This week: Girls! Girls! Girls! We’re highlighting the femme comediennes who have found a home on web television. A deadly combination of funny and sexy, these smart ladies have web tv nailed down to an exact science.
One of TheWB.com’s new original series starring three fun-loving best friends who turn their backs on the Hollywood machine and make a series of ridiculous short films and a faux-reality show to launch themselves into the spotlight.
Julia Allison, Meghan Asha, and Mary Rambin host a no-holds-barred weekly web talk show about all the things you wanted to know but were afraid to ask—from strippers to stalkers to sex with the ex.
Lucy Lawless and Zoe Bell on set of Sony/Crackle’s Angel of Death (Photos by Brady Brim-DeForest)
It’s a beautifully smoggy day in the city as we make our way downtown to a tired corner of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights neighborhood. We pull up to Linda Vista Hospital a rundown 20’s era building that even in its heyday more resembled a mental institution than any sort of medical facility. We’re told they used the building to shoot Outbreak, End of Days and Pearl Harbor amongst dozens of other productions since its doors closed back in 1990. Rumors of the building being haunted add a chill to the backdrop as we head in to the bustling set of Sony/Crackle’s newest action web series Angel of Death.
Zoe Bell and Lucy Lawless are on set together, but despite having a rather large role in the series, this is the only day Lawless will be shooting. The 50-member crew, a luxury for most web series, are moving briskly – you could almost call them relaxed. About fifteen or so huddle around the twin monitors set up just outside of one of the hospital suites that has been converted into Lawless’ character Vera’s apartment. They eye every detail — with concentration common to a TV or film production with a respectable budget. In fact most of the crew consider this just like any other film gig. A film gig with an ambitious 25-day schedule, of course, but essentially the same logistics.
Bell plays Eve, a “remorseless assassin” working for a shadowy crime family who finds herself haunted by her former victims after traumatic head injury. As part of an exorcism of these demons, she turns her deadly skills on her former clients who ordered the hits in the first place. When we arrive on set, Eve is bleeding, roughed up from some recent revenge fight. The cameras roll in her neighbor Vera’s apartment as she cares to the wounded Eve laying limply on the worn russet couch.
In fact, this is the first time Bell and her fellow New Zealand native Lawless have shared the screen — at the same time that is — despite an 11-year history going back to Bell’s days as Lawless’s stunt double on Xena: Warrior Princess. Bell was just eighteen when she started her stunt work, which would eventually lead to her plush assignment as Uma Thurman’s stunt double in Tarantino’s Kill Bill films and later as a stuntwoman-actress in Tarantino’s half of the Grindhouse double feature, Death Proof.
From Stunts to Center Screen
With Angel of Death, Zoe Bell is making her transition from stuntwoman to full-fledged badass female action star. Between scenes, we get a few minutes to chat with Bell, still sporting makeup wounds on her face and wrists. “Eve is guiltless, heartless — emotionally sterile before she suffers the trauma that changes her,” Bell tells us. “She has to learn to co-exist with emotion” she adds, letting on that she has worked her character backstory well beyond what writer Ed Brubaker had written out.
Bell is taking her new found acting role seriously — prep work for the series included not only the several weeks of fight rehearsals with her stunt coordinator, but also acting and dialogue coaching with Chad McCord. When asked about the transition from stunt work to acting, she concedes, “it’s actually fairly natural, almost comforting since my past work has been so physical.” Physical work is of course Bell’s wheelhouse and her dual-threat skills will be used to the fullest. “Oh yeah, there will be heaps of stunts,” she assures us, “and loads of asses will be whooped.” Eve’s tools of choice? “Mostly hand combat, but also some guns, tasers and even a baton.”
What’s it like working with her longtime friend and former doppelganger Lucy Lawless? “She’s just so easy to be around,” she gloats. “She has been way more influential in my career than I think she even knows.”
We have to ask, does she watch any web series regularly? As might be expected of the busy crossover star, she hasn’t had much time to catch up on the latest shows, but she certainly is excited by the medium no less. “Web series still feel very uncharted,” she points out, “and they allow a lot of freedoms and opportunities for talented people that otherwise might not have made it to production.”
Shortly afterward, we run into Jake Abel (Go Figure, The Lonely Bones) who plays the blade-wielding “cutter” Cameron Downs. He’s not shooting this day but is here to work out movements with the old-school barber prop razor blades.
