Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Artists I Know: Hannah Bos (Part 1)

Where I'm from, where I live now, Evanston, Illinois, is a very special place. We grow up with more than our fair share of creative inspiration, so in disproportionate numbers we turn out to be creative. Documenting the inspiration and results of life in Evanston in order to further inspire the youth of America to pursue creative occupations is the brief of Heavanston (motto: "Evanston is our Yale"), an ongoing series of interviews with Evanston's creative sons, daughters, parents, and queer family friends by me, Johnny Sagan.  

The first interview is with my Washington School classmate Hannah Bos, a childhood friend who got over a million hits on YouTube with her R. Kelly parody "Same Dude". We talked about: how to be an internet TV writer, actor, playwright, and filmmaker; and about: how growing up in Evanston set the stage for her creative accomplishments as an adult.


Johnny:   I'm here with Hannah Bos. We were just talking about how it's been a little more than 10 years since she graduated. We're watching the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony on the screen behind us, a suitably epic backdrop for the first interview about Evanston, Illinois. Hannah is one of Evanston's creative daughters. Well, why don’t you tell me, when people say, "What do you do?" what do you say? 


Hannah:  I now say I'm an actor and a writer, I used to say I'm an actor, but now I say I'm an actor and a writer. 


Johnny:  Cool. And people would know you best at the moment, I would say, for two ongoing projects. 


Hannah:  Right. 


Johnny:  Your theater group, and your internet TV series. So what are those called, tell me a little about those? 


Hannah:  I have a downtown theater company called The Debate Society, which I'm the playwright for, and the actress. There are three people in it; I have a writing partner Paul Thureen, and a director of this tiny theater company, Oliver Butler. And we write our own plays that are all kind of good, avant-garde pieces, they're not hard to kind of access. The next play is at PS122 in November and December, and we're taking The Eaten Heart to Syracuse, New York, to the Red House in September.


Johnny:  I think I've heard of the Red House. 


Hannah:  It's awesome. It's a small, new theater space and gallery, they have a gallery space, they do music as well, but they're trying to bring some downtown theater people to their space. So we're going to be there in September, so I get to live in Syracuse for two weeks. 


Johnny:  Oh, wonderful.


Hannah:  Yeah. 


Johnny:  How many performances are you going to do? 


Hannah:  It's two weeks, we're doing two weekends, and then maybe some shows for schools, we're going to try to teach when we're out there. 


Johnny:  Oh, nice, like workshops? 


Hannah:  Workshops, yeah, my theater company's been doing a little bit of teaching just for fun, and trying to figure things out. 


Johnny:  And is it more teaching acting techniques, or like how to mount a show? 


Hannah:  It's not mounting a show, because we'd be talking too much about producing, which is the most depressing thing to talk about in theater, because there's no money for any arts in the world. But we kind of teach—I have a Masters, so I've taught like improv and acting, but I'm trying not to teach—but we teach this workshop called How To Write A Bad Play, and we make the worst possible play, in conjunction with actually writing something good, because whenever we're developing something, we have a really unique situation. It's one director and two writers, and the writers are the actors, which could be hell, but actually we found this great group of three people that really respect each other and we work well together. So when we're writing something, we often write the worst possible version of something. Say we're working on The Eaten Heart, which is the play we did last year, based on Decameron, which is like Italy's Canterbury Tales


Johnny:  Is it by Juvenal? 


Hannah:  No, it's Boccaccio.


Johnny:  Oh, Boccaccio, okay. 


Hannah:  But we did it in like a seventies hotel, and we took several stories; there's 100 of them, told over 10 nights. When we were writing it, we were like what is the worst fucking thing this character could say? So we take that, and we're constantly writing like the worst version of what we could be doing, to get to the gems. So with students, we teach them kind of like that the horrible, horrible decisions are often a way to find what really works. Because if you're stuck, it's so great to say, "Well, we know that the worst thing this person or this situation could be is this," so that's something we've been kind of teaching. 


Johnny:  Yeah, that's really important, because I think that for me as a writer, a lot of times I let thoughts of how awesome the writing I do could be if only I could bring my A-game at every possible second, and live up to my expectations; I let my vision of how great it should be stop be from getting started on the writing. 


Hannah:  Exactly. 


Johnny:  And you’ve got to figure out different ways to convince yourself to just put something on paper, take the risk. I mean is that kind of how that practice started? Just getting over perfectionism? 


