‘#FreeRayshawn’ creator Marc Maurino says Quibi’s ‘mechanics definitely helped the story come alive’
Quibi, an all-new streaming platform that caters to mobile-friendly content, has created a kind of disruption in storytelling. With episodes that are no longer than ten minutes apiece, the format of serial storytelling has undergone a shift in paradigm. Of the many shows on Quibi that have received praise is ‘#FreeRayshawn’ starring Laurence Fishburne and Stephan James. It tells the story of an army veteran caught inside his own apartment as cops try to arrest him. But with his family with him, the whole situation takes the shape of a hostage situation.
Speaking to MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) about ‘#FreeRayshawn’ and Quibi, Marc Maurino, the creator, executive producer, and writer for the series provided insight on the show and his writing process. A word that kept repeating itself throughout the conversation was “Kismet”.
Maurino spoke about the mechanics of the platform adding value to the story. Quibi, being mobile-only, works in both a portrait mode and a landscape one. The show’s urgency and the vitality of social media to the plot are often accentuated by the portrait mode of the show. Maurino said, “I feel the mechanics of the platform definitely help this story come more alive. In the original screenplay, [Rayshawn, played by Stephan James] was on his phone, he was posting, he was taking pictures. That was the whole social media thing. All of that was written when this was intended to be a feature film. You know, in the theaters. What happened is or can only be described as an incredibly happy accident.”
He added, “We ended up being one of the first major movies and chapters on a mobile-only platform where characters are communicating by phone, utilizing social media, videotaping things on their phones. Quite frankly, living and surviving on their phone, and then we ended up connecting with and producing for a company that exhibits on the phone, it can only be described as incredible kismet, you know?”
Asked if the story would have been this hyper-real in the absence of such mechanics or such a platform, Maurino said, “Would it have worked? Well, if down the line, we assemble a feature from this footage and release it as a feature, it will still absolutely work. But I think that it's kind of incredible that, you know, we ended up at the, one of the first major releases on Quibi and having it, having the phone and social media so much a part of both. Our narrative and of course the native nature of the platform.”
But there are obvious challenges to writing a show in such a structure, especially when episode or chapter lengths are capped at ten minutes. Maurino who had initially written ‘#FreeRayshawn’ as a feature film said, “It was a very interesting process because it forced me to look at my feature screenplay and find the natural places every six, eight, ten pages where a cliffhanger moment could be created.”
He said that as a person who is used to writing feature-length screenplays and hour-long television pilots with three-act or five-act structures, “there are natural moments where things occur, you know, plot points that normally, you know, sort of happen very organically”. For ‘#FreeRayshawn’, however, Maurino said, “Eight pages in -- Okay, this is gonna stop and people aren't going to see anything till the next day. So it was very interesting. It was very challenging, but it also created an opportunity to look at my own writing with an eye towards delivering edge of your seat moments with greater frequency.”
And with a plot as urgent as ‘#FreeRayshawn’, frequent cliffhangers are the way to go in an episodic format. But such a thing can also lose its potency when the show is binge-watched. Maurino, upon being asked if he feared it would give viewers whiplash when they saw the show in one go, said, “I did not have that fear. While I had to come up with where the episode breaks would be, I didn't actually have to manufacture new artificial cliffhangers. The scripts already worked as an edge of your seat, you know.”
New episodes of '#FreeRayshawn' air on Quibi every weekday.