Filming Shortly

Those of you who have been paying close attention to my status updates (read: shut-ins, the mentally unstable, or my mother) may have noticed that I've been doing a bit less standup lately. This drop-off isn't because my standup hasn't been going well. On the contrary, my career (a term I'm using loosely until someone actually starts paying me) has been going fairly well as of late. I got to open for Judah Friedlander the other night; I've been doing regular hosting gigs at The Village Lantern, where I'm getting better at using my abundance of charm to compensate for my modestly improving hosting skills; and I've had a number of people come up to me after shows and tell me how funny I was, which, after all, is the ultimate goal for a shameless praise-whore such as myself. Like a good woman, standup has been treating me far better than I deserve, and I have every intention of keeping it around until it notices.

However, the extremely relative degree of success I've been experiencing lately rekindled my love of comedy writing in general. In college, I wanted to be a screenwriter, and I wrote several screenplays, which the folly of youth allowed me to believe were exceptional. I even tried to get one of them produced, to limited success. That is to say, my success was mostly limited to abject failure. At the time, I believed that this was my one and only chance to get anything made, and with the project's demise, I abandoned the idea that I could ever be a successful writer. I'd still occasionally put my fingers to the keyboard, but less out of professional ambition than to justify my OKCupid Profile's claim that I was a writer. After all, if there's one thing women hate more than a failure, it's a liar. But it turned out they disliked me even more, so the point was a bit moot.

But then I started writing standup, and to my surprise, some of my material actually resonated with people. When I first started out, the few laughs that I got here and there were so incredibly validating that I kept writing more and more. And the more I wrote, the more and better laughs I got. And the better I got at standup, the more my mind drifted back to writing screenplays. After a while, I wanted to try to make something again, but I didn't know what. A fire was further lit under me when I heard an interview with one of my comedy heroes, Patton Oswalt, who talked about how, with the fact that these days it's easier than ever to shoot and edit video, if you want to make something there's no reason not to. And though I still wasn't sure what to make quite yet, I was determined to make it.

I did end up making something, though it wasn't exactly the personal statement I was craving. In the hours before Hurricane Sandy barreled down on New York, I found myself shooting a small music video with a friend and occasional director, Soren Miltich. It was just an impromptu project to help out a friend and collaborate with some good people. And despite the fact that I can barely operate a cheese grater, much less a camera, the video actually came out fairly well. (As soon as the artist is ready to release it, I'll post something further about that project here, but that story is for another day.) When editing of the video was more or less done, Soren expressed an interest in collaborating on something again, perhaps with slightly more planning and significantly less gale force winds. A few weeks later, I came back with ten short scripts, which we whittled down to what we considered to be the four strongest. And thus, Kings County, our new project, was born and tentatively titled.

The idea was to create a short, comedic web series that was simple enough to shoot with limited time, minimal actors, and what little money I had in my pocket. So I decided to focus on the immediate world around me and make a series of sketches based around a revolving cast of young, delusional, and self-involved inhabitants of Brooklyn as they scour New York City in search of creative outlets, survival jobs, and ways to contribute to society without cutting into their "me" time. The initial sketches were designed to be simple in scope, but to begin establishing a universe in which future projects could take root. I don't want to spoil too much of the surprise, but some of the things you can expect to see on the streets of New York include protest singing, soul-crushing fund raising, homeless credentials, and conceptual-docu-video portraiture.

While Mr. Oswalt may be correct that it's easier than ever to make something, it's still quite difficult to make something good. It's not enough to have a singular vision and an iPhone, you need talented actors and talented crew to help you achieve your goals, and most importantly, you need them to be willing to work for next to nothing. It can be very difficult to get talented people to work for less than their talent is worth, especially if, like me, you are a hermit-like introvert who hates to ask favors of your friends because that would require talking to someone. But somehow, we managed to find a large number of people who were excited enough about my scripts to give up their weekends in exchange for little more than being involved with the project. But even so, once you've managed to find the talent to put behind your project, coordinating their schedules can prove to be more difficult than solving a Rubik's Cube at a rave. But if people are excited enough, you can always make something work, and in spite of it all we managed to get all the pieces in place for an incredible shoot this weekend!

Unfortunately, The Weather Channel then promised to rain on our parade, and possibly strike it with lightning, forcing us to postpone the shoot. And of course, the weekend ended up being filled with nothing but mockingly sunny skies, at which we shook our fits while cursing the names of the responsible meteorologists. But despite this minor setback, the pieces remain in place, and I've come too far to quit now, so there's nothing for it but to consult the pieces' calendars and reschedule. In the next few weeks, our cast and crew shall reconvene on the streets of New York to knock out the first four episodes of our web series, and I think that in the end, you'll find them to have been worth the wait.

And of course, this is just the beginning. Once we have these shorts in the bag as a sample of what we can do, I'm planning to use them to help raise funds for some more ambitious projects. But always the generous spirit, I didn't want to ask anyone to give me money until I'd given them something first. So these first four videos will be on me, and I hope that you'll enjoy my gift to you as soon as the weather permits.

-TC