Paul Barrett is an award-winning video producer, writer, production crew member, and fantasy and horror novelist. Videos he’s written and produced have won two Communicator Awards and one Telly. In his free time, Paul enjoys board gaming, painting miniatures, and watching really cool TV shows.
Daily Dragon (DD): According to your website, you realized you wanted to be a television producer at age sixteen. How did that come about?
Paul Barrett (PB): It started with me wanting to be an actor, but as I went along, I discovered I enjoyed behind-the-scenes work, too. In 1981, I was called on to help produce a short piece about Dungeons & Dragons, which showed how a game might play out in the characters’ imaginations. I fell in love with the logistics and work required to pull it off, so I thought it would be a fun way to go. Thus, producing jumped to the top of my dream-job list.
DD: Did anything about the producer’s job surprise you when you first began working as one?
PB: Not really, because I had watched enough other producers so that I understood the concepts of what went into the job. Maybe the difficulties of dealing with varying crew personalities shocked me some. I quickly learned how to be a good negotiator.
DD: Do you still enjoy gaming, and if so, what kinds?
PB: I do enjoy gaming, mainly board games and miniature wargames. Two of my favorites are Blood Bowl and Frostgrave, but I’ll play almost anything if it has dice or cards attached. I still love video games but don’t have as much time to devote to them anymore. Right now, I’m playing Wartales and Castle Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. I also play online games of Civilization VI, Twilight Struggle, and Through the Ages with friends.
DD: Your website bio mentions that you’ve worked as a crew member on various productions. What drew you to that?
PB: As I mentioned, I started as an actor, mainly on stage. As a child, I loved the theater so much that if I didn’t get cast in a play, I would offer to work backstage. I was pretty much a theater rat from eleven to seventeen years old. From there, it was a short step to finding my way into working television through an internship at WTVI—the Charlotte, NC, PBS station—when I was fifteen, and from that to wrangling work on film sets.
DD: Is there something you think the casual viewer doesn’t appreciate about what the crew does for a production?
PB: The biggest thing, although people are more aware of it now because of various news stories, is the incredibly long hours the crew puts in on productions, often in some of the most grueling circumstances. It’s certainly not the most difficult or most dangerous job you can have, but at times, it combines those elements together and can momentarily be one or both of those things. It takes a particular personality to work in production. You must be willing to live a circus-worker lifestyle in a business where an hour of boredom is followed by fifteen minutes of frantic, butt-clenching work to get things ready for the next shot.
DD: Which of your productions do you think offers the best introduction to your work?
PB: The one I’m proudest of is Cold Storage, a creepy little gothic love story at its heart. But if you want to also see some of my twisted sense of humor, I’d recommend the puppet show we did a few decades ago called The Thickuns.
DD: How would you advise someone interested in working in video production to get started?
PB: Depends on where you live. If you live in a town where films or television shows are made, see if you can get work on them as a production assistant. Most states have film commissions that can inform you about what’s happening in your area. Another way would be to see if you can intern at a television station. I haven’t worked at one in forever, but I assume they still have internships there. And of course, nowadays you can take your phone, a few lights, and some editing software and do your own productions. Plenty of videos on YouTube show you how to do it all. Wish something like that existed when I was starting out.
DD: When did you start writing fiction, and why?
PB: I started at a pretty young age. I always told stories when I was a kid, and I remember pretending my father and I were doing a cooking show when I would help him cook. Thankfully, my parents didn’t laugh at these flights of fancy and always encouraged my creativity. I remember writing my first “serious” story when I was eight. I wrote a piece that was a riff on David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, except my Ziggy was the Ziggy from the comics, and how he dealt with all these Martian spiders suddenly showing up at his house. Another one I wrote when I was ten was the fable of how rubies got their color. It was a pretty violent story involving a lot of blood. I’m surprised the teacher didn’t recommend my parents take me to a psychologist.
DD: What was your first published work of fiction?
PB: If you count school newspapers, it was when I was in tenth grade, and the school paper published the first chapter of what would eventually become Knight Errant. If you don’t count that, it was much later in life when A Whisper of Death was published.
DD: What inspired this work?
PB: Knight Errant was originally Steve Murphy’s idea and was a space opera off-shoot of some of our Dungeons and Dragons groups. A Whisper of Death came about when I began to wonder what someone would do if they had to use necromancy, an inherently evil magic, to save the world from an even greater evil.
DD: Is there a theme that runs through all of your fiction?
PB: If there’s any theme, it would be that teamwork saves the day. There are not really any lone wolves in my stories. I’m a collaborative person by nature, which is necessary when you’re a producer, so the main characters in my work are always willing to take help from others. I also love to subvert tropes. And if I can’t subvert them, I do my best to make fun of them.
DD: In addition to writing on your own, you collaborate with Steve Murphy. How did that come about?
PB: Steve and I have been friends since I was fifteen and he was eighteen, bonding over our love of gaming in general and D&D in specific. Then we discovered we enjoyed putting our creative energies into writing; we thought it might be fun to work on something together. He had this idea about a group of space mercenaries—our recent discovery of the RPG Traveler may have had some influence—so we started jotting down characters and coming up with ideas, and it went from there.
DD: What would you say are the biggest benefits and biggest challenges of collaboration?
PB: The biggest benefit is the classic “two heads are better than one.” Two people can develop ideas better than one, and you have someone to bounce things off of and tell you when you’re being ridiculous. You can also share the actual physical act of writing. The downside is that if one person isn’t feeling productive, it can sometimes be challenging for the other person to be motivated. With us, that’s really the only thing. We’re pretty good about leaving the egos in check as we work together, so there are few issues with disagreements about how a story should go.
DD: Where do you recommend that someone interested in your fiction start?
PB: Depends on what you’re into. If epic dark fantasy is your thing, then The Necromancer Saga, with book one being A Whisper of Death. If Guardians of the Galaxy-style space opera is more your glass of whiskey, then go with Knight Errant. Of if you want goofy comedy, then definitely The Malaise Falchion. As you can tell, we like to experiment in different genres.
DD: Thank you for your time.
PB: Thanks for having me. It was fun. If anyone wants to talk to me about anything, I’ll be with all the other writers at the Westin bar every night. I’ll be the bald guy wearing some sort of cat-related T-shirt.
For more information about Paul Barrett and his work, visit his website, www.twomentandatypewriter.com, or his Instagram site, where he’s producerpaul1965.
