Infamously, anything goes in New York City: Someone walking onto the subway wearing an inflatable dinosaur costume is probably not the weirdest thing you could see on any given day. In fact, there’s a 16-foot statue of a pigeon perched on the High Line in Chelsea, right now.
Enter Get a Real Job, the latest pilot exploring just that.
When you walk down the streets of New York City, you tend to ignore the unusual and outrageous. And in the city that never sleeps, there’s never a shortage of people trying to talk to you. It’s rare to go a day without being stopped by a canvasser raising money or campaigning for something — they’re there, rain or shine. The proof of concept released for Get a Real Job explores two friends asking the streets of New York City for donations to the charity of the week. Sam, Yogi, and their coworkers encounter the good, the bad, and the ugly of harassment, anger, and just downright weirdness.
Samantha Lochs and Yogi Paliwal brought their project to New York City film festivals recently and they sat down with Just N Life to talk about it.
Lochs, a comedian and filmmaker, conceived of the idea for Get a Real Job while listening to her partner and his coworkers share the craziest stories from their real-life canvassing jobs in New York. Though she shelved the concept originally, because of a lack of interest and funding, she revisited the concept when she met Paliwal, a stand-up comic. (They met, of all places, at a dog park in New York.) He was immediately interested.
“There was something so fun about the concept of canvassing in New York City and the amount of characters you could just have pop in and out,” Paliwal explained. “A good show about a job is depicting misery that’s fun — and this show, we were able to do that time and time again.”
Paliwal and Lochs took the project on together, first writing, then directing and producing, and eventually deciding to center the story around their friendship and star in the show.
The “buddies” of the buddy comedy channeled the reality of their friendship into the project. During shooting, Paliwal would try to make Lochs break character and laugh, usually succeeding. Or, the pair would talk after work and their conversations and jokes would go into the script. Lochs came onto the call with Just N Life wearing a fake mustache to “match” Paliwal’s real mustache.
“Once it became about Sam and I’s friendship and just trying to figure out how to do things in New York, it became a much more fun vehicle for us,” Paliwal said.
This wasn’t just their strategy for the personalities of their own characters. They used what happened on set to inform their shooting and they looked for actors who could improvise; first, they shot the scenes as written in the script — on location in New York, no less. Then, they’d allow their actors to reshoot the scene while improving. In many of James Adomian’s scenes, the leader of the Get a Real Job canvassers, included the comedian improvising, trying to make the team laugh. Because of this and other actors’ improvisation, the editors left hundreds of bits on the cutting room floor that they hope to use in the future.
Paliwal and Lochs enjoyed creating this together and with the team they hired.
“Overall it was really fun and we didn’t really run into that many issues,” Lochs said when asked how it was filming on location in the streets of New York City.
Though most people ignored the team filming, they did run into hundreds of runners early one morning in New York City’s Washington Square Park. Lochs found herself yelling to get their attention and ask for some quiet on set. At Coney Island, a kid approached Paliwal asking what they were doing. When Paliwal told him they were filming a pilot, the kid was excited.
“To him, to this guy though, we are the real deal and that feels great,” Paliwal said. “Who cares what we’re doing? For that kid we made it.”
Get a Real Job premiered at the New York City TV Festival, in the Dolby Theater, a relatively small screening room. But the project screened last, making Paliwal and Lochs feel like the headliners of the event. After the screening, the creators stuck around to chat with other people making similar projects.
“It feels good to be amongst the same award wins as other people who have similar projects,” Lochs said.
“It’s been nice to watch it now that we finished it months ago. The last ten percent of finishing anything is the hardest, cause you’re just making the smallest adjustments,” Paliwal said. “So it was really great to see it a little bit of time after that.”
They didn’t just get support from people in the film industry and on the festival circuit. Around the time they were filming, canvassers were stationed outside of Lochs’ apartment in New York and she shared about the project with them. The canvassers were excited about it.
“I am creating a thing, telling a story about people’s jobs and their livelihood in New York that doesn’t get to be seen that often,” Lochs said.
When Lochs presented the idea for Get a Real Job to Paliwal, the two decided to create a production company together. DogRun Productions will continue to be a space for Paliwal and Lochs to create the projects they have always wanted to create.
“It’s been really, really great to work with reliable people who are excited and make cool things,” Paliwal explained.
“I feel like it’s really difficult to find people that you like working with, that you can also bounce good creative ideas on,” Lochs added. “And I feel very, very fortunate to have met Yogi and be able to send him [ideas].”
They also want to continue creating real stories through their work with DogRun.
“Yogi and I really aspire to create heartwarming, true stories that are reflective of where things come from in our own lives,” Lochs said. So much of the episode they have already produced not only came from their actors’ comedy but came from their own lives, which they drew on for inspiration.
With the episode of Get a Real Job and the creation of the production company, Paliwal and Lochs are looking forward to the ideas they have coming, including two short films, a few feature films, and more episodes of Get a Real Job. They’re raising interest and money for their projects, as they continue to make more content.
In terms of where they see Get a Real Job going in the future, they want people, especially young people, to find it engaging and relatable.
“I think young people are gravitating towards things like YouTube because they’re in search of that relatability,” Lochs expressed. “We don’t have shows that are showing young people in their first or second job or even just freshly out of college, kind of trying to navigate the world and how dystopian … everything is. I think having that would be really helpful in engaging and also probably bringing a fair amount of young people to watch network TV shows.”
“I think that with this show reminding young viewers that like, oh, it sucks to do a shitty job, but the time you have with your friends … trying to make a living is kind of the most fun you have at a job,” Paliwal added.
The pair went into the project wanting to show others that even if that entry-level job sucks, there’s a level of joy waiting for them and making that story for everyone.
“It’s always been the weirdos that have made me feel less odd and allowed me to be myself,” Paliwal continued. “And I think that the heart of the show, it is about like, everyone’s fine. You’re okay, trying to do your best, because that’s all we can really do.”
Get a Real Job has already won three awards in New York festivals and will be showing at the Indie Night Film Festival in Los Angeles this month.
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