TV INTERVIEW: BARBARA ROMEN
From 'The Green Room' to Your Living Room - Bringing Backstage Magic to the World
Since the 1970s, Barbara Romen has been deeply embedded in the comedy world as a talent booker, agent, and development executive. In recent years, she has focused on being a writer/producer and helping to create television shows like Comics Only and The A-List alongside live specials for the likes of Bill Maher, Steve Martin, and Catherine O’Hara. After a long-time friendship and working relationship, Barbara joined Paul Provenza in 2007 to create Susquehanna Hats Productions (named for a Vaudeville routine made famous by Abbott and Costello), and together, they lead the team bringing The Green Room directly into your living room each week on Showtime. Buzzine’s Nicole Rayburn sat down with Barbara at The Vanguard in Hollywood, California to talk about the beginnings, development, and creation of The Green Room’s second season…
Nicole Rayburn: How long have you known Paul Provenza?
Barbara Romen: I’ve known Paul for probably 30 years. We were young tykes coming up in the comedy business together. He was a stand-up and I was an agent. I started out as the assistant to Mitzi Shore at The Comedy Store.
So I was helping book The Comedy Store in its giant heyday, and I actually thought, although I was getting paid maybe $150 a week [laughs], I knew that it was the place to be… I started really becoming friends with comics at an early age, went through a couple of career incarnations: worked at Universal, I was an agent, and then I just had too many friends who were living the creative lifestyle that I dreamed of, and so I switched over to production about ten years ago - writing and producing. And it’s always been stand-up comedy-centric.
NR: How did The Green Room come to become a TV show?
BR: This show evolved through a friendship, number one, and secondly because we’d both been in comedy for so long, in and around the business, and being privy to conversations after every show at Canter’s Deli or at the bar or backstage, we both said, “if people could hear these conversations, they would die laughing”.
They’re even more amazing than what the guys say on stage, so we just decided we’d try to turn it into something, and we launched it at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival about four years ago, and did it there for a couple years – live – with mainly UK comics, so it was The Green Room with a lot of Scottish accents, and then American comics as well.
We did it at the Montreal Comedy Festival, Chicago Comedy Festival, and we just knew that we had magic. People would turn out night after night, pack the room, go crazy… rabid fans, and we decided it might be nice if we could make some money off of it.
NR: Were those filmed?
BR: They were filmed by a college-kid crew for about a penny, and we did cut together a really scrappy little demo from the Fringe Festival that was not well-shot or well-lit or with good audio, but it was just hilarious – hilarious sound bites… and we took it to Showtime, and lo and behold, they ordered it immediately.
NR: I love that a show based on candid conversations was itself spawned by a candid conversation… but how can that intimate feeling be preserved, even with a live audience and cameras everywhere?
BR: It’s really interesting to note that, despite the fact that we have all kinds of cameras and crew running all over the stage, I think you probably noticed, after about five minutes, the comics forget about it, and it becomes just as intimate as though they were at a regular backstage at a comedy club. So that was the test: Could we do this in a way that felt so comfortable to the comics that they’d feel at home doing it? And I think it’s worked out.
Also, Paul has longtime friendships with a lot of comics; many of them came on the show because of their friendships with Paul. Agents were not all that helpful; personal phone calls were helpful, and there’s already a comfort level. And putting together the combinations, it wasn’t just let’s try to get four comics and throw them up there; it’s like, where can Paul go in a conversation with these four people that’s gonna have some juice?
NR: As far as scheduling the guests on each individual show and each night and everything, what else goes into planning who sits with who on which episode? Does pure logistics dictate some of the bookings, or any other considerations?
BR: No, it’s not who we can get on what night… The big challenge is the fact that to meet our contractual obligations with Showtime, we have to deliver X amount of what is considered household names, and then we have the other slots to book as we like. So it’s really a matter of satisfying the network with two pretty big names per show, and then fitting in crazy little discoveries of ours, or people we think are underrated or underexposed… like Kumail Nanjiani – not many people get to see a Pakistani comedian. We really like to give exposure to the people we’ve discovered in our comedy travels around the world.
The second season of ‘The Green Room with Paul Provenza’ premieres new episodes on Showtime every Thursday night at 11:00 p.m. ET/PT beginning July 14, 2011.
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