Kings County: Notes From Season 1

After many months of promising the impending release of my sketch series, all the videos that I shot last summer are up and live on YouTube! Despite the limited scale of a no-budget web series, it was still quite an ordeal to coordinate everything and make sure that these videos got done. Big thanks are owed to my wonderful director and producer, Soren Miltich, who graciously took so much time away from her busy schedule to help me make this silliness. I'm already working on scripts for our next few collaborations, and I'll be annoying you with plenty of crowd-funding pleas soon enough. But first, I wanted to give a very quick little glimpse at the making of the videos so far.

As I'd mentioned in a previous post, this project began to take shape when Soren and I collaborated on a little music video we did for our mutual friend, Satchel Jones, which was shot for no money and less time in the hours before Hurricane Sandy hit New York (you can see a few ominous clouds in the distance). While Soren is typically used to working on much higher budget projects, after she saw the initial cut of the video I did, she was impressed that I'd made our hastily shot footage look so good, and she said she'd like to collaborate on something again sometime. If that was what we could do with so little planning, she figured that with some real pre-production and any budget at all, we'd be unstoppable. So with that offer on the table, I set about banging out a few scripts before she changed her mind. A few weeks later, I sent her a half a dozen short scripts, each written in all of about twenty minutes. Soren picked the four she liked best, and we agreed to shoot them on a whopping budget of $250 per video. It wasn't much, but it was $250 more than we spent on our first collaboration, so it was at least a step in the right direction. And despite everything I've ever learned about film making, I paid for it all out of my own pocket.

Now, in your twenties, it's pretty easy to get people who are willing to pour their heart and soul into someone else's pet project for no money. At that age, most of the people you know will also be in their twenties, and they're typically as desperate to prove themselves as you are, so everyone helps everyone else out in the hopes of building their reels. However, now that I'm in my thirties, most of my friends are also in their thirties, and things get a bit tricker. People have real jobs and families to schedule around. Seasoned professionals are accustomed to being paid fairly for their work. And the boundless energy that enables your average twenty-two year old to survive on two hours of sleep and eight Red Bulls a day has given way to jaded, professional cynicism. There are only so many times you can get job offers where the only compensation are "opportunities to network," and "work on future projects when this one takes off" before the very sound of the words "passion project" make you want to vomit up your free pizza.

So even with determination on our side, it was quite difficult to make something happen with nothing but a few dollars and some good intentions in our arsenal. But we were dedicated, and we were thankfully able to find a cast and crew of talented people who were as excited about the project as we were. We did have to do some recasting as we went along, and reschedule our shoots a few times to accommodate the needs of the people we wanted involved. But in the end, everything got done, and we all had a ton of fun doing it.

The Protest Singer was the first sketch I wrote specifically for the series, as well as the first one we shot. The original idea for the sketch came when I was thinking about how bad most socially conscious music is. As a big fan of 60s folk music, I really enjoy songs with a message. But more recent songs tend to be so clumsy and heavy-handed that they're typically hard to appreciate as anything more than self-righteous venting, which is pretty difficult to tap your toe to. I started thinking about this bad, modern protest singer, someone who doesn't really have anything of consequence to protest, but has an inflated enough sense of self-importance that he'll round up any petty annoyance to a "social injustice." And from there the sketch wrote itself: an angry hipster demands attention for a grievance that only matters, but nonetheless means the world, to him. I'd originally hoped that our friend from the music video would play the lead role, as I thought his cadence and style would add something unique to the character. With this in mind, I tried to write the rambling gibberish with his voice in mind. But when we got around to shooting, he was out of town recording an album, and we were forced to recast the role. But I like to think the sketch came out better for the change, as Casey Regan's own unique charm and naturally inept guitar really made the script come to life, and he had great chemistry with Peter Wallack.

