Gathering around the campfire and telling ghost stories is such a powerful image of how we share our mythologies that John Carpenter used it to open The Fog (1980). Often we forget that there was a small window of time when the light from the fire was replaced with the glow of the radio. When older brothers and summer camp counselors were replaced by Orson Welles and the writing of legends like Giles Cooper. The 1930s–1960 were a time of wonderment, tales of excitement, revenge, thrills, chills, laughs, and loves, and, if you were really lucky, you’d get a chance to see someone like William Castle bring your favorite story spinning underworld know it all to life in films like The Whistler (1944) and The Mark of the Whistler (1944). It was never the same as what you saw in your head though, everyone knew that. But with the cinema of the ‘60s taking advantage of the fall of censorship and radio still subjected to strict broadcasting standards, the form fell away in the face of blood, guts, breasts, and, most upsetting of all, simple cuss words. It seemed like radio dramas were dead.
But then technology brought us podcasts and resurrected an artform. With shows like Serial, Welcome to Night Vale, Limetown, and The Black Tapes, the radio drama was back … only now, there were no rules, no broadcasting standards to live up to. No more censorship. Not only that but it’s cheap to make a podcast, taking the power from the radio stations and giving it to the everyman. We’re living in a time of exploration, experimentation, and damn good audio dramas. Perhaps none sum this up better than VIDEO PALACE, now streaming on Shudder.
Video Palace is the story of video collector Mark Cambria who begins to investigate the urban legend of “the white tapes” after a mysterious white VHS he received causes him to talk in his sleep. The investigation keeps getting weirder and weirder, every answer leading to more questions, as Mark and his girlfriend Tamra begin to wonder if they’re getting themselves too deep into a world they could never have imagined. Compelling in its own right, Video Palace pulled me in through its expert weaving of fact with fiction. The first episode includes interviews with filmmaker Adam Green and Brian Collins, a writer at Birth.Movies.Death that previously ran the wonderful Horror Movie a Day. Most interestingly is the inclusion of Shudder regular Sam Zimmerman, who informs Mark that the white tapes featured in the “existential video store” on The Core were a nod to the “existential, weird, frightening” legend of the white tapes. Through the weaving of real life personalities and programs, Video Palace smoothes the transition of “suspension of disbelief” into the experience that Alexandra Heller-Nicholas calls “pretending-to-be-real” in her 2014 book Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (p. 113).
I was lucky enough to get to chat to the writers of Video Palace about their experience on the show and working with the medium.
Ben Rock entered the industry through makeup and special effects: “The first director I ever worked for was David Prior (hence my shout-out to David’s best-known movie Deadly Prey in episode 8).” In 1997 Rock “quit being a makeup artist to focus on directing,” but luck had different plans for him first: “I was asked around that time to work on a funky micro budget project that turned out to be The Blair Witch Project. 
I was credited as Production Designer on that film, but we all kind of did everything – although I did design the “Stickman” that became the central icon of the film. A few years after that production I moved to LA, and when it came out my involvement opened a lot of doors. I wrote the Sci-Fi (before it was SyFy) special Curse of the Blair Witch to hype the first film, wrote and directed the Showtime special The Burkittsville 7 and Sci-Fi’s Shadow of the Blair Witch for the BW franchise, as well as The BPRD Declassified for the original Hellboy movie and a web series to support the movie The Ruins. In 2005, Mike Monello (co-producer of The Blair Witch Project) formed the specialty marketing/advertising agency Campfire and I directed content for several of their campaigns including Audi: The Art of the Heist, True Blood, The 4400, and Homefront. All the while, I was directing late-night theater that Bob wrote and a smattering of full-length plays including Bertolt Brecht’s “Baal,” Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and most recently an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s “The Sirens of Titan” adapted by Stuart Gordon. 
About 10 years ago I was hired to direct a movie for WB’s specialty genre label Raw Feed and that movie is Alien Raiders. It’s a movie I’m proud of and a title I’m not so proud of. The title wasn’t up to me.”
“Ben and I have been friends since we were struggling young filmmakers in Orlando,” Bob DeRosa continues. The second half of the writing team behind Video Palace, DeRosa has been working as a screenwriter for over a decade with credits on The Air I Breathe, Killers and the fourth season of White Collar. “After we moved to Los Angeles and began pursuing separate careers, we’d often collaborate on late-night theater shows at Sacred Fools Theater Company, where we’re both members. A few years ago, we co-created the horror/comedy web-series 20 Seconds To Live, which played nearly 20 international film and web festivals and won multiple awards, including Best Horror Series at the 2017 Hollyweb Festival.”
“Which is one of my favorite things I’ve ever been any part of,” Ben adds.
