came out or the printing press

8:24came out and change would happen dramatically, but over a slow, you know, a long period of time. And so people adjusted. Now we have such anxiety that AI is coming for the artists, the creators, the computer scientists, the robots are coming for manufacturing. This is all happening so fast that society doesn't know what's not forget the next 10 years, what the next year is going to look like. And then it would be AI is changing constantly. But the fears, and to answer your question, about what the fears aren't about the technology necessarily, it's about those few billionaires or trillionaires who has plans who are in control of technology. That technology, society knows we are all manipulated by, by, you know, by, it affects who we see, what we believe, what our politics are, what our religion is, what our relationships are like. But the stories aren't about the technology, necessarily changing. It's about what if those corporate interests, their plans come through fruition. And then the stories are about, well, it's good entertainment if those, of those thoughts

9:26are nefarious, then that's a good backdrop for good stories. So I think we're kind of at the beginning of this new science fiction age of storytelling, again, in books and in TV and film, where it's about how does the average person or like how do I envision myself or these interesting characters surviving in a world where there's yes, new technology, maybe there's aliens, whatever it is that fits in normal sci-fi, but it's against this backdrop of corporate control of the technology that affects our lives. And that's what's in my book. And I've been working on this for like 18 years or so. I keep not remembering how long, but I'm so glad it came out now because, you know, at the backdrop of my story, you know, it takes place in a world, it's like a near dystopia, it's a technothriller, and it's where there's this powerful institution called the Jacobs Institute who have seemingly proven an afterlife. But society rapidly changes. Like what does that mean to prove an afterlife? Like someone can say, you know, religions, you know, religious organizations for centuries have been saying, follow us, you'll go to the afterlife, follow the set of beliefs

10:30to go the afterlife. So what it took so long to develop was like, what would it mean for people to so fundamentally believe this, that they would push organized religion to the side. And now this new corporate entity would hold the keys to not a new religion, but that's the way you could look at it. That's a hot subject right there for you to be pushing, isn't it? Because you're going to have people freaking out about that because, well, from fear, right? They'll be because what if that really happened? And how would we deal with that? And then there may be some people who are offended by it. But you know what? I think it's really a subject that's got to be talked about because, I mean, I know how I was born and raised and I believe in God and you know, and we work, you know, we go to church and we have our stuff. But I mean, we have to question everything right now is to where are we going to be in the future, even the soon future with, you know, are we going to have people who

11:31are going to believe more in that? Then they're going to turn everything and turn away from their religious beliefs or their spiritual beliefs for that. And I interviewed a lot of AI people over the last six, eight months, some of them were experts in the field. And I know one of the latest interviews I had, he has said that within, I think by the end, I want to say the end of next year, AI will be smarter than all of us in every single area, not 100 years or not, not 20, not 50. So that's kind of scary. And I think a lot of us want to stay in a bubble and not think it's happening. Right. And the question is whether that AI that's super intelligence or will be, right, the questions are, is it just going to be a great resource full of knowledge and use or is it going to somehow wake up one day and say, Hey, humans are more troubled and they're worth. Let's get right. Right. It's not that. I think, right. Ultimately, the people behind it, you know, that use the tool, are they the ones that are going to cause the problems? I don't think it's

12:31inherently the technology. But you know, the book isn't necessarily for the reader to question their own religion or anything like that. But it's about sort of stepping out and looking at what you believe. And it's not necessarily religion. It's just any kind of extreme ideology should have thought. And like, are you able to look out from the outside and and and reflect in about what it means to believe something so deeply in terms of your fear comment, one of the things in the story I've sort of mapped out essentially 60 to 100 year history within this novel is that the technology enables people to seemingly have this proof that they so fundamentally believe. And I don't want to give away all everything in the book. But like, people go and they can go into these rooms and they could witness an experience, not just see what their eyes, but literally have the lived experience of someone dying and passing over. Imagine what happens if you could do that. Imagine what happens to organize religion. Now, fast forward a few years, what happens if that same institution that sort of brought this to the world said, hold on, only a small percentage of the

