(no subject)
I envision a web series. A web series involving comedy, parodies, and movies. Excited yet? Okay, I know the web is packed to the gills with spoof videos, comics, reviewers, and dudes sitting in front of their webcams posting 15 minute tirades about Xbox One. And I could easily do any one of those (I've never played an Xbox before, but I have a natural talent for being angry in front of a crappy, built in microphone), but here's the thing...I want to do something challenging! Something that involves the cooperation of other people. Something that will involve writing, editing, developing, and other difficulties. Something that will start out small and ineffectual and may or may not improve if I can continue filming and working out the kinks. Something that may fall flat on its ass right from the get-go and never recover, and even if it does, nobody may care enough to watch. This is the chance I want to take, because this is what makes creating anything enjoyable and worth pursuing. It's the challenge. So here's the concept: A local, small-town community theater wants to attract wider audiences, so some of the more ambitious members start putting on stage versions of popular things: TV shows, music videos, blockbuster movies, anything that will get an audience's attention. And they may have different ideas in mind. Someone may want to stage a musical version of The Notebook. One of the more activist theatricals may have a gender-swapped reinterpretation of Chicago. One may consider bringing Game of Thrones to the stage only to struggle with all the ways to stage it without making the elderly local audience cry out 'blasphemy!' The series could be a series of sketches: the onstage productions themselves, or it could be a combination of performance and behind the scenes work. We can get to know the actors, production team, and producers as characters. We can see what drives them, what brought them to the theater in the first place, what their relationships are with each other, and how they deal with the challenges of realizing their vision. Now granted, a lot of these ideas are nothing new. We've seen stuff like this in movies like "Ed Wood" or "Waiting for Guffman", but first of all everything is derivative in some way. And second of all, as often as it's been done, the backstage genre is almost always fascinating when done right.