Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Montecito after Sunset. My name is
Christy and Montecito is one of my favorite new shows.
Speaker 2: It is a audio soap opera.
Speaker 1: If you haven't listened yet, go back and check out
episodes one, two, and three are all up.
Speaker 2: On YouTube and anywhere you get podcasts.
Speaker 1: Now I have the incredible pleasure of breaking down episode three.
Please welcome executive story editor Andrew Pemberton Fowler.
Speaker 2: Hi Andrew, Hi Christy, you get to see you again,
you too, Thank you.
Speaker 1: And we also have creator and executive producer of Montecito
joining us now, Grant Rutterer.
Speaker 3: Hey, Grant, Hi Christy, thanks for joining this.
Speaker 1: I am so excited to get behind the scenes a
little bit of this with you guys, because I am
so engrossed in this show, the characters.
Speaker 2: The chaos.
Speaker 1: It's a new dawn, it's a new day. We're at
the hospital, and a lot of questions get answered just
in those first few seconds of the show. This must
have been kind of exciting to get to this point
in the writing process because it kind of opens up
to a new day in new stories and new details
about our characters.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that that first scene in the hospital you'll hear
some chords at the beginning the first for Kai Colum,
the Montecito chords, and they come in and that kind
of signifies that it's a new day.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: In other episodes, you'll hear a version of the music
that was in the final scene, and then that will
say that this is an extension of where we left
off on the previous episode. But like you said, new day,
everything is reset. You know, it's always a beautiful day
in Montecito. And we learn that Mina is in the
hospital and nobody would really check themselves into the er
after getting tased. You usually can bounce back quite quickly,
but we didn't obviously say that, but it just shows
if you're paying attention that Mina is indeed a drama queen.
Speaker 2: She is.
Speaker 1: She's also we know, not the maybe best wife, right,
and we also get a little bit more detail about
her relationship her marriage.
Speaker 2: Deacon is there.
Speaker 1: He goes and visits Mina at the hospital like the
doting husband and they have to sort of play that
role in front of the doctors and everyone. A lot
of thought must have gone into how much to reveal
in that moment about their marriage.
Speaker 4: We spend so much time with them. A part in
the first two episodes that this is the first time
they're ever together, Mina is putting on and nowt and
Deacon se'es right through it. But when Gret gave me
the long story that he'd written and we started breaking
it down into scripts and deciding how to structure these
ten episodes, this was kind of like the natural starting point.
You have the big party, which soaps are known for,
but then you have the denouncement that comes the next
day as a result of everything that's just occurred, and
then that really helps propel you on for the rest
of the series.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you mentioned doctor Layla Carreri, played by Kelly Tibo,
And at this point in the show, she's really the
only character that we've met that doesn't know the dynamic
of Deacon and Mina. So she represents kind of the
public facing, right important figure in the community. That is,
you know, maybe she has her own thoughts on what
she thinks is happening, but we're seeing how this couple
faces the world.
Speaker 1: Sounds like we're going to be seeing more of doctor Carreri.
Speaker 3: She'll be and she'll be slipping in. There's more with
her in later episodes for sure, she definitely plays a role.
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, well I heard doctor Bellavoe being paged as well, Grant.
Speaker 2: Is that a throwback of sorts?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well that voiceover by Christielson with that one.
But yeah that I had a project all through high
school that I produced a couple seasons of a soap opera,
and that was I've been doing this too long. But
very few people would know about that. But the Bellevo's
were a family on the show, and I just figured
I'd slip it in because why not. Why should I
use canned sound effects that someone else recorded ten years ago?
So why not customize it?
Speaker 2: Well, and that's really cool.
Speaker 1: I think the fans of Montecito would be happy to
know that you've been at this for a long time.
You are just as big of a soap opera nut
as the rest of us.
Speaker 3: I know too much useless knowledge. I don't know.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: Deacon and Mina's relationship is not the only one that
we get a better grasp of in this episode. We
also figure out what's going down between JJ and Bethany
Gina a lot to unpack their Holy Moly, now I
don't have any siblings so I am particularly interested in
this dynamic between the.
Speaker 2: Two of them.
Speaker 1: What needed to happen between the two of them for
the rest of the story to move along, Like, clearly
this relationship is going to be integral to the story.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, I think it was important to have a
brother sister relationship. It's you know, soaps are based in relationships,
so you know, we can have couples and you know,
father son dynamics. But I like the idea of these
siblings and they're they're too old to cry to their parents.
You know, their father has passed on and everything got
left to the brother, and obviously there's a lot of
deep seated contempt in that. And objectively, Bethadgina is more
of the alpha of the two, but JJ kind of
won out and it doesn't sit well with her, and
JJ is compromised and vulnerable, and I think that the
character definitely is manipulated by the women in his life,
and you know, for God or for bad. But I'm
glad that it came through that you could see their
dynamic and the kind of the push pull between that
because they've just never seen an eye.
Speaker 1: It's giving succession, but that's what you guys were going
for you and nailed it.
Speaker 2: I just I love.
Speaker 3: These rich people who don't really need to work, but
yet it's all so important that because it's all you go,
you know.
Speaker 2: It's fascinating.
Speaker 1: Well, and another reason why it's important for everybody to
watch and sit down here for the after show.
Speaker 2: Last week on the after show for episode two, we.
Speaker 1: Learned that Mina's father was a doctor, and that was
something that we hadn't heard in the episode. And so
this week, when we get this moment between her and him,
I was especially intreateds like, oh, okay, more about Mina's
history and her family and so that we can really
understand why she is the way that she is. Also,
it must have been important at this point to show
her being vulnerable.