13:31population can ascend. And that's where the story, the backdrop of my characters, their story lives. It's this world that's got two paths. You're either ascended or you're not. You're either going to have this afterlife or you're not. So the questions for the world are, what does the world look like? How do we treat each other? Are their services different? You know, it's a new type of class structure that's created. So that's the backdrop of my world. Now, that's not a story, right? You need a story. So that's that's that's that's the backdrop. That's a sci-fi. But I wanted to make something, you know, I want to make characters that people would be interested in and could relate to to fit within this world. So, you know, the this novel, this, this is the first in a series I want to create. But it follows sort of the interconnected journeys of a few characters. So at the heart is a single mom trying to raise her two daughters who become a target of this institution. She's a doctor, she's trying to do good while it seems like the whole world is trying to tell her only healthy ascendence or only be a certain way. Okay. She's got a rebellious, you know, 20-year-old daughter

14:37who just does not want to accept the world that she's in. And we're talking about, you know, special needs and mental health. So this daughter, you know, she was traumatized by a horrific event that sort of analogous to 9-11, right? So going back to my whole house, I find change around 9-11 and she's sort of suffering from PTSD from that experience. And so she's fighting the world and she'll take up a resistance role later on. So it's about the family, this fractured family. It's about the scientist behind the technology who has to come face who has to confront what he's created. Because all he's ever done has been to try to help his daughter who's survived this terminal illness and trying to cure her for her whole life. He's neglected her and he sort of unleashed this technology to the world. That's the fundamentally shaped everything. It's about him, it's about a power hungry right man. It's about a husband who so fervently believes in this technology that he's not willing to listen to his wife who again, who is the daughter of the terminal ill daughter who just wants

15:40to be let go. So it's about all their stories, how they got there, how the world was created, and how their individual stories kind of come together in a head. So it's a fast, paste read, you know, it's made for TV actually. That's the worst. Well, the worst reviews I got to say, this should be a TV show. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Okay, well, that's a terrible thing to say about it. So are you going to be doing it since you're a filmmaker? So no, I think it's funny. I like to say I've done this entire process backward. I would love to get this picked up by someone in Hollywood. This actually started many years ago as a feature film script that I not evenly thought I could do. And once I developed the script and spent a few years working on it and more than a few years, I looked at it and I'm like, huh, I'm like a hundred million dollars short on being able to produce this film. Yep. And instead of trying to get the script to someone who might be interested in it. Who has a hundred million dollars? Yeah. Well, back then it was maybe just a cool 70 million,

16:40you know, 20 something years ago. I was a little 20 year old something, you know, mid 20 year old snot. And I said to my friends on Hollywood, they told me actually the behind the scenes is they said, make a rip reel. So rip reels when you take trailers from other people's films, you stitch them together into a new trailer that looks and feels like the film you want to make. Now I didn't want to do that. I had a little video company that was starting. I had resources. I had crew and we were working on each other's projects. So I actually put the film script to the side and said, I'm going to create a short film not based on the script, but that takes place in the world of ascendance. And so I got a big team together. We were able to do it, you know, for a little budget, had a short film. It was a great experience. It did decently. I got to travel around and show it off. It got some coverage. And I'm like, oh, that was fun. Let's do another one. And then another one. And you know, what are the actors who came on for a small part of the first one was this amazing actor named Johnny Lee Davenport. He was in like the fugitive and the blues brothers, great Shakespearean actor, amazing man. And I just wanted to hear him talk and speak as he was

17:44such a good actor. So I wrote one for him. So fast forward like five years, I had, let's see, three short films in the first and what was called the ascendance anthology that I got a grant from like the state of I think was Vermont to make another one. So I had this ascendance anthology film series. These were all stories that took place in the world of ascendance, but wasn't my main story that I wanted to tell. Oh wow. So once I was done with all those, I'm like, okay, now I really got to try and sell this to someone. And I start to have some meetings with producers and a couple studios. And they all set to me. And I had a quick phone call with a very large studio. And he said to me, well, this would be a lot easier if you had a novel. Could you get us a novel? I'm like, Oh, God, and I don't want to be a writer. But you know, someone told me no one's ever going to write your stuff for you. You got to do it yourself. That's is true. Unless you hire a ghost writer and you still have a ghost writer, but still you still have to write some of it because I can't go in. I mean, I could research you and blah, blah, blah, blah, but I can't write

