The Writers Room

What's a network executive in charge of a hit show to do when the the writers go on strike?

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Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 11

Here's the 11th and final episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9 and part 10.
You've been watching this far, you pretty much know what's going on. Here's how it all ends. This episode features a cameo by Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping. We had been in contact with him about doing this scene during a protest against the World Bank, and the last we had heard from his manager was that he wouldn't be at this protest. Lucky for us, he was the first person we saw when we got there. The funny thing about staging a wedding at a protest is that everybody at the protest thinks it's the real deal.

Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 10

Here's the 10th episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, and part 9.

This is the episode in which I predicted the Jack Abramoff scandal a few years before the fact. It's also the sexiest episode, and the second to last. Enjoy.

Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 9

Here's the 9th episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, and part 8.

On the DVD, this chapter is called "The Setup." Becky and Scottie put their plan in motion to get the sleazy congressman.

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A Guy Walks Into a Bar

For those of you who have been watching this vlog for a while, this video is not new. But this is the first time that it's available to download. For the tens of newbies out there, this is a short comedy that I made in the spring of 05 for a short film contest run by the local wuss-rock radio station. I heard about the contest and thought that I only had two weeks to get it made, so I enlisted the help of the funniest people I knew and we came up with the concept, banged out a script, rehearsed and shot it all in the course of a week. Then I edited like crazy before finding out that the deadline was actually a month later than we thought. It never did make it into that contest, but it's played in a few festivals to a good response and was even highlighted by Salon.com's vlog. So without further ado, I give you A Guy Walks Into a Bar...

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Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 8

Here's the 8th episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6 and part 7.

This episode features the congressman getting really sleazy with Becky and is another showcase for Adam Kroloff's great physical comedy.

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Washington Interns Gone Bad - Episode 7

Here's the 7th episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6.

This episode was a lot of fun to shoot. We had a restaurant lined up to shoot the lunch scene in, but it fell through at the last minute. So we turned a corner of the living room of 942 Westminster into a restaurant. For those keeping track, that's also the location of the party scene in Episode 2, Becky's bedroom in Episode 4, and will be showing up a few more times in later episodes. Then for the exterior, we used Bistro Au Ghetto, a closed-up building that the artist next door painted to look like a little cafe. While we only shot there for about 10 minutes, we built up quite a crowd of onlookers for that.

Enough about locations though. This episode is where we first meet the sleazy lobbyist character. Since at the time I wrote this I had never heard the name Jack Abramoff, I can't say that this character is based on him, but once you see one of the later episodes you will have to think that Abramoff based himself after this character. The scene at the restaurant shows my anger at democrats who have all but abandoned the working class in favor of big corporate donors.

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Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 6

Here's the 6th episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.

Becky gets back to work after a weekend with Scottie and Elizabeth goes postal on her. Elizabeth's smackdown of Becky is highly inspired by my own experiences of working for the democratic party while trying to be an activist and realizing that these two things don't really work so well together.

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Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 5

Here's the fifth episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

Here's the obligatory mid-film romantic interlude as well as the obligatory montage. The inspiration to do a montage was equal parts Naked Gun, every other cheesy 80's movie, and Trey Parker's brilliant montage song that was in an episode of South Park before it was in Team America.

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Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 4

Here's the fourth episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1, here's part 2, and part 3.

It's only Becky's 2nd day of her internship and she is beginning to realize just how far in over her head she is with this internship. Elizabeth schools her in Washington "professionalism" and the congressman decides that he wants to keep a special eye on her.

While none of my personal experiences working in politics were ever quite as extreme as what I put in this film, it was based around real scandals (the summer before I wrote this was what we DCer's referred to as "The Summer of Chandra" where every local media source was all Chandra Levy and Gary Condit, all the time) and while none of the characters were directly based upon real people, they certainly shared elements of real people. The fact that we tapped into something very real with this film is illustrated by the many instances in the years since it was made that life has imitated art. Here's the first of those instances.

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Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 3

Here's the third episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1 and here's part 2.

All of the special effects and most of the stunts in the entire movie happen in this episode, so get ready for a wild thrill ride!

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Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 2

Here's Part 2 of Washington Interns Gone Bad, my first and so far only attempt at feature filmmaking. If you haven't already seen part 1, you probably want to start there before watching this.

This was a very fun scene to shoot because a great deal of it was improv. We wanted to capture an afterwork party of Hill staffers. Some of the folks there actually were at one point staffers, but most have at least been around them (they're kind of hard to avoid there) and seen how they socialize. This was originally written to take place in an actual bar on Capitol Hill but we had heard that it was very difficult to actually get permission to shoot in those establishments (sure, The West Wing had no problem, but they had a budget and insurance and proffessionalism and all that stuff). So we wound up using the back balcony at 942 Westminster, near the U St Metro where several cast and crew members lived at the time. We used practically every inch of that house to serve as a variety of locations.

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Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 1

Here's the first episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I've already posted 6 of these episodes here, but that was before I stopped using YouTube for hosting and started a podcast feed, so chances are if you're reading this vlog now, this is new to you. As I post new episodes, I will offer some behind the scenes insites about the making of this movie.

I've told this story a million times, so for those of you who have heard this, just scroll on down to the video. In the fall of 2000, I joined a band with Adam Kroloff. We rocked the DC area for almost 2 years before he upped and moved to Pittsburgh to get married to the amazingly cool Mrs. Paradox, Sarah. I met Sarah on a Ween usenet group, they met at one of our gigs, and then I had to do some social engineering to make sure they were both at my place so they could get to know each other a little better. That's a whole story unto itself which I won't get into here. So anyway, besides being a singer/songwriter, Adam is also a very talented actor, and while we were in the band and also working a shitty job at a cellphone store, we came up with the idea of making a short film called Captain Paradox vs the District Manager (and trailer for its sequel, Captain Paradox vs Scotland). These never happened. But I still had the filmmaking bug, and without a band to take up my creative energy, a screenplay was soon to follow.

The other bit of info you need to know in order to understand my mindset when I wrote this film was that I had worked for the Democratic National Committee during the year leading up to the 2000 election fiasco. I quit in disgust 2 weeks before election day. As far as I'm concerned, that was Gore's election to lose and he blew it so spectacularly in so many ways (which is also another story for another time). And if my distaste for both political parties wasn't strong after working for the supposed lesser of two evils, it was absolutely cemented by the political climate just after 9/11.

That's more than enough for now. I'll have more details about the pre-production with the next episode.

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