UPDATE
June 29th, 2009 JonWinners out for the Summer.
Don’t forget to tip your bartender if you think it’ll lead to sex.
Sincerely Yours,
Wasted Potential FilmWorks
Episode 10: The Dark Doucher
May 17th, 2009 CharlesEpisode 9: Wipe the Drip
May 10th, 2009 CharlesA little back story never hurts, so check out “Judd Nelson” from Season 1.
Episode 8: Pick Up Artists
May 3rd, 2009 CharlesEpisode 7: American Peaches
April 26th, 2009 CharlesEpisode 6: Snow Blaze
April 20th, 2009 CharlesEpisode 5: Money Shot
April 13th, 2009 CharlesEpisode 4: The Dills
April 7th, 2009 CharlesEpisode 3: Miley Cyrus
March 29th, 2009 CharlesEpisode 2: Second Coming
March 25th, 2009 CharlesHere is the streaming version of Second Coming, High quality version also available through link on the right.
Episode 1: Fuck My Face
March 15th, 2009 CharlesYou can download the high quality version of Fuck My Face here
Welcome to the F-List
February 18th, 2009 Charles
It’s always kind of surreal when I’m out somewhere and someone I haven’t seen in a long time, or someone who I only know in passing comes up to me and asks about season two or calls me an asshole for not updating the web page. I know we have a fan base, I only need to look at the raw data on monthly hits to see that, but there is this weird disconnect between understanding something empirically versus abstractly.
We don’t get much fan mail (or any) and the comments written on my posts have been limited, so for now, much of what we do seems like its just being thrown into a vacuum. But then again, as I said before there are the moments where the existence of the show creeps into real life.
My last post talked about acting, and in it I mentioned the two times I appeared on the show as one half of The Clintons. What I didn’t mention is that my Role as Clinton #1 (or is it 2?) launched me into F-List celebrity status where I party with Kirk Cameron, the cast of Real World: Bangladesh, and others of our ilk. It’s one step above being Sean Mayo and one step below the ShamWow guy, but thats only because of his connections as a former scientologist.
Once, while at a bar, Jon became involved in a conversation with someone he graduated with about Winners. While I always considered Winners to be a show inspired by alcohol, this person said that their pre-Winners ritual was to let the video load to 100% while smoking a joint before watching. Fair enough. When I came over a fourth person joined the conversation by saying:
Person 2: So do you have anything to do with Winners too?
Me: Whats a Winners?
Person 2: You know, the online show, Winners.
At this point the original person we were talking to slapped him in the chest and said loud enough for everyone around us, and then some, to hear:
“Dude, they’re The Clintons. They ONLY FUCK TOGETHER!”
Word of mouth advertising at its finest. Ladies line up in the rear, autographs are free.
So you think it’s easy?
February 12th, 2009 CharlesThe website hasn’t been too busy because we’ve been busy doing a lot of shit behind the scenes. Filming is still going on, as is editing, and I’ve been neglecting much of that partly because of an obnoxious personal schedule, and partly because the more chefs we tend to have in the kitchen the more likely the soup is to get sidetracked and talk about sex and drinking. We actually learned a lot from the mistakes we made in season 1 and have really streamlined and increased overall productivity while making season 2. But much more on that later.
With the two most highly talked about Oscar nominations belonging to a dead guy and a guy whose career was left for dead, much of my Winners related thoughts have revolved around actors and acting in general.
There tends to be this unspoken consensus among people with no experience working with actors that acting is pretty fucking easy. It seems that, while no Nicholson, people tend to consider themselves fairly well equipped to jump in front of a camera. This couldn’t be more wrong.
I have been on camera twice now for Winners, and both times it is striking how awkward it is. Some might consider that strange for a person whose own girlfriend refers to as selfish, and needing to be the center of attention, but the act of being in front of a camera being asked to repeat the same thing with the same mannerisms and cadence multiple times and to come off natural and to convey a certain level of emotion and comedic timing each and every time immediately separates the amateur from the professional.
We tend to stick pretty close to the actual shooting scripts when we film but every now and then a scene allows for a certain level of improvisation. Most of the time this is because Christiaan just keeps the camera rolling and forces everyone in the scene to keep going, but other times the script might call for a joke which offers the chance for the actors to get creative. When this happens, seeing it live is truly incredible.
Fernando (the actor who plays Rob), to my knowledge, has never memorized a script. He must skim it and reduce it down to the essential message then decide on the spot which jokes he wants to do. No two takes with him are the same yet he manages to still come off natural and funny. Ironically, Rob’s character has also been the most polarizing. I’ve heard a lot of people say the character is not realistic, yet I’ve had this actual quote said to me about him:
“Bro, c’mon, wife beater, Yankee hat, talks about fucking guys, bro why you basing characters off of me.”
Most people, however, tend to focus on how real Winners is. The jokes and the conflicts and the story lines are conversations that they have had or things they’ve been through. The majority of that stems from the writing, but once again with our actors being relatively close to the ages they portray, it allows them to channel real life experience–as they live it–into how they act. And the result is tremendous.
