Indie film icon Illeana Douglas has been busy these days with her web production company Brando TV. The company has finished the first season of its Ikea-sponsored series “Easy to Assemble,” in which Douglas, playing herself, takes a job at Ikea in an attempt to escape from after-40 Hollywood hell. But leaving showbiz behind is not so easy: Her celebrity friends, led by Justine Bateman, follow her and end up at Ikea as well.
She and her executive producer, Chris Bradley, spoke to TheWrap at the first annual Streamy Awards.
How is your relationship with Ikea going now that the first season of “Easy to Assemble” is over?
Illeana Douglas: Great. We can’t say anything official yet. But what’s happening now is, our Ikea contact, Magnus, it seems like he really wants to be in business with us forever.
Chris Bradley: As a company we’re really catching this wave of branded entertainment. Our angle is that it’s all very celebrity based. It’s original fictional stories with real celebrities doing it. It takes it to that next level. We bring A-list talent. We have Keanu Reeves in the next project, for example.
ID: A lot of really cool people are in it. We can’t talk about it yet, but it’s a spinoff from “Easy to Assemble.” Also, there’s a cool thing happening in that Ikea will be marrying Sony in a sense -- it will also be distributed on Sony Crackle.
CB. Were afforded a lot of creative freedom. We’re getting big corporate brands to pay for it, and A-list talent, and we have total creative freedom, which we wouldn’t be getting with all these pieces in place if it was a big movie or something.
How do you feel like web TV is relating to traditional Hollywood? Is it taking off on its own, or merging into it, or ….?
ID: I think web TV is really the new independent film. Even the conceit of our new show is that it’s a documentary film from the 1970s presented in 13 parts, as a public television 13-part thing. But essentially it’s a Swedish documentary film from the 1970s. So it’s very much a film, and a lot of us come from a film background. The people who are in our web comedies are actors, they are not necessarily comedians or web comedians. All of us bring a film sensibility to what we do, and I think that’s what differentiates what we're doing from other people. We’re not doing the fat guy falling out of bed. We’re doing very intricate, interesting stories.
CB: The spirit of making it is that bootstrap, independent film idea. Everyone’s doing a lot of jobs to make the piece work. We do have a lot of room for actors to improvise. They’re not just sitting in a trailer the whole day and coming out to say one line.
So it sounds like it’s a really energized environment.
ID: Oh, for us it’s been incredible. I see other Web shows and it’s like, they’re holding the product and the product obscures the content.
