They’ve been very hands-off when it comes to the editing process and even the marketing and the publicity aspect of it, they are very open to our efforts, our ideas. Had this gone to a much more established network, I think the first thing that would have happened is that they would have said, “Let’s re-cut this so that it fits whatever aesthetic we are going for.” With Ovation, they really allowed us to explore the creativity that we wanted. I think that’s what’s really exciting about it. What was your working relationship with Ovation like?īecause they’re such a brand new channel, it creates this symbiotic relationship where they are really open to taking their cues from us, from their shows. You give them an opportunity to talk about what they really want to talk about and it’s hard to get them to shut up. Writers love talking about the creative process and they don’t get the chance to do so that often. We’ll come and do it.” Every single guest has said, “This is the most fun I’ve ever had in an interview.” Because there’s something about the environment - the drinking helps. I basically wrote all of my friends, and the majority of them said, “Yes,” but the majority of that majority said, “Once you have a distributor, let me know and I’ll come and do it,” but we were lucky to get Norman Lear and Jill Soloway and Damon Lindelof and Mike White and Gideon Raff and Tim Kring, to say, “Sure. The first season was all my own relationships. How do you go about booking guests? Is it through your own relationships? For Jill Soloway, it was a take on the old adage, “write what you know.” Jill had this incredible experience of having a parent transition from male to female and thought, “that’s a good story. The Norman Lear episode, the lesson was about how writing cannot just reflect, but define the culture. I take advantage of that five-minute monologue that I get at the beginning of the show to teach a little lesson about writing and what writing means. It’s fun and fast-paced and it’s humorous and it’s a little bit raunchy and it’s also light-hearted and really entertaining, but what I always wanted to do was for it to also be instructive in some way. My desire, of course, is to make sure that there’s a narrative that can be seen through the whole show. The shows themselves are 27 minutes long, but we have three hours of material and a lot of great backstage stuff so we want to make sure that you can experience all of those things on different platforms as well as the show itself. It’s brand new and it’s a network that is dedicated to the arts in a way that Bravo used to be and also has a very big digital footprint. We originally wanted to do something mostly digital. As we were in the process of pitching this show and thinking about where it would fit, David came across Ovation, which to be frank, I had never heard of before, but which is in 50 million households. We wanted to maintain the hip factor of the show.
I mean - standing room only popular. So many people outside of Los Angeles kept asking how they could watch it that we decided, let’s begin filming this and pitch it as an actual television show. We thought it would be a fun thing that our friends would come to, and it turned out to be enormously popular. First Wednesday of every month, we would have a writer of some note that we would interview along with a live band, and we charged 20 bucks a head. My producer, David Andreone, and I are fans of ‘Inside the Actors Studio,’ but we always thought, how cool would it be if you could do that show but with writers and in a nightclub with a live band and everybody was drunk? So we began by first doing it as a live show at the DBA in West Hollywood. How did you come up with the idea for the talk show? The first episode features legendary producer Norman Lear - who was so at ease during the conversation, he even stopped to take a call from his daughter.
ROUGH DRAFT WITH REZA ASLAN PROFESSIONAL
Reza Aslan is an accomplished religious scholar and author, who’s lent his professional insights as a producer to HBO’s “ The Leftovers” as well as ABC’s upcoming biblical drama “ Of Kings and Prophets.” Now he’s also taking a turn in front of the camera for a new talk show, “Rough Draft with Reza Aslan” for Ovation, interviewing famous writers about their work - along with a liberal dose of alcohol.
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