THE BURG.TV: HOW TO LOVE ONLINE TV
01/29/2007
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City. Hipster capital of the world, but host to lots of good food, drink, music, and sometimes culture. How does one find the delicate balance between what's good and what's bullshit and how do you live with it?
Kathleen Grace and Thom Woodley, producer/director and writer/director of an internet sitcom called The Burg might say that the answer is to laugh at it, or, if you can, laugh along with it. And they believe in their answer so much they're willing to go into credit card debt over it, so they must be a little bit right.
The Burg is as good in quality as anything on TV and better because the jokes are actually funny. It's also on the internet, which means it's on any time you want it to be. Watch it, and don't be afraid to identify with it, chances are, you're at least part hipster yourself.
THOM WOODLEY, WRITER AND SOMETIME DIRECTOR
The Vulture: You're in the band The Infidels ?
Thom Woodley: I play Bass and I'm one of the singers.
V: You use one of your songs as The Burg's theme song?
TW: Yeah. We thought it was a good theme song, but it was also because of copy-right issues. I in part own the copy-right to the song because my band wrote it. We wanted to make sure that we had a song we could always use.
V: It's a really good song.
TW: Thanks.
V: Why were you drawn to the medium of a web sitcom?
TW: When we started, we were thinking we would start and just put the show online as a pilot and people would see it. Then we would see what happened. As we started working on the show though, we found we had a lot of ideas and thought it would be kind of a shame if we didn't go ahead and really do it.
We figured out how to make it really, really cheap., so why not just make it it's own thing? We played around for awhile with doing it on YouTube, but I think you have to be some special class of user if you want to post anything over. . .
V: And the resolution. . .
TW: And the resolution fucking blows. So we decided to host our own site, we can do it pretty cheaply and as we started thinking about it. . . The idea for the show, to do a show about Williamsburg was Kathy's idea . . .
AND THE LATE PRODUCER/DIRECTOR KATHLEEN GRACE
Kathleen Grace: Hey!
TW: Hey! What's up?
KG: Sorry, I ran into Dave and his friends on the upper West Side . . .
TW: Ah, nice.
KG: It took us a very long time to get here.
V: Nice to meet you.
KG: Nice to meet you too, I love your glasses.
V: So we just got started. . .
TW: We just started.
V: Started talking about how. . . you're the producer right?
KG: Yeah.
GETTING STARTED
V: So how does that work?
KG: I produce and direct. It was initially my idea, a little bit. The idea of doing a web show, and doing a show about Williamsburg, but Thom and I came up with all of the characters together. We bounced ideas about for episodes and shaped the team together. We split a lot of that. When you're producing a show on your own, the roles are not as clearly defined.
Thom is better at the scheduling stuff than I am.
TW: And Kathy is great at getting people to do stuff.
KG: For free.
V: You aren't making any money for this are you?
KG: No.
V: So why do you do it?
TW: Once we cast and started the episodes, we wanted to keep doing them. We also wanted to do them quicker then we originally thought. There was an urgency because we thought it was an idea someone else would have. We wanted to be the first one's doing it.
Then, I think we just got into the idea of the possibilities of putting episodic stuff on the internet.
V: Do you know of a lot of other people doing this?
TW: There's not a lot.
KG: There's not a ton. There's some indie sitcom and film stuff out there. Our friends Susan and Arin do this website called Four Eyed Monsters . com and they're self-distributing their film. There's a lot of people out there who are experimenting with it. I think we've gotten a lot of attention because we're in Williamsburg.
TW: Most of the people doing video online are sketch-comedy groups.
KG: We're not.
V: It seems like a structured sitcom which could be on TV.
KG: That's what we were interested in working with.
I LOVE TV
V: Why the sitcom?
KG: I think I spent years denying the fact that I absolutely love TV. I actually don't watch that much TV, but I love it. Everyone grew up watching sitcoms. Some of the best TV shows of our childhood are sitcoms. Cosby Show, things that. . . I spent a lot of my time in the past trying to be arty. Trying to direct film and theatre and create something high-brow, and then. . . I dunno. I just wanted to do something fun.
