JOLIE CURTSINGER & DANA MARISA SCHOENFELD Talking about EAST, their new comedy series By Alex A. Kecskes
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nown for Swiped Right, Divorce School, and Sasha, actress, writer, director, and native New Yorker, Dana Marisa Schoenfeld graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She studied acting at Warner Loughlin Studios in Los Angeles and AMAW in New York City. Dana won a two-year scholarship through the Creative Screenwriting Magazine Screen-writing Expo to study screenwriting at Writers Boot Camp in Santa Monica. Dana has been working as a writer, a director, and an actress for over a decade and her work has been recognized in film festivals around the world. She has been honored to receive awards in a variety of categories including directing, screenwriting, acting, and film editing. Known for Bastion, Loanshark, The Perfect Fit, and The Dry Spell, New York-based Jolie Cutsinger is a theater, film, and television actor, as well as a producer. She is the Artistic Director of InProximity Theatre Company and founding producer of Project W Theater Festival, an annual reading festival which highlighting various female playwrights, directors and theater professionals. In EAST, Dana and Jolie unite their talents in a quirky comedy set in the fast-moving world of New York City’s entertainment industry. Dana
26 • Hollywood Weekly
is Ella, a precocious, self-deprecating attorney struggling to achieve her childhood dream of becoming an actor. Jolie is Lacey, a toughtaking, no-nonsense studio executive dead set on producing a hit film.
Thank you for taking the time for this interview. So which of you ignited the initial spark to create this quirky series? Dana: I came up with the idea in 2017. I filmed the pilot for a short film challenge. And then I shot another episode in 2020. Everyone was excited about the series so I wrote the next six episodes. Jolie: We shot all six episodes. And reshot some of the initial episodes. So we have season one done. We don’t have distribution as yet, but we’re streaming in front of a live audience in New York. We’re hoping that it finds the right home . EAST has kind of a Neil Simon, Woody Allen vibe with its whipsmart dialog and edgy humor. Did any of those writers inspire you? Dana: I love Woody Allen. I’ve always been a fan of his work. Watching a Woody Allen film growing up in New York, I could see the neuroses of being in New York City.
So Dana, how did you prepare for the role of Ella, a woman in search of her true calling? Dana: Ella is loosely based on my life. I was a political science major at the University of Michigan. I always thought, and everyone around me always thought, that I’d go to law school or become a journalist. But when I graduated from college, I realized that my real passion was in movies and television. So I went to L.A. and fell in love with the business. I spent six months there, then moved back to New York and started my career at NBC in the Page Program. I had this extraordinary opportunity to work as a page at 30 Rockefeller Center. I worked on Late Night with Conan Obrien, on Saturday Night Live. I got to see the business and production sides of the industry. But in my heart, I wanted to be an actress. It was an incredible opportunity to be on both sides, knowing that at some point, I was going to get into acting. So stepping into Ella was like taking a journey back into that 22-year-old girl, and thinking how do I show my stuff, how do I get there? So it was a pretty easy character for me to flip back into. My father went to law school and business school and he thought that following him would be the trajectory of my life. There’s a line in episode four where he says, “Don’t move to Los Angeles, the entire country is tilted to the West and all the loose screws fall to Los Angeles.” He said that to me when I moved