Video Palace was such a fun and addictive show, I really wanted to know how it came to be. “Mike Monello – the same guy who founded Campfire NYC and was the co-producer on The Blair Witch Project, Ben says, “and I had been talking for a few years about doing a purely creative project together and one of the mediums we’d been particularly excited about were podcasts. I’ve been a giant fan of podcasts since I got my first iPod in like 2006 and discovered this radio-like-but-not-radio medium which was ever-expanding. I love the freedom that great podcasters enjoy to tell stories–often very visual ones–in fresh and interesting ways. Anyway, so Mike and I had been talking about creating a podcast but he lives in NYC and he’s constantly busy so very little movement happened on that front. But then several months ago his agency pitched a marketing idea to Shudder and it was a comprehensive thing with popup stores and online components and yes – a podcast. Which he and Campfire partner Nick Braccia outlined as part of the overall pitch. Shudder decided not to do the campaign, but they basically asked Mike and Nick if they’d be interested in just doing the podcast and they said yes and reached out to me to write and direct. I immediately reached out to Bob to write it with me because we’d had a great series of collaborations in the past, he’d had extensive experience with episodic, we both love horror, and I think our sensibilities compliment each other well.”
I wasn’t expecting the podcast to have such a rich and detailed origin. When I think of podcasts, my mind still goes back to running Teen Geek in 2007 and the DIY attitude I was encountering at the time. Back in the before-Serial days of podcasting, it wasn’t the phenomenon it is now. Ben captures this perfectly when he says that ‘I feel like until “Serial,’ whenever discussing podcasts I had to preface any conversation with anyone by saying, “Do you listen to podcasts?” And most people didn’t. I even began a podcast with my friend and cinema camera company owner Illya Friedman where we interview cinematographers, but when I first brought the idea to him he said ‘What’s a podcast?’”
Serial was more than just a breakthrough podcast; like Halloween did with slashers, Serial would influence the podcasts that followed in its wake. The mythology of Video Palace combines Lovecraftian cosmic horror with the episodic investigative journalism of a show like Serial in a way that would make Lovecraft proud if he were alive today. “First and foremost,” Bob tell me, “we were working from the initial document that Mike and Nick created when they first pitched Shudder. That was around ten pages that outlined the premise of the show, the world, the main characters, and an overall season-one arc. It really hit the sweet spot in the kind of genre material we like to watch, listen to, and make. Ben and I were tasked with turning that initial document into ten scripts that ended up being just over 180 pages combined. So our first step was to start identifying all the kinds of stories in this space that we love.”
“You’re right on in terms of inspirations, Zack,” Ben expands. “One reference I kept making as Bob and I were creating the mythology of ‘The Stack’ was the Stuart Gordon adaptation of Lovecraft’s From Beyond and how it imagined multiple dimensions coexisting in the same three-dimensional space. There’s also a bit of a Clive Barker inspiration for me, specifically his novella In the Flesh. There’s also a strong dash of Cronenberg, specifically Videodrome which doesn’t just deal extensively with nefarious VHS tapes, but also a video signal that changes the viewer’s brain. And then there’s Stranger Things and it’s amazing creation of “The Upside Down.” It opened my mind to ways one could interpret otherworldliness. On the podcast side, I was listening to season 2 of In the Dark while we were writing and thinking a lot about how shows like that, Serial, S-Town, Reply All–basically true-story-based documentary podcasts, true crime and otherwise–how they tell a very deep, moving, compelling story with just audio. How much voiceover? Where are the audio sources coming from? Bob and I spent a great deal of time during the outlining and writing process making sure that we had a rich variety of audio sources from as many places as possible.
I’d like to add,” Bob quickly mentions while we’re on the topic of influential podcasts, “that Ben told me to listen to season one of Start Up before we started and it ended up being a huge inspiration in the way we handled Mark and Tamra’s relationship in our show. In the original pitch, Tamra was Mark’s sidekick, and Ben and I felt that we wanted it to be more of a two-hander. The way into that was the kind of intimate, “I can’t believe he recorded it” stuff that Alex Blumberg had in season one of Reply All where he’s having these incredibly private conversations with his wife. We knew that was the way to pull Tamra into the narrative of Video Palace in an organic way that would add a whole other emotional level to our story. And that was critical to Ben and I: we love scary stuff but there has to be an emotionally compelling through-line for us to invest ourselves in something creatively.”
