This week also signals the beginning of a new partnership between Hulu and EMI, and to kick things off, we’re bringing you a new page devoted to Norah Jones. It features music videos and concert footage from The Fall, as well as all the essentials from Jones’ previous releases, Not Too Late, Feels Like Home and Come Away With Me; and live performances such as her 2004 show at the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, where country greats Dolly Parton and Gillian Welch joined her on stage. But before you dig in, find out what Jones had to say about shooting with Elmo and working with The Lonely Island guys in our exclusive interview below. — Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com), Editor

Hulu: We’re talking about the new collection of your videos and concerts here on Hulu, but I also wanted to ask you about your new album, The Fall. What’s the story behind the name?
Norah Jones: Well, I just really like that it has some different meanings, so it can be kind of interpreted. For me, it relates to the album with all the meanings. I don’t know, it stuck in my head one day and I couldn’t think of anything else.

And I love the cover. Is there a story behind it? It looks like something you’d see in Vogue.
That’s funny. [Laughs] It was the photographer’s idea. She wanted to use a bunch of dogs because she likes working with animals. I thought it sounded fun. We ended up just loving the Saint Bernard so much that we got some shots with just him. He was so beautiful. So yeah, it’s meant to be kind of playful and theatrical.

What influenced some of the sounds of The Fall?
A lot of different things. I really wanted some heavy drum grooves on this album. Listening to stuff like Tom Waits, but also younger bands like Santigold. I don’t know, I did a song with Q-Tip last year that had me kind of wanting some heavier drum grooves in my own music. Just a lot of different things.

You collaborated with a lot of great people on this album, like Ryan Adams and Will Sheff. How did all of that come about — did you approach them?
Well, Ryan’s been an old friend of mine for a while. We were just hanging out, and I ended up playing him a song that I wasn’t able to finish, that I couldn’t come up with any lyrics to. And he just took it and made it great.

It’s nice to have friends like that.
Yeah, it’s fun. I mean, he’s so quick creatively. He finished the song in like five minutes — he wrote all the lyrics and changed them all around. He’s amazing.

Now that we have a lot of your older material on Hulu, are you planning to go back to look at any of it?
I might someday, but I’ve seen it so much. But yeah, it’s always like walking down memory lane, like a photo album or something.

You know, last week happened to be Sesame Street’s birthday, and they hand-picked a collection of clips from the last four decades for us. Your appearance with Elmo was among them.
That’s cool. It’s so funny, because having done that, whenever people come up to me and tell me anything about my music that they like, or whatever, more than anything else, I’ve gotten comments about that Sesame Street performance.

What was it like working with Elmo?
It was amazing. It just happened during my first album when everything was really big and crazy. When we got the call to do Sesame Street, it was a no-brainer. Everybody’s grown up on that show. It was so amazing being on the set, too, because it’s exactly the street you remember from when you were a kid. They were so welcoming to us, and they let us take pictures on the set and everything.

This was a little bit of a surprise to me: you collaborated with The Lonely Island [the Andy Samberg-Akiva Schaffer-Jorma Taccone group behind "I'm On a Boat"]. What was it like working with them on “Dreamgirl” one of their tracks?
Oh yeah, I love those guys. It was great. They’re super-nice guys, and they’re just really fun. They asked me if I’d sing on it, and they were super-sweet about it. They’re just funny, you know?

Given that connection, are we going to see you on Saturday Night Live any time soon?
I would love to, I love that show, but you know, they don’t have a lot of bookings — so we’ll see.

We’d even suggest that you should be the next musical act to crossover as a host.
Yeah, right.[Laughs] I would love to do that someday, but I don’t know if I’m big enough for them anymore!

If Taylor Swift can do it…
Well, Justin Timberlake was so good. He’s got a whole other career if he wants it — he’s so funny. I don’t even really know his music that well, but he won me over just by seeing a sketch on SNL.

You never know, you could be next! Thanks for your time, Norah — good luck with the new album.
Thanks!

Carey Mulligan is the breakout star of your film. She was also in Pride & Prejudice (2005), but how did you discover her?
Director Lone Scherfig: She was just in a pile of casting tapes. She had done very little, so it was chance. I knew that we probably had to find someone unknown because [her character] Jenny is so young. She was always my first choice — but we saw her again and again, and now I feel really bad that we took so long to make the decision. It’s been going so well, so maybe she doesn’t have to go through all that again.

I hope so, too! An Education is set in 1961. How did that particular time period play into the film? What did that mean for Jenny?
I think it’s really important. The way London was changing at that time is so in sync with how she’s changing. The way she’s bursting with energy for a future she can’t describe because she doesn’t know what it is yet is the way London was shaking the war off its shoulders, wanting to do things for fun and to have much more appetite for life, for art and for literature — and music in particular. That became so much more dominant straight after she [would have] entered Oxford.

I known here in the U.S. right now, that time period is really resonating with our culture — if you look at Mad Men, for example.
It’s a bit different. Maybe what is so attractive with Mad Men is that it’s a period where they, in some ways, were more liberated and also more innocent than it’s the case now. It’s a bit different in England because Jenny, she’s among the last generation of women who had that little future and so few possibilities. It’s almost as if Lynn Barber, who wrote this story, had been fighting at that. What that means is that women since Lynn could relax and take for granted that they had the right to do the things that they like to do, to try and to find individual futures for themselves and to live that future, or live that adult life, at least, if you have an education.

But my guess is about America is that it’s this combination of innocence and freedom that attracts you. Here in Denmark, as well, it was more liberated than it is now, and was definitely more innocent and less dangerous. I mean, when I was a teenager, the world was a lot safer than it is now for my daughter as a teenager, which meant that I could have a lot more fun. It wasn’t risky the way it is now.

Were you familiar with Lynn Barber’s story before you started this project?
It was just a 10-page article in a literary magazine. Later on, I think Penguin commissioned some more chapters, and she oddly became a journalist for Penthouse. She almost went too far because I know her, and I think she’s a woman who’s had a very rich, varied and happy life that is right for her. Her only regret seems to be that she now thinks that she should have been a better wife to her husband, whom she met in Oxford. But apart from that, she has fulfilled a lot of her dreams, and she’s a brilliant writer.

But no, I wasn’t familiar with her or her work, but obviously I started reading it when I got the job, to get to know her better and to portray her better. But Jenny is different. Lynn is more sarcastic, more of a fighter, and her piece has much more self-irony. Because Nick Hornby and I are not her, we could describe her with some warmth that’s not in her piece.

Speaking of Nick, what did he bring to the screenplay? Did he make any significant changes to Lynn’s story?
The story is short, so he fleshed it out. There are a couple of characters that are his, especially the teachers, but the structure and a lot of the details are actually in her original piece. I think he’s given it a tone that’s definitely Nick Hornby — and jokes, too. He’s really humorous. [Lynn] says that Alfred Molina’s role (as Jenny’s dad) is a lot more sympathetic than she had imagined. I hope we have added something as well. It’s just layer upon layer, and as long as we’re telling the same story — a group portrait of a girl and the people her surrounding her, particularly David … the more time we spent on it, the more time [it was] in this development situation, the more detail you see, the more contrast and the more integrity. But it’s the same piece that we’re all working on, and that was really important to me as a director that everyone was making the same film, that everyone contributed to the package and tried to strengthen it and get as many facets as possible but not be over-inventive, just tell the story as well as we possibly could.

I really enjoyed Alfred Molina’s performance. Can you tell us what he brought to his character?
He has really good timing. He’s very musical, and so is Nick. That means that lines are something where Alfred Molina feels immediately at ease and pitches them very well from the beginning. Also, [Alfred] felt that he knew that world very well — he grew up in Notting Hill and he thought that Jack who he portrays was definitely someone that he knows, and that Jack and England have a lot in common at the time, the xenophobia and the fear of everything: the fear of food, the fear of excess of any kind, and also the insecurity because he didn’t have an education, so that’s one of the reasons why they would let someone like David into their home. He seems worldly, and they’re afraid to be prejudiced as well. So they let him in and let him run off with their little girl.

I wanted to ask you about the clothes. I loved the costumes in this film, particularly Helen’s [a friend of David's who takes Jenny under her wing], but also Jenny’s as well. I read that you brought mood boards to your meetings with Odille Dicks-Mireaux, the costume designer…
That was about Paris, though, it wasn’t about clothes. But I did a board for each of the characters because it is a character-based film. I thought that’s a good place to start, to ensure that if I have a language problem, that’s not going to be our problem, that we’re all speaking the same language. A lot of film people, it’s helpful to have visual examples rather than to explain. So it was clothes, but it was also photos of real people at the time and props. Because a lot of people on the crew and in the cast had not experienced that period, it was also about communicating that London was not that “swinging” yet, and it wasn’t that long ago. It may be a period film, but a lot of the things are the same still.

She and I had a really good collaboration, and all of the costumes are just real clothes that have been saved. We only made one single dress, which was the nightclub singer’s dress. It was a copy of my Barbie doll’s ’60s dress. Because the singer is so small, she didn’t fit into any of the clothes that they had at the prop house. But it was so easy, and they have so much stuff in England, it’s probably the biggest place in the world for that kind of thing, and because the actresses are so beautiful, they just jump into anything, everything just fits. It was a good way for me to go and talk to the cast about the characters and to be at the costume fittings because then you get to express the character’s style and what would be in his pockets. I do the same thing with the props department, which kind of wristwatch would she have, who gave it to her, it’s a very concrete and specific way of building characters. It’s a good place to start dialogue with the actors, rather than sitting at reading tables.

Thanks, Lone, for speaking to us about the film. An Education is in theaters now.

Lohaus is currently working on another documentary that will follow the experience of Vietnam veterans and the 10-year battle it took to have PTSD recognized as a mental disorder. He took a break to talk to Hulu about When I Came Home, which he screened at a benefit for Services for the UnderServed (susinc.org) on Veteran’s Day. — Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com), Editor

Hulu: How did you decide to do a documentary about homeless vets?
Filmmaker Dan Lohaus: Back in 2002, I was interested in making a documentary about homeless Vietnam vets; that was really the focus of this film. I had found there are over 150,000 homeless Vietnam vets. I wanted to look at their experience when they come home. Staggering numbers of Vietnam vets ended up in prison when they came home, or ended up ending their lives prematurely. That statistic, that there were over 150,000 homeless Vietnam vets, just really made me angry. I just felt like so many of these guys were in their late 50s or early 60s, and had been out in the streets for years. This is kind of the final chapter for them in terms of being ignored and forgotten when they came home in the early ’70s.

So that’s where it all started, and as I started filming homeless Vietnam vets out on the street, the war in Iraq started. Once that war started, all the Vietnam vets started telling me to keep my eyes open for kids coming out of Iraq, because they were like “This VA is so backlogged, we can’t even get help from the VA. We’re still fighting for our benefits, and we just don’t understand how a whole new generation is going to come and get taken care of.” Then I started seeing little articles on the Internet about homeless Iraq veterans. The first one was in the Boston Globe, about a woman named Vanessa Turner. She’d gotten back from Iraq and ended up homeless in the Boston area. Basically, at that point I decided this is ridiculous; I couldn’t believe this was happening again. I wanted to find homeless Iraq veterans to include in the film and kind of show how history’s repeating itself. And then [in late 2004, early 2005], I found Herold [Noel] in New York. It just took off from there.

Who is Herold?
Herold Noel, he was in the Army, in the 37 Cavalry out of Fort Stewart, Georgia.

How did you find him, and why do you think his story is representative of others?
He was the subject of a cover article for this newspaper here in New York called The Indypendent. They did a cover story about Herold called “The Invisible Soldier.” I just couldn’t believe it — here was this guy in my neighborhood, going through this. At the same time, I had been going to this one organization in [Bedford-Stuyvestant] called Black Veterans for Social Justice, where I had found a couple other Iraq vets, but they weren’t quite ready to be in the film. It just so happens that Herold was also going to Black Veterans for Social Justice to try to get some help. My contact there told him “Hey, if you want to be in a movie, there’s this guy looking for homeless Iraq vets.” Herold was just really determined. The first day I met him, he said “I want you to document this, I want you to show people what a soldier has to go through when they come home. I want you to follow me to the end of the earth with your camera. I want the country to see what we have to go through.” He was a perfect subject. Right after the first day of filming, he was obviously the main subject for the film.

Where is he today?
He’s still in New York. He’s actually working with a non-profit, Urban Neighborhood Services in Coney Island, and he started a veterans’ project there. He’s really trying to reach out to low-income vets that are coming back to the neighborhood where he kind of grew up, just trying to make sure they know where to go for help. He’s just trying to make sure that what happened to him doesn’t happen to anyone else.