Jumping Mediums
Paul Etheredge is quarterbacking from the director’s chair, although we never caught him sitting, as he beams with a refreshingly contagious energy that keeps him on his feet throughout the shoot. At one point during a scene he lets out a bemused yelp from the monitors outside the room so loud that he covers his mouth as if knowing he may have just muffed the shot. He’s having fun. And through him so is the crew. There are no divas on this set, no badges of excess like massage trailers or fawning assistants.
This isn’t his first time helming a web series, having recently shot another Crackle project, Buried Alive. The jump between film and web series is apparently an easy one – next up for Etheredge, he heads to London to direct Clive Barker‘s next genre film I Am Not Myself.
Sony hopes to get the series up on Crackle in early 2009. Since its announcement earlier this summer, the Ed Brubaker-written series has been getting talked up as one of Crackle’s most ambitious and potentially groundbreaking ventures. Unlike the green-screen heavy web series Gemini Division from NBC, Angel of Death will be bringing real stunts and combat to action-starved online viewers. Why not? Having one of the best in the business with Bell means you can actually shoot the fall from a three story window that Brubaker intended when he wrote it in.
The announcement of YouTube Screening Room last June represented a serious — if obvious and inevitable — step for professional media: filmmakers no longer rely solely on an oligopoly of distributors for exposure…or do they?
Google, with YouTube, is decidedly intent on distributing professionally-produced media. It plans to create “new business opportunities for filmmakers” and seemingly all other media-makers. The internet hegemon’s increasing presence in entertainment media shows a quickly shifting ecosystem for professional production.
The Princess of Nebraska (above) by Wayne Wang, has already received positive reviews and has been seen roughly 180K times – a fraction of what a film might expect to see from a limited theatrical release, but a striking sign of a shifting media landscape.
“Terrible” Terry Tate is the meanest, baddest, and downright prettiest Office Linebacker around. Good old number 56 is always on hand to blindside some deserving rube in order to right social wrongs, fight for peace, justice, and common decency in the Felcher & Sons office place, and get out the vote.
Originally the central character in a 2000 film pilot by Rawson Marshall Thurber, you might already know Terry Tate (played by Division I-AA All-American-turned-actor Lester Speight) from his nine-episode, online Reebok series and accompanying Superbowl Ad. Always referring to himself in the first person, Triple T’s job is to slam office workers into the side of their cubicles for such faux pas as not refilling the break room coffee pot (“If you kill the Joe, you make some mo!”).
Middle management might be afraid to get in the faces of Jr. Mail Room Engineers. Terry Tate is not.
Basically, it’s the same joke every time. Not as hard-hitting in longer formats, but good in one-minute bursts. And amazing when coupled with Sarah Palin.
Oh, dog people. They bring their pets to restaurants. They coo at their pooch in baby talk. They even let their smelly little mutts into their beds at night. Is it any wonder they’re misunderstood? The pilot episode of Puppy Love, the new L Studio web series by producer Amy Harris (Sex and the City), explores the dating dilemmas for those people who love their four legged friends…maybe too much.
Famke Janssen capably stars as our hopeless heroine, whose friends think that her relationship with her pet, Owen, might be keeping her from closing the deal with her new man—but she’s not convinced. She asks a friend, “When you see a woman with a dog, what do you think?” His answer: “She’s so desperate to have a baby that she’ll pick up crap from the streets.”
Over the credits, Janssen recounts how she found her dog, Licorice (a Boston Terrier, who plays Owen in the series), and her story sounds not unlike the tales smitten fiancees tell about meeting their intendeds. We’ll see whether the series will follow Janssen’s character, or if it will focus on a new dog lover every week—celebs slated to appear in coming episodes include Ally Sheedy, Kristen Johnston, and Sarah Paulson.
Like Sex and the City, Puppy Love has quick, witty banter with just the right amount of snark. If you’re missing the rich-New-Yorkers-talking-about- relationship-issues-over-brunch aesthetic, you’ll love the show, but even those who scoff at SATC (every guy I know, I’m looking at you!) will find something to love in this series. Well acted, well written, and with the high production value that seems to be a staple of L Studios programming, Puppy Love playfully satirizes the quasi-relationship-quasi-parenthood commitment of dog ownership.
And an added bonus for you dog lovers out there: Puppy Love’s proceeds benefit the ASPCA. I’m sure Licorice approves.
If you’ve ever wanted to watch a handful of classic and terrible horror flicks, but haven’t found the time, FEARnet‘s 66.6 Second Film Festival is for you.
