Hayden Black has a history of great series produced for the web, with Goodnight Burbank, which was named on of iTune’s best podcasts in 2006 in both the People’s Choice and Staff Pick categories, and which USA describes as “better than 99% of the stuff on TV”.  He recently delivered 20 episodes of the series under the spin-off name, Goodnight Burbank: Hollywood Report.  The series is produced for babelgum.com.  He is also responsible for Abigail’s Teen Diary, about a 13 year old girl with a strange condition that makes her look like Hayden Black.  His current comedy masterpiece, which premiered this week also on babelgum.com is The Occulterers; a comedic take on the current popular paranormal investigation shows such as Ghost Hunters. 

Hayden recently came on to The Two Doctors radio show to discuss The Occulterers and his various other series including the highly anticipated The Cabonauts, a sci fi comedy musical which will feature some unique guest stars.  He also gave some clues as to where he comes up with his ideas.

You can catch the web series at: http://babelgum.com/theocculterers, and listen to Hayden’s interview on The Two Doctors.

Kenn> The Occulterer’s premieres this week right?

Hayden> Yeah, an absolutely crazy schedule.  Basically, I pitched the show about 3 and a half weeks ago to Babelgum, and it was bought over the phone.  It premieres tomorrow at babelgum.com/theocculterers. 

Jim> What is this show taking off from?  The Ghost Hunters, Paranormal Activity, or what?

Hayden> I love Ghost Hunters, I’ve watched every episode since it premiered.  I’ve always wanted to do something in this genre, and it was just a few weeks ago, when I got the word that Babelgum was looking for an interactive comedy/horror series. So I thought, now is the time to pull that idea back out and see what I can do with it, and created these four very original characters, completely over the top.  The cast is unbelievable.  We’ve got James C. Leary, who you will remember as Clem, the loose skinned demon from Buffy, we’ve got Ellen Sandweiss, who starred in The Evil Dead, she played Cheryl.  And we’ve got Camden Toy who played a few seminal vampires in Buffy and Angel, and I play a particularly outrageous character, this sexually ambiguous Belgian psychic called Herve Villechez, who spells his name differently from the other Herve, and rounding out the cast is the beautiful Amy Kline, who I’d seen in an online series called I Heart Vampires, and she has this really cool Wynonna Ryder quality about her.  So the series is six episodes long, and we are spending the night in a Transylvanian castle. So it goes chronologically, just like any episode of Ghost Hunters.  But what makes this a little bit unique is with every single episode comes a one hour mock live feed from the castle, so you can look at a webcam feed.  And in that feed, we want you to twitter us at @theocculterers if you see anything, because there will be plenty to see.  We are making this very interactive, so if you follow @theocculterers on twitter, we will be using names at random, and Camden, who is playing Count Vampire, will be calling those names out.  So you can be a part of the show and have one of your favorite Joss Whedon vampires using your twitter name, calling it out.  It’s going to be very funny and cool and exciting.  It’s far, far better than it has any right to be after being written and produced in two weeks. 

Kenn> I didn’t realize the timing there.  That has to be exciting?

Hayden> If anybody had come to me and said I’ve got a show done in two weeks, I wouldn’t even look twice.  I mean, how good could it be?  It’s turned out pretty damn good, I’m surprised as Hell to say.  And every episode runs this week.  It runs Monday thru Friday and culminates on Saturday.  And on top of all of that, in one or two of the live feeds, we are throwing to two flash mob events, that we are going to create, to any Occulterer fans living in the Los Angeles area, for Halloween night. 

Jim> Very cool.  Are you going to be doing an Occulterers seven hour live show eventually to mock the Ghost Hunters events?

Hayden> You never know, right now we are in very early talks about a season two.  If things work out, we will do a season 2 at Christmas, and that is all I can say about that.  But I know exactly what it is going to be if we do it, so we’ll see.  But for now, we are just looking forward to tomorrow’s premiere, and hitting the ground running. 

Kenn> Let me ask a question here, what is it that’s on the site this weekend?  There is something up labeled as episode one.

Hayden> That was, of course, a technical snafu on Babelgum’s end.  Because nothing is perfect and let’s blame the ghost in the machine, shall we?  I’ve got a million of them and that is a little glitch, but episode one is running right now if you go to Babelgum.com/theocculterers.  You can see episode one and the live feed isn’t up yet.  That will probably go up late Monday. 

Kenn> The show is hilarious.  Jim and I are big Ghost Hunters fans, and while the other two guys aren’t too keen on it, but they liked your take on.  Right guys?

Jeff> Absolutely!  Anything that rakes them over the coals, and is that funny is just worth supporting immensely. 