Extended Ending to Season 1
January 14th, 2009 CharlesThe season 1 finale left everyone hanging.
You can see it here for a reminder. Below is what happened after we cut to black:
Greenwich Citizen Drops the Ball
November 10th, 2008 Charles“All of the girls in my class said that they would never watch Winners” -Sean, circa June 2006 *
“You don’t dumb down your art just because a few assholes can’t see the Monet for more than a bunch of dots.” Me, in response to Sean.
One of the planned scenes last season involved a little kid overhearing Mark swearing up a storm while working at the video store. We were having a lot of trouble casting the role so I resorted to asking people I knew if they would offer up their children. As luck would have it one guy that I talked to had a daughter who was getting into acting and said that he would help us out, just,”what was the show about?”
I told him nothing different from what I’ve said elsewhere, and even went as far as to tell him what the episode was about [the anal sex episode]. Not surprisingly he decided it would be in his daughter’s best professional interest if she didn’t take the role.
In May of this year Anne W. Semmes of The Greenwich Citizen interviewed Jon and Sean about the show. At the time, and even up through last week I had no intention of posting what she wrote, but a recent conversation with the same guy who didn’t want his daughter to do the show helped me intellectualize what I hated about the article.
A couple weeks ago I saw the guy again and we got to talking about DWI’s, his daughter, tipping bartenders, and Winners. When he told me he never got around to seeing the show I pulled out a laptop and showed him a few of the clips that we posted about each character. His response:
“Oh I get it. It’s like real life. Every guy who has lived through his twenties has had friends just like that. That’s a good idea nobody has ever done a show like that before. Shit, I wish I knew that before. You have any roles for my daughter?”
Clearly the subject matter of our show doesn’t lend itself to everyone. Despite that, we’ve always made it our goal to be completely honest with what we wanted to portray without worrying about who would be put off. In that regard I think we’ve accomplished our goal. And for that reason I wouldn’t have cared if Anne W. Semmes said our show sucks, called us misogynists, smut peddlers, or losers, at least then she would be writing A) in her honest voice, and B) about us, as opposed to whatever other agenda she had when conducting the interview.
Sure she actually did bother herself to talk about the show, but Winners just served as the framework for her to drape her hangups on. Anne seemed more concerned with waxing philosophical about the name of our production company, and stressing over loaded statistics about the rate of STDs amongst teenagers then, I don’t know, actually doing any real reporting about the show.
Jon’s original response to how the interview went was something along the lines of, “She asked all the generic questions, then started to space out and talk about her own thoughts before going on and on about sexually transmitted diseases.” He couldn’t have been more right. She actually misquotes Jon as describing all of us as, “not too successful at anything.” This is only after she takes it upon herself to say that we hired actors to portray ourselves and that they are, “five guys who don’t exactly fit the profile of upwardly mobile Greenwich grads.” Not only is this completely wrong, it was already covered by a better journalist (who was in college at the time of writing her article.)
I’m not surprised about the content of the article given the author’s affinity for hearing her own voice, even a soldier in uniform would have trouble keeping a straight face while she talks.
I’ll leave on one final quote from her article, but before I do I want you to fill in this blank: The web address for the Winners website is http://www._______________.com.
“Saks, 24, is the writer of the WinnersSeries.com“-Anne W. Semmes
Chances are you filled in the blank correctly, and you aren’t even getting paid to know that.
*Lots of girls watch Winners.
Actual FAQ’s
October 15th, 2008 CharlesPeople ask a lot of questions about the show and our motivations behind it, aside from, “what’s your goal” the question we get asked the most is, “so which character is based on which of you?” I appreciate the implication that I know people who: throw up on girls because they are nervous, fuck prostitutes regularly, see marriage as a cure for bad anal sex, get blue balls to the point of icing their dick, and defy all explanations of what a normal human being is. Well, on second thought, never mind.
The real answer to the question is that the characters are based on everyone and nobody. As Saks has already said elsewhere, much of the script is influenced by the real conversations and experiences we’ve had with each other and with other people. A lot of actors and actresses point out how they’ve had exact conversations that take place in the script in real life, I mean fuck, who hasn’t played Marry, Fuck, Kill [for the record it's Scarlett, Beyonce, Alba in that order. Alba just looks like a bad lay*] and in that sense the show is grounded in reality.
*Full disclosure: the other guys disagree on this. Post your Marry Fuck Kill order in the comments.
I’ll be there for you…
October 7th, 2008 CharlesO Balls
September 21st, 2008 CharlesLost in Translation
September 15th, 2008 CharlesIn the process of switching the site over a couple of the smaller videos we posted were lost. Here is one of them:
Murray Tells Your Children a Bedtime Story.
That link takes you to the old site. Our regularly scheduled look back at characters from season 1 will continue once Apple gets their shit together and fixes my computer. Check back tomorrow.
Season 2 Links
