In partnership with the Film, Television and Interactive Media Program, Ethan Mermelstein '12 helped bring prominent actress Nikki Blonsky to Brandeis to act in his own TV Web series, "The Hall." Mermelstein and Blonsky know each other from high school, where they starred together in theater productions and joined the same improv troupe. In an interview with the Justice, co-producers of "The Hall" Mermelstein and Jerry Genser '12 discuss their experience filming the series and working with Blonsky.

JustArts: How did the show come about?

Jerry Genser: We had done this thing called "Roomies" sophomore year, and Ethan called me this summer, talking about rebooting it.

Ethan Mermelstein: It was the first thing I ever did. I directed, I had a leading role, I wrote a 30-page script, and it was a 12-person cast. It was just a huge undertaking, hours and hours of footage. At the last minute, one of the hard drives that things were backed up on crashed—so it just fell apart. Everything I learned from that experience, we improved on. So this is a similar seed concept as "Roomies" but a complete new direction.

JA: What is the show about?

EM: It's called "The Hall." It's about a school in a financial crisis—much like the school I entered as a freshman—whose dean decides that, in an effort to raise revenue to close the budget gap, he will make a reality TV show out of a hall of freshmen. Deep down, the dean just wants to be a Hollywood producer, has no interest in academics, is prepared to exploit the students by any means necessary to make the show appealing to networks so it will be bought and the school will make money. On the first episode, he hires Nikki Blonsky as his receptionist and is paying her more than half a million dollars for the year just to answer his phone calls.

JA: What are you planning to do with the episodes of the show?

EM: First priority is to screen it on campus. Hopefully, we'll have three episodes that we can show in sequence. Traditionally, we've uploaded to YouTube, but something like this, which is a little bit longer, might not get as many hits. That's just a discussion that I'll have afterwards. The fact that Nikki's on board with this means that she can ask her agents for me strategically what might make [the] most sense.

JG: We're still trying to think about how people look at [the show]. Obviously we're going to screen it for Brandeis. But it's a Web series. We're not sure how distribution's going work. But [there are] myriad ways. Technology has advanced at a level that allows us to get a lot more shots. We have the ability to get shots that would have taken hours and much higher technology equipment to get.

JA: How was your experience working with Nikki Blonsky?

EM: This weekend went so much better than I could have imagined. I was pretty anxious. Even though Nikki and I are pretty good friends, she's flying out here to be part of my first-ever big creative project, and there's a lot of pressure, but everybody really just worked together. As somebody who was acting, very involved in the creative side and dealing with Nikki, making sure she was happy at all times and directing the other actors, I was able to say the rest of the stuff on set, everyone else did their part and made sure things ran smoothly, which I can say is very, very rare on any production.