Comic Book Confidential: Queen and Country and Global Frequency with John Rogers

Comic books have always been a part of John Rogers’ DNA. Like many people, his love of comics began in his teens.

“My brother was really into the GI Joe comics, so I started reading those then I got very much into Mike Grell,” he said.

“But it was really when I got to university that I really picked them up. By that point, you’re in ‘Dark Knight’ territory; there were the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ - and those artists were from Montreal, where I was going to school. It was all very exciting stuff creatively - the idea that you can tell any sort of story you wanted, you weren’t limited by budget, an artist could change the look of a book, and you can interpret the character in partnership with the writer. But I’d come in mostly on the indie side because there was a great comic book shop upstairs in this insane loft space on St. Catherine Street in Montreal that stocked a lot of Indies. And when I started writing professionally, they were looking for people to adapt comics; they were just starting to farm IP. There wasn’t really a mainstream comic adaptation industry at the time, and I had a bit of a head start because I was known at the time as an action and dialogue writer. And the things I was naturally attracted to were properties where they were looking for someone who was familiar with the material, and they were delighted to find someone who was familiar with it so they didn’t have to do some sort of crash course on it.”

QUEEN AND COUNTRY

When Rogers was approached about adapting Greg Rucka’s spy series “Queen And Country”, the screenwriter was already familiar with the acclaimed comic book writer.

“I’m a giant fan, his work has such a clear voice and strongly developed themes,” he said.

“Emma Watts was working for Fox and was looking for someone to adapt ‘Queen and Country’, and she called me in. I was a huge fan of the book and said, ‘Look, they can only ruin this. It is a perfectly written book; I’m not going to be the guy who screwed up ‘Queen & Country’. Go get a much better-known writer than I am.’ A week later, she checked in. I said, ‘Look, I still feel this way. But please make sure that whoever adopts this has seen ‘The Sandbaggers’ because that’s the tone you’re looking for.”

The British spy drama produced during and set in the Cold War was, Rogers felt, the style ‘Queen and Country’ needed. Going against the grain of the vodka martini-infused, glamorous world of James Bond, it depicted spies as real people: low-paid public servants whose work just happened to involve espionage.

“One of the advantages of having lived in Canada was that I was exposed to a lot of British media, and, as a result, those voices weren’t foreign to me,” he said.

“Wherever I could, I was hunting down British spy thrillers and dramas and sci-fi, and I’d seen ‘The Sandbaggers’ and had loved it.”

Watts’ response came as something of a surprise.

“She emailed back and said, ‘Greg told me that The Sandbaggers’ is the entire spine of his book, so get your nerd ass in here and write this movie because you’re the only one who got that reference!’” he said.

“The fact that that was our common reference kind of indirectly led to me doing the job; it got me over my own fear of screwing it up because I knew exactly what Greg was trying to do. I wasn’t just ready to adapt his book; I was familiar with his inspiring source material. And the great thing here is that the book’s very solid - the main thing I needed to do was find a more cinematic ending to open it up for features.”

Rogers’ screenplay takes its central plot from the first book in ‘Queen and Country’ - ‘Operation: Broken Ground’, in which agent Tara Chase is ordered to carry out an unsanctioned assassination in Kosovo that goes sideways, with potentially dangerous consequences for MI6. But, to keep with the more cinematic approach (‘Broken Ground’ ends with Chase and her team duped and the bad guys getting sent to the US as part of a deal with the CIA brokered by MI5), Rogers takes elements from the subsequent books, ‘Operation: Morningstar’ (incorporating Chase’s increasingly risky, seemingly PTSD-inspired behaviour, and her entering work-mandated therapy) and ‘Operation: Crystal Ball’ (a potential chemical weapons attack). Still present is the cynicism, world-weariness and anti-Bond sentiment that were so intense in both ‘The Sandbaggers’ and Rucka’s comics (“Sorry, Q is too busy fixing our laser watches”, one character snaps after his supervisor laments the lack of real-time satellite coverage).

“When I adapt something, I’m adapting it because I love it. So I’m going to stick pretty close to it,” Rogers said.

