May 7, 2014 Interview with MICHAEL CARUSO, creator and star of DEVANITY. The hit web series is nominated this year for Best Web Series at the Daytime Emmy Awards. This show -- full of dysfunctional family drama, sex, drugs, murder and a dazzling array of guest stars -- has been on the internet since 2011. With its third season up for a nomination, OutTakes talked with Michael about this series. Radio interview available at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/outtakes/2014/05/09/michael-caruso-creator-and-star-of-devanity
OT: Congratulations on your Daytime Emmy nomination for
DEVANITY. Are you planning on attending?
MC: Absolutely. Are you
kidding? (laughs) It’s not every day you
get a nomination like this so it’s not one of those events where you say, yeah,
I was gonna go but I decided to stay home and wash my hair. My wife and I will absolutely be in
attendance with several other people from our cast and crew. We’re very excited about it. It’s a tremendous honor; and I’m still kind
of recovering from the shock of it all.
I don’t know if that has necessarily happened yet. But we will definitely be there.
OT: Have you been to the Daytime Emmys before?
MC: I’ve never been. We’ve
watched it on television in the past. At
this point, I have a lot of friends who are on daytime. So I watch all the interviews and the red
carpet stuff. I’ve never actually
been. It’s crazy because the ceremony is in
downtown LA where my wife and I actually both live and where we filmed
DEVANITY. It is right up the street from
us. So it couldn’t be more convenient.
OT: So how did the idea of this web series come to you in the
first place?
MC: We started DEVANITY in 2011.
The honest answer to this is that I always wanted to be on a daytime
soap opera. God has given me many
wonderful gifts in life, but being an Abercrombie & Fitch model is not one
of them. So unfortunately it just never
really panned out that way. I realized
that if I wanted to be on a soap, I was going to have to create one for
myself. We live in the jewelry district
of downtown LA. So we would walk by all
of these beautiful windows with all of these amazing creations. I turned to my wife one day and I said, “You
know, nobody has ever done a show about this.”
I think ultimately a great soap at its core has to be about typically
family – and something for that family to fight about. That’s kind of where the genesis of DEVANITY
began. It’s about a family that runs a
very dysfunctional jewelry empire. That
was kind of the birth of that whole idea.
OT: That’s cool to create your own content. That if you couldn’t get in a soap, you would
make your own.
MC: Yes, absolutely.
Honestly, I think that is where this industry is going; and not just
with soaps…but movies and television. A
lot of people are now realizing that they need to reclaim their careers and the
kind of characters that they’d like to play.
More and more people are doing that.
That is what is so spectacular about this category – and what is so spectacular
about this online movement – is that it is really giving people this incredible
chance to create, tell their own stories and do their own thing.
OT: When I interviewed DEVANITY cast member Gordon Thomson, he was saying how DEVANITY was similar to DYNASTY, except with an
edge. Being able to do stuff that you
couldn’t do in the 80s on ABC. Did you
watch a lot of primetime soaps as a kid like FALCON CREST or DYNASTY? Were those influences for you?
MC: When those shows were on, I was a little too young to get
them. My grandmother’s favorite show was
FALCON CREST; and the whole world stopped whenever it was on. And then my mother and my aunt loved DALLAS
and DYNASTY. I believe DALLAS was
originally on Friday nights on CBS. I
remember sitting on the steps in my parents’ house in New York, watching my
whole family watch DALLAS. Obviously we
were in no way allowed to watch shows like that when we were kids. I didn’t really discover DALLAS until many
years later when I was in college. There
was a channel that doesn’t exist anymore called TNN which is The National
Network; and they reran the entire series.
I pretty much fell in love with DALLAS; and I didn’t see DYNASTY until
many years after that. I’m a huge fan of
those shows. I find them
captivating. I love the concept of the
high drama and high glamour. It was not
my intention to set out to duplicate either of those shows in any way, but I
think it is such an incredibly flattering thing when you’ve got one of the
major stars of DYNASTY comparing my little web series to this iconic television
series. I take that as a huge
extraordinary compliment. Working with
Gordon has probably been one of the coolest things to come out of
DEVANITY. And we’ve actually become very
good friends post-DEVANITY. It’s been
really great.
OT: Speaking of DALLAS, also a congratulations for Charlene
Tilton who won Best Guest Star at the Indie Series Awards this year…
MC: She did! Charlene is
a firecracker. She is so full of life
and energy, so enthusiastic. I have to
give her props. She joined us in Season
3. She was supposed to return for Season
4, but there was a scheduling conflict; and she was not able to solve it and do
the scene that I had written for her.
When I reached out to Steve Kanaly who played Ray on DALLAS for 10
years, he wasn’t familiar with the whole web series world. He reached out to her. And she said, “Steve, you’ve got to do
this. You’ve got to do this show.” So she helped me get him on Season 4 of
DEVANITY which was just incredible.