Hannah:  Yeah, I mean actually none of us thought we were perfect in any way, we were all kind of weird, obscure artists trying to figure out what we do well. You know you do something well, but you're not sure what you do well, or you think you do one thing really well and you're scared of that, because you're like is this the one thing I do well? So I think in breaking through all those layers of the things you do well, it's fun to try things that you don’t do well, and in doing that you find all these negative and positive spaces of ways of writing, or acting, or creating, or trying anything. 


Johnny:  It's kind of interesting, I was working on a screenplay with one of my friends this winter, and at first our method was going to be dividing up the scenes, and writing something alone, and coming back, and then editing them together, and adding to each other's scenes. But my friend and I came back a week or two after the first scenes had been divided up, and I had worked on mine, but not enough, and he hadn’t worked on his, so we decided this week we're going to try to work together. And we just learned that we weren't the best writing partners, because I would throw something out and write something down on the script, and he kept saying, "No, that's not how you do it, you're putting too much information in, that's extraneous; show, don’t tell, show, don’t tell." And I realized after a couple of hours that he wasn’t letting me get any lines just down on the paper, he wanted to debate it all out verbally instead of getting it down. 


Hannah:  Yeah, I just figured out how to write by myself; I've always known how, but I just got the balls to do it a little bit. But I have this collaboration with my playwriting partner, who I've been writing with for like 10 or 11 years. We did our college thesis together, so we have a very unique kind of collaboration, it is hard to write with someone, and we have tried all different sorts of things. Like we have one computer, and weirdest case scenario is like the two of us on a couch with one computer in between us writing every word together with is crazy, but we've been working so long it's like twin talk. Another thing is us dividing up scenes, or characters, or storylines, and each of us writing the same scene, and then kind of melding the two together. Sometimes we're on both computers writing at the same time, I mean we've tried it all. Luckily we both work, and we respect each other enough to know that fighting is not personal, it's most like getting to what is really important that we're writing about. I also have Mimi & Flo, which is three writers, and it's sometimes writing together, and it's sometimes writing ideas together, and it's another kind of just figuring it out as you go, but it's always a challenge. 


Johnny:  And then one interesting question is do you have hard and fast rules when you're writing, about like how many hours to do it at a time for, or how many days a week to do it? I mean you said you’ve done most of your writing with other people, right? 


Hannah:  Yeah, but now I'm in a writing group, in the summer I started a screenplay, and starting a little novel project, but I'm really focusing right now on a screenplay just to do myself, because I have all these great collaborations, and I've been writing more and more on my own, but I've kind of given myself a goal. I'm not a procrastinator, but I'm really good with goals, so I wouldn’t say that I write every day for a certain amount of hours, but if I have a deadline I will kill myself, and that's how I get stuff done, even if it's a self-imposed deadline. I just need to give myself my own anxiety and suffering. 


Johnny:  Interviews always jump around a lot at the beginning, but your boyfriend is also a creative artist? 


Hannah:  Yes. 


Johnny:  Do you guys write and edit film and stuff in the same place, in the same house, in the same room, and just ignore each other and focus on your little project together, or do you go off in separate places to do it? 


Hannah:  Luckily we don’t live together, which is...


Johnny:  Yeah, it is lucky. 


Hannah:  [LAUGHS] Which is great for now, and he and I do sometimes work in the same space on separate computers, but they're in different rooms. He luckily has a two-bedroom in Carol Gardens, so I have enough room to work on my computer and do my writing if he's editing. But Paul and I, my writing partner, and a third person, live in Brooklyn together in an apartment, so we are constantly in the same apartment, but we shut our doors or meet in our living room. It's super cheese ball, we'll be like, "In a half hour, bring that scene in the living room," which is sometimes terrible, because we're making something together and want to kill each other, but it's also great to wake someone up in the middle of the night with a great idea. 


Johnny:  Oh, hell yeah. I love those little really short deadlines like go write something down for half an hour, and I don’t care how bad it is. Bring it back and read it, and then...


Hannah:  That's often the best stuff, when you're like, "You have 10 minutes to write a paragraph." There's no judgment, there's no editing, it's often really good stuff. 


Johnny:  One of my tricks I like to use if I'm writing with someone else is something I actually really—one of the places I really got to perfect this method was tutoring in English and history at ETHS; if somebody's stuck with writing, I ask them to just say verbally what they'd like this part of the piece to say, and then I kind of trick them, because they tell me, "Well I kind of want it to say that there's nothing so important as love," and I then I say, "Write down exactly what you just said, 'There's nothing so important as love.'" And I've found that's a good way to just maintain momentum and get stuff done on paper. Because a lot of high school kids in particular get intimidated about propriety and stuff in the written language, and most people without thinking about it are really easy to understand verbally.


