does anyone have the globe article? it may be inappropriate for chris to post a (c) article but i bet he would appreciate it if someone put it in the comments for people to read(?)
Status:Busy being lazy
From: Canada
Registered:03/04/2008
RE:News Of Chris
(Date Posted:04/27/2008 8:56:47 PM)
You can read the aricle from the globe and mail online: here But it has also been included in this post in case of link breakage:
Web hit, live show thrives on the power of cute
IVOR TOSSELL
April 19, 2008
ChrisLeavins is not a household name. He's not, for instance, a Leonard Cohen, whose fans pounced on tickets for two forthcoming Toronto concerts so quickly that a third show was hastily added. Leavins, by contrast, is merely the host of a five-minute online show about, well, things that are cute.
All the same, when the Canadian actor announced that he was about to turn his Web show into a live act in Toronto, the show sold out in 20 minutes. And when, like Cohen, another night was promptly added, this one sold out too (though a few rush tickets remain for the second show tonight). Now, Leavins is hoping that his online approach to off-line success will be a model for other performers.
It all starts with an ardent Web following. If you look at Leavins's blog, you can see the ecstasy of those who managed to snag tickets, and the agony of those who didn't.
"I want to cry right now," wrote one. "All my dreams are dead," wrote another - a refrain that several people echoed.
All this over Cute with Chris, a weekly five minutes of fun, snark and things that are cute: kittens, puppies, horses.
The cuteness is just a ruse; the real product here is Leavins himself. The kittens are an excuse for him to look into the camera with puppy-dog eyes and, in a wry, drawling voice, play his viewers in a never-ending game of content-creation ping-pong.
Each week, they send in awkward photos of themselves, which Leavins gently mocks. They write e-mails, which Leavins reads, dispensing tart advice in return. They send in pictures of cats and dogs and horses, which Leavins asks viewers to vote on. Winners receive the joy of winning. Losers, each week, are told that "all their dreams are dead." A plastic horse emerges to deliver sugary platitudes, and the show ends.
"I'm not a fan of cute stuff, to be quite honest," Leavins muses, on the phone from his home in Los Angeles, "but it's a meme that works extremely well on the Internet."
His disdain gives his show a dramatic tension: a show about cute things by an actor who doesn't much care for them. Not that this seems to bother his fans, who bombard him with hundreds of cat photos each week, even as he upbraids them, as he did recently, for being "crazy cat ladies."
Raised in Saskatchewan, Leavins spent 12 years working in Toronto before moving to Los Angeles in 2003. Canadian audiences might recognize him from roles in Traders and Slings and Arrows, both of which netted him Gemini nominations. He still makes his living as a professional actor.
Leavins, 39, has long been an independent writer and performer of one-man shows, albeit one who didn't always get the crowd he wanted. He tells the story of staging a one-man show in Toronto and being reduced to recruiting people from the street corner to fill up seats.
"I really enjoyed these shows, and so did the 12 or 13 people in the audience," he explains in one of his videos.
When services like YouTube, which host users' videos free of charge, made producing an online show feasible, he decided to move into online production.
The Web show, now all of 18 months old, didn't attract much attention until the last six months. The production crew consists of Leavins, working alone in his apartment, and each show can take more than 40 hours to make, including eight hours of filming and editing. (The rest goes into research, writing and never-ending correspondence.) But at the same time as he was relishing the creative freedom that the Internet afforded, he became increasingly aware of its immateriality.
"If all the electricity in the world went out, I wouldn't exist," he says.
Thus began his project of bringing his online audience into the physical world.
"I was fascinated by the idea of getting an Internet audience together into one room and seeing what would happen," he says.
He staged his live show in Los Angeles in January to a sold-out theatre of frenetic fans who arrived versed in the show's history and nomenclature (or, if you prefer, its in-jokes). The venture was successful enough for him to bring it back to his former home of Toronto.
Fans responded here, too. "This is definitely the fastest-selling show we've ever had," said Cathy Gordon, managing director of the Theatre Centre in Toronto.
