This week on the blog, a podcast interview with filmmaker Matthew G. Anderson about his hit web series, “Theater People.”
LINKS
Theater People Website: https://www.theaterpeoplewebseries.com/
Theater People on SeekaTV: https://watch.seeka.tv/en/theater-people
No Context Theater People on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nocontexttheaterpeople/
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
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Kevin Smith: Skipping film school
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Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories
Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature
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George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget
Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories
Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations
Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive
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Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing
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Transcript — Episode 105
[Film Clip 0:00 to 0:32]
John Gaspard 00:33
That was a soundbite from the Theater People Web series, which was created, written, directed, edited and occasional photographed by today’s guest, Matt Anderson. Hello and welcome to episode 105 of The Occasional Film podcast -- the occasional companion podcast to the Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts Blog. I'm the blog's editor, John Gaspard. I've known Matt Anderson for too many years to calculate -- certainly as a screenwriter and filmmaker, but occasionally as an actor. He even shows up as a waiter in my digital feature, Grown Men.
[Film Clip 1:09 to 1:28]
In our conversation today, Matt talks about the origins of the Theatre People web series and takes us through the unique challenges he and his team faced bringing each of the four seasons to life. Where did theater people come from?
Matt Anderson 01:44
Desperation. Don't they all come from desperation?
John Gaspard 01:48
I guess so. What was your desperate situation?
Matt Anderson 01:52
I had just not been working, or, more specifically, I'd been working for a really long time writing. I was out in LA, and was doing that thing where you write for free, and nothing ever actually gets made. And I got to a point where I just kind of got tired of that, you know? After a while you kind of would like to see something actually reach fruition. I just kind of hit this point where I felt like, even if it was something just completely do-it-yourself, I just needed to see something I was writing actually get made without needing to, you know, pass through 1000, gatekeepers and sell to a studio in order to see it happen. So, that was pretty much it. I just felt like I wanted to make something truly independently and I hooked up with a producer named Lydia Bolder, who was just getting out of stage management and was looking for a new kind of project and the two of us just kind of started it up. And we brought Crist Ballas on to produce with us and the three of us just kind of made Season One happen without any real sense of whether it would work or not.
John Gaspard 03:08
All that being said, why did you land on the idea of theater people as your subject matter?
Matt Anderson 03:14
Just because it seemed like subject matter that would never exhaust itself. I'd been acting for 10 years prior to moving out to LA and I felt like the material was inexhaustible. You know, if you've spent any time in theater, as you know, you have the story, it is just coming fast and furious, like you couldn't, forget enough to not have just a goldmine of good stories and good characters and experiences to draw from. And so that was kind of the idea behind why that world. And then the practical reason was I really just wanted to work with a lot of the people that I'd used to act with. I knew that I knew a ton of really good actors and I felt like this this kind of story would lend itself to a really large cast which would allow me to work with a lot of actors, which was another thing that I wanted to do. Get as many people involved as possible and I knew I had a lot of resources. I knew that, you know, if I was going to be trying to do this completely out of pocket and as inexpensively as possible, playing to the fact that I knew a lot of people with theater spaces and knew a lot of people that would be willing to help me out and let us shoot in them for free. And all of that logistical stuff just made it seem like it was a really economical choice of story, as opposed to doing something like an office set, you know, or a restaurant or any of the other kinds of locations that are just absolute nightmares to line up. I felt like theaters were the ones that were going to be my best shot and this was something that could be primarily shot in theaters.
John Gaspard 05:11
I had that exact same thought when we did Ghost Light, when I was hanging out at Theater in the Round and realized that the building was only actually in use, really, Friday, Saturday night, Sunday afternoon. The rehearsal room was used in the evening, but there were more than 30 other rooms in that building that were genuinely never used and were kind of interesting.
Matt Anderson 05:33
Being able to have that kind of access is just, you know, when you can't pay to close a place down, finding a restaurant or a store or an office. And me being me, I still wrote in plenty of restaurants and stores and offices and then we just had to problem solve that. But at least we were able to, for the majority of what we needed, rely on friendly locations that were available to us for cheap.
John Gaspard 05:57
So, as you were doing that, I remember that in addition to the episodes for Season One you also did I don't know what you would play call them. They were Theater People Minute, a Minute.
Matt Anderson 06:10
Yeah, the Promo Minutes.
John Gaspard 06:12
Why did you think to do that? And they were all very funny but if I'm remembering right, aren't they really completely divorced from your main stories?
Matt Anderson 06:22
Yeah, character-wise, there's no continuity. We just did that because we knew that we needed to, this was my first, I had never done a web series before. I came from a background where I had done a bunch of shorts, and I had done a feature and I had kind of done that sort of those modes. I'd never done something that I was going to need to be able to market and promote and find an audience for and raise awareness of and build a brand and all that kind of stuff. And it was really sort of a learning as we were going sort of thing. So, I knew that we somehow needed to get the idea that we were making a show out there, to start building an audience and bringing people to our Facebook page, even though we didn't have a show yet and you know, getting people interested in when the show was going to launch. And so the Minutes were just a way for us to do something that was in the same spirit of the show, you know. They were silent. So, they were things that we could shoot without needing sync sound, they were short, they were a minute long, set to like old times silent movie music, and they kind of had that feel to them.
