Ilana Glazer: Beyond Broad City

release of her new movie, Babes. Alana is an actress, a writer, a producer, a change maker, and a mom. Today, we're talking about her latest film, Babes, and how her personal experience shapes the creation, as well as her incredible

pivot into founding Generator Collective. Alana does what Alana does best in her new movie Babes, where she uses her sharp wit and intellect to explore the multifaceted lives of women and the crazy but beautiful moments of pregnancy and the ups and the downs that come with navigating life.

what we need in this political climate. From her advocacy to comedy to motherhood, Alana has always had the incredible ability to bridge her personal experiences with her professional work. I mean, her character was literally named Alana on Broad City. Excited to share this conversation, let's dive in.

At the time. There was so much TV to watch. I used to watch hours and hours of TV every day. It was crazy. So my brother also wanted to be a comedian, and my dad was awesome enough to be chill about letting us use the Sony camcorder. So my brother like really put me on when we were kids, and he, you know, we would make sketches from when I was four and he was eight years old. We would make hours and hours and hours of sketch comedy

and it was based on SNL. We loved SNL and we loved SNL before we were like old enough to watch and throughout the years and all the generations from like Adam Sandler and Chris Farley and David Spade to like Tim Meadows and Will Ferrell and Cherio Terry and Molly Shannon to Tina and Amy. So we would make

these videos in our basement for so many hours. So my grandpa, my mom's dad, Grandpa Dave David Wexler, he would make videos and called it KRIPTV was his like Joke Network, and we inherited it from him and took on that branding and then we had a rebrand GBS Glazer Broadcasting System. Yeah, we were obsessed. We were obsessed.

And it's so funny at the time, like Elliott would edit in real time how you one used to do with film cameras where you're like you redo over the tape if you don't like that, take like crazy crazy.

spend resources on it, you know what I mean. Like when Abby Jacobson and I were making Broad City, we were catering and waiters and nanny ing, and she worked at a bakery and then we worked together at a as sales people at a company that later my character's Alana Weser's job deal Steel Steels, was based on. And we were just like spending all our money on this web series and it was like are we crazy?

We did it thirty five times. Actually, we had thirty five short films by the end of the two years that we made broad City the web series, And I think that obsession, that obsessiveness of making thirty five short films in two years was what proved our command over the world, Like you can't recast that shit, you know. And the first webisode we put out it was called making Change.

they told us. I'm now remembering they told us about Ali Shakat and Elliott Page at the time had this project at HBO, and Luccia was like, you should try to like send this over to that team so they can see and if it goes, you could be writers on it. That was like what we That was what we were hoping for, to get a writing job as a duo, you know, like really couldn't have I don't

like maybe maybe yes, could have dreamed. But like it's years later, it's like fifteen years later, and I still kind of am processing that the miracle happened and what we started the web series. I was twenty two. We ended the TV shows thirty two, and that was five years ago, so like fifteen years later, I'm like, damn, damn. You know, it's like it's still kind of shocking. But we learned everything. We learned how to line, produce, show

run right, direct, and act. And in that process of finding it, Amy Poehler had found you guys.

Citizens Brigade Theater. She and the UCB Improve and Sketch Group came from Chicago, planted themselves in New York and built this theater which became This is when like comedy used to be like real binary. You were either like Jim Carrier Robin Williams, or you were a stand up you know in clubs, or you were on SNL. And then like there became this like alt comedy scene and uh kind of kind of intersecting with like mumblecore, where

like weirdness was allowed to kind of come up. And that's when like UCB was kind of getting into the planting its seeds in the New York comedy scene and making this like sort of third space, this third weirder space. And my brother was going to NYU and I was still in high school, and he was like telling me about this scene emerging, and we like planned to get into it when I got to the city. So Amy was one of the founders of UCB, and my brother and I and Abby at the same time time had

been taking classes there. And I think it was almost like we prepared for the opportunity to meet her because we asked her to be in our thirty fifth webisode, this the finale, and so then we have this like huge portfolio of work that she could look at, and we didn't ask her to be a part of it. We asked her to you know, feature in it. It was a cold ask, and we were like a generation a part where our teachers had been her students. Before she got on SNL, way before Parks, she was teaching improv.

