Crackle Blog

Get a closer look at the process that eventually lead to the show known as The Bannen Way.

It’s a hot day, and I’m somewhere just north of downtown Los Angeles when I approach what looks like a secured compound. This massive, vacant warehouse is where Crackle has recreated the seedy underbelly of a Los Angeles most of us never see, filled with mobsters, unpaid debts, high-stakes poker, sexy assassins, and Neal Bannen, dodging bullets with a wink and a smile. This is week two of the breakneck, 19-day shoot for the Crackle Original series, The Bannen Way, which promises to up the ante for what we expect from online content.

This is not your average digital production helmed by a guy with a camera phone and a funny buddy. Director Jesse Warren may be a newcomer, but you'd never know since he's deftly overseeing a star-studded cast list including Michael Ironside, and Academy Award nominees Michael Lerner and Robert Forster, Vanessa Marcil (Las Vegas), and introducing Mark Gantt as the eponymous lead.

Eager to see the sets, which are built throughout the downtown location, I head upstairs through a hallway reminiscent of The Shining and land incongruously in a dorm room set where the show’s techno whiz character, “Zeke,” played by Gabriel Tigerman, sits intently in front of green screened computer monitors. A second unit director calls out, “It’s good that you’re doing that with your tongue. I don’t know why you’re doing that with your tongue, but we all do it.” No, this is not a scene involving the Maxim women, or stunning female lead Marcil… They come tomorrow.

Heading back downstairs I pass through another decrepit hospital hallway and make my way to the card room, set of today’s shoot, which is dark and smoke-filled. Huddled around a card table is Gantt and a number of other shady characters who joke lightly as the crew hustles, lifting lights and laying dolly track. Finally I spot the tricked-out mother of a high definition camera, known lovingly as the Red camera. Jesse Warren sits an arm's length from the Red, in front of two flat screen monitors, with a huge smile on his face as he watches Gantt slowly lose a pile of chips at the poker table. Someone next to Warren leans in and whispers, “The camera just loves some people.” It looks to me like Jesse loves that camera just as much.

So how did Warren score this large-scale web series? He chased it. Warren is tall with close cropped hair and a lithe, athletic build, leftover from his days as a UCLA track star and the four-year long professional career that followed. It was a sweet career, he was sponsored by Nike, but, he says, "I was always interested in film. When we'd go on long runs, everyone'd be talking about running and I'd be talking about film." He eventually had to choose between his athletic career and his writing and directing studies at the UCLA Theater School. "I retired," he explains, "I stopped running at 26, and then a couple of years ago I decided to transition fully into writing and directing."

And the real race began, leading him to write The Bannen Way. Warren says, "I was writing this feature, the main character's name was Neal Bannen, and also taking this class at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. Mark [Gantt] was in it with me, and I looked at him one day and was like, 'This guy's Neal Bannen! I've got to do something with this!' So I gave him the feature, he loved it, and I suggested we make a short. He says, 'Let's not do the Sundance thing. They're starting to do Mobisodes, and stuff like that,' and I was like, stuff you see on a little screen? Then we started doing some research into web series -- this is two and a half years ago -- and we watched some web series. We felt we could knock it out of the park, so we started calling in favors. We spent six months just to get the first six episodes of the script as good as possible."

Warren's attention is suddenly called back to the set, where over the next couple hours the poker-playing group will be lighting up cigars and cigarettes, and drinking iced tea from rocks glasses while Jesse yells suggested mannerisms over the wall for Mark -- fiddle with sunglasses, flip a sobriety chip, keep that smirk on your face.

“Who asked for all this smoke?” someone calls out as another crew member pulls out a giant lighting flag and fans the excess plumes out into the alley, where Bannen's car, a brand spanking new 2010 Jaguar XKR, peaks out from underneath a powder blue car cover.

I sit there in the dark, and I can’t wait for January. For series updates check out The Bannen Way Fan Page and Twitter account.

This is gonna’ be fun…

CJ – Crackle Blog Editor