FEARnet's original comedy series
Holliston chronicles the struggles and
humiliations of two
horror geeks who aspire to become filmmakers. Created, written and directed by horror
director
Adam Green (
Hatchet), the series stars Green and director Joe Lynch (
Wrong
Turn 2: Dead End)
playing parodies of themselves. Blu-ray.com staff reviewer Michael Reuben spoke with Green
and Lynch on the eve of
Holliston's release by Image Entertainment. The
following is excerpted
from their conversation:
Congratulations on the first season! Is IMDb correct that there will be a Christmas
special in December?
ADAM: Yes, we're just editing it now, and we're very excited about it. Because of how cable
TV works, there would have been a long break between seasons, and we didn't want the fans
to
have to wait that long. So we came up with the idea for a one-hour Christmas special. And I
don't want to give spoilers, but big things are going to happen for some of the characters. It's
going to be important for what happens in the future.
JOE: We were thinking about some of the British series like
The Office and
Dr. Who, where they
have these big Christmas specials that are special celebrations, and we wanted to do
something
like that, so that maybe in years to come, people could celebrate their holiday by playing the
Holliston Christmas episode. I mean, Christmas is Adam's favorite holiday . . .
But Joe, didn't you say in one of the commentaries that Halloween is
Adam's favorite
holiday?
JOE: Wow, you listened to the commentary? I'm impressed. Well, Adam loves holidays . . .
ADAM: Yeah, my Christmas decorations go up early, even though I'm Jewish.
We'll call it a Halloween-Chanukah-Christmas special.
ADAM: We'd really like to do a Halloween special, but this year the timing didn't work out.
IMDb also says the second season of Holliston will be ten episodes
starting next June.
ADAM: I'm not sure whether it will be June or May. I don't think it will be as early as April.
[
Ed. note: Season 1 premiered on April 3, 2012.]
But it's ten episodes?
ADAM: Yes, but the big difference is that they'll be half-hour episodes. They were closer to an
hour at the beginning because FEARnet was making this their flagship, but this season it goes
into more of a traditional format of twenty-two to twenty-four minutes.
Joe, you're also a director and writer. Will you write or direct any upcoming
episodes?
JOE: One of the things that I'm really happy with in terms of the collaboration that Adam's
brought me into [is that] we both hash out all of the plot points, a lot of the jokes, a lot of
the
character beats, and then Adam goes away, and the next thing you know there's 500 pages
staring right back at you and you go, "oh shit! that's a lot of stuff"—in a great way. So I've
been
involved in the writing process in that sensibility, but this is Adam's show. In terms of writing
future episodes, I think it's more just down to union stuff. The reason why I'm not directing
episodes is because we're not DGA, and I'm a DGA member. It gets a little sticky with the
unions. But to be totally honest, I love to just be focused on bringing my A game to the acting
sensibility. Adam wears a lot of hats, and it's so inspiring to see him putting on all those hats
all
the time, but it definitely takes its toll too. One of the things that we switched up a little bit in
this
season is that Adam
didn't direct all the episodes. He directed some, and then
Sean Becker, who
is our supervising producer, came on and directed a lot of the episodes too. But it's never
about
title. All of us are so much in this bubble of collaboration that it was just a matter of making
sure
that everything's on page, and everything's put together right when we're there on the day
between Adam, myself, the girls and Sean. We would make sure that everything was so tight,
and
we'd rehearsed for months on end, that I'm not sure I'd want to put on another hat at that
point. I
would just want to make sure that I get my lines right, and I'm serving the story.
ADAM: The other thing to remember about television, and especially scripted half-hour
television, is that the show runner is really the director. You can watch any episode of
Friends,
and you'll see all these different director names come up, but it still feels like the same show. I
think what really worked was that last season I was able to groom Sean Becker, who is the
supervising producer and basically helping me direct the show and watching how I want things
and how I do things; so this season I was little bit more comfortable to step back and not
have to
go watch playback after everything. I trusted that Sean knew exactly how to do this, but at
the
same time Sean has no ego and had no problem with me still calling the shots and saying,
"This
is what we're going to do, this is how we're doing that or doing this. I think if you were to
bring
in another feature film director, they would get very frustrated very fast having to answer to
me
or have me still overseeing the whole thing so—[
to Joe] I won't speak for you—
but it's almost
like, why even do it? Unless you're going to take it and be, "I'm going to do my own spin on
this
whole thing . . . "
JOE: A lot of times, technically, you have three directors on set between Adam, myself and
Sean,
but there was never once where I felt uncomfortable with a choice. Whenever there was an
idea
that was pitched or a certain scene that was shot, I never questioned it once, because we
either
hammered out these questions in prep or we all had the same sensibility when it comes to the
show that, if Adam has an idea or if Sean has an idea or even one of us has an idea, one of
the
other cast members, it's all taken very seriously and we try a lot of them too. But I never
doubted
either of you guys [so] that the directorial version of me had to go, "Well, actually, I think that
we should do
this." Never once. Everybody got the show.