This was like funny, like funny enough, I think years ago, like in her I don't know whatever press periods, she was always like I could always fall back on teaching improv again always, you know, can you imagine taking improv from Amy Poehler like that is magic and then also also funny because like, sure, I can idealize her, but she was probably a human being and complex and tired at some points or annoyed at some points, Like that

is just so funny to imagine. So our improv teacher, like the head of UC at the time, had been her student, and we were like, would you ever consider forwarding an email to her? You know, like we didn't even like ask very directly, but he was like, yeah, she's gonna love this. And then it turned out she had heard about us already. And then the ass was so I think finite and specific and you could grasp

it right. It's a one scene featuring in one scene, and we'll shoot it wherever, wherever the hell you want. So she chose around the corner from her house. She has two boys under four years old. At this point, she and her baby and her youngest her nanny, walked around the corner from her apartment. We were already set up, ready to go, and we got her out in an hour. My parents drove from Long Island and we filmed out

the back of their car. The director and DP of that episode shooting a camera out the trunk of the prius and Amy and us were running down Cherry Lane. I mean, just crazy without me, save yourself.

to sell it. And I feel like Jonah Hill was like also looking at the web series and we were like yeah, Like Jonah Hill is like you know, asked about it, just like yeah, yeah, and she was like okay,

all right. But then afterwards we like sent her the episode and we had created these parties around a season one and a season two, so we had this event around the season two and people were like dying that she was on screen when we showed it, and then we formally asked her if she would want to attach as executive producer and she did and we were planning already to go to La and pitch it, but this time we were bringing Amy with us and it was phenomenal.

We met her after that, after she agreed to be a part of it, and we had a pitch in a script, but we really needed her scope and her purview. We met up for lunch and she had like a legal pad with notes about what she loved about thirty four of the webisodes and that I was like floating out of my body.

doing comedy for twenty three years. I mean we just did Hoda and Jenna the other morning and it was like a trivia question she used to do, like stand up in a strip club and her payment was like hot food, you know, like we have just And Pamela is the scrappiest, Like the texture of her voice is her character, you know what I mean, Like she's down to get down and dirty, and like you know when we were making Babes. I was like, damn, like I wish this was. It was an indie movie, it was

a small budget. We made it like hardcore. And Jeff Kimmer cinematographer, an elegant man, a man of beauty, like made this movie look like it cost twenty five million dollars, thirty million dollars. It looks like a nor Efron movie, or a or a Rob Reiner or a jud movie. But like it was so scrappy and it was seven million dollars. It was a scrappy indie movie that especially in New York City. Your dollar doesn't go afoot in

New York City. And I don't know talking about this today and like remembering how that was actually the sort of like I'm thinking of guitar string, like the vibration on which we were meeting Amy, It's like that's who I am.

Alana and her co writer Joshua Binowitz ridge the complexities of friendship, pregnancy, and parenting, all while being hilarious and deeply honest. It's a movie that showcases the wit and intelligence we all know and love for Milana more after the break. Okay, So I want to hear about Babes as a parent and specifically as a mom of three. I was so excited when I heard about this film.

to have a child. And when she gets pregnant by a one night stand, she decides to keep the baby and it tests the friendship of Eden and Down played by me and Michelle Buteau, this movie is I gotta tell you, gotta be honest.

then coming now to Babes. Like the reason that I do this podcast is to kind of show like the intersection of personal and professional when we have this narrative that everything professional we do is just for professional factors, like that's a good job, it's a good movie, like's I made that decision, And then we also try to cover up things when we make them for personal reasons, so like if you leave the workforce to like have a kid or take care of a sick parent or

move or something, we like come up with these ridiculous reasons why we did instead of just saying why we made these choices, Like how have you thought about this intersection of personal and professional?

maiden name. And Abbie chose Abrams for her character's last name, and that's her grandma's made a name. I think a big something that's been that feels very different for me in a personal sense is that broad City was like this character that I wished I could be. She was so free and she was so wild, you know. And I think, especially once Broad City became a thing, even a web series that people knew, but especially on TV, like a sort of painful self awareness kicked in where

I was not as free as the character was. And with Babes it's been it's been so you know, broad City. I learned absolutely everything I've learned. I learned everything I know about this business from Broad City. We made fifty episodes, and ending broad City choicefully was like also kind of a miracle, you know, creatively, I think as artists it's a rare opportunity to be able to choose an ending.

