This week in my column for the LA Weekly, I featured Canadian web series. InSAYSHAble created by and starring Amy Matysio.  InSAYSHAble, winner of Best Comedy at the Hollyweb web series festival follows Saysha Grabinski, a hot-headed, horny nutjob willing to throw all social norms to the wind in pursuit of a job for a day and a cock for a night. She’s a wacky antihero: Sarah Silverman meets Ace Ventura. Read my full review of InSAYSHAble HERE. Watch InSAYSHAble on HERE. And below you’ll find my full interview with Amy about creating for the web.

This week in my column for the LA Weekly, I featured the indie animated web series. Hell Yeah!, which follows the trials of Satan as he tries to convince Jesus to let him chill in Heaven seeing as everyone in hell is a total asshole. Co-creators Sam Yousefian and Craig Ginsberg animate online advertisements for company websites by day and develop animated shows for TV and the Web by night. To read my LA Weekly article on the show, click HERE. Below, you’ll find my full interview with Co-creator Sam Yousefian who also does all the voices on the show. Enjoy!

How did you come up with the idea for Hell Yeah! ?

My friend Cameron Fredman made this little comic strip that was almost word for word what our first episode ended up being. I thought it would be a funny cute little 30 second episode, for like, ‘welcome back to school,’ Satan’s incoming class.   The more we thought about it, the more fun we thought it would be to follow these characters. We knew Satan couldn’t like his job because the place has to suck. It’s full of all these crappy people.  His job in hell is to make What Would Jesus Do bracelets, but he can never meet his quota because all his workers are assholes.

The idea was to do three or four until we figured out what to do with it. If you look at the first episodes, you’ll see they’re pretty rough. In the later episodes, we got more elaborate.  At the beginning, the whole series was supposed to happen in Hell, but it got boring.  So we though, ‘What if he visited his boss? Who’s his boss? It should be Jesus!’  We took him up there and it was just so much fun to see the interaction between the two of them that.  We did that in the third episode and realized the dynamic with Jesus and Satan was what was fun. We thought it would be cool to bring in other religions too like the Flying Spaghetti Monster Religion.

You do all the voices in Hell Yeah. How did you end up getting so good at it?

Well, I do most of the voice tracks in our commercial too.  I never did voices before starting the company.  I just had to do it because I needed to make money. I’d do narration tracks or whatever. And I would tell the client, if you want to change it, I can change it. And they would say, ‘No we love that voice. Who’s doing that voice?’  Now I do all the voices on our commercials in the beginning, and if the client wants to change it, we hire someone else.

You’re dealing with some touchy subjects here. Have you gotten any horrified emails?

Some people really hate it. Of course!  They’re like, what are you doing? These are things I believe in. I think the show’s hilarious and I don’t think it’s that offensive.  Sure it’s Jesus and he’s dressed like Barry Gib, but he’s not a jerk to anyone but Satan. Jesus should not like Satan!

In animation magazine, there was a really long comment. He rambled for two paragraphs about how the reason Hell Yeah is being mentioned in animation magazine is because we’re paying money and money is evil and we’re all going to hell.  And I’m like, paying money? I wish I had money!

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Just shy of 30, Brian Mcgreevy has been working as a successful screenwriter in Hollywood for years. He and writing partner Lee Shipman have had two scripts on the Black List and have an adaptation of Dracula currently in development with Russell Crowe and Eli Roth attached, among other projects.  His adaptation of his first novel Hemlock Grove premiered Friday as Netflix’s second original show. Mcgreevy also executive produced the show along with Eli Roth, and was kind enough to sit down with me and chat about how Hemlock Grove ended up at Netflix and the process of creating for New Media.  He also offeres some damn good advice for aspiring writers and artists of all types.  I know I was taking notes, and not just for this interview.

How did you come to sell your first TV show to Netflix?

I am a novelist in addition to a screenwriter and I had written a novel and sold it to Farrar Straus and Giroux. I didn’t really use a book-to-film agent because I’d been working in the studio game for a couple years so I had a pretty solid sense of the landscape.

I had my agency set meetings with producers and interviewed them personally. I basically went with the guy who was most aligned with my preexisting criteria for a partnership.

What was that criteria?

I was in a position that writers in this town rarely find themselves in. I had leverage because I owned the property flat out.  The two conditions I went in under were: One- I am executive producer on this project. You are not a producer over me. We are peers.  Two- this is a hard R.  The subject matter inherently lends itself to a kind of sanitization because it has paranormal themes and the main characters are adolescents. The execution of the book was very unsanitized.  There was a lot of fucking, violence and casual drug use, which, from my own perspective, is much more representative of adolescence than, for instance, Twilight.

I had a very high profile producer, who I like and have worked with, say to me, ‘This is the next Hunger Games!’  And my response was, ‘Have you read this? Did you get to the part where the protagonist is doing violent role-play with a prostitute yet? Out of boredom?’

It was great to find someone who said, ‘I’m OK with potentially making way less money off this and doing the way cooler version.” That was who I ended up working with.

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