We did run into one unforeseen complication in shooting the script. Or rather, we ran into a completely foreseen problem that we had chosen to ignore. When we asked the coffee shop if we could shoot outside, we didn't exactly tell them what we were shooting. They knew it was a comedy sketch, and that we were going to buy lots of coffee while we were there, but that was about it. And after 45 minutes of our hero banging out his anti-coffee shop anthem, it wasn't entirely surprising that they became a little suspicious. Soren explained to the owner that the point of the video wasn't to make fun of the coffee shop, but to make fun of the protest singer (which was true), and that I was about to buy another round of drinks for everyone on set (which soon became true). The owner very graciously accepted our word that we weren't trying to make his business look bad, and let us continue filming. And for the record, their coffee really is quite delicious. If we'd picked a location that really had coffee worth protesting about, the cast and crew would have murdered me for making them drink so much of it.

#Homeless was inspired by a guy I used to see every day on my way into work. Every morning, I'd see him sitting in the same spot near Union Square, passively waiting for people to give him money. I thought it was interesting that he was there first thing every morning, but always gone by the evening, and I remember thinking it was nice that he kept regular office hours. (Yes, I've lived in New York long enough to be completely callous and insensitive to another person's plight.) Then a few days later, I started feeling like something about him just didn't seem quite right. He had a cardboard sign, but he always looked like he was a little too clean and well rested to have spent the night in the gutter. Plus, he was always writing in a clean Mead notebook that hadn't seen a lot of late nights in a dirty subway tunnel. I started to imagine that he wasn't really homeless, but instead an aspiring writer trying to come up with his first hit article about life as seen through the eyes of the city's homeless. Filtered, of course, thorough a good night's rest and a hot shower, because even if you live as a vagrant, you should still write as a gentleman. Then one day, my suspicions were confirmed in my mind when I noticed him give a dirty look at a woman who walked by, then pull out a Blackberry and start something no doubt snide about her. A small part of me wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he really was homeless, because why else wouldn't he have an iPhone? But, terrible person that I am, I mostly just thought about how glad I was that I'd never given him money.

We posted a casting notice on a few websites, and actually held a real casting session. But in the end, we didn't get a lot of responses due to the rate we could afford to pay, and we almost exclusively ended up casting our friends and colleagues to fill the roles. Amy Metroka had worked with Soren in the past, so Soren knew her to be a pro. And Mick Andrews is one of my favorite up-and-coming comics that I've encountered on the open mic circuit. But the one bit of gold that came from our casting call was our homeless man, Nathan Oesterle. He was clean cut, and delivered his lines with poise and skill, clearly an actor with some impressive chops. And most importantly, during his audition I couldn't stop thinking, "He doesn't look homeless at all!" That's when I knew he was a perfect fit for the role.

You need permits to shoot things on the streets of New York, and we actually got one for all our videos. However, we ended up having to reschedule the shoot dates a few times, and when we finally managed to get everyone together at the same time, we decided it wasn't worth the hassle to get our permit renewed. After all, the police don't stop people selling bootleg DVDs on street corners or the guy selling weed every morning in my lobby, so what are they going to say to us for taking up ten feet of sidewalk in front of an abandoned storefront? Perhaps we were tempting fate, but most of the day went by without a hitch. Then, as we were setting up one of the final shots for the day, a couple police officers walked by. At first they didn't seem to be paying us any mind, but one of them turned around and started watching the take we were in the middle of shooting. I got really nervous, as we were so close to being done, but not quite close enough that we could cut the video together with the coverage we had so far. I didn't want trouble, but I'm also not good at confrontation, and if they told us to shut it down, I was going to obey. Things got tense as Soren yelled "cut," and the officer approached us. He looked us all over, then excitedly asked, "What are you guys shooting?" We told him it was a comedy sketch, and he wished us luck and kept walking. At that moment, I decided to officially retract anything negative I've ever said about the police.

The Interview was an idea that actually predated this project entirely. I'd originally conceived of it as the first scene of a feature film about a delusional, self-absorbed artist with vague notions of speaking to the plight of the common man, but without any real experience of living as one. I never got so far as to flesh out the plot that would follow the first scene, but the idea of that one job interview stuck in the back of my mind. I imagined his frustrated parents pulling some strings to get him a job interview, which he was only interested in because he could justify slumming it amongst the 9-to-5 set as research for his real work.

I originally hadn't meant to have any characters recur between the four sketches. But in our auditions, we had Mick read against a couple people for this role, and we could barely hold in our laughter, so I tweaked the script slightly to keep the character sort of consistent with the one from the previous sketch. The actress we'd originally hoped to play his interviewer was sadly unavailable the date we ended up shooting, but in another moment of fortuitous casting, I thought to ask my friend and former roommate, Angel Vail, to fill in. Once I thought of her, I felt like it was perfect casting because, not only is she an actress, but she also works a day job that has worn her patience for stupidity quite thin, which came through beautifully in her performance. But the thing that really ties the scene together was the finger painted giraffe, created upon request by the lovely and talented Leah Clark. She offered to help out on set one day, just for the fun of playing along with us. But as professional graphic designer, we thought we could put her to work on designing something silly and beneath her. As we started shooting the scene, we only gave the vaguest of direction (giraffe...rainbow...go!). But what she came up with couldn't have been more perfect, and it's reveal is perhaps my favorite moment in all these videos. And not just because I get to look at myself.

Children Saved, like so many children, was born from spite. When I first moved to the city, I was on my way to a job interview, and a girl with a clipboard stopped me in the street by saying, "I've been looking for you!" At the time, I was so young and naive that I didn't pick up on the sales ploy and was racking my brain to try to remember where I was supposed to know this person from. Once I had a few pictures of underprivileged children waved at me, I only managed to extricate myself from the situation by telling her that I was on my way to an interview, and if I got the job, I'd come back and adopt a child. (For the record, that was a complete and utter lie, but I didn't get the job, so she didn't need to know that.) In the years that followed, I've seen countless incarnations of this same basic scene, where the young and idealistic wave clipboards at random strangers with the exact same sales tactic, which seems to amount to little more than, "let's annoy people until we find someone new enough to the city to find an unsolicited guilt-trip charming." The idea for the script was simple: I wanted to shatter the volunteer's illusions that she was making the world a better place by inflicting the most horrible person I could imagine upon her.

This video almost didn't happen, as we had to re-cast and re-schedule it more than any other script. But of the scripts I'd presented, it was Soren's favorite, so she kept pushing against all odds to make it come together, and I'm glad she did. Bridget Burke was always our first choice to play Carla, but we ended up replacing her nemesis twice. During our first rehearsal, the original actor we selected got under my skin by asking after every line, "what's that supposed to mean?" By the time he'd suggested we re-write every single joke in the script, my ego was sufficiently damaged and I wanted him out. Next, I asked my good friend Matty Blake to fill in, and despite being a full-time, professional actor, he was excited about the script and on board to make it happen. Unfortunately, being a full-time, professional actor, he was almost immediately offered more long-term (not to mention paying) gig that he couldn't pass up, and he was forced to back out. But then Soren had a stroke of genius, and suggested we use James St. Vincent, who we'd brought in to read for a few parts. He'd worked with both Soren and Bridget before, so they had a great rapport, and once it was done, it was probably my favorite video. I'm so glad Soren didn't let me drop it from the schedule, as it's a great conclusion to our little series.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without our great crew. Our amazing cinematographers Brad Heck, Andrew Hood, and Jeff Allen made the videos look great despite the fact that I couldn't afford to rent any real equipment for them. Richard Platzman fought valiantly to record sound in some of the busiest and loudest areas of New York that we could find. The Milligrams provided awesome theme music, and despite my inability to give any more meaningful direction than "I want something good and short," they knocked it out of the park. Evan Schwenterly helped with all things post-production, providing color correction, wonderful title design, and some great tweaks to my initial edits. Peter Bowhan gave us a beautiful logo for Children Intercontinental. And my fianceé, the lovely and talented Rachel Gardam, provided behind the scenes stills, ran errands, held equipment, and put up with me while I incessantly fussed about how hard it was to make things. I couldn't have done it without any of them, and even if I could have, I wouldn't have wanted to.

And I'd like to give one more, extra big thank you to Soren for knowing how to do everything from scheduling to blocking actors, and from filling out paperwork to setting up shots. It was so much fun to work together, and this series is only the first step in our collaboration. My goal with these videos was just to get something produced with my name on it. And despite our limited time and budget, they came out great. But now that they're finally done, Soren and I are already discussing ideas for bigger and better things ahead. I can't wait to make them happen and share them with you all.

Thanks so much for watching, liking, sharing, and, if you made it this far, reading.

-TC