It seems like the subject of homeless Iraq war veterans is quiet, not something you hear about in the press very often.
Back in 2003, when I was first starting to see little articles on the Internet, I had a list of organizations that help homeless veterans. I would call them and say, “Hey, are you guys dealing with any homeless Iraq or Afghanistan veterans?” They’d say, “No, we’ve had maybe one come through our program, but they’re doing OK now. We’re ready for them; we’re expecting to see them.” Now, if I call those same organizations, every one of them has 10 or 15 homeless Iraq or Afghanistan veterans in their program. According to the VA, there’s somewhere around 2,000 at this point, but it’s so frustrating, because it’s the same thing that happened with Vietnam vets. I just feel like it’s a generation getting swept under the rug. There have been some stories about them here and there, but I really feel like people don’t know. When they hear what my movie’s about, the first thing they say is, “What? There are homeless Iraq veterans? That’s ridiculous.”

Before this, were you all that aware of homeless veterans? Was this something you’d already been involved with?
Yeah, I had been working in the non-profit world and helped start a couple of organizations that help employ homeless people and, ever since college, volunteering at soup kitchens and stuff. I think along the way, I met a lot of Vietnam vets. I think I was aware in the back of my head that there were a lot of Vietnam vets on the streets, but it was only when I started doing research on it that I really found out the numbers. It’s pretty staggering. One in four homeless people is a veteran, which is kind of staggering. Twenty-five percent of our whole homeless population are vets. I was aware of homelessness among veterans, but it was only when I said “OK, I’m going to do some research; I think I want to do a film on this,” when I really discovered the numbers.

What moment most stands out for you from shooting this film?
The first thing I filmed was the San Diego Stand Down for homeless veterans in 2002. The Stand Down is meant to be a three-day event where homeless veterans can come off the street and live as a community. They actually get like a coat check for all of their stuff. There’s no drinking, there’s no drugs. They just come in off the street, they live in these military-style tents, and they live in a little community together where they can get not only hot food and new clothes but dental care, too, and they can get hooked up with benefits counselors. They’re constantly hearing speeches from formerly homeless veterans. The event is all about motivating these guys to see that there is an option to get off the street, and that there are people out there that care about them. So I went to this event, and there were 1,000 homeless veterans that came in off the street. Of that 1,000, over the course of the weekend, about 400 or so kind of saw the light and were ready to jump into a program. They had kind of had enough and were inspired by everybody there. This was the very first thing I was filming, I was like “Oh my God, we’re about to see 400 homeless veterans get taken off the street. They’re ready to go, they haven’t drank in a few days, they’re signing up for these programs.” In the course of filming, I was trying to see if I could follow someone who was going to get into a program. That’s when I learned that, in fact, even though 400 vets had made the choice to try to get into a program, there were literally only seven spots available in San Diego County. It just became so frustrating.

So here’s this great event called Stand Down that really connects with these vets, it gets them off the street, it gets them to come in and start thinking about what they need to do to get out and get off the street. I was so frustrated when I learned that only seven guys would get a shot at getting into a supported housing program. It just became really obvious to me. If the money was there to create these supportive housing communities — and there are some great models out there like US Vets, which has supportive housing communities across the country, and there’s one in San Diego called the Veterans Village of San Diego, which has like an 85 percent success rate. It was just really frustrating. It became really clear to me. A guy in the movie, the founder of Stand Down, really says it best: “Why is it that we keep asking why there are so many homeless veterans when we don’t ask where are the resources?” It just became really clear. If the government would put the money into supportive housing programs in combination with the Stand Down event, we could literally get these guys off the street. It was really tough for me. That was the first thing I filmed, I got to know a bunch of these guys who decided that was the weekend they were going to get off the street, and I watched them have to pack up and go back out on the street. It just really, really pissed me off, but I think it was a good thing because it pissed me off enough …That was a real point where I decided I was going to have to make this film.

Are you seeing that the same factors that contributed to Vietnam veterans becoming homeless are the same for the new Iraq war veterans?
I think overall, it’s definitely different. It’s 40 years later, but some of the same things are happening to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. I think, in general, the nation is familiar with the term post-traumatic stress disorder, which is good. I think it’s basically, if you’re affected by war and you’re coming home with PTSD, oftentimes, it’s tough to hold a job. If you can’t find a job, it’s hard to pay rent. It’s a downward spiral that I think veterans of any war can fall into. Just like Vietnam vets … We have 1 million Iraq or Afghanistan veterans who are waiting on decisions from the VA on their disability claims. That’s a staggering number. It was at 600,000 earlier this year, and now it’s at a million. There are literally a million veterans who are not able to work right now who are waiting for a decision from the VA on whether they’re eligible to receive benefits and how much they’ll receive. If they’re unable to work because they’re injured, and if they’re waiting on these benefits, I don’t know how we expect them not to end up homeless. I think vets are a very proud people. For some vets, they maybe didn’t leave a good home situation. Once again, they’re coming back to an economy that’s hurting. I think there are similar factors for any generation of vets that come home. When vets don’t get the proper care they need for PTSD, a lot of them will to start to self-medicate. That’s a factor in that whole downward spiral, as well.

To learn more about this film and how you can help homeless veterans in your area, please visit to WhenICameHome.com.

To celebrate their big 4-0, the team at Hulu asked our friends at Sesame Street to pick some of their favorite clips from over the years. The collection features everything from Norah Jones singing “Don’t Know Why” to bits I remember from my childhood, like “Grover and a Fly in My Soup.”

Hulu had the chance to speak to Carol-Lynn Parente, executive producer for Sesame Street, last week as the show ramped up for its Season 40 premiere. The 21-year veteran of the show basically grew up with the likes of Grover and Kermit the Frog, and today, she guides the creative vision for the show. So what’s it like working with a bunch of a bunch of puppets? She tells us all about it below. — Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com), Editor

Hulu: One of my favorite things about Sesame Street is the timelessness of certain segments. Have certain ones proven to be consistently popular through the years?
Sesame Street’s Carol-Lynn Parente: One of the things about the show is that not only do we have a lot of history with different segments, but different characters. Each one has kind of its own cult following. It kind of depends on who you’re talking to in terms of what’s popular, but we have a pretty good, consistent appeal across the board.

You’ve had a ton of celebrity guests over the years.
Yeah, it’s sort of a who’s-who of celebrities, the ultimate list. Season 40 is particularly star-studded with everyone from Sarah Jessica Parker to Cameron Diaz and Adam Sandler and Ricky Gervais and Kobe Bryant and Eva Longoria [Parker]. We’re just very fortunate in that we get lots of requests from celebrities, so we don’t really have to go after these guys — they come to us. We try really hard to fit as many of them in as we can, which is so much fun.

How do those sketches work? Do they come up with ideas?
It’s different with everyone. A lot of time, what we do is wait until we have the booking, and then we assign a writer to a project. Sometimes there’s something that we’re parodying about some project that they’re in. Occasionally they want to get involved in collaborating. So Ricky Gervais this year actually wrote his piece, the song that he’s in. It’s really a lot of fun when the celebrities get into it.

What’s it like working with the characters?
Wow, I’m probably the luckiest person on Earth, because I get to come to work with Big Bird and Cookie Monster and Elmo every day. Not everyone can say that. You know, aside from just having a whole lot of fun, these performers are really the best in the business. The show attracts the best in the business across the board, from writers to directors, too. But the performers are real artists, because they’re making characters and emotion out of just these very simple felt and fur puppets.

Do you have as much fun off camera as you do onscreen?
You know, we really do. I think that’s the reason this show is so much fun to watch. There is just as much fun if not more on the set. These guys are really amazing performers. Our outtake reel at the wrap party is an awful lot of fun.

How do you come up with new ideas for the show?
We’re lucky because we have amazing writers. The model of Sesame Street is unique. Part of the foundation of the show from the very beginning was that writers work with producers and researchers, all in tandem. That’s how we get not only really funny scripts — because we have very funny writers — but also educational ones, because they’re working every step along the way with researchers.

The show has seen some of its cast and extras grow up on the set. Do any of them come back to visit?
They do. It’s sometimes just a very small world. We had a crew member that came by, just a rotating crew member — you know, you sometimes need someone to fill in for someone who’s out — and he was actually on the show when he was a kid. We’ve had a press reporter that also came on the show and was one of the extra kids back in the ’70s. It’s very surreal for them to be back on the set.

What’s in store for Season 40?
What’s amazing about Season 40 is that it’s really a complete format change. The show has gone through evolution over 40 years — I think that’s the secret to its success; that it’s kept up with the times and made changes, really, because it’s a real neighborhood. And just as those real neighborhoods that the show was modeled after have changed, so has the show.

The show format was modeled after variety-type show like Laugh-In, in a very magazine-like format, that’s not the case anymore. In fact, now there are entire networks devoted to preschool programming. We’re an hour-long show, which is a long time for preschoolers, and that’s unique in the preschool programming world. We decided to think of our hour as a block. It’s formatted that way so we have four anchor shows within our hour, and a brand-new show as part that block is Abby’s Flying School with Abby Cadabby, who’s taken the form of 3-D CGI, and so she will appear in the show in puppet form, but she has her own format, this show within a show. It’s really part of that evolution of what kids are watching, what they’re used to watching, that style of graphics animation. And it allows us to be more physical than we can be with puppets, which is great.

Thanks, Carol-Lynn! Good luck with the 40th season.

Think our collection is missing a shining Sesame Street moment? Tell us which in the comments section. We’ll include some of our favorites in a brand-new collection.

Hulu: What sparked your interest in the relationship between porn and Internet technology?
Vanguard’s Christof Putzel: If you use the Internet, it’s hard to ignore the existence of porn. It shows up in your inbox as spam, as links to your unrelated search inquiries. It’s everywhere. It’s no secret that pornography has been at the cutting edge of media for decades. Pornography is what we have to thank for some of the expansion at the early days of the Internet. So what I was interested in was, in this day and age when mainstream industries like the movie business and the music business are all struggling to figure out how to best utilize the internet and not keep losing their shirts, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how the porn industry was doing. It’s traditionally been one step ahead of mainstream businesses when it came to distribution formats.

What were some of the biggest surprises you encountered while working on this story?
I think that I was most surprised by just how much the adult industry is hurting as a whole. There’s a common misconception that anyone can make a dollar dabbling in Internet porn. While there might have been some truth to that 10 years ago, even the well-established companies are having trouble staying in business today. There’s just so much free pornography out there on the Internet, whether pirated or homemade. Many consumers just see the need to pay for it anymore. That’s kind of ironic, that the same technologies that helped push the industry forward — you know, things like cheap cameras and faster Internet connections — are today bringing it to its knees.

Did you find that you were shocked by any of the things that you saw?
Oh man, yeah. I was shocked by a lot of things when I visited Kink.com’s offices. I’m no prude, but the porn that Kink was producing was unlike anything that the darkest, most warped part of my conscious could come up with. Their business model is based on appealing to those with niche fetishes. So it can be a bit much to handle for an unfamiliar outsider, like myself. The company houses its offices and production studios inside the old San Francisco Armory building. When you walk through the hallways, it has this dungeon-castle type atmosphere. The first room that I was taken to was the blacksmith’s workshop, where they build all the cages and the props. When I walked in, the blacksmith was trying to figure out how to construct a device that could simultaneously send electric currents from a car battery to various parts of the female anatomy. That was just like, “Oh, just another day at the office” for them. And then I was escorted into a room that contained multiple shelves lined with various electronics: a KitchenAid cake mixer, a leaf blower, chainsaw; all modified to perform the task that their website implies. But perhaps the most surreal machine was a replica of the beloved Johnny 5 robot from Short Circuit. That movie stirs up fond childhood memories for me, it’s a 1988 classic. It kind of threw me a little bit when the robot followed me around the room.

Do you feel like you ever became more comfortable around all of it?
I think what was most shocking was just how normal I found everyone to be. You have this feeling that it’s gonna be like a kid in a candy store. It was actually just a lot of people working. I guess as someone who works in media production for a company that has a giant website and is into new media, I think I had a preconceived notion of the types of characters who would sink so low to take a job in an industry that’s widely considered to be at the bottom of the barrel. But every employee that I met appeared very cheerful, and genuinely ecstatic and grateful for the opportunity to work there. And they were smart. Many of them had turned down job offers at mainstream companies to have the opportunity for more creative freedom. The guys in the IT department really felt like they were on the cutting edge, Internet-wise. They felt that they were getting challenges and opportunities that they couldn’t get at other companies. I think that’s what I found most shocking. It kind of blew away my stereotypes.

