The French Director - Season 1 Trailer

Filmmakers such as the Coen Brothers notoriously inaugurated their careers by making amateur trailers from unproduced film scripts, but we decided to take that one, imminently less realistic step further by producing a no-budget trailer representing season 1 of a TV series.

I hope this trailer entertains while providing a cryptic roadmap for the first season, in which Truffauldian 60's auteur Josué des Étincelles finds himself inexplicably waking up in 2017 Milwaukee, where he's quickly harangued by a desperate author who wishes to ghostwrite his memoirs.

Independently filming two entire 12-episode seasons of a TV show set in Chicago, Milwaukee, Paris, and Los Angeles would be impossible. But so is bottling up excitement to realize a project -- even if that means finding a French guy on Craigslist, filming catch-as-catch-can for a few days, and enlisting friends and family to do a lot of acting and tiring work.

What began as a compulsion to simply see some of my characters realized onscreen became an exercise in the art of trailer making, which in turn became an experiment in trying to get a trailer for a TV show to feel like a short movie. This ultimately reflects my scripts' attempts to dissect and crossbreed film, prose writing, poetry, and television in order to examine auteur theory, social responsibility, autonomy, memory, time, biography, and modern artificiality.