The live show is part extension of the Web show and partly a peek behind the scenes. Leavins is cagey about what exactly this week's live shows will involve, but they'll touch on how he goes about making the Web show. Moreover, they'll take the protracted audience back-and-forths that he has online and bring them into real-time. He's already soliciting pet photos from his online viewers for use in the show.
Leavins sees this as a new model for writers and performers: build a fan base online, which can then be parlayed into box-office earnings. At the same time, he shrugs off the question he says everyone asks him - indeed, the question that dogs every piece of online media: Is it making money?
"I haven't been in any rush to make money off Cute with Chris," he says, adding, "I definitely could. I think it's a gold mine."
He points out that he makes his living as a professional actor, despite the long hours he puts into every Web episode.
All the same, he says, actors and authors have yet to find a model that will let them use the Web to promote themselves as effectively as musicians have (even if there's hardly agreement among musicians on how best to do this).
"I'd really like to be the guy that invents that model."
ChrisLeavins appears tonight at 8 p.m. at The Theatre Centre, 100-1087 Queen St. W., Toronto (http://www.cutewithchris.com/).
(Message edited by lyanne On 04/28/2008 12:17:34 PM)
OMC, I am SO braindead! I hadn't even realized you bought it Griff. It would be useful to have this wouldn't it? Duh! I get it now. Just work with me folks, I'll catch on eventually. (maybe)
My facination with origins is piqued (I still haven't resolved who Rhonda is), and it looks like this is possibly the first time a cat used a chainsaw.
It makes sense. When Chris was brainstorming for ideas about cats destroying Christmas trees, it's only logical that he would come up with the perfect tool--chainsaws!
Then again, if this is episode 120 or something, probably not.
(Message edited by m__k On 05/18/2008 10:46:51 AM)
Another old episode :D You have to search around, but it really pays off, because this is one with the inner child and the inner childs sister. She was at the toronto show too (yeah that's right, I saw her in the pictures, I should be a detective)
What number is this? I'm thinking it could be # 62/63/64/65/67 (to give you an idea)
(Message edited by lyanne On 07/29/2008 4:19:29 PM)
Which, for your ease, and because it might do a disappearing act like the Globe article, I have provided below: ----
Fans fall in love with 'Cute With Chris'
Darren Bernhardt
TheStarPhoenix.com
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
From Saskatoon to Los Angeles to cyberspace, the road to success for Chris Leavins has been a winding one paved with satire, crazy cat ladies and other oddities from the ugly side of cute.
Just don't ask him to explain what exactly his weblog, cutewithchris.com, is about.
"I don't know. I've tried to come up with a stock answer but I just can't," he said. "When I started it, I was fascinated by the Internet as a giant picture machine, full of pictures of fluffy bunnies and kittens. I like animals but I just didn't see the appeal. I'm not a big fan of cute, believe it or not.
"But we are living in the most prevalent era of cute in the history of humanity. I guess this is my way of both celebrating and skewering it at the same time."
The site, which generates as many as one million hits in a month, is a mixture of random thoughts about things like the letter B, rubber gloves and sardonic advice to viewers, who send in letters. Leavins, 40, recently encouraged one man, who lamented his lost dreams of being a writer and performer, to keep trying despite the fact he'll likely fail.
"Put all reason aside and devote yourself to chasing the approval of others," he said, as piano music played softly in the background. "All that matters is that you try and try until you're dead. And then you won't know that you're a failure; because you're dead."
The site also contains photos of shirtless people with animals, people and pets who dress alike and cats shooting lasers out their anuses (animation courtesy of Leavins). One viewer, for some reason, sent in pictures of her cat being euthanized.
"Look at this photo where he's glazed over with death before his cold, cold corpse is lowered into the ground and buried forever," Leavins commented.
Every five-minute, weekly episode ends with the results of the previous week's photo competition, where viewers vote on the "cutest" submitted pic. The losing photo is crossed out, with Leavins advising its sender, "All your dreams are dead."
Leavins credits his dark humour to his family's heritage, which is "very British on both sides."
"I don't do this to lacerate anyone. When people submit their photos to me, they know what they're in for," he added. "There's a tacit understanding that there will be gentle ribbing."
