Arrow Show Runner Marc Guggenheim in Honest, Wide-Ranging Interview

Arrow exec producer Marc Guggenheim and his wife Tara Butters who’s the show runner for ABC’s Agent Carter, with writing partner Michele Fazekas have an honest, wide-ranging round table interview with each other in relations to their shows.

Here are the highlights from the interview in relations to Arrow and DC Comics.

Butters: What is DC Entertainment like?

Guggenheim: DC is actually pretty chill. I will say [Arrow and Flash showrunner] Andrew Kreisberg and I tend to be the gatekeepers in terms of what’s a secret or trying to keep spoilers from leaking out. DC never really dictates stuff to us. We’re self-policing, and we always apply a story that I had heard about Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Spoiler alert: In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the Enterprise was blown up, and when Paramount cut the trailer, that scene was in the trailer. [Producer] Harve Bennett and [director-star] Leonard Nimoy went to Sherry Lansing — the head of Paramount at the time — saying, “That’s a huge moment for us, we don’t want that in the trailer.” And Lansing replied, “Well, do you want people to be surprised or do you want them to go to the movie?” We use that as a barometer [on Arrow and Flash]. We’re not militant but there are certain things that are absolutely secret. There was a pilot printed on red paper, and I read everything on my iPad and have a scanner on my desk for these purposes. I scanned in the script and red paper script scans in perfectly fine.

Fazekas: Are you beholden to anything the comic book sets up, even with minor characters from the DC comics?

Guggenheim: I always get in trouble but my answer is no. To me, there are different levels of comic book canon. You talk about minor characters. I read a draft of a Superman screenplay years ago where Krypton didn’t blow up. To me, that’s not really a Superman story. It’s like doing a Batman story if Bruce Wayne’s parents are still alive. The advantage of a character like Green Arrow is his origin really is apart from the fact that he was a billionaire who ended up on a deserted island. His origin is not very well established and the character isn’t as “high profile” as Superman and Batman. You can’t do Spider-Man without him getting bit by a radioactive spider, otherwise it’s not Spider-Man. So by the nature of the character we’ve been playing with through these years, we’ve always felt more freedom than if he was a more well-established character or if his origin was more well established.

Butters: How many members of the Justice League would you like to get all together?

Guggenheim: At the end of the day it’d be so awesome to have Batman on the show. That’d be really cool. I don’t think that will be happening anytime soon, but you never know…one day. One thing we’re always saying…we never expected to have had the Huntress [Jessica De Gouw], Deathstroke [Manu Bennett] or Deadshot [Michael Rowe]; we ended up with a lot more DC Comics characters becoming part of the show than we had ever planned. It wasn’t initially part of the pitch or the conception of the show. Now here we are in our third season and we’ve Flash [Grant Gustin] and the Suicide Squad and we’re going to have Katana and we have Ray Palmer [Brandon Routh], and it seems like you could field an entire show off the characters that we have introduced on Arrow. That’s so beyond anything we expected. That’s a long-winded way of saying I’ve learned not to expect anything or make any predictions because the reality has far exceeded any of our initial predictions or initial conceptions.

Source: Hollywood Reporter