Author James Frey took the name of his transmedia company, Full Fathom Five, from a line in Shakespeare's The Tempest that, incidentally, also titles one of Jackson Pollock's first drip paintings.
"The idea of the company was to use the art world model to create things with words," he says, and the phrase merged the two nicely.
"And it sounds cool."
Frey conceived the LA.-based company six years ago, when he was in England, touring the facilities of artist Damien Hirst. Watching assistants fabricate the projects that Hirst envisaged, Frey was excited by the efficiency of the contemporary studio. "It's how da Vinci made art, how Michelangelo made art, how Warhol made art," he says.
Adapting the process to storytelling, he came up with an idea for a young adult book series, found cowriter Jobie Hughes and subsequently produced the bestselling Lorien Legacies.
The first book, I Am Number Four, was adapted into a feature film. The series, featuring the work of various writers, so far consists of seven novels and 15 novellas published in 36 languages. And three television and streaming projects based on the series are slated for production this year.
For Frey, Hollywood represents something of a homecoming. He always knew he wanted to be an author, "but I also wanted to make a living," he says. So he moved to LA. in 1995 to write screenplays.
After eight years of steady work, he moved back to New York and achieved massive success — and controversy — with his first book, A Million Little Pieces. Though the release was initially marketed as a memoir of Frey's experience in drug rehab, the author later revealed that sections were fictionalized.
Frey continued to write novels, but he missed the collaborative nature of production. He's getting plenty of that now.
Fathom's first television show, Amazon's The Kicks, comes from a book series by Olympic soccer gold medalist Alex Morgan. Frey and his oldest daughter, Maren, had watched the U.S. women's team play in the 2012 World Cup and found Morgan's performance electrifying.
"We spent a year or so working on the [book] series with Alex, sold it, and it's been really successful," he says. "The idea always was that there would be a television show. At the company, I always say we should be making things we wished existed in the world."
American Gothic developed from an obsession that Frey shared with Fathom executives Todd Cohen and Laura Terry over the podcast Serial. Wanting to create something like it for television, they generated an outline, approached Amblin Entertainment and brought on writer Corinne Brinkerhoff (The Good Wife) to write and run the show.
Picked up by CBS as a summer series, Gothic centers on a Boston family who believes one of its members may be a serial killer.
Fathom execs then dreamed up Relationship Status for the Verizon-YouTube network Stylehaul. The series — developed on spec with Celine Geiger, along with producing partners Milo Ventimiglia and Russ Cundiff — explores how young people today fall in love on their phones.
"The best way we thought to do it was obviously as a digital series," says Frey, who is an executive producer on all Fathom shows. Digital books will tie in as well.
"I'm not so pretentious to call myself an artist," Frey explains, "but I follow the core idea that artists can make whatever they want, and they can present it however they want."
