THE WINTER KING screenwriters Mickey Fisher and Brian Depetris join Franklin this week to chat about how they met playing Santa Claus, coming up with the idea for the script walking around New York City on Valentine’s Day, and their actual writing process.

Mickey Fisher and Brian Depetris

Brian Depetris is originally from the suburbs of Detroit. He moved to NYC to study theater at The American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Since graduating, he has performed everywhere from off-Broadway, to off-off-Broadway, to touring the country in various venues, as well as in film, television and commercials. For the past fourteen years, he's been taking on his all-time favorite role as Santa Claus at Christmas. As a writer, Brian is currently working on the sequel to THE WINTER KING, and has written a spec comedy pilot called SIDEKICK. Mickey Fisher is originally from a small town in Ohio and was a musical theater major at Cincinnati's College Conservatory of Music. There, he fell in love with writing and directing and by the time he moved to NYC, he was producing his own shows with former classmates and spending Christmas as Santa Claus. He wrote and directed three independent features as well as a bunch of original theatrical works before moving to LA to try to break into TV. In 2013, he got the opportunity of a lifetime when his spec pilot, EXTANT, was picked up by Amblin Television and sold to CBS. Executive Produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Halle Berry, EXTANT ran for two seasons. He's still not sure it wasn't all a hallucination.