Johnny: When you're an artist, I was just telling Hannah that I would rather have the $800 I spent on my iPhone free to pay for more transcribing of interviews, or like be there to pay for if I need a computer program or something. Or just to live on. I find as an artist nothing feels better than not spending my money, but just having money sitting there available for a rainy day.
Hannah: Right, I actually don’t think you need a lot of money to be an artist, or you don’t need a lot of things. Unfortunately I love stuff. But coming from Evanston, I like funky stuff.
Johnny: Exactly, exactly.
Hannah: [LAUGHS] I like cool stuff.
Johnny: Hell yeah.
Hannah: But not expensive stuff, just funky stuff. I like my thrift stores.
Johnny: Yeah, I mean this is a question. Hannah's mom is an antique dealer, and how much of her way of life of taking her passion for funky stuff and finding a way to make it work as a way to make a living, how much of that fed into your decision to proactively go after your dreams and stuff?
Hannah: A hundred and fifty percent. My mom's store was like she would deliver things that people purchased to Steppenwolf, or like John Hughes movie sets, and she'd be like, "We'll deliver it for free if we can get a ticket," and we'd get to go backstage and deliver props, or go on the set of some movie, and I used to get to go with her. That was totally a part of what I'm doing now. I also used to play house and store, and setup her window displays when I was way too little to be doing that, like body parts on Halloween, with vintage doll heads and stuff.
Johnny: What was the name of her store?
Hannah: Recollections, on Custer Avenue, and it was there forever.
Johnny: I want to do a feature on her store, and whatever pictures you guys have.
Hannah: We do.
Johnny: I almost started a store last summer, and that is another part of the Evanston dream.
Hannah: You have to talk to my mom. She will tell you how things have changed. Especially with what's going on downtown Evanston now. I mean Evanston's a different place. Main Street is still kind of cute, there's kind of a rebirth.
Johnny: But Good's just stopped selling art supplies, dude.
Hannah: It's all just frames. It's all gone totally backwards. My mom and I walked down Main Street yesterday, and she's like, "When I started my store back in the day, Good's was just a paint store, just hardware paint. And then it became an art store, which was so cool." Now just frames, next to a really expensive Italian restaurant.
Johnny: I already have the hookup to get the inside story on RIP Good's.
Hannah: RIP downtown Evanston.
Johnny: I know...
Hannah: Time out on that, that's too depressing.
Johnny: Chandler's...
Hannah: Yeah.
Johnny: So here's a question, do you and Frances still have day jobs?
Hannah: Frances quit her full-time secretary job, which was just her day job, no-brainer, New York, you have to do that, I don’t know if you have to do that in Chicago still.
Johnny: No, you do. Everyone does except Johnny Sagan, and Johnny Sagan's going to have to start doing it soon.
Hannah: [LAUGHS] Uh-huh. I had like seven jobs or something when I moved to New York at first. I was like dog walking, babysitting, I had a day job working for a middleman of a print shop, that I didn’t know that I was working for the middleman of a print shop, and then I finally quit because it became like a personal assistant job where I had to go with him to get his colonoscopy.
Johnny: Yeah, this is a very important subject, actually, for those in the creative arts, because personal assisting is like an ever-beckoning black hole of your self-respect and time.
Hannah: I was hired to answer some phone calls because I didn’t want to work in a restaurant, and then I started working in a restaurant in addition to working in an office. But I started working in a print shop that I didn’t know was not a real print shop. He like took down Getty Images' pictures, and showed me the factory that he owned, but he didn’t own it, and then he hired to be his personal assistant, which just meant going to his house and talking to his wife, who is ironically from the south side of Chicago, who was like eating bunions and had to sort her closet, and I was like, this is the end of that job.
Johnny: Because it corrupts the people who hire personal assistants, they become helpless and peevish.
Hannah: Yeah, horrible. Off and on I do theater gigs, I'll do some little commercially thing, or my theater company, now we're starting to get grants, and doing bigger projects, so I'm making money from that. I have been waitressing since I got to New York off and on, except I'm quitting next week.