“There’s a lot of times when I’m producing adaptations or supervising them, and  I say, ‘Remember why you loved this the day you forget why you fell in love with it, go back and fall in love with it again. Because the thing that’s energising you is going to animate the audience and make them invest in it. And for ‘Queen and Country’, it has to have a different vibe from an American spy thriller because the British have a different relationship with authority, intelligence, and law enforcement. So, if you’re coming from that other culture’s place, you’re going to have a different internal architecture to it. ‘The Sandbaggers’ is of a genre that says spying seems glamorous, but it’s basically a civil service job where you may just have to die. James Bond is really more an American spy franchise where they just happen to have British accents.”

Adding to the intrigue in the story is the revelation that a terror attack was coordinated in league with MI5 - who would bravely swoop in in the nick of time to save the day - to manipulate public (and government) sentiment towards the spy agency.

“I’m not the guy who’s ever going to do the right down the middle, cop agenda version of power, authority and how power works,” Rogers said.

“We talk about how Western intelligence agencies manipulate information because, at the time, we were gearing up for the Iraq war, and you could absolutely see people in the White House manipulating intelligence to get the desired results. So, it was an attempt to be a slightly more sophisticated spy thriller, or a more cynical spy thriller - a little bit more aware of the limitations of the genre.”

Naturally, at the end of the day, the terrorists are defeated. Still, the plot’s MI5-based engineers aren’t exposed publicly - they’re effectively blackmailed to be more supportive of the actions taken by MI6.

“We were trying to be mature, trying to say that the most you can hope for in this situation is a realignment of power to people who maybe will handle it more responsibly,” Rogers said.

“We don’t defeat bad guys. It’s childish to think we do. We force them out of positions of relative power, and that’s it. That’s as good as it gets. Even back in 2003, it was the idea that there is never going to be real justice in this world. And a lot of that comes out of the spirit of ‘The Sandbaggers’, the spirit of Len Deighton - the idea that there’s never a clean win.”

As he was writing, Rogers kept in close contact with Rucka.

“He read the drafts, and he liked them. [So] I was thrilled when I got an e-mail from Greg saying one particular moment was perfectly Tara, and he wished he’d written something like that,” Rogers said.

The moment in question: Tara, surrounded by bad guys as a crowd of drunken soccer fans approach, slams her face into a nearby rail, splitting her lip and getting blood all over her face.

“Football hooligans, mate. They’re Britain’s finest,” Tara tells the lead terrorist just before the Arsenal fans arrive to see a pretty British girl seemingly getting attacked by foreigners and, well, responding exactly as you’d expect a group of drunken hooligans to respond.” 

“He said that’s perfectly self-destructive of Tara, that it was perfect characterisation,” Rogers said.

“And I’ll take the win. If all I get out of this movie is Rucka telling me I wrote a great Tara chase moment, I will take it!”

Unfortunately for Rogers - the powers that be - had a different vision.

“At the time, Betty Thomas was going to direct. She’s a great director, but she was coming off ‘I Spy’, and I think that very naturally, she and her team had a very American viewpoint on it,” he said.

“My view was it should feel British; it should feel like a spy movie. Don’t try to gloss it up, don’t try to sexy it up; it works as it is. There was pressure from the executives to put a romance in it. And, you know, Tara Chase was not going to fall in love. James Bond doesn’t have romances; he has dalliances. It’s the same with Tara. This idea that it has to be some tormented love story, I may have voiced some strong disagreements. And eventually, I was fired at some point; they decided they had this vision of the movie that I didn’t share, and they decided to find somebody to make their vision of the movie. It’s funny in a way because every now and then, every few years, I get a bunch of emails from people going, ‘Hey, we’re super excited about ‘Queen and Country’ because a new actor would get attached. My name was always mentioned, and I’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s awesome.’ I think the last time was 2015 and 2016 when somebody was last attached, and I got a bunch of congratulatory emails because it was in Deadline.” 