Sheree J. Wilson joined us in Season 4 as well as a guest star. So we’ve got a little DALLAS contingency on
DEVANITY which has been pretty exciting.
I was so proud of Charlene for winning that award. She absolutely deserved it. She did a phenomenal job. A total dream to work with.
OT: You also had some great daytime actresses on the show like
Andrea Evans and Arianne Zucker. How did
you manage to get all of these amazing people?
MC: Rewind to back after Season 1 had ended. Season 1 was a very exploratory season for
us; and we were really testing the waters.
If you had asked me when we started if we would have been in Emmy
territory four years later, I never would have thought that in a million
years. We were just trying to create
something and see where it went. After Season
1, I realized that we really needed to step up our game. I wanted to bring in some name talents. Kyle Lowder, who used to be on DAYS OF OUR LIVES
and BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL – he and I actually went to college together. He’s a couple of years younger than I
am. One of our other cast members, Erin
Buckley (who played my sister Jackie) was going to the Daytime Emmys years ago. I said to her, “Well, if you happen to see
Kyle Lowder there, tell him I said hi and see if he’d be willing to have a
conversation.” And she did. And he was.
We brought him on in Season 2 as a guest star, which was amazing. Kyle’s great; and I always love working with
him. In Season 3, he came on as a series
regular. One day, we were talking on the
phone; and he said, “Hey, do you think you might have something for Ari?” And I was like, “Uh, yeah! Are you kidding me? Of course I do!” I had to twist it up a little bit…so I wrote
her character as his character’s sister (which was kind of gross because they
were married at the time). Ari Zucker, I
would say, has to be one of the nicest most down-to-earth women I’ve ever met
in my life. She is absolutely the girl
next door. She came on set; and she
acted as if she had known everybody for a million years. She couldn’t have been cooler and more go
with the flow and just happy to be there.
With Andrea Evans – typically what I do is I just reach out to agents
and managers, that’s how I hire people or ask people to work with me. I have their characters already written so
they get their script; and they get to decide whether they want to do the show
or not. We’ve been very blessed that the
show does have a very good reputation in the industry. I haven’t had a lot of problems getting the
people that I’ve sought after. We’ve
just been very lucky in that regard. And
Andrea Evans is another one. This is
just daytime royalty sitting in my living room.
The most normal down-to-earth kindhearted person you could ever hope
for. We were talking about our love for
animals; and she was telling us about her daughter. Just a really normal lovely sweet lady.
OT: How was it acting in a series that you were writing?
MC: In the plus column, with the introduction of DEVANITY, I become
so immersed in the world that I very easily slip into the role of Jason
DeVanity. He’s kind of like a second
skin to me. The bigger challenge is that
not only am I acting in it, but I’m also the producer and the set designer and
the costume coordinator and the crazy person that has to order lunch for the
cast and crew and whatnot. So I don’t
think it’s necessarily the acting part that’s the challenge but the fact that I
wear probably 15 to 20 hats. In addition
to that, I’m very fortunate that my wife is the co-executive producer; and she’s
right there by my side. And we’re
working together. I have a wonderful
team of people. A very small crew, but
they are incredibly dedicated. My
director, Kelley Portier; her
husband, Rod Portier, who is our
cinematographer. Everybody chips
in. Kelly has always been really great
at saying “OK, Michael. Now you get to
just worry about being an actor.” So we
tried to make sure everything was squared away so when it was time for me to be
in the scene, that’s the only thing I have to focus on. Which is really nice to be able to do.
OT: I love the beginning sequence with the jewelry and the
classical music. Was that what you
created?
MC: I picked the theme music years ago that has always been our
theme. The wonderful composer, Vivaldi –
a far more creative genius than I could ever hope or aspire to be. It’s actually a program that I licensed. I licensed the actual program; and then you
slip in the moving images and screenshots of people. We basically paid for that. Rod puts it all together and adds the
names. So you have your great big
opening title sequence. I am a very big
fan of opening title sequences from those shows from the 80s. I think it really helps to get your audience
churning and burning. It gets them ready
to go. And it really sets the scene for
what we are going to expect. What is the
kind of story that we’re going to tell?
OT: So sadly this was the last season of DEVANITY. Why bring the show to an end?
MC: I’m a very firm believer in not overstaying your
welcome. Good storytelling has a good
beginning, middle and end. What I didn’t
want to do is to keep it going just for the sake of keeping it going and then
burn out and diminish the quality. I
really wanted to end it on a high note.
Keep in mind that we’ve been doing this for four years without major
financing, without people to cut us checks.
We all do this as a passion project.
