Boy 9 Productions is back with five new episodes of its online soap opera “Secrets. ”
Filmed in Philadelphia and produced by out writer-director Damien Tracy, 36, the series gives the soap genre a much-needed gay spin as the drama unfolds at a fictional Center City university around a former soap writer (played by Tracy), a Mafia princess and serial killer who preys on gay college students.
Tracy, who works for a TV station in Philly, talked to PGN about the series and how he manages to pull everything together.
PGN: Why only five new episodes? DT: With no money and no time, that’s pretty much all we can squeeze out.
PGN: Where did you draw your inspiration for “Secrets”? DT: I grew up in a soap-opera house. My father was a police officer and he worked nights. So he’d be home during the day with my mom and they would watch the shows together. Soaps were always on in the house. I’ve always been a fan. In college, I actually worked at “One Life to Live.” That was a formative experience. When I got back to college, I actually did a version of “Secrets” about 15 years ago and it turned into my senior project. I sort of just pretended that it had been on the air all this time and picked up where I thought the storyline and the characters would be. That’s where we are with the new episodes.
PGN: What were some of your favorite soap operas? DT: “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” were the big hits in my house. I really don’t remember too much of “Ryan’s Hope,” but my parents, that was their show, as evidenced by the fact that I have a brother named Ryan.
PGN: How long does it take you to complete a season of the show? DT: It depends. Ideally it can be done over five and six days. But with everyone’s schedule, this five or six days happens a day here and a day there. There have been long stretches between episodes because of working around everyone’s schedule. If we had the luxury of being able to pay professional actors, we could get it all done in a week, probably.
PGN: Is there any reason that you choose to present “Secrets” in six-eight-minute episodes instead of one big one? DT: I like the idea of the episodic storytelling. I like leaving people guessing what’s going to happen next, leaving them with a little cliffhanger or a big twist.
PGN: Was it always your intention to cast yourself in the series as Donovan? DT: I always tell people it’s for economic reasons, but the reality of it is that’s one of the best parts — that you get to be someone else and say and do things you would never actually do in real life. I’m not sure how I would feel about acting in something somebody else wrote, because it’s kind of a personal thing for me to bring my own words to the screen.
PGN: Without giving away too much, where is the story going in the new season? DT: You’re going to see a resolution to the serial-killer storyline. That’s one of the big arcs that we have been playing out. My character, Donovan, is involved with a character named Logan and you’ll kind of see what Logan’s motives are for reentering Donovan’s life. We also set up some stories for future episodes.
PGN: When doing a project like this on the Web, do you try to make an effort to break away from the conventions of traditional soap operas? DT: There’s a certain comfort in the conventions of the soap opera. I like to embrace them. I think the way that we’ve made it unconventional is that almost all of the characters in the story line are gay. You don’t see that in broadcast soaps. They might have a token character or a couple. That was my take: taking these traditional formulas and applying them to untraditional characters.
“Secrets” can be viewed online at www.secretstheseries.com.
Larry Nichols can be reached at [email protected].