Many of the Cute With Chris (CWC) episodes feature a tiny, talking plastic horse named Colty, which provides Leavins with an outlet for conversation. It's difficult to advance storylines with a single character. Colty is also a nod to Leavins' grandfather, a rancher in Dinsmore, located about 130 kilometres southwest of Saskatoon.
"He always had horses and I love them," said Leavins, who grew up in Saskatoon and attended Walter Murray Collegiate then studied creative writing at the University of Saskatchewan, where he also appeared in some dramatic productions.
Leavins has been writing, producing, performing, animating, scoring, editing and posting CWC from his L.A. apartment since 2006. He moved there in 2003, after stops in Toronto and Montreal. Though he's been away from the Canadian Prairies for 20 years, Leavins still shows his roots and his regionalism: He refers to a hooded sweatshirt as a bunny hug. Referred to by most people on the continent as a hoodie, it has a decidedly different name in these parts.
"That's all I've got, and I'm proud of it," he said, adding when he moved from Saskatchewan, he was disappointed to find he wasn't an exotic foreigner. "Bunny hug is the only thing that does it for me. I've got some of my viewers calling it that now and I hope to be responsible for spreading it across North America."
A professional actor who was the lead character in the 1997 feature film The Hanging Garden, Leavins has also been a cast member or guest star on some of Canada's most popular TV series, where his work has earned him two Gemini Award nominations.
"I definitely get recognized (on the street) as the Cute With Chris guy more than anything. I'm a professional actor, but from Canada, so people in the States don't really know me for that," he said.
Leavins is listed in the online Urban Dictionary as "the funniest guy on the Internet today," and has won numerous awards by popular vote, including the No. 1 rated comedy video on YouTube and No. 1 rated video blog on YouTube. Some fans call it a "Chrisvolution" while Leavins calls it "collective creationism" at its finest.
An interactivity exists that never did in his 10 years as a stage actor struggling to attract audiences. Viewers provide content and Leavins moulds it into entertainment.
"The Internet has empowered artists," he said, adding he isn't sure how long he can keep poking fun at cuteness but is certain he will continue providing online content in one form or another.
He's got "a million ideas" but it may be the viewers themselves who choose the direction, said Leavins, who admits to receiving a lot of creepy fan mail, too.
"I don't even keep those letters and pictures, but maybe I should start. Maybe that will be the next show: Freaks with Chris."
dbernhardt@sp.canwest.com
(Message edited by KrysiaB On 07/27/2008 12:48:13 PM)
Below are some bonafide classics you've probably not seen before, unless you've been a fan from the first:
This one is very old, I thought at least somewhere between 2 to 25 digg tells me it's #48 though:
Show #78 with Baxter the drunk dog:
This is episode #93
Face/Cat of evil, acording to digg #103
Then this could be #102 (source digg, but it makes sense too)
This is episode #98:
I'm pretty sure this is episode #97:
Episode 99: fwuffy puppy:
All the cutedowns up to show #119 (which is the show beneath this, acording to digg):
All the above is stalked for your pleasure... And I honestly don't know why Chris took them down, because some of that shit is funny as hell.
Some are very familiar. Did Chris delete even more vids from youtube? It would be nice to find out what number these episodes have... so we can keep track. Also maybe if Al can store them on his pc in case they get taken down, that'd be awesome!
(Message edited by lyanne On 07/30/2008 12:26:13 PM)
All episodes below used to just be on revver and/or youtube, so if you've been a fan for a while and watched all the oldies you're bound to have seen these already. Still funny though!
#141, Canada is different. One of the eps with the weddingring:
#127, I don't see a pattern at all with these removed video's. Here's the studly squirrel:
#133, mysteriously disapeared from yt n revver. Shiny pants, the Randy story:
The x-mas episode (I'm think its #86? although unnumbered at digg):
# 135, Alec Baldwin's Desk (for some reason removed from both revver and youtube).
Remixed episode # 70 Stalking Zac Efron:
#129, Crazy Lady. Same thing, remember it, now taken off.
