My Name Is Dolph

December 2009

           Ineeded to talk to John Bitterman.

           Thepreviously 12 months I had been working on an Independent Study at Waubonsee Community College, a self-made course where I proceeded to “make” a documentary. When I proposed the idea a year earlier, I had visions of a moving piece that would have a small impact on how viewers saw the world. Now here I was, having to turn in a 6-minute piece of crap that was the result of my laziness and fear. Still, I needed to talk to my instructor, Bitterman, and hand him the DVD of my failure.

           The previously 12 months hadn’t been totally fruitless. While ignoring my duty to my documentary, I had progressed a great deal in my skill set around the TV studio of WCC. I wasn’t getting class credit and I wasn’t getting closer to moving on to a four-year university, but I was improving and gaining confidence. Despite my failure, I felt more confident in my abilities than ever before.

           I find Bitterman, finally, teaching his class in the control room in the studio. While waiting to talk to my professor, I listen in on these students doing what I had done two years prior, and I honed in on one kid in particular. Definitely pretty, way full of confidence, and going on and on about this contest he entered for the Winter Olympics and how he was going to win. I chuckled to myself. All of us in that room, we had dreams and goals and aspirations, but we were just community college students – we didn’t know shit. Only I, of the under-30 crowd in that room, had developed an inkling of shit. Bitterman took a second to introduce the guy to me.

           “Hey I’m Dan. I’m going to be an intern next semester.”

           Heh. Fresh meat. I’m going to show him what he doesn’t know. Little did I know I had just met one of my best friends and creative matches. And his name wasn’t really Dan.

So you wanna do a podcast?

            I didn’t know shit about podcasts. I knew it was like radio, that my friends had done one and it can be found on iTunes (on iTunes!). I had just started in the TV studio and thought doing a sports-related podcast would be fun. I used to write op-eds about NASCAR and this would scratch a similar itch. I got a friend who I thought I would do well and we recorded a pilot episode.

           It was called “Racin’ N Stuff” and it was terrible. Well, not altogether terrible but it was just two random dudes doing a sports show where NASCAR took precedent. We’d talk about a subject and then move on. My boss at the TV studio listened to the first episode, gave us a critique and then told us we were going to start recording it in the studio on camera and putting it on cable access. Alrighty then boss!

           We ran for a little over four months when a number of factors ended the run. One, I was “working” on a “documentary” and needed to focus on it since it was due in a couple of months. Two, my cohost’s schedule just got significantly different and would’ve forced us off of our studio slot. And finally, I was just tired of all the work it was: planning, setting up the studio, shooting it, editing it, adding in graphics, cutting up for Youtube, posting to our server, compressing…I’d start every Wednesday by working a 4am Target shift, and I wouldn’t leave the studio until 6pm that night, no breaks. But I still wanted to record, and I wanted the TV aspect gone; I wanted independence. And independence meant investing in some equipment.

           A few months later I bought a soundboard with 4 mic inputs, a cheap dynamic mic and a crappy stand, called up a friend with a mic and a love of sports, and brought back the same show, now with the name THE FAN’S STANCE, around March of 2010.

“We can do a podcast and we’d call it ‘The D on D Show’”

            Around the time The Fan’s Stance kicked up, I was spending my daytime hours in the TV studio doing whatever we needed to do. Shooting and editing this movie preview show called Down In Front was my primary responsibility, but we had plenty other going on. “Dan” was now my colleague, and was apparently Dan in middle name only; his first name, Dolph, wasn’t used that often because people would have trouble with it. I preferred him as Dolph, and never called him Dan again. One day, I can’t remember exactly when, Dolph and I were working at the same time around lunch time, so we took a break and headed towards the student center.

           The topic was podcasts, and stuff we listened to. I wouldn’t call myself majorly into podcasts by themselves but I had a few I listened to, and Dolph was one of the few people I knew who also listened (he might’ve been the first). Then he dropped this line:

           “I’ve always wanted to do a podcast.”

           “Oh, I do do one. I just got a soundboard and everything for it.”

           “Oh man, we could do one! We could call it ‘The D on D Show’”.