TW: We just wanted to do something fun and populist.
KG: I just wanted to do something we could do with our friends. I could cast all my friends because it's just about people my age. People I know, and have fun while doing it.
TW: And it was going to be a comedy, it wasn't going to be long. So it ended up being a sitcom, almost by default.
KG: In the beginning, Thom and I talked about making something more similar to Arrested Development. Making something that made fun of the sitcom genre, like "In this episode Xander takes two girls out on a date at the same time". Like, really cheesy. Super, super, cheesy.
TW: Like the cheesy television sitcom tropes.
KG: In the last episode we posted there were even two, sort of, "lesson moments" that we weren't even aware of. . .
TW: One of them was intentional.
KG: But one of them just happened. The writing was there but I never thought of it that way until it played itself out. We were making fun of the nineties in the recent post, so we used some clips of Full House. And, as you know, in Full House Bob's always being like "You know, DJ . . ."
Before the episode was filmed we didn't even know we were going to use Full House. . .
TW: No. We did. It was brilliantly planned.
KG: We're geniuses.
WHAT CAN DAVE MATTHEWS DO ANYWAYS?
V: You actually used clips from Full House? Do you ever worry about copy-right problems?
KG: Not right now.
TW: If we ever get sued we'll just take it down.
V: It's probably better to get sued. Your show will get more attention.
TW: We don't have any money.
KG: Once we broke "the rules" by using Dave Matthews on the very first episode, we kind of thought, well, if they really come after us what can they really do? If they sue we can always take down the post and then send a press release to the New York Times.
The funny thing is I went to Tessa's holiday party (more to Thom than The Vulture) and her friend works for Dave Matthews in the licensing department. He was talking about people using illegal music and licensing issues, and I was like "Ah, you probably don't like me very much."
He said he didn't care about small things, because it's not like we have tons of commercials on and we're making lots of money. It's not like we're using Dave Matthews for a Toyota commercial, we're using it for an indie sitcom online. Who cares.
TW: There might be a point where people start caring but right now no one cares.
ARE YOU GUYS HIPSTERS OR NOT?
V: Do you feel like you get your material from being a part of the Williamsburg hipster culture or are you making fun of it from the outside?
KG: A little bit of both.
TW: Yeah. Both.
KG: Any good hipster has a little bit of an awareness of themselves, and kind of hates themselves but loves them-self at the same time for being so ridiculous. I think both of us would never admit to being hipsters, but I'm sure. . .
TW: We've both been accused of it.
V: You've heard it enough times to know that most people think that you probably are one.
KG: I don't even know what hipster means anymore.
V: People call me hipster. What is that? And it's always a hipster calling you a hipster.
TW: I think that's what we're making fun of. In a way it's an arbitrary designation between people. It's like "I was here a year before you, so it makes me infinitely better." All these rules that people take so seriously about what's cool and what's not cool, and it's just ridiculous.
How seriously people take trends. One of the things we thought originally, and in some ways it is, is that Williamsburg is this place of open-mindedness. . .
KG: Liberal. Be what you want. Be different.
V: It's like that line that Courtney says in one of the episodes "We're all being different together."
TW: That's exactly what it is. Even despite that there's this. . .
KG: If you shop at the GAP, don't live here. My sister lived here for awhile and she moved because she was like "I shop at the GAP, and I'm not going to have any piercings." She's a lot more conservative then I am. She didn't feel like she belonged.
TW: The important liberal issues get swept under the carpet for stupid shit like shopping at Virgin instead of at EarWax.
It started for me in 2004 with the RN convention because I was peripherally involved with a bunch of people contributing to these protests. Every single one of these people flaked out in every way. Here they were working on something they considered really important and no one ever showed up or did anything. They were too busy playing XBox and stuff like that.