Johnny: Awesome.
Hannah: Yeah. Literally quitting next week, I'm done.
Johnny: It's going to be a means of making money that you're no longer going to resort to if at all possible.
Hannah: Yes, yes.
Johnny: And tell me what you don’t like about waitressing, this is very important. I'll tell you what I don’t like about waitering. I am totally fine with dealing with the people, I'm totally fine with dealing with the mean chefs and all that. The one thing I don’t like is prep work and cleaning up later. I don’t like having to fold napkins or polish glass or something. You don’t always have to do that, that's the deal breaker for me.
Hannah: I am a bad waitress, I have a bad attitude, and I don’t like working. [LAUGHS] I don’t like serving people, that's the problem for me. I've gotten to a point where I don’t like serving mean people. And I work at a place where you can throw peanut shells on the floor, and there's live music, and it's open on Christmas. So that means I have to work maybe Christmas, or New Year's Eve, or Thanksgiving every year.
Johnny: Annoying.
Hannah: Yeah. And it's been good to me. Like off and on, I've not worked there for three months and come back, they’ve been totally supportive.
Johnny: That is cool.
Hannah: That is cool, and flexible; it's all about that.
Johnny: And this is something that you need to understand too, like here we are being very candid, you're saying like on the whole it sucks so much you hope to never have to do it again, but somehow you got them to like you enough to be flexible with you, and let you come in and out.
Hannah: Everybody there's an artist of some sort, so they understand that flexibility is key, that we are really highly responsible people but we'll drop any job in a heartbeat if you are going to get a chance of having what you're really there on Earth to do. It's hard to find a job that has that kind of understanding. There's also the flipside of that, it's like in the last month, two people have thrown up on my feet. And to me, that's like... [LAUGHS] Don’t put that in there.
Johnny: And that's like coworkers or customers?
Hannah: That's like, you know, a sign from god, or the higher whatever that it's time to go. I'm a good person, but karmically, I have to take responsibility of what I'm doing to these people, it's too destructive.
Johnny: No, I understand. That was one thing that was hard for me about being a waiter, was at our restaurant there was this expectation that you would all go out drinking after every shift, you know?
Hannah: Hell no, anymore, I'm not 10.
Johnny: Yeah, exactly, that’s what I'm saying. Although one cool thing is I may do a cookbook with the chef now.
Hannah: Oh, that's cool.
Johnny: Yeah, at Oceanique on Main Street.
Hannah: Oh, yummy.
Johnny: Yeah, he's a cool dude. I felt misunderstood there, but then I found out later that he was feeling my vibe, and now we're cool, and we see each other.
Hannah: That's a good restaurant.
Johnny: Yeah, it's all fish.
Hannah: Yeah.
Johnny: So yeah, this is something. So I don’t know, since you do work as well as write and act and stuff, I guess the question is just are you working on art through extreme fatigue a lot of the time?
Hannah: Yes, I am constantly tired and constantly working. I have like three full-time jobs. I have Mimi & Flo, I have a theater company which his now non-profit, which I'm a board member for, which it costs $50,000 to do a play that you'll make no money on and you're in the red, and you have to kill yourself for a year and a half to do. And I wait tables, which I'm trying to eliminate now, because I just don’t want to do it anymore. And I also kind of want to jump in and take the risk of once I don’t have that crutch, maybe other options, I'll have the real time, even if it's 10 percent of my time, 30 percent of my time, whatever that percentage is, that is time that I could use to be poor, but also totally focused on what I really want to be doing.
Johnny: Hell yeah, hell yeah, I definitely understand.
Hannah: But it is necessary to have either a trust fund, or a really good work ethic, where you can do a job that you don’t care about for money, to support your real career, which sometimes takes years of not making a lot of money and pursuit, to really go forward to get what you want, and then you could quit your day job.
Johnny: Absolutely. And then let's also talk about the role of schooling in the arts, and in your art, because I guess I haven't gone to school yet for writing, I actually am getting ready to apply for an MFA, and I'm excited about it. But I've known some people who sort of were saying that they wish they didn’t have to work so that they could work on their art or something.
Hannah: Who doesn’t?
Johnny: Yeah, who doesn’t? But sometimes those people haven't gone to school. So in terms of the development of you as an artist, what happened at school versus the real world, or just tell me about what you do in art school, what do you do in theater school, how did it get you where you are now? Because I've always heard some people be like, "Fuck school, I don’t need to go to school for what I'm doing."
Hannah: School's important for me, it's not that I like being a student; I genuinely like learning. I'm not the best student, and that's not because I'm not a hard worker, I'm a really hard worker, but I'm a really slow reader, which slows everything down for me. I didn’t learn how to read at Washington until fifth grade, and nobody knew, and they only knew because I was like 99th percentile for math, and then slipping, and they were like, "What's your problem?" And I was like, "I don’t know what the story problems are, because I don’t understand what the words are." So then I went to... what's the school attached to Baker, the teaching school there?
Johnny: Yeah, Baker Demonstration School?
Hannah: But next to it they have the teacher's school, I can't remember the name.
Johnny: Oh yeah, National-Louis.
Hannah: National-Louis had this really great woman Barbara Platt, who is still in contact, and is supportive of my theater company. This really cool woman taught me how to read really quickly in one year. Long story short, I went from being a really bad student, good kid, shy-ish, not really, to sixth grade, straight A's throughout high school. Because I was so behind on everything, I figured out how to read, and then it wasn’t because I was super smart, I was really a little hard worker, because I felt like I was catching up for not knowing how to read, and being really lost for all those year at Washington. So I kind of got into school late in the game. I was kind of slacking through the beginning, and kind of just not being the best student I could’ve been. And in high school I was in some AP classes, this and that, but I just was not a great reader ever. So I've always been kind of really interested in different ways of learning, and it's kind of ironic now that I'm doing a lot of writing, because I'm like, "I'm a writer?"
Johnny: Do you spell well?
Hannah: I spell so horribly. Like if you see me before spell check, it's crazy town.
Johnny: But guess what, there's this really great short story writer named Thom Jones, who has this book called Cold Snap, and in the acknowledgments to his book, he says, "Special thanks to Alice K. Turner, the fiction editor at Playboy magazine, who takes my horribly misspelled, chicken scratch manuscripts, and turns them into the fluent works of language you see before you." And I was always like, "He's being disingenuous, he's like a PhD in spelling, and his shit is probably perfect." And then Jessica, my girlfriend, got the job of Playboy's archivist, and I was hanging out with her at work one day, and she let me see all his original manuscripts.
Hannah: Are they crazy?
Johnny: Yeah, he just like shits out on the page, like he's channeling his inner child, and he just scrawled it out and FedEx'd it, like a sheaf of papers to her. And yeah, she carefully was like, "Thom, you're a genius," and spell checked it, and corrected it, and brought it to fruition with him.
Hannah: Oh, I love it.
Johnny: Yeah, so just spell check exists, and a what a lot of beginning writers don’t understand, because all they read is the finished product of the writing process, is the importance of editing, and good editors in collaboration and revision. And you're aiming for that perfect publishable polish, but be like Hannah, just write it, get it down, and spell check it.
Hannah: Yeah, totally, which is good, because I'm starting from playwriting. Playwriting there are no rules, it's more like poetry, and now that I'm doing a little bit of fiction, and a lot of screen, there's a big format that you have to do for screenplays, but it's nice to come from a place where I'm like, "Oh, there are no rules." That's my world. What was I talking about? School. Okay, so then I went to Vassar, and then I went to Harvard.
Johnny: And at Vassar...
Hannah: Vassar as a drama major.
Johnny: Yeah, and did you know that you were going to be a drama major from the beginning, like you were intending to do it?
Hannah: Yes, yes, I was like, "Meryl Streep went there, I'm going there," and I got really good financial aid.