           “Aight.”

           Not exactly the signing of the Declaration of Independence. About a week later I went and helped Dolph out shooting something for his class, and we decided to record a podcast afterwards. He went and bought his own cheap dynamic mic and we sat down and just started…talking. I believe that episode never made it to air, and I honestly can’t remember anything we talked about…save for one. And it was a bit that would color everything we did for the next year or two.

           It can best be described as a thought experiment, or maybe just a really disgusting riff, but we attempted to find a way to justify Batman raping Robin. The joke wasn’t the rape; the joke was the escalation of the situation to ridiculous lengths in a futile attempt to make Batman not a monster. The scenario eventually landed on The Joker planting a bomb that can only by turned off via the tears of a preteen boy being raped. Crass, tasteless, embarrassing, and a teensy bit funny. D on D Show material right there.

Hating videos and cold opens

           5 years on, it’s difficult to remember specifics of certain things, but the one unassailable truth of our time working together is that 2010 was all about us getting to know each other. Unlike every other show I’ve done here at CRT, The D on D Show was not the result of longtime friends putting their established chemistry on air; instead, it was two people taking their newfound chemistry and refining it. And that refinement was a slow, painful as hell process.

           It quickly became obvious that Dolph and I had vastly different approaches. I preferred low post work, organic and on the fly conversations. Dolph wanted a super slick product that would explode on the internet. As the editor, he established aspects of our show that would remain D on D exclusive; the explosion transition, gratuitous editing, classy jazz music in the background, and cold opens. And I fucking hated cold opens.

           I couldn’t tell you what episode we started doing them, or when Dolph decided it was to be a regular occurrence. I just remember a time when every week we’d meet, Dolph would come in and plop his stuff down and go “what are we doing for a cold open?” I’d just go “I don’t know, let’s skip it until we have a good idea”. But no, there must be a cold open. So we’d sit and think and try to think of something, anything, which resulted in the most painfully unfunny skits…but the occasional piece of gold. All these years later, I still giggle every time I think of the line “in a world….where POSSUMS ARE KING AND CANDY IS DELICIOUS!”

           Another thing Dolph pushed for was making videos about our podcast. Once again, I was completely strapped for ideas and wanted very little part of it. We made three or four, and once again they were pretty uniformly terrible. The “Behind the Podcast” one had some moments, and Dolph did a fantastic job editing them, but that was it. Ironically, our best video is never getting released.

Games and Segments

            We ran into a problem pretty quickly: we ran out of things to talk about. Every other podcast we’d end up doing would always have a topic, something to focus us, but The D on D Show was all personality driven. And if we were tired, crabby, lazy, or whatever, well, we couldn’t rise to the challenge. Thus started a string of episodes that were so terrible we should strike them from the record and renumber episode 200 “150”.

           After a while, the need for structure was so apparent we made it happen. Dolph’s tendency to be pissed about something became “Dolph’s Diatribe”. My endless supply of stories about this one guy I worked with became “This Week in The Idiot”. We had fun recasting classic movies with current actors, which isn’t that fun or original of a concept but it’s worth noting that one of our running jokes was always finding a role for Peter Dinklage, about a year before Game of Thrones would make him a fandom favorite. So suck on that, internet.

           This is when games began to appear. One night, while on a shoot, I suggested over the wireless headsets that we do a “draft” to kill time before the show started, and the topic would be perfectly cast actors, and Dolph, myself, and future D on D guest Paul had a fun five minutes. A couple of weeks later we did it on air and loved it. Games quickly became something we wanted to always do but after a couple of drafts with just the two of us, it became apparent the conceit only works with a third (or fourth) person, so Drafts and Movie Executive became once in a while games.

“What if we recorded us watching them?”

            Classy Radio Theater, if we were even calling it that at that point, was consistent at the very least. October was approaching, and Dolph and I walked out to the parking lot for a smoke one day. We were editing Down in Front and had just watched the trailer for SAW 3D, and Dolph mentioned how much he loved those movies. I liked the first three but had stopped watching after that. As a coda to this brief exchange, Dolph says “I can’t wait I’m going to do a marathon of the previous six then go see the new one.” This, to my surprise, both interested me and gave me an idea.

