This article is from the March 2012 issue of KC Stage
The rooms are downtown, near the River Market and upstairs from a bakery. In the videos, they were a furnished apartment. Now, as Dwen Doggett welcomes me into his office, the place is minimally furnished, almost stark. “I’m getting ready to move to a new office,” he explains. “When it comes time to shoot season two, it will take place somewhere else.”
By day, Dwen works on websites. In his spare time, however, he is one of a large and growing group of independent filmmakers: nonprofessional writers, directors, actors, and others working together to make movies just for the sheer joy of doing it.
Dwen and his team have recently finished work on the first season of a web-based series called Circle Jerks, concerning a man and his friends running group therapy sessions out of his apartment. “[He] is trying to rebuild his life after divorce,” he explains, “and he comes up with basically a scheme to administer group therapy to people from the state and get paid for it without having to really help anybody, and he goes through these adventures with some of his best friends who join in on what they think is fun.”
Comedy – and indeed, short series films – are new territory for Doggett. “In the past, I have done nothing but feature-length horror films ... they take a good year to two years of your time to put together from beginning to end, and I really wanted to do something that I’d have a quicker turnaround on my investment of time, and doing an online web series was something that was much easier to shoot and edit and get online ASAP and say, ‘OK, I’ll see you next year when it’s all done.’”
Dwen is a Kansas City native, born and raised. He got his start in independent filmmaking in the 1990s working with noted local filmmaker Todd Sheets, working on zombie pictures. Assisting on these eventually led to the desire to create his own projects. To date, he has made two feature-length horror films, with the possibility of more on the way.
The genesis of his current project came when he was casting about for new ideas: “I was doing some research on Google for twelve-step programs, and I was amazed at all the things I didn’t know that people in twelve-step programs actually sought help for, and with my warped sense of humor, I thought, ‘That would be really fun to make fun of!’”
As he sat down to create the series, he found the writing process required a change of mindset: “I knew that it was gonna be a web series, but I had never conceived a story to be in a short format, let alone write one all the way out. So when I actually wrote it, I found myself trying at first to write it, ‘Okay, this is episode one, this is episode two, and so forth,’ and I realized that, actually, was hindering the writing process by trying to, you know, shoehorn it into certain breaks. So, I had to fall back into the feature mindset and go, ‘Just write the story, and see how it goes, and then go back in and figure out where the breaks are gonna come and where they make the most sense to divide them up.’” Producing the series for the web gave him a flexibility he would not have gotten in a feature length or broadcast format, and he was able to break is narrative into coherent pieces.
Once the story was written, the next step was location scouting. “I would never start casting until I secured a location and adopted a rough shooting schedule,” he explains. “One of the biggest challenges for a filmmaker is finding locations.” Fortunately, one of the advantages of being a filmmaker in Kansas City is that when it comes to locations, there is almost an embarrassment of riches. “When we shot my last feature film Ravage, we shot in an actual hospital, we shot in the body prep room of a mortuary, we shot in a cemetery, we shot in a school, and we didn’t have to pay for a single location. There are a lot of people who are more than willing to [allow filming], because everybody loves movies and say ‘How cool!’ and most times they just wanna sit around and watch what you’re doing, see how it’s made.
“And I think that makes a big difference because I think that if you were off in LA or something, no way; you’re going to have to have permits, you’re going to have to pay for rent on every location you have, and that’ll put the budget way beyond your reach, and I think in KC you can achieve a lot more for a lot less. And it’s very diversified. From the Kansas side to the Missouri side, you can pretty much find anything you need. if you want the plains of Kansas, the mountains, hills, trees, and cities, whatever you need for whatever story you’re telling, it’s here in the metro area, somewhere.”
Casting has always been a time-consuming part of the film making, process, but here Doggett was able to call upon his ingenuity to streamline the process. “Casting in any city used to be ... put an ad on Craigslist, or the paper or wherever ... and who knows how many people are going to turn up.” He used his web programming skills to create a site where filmmakers and actors could sign up and be matched with each other. “Filmmakers such as myself can come in, add a project, add all my characters ... and then the site will automatically match them up and say ‘Hey, there’s a project casting that matches you.’ 100% of Circle Jerks is cast through that website.”
Once cast and crew were in place, rehearsals began. Rather than go the traditional route, Dwen decided to try something a little different. “I scheduled everyone to show up an hour, two hours before shooting time, and we would actually do read-throughs, dialog changes if we felt it necessary ... there are times that I will stop it and go, ‘That just doesn’t sound right, it doesn’t flow,’ and we’ll sit together and collaborate. There will be discussions, with scripts and pen in hand, and we will rewrite the dialogue, right there, before we shoot it ... it’s more a collaborative effort.”
After four weekends of filming, Dwen retired to his editing suite to put the pieces together. “We had all the episodes together before we launched them, so we could just launch them and they were already all finished. It worked out really good. I think the whole process, from casting to launching the website, was just over six months, which is really quick, compared to what I’m used to.”
One challenge that he – and most filmmakers in the Kansas City area – face is the matter of getting their work before the public. For his part, Dwen and company are turning once again to the Internet. “The first thing, also the easiest thing, is spreading the word with your cast and crew. they’re spreading it, via Facebook, that’s the first thing. We have a Circle Jerks Facebook page. The cast and crew spread it around ... get the website indexed by Google and things like that. What my next step will be, I’m not really sure.
“Because it’s new, doing a web series, doing the marketing of it is a whole new thing for me as well, simply because, with the features I did, I got distribution deals on DVD; someone else handled that. I never had to do it. So now I have to do it. I have to step up my game, learn what the tricks of marketing your web series online are.”
While the task of publicising his work is daunting, Dwen is optimistic: “I would like to see it continue. I think there’s a lot of stories to these characters we can delve into. I think we can do several seasons with them. And it’s a blast, a whole lot of fun. [The cast] still say ‘When are we doing season two? What are we doing?’”
“I’ve got a mental outline of what is going to occur in season two. I have not put it to paper yet, but I do know all the key events that will occur: there are some new characters, and there will be more and more about the private lives of the main characters that we didn’t find out this short season.”
As we left Dwen’s office, we passed a corner bar where some of the scenes were filmed. We wondered how many of the patrons inside, if any, were aware of the fact. We began to wonder about the places we frequent, the varied and photogenic areas of town we visit when on a photo shoot. It seemed to us that Kansas City is, almost without realizing it, becoming a filmmaker’s town. As technology brings the tools and techniques of filmmaking into more and more hands, and given the rich diverse pool of talent already here, it seems a boom is almost inevitable. Whether Kansas City will come to be known for her cinematic accomplishments remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that aficionados of independent cinema in this town have a lot to be thankful for.
Season one of Circle Jerks is now available for viewing on www.circlejerksseries.com. When Kelly Luck isn’t working or writing for KC Stage, she is the head of the writing team for another online series currently in production. She looks forward to the first episode being released before the final trump.
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