ADAM: Especially stylistically, because with a sitcom it has to be shot a certain way. That's
one
of the hardest things for us to do with a feature sensibility. "Oh now we should get this cool
shot"
or "let's go over the shoulder for this conversation"—you don't do that on a sitcom. It's a
very
specific thing. That's why the show works, [because] we are married to what a mainstream
sitcom would look and feel like, but then we do our thing with that. And also, just to be very
clear too, it's not like Sean Becker, who directed eight of the episodes this season, is just
sitting
there doing exactly what I say and doing shots. He's very, very involved [and] totally gets the
dynamic of the show. [E]very idea he brings to the table we use, because they're phenomenal
. . .
JOE: Hilarious! That was one of the great things. It's very rare that you get a director or
another
producer like Sean, where he's coming out and he's being part of all the rehearsals, but even .
. .
every night that we would rehearse, we would end up working out after, he would run with
us, he
would exercise with us. And when we would go out and do cast bonding things, like we would
go bowling or we would go out to dinner, or whatever, Sean was with us. He didn't need to,
but
he wanted to hang out with us. Also, Sean has a
fantastic laugh; so when you're
doing a scene,
we have audience there to kind of laugh with us and let us know where the laugh beats are,
but
you knew you hit it right when you heard Sean's very distinctive laugh. So that was another
thing: Did we hear Sean laugh? Then we did right.
Adam, did you always plan to play yourself, even as far back as when the series
was at
UPN?
ADAM: When I made
Coffee and Donuts, which was the movie that spawned all
this, I did play
myself. It's just easier that way, since I'm writing it, directing it and it's based on me. Rather
than
put some other actor through the torture of "no, do it like this! no, do it like that!", it's just
easier
for me to do it. I'm very confident with acting to a level. To play myself, no problem, I can
totally do that, but I don't think Gary Oldman has to start looking over his shoulder being
scared
I'm going to take some of his roles away from him any time soon. I know where I'm good.
This
was a natural fit. The whole main cast, the characters are all written for them specifically,
because they're based on these people. In that regard, it really worked. Now, when the show
was
originally set up at UPN as
Coffee and Donuts, it was a very different show, and
that was the first
thing they said before "noting" me to death through the development process and changing
the
whole show into something I really didn't want to do anymore. Right out of the gate, they
were
like: "You will not direct this, and you cannot act in it. You're only writing it." I was like, OK, I
get it. This was my first real job. So I understood that's how it goes. Another benefit to this
taking thirteen years to get made is that now I was in a position where I could sort of call the
shots and say this is the cast, this is how we're going to do it. But there was never a problem
with
that. There was never a moment where FEARnet didn't see eye to eye. It was really Peter
Block's, the president's, idea to do a show that we were in, which is what made me
comfortable
even pitching this idea to him in the first place.
I like that phrase "noting me to death". On the commentary, you say the show
"got away"
from you at UPN. So besides taking you out of the cast, UPN also didn't want you to direct?