           “Lemme know when you do that and I’ll join you…wait. What if we recorded commentary tracks to them while we watched? And called it the ‘Saw Pod-Cast-a-Thon’?”

           Dolph loved it.

           This immediately sent me into a planning frenzy. One, six movies is a lot to watch in one day, much less to talk about. Two, I really didn’t even want to see 4-6. Three, our usual recording location seemed like a terrible idea, without a TV and all, so we needed a location, which ended up being our friend’s Jaz’s house, which brought about four, which was we needed to be able to sit on a couch and watch them while recording. So I planned.

           We’d check out two big mic stands from the studio and have them sit in front of our faces with the soundboard and my laptop on the table. Since mine had been unreliable, we decided we’d alternate between Dolph’s laptop and mine. We’d also check out longer XLR cables since the mics would be farther away. I made a schedule based off of how long each movie was to ensure we’d commit, with short breaks after each movie for smokes and whatnot. I bought the six movies, a few frozen pizzas, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. We were set.

           We got there the day of and got to work. We stayed on schedule. Pizza was eaten. Drinks began during the fourth movie. People came and went. We made obnoxious running jokes. And we just kept getting stronger. By the end of the sixth movie, we contacted a theater friend of ours and he allowed us into the projection booth to watch and record a podcast for the seventh and final movie. I may have bumped the film with my shin once or twice. I also may have been drunk when we arrived at the theater.

           We even had so much fun we recorded a special D on D Show about the Saw franchise that we’d upload around the same time we posted the commentaries. There was only two problems: the first was obvious, that recording in the projection booth at a movie theater was a terrible idea, since we had a hard time hearing the movie (and each other), and everything was so loud in there. SAW 3D’s audio was junk. There’s also the problem of laptops. We ended up only using Dolph’s during one movie, SAW II, because once we finished we realized that there was something off about the audio…it was all scratchy. II and 3D needed to be rerecorded.

           A silver lining took hold though: we found we really enjoyed ourselves. Thus, it was decided that Classy Radio Theater just got pregnant and gave birth to a new podcast, one where we’d watch all the movies in a franchise and record commentaries, once a month. We ended up calling it THE ULTIMATE MOVIE COMMENTARY. And we finally rerecorded SAW II and SAW 3D a year later and released them then.

Everybody gets a podcast with Doug

            Everything was going pretty well. The D on D Show continued to evolve, and while Dolph and I would go at it likes cats and dogs sometimes we were getting more consistent. The Fan’s Stance was improving as Kyle got more comfortable and we found more ways to format the show. And The Ultimate Movie Commentary may have been hot garbage but we rose to the occasion every month and had a blast doing so.

           Around April 2011 I was helping with a volunteer event with a few friends, chief among them Shawn and Kyle. The conversation took a turn towards podcasting, and I told everybody that I was open to do pretty much anything on air, just give a suggestion. I then took my leave to have a cigarette.

           When I came back in Shawn cornered me and said “let’s do a movie podcast”. I was sold. We decided we’d just pick a movie and talk about it, and to help format things a bit I suggested playing the trailer before talking about it. I made a list of what we called “low hanging fruit”, which was movies we’d both seen and liked, since Shawn didn’t see new stuff very often and we also had very different tastes. We started with THE DARK KNIGHT.

           Over the next few months we recorded when we could to build a backlog of episodes before we started to release them. In September, with an 8 episode head start, I began to release them. Classy Radio Theater had another new child: Movies We Love.

The Long Distance Challenge

           It was never going to go on forever. We all knew that, but there’s a difference between knowing and knowing. Unfortunately life needs to move forward, and one of my goals was to go off to school. It was rapidly approaching and we all needed a plan to keep this going.

           First, we all got Skype. Dolph did some research and discovered a way for us to send files back and forth of considerable size, which now everyone can do super easy so we shouldn’t have been freaking out. Kyle had a soundboard and mic, and Dolph bought one. Shawn, well, Shawn was willing to give me practice at filtering out ambient sound.

