Harry Elfont (born April 5, 1968) is an American screenwriter and film director.
We feel like we are using the East Side to kind of spoof what everybody thinks is cool.
I don't want to call the show [ "Mary and Jane" ] a satire because it is not, but there are satirical elements.
We ["Mary and Jane"] did not want to be a weed show, like it is a bunch of people sitting around smoking.
It feels like a totally different MTV now. Now they have all their own original series, and people are talking about going back to music now? It's all original programming.
When we were done and not picked up to series yet, they wanted us to read lots of writers. I was like, "No. " Then we finally were picked up. It is hard not to start thinking of story lines. It is like doodling.
The one thing that we wanted to make sure in the pilot [of "Mary and Jane"] is that we could go everywhere. Part of the fun of them being a delivery service is that they go to different areas episode to episode. We do have an episode in the beach and there is an episode in the luxury rehab. It's all different kinds of things we are making fun of in LA.
The original pilot script [ of "Mary and Jane"], we literally just wrote for fun. It was, let's just do this.
Two years ago it felt novel to do the East Side and then tons of other stuff have come up set in that world, but we still liked it. It felt like people are using East Side in other shows because it is cool.
Hopefully we have a slightly different vibe, but also East Side is where a lot young people live. It is a really fun, trendy, funky neighborhood, and it is ripe for satire, that area specifically.
We like to make sure there is a plot at the center of it and that you care about the people but to poke fun of little things, like the toast restaurant in the pilot.
There is an episode [in "Mary and Jane"] where there is not a lot of pot smoking, but there is a giant wall of weed in their apartment.
Somebody said, there is no show if it goes legal. But actually, there is.
We did want it ["Mary and Jane"] to feel a little different and have some surreal weird touches, which we try to do every episode. That is what we took advantage of.
The pilot is easy. It is 30 minutes, 20 minutes. It is not that much to juggle.
We also had an "in" with MTV those days. Tara Reid was engaged to Carson Daly. She just called him and was like, "Do you want to be in the movie?" So they kind of had to make it work.
I don't think it feels like a burden. We did not really think of it ["Mary and Jane"] that way. I think it is certainly how we branded. The thing it does is enables us to be a little bit surreal.
I don't think we had a hard time with ["Mary and Jane"]. It is just, it was the constant management of it.
It is just fun to play with [in "Mary and Jane"]. I think our sense of humor tends to go that way.
Totally whatever we want to put in there. Then it was really "Now we are going to make it. We really need to find a consistent tone. "I think the pilot ["Mary and Jane"] actually got it. It was more about the other episodes making sure everything else.