Interview with Lance Karutz and Jim Toomey
Chris: All right. Let’s go ahead. Lance if you want to go ahead and introduce yourself to Jim and just tell him a little bit about yourself. I think he’s already got some information about you but you can start there.
Lance: Okay. My name is Lance Karutz. I am a native of Anaheim California and I’ve got a wife and an 11 month old daughter, and I want to be a writer for a living. I am currently working for a software company doing interesting, yet incredibly boring stuff; it’s not the most creative job in the world. It’s always been my dream to be a writer so I’m currently trying to chase that dream.
Jim: Oh great, great! What kind of writer, a novelist?
Lance: Screenwriting mostly.
Jim: Screenwriting, okay.
Lance: Yes, my partners and I had a couple comic book stories printed, mostly through comic works and we actually optioned one of our properties as an animated feature about a year and a half ago and we’re currently trying to get that turned into an animated series.
Jim: Uh huh, so the option lasted more than a year?
Lance: Yes. It’s one of those things where we’re actually in the middle of producing a three minute trailer that we can show around. It was kind of a unique deal in that; it was a Korean animation studio that took out the option. It’s called Masterminds. It’s all about a bunch of super villains trying to take over the world and failing miserably. They [the Korean animation studio] were just looking to break into the American market and felt that they needed stronger stories to do so. They looked at a bunch of stuff and saw ours and thought it was the best of the bunch. So that’s where they’re going. Now we’re trying to put together this three minute trailer. We’ve got Stan Lee, who actually did the voice of our narrator. We’re probably about half way through getting it done and then we can show it around to the networks and various studios. [We hope to] then get the American part of the equation and make ourselves a little cartoon.
Jim: Oh that’s great. Are you pitching a film or a TV show?
Lance: It was originally optioned as an animated feature, but there’s been a lot more interest in it as an ongoing series at this point.
Jim: And are you working with an Agent?
Lance: We are managed by Circle of Confusion, their west coast office, Dave Alpert is our manager. He’s actually the guy who put together the deal for us. I think their east coast office manages the Wachowski brothers and their west coast office is best known for taking comic book properties and getting them into other media. I think the biggest announcement they’ve had recently is that they just signed Bryan Michael Bendis, the guy who writes New Avengers and Ultimate Spiderman and a bunch of hit books for Marvel, and I believe they just got David Finch attached to direct his independent story Torso, which is the story of Elliot Ness and America’s first mass murderer, that he [Finch] co-wrote with Mark Andreyko. So getting Finch for a property like that was just huge.
Jim: That’s very cool. Getting…you mean getting venture capital?
Lance: No, David Finch.
Jim: Finch, oh, I’m sorry.
Lance: He’s worked on Seven, Fight Club…the guy’s done some serious quality flicks, so it’s always nice when you can get a quality director attached to a comic book property like that.
Jim: Excellent. Well Chris, do you have some questions in front of you in some form or fashion? I’m about seven minutes away from my desk here.
Chris: Yes Jim. What I’ll do is go ahead and read the question and as we go along, if you want to add anything Lance (if< | 
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