Zach and Jess: Origins
A little more story time, this time: PARTNERSHIP EDITION! How did we go from zero to a movie?
We (Zach and Jess) met in 2010 at Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles. We were on an unofficial team called, MurderCliff. A very fun team. HI MURDERCLIFF!
We pretty quickly realized we had a very strong overlap in our comedy venn diagram. I’m sitting there like, “Dang this guy just walked on in this scene as a baby dragon, that’s the move I WAS GONNA DO!” The team started adding freestyle rapping in our shows and then there was an additional spark between us. We shared this same love of musical theater and a desire to meld comedy with music.
From there we started writing comedy songs, filming them, and putting up shows at UCB.
Around the same time we joined Baby Wants Candy (Big big time musical improv group started in Chicago with casts in New York and Los Angeles, HI BABY WANTS CANDY!) and our love for musical improv deepened into obsession and that became OFF BOOK! Our podcast where we improvise a musical. That ran as a studio podcast for 300 episodes and we continue to tour it as a live show. In the meantime our partnership as a writing duo expanded and we wrote a whole bunch of stuff, some of which we really hope you still get to see one day. Including big, big musicals. One day, don’t worry. We will get ya one. For Good.
Okay, okay, get to it. This whole time that we’ve been writing and developing together and we decided we HAD to think of a smaller idea we could achieve on our own with our big daddy Hollywood. And so we came back to one of our shared loves: High School Mock Trial. And we were like, dang we really liked that, and maybe the world would like it too. We could celebrate it with an ensemble mockumentary. I haven’t seen one of those in a while (as a film) and Waiting for Guffman is a foundational text! We know lots of people who are very funny and VERY good at improv, we could put them in it!
Here’s a link to the full proof of concept we made last fall, it’s only the beginning!
So that’s what’s up. What Christopher Guest did for dog shows we wanna do for the very best club there ever was: Mock Trial.
Lastly, this whole time we’ve been working together we’ve also been working on that ever elusive but very important thing: our voice. We are here to bring you a story with characters you’ll want to know, who are sometimes stupid but mostly good. We know we’re onto something when we read something back and say, “that’s so dumb!” We like telling ridiculous and joyful stories. We know this will be one and we really think you’ll like it.
Thanks for following along friends, and stay safe out there!
(Zach &) Jess