As far as being desensitized, I think that no; it was still a pretty new experience for me to see people having sex right next to me. I think it was hard for me to become desensitized because, in both instances, when I went to Kink and when I went to Wicked, I actually went and interviewed and talked to them first, and got to know them a little bit. So then seeing them take their clothes off and have sex felt wrong in a way. I think that’s why it was a little hard to become desensitized.

Of course, you touch on this a bit, but how did the insiders feel about their jobs?
You know, that was another one that blew me away. The interns at Kink.com couldn’t be more ecstatic to be cleaning [props], hoping for the chance to be promoted to one day be producing or directing their own porn, or at least play a larger role in the production process. I think that was another part that was just so shocking. Everyone I met genuinely believed in what they were doing. The common perception is that there is a lot of abuse in the industry, and while I’m sure that still exists, the people that I encountered were definitely doing what they were doing because they wanted to be. I’d say people like TomKat [seen in the web extra] seems to absolutely love her job. The geeks in the IT departments, I think one of them said to me “We’re a company where you can fulfill not only all of your sexual fantasies, but all of your technological fantasies, as well.” That’s a geek thing to say, but he clearly likes it.

What also became very clear was that, to stay afloat these days in the adult entertainment industry, you’ve got to work really hard at it, and you’ve got to really want to stay afloat — because otherwise, you’ll go under. I think that a lot of the characters from back in the day that might have been sluggish to get online and stuck in their ways, or technically just not very bright, I think they’re being weeded out.

Can you touch on some of the innovations from porn that are now present in mainstream Internet technology?
E-commerce. The first pioneers of e-commerce were in the adult industry, pushing further what kind of credit card transaction could take place over the Internet. Affiliate marketing was pioneered and embraced by porn online and quickly became a system basically every mainstream company that advertises on the web uses. Kink certainly was the first one to be doing multiple galleries of photos, high-speed streaming video. At the time I interviewed them, Kink.com was the only company who had figured out how to stream high definition live on the web. It’s fascinating to see these guys in the basement building the technology out of wood and spare parts, and figuring out how to do it. I thought that was very telling.

How is the rise of Internet porn affected the more established porn companies?
It’s affected them tremendously. The technology has kind of caught up with itself. The same technology that pushed the industry forward is now killing its profits. It’s doing that mainly through privacy, where people are just ripping off DVDs and putting them online through tube sites and bit torrent sites. The genre’s changed, where people like gonzo and amateur porn, which is incredibly cheaply produced and it’s very short. Now people just want to see two or three minutes of porn and, you know, get it over with, and aren’t necessarily sitting down in their living rooms with a DVD that they just bought to watch a whole storyline unfold. A lot of people were predicting, like all the format wars — BetaMax vs. VHS, DVD — whatever porn chose would win. A lot of people were predicting that Blu-Ray and the HD DVD war would be decided by porn. And it wasn’t. The theory of why it wasn’t was because the Internet had been involved this time. People want to watch porn in privacy, on their laptops or on their iPhones. They don’t necessarily need the high-def value and surround sound that the living room would require.

Last year, the biggest-selling porn DVD wasn’t from any big porn companies, it was Paris Hilton. She’s what they call the “accidental porn star”. That’s giving these big companies a serious run for their money and putting a lot of them under. Now the challenge that they’re facing is how do they continue to innovate? How do they provide a service people will pay for? Essentially, it’s what everyone else is trying to figure out — journalism, Hulu. Everyone’s trying to figure out how to make a dollar off of this. Some of the more innovative companies are trying to provide experiences that can’t be pirated, being more interactive, creating communities, doing things live. I think you see at the conference, there’s an on-demand service that syncs with a machine you can attach to yourself and watch things in sync. That’s an experience you won’t be able to pirate. That’s what’s coming next. I think that, like everyone else, they’re just scratching the surface.

What was that experience like?
I was kind of so flabbergasted at the time that something like this existed. But you know, yeah, I got where they were going, definitely. … I don’t know if that’s the future, but it’s very telling of what they discovered that they need to provide in order to survive.

Changing gears a bit, what will you be covering next on Vanguard?
Right now I’m editing a piece about cocaine trafficking in Europe and the growth of the Nigerian mafia. Cocaine use in Europe is at an all-time high, and in order for South America to meet the demand, they have started trafficking cocaine in high volumes through West Africa for geographical and proximity issues. It’s creating quite a stir. It’s called “The Cocaine Mafia.”

What have been some of your favorite assignments for Vanguard?
I think we have the greatest job in the world. We travel around, getting to meet people and understand situations that most people would probably even know. I think that going to Mogadishu was certainly probably one of the most intense reporting experiences I’ve ever had. We went there with our own private militia of 16 armed guards and were some of the first Western journalists to report from there in 15 years. I’d say that it was a petrifying but amazing experience. Definitely one of my favorites.

I’ll be that the porn piece seemed kind of safe after some of your other assignments.
You know, it did. I think Vanguard has covered a lot of doom and gloom. I covered Africa multiple times; disease, drugs, death, destruction, war, fighting, and honestly, I need to lighten it up a little for myself. So that’s kind of why I chose this story. I needed something a little lighter, just to take a break. I think that this season needs to be broken up a little bit and provide people a little something different. If you use the Internet, it’s almost part of your everyday life.

Have you had any scary experiences in general, stuff we could share with our users?
There’s a great scene in Mogadishu. There are two great moments in that story: one when we’re first entering Mogadishu for the first time and we’re basically stopped at gunpoint, and we think we’re about to be executed. There was another moment where we were trying to hide up on a hill while filming the largest public prayer gathering in a mosque in 15 years. We’re hiding up on the hill when everybody, the thousands of people below us, turned and faced west to begin praying and we realized that we were to the west and everyone was staring right up at us. I think the line in the piece was, “If there was ever any secret that two white guys were hanging out in Mogadishu, that cat was now out of the bag.”

I went and interviewed these skinheads in Russia and I ended up in the middle of the woods in this training camp. I was really trying to understand what was behind these guys’ motivations. When I discovered that this guy I was talking to was genuinely ecstatic watching himself beating people up, it was my first realization that I was interviewing a psychopath. That was pretty scary.

For more about Vanguard, visit their website.

“At this point in the history of motion comics, ‘Gifted‘ is the very best motion comic book out there,” Adams told us. “There will be some in the future that will be as good if not better, but right now it’s the best one.” It’s the early days of this medium — you can catch a motion comic version of Marvel’s Spider-Woman, Agent of S.W.O.R.D. on Hulu, as well, and we’ll have more chapters from the Astonishing X-Men next month — but Adams thinks there’s much more to come, especially as uses motion comics are used to promote feature films. (He tells us there’s motion comic material for a Predator-like character in the works, but that’s all he can say.) Learn how Adams defines –or rather, doesn’t define — motion comics and get his take on Joss Whedon’s graphic novel talents in Hulu’s exclusive interview below. — Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com), Editor

Hulu: Can you tell us about motion comics and what they are?
Neal Adams: Well, first I can tell you what they aren’t. They aren’t a replacement for comic books. They are an adjunct to comic books. They are, in some ways for some people, an easier way to read a comic book, because the comic book kind of reads itself. They are not animation. They are not animated like an animated adaptation, which is when you have some designers in Czechoslovakia or Thailand or India draw thousands and thousands of drawings that have to look very similar to the other ones so that the characters can animate, and so they use the least number of lines that they can to create the animation. They’re not computer animation, and they’re not movies, which are adaptations of comic books. Sometimes you can recognize what went on in the comic book in the movie, and sometimes — most of the time — you can’t.
These are the comic books. They are word-for-word, comma-for-comma the writing of the writer. They are line-for -line, drawing-for-drawing the drawings of the artist, except that the words are turned into voices and the drawings have become animated through manipulating them with computers. You know, you can draw a line and you can turn it into rubber on the computer. You can make it move up, you can make it move down; you can turn it into a face, you can do things with it on the computer that is not what an artist does by redrawing it. So the line that’s in the comic book becomes the line that’s in the motion comic. The only difference is you’ve added the dimension of motion so you can watch it happen. It’s a new form. I don’t want to get all high and mighty or anything, but it’s a new form of entertainment that never existed before.

You’ve explained this before, haven’t you?
I’ve explained it before, to people I’ve tried to sell it to at Marvel and DC Comics. We do this kind of thing in advertising. We do, in effect, a motion comic of a commercial that the advertising agency takes out and tests before they spend a lot of money to do the commercial. Sometimes those what used to be called “animatics” are actually better than the finished commercial. So my little company, Continuity, has done that for over 20 years. We have tried to get some folks in the comic books business to give it a try to see whether or not it can be turned into another form of doing it. Well, a whole series of events had to take place for it to happen, but, by golly, it happened. It turns out that Marvel is, as usual, the first one to open the door and try something new.

You’ve been involved with some of the biggest names in comic books — names like Superman, Batman and X-Men. How did you get your start?
I started when people thought that comic books were toilet paper. In America, once we attacked communists, we also then attacked comic books. Comic books, for a long time in America, were considered to be the kind of thing you never wanted to show your kids and you never wanted to read yourself. So there’s been this long climb upward. When I began, everything was pretty much in the doldrums and everyone was telling me, “You don’t want to do comic books because pretty soon — a year or two, maybe three — they’ll be gone.”

I started at a very bad time and, by golly, those of us who persevered and kept on going, we changed the standards as much as we could to make them not so much more adult, but to appeal to a broader audience. Some people say there are certain movies and certain movies that are meant for kids, some are meant for adults, some are meant for everybody. The wonderful thing about comic books is they’re a medium that everyone can understand. We don’t limit the language. Comic books are, in fact — and always have been — the only kind of book that a kid buys with his own money. This is not an insult to children’s books, which I think are wonderful, but children don’t go out and buy children’s books. Their parents do. Kids will take their own money and buy a comic book. They’re also not magazines. A lot of people think of them as magazines, but they’re not. They’re periodicals and books. Magazines make their income from advertising. If you pick up Vogue or whatever magazine you feel like picking up, what you’ll find is 80 percent of the magazine is advertising. Comic books survive on entertainment. They’re like going to the movie. There is some advertising in comic books, thank goodness, but not so much that it gets in the way of the story.

It’s a very weird and unique medium. In fact, I’ve spoken with some French folks who have opinions about America and have opinions about culture. If you scratch a French fellow who is interested in this sort of thing, he will tell you that America is responsible for three forms of art: jazz, musical comedy and, guess what, comic books.

How have you seen the business change recently?
I don’t see that there’s a limit. I think the limit is going to be about quality. One of the amazing things about the Astonishing X-Men that we’ve done is that it’s a motion motion comic as opposed to a cut-out dolls motion comic. It actually has motion to it. There’s a wide variety of motion comics that go from no motion to extreme motion. We’re on the extreme motion end, not on the no motion end. So there’s a great variety of that stuff. It’s available for many reasons. For example, some movies are going to be promoted with motion comics. There’s an educational program that I’m myself involved in with the Disney Corporation doing motion comics about the Holocaust. The Disney Corporation is providing them to schools. There’s going to be five in the first half of the year, basically stories about Mayor LaGuardia in New York, the ship that can’t find a port to let the refugees off, Ann Frank, things like that; really significant stories done in a form that, like motion comics, are very palatable and very, very interesting. You just don’t get bored. That’s not to say that educational things are boring but, you know, it has to do with the “boree” rather than the “borer.” The “boree” is sometimes more easily bored with one form or another. It’s very hard to get bored when you’re given good and interesting information in a form like this.

It almost takes a certain kind of person to read a comic book, to be a comic book geek. But it’s very easy, once you see the video, for you to then turn to the comic book and go, “Oh, I get it. I may read this very quickly, but it may have more meaning.” And so they go back and they look at it with a different point of view. In fact, one of the things that we do when we show people Astonishing X-Men, is I put copies of the graphic novel in the room with people as I show it to them. As they’re watching, they reach for the graphic novel to see “Is that in there? I didn’t get that from that. What is that? Was that really in there?” And they go ahead and read it and look at it to see if we were really following the comic book, or there was some nuance that they missed, this is really good artwork, or oh, that’s the guy who wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So the connection is being made in a very important way to people who aren’t necessarily comic book geeks. I think that’s what happening here, and not the way a movie does it. You can go to an X-Men movie and never pick up an X-Men comic book, because it’s an entertaining movie, and it’s never exactly the comic book. It’s very hard to look at these and not pick up the graphic novel.

