Max Freeman and Margaret Singer are the textbook definition of an odd couple.
1. Max and Margaret met at church while they were both living in Boston and, for a short time, actually dated.
When the two met, Margaret had already been married once — at 19 years old, to a man. About a year and a half later, that swiftly fell apart as her husband became the first person she came out to. "I think there was a wide range of emotions," she said. It was hard ... I just imagined that once I told everyone, my siblings wouldn't want me around their kids, my parents were going to want me to move, my friends in Utah would just disown me — none of which happened."
After a few months of dating Max, on Valentine's Day, Margaret had to let him down easy. "I was like, 'All right, this is getting out of hand. I need to tell you something. I’m gay.'"
2. At the time, both of them were living closeted lives within the Mormon church.
3. Together, they made the decision to simultaneously leave the Mormon church and come out of the closet.
4. They didn't want The 3 Bits, a "Girls-esque series" about young queers in Brooklyn, to be boxed into a "sitcom stereotype."
The episodes are divvied up by the three main characters — three siblings — so you can see the story unfold from different points of view. Two of the siblings are queer, and one is straight. Having three main characters to focus on instead of only one or two allowed for a bit more elbow room creatively and prevented the writers from feeling "a little claustrophobic."
5. In order to create The 3 Bits, they had to let go of their zombie-film aspirations.
"We were so naive," recalled Max. "When I say we wanted to make movies, what we did was like, sat down and wrote an awesome screenplay together. We kicked it out super fast. We still love the script, it’s like a zombie — it’s a horror movie. And we were like, 'This is rad.'" Soon reality slapped the two hopeful filmmakers in the face, and so it was on to plan B.
Margaret and Max realized that between the two of them, they had the necessary skills to put together a web series. "We were like, 'We are photographers, we will shoot it ourselves' — which seems like maybe a good idea, but actually I think it slowed us down a little bit, because we became, like, director, actor, lighting, shooting. We were taking our DSLRs, and trying to do the show ourselves. That just made for shitty videos. Then we wrote a short and we had a producer look at it. He was like, 'Awesome, you should be a web series instead of a short, no one watches shorts anymore — they’re elitist and stupid,'" Margaret said.
6. Margaret didn't plan on acting in the series originally, but they realized it would be an easy solution to their need for actors.
7. A lot of the series' content comes from real-life experiences, such as being so broke you can't go on a date.
8. One of the web series' more daring scenes, in which cocaine is snorted off a baby, resulted in a call from the NYPD.
9. The 3 Bits show has no problem with nudity and would like to have more, but YouTube restrictions are a constraint.
"Our attitude toward it, though, is — why does it have to be called for? Why do we have sex and nudity in this special category of, 'Yeah, you show people eating breakfast because whatever, but sex, it has to be really called for,'" said Max.
Margaret added, "That's just not how we feel about it." Max went on to note that the two are considering collaborating with a porn company that would show the more explicit content, although they won't name names yet. "We hope mostly that it’s fun. We want the politics to be sexually radical," said the filmmakers.
10. The two filmmakers consider themselves soul mates, just non-romantic ones.
Start watching the series here, beginning with Episode 1:
View this video on YouTube
Check out all the episodes here.