Johnny: And so tell the kids a little bit about that. When you first get to drama school, how does it start? How does a four-year drama program work, like how do they teach you?
Hannah: Well luckily Vassar is a liberal arts school, so you weren't suffocating in your one major, you got to try a lot of different things. Vassar was awesome, I liked ETHS a lot, but I think that I was kind of nerdy and weird, and a little bit lost in school. I was definitely not cool, and being cool was really important at Evanston.
Johnny: Were you doing plays at ETHS?
Hannah: I was doing Piven, so I was really focused outside of school on something that I really, really loved. I wasn’t part of YAMO, like YAMO and Piven had kind of a thing, and I was a big Piven kid. So I was always kind of artsy and into my own thing.
Johnny: And who were some other Piven kids in your year?
Hannah: Teddy (Heich?), Rachel (Giddleson?), Alexis McNabb. She is in New York now, and she comes and sees my plays. She's acting, she does a lot of clowning.
Johnny: Do you know Ethan (Plout?)?
Hannah: No.
Johnny: He is a guy in Jessie's year, class of '99, who did a lot of Piven, up to a point, but I don’t know how much he kept doing it in high school though. He's my friend.
Hannah: I don’t remember who else... A lot of people from other schools, because it was like all different suburb schools in Chicago.
Johnny: But did you burst with pride when PCU came out?
Hannah: A little bit.
Johnny: I was at the premier, in the Evanston One Theater.
Hannah: Oh, yeah. I mean, I liked Jeremy Piven, I think he's great.
Johnny: He's awesome.
Hannah: I like Entourage.
Johnny: I haven't seen it.
Hannah: It's kind of good.
Johnny: I want to see it.
Hannah: It's kind of great.
Johnny: I mean he did I think kind of like a parody of himself on it, in the beginning of this Katt Williams DVD, that me and Jess were obsessed with this summer. On that show, when he's walking his clients through what their strategy is going to say in a pitch meeting, does he say this catch phrase of, "Stick a pin in it?"
Hannah: I don’t know, I don’t watch it religiously. Probably, he has a lot of catch phrases. He says, "Hug it out," a lot.
Johnny: Like, "Kiss and make up?"
Hannah: Yeah, like men hugging. Drama school...
Johnny: I mean let's say someone reading this is someone who loves acting, whether from an improv Piven tradition, or full-scale school play, learning my lines tradition. Is it like dying and going to heaven?
Hannah: Well grad school was like major drama school. College was like learn art history, learn all these things that you thought you might like in high school and got a week of, and then you get to dive in in college. So I highly recommend if you are from Evanston and you like drama or you like any kind of art, go to a liberal arts school, because you need to learn about everything to really understand art. You need philosophy, you need everything. And I think you're too young to go to a conservatory, like I wouldn’t have wanted to go to NYU Conservatory, or Carnegie Mellon, at least personally from where I was, because I was not ready to be torn apart like I was four years later in grad school. In grad school they personally tear you apart. They find out what you're very good at, kind of like what I was talking about with writing before. Like in acting, they find out what you're very strong at, and then they kind of pick that out of you and say that you can't really do that for four years, because you're good at that, and you know that that's your crutch, that's your cliché, you can't do any of those things. You have to try all the other things that you're good at, in the process you're like, "Wait, what was I good at?"
Johnny: "Am I still good?
Hannah: Yeah, you're like, "What do I do? Why do I do? Who am I? What am I?" So you figure that out, and that I couldn’t have done at 17 or 18. You know, I had two weeks in between Vassar and grad school, which was not smart. I applied, I was like, "I'll never get in," and then I couldn’t defer, and I was like, "I guess I'm going... more school..."
Johnny: That's actually a sort of controversial issue, because I've just heard people expressing views on this subject again and again. Do you or do you not wait between undergrad and grad school?
Hannah: I think it really depends on the person. I think it's good to go earlier than later, because I know a lot of people in my class had gone to New York, experienced it. The longer you're out, I think you maybe see more of the world, and it's nice to go in a little bit young, and not really knowing what the world is like, because the world is a dark, dark place... [LAUGHS]
Johnny: Ooh, I'm writing on that one, girl.