So, we could shoot them in three hours, and edit them pretty quickly and just put them out there as something that people could watch in a minute and get a sense of what the sense of humor of the show was going to be. The first season was 10 episodes, of eight to 10 minutes a piece. And once we launched, we released one a week, every Friday for two and a half months. And people liked them and we got, you know, a few 100 views every time we'd launch one. And then more people would find them as we released further episodes, and we'd go back and catch up and, and it was good. It was really warm. What was most important to me was when we started it, you know, we didn't have any money and literally nobody got paid and everything was out of pocket and everybody was basically signing on to this big question mark. When I approached them, I think I told everybody, you know, I have no idea how this is going to turn out. I just want to work. Lydia, I and Crist just want to work and so we're going to do this thing and I have no idea if it's going to be any good. I think it's going to be good because it's resting on good writing and great performances and I feel like we can do that but, I said two things.
· I said, one, it'll get done. Because that's a big thing, you know, a lot of projects, a lot of independent projects, that actors sign on to, they work on them really hard for you know, sometimes months int the end, and they never see the light of day, you know. You're checking in with the producers like a year later and they're like, our editors trying to fit it in between the other projects, and we're not sure when it's gonna get done and you know, a lot of them just don't get finished. So, I said, this will get finished.
· The other thing I said was, you're gonna like your work. I said it'll get finished and you'll like you in the final product and that's really all I can offer. And we had a ton of actors that were willing to come on for this big question mark and just see what happened and, and it worked out well.
I think I probably also said, I think it's going to be fun, and I think it has been. I think people have had a good time working on it, which is, as you know, with an independent project always, again, a question mark because, these productions are not cushy, you know. They're a lot of work and it's a lot of scrambling around and I mean, making any kind of film is a ton of work and then for a web series, especially one like this, where I mean, we ended up shooting 35 days, I think over the course of a year. We started in September, and I think we finished in May or June. And it was a really long process and we had all these great actors that were willing to come on for free and just kind of roll with it. And, you know, take the gamble.
John Gaspard 10:34
Okay, so Series One is a success. What pushed you into, hey, let's do Series Two, and along with that, let's try to raise money via Kickstarter?
Matt Anderson 10:46
When we finished Season One, there were a lot of questions about what we were going to do next. Because it had turned out well, and people liked it, and people liked working on it, and it definitely did have that sense of, you know, we could go anywhere with it next. And I always had the same answer, which was we'll do another season, if we're able to pay people. Because for me, I think it's perfectly legitimate to ask actors to work for free for a project that you think is going to end up being a good project. And I think actors are used to that and you know, they can always say no, if they're not in a position to do it, which is totally fine. It's no different from theater that way. But my personal philosophy is you get to ask them to work for free once and if you're gonna ask them again, you have to be able to add something to the equation. Like that's just how I wanted to operate. I always said, you know, if we can find a way to put some money together and actually pay people even if it's just a stipend, then we would do a Season Two, or look at doing a Season Two. About a year after we finished Season One we've been doing well, like, we'd still see, I would say probably, like 15 to 20 Episode views a day, I think if I'm remembering correctly. Like just organically, like it was just kind of out there, people would hear about it and, you know, check it out and that was day to day for a year. So, I mean, that was nice, you know. It's just small, grassroots organic growth. And then, about a year after we launched, American Theater Magazine put our link on their Facebook page. I still don't know, I think it was somebody local, specifically who got it to them, I've never really heard what the provenance of it was. And they didn't editorialize it. They weren't like, hey, here's a great show. It was literally just the link, if I recall correctly. And within a week, we had, like, hundreds, if not 1000s of views on top of the, you know, probably couple or 1000 that we've had to that point. My numbers might be wrong. It was a long time ago, but it was huge. It was a huge bump. A lot of people were checking us out because of that American Theater push. And so we were getting all this feedback from all over the place and we were seeing our numbers go up and it was really exciting and totally unexpected. And that was the point where I said, you know, maybe if we're going to look at doing crowdsourcing, which we knew would have to be the next step, if we were going to try and raise money, this would be the time to do it.
And so, Lydia and Crist and I kind of put together a Kickstarter campaign to try and raise a budget for a second season. The first season was about independent theater, the second season was going to be about corporate theater. And so we put together a budget for that and put together a Kickstarter and ran the Kickstarter for a month and it was absolutely, unexpectedly exhausting. I had no idea. I had talked to some people about Kickstarter, to get ideas about, like how to run it. I talked to people who had run successful campaigns. I was so completely unprepared for how difficult it was. It was, so much more than a full-time job, but it was successful and, in the end, we had actually a decent amount of money over the amount that we were planning to raise, which was great. It was all worth it, but it was a real learning experience.
John Gaspard 14:12
What would you say to someone thinking of starting a Kickstarter campaign now, even though it is a couple of years later, and things might be a little different? But what were the big takeaways you got from that exhausting experience? Because I remember watching just how exhausting it was from the sidelines.