           I made my way to Southern Illinois University in January of 2012. The first few episodes were…difficult. Calls got dropped. Weird problems arised. And of course, the simple fact is that talking to a person on Skype is vastly different from talking in person. The vibe was just…wrong.

           How The D on D Show survived these two years will forever remain a mystery.

Excitement and Exhaustion

            The summer of 2012 seemed fresh and exciting. I was back home for three months meaning all of the shows could go back to normal. THE AVENGERS had just been released, and it had me and all of my friends buzzing. Dolph and I were so stoked that my first episode back saw us get drunk on air and spend nearly three hours discussing THE AVENGERS and Whedon’s other film, THE CABIN IN THE WOODS. The world appeared to be right.

           I don’t know when it happened, or if it was obvious, but we all of a sudden got burned out, by all of it. It was hard to find things to talk about. It was hard to get excited about recording. It just stopped being fun.

           We were both growing tired and more apathetic to the podcast, so we finally had the discussion. Do you want to end it? Should we? Is it time to stop? We didn’t know the answers, but we both knew there was a certain attraction towards not doing it anymore. Dolph just wanted one thing: to make it to episode 100. We were only a handful away, and it seemed like a grand idea: do a big, blowout special episode, say goodbye, and call it quits.

            For the 100th episode, we had a few sketch ideas and decided to record them as our big blowout. Well, that was a terrible idea because we didn’t write them (relying on ourselves to improv something funny) and they weren’t all that inspired to begin with. Not to mention the fact that I think half of them were inspired by THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.

           The second step was much more inspired. For our goodbye, we decided to shoot a video where The D on D Show would break the news to the other three podcasts. This required a script, and I assure you the results were quite funny. Dolph and I played the reasonable parents; Kyle and I represented The Fan’s Stance as the ignored middle child; Shawn and I were the reasonable oldest child; and finally, Dolph, Kyle and I played The Incompetent Movie Commentary as a bratty youngest child. We shot it over several days as time permitted onto HDV tape. It was a blast.

           Which was apparently just what we needed to get back on track. Recording got fun again, and as we approached episode 100, we both got cold feet. Finally, we said fuck it and scrapped everything.

           The HDV tapes were never captured. I don’t know where they are.

The original bites the dust

            The D on D Show wasn’t the only show buckling under the weight of long distance recording. Movies We Love struggled to record new episodes. And The Fan’s Stance had a whole set of problems.

           First off, well, Kyle’s not the most talkative guy in person, and it was always a challenge when we recorded. He knew it, and was always working on it, and if you were to dig up old Racin’ N Stuff episodes and compared them with anything from his recent stints on The D on D Show, it’s night and day. But long distance affected him worse than anybody else; it’s awkward enough to be putting on your announcer voice in a room with a buddy as it is, but take away the other person and it’s incredibly hard not to feel stupid.

           But the more pressing concern was a technical issue. Every week we’d record, Kyle would Dropbox his audio and when it downloaded an hour or so later, I’d get to work. I can’t speak for Dolph’s experience with this, but when editing The Fan’s Stance we had a problem. We’d always do a clap before we began the show for me to use to sync up the audio tracks. It wasn’t perfect but it would give me a ball park to work from. So easy peasy, right? Sync the sumbitches up, add some tags, adjust the levels a bit and we’re good to go.

           Except it wasn’t.

           For whatever reason, the two audio tracks would not stay in sync. And it would happen, slowly, over an approximate 10 minute span. I’d sync them up, jump forward a half hour on my timeline and we’d be making no damn sense. I lazily attempted to deduce where I’d need to check each week, and probably put out some pretty janky episodes, before it dawned on me: I’d have to listen to the entirety of each episode to catch when it happened. An already long night (BS, record, wait to download, download, edit, post, make blog posts, sleep) gave way to an even longer night where the editing would take hours.

           With Kyle’s discomfort and my nightmare editing scenario, I sat down with him and asked him if he wanted to keep doing the podcast. He wasn’t having fun, and neither was I, which was my only podcasting rule. We ended The Fan’s Stance, abruptly and without fanfare, marking the first and somehow only casualty of Classy Radio Theater.

