The Making of Gigi - Part 1

by Ty Clancey

The Lost Nomads' new digital series Gigi: Almost American, about a lovable foreigner trying to make it in America, stars Josh Gad and premieres this Wednesday, March 23rd on MyDamn Channel.com. Part of an amazing collaboration between the Nomads, BBC Worldwide and MyDamnChannel.com, Gigi has been quite a journey from an early sketch of ours, shot in a bathtub, to the 10-episode series that is about to be unleashed on the public at large. This six-part blog series is dedicated to that journey.

Before we rolled a single frame of footage on any Nomads sketch, I shot an audition tape of Josh Gad performing different characters he had dreamt up on a stage in Theater Row in Hollywood. Halfway through the performance Josh took on a hunched, eager posture, raised a tape recorder up to his ear and suddenly a booming voice materialized in the front row of the theater. It was Tyler Moore, voicing a radio DJ named Hank "the Rock" Goldberg. Josh had by now fully morphed into Gigi, a guileless foreigner yearning to learn the English language from this pompous shock jock. I watched in awe as Josh and Tyler played this linguistic fun-house mirror game - Hank repeating crass morning DJ lines over and over as Gigi summarily butchered them. I was mesmerized.

When Josh, Tyler, Ida and Kevin, who at that time in 2005 were operating as a stage troupe named Option C, approached me to shoot some of their sketches I was elated to see that Gigi would be among the characters we'd be re-imagining for the screen. So we stuffed Josh into a bathtub over at our friend Michael Sontag's house and rolled on what would become one of our most popular sketches.

Cut to a few years later the Nomads were introduced to Ian Moffitt at BBC Worldwide. We hit it off instantly. Our initial meeting, scheduled for about an hour meet and greet, turned into a multi-hour love-fest. And over the next few years we continued to exchange ideas, mostly over some pints at his birthday every year. In 2009 we began pitching BBC Worldwide concepts for digital series, but the one idea they kept coming back to was Gigi. The sketch practically sold itself.

In late spring 2010 we reached a deal with BBC Worldwide to write and shoot a pilot for Gigi. At this time in our Nomadic journey we had recently finished shooting two webseries pilots with another studio and found that the conventional wisdom of shooting "trailer pilots," meaning shoot more of a 2-3 minute movie preview then a typical episode, wouldn't work in the case of Gigi. This character couldn't really be summed up in a flashy music video type edit. You needed to see this character breathe and unfold before your eyes as the wonderful naive stranger in a strange land that he is.

So we took the budget we were allotted and decided to shoot two full episodes - we'd reshoot the bathtub scene and write a new scene that would require a simple location and revolve around a central area of action so as not to add too many shots on the day. What if Gigi was pulled into an underground poker game? we asked ourselves. Simple enough - interpersonal communication fraught with plenty of pitfalls for Gigi to encounter. We'd find that neither would be as simple as we'd hoped...