Eko’s ‘Damage Control’ Co-Directors, Actors on Challenges and Opportunities of ‘Choice-Driven Entertainment’
Summary
This year’s Sundance Film Festival featured a first look at a forthcoming series from interactive-video company Eko called “Damage Control” — in which you, the viewer, decide how the story unfolds — presented in partnership with Variety. “Damage Control” is set in a marketing agency called Mantis Media, where you make decisions for Emily (Pendergast), who is the assistant to overbearing company CEO Blake (played by Ben Schwartz of NBC’s “Parks and Recreation”). The directors, Pendergast and Shankar gave credit to the “Damage Control” writing team of Laura Wilcox, Jamie Loftus and Scarlett Bermingham for delivering a script that was funny and kept a consistent through-line across all the different possible outcomes. She had asked her husband to run lines, but “after a while, he was like, ‘Absolutely not, I don’t have any idea what’s happening.” “This is a machine with, like, a million gears turning,” added Shankar, who was formerly head writer at CollegeHumor and appeared in “Between Two Ferns: The Movie” starring Zach Galifianakis. The three comedy writers “wrote us to be funny — and that was nice to see a script where you’re not just like, ‘Michael!” Pendergast, a current member of the Groundlings Main Company who most recently was seen in the final season of HBO’s “Veep,” said the project was challenging but rewarding.
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