You can't have it both ways. You can't pretend to be an activist about something and then not follow through. At the same time I'm guilty of the same thing. I'm guilty of half the stuff Jed does.
V: I don't do anything good for anybody.
KG: I'm totally guilty of a lot of the stuff Courtney does. I'm in credit card debt. In all of the characters there's this little element of each of us. I relate to Courtney's fashion addiction and some of Spring's cause stuff.
IT'S OKAY. IT"S ONLINE.
V: How do you get your material? Do you just go to parties and watch people talk and say "that's the next thing."?
KG: We haven't culled that much from our lives.
TW: We had most of the ideas right away, we've had shorts where something has come up and we decide we need to do something about it right away. The episodes are planned really far in advance.
"Nineties", the one that went up yesterday, was supposed to go up in October. We shot it in September.
KG: It's hard to be spontaneous with the episodes. Shorts we can be more spontaneous with, but people aren't as into them.
V: I haven't even watched them.
TW: At first we thought it would be the other way around. That people would watch the shorts but not the episodes.
V: The immediacy of it seems great, and it is something you can do on the web that you can't do on TV.
KG: They can work as a test, to see which jokes are actually funny. They're not perfectly edited, but, honestly, it's online.
V: Do you feel like you can put crap online and it doesn't matter?
KG: We try to do the best we can.
V: I feel that. For me, a blog is about now, not about what'll be good tomorrow. You try to make it good, but it's about entertainment today.
KG: I get frustrated when people make comments like "this is horrible, you should do better then this..."
V: You guys are doing this on the weekend!
KG: Yeah! Do they wanna work my job for me or pay my rent? Then I'll make it perfect.
V: Would you go on TV with this?
TW: Maybe.
KG: As exciting as it is to increasingly embrace the internet, we're open to anything. We just want to keep making the show. When it stops being fun we'll want to stop.
COMMUNITY AND FREEDOM VS. MONEY
V: You always have a local band on the show and you always spotlight local places. . . do you love your community?
KG: Yeah. I mean, that's part of it. We set up the show to have bands. We wanted every episode to end with a New York band and if we can narrow it to a Williamsburg band, even better.
TW: It mostly is.
KG: Mostly.
TW: We want to shoot, always, if possible, at the actual places we are talking about.
KG: We still have ideas of having Spring go work at the flea market down the street, have Xander put an entry into the Williamsburg Documentary Film Festival, have local designers put their clothes in the show. . . We want to do more and more of that.
TW: The intersection of regional and local stuff with internet stuff is fun.
KG: We have talented friends and we want them to get notice. We like to support local business too, because, it's not like Starbucks or Subway would let us film there. . .
V: It would be a pain in the ass to try.
KG: Yeah. Whereas we can go up to Walter at Atlas Cafe or Fabiane, who runs Fabiane's, where we're sitting now. We shot at this table one day. For a short, really quick, we didn't call her in advance, we just asked her if we could grab this. She said sure.
TW: Part of that would change if we ever where on TV. All the sudden there'd be all these rules we'd have to follow.
V: Like?
KG: Permits and insurance and union crews.
TW: It's more fun if we don't get on TV, and just somehow find massive amounts of money.
KG: Like a patron.
V: What about advertising on the site? Isn't that what works for everyone?
KG: It's not that lucrative.
V: Really?
TW: Someone who's just blogging, it just has to pay for their time and web-hosting. With us it's all these people.
KG: We could put up a bunch of google ads, but they pay by click-thru rate, and people don't really click through our site. If I got two cents for every click-thru it wouldn't even pay for hummus for two weekends.
TW: The other option is ad-plants in the videos themselves, but you don't get much money for that and it turns people off.
KG: We'd rather just go horribly in debt. That's really awesome. We'll figure it out. The market is changing. Someone will figure out how to make money off of people like us or how to help us make money.
TW: We might sell DVDs and shirts. Maybe we can sell candy on the subway?
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