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.

48 Hour Go Green Boston Results

The results for the 48 Hour Film Project Boston Go Green event are in, and the Malarkey entry How Mobile Apps Saved the World did pretty well, although we didn't get the big prize.  The film won "Best Director" and "Best Ensemble Acting", which were both ironic since the directing consisted of one camera shot and most of the actors were non-actors who were interviewed in the Errol Morris style. 

Of the 15 Boston entries, ours was named the Runner Up for Best Film which was a heck of a showing for something that was even more of an ad hoc production than is usually the case for a 48 Hour Film Project production.  We basically showed up on Saturday with a few pages of notes, a homemade "Interrotron" and the hopes that we could get normal people to make up stuff that we could fit together into a coherent piece. It just goes to show how well the normal people brave enough to go on camera did when asked to riff on stuff, and how good the editing was.

The Silent Treatment

At the end of the nineties I had a silent comedy phase.  I went back and rented every Chaplin and Keaton movie I could find and read both of their autobiographies.  I read every bit of commentary I could about that era, and even took clowning classes to get a sense of how you someone can tell stories without words.

During this time, I wrote two full length biographical pieces, a screenplay called Buster Keaton's American Life and a play called Chaplin and Keaton on the Set of Limelight.  I like them both, but I might never be able to do anything with them due to the legal difficulties of using real historical figures. I may post them here at some point.

Two Short Plays: My Boston Theatre Marathon entries

My playwriting discussion group has a guy who hates the 10 minute play.  Actually, to be fair, he hates that the predominance of the 10 minute play tempts playwrights to try and cram 15-20 minutes worth of story into 10 minutes for the sake of getting them entered into contests.

I'm someone who loves the form of the 10 minute play.  I tend to write towards constructing moments rather than resolving plots or exploring all aspects of an idea, and 10 minutes seems to be a good length in which to build the machinery that will unveil the perfect moment.  That's not to say that I don't write longer pieces (I'll get to those eventually on this blog), but the short play has been in many ways some of the most rewarding things I've written.

Writing Under Pressure - The 48 Hour FIlm Project Go Green

This past weekend, I just took part in Malarkey Films entry in the 48 Hour Film Project's Go Green Challenge.  If you're not familiar with the 48 Hour Film Project, it's a challenge in which teams are given 48 hours to write, film, edit, and produce a short film.  In each case you're given a set of criteria that you have to include in your film, usually a genre, a line of dialogue, a prop and a character.  In the Go Green iteration of the challenge, the genre is up to the teams to choose but the films have to have an environmental theme.

It's the sixth time I've been involved with a 48 Hour team, the third time with Malarkey.  Before I had latched onto teams, I had wanted to get involved in the project for a while but hadn't been able to find a team to join.  Eventually I discovered some co-workers of mine were involved in a team and joined up with them for a few events.  When that team lost steam, I was referred to a team run by a friend to the Malarkey Films team, where I discovered that people I knew were in the group.

Lilith at the Wedding

Link: LilithAtTheWedding.pdf
Type: Short Screenplay
Status: Unproduced

My regular writing group has a yearly tradition around holiday times.  Each year we decide on a new writing challenge, and we give ourselves the period over the holidays to work on it.  Sometimes we give ourselves inspirations, such as music or photos.  Other times we have to hit certain plot points at certain times.  Sometimes we give ourselves requirements that we have to use.