18:45you. I've come from something. Yeah, I've come from something. And then you edited it based on you know, yeah. So I don't I don't ghost writers or writers. And if you hire a ghost writer, you're still a writer. It's still it's a collaborative process. You got to give them the content. Yeah, it's got to come from something. So that meeting, that last meeting was like a week or two before COVID. So COVID hit. And then I'm like, okay, now's the time we're all kind of isolated. Let's just turn the original idea at which point, you know, 10 years or more had gone by. What was in my script, my script was awful looking back at it. It was terrible. Doing the short films allowed me to understand the world to I'm a visual guy to understand what it might look like. And so I spent like the five years since COVID writing the book and then getting it published this past March. There you are. And here we are. And now I'm back to square one being like, okay, take my book and now someone go make it. Right. But if anyone wants to see it like the short films, they're not available currently online because I didn't want to I didn't want to buy us anyone who might look at the book or be interested in it. But on on the books website, we made a trailer

19:48for the book based upon the film series that we did. So there's like a minute and a half. Really, I think I think the best book trailer ever because it's actually not stock footage and this weird stuff. It's actually based on the film. So you can look at get a hint of what the anthology was like and read and see more about what the books like. So that's that that's at a ascendancebook.com. There's a trailer right there for it. Wow. What an adventure you have had. Such an adventure. Yes, you have. And so how many how many books do you see in the series, do you think? Yeah. So I'm not sure if it's you know, it'd be great to do three. I think you could be more I do I don't personally as a fan who reads. I don't like sort of open-ended stories. I mean, it's great when the world's interesting. I do have a beginning, middle, and end mapped out for this world. I know the bulk of what happens in the middle and I know how it all comes to a head at the end. And I love to get that whole if the book is popular enough, I'd love to get all

20:48of that down. But one of the reasons why I'm trying to get it out there as a TV series picked up is because I realized there's so much to this world and so many stories to tell that a film wouldn't do it justice. Sure. There's so many avenues to explore so many relationships. So there's so much consequence that's built into this story that I'd love to have it keep going as both a novel series and then a TV show one day. Well, and then you could have the ascendance descendance. The amount of time I've heard that I can't even get to be. Hi, I was hoping it was an original little mess there. The amount of time is called the descendance, the ascendance, the descendants, I get it all the time. Oh my gosh, yeah. You say that five times and not exactly. Just your tongue. That's that's so cool. Okay, so you're you say the story kind of, did you say 18 years back? Something like that. I can't quite remember. It's been so long. I don't remember when this idea first hit me. Yeah. Yeah. And so do you so are you okay? So I

21:50and I want to clarify this. So the I guess the prompt that gave you the story was growing up with all the sci-fi, right? Or yeah, I mean, that was part of it. I was the kind of kid in my teenage years who would take a bus to blockbuster and rental the 1950s bad sci-fi films and things like that who like copies of plan nine from outer space and videotape every Star Trek and rewatch the rewatch it. So that's so that's part of it. That's number one. That's part of it just being a fan. Number two was around that same time. I got hired to work as sort of like a local producer on a documentary about Ray Kurzweil. Ray Kurzweil, the film was called Transcendent Man, directed by Barry Tullamy and Ray Kurzweil is the sort of famous futurist. He invented a lot of things throughout his years, but he's well known for any reasons, but for really bringing the conversation about the singularity to the forefront. That's the time in the future when you can't tell the difference between artificial intelligence and human intelligence. And the moment when artificial

22:54intelligence and technology will outpace human intelligence. Now 20 years ago, that seemed like distant future. Right. Now it's coming in a few years. And I think his book was like, he's got a new book coming out that's something like, you know, it's here basically. I think he put the date of 2028. I don't remember exactly. Okay. We need to inform him. It might be 27. It might be 27 too, actually. He's the foremost sort of like philosophical futurist about when this is the previous coming. So Ray Kurzweil, look at him. He's amazing. Interesting guy. So part of it was I was working on a documentary for a number of years for Barry. And number three, I was working on this other film project. It was like a 48 hour film festival. It's the thing you do once in your 20s with your friends where you make a film, you make a short film in a weekend, basically, like, want. Right. And we're waiting for the prompt so we could figure out what kind of film we're going to make. And out of nowhere, I had this image in my head of a little scene playing out between this sort of like sickly, but beautiful woman, leg and bed, coughing and dying,