Trying some improvisational comedy, now

           What ended up really saving us was improve. Now, I know a lot of people say that…they don’t? Oh, well then, guess that statement is all mine then.

           Dolph and I took the rest of my tenure at SIU and seemed to rewind the clock a bit back to that first year. Episodes became a lot more about catching up, like how so many early episodes were getting to know each other. But that wasn’t good for every week.

           I remember thinking about some of my favorite bits from the show. We had “THE D ON D SHOW OF TOMORROW”, The Tales of Alex the Awesome, and a handful of think pieces where we’d take a wild scenario and rationalize it out. That’s when it hit me that maybe improve was the way to go.

           We’re both pretty solid at it. We’d get destroyed on Who’s Line is it Anyway? but we get the basic principles and are quick enough on our feet to bounce off each other instead of through each other. So we’d start coming up with outlandish ideas that we’d implement from time-to-time, where we’d tell a story about some prior, off-air adventure. It would always be fun, sometimes be funny, and would always leave us giggling.

           We enjoy it so much we’d love to start a new podcast, hopefully with a third person, all about riffing on scenarios like these. Maybe one day.

THE SUMMER OF GUESTS!

            When I graduated from school, I came home with a checklist of things I wanted to do. Mostly it was seeing old friends, maybe have an old-school party. Sometimes it was visiting old haunts or new ones. But the biggest thing I missed was having guests.

           We started to invite other people onto the podcast back in 2010 from time-to-time mainly because we got stagnant with each other. A third person changes everything in a way you cannot imagine. Think of recording like playing catch: you throw the ball to your partner, he throws it back. But it’s not always the same rhythm. Maybe you’ll toss it, he’ll hold it for ten minutes, then toss it back. You had to always be aware.

           But if you add a third person, one who also might hold it for a surprising amount of time? Well, that’s actually easier, and more chaotic. Sometimes I could count on Dolph and the guest to play for a while and check out. Sometimes I’d play catch with him or her and Dolph would get a break. And sometimes that goddamn ball would exchanging all three of our hands so quickly it would be both extremely fun and hard as hell to keep up.

           Now that I was back in town, we could resume the game. We couldn’t do it while I was away because Skype makes it nigh impossible. Do I get a SIU friend and have us share my webcam? Do we three-way call? Does Dolph even have enough mics to get a guest on his end? Too many issues.

           My first few months back we had one here and there, but so many hadn’t been hit up. And then I had an idea, a way for us to brand ourselves, have some fun, and get to have everyone on that we wanted: devote the entire summer to having guests.

           As the guy who schedules the show for the most part, I regret everything.

           Not really, it was a lot of a fun and we did a new game. But it was very difficult. A lot of our friends are busy as hell, and getting an agreed upon time was rough. I’d usually start looking for next week’s guest before we even would record with the current week’s guest. We even weathered a cancellation or two. Our only trip up came around the June, when we got cancelled on at the last minute I believe, and ended up doing some improve to cover it up, by claiming we recorder it during the winter and shelved it. Lord knows we’ve shelved enough over the years that it could have been true…

Did we really make it to 200?

           We ain’t perfect. Hell, we don’t even use proper grammar. And if someone were to say we sucked, we’d probably have to agree.

           But we also have been doing this show for nearly five years, missing only a week here and there. We are consistent; we are eternal.

           Okay this is getting a little melodramatic.

           A few weeks ago, I was exporting an episode and looked at the number on it: 196. We had somehow gotten four away from episode 200 and didn’t even blink. No wavering this time around. Episode 201 was only a week after 200.

           I don’t know how many podcasts out there make it to 200 episodes. It’s certainly not that rare. But it feels special to me, because we fought each other, because we wanted to quit, because it doesn’t make us a dime and we’re too damn busy to do it better. But I find something motivating and reassuring that tomorrow we’ll wake up and do it again, because we fucking love it.

           And if you ever got a chuckle from us, all the better. Thanks for listening.

           Or not.