Marissa Reed
Appearances
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
And we thought it was fun to see Christmas through a grown woman's eyes, but with kind of that childlike wonder.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
You can find us on the gram. I'm Marissa L. Reed. And I'm Selena W. Spelled out. And we just actually wrapped, speaking of creating your own opportunities, an independent pilot that we filmed. We crowdsourced for $70,000 to film this pilot. So you could also check out our Instagram page for that, which is... At stepfriend underscore show.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
And I say, do what makes you happy. You know, the holiday season can be also a hard time. So do what makes you happy, whether or not that's flying and being stressed out and doing everything perfect. Just literally do what makes you happy and makes you feel cozy and eat all the good treats.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
Oh my gosh, we've never actually tallied it up. But I'm guessing we write both TV and features. I would say maybe 20. 20, yeah.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
And I'm exactly Sotnick, if you were wondering about that. That's me to a T, fully based on me.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
Maybe more Eve, I would say. We have some fun banter like that and bringing the Christmas spirit to it.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
Well, it was one of the miracles we thought up and naturally we had to go all out and we were at a coffee shop, Republic of Pi, shout out, and we just started writing it and singing it into our voice memos and then Jason Curry, our friend who is a composer, came on board and composed this original song and it became what it is.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
We really envision the elves as being CGI, which of course automatically really ups the budget. And, you know, they're going all across the globe, so a lot of locations.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
Yeah, it's really funny. It's not something we thought as being super edgy. Even an elf, you know, he gets drunk in the mail room and we kind of just viewed it like that. But there still is a stigma on it just because it's not legal everywhere.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
And allow Eve to kind of push her into this next step of her life, this next phase of becoming a flight attendant. You can't have reward without risk.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
Well, I especially really loved writing all of the elves puns, like all the Christmas puns were so fun.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
We had like in the notes section of our phone a list of just every Christmas word or phrase we could think of. Those were really hard. And even sometimes we'd have to come back and be like, we'll have to figure it out because we can't spend two hours thinking out this pun. But those to me are super fun. I especially loved Fat Christmas Ham.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
Well, I was raised Catholic, and Selena's Jewish, so we always kind of wanted to do a Hanukkah-Christmas hybrid. So that's originally what sparked it.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
Well, we physically write together, like we sit together. We pretty much talk out loud the story. We'll say the dialogue as if we're the characters. And we just workshop aloud.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
Yeah. So we're both like saying the dialogue out loud as we're writing it and then rereading it too. And we usually write at a coffee shop. And we do like to be out, have some activity around. We don't do well just like sitting in our apartment. We get distracted.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
Um, you know, it's funny. I feel like it hasn't shifted too much other than the fact that we used to sit side by side and now we sit across from each other. And like hopefully we've gotten better as writers. Yeah, but our process has always been pretty similar to what it is now.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
Well, we're best friends first and family. We love each other. We've been through so much together. So I think at our core, that's most important to us. So we always, I mean, like Selena said, we ride our bikes and as we hop on our bikes to ride away, we say like, I love you, good job. We end pretty much every day saying that to each other. And we get annoyed with each other and we'll be like,
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
Yeah. We get in collaborative or creative fights, but We, for the most part, share a brain and it's like, like Selena said, we come back to it the next day, we know we were fighting over it, but we don't even necessarily remember who was fighting for what side. So it's like, we don't let creative fights get us in real fights for the most part.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
I don't think we've gotten in very many actual fights that stemmed from a creative debate.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
Every script will have a table read. We see so much value in table reads. Because we read the scripts out loud, just the two of us, but we wrote it. So if someone else is reading even just the stage direction and they're fumbling on it, it's apparent that it's probably not written in the most organic or natural way of saying something. You can tell jokes aren't hitting.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
Something we really like pondered and struggled with a little bit when we first started writing this story was like, what's the takeaway? What's the message? Because we didn't want it to be like Christmas is better than Hanukkah or that, you know, Bernie's missing out on something. So we really wanted to make sure the message was kind of not holiday based.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
It's something that we're still learning to do and getting the courage to do. I think a lot of people feel scared that if they create something, it has to be perfect. Or even good. Yeah, it has to be good. We're starting to really see the value in the process and enjoying the process and enjoying the journey.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
every single time you create something, you know, you're just striving to be better and to learn something and to enjoy the people that you're working with and surround yourself with a crew that, you know, you hope to work with again and again. So we see so much value in that. But it is hard. Like, I think honestly, We sold foursome when we were 25 years old.
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
It was the first professional writing job we had. And like Selena said, you know, it was more of a typical studio job where our budgets, while they were small for a half hour show, they were still in the millions. And so going from that to scaling it back and being like, okay, what's a five page short that we can budget under $5,000 and film it ourselves?
Table Read
AFTER SHOW - The Jew Who Saved Christmas
It felt like so much pressure going from something very glossy and clean to kind of doing it on our own. So it's something we're still kind of learning.