**Editor’s note: the last reference was from 2018, when Sir Ridley Scott was the latest director attached.

“It was a little shocking nearly ten years later to watch the assault on MI6 in ‘Skyfall’ and think ‘, Yeah, I wrote that sequence years ago. I’m so glad somebody else got to film it and make it a giant cinematic spectacle. I typed those words nearly ten years ago. Thank God we never made that movie - that would’ve been a mistake!”

While time hasn’t mellowed Rogers’ anti-establishment sentiment, he says the experience on ‘Queen and Country’ and other similarly-fated projects helped him evolve.

“At the time, it was very apparent that everybody had a different version of this movie in their head. When you can’t reconcile those, it becomes a power struggle, a question of who’s the most powerful person in the room. And in film, it’s not the writer,” he said.

“The internal challenge is always that the writer has one version in their head, the director has one version in their head, the executives who bought it have one version in their head, their bosses have one version in their head, and marketing have one version in their head. Moving something through all that to delivery is not easy. There’s an old saying - good movies aren’t made; they escape. The good thing is that in the intervening years, I’ve learned how to be a better writer and a better producer or executive producer. I’ve made multiple shows, and the thing I will say - so often enough that other executives will get sick of me saying it and then throw it back at me - is we must all be making the same show in our heads. There are meetings where I will stop, and I will go, ‘I think we are not making the same show in our head now.’ And then I will bail on development if I don’t think we’re making the same show in our head.”

To Rogers, though, the inability to get Tara Chase on the screen in some way, shape or form remains baffling.

“It’s not a hard thing to make, and that’s the crazy thing about it - it’s a great character, a great story,” he said.

“If it’s done right, it will be a very entertaining movie and a great role for an actor. The trick is - and this is the challenge - you just have to make the Tara Chase movie. Even now, there’s still a bias against making strong female action movies. “She remains a  relevant character doing interesting things as long as they don’t give her a fucking spy car; it’s a compelling story.”

GLOBAL FREQUENCY
Rogers’ long-standing, encyclopaedic knowledge of comics also came to the fore in landing another plum assignment, adapting Warren Ellis’ comic series ‘Global Frequency’. 

“I was well known to the execs at Warner Brothers at that point, and when they acquired it (the ‘Global Frequency’ rights), my agent got me in the room with them,” Rogers said.

“I walked in; I said, ‘Look, I understand you just acquired ‘Global Frequency’. They said, ‘Yeah, we just filed the paperwork yesterday’. I said, ‘Here’s the pilot and 13 episodes’. I just puked out the entire box set on their desk and said, ‘Here’s the show’, and Jordan Levin - who was running Warners at the time - said, ‘Well, that’s settled then.’ He had to make a phone call first, but he just gave us the show. From then, it was just ‘Go’. They were looking for something for Mark Burnett to do, and this felt like a good thing for him to produce. He was just getting into scripted, and this was offbeat, actiony and based on this great franchise. I drew on my deep nerd knowledge. If you read the script or see the show, you know I stole the opening scene from; I think it was the Batman Planetary crossover (another Ellis book) and used it as the opening for the adaptation. So I was, like, good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

The pilot begins with 20-something Sean Ronin (played by Josh Hopkins grabbing a bite to eat from a San Francisco hot dog vendor when he hears a cell phone ringing, unanswered. Following the sound to its source, he finds a bizarre-looking crater that marks the border of a strange phenomenon. Caught halfway in the crater is the now-dead owner of the cell phone. Half of the body outside the hole appears normal, the half inside stripped entirely to the bone. Answering the phone, Sean is introduced to Miranda Zero (Michelle Forbes, described by Rogers in the script as the ‘mad-bastard love child of Sean Connery’s James Bond and Trinity from ’The Matrix’), who informs him he’s now on the Global Frequency and now has 45 minutes to save the world.

“On paper, it’s a ridiculous premise, and when telling a ridiculous premise, it’s best to move at speed,” Rogers said of the pilot’s pre-credits sequence. I was fighting the original urge of the executives and the studio to explain how it works and explore the origin. And the thing that’s great about it is that it’s a little ridiculous, and if you get the audience in, they’ll either buy it or they won’t. The comics are that way. That’s the first issue of the comic. Again, it wasn’t a hard adaptation to map out, he’s there, and all of a sudden, there are spies doing Global Frequency shit. We explain it on the fly, and Miranda Zero explains it to Sean in the same way we need to explain it to the audience. All my pilots and all the shows I write tend to be very in media res because I’d rather you were engaged and want to know more than you know everything, but you don’t really give a shit.”

