AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Rough draft with reza aslan10/20/2023 ![]() 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. See /privacy for more information.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. Editing and mixing by Will Stanton, with additional editing by Blake V.įollow Reza us at transcripts and full credits, head to Executive Producers for Topic, Ryan Chanatry, Anna Holmes, and Gena Konstantinakos. Go to /topic to get your free 7-day trial.įollow Robin Coste Lewis Marquesha Babers Monique Mitchell Draft is a Topic Original Series.Įxecutive Produced by Reza Aslan, David Andreone, Alfredo de Villa, and Safa Samieyazde’-Yazd. Watch Rough Draft and other Topic shows on the Apple TV app. Featuring guest poetry performances from Marquesha Babers and Monique Mitchell! She brings it all in this conversation that touches on growing up in Compton and New Orleans, removing the “I” from her writing, and pursuing beauty. Her debut poetry collection Voyage of the Sable Venus won the National Book Award in poetry in 2015, the first time a debut collection by an African-American had won the prize (and the first time a debut had won since 1974). Robin’s blazing intellect and pitch-perfect way with words are no shocker. For the season finale of Rough Draft, we’re welcoming poet Robin Coste Lewis.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |