Recently, Buzzfocus.com and Kendra from Side Reel had the the chance to chat with the the Handsome Donkey Comedy Troupe and chat on the Squeegees, life with Stage 9 and basketball (moreso the Squeegees and Stage 9). Check out the discussion:
Kendra: Hello. This is Kendra from Side Reel. I was wondering where the idea of Squeegees came from. It’s a pretty original idea.
Marc: This is Marc Gilbar speaking. We came to Stage Nine with a bunch of different ideas, one of which was Squeegees. We wanted to do something that involved the four of us and occupational setting sorts of seemed like it would be fun. We spent a lot of time together. One particular afternoon in Century City, we happened to notice some high rise window washers hard at work. As Adam likes to say, it was a particularly windy day. Their task seemed particularly dangerous.
To us, we saw the potential for great comedy, both because of the job itself and the inherent dangers and unique aspects of having to wash enormous skyscrapers. But also, narratively, it would open the opportunity to look inside the building and see stories that are going inside amongst the occupants and the interplay between the offices and the stories inside and the shannagans that the guys get themselves into on the outside, we thought could be interesting and fun.
Brendan: This is Brendan. Also, just from a character standpoint, we were always wondering what kind of people are able to get up 60 stories above the ground and do this wild work, so it was really fun. They’re either just absolutely completely brave or they’re completely crazy. And I think in our characters, we have a little bit of both. It a great way to mine comedy out of it.
Kendra: It looks like, I saw on one episode Gill got up there and it looked like he was a little scared. So is that why he’s not part of the actually window washing crew?
Marc Yes, I can say that our characters are, sort of have similarities to our personalities in real life. They’re not exactly the same, but I would say out of the four of us, I might be the least inclined—actually Aaron who plays Ronny and myself might be the least intrepid in those sorts of situations. I was only about eight feet off the ground there, but that fear was real.
Aaron: We actually had a really funny thing written for Ronny when Ronny tries to hang on the side of the building. But I have an unusually small bladder and wasn’t even able to be up there long enough to shoot it. So we just harnessed that energy and really turned it into the character.
Bags: Hello, everybody, this is Bags from Buzz Focus. I was wondering. I saw that a lot of you went to Georgetown together. How did you get together and decide that you wanted to do comedy? Did you ever study at the Ground…or Second City or one of those places before you decided to go into sketch?
Brendan: We were always just as friends hanging out and we always go to movies together and watch the same shows and whatever. We’re always throwing out jokes and whatnot, but we never really thought about turning any of this into a business. In fact, we just like to turn the camera on and make some short films and make our friends laugh and make ourselves laugh. Never from the beginning, we were like, “Oh, we’re going to set out to start make a business out of this and work with ABC one day.” We just had a lot of great fortune and that’s what we’re trying to continue doing, tell jokes with our friends.
Marc: Adam, Brendan and I were at Georgetown together and then Aaron and I actually went to high school together. So Aaron had a similar experience when he was at Berkeley, but the three of us at Georgetown, different people do different things for fun in their free time. For us, just turning on the camera, goofing around and cutting something together and showing it and making our friends laugh was really how we like to spend our spare time.
At that time, the Internet is constantly evolving. We hadn’t gotten to the point, this is from 1998 to 2002 is when we were in school, YouTube wasn’t around yet. That was really to come about three or four years later. I think college students now and comedy troupes in college now have a great distribution opportunity.
For us, it was about showing our friends. We all ended up back in Los Angles right around when YouTube got popular. We had the opportunity to shoot and cut something and then e-mail to our friends and family who are all over the country and then a step further, to have people see it and send it around and become viral. So it’s really about the timing and the technology that changed the way we saw something that started out as just really a hobby.
