Now, with season three, EastSiders has gone from a micro budget to a
major player on the international stage, bringing with it its originator and the many actors who have become a part of the fabric of the series. The current season’s outing is literally that, a road trip across America for Cal and Thom as they pull a vintage camper from New York to L.A. and in turn, discover what this country and they, are made of. It’s a wonderful success story andThe Rage Monthly has been lucky enough to be a party to that journey. We first interviewed Kit Williamson in 2013 as a twenty-something filmmaker, just after they had finished season one. Little did we or they know, that the rollercoaster was just about to crest the rise and the insanity of success was just about to take off. Fast forward five years and we’re talking with a seasoned expert who is now teaching others how to do what he’s done: cofounding the Brooklyn Web Fest and Content Creator Conference in 2015 to showcase the projects and content of others.
Willamson and Van Hansis who plays Cal, sat down with The Rage Monthly to chat about their incredible journey so far. Van Hansis jumped in when I asked if they had any idea what they were
in for back in 2013 when they started the EastSiders. “I did not. In fact, when I was approached with the material, Kit couldn’t find somebody to play Thom. He reached out to an acting teacher in L.A. named Leslie Kahn, who both of us worked with and she put him in touch with me. It was a web series on YouTube and at the time I was like “Oh, what’s a web series? Is it going to be this eight-minute-long thing shot on a camcorder?” Then I read the script and I was blown away by it and really wanted to be a part of it. I had coffee with Kit in Silver Lake, we got along really well and he offered me the role and. I immediately said ‘Yes.’ It was one of the best decisions I think I ever made.” Kit Williamson spoke about his intentions and what it was like when he
first started putting together the series. “Those first episodes of EastSid- ers, were the first things I had ever written and directed for episodic TV, I was a playwright and a stage actor who had just kind of started working in television withMad Men. Prior to that I’d only done a few small independent things and TV shows, but largely I had been a stage actor and a playwright. It was my first time out of the gate and I think season one had some sort of alchemical thing—the pieces of it all came together in a rare way—it felt real and grounded.” “There are some parts of it that definitely feel like a student film as
well,” Williamson laughingly continued. “I was in my twenties when we started and I’m now in my thirties, so you see the change in the dialogue, in the actors and the differences in their relationships. We don’t get a lot of long form, episodic storytelling, where you live with characters for a long time. There might not be a ton of EastSiders episodes, but I think it’s really cool to see what this couple is like over the course of five years together.” Hansis agreed and followed with this comment, “One of the things that
I really love about the different seasons, too is that it all kind of progresses in real time. We might take a year off for a season, but that year has happened for Tom and Cal and each season we meet them at a new place
FEBRUARY 2018 | RAGE monthly
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