Hayden> Thank you.  I think the Ghost Hunters show is great, but they have settled into a very obvious routine. And so it’s getting easier to just run to the reveal at the end.

Kenn> I have to admit, I’ve been doing that the last couple of weeks.  I’ve just got so much TV to watch, I just go to the end.

Hayden> Yeah, and of course, if they two cases in one hour, you know the second one is going to be lame as hell.  I’d rather not go into it with that expectation.  I’d rather them have one show in an hour, and build up my expectations.  And if nothing happens, nothing happens- that’s kind of par for the course.

Kenn> Did you happen to catch the South Park take on Ghost Hunters a couple of weeks back?

Hayden> I did.  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, because they were touching on what we were doing-ish.  But like I said, a parody is a parody.  We were trying to stay away from parody as much as we could.  Parodies are so easy to do, and there are only a few people who can do parody brilliantly.  South Park is one of those.  That is just such a great show.

Kenn> When I saw The Occulterers, even in that first five minutes, it looks like it’s going to be hilarious.  I’m really looking forward to this week.  Now what is the schedule for the live feed?  That’s going to be up for an hour at a time you said?

Hayden> Yeah, they’ll be posting the whole hour.  So I’m not sure what times they post, but because the technical team are based in Ireland, it’s probably Pacific Time.  When we get up in the morning, it will probably be up.

Jim> I have a question for you, do you actually find ghosts in the castle?

Hayden> You know, the great thing is that there are ghosts in the castle, and the Occulterers are so dysfunctional and stupid, they manage to miss all of the real ghosts.  They just rely on Herve who is clearly faking it.  He’s the one that is channeling the spirits, and he is clearly faking all of it.  But he is the one who has them in his sway.  There are real ghosts in almost every episode.  In the first episode, for example, they are exploring the library that is purported to be haunted by a ghost that reads aloud from the books, but not just any books, the erotica section.  So they are looking out for him, and at the very end that ghost makes an appearance, reading a section of erotica that is astonishingly modern for a castle that is 800 years old.  Camden Toy plays Count Vampire, and he does interact with one of the cast.  I’m not going to say who, and actually bites them and possibly turns them into a vampire.  But we decided to creatively make the decision that that doesn’t happen in the show, it happens in one of the live feeds. That’s the only place you can see it.  Now we’ll twitter it when it happens, so not everybody is forced to sit through six hours of content if you don’t want to, but it will be there as a surprise for people who do want to.

 Kenn> Let’s me ask you a broader question.  In the last three years, with all of these web series coming to the Internet, that just has to be an amazing thing for a creative person, doesn’t it, to have that outlet and ability to get something up without the hassle of going to a network?

Hayden> Well, that’s where we started from.  When we started doing Goodnight Burbank three years ago, I was part of an improve class at the Upright Citizens Brigade, and it was just a really bunch of talented people in this class.  Not necessarily improvisers, just really great actors.  So I wrote this Goodnight Burbank thing, thinking, “What a great way to bypass the system. We can get this into producer’s hands and they can press play and watch it on the computer.”  That didn’t really happen as much as I thought it would, but what did happen is I found myself, over the course of a few months continuing to do the series, finding that this was a whole new business.  The last thing I ever pictured myself as was a businessman.  I pictured myself as a writer and performer, and now I have my own production company, Evil Global Corporation.  My father wanted to kill me when I told him what I was calling it.  I told him, “Dad, we do comedy.  We’re not selling widgets.”  But we have a full time business manager; we have a full time lawyer.  We’re doing stuff all the time.  We did 20 episodes of Burbank this year, again for Babelgum. 

I do the other series that I’m not sure if you are familiar with, Abby’s Teen Age Diary.  That’s about a 13 year old girl who blogs to camera, like a video diary about whatever 13 year old kids want to talk about.  But what makes her a little different, is that she has the fictional genetic condition called Bloomberger’s syndrome, and it’s kind of aged her a little prematurely.  It’s put hair where there shouldn’t be, and added weight.  It’s bloated her, and she now looks exactly like me.  I play this girl, Abigail, and it just blew up with of all people, females.  Girls in high school and college are big fans of Abigail.  We do that, and of course as you know from speaking to Miracle, we are going to be doing The Cabonauts early next year.  It’s the first ever scripted sci fi musical comedy.  And that goes back to the original question, this being the internet, you can do anything you want.  It doesn’t have to be diluted by people who are looking to do the same, or do what’s already been tested.  The biggest thing that runs Hollywood is fear.  Fear that you are going to loose your job, fear that you are not going to be accepted.  On every single level, it’s fear, fear, fear.  But you can go ahead and do crazy stuff on the internet, because you’ve literally got nothing to loose.