In each installment, Spider introduces a movie that the savvy editors at FEARnet have edited down to a little over a minute, then cues the Rob Zombie jingle. Over the next 66.6 seconds we see pivotal scenes from the film as my uncle from Long Island (I do not have an uncle from Long Island) plays the role of narrator and explains the on-screen action.
My favorite is Leprechaun in the Hood. I love me some Ice-T and Warwick Davis.
Check out all 10 miniaturized horror movies at the brand new FEARnet.com.
With a little less than a week to go before the writer-backed web series portal Strike.TV launches, it’s time to take a closer look at some of the first shows on the debut lineup. Fresh off their announcement of a content distribution deal with YouTube and Joost, the site has released the trailer (above) for its highly-touted office comedy, Global Warming starring SNL’s Kristen Wiig and The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi. The series is written Daily Show writer Rob Kutner and Sheryl Zohn (Penn & Teller: Bullshit). Even Mindy Kaling (The Office) makes an appearance Mandvi’s heartless IT call center boss.
Aside from the recent Tina Fey as Sarah Palin hoopla, Kristen Wiig has been dominating the resurgence of Saturday Night Live with her zany, fully-committed Groundlings-bred characters. (See: “Surprise Party” and “Penelope“). Even her film roles are scene stealers, playing Katherine Heigl’s antagonizing co-worker Jill in Knocked Up and John C. Reilly’s girlfriend in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. This time she plays a more reserved, but still adorable Kristine, a office woman longing for a relationship that means something.
Aasif Mandvi is also no stranger to the TV-to-film crossover with roles opposite Ricky Gervais in Ghost Town and Robert De Niro in Analyze This. Comedy fans best know Mandvi as a staple for Jon Stewart’s Middle East coverage on The Daily Show. (See: “Aasif Mandvi is Brown“) In Global Warming, he’s a hopeless romantic tech support rep in India who strikes up a long distance relationship of sorts with Wiig through a series of mutally flirtatious IM chat sessions. The official premiere is Monday October 28th when Strike.TV finally cuts the ribbon and sets loose its wealth of professionally written series.
In the summer of ’07, Kirby’s Yo! Gah! – a short film about an annoying New Age enthusiast who’s mortally inflexible – landed him first prize in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporations‘ online video contest, Exposure. The CBC awarded Kirby a shot at a full-fledged online series and gave him $25,000 to create a pilot. He spent $12,00 of it on Macs vs. PCs.
It’s a gory Westside Story remix (complete with snapping!) that escalates the age-old Mac vs. PC battle to the level of choreographed musical / grindhouse flick. (Note: You’re missing the good stuff if you stop watching before the 2:00 mark. My fave scene comes at around 3:30. MacBooks make for one helluva blunt object.)
It’s undeniable – Jessica Rose, veteran of Lonelygirl15, Hooking Up, and Sorority Forever, is one of the hardest working stars in web television. But does her name carry a show? That’s the gamble 60Frames took when it signed Rose and film school stand-out, Eduardo Rodriguez, for it’s new serial thriller, Blood Cell.
The premise is standard thriller fare – Julia (played by Rose) is woken in the middle of the night by a mysterious cell phone call – only this time, the call isn’t just audio, it has video too. Onscreen is her friend Susan, crying and obviously quite upset. She’s been kidnapped by a disturbingly grotesque thing (think Saw’s tricycle riding clown and you wouldn’t be far off), but there’s a catch: Julia can’t turn off her phone – if she does, her friend dies. The text message she receives moments later only confirms the worst: “Dead Cell = Dead Friend.”
The series, in development since at least November of 2007, features New Zealand-native Rose in each episode. Episodes reportedly cost $5,000 a piece to produce, and with 18 episodes in the can, plus promotional and other costs, the total series budget is most likely well over $100,000.
Rodriguez, notorious for having landed a three picture deal with Dimension Pictures before graduating from FSU in 2002 — lends genre credibility to the show — his film, Daughter (2002), was one of the first student produced shorts to be selected for the Cannes professional short film category. His reputation is only slightly marred by the fact that the only feature to surface out of the Dimension deal was Curandero (2006), which drew scant attention on the festival circuit.
With a sizable budget and all this star studded power behind it, Blood Cell seems like a sure thing. The buzz generated by the trailer alone, which was released on April 1, 2008, is enough to build a series (or two) around: In the last six months, it has garnered over 5.3 million views on YouTube (thanks in part to the opening shot of Rose’s derriere).
But, with all the hype, why hasn’t Blood Cell been released?