Matt Anderson 14:29
Well, you know, part of it was the way that we approached it, for sure. Like, I don't think every campaign has to be this way, but the way that we approached it, you know, you know me. My strong suit is not going around and asking people to give me money. That's just not anywhere near my comfort zone. And the only way I could really get comfortable with it was I said if we're going to ask for money, I kind of want to sing for our supper. I only going to be comfortable doing this if we are giving something as well, during the campaign. And so what we planned out was we released three videos a week, for the month of the Kickstarter campaign. So, every week, I think it was probably Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we would release a new video. We'd release one video that was like sourced from Season One. So, it'd be like an outtakes reel, or it would be a supercut of every one of the dozens, I think we had 50 some speaking parts in Season One: every one of those actors saying one line or one word from one line, just fun stuff like that. And then on another day, in the week, we'd released what we call our help us pay videos where we introduced a member of our crew and kind of showed what they did. So, help us pay Katie Driscoll, she's our production assistant, these are all the things she does. Help us pay our composer, this is Mike, you know, get to know him a little bit. And they were all just these little one minute videos and again, you know, all of them had the same spirit of the show. I mean, that was kind of the idea, you know, everything was sort of a piece of the project. So, every time we released something, it was like another piece of Theater People. And then, the last video each week would be something sort of more ambitious. So, for one of them, it was another Theater People minute. For one of them, it was a scene between two of our Seasons One characters. One of them had gone to prison at the end of Season One, because really, if you're going to try and do a really easy, quick shoot, what you should do is write it to take place in a prison. That is just smart producing.
John Gaspard 16:37
Can I suggest something? Why don't you do it out of state, certainly a long way away from your base?
Matt Anderson 16:43
You know, luckily, we came up with that idea on our own and ended up in Iowa.
John Gaspard 16:48
Yeah, that makes sense.
Matt Anderson 16:51
No, this is the thing. I mean, I'll tell you like, I was gonna say the unsung hero, but I think I'm still singing about her. So, hopefully she's the sung hero, but Lydia Bolder and her production magic, like literally, I would just write this stuff, and then say, hey, Lydia, I need a prison. And then she would give me that look and then she'd go get a prison. So, the last video was always something like that, sort of a bigger piece of the puzzle. And so we were releasing videos, like every other day during the week, and obviously, you know, producing anything is exhausting. So, producing at that pace was really difficult and that's on top of the fact that you have to be constantly shepherding your campaign, you know. We were Facebook based, because the Twin Cities, social media wise, is primarily Facebook based. So, we were always on Facebook, you know, we were always, tracking where we were getting the word out, spreading the news about new videos. That was actually a real upside to how we operated. You know, it allowed us to have something new to talk about all the time. So, it wasn't a month of, hey, we're doing this thing, give us some money, and then two days later, having to go back and be like, hey, we're still doing this thing, give us some money. Like, we were able to have a conversation about each video, you know. Instead, it was like, hey, come meet Katie Driscoll, a one minute video just hit our page, you know, and then we can focus on that and then the ask for the campaign was in that video. So, we didn't have to kind of be walking around hat in hand all the time.
John Gaspard 18:43
You gave them a reason to keep coming back.
Matt Anderson 18:46
Exactly.
John Gaspard 18:47
Just the hardest thing to do.
Matt Anderson 18:49
It was absolutely exhausting and then honestly. And this was advice that was given to me by somebody, who had done a successful campaign, you're emailing literally everyone that you've ever had an email address for. And you’re Facebook messaging every single Facebook friend you have, that you can bring yourself, to ask for money from. And, you know, that's just kind of how it works and it's hugely uncomfortable if you're not sort of constitutionally built for that, which I'm really, really not. But really effective, because if people know, especially with a personal ask, and you know me surprise, surprise, I couldn't just send a form letter, like I needed to make a personal reach, check in and, it was really rare, frankly, once you reached out to somebody for somebody not to contribute. I mean, it might not have been much, it might have been five bucks. But that's kind of what we wanted, we weren't angling for big ticket donors. We didn't feel like that's how our show operated. You know, the show for us was really about community and showing that if you make something out of a community, that the community will be there to support it. And so in the end, I think our average donation was something around 20 bucks, which meant we had a lot of people who gave five bucks and we had a lot of people who gave more. And it averaged out to a really nice, manageable reasonable average, which I was really pleased with.
John Gaspard 20:25
So, you exceeded your goal and with the leftover money thought, what the heck, rather than do Season Two, let's do Season Twoand Three.