Hannah:  Right. Great watch. 


Johnny:  Oh, thanks. It may be a reference to a Jay-Z line. "I'm like Che Guevara with bling on, I'm complex, I never claim to have wings on, I get by any means on whenever there's a drought, get your umbrellas out because that's when I brainstorm."


Hannah:  Holy shit, I love that watch. 


Johnny:  But I felt a little guilty when I got it, because it's from the Museum of Contemporary Art gift shop, which by the way is one of my tips for finding a cool, unique watch. 


Hannah:  Here? 


Johnny:  Here in Chicago. Because I love the idea of Swatches. 


Hannah:  I love Swatches. 


Johnny:  They're awesome. 


Hannah:  I have many. 


Johnny:  Exactly. It can be hit or miss, though, sometimes when you go to the store, because they always have this limited season. Ebay is the shit. 


Hannah:  You could also join their club. You get a free watch. 


Johnny:  Oh, really? 


Hannah:  Through them. It's really dorky. 


Johnny:  I wanted their little personal proprietary time thing to catch on, they have like Swatch time. It's cool. And there's this guy who works at the Under Bridge Bookstore on Broadway, in Boys Town, where Jesse used to live, and he had the coolest, most colorful Swatches all the time. And he put me onto this online world of like plastic watch excessives. Cool shit, you know? But I felt like it maybe would be a little bit of bad karma to have Che, you know, I was at some Cuban diner, and some old émigré was pouring my coffee, and it would be like seeing Hitler, you know? 


Hannah:  Yeah. 


Johnny:  But this is like subtle anti-Che protest. 


Hannah:  Mimi & Flo was writing a television show, and there was like a whole thing about the fascist—it's like a new Mimi & Flo idea we were pitching, and there was like a whole thing about Che. 


Johnny:  Oh, really? 


Hannah:  Yeah. I can't tell you. [LAUGHS]


Johnny:  Oh, did you sign that disclosure? 


Hannah:  Yeah, it's top secret. 


Johnny:  So tell me about Mimi & Flo, how it started, and where did the characters come from? 


Hannah:  The characters are loosely based on myself and Frances Chewning, the other actress on the show, she's from Wisconsin.


Johnny:  Where in Wisconsin? 


Hannah:  She's actually from Madison, but the character's from a smaller town, and I'm from the Chicagoland area, obviously. 


Johnny:  I consider Madison and Evanston to be sister communities. 


Hannah:  They are very similar, very similar. So she kind of has a very similar background of moving from the Midwest to New York City. We wanted to do something funny together, we had both gone to Harvard together, she was a year ahead of me in the American Repertory Theater, Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University and the Moscow Art Theater. That's the name of our school. 


Johnny:  What? 


Hannah:  Yeah. Side note, it was crazy hard and awesome, but it was basically very similar to the stuff I learned when I was like eight years old at the Piven Theater Workshop. I'm a Piven kid. 


Johnny:  You're a product of Piven? 


Hannah:  Yeah. 


Johnny:  This is so interesting because Miss Squires-Collins, a beloved ETHS English teacher, who was doing her first year of teaching in my freshman year, so you may not know her, we had dinner with her the other day, and her daughter just did like her first Piven class, and she asked for a second one. And I feel that's the pivotal test of a Piven kid. Like I did one Piven class and I was like, "Hell no." 


Hannah:  [LAUGHS] You're like, "This is lame." 


Johnny:  Yeah, or, "I'm embarrassed." But like if they do it once and they want to go back, something could be going on.

 

Hannah:  Totally, yeah. I mean I did it forever, it was like my favorite thing ever. I still have beautiful, vivid dreams about those classes as an eight-year-old. 


Johnny:  And you would improvise, and just roll with it? 


Hannah:  It was like Story Theater, and improv, and the best kind of playing ever. 


Johnny:  What about the fact that, at least at Washington School, we had drama teachers, and I'm thinking of one drama teacher in particular, Miss Laurel Serleth. 


Hannah:  I love her and sometimes have coffee with her when I come back into town. 


Johnny:  You do? 


Hannah:  Yeah. 


Johnny:  So she still lives here? 


Hannah:  Yeah. 


Johnny:  And does she still teach at elementary level? 


Hannah:  I think so. 


Johnny:  At Washington?


Hannah:  I think so, a couple years ago she was. 


