“Inside the Twisted Minds: How Johnny Wickham and Mike Capes Turned Chilling Fears into Hilarious Thrills in SYS 529”
Ashley
Perfect, perfect. Yeah, Johnny. So maybe you can bring us up to speed on your background.
Johnny Wickham
Yeah, so I am from Tennessee. I’m not an LA native. After college, I actually had an internship in LA during college where I worked for a commercial production company that then offered me a job, which is what prompted me to move out to LA, which kind of kickstarted everything. I really wanted to work in comedy, so I kicked as many doors as I could, finally found someone who would let me be a PA at HBO for the Comedy Festival. And that kind of spurred all kinds of jobs after that, because HBO started a digital division. I jumped over there immediately, and that’s where I really got to start making digital content. And back in those days, which was like the early 2000s, no one was really paying too much attention to what was going on over there. So, as a young producer, young writer, you were able to kind of start making stuff. The track was accelerated because all the professionals were working on movies and TV shows, and no one was really paying attention to the digital stuff. So, we really just got to run wild and do that. And then it kind of snowballed from there. After that job at HBO, Jerry Zucker, the guy who wrote and directed Airplane, a Naked Gun, started a digital company. I started producing writing with him, which is where Mike and I met. We met in a secret writer’s group in his office, where by day we were making sketches for him. By night, we were using all of his equipment to do our own stuff. And a fun little side story there is this stuff that we were doing on our own was getting more views than the stuff we were doing for the company. So it was really building confidence there. And then after that, I worked for a company called Break.com and then Nerdist. And we were doing sketches and making internet content gave us the confidence to say, we’re doing this already. We can do this on our own. And it just took 20 years to write and get a screenplay off the ground, which that’s what they say. An overnight success is not made overnight.
