Written by Josh Brewer, December 2, 2016, at 7:30 p.m. Tweet to: @theJWBrewer
This fall, I had the opportunity to sit down with Spencer Glenn Miller and Blake Dorris, the cool cats from Forever Summer Productions and talk about their web series The Tenants, which is currently in post-production for their second season. Here’s what went down:
Interview with The Tenants Creators
Slickster: So, I’m here with Spencer Miller and Blake Dorris from The Tenants, which is an awesome YouTube series that’s floating around. And you guys are filming your second season right now?
Blake Dorris: We are.
Spencer Glenn Miller: Yeah, we had a successful Indiegogo campaign for season two and so we’re filming now. I think we’re a little over halfway done shooting the second season.
BD: A little more. And we have a pretty aggressive schedule so the second half of shooting should go a little faster.
SGM: This weekend we have something like eight to 10 hours scheduled…
BD: We have a lot. We’re doing some of the bigger chunks of pages. Early on we did the easier, shorter things.
You started slow and you built up.
BD: Exactly.
SGM: Yeah, that’s why we did that…
BD: It’s all part of a plan.
Really? Is it written down somewhere?
SGM: Sort of. I make a schedule to get into all of this. I think the big thing I realized was that someone has to turn into more of a stage manager and I’ve sort of fallen into that role. Which is sending everybody stills to make sure we stay in continuity and order because we have a limited hair and makeup budgets, finding out exactly which cross streets we have to be at for outside shoots. Finding the random theater we have to be at to shoot in because we decided to write scenes in other places like idiots!
BD: Yeah…we got a little ambitious with Season Two, to like the point of different looks for different episodes, which was a pretty minor concern for season one because, especially for Spencer and I, we deliberately wore the same clothes for every episode.
Because there is this kind of unity of story that goes along with it. It is all confined to that one location and that one, pretty major, issue. Plus, the Tenants don’t strike me as the kinds of guys that change their clothes regularly.
BD: We lampoon that in the last episode because they’re almost cartoon characters in the way they don’t change their clothes. And the other characters do, but it’s pretty minor stuff. For the most part, they’re hanging around the house. The constraints were pretty low. This year, we’ve focused less on this apartment-centric struggle and sort of sitcom style plots and we’re looking more at character journeys like who are they as people and what are they up to. And that has taken us out of the apartment a lot. You can feel that the characters are differentiating themselves a little bit more and I think we’re getting better stories for it. It’s a much harder technical struggle as well.
So, what in the beginning lead you guys to this? The YouTube series is an undertaking unto itself. Why this medium in this way for Tenants?
SGM: Why do this to yourself?
I mean, yeah. In a really nice way.
SGM: I think it really didn’t start out as anything other than the idea of doing a project together. So, we started writing this in college. Which was-
BD: Six years ago?
SGM: Something like that. We started and shot a pilot in Memphis, then move to separate cities, me to Chicago and Blake to San Francisco. And then Blake ended up in Chicago.
BD: And right before I moved, Spencer called and said he had someone who wanted to do a web series. Do you want to write long distance? And I think we were kind of holding it back, because it was always our thing. It was written to be us. And they were talking about re-casting my part. And suddenly I moved to Chicago and things fell into place.
SGM: And then we started shooting here and it felt right to just shoot the pilot. Then we wrote the rest of season one and ran a successful campaign for that one as well and ended up shooting and it was fantastic, and then it came down to what are you going to do with it. And I think you can go a couple of different routes. You could put it on Vimeo and never get it seen. You can put it on your own website and just have your friends see it. And your parents. Or you can put it on Youtube and run the gamut and have the chance it’s seen. And we did pretty good.
BD: It think the pilot started out at about 3000.
SGM: Which is nice when you start sending out to festivals, which is the route we’re ending up going. And that’s why we were running the fundraisers, ‘cause shooting a web series isn’t the most expensive thing you can do.
BD: Depending on the web series.
SGM: Tenants is pretty reasonable. But, if you want to get it out there, you’ve got to put a little bit of money on marketing and submit it to festivals where people actually see them.
BD: And I think the marketing was one of those things that was a little foreign to us. I’m on Facebook a few times a day but we’re not the most active users among our friends. And when we started, it was kind of drawing on word of mouth. The hope that friends and family would really extend our viewers and that really didn’t happen. They would view it themselves and that would be it. We needed to step it up. So we’ve started using Facebook marketing to boost our posts to people we wouldn’t have contact with. And a couple of those people have really latched onto it.
SGM: Yeah.
BD: And one my favorite things is that you can see the demographics of people that are responding to your ad. Tenants has been very popular with thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old-girls.
