Gabriel Dohrn
Audio By Carbonatix
Gabriel Dohrn and Andy Juett’s Offline, which premieres at TV festival SeriesFest this week, opens with a desolate landscape in the Rockies and snow falling over dark mountains. Two grizzled cowboys on horses clomp into view…and then you realize it’s two of the goofy cops from the cult-classic comedy Super Troopers.
Casting several members of the famously funny Broken Lizard crew as post-apocalyptic survivors is just one of the twists from the genre-bending new pilot, which was shot in Colorado around the former mining outpost Gold Hill and in Denver. Part science fiction adventure, part black comedy, part Western, it follows the adventures of heroine Jocelyn (Mathilde Ollivier), who has survived the recent mysterious collapse of the Internet (and society) and is on the run from the grim and mysterious Agent Judah (Michael Madsen). She has help from three of the Broken Lizard boys (Erik Stolhanske, Paul Soter and Jay Chandrasekhar), who are fellow denizens of the wasteland. We spoke with the co-creators over the phone this week ahead of their Denver debut.
Juett is well known around town from his decade-plus of radio and comedy work, but he’s also become one of the more prominent film producers in the state, leading to his work on such projects as Super Troopers 2 in 2018. “I’ve been quietly producing films after hours and on weekends,” he says, which has started to make him known for being able to make small projects happen.
“More and more people bring me scripts, like, ‘Hey can you help me get this made?’ A lot of them are okay or not great, but the ‘Jo Jo Radio’ scripts got me hooked,” he says, referring to the atmospheric feature-length source script for Offline by writer and director Dohrn, who says the unique story sprang from a mysterious vision that occurred to him.
“It’s funny where inspiration comes from. … This project began as an image in my mind,” says Dohrn, “and it was a female hacker on horseback, riding through the snow toward a pillar of smoke…in an offline world without the internet. From that I was like, ‘What happened? Why she in this world without the Internet?’ Slowly these characters started to emerge…and as the world grew and the concept grew…it became a series, because I didn’t know if it was a movie, if it was a short, if it was a book.”
As the script developed, Dohrn began looking for a way to make the project happen. Buddy Thomas, a mutual friend in both the Colorado and L.A. film scenes, knew that Juett was actively working to produce projects in Colorado, and put the two in touch. Juett is convinced the Colorado film scene should be a lot bigger, and it’s become one of his main projects. “Even when I lived in L.A.,” he says, “I was coming back all the time to try and drag projects to Colorado.”
Admiring the strong characters and mix of genres in the script, Juett quickly signed on as co-creator and began making moves. Buddy Thomas joined as cinematographer. “Gabe wrote it, and I helped embellish and produce every aspect of it,” he says. That included “raising the funds, acting in it, casting it, lights, camera, sound, wardrobe, makeup, hair – every discipline.”
The team raced through production in a week under the imprint of Dohrn’s Denver Film Company, which is a testament to the talented crew, Juett notes: “We shot it all in Colorado, with everybody cramming it into schedules and working long hours and really knowing their shit on set. That’s the type of people we had around. We’d all cut our teeth in places where there’s literally either no budget or five to ten times less budget than there should be.”
It was also Juett’s idea to pitch it to the comics of Broken Lizard, who were eager to show their range with something different from their usual fare.
“They always say in comedy, ‘Casting is everything,’ but I think it’s true for really [every genre], ” he says. “Those guys can act! Their subtle humor and their charm and their humanity is what sort of shines through in this film. … It’s real acting, real character development, in a way you haven’t seen before.”
Dohrn agrees. “I was so proud of what they did, for them. It was so great to see their talent and the breadth of…what they can do.” The characters of Randy (Paul Soter) and Daryl (Erik Stolhanske) were originally part of a subplot, but became more developed when Dohrn realized they needed to package a smaller piece of the sprawling narrative for the pilot. “This vignette from the series, it’s a little bit starting in the middle,” he says, “but it reveals an interesting part of the world.” The current episode is actually more of a prologue to the main story.
“It’s an episode, but it’s really more of a slice of a world,” explains Juett, “and that’s all you’re doing when you’re making a pilot – demonstrating the tone in the slice of the world.” Now they’re taking it to Seriesfest with high hopes. The festival teems with high-powered agents and distributors from the industry looking for new talent.
“I’m excited to sell it and see where it goes,” says Dohrn. “There’s just a lot of story and things that I’m excited to tell for people to see and hear, laugh at, interact with, be challenged by.”
Offline premieres 11:30 a.m. Sunday, May 7, part of SeriesFest at the Sie FilmCenter, 2510 East Colfax. Admission is $15; find more information and purchase tickets here.