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"You have to mix it up, and you have to have a balance," says Reeves, who, along with John Toba, develops all the content and tries to figure out what new programming might work. So far, the pair has introduced a fifth vertical, Curated By, where artists and creative personalities discuss YouTube videos they like while hyperlinked versions of those vids play in insets. They also brought in Feast of Burden, which belongs to no vertical, but, if it succeeds, would be their most important feat.
Feast of Burden happened quickly. Marple met filmmaker Kotlyarenko at a party last fall and he invited her to a December screening of 0s and 1s, the film he had worked on for just more than three years. In it, a guy loses his laptop and has to interrogate everyone he'd seen the night before. Each text message and email he sends and receives during the process appear on the screen, and the film has both a DIY rawness and almost-byzantine technical detail. "It was so experimental with its aesthetics, and playful," Marple says. "It wasn't perfect, but it didn't look like anything I'd seen in art or film."
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE DUNGEON
A group of eastsiders has its last supper in Feast of Burden.
PHOTO COURTESY OF YOUTUBE/MOCATV
Mark Bradford discusses his painting on MOCAtv.
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She told him she'd like to produce his next project but thought it should be a web series. "Since I'd never done this, I thought it would be pretty foolhardy to make a movie," says Marple, who planned to bankroll the venture with her own savings under the name of the startup production company she's titled The Dungeon.
"Web series suck," Kotlyarenko says, recalling his initial skepticism. "They're mostly sketch comedy. They've explored such skim options. But then I thought, why are you being so pretentious? All the greatest books have been serialized" — books by Dickens, Dostoyevsky — "we just had to make the greatest web series ever."
That tension and catharsis you get from a good film had to happen in each episode, and the film had to happen in each episode, and the whole narrative had to have an organic flow.
Eventually, he decided on a premise that would require just one main set: a dinner party that guests are unable to leave. When he remembered this had been done, by Luis Buuel in the 1962 film The Exterminating Angel he last saw as a 12-year-old, he opted to do something of a remake, relying only on vague memories. He used David Lynch's eccentric crime drama, Twin Peaks, as a model, too, though he hadn't seen it.
Shot in Marple's Silver Lake apartment and cast mostly with non-actors with magnetic personalities Kotlyarenko had met around L.A., Feast of Burden is part surreal and part comically, cosmically creepy. It's also supersaturated, with dinner courses that have the colors of cartoon candy. Episodes last for less than three minutes, and each pivots on its own fantastic drama. A girl has to knock out a topless, homeless man with breasts to get to the party, or one guest confronts another, who has a web cam hidden in her neck brace.
"Sometimes art gets a little lost in its limitlessness," Marple says. "But entertainment limits structure."
If you know you have to grab the attention of an online audience, you have to fall back on narrative tropes pop culture has made familiar (just, hopefully, not the sort of instant-gratification gags — one-liners, cute kittens — that take off on YouTube).
"We'll promote it and we have a social media plan around it," Reeves says of Feast. "But you can't say 'this is going to be a hit.' "
But if it is even a modest one, it will help MOCAtv open a door for filmmakers and artists who have limited resources but smart, experimental ideas for the web.
As Marple says, "Not everyone wants to make viral content."
MOCAtv is at YouTube.com/MOCAtv.
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