I saw Rosie on the red carpet. We chatted about Michel’s madness and whether or not she’d be online if her career was just beginning now in a YouTube age. Her personality and candor were infectious.
When the two of us met up for drinks after the ceremonies, we giggled and laughed for hours, telling each other super-secret stories like we had been best friends for years (we did not get drinks together after the ceremonies and didn’t tell each other super-secret stories).
Channel 101 co-founder Dan Harmon and longtime 101 vet Ryan Ridley are at their best in their calamity-ridden, emotional powerhouse of a web series Water and Power. The two play mid-level employees in a strait-laced branch of local government in charge of the city’s utilities.
Comedian Dan Levy is breaking down the anatomy of a Long Distance Relationship with a new series on Crackle. In LDR, two forlorn lovers Sam and Samantha resort to a webcam relationship when they part ways to go to college. The vlog format, at times overused in web series, uses the cliché to its advantage, highlighting the hilarious background action of the roommates–particularly Sam’s roommate Eddie, played by James Kirkland, whose antics often steal the show.
Tubefilter caught up with show’s creator and star Dan Levy to get all the sordid details on Long Distance Relationship.
TF: What was the inspiration for the show?
Dan Levy: I’ve been in three terrible long distance relationships–two in college, and one post college, you think I would have learned my lesson. I do stand-up, and I started doing a joke in my set about long distance relationships and how terrible they are, and it always got a laugh, so then I wrote a sketch based off that joke, and James Kirkland was in it. And a year later I met with Sony, and I told them I always loved the idea of doing a show about long distance relationships. They liked the sketch. So the show went from a joke to a sketch to internet success.
TF: How did you find your co-star, Samantha? There’s great chemistry there even via a webcam!
Dan Levy: That girl, well, I found her in my real-life relationship I am in right now…she’s my girlfriend. (Samantha is played by Rachel Specter who recently played Courtney in House Bunny). Everyone in the show is a friend of mine–except for the weird Korean women smoking cigarettes in a later episode, and the female basketball team–I do not know them. We cast those people. But the random girl in the orgy and the guy in the pickle suit, those are my friends.
TF: Do you find your stand-up experience helps with the webcam format of the show?
Dan Levy: I think stand-up helps with every sort of media because it is about instant gratification. You know what’s funny that night because the audience tells you. I think it especially helps with the internet, because these shows are so short. You’ve only got seven minutes at the Laugh Factory or The Improv to make people laugh–it’s very similar–you learn how to get to the jokes, and relate to your audience.
TF: Do long distance relationships really work out–any chance for this one?
Dan Levy: I don’t want to give anything away. But there’s some hope for Sam and Samantha, but it’s a really bumpy road, because that R.A. is so fucking handsome.
TF: Tell us about your roommate, Eddie. He seems like a handful.
Dan Levy: James Kirkland plays the role of Eddie, and he’s an older college student, as you can see by his giant red beard. I went to college with James, and James and I have been working together in comedy for eight years now. I think he is one of the funniest people, period. The hardest part of the entire process was us not laughing. In one of the episodes, James is eating beef jerky throughout the entire scene, and James is a vegetarian, so every time we would cut he would spit it out, and we’d crack up.
But yeah, it’s tough for Sam to be living with the elder college roommate…he’s always very drunk or on X or trying to hook up with freshman constantly, making it hard to have a good time, or privacy with Samantha. You’ll see that when Sam and Samantha try to have cyber-sex.
TF: Have you and James been roommates in real life?
Dan Levy: We’ve never been roommates, that’s why we’re friends. I did live with him for seven days in Amsterdam, though.
TF: Seven Days in Amsterdam sounds like a good title for your next web series.
Dan Levy: Yes, maybe the sequel to LDR will take place in Amsterdam. TF: What was your budget like for the show?
Dan Levy: It was not that much money, but I have to say, I developed it with Sony execs, and they were really good. You hear a lot of stories about how execs ruin a show, but they helped develop it, and were awesome. We were shooting ten episodes in five days with five pages per episode. And those dorms were actually all in the same room–my brother’s bedroom. We shot all of the Oregon campus first, stripped it down, and then shot all the Florida campus, and ripped it down, and built the set of another dorm room you’ll see. And we went to the USC campus to steal exteriors and interiors of dorm rooms. Also Jenny Starnes Tessler, she was she was the set designer, she did all of those sets.
