The
Bannen Way Webseries Review
While the webseries medium provides the opportunity for
talented television wannabes to tell their stories, hone their skills
and get the finished product out to the masses without having to play
the Hollywood game, it also provides Hollywood insiders to likewise
bypass the system and prove what they are capable of on their own. Joss
Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is the
most prominent example, but The
Bannen Way
likewise demonstrates what media professionals can accomplish with talent,
a handful of credit cards and calling in favors from connected friends.
The
Bannen Way stars Mark Gantt—an industry veteran who has worked
behind the scenes on over a hundred productions as well as created a
dozen or so short films—as Neal Bannen, a small-time criminal
trying to escape from his life of crime. Bannen’s “one last
job” turns into more, however, when he loses the $150,000 he owes
underworld boss Sonny Carr (Ski Carr) in a poker game and agrees to
steal a mysterious box for his ruthless mobster uncle (Robert Forster)
in order to get the money back. The assignment takes a turn for the
worse when an attractive picket-pocket (Vanessa Marcil) seemingly double-crosses
Bannen, the target of the theft (Michael Lerner) hires three female
assassins to protect the box and Bannen’s police chief father
(Michael Ironside) threatens his son with jail time.
Gantt had
a small acting role in the 2001 film Ocean’s Eleven,
and The Bannen Way emulates both the style and sophistication
of the George Clooney-starring classic. The webseries also offers an
offbeat assortment of characters and a fair share of comic dialogue
and situations to go along with the action and noir intrigue. The
Bannen Way also owes debt to the works of Quentin Tarantino—the
content of the mysterious box that no one can find a way to open brings
to mind the briefcase from Pulp Fiction, while the three female
assassins, named Jailbait (Autumn Reeser), Stiletto (Brittany Ishibashi)
and Bombshell (Brianne Davis), could easily fit amongst the cast of
Kill Bill. Other elements inspire a comparison to live-action
comic book adaptation, but in a good way. Where else, after all, would
one find an underworld crime boss who breaks into Salsa dancing just
as often as he shoots someone?
While most
webseries are filmed on the cheap and feature a cast of relative unknowns,
The Bannen Way was filmed with a high-end RED camera and is
comprised of actors whose faces are instantly recognizable even if their
names might not be. Robert Forster is a veteran actor who has appeared
in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown as well as the NBC
drama Heroes. Michael Ironside, meanwhile, was in Top Gun
and Total Recall, Vanessa Marcil is a Daytime Emmy Award-winning
actress and even Autumn Reeser has appeared in both Entourage
and The O.C.
“We
decided to make webisodes, where potentially millions of people could
see our work versus the forty or so people who would see our work at
a film festival,” executive producer and star Mark Gantt told
Mashable
in April 2010 regarding how The Bannen Way came to be. Along
with co-creator Jesse Warren, the two also followed the tried-and-true
industry route of pitching their project to various studios despite
the independent nature of the endeavor. They no doubt benefited from
The Bannen Way being a webseries—as opposed to television
series or motion picture—because Sony was already on the look
out for content to add to their online video venture Crackle and immediately
seized the project. Having thus obtained funding, the next step was
to call in the favors.
“We
realized having names in the project was necessary to recoup the money,”
Gantt explained to Mashable. “So a casting director with
Sony helped us create a list of actors that would be good fits. We realized
that one of our producers knew Robert Forest. Our agent at the time
knew Vanessa Marcil and Michael Lerner. We went through Sony’s
casting department and we pitched the show to them.”
Having
a major studio like Sony involved—as well as a high-profile Internet
release on Crackle—also offered the opportunity to explore a different
kind of business model than is usually used within the medium. While
most webseries are simply made available online for free or, if fortunate
enough to acquire a distribution deal, on DVD, Sony experimented with
The Bannen Way by stringing the seven-minute individual episodes
together into a feature-length motion picture. The longer format allows
for the selling of the series into foreign markets as well as the potential
for television broadcast in the United States and a more conventional
DVD release. While such a model is no different from an actual motion
picture or television series—which likewise follow a similar path
during their money-generating lifetime—The Bannen Way
demonstrates that the webseries medium need not be limited to surviving
on revenue generated through online advertising alone.
While The
Bannen Way does indeed work as a full-length feature, it is still
a webseries at heart with tight, concise episodes that further the story
along and conclude with some form of cliff-hanger. In the end, Mark
Gantt and Jesse Warren have constructed an entertaining story that not
only pays homage to noir classics of the past, but demonstrates that
any genre can be tailor-made to fit the growing possibilities and potential
of the World Wide Web as well as succeed there.
Anthony
Letizia (April 26, 2010)
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