Kenn> How much was Abigail a take on lonelygirl15?  Is there any connection there?

Hayden> Too be honest, no, it really wasn’t.  Goodnight Burbank had won an award for this vlogging thing.  I was looking at vlogging, which is a god-awful word. There are so many god-awful words associated with this new media.  I came up with one myself the other day to describe just the sheer amounts of crap that people put up on the internet, it’s called New Mediocrity. 

Kenn> That’s a good one!

Hayden> Credit me, please.  I’m looking at some of these vlogs that have won awards with people talking to camera, and I thought you only need two things to do a vlog.  One is a camera, and the other is an ego to think that anybody will give a shit what you’ve got to say.  So I thought, creating this character that is scripted, that might be funny.  That’s where it came from, so it didn’t come from lonelygirl.  It just came from this myriad of vlogs.  And I think that lonelygirl was born out of this myriad of vlogs as well.  So we all took our inspiration from the same place.  To be very honest with you, I love Miles and Greg very much, and know them personally, but I hadn’t seen an episode of lonelygirl when I came up with Abigail. 

Kenn> It seems like the web is really an amazing outlet for all of these things that are good, but the mediocrity is also amazing.  But you can find these real jewels out there. 

Hayden> And that’s par for the course.  Because anybody can do it, anybody and everybody does do it.  That doesn’t mean it’s good.  Look at television.  Look at how many channels there are, and how much money is spent on those shows, and is every one of them a jewel?  God no!

Kenn> I think the other thing too, is just being able to go back and access it.  To be honest, I guess I’d heard of Goodnight Burbank, but hadn’t watched it.  And now I’ve gone through quite a few of the episodes here in the last few days.  It’s just amazing to go back in the archive and pick them up.  You really can’t do that with a TV show unless you buy the DVD set.

Hayden> This is just one element of why New Media is so different from television.  I think a lot of people are making the mistake right now.  Ostensibly, at the end of the day it’s video.  It’s moving talking pictures.  Because it’s on movie screens and televisions, people think that because it’s on the internet, it’s the same thing.  And it’s not quite.  There are different ways of engagement; something as esoteric as editing for comedy. When you are watching comedy with your friends, whether on television or a movie theater, you will generally laugh out loud.  I don’t know why that is, it may be a subconscious thing, saying “I get that!”  But when you are watching something alone, you don’t tend to laugh out loud as much.  So if you are editing comedy for the internet, you don’t want to leave massive gaps for people to laugh in, because that laughter isn’t necessarily going to be there.  It’s going to be internal.  So that is just one little touch.  Then of course, there is the whole interactivity of things, allowing people to be a part of the show.  Whether it’s allowing them to determine where the story goes, or as simple as hearing their name in the show, and having some fun or famous person talk to them individually or personally.  It’s great.  And of course, like you say the fact that you can go back and watch an entire series because it’s right there on the internet at the click of a button- it’s fantastic.  There is a whole new dimension to things, different than you can do on television, or anywhere else.  And it’s just the beginning.

Kenn> Are Abigail and Burbank still in production?  Or is it just The Occulterers and The Cabonauts?

Hayden>  It sort of depends on what the deal is.  We are currently talking to all kinds of people right now, about all kinds of different things.  I guess they are on hiatus, I suppose.  Just last week, 10 new episodes of Goodnight Burbank: The Hollywood Report premiered on Babelgum, at http://babelgum.com/GoodnightBurbank.  And those are the best 20 we’ve done.  I’m really proud of those.  We did all of those earlier this year, and they’ve got great storylines.  The acting is just top knotch, and I’m really, really proud of those.  We also have David Lawrence, who plays the puppeteer, Eric Doyle in Heroes co-starring in Goodnight Burbank.  So we have a little sci fi person there.

Jim> In The Cabonauts are you going to be doing any spoofs of Doctor Who or Star Trek?

Hayden> We’re not doing any spoofs.  Again, I’m not really a big parody fan.  I want us to be original as we can be.  But we are going to have fun, that’s for sure.  It’s very subtle, but you’ll notice in the scenes with Nichelle Nichols in her office there is a 1991 cell phone.  It’s the size of a small brick, on her desk, which is a very subtle nod to the communications blue tooth device that she had hanging off her ear on Star Trek.  But that’s as far as I want to go with those kinds of references.  I just think the idea of having people come on and play roles that they are not known for; I want them to play against type.  We’ve got Gil Gerard and Erin Grey set to do one episode together.  I don’t know if they have ever actually acted together since Buck Rogers.  One of them is playing a Goth, and one is playing an Emo.  In the year 2050 there was this horrible, horrible Goth/Emo war that decimated most of the world.  Still people are very one way or another on that.  Then we’ve got John Barrowman from Torchwood and Doctor Who lined up to do an episode. 

Jim> He sings right?

Hayden> Well, John actually does sing so it’s not going to be a surprise to see John singing.  But there’s somebody we’ve spoken to off Lost, who is the last person in the world you’d expect to see singing and dancing.  The last we spoke, he wants to come on board the cab.  So we will have some brilliant surprises. 

Jim> You said “he”, so we can check off the names.

Hayden> That’s the idea, this thing could go for awhile.  On top of that, the show is set in the ‘80s, but not the 1980’s- the 2180’s.  So the music is all very electro-pop.  We’re bringing in some very big names from the ’80’s to remix the tracks in each episode.  We’ve already signed on board one of The Human League who is going to be re-mixing tracks.  That, to me, is a personal dream come true.  I think I was squealing like a little girl for days when that news came through.  It’s Jo Callis, and I’m just over the moon with that. 

Kenn> Do you do your own music for the web series?

Hayden> I do!  I do my own music for the web series.  In fact if you listen to The Occulterers theme song, that’s a piece of music that I wrote a couple of months ago that was just sitting around.  And I’m doing all of the music for The Cabonauts.  That’s why I say it’s such a dream come true.  They are mixing my music, not music I hired somebody else to do.  Who would have ever thought that?  So I’m mixing my own music.  I use Garage Band.  I have a keyboard that I got from a Mac store, and plugged that in. And it’s off to the races we go.  It’s so much fun, and I don’t know how this is going to sound.  I’ve never written music before last year.  I’ve always been able to play by ear, which really hurts your head, “Oh, I’ll be here all week.”  But seriously, it was something I’d always wanted to do, and I started to do it.  I think I’m just about passable at it.  But to have Nichelle Nichols, Miracle Laurie, and James Leary singing your songs, then to have The Human League remixing them, you’ve really just got to keep pinching yourself. 

Jim> Now is this a little bit tougher for you getting them to sing songs?  Does it take a little longer than you are anticipating, to do these episodes with song?

Hayden> There’s a lot of work to do.  Each episode of The Cabonauts will be 10 minutes, and three or so of that will be the song.  That’s two shows in a sense.  There is the show itself, and then there is the music video.  We’re not singing in the cab.  We break out of the cab for a music video.  So there’s definitely a hell of a lot of work involved, and we have a very short amount of time to achieve it.  When we’ve got the celebrities in, it was literally a ten hour day, where they came in and went through makeup, recorded the audio lyrics of the song, we shoot their scenes in the back of the cab, then we do a couple of video interviews with them for the website.  Then when the day is kind of coming to a close, that’s when we start doing the dancing.  We know they’re going to be a physical wreck after that.  It’s a very tight schedule, but we get a ton packed in. 

Kenn> So it’s about an hour a minute, for what actually airs?  Is that the schedule?

Hayden> I hadn’t even thought of it that way.  Just, “Here’s a shot list, we’ve got to get through this or I die.” 

Kenn> Is it harder to put together a good coherent five minutes than it is a longer shoot?

Hayden> Well, I’ve been doing promos for the networks which is 30 seconds in length.  So on the one hand, it’s actually a step up.  On the other, I’ve written screen plays that have been optioned and stuff.  But nothing has ever been made.  So I’m used to a quite longer format.  I think it’s entirely possible to tell a fun cool story in five minutes as it is in 30 minutes, or an hour and a half.  It all boils down to compelling characters that people want to spend more time with, and will come back to.  That is really the definition, as NBC calls it, of ‘Must See TV’.  Must See Entertainment, you’ve really got to relate to these people, and it’s five or ten minutes.  You still want to come back, so the challenge is just creating great characters, and making sure that the episodes move at a rollicking pace.  One of the downsides to being on the internet is that we are all competing with the chime of the e-mail.  If you get bored for a second, you can click on anything else and you are gone.  You’ve just got to make it as exciting and compelling as possible. 

Kenn> What’s after The Cabonauts and The Occulterers?  Do you have a whole other series planned out?

Hayden> You are killing me, aren’t you?  After that, we are looking at next year being the year of The Cabonauts, 2010.  We’re already in talks with people to take this to television, so that’s going to go for awhile.  The Occulterers, we’d love to see more seasons and get those done.  It was just so much fun and an unbelievable cast.  Our unsung hero, I have to give a shot out to Aaron Lappin, who edited this thing for the last week and a half.  He’s hardly left the edit bay, just putting all of the stuff together.  And so if we do some Goodnight Burbanks, or some Abigails, or something that I’ve been asked to go pitch to an A-list celebrity who is looking for shows next week.  I don’t know what’s going to come of that.  That might be something, or it might be absolutely nothing.  But we are keeping very, very busy.

