Don Roos and Dan Bucatinsky Don Roos Credits Best Known
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INTERVIEW: Don Roos and Dan Bucatinsky Don Roos Credits Best known for: Web Therapy (Executive Producer/Creator/Writer/Director) 2008–2012 Who Do You Think You Are? (Executive Producer) 2010 The Other Woman (film) (Writer/Director) 2009 Marley & Me (film) (Writer) 2008 Happy Endings (film) (Writer/Director) 2005 The Opposite of Sex (film) (Writer/Director) 1998 WGA Award Nominated 1999 (Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) Boys on the Side (film) (Executive Producer/Writer) 1995 The Colbys (Writer) 1986–1987 Hart to Hart (Writer) 1981–1984 Dan Bucatinsky Credits Best known for: Grey’s Anatomy (Consulting Producer) 2012 Web Therapy (Executive Producer/Creator/Writer/Director) 2008–2012 Emmy Award Winner (Outstanding Special Class – Short-Format Live-Action Entertainment Programs) 2012 Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Special Class – Short-Format Live-Action Entertainment Programs – Series) 2012 Who Do You Think You Are? (Executive Producer) 2010–2012 Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Reality Program) 2012 The Other Woman (Executive Producer) 2009 Lipstick Jungle (Co-Executive Producer/Consulting Producer/Writer) 2008–2009 The Comeback (Executive Producer) 2005 NL: How did Web Therapy come about? DB: Lisa [Kudrow] and I had been producing television together with this production company. It was after The Comeback that we would start to get questions from our agent about whether we were interested in doing a web series. It was really the beginning of stuff on the web with Funny or Die and YouTube with one-off sketch or kittens-that-go-poop videos. There was really nothing that made sense to us about creating a web series that was designed specifically for the web. But Lisa could not let it go. She thought it would be so much more interesting to come up with something that was literally designed for the web, that lived in the presence of the web instead of a sitcom that gets cut up into pieces. And just one year prior, we had shot a presentation for a comedy ourselves and we were thinking about cutting that into three little bites for the internet. Lisa woke up one day and thought wouldn’t it be funny… what kind of person would, on their coffee break at work, get three minutes of therapy? What kind of therapist would do that? It became this game of “What if?” And luckily, we got a call around that time from somebody who was building a new broadband site for Lexus and they had focused on Lisa as someone who represented their audience. DR: Lexus went to Intelligent Life Productions and said, “We want to build a website. Will you recruit talent and look for content?” DB: They wanted it to be like HBO on the web without commercials. They said, “We don’t want to sell any cars on it. We just wanted it to be a cool destination which had a very, very subtle integration with Lexus.” Which was music to our ears because we weren’t really looking for commercial-branded entertainment. And Lisa, in like one minute, said I want to play this online therapist who does three-minute sessions who is completely unqualified and narcissistic. They bought the idea and they gave us complete and total creative freedom, which to Don and me and Lisa was music to our ears. We were literally given the opportunity to create 15 webisodes. DR: They gave us money. I guess Lexus gave Intelligent Life money and Intelligent Life gave us money. DB: Yeah, and we had to give them an outline so that they understood what the breakdown of the 15 would be. It was really the three of us sitting in this exact office, spitballing, and Lisa developing this notion of this character, Fiona Wallace. Just based on who would be this person and who would be the people in her life. DR: We shot it a few of the webisodes in here. We shot the first two seasons – the first 30 episodes here in our offices. So production was always like, “Oh my god, we have to move out all the offices.” It was a nightmare, so in season three and four we went to a studio. DB: The notion of the whole show being a series of web chats was fun and seemed so simple and so obvious and made for the web. What became interesting was the months of strategizing over how to shoot it. You can either shoot it at low quality by actually using the webcam and in the back of our minds we thought we should shoot it so that it was television-ready. Not that we were intending to be on TV, but why not make it something that can move into other formats? We wound up coming up with a system of being able to improvise the show on two sets simultaneously with two cameras and teleprompters and ear wigs and actors being able to improvise live. We’ve been doing it sort of the same way from the beginning. DR: We have a great cameraman, Michael Goi, who is actually the head of the cinematographer’s guild now. We just tried to do as best we could. We didn’t know what would happen to it, but we owned it, we owned the content which was another thing that was attractive to us. DB: And fairly groundbreaking. Most of the studios were trying to develop web content, but for artists themselves to be the owners and creators of their content was a very exciting proposition for us. We were the actors, the creators, and the directors in it. We could make it what we wanted. With the exception of our license deal with Lexus, we owned it, so we wanted to make it as good as possible. We also wanted to make this whole show union. Even though at that time it was just after the writer’s strike and the contract for new media was not clear what those minimums were and what those parameters were. NL: When I first saw it, it was literally just three- or four-minute segments. DR: It was supposed to be something that you could watch at your desk when you were supposed to be working. NL: Then you keep watching more of them because they’re so addictive. So how did it expand from just doing that to episodes on Showtime? DR: It was sold to Showtime and we weren’t even in the room. And they weren’t even sure what they had bought. DB: It was a happy mistake in a way. Our agents thought, “Oh, you guys have done 30 webisodes and if you do three of them, that’s 30 minutes times ten episodes, you’ve got 30 episodes.” DR: Not realizing that three times three is nine minutes. We originally thought, or maybe Showtime thought, that they were just going to use them as interstitials or something. DB: They always loved the notion of 30 minutes of content that was ready-made. The thing was though that when we shot them there was great talent attached and they were very funny and they could license them. And that’s what was sold to them, these half-hours already shot. Of course, it was very attractive. The only thing was, no one did the math. At the most, there was only 18 minutes of content. We got on the phone with Bob Greenblatt, who was the head of Showtime at the time, and we said, “Were thrilled to have this opportunity, but we just have to explain something to you which is in order to make 30 minutes times ten, we need 300 minutes of content. We have 111 minutes of content. We’re going to need to shoot more in order to fill these up. We also watched three of them in a row – and god bless Don who said, “We can’t just make these individual clients who have a problem and then they’re done in three minutes. We need to build the history and the life of this woman and relationships among them.” It’s the very reason we even have a narrative to tell season to season. DR: Yes, I thought it was important. In the very beginning, we just thought she’d have funny clients and say funny things. But we realized early that every client had to have something that Fiona wanted. She had to have an actual goal in all of the clients because otherwise it’s just clever or funny, but there’s no way to engage the audience—there’s no rooting interest in Fiona. So her wants and desires were center stage, always. Which is why we ended up having to people her world because she has more invested. For example, Dan played a client who was working at Visa, so she used him to at first promote her business and then she used him to get Visa information against her husband. And then, thank god, we decided to make him a regular so now Jerome [Dan Bucatinsky] works for her. So there’s a little bit of a family. We realized why television shows are the way they are. You need a stable of regulars. You need a main character who wants something. DB: But once we got going and once we had done one season and then we were lucky enough to do a second season and a third season for Lexus. With two seasons under our belt and then shooting specifically for television, it all still had to play—because of the unions—on the internet.