Hoboken Rocker Scores Hollywood Backing for New TV Show

For almost five years David Fagin tried everything he could to get someone in Hollywood to develop the television show he and his sister Stephanie created.

Then, on a whim, he emailed a famous actress who listened, loved the idea, and showed it to her friends.

Now a big-time producer is pushing the show to air on a major network.

The show, a dark comedy called Rock in a Hard Place, delves into Fagin's career as a musician and depicts Lint Jones, an aging has-been punk rocker who squandered his life on drugs and bad relationships. In the first episode Lint finishes rehab and decides to try to reconnect with his dysfunctional family – three wayward kids, two combative ex-wives, and an elderly mother who was widowed in her youth.

“It's about a family living in the public eye who are trying to get back to each other,” Fagin, a Hoboken resident, said.

Lint also finds himself needing to try to make a career comeback, but he's wary because rock & roll is both the only thing he knows and the thing that almost destroyed him. His youngest daughter is also in the biz, starring as a sort of Hannah Montana pop singer who takes cues from her cynical former porn star mother, Lint's second ex-wife.

“Lint fears he never made an impact in his daughter's life,” Fagin said. “He sees her turning into him.”

Fagin said he and his sister, a former actress, developed the show to pass time while participating in a charity walk five years ago. They centered on the idea of an old rocker trying to redeem himself, and surrounded him with complicated characters: the ex-porn star ex-wife, the other ex-wife who's now a smug celebrity therapist, the older daughter who is a lawyer and sexually confused, the adrift middle son, the rehab sponsor who's a born again Christian hip hop star, and the lovable but tired grandmother forced to support her adult son.

Fagin contacted every lead he had in the entertainment business, but kept getting rejected. “Hollywood doesn't want to work with you if you've never done anything before,” Fagin said. “Everyone would say, but, but, but. Everybody wants to play it safe.”

So Fagin spent much of his savings and made a sizzle reel, basically a development stage trailer, and began sending it plus a pilot script unsolicited to anyone and everyone, including actress Rosanna Arquette. Fagin thought Arquette might be interested from being both a music lover and a muse for artists – she inspired Toto's "Rosanna" and Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" – but he wasn't sure if she would respond.

“First I wasn't sure if it was really her on the page, then I didn't know if she'd even see it, and then I didn't know if she would like it,” Fagin said.

But Arquette did see the reel and loved it. In addition to agreeing to play Lint's second ex-wife she helped Fagin recruit actor Steven Weber of Wings to play Lint, Griffin Dunne, who starred with Arquette in After Hours, to direct the pilot, and most importantly, Brett Ratner to produce. Ratner previously produced the movie Horrible Bosses and the television show Prison Break, and directed the movies Tower Heist, X-Men: The Last Stand, Red Dragon and the Rush Hour trilogy. Fagin said Ratner is currently helping to gather funding and is steering the show towards a major network, possibly Showtime.

Fagin said the characters in Rock in a Hard Place derive from his background as a musician, and somewhat also from his family. He said he based Lint upon people he has known and stories he has heard in the business, while the fictional family's grandmother, the show's narrator, draws from Fagin's own.

Fagin, 44, was in a band several years ago that seemed poised for success but ran into contract problems with its record company and eventually collapsed. He has since written music behind the scenes for commercials and television shows, and also writes for the Huffington Post. Fagin has lived in Hoboken for three years and sometimes performs in town with his new band, the Counterfeiters.

Fagin is currently writing the show's music, including punk songs for Lint's band the Prix, with singer-songwriter Richard Marx. Fagin said he expects several famous musicians to make cameo appearances, including Arquette's friends Chrissie Hynde and Sheryl Crow, and others like Green Day and Robert Plant.

He also wants Rock to showcase emerging acts by writing them into scenes and playing clips of their songs. "Record labels don't sell music anymore, television shows do," Fagin said.

Fagin doesn't know yet when Rock in a Hard Place will air, depending on all the negotiations, but he's optimistic that it can launch somewhere within a year. In the meantime he said he'll continue to hone the show's characters, plot lines and songs.

“As soon as someone says yes that's when the real work begins,” he said.