Johnny:  Because I don’t know if this is a common experience or not, but the fact that her main method was to collectively tell a story and have cliffhangers each week and return to the story, and add another 45 minutes or hour to it and live through it was so fucking cool.


Hannah:  She blew my mind in I don’t even know what grade. She dressed up as the church lady.


Johnny:  Oh, from Saturday Night Live


Hannah:  It was so good, it was so accurate, it was so good. She gave me my start, she gave me the lead part in my fourth or fifth grade school play. 


Johnny:  And what was it? 


Hannah:  I don’t remember. 


Johnny:  Because I'm trying to remember what our school play system was at Washington.


Hannah:  I think it was Beats Me, Claude, and I can't remember, Mario something was Claude, and I was his wife, and I got to eat a real piece of pie each show. [LAUGHS]


Johnny:  I think you're right, because that name sounds so familiar, but what is Beats Me, Claude


Hannah:  I think it's like a kid's book that they did a full-length all-school play, everybody got a part. 


Johnny:  And she like adapted it herself you think? 


Hannah:  Yes. She also I think recommended me for Piven, I think, 8,000 years ago. 


Johnny:  Were you in the studio art program at Washington, by any chance? 


Hannah:  No.


Johnny:  That was just another cool thing where you could go and work on your own, like visual art projects. 


Hannah:  At Washington? 


Johnny:  At Washington, yeah. 


Hannah:  I don’t remember that.


Johnny:  In Mrs. Galloway's art room.


Hannah:  I remember Miss Galloway. Maybe I was. Could you do whatever you wanted? 


Johnny:  Yeah, you could do whatever you wanted, and you would have like an open studio time once a week. 


Hannah:  I think I did that. 


Johnny:  Yeah. I was in that, and it was really deep. 


Hannah:  A special place? [LAUGHS]


Johnny:  Yeah, a special place for me. And it was where I started my long tradition of starting ambitious projects, and never feeling like they were finished. That's an interesting question. 


Hannah:  So it's all her fault. 


Johnny:  It's all her fault. But it's also, I mean...


Hannah:  It's 11 o'clock at night, let's call her right now.


Johnny:  Exactly. It's also, though, I think just a way of being as an artist, and something that all artists have to deal with, the fact that completion is in the eye of the beholder sometimes. Like do you have completion issues, or are you the kind of artist who likes to read or watch your finished work, and is happy about it? Or when you see your finished work, are you like, "Do I sound like that?" Or, "I remember we couldn’t get that sound recording right, I hate this, it's not done?" 


Hannah:  Well I hate watching live theater recordings, because it's like hell on Earth, it's the worst possible thing. 


Johnny:  Like the most embarrassing possible thing in the world? 


Hannah:  [LAUGHS] It's the worst thing ever, ever. 


Johnny:  It'd probably be like listening to unwittingly recorded phone conversations or something. 


Hannah:  Yeah, yeah. It's horrific, but you learn a lot. I do like reading things, but if I know that I have the option of it not being finished, of course, to me I will feel unsatisfied. That's why I think deadlines are really important, whether it's like the theater is opening the play that night, or we need a draft by this or when. It's weird when you're acting, I feel, when I'm in a role, and I'm in a play, I get to feel the ending, because it's sometimes someone else's words, or it's my own, but it's only my job to do a good job as an actor, so I'm in it fully, and I have to make an ending, or I have to do my job. So that's a good way of feeling endings of things. But often, you know, maybe the play's not perfect, or something's off, so you're like I can only do my job as well as I can do it. But you get to experience an ending of an arc of a character at least. 


Johnny:  Because Mimi & Flo is sort of like designed to be endless. 


Hannah:  True. That actually is a really good point. Yes, we can finish an episode, or like a beat, or a joke, but we're always ongoing, because it's choose your own adventure. 


Johnny:  And are you influenced by the venerable classic Choose Your Own Adventure books? 


Hannah:  Yes, when Frances and I were like, "Let's do a project together," she wanted to do something for theater, and I was like, "I'd really like to do something more permanent, like film, or the web," and she was like, "Great, me too," and I was like, "Secretly, I've always wanted to do a Choose Your Own Adventure web series," and she was like, "Yes." And her boyfriend got involved, we started writing together, he's a filmmaker. I grew up reading those books; I love Choose Your Own Adventure books. 


Johnny:  Did you used to like stick your finger in the Choose Your Own Adventure book, and like go and look and both potential endings, and then choose which one you would go with? 


Hannah:  Yeah, totally, or like go backwards through stuff. 


Johnny:  Yeah. 


Hannah:  Cheat, completely. 


Johnny:  Oh, absolutely. Because when I was first watching Mimi & Flo, I didn’t know how all that would work, and I didn’t know that once you get to the very end of a storyline you can go back and look at the other options. But the first time I used the option to go back was when you guys were thinking of starting the trend of wearing oven mitts. I initially chose entertainment, because I thought that you were going to do fashion based on the entertainment magazine. And I was like, "Word," because that's another one of my things I like to do, like make collages from fashion magazines, you know? 


Hannah:  Right, right. [LAUGHS]


Johnny:  And I was like, "Oh, my god, she is strumming my pain with her fingers." 


Hannah:  Right, but we totally disappointed you. 


Johnny:  Yeah. So as soon as I saw it was going to be some stripper shit, I was like, I bet this is going to be a quick dead end, I want to keep the love. Then it was interesting, because I kept choosing the more positive ones, like accept that girl ripping off your style, like rather than kill her. It was the same feeling that I would get reading the Choose Your Own Adventure books; they were subtly moralistic. 


Hannah:  Or morbidly depressing. You'd be like, "You fell down the cauldron, and you're burning now." 


Johnny:  But usually that would be the consequence of choosing some more impulsive or materialistic path or something, you know? 


Hannah:  That's true.


Johnny:  I think they were also teaching storytelling in some ways, like it's harder to keep a story going with more violent and decisive action sometimes, you know? 


Hannah:  Totally, totally. 


Johnny:  So yeah, I was trying to surf on the love. 


Hannah:  We try to keep it positive. 


Johnny:  Yeah, I mean I even had the dude fall for you and not her, out of like a weird real-world in narrative prejudice where I was like—see, the thing is, when you perpetuate the stereotype of men being more attracted to blonde women, is that you can never really trust that stereotypical infatuation with a blonde. I can just tell that there's going to be less narrative juice in that. I think, or are those the last two episodes you filmed, so that neither one goes on longer? 


Hannah:  We have three more coming out like this week. 


Johnny:  Yeah, but as it is. 


Hannah:  As it is, I think...


Johnny:  There's a date with each girl? 


Hannah:  Yeah, I think that there's more blonde right now. I mean existing, I think you have more of a story right now with the blonde, with Mimi, than Flo's character. But that's also the nature of Flo's character, is just a little bit more...


Johnny:  Frustrating? 


Hannah:  Frustrating, yeah. 


Johnny:  Yeah, totally. Here's a question about Mimi & Flo, and just about both of your ongoing creative projects. Is it something that needs money to even be created, or is it something that as long as you guys are willing to devote your energy to writing it and filming it, and rehearsing it and stuff, you have enough time and money to put it on? 


Hannah:  Good question. Does it need money? It costs money to make it, it doesn’t cost a lot of money in dollars and cents, because luckily, we put a lot of our own time into it, which ultimately costs a lot on stamina, on relationships, on favors, on this and that. 


Johnny:  And that's why you're like talking to people about TV and stuff, because it might be reaching like a critical mass point? 


Hannah:  Yeah, I mean, it's something that we made for fun, but also that we're really serious about, because we wanted to make a television-y show for the web, and we also wanted to try and interactive website, which luckily we were all really proud of it, and we got good attention, and...


Johnny:  It really works pacing-wise and stuff. 


Hannah:  Yeah, also personally, it was a chance for me to do the opposite of theater, and to get something a little more permanent out there, and also to learn how to write not for the stage, and learn how to write for more commercial things. And Frances and Jeff have a similar feeling of things that we got out of it. We also got good connections, and we had a Youtube hit based on the characters with the Same Dude, and we got like a million and a half viewers from that. 


Johnny:  Yeah, you should definitely mention that almost in a class by itself, because it's like a spinoff into the world of Youtube music, and Youtube hits. 


Hannah:  Right.


Johnny:  And it's so Evanston, by the way, of you to have love for R. Kelly and music videos, you know? 


Hannah:  I love R. Kelly, yeah, totally. 


Johnny:  Enough to be like, "It's important that I first memorize Same Girl." Well did you have love for Same Girl before you knew you wanted to do a parody of it, or was it like it came out, you immediately knew you wanted to do a parody of it, so then you learned it? 