Hannah: Well just I think it's really hard to be an artist. I think progressively there's less and less money, and it's less socially accepted, and just as the world gets harder and harder economically, the way things are, like from 2000, when I graduated Vassar, a year later everything changed. I don’t want to be this dark, but it is hard in any profession you do, and it's always been hard to be an artist. But I think it's really difficult.
Johnny: Well just as someone who always watched New York from afar, I used to read about how New York was a place where your neighbors didn’t care if you played loud music and did heroin or something, and then in the Giuliani years, hearing that he was actually shutting down on shit and stuff, to now hearing about how New York is so money driven that it's not as easy anymore to go there to be with the people who are there working on stuff, because you might have to make such a huge nut for rent and stuff.
Hannah: Yeah, like everyone's like there are no poets in New York anymore, the poets are in...
Johnny: Kansas City.
Hannah: Kansas City, or New Jersey. New Jersey now, there are neighborhoods that are more diverse with 50 different ethnicities in two blocks, versus New York, which is like 50 different Dunkin' Donuts. Literally, there's so many...
Johnny: Yeah, my sister's beloved Astoria Queens, which even that is now becoming a luxury.
Hannah: Totally.
Johnny: Two questions about this darkness of the world financial issue. One, in your non-profit side of your career at the theater company, who writes the grants and researches the grant granting organizations? Because my mom, she did financial aid at a college, and she always says something that you hear a lot out on the road, people say, "There's so much money people are trying to give away," you just have to apply for things. Like who writes your grants?
Hannah: The three of us do. I basically do a little of the editing, the boys are really good at it. And it's really hard to write a grant. Luckily we're getting better at it and we're getting better grants. There is money out there; I mean the world is wonderful. I should really tell the truth. I should also say that I'm completely satisfied and happy with what I'm doing; I'm so happy to be doing what I want to do since I was very little.
Johnny: And it shows in the work, I must say.
Hannah: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I'm completely happy with what I do, and I'm glad that I'm crazy enough to keep doing it. I guess what I was saying about the world is just like it's a different place than it was 10 years ago, what I thought the world would be like. I always knew it would be hard, but I really think it's a really big struggle if you're going to commit to being artist, or to commit to doing what you love, you have to truly commit to doing the work to do it, because it's harder than ever to break through and make it in whatever kind of capacity it is. So you have to be a really genuine artist, and a really hard worker.
Johnny: Absolutely.
Hannah: But you know what? It's the best time to be an artist, because everybody's losing their jobs, there are no jobs out there for you if you're graduating from college, you should be doing exactly what you want to do, because the world is so weird now, you shouldn’t be wasting your time doing anything but what you love.
Johnny: Right, you’ve got to be like Luke Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi, like flying full speed into the heart of the Death Star, you know?
Hannah: Totally, totally, follow exactly your intuition and just do that, because everything else is just baloney.
Johnny: Oh, yeah, we've been talking in our house about surviving the new depression. But it's cool because what I'm doing with doing people's autobiographies, it's just neat to know that there are going to be people with weird situations who have a little pile of money, and you somehow approach them and figure out a way to go into partnership with them and live off that for a while. That was the second part of the question. When you're talking about like pitching a TV show, what are the people like, who are the people who you are talking to? And I mean, when you go into a meeting with them or something about your idea, are they sitting there spitting back critiques at you, or are they just being mysterious and just sort of saying like, "Hmm, we will take this into consideration?"
Hannah: I've only done it a couple times, I've done it with Mimi & Flo, and I've also done it with Paul. The kind of television stuff that we've gotten for Mimi & Flo so far has just been audition with networks for the acting part of us, which is me and Frances. With pitching web series, which is actually where it's more hot, networks are doing less and less pilots, so you don’t get to pitch pilots as much. Web stuff people are making like crazy. So we’ve had some really good situations so far, nothing's come to fruition, but we've gotten close in pitching ideas for new web series, and right now we’re in the middle of a new process of doing that. It varies; it's producers and it's people that are coming from the west coast, which I never have had before. They’ll give you either notes, or they’ll steer you into a direction of ideas, and you try to take that as either a suggestion, or you take that as something that you need to do to put into your writing. Does that make sense?