You referred to Joss Whedon of Buffy fame, who also wrote this “Gifted” storyline for Astonishing X-Men. Can tell us what it was like working with him?
We would have preferred that Joss to stop by and give us some input, but of course he’s been busy working on Dollhouse. On the other hand, I’ve done some directing for commercials and stuff, and from the point of view of my directing this thing, he has a better economy of words since he’s used to writing for film and television. He knows when to stop having this person talk because all you’re watching is talking heads. He knows what his limits are and he knows how to use them. He knows how to cut back-and-forth between characters, because he’s so used to doing this. He’s the very best person to be first out with a really good motion comic. I guess there may be a better script writer out there, but is there someone more used to the form of both comic books and film? I don’t think there is. He was the perfect guy for us to work with.

Can you give us a little taste of what to expect with this series?
First of all, “Gifted” is one of Marvel’s best series of graphic novels. It has an awful lot to do with the potential of having superpowers and what the inevitable result can be. You could put another culture in danger. I don’t want to tell people where this culture is, or what kind of danger it represents, but what is known is that one of the X-Men is going to present such a disaster to another culture, and that culture has to go and try to find that X-Men and do away with him, or do something to change the history that’s going to unfold. So you have a story that starts at one time and goes back in time and starts to evolve forward while you’re watching the story of the X-Men, so you get a real classic tragedy in comic book form.

Of course, one of the things about Joss, if you watch Buffy or his other stuff, is that he likes action. You’re not going to turn too many pages before you get to some big knock-down, drag-out fight. Of course, we love that. You’ve got guys going behind the computers going, “Who’s going to handle that thing where the guy bashes the guy and throws him through the wall and they end up on the other side of the wall and then crash into the third wall?” And I say, “You want to do that? Oh, OK, I guess. Hmm…yes, make me a cup of coffee and I’ll let you do it.” People just love that. We have some people who are very strong in the soap opera sense. I’m not saying that girls are more sensitive than guys, but I will say that our best soap opera person is a girl, and she milks the emotion out of the characters using the animation tears coming to the eyes and going down her face.

What’s so wonderful is that we can pass these pieces out and look for people’s strengths to see how they handle that particular scene. You wouldn’t think that handling drawings and creating animation would do that but, by golly, it does. If you watch this little epic unfold, I think you’ll see what I’m saying is true. You’ll get a lot out of it drama wise, and you’ll forget that you’re watching drawings move. You’ll think you’re watching things happen.

“There’s a lot of stuff going on. Some of the scenes near the end of the episode were really fun to shoot. It’s an action-packed episode with a lot of drama. It’s actually kind of sad, too,” Scott Michael Foster (who plays Cappie) told us. “There’s a lot of stuff going and emotions are high. It’s always cool to shoot scenes like that, because we always want to make sure we have good finales for the audience.”

Now that Cappie’s back together with Casey, he has to break the news to a possibly less-than-supportive Evan. “When we were reading the scripts and finding out where they were going to go with this storyline, we wanted for them to all stay friends and be happy,” he said, “but drama has to come from somewhere, so it’s definitely hard for the three of them to have a relationship. You’re going to see how it all affects them in the finale.”

Ready to see what happens? Here’s the full episode.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Hulu’s ZBZ Wannabe

Hulu: First, can you tell us why you decided to do a series about Hong Kong?
Chef Yan: Well, if anybody has traveled to Hong Kong, it’s a city that not only never sleeps, but it never slows down. Hong Kong has always been considered the gourmet paradise and the Mecca of great foods. Being an international city and colonized by the British for over 100 years, Hong Kong is the crossroads of all the great foods. You have some of the best Western restaurants, French restaurants, Italian restaurants, Russian restaurants, Southeast Asian restaurants, and you also have the best Chinese restaurants. They actually refer to Hong Kong as the “fragrant harbor.” There are more restaurants per capita in Hong Kong than anywhere else in the world.

How did you decide which dishes and which parts of Hong Kong to focus on for this series, since Hong Kong is such a diverse large city?
I actually trained in Hong Kong. When I left Guangzhou, China when I was 13, I actually spent six years in Hong Kong working in restaurants. And after I graduated from college, I went back to Hong Kong to work. I worked for a food magazine, so I have a lot of fond memories, and I have some favorites of Hong Kong. Normally what I do in the Hong Kong Series, basically, is to feature the uniqueness of Hong Kong and what makes Hong Kong so different. Each show actually has a theme — for instance, bamboo. In Hong Kong, when they build high rises, they don’t use steel racks. They use bamboo scaffolding, all the way up to the 30th or 40th floor, so it’s very, very unique. You see people climbing up and down the bamboo scaffolding. And then the whole theme is on bamboo, talking about the use of bamboo in China and Southeast Asia. We talk about using bamboo shoots, cooking bamboo shoots, when whole bamboo is used, and when the bamboo leaf is used to wrap Chinese tamales in dim sum restaurants. Each one is about what makes Hong Kong so unique.

In another program, we talk about water. Hong Kong is an island, a peninsula island that is all surrounded by water. You water everywhere: you see deep water, you see the bay, the harbor, and then you see seafood restaurants everywhere. There’s an abundance of seafood from all over the world, not only the surrounding area. The whole series is about life, food, lifestyle, arts and the excitement, and what makes Hong Kong so unique.

Which episodes are your favorites?
They’re all my favorites. Otherwise, I wouldn’t put them in the series. I’m a world traveler. Normally my focus is not just on featuring one subject matter and one theme, but also to give people a broad understanding and an introduction to a great city. You see London, Paris, Tokyo, and New York and Los Angeles… Hong Kong is probably if not the most, then one of the most exciting cities in the world. You ask anybody who has visited Hong Kong, and they never forget all the excitement, all the energy. You go to New York – -and I love New York, I love London — but you only see part of New York, or part of London. You only see the theater district or Times Square, a certain area that never sleeps. But in Hong Kong, the entire city never sleeps. If you’ve ever been to Hong Kong, you’ll notice that it’s not just part of Hong Kong, but the entire city of Hong Kong is always bustling. There’s 7 to 8 million people living in a place that’s smaller than Chicago.

How often do you travel to Hong Kong?
I go there eight times years. I just landed, and I’m going back there in November and December. I do shows in China and Hong Kong, and I bring a lot professional chefs. I bring a leisure, gourmet tour as well as professional chefs to Hong Kong and China.

And why did you decide to put this series on Hulu?
Hulu is a great medium to reach a good audience. People who are interested in information, interested in entertainment would be browsing around Hulu and watch the programs. It’s also a new medium and excited. I’m very excited to partner with Hulu, and hopefully this is not the end, but the beginning.

I read that you’ve hosted over 3,000 cooking shows …
Yeah, I’ve done more cooking shows than most people. Not necessarily all people, but most people. I started doing the cooking show in 1978, 1979, for 30 years now.

How do you keep finding new ideas?
Well, I travel a great deal. I’m passionate about food and I love to eat, and I have a lot of friends everywhere. Everywhere I go, people always give me the best. Because of that, they inspire me. Being a guy that loves to eat — some people love tennis, some people love hiking, some people love swimming or surfing. I happen to love to eat and love to cook. Also, when you eat different food, like Cuban food, or Russian food, or Burmese food, you also understand the culture and the backdrop of the people. It’s a fascinating thing, a study of anthropology, of history and lifestyle when you go to a restaurant. Like when you go to an Indian restaurant, you see the decor. You go to a Thai restaurant and you see the wood carvings and the embroidery. You go to a Vietnamese or Cambodian restaurant, you see something. So the restaurant is a reflection of the culture and heritage. Just like people collecting stamps, you can study a lot about the people and their history. Food and restaurants are the same. Food is an expression of the chef and the owner. It’s how they want to present themselves and what kind of target audience they want to reach. For me, it’s always a cultural and culinary journey when you go into a restaurant, and it’s the same thing when I travel and when bring the program to people. I constantly learn from the chef, from the people, from home cooks. You cannot possibly know all the cuisine and the culture in the world, so by traveling, I bring all my memories and all my experiences with the people to the audience. I hope Hulu will continue to be in the forefront of bringing all this information and excitement and entertainment to people.

And when you’re at home, are you the one that cooks?
I always cook for myself. People always ask my wife, “Who cooks at home?” My wife always points her finger to me. When I’m home, I cook. I have three refrigerators and two sinks, and a big counter and a professional cooktop in my house. Everything is given to me by GE Monogram, so I can cook at home. I entertain a lot at home. When I’m home, I invite all my friends and neighbors to come and have dinner. A lot of times, I ask everybody to get involved, though. I normally cook one or two items, and they bring the dessert and salad and everything. Food and cooking brings everyone together. I hope my program on Hulu will bring more excitement and fun to the people that love food and travel, because all my programs are a combination of traveling and food and cooking.

Hulu: Can you give us a summary of the film?
Filmmaker Hanson Hosein: The big picture is that it’s about what I call the rising insurgency against corporate chains in American small towns and cities across the Heartland. The smaller story is of a road trip my wife and I took across the United States to document that, by taking only secondary highways to see what we thought was a more authentic view of America, before the corporate chains took over, and by only doing business with independent businesses along the way.

What were some of the more surprising things you discovered while you took this trip?
I think the most surprising thing is that this issue transcends politics and the standard conservative-liberal divide we keep hearing about in the United States, which is obviously quite true with many other issues. But we were in Midwestern towns in Nebraska or Wyoming, and these are conservative areas, but they also had the same concerns; they just call it something different. In Seattle, they call it sustainability; in these places they call it conservation. They’re just as concerned about these sort of concentrations of power by large corporations, which they don’t trust as much as they trust their neighbors in terms of how they do business.

One of the reviews about this documentary points out that you aren’t actually anti-Wal-Mart, that you actually provide equal time to their company. What’s your perspective on Wal-Mart?
It’s changed over the years. Because we come from a traditional journalism background — we both used to work at NBC — we take this fair and balanced thing very seriously. It was very important for us to actually get Wal-Mart in the film. They get 800 requests a week — that’s what they told us — for interviews. They looked at our website while we were doing our trip, and they said “Well, they obviously have a point of view that’s critical of us, but they’re giving us fair opportunity to talk.” So they decided they would give us some time. They gave us free access to their stores and their advertising, and there were no conditions whatsoever. So my thought on Wal-Mart as a company is, you know, I’m concerned still about the amount of power they have in the community and some of the things they’ve done in the past, overturning what communities have decided in terms of how they want to run their neighborhoods. On the other hand, I think the fact that Wal-Mart has been very open about some of the mistakes they’ve made along the way doesn’t necessarily endear me to them, but I believe in giving them a fair opportunity to state their case. It’s been said that a book can be written about Wal-Mart and all the bad things they’ve done, and a book can be written about all the good things they’ve done. Especially in this downturn, there’s a sense that that Wal-Mart is not necessarily the bad guy as much as they had been in the past.

You mentioned that you traveled the country with your wife, Heather. What was that like for the two of you?
[Laughs] It was tough, because we had both worked in television news traditionally. We both had real jobs. This was this crazy flight of fancy we had … We tried to get PBS and Discovery Channel and these other broadcasters to support us, and nobody did. We had this incredible pressure to do this story anyway, even though we didn’t have a major supporter. We had a partner, Tom Powers from Open Door in Toronto; he’d give us some funds to do this. But this was like driving into oblivion, not knowing whether we’d have something to show and whether anybody would care about what we were doing. Doing it was a little scary, but going out with your wife and your dog, there’s some moral support there — but it’s also like you’re facing every day, like “Gee, I hope I’m not leading my family into ruin on this creative urge that may not lead to anything.” It was tough, and you have the usual squabbles that happen between husband and wife: the husband never wants to check directions, and the wife always wants to stop and ask for directions — there’s a moment of pride there. But amazingly, we got along pretty well given all the stress of what the trip was about.

How did you determine your route? Did you have certain towns you wanted to hit, or was it all a “flight of fancy?”
I used to work at NBC covering breaking news around the world, so I’m really into covering things organically and letting the story tell itself. On the other hand, I knew that we couldn’t just take a chance and just close our eyes and point at a map. So we did some research before leaving — where we thought some of the hot spots might be, and we decided that we would visit some of those along the way. But what happened –this was a few years ago, before even YouTube had launched — we decided that as we were making our trip, we would share our video and share our thoughts on our blog with the world. As we kept going, more and more people kept following us, and we’d get covered by NPR stations and local newspapers. All of a sudden, people started sending us requests and recommendations of where we should go and said [they'd] put us up for the night. Fifty percent of the trip was very serendipitous based on that interaction with the audience. I’d say that the best half of the film was actually done through improvisation from these suggestions.