23:59or maybe dying. And this husband coming in trying to feed her. And she says, like, let me go. And he says, not yet, just wait till your next birthday, then we'll ascend together. I don't remember if the word ascend was in there. If that came up later. But that was it. That was the entire thing. I just had like the lighting and the way he moved and like what the room looked like. Right. That just kind of came to my head in like one little thing. I don't know what triggered that. But it was interesting enough to me to be like, what did that mean? What's that story? What would the world be like? Well, you know, that was a divine golden nugget. Something like, yeah, the next 20 years of your life obsessed with the story that people may or may not want. So right. Thanks a lot. So, you know, because of that, so because of all those things, because it was like when it was around like the Iraq war. And I was from New York. And, you know, I remember I was in grad school in Boston, but I had woke it up and started watching what happened to 9-11. I'd gone to high school right around the World Trade Center. I knew someone who died there. So like that was kind of in the sort of mixture of what elements went into the story kind of developing.

25:02And I think I was getting kind of fed up with extreme religion that I was around a little bit. And sort of just extreme ideology in general. And so take all those elements. And that's kind of the foundation of where ascendance came from. Wow. And so your family very supportive? Yeah. Yeah. I think they probably think I'm crazy for doing this for so long. I mean, I support a family. I mean, the supportive, like the team who did the anthology film series with me. I mean, we had like 30 or 40 crew members. We had like a hundred extras. It was such a big big big production that came together, you know, just just for the love of the craft and for the story. And so for all that time making those films, I had a lot of people really supportive of the idea. But my idea and the films were not the story. And so that's why it's so important that the story is, you know, is out now and available. Yeah. Absolutely. Gosh, we're almost at a time. I'm just looking over here at the clock ticking on us. They need to stop. So what do you hope real quick that people

26:03will take away from the book? Well, it's a good question. I hope they will take away a receipt from wherever they buy it from. But other than I'm sorry, that's my New York viewer. You know, I hope they enjoy it. Like I've been told it's a fast read. I'm mostly from my my children who I don't think I understand it. And hopefully they don't understand it too dark. No, I hope that people enjoy the ride. I hope it makes people want more stories. But I also hope it makes them think about, wow, what would it be like for my life to be in this world? How would how would I survive this? How would I go about my work? How would it go about my relationships? What's important to me? I mean, going back to that fear conversation we had, you know, imagine you truly believe that this is just, you know, you believe it, your core, your core, there's no doubt. And there's a reason for that in the book that there's an afterlife. I think very religious people, they believe it, but there's always that 1%, that 1%, that doesn't like, why not, sorry, be dark here, but like why not kill yourself if you're so sure that there's this beautiful afterlife? Because there's things to do. But the conversation goes like, what happens to

27:08children? What happens to people who are like somewhat sick or very sick? You start having to make pretty consequential decisions because of this. So I just think people, there's a lot that people can kind of gravitate towards and take some moment to think about, you know, what if I lived in this world, what would happen? And then like, what is our world turning into? And how is technology and incorporate interest affecting what I believe in what I think? Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I have it in, we're going to wrap up here, but I have, I do have a family member who's working on the cutting edge of AI and medical medicine biopiopics. It's very fascinating. It's fascinating. And we're going to have amazing inventions and new drugs and I think it's a huge revolution in terms of helping us by the type of research and work that AI can do in medicine for sure. We want to stay in the helping place. Helping part. Helping, helping. Yes. Okay, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you. And go out everybody and get a copy of the ascendance. Okay, and support our friend Don. Leave a nice review. I will be back soon and I'm going to leave you with

28:12a prompt of a question. So what is your story in this world? I want you to write about it, think about it. And we'll be back soon. Thank you, Don. Thank you so much. Thank you for being a part of our audience today. Please subscribe, like and share the show with your friends and tune in for the next episode of Cover to Cover for all things in the author world.