John Cramer:

The people that we're talking to are primarily actors who want to make their own work. And they're like, "how do you do that?" And you obviously have done that and had success at doing it. So even though you're doing so much stuff besides "Keith Broke his Leg," we wanted to focus on that and talk about why you made "Keith Broke his Leg" and how you pulled it off.

So can you just start out by telling us a little bit about where were you in your acting career when you decided to make your show?

Keith Powell:

The whole show kind of came about after I had left "30 Rock" and I had just moved to Los Angeles with my girlfriend, who became my wife. And so I was newly married and I was in a new home and I was on a new coast. And there was a period of time in that transition of "30 Rock" ending and right before I made this web series where I was kind of trying to figure out what I wanted my voice to be. And because my voice was changing, because I was changing, I didn't quite know what it was, but I knew that my style was different than "30 Rock," and I didn't want to get pigeonholed into it. So I was actually blessed to be in in a good place in my acting career. I just wanted to define myself before other people defined me. I was well known in terms of getting work, but I was well known as Toofer on “30 Rock” and not as Keith Powell, the artist. So that's kind of how the genesis of “Keith Broke his Leg” began.

John:

That's so interesting. Right off the bat, you talk about a thing that I feel like when we've talked to other people who have made their own work, they ultimately get to that realization by the end. I think a lot of actors are motivated to make their own work because they see it as a tool. An outcome being hopefully, that they'll have more and better acting work. This is a kind of a different angle that you're starting from, which is you're already doing well. It's funny when you talk to other actors (who’d say), “Man, you've really made it. You're on ’30 Rock’!” You’re thinking there's all these other things I want to do, but to kind of take control, even at a different stage of your career.

KP:

That's really what it was for me. I just didn't want other people to define me. I wanted to define myself. And I really felt like that was the road I was headed down where I was only going to get cast in certain things and only do certain parts. And I always wanted to be a full artist. I didn't want to be an actor. I went to school for acting, I went to NYU, but I got my degree as a director and as a theater director. And thankfully, I was getting acting work while I was still in school, but I wanted to be a full artist. Being pigeonholed after “30 Rock” was not allowing me to do that. So my goal for myself was that I only allowed myself one rewrite. So two drafts. So I wrote all of “Keith Broke his Leg” and I because I wanted it to just be my id coming out on paper to make each episode a very specific crafted episode about something. Even if it wasn't funny, even if it explored the mundane, I wanted every episode to be about something.

Jason:

Did you think of them as, vignettes, like they could stand alone, or did you want them to have an overall arc with characters that you brought in occasionally?

KP:

It was not so much an overall arc with characters. That’s not to say that there wasn't something in my mind going, “this is about one person exploring, relearning who he is after an injury”. I believe that by the 10th episode he gets to a place that is different than he was in the first episode but I was thinking about it more in terms of the little moments and little stories that I wanted to tell. I think I was on a “Mad Men” kick during writing “Keith Broke his Leg”. “Mad Men” to me was so about the overall journey of Don Draper, but also, each episode was about something. I wanted that to kind of go through my work. Ironically enough, I shared the script with Matt Weiner, who created “Mad Men”, because “30 Rock” and “Mad Men” were kind of sister shows, in a way. To get his guidance very much encouraged me to not worry about if the show is funny or not.

John:

So when you say you did a first draft, is that a first draft of the whole season?

KP:

The first draft of the first six episodes. Then I did another six episodes, but I only released four. Then I released two as bonus episodes because they didn't fit. So I wrote them into six episode chunks.

Jason:

And you had written before, right, Keith? This wasn't your first time writing, was it?

KP:

No, it was not my first time writing. I had been hired to write things. I was a professional writer. I was in the WGA and it was a part of my talent that no one ever really knew about or saw. And being a director was not something that anybody knew about or saw. And so that's why I wanted to do this. But when I had the six episodes, then I went, “Well, what the hell am I going to do with them?” And so it began the journey. I met with the DP and I talked to him about what I wanted to do with it, how I wanted to make it and why I wanted to make it. And what I felt like the the arc of the story was and what I felt like it looked like and I wanted to do. At the time, web series were just starting to become an acceptable format. And this actually speaks, John, to what you were saying, that during that time, there were people who were making web series as showcases for themselves, as actors. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to tell specific stories. I wanted it to feel like a cable show. I wanted it to feel like you were watching, not a showcase of “look at me, look at how I can act”, but watching very specific little stories.