You created a follow-up film where you go to New Orleans. Can you tell us about that, and why a film about New Orleans was important?
We were actually supposed to go to New Orleans on the first trip. This was in 2005, and we got a call from Wal-Mart saying “We will talk to you,” so we had to rush to get to Arkansas, where Wal-Mart has their headquarters. We were thinking, “Oh, we’ll get there sometime.” Six weeks later, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. We’d always been told that New Orleans was the classic independent American city, where they had a really strong local economy and local culture, and they didn’t like big-box stores in the city. We knew that was going to change after Katrina. The second film was kind of like a lost chapter of Independent America. It’s my attempt to capture what the city was like before, and how it was actually small businesses that came back immediately after Katrina. I mean, I heard stories of people opening up the day after the floods to help their neighborhoods, and how vital that is to a community after a disaster like that. So that’s the story of that second film. There are some concerns about how city officials have been favoring big-box stores like Home Depot with tax incentives while not giving the same incentives to small businesses. It’s very much the same themes as the first film, but it’s really focused on one community right after a major disaster.

And what are you working on these days?
Right now I’m a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. And funnily enough, all the stuff that I did for that first film — creating your own content, telling your own stories, using engaged community members to help spread the word about what you’re doing — is pretty much what I teach now. It’s like the future of digital media and communication and social media. I’m also working on a book on storytelling in the 21st century. Independent America is going to be the main theme to it, which is essentially that if you ever want to cut through all the noise — everybody can communicate these days — you have to tell a really good story and you have to find a way to connect with your community using these different platforms to have them engage with you, kind of like we did in having them tell us what the second half of the story should be. That’s basically a book on the future of storytelling.

Thanks so much for your time — good luck with these projects!

Hulu: You attended Columbine High and were at school the day of the shootings, so you clearly bring an insider’s perspective to April Showers. Can you talk about that? Where were you when the shooting began?
Robinson: Well, I was in school and a senior at Columbine on that day. We broke for lunch and, instead of going to the cafeteria for lunch, which I rarely ever did, I went up to the computer lab, which is kind of dead-center in the building. It’s kind of a study hall thing, and I was hanging out with a couple of my friends. They were editing some video projects that they had and I was just there for a second opinion. Apparently the shooting had begun outside in the student parking lot, which is behind several layers of concrete from where we were, so we didn’t hear it. The fire alarm was pulled and you immediately think “We’re two weeks from graduation, it has to be a student prank.” We walked out into the main hallway, which was empty, and within a few moments a whole horde of students came running up the hallway towards us, screaming and yelling “There’s a gun, there’s a gun!” and “They’re shooting people,” stuff like that. So we ducked back into the computer lab and kids were putting themselves into closets and cabinets and hiding under desks. My friends and I just didn’t feel comfortable there. We didn’t want to be in a room if whatever was out there came in there. We were going to be in real trouble, so we left the computer lab and found a way out of the building without encountering any direct gunfire or anything like that.

Is the film told from your perspective?
The film follows about six different points of view. You witness the event primarily through the eyes of the main character, Sean. However, with him as he’s going through the event, are two, three, four other people that, in various stages of the day, kind of get separated and branch off so they have their own unique experiences, and certain experiences that came before the shooting happened, that influence the things that they do during the day. We’ve got some other characters that don’t intertwine with the three main storylines, but you go through it through their eyes and then, at the end, how they all come out the other side — some do, some don’t. The film is not about the shooting. When we were discussing how to film it, I was very adamant that I didn’t really want to stage the shooting in the film, but I knew that I needed to, to some degree, in order for the audience to take the journey with the characters in order for them to understand the rawness of the emotion that they’re going to see onscreen, because that’s one thing the general public doesn’t really see in real life when the news media sweeps in and covers these things. They tend to cover the live pictures of it unfolding, or just after it’s unfolded with a couple of sound bites. Then they bring in experts, but you don’t really see the two dozen, three dozen kids having impromptu gatherings in basements trying to figure out where their lives go from here, or some people having backlash against others, that whole thing. I needed them to see just enough, just enough of the horror to be in the position where our characters and the audience go through the same kind of journey. What you get out of it and how it affects you and how you look to tomorrow is different to each individual, just like in the film.

Was it hard for you to revisit these scenarios? How did this project affect you?
I couldn’t have done this project three years ago, four years ago, five years ago. I’m in a really good place now, emotionally, mentally, everything with regards to that day. I harbor no ill will about the shooting. It is that day, and I’ve come to grips with it.

What was really difficult for me was having to put other people through it, even in a make-believe film sense. But we used 1,500 real high school students. Having to stage these events and talk them through them and get them into that mindset, to put them there and to watch their reaction… after a while, people on the crew were saying “These extras are really good actors,” but I said “I don’t think they’re acting. I think they’re feeling it. What you’re seeing is genuine.” It was hard to all of a sudden be a spectator to this because I went through it and wasn’t able to see it. Now I’m orchestrating it and being a spectator, watching people as it plays out this thing in my life. That was difficult because, I know when we came to town and were looking for extras, everyone was like, “Oh, I’m gonna be in a movie.” But it’s not a Zac Efron movie. A lot of kids, the first day they’re on the set were like, “Oh, we’re in a basement… it looks like a house party scene!” Meanwhile, I’m telling them “No one’s talking. You’re all fixated on the TV.” Then I start describing the images that are on the TV, which the audience never sees because their faces tell you the whole story. Just watching them go there and imagine all of this… It was difficult to have to do that to kids. At the same time, as we kept filming, you could see a bond growing. You could see people reaching out to one another. We had several different schools participate and so it was just really cool at the end of it. You saw these kids go through a transformation without having to lose friends to do it.

Of all the famous marathons — New York, Boston — why did the Los Angeles filmmaker choose to focus on Chicago? “All roads were pointing to Chicago,” says Dunham. Because he was looking for someone training to qualify for the Boston Marathon, Chicago made sense. “Chicago sends the most runners to Boston,” he says, because it’s such a flat, fast course. But Chicago was also on the agenda for 2004 Olympic Bronze Medalist Deena Kastor, who suffers a foot injury early in her training for the Chicago race. But, for Dunham, it was also about the location. “It’s one of the bigger races, and it has a skyline rife with opportunities for filming. It’s a beautiful city,” he says.

As we learn more about Spirit ’s subjects, we learn more about marathons: the training involved, the deep inner strength required to keep your feet going one step after another for 26.2 miles, and the sheer spectacle of the event: tens of thousands of people streaming through the urban city streets.

With this year’s Chicago Marathon taking place on Sunday, Hulu caught up with some of the runners we met in Spirit of the Marathon to see where they are now. (Professional runners Daniel Njenga and Deena Kastor were not available for interview.) — Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com), Editor

Ryan Bradley — Boston Hopeful
Though Ryan Bradley’s race didn’t turn out quite like he planned, he was back to his routine about six months later. “I’ve been doing about one marathon a year since then,” he said. Like the other amateurs we meet in Spirit, he’s not running the Chicago Marathon again this year — but that’s because he’s planning to run 26.2 miles in Des Moines next weekend, instead. His wife will be doing Chicago this year, though, so while she’s running the race Ryan’s on kid duty. “I’ve got to somehow manage to get three kids under the age of five down there to watch their mom run,” he said. “It will be fun — it will be a challenge, but it will be fun.” He and his wife had the opportunity to run the Boston marathon together, and now Ryan’s hoping to requalify within the next couple of years so he can return when he’s 40. So what’s it like living in a household with two marathon runners and three young kids? “We’ve broken our treadmill quite a few times,” he laughs. They take the kids with them on some of the shorter runs — the kids love it, he says — and the whole family recently ran their first 5K together (with strollers, of course).

Leah Caille — First-Timer
A knee injury slowed Leah Caille down in her first marathon, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to do it again. “I got to the first finish line, and the only thing I wanted to do other than sleep for three days was go out there and do it again,” she says. This year, though, she’s unable to participate in the Chicago Marathon due to spinal issues. “When you’re a runner, if you’re sidelined for even a few weeks, that kind of sets you back for a bit,” she says. “Well, I’ve been sidelined for a good long time more than that,” thanks to back surgery last year and then two herniated discs in her neck in March. “When God was passing out healthy spines, I might have been at the bar or something — actually, I was probably out for a run,” she laughs. She’s back to shorter, three- or four-mile runs now and hopes to get back to doing both the triathlon and a marathon this year. In the meantime, she’s started a run team at her daughter’s school — they’ve done several 5Ks together — and she’s coaching her volleyball team, as well. “Things are going really well,” she tells us. “My career has moved forward. I’m in the ‘business’ — I sell sponsorships for major races throughout the country, and I love it. Being a runner helps me to speak with not only knowledge, but also a deep passion for the sport.”

Gerald “Jerry” Meyers — Veteran Marathoner
In Spirit, we meet Jerry Meyers as he’s training his daughter for the Chicago Marathon. And though he’d love to be running this weekend, he won’t be able to make it. “I’m on the injured-reserved list,” he says. “I threw a blood clot in my leg in January and it’s still there.” Though he hasn’t been able to run since the beginning of the year — the longest he’s been off in 30 years — he’s still walking every day. After the film, Jerry ran the 2006 Chicago Marathon but had to pull out at mile 16, when an exposed nerve on the ball of his foot kept him from going any farther. “My family told me that if I didn’t quit, they were going to come after me with a baseball bat,” he says. “I was going to hobble in, but they said, ‘No way, you can’t hobble in on two broken legs, ‘cuz that’s what we’re gonna give ya.’ That’s the first time I was not able to complete a run.” Despite the blood clot, Jerry says he feels great today. “If I didn’t know better, I’d go out and run,” he confesses.

Lori O’Connor — First-Timer
Lori got the marathon bug during her first Chicago Marathon and had every intention of doing it again the following year. “During the first one, my training went really, really well,” she said. “I stuck to the schedule. I missed maybe one run that entire training session. I finished, I had a smile on my face, and I felt great at the end. I thought, like some runners do when they finish a race, ‘I can do it a little bit faster!’ There’s always this push to be better.” She prepared for her second marathon the next year, only to find out that she was pregnant after running the 20-mile training run. “My doctor gave me the option [to do the marathon] and I said ‘Hmm, I think I’m going to stay on the sidelines for this one.’ I know it would have been perfectly safe, but I just didn’t want to do it. I wanted to go for speed, and I knew I wouldn’t be going fast.” This year, Lori’s out of the race because she and her husband are both wrapping up their dissertations. (Lori is getting her PhD in Sociology.) “It’s very time-consuming to train for a marathon, and so this year I said I’m basically just sticking to half marathons,” she said. “I did a few halves in the spring and I’m doing another at the end of October. I’m holding off until the degree is in hand — that’s my reward, so I’ll probably train for one again next summer.”

Hulu: Hi Mariana, thanks for speaking with us. Can you tell us about Vanguard?
Mariana van Zeller: Vanguard is an award-winning weekly documentary series that airs on Current TV. What we try to do is tell stories that we believe are important and unreported, and we try to tell them in a way that basically speaks to a young adult audience. We live in a time when most outlets out there, most networks, are shying away from international reporting. They’re closing foreign bureaus, and they’re just not telling international stories. It’s out of a belief that people just aren’t interested in international stories. We believe the exact opposite. We think that especially young people are interested in long-format, in-depth reporting, but there’s no outlet out there that speaks to them directly. That’s what we’re trying to do. We do a lot of international stories, but we do a good batch of national stories as well. What we do differently is that we tell them in a more in-depth way. We don’t spend a minute on the topic, which is what you see nowadays. Again, we live in a time when every subject is approached for either a minute or it’s all conversation and discussion about the subject, but there isn’t actually feet-on-the-ground, in-depth reporting. The way that we report our stories is also very different from what you see in traditional media. It’s more off the cuff, informal. There’s more immediacy to the feel. That’s because, when things are staged, you sort of step away from the story, from the reality. We wanted people to feel like they’re with us, that they’re there on this journey as we tell these stories that we believe are important.

Of course, you reported on pills in the Season 3 premiere. Why prescription drugs?
You hear about prescription pills, unfortunately, when celebrities die. You heard a lot about it when Heath Ledger died and when Michael Jackson died, but that’s pretty much it. But actually prescription pills are a growing problem in the United States. More people now are abusing prescription pills than ecstasy, cocaine and heroin combined. We decided to take a harder look at it, outside the celebrity world, and really go and do an in-depth documentary about where this is happening, why it is happening, and how it’s affecting people. Just to give you an example, we found out that Florida was sort of becoming this source state, the Colombia of prescription drugs. A lot of people from all over the U.S. were heading to Florida to get their drugs. This has become a huge problem in Florida, where 11 people a day are dying from prescription drugs. This is something I like to say, because I think it really opens up people’s eyes: The day that Michael Jackson died, 11 people died that same day in Florida. That’s the average there. Between the deaths of Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson, 6000 people died in the state of Florida alone. This is a big problem and we can’t just look at it through the eyes of celebrities. We felt that we really had to go out there and do some actual reporting and find out what’s happening.

