Sean Clark

Sean Clark has only one credit to his name at Sliders, but he played an important role in the series’ formation. Behind the scenes he was one of the four main writers who crafted the characters and the contours of the show during its first season.

“Sliders wanted one more person on staff,” says Clark. “I was told the studio wanted someone more concerned and adept with character development than the specifics of the world they were in. They made [Jon] Povill and I 'audition' with writing samples—which was illegal by Guild rules, but I did it to try and get the job. They hired Povill, and then me a week later.”

Together with co-executive producers Tracy Tormé and Jacob Epstein, Clark was tasked with normalizing scripts from freelancers who had never seen the new show.

“There is something of mine in much of the first season. A scene or a chunk of dialogue, a joke from here or there. Epstein rewrote a lot of the scripts. I just did what I was told to do and tried to make it as best as I could. I wrote pages and pages of additional dialogue (automatic dialogue replacement, aka ADR) and lots of loop-group lines. Many of those were done watching a rough cut in the conference room outside [John] Landis' and [Bob] Weiss's offices.”

And yet, Clark is not credited with any episode of his own in the first season. But that’s not because he didn’t write one; he provided one contribution called “Gangster World.” In it, the crew are inadvertently pulled into a scheme by two leading crime families to merge their empires through marriage. What they don’t count on is a plucky diner owner abducting the groom and dragging him to Rembrandt, who she believes to be the Eliot Ness of her world, leader of the FBI’s organized crime task force.

Sound familiar? It forms the bones of the second season episode Greatfellas. But Clark’s draft has the telltale signs of its first season origin. Comedy is placed at a premium in an extended television parody of “Family Feud”, where the families in question are “families.” “Vendetta!” yells the losing crime boss as he’s handed his parting gifts.

There are no complex storylines about races for governors and plans for California to secede from the union. It’s just a straightforward story of running and hiding from the mafia while the groom falls in love with Wade and proposes marriage. It also includes a teaser of an America also featured in the second season—Nudity World, which, in this draft, Arturo is quite comfortable with.

Clark describes his writing process as pretty simple: “I look at the beats in the outline and make it a visual scene. I wrote, and still write, in block print on a legal pad sitting, preferably outside, at a coffee place. I wrote probably 80% of everything I wrote in LA at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Manhattan Beach, at the same table with a view of the pier and ocean. I finished the draft and gave it to a writer's assistant to type it up. I type fast but sloppily.”

Unfortunately, this script wasn’t available for the abbreviated first season, and Clark wouldn’t be around to see it through to its final iteration. “When I finished my script, Epstein and Povill were so engaged in whatever they were doing to wrap up the season that no one gave me notes for a rewrite. Tormé was getting married about then—it was either the wedding or something to do with the Star Trek people over at Paramount.

“I went on to another show. No one knew, when I left, if Sliders was coming back or not. So much time had passed that, by Guild rules, they did not have to offer me the chance to get notes and do a rewrite. I don't know who all came back or who replaced me in season two. I was informed someone else was doing my rewrite and the episode was going to camera. Since things had changed and someone else was rewriting my script, my credit changed from 'Written By' to 'Story By.' I never saw the finished episode.”

The "someone else" turned out be Scott Miller, but he also refuses credit for the final version: “Almost none of that was me.”

Miller’s script focused on an expanding empire founded by Bugsy Siegel. “Jacob [Epstein] decided it was not going to fly for us to make the gangsters the descendants of Bugsy Seigel. Only thing left of mine was the one line about Seigel actually succeeding in this world.”

Clark left Sliders before he saw what his idea blossomed into, but he did get to meet a Ghostbuster in his time there. “One day, Dan Aykroyd sat in on a story meeting which was very cool—and Weiss was a really nice and supportive producer and I don't say that about many people at all. He even invited us to the red-carpet opening, in Westwood, of Tommy Boy—which was a great time, even if the movie was, well, Tommy Boy.”