The Global Frequency, under Miranda’s watchful eye, is a group of elite experts from around the world in pretty much every field that could matter - science, medicine, physics, you name it. They’re equipped with special mobile phones and on-call 24/7 to respond, assess situations and advise accordingly when the world needs saving (which, as you could probably guess, happens regularly in this world). Rogers said he lucked out in casting, assembling a terrific group of players to fill out the lead roles.

“For Miranda, we auditioned, we read a few different people, women at the proper age who had the proper star power. There were one or two other people that were good and would have been really enjoyable in another version of the show. But it was Michelle Forbes, and there’s no argument there she’s Michelle Forbes,” Rogers said.

“For Aleph (Zero’s offsider) and Kate (the Global Frequency scientist tasked with helping Sean save the world), we kind of mixed and matched them like wow, this actress auditioning for Kate would be great for Aleph, and this Aleph actress would be great for Kate. (Aleph ended up being played by Aimee Garcia, with Kate played by Jenni Baird. At the time, the networks had these lists, and you’d cast off the lists because that way, the network has already approved them. But young male leads were already gone; they were already booked. So we were having a devil of a time casting Sean. And because there weren’t a lot of great roles for women in action shows at the time, we had this ridiculously deep pool for all three of those characters in the pilot. At one point, the execs were like, ‘Why don’t we just make Sean a woman, and we can just keep all the actors we love?’ I was like, ‘Yes, we should absolutely do that!’ But in 2004/2005, there was no way we could make an action show with all female leads. You just couldn’t do it. In the end, we came down to two people that we read for the role of Sean Josh Hopkins and Christian Kane who I’d loved in ‘Angel’. It wound up being Josh, but it was really close. It could have been either guy.”

During the shoot, Rogers said, there was one moment that highlighted the strength of the concept in the most incredible way.

“There’s a moment in the pilot where Aleph calls everyone; they’re in different places around the world. There’s this big sequence where everyone’s on the screens, and they’re all talking about how to save the world,” he said.

“Poor Aimee Garcia had to sit in this set and just pretend to be talking to multiple people and running through different languages. So in order to get the timing right, we had the actors who were on the phone calls to do their part off-camera, ten feet away - so it would all feel natural. Because, in those days, we didn’t have instant video playback. We didn’t have any of that stuff we do now, and so that sequence had to be performed like a play. Those people were standing ten feet away, just out of camera reach, and she’s calling them, and they’re each chipping in to try and save the world. So we did that sequence, Aleph reaching out and all these people from around the world - these average people - who will do whatever they can to save the day. We were shooting late - it’s a pilot, so that’s always a horror story - and Nelson (director Nelson McCormick) calls cut. I, of course, as the writer, have got my head up my ass, and I’m like, ‘Let me adjust this line and this line.’ And I stepped onto the set, and I stopped because it is dead silent. There was this sniffling next to me. I turn around, and there’s this young PA, and she’s crying. And she says, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it was real? Wouldn’t it be great if it was just real?’ because for two minutes, in a warehouse, the Global Frequency was real, and it destroyed people. It destroyed people with the potential of how that could feel if ordinary people were working together like that. I was like, ‘Yes, this is the show.’”

As the pilot was edited, the response was so enthusiastic that Rogers and Warners began looking at the show’s future.

“We were cutting the pilot, and it tested very well. So we started to put together a staff and start breaking it, so we’d be a little bit ahead and have a real sense of what the show would be when it was picked up,” Rogers said.

