freeloveforum

Dear Diary, We are finished with our pilot at long last.  We have been working on it since September, though it seems like we started much longer ago.  Post-Production was lengthy, and we've had so little to eat.  Miep and Mr. Kraler say they've saved up enough sugar rations to bake a cake for Papa on his birthday.  Oh, I'm so excited to see the butterflies and to run along the garden with Margot again, once the Americans make it inland.  Jared looked so sick at the wrap party, and I fear Anne might burst into tears if she can even make it to a screening.   FreeLoveForum has been together as a sketch group for about 10 years, since early high school, and when you consider all the time we’ve had to finish a pilot, there’s really no excuse for us showing up at 9:30 pm on July 7th with our NYTVF submission, a scant 2 and a half hours prior to the midnight deadline.  We risked a myriad of circumstances offered by New York City every day that can derail anyone’s plans by at least two hours.  Stalled train.  Closed train.  Sick person on the train.  Uptown trains running in reverse.  But we made it, with double-checked freshly-burned DVD's, and we rode the elevator, and we turned in a little envelope that contained so many months of work, and we rode back down, and we walked for 4 or 5 avenues knowing no good bars in midtown at which to celebrate, and we got pissy with each other about “where the hell are we going” and it became abundantly clear that we could not see each other for at least a week, and we couldn’t possibly watch the pilot for a few more.  It was the end of a journey too long and arduous to simply “sit and celebrate.”  The time had come for deep sleep.   Weeks have passed, and we have sufficiently celebrated, and we are totally thrilled to have been accepted into the festival.  It feels unanimously exciting to be a part of something so new and significant and fun.  We can’t wait to see the other pilots, and we can’t wait for people to see ours; we now know how crazy a person has to be to want to make a TV show with no money, so we feel welcomed as part of a giant family of crazies.  Thank you NYTVF!   Jeremy freeloveforum

We'd like to clear a few things up for you all. First, we're not all from Astoria, New York, as it is listed on the NYTVF website. We have a dual residency between Queens and Brooklyn. And that's only looking narrowly at where we are now, because that's not where we're from. We're hardcore dairy state produce, in the fine tradition of Tom Wopat and The Onion. The other thing we'd like to clear up: Free Love Forum isn't a small, independent pilot by a producer and his rag tag bunch of auditioned performers. It's a small independent pilot produced by sketch comedy troupe, freeloveforum, and our trusty professional collaborator, Daniel Klein. The troupe has been writing and performing together for over a decade, and moved to New York shortly before the first NYTVF. We moved here for the stage and the scene, but after learning of the NYTVF we almost entirely held off performing for 12 months, focusing instead on this pilot. freeloveforum kind of started backwards. We began with television, on cable access naturally, the freshman year of high school. It was after high school that we went on to doing performances like most other comedy troupes. As a result, many of the characters and sketches we perform are done with an eye toward being shot for video. Because of this built-in duality we've always entertained pilot ideas, but this television festival contest gave us a strong excuse to take the process seriously for once. Oh, and one last thing: When you watch our pilot, keep in mind that we're all in character as crazy, not well people. We actually clean up all right and carry on in much healthier relationships. Dieter freeloveforum

20 minutes. That's how long our pilot is. 20 minutes.  Twelve months of work. 20 minutes. Over 12 hours of footage, months in pre-production, writing, crafting. 20 minutes. It makes perfect sense, we didn't have the backing of anyone's money, we had full time jobs and family and significant others to share our time with. Still, explain it to grandma. It really is hard to do without sounding like the slacker she knows everyone born after 1940 to be. "You take a year to make 20 minutes? I watch the television; most of my programs are at least a half an hour. Where's the second one? Who makes one TV episode, people like serials." Don't bother explaining to her how earlier edits of your show clocked in around a half hour, to the depression-era mind it would have seemed wasteful. After all, it was perfectly useful footage. For her, a pilot should simply remain a man in the cockpit of an airplane. Someday we too will be the victims of our children's futuristic linguistic meddling, clinging to the warm memories of how polite everyone used to be. Actually, I'm giving my grandmothers a bad rep. I haven't yet explained any of this to either of mine. The quotes above came from the old doubting Queens grandmother that lives inside my head. Dieter freeloveforum