So what we did is, we followed the pills. We got to Florida and saw the devastation and the impact that prescription pills were having there, and then we followed the pill pipeline from Florida through Appalachia, where every day hundreds of people are coming down to Florida to get their pills and take them back to their states. They’re having huge impacts there, too. Prisons are filling up and people are dying. It’s destroying families and whole communities.

How did you find the people you profiled, people like Todd, an addict we meet at the beginning of the episode?
We spent about two months of preproduction in the office, just making phone calls every day, trying to find people. That was the hardest part, to find actual addicts who were willing to speak to us on camera. We were able to speak to a lot of them but, obviously, there weren’t many who were willing to just give us interviews on camera. But then we came across Maureen, who’s very active herself in the fight against prescription pills because she has lost a son already, and a daughter-in-law. She’s become very, very involved in this fight against these pain clinics in Florida. On the phone with her, she told us that her other son was also addicted to prescription pills, so we came down to Florida and she introduced us to him. We ended up spending a few days with him, and it was just an incredible experience for us.

Watching this, I was personally disturbed by Todd’s story and his actions, that he’s still using after all that’s happened to his family. Do you find that you have a hard time remaining objective as you report on things like this?
Absolutely. I think that’s always the biggest challenge for us journalists. In this story in particular, we had seen the harm that these pain clinics and these doctors are doing to these people, and were trying at the same time to be objective. We tried to get their perspectives on this, too, and of course, as you’ll see in the piece, we were chased away from one clinic. We called a bunch of other clinics because we wanted to set up interviews. No one wanted to talk to us. It gets really difficult when you’re trying to get their voice in there, too, but you’re being chased away and people are hanging up on you as soon as you call. I think that also says a lot about what sort of business is going on there, when we can’t get anyone to sit with us and talk to us. What we have to see, too, is that this is a minority. It’s a small group of doctors, but unfortunately they’re capable of doing a lot of harm. I’m not saying the whole medical community is corrupt.

When you do these exposés, what are your goals? Have you had any success stories from past stories that you’ve covered?
I think our main goal is always to raise awareness, to make people talk about what is broken in the system. People usually ask us journalists, “Why do you always do sad stories or tragic stories; why don’t you report on the good stuff?” Well, because when there’s good stuff, there’s nothing to report about. Our job as journalists is to shine a light and raise awareness on things when the system is broken, when things aren’t working, not when they are. If they’re working, it’s because everything is going accordingly. I think that’s always our objective, to shine a light and raise awareness on what’s going wrong and what’s broken in the system. In this case, it’s very flagrant and very obvious that something is broken and something needs to change.

In “The Oxycontin Express,” you were followed by someone during your coverage. What was that experience like? How did it all unfold?
It was insane. I thought I was in the middle of an episode of The Sopranos. Basically, we were filming on the other side of the street outside a pain clinic. As soon as we took the camera out — we had it out for five minutes — a car parked behind us. This guy started yelling at me because I was the only one standing outside the car at the time. He was cursing at me in a very, very threatening manner and asking us what we were doing. We explained that we were doing the film. He was just cursing and yelling, so we got in the car and drove off. He actually started following us. Two guys got into the car with him, and then another car joined them. Every time we tried to stop at a gas station, they would basically get out of the car and start running toward us. Eventually, we had to call 911, and they came to the rescue.
The back story is that we actually ran out of gas. We didn’t include it in our story, but every time we tried to stop at a gas station, they would come out. Eventually, on the highway, we ran out of gas as we were calling 911. We had to pull over, and I think they were very confused about what was happening because it was in the middle of the freeway in Florida, so they just parked behind us. They stayed in the car and didn’t come out or anything. We just waited. It was the most insane thing. The whole time, I was completely imagining that scene from The Sopranos where the guy comes out of the car and points a gun at us.

It was crazy. I was terrified. Luckily, the police arrived and they got off with a warning. We later found out that one of the cars belonged to the owner of the pain clinic, who was actually a guy who had already served time in prison for possession of steroids with intent to sell.

Have you had any other experiences like this, where you were in danger?
Oh yeah, many. I was doing a story once on the border of Syria and Iraq — it was actually right after the war in Iraq officially supposedly ended, when Bush declared the end to the war in Iraq. It was when the insurgencies started in Iraq, where insurgents, foreign fighters, were coming from all over to Iraq to fight. We did a story about the Syrians who were crossing the border into Iraq basically to fight the Americans. We spent a couple of weeks on the border, trying to get some of these insurgents who were coming back after fighting. We wanted to get their perspectives on what happened, why they were fighting, and how they were doing it. It was very, very scary because we were in a territory where, on one hand, we were told it was full of Al Qaeda members and, on the other hand, we were also trying to stay away from the Syrian secret police because we were there as tourists, or else we wouldn’t be able to report this story. We were followed by the Syrian secret police several times and we had to get the tapes out through Lebanon and it was crazy stuff.

Let’s see, what other harrowing experiences have I had? Well, we had another nerve-wracking experience when we met with militants in the Niger Delta, with the oil conflict. We had an appointment to meet them at this fort, and when we got there, it was a boat with seven armed young men — some of them looked like they were teenagers — who had a bottle of whisky in one hand, and a gun in the other, and they took us away for an hour in their boat in the middle of the swamps to one of their camps to show us, basically, their power. We were eventually able to speak to their spokesperson, and that was very nerve-wracking, especially since at one point, once we got there, to their camp, they didn’t allow women inside. It’s bad juju, bad luck to allow women in their camp. I had to stay in the boat and my producing partner, who is also my husband, was taken inside. So I stayed out in the boat with these seven guys with guns looking at me while my husband goes with the camera inside the camp. That was a nerve-wracking experience, for sure. I’m lucky that I do it with my husband, though. He’s my own personal bodyguard.

What else are you reporting on this season?
We also have another story about the end of the war in Sri Lanka. For 25 years, the government of Sri Lanka was at war with one of the biggest badasses of modern-day terrorism. They’re actually called the “O.G.s of modern-day terrorism,” the Tamal Tigers. After 25 years, that war came to an end, and a lot of countries were looking at Sri Lanka as an example of how to defeat terrorism. We traveled to that country during the waning days of that war to see what Sri Lanka had to do to defeat terrorism and what kind of examples we could learn from that country, if any.

How did you get your start?
I’m from Portugal originally, and my name is Dutch, so I think I have a lot of the explorer’s blood in me — you know, Dutch and Portuguese. I’ve always loved to travel and I sort of decided I wanted to become a journalist when I was around 12 years old. I used to see all these beautiful anchors on Portuguese television. They seemed so knowledgeable; they could talk about anything and go on for hours for every issue. Little did I know they were actually reading from a teleprompter! That’s basically when I decided that I wanted to be that knowledgeable, and I always loved to travel. Early on, I decided I wanted to be a journalist, one who actually goes out and reports and travels and looks for stories. I wouldn’t want to be just an anchor or anything.

Thanks, Mariana for your time today.

For the latest news from Vanguard and Current TV, become a fan on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/CurrentVanguard and http://www.facebook.com/current.

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Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

Hulu: The preview made me anxious to see the full episode!
Jeffrey Reiner: Yeah, it’s a real energy-packed thrill ride with such interesting characters. I think it’s a fun show with heart in dealing with these guys who are heroes. [Paramedics] don’t get a lot of praise, but they go into really difficult situations, you know, and they’re first ones on the scene. They’re saving lives.

Could you set up the preview for us?
It’s a teaser, so it’s the opening, and we introduce our characters and then we introduce the action, which they respond to. It’s in San Francisco on top of a big skyscraper. The city plays a major part in it. The EMTs also have a helicopter response unit, so it’s by land and by air, and we’re basically covering our six main characters.

Tell us about Cliff Curtis and his character, Rabbit.
Rabbit was a really hard part to cast, because he’s full of energy, he acts like an a**hole at times. We wanted to make sure whoever did that wasn’t playing, that it was very easy for the actor to play it in broad strokes. The work that we’d seen from Cliff — he’s been in movies such as Whale Rider, and he’s worked for Scorsese and Danny Boyle; I’d seen him in Sunshine — there’s a gravitas about him and a weight that I really responded to. I always wanted to work with him. So we needed somebody to really ground Rabbit, because it would be very easy for the character to be over the top. But also, it’s a question of who could play all that energy. Cliff is a Maori; he’s got that kind of warrior’s mentality. He’s just very — he’s like somebody you’ve never seen on television before. He’s kind of a wild card. The network was very brave in letting us cast what I would consider to be a very nontraditional leading man. I think he’s really refreshing for television. But he’s funny. By the end of the pilot, you come to love him, or understand him. He is full of contradictions, and he marches to his own beat.

There’s been lots of talk about all the medical dramas on TV right now. What’s different about Trauma?
The first thing is, it’s not in a hospital. We shoot this on the streets of San Francisco. I worked on Friday Night Lights for three years, and I think we were dedicated to shooting in the streets and shooting in a realistic way. I think that we’re continuing to do that. Most medical shows are stuck in a hospital. We’re out on the streets, and there’s a thrill, an energy to whipping down the streets of San Francisco in an ambulance and whipping over the city in a helicopter. The sense of urgency is far greater than your typical medical show. These guys share a lot of the same vibe as cops, where their job is filled with adrenaline. It’s one thing to perform surgery in a contained environment, but try going to an area that is not only dangerous, but a person is bleeding to death from his femoral artery. You’ve got to stop it, and you’re out in the elements. I think it’s a lot different from any other medical show.

What I love about Friday Night Lights are the characters. Trauma is being positioned as an action-packed series. Will we see the same sort of character development in this show?
Well, I think it’s a different type of character development. In Friday Night Lights, you’re only servicing the characters. Here, you’re servicing stories. I think the attention to the kind of behavior and the way that we let the actors act and how we shoot them. As the series wears on, you’ll get to understand the characters, and hopefully our approach to getting performances out of [the actors] will share a lot of that. We use real people, we use real situations, which we do on Friday Night Lights. It’s something that’s very important to Pete Berg and I, and Dario Scardapane and Sarah Aubrey, my fellow executive producers, it’s something that we definitely care about. It’s a different beast. The sense of realism and the sense of being there, experiencing it from a thousand different angles is going to be much the same.

There’s a serious action sequence in this clip. Will we see more action of the same caliber as the season progresses?
It will be different, but we do kind of a farmer’s market crash. I have to say, you can’t do these stunts to get your ya-yas off. You have to do it to serve a story. Even when I directed it, there weren’t shots that were like, “Wow, this is cool.” It was told from people’s perspectives. The helicopter [scene] is really told from the guy, Rabbit, inside the helicopter — which I thought was terrifying. So rather than have these scenes be generic, they had to be very specific to a point of view. And for people in a car crash, what’s it like to be the person in the car who’s about to enter a multi-collision accident? It’s terrifying. What was it like to be at that Santa Monica farmer’s market [where there was a fatal crash several years], and experience it firsthand? That’s what we’re trying for. Big action stuff is told, at times, from a very broad point of view to get the thrills. We want to be very specific to a person going through an accident. There are some big moments in coming episodes, and some episodes where there aren’t big moments. But the one thing we’re trying to deliver is adrenaline. There’s a code word, “six minutes,” in EMT medicine, which is basically the most a person can go without their heart working or getting oxygen. It’s that sense of urgency that we’ll never lose in the show. You’ve gotta fix it, you’ve gotta get there. You know, the most accidents in Los Angeles are caused from EMT ambulances.

Really?
Yeah, can you imagine? These guys are racing through the streets of San Francisco at 50 miles per hour. You’re going through red lights hoping that Tom, Dick or Harry doesn’t have their iPod blasting. I’ve been in the ridealong and it’s like being on Space Mountain at Disneyland. And we want that to come across. These are brave people and they do some really, really great things.

In the opening, there’s the paramedic on the skyscraper, Nancy, who comes off as very headstrong. It seems as though she has a past with Rabbit. What’s going on with them?
They have a real past. They’re like the top-notch paramedics, the two people who are the top of their game. They’ve had a relationship, so there’s a lot of repartee, which is something a lot of the characters end up doing. You’re sitting in a car for hours at a time with that person, and they’re either going to be your husband or wife, your ex-husband or -wife, or your brother. A lot of humor comes out of that.

