Derek Kolstadt, is one of the writers on The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. Recently Kolstadt talked about working for Kevin Feige and The Parliament when he spoke with Collider. The Parliament are a group of high level Marvel Executives working under Kevin Feige. This group make all the decisions about what goes where in the MCU. Kolstadt is probably most famous for creating the John Wick franchise, but he also wrote Episodes 3 & 4 of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.
Kolstadt seems to have really enjoyed his first experience in a writers room. The John Wick creator had nothing but praise for the way Kevin Feige and The Parliament worked.
“Now, I will say that after I turned in Episode 3, he [Feige] read it and emailed me [some] quick praise, [he was] happy, happy, and then I got 15 pages of single-spaced notes. And I was like, ‘Oh fuck, I’m fired,’ and then you start reading the notes and they were both macro, micro, and minutiae, and it made it better, man. Suddenly, you started delving in with someone who’s like, ‘Look, I totally get the point of the spear, but let’s find that stone and hone it down and make it sharper.’ And I learned a lot, and to Malcolm’s [Spellman] biggest credit, it was a room where you looked forward to being there, and [where] the best idea wins. Even if it created work, you wanted to hear that idea, because come the end of it, you wanted the series to be as good as you could make it.”
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Of course as Kolstadt points out, Feige doesn’t not handle this alone. Instead Feige has a team of senior executives known at Marvel as ‘The Parliament’. One would guess in the analogy, that would make Feige the Prime Minister or President. Of course this is exactly the role Feige fills at Marvel Studios. Kolstadt gives is some insight into how that process works.
“It’s probably 12 to 15 people, and all of their notes are compiled,” explained Kolstad. “And by the way, the cool thing about their notes, to the assistant’s credit, there was nothing in those notes that was repetitive or conflictive. And if it was conflictive, it would be like, ‘Okay, these are conflicting notes.’ And you’re like, ‘Oh, thank god.’ I think they referred to the heads of Marvel as The Parliament. There’s 15 of them or whatever [who] meet at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, so it was their notes. But for the most part, man, you loved finally getting a draft in. They’re like, ‘Hey, great job, it’s going to go to production, a lot of it is going to change,’ and you’re like, ‘Yup, good luck, man!”
Man, how much would you love to be part of that team? What do you think about Kolstadt’s comments regrading Kevin Feige and The Parliament? As always, leave any thoughts below.
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