Jeff> Have you had any contact with people at Adult Swim at the Cartoon Network?

Hayden> Not yet, no.  We will at some point, I know, because they obviously kind of seem to swim in those waters a lot.  So I think when we are ready, we’ll definitely speak to them. 

Frank> What is the process of coming with your ideas?  You come up with some very cool stuff.

Hayden> Well, to be honest with you, I listen very closely to my dog.  He is a Yorkshire Terrier, and often times whispers some amazing ideas to me.  But before you start saying, “This dog is amazing!”, he also whispers a lot of shit too, which is absolutely crap.  But there you go, that’s pretty much where I get most of my ideas from.  Ideas come to you, just  like any ideas come to you, out of the blue.  

Frank> Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night, think you have a good idea, and just write it down?

Hayden> The only times I’ve ever done that, then re-read it in the morning, the only thought that comes to mind is, “What the hell was I thinking at 2AM in the morning?”  It doesn’t make sense.  Generally, I just see things differently.  I hear headlines differently, and do lots of tweets, both on my own account, @haydenblack, and @goodnightburbank, which is just my silly take on the headlines, kind of like Weekend Update type jokes, headline/punch line.  It’s the way I see the world, and ideas just suddenly pop in.  Some of them are really, really cool, and some of them just seem really cool for five minutes, then the next day it’s like, “No, that’s ok, nice try.”  At the end of the day, you only need a few really good ideas, because there’s only so much time to execute them. 

Frank> Is there somebody that you’ve been trying to get that you haven’t been able to get on this?

Hayden> Well, we really haven’t made a huge major reach yet on The Cabonauts, because we’re not ready to go into full production on the series until next year.  So when we do, I can tell you who is on my dream list.  I would love to get David Tennant.  I’d love to get Tom Baker.  I’d love to get  Paul Darrow from Blake’s 7.  A lot of my guests are going to be from English shows and I’m sure you have no idea why that is.  I grew up on Doctor Who, and anything Doctor Who and I’m there.  Any Doctor Who.  We could get one of his assistants from the 1960’s and I’d be happy.  And we are actually in touch with an agent who wants to give us one of his assistants from the 1960’s, and trust me that would be brilliant, that would be absolutely brilliant.  Those would be some personal heroes.  When I was very, very little, I thought the Avon character on Blake’s 7- I just loved the fact that he was so cool and cold.  And I always wanted to be like that, but I’m a Jew from Manchester in England.  There was no way my character was ever going to fit that of Avon.  But it was fun to dream it for a while.  Being Jewish, I’m just too neurotic to ever be that cool and cold. 

Jeff> You mentioned the Upright Citizen’s Brigade for the improv, I just wondered if there were any comedy troops of the past that might have been an influence.  Have you heard of Farside Theatre from the ‘60s.

Hayden> I have heard of them, but I’ve only heard the name.  I’ve never actually seen their material.  I think the older comedy influences for me, obviously Python because when you are a teenager and discover Python, it’s the closest you ever get to sex, or something.  It’s so brilliant, and I think Douglas Adams with Hitchhiker’s Guide.  When I heard that, I was like, “I want to do that.”  The initial idea for The Cabonauts started when I was 15 or 16. The first thing I ever wrote was a novel featuring these two characters, Cyril and Harry, but they didn’t drive a space cab.  They ran a cargo trucking company.  So Douglas Adams, definitely, was a huge inspiration.  And a lot of comedy stuff that came out of England in the ‘90s and 2000’s, stuff like The Office. Ricky Gervais I think is absolutely brilliant, an ultra-naturalistic style which is something that I try to bring to all of the productions that I do.  I’m always constantly telling cast members of all the shows I do to dial it down.  I think a lot of actors over here are performing theatre, and don’t realize the camera captures everything they do from 2 inches away.  So they tend to project and get very big a lot.  I like it when it’s far more naturalistic. 

Kenn> I think we’ll go ahead and let you go.  We kept you a lot longer than I said we would, but would  you come back and talk to us about The Cabonauts in a couple of months?

Hayden> Certainly, I’d love to.

Kenn> Again, thank you for your time.  You’re a comedy genius, and I’m glad to have found you.

Hayden> Thank you, that’s so sweet of you to say, and so very, very wrong.  But thank you!  It was very nice meeting you all.