TF: You gave us some good hints at upcoming episodes regarding Korean ladies and cigarettes, any other teasers?
Dan Levy: Serious sh*t goes down. Just like any long distance relationship, it has its ups and downs, and lots of frustration. And lot of more characters come in. We had like forty people in our cast, and so far you’ve only seen four, so there’s lots to come.
The half boxer/Luchadore, half irreverent Anne Landers, and all sarcastic prankster of Free Country, USA just answered his 200th e-mail since he began the electronic Q&A way back in 2001. Click on the below to watch (my fave part is how Homestar uses one one of those $100 laptops):
Boner for Boner, a new, not safe for work show on Channel 101, deals with common themes of young male sexual angst with a clever catch-22: “Milky McClellehan (Brant Duncan) can only get a boner when he looks at a picture of his own boner.”
Like me when I first heard this, you are probably thinking “What?!?” But it’s the kind of stupid, adolescent humor transposed to a post-pubescent subject matter done well. And it’s actually really hilarious.
When Milky’s roommate, Mocha (James Atkinson), cleans up their apartment for the date he has set up with a couple of easy breezies (named Shampoo and Perfume), he throws out the only picture Milky owns of his member (Which, of course, raises the question, what kind of an idiot would keep only one picture? But anyway…) leaving Milky up a creek without a paddle.
This leads to an even more disturbing revelation from Mocha.
Trailer went up today for HBOLabs’ Hooking Up series which is set to premiere Oct. 1st. The college-based series set on the campus of fictional Bask University, is a virtual grab-bag of YouTube weblebrities, with Jessica “Lonelygirl” Rose, Phillip “SXEPhil” DeFranco, Kevin “KevJumba“, Wu, Deanna Casaluce, Michael “WHATTHEBUCK” Buckley, Cory “Mr. Safety” Williams, Charles Trippy, Kevin “Nalts” Nalty and Dave Days.
Not to ignore the interactive elements that these kids are known for, the site will feature a Facebook knockoff called “Baskbook” social network where fans can interact with the stars. Seriously, how many online profiles can even an avid fan maintain? And anyone want to count how long until MySpace issues a cease-and-desist for completely copping their logo?
The big experiment – can the vloggers act – is about to begin, for more info on the series check out our previous article.
Elevator, a weekly comedy series on HBO’s Runaway Box, uses the constraints of a web format to its advantage. Each short episode feels like a living comic strip, with minimal editing, music and effects, and the action is confined within the tiny space of an elevator car. Besides the predictably present office workers, you can catch ninjas, jousters, clowns, and the occasional overly graphic serenade. Sometimes awkward, occasionally surreal, and consistently funny, the show explores what can happen in the two minutes or less its characters find themselves on an elevator ride. [Ed. Note: RE: The video above, anyone else think Internet Commenter Series did this joke better?]
Nominated for a YouTube Award for best comedy series in 2007, Elevator boasts a dynamic cast and guest stars from comedian Dan Minz, Jack Coleman of Heroes fame, Jason Earles of Hannah Montana (you know you love it), and Melora Hardin (Jan from The Office). The series also frequently reaches out to other online sensations, featuring them in their episodes. Their most popular video, “Music,” guest stars YouTube musical sensation Ronald Jenkees who unveils his newest remix while posing as an elevator repairman. You can watch a bevy of popular web-lebrities, Nickynik, Charlestrippy and Mr. Safety, in a single episode (check out “Lights Out” if that’s your speed). Elevator creator Woody Tondorf might look familiar from his work as a creator/actor in The BC, an online spoof of The OC that he created while he was a student at Boston College.
Runaway Box is the comedy content arm of HBO’s web experiment HBOLab. Many of the actors pop up in each others’ series, so check out Man in the Box andJoke of the Day if you like what you see on Elevator. It seems HBO might have been vetting Tondorf to created more heavily promoted content, as he is behind the new HBOLab series Hooking Up, which will debut October 1st and features an all web-star cast. Until then, Runaway Box posts new episodes of Elevator every Thursday on its YouTube channel.
