TV Talk: Screenwriter brings a Pittsburgh friendship to Pixar’s ‘Luca’ on Disney+

Point Breeze native Jesse Andrews, who wrote the original novel “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” and the script for the 2015 filmed-in-Pittsburgh movie adaptation, had one of his own high school friendships in mind when writing the script for the Pixar movie “Luca,” streaming Friday on Disney+.

Luca (voice of Jacob Tremblay) is a sea creature — think: merman — who’s forbidden by his parents from leaving the sea to walk the coast of the Italian Riviera, but like a previous Disney hero, Luca also is sick of swimmin’, ready to stand.

When Luca inadvertently defies his parents, he stumbles into a friendship with another sea creature, Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), and they wind up having an adventure-filled summer on land that eventually leads to a friendship trio with the addition of human girl Giulia (Emma Berman).

Andrews is one of two writers credited with the “Luca” screenplay. Mike Jones, who wrote Pixar’s “Soul,” joined Andrews in writing “Luca” for the last year of script work.

In a Zoom interview Monday from his home in Berkeley, Calif., not far from Pixar headquarters, Andrews said the friendship between obedient Luca and the wilder, more rough-and-tumble Alberto mirrors his friendship with Matt Phillips during Andrews’ freshman year at Schenley High School.

“I was just a scrawny, little matchstick of a kid who was not good at sports, and then this guy who played hockey, listened to Metallica, kind of tough but very funny and I was intimidated by him, we were playing pickup football … and he knocked me over,” Andrews recalled. “I was laying on the ground crying because I cried a lot, too — that made me really cool — and he was sort of looming over me, and I was like, ‘It’s OK, please leave me alone,’ and he was like, ‘No, I’m sorry, I always do this!’ and then it was very funny, and by the end of the day we were best friends.”

Andrews said the two remained fast friends through high school.

“He taught me how to head-bang, which I never would have attempted on my own,” Andrews said. “He had this totally different way of seeing the world. He was a brilliant artist and still is a really gifted visual artist, so we would make cartoons together. He was someone I never could be, yet when I was with him, I kind of was him. There is a magic to that, a transformational magic that I will never want to stop writing about.”

Andrews said writing as a career was not on his radar in high school, although he and his friends did make movies, recorded on VHS tapes (“They were horrible,” he said, laughing. “I really hope they do not make it out into the world”).

Andrews’ parents — Reid, a University of Pittsburgh professor of Afro-Latin American history, and Roye, a retired librarian — still live in the home Andrews grew up in, and his sisters, Lena and Eve, still reside in Pittsburgh.

After graduating from Schenley in 2000, Andrews attended Harvard, initially studying applied mathematics and physics before switching to art history, which he characterized as “as much an escape from the sciences as it was about the visual arts.”

During summer breaks throughout college, Andrews wrote and edited for “Let’s Go” travel guides. After graduation, he moved to Berlin to write a novel. His first two attempts didn’t turn out the way he had hoped they would. His third was “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.”

A few years ago, after he was unable to get financing for a film he wrote and hoped to direct — “Empress of Serenity” is still listed as “in pre-production” at IMDb.com, but Andrews said “the ship has sailed on that version of it” — his agents suggested using the script as an audition piece for Pixar.

“Pixar is sort of the mecca of story,” he said. “It’s incredible writing that gets married to animation. I always thought of it as this place that it would be a dream to write for but also probably impossible.”

Directed by Enrico Casarosa (“La Luna”), “Luca” had been in development for two years before Andrews boarded the project in 2017.

“It’s an unusual movie by Pixar standards,” Andrews said. “It’s interested in being really authentic to childhood and is comfortable with, from the outside, small stakes. But internally, those stakes are enormous. The friendships that you make, how you see yourself, what you allow yourself to do out in the world, that’s the entire universe for you as a kid, and we wanted to create a movie that feels like that.”

Next up: Andrews is writing a fourth novel that goes to Pittsburgh but doesn’t start there (it’s set in part before the big bang). He has an unannounced, live-action movie with adults, including an A-list star attached (it’s not set in Pittsburgh). And he’s pitching a couple of ideas for potential TV series.

Kept/canceled/spun-off

Apple TV+ renewed Jason Momoa’s “See” for a third season ahead of its Aug. 27 season two premiere.

Peacock renewed musical comedy “Girls5eva” for a second season; Freeform did the same for drama “Cruel Summer.”

NBC canceled “Manifest” after three seasons.

Peacock ordered a live-action series based on Seth MacFarlane’s R-rated movie “Ted,” about a foul-mouthed talking teddy bear.

HBO Max is developing a “Perfect Strangers” reboot that will star Robin Thede (“A Black Lady Sketch Show”) and London Hughes.

Disney+ ordered a “Beauty and the Beast” limited prequel musical series centered on Gaston (Luke Evans) and LeFou (2003 Carnegie Mellon University grad Josh Gad).

Channel surfing

Former KDKA-TV news anchor/reporter Brenda Waters will be inducted into the Silver Circle of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences. … It will be a Pittsburgh reunion on the set of Showtime’s “American Gigolo” series which is directed and written by Mt. Lebanon native David Hollander and executive produced by 1990 Bishop Canevin High School grad KristieAnne Reed through Jerry Bruckheimer Television. … Rick Sebak’s latest special, “A Very Quick History of an Unusual Television Station,” a 29-minute capsule history of WQED-TV, is now streaming at wqed.org/communityimpact. … Megan Boone will make her final appearance on NBC’s “The Blacklist” in the show’s upcoming eighth season finale. … “Raiders of the Lost Ark” celebrated its 40th anniversary last week, and all the Indiana Jones movies are now streaming on Paramount+ along with the 1992-93 ABC TV series “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.” … Liz Quesnelle, owner of The Guilded Girl Beauty Emporium in Sewickley, competes on ABC’s “The Chase” (9 p.m. Sunday, WTAE-TV) opposite Chaser James Holzhauer.