Aaron: One day I was at work at my old day job. I got a text message from Marc that said, “Want to make a fake music video and put it on the Internet?” And I wrote back simply, “I’m in.” That was the first thing that the four of us did together, which was a video called Photograph that was sort of making fun of this song and genre we thought was just right for parody. I don’t think any of us really considered that making that little video on the weekend one afternoon in half a day could turn into a business. But here we are, counting our blessings.
Kendra: Do you guys do most of the writing for the Squeegees or do you have some team helping you out?
Marc: It would be great if we had a team. The writing process for us is pretty funny because it’s the four of us sitting in the same room that we’re talking to you now in, which is our living room. We have a white board, dry erase board and a projector connected to a laptop. The first day is, “All right, so we’re going to write this show about window washing. What’s funny about window washing and what could happen to four guys running a window washing business?” We write these lists of different things. Then it comes to about the stories we want to tell about the individual characters, what should happen to them over the course of the series.
Then when it comes time to write, some of is spent the four us separate writing some stuff down and some ideas. Ultimately it’s the four of us in the same room. One person is on the laptop writing and it’s being projected onto the wall, our living room wall. We’re just trying to throw out jokes and see which gets the biggest laugh internally. That process is also, things changes. When you go and shoot, new ideas come as well, but the writing process is very much, almost everything we do is very much collaborative.
Kendra: I noticed in your cast you have three different guest members who were all on American Dreams a couple of year ago. I don’t know if that was a coincidence or how you picked up the other cast members besides yourselves.
M: I didn’t notice it.
Aaron: Both Adam and I worked on American Dreams. I started there at the beginning, was there for 2.5 years. Adam and I overlapped a little bit, but we became friends with a lot—that was a particularly familial show. We all really became friends with all of those cast members. There’s actually more than three people from that show. A significant portion of our cast and crew did at least a day on American Dreams, Adam and myself included. We were very fortunate to have become friends with some really talented actors through that show and have remained friends over the last few years and asked them if they would want to participate in this.
They all said without a moment of hesitation, that they would love to. We really, I think, benefit from having that level of talent surrounding us in Squeegees. They just bring a professionalism and quality to the project that I think we’re really lucky to have.
Bags How does the partnership between the Handsome Donkey comedy troupe and Stage Nine ABC come about? Did ABC approach you first after seeing some of your work on YouTube or did you submit to them before they went and came out with Stage Nine?
Marc: For us, things really changed. There was a New York Times article published in late 2006. That was an opportunity for a lot of people in the industry to see some of the stuff we had done because it’d been online for a little bit. We were fortunate enough to be included in this article.
Stage Nine was one of the people that contacted us to come meet. We met with a lot of different places and for some reason, we just hit it off with them. They seemed to be interested in the same sort of things we wanted to do, which was to take what we had been doing to a higher level, production wise and creatively and try and something new and something different.
Stage Nine had this great relationship with ABC.com as part of their synergy. We thought that would be a really cool destination for a show. They get a lot of great traffic and we’re a big fan of all the ABC shows. Stage Nine was a good fit. We turned out that we were right, because all along the way, the executives there were really helpful and really great to work with.
Aaron: The business model they presented us was very much in line with what we were looking for, with specific regards to that they didn’t really to meddle. They wanted to support us, but not to impose themselves upon us, which for, there’s a charm of the Internet, which is that there are no rules. We didn’t have to answer to anybody when we were making this stuff for ourselves. We could do what we wanted and we could control the distribution and we could control the production. They were very deliberate from the get-go about wanting to let us continue to feel that way and let us continue to make what we wanted to make in the way that we wanted to make it, but they wanted to support us, both financially and from their years of production experience.
It really seemed like a great step for us, rather that jumping in bed with somebody who wanted to use our name or tap into our resources or talents or whatever. It just seemed like, it was very in line with how we thought this stuff should start happen.
Brendan : Basically a lot of the different companies that we met with, it sort of felt like they were dipping their toes in this space and weren’t really sure about whether this was going to work or not or whatever. Stage Nine was the company that you could tell wanted to go full guns into Internet video. They wanted our show to be an Internet show. It wasn’t like they wanted to test it out to see if it did well on the Internet and put it somewhere else. They said very clearly from the get go, “Let’s make an Internet show and let’s do it now.” So that was basically the tipping point for all of us.