Matt Anderson 20:33
Yeah, well, that was a surprise that came out of the campaign. So, midway through the campaign, I got contacted by Graydon Royce, who was the Minneapolis Star Tribune, theater critic, who I'd met, I think, in passing. He just sent me an email, I think, via Facebook and said, hey, I really love the show, I saw that you're doing the Kickstarter, I hope it's going well. I had an idea for Season Two, if you'd be interested to talk about it. And I said, well, I think I know what Season Twois going to be. But you know, I'm never going to turn down an idea. Let's get together and talk. And we met for coffee, and I just loved his idea. It was just this really fantastic idea. He said, I have this house that my brother and I are renovating. It's our old family home and it's in Mound, Minnesota, about 40 minutes west of the cities. And we were out there working last weekend and it just occurred to me that it might be really funny to have Jamie, the ridiculous Avant Garde director from Season One, if he decided to do a site-specific show. You know, sort of crazy, rundown farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. And then we started spit balling ideas and I was like, yeah, maybe, what if he plans it in the fall, but by the time they do the show, it's winter and so now it's winter in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota, and nobody is aware of what they're getting into, and it just kind of spirals out of control. And I just fell in love with the idea. And so we took a look at the numbers and the money that we'd raised and you know, we'd plan for a month-long shoot for our big season for our corporate season. I said I feel like we could shoot Season Two, if we really scale it back, and I shoot it myself. So, we don't have to worry about bringing in a bunch of crew to do it. Similar to Season One, we did bring in a godsend, Mickey Richardson, who did sound and lights for us, which was beyond I mean, it wouldn't have happened without Mickey. But otherwise, we shot it pretty much like we shot Season One, except it was all in one location.
So, we could go out there on a Friday night and basically shoot Friday night, all day Saturday, all day Sunday for three weekends. And we ended up shooting in, you know, what is that seven and a half days. What was originally going to be a shorter season and ended up just being a fewer number of episodes, but the episodes were longer. So, it still ended up being I think about a 90-minute season. So, basically, it's one story as opposed to the A story and the B story. It's basically like a feature film cut up into, you know, six episodes.
The first thought was a well maybe that'll be Season Three. But I knew that this one was going to have to play differently. I knew it wasn't going to have the A story and the B story. I'd had this idea about doing it in black and white, because Jaime our director character is very much the sort of person who would think of himself as being Ingmar Bergman, and this season would sort of be from his perspective. And so it allowed us to shoot in black and white, which gave us a lot of leeway because you can shoot faster in black and white than you can when you're shooting in colors. It can speed up and you know, winter in Minnesota and black and white.
Like, if you're trying to make something look stark, desolate and foreboding, black and white is the way to go. And so I said if we're going to do it that way, it's got to be Season Two. Because if we have a Season One that's in color, and there's A story and a B story and it's 10 episodes long, and then we have Season Twoand it's in color and there's an a story and a B story and it's 10 episodes long. That's the show, we've established our format for the show. But I said if we sneak this one in between as a six episode thing in black and white, that's kind of the weird offshoot, I said then it kind of opens up the possibilities for the show. Then we've built ourselves some flexibility then, we can kind of do anything. If we really liked that prison location and want to do an entire season in a prison, that could be Season Four. We did not do that because that would have been a terrible idea. But it gave us the flexibility. It just opened up the format to have it be the second season. So we actually did shoot Season Three first. And then while we were wrapping up Season Three, we started the weekend shoots on Season Two. So, I think we shot Season Three in December of that year and started and shot Season Twoon the weekends in January. We were done with everything pretty much by the end of January.
John Gaspard 25:01
Okay, so you finished Season Two, finished Season Three, what was it that happened that made Season Four happen?
Matt Anderson 25:07
So, we did Season Two. Season Two was a really interesting experience. Honestly, I have so much love for all of the seasons of the show. Season Two is the is season that if I were to stumble on it, just by accident online, it's the season that I would like the most. I'm a film guy so, like the Bergman thing and the like, ridiculous fake British director. And there's a Fawlty Towers aspect to it like, it really speaks very directly to the stuff that I enjoy. But it was a huge break from our format, and it really threw a lot of people. And we saw our views go down, like from where we were in Season One, it wasn't the same level of enthusiasm. The people who liked it, the people who really responded to it, liked it better, absolutely, like the passion index was much higher for it. But they were also longer episodes and as with anything on the internet, as you increase your episode length, you're going to reduce the number of people who are just going to click in and then watch on a whim, you know, instead of 7 to 10 minutes. Now, our episodes were 12 to 17 minutes, which sounds like not a ton more, but it's like 50% longer. And so like that was a dissuading factor for a portion of our audience. And we definitely had people come up to us and say, hey, I saw Season Two, that's really weird. Season Three is going to be like Season One, though, right?
Like, you're gonna go back to that. There were definitely some people who really missed the sitcom format of it and that was, I don't know, it wasn't surprising, I guess, but it was a little disappointing to me. Just because I loved it so much and I felt like it was such an interesting step forward for the show. But I say, I understand why it happened and it made a lot of sense to me. But what was really great was because of the nature of it, because I felt like it was something unique. I felt like it might have some legs on the film festival circuit, which I'd never really considered doing, with the show. I'd been burnt out on the film festival circuit pretty badly, just doing short films. Like my experience was pretty much always you spend a lot of time submitting it to a film festival, your work, whatever it is. And you pay your 50 bucks and then two months later, you get a letter saying how happy they are that you paid your 50 bucks, but they just didn't have a place for you. And then you do it all over again. And so I'd kind of moved past that, you know, it was not something I had anticipated.
