“Summer of Tears”
Received an interesting email from a writer-comedian Todd Waldman, founding member of the L.A.-based improv comedy troupe Summer of Tears:
I am writing to share a piece I wrote about the pilot process I went
through a few years ago. I was working with a comedy troupe that had
just won HBO’s U.S. Comedy arts festival. We got a deal to do a pilot
with Warner Brothers and the experience from winning the festival to
making the pilot (we were just 27 at the time and responsible for all
aspects of writing and production) might be interesting to you and
your readers.
“We got a deal to do a [TV] pilot with Warner Brothers.” Yeah, I think that might be interesting to GITS readers, especially those interested in TV comedy. You can go here to read Waldman’s take on that experience, both the highs and the lows. An excerpt:
Summer of Tears won the Aspen comedy festival and upon arriving in Los Angeles, we quickly took a round of meetings with various television networks and studios. Since we were a sketch comedy group our agents and manager thought our best bet at being handed a pilot was with MTV and Comedy Central. These were two of the first meetings set and our reps asked us to think about what kind of sketch show we wanted to do.
Needless to say this is where I completely fucked up.
You see after the glory of Aspen, I had in my mind not a Summer of Tears sketch show (that was far too base) but a television show about well, about…about how do I put this poignantly? Shit that was real.
And a lot of this desire to do a “shit that was real” show stemmed from THIS 2007 David Brooks article…
This article perfectly captured what 20 something dudes were going through at this point in time — Arrested adolescence. Yeah, it’s not a new theme but it was an important theme to me. And one that showed up in a lot of our sketches to begin with. Most of our sketches usually start with “This happened to me the other night… What if we did a sketch where ___ happened.” For example:
http://www.youtube.com/v/1yNrUtcouVI&hl=en_US&fs=1&
I felt/still feel a lot of our sketches and writing are about the confusion of what it means to be an adult today. And that’s exactly the type of TV show I wanted to do every week. It would have sketch elements but at the end of the day it would also have a lot of heart and have a lot to say.
I was (and possibly still am) an idealistic dumb ass.
Eventually they meet with Warner Bros. Studios which, lo and behold, wants SOT to shoot a pilot for a possible TV series. Here is a taste of the chaos Todd and his cohorts faced in that process:
At the time I worked as a creative executive for a small company that was founded by a very successful director. Luckily in those days that director was to be found anywhere BUT in the office. He was promoting a film he had just completed and was flying all over the country to introduce it at film festivals. This was a very fortunate occurrence for me because it allowed me to run the pilot production offices from inside my current office. So day in and day out we’d have production meetings ranging from costumes to actual casting sessions inside the office.
This was kind of risky when towards the end of pre production the director returned to town and seemingly had nothing to do. This would mean he’d periodically pop into the office, play bad techno music, talk about how great his life was and then leave for the day.
One memorable day I received word from our assistant that the boss was unexpectedly headed into the office. Within the span of three minutes we frantically picked up the whole pilot production and HAULED ASS as fast as we could down the street to Peet’s coffee. I vividly remember forcing our Production Coordinator, who I had known for all of two days, to pack up his printer and run across the street as fast as he could and await further instructions. Meanwhile Kirstin hid in the backseat of her Prius desperately trying not to be seen by the boss. Luckily he was only in the office for 10 minutes (playing bad music etc.) and once he left, a text went out and everyone moved back down the street from Peet’s. We lived in this chaos for weeks.
But out of the chaos of their process, they ended up with this pilot:
And the fate of the pilot? You’ll have to hit the link to find out.
For kicks, here’s an SOT video where they put themselves into the classic 80s teen comedy Teen Wolf:
Hollywood can be a cruel town. And the odds against success are huge. But there’s another ineffable truth about the entertainment business, summed up nicely by writer Dennis Foley:
“Hollywood is the only town where you can not fail. You can only quit trying.”
To Todd, the rest of the Summer of Tears troupe, and all you creative dreamers out there…
Keep trying.
UPDATE: Well, that was easy. A note from Todd:
Good news recently. Rob (my writing partner) and I were hired as staff writers on a new ABC show called Happy Endings. It was created by a guy you posted about recently David Caspe. He sold a pitch with Charlize Theron attached. At any rate, we’re super pumped. We start in 2 weeks and you can believe that GITS will be a heavily visited site in the writing room. Here is the trailer for the show coming out on ABC next spring:
All I had to do was draft a version of this post with the advice “Keep trying” and Todd gets hired for a writing gig. The power of GITS juju!
Seriously, congratulations to Todd and writing partner Rob. Todd has already assured me he will keep tabs on GITS to help waste time in the writer’s room when he should be busy writing.