# 96, Reverse Chris, used to be on revver, but now it's not:
I think this is #106 with bits from every episode up till that point:
Episode #131 The pervy Horse, for some reason removed:
The one about the internet: Maybe #104 (source = digg)
(Message edited by lyanne On 07/30/2008 12:23:45 PM)
Great stalking Lyanne!! There were five or six I haven't seen. One thing it also did was refresh my curiosity about the origin of "Suck it Tanya". Several folks have indicated that they thought the new plastic horse that Colty ran over with the car was Tanya. However if you listen closely to that ep., it doesn't wash.
The proof of my pre "Asshole the horse" episode origins of Suck it Tanya would be to find an earlier ep. where Colty speaks that imortal phrase.
Anybody remember which number the new horse ep. was?
The new horse episode is Colty's New Year, posted 1 Jan, 2007. I agree, that's not where "suck it, tanya" originated. So any episode before that where Colty says it would definitely prove a point. I'm gonna say the ep # is roughly in the early seventies using the panda episode as a reference.
These pictures I found on a german site should help us identify older eps :D Unfortunately the links to the movies these pics go with are broken.
And I added some information about some episodes that I found on digg and cwc.com
41:
43: Spaghetti dog
44: Cat massage (good one to test the system, because I though we had a bit of this vid)
50:
51:
52: Clifton (little knitted bear that Thalia made)
53:
54: Also something to do with these knitted Thalia thingies
59:
60: Jemma = 3 legged dog
62:
63: Something to do with panda's
66: Dog without nose
67: More panda!
68: Aht cars (so far so good, I found the pic and description seperately)
69: Ginger, dog that hates men
71: Ginea Pig Lasers
72: Baby goats
73:
74: Yoda
75: More yoda
76: Coarse language and tumor
77: I think this is the black dog ep that is up on revver
79: is your cat a wino?
80: teen mutant baby (ft Hilary, a black dog)
81: former teen superstar (ft. the girl in love with her cousin)
82: cat paint
83: Miami Slice, bulldog pumpkin
84: Alba Kutcher (shirtless celebs and cats in hats)
85: Starmaker
88: Ninth (unknown Canadian actors)
89: The map (part of Canada week)
90: Fat tab
91: 3-legged dog (free healthcare for Canadian pets)
100: Puppy improvement
omg finding all this shit and organising it took up soooo much time :s someone else save these things to their pc too, in case something bad happens to this thread.
(Message edited by lyanne On 07/30/2008 2:10:32 PM)
Mocking websites obsessed with animals has made Chris Leavins an Internet star, coming to a Toronto stage
Oct 26, 2008 04:30 AM Richard Ouzounian <!-- ARTICLE CONTENT -->
LOS ANGELES–Strange are the ways of the Internet.
Ponder this: One the most popular online stars these days is a guy from Saskatchewan who laboured for years in the fields of Canadian episodic TV without raising an eyebrow.
Then he moves to L.A. and starts a weekly online show made up largely of pictures of kittens and puppies, all tied together with his own Sahara-dry brand of satiric commentary.
Before two years have passed, he's attracting more than a million hits per program and he's about to bring his web-world to the Theatre Centre on Queen and Dovercourt for six shows that are virtually sold out without a word having been uttered outside of cyberspace.
Such is the world of Cute With Chris.
The Chris in question is Chris Leavins and the space he's chosen to meet for an interview is the sole California branch of the Toronto pizza chain Terroni.
"Kind of feels like home," says the 40-year-old Leavins with that whisper of irony he brings to almost every statement.
He's a good-looking guy, with melting eyes and the kind of illusive smile that fans of both sexes and all ages find irresistible. But you wouldn't say that physical appeal is his major playing card.
How do you describe his charm? The best way is to go to his website: cutewithchris.com.
The production values are low-tech, the gimmicks nonexistent. Chris looks into the camera, talks and occasionally shows the pictures of cats, puppies and other animals that his fans think are so cute that they had to send them in.
Without a whisper of venom, he deadpans them into oblivion: "All your dreams are dead," he tells most hopefuls, but they keep coming, forming a community of needy masochists who would rather have his scorn than no attention at all.