Johnny: Yeah, it does, there's one thing. I was having a conversation with this girl I know who is a photographer, breaking into photography in LA, and we were speaking grand generalizations about LA and stuff, and she was saying like, "The more I photograph celebrities out in LA, I feel like some people just have 'it,' and other people don’t have 'it'." And that ties into stereotypes you hear about like producers meeting with people and deciding within three seconds do you or do you not have 'it'. And I could see like young people who want to become actors thinking I guess it all comes down to whether or not I have 'it,' and if I don’t have some 'it' factor that says I should be onscreen, I should just give up. But I have all these stories from my experience of people I know, who might have been able to be convinced at one point that they didn’t have 'it,' but they kept working on whatever 'it' was that they did, and now no one can say they don’t have 'it'.
Hannah: I mean if this is for like young Evanstonians, I don’t even think if you're a young Evanstonian you even know who you are yet. I don’t think you can judge who you are.
Johnny: Right, so your desire to do this is its own ticket, its own warrant that you should be doing it.
Hannah: I think I think this. I think you are what you do. So if you're figuring out what you do, you don’t really know if you have 'it' yet. I mean I'm a self-starter, I really believe in making my own work. I went to New York to be an actress, I've been writing my own plays, and my own TV show of some sort, at first not because I wanted to, just because I wanted to give myself work, because it's so hard to get work, especially if you don’t have all the connections in the world, you have to make them. So I feel like you are your work. I can understand if someone's saying 'it' is talent, but if you work really hard, you could make 'it,' you could make what that is, you make that entity.
Johnny: Exactly, and this is a related thing. Do you find it embarrassing or hard to talk about your work, or sell yourself?
Hannah: Yeah, totally, it's the worst. Like right now, I grew up with you, and it's a little difficult and weird to talk positively about where you are in your life. I'm like, "Oh, where am I, oh my god?"
Johnny: Well, and I'm sitting here thinking, as I talk to you, talking to people like this is a big part of my job as a writer, but at the same time, I wouldn’t want anybody to think that it’s your job as a writer to talk confidently and in generalizations, and in the way that sounds somehow definitive about things. But just to let everybody know, with my work as a writer, I find it hard to talk about it rather than just do it too, you know? Do it and show it, do it and show it.
Hannah: Totally, well it’s like when someone's like, "How do you tell a good joke?" And you start mathematically taking it apart, and you're like, "Oh, my god, there's nothing funny about this, and it's taking all the fun out of it." Sometimes it's scary to dissect what you do.
Johnny: Well here's an interesting question, have you ever had this feeling; I've had this a bunch of times in my life, sometimes related to art or not. But have you ever not laughed a truly deep belly laugh in a while and wondered if you lost the ability to laugh, and then you laugh, and you're really happy that it came back?
Hannah: Yeah, I have. Or your stomach hurts, and you're like, "Oh god, I haven't laughed so hard in six months." Yeah, it's growing up a little bit. [LAUGHS] Or you're just not around anything funny.
Johnny: Because I think if we're going to talk about concepts as mystical as 'it' or whatever, let's talk about more positive mystical concepts like your gut and stuff like that. It is important to notice if you haven't laughed in a while, and be grateful when you get around the right people, or you get into a new mood and you do laugh, you know what I mean?
Hannah: Yeah, I laugh a lot with Mimi & Flo and with my theater company though.
Johnny: Yeah, it was really fun, when I first started watching the first moment of the first episode of Mimi & Flo I ever watched, I was ticking off the references that were funny, and they were making my inner funny bone go, but sort of anticipating my first laugh. And then when my first laugh came, it was really fun.
Hannah: Good. [LAUGHS]
Johnny: It was really, really fun. So yeah, I guess here's another question, this is something that it's good to be able to think strategically about, it's part of thinking about what you want out of art. When you're meeting with somebody to like give you money to develop a web series, or sign you up for TV show or something—I want to find a way to say this very plainly, because it just relates to what a lot of my friends who are doing all these arts are doing. Like I've got painter friends, and they're wondering what price should I put on my paintings? Or I've got musician friends, and they're wondering how much should I charge for a show? Like at this point, if you could get exactly what you realistically wanted from the TV people or whatever, what's your price? Would you be like, "I want to set aside a certain amount of money to be my personal salary, a certain amount of money for producing my stuff, and then beyond that I just am grateful for the bigger audience and we'll see what happens?"
Hannah: Completely.
Johnny: Like what's your breakdown?
Hannah: I mean, in all my projects I wish that everyone could just be comfortable, there's nothing that I really want to be making a lot of money. Like slowly things with theater has gotten increasingly better, just by working harder, and bigger theaters and stuff. But with Mimi & Flo, or with any kind of web project or anything, it would just be something that was just enough that I would be more comfortable than really, really doing it all low, low budg'.
Johnny: And like when you're talking to money people, do they...
Hannah: They ask us for budgets, they ask us to break down an entire budget, and we have to guess.
Johnny: And can you put your salary in the budget?
Hannah: Oh, yeah.
Johnny: But they don’t pressure you in a weird way to omit your own salary from the budget and act like you would do it for free or something?
Hannah: No. I mean I am a big fan of not underselling yourself, because you kind of set your price. If you undersell yourself, other people will too. Also, a $50 couch is not treated as well as a $2,000 couch. And that's not saying inflate yourself, but it's saying you are worth a lot, and if you think you're worth a lot, it's a really good thing. You're also your own PR person. But that's more of a painter's kind of thing. For this kind of stuff, with Mimi & Flo, they're asking us to do budgets, we're trying to do breakdowns. Everybody wants to hear you say, "We make it for nothing," and they're like, "Could you make it for X?" And us be like, "Sure." But it's really not X, it's like all these friends who give us time pro bono, for a year of here and there doing things for us. So when we make a budget, we put in what our friends who are actually costume designers, or set designers, who do us a favor here and there. I mean a lot of times Frances, Jeff, and I do the whole thing ourselves. You know, I'm doing catering, Frances is doing assistant directing, or time charting everything, and I'm doing costumes, and Jeff's holding the camera and being the director. We're all writing it.
Johnny: And do you guys sketch your storyboards or anything?
Hannah: Not storyboards, but we write all of the scenes, everything's written.
Johnny: I was just wondering if drawing is a part of web video.
Hannah: It is for some people, Casimir does it all the time for music videos and stuff that he does. It depends on the director I think.
Johnny: But it's not unheard of?
Hannah: No, it's totally...
Johnny: It's totally heard of?
Hannah: Yeah. I mean web is the new film. There is not much film being done, it's all digital, so people are treating it with that kind of respect, especially now with HD, it looks so nice. So people are really storyboarding it, everybody's really, really going all out on it, especially given the time and the budget.
Johnny: And what about your relationship with people like me, like journalists basically, who might interview you, write criticism, and that can be just blogging about your stuff, or write like feature stories about you or whatever?
Hannah: Are you going to criticize me?
Johnny: Oh, no.
[LAUGHS]
Johnny: I do want to find a way to graphically describe and present on the page what the Mimi & Flo page looks like and stuff.
Hannah: Oh, yeah.
Johnny: There's this British film magazine called Sight and Sound that precedes all its film reviews with this really cool synopsis of the entire plot of the film or something.
Hannah: Have you seen on the website that there's like a web? There's a special link that you could see all of us...
Johnny: Yeah, I was amazed to see that.
Hannah: Is that something that you'd want to put in?
Johnny: Yeah, I'd want to put that on the page. Because for me, as a big information overloaded fan of entertainment, I'm so over the idea of spoiler alert, like if shit is really good...
Hannah: Yeah, put it in there.
Johnny: Yeah, instead of being vague for the sake of not spoiling it, put it in there, and the true fan will appreciate it more.
Hannah: Yeah, any of that stuff, we can just find a way to get you a JPEG or something.
Johnny: Yeah, absolutely.
Hannah: I think I'd like to go home soon.
Johnny: Cool, yeah.
Hannah: I have to get my mom's car back. [LAUGHS]
Johnny: Yeah, and you're an only child, she's probably afraid if you're out late. Well cool.
Hannah: More questions?
Johnny: Well I was just trying to remember what I was saying. Something about...
Hannah: Getting your visual picture... journalists.
Johnny: Oh yeah, that's just the one other thing that I'm encountering a lot. People are actually going a good job of promoting themselves on the web, like you guys are doing a great job of promoting yourself on the web, because you have a really nice, frequently updated website, and you're putting yourselves out there. But I've had people say, "I wish I could promote myself on the web better," and there used to be more of a formal network of critics and stuff. So my question is just do you ask people to write about you, or pursue attention from writers?
Hannah: We have a press release that we never sent out. We wrote something and we never actually sent it out. We've written some emails to like friends and stuff, just being like, "Hey, we updated stuff, we have a blog." I wish we were better about doing PR in general, but I think we luckily have just had the work or the viral video be the PR. Which even major PR companies are hiring people to do shitty looking viral stuff, because that's what PR is now, it's all backwards and weird, and they're at the brink of weird, new ways of making commercials and stuff. So luckily our medium is kind of feeding in on what people are kind of looking for. So we haven't done the formal PR, or seeking that kind of stuff out. I wish we were better at that. A lot of stuff has been word of mouth, like Facebook and stuff like that. All those kind of weird social networks are the new self-promotion.
Johnny: Yeah, and it's truly self-promotion. And how many times have you been interviewed in this way, where someone is asking you questions?
Hannah: Mimi & Flo, like for a radio station, or people have done little articles on stuff, on the Choose Your Own Adventure.
Johnny: And all that would be on the blog?
Hannah: Some the links are on the blog. Paul and I and Oliver have been on a few blogs and things like that, or reviews. Most of our pressy kind of things have been reviews on stuff.
Johnny: Oh, that's cool. And when you read reviews, because I have not had any of my work reviewed ever, to my knowledge, so I don’t know what that's like. Do you read your reviews, and do your reviews help you, or are they just like they are what they are, they're just reviews?
Hannah: If I'm in a play that someone else wrote, I don’t like reading reviews, because there's really not much I can do about it. But if I'm the producer of my theater company, or the play that I wrote, I'm conscious of it, just because it's my baby, and I know it's out there, and also like a month later, we're looking for pull quotes for a tour press packet that we're making, so I'm aware that it exists. But it's gross. I mean it's part of putting your stuff out there, people are going to judge it, people are going to talk about it, that's what you're doing, you're putting your own work out there.
Johnny: The final question, basically, related to that is, do you have any desire to comment on other people's blogs about shit, or write reviews yourself?
Hannah: No. You know, for a while with Mimi & Flo, at the beginning we were getting a lot of negative Same Dude stuff, just like, "Girl, your face is nasty," or stuff like that, and we were like, "How could you?" But then we realized that that's what the Youtube chatrooms, that's what those kind of things are, it's like open conversation. In some weird capacity it's like freedom of speech, so raw, gross, unedited. And it's amazing, because then you get all these other comments of people just following those threads, and for Youtube that's great, because you're getting all these clicks, but also it’s just interesting to see the constant chain of thoughts of crazy people around the world. We don’t edit that stuff. And also I don’t like backlashing on those, if someone's going to review you, you put yourself out there, you have to respect—unless it's personal. But I've never had anything like that.
Johnny: Cool, anything else you want to say?
Hannah: No, but if you have any other questions call me.
Johnny: I will.
[END INTERVIEW]