Created by uber-talented interactive design firm SilkTricky – whose clients include Taco Bell, Axe, and Red Bull – The Outbreak spawned from a love of choose-your-own-adventure books and gore and a lifetime of pent up frustration from yelling at the move/television screen whenever a horror flick’s mortally inept characters make very bad decisions.
The undead action unfolds from a backwoods house where Kelly (the token girl), Seth (the cocky badass), Alex (the scared $#!%less creepy guy), and Dave (the injured one) attempt to stave off the zombie apocalypse while You/James (the CPA-looking dude in control) are calling the shots. It’s fast enough to appease ADD-ridden websurfers with more than enough blood and entrails to satisfy the genre fanatics.
I caught up with SilkTricky patner, Lynn Lund who told me more about how the project came to life:
Tilzy.TV: How’d you come up with the idea?
Lynn Lund: Actually, the idea came about from the many years we’d been involved in interactive design. We had worked on several projects that had different levels of interactivity and thought, “Why don’t we do this for ourselves and apply it to a genre that we love?”
Just a reminder for those in the Los Angeles area about tonight’s Hollywood Web Television Meetup, where movers and shakers in the web television community come together to share their knowledge. Last month’s meetup featured presentations from the SAG New Media team and Sandeep Parikh of The Legend of Neil.
This September Meetup is tonight at the American Film Institute in Hollywood we have some great speakers:
Greg Benson
President of Mediocre Films, the #27 All-Time Most Subscribed channel at YouTube whose edgy, decidedly un-PC comedy shorts and series combine great laughs with high production values.
Over the weekend, October’s issue of Wired Magazine arrived at the office – and before we even had a chance to thumb through the editorials, the magazine flipped open to a bulky insert containing a Blu-Ray disc version of WIMO’s Coma, which includes an exclusive director’s cut, presented “in its entirety in stunning Blu-ray technology.”
We’ve been watchingComa since it debuted on Crackle in late August – and despite an average 2 minutes of opening and closing credits per 6 minute episode – the show’s high production value, score, and acting talent (Michael Madsen, George Hamilton) don’t disappoint.
But, with a mere 36,419 views on Sony’s own platform, Crackle, we had to wonder, why would Sony Pictures Entertainment go to the expense of providing a Blu-Ray disc of the series to over 706,494 Wired subscribers?
That, it turns out, is a rather complicated question. Coma was originally produced by WIMO, in association with Anonymous Content, and Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment – as a film – meant to be viewed in seven installments on mobile phones. That was, until Creative Artists Agency paired the WIMO team, led by Drew Fitzgerald and Stefan Haller, with Sony Electronics. With input from media agency Universal McCann, Coma became a vehicle for marketing Sony Electronics’ high end Sony Vaio FW laptop.
Crackle, it turns out, was not involved in the Wired campaign at all. Which would explain why the reverse side of the Coma insert is an ad for Sony’s laptop, and not for Crackle’s other web series. The ad does however, provide a link back to Crackle, but you have to remove the disc in order to see it.
Will more web series be distributed in their entirety as films, via traditional physical mediums, like DVDs and Blu-Ray? We think so – in fact, Crackle’s soon to be released Angel of Death will be distributed on DVD in early 2009.
Tubefilter Asks You:
Do you think short form episodic web television will appeal to viewers via traditional distribution routes, like DVD and broadcast TV? Sound off below:
Lexus, Toyota’s fancypants car division, has taken the obvious next step for a #1 selling American luxury item. Today, the company launched an online-only, branded, new media studio. Finally!
But L Studio isn’t what you’d expect. Unlike BMW’s web.tv and Ford’s Bold Moves, there are no self-congratulatory videos for obsessive car owners with vehicle engineers lauding advancements in efficient dynamics or marketing ploys disguised as honest documentaries about brand reinvention.
Instead, The Hollywood Reporter notes, L Studio has a lot more in common with Bud.TV (except that you can access the site without draconian age verifications) and HBO. It’s a digital home for disparate types of quality programming linked together by the PR-Speak-idea of innovation. Lexus “has always been inspired by finding unique ways to look at the world” so the car manufacturer put together “an eclectic collection of unique perspectives meant to inspire you.
Headlining that collection is Lisa Kudrow, playing the role of (what sounds like Long Island) psychotherapist, Fiona Wallice in Web Therapy.
