BY JOHN KIESEWETTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
On every trip to California I run into yet another Cincinnati native who's making it big in Hollywood. This time it was screenwriter Cyrus Voris.
The 1981 School for Creative and Performing Arts graduate is co-creator and executive producer of Fox's Brimstone drama, starring Peter Horton (Gary from thirtysomething). It's his first venture into television with partner Ethan Reiff after a decade of writing films.
"I've been pretty much working since the day I got to town (Hollywood) about four years ago," says Mr. Voris, who grew up in Clifton Heights, a few blocks from old Hughes High School.
"We did a lot of low-budget, straight-to-video stuff."
Anything I've heard of?
"That's not embarrassing?" he replies with a laugh.
His Fox bio doesn't list Josh Kirby: Time Warrior, the direct-to-video series starring Corbin Allred. He and Mr. Reiff, both in their mid-30s, wrote "chapters" one, two, five and six of the 90-minute movies.
The New York University film majors also rewrote Dolf Lundgren's 1994 Men of War action adventure film before earning their first major credit, Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (1995) starring Billy Zane and Jada Pinkett.
Audience will expand
No doubt, their total audience for all of those movies will be surpassed by the national TV audience for the Oct. 6 premiere of Brimstone (9 p.m., Channels 19, 45).
"Because of shows like The X-Files, TV has become a much cooler medium to work in," says Mr. Voris, who started at Fairview Heights Elementary and transferred to the SCPA in fifth grade.
"We had been snobs about ever wanting to work in television, which you find that a lot of feature (film) people are."
When the bottom fell out of the horror feature film market, the writers began thumbing though their old movie scripts looking for a possible TV project.
There was Brimstone, about a decent New York detective named Zeke Stone, who died and went to hell for killing his wife's rapist in a fit of rage.
In their movie script, the devil promises Zeke heavenly redemption if he returns to Earth and captures a vile soul who recently escaped from hell. For TV, they upped the count to 113 people who return after "a mass jailbreak" from eternal damnation.
Think of this as Touched by the Devil.
"We used to talk about this show to people, and people would say, "Oh, they're never going to put that on TV!' And we sort of like said: "Well, maybe Fox would.' "
NBC liked the idea too, but executives there wanted the Bible-quoting Stone working for God, instead of Satan.
The guys weren't interested in making another Touched by an Angel, says Mr. Voris, who loved to watch the "Cool Ghoul" and others host Saturday night horror movies on WXIX-TV (Channel 19) in the 1970s. He also developed an affection for comics in the Corryville comic book store operated by his father, Andrew, a former Over-the-Rhine social worker now living in Columbus.
Hooked on spooky movies
"I've always liked spooky movies and horror stuff," he says. "And I think as your get older, you start to realize that all those childhood fears linger with you as an adult, because they sort of become moral and ethical questions.
"It's like: I'm going to die? What's going to happen after that? Is there a devil? Is there a God?"
The premise for Brimstone is a simple moral absolute, he says. "If you're a bad person, you're going to pay for it in the afterlife," he says.
As Satan tells Stone in the Oct. 6 premiere: "God's universe is not like the American legal system. If you do something, you pay for it."
John Kiesewetter is Enquirer TV/radio critic. His column appears Monday and Thursday. Write: 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202; fax: 768-8330.