John:

What kind of experience had you had before making “Keith Broke his Leg” in terms of production? And I guess I skipped a step, you know, pre-production. What kind of experiences you had with this kind of planning before?

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KP:

Well, I was trying to transition into TV directing and thank God, knock on wood, I've now transitioned into it. I had shadowed on a number of television shows and started understanding how TV works and how to shoot quickly and how to have a plan and how to make something look good, but also done cheaply. So the major lesson that I learned in all of that is: prep is king. We spent about three times the amount of shoot on pre-production, than shooting. We did an episode a day. So if shooting took six days and it they were spread out over weekends, then I probably took a month, a month and a half in pre-production, and that was a month and a half of diligent planning because we had no money. I made all the call sheets. I made sure that we had enough insurance for X, Y and Z. I did all the planning in that regard because we had no money. I had to do it all and made sure that whatever artists I collaborated with had enough time where I could could collaborate with them and make them feel comfortable about what the shooting plan was. Prep prep prep prep prep prep is your friend. I wrote an article about making “Keith Broke his Leg” and I had said time is the currency of a broke filmmaker. I mean, if you think that you need X amount of time, triple it.

John:

I'm just going to put this out there: that piece that you wrote was for Indiewire. That was a helpful article, I think, for people who want to make their own show. In terms of your planning, was there anything that you needed to learn or do that you didn't already know how to do from your shadowing experience? And how did you learn how to do it?

KP:

I guess I did. I didn't know what I didn't know. And so I kind of just jumped into the deep end of the pool of that situation and started figuring it all out. I do believe that shadowing on television shows is a wholly boring but informative experience. I knew from all the things that I learned that I felt confident jumping in and knowing how to begin. Then once I was in it, if there were things that came up because I was prepared enough that to know that crazy shit will happen and that you can't plan for it, then you just kind of dealt with it as it came. You know, I feel like me and the crew had a very, got into a rhythm and started understanding each other and understanding what our our quirks were. So it helped us as we moved on. I also think that spreading it out over various weekends helped us to kind of do mini-postmortems so that we could do better the next weekend.

John:

Yeah, that's great. So you had mentioned that you would do things differently next time. 

KP:

My number one piece of advice to any person who is making a web series is be an artist first. Make sure you're telling a story. Keith  And I guarantee you it needs a rewrite. I guarantee you, even after you've done the rewrite, I guarantee you it needs another one, guaranteed. The hardest part is just in the conception of making it and making sure that your scripts are as tight as possible. Because I see a lot of web series that go on way too long. You don't want to kill your babies. Make sure your scripts are as tight as possible, then give yourself the extra time to shoot it. A big regret was making the artistic experiment that I did, which I only did one rewrite. I wish I had rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it. I mean, I wish I had gone through several more drafts, but this show was, you know, just my id. And I also wish that I had spent more time in post. We spent a long time in post, like four or five months, and that was because I wanted to make sure that the color grading was correct and I wanted to make sure that the sound was good because bad sound will show bad, bad movie making in a millisecond. And I wanted to make sure that the edits were as tight as possible. I think we spent way more time in post because I didn't do rewrites on the script. A lot of the editing was about cutting it down and making it as tight as possible to tell the story. And then I really, really, really wish that on day one of making “Keith Broke his Leg”, I had a distribution plan. So much of my trying to get “Keith Broke his Leg”out into the world took years because I did not have a distribution plan at the very beginning. I did not think about how the world was going to be able to see it. And so, so much of my time working on “Keith Broke his Leg” was just years of promoting it. And if I had a plan going forward, it would have made the journey much easier and faster. And would have made sure that people got to see it much sooner.