But I started looking around and I started seeing that more film festivals were having sidebars for web series. And I thought, you know, there's not going to be a lot of black and white Bergman-esque comedy web series out there, I might as well you know, throw our hat into the ring. And so I submitted to a few festivals, and was really surprised that we really started doing well. Like we got into a really high percentage of the festivals that we applied to. I mean, I feel like on average, if you apply to if you're applying to film festivals, I feel like you've got a really good hit to miss ratio if you're getting into 10 to 20%, right? And we got into probably two thirds or more of the festivals that we applied to, which was really great, because it meant that first of all, the show was getting out there, you know, it was finding audiences in a different way than I'd ever expected it to. And also it was just really validating, you know, because when you do see your numbers drop like that, you know that it's not really playing for everybody, you start to kind of second guess yourself a little bit. And it was really validating to have, a curated festival come along and say, we really want to show your show. And then we won some awards and our cast was nominated for Best Ensemble Cast at the New York City Web Fest, which is one of the biggest web fests in the country, if not the biggest. And so like, we started having that reaction, it made a lot more people aware of the show. And it's always difficult to get people to hit the play button and having that kind of legitimacy bestowed on you by people who aren't friends of yours, who aren't people who are in the show, really helped us build an audience.
So, that was kind of step one toward raising the profile of the show. And then we did Season Three, we released Season Three later that year, once I was done editing it, obviously. And right before Season Three launched, Minnesota Public Radio, Marianne Combs, did a piece on the show, a really great piece, which by the way, I was completely unprepared for. I thought that was going to be a train wreck. I met with her thinking that we were going to meet to talk about doing a piece and then we sat down and she pulled out a microphone and like, I hadn't been doing any PR for the show for like six months, because I'd been editing. I had no talking points like, I was totally unprepared and that woman is a genius and the piece that she put together was fantastic. Like it was this really great piece, like she integrated some fantastic clips from it and it played on NPR one morning, right around the time, we were launching Season Three. And that same day, I got a Facebook message from a local guy in town named George, who said, I heard the piece on the radio this morning and I'm working with a couple of guys to put together a new social media content platform. And it's going to be geared specifically toward independent web content and it sounds like we should sit down and talk.
So, we did we sat down and had a cup of coffee and kind of talked about what their plans were. And over the course of a few months, we talked about--because I'd had the same response to, after we were done with Seasons Two and Three, again--people would start asking, are you gonna do a season four and I had the same response. I said, yeah, we'll do it. If we can pay people more, because we were finally able to pay people for Seasons Two and Three. But I mean, it was a pittance. I think everybody, all the actors in Seasons Two and Three made $100 for the project, you know, whether it was people who were shooting for a month on Season Three, or people who were living in a freezing farmhouse for three weekends for Season Two. 100 bucks for the project, not a lot. And I said if we're going to move forward, same situation, we'll do it if we can pay people more. If we can actually pay a day rate instead of a stipend. And so in talking with, with these guys, who were putting together this platform that's called SeekATV, they said, you know, we're going to be acquiring a lot of shows, like dozens of shows, but we also are interested in producing a handful of original seasons of shows. And Theater People was the first one that they asked, I believe. And they said, would you be interested in, if we could license the first three seasons for our site, we could produce, we can help finance a fourth season. And, you know, it's one of those things that comes up, and you never think it's actually going to pay off because you hear you know, these ideas floating around all the time. And most of the time they don't come through. nd these guys absolutely came through and you know, by June or July, we had a deal in place for them to produce the fourth season of Theater People with a budget of about five times what we had made, Season Two and Season Three for. So, a significant step up in terms of what we were able to work with for a budget.
John Gaspard 32:55
So, with Season Four, though you're going with longer episodes.
Matt Anderson 32:59
Yeah, they were looking for something more around the 15-minute mark, like the 15-to-20-minute mark, and most of our episodes for Season Four are about 15.
John Gaspard 33:07
Which is closer to the traditional 22 minutes of standard sitcom?
Matt Anderson 33:11
Yeah, and that was actually the appeal for me, like when we got our deal put down, and they said, we'd like your episodes to be somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes, there was sort of a moment of creative, well, it turned out to be hubris on my part. Because I went, hey, we get to make a sitcom, that's great, that's really exciting. Like, this is a terrific creative challenge. That was really short sighted of me. It meant that now we were going to be dealing with, instead of 150 pages of content, 200 pages of content, which is a lot more content.
John Gaspard 33:53
Now, let's just back up and do the math on that. You're saying 200 pages of content is more content than 150 pages of content?
Matt Anderson 34:01
I don't have the numbers in front of me. But we worked it out and 200 It turns out is a significant percentage more than 150. And we had budgeted for, you know, more or less the Season Three model, like a 10-to-15-minute episode. And so, we had budgeted in terms of both money and in terms of schedule for that kind of a production. And now, as excited as I was about it, I very quickly realized, we signed on for suddenly 25% more show. And that then became the challenge for Season Four, was how do we develop it in such a way from a production point of view that we can with this budget that we've got. Which was primarily Seeka put up the lion's share of the budget and then we raised the rest of it from individual investors. And then it was figuring out okay, well, how do we do this show right? How do we do this show in a way that we are compensating people the way that we'd like to be compensating them and we're getting done the work that we need to get done and the show is a legitimate step up from what we've done before. Like, if we do a show, at this new budget level, ends up looking like what we did for 20% of this budget previously, that's going to kind of be a failure. It should look better, it should look like a marked step up from what we've been doing before. Like this is our chance to show what we can do with more resources. And so that was the goal with this one was to make a show that really represents an advance on what we've been able to do previously.
John Gaspard 35:49
How did you do that? What were the key things you focused on to make that happen?
Matt Anderson 35:53
From a development point of view, the real key was embracing it as a sitcom and by that, I mean, the show had always been sort of arranged in a way that I really liked. But if you watch an episode of Theater People, aside from Season Two, which was its own beast. From Seasons One or Three, we're all over the place. Like an episode will hop from an apartment to a theater to a street to another theater to an office. We needed to find a way to embrace the idea of sort of a single set sitcom, you know. It was never going to be a single set, but, if you watch a sitcom and especially like, the shows that I really love, like I'm a huge fan of Community. Community is a little rangy, but the majority of an episode of Community takes place in the study room. Cheers is in the bar, most of Seinfeld is in Seinfeld's apartment. It's not that you never go outside, it's just that the majority of what you're doing takes place in one location. And we've never done that before. And so for Season Four, what we decided was we are going to embrace this idea of being a real sitcom and as with the other seasons, we wanted to look at a different kind of theater.
So, Season One had been independent theater, Season Two was site specific theater, Season Three was corporate theater. And for Season Four, I felt like, because we were looking at being on a new platform that I felt was probably going to want to be appealing to like college kids like 20 somethings like a younger audience than we had necessarily been skewing toward in our previous seasons, I felt like Youth Outreach Theater was the way to go. I had been a member of a Youth Outreach Theater in high school for a year and a half and it was a huge part of my sort of getting into theater. And I knew that the material was there as well. And it put us in a position where we could be dealing with a younger cast than we'd had before. You know, a lot of 20 somethings. Our youngest principal cast member literally started college the day of our readthrough. And it also meant that we could base out of basically their headquarters, their homeroom, which is this, you know, supposed to be a room in this college and it turns out to be the costume locker in the basement. But it allowed us to shoot probably 80% of what we were doing in this one controlled room, which really was the only way that we were going to be able to crank out the amount of material we needed to on the schedule that we had there.
John Gaspard 38:22
So, you had a different aesthetic designed for Season Four, tell me a little bit about that.
Matt Anderson 38:26
Yeah, well, the aesthetic was kind of… I would have brought Amber back on if I could have to shoot Season Four as well. But logistically, knowing that we were going to have to be moving as fast as we were with a nine person principal cast, which meant scheduling was already going to be really difficult, and she is a busy shooter and it just seemed like it was going to be logistically impossible. And on top of that, most of our shooting was going to be taking place in this little tiny room where every extra body really makes a difference. And so we kind of were in a position where we had to run lean again, which is what we're used to. We've never had a crew of more than four or five people. But we had to keep to that again and it just made sense for me to operate. I was feeling comfortable enough, I was pleased with how Season Two looked, having somebody who was lighting it for me in particular being important and Mickey was back. He actually produced Season Four and he was also our gaffer, and our lighter are all around go to tech equipment guy. And again, like this season wouldn't have happened without him being there. You have to have somebody on set, John, who knows what they're doing.
This is what I found, you might only need one, no, you need two because you also need a sound guy and we had Nathaniel who did the sound for Season Three for us. But you have to have those two people who know what they're doing as Kevin Costner, I think, would tell you. As long as you've got people around you who know what they're doing, you can do a pretty good job. And that was the situation. I felt comfortable enough shooting it myself, because we were going to adopt this aesthetic of having it be handheld, everything that's down in the room is handheld. And that was, you know, largely born out of just necessity. Like we traditionally, I get absolutely nothing usable from the first day of shooting, this has just always been my experience, I should plan on it and I still never do.
John Gaspard 40:27
You should start on day two then.
Matt Anderson 40:30
Right, give everybody a day off. Now, Season Two, we had to be up and running on day one. But usually there's a bit of a learning curve going into it. And the learning curve with Season Four was we were going to shoot, I was planning on having everything locked down just because it takes a little bit of the responsibility off of me to be able to actually operate the camera. But we tried shooting in that room on a tripod, and it was just not going to be tenable. We just weren't gonna be able to move fast enough. Like, every time we moved, it required a different lighting setup. And there frankly, wasn't enough room in the room to have a full tripod setup. I mean, for a lot of different reasons, it just really quickly made sense that, okay, we're gonna do sort of a, you know. I've been watching a lot of Veep, so like, when I sat down to write Season Four, I was looking for good inspiration. I had already stolen everything I could from Community for Seasons Two and Three. So, I needed something new. So, I sat down, and I watched Veep and Silicon Valley, both of which are fantastic. And the Veep aesthetic, the sort of run and gun, let that be part of it, you know, that sort of fly on the wall feeling. And you know, we were able to emulate that. We didn't go so far into it that it ever feels documentary. But it does definitely have a looseness, it definitely had, it gave us the flexibility to have less of a restrictive lighting setup.