That’s a kinda creepy fact…
BD: And we were like, “What the hell?” Because it’s not really written for any specific age group. But that would be one we didn’t think we would appeal to. And our theory is that Ben is an attractive man who is often shirtless.
SGM: That’s what we figured.
BD: It’s an ass-in-seat situation.
Is he shirtless in season two? ‘Cause if not, there’s an easy solution…
BD: He’s even more shirtless, and he’s been working out.
SGM: We’re really pandering.
BD: The middle school market is really going to explode for us. That’s where the money is. First there was Twilight, then there was Tenants.
They all find 50 Shades… later and think, “This is terrible. Let’s go back to Tenants.”
SGM: So, it’s perfect!
And so you’re in the middle of production of season two. How’s it going?
BD: It’s good.
SGM: It’s going really great, actually. And we’ve noticed that, really in the first season, it’s very cartoon-like. It’s joke, joke, joke, joke, joke with very little substance underneath. It sort of plays as a way to kill time. So with this second season, we’ve decided that everyone gets to go on this journey into their own selves. And thus you’ve found the plot line.
BD: Yeah.
SGM: I think the thing we’ve found is that if you give the actors the time to really get into their character they really give back a thousand fold. Ben started as kind of a strange artist in the first season and since he’s spent the time with the character, he’s killing it.
BD: It’ helped us to. We kind of… we segment ourselves: we write, we shoot, then we edit. Using a television model. We finish writing before we’re shooting. And what’s great is that you can look at the characters in season one and say I’m not sure we had is voice quite right. A lot of it was that we took the words to Ben the actor and he can interpret it through the lens of what he’s going for and that’s going to shape his journey. And for season two, we were able to write the character based on what he’d given us. And we know now where he is, so we can find new places to take him.
SGM: And I think that’s what happens when you work with good actors. There going to give you so much to work with that, shit, it’s just easier to write. Liz Sharpe is the same way.
BD: She’s so good. When we started, it wasn’t like with Ben where we were trying to find his voice. We weren’t sure we hadn’t written a boring character. Warly on, she was in a lot of bookends and she was the straight man, and then we were worried we were wasting this amazing actor we had. And she saved it by being amazing and making her work amazing; those scenes we were worried about, she made them hilarious. And now we get to give her more to do in season two.
Fantastic. And so, what’s next for Tenants? You’re in production now, so you get to do the best part of the process: editing.
BD: It’s so great.
The best part of anything is sitting in front of a computer for 100 hours.
SGM: Yeah. It’s super fun. Well, this season is about discovery.
BD: We had things that we wanted to do that were more driven by the characters and that shaped some of the plot lines. And it’s really focused on “Who am I?” And then they have to pick up pieces when things suddenly swerve in their lives.
SGM: Yeah. And we got to lock someone in the bathroom.
That sounds really mean…
SGM: It was fun.
BD: And I got to eat a hot dog.
SGM: Which was terrible to film. ‘Cause if you’re filming on a low budget, you don’t have a lot of hot dogs. So there’s a lot of before and after.
If you want to be real mean, you should have folks smoke-
SGM: Oh god!
‘Cause they all have to be the same size.
BD: Don’t they make that joke in Naked Gun? Where they cut back and forth and they’re all different sizes…
SGM: I think they do.
BD: We had that trouble with my hair, because we thought the shoot for Season One was going to be much shorter.
SGM: (Laughs) Especially Episode 3.
BD: We filmed the bookends of three very early in the process, and then I didn’t want to get a haircut and thought it would be pretty close. By the end, that’s the longest my hair has been… probably in my adult life. It goes from pristine to this massive flop mop on my head in like two seconds. It’s hysterical.
SGM: There was learning.
BD: There was a lot of learning for Season Two.
Well, the second way you never do the same way as your first time. And it’ll give these amazing, wonderful things that you’d never want to do again. ‘Cause it may kill me.
BD: And that’s what I feel best about with Season Two. I feel like we’ve got our shit together on that thing. I’m sure we’ll find all kinds of things where our shits not together. And we’ll find it while we’re editing.
SGM: So, it’s freshman fifteen and now we’re moving into… uh…
BD: Sophomore slump?
SGM: No… ah…
This metaphor has gone down hill very quickly.
[Laugh]
Well, thank you guys for stopping by. We’re looking forward to Season Two.
SGM: Yeah.
BD: Thanks for having us.
So, there it is! A big thanks to the guys for stopping by. If you’d like to check out The Tenants and their first season, the link is below. Season Two should be dropping early next year!
Tenants on Twiter
On Facebook
On the Youtubes