This seems like this is a high budget show. Between the cast, the special effects and the on-location filming in San Francisco, it can’t be cheap. Do you think it’s harder for shows like this to be greenlit these days, given the economy?
We’re very responsible with the money the network has given us. I think it is hard, but what network television can deliver that some of the cable shows can’t is a sense of scope. It’s like there are independent movies, and then there are studio movies. Independent movies are doing the small-scale stories. The majors are doing the big ones, the Spider-Mans, the Iron Mans, Wolverine. I think NBC, for a certain time slot, certainly following Heroes, I think they’re making a smart move. We have a very strategic way of shooting these episodes. We use multiple cameras, we use three cameras, sometimes five or eight, so we’re able to capture stuff in a quicker way.

Anything else you want to say about the show?
I think you’ll really learn a lot about the characters, even in the pilot. If you like the crash, just hang around for five, six more minutes, to see a stunt that’s really spectacular.

Well, I can’t wait to see what happens. Good luck with it.
Thank you so much.

There’s a bit of an announcement we’re hoping you can make about Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Can you tell us about that?
John Krasinski: Hulu’s premiering the movie first on the Internet [after it finishes its run in theaters], so we’re a part of that, and that’s fantastic. I think anybody in this business would be incredibly fortunate to be a part of anything having to do with Hulu, to be honest. Hulu is one of those ideas that is so cutting edge, that you just know it’s going to be a huge, huge part of people’s lives from now on. Not only for what it is doing and is capable of doing now as an interactive site, but also for what it has potential to grow into, which I think is nothing short of world domination. [Laughs] So we have that to look forward to, that our president will be Hulu.

To have Hulu support you in any way and display the ads for the movie and things like that is incredibly exciting, but then to have the movie be premiered on Hulu after its first run in the theaters is incredible. I think that Hulu’s done an incredible amount for The Office, and we are indebted to [Hulu] in a huge way. I think that it’s a massive part of our popularity, and why people have continued to watch us. We’re really, really lucky to be part of it — I have had experience with being part of a project [The Office] that benefits from being on site like Hulu, so to have our movie on Hulu and accessible to anyone at anytime, it’s really an honor, to be honest.

Well, thanks! And of course, I would say we wouldn’t be Hulu without The Office.
Awww, that’s nice.

Now you lined up some really incredible people for this project. Did you have some of the actors in mind from the start?
Absolutely. When I got the pilot to The Office, I used that money to buy the rights [to the book], but I had actually started writing the script a little bit before I got the rights, which was incredibly — in a negative way — ambitious. I’m sure it’s what more people would call stupid. In doing so, I started writing the script and knew exactly who I was going to cast. At the time, I was waiting tables in New York, and though I was having a great time, I wasn’t necessarily creatively stimulated, so I was constantly looking for inspiration anywhere I could find it. I definitely found it all the time in the theaters, by going to the theater, and by going to independent movies. I just consistently did that as often as I could. The people who I saw have these awe-inspiring performances were the people that I knew I wanted to be in this movie. And all these incredible New York actors who were just so brilliant on stage and in these small, independent movies, where a lot of them were coming out in New York, I just knew that those were the people I wanted in it, and I was just lucky enough to get them.

This being tied to David Foster Wallace, did that make it easier to get these actors?
Yeah, I’m sure it did. I think that being part of a project that is not only based on but also very much his actual writing … The movie’s not at all based on the book. It is completely the material itself. In doing this movie, my only intention was to bring his material to a wider audience in a different medium, but in no way to take the movie and change it in some drastic way. My being involved in the movie and so connected to the book was because of his writing, so I just wanted to do him justice and sort of show more people how incredible this author is and show what an impact he could have on you. I think that, truly, without him knowing it, I think David Foster Wallace wrote near-perfect acting material in these characters. So I didn’t have to pitch the movie very hard to these actors who I said had to come in a day, maybe two for some of them, and have these interviews that they could basically act in one day and really sink their teeth into. They very much appreciated it.

As a writer, how do you approach such a revered author’s work? I would have been intimidated!
Yeah, it’s funny, because to be really honest, Brief Interviews is the anomaly, I think. I can totally see why he hasn’t been adapted before, because his work is incredibly intimidating in that respect. It’s intimidating because you’re so admiring of it as a reader. When you’re a reader of his books, it’s a unique experience that you’ll never have with anyone else. I think he’s bar none one of the best writers ever to have lived, and he’s right up there on the pedestal with all the greats, in my opinion. And the real truth is, there’ll ever be anyone who writes like him again. For me, this book is the anomaly because he actually wrote these characters speaking dialogue, so there are actual words being said that were actually written as characters representing themselves. To me, it was almost near-perfect dialogue and the biggest challenge was editing it down to a piece that could actually fit into a watchable movie rather than an epic miniseries or something. And then also, he was also an incredibly literary guy, and so there were moments where I chose to leave some of the literary vibe into the dialogue, and some where I had to tone it down in order to allow the guys to be a little more accessible. But other than that, really, the script in the movie is all David’s work. I can’t take much credit for it, because the work he did as a writer in this story is what brings such incredible life to these characters.

I understand that he actually called you to give you his blessing. How did that call go?
It was thrilling, for lack of a better word, it was just fantastic. He was incredibly kind, and incredibly generous. I remember him being so soft-spoken and so nice. He put me at ease right away. I remember him being flattered that someone had taken up this book and tried to run it up the hill. He told me that his intention for Brief Interviews was to write a story about a character that you never see or hear from, but by using all the characters around that person, you find out all you need to know about them. And that’s exactly what I’d done. I’d already written the script when I talked to him, and I’d done just that in the script, because all the signs were there. It was just incredible to have that connection with him; that I was not only on the right path, but charging down the right way. It was so inspiring and such a pick-me-up that it was a great way to go into the actual shooting of the movie, knowing that we were on the right path and that we were representing him in the correct way.

You know, the big cinematic move that I did and probably the biggest part of the adaptation that I did is that [the female lead, played by Julianne Nicholson] connected to one of the characters, and I remember he was incredibly excited about that. He said that he had seen Brief Interviews as sort of an incomplete project because it hadn’t fully tied into itself, and there was nothing that could tie them all together. So when I sort of brought one of the characters in the book and connected it to her personally, all of a sudden there was a linear aspect to the movie. I had written one draft that was extremely linear and had all these incredible arcs that were fitting in pretty well, but at the end, when you re-read it, you realized that it just didn’t feel right, that it was feeling forced and fake. And so I realized that the best way to adapt the book was to go back and allow it to be what it wanted to be, which was spontaneous and slightly erratic and something that basically presented itself when it wanted to present itself.

You end up appearing in the film, but that wasn’t always your intention.
It wasn’t at all. My intention was solely to direct. I was pretty sure that these actors could do any of these characters way better than I could, but then we had an actor pull out at the last minute. There was this scheduling conflict, just one of those things that happens. We only had two weeks until we shot the scene. Normally that would be fine, but unfortunately that is such a big monologue and, as such, a huge part of the movie. I had shot all of the other interviews, so it was the last one and it needed to fit in just right. It would be a very stressful situation for any actor to just come in and sort of take on that much dialogue and that much intricate storytelling without knowing any of the other pieces, and I was the only one who knew the pieces. So the producers and I sat down and we decided that I’d be the best person to do it, solely because I’d read it 100 times, for no other reason than I knew what I was talking about when I was sort of relating the story to her and how it would connect to everything else.

Because this was a passion project for you, was the acting easier for you?
It was by far the scariest performance I have ever given; rather, it was the most scared performance I’ve ever given. It has solely to do with the fact that I was the director, and not because it hard to direct myself or anything like that — that’s not at all what happened. The reason why it was so scary was that I had sat behind the monitor and watched all these incredible actors turn in performances that were nothing short of awe-inspiring. The day before, we had shot the bathroom scene, which is one of my favorite scenes in the movie, and so to literally be the last person to go and to be the last piece of the puzzle, and to know that if this didn’t work, the movie wouldn’t work, was probably the worst position I could have put myself in. But I really didn’t want to fail everybody else. Hopefully it works out.

I can imagine how challenging this must have been for you, but I think it worked, I really do. But I have to ask — on behalf of all of the fans of The Office — can you tell us what we’re going to see in the new season? A little teaser, perhaps?
It’s funny, the season premiere is just sort of an old-time structure of The Office — it’s just a really funny episode of The Office. There aren’t necessarily any incredible spoilers; it’s sort of getting back to the season in a way that I think is a really smart way to do it, which is just getting everyone back in the office. But then definitely the wedding episode is coming up and it is fantastic. I think that — and I think I can speak on behalf of the entire cast when I say this — we’re all just huge fans of the show and we love it so much. To get those scripts, we’re as excited as any fan would be to see what’s going to happen next, the way they deal with the wedding and how [Pam and Jim] get together. It’s a scary thing to get married on a show, because it’s always a tough conundrum of whether it’s good for the show or bad for the show. Of course the writers are so fantastic that they did it perfectly.

Last season was such a great season that I really can’t wait to see what’s in store now. Well, thanks, John for your time – we really appreciate it.
Absolutely. Thank you.

Can you give us a one-sentence summary of the show?
Tamsin Greig: It’s a bizarre, unexpected and sometimes terrifying comedy set in a British hospital where a new member of staff comes in and meets an extraordinary array of surprising characters who work in the hospital, with most of it surrounding the surgical department. And how that woman retains — or otherwise — her sanity in a place of undisguised madness.

Wonderfully put. You, of course, play that new doctor. Can you tell us about your character, Caroline?
Caroline Todd has slightly less control over her limbs that she would like to have, but is unaware of that. She is good at her job but doesn’t know it, and is is at times terrified and anxious and childishly curious about the bizarreness surrounding her, but also finds it almost as though she has come home to weirdness without realizing it.

How is this hospital a hospital unlike any other?
Well, frighteningly, I have to say a number of people who work in the National Health Service here who I’ve met say actually Green Wing is rather like real hospital — they have told me it’s quite like real hospitals. The number is quite high, actually, and I don’t know whether that’s a good thing to promote the show or a bad thing to promote the NHS. I don’t think it’s in any way an extraordinary hospital. It works within a system which, you know, has pretty tough constraints. As you know, in this country, it’s a public health service, so doctors work incredibly long hours under peculiar conditions. So I think that the wildness of the environment, in some ways, adequately reflects the peculiarities of that kind of hyper-existence.

And the one thing I noticed in this particular hospital is that nothing medical ever seems to happen.
[Laughs] We do do a little bit of sewing every now and then on body parts, but the interesting thing about this show is that there are no patients. But there’s a lot of interaction with the people who work in the hospital. But I think the creators of the show were not really that interested in patient-led stories. Because, you know, we have lots of that over here. What they were looking for was just finding a group of people who work together and it could be any environment. Really, the show could have been set anywhere. It could have been set on a space station or on a cruise ship or in a diamond mine. They were just interested in how people in tense situations interact with one another in a work environment. So, in some ways, the patients are unnecessary for the development of these relationships.

Here in the States, Green Wing is often compared to the show Scrubs. Are you familiar with that show?
Yeah, I’ve seen it. I like it. I love the flavor of it. I think it’s darling. I think both shows were being developed at sort of the same time, but I think it’s like that synchronicity where you have the same ideas at the same time. You know that character, Dennis the Menace? It was developed on both sides of the Atlantic at the same time, completely independently. I love that, the idea that when something is going to happen, it’s going to happen at that particular time. There’s a flowering of something extraordinary which is similar… I quite like that, the synchronicity of that.

What are some of your favorite Green Wing episodes, if it’s not asking you to go too far back?
We did this quite a while ago, so it’s difficult to remember specific ones. I can remember in the first season, there’s one episode where my character has a housewarming party and about half the episode is the party. There’s a lot of stuff done on Steadicam, so the Steadicam was like a person at the party, and all these really strange things that happen at the party. It’s cleverly developed, and I like that episode.

We have a special after the second season, which you may well get, and the final scene of that has the most wonderful, most surprising, unexpected, beautiful stunt, which I think America would quite like.

Can you talk about the use of the Steadicam and why the show’s creators decided to go that route for the camerawork?
Yeah, I think what they wanted was a new form of visual storytelling, where it wasn’t done with the traditional wide shot and then the singles and then the cutaways — which has helped television, but it’s become standard. So I think they were very interested in finding a way to engage the audience in a more interactive way, so that the camera is actually part of the action. When we were filming a lot of it, we’d do a lot of it on a single take, so scenes had to be set up very specifically. If there was going to be a reverse shot of someone, the Steadicam would have to do that within the flow of the action, so the cameraman had to have really good thigh muscles and a high boredom threshold, and also an ability to dance because they had to dance within the action. We as actors had done a lot of development in rehearsals, but the cameraman was doing it on the day of, so he had to be pretty nippy. I think probably that it was meant to engage the audience, so much that you actually feel like you’re on the roller coaster with the story.