While on the topic of influences, the VHS/Betamax collecting nerd in me couldn’t pass up an opportunity to ask about the Video Palace itself. The Video Palace is imagined as the ultimate video store, a VHS collector’s heaven on Earth, stacked floor to ceiling in tapes. Was there any real life video stores that influenced the feel of the Video Palace? Ben jumped on that grenade: “Mike Monello and Nick Braccia are both New York kind of people, and I think their original conception of Video Palace was the famous Kim’s Video, that place in NYC where you can get anything; just located in the middle of freaking nowhere. But for us, here in LA in Studio City there’s a little place called Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee where you walk in and it’s just the way we described – videos piled from floor to ceiling facing top-out so they can fit more of them on the shelves. And to this day, mostly VHS. To say they have everything there is an understatement. When I can’t find something in my own collection or streaming on online or anywhere else on earth, I know that Eddie Brandt’s stocks it.Even though from the outside the place doesn’t seem that big, but the VHS collection just keeps going. It’s one of those great places to go get lost and wander and find movies you forgot about when you were a kid or caught once on PBS or never heard of at all. If you’ve ever seen Beyond the Gates, it’s the video store owned by the father of John and Gordon Hardesty (our lead Chase Williamson and our great friend Graham Skipper). Bob and I took a field trip there while we were outlining Video Palace. It’s definitely the place that was in our minds.”
I couldn’t believe how close it was to what I saw in my mind’s eye while listening to the show. I had seen Beyond the Gates, so I knew exactly what Ben was talking about with Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee, the place looked like a dream come true. That I could see in my mind exactly what it was Ben and Bob wanted me to see was a startling realization. When it comes to filmmaking, as screenwriters we finish the script and it heads off into the hands of fate. The final product is a confluence of events that we can’t account for: what sets / locations it’ll get, what actors will be in it, if that one cloud will move mid shot like it always friggin’ does. But with this format, so much of the script is in the final product. I wanted to know, as creatives, if they could put into words how it feels to listen to your story brought to life so vibrantly?
“Since our theater days,” Ben tells me, “and our web series 20 Seconds to Live, Bob and I work extremely collaboratively together. That doesn’t stop at the script stage. Bob was the only person in the room with myself and the actors every day of casting, every day of recording, and he heard and gave feedback every cut of every episode. He was a co-writer, but in the TV parlance, I’d say we co-showran the podcast (if that’s a word). As we were in pre-production with our producer Liam Finn and making decisions which would ripple through the entire series, my biggest concern was that our methodology (to record everything in a soundstage and add ambience, sound effects, and reverb later) might not work. I mean, I’ve directed lots of ADR sessions in the past and if you do it right it always works, but I was afraid that the voices would sound “too clean,” not like they were in real environments, too sterile and even if the performances were spot-on that it would sound like it was recorded in a booth and then sound effects were added later. One of the things we did to work against that was to give Chase the actual handheld digital recorder that a podcaster might use, and let him point it around like someone capturing an audio story on the fly would do. Protecting ourselves with higher-end microphones that are almost never used in the final mix, we had him conduct interviews, run away from scary people, sneak into buildings, etc. while handling that handheld recorder and it really added a lot of space, perspective, actual handling noise, and realism to what he was doing. And since I was blocking the scenes with the actors the exact way I’d block them in a rehearsal space, we got real physical performances out of everyone and the microphone became something of a character in the show itself. “
“Still, in production, having never made an audio drama before, I was deeply concerned that everything would sound too clean. But once our sound designer Jeremy Lee at Diablo Sound started playing sections of scenes for me with all the ambience, reverb, and sound effects that he’d meticulously sculpted into each scene I knew we were safe and we’d done the right thing. When I heard it really work as it did, that’s when I felt what you’re describing. That feeling that we could set a story like this literally anywhere and create that world in post.”
“As a screenwriter,” Bob adds, “you’re lucky to sell a script. You’re lucky if it ever gets made. And you’re incredibly lucky if the finished product resembles your original script at all. Between 20 Seconds To Live and our theater work, Ben and I have done plenty of self-financed projects that came out like we intended. But Video Palace is the first project we’ve done together where we had a budget to work with and still had almost total control of the finished project. And it was fast! Ben called me in May about this show and it was finished and released in October. I can’t understate the joy in being able to tell people, ‘Hey we made this, you can check it out right now, and we’re really, really proud if it.’ That just almost never happens in this business, but this time, it did.”
Listening to a couple industry veterans describe their feelings on hearing the end product of Video Palace was exhilarating. Anyone that has seen their screenplay translated to screen knows the feeling of seeing their “baby” grow and change. But with Video Palace, and podcast stories in general, there is a freedom to the medium in the form of costs and the turn-around times. As much as we love stories and influences here at Scriptophobic, I was most excited to explore Ben and Bob’s thoughts on working in this “new” medium: Was it intimidating? Did dropping the visual component add struggles to the writing process? Or was it, perhaps, liberating?
“As far as the newness of the medium goes,” Ben says, “this was a lot like the faux-documentaries I’d done for The Blair Witch Project and we even used some of the same techniques to make the interviews sound extremely authentic. Anyway, that’s the part I gravitated to. Our producer, Liam Finn, as well as Bob and I had talked a lot about how we’d all done every part of this except exactly this. We basically wrote, scheduled, and recorded it like we’d make an ultra-low-budget indie film, kind of reveling in the fact that we didn’t have to see anything. That made for a lot of creative sound design as the episodes came together, but the fundamentals of creative, the structure of the episodes, the casting process were all very familiar to us – we just tended to close our eyes during everything so as to not have our opinions corrupted by how things looked because the visual wouldn’t matter at all.”
Bob expanded on the struggles they faced, “I’ve been writing for the camera for over twenty years, and my brain has been hardwired to write only what a camera can see. This, of course, blew all that out of the water. I wrote an early version of the first episode that clearly wasn’t working. I’d adhered to the old screenwriting mantra, ‘show don’t tell’ and after Ben and I went over the script, I realized, ‘Oh, this is tell-don’t-show!’ After that, I think we were both energized in figuring out how to tell this story by using only certain tools in our toolbox. And we figured out all kinds of new tools. Ben really understood the architecture of podcasts and narrators, and my old habits of writing stuff as lean as possible didn’t work with our narrator Mark’s ability to just swim in his words, really dive deeply into the story he’s telling. On top of that, we brainstormed all kinds of audio artifacts that Mark would have access to, including recorded phone calls, the audio from an electronic doorbell, and one of Ben’s best ideas, a crappy cassette recording of a police interrogation from over twenty years ago. We also knew Mark and Tamra would be recording all of their investigations out in the world and we were very careful to only use moments that we thought they would realistically record. This was a huge challenge, since we wanted as much scary stuff as possible to happen in the show, but sticking to our set of rules forced us to get as creative as possible.”
After binging through Video Palace I had to know there were any plans for further explorations of the medium and if there was anything else of interest that Ben and Bob think people should check out. “I think podcasting is in its infancy as a narrative art form,” Ben answered, “but the tools to produce it are ubiquitous and relatively inexpensive, actors and sound designers love the challenge, and for audiences it’s extremely accessible to anyone with a smartphone. And there is such a massive audience for it already and it’s ever growing. And because it’s relatively new, it’s less codified and listeners are excited to hear interesting stories told in new ways. And for people like us making the stuff, there’s something very pure about creating in this format. Writers and directors can try out crazy ideas without it costing that much money or even taking nearly as much time. “
Bob makes sure we don’t forget about the fun involved: “Everyone on the Video Palace creative team (Ben and I plus executive producers Mike and Nick and our producer Liam) has had success in other media, but we all had such a blast working on this together and as I’ve said, the fast turnaround from pitch to release is addictive. I hope this team gets to work on another project soon and if it’s another podcast, all the better!”
And as for other Ben and Bob projects go, Ben speaks for them both when he says, “The biggest thing we have outside of Video Palace at the moment is our upcoming season 2 of our web series 20 Seconds to Live. We already shot it, but we put post on hold when this project came along because of the size and scope and short turnaround time. But we’re getting back to that and anyone interested in it can see all of season 1 and the beginning of season 2 at http://www.20secondstolive.com.”
Thanking them for their time, I had to ask one last question for my fellow Scream Writers: Is there any advice you have for people that want to tackle audio dramas or even just screenwriting in general?
Ben: I would challenge anyone who’s got an idea for a movie or TV show or whatever to consider how it might play out as an audio drama. The cost of a decent microphone or two and a professional recorder is EXTREMELY low and accessible, and the same goes for audio editing software. For us, the writing process was very similar to our work in film and TV but the cost of production can be extremely low and for under $10/month anyone can set up a podcast feed and find their way onto all the podcasting services. It’s a good way to try out dramatic ideas and build an audience, and it’s an extremely fun and fertile medium to work in today.
Bob: I think the days of aspiring writers sitting at home alone writing scripts and hoping to win a contest or find an agent are fading. There are just too many ways to get out there and make something, and there is no better way to learn screenwriting than to write something, produce it, show it to an audience, learn from your mistakes, and then do it again. The good thing is that the basics of storytelling apply to whatever you’re doing, whether its film, TV, theater, or podcasting. So my advice is always the same: work on your craft, then get together with your friends and start making stuff. You’ll be glad you did.
You’ll be glad you did. I can’t echo Bob’s final words enough. Not just in getting out there and creating wicked stuff but in checking out The Video Palace on Shudder, too.