So, we could sort of light the room and just let the camera go where the camera needed to go as much as possible. And that just meant that we were able to shoot a lot faster than we would be able to do. And because it was looser like that, I felt more comfortable operating because it didn't need to look composed and perfect. It needed to just have the right energy, and basically be pointing at the right people at the right time. And as long as I knew who I needed on camera, when I needed them on camera, it allowed me to operate pretty quickly, it worked out really well.
And you know, the upside to having a good director of photography is that you have a good director of photography. The downside of having another a separate director of photography is that that's another layer of communication and well, I would say on most productions, it's absolutely worth that. On this one, because we were going to need to be moving as quickly as we were, it was really helpful for me to just be able to know what I needed to get and get it, as opposed to having to try and effectively convey that information to somebody else who was going to have to execute it. And then probably have to go and watch it myself on a monitor to make sure that it was what I wanted. You know what I mean? It's in order to move fast and when we needed to move fast. It just made more sense for me to do it and I'm pleased with the results. If we had a better director of photography, I have no doubt that they would have brought another level of production quality to it. Like, it would have been another step up on that front, but we'd still be shooting.
John Gaspard 43:30
Well, then you wouldn't be able to talk to me right now.
Matt Anderson 43:31
That's true, I'd be in the middle of a shoot and dealing with mass mutiny on the part of all of my cast and crew, I have no doubt.
John Gaspard 43:38
Most likely. So, you've pretty much covered most of the pro side of when it comes to you being the writer, director, shooter, editor.
Matt Anderson 43:47
Yeah, the pro is if you're doing it all, you know that you're going to be there, and you can prioritize the work in a way that you're not going to be able to afford to have other people prioritize the work. You know, I do always bring on the most important crew position in a lot of ways is your sound recordist. I remember, did you ever see, In The Company of Men?
John Gaspard 44:12
Yeah.
Matt Anderson 44:13
Got that movie, I remember watching the DVD of it, so that was Neil LaBute’s first movie. And I will always remember this: he was talking about how his sets don't look very good, which they don't. Like if you look at a shot in that movie, it looks like what it is, it looks pretty amateur. But he said his belief--and I don't know where he picked it up or whatever it stuck with me forever--he said people will accept a movie that looks like crap, as being an aesthetic. As long as it's consistent, they will absolutely watch a movie no matter what it looks like and just assume that that's an intentional choice. No one will watch a movie with bad sound because that's never a choice, it's always a deal breaker. And so, I use the guy that I uses name is Nathaniel and Nathaniel is fantastic. Nathaniel recorded a lot of Season Three for us and that was really important to have a sound recordist and then he also mixes for us, which is great because, he can record in such a way that he knows what he needs when he gets to the mixing part of the process. But yeah, then you're in a position where you know, Nathaniel's got a job, you know, he's got other projects, other things that potentially are going to be prioritized over this. He does a really great job of prioritizing us and of hitting the deadlines that we need and I'm not really sure how he does it? But it's really difficult to ask that of people when you're not able to pay them something commensurate to what they're making on a corporate project, or on their day job doing this. So, the nice thing about doing it yourself is you're personally driven to get it done and to do it as well as it can be done, and you are able to prioritize it ahead of kind of everything else because that's just your role. You know, your job is to kind of make it the most important thing in your world while you're doing it.
John Gaspard 46:03
That's all well and good. But what's the downside of wearing all those hats?
Matt Anderson 46:08
It'll kill you. I'm not done yet, John, which is why we're able to have this conversation. It's way too much. I mean, honestly, like, I have overreached, which is good. That's how much you can reach, you overreach, and then you go, I won't do that that way again. But that is the position that I've put myself in, it was just, it was a lot, it was shooting, you know, like I say, 200-page script over the course of we started in the middle of September, I was still doing pickup shoots in February. So, again, I'm not a math guy, but that's, you know, at least two or three months.
John Gaspard 46:52
How do they tell, them how they can seek out Seeka?
Matt Anderson 46:55
Seeka is amazing. And this is what I loved about Seeka: from the first time I heard about what they were trying to do, when I started making a web series, I had never seen a web series, I might have stumbled across something. But it was probably something pretty high profile, like Funny or Die. The problem is with web series, they're just out there. But unless you know that they're out there, it's like a cool club, you know, you only know it's there, if you already know it's there. Which is neat for a cool club, but not neat for a web series that you would actually like people to find. And what Seeka's whole mission was, let's make a hub for quality, independent web content, so that people can just go to one place and find 50, 60, 70, 100 shows and find what they like, you know. There's no more searching around. And when I started, Season One of Theater People, it was hard to figure out even what to watch, to know what to emulate, you know, because unless you knew what to Google like, and you could Google like best web series out there, but you're gonna get like five or six different shows. And there's 100 shows, at the time, there was probably already hundreds of shows out there.