And with Babes, I mean, just the pleasure I took in the process, having gone through all the training in the boot camp of broad City, it was like it was so fun I felt like I was returning to camp actually, and it was really fun. And I think my character of Eden and Babes like I'm pushing less and more just like being being her more rather than like conjuring and adding and jumping and leaping. You know, it was I think I had a sense of being

enough much more during Babes than in Broad City. And now my daughter's three, having a real kiddo, not just like a new born baby, I feel so rooted, and I feel like in the same way that I continue to discover things about my kN and she keeps unfolding and uncovering herself to me.

number of years further along my personal timeline. You know. We also felt like we had so thoroughly covered our twenties and wanted to push these characters into their new chapters, but not cover those chapters. You know. Creatively, we really were like this has been so funny and good and we are so proud of this, and it really felt

naturally like it between us came to an end. You know, our contract was for seven seasons, and it was a really uncomfortable and painful conversation A series of conversations that we had to have to end it, but it felt

like we really again. I was thirty two by the time the TV show ended twenty two when the web series started, so a third of my life I had been in this broad city vortex, which I loved and I still love, but had had to pull my head out of the sand to see who else I am and how we started this conversation, you know, where I'm like, these patterns they're not me, you know, they're not me.

And my husband and I talk about it with just each of us, both of us all the time, where it's like these anxieties, these stories, even these desires and hopes and dreams. Like I also had tricked myself into thinking that productivity was an identity, you know, or a

personality trait or something about me. And I've always been ambitious and generative, but there's such external factors and such like capitalism embedded in encouraging productivity, you know what I mean, Like I don't want to be a worker twenty four

to seven. I also just want to be like a mushy pile that my kid can jump on, you know, Like it's I'm so I feel so grateful for having the opportunity to have a healthy kid, because it's just like those moments where the way that you think life is organized just isn't.

lot of different things. Generator as a collective had conversation like I, I'll host conversations with you know, I was lucky to talk to Gloria Steinem and Amanda Winn and Eric Holder and Jumanni Williams, the public Advocate for New York and Cynthia Nixon when she was running against Cuomo, which was an unbelievable Mitzvah dance party is called Jenny Socials, where we dance for twenty or thirty minutes at a time.

Then we take the little breaks to get cheat sheets for the voting booth for whatever upcoming election is next. And then when COVID hit, we actually were on tour. I was doing a stand up tour in every city I was going to adding a Jenny Social onto that city. Because of lockdown, we couldn't do these Generator conversations. We couldn't do Jenny Socials, So we pivoted to digital messaging and owned our sweet spot there. We found that we can actually reach more people with cheat sheet for the

voting booth as digital graphics and cover more ground. You can actually take this cheat sheet into the voting booth in Key States. Welcome to microdos democracy parrot by Generator. Okay, we are exhausted. Every four years we get screamed at for months about the upcoming presidential election and it's just it's just gross and a blows. So we're here because we don't want to trip balls on democracy next year. We want a microdose, take a little bit consistently over

time to create foundational change. As a white led organization, we hear a generator collective are in a safer position to call out white people.

hear it. I don't know, but you know, you know, it really does come up a lot, which indicates to me when I think about when I kind of put my political strategists hat back on that there's something very visceral for women about that moment. It's not intellectual, but it's actually visceral and emotional. And although we get into like you know, this polling and this horse racing and the strategy right now talking about the presidential that thing

will take over when we get into the fall. I'm hoping and that it's not going to be an intellectual moment, but it's going to be a visceral moment.

ever have before in human history. But I'm definitely just like in comedy, I'm trying to grow with my generation and keep you know, entertaining them and making them laugh, but also making a space in comedy, making a space for them to reflect and feel, and in politics, make a space for people to have the minimum civic engagement they need to change the system at a foundational level.

how to say this, but things have changed. I mean things have changed in the past seven months that have made I think the task at hand even more nuanced than before. People were like struggling to get it up for Biden in twenty twenty even and it's different. The landscape has changed. And something you know, so funny to hear, like, well,

the youth even engage in politics. Oh my god, now we've seen eight years later, they're running politics and they're resisting the two party system within from within from the White House, like these young people who are working in government. I think those young people know more than I do. And the thing that I know that I know is how to say something funny and quickly. But it's like the ingredients for the stew are all there, but like the proportions are changing.

college I was applying to. I got into this like general studies program more for like I think kids who like went to public school and needed to catch up on the basics before going to like the aftroviologe and I, you know, I had all this financial aid and like had all this like debt for you know, student debt, and all of those things were part of what motivated

me to get into comedy. I wasn't in like, you know, a normal program there, and everybody in that school was working really hard to get to the college they had

originally applied to, and the financial aid. I was like just obsessed with like working and saving money and being able to do, you know, to live and you know, then I learned how to make that money for broad City and spend it on the web series, and you know, it was really freed me up to be in the comedy scene night, every night, doing sketch, stand up and

improv in those early days, starting at nineteen. So you know, while I felt like felt like I had been like Jack in a way and sort of like renting a seat, it was the motivation that really actually catapulted me straight into the comedy scene, where I staked out a permanent claim.

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