To help us answer this question, we talked to Brent Weinstein, CEO of 60Frames Entertainment, to find out when Blood Cell would launch. He couldn’t give us a firm date, but he would say that “60Frames had always planned on creating anticipation surrounding Blood Cell, so there is no delay per se, rather a ramping up as the company moves to finalize distribution partners across various areas and build excitement.” It’s expected that the company’s usual crop of partners — Bebo, Blip.tv, iTunes, MySpace and YouTube — will handle distribution.
In case they hadn’t considered it, with Halloween around the corner, now would be a great time to launch a thriller series. But Rose herself could be facing overexposure on the web scene this fall, especially with 5 days a week of Sorority Forever making the rounds, not to mention HBO’s pannedHooking Upexperiment. Maybe web fans just need a little time off from their beloved starlet before she returns to the genre that made her famous. Only time will tell.
But those numbers can’t possibly sustain themselves post-election. Come the second week in November, political bloggers, comics, production companies, and websites are going to have a helluva hangover before witnessing a downturn so sharp it will only be rivaled by the ‘cratering’ of our economy. Once it’s politics as usual, the vast majority of those invigorated by the ultramarathon that was the 2008 Presidential Race will go back to their lives as usual. I’ve watched C-Span, I know. Elections are intriguing. Politics is boring.
Legally Brown is not your average star search show. In fact, most people on the show are already stars in their own right; but, that doesn’t mean they won’t throw down ruthlessly for a chance to be the next Piragua guy for the Broadway show In the Heights. The show was created by Lin-Manuel Miranda (Tony Award winning-composer-lyricist-star of In the Heights) as a dead-on send-up of the reality genre, following nine Broadway actors as they vie for the Piragua guy role.
What’s great about Legally Brown: The Search for the Next Piragua Guy, as its title suggests, it’s not afraid to embrace the ridiculous. In a great marketing move, the six-episode web series concluded yesterday as the curtain went down on Legally Blonde: The Musical. In case you missed it, this past summer MTV paraded around wanna be Broadway stars as they vied for the title role of Elle in the musical version of the movie. In Legally Blonde: The Search for the Next Elle Woods girls laughed, cried, sang their lungs out, and danced their gams off in one of the networks better reality shows since Pedro and Puck and the good ole days of The Real World.
Legally Brown embraces all the conventions of the MTV show it parodies, but stirs in unfathomable road blocks for each of it’s contenders. For example, actress (and 9 to 5: The Musical star) Allison Janney (The West Wing) is the only woman competing for a male role. Cheyenne Jackson (Xanadu) is just too darn attractive. Meanwhile Eliseo Roman, who currently holds the role in the actual Broadway show In the Heights is bitterly fighting to keep his part of Piragua guy.
Perhaps the genius hook of the show is all the fuss over casting a Piragua guy to begin with. What, pray tell, you ask is a Piragua guy? Why he’s the Puerto Rican man who sells delicious frozen treats shaped like a pyaramid, made of shaved ice and covered in syrup… of course. But to the contestant on Legally Brown, he’s everything.
In the big season finale, none of these contenders actually land the title role. Instead, reality show winner extraordinare, and Broadway’s Elle Woods aka Bailey Hanks, nabs the role in a not-so-subtle plug for the show. In fact, most of Legally Brown is a plug for Broadway in general, as the judges continuously name drop which show Piragua contenders are currently starring in. Fortunately, for the viewer, the show’s funny enough to keep watching anyway.
No zany, off-the-wall antics. No mumbled conversations with the unseen while confused on-lookers question a character’s sanity. In fact, if everyone was visible, the series could easily be scenes from last week’s CSI (that’s praise for both the production quality and carefully grounding an absurd premise in reality). The hook of the Invisible Friend murder mystery comes with a clever twist – only certain people can see the star of the show, and we’re not quite sure who or why.
The story begins after a heavy night of drinking, when Gabe (played by The Totally Rad Show‘s Jeff Cannata) turns Allison (played by blank space) from a friend into a friend-with-benefits. He wakes up beside her and quickly discovers she’s no longer living. In a panic, he calls BFF Gabe (played by Ryan O’Quinn). The two decide what to do with the body, and we’re left wondering wtf they need to conceal something that (we think!) no one else can see.
I recently spoke with Very Angry Neighbor, Ryan about how the series and his comedy group came to be and whether or not he has any invisible friends of his own.
Tilzy.TV: How’d you come up with the idea for Invisible Friend?