How did I find out about Cute With Chris? The same way most people do: through a devoted fan. In this case, my daughter, Kat, and her boyfriend, Ron, who thought I would be amused with one of Leavins's ad-lib pop cover recitals.
In this case, he had entered the world of rapper T-Pain and with his peppy WASP-boy detachment, calmly read the lyrics to the maestro's hit, "Buy U a Drank."
"Baby, let me buy you a draaaaaaank," he began and I was lost in laughter.
Sure, the deadpan recitation of pop lyrics has been an easy tool for modern mockery, but this was different. More sly, more clever, probably with an agenda underneath.
I did some homework and discovered that Cute With Chris had been online since 2006 and that he had built up an amazing audience of fans. A short run of a live version of his webcast held at the Theatre Centre in the spring of 2007 sold out quicker than any event in that venue's history.
I needed to find out who this man was and what he was like.
Harder than you might think.
The biographical facts available are few: Born in Vancouver in 1968, grew up in Saskatchewan. Studied at Concordia, moved to Toronto where he was most lucratively employed as a supporting regular on Traders, The Eleventh Hour and Slings and Arrows (Paul Gross's psychiatrist in Season 3, for you fans).
So what is he like?
Over pizza, Leavins is initially reluctant to share his secrets, preferring to ask questions instead, but sooner or later the wheel turns.
"I was a good teenager," he shrugs. "Did well at school, good grades, joined groups. I wasn't popular, but I was well known.
"Once I decided to become an actor, my whole life was about getting my career on track and that's where it took me."
It's strange, but some of the most impressive credits on his resume (like playing the lead in Thom Fitzgerald's The Hanging Garden) made little impression on him.
"It was 14 days on location 11 years ago. It's all kind of vague." The same haze even surrounds Slings and Arrows. "My whole part was shot in two days, 14 hours a day. It was incredibly intense, but when it's over, it's over."
He remembers Traders more vividly because it was "five years, full of good friends and I learned a lot." But he ultimately learned that wasn't the way he wanted his career to go.
"And so I moved to Los Angeles. Not to act in TV or movies, but to do something else."
He didn't know what that something else was, but he finally came upon it when he discovered Cute With Chris. Mocking the cloying baby-animal obsessions of hugely popular sites like Cute Overload might just seem savvy and opportunistic, but Leavins insists it's from the heart: "I hate cute, period. I hate everything about cute, period."
"I know it sounds strange," he admits shyly, "but the stuff I do on the Internet feels like me at the height of my powers."
Fortunately Franco Boni felt the same way, too. The visionary artistic director of the Theatre Centre is one of his biggest fans.
"Chris did one of my all-time favourite Summerworks shows," says Boni. "It was called Posterchild."Leavins's meta-work about someone who either was or wasn't a survivor of a life-threatening disease shocked some, annoyed many, but inspired quite a few as well, including Boni.
"Once he was settled in L.A. and had started his website," continues Boni, "we gave him some money to help develop what he was doing into a stage show. I think he's incredibly exciting and I love the way that teenagers as well as people in their 20s have come to embrace him."
Some of Leavins's fans are a bit obsessive, looking for clues about his carefully hidden personal life and leaping on a wedding ring he wore on one show as sign he had gotten married.
"I happened to be wearing it from a shoot I did earlier in the day," blushes Leavins, "and forgot to take it off. God, they can get crazy ..."
Leavins is starting to weave more extended personal stories into his work, creating a style he calls "Spalding Gray meets David Sedaris" and some of that will be on display at a special 2 p.m. show next Sunday.
But the rest of the gig (from Thursday through Sunday night) is Cute With Chris as the fans have come to love it, complete with cat pictures, razor-edged mockery and readings from T-Pain.
I'll be there, because – like Boni – "I have no clue where Chris is going to go and that's the exciting part about it."
(Message edited by lyanne On 10/27/2008 2:19:16 PM)
While recognizable for his roles in straight-faced Canadian television dramas like Traders and The Eleventh Hour, playwright-actor Chris Leavins is becoming famous for telling jokes about crazy cat ladies, horny horses and animal poo. Cute With Chris, the one-man internet show — and YouTube hit
— that he anchors from his own apartment, is a dry, satirical take on
cyberspace’s infatuation with all things furry and adorable. The live
theatrical version gives fans a closer look at the man behind the kitty
litter box.