“So my staff was was David Slack, Diego Gutierrez and Ben Edlund. David Slack was my baby writer on ‘The Jackie Chan Adventures’ and has now gone on to be a very successful one-hour show creator, Diego Gutierrez is a very successful writer, and Ben Edlund is, of course, Ben fricking Edlund, the player to be named later in every great genre show you’ve ever heard of. Find a genre show, pick your favourite episode; Ben wrote that one. So we were breaking episodes, and then we heard that there had been an internal change. The strategy for the WB at the time was that all television ratings were shrinking, so we’re going to develop an insanely loyal following - like, you know, 10 million viewers who’ll follow us through hell. But the execs were saying, ‘No, we want to be Fox; we want to expand’, so they basically cleaned out that regime and brought in people who believed that the WB would be the next Fox. So, I got a call that there was a new network President and I was like, ‘Ah, shit’. I went in, and I met with him, and I pitched how much I love the show. He was a very nice guy, a great TV producer, and he was very courteous and treated me with a great amount of respect and decency. But there was no way in hell he was going to make that show. I’ve had it happen three or four times, and the only I had a show survive a regime change was ‘The Librarians’. We’d shot the entire first season for Michael Wright when he left TNT, and they brought in Kevin Reilly, who obviously has very different tastes. When that happened, I called all the actors and said, ‘Look, there’s a new network president. We haven’t aired yet, so they’re going to air us. They’ll just burn off the first season.’ But then we premiered to 7.9 million people; we were their number-one premiere for the year, and he had no choice but to bring us back. It was literally only the greatest amount of luck that kept ‘The Librarians’ on the air.”

Despite the cancellation, the unaired pilot took on a life of its own.

“Somebody leaked it. It wasn’t Warren, it wasn’t me, but somebody leaked it,” Rogers said.

“It just happened to be at the right time because digital piracy was just being born, and it was flourishing and becoming accessible. It had gone from being hard to do to being easy to do. People were doing digital rips to get stuff to be region-free a lot back then, and so it just entered the mainstream. So it was exactly the right time to be nerd oriented; it was right for the audience that was torrenting and just at the high point of torrenting. Sometimes it’s smarter to be lucky. Then The Guardian called us ‘The Best Show You’ve Never Seen’, and it just took on a life of its own. My favourite moment from that experience - and I forget how it happened - but this kid reached out to me from Seoul. He was like, ‘Look, we’re showing the ‘Global Frequency’ pilot here, and I’m doing the subtitles, and I just want to ask you how something translates because I’m not sure I have this right. It was a pilot so good it became famous - famous enough that when we were meeting writers for ‘Leverage’ at one point (‘Leverage’ co-creator) Chris Downey turned to me, and said, ‘If one more writer mentions the ‘Global Frequency’ pilot, I’m going to just storm out of here. I don’t even want this motherfucking pilot anymore. DC was really angry about it, I was at Comic-Con, and one of the DC execs absolutely chewed my ass out, saying because it leaked, everyone was angry, and he couldn’t re-develop it. I’m like, ‘Dude, I didn’t leak the goddamned pilot. I don’t have the tech. I don’t know anybody. Warren lives in a hut in a forest on the Thames. It wasn’t us. I’m sorry, it’s so popular.’ What’s crazy is they were so angry about ‘Global Frequency’, and then they intentionally leaked the ‘Aquaman’ pilot the next year to try to get buzz around it and lay down and died.”

Even without follow-up episodes to build on that world, Rogers said he was glad the pilot did find its audience.

“I’m pleased the performances got seen. I’m very sad. I didn’t get to work with those actors more. I was also heartbroken that we didn’t get more Aimee Garcia as Aleph,” he said.

“My main regret with ‘Global Frequency’ is that I wanted to watch that show. In particular, you know, we had great episodes in the pipe. The pilot is so much just the first episode of the show, and I think we executed it well. There was nothing wrong with it; the pilot tested incredibly well - so well that we had a staff and were breaking episodes, and we were going to be on the air. And then, the corporate stuff happened, and nothing that we did or could do was going to change that. In the end, we did everything right, and, you know what, there’s another great Hollywood lesson. Sometimes you do everything right, and it just doesn’t matter.”

(Hopefully, neither Warners nor DC will hold it against us for pointing this out, but the unaired pilot is still available on YouTube and can be found here.)

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