Speaker 2: Mina the big old B word.
Speaker 1: Until this moment here we see a really vulnerable daughter.
I can only imagine that you were thinking about ways
to humanize her a little bit.
Speaker 2: Is that what this part of the story is for Andrew.
Speaker 4: Yes. However, with Mina, humanization can only go so far
in one direction or the other. And you know, in
soap opera we do have these tropes of people talking
to photos, people talking to objects, from a childhood or
a lock of hair or a wig. You know, we
have everything. So the fact that she's talking to a
Komocho's father is really interesting because why is he being
kept alive? What is her relationship to him? She makes
it a point to go see him, and you know,
we really wanted to start digging into her own pathless
in her own psychology and her own history. But this
was done intentionally an audience just trust us on this one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And in typical mean of fashion, she talks about
herself the entire time and what she's good, what she's accomplished,
and what she's going to do next.
Speaker 1: Well it's great because as a listener it answered a
lot of things, but also kept me wondering.
Speaker 2: You know, was her dad heard on her?
Speaker 1: Did he need her and want her to be this
person who would do anything to get to the top.
Speaker 2: Is that where this came from?
Speaker 1: From?
Speaker 2: Mina? So that was an incredibly interesting scene for me.
But there's more here.
Speaker 1: Of course, Bethany Gina becomes the next visitor to Mina
in the hospital, and I was kind of expecting like
a clash right away. I just assumed from the way
the story was going that these two did have history
and they did know each other, and we were going
to hear about something that.
Speaker 2: Happened in the past.
Speaker 1: But what's more fun is that we as the listeners,
get to kind of come along on the relationship of
Mina and Bethany Gina and how that's gonna go down.
Speaker 3: They definitely got up on the wrong hood. Yeah, yeah, No,
Bethany Gina is coming into this seed and she is
just practical and grounded, and you know, we're gonna just
work this out, and you know, here's some flowers. How
can I help? And you know, we're just gonna pack
this away and it's just a simple misunderstanding and it's
certainly not gonna take it that way like anything else.
This is an opportunity for her to have somewhat in
debt to her. And I loved how Beta just kind
of kept catching Bethanigina and ratcheting her up and ratcheting
her up for it to the very end, because beth
and Egina doesn't get it, she'll never fully understand how
to handle a narcissist. She's feeding into that narcissistic supply,
and Venus just taking it all the way to the bank.
It's one of my favorite scenes in the show because
I just love seeing this origin of this feud, but
also both these women just really with their own agendas, right.
Speaker 4: And we also get to see something in play that
Mina references when she talks to her father about how
Montecito has different expectations for her versus themselves. So it really, like,
very subtly just on the undercurrent, it's still playing with
disposition of power as it who can have it and
who is allowed to make a school versus who's mistake
of blinding them in prison. There are a lot of
things going on in that scene. For me, it kind
of calls back to the origin of Dorian and Vicki's
feudal One Life to Live, where Dorian always assumed that
Vicky was the reason why she lost her medical license,
but Vicky knew and the audience knew that Vicky was
the only one who stood up for her and voted
for her to keep her job. So, you know, we
get to lay that kind of groundwork in mon the seedo.
Speaker 1: I have to say, I really am kind of rooting
for Bethany Gina at this point. Most of the characters
are what I would call terrible, horrible people. And I
would have assumed that Bethany Gina just because the way
everyone was talking about her, like she's such a huge deal.
But she's really going to come back and mix things
up a little bit. I was expecting the same sort
of narcissistic behavior from her, but she's really giving us
something different, and it's intriguing.
Speaker 2: It's got me. I'm ready to root for Bethany Gina.
Speaker 3: I will say, all these characters, I'm so curious to
know who resonates with who. I've had seen a lot
of comments about people loving Nina. Some people are gonna
hate her, and other people are gonna root for Bethany Gina.
So I love it because there's no wrong answer.
Speaker 1: Oh well, guys, we got a good satisfaction to our
huge cliffhanger from episode two in this one. But I
am still so enthralled. I am ready for the next episode.
What do I have in store? What's in store for
us in episode four?
Speaker 3: Well, if you like Bethany Gino you hate her, you're
gonna see or hear more of her in this next
episode because the board is meeting and we're gonna hear
from Vincent Ayrazari, the chairman of the board of Regalton Worldwide,
and he's kind of on the fence about what you do.
And then we'll see where it all lands. It's gonna
get intense all over again. We're just going up from here.
Every episode is gonna be more chaotic than the last.
Speaker 2: Andrew, is there anything you're looking forward to us hearing
an episode four?
Speaker 4: When I want the audience to start anticipating are the
consequences of people's actions and their decision I think that's
the best way I can put it.
Speaker 2: Well, we will certainly be watching it.
Speaker 1: If any of you out there have questions for Grants,
and Andrew or some of the other production folks and
the cast who will be joining us for later episodes
of Montecito after sunset, you can hit us up on
Facebook on the Monticito Facebook page or leave a comment
or right here on YouTube and we will make sure
to get your questions answered.
Speaker 3: You can find me on Instagram at its Grant's Rants
and Andrew.
Speaker 1: You've got a lot of projects going on all the time.
Where can everybody check you out?
Speaker 4: You can find me on Instagram at Andrew for twenty
eighty three.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you guys so much for indulging me in
a little extra Montecito this evening. Thank you for joining me,
and we will see you all next time for more
montecito after sunset.