Kendra: Do you have a plan for how long Squeegees is supposed to last on ABC or is it up in the air at this point?
M: You mean how long is it going to be available on the site?
Kendra: How many more episodes you’ll be doing?
M: Today is the finale of season one. We’re hoping that we get to do more. We don’t want…we want to do it right and keep it as fresh as this first one was, both for us and for the audience. We’re just starting to think about what we’re going to do more.
Bags: Do you have any future plans for any longer episodes, doing like a feature, just using your comedy team as the writing staff?
Aaron: When we set out to do this, we were really targeting about five minute episodes, which because it seems from our own experience watch video on the Internet, that anything more than that was asking a lot of the audience because most people are sitting at work and watching this when they can steal away for a few minutes. We’ve gotten some reaction from people that are wanting longer episodes. That’s something we’ll have to think about.
Towards the end of the season, the episodes got a little longer because we figured if people were going to be watching episodes seven, eight, nine, ten, if they were invested in the series and willing to sit through a little more. We’re trying to find that sweet spot on the Internet.
Marc: It’s sort of, you can tell stories in many different lengths. We tried to tell stories that fit best with the medium. Like a movie, you’re very comfortable in your chair and you can sit there for two hours. In TV, you’re on the couch and a half an hour, an hour isn’t too much to ask.
But we figured if you’re on your laptop or at work, it’s a lot to ask, especially for stuff you haven’t seen before, a show you haven’t seen before. So we went after the three to five to six minute range. I think as the technology improves and people are watching on bigger screens, like ABC.com actually has a pretty good player, so you can watch it. People do watch episodes of LOST, which are an hour. It’s possible that we can do longer format episodes or show, depending on what the project is. Everyone is experimenting.
Kendra: Do you have any of your ideas that you really liked for the Squeegees that you haven’t gotten in there yet that you’re hoping to play out?
Aaron: Yes, sure. There are certainly jokes that were written in various stages of the script writing process and even story lines that we ended up losing for whatever reason that may or may not reappear if we get to do this again.
M: I remember at some point, we actually wanted to get a real bird that would continually maybe landing on Adam and he’d get really annoyed. For some reason, it would never bother Brendan, but episode by episode, the same bird would be landing on Adam’s head or shoulder, except production wise, that’s a real headache, animal trainers and whatnot. So that particular story line never made it through. If we do get to do a second, there’s definitely a lot of places we’d like to take the guys, some of them unexpected that we think would be a lot of fun.
Bags: I noticed that Aaron was working on My Name is Earl. I was wondering if anyone else was like doing other projects, whether it’s TV shows or are you going on casting calls for acting?
Adam: Aaron and I had both worked in television for the past couple of years. I was pursuing a writing career. At the time we started Squeegees, I was working as a writer’s assistant on the Fox show, House. Before that, I worked for a director and producer, both at House and on the pilot for NBC’s Heroes, as an assistant.
Aaron: I was working in post production on My Name is Earl. None of us are really, I heard you say casting calls. None of us really pursued any acting career outside of Squeegees. We sort of did it for the fun of the experience of doing it. I mean it was a blast. I think we all had a great time doing it and we all felt pretty good with our performances in the end and would certainly be open to opportunities if you find yourselves casting anything any time soon. None of us have made an effort to be professional actors.
Adam: Aaron is being modest. He had a tour de force cameo as Steve Winwood on American Dreams a couple of years ago.
Aaron: Adam is being modest. He had a tour de force cameo on American Dreams as Adam.
Chrissy: All right, thanks, everyone. To the Handsome Donkeys, do you guys have any closing comments?
M: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. We’re always available if you guys want to chat about politics, sports, March Madness. We’re around.
