More than PEORIA made for TV
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A couple of weeks ago, I recused this article from active duty as a Field Report embedded in the weekly Calendar because I thought it would be better served as a stand-alone feature. It is intended in part to help me finish a thought or two raised by a previous Report – well, thoughts in my own head, anyway – and will serve to (re)introduce you to projects I never got to explore fully in their prime time.
Not all coverage here on C-U Blogfidential comes off as planned. Them’s the breaks when you’re a one-man band and don’t have a staff to help drive it. The first half of the master document I use to compose everything here that isn’t a Calendar is filled with notes, links, cut-and-pasted reference materials, and partly-drafted content. That’s nearly 100 pages’ worth of unrealized reading for you, dearest readers, which I tend to refer to as “the wreckage.” Some of it I finish belatedly, such as our recent obituary and Tubi posts, and more of it can be repurposed down the road. The remainder may ultimately be a wash.
That brings us to PEORIA, the television project we updated you about in part because we were happily surprised to see it still going forward, even with its creator’s grandiose plans. The piece we published about it three years ago was introductory in terms of covering PEORIA itself and primed to address the concept of locally-produced narrative television in our area. It’s been well-dramatized over time in the entertainment press as to how difficult it is to push a 90-minute indie feature from concept to completion and then distribution; can you imagine what it must be like to usher complete sets of episodes into the world at large and on a low budget? Despite the odds, I had leads on three more endeavors along these lines at the time and was planning to run a four-part weekly series that would talk about them.
After part 1, “L’episode un C-U: PEORIA plays TV,” posted in 2020, I ultimately tripped up. Bad me. I knew that I had gone fishing for too much original content in too short a time span, all of which required interviewing and research to make it work, and needed to move on when my effort amounted to not nearly enough. As it turns out, I didn’t let any Big Ones get away and it wasn’t for the lack of folks trying hard across central Illinois. Here is what I turned up in retrospect on those shows.
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“L’episode deux C-U: WAGE earners” was to have promoted the online debut of MINIMUM WAGE, a comedy pilot set in a coffee shop. It was created by Springfield resident Brandon Austin, who graciously took some time to interview with me about the show while I was bouncing between article leads. Shot in the mockumentary style popularized by the likes of THE OFFICE and RENO 911, his scenario finds the owner of “Temptations,” Phill (played by Austin), in a manic state as he begins to show the ropes to a new hire named Ben (Garth Whitehead). Yet, with Phill stepping away early and often to micro-manage and misconstrue, Ben’s introduction to his new co-workers and the way of Temptations is handled by head barista Samantha (Rachel Douglas Perdue). The two eventually sit down for a chat, having navigated the attentions of the affable and odd assortment who work there, and find common ground rather easily.
A second episode, in which a last-minute Christmas party is sprung on the gang by Phill, was released at the end of 2020 with a third apparently planned to be filmed in mid-2021, but that may have been closing time for MINIMUM WAGE as the Facebook page trails off from there. It’s too bad, for I liked what I saw even though it didn’t quite resemble the demeanor of coffee shop culture I was used to enjoying while I lived in Champaign-Urbana. The concept is fertile for situational humor and Austin draws chuckles from the awkward mismatches staged in the name of good-spirited fun. As is expected with many a local effort, performances range in quality and production values are spare and largely reliant on a single real-life setting, in this case the Three Twigs Bakery of Springfield, so working to improve on those and advance the various story threads compellingly are key if MINIMUM WAGE is destined to percolate again.
MINIMUM WAGE’s pair of half-hour “sipcoms,” which are still available to view on Facebook along with teasers, table reads, and more, were co-directed and co-produced by Phil Watson, who also ran camera on the set, and co-starred Amy Manuele, Hunter Woods, June Llewellyn, Lexi Tyus, Nia Tiller, Robert Quance, Shirley McConnaughay, and Zach Meredith, with bonus flavor shots going to Brandon Mauney as the resident “Drunk Guy.” Brett Blakely and Chloe Franks made their debut as staffers in episode 2.
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Another project that burned brightly for not very long is G-HUT BEACH, which we would have introduced in “L’episode trois C-U: On the BEACH.” Created by a University of Illinois undergraduate, Yash Hatkar, the series was conceived to be a “realistic” approach at exploring the lives of misfit kids attending the fictional Collins High School, based on Hatkar’s personal experiences in the Chicago suburbs. A teaser trailer was made first and premiered in December 2018, setting up the unmade series proper that would have involved the unspoken vanishing of a class president during the senior year for most of the principal characters: Dennis (Benjamin Croft), Gwen (Gwen Kaiser), Jake (Myles Valentine), Kennedy (Katherine Bokenkamp), Morgan (Yahli Barkan), Yash (Hatkar), and Zeke (Ezequiel de Castilla). Scenes were staged all over the UIUC campus with the hallowed halls of University High standing in for Collins.
Whether the trailer was meant to test out an aesthetic for G-HUT BEACH or be used to raise production funding or both, Yatkar and his team actually went in a different direction from there. Nineteen minisodes ranging in length from one to eight minutes were filmed and released weekly to Facebook and YouTube between July and September of 2020, right as I was writing our PEORIA entry and looking into the rest. Also produced in the C-U, these vignettes explore the backgrounds of the students and their relationships with one another, including a few initial encounters with Eddie (Casper Alexander), two years prior to hell breaking loose. Just hired by Collins as a security guard in this prologue, Eddie will become an adult confidant for the students as a member of the faculty in the near future.
