Texarkana native starts her own production team,
For actress and Texas High School grad Catherine Thomas, co-founding a female-led production group has created a chance for young performers to stick together and gain valuable experience.
Thomas and three of her theater school friends at the University of Houston started Says Who? Productions, and their first project, a pilot episode of the series “Secret Lies of the Gossip Teen,” a comically absurd spin on high school life, has already brought them success.
The script won the team kudos as a finalist for the Houston Comedy Film Fest’s Best Comedy TV Series Episode and Austin Comedy Film Fest’s Best Comedy Series Episode. Elissa Cuellar is the writer, while she and Thomas join Jeana Magallon and Alyssa Marek as co-founders of this group.
Thomas, a year out from graduating from the University of Houston’s School of Theatre & Dance, says there are a thousand sources that inspired her to get involved in this production project. She and her co-founders were in the same class and acted, sewed costumes and tore down sets together in shows.
The project incorporated each of their strengths as actors, Thomas said. Cuellar took a film class they had together and wrote a script from it.
“We had to go through and talk about what characters we saw ourselves, what characters we could read as, finding our strengths and figuring out how to
play those,” Thomas said. To make it fun, characters were based on high school stereotypes the actors chose.
“We wanted to give ourselves this chance to work on our strengths, because you can’t get in a show unless you’ve been in a show but you can’t be in a show unless you’ve already worked with someone, so we decided to create our own work, essentially,” Thomas said. “The production company itself kind of blossomed out of that idea.”
They want to continue the idea of working on their strengths and give Houston artists a chance to work on new things — “and have fun and experiment with what we don’t usually get to do,” she said.
They’re operating off of charity and their own bootstraps, plus their own investment, at the moment. “We work well as a team,” Thomas said.
The pilot is an episode of what they hope will be a series.
“We call it an absurd broad comedy,” Thomas said. She describes it as an irreverent parody of the high school soaps and dramas they loved from the 1980s onward. “All of the character tropes that we just get a chance to make fun of,” she said. They’re characters like Princess, Lunch Lady, Mr. VP, the Athlete, Cool Guy and the Outcast.
The team is putting the finishing editing touches on the pilot episode. They finished with footage right before everything shut down due the coronavirus pandemic. Even so, they’ve been able to continue working. The virus can’t stop that.
“We were pretty lucky to get to the point where everything was remote,” Thomas said. “All the editing and the music and promoting essentially could be done … now it’s moved on to post-production.”
Even though they haven’t quite finished the final product, they’ve already received critical acknowledgement for the script. Why a TV series?
“We had the resources, we’d just gotten out of a film class,” Thomas said. They had friends with the right training, along with a desire to try film in a place where they likely have to make their own opportunities.
“We all want more experience with it because there’s just not as many chances to work in film in Houston.
You kind of have to go out and make your own,” Thomas said.
They could also do it as a side project while working theater shows as their day job, which for her is Main Street Theater in Houston. She was in the middle of a traveling spring show for them when the pandemic hit. Although that’s put on hold now, she’s staying active with her female-led Says Who? Productions.
It’s a way for them to do something for themselves for a change, she said. They were inspired by the work of entertainment industry folks like Tina Fey, Reese Witherspoon and other women who are producers, writers and directors.
“Just kind of the idea of changing and reclaiming some of the ideas that people have about women’s leadership in the arts,” Thomas said. “It runs pretty smoothly whenever women are in charge. I tend to really like the direction it goes in.”
She says Says Who? Productions aims to release something soon and also has new projects in the works.
(On the Net: www.facebook.com/SaysWhoProductions.)