Hannah:  We wanted to do a music video for fun, and also to get more viewers, because we had our own existing website that was separate from Youtube, and it was necessary to get viewers through Youtube, because it's like changed the world. And we just wanted more people to our site for fun. So we wanted to do a music video, I saw the R. Kelly Same Girl video, and Frances and Jeff called me and they were like, "Have you seen this video?" We were all like, "Yes," they were like, "We want to make a video," we were like, "This is it." And we were all kind of surprised secretly that we were all really excited about making an R. Kelly video. So we spent like a month on it, doing it shot for shot, Jeff did a beautiful job, we all wrote the song together, Jeff did the music, re-recorded it so we wouldn’t get in trouble. It's a satire, so we're okay in that department. And then we had all these funny costuming ideas, and just retarded Brooklyn things that we could put in there, and tried to do the best worst job we could do with it. And then we put it on Youtube, on our Mimi & Flo account, and then we got featured, like maybe a week after, two weeks after. And then we went from like 27,000 hits to a million.


Johnny:  And how did you get featured? 


Hannah:  I think they just liked the video. It's very hard to get featured now; at the time I think it was really hard as well. 


Johnny:  But did you submit it to be considered for featured? Or you just put it up and they themselves just found it? 


Hannah:  We put it up, and we contacted all our contacts, like we'd been featured for other things, and just watched by other things, like Yahoo really likes us, and Revver really likes us, and Pop Candy, and... who am I forgetting? 


Johnny:  And did you find out about Revver and Pop Candy from a fan's perspective, because you yourself were searching for sketch comedy and stuff to watch on the internet? Or did someone say like if you're making internet videos, don’t sleep on Revver and Pop Candy and you found out who they were? 


Hannah:  We uploaded to anybody who would take us. 


Johnny:  So you researched that a little bit? 


Hannah:  Yeah, some people gave us good responses. We're not doing any ad sales, we were just like, "Let's just put our stuff out there," that's what important, having people see your work. So we kind of just put ourselves on anybody who would take us. And then we established some good relationships with certain websites, and really nice editors, and then I think with Youtube we started putting some stuff up, and we wrote to them, and didn’t hear anything back, and eventually were on the front page. 


Johnny:  Sweet. 


Hannah:  Yeah, it was great, and we got a little bit of good press from certain people. It's all on our blog, I can't really remember right now. 


Johnny:  Oh, you have a blog that detailed the story of this? 


Hannah:  We have a blog, it connects all the nice stuff people have said about the site, it's somewhere on our website. 


Johnny:  And who programs that blog? 


Hannah:  That blog is programmed by us.


Johnny:  So you know how to do that and everything? 


Hannah:  Yeah, little bits, I'm pretty bad, Frances is really good at it. 


Johnny:  Okay. 


Hannah:  But our website, like our huge crazy one is done by someone in Spain. 


Johnny:  And is that somebody who's a friend, or someone you hired/ 


Hannah:  It's friend of Jeff's, his name's Nathan, he's really good. And so we send episodes to him, and he puts them up. And for the first launch, we had editors in New York and LA sending stuff to Spain to put up for our New York launch.


Johnny:  Wow, so are you communicating with these people on the phone, e-mail, instant message, or all of them? 


Hannah:  A lot of e-mail, not much phone, a little bit of phone. 


Johnny:  Instant message? 


Hannah:  Not so much, we did a little Skype. We've done everything, especially for conference calls, as we've gotten a little more exciting things happening, we're starting to pitch new shows, web shows, or a television show, web mostly, we've done conference calls and IMing and all that stuff. That's what people do now, I didn’t know that, but that's what people do. 


Johnny:  Have you done video chatting? 


Hannah:  Yeah. 


Johnny:  And what do you like to use video chatting for? I just started video chatting, and I find one thing about it is it's emotionally satisfying, so for like friendships, it can be so much more emotionally satisfying than writing or talking on the phone. I haven't used it for any kind of formal collaboration. I have noticed that sometimes when it's time to get off of a Skype call, it's really time to get off, because you're like, "Uh, this is so boring..."


Hannah:  Yeah, it's good for not interrupting, like it'll stop you from interrupting, because it's like da—eh—er—... [LAUGHS]


Johnny:  Yeah. 


Hannah:  When I talk on the phone, like I like to do 50 things at once, and you can't really escape your computer, and if you're painting your nails, and making a sandwich, or totally not paying attention they know, so that's kind of bad. 


Johnny:  But for comedy writers, is it like...


Hannah:  Frances, Jeff, and I have had meetings, but we've done just throwing ideas around, we haven't actually done writing on Skype. 


Johnny:  Oh, like on their little writing part, on their little chat window? 


Hannah:  Yeah, we haven't done that. 

[END PART 1]




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