I can fairly say that after four years of burning the candle at both
ends, I think that everybody was ready for a break and to walk away from
it. Those six or seven episodes –
although the audience is seeing it in a six or seven week cycle – we’re looking
at that all year. From the writing to
the preproduction to the production to the postproduction, we don’t ever get a
break. We all work full time jobs on top
of it to pay for the show. So I think
that it was an equal mix of both creative and logistic decisions that it was a
good time for us to say, OK, I can end this and be happy with how it is going
to end and start on a new soap opera.
Work on something different. As
much as I love DEVANITY – it’s like my child – I love my show but it is time to
move on; and it’s time for something new.
OT: So you plan on working on more web series in the future?
MC: I do. I’m currently
developing a new soap opera which I’m exceedingly excited about. It’s going to be very fun and very cool. I’ve talked to a couple of actors about it;
and they seem very excited to do it as well.
I’ve made a firm commitment to take a break and take the rest of this
calendar year off. I’ll formally start
preproduction at the beginning of next year.
I told myself that the whole purpose of ending DEVANITY was to take a
little time off and recharge the batteries.
But you get an Emmy nomination…and it’s like Wow! If that isn’t a battery recharge, I don’t
know what is. It’s all very surreal how
everything comes full circle. It has
always been the little project that could.
I’ve always been very committed to never resting on our laurels. We’ve been very fortunate. We’ve got so many wonderful nominations from
the Indie Series Awards and HollyWeb and all of these great festivals. We’ve had a lot of love given to us. And that always inspires me to say…how can I
be better? How can I make the next show
better? How can we really dazzle and
excite the audience? And tell a great
story? That’s what I’m really hoping to
do with my next show. So I think this is
a really good thing. We’re just going to
enjoy the moment and celebrate four years of DEVANITY. The truth is there are so many people that
are still discovering the show. That’s
the beauty of a nomination like this is that it opens up the doors to a whole
new audience – that you thought knew about it, but they didn’t. They’re finding it for the first time; and
they’ve got four seasons to play with. I’m
very proud of that fact.
OT: It’s also exciting that ONE LIFE TO LIVE, the web series, is
up for Best Drama. That’s the first time
ever that a web series has been up in that category. So that just shows you how the world is
changing.
MC: I think that entertainment is changing. At the end of the day, whether it is on TV or
on the computer, a good story is a good story.
If you create a good story and fill that story with characters that the
audience cares about, the audience is going to follow those characters. The medium of either television or the
computer is just a tool – just an instrument to tell those stories. The most important thing is that the soap
genre stays alive, that it thrives, that it’s healthy; and now you have this
influx of new blood that’s willing to try things a little bit differently. We were always the black sheep. I don’t come from a daytime background. I don’t have a soap opera pedigree. I’m not a connected person in that
sense. So we really kind of came out of
left field and were able to build that from scratch and cultivate that
audience. Soap fans are the greatest
fans on earth. They’re loyal. They’re loving. They’re passionate. And they really embraced DEVANITY. I think this is a very exciting time in soap
opera history. It was a little rocky
there for a while but I think that the internet has given soap operas the
opportunity to transform and to have a rebirth.
A dramatic Phoenix from the ashes kind of thing.
OT: When you look back on DEVANITY, do you have a favorite
moment, storyline or scene? Is there a
special highlight for you?
MC: I don’t know if there’s one moment in particular. I think it was the first day – and it wasn’t
something that you saw on screen – but the first day that Gordon Thomson filmed
with us on the set. We’re sitting there;
and he’s telling us a story about working with Charlton Heston. Then he started telling us a story about
working with Jim Henson. Then he started
telling us about Aaron Spelling. Those
are three people that I worship. These
are the greats. Gordon has worked with
each and every one of them, talking about them from first-hand experience. It was just this really surreal moment that
an actor that I really looked up to was performing in something that I had
written – and was generous enough to be telling these stories, not in a
comparison kind of way, but just talking about his life and experiences – and being
so grateful to be a part of DEVANITY. Those
are moments that you don’t forget.
Watching Gordon and Andrea have lunch and they’re chit chatting; or
having Charlene or Sheree talk about their time on DALLAS. We have two pitbulls; and Maxwell Caulfield
loved to play with the dogs. And I’m
like, these people are in my home! This
is crazy! Who does this? Who gets this? This is like a trip to Disney! That’s what I take from DEVANITY. Not just the celebrities…but all of these
amazingly hard-working gifted talented people that have believed in my dream
and worked with me to achieve it. It’s
been this delightful collaborative wonderful process that will I never
forget.
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Watch DEVANITY at http://www.devanity.com/
Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/DeVanity
Twitter https://twitter.com/DeVanitysoap
Michael Caruso Twitter https://twitter.com/MCarusoactor
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