This... is the Ex-Factor

So here's the thing I've been working on for about two years that I'm finally able to talk about.

 

"For three long years, Josh and Hilary dated, until they both mutually agreed
that it was a terrible, terrible idea. Now these "just friends" are back,
and they're podcasting together. Look out world. This… is the Ex Factor."

Almost two years ago, I started working on a web series, a group of short films designed to be distributed over the net.  My reasoning was that if I could make it as cheap and produceable as possible, I could then find someone to actually make it as opposed to having it languish in my hard drive.

The premise for the series I came up with was this: Two people who used to date for a non-trivial amount of time broke up, but together they produce a weekly comedy podcast together.  It ties together a lot of the things I like to write about.  It's a "backstage" piece, and I find myself writing about people who are involved in some sort of media or art quite a lot.  The premise of Exes having to work together leads to scenes of social awkwardness galore, and broken "bad first date" type of dialogue is something I like writing.  Finally, it's about podcasting, which is something I've been more or less obsessed with since I got an iPod.  First the iPod was all about music, but eventually it's now all about podcasts.  It's a curiously intimate thing, having strangers chat in your ears for hours at a time about whatever you're interested in.  The question that comes to mind is: Who does that?  Who does all the work it takes to put together a podcast, especially if you're not doing it for money.  And why?

That was the thinking that went toward writing The Ex-Factor.  I created the two lead roles to answer that question for me.  Josh, the guy who does most of the work behind making the podcast, who seems to do it to keep close with Hilary, his Ex. He's really good at hosting the podcast as he's an improv comedian who can keep the banter going.  Hilary plays the podcast sidekick, and unlike Josh she has fewer creative outlets as she's stuck in her dead end job, so she's on the podcast to flex her creative muscles not quite realizing the size of the torch that Josh still carries.  Over the course of the series I play with their relationship in various ways.  They're good at making amusing podcasts, but every once in a while something goes awry.

I wanted a specific tone for the web series, as many of the ones I've seen seem to go for the wackiness as a first resort.  I don't mind the "slam cut to something ironic" style of comedy, it's just that it seems to be overused.  I wanted to have all of the comedy of the show to be derived from the relationship between the main characters.  I wanted to establish who they are and then smash different problems and situations against that relationship and see what happened.  It resulted in two really interesting characters that get fully explored over the course of the series.

After I got the writing done, I started showing this to people and got a very positive reaction.  I pursued making this with one friend of mine, and we got quite a ways toward actually going forth with it, but finances caused this friend to pull out of the project last fall.  I then took the project to the folks at Malarkey Films, whom I had just worked with for the 2010 National Film Challenge to see if they were interested, and after some discussion on their part they decided to take it on.  It's interesting to go through the process with different parties as they have different perspectives on the material.  Some things that were crucial details to one group were totally inconsequential to the other.  It really shows how collaborative filmmaking is, and why "Making Of" commentary tracks exist.

So, this is the Ex Factor.  We're holding auditions on April 3rd, and if all goes well we'll be filming this summer. Stay tuned.

An Accidental Success: The Reed Hum 110 Play

If memory serves me correctly, in about a month at Reed College they will perform a play.  I'm not sure what the title of the play will be, but it's a parody of Hum 1110, the humanities course all Freshmen at Reed have to take.  The plot is that a freshman who has not studied during the first year prays for help for her (usually her) final exam, and the gods send down Homer to help guide her through the material she has meticulously avoided learning.  What follows is a loose romp, a mixture of nerdy witticisms,  dirty gags, cameos from the professors and staff who don't have the good sense to stay away, and Reedie in-jokes that are hilarious to the student body but probably loses context the nanosecond a student steps off campus.

The annual performance of this play is, by all accounts, one of the pivotal events of the Reed student calendar, with huge lines forming to wait to pack into the auditorium for it's one-time only performance.  Far more people attend this play than ever attend any Hum lecture.  It's easy for a current student to think that it's the type of tradition that has been happening at Reed forever.

It hasn't, though, unless you define "forever" as "since 1994", when I wrote and directed the first one. Actually, for a current Reedie, that probably qualifies as "forever".  Sigh.