As it stands, the miniseries is foreboding and disjointed, maybe by design; the high schoolers come from compromised home lives and sinister forces linger just out of reach like a deadly street drug, a local factory called Plugets, and a satchel being passed around with mysterious contents. (Look for a quick nod to REPO MAN and KISS ME DEADLY with the latter.) Some of the dialogue is stilted and not well recorded, lending a documentary verité feel at times to the action, and the students feel like a group worth getting to know. On occasion, the filmmakers take a chance; the baseball metaphor sequence with Jake reckoning his past comes out of left field and illustrates the potential inherent in G-HUT BEACH. The complete set runs 45 minutes and is worth a look to imagine what could have been and, alas, I still don’t know the meaning of “G-Hut Beach” after watching it all again with fresh eyes and open ears.
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While cross-checking my details and sources online in 2020 in regards to G-HUT BEACH, MINIMUM WAGE, and PEORIA, I happened upon an article about a photography shoot at a downstate airfield for a proposed series that would involve time travel and high adventure. The creation of Jacksonville-based screenwriter and visual artist Mikey Tiffany and his daughters, Maggie and Lilu, TIME GIRL was to be the subject of our final entry in the article series, “L’episode quatre C-U: TIME GIRL!!!” The logline found on their YouTube channel, filled with a modest selection of soundtrack songs, test animations, and preproduction artwork, is: “Amelia Earhart‘s granddaughter Ember and her best friend Trinity must navigate through time and space across bizarre dimensions to find the tyrant who took their parents.”
Sounds neat to me! After looking over the social media accounts in the present day for their company, Time Girl Productions, LLC, I gather they didn’t get to launch TIME GIRL as hoped. (Their 2020 push did result in a not-bad conceptual trailer – I hadn’t seen it until now – that ends in a surprise blast of colorful animation.) With a flood of visual posts on their Facebook and a lack of original live-action video on their YouTube, I also believe the Tiffany family has opted to spend their time creating a portfolio of scripts, working with artists to depict their flights of fantasy, and networking with B-movie stars to attach to their projects. From the outside looking in, I had a hard time separating the different ideas as a lot of the hard information is secure behind the pay wall of Internet Movie Database Pro. I guess they mean business!
That said, I’ll share a few observations and try not to assume too much. First, a good portion of Tiffany’s stories are probably related to Ms. Ember Earhart and her transtemporal travel. Second, given the large budget that TIME GIRL would require to be sufficiently produced, I’m not surprised that Tiffany is aiming for a TIME GIRL movie (as opposed to the television series they talked up previously) and is seeking executive producers and a literary agent to help shop the property/-ies, as relayed in a Facebook post dated on June 7. Third, part of this new push is apparently so they can film a revised TIME GIRL teaser, having announced the young actress Rose Bonino as their new “Time Girl” in January. And fourth, I’m thinking that Deborah Twiss (KICK-ASS, SAPIOSEXUAL) is still committed to playing Amelia Earhart as she did briefly for the Tiffanys a few years ago; on Facebook, they keep recycling artwork of Twiss dressed up in vintage pilot gear. Beyond this, we’ll need to wait until TGP, LLC tells the world what’s next.
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So, life goes on for all involved even if none of these series quite panned out the way their guiding lights had originally intended. The TIME GIRL detour was due in part to Tiffany suffering a stroke, an event shared by his family through online channels, and his recovery hasn’t dampened a creative streak that resulted in a stable of properties with titles like BUDTENDERS and QUESTION REALITY. Similarly, Austin had to pause MINIMUM WAGE due to pandemic health scares as well as family loss and the closure of he and his wife Cana’s business, Grateful Coffee Co.; in recent months, he restarted a deejay entertainment service and launched a TikTok sketch comedy with cohort Watson called “Drama Club Dropouts.” I wish the best to both in gaining strength and building again on what they have.
Elsewhere, Hatkar found his groove back north after finishing up in Urbana, co-creating with Rahul Dhiman a new indie series about a pair of Indian-American families and their relations, UPSIDE BROWN, which debuted in April at the Davis Theater in Chicago. Michael Mcgruder is sticking with his big plans for PEORIA and apparently bent on taking his time to get it right before he gets it done. Their camps are farther along than the others in realizing their episodic efforts for audiences to enjoy, and I’m ready to watch the final results myself and learn more about how they plan to continue.
Leaving the banks of the River City, the streets of the Bubbly City, the respites of the Capital City, and the wilds of the Athens of the West in good hands with their citizens and resident storytellers, I’m content that we’ve finally made due on what we first set out to do three years ago. It’s abbreviated and doesn’t have the personal or contextual touches that would have added to the original series, but it’s nice to have it all on record. The topic of local television usually drums up visions of newscasts, sports coverage, local commercials, telethons, and weird gaffes one usually doesn’t see on network broadcasts. With a certain mindset and follow-through, it could be more like what these casts and crews set out to create despite the inherent difficulty of telling effective stories in a serial fashion. I’m sure there’s more to explore on this front but, for now, it’s time to dim the devices and shut off the set. Good night, and continued good luck.
~ Jason Pankoke
p.s. Help me out for a moment, C-Uvians. There was or was not a sequel series to ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE 1970s filmed before the Lukemans opened Champaign-Urbana Adventures in Time and Space? Anyone? Asking for a friend. Her name is, er, “Ember.” Knows a thing or two about portals in the sky.
p.s.2 We can easily argue that life itself is a serial with a beginning, ending, and any number of sobering and wonderful episodes. Stories in brief can affect you; stories in succession can define who you are.
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