Is Caroline like you at all? What traits of your own did you bring to the character?
I brought my own hair. I don’t believe that’s the way I walk. I was encouraged to walk in a slightly unguarded, lopsided way, which I feel like I manage to suppress in normal life. We do have quite similar hands, and our eyebrows are the same size, although mine now are slightly smaller having seen them on TV.

What are you up to these days?
I just finished filming for Sky [Network] a two-part adaptation of a Terry Pratchett novel called Going Postal, which we filmed in Budapest. I’ve also just done a BBC adaptation of the Jane Austen novel Emma. And I’m about to start a film which Stephen Frears [The Queen, High Fidelity] is directing called Tamara Drew, in which I will be unrecognizable.

Who are you playing in Emma?
Miss Bates, the lonely, lovely spinster who can’t stop talking. Suprisingly.

You also starred in Black Books. For those of us (OK, me) who are illiterate when it comes to British comedy, can you tell us about it?
Yeah, Black Books … There’s three seasons of that. It’s set in a bookshop run by a curmudgeonly Irish misanthrope called Bernard Black. His main gripe about life is that there are people in the world who want to buy books in his shop. Why he has the shop is never revealed. [Laughs] And why he doesn’t get rid of it is also never divulged. But he runs this bookshop in a very haphazard, drunken way. He has a sidekick/assistant/whipping boy and a friend who has a shop next door, but then loses the shop and just becomes some hanger-on, and that’s the character I play, who is excessively maudlin and as drunken as Bernard is. It’s how the two engage and manipulate and abuse Manny, the assistant.

I love the premise, a bookstore owner who hates selling books.
Hates selling books! But likes drinking and smoking, and doesn’t want to share them with anybody else.

Well thanks, Tamsin, for your time. We can’t wait to dig into Season 2.

You can get a sense for this VH1 “You Oughta Know” artist’s music with A Fine Frenzy’s concert at Guild Hall, courtesy of Live from the Artists Den. “[Guild Hall] is a cool place. It sort of has a circus tent inside, but it also has this old theater kind of a feeling,” the 24-year-old said. “It’s also very small, so it’s not overwhelming at all. It’s very intimate, like a little show. The whole setting is great. The Hamptons are beautiful and there’s such a calm, summery vibe there. It was really neat to experience that.”

Hulu is streaming this episode of Live from the Artists Den well before its TV airdate to mark the release of A Fine Frenzy’s sophomore album, Bomb in a Birdcage. “We’ve kind of evolved on this album,” Sudol says. “I’d say currently it’s like folk-tinged alternative pop rock, I guess, with kind of a cinematic kind of edge to it. I don’t know, it’s very hard to describe music. [Laughs]”

We’re fans of the catchy “Blow Away;” Sudol also told us that “Beacon” and “The Minnow and the Trout” were really fun the night of the Artists Den taping in August. Bomb in a Birdcage is available today, and the Los Angeles-based band starts their U.S. tour in mid-October. We’re looking forward to seeing them in person.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor, Hulu

First, can you tell us what sparked your interest in Africa?
It’s really a couple of things: Being a teammate of Dikembe Mutombo for five years, knowing he comes from Congo, and just having conversations with him over the years. And also knowing that he put $10, $12 million of his own money to build a hospital in his own country. But you know, after games, sitting back there, talking, talking about everything that’s going on over there in Africa like we did so many nights … it really didn’t have that effect on me, to want to go over there and see it for myself. What really did it for me was sitting at home one day. I saw a PSA that [Chicago Bulls forward] Luol Deng did on TV, and I immediately after that ad, I called my assistant to set up the whole trip. I just wanted to know a little more about the conflict and everything that was going on over there.

What made you decide to document your visit on camera?
I just think it was important for me to learn as much as possible, to get as much information as I could to learn about the conflict. For me to admit to my fans that it’s not embarrassing to me to admit that I don’t know something. I just wanted to get all this information and learn as much as possible, and to show my fans that it’s OK to say that you don’t know about something and [you] want to learn more. I want them to also learn what’s going on over there, so I wanted to document this whole trip.

There was a lot of discussion about how you were out of your element when you made this film. After all, you’re an NBA star who lives in a mansion, and you went to these camps where you found yourself sleeping in a tent surrounded by giant bugs. What were some of the things you learned on your trip?
Well, first of all, stepping out of my element, yes, that is definitely what I did. You go from living this great life to flying over there and living in the U.N. compound. At first, I tried to sleep in the room, but I couldn’t get comfortable in there because it was so hot. So then, the first time ever in my life, I slept in a tent. I just thought I could get a nice little breeze throughout the night. [Laughs]

What I wanted was just what they wanted, the three P’s and that’s why the documentary is called “3 Points,” because it’s the three P’s that they wanted. That’s to be protected; they wanted punishment, and they wanted peace. I’ve learned that the kids over there, they want to be educated. My whole idea coming back was to tell their stories and let people know what’s going on over there in Darfur.

What’s stayed with you since you’ve been back?
Everything, everything. Seeing some of the wounds. Seeing the little kids drawing in the art room. Just seeing the little kids walking around — two, three years old, with no supervision. Seeing all the pain on their faces. I mean, it’s just so much that it really, really was a sad situation.

Were you surprised by what you saw, or were you prepared for it?
I think I was pretty much prepared for it. I think it helped talking to Dikembe because he’s from Congo, so I was a little bit prepared. It took a while for it to really hit me. I mean, I was fine up until the last day, when I was just lying on my bed, staring at the wall. I woke up in the middle of the night and that’s when it really hit me. I actually started shedding tears.

Tell us about some of the people you met — did they have any idea who you were?
[Laughs] No, they had no clue who I am. They were excited to see me, because they felt like I was there for a great cause, to bring them help. We had a bunch of people willing to sit down and have a conversation with us, which is great. It was cool, it was cool. I got to meet a lot of people over there. The most important thing is they were willing to sit down and share their stories, and I know how tough that would have been, you know, just bringing back up what they witnessed at a time in their life that was pretty harsh.

Did the experience change you at all? How?
It definitely changed me because I feel like that could have been me in that situation. If that was me in that situation, I’d want people to help me and do everything possible to get out of that situation. But because I’m blessed and I’m fortunate — you know, I’m one of the lucky ones to be able to wake up every morning and do something that I’ve always loved to do — I felt like it was my responsibility to do what I told them I was going to do, and that’s to tell their stories when I got back to the States and educate a lot more people on this situation, and to help educate the children that are over there.

Would you go back? Do you plan to?
I don’t think it’s safe right now to go back. Once we get these schools up and running, hopefully it will be safe to go back. I would love to. I think I have a better understanding of how to handle the situation over there as far as the living conditions.

What is the progress of the schools? Has the conflict held things up?
No, we’re definitely moving forward. That’s something that I promised them I was going to do. No matter what, we’re gonna move forward. We’re building these schools, and I just want to thank the guys that were added on this team, this Dream Team, and that’s Derek Fisher and Baron Davis, for their help in building these schools.

To learn more about McGrady’s efforts, please visit http://www.darfurdreamteam.org/.

Hulu: Tell us about your film, RiP!, and why you decided to tackle the recording industry and copyright law?
Brett Gaylor: Well, I didn’t set out so much to challenge the recording industry. What I really wanted to do was celebrate creativity, specifically individual creativity. Digital technology has always been where I’ve expressed myself from a young age. I was using the Internet in the early days, when it was all about modems and mainframes and things like that. For anybody that was involved in digital culture from the beginning, it was always very apparent that there was a disconnect between the existing industrial models of commerce and production and digital thinking, which is about the free flow of information and connectedness. There’s always been that tension there. And so I wanted to explore that, and when it really became apparent was when the first peer-to-peer file sharing programs came out, like Napster. It sort of crossed over into pop culture, and music became the thing that really grabbed people’s attention and made this tension really apparent. When I first began making the film, it focused on the music industry, but as I did my research and I discovered the history of copyright law, it became a much bigger story. It took several years to make. The record industry is really a moving target, but the kind of basis that this was built upon is an older and a bigger story. It wasn’t so much tackling “What is the future of the music industry?” What I was a lot more concerned with was “What are the other underlying issues here?”

Let’s talk about this disconnect you mentioned. Of course it was felt in the era of Napster, and I think may seem more mainstream than ever now with online video — or at least we feel it every day here at Hulu, where we know what our users want, but we also honor our content partners’ business objectives. How is this relevant today, in the post-Napster world?
Yeah, it’s good stuff. It’s getting bigger and bigger, this conflict. That was the concern that we had while making the film — will people get tired of talking about this? But it just gets more and more relevant as an increasing amount of our communication takes place over the Internet. You know, in 10 years, we won’t even call it the Internet, it will just be communication. When copyright law was originally designed, it was to govern the printing press, which very few people had access to. But now everything, from a post on Facebook to YouTube to Hulu, from the very small people, to the major TV studios that are putting stuff on Hulu, everyone’s covered under the same law, which starts the disconnect.

Copyright law covering is an extremely broad level of discourse, whereas before it was for one specific problem that concerned very few people because very few people were publishers. You know, that’s not quite right, either, because there was this folk creation that people took part in. It used to be that when people listened to music, it was music that created by themselves and by their peers in their living rooms, playing the piano. But over the 20th century, we kind of shifted to more of a consumer-based culture, and fewer and fewer people were making culture, whereas now, anyone can be a publisher, anybody can be an author and reach millions and millions of people, so that’s at the heart of this dilemma.

Were you ever concerned that lawyers would come after you for doing this film?
Well, you know, part of my inspiration for this film has been culture jammers such as Negativland or Dan O’Neill, who are in the film, who basically practiced this, in some sense, as some form of civil disobedience. Mark Hosler from Negativland always told me to “live your life under the rules that you wish existed.” I definitely took that to heart, but the project was always meant to push the boundaries of fair use and of fair dealing, and to really make those issues apparent in the design and the form of the film. We actually felt quite comfortable about the uses that are in the film because we’re using them for the reasons that fair use and fair dealing exist, which is to critique, to comment, and to criticize. We actually had a lot of lawyers look at the film for the interpretation of every clip I had to use, and we’d sort of debate whether that was a fair use or not. Interestingly, nine times out of 10, if a lawyer said “Well, that’s not a very good example of fair use,” it was usually in an artistically uninteresting part of the film, so it almost a part of my creative toolkit, to say, you know, if I’m going to stand behind fair use, I have to be sure my uses are fair.

How much did you know about copyright law going into this? Did anything take you by surprise?
That’s a good question. I was like most people in that I had a vague sort of understanding of it, but as I made the film, I had to amass a lot of knowledge about copyright law. Maybe not what surprised me, but certainly what inspired me was the history of appropriation in Brazil, and how going back to the very beginning of Brazilian culture, there was this history of fair use and appropriation. And you know, we have that in North American culture, as well, with things like the Blues and obviously hip-hop. But what really struck me about Brazilian culture was how recognized it was, and how there was this culture that seemed to be built on taking influences of Europe, of North America, of their native cultures, and sort of putting them in this big pot and making a stew. That was really inspiring, and I read the works of a Brazilian poet and modernist called Oswald de Andrade. He wrote this thing called The Cannibalist Manifesto, which was basically saying that Brazilian culture needed to eat and ingest the cultures of the world to regurgitate and create something new. I just thought that was a really great metaphor for the digital age and postmodernism. That’s why I decided to go to Brazil and spend a good amount of time there.

And this manifesto, of course, was the basis for your “Remix Manifesto.” Can you tell us about that?
It was funny, because the manifesto was actually the last part of the film to come together. I probably would have saved myself several months in the editing suite if I’d come at it first, but it came kind of late in the editing stages of the film. I decided to take a couple of weeks off to think about the film and part of that was the title. And I thought, “Oh, what about a remixer’s manifesto?” And someone asked, “Well, what’s the manifesto?” I realized that a lot of it kind of closely followed a really early speech by Lawrence Lessig, who is also in the film. He was speaking at a convention; I think it was around 2002. I kind of remixed his manifesto and condensed it a little bit, and it was suddenly enough. There wasn’t heck of a lot more editing to do because it really fit with a lot of the progression of the film.

Jones, a long-time 7UP spokesman, and Cortese, the former host of MTV Sports, recently gave Hulu a rundown of the series premiere, and we think Jones delivered a spot-on impression of some of the contestants. Catch his impersonation of Ralph and Jennifer in the embedded interview below, and then tune into the premiere and see what you think.

We have more exclusives in store as we approach the fall TV season. Check in with the Hulu Blog for interviews, Q&s; and extras from your favorite shows.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor