Walker Kalan is a filmmaker based in New York. I Need Your Love, the comedy series he co-created with pop singer Camille Trust, premiered at Tribeca, won a jury award at Slamdance, and is now available on YouTube and Spotify. Walker’s previous work has won jury awards at Brooklyn Film Festival, HollyShorts, and Ventana Sur. He’s currently developing a drama series set at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships and training his rescue hound, Snoopy, for her on-camera debut.
Two years ago, I handed a sealed envelope containing an undisclosed amount of cash to my neighborhood priest.
It was my butcher who made the original introduction. He put me in touch with the head of an influential family in the neighborhood, who then arranged a sit-down with the Monsignor in charge of the neighborhood’s historic Italian-American carnival. When we met, I made small talk about the Pope (the Monsignor told me he’s good buddies with the guy) and I assured him, among other things, that I had no intention of slandering the church. A few minutes later, I had his blessing to shoot our indie series, I Need Your Love, at his carnival – but not before he requested the aforementioned “donation.”
(I felt bad, months later, when I read in the papers that the Monsignor was burned by Sabrina Carpenter in an oddly similar situation, and nearly lost his job over a blasphemous music video shot on church property. Clearly, bribing priests is an integral component of being a producer.)
Though a bit dodgy, the envelope was one of the easier choices we made in the course of producing the series, a bittersweet comedy based on my friend Camille Trust’s wild but true experiences hustling to make it as a pop singer in New York. Weeks after the carnival, Camille booked a gig singing the national anthem at a major sporting event. It felt like a godsend: we’d have an opportunity to film an entire episode within an iconic stadium packed with tens of thousands of spectators – an unbelievable production value for a microbudget series –for free! But there was one problem – we didn’t have permission to film in the venue, and any false steps would mean putting Camille’s biggest gig to date at stake.
So we faced a dilemma. We could ask for permission to shoot, risking an all but certain “no.” Or we could film in secret and ask for forgiveness if we were caught. Our crew was torn. But in the end, the guerrilla way won – the opportunity was simply too good to let go of. We had to be discreet, sneaking a small camera into the stadium, making friends with the right security guards, and racing through a pared-down shooting script. It all paid off when we got our money shot – a glorious wide of Camille belting the anthem as fireworks fill the sky. Thankfully, we didn’t get caught, but as Werner Herzog once said: “There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting the shot you need.”
Why did we go to such lengths just to film a TV show? It’s simple. It was a matter of breaking the rules, or letting our filmmaking dreams go. Our ambitions of creating an HBO-quality series far outstripped our resources, but we were unwilling to settle for a watered-down version of the show we’d envisioned. The stakes that we faced in production and distribution reflected the themes and storylines of the show itself – the struggle to create something meaningful, to be heard and seen, as an underdog in an inhospitable industry. We knew that to break in, to get the job done and do it well, we had to color outside the lines.
In order to build a rich and compelling world – to authentically capture the music industry, from its glamorous stages to its greasy underbelly – we needed to go rogue. We needed to film in flashy locations without permission. We also had to contend with law enforcement, litigious corporations, and the risk of crossing the world’s most powerful and beloved pop star (hint: it’s not Beyoncé) whom Camille accuses of plagiarism in one of our episodes.
(On the latter issue, I sought counsel from a cousin who works as an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles. He offered me exactly nine minutes of his time, before warning that we’d be on the clock for $1200 for the following hour. Thanks, but no thanks.)
But nothing about our production was that special. Indie filmmakers like Sean Baker, Vera Drew and John Cassavetes have blazed trails outside of the studio system for filmmakers like us – bending, breaking and pulverizing the rules in order to achieve their vision.
We’ve applied the lessons learned from their scrappy indie-feature ethos to an emerging format–the indie TV series. The early social media era delivered a crop of short-form, often sketch-based web series, which were acquired by networks and became hits like Broad City, Insecure and High Maintenance. After a dizzying decade of boom, bust, chaos, consolidation and contraction within the industry, it’s become harder than ever to get shows made, even for big stars and established showrunners (and we are, of course, neither). But a growing cohort of indie filmmakers like Mark Duplass and Cooper Raiff have chosen to bypass the traditional studio system, and independently produced entire seasons of television.
The first seeds of the indie TV movement have borne some juicy fruit. Raiff’s Hal & Harper was picked up by Mubi, while Duplass sold a fully produced season of his coming-of-age series Penelope to Netflix last year. Shane Gillis has also gotten in on the game with his workplace comedy, Tires, also at Netflix.
Where do we fit into the indie TV new wave? After a year on the festival circuit – which included a premiere at Tribeca and a jury award at Slamdance – we’ve just released the first season of I Need Your Love on YouTube. While we haven’t raked in piles of cash, the show has connected with hundreds of thousands of new fans, and we can feel the grassroots growing.
We’re also the very first scripted series to stream on Spotify – which hasn’t officially sanctioned the release. Thankfully, we’ve gotten pretty good at asking for forgiveness.
Featured image shows a stolen shot of Camille Trust singing the national anthem at CitiField; all images courtesy Walker Kalan.