So, Seeka's whole model was, let's make a place where you can find a lot of great shows, of a lot of different types from all over the world in one place. Watch them easily, it's free, it's subscription free, there's the opportunity to contribute to a show, you can tip the show, after you watch an episode, there's a little button if you want to kick in a buck, or three bucks, or however much you want to kick in. And that money goes largely like generously, largely to the content creators. I forget what the actual split is. But it is a generous split in favor of content creators, because they want content creators to want to be on Seeka. The only way this works for them as if they've got people who want to have their stuff on the platform and so they have to make it attractive.
Also, they're just really great guys and I don't think they want to screw anybody over. But like, they need to have a good platform in place in order to have the kind of content that's going to make their platform successful. And I have found some fantastic stuff on there. Like I feel very privileged to be airing alongside some of the stuff that they have on there. And I know that as they move forward, you know, the goal is going to be to continue to find that really high quality stuff. And they're going out to festivals, and they're getting the stuff that's winning the awards at festivals, and they're really doing a great job of finding the kind of content that is sort of ready for primetime, in the web series landscape and it's great.
John Gaspard 49:37
So, I'm going to wrap this up with a closest thing to a Barbara Walters question that I would ever ask anybody, which is, I don't remember how many years ago, young Matt Anderson drove home from Los Angeles with his new Rebel camera with the idea of creating theater people or something like that?
Matt Anderson 49:56
Pretty close to that.
John Gaspard 49:57
What would you want to say to him? If you could just give him a call, because you've been through quite a bit here, what have you walked away with, that would be helpful for him or anybody else starting something that turns out to be quite this massive.
Matt Anderson 50:10
You know, honestly, I would say this: I've been really fortunate. A lot of it would be validation of the ideas that I had coming into it, there have absolutely been discoveries, there have been so many discoveries. I'm actually teaching a course called web series one on one right now. There is so much knowledge that I have just had to find via trial and error over the last five years that it's absolutely, I'm still learning all the time, you know. You learn how to make the show, you learn how to put the show out there, you learn how to find an audience, you learn how to promote it, you learn how Facebook works, if you want to get the word out to more people, you know, like all of that stuff. But honestly, I think the most important thing that I would say would be the general idea that I had, which was that, if you've got good material, and great actors, that is all you need, like I really and direct them, that's what you have to do, you have to direct them.
That actually is also super important, because actors are supposed to be working with the director, you know, the director is the one who knows how everything fits together. And I think part of the reason that I'm as proud of our casts and all of our casts, like, every season, including Season Four, which has a ton of young actors and a ton of actors. For the first time, I'm dealing with a cast where I haven't worked with most of the principal actors before, because I've been working with actors that I used to act with 10, 15 years ago, and a bunch of them are still around, and a bunch of them are still in the show. But for this, you know, Youth Outreach Theater, we needed people who could pass as college students. And so we had to go out and find them. And this cast is as fantastic as any we've had and that's why the show works. Like it really is, and you know, different shows are different, some shows are effects driven, some shows are, you know, location driven. So, I'm sure you know, there's lots of things that draw people into a show. But for this show, the key has always been having a really great ensemble, you know, having an ensemble that doesn't seem like they're doing an amateur project, you know, having an ensemble that is delivering work that is on par with something that you would see on broadcast television. I really believe that is why the show has traveled as well as it has. I believe that's why it's played, the festivals, that attract, that it has, I think that's why Seeka wanted to come on and produce a fourth season. And that was always the idea was the Twin Cities have this amazing pool of actors. And now you know, specifically I'm talking about, where I'm making stuff in Minneapolis, like what we have is this fantastic, deep pool of acting talent. And so I built a show around it. And the show works because that's the engine and these guys are fantastic and that's what I would say would be just continue to have faith in the idea that if you've got good writing and great actors, you don't need to be a great camera person.
You don't need to have all the technical stuff down, you don't need to have a jib arm, you don't need the equipment that you don't know how to use, you don't need a 10 person crew. Like this show is about really good actors delivering hopefully really good dialogue in a way that is compelling and that tells a story from start to finish. And I think that has borne itself out as being a really viable method. And the nice thing is you don't need to do that in a studio, you know what I mean? You don't need to do that with a million dollars behind you. You can do it effectively on the scale that we've been doing it. That's the best thing that I could say like if I was whether I was talking to myself or anybody else, especially in Minneapolis,making stuff that would be what I would say was find really great actors and then work with them and trust them because that's the goal. That's why I like watching the show.
[Film Clip 54:24 to 54:38].
John Gaspard 54:38
Thanks to Matt Anderson for chatting with me about creating the Theater People webs series, which you can find online at SeekTV.com – check the show notes for a direct link to all four seasons. If you liked this interview, you can find lots more just like it on the Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts Blog. Plus, more interviews can be found in my books -- Fast, Cheap and Under Control -- Lessons Learned from the greatest low-budget movies of all time ... and its companion book of interviews with screenwriters, called Fast, Cheap and Written that Way. Both books can be found on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google and Apple Books. And while you're there, check out my mystery series of novels about magician Eli Marks and the scrapes he gets into. The entire series, staring with The Ambitious Card, can be found on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, ebook and audiobook formats. That's it for episode 105 of The Occasional Film Podcast. Produced at Grass Lake Studios. Original music by Andy Morantz. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you … occasionally!