Hello!

Todd Waldman here!  Since I’m unemployed, bored and made a promise to myself I wouldn’t jerk off today, I thought now would be the perfect time to write a few paragraphs (that no one will read or care about) about the Summer of Tears pilot we made back in 2007. So strap yourself in for a delightful and insightful journey about how we made a failed pilot!  Or just watch said failed pilot without any bitterness or self-aggrandizing back-story right now…

Naturally this story, like most important stories, begins in Aspen, Colorado.

In the spring of 2007 Summer of Tears won the U.S. Comedy Arts festival in Aspen Colorado.  At the time, this was a big deal and next to that time in college when one night I ate everything off of the Taco Bell menu it was easily one of the highlights of my life.  See from 1985-2007 the Aspen Comedy festival had established itself as the premiere comedy festival in the world.  For years SOT had trained with a Rockyesque intensity to go and DOMINATE this festival.

Remember this video?

When we finally were accepted and attended in 2007 we were just happy to be there.  We didn’t expect to WIN an award for best sketch troupe.  When we did, it felt like that crazy dream of having our very own television show could become a reality.  Preposterous you say?  Well first of all why the fuck are you saying things like “preposterous.”  Secondly, consider what had happened to the previous year’s winners THE WHITEST KIDS U KNOW and Aziz Ansari.  Aziz won best stand-up and quickly got a commitment from MTV to do a very funny show called Human Giant.  TWKUK won best sketch troupe and quickly got a sketch comedy series on the FUSE network.  They also sold a screenplay in which two of them were attached to star.

If you want to know more about the Whitest Kids U Know and their movie, you can read the NY POST review of it HERE...

And HERE’S one more review...

And in case you’re curious HERE’S like 90 more...

Anyway!  Summer of Tears won the Aspen comedy festival and upon arriving in Los Angeles, we quickly took a round of meetings with various television networks and studios.  Since we were a sketch comedy group our agents and manager thought our best bet at being handed a pilot was with MTV and Comedy Central.  These were two of the first meetings set and our reps asked us to think about what kind of sketch show we wanted to do.

Needless to say this is where I completely fucked up.

You see after the glory of Aspen, I had in my mind not a Summer of Tears sketch show (that was far too base) but a television show about well, about…about how do I put this poignantly?  Shit that was real.

And a lot of this desire to do a “shit that was real” show stemmed from THIS 2007 David Brooks article...

This article perfectly captured what 20 something dudes were going through at this point in time - Arrested adolescence.  Yeah, it’s not a new theme but it was an important theme to me.  And one that showed up in a lot of our sketches to begin with.  Most of our sketches usually start with “This happened to me the other night… What if we did a sketch where ___ happened.”  For example:

I felt/still feel a lot of our sketches and writing are about the confusion of what it means to be an adult today.  And that’s exactly the type of TV show I wanted to do every week.  It would have sketch elements but at the end of the day it would also have a lot of heart and have a lot to say.

I was (and possibly still am) an idealistic dumb ass.

Our first meeting was with MTV.  We made them laugh, they seemed engaged, but when I started talking about the “the confusion of what it means to be an adult today…” the smiles quickly dropped and I could see that glazed over look from the executives.  I wasn’t making them laugh.  I was being way too serious.  We had a very similar experience with both Comedy Central and FOX.  Made them laugh, loved our sketches, glazed over look when we told them we wanted to do a show about three guys coping with the acceptance of adulthood/manhood.

Does it still hurt thinking back on those meetings?  Yes, kind of.  Is the sting lessened knowing that the heads of all three of those networks are no longer employed there and in some instances out of the business altogether? Yes, yes it does. 

One of our last meetings was with Warner Brothers Studios.  At this point if we didn’t get something out of this meeting we would have essentially laid an egg out of Aspen.  No deal, no nothing.  All that hard work would have been for naught.

We went in, made them laugh, they seemed engaged and then I spoke about the David Brooks article and the “confusion of being an adult”, but instead of glazed over looks we got head nodding!  Head nodding?!?!  Yes, we’ll take it!  Finally a connection!  They totally agreed our point of view was missing from TV and soon we were hammering out a deal for a pilot presentation. 

And that’s how we got MODERN FAMILY on the air…

Just kidding you guys! It’s jokes like these that resulted in me writing a blog about making a failed pilot… Ugh… Anyway…so here’s what really happened next.

We were thrilled!  We were pumped!  We had done it!  And now we were discussing how things would work from this point forward with WB.  In our heads there would be a lot of studio types telling us what to do and getting in our way and I was all ready for a huge battle about how important our point of view was and how they knew nothing about our generation etc etc.…but surprisingly there was very little of that.  They really respected our point of view and didn’t want to get in the way.  Like really didn’t want to get in the way.  We had a few meetings and bonded over certain things and then boom we were off to write a script.  Could this really be happening?  Could they really be leaving us alone?

Well they weren’t just leaving us alone but REALLY leaving us alone, which meant we had to hire our own crew to film this 23-minute pilot over six consecutive days of production.  Our silly Internet videos never really had makeup artists or costume designers but now we needed them to make this thing look network ready. I quickly found myself consumed with producing the pilot on all levels.  Looking back I wish we had found someone else to take on some of these burdens so we could have focused more on creative tasks….

Let’s not dwell on problems.  Here’s what I remember from preproduction and production:

I remember not sleeping for what felt like two months.  I powered through my days and fought off complete exhaustion while still trying to work a day job.

Yes the day job.  At the time I worked as a creative executive for a small company that was founded by a very successful director.  Luckily in those days that director was to be found anywhere BUT in the office.  He was promoting a film he had just completed and was flying all over the country to introduce it at film festivals.  This was a very fortunate occurrence for me because it allowed me to run the pilot production offices from inside my current office.  So day in and day out we’d have production meetings ranging from costumes to actual casting sessions inside the office.

This was kind of risky when towards the end of pre production the director returned to town and seemingly had nothing to do.  This would mean he’d periodically pop into the office, play bad techno music, talk about how great his life was and then leave for the day. 

One memorable day I received word from our assistant that the boss was unexpectedly headed into the office.  Within the span of three minutes we frantically picked up the whole pilot production and HAULED ASS as fast as we could down the street to Peet’s coffee.  I vividly remember forcing our Production Coordinator, who I had known for all of two days, to pack up his printer and run across the street as fast as he could and await further instructions.  Meanwhile Kirstin hid in the backseat of her Prius desperately trying not to be seen by the boss.  Luckily he was only in the office for 10 minutes (playing bad music etc.) and once he left, a text went out and everyone moved back down the street from Peet’s. We lived in this chaos for weeks.

From preproduction chaos to production chaos. The typical things happened during the shoot: we were locked out of an office building in downtown LA at 6:30 in the morning.  That was a fun day of waking up the office manager and making them drive down and open the door for us.  You’ll also notice we had no AC that day.  That’s why we all look like we’re in a sauna in the office scenes.  On another day we literally shot next to an ACTUAL funeral that made us feel pretty terrible. "I'm so bereaved that Uncle Dan is dead... Um, why the fuck is Harry Potter walking past us right now?" 

Honestly it was all so consuming and such a monkey fuck crazy time that I don’t remember too many details from production.  It’s a cliché but it was a blur.  During the six days of production I was acting, producing and in some cases picking up craft services and figuring out how we were going to pay bills.  It was miserable and challenging and I’ve never been happier in my whole entire life.

The final result…well, I can definitely say we shot for the moon. We tried to say something.  We tried to capture that unique time in your life when you aren’t quite an adult but are too old to still be a kid.  We tried to expose those awkward in-between years and the confusion and misery that it causes in all of us.

We tried to say a lot really….

After it was completed we had some bad luck.  The Writers strike hit and we had to wait an entire year before going on with the pilot.  It went out the following year with a lot less fanfare (Aspen was over, our heat had cooled, etc.) and we got passes from everyone.  It was over pretty quickly.  Personally I took it pretty hard.  I haven’t looked at the pilot in two years. 

When I sat down to revisit it for this blog it was (fuck it I’ll sound like a ninny here) emotional.  There are a lot of parts that make me squirm and say “Damn we could do that so much better now” and there are a lot of parts that I smile at and am really proud of us for trying.  So we may have failed in some parts, but at least we failed ambitiously… I think.

Here’s Summer of Tears.