“When people watch Cute With Chris, I
don’t think they really learn a lot about me,” says Leavins. “It’s more
about the viewers and their lives — whereas the live version is more
about me and my journey in creating the show. I have this weird, rabid
fan base and I wanted to try to bring them into the theatrical realm
where they can meet in person.”
How similar is your live
show to your internet show? Do we see all the familiar tropes, like
Colty and Pervy the talking plastic horses? Nope,
absolutely not. It’s completely different. I’ve designed it so that
people who are completely unfamiliar with the show can come to the live
show and understand it, while people who are familiar with the show
will learn a lot more about how it’s made. They can experience it in a
different way. It’s a completely different medium. I tried transposing
a lot of the internet tropes to the stage and it just wasn’t effective
in the same way. I just don’t have the same techniques at my disposal
in the theatre.
In one episode you briefly poke fun at the perils of being a struggling Canadian actor. Is that from personal experience? Well,
my film and TV career always sort of took care of itself — that was the
easy part of my acting career. But while I was doing that, I was also
writing and producing solo shows that I put on in Toronto, mostly
through the theatrical festival circuit. It was always extremely
difficult to get audiences out. I mean, you know, nobody wants to go to
the theatre. The last show I did had been programmed at 11 at night on
a Thursday and there were four people in the audience. I took a handful
of free tickets and went out onto the street and tried to give tickets
away, and still nobody wanted them. That was sort of the turning point
for me; I said to myself, “If I’m going to continue to do this, I need
to be smarter about it.” So when internet video came into play, I
really dedicated all the skills I had been putting into the theatre
into the internet. And then I built up an audience who will now follow
me to the theatre. I’ve had to add a whole bunch of shows in Toronto
because they all sold out.
So why the obsession with cute furry animals? I
have no obsession with cute furry animals at all. I started my show on
that kind of a premise because it was inherently comedic and also it
was specifically net centered. You know, when net video took off, all
these websites started up devoted to cute things. I was fascinated with
the way the internet functioned as this giant picture book. And I
thought there was an inherent tension there that I could explore. I
mean, I’m definitely not a fan of cute stuff [laughs].
There’s a considerable amount of ugly in your show as well. Yeah,
I mean I like animals. I think it’s important to understand what it’s
like to actually own and raise an animal and I try to show it isn’t all
just cuteness. There are health problems and behavior problems that are
part of the package. And cat anuses. If you own a pet, it is basically
12 to 15 years of monitoring their bathroom habits.
You
often say your audience is predominantly composed of teenage girls. Do
you think most of them catch onto the cynicism and irony in your show,
or do they take it literally and tune in because they think it’s cute? They
catch onto the cynicism and irony. You know, not all teenage girls are
Paris Hilton. My show appeals to the kind of teenager who hates
teenagers. These are sort of the disenfranchised, edgy teen girls who
grow up to be fantastic women. The teenagers who come to my show — I am
shocked and amazed at how incredibly cool, poised and composed they
are. I don’t remember teenagers being like that when I was a teenager.
They’re all really intelligent, interesting people with great senses of
humour. I don’t think the media and the internet really give those
types of teenagers a place to see themselves. I don’t think they’re
represented very well.
Almost two years into it, would you say your show has changed at all since the onset? The
show as it stands now is completely different than when I started. [At
the beginning] I think it was more traditional and more based on the TV
model. I hadn’t discovered my voice and I hadn’t really understood why
I was exploring the cute trope. I think the early shows were … kinda
cute [laughs]. I think it turned a lot of people off — it certainly
turned me off. I really had to examine why I had chosen to work in that
milieu, and I’m much happier with the place I’m at now. I think now,
cute is superfluous. The show could really be about anything; it’s
about the people who watch it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gemini Award nominee Chris Leavins brings his new stage show to Los Angeles after a triumphant tour across cyberspace