Jeremy Hersh
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“I Wanted to Explode the Will and Grace Stereotype about Idealized and Infantilized Gay Men and Women”: Writer/Director Jeremy Hersh Interviewed by Jeremy O. Harris About Hersh’s Powerful and Nuanced Drama, The Surrogate
Now streaming on STARZ and with a Gotham Awards nomination for its lead, Jasmine Batchelor, The Surrogate, Jeremy Hersh’s powerful and probing drama, begins with what might seem a familiar sort of indie film setup: a young, twentysomething Columbia grad, Jess (Batchelor) agrees to be the surrogate mother to the baby of her best friend Josh (Chris Perfetti) and his husband Aaron (Sullivan Jones). But very quickly writer/director Hersh establishes that The Surrogate will not be a bantery relationship comedy: a prenatal test reveals that the child will be born with Down syndrome, a development that destabilizes the progressive male […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 4, 2021 -
Sheltering in Place: The Independent Film Community Faces the Coronavirus Shutdown
It was February, 2020. At New York’s Steiner studios, the largest studio lot outside of LA, people were busily prepping Lin Manuel Miranda’s highly anticipated directorial debut, Tik, Tik…Boom! The movie was set to begin shooting in two weeks, and Jessie Pellegrino, a seasoned assistant prop master, paused her work to sit through a mandatory Netflix HR meeting. Near the end of the session, one of her colleagues raised his hand. “What’s Netflix’s plan for us if coronavirus forces our shoot to shut down?” The HR rep responded the best she could at the time. They were working on it; […]
by Kishori Rajan on Mar 24, 2020