ADAM: Yeah, I wouldn't have been directing it either, because remember at the time this was
2003 when the show was first set up. If it had happened, I had nothing to prove that I should
be
directing it. Especially with TV pilots, there's this handful of pilot directors that every network
uses and they go to. So that was never even going to [happen], and I had no leverage. There
was
no way to say, "Well . . . " Maybe if there had been competing networks trying to get this
property, I would have had a position in the negotiations [to] say, "I'll go with the network
that's
going to let me direct it." Honestly, I had no business directing it at that point. I hadn't done
anything real at that point in my life. So I understand that. But the note process is what ruins
most things, because you've got twelve people from the network and sixteen people from
the
studio and then the producers, and everybody's got to say something. It's not their fault, and
it's
not [that] their notes are necessarily bad. I mean, if this show were developed for say, the
CW, or
ABC, they have to fit with their other shows, and they know what's working for them and
what
their brand is. So they're going to design and gear the show to fit with a specific thing and to
be a
companion piece for another show like it. The beauty of FEARnet was there
were
no other
original shows there yet. They had
not been defined. So we got to be that litmus
test, and we got
to be their flagship thing. When you get to do a show with a brand new network that's not
available everywhere just yet—I mean, they're growing superfast—one of the sacrifices that
you
make is this isn't an NBC show with NBC money and a reach of twelve million people right out
of the gate, but at the same time you get to make the show that you really want to make.
Thankfully, in the case of
Holliston, even if people didn't get the FEARnet network
yet at the
time, they still found it on iTunes and they still are searching now, and next week when it hits
DVD, everybody will be able to see it on Blu-ray or DVD or Netflix, and it's really next week
we're excited about, because now it's really going to find an even bigger audience than it
already
has. But the audience was so passionate about it and so outspoken and
loud in
how much they
rallied behind it that we got a second season pickup the morning after the second episode
aired,
which we never expected to happen . . .
JOE: No way!
ADAM: . . . we thought this was going to be a very slow uphill climb, if there was a climb at
all.
We had no idea what to expect. So the fact that people embraced it so fast—and it's not just
genre fans; it's comedy fans that just like the show, and they don't even get the horror
references
entirely but they still think it's funny—it's very, very lucky in the way this all worked out.
Suppose it had worked out at UPN or CW, and you ended up running there for
years. Do
you think you would have had the horror career that you've had since then?
ADAM: I don't know. Probably not, because if the show had gone [ahead], I wouldn't have
had
the time. There's something about making an independent movie, especially something like
Hatchet, where you have to be so hungry for it. I mean, I put everything on the
line, maxed out
all my credit cards, went $80,000 into debt by the time I was done with that movie, and
that's not
even money spent on making the movie. That's money spent on promoting it and trying to
get
distribution and let people know about it. The movie didn't have distribution until the end of
the
line when Anchor Bay picked it up. Before then, there are all these festivals all over the world
that were accepting it. Some of them will pay for your travel, but unless you're a big name, a
lot
of them just want the movie, they don't care if you're there or not. So I would pay my own
way,
and food and lodging in hotels and, like,
life. And it adds up and adds up:
conventions and
printing up posters that I made myself and whatever I could do to be a politician, shaking
hands,
kissing babies and, like, "please, give my movie a chance", "here, look at this!" I don't know if
I
had a show on a major network and I was doing twenty-four episodes a year, I don't know if
it
would have happened.
JOE: Who knows? You could have done the pilot then.
ADAM: Everybody says everything happens for a reason, and it's very frustrating to hear that
from somebody who it all worked out for, but it's very true. As hard as this was, as much of a
struggle as it was and it still is in some regards, I wouldn't want it any other way.
There's a strong sense in Holliston that creative people can be
motivated by anger, when
the world frustrates their efforts. Joe expresses that forcefully in season 1's final episode
after the John Landis letter. But so much of the show's humor results from Adam and Joe
being angry at each other . . .
JOE: But it comes from a place of love too. When you're best friends for that long, arguing is
part of conversation. Writing-wise, that was such an easy way of us working out all the issues
that you would in a normal sitcom.
ADAM: But distinguishing between the characters too, they're kind of an odd couple of sorts,
where Adam's very meticulous and OCD and anal-retentive, and things need to be planned
out
and it's got to make sense, whereas Joe, all he cares about is, oh now we're gonna do this
and it's
gonna work out great—and then it doesn't. That's a good dynamic for a TV series, because if
we
were both liking every idea . . .
JOE: It would be the same voice.
ADAM: It would be the same voice. When you touch on the John Landis thing, that's one of
the
highlights of season 1, [because] that's going to happen to everybody, whether you're a
filmmaker or whatever you want to do for a career. At some point, somebody you look up to
or
need approval from for whatever reason is not going to give you what you're looking for.
Especially [revealing] about that scene is the fact that when Corri has to read the letter to us,
she
lies and makes up something that we would want to hear, knowing very well at some point in
the
next few seconds she's going to have to come clean. But she doesn't want us to be hurt
anymore,
because it's so hard watching us constantly fail. But that's real life. I can tell you honestly,
when
I first met Landis, the first thing he did is tell me that he hated
Hatchet. And I was
like, Jesus!
But then that was followed with: But
Spiral is genius, and it lessened the blow a
little bit. But he
said, I just don't like gore, and I don't like gore movies . . .
JOE: (
does a cranky Landis impression)
ADAM: But Landis has become a great friend to Joe and I and a huge supporter of everything
we
do in our careers, and he's such a great, great person. So yeah, that moment where we get
in front
of our idol and we show him our work, and it's the season finale and it still doesn't work out .
. .
JOE: But the fact is we keep going.
ADAM: But we still keep going. Really, the message of this show is, no matter how much
negativity the world throws at you and how many times you get knocked down, you have to
get
back up again, and you have to keep going. That's been really great to hear from the fans of
this
show, how fired they are by watching it, because they see themselves on the screen, whether
they
want to be filmmakers or not, that really has nothing to do with it. They're laughing at our
failures, but for a lot of people it also hurts, because they're seeing their own life mirrored
back
at them but seeing that we're still coming and we have a new plan and we're going to keep
going.
That's one of my favorite things about making the show is positively affecting especially our
younger audience to feel like that: if we can, then they can do it too. Because they can.
Since I have half of the directors of Chillerama here, let me
ask whether you regard it as
one film or a collection of short films? We've had some disagreement on that point.
ADAM: I'd say it's three and a half short films, because there's
Wadzilla,
Anne Frankenstein,
Werebears and then
Deathication that gets cut off, but the
Zombie Movie really goes through and
encapsulates the whole thing. It's not really a short film. I mean, you couldn't really cut
Zombie
Movie together and have it stand just alone together as its own short. But the
experience . . . it is
one experience and one movie, but the beauty of it is that you might not like all of them—you
might like
Anne Frankenstein and not like one of the others, you might love
Wadzilla and not
like one of the other ones—so I think I see it both ways. I think whoever said that might be
taking
it to a bit of an extreme by saying it's all one movie. I mean, no, it's not. It's four different
voices, it's four different styles. Even
we might not like all of them. We've had
the fun of making
it; Joe did his thing, I did my thing, [Adam] Rifkin did his thing, and so on.
JOE: Add to that: It wasn't like we just went, oh we have four short films and we might as
well
cut them all together somehow. We all did this from the ground up, so we knew right from
the
beginning which film was going to play where. Based on other anthologies, specifically
Twilight
Zone, The Movie, if you look at that film and the way the structure goes from Landis'
to
Spielberg's to Dante's to Miller's, we tried the same kind of formula where this film is here,
that
film is there, and then just tried to wrap it around the device of it being an all-night movie
marathon, [which] was fun because even the people in the drive-in were talking about the
movie
just like the fans were. Then, if you watch the movie closely, the people in the cars are
making
fun of the movies along with everybody else. So we kind of take the piss out of anybody
going,
"Well, I like this one better than this one!" That's fine, everyone feels that way. So I see your
point too, but it was always conceived from the beginning as one film experience, kind of like
if
you go to . . . Joe Dante does these Halloween nights at the New Beverly, an all-night twenty-
four hour movie marathon, and that's what they are, it's not like you can pick out one film
over
the other and go, it's this, that or the other thing. All of it is tied together as cleverly as he
could,
so that it would feel like one experience. Now, you could watch
Diary of Anne
Frankenstein or
Wadzilla or whatever alone as standalone films, but Adam's right,
Deathication aside
, Zombie
Movie is more of a support system for those other shorts, but just the fact that we
got to make it
alone was insane, because [like] all of our films, what could we do with no money and no
time,
having complete creative freedom? And that was
Chillerama.
I have one suggestion. Joe, do you think you could recruit Fernando Phagabeefy
as a guest
star on Holliston?
ADAM: (
laughing)
JOE: Well, Fernando is still in Vienna right now. He's still hiding out after the
Deathication
debacle. We're working on that. We're in talks with him right now, but he's being very difficult.
I'm not surprised. Thank you both!
[
Ed. note: "Fernando Phagabeefy" is the name of a character created by Joe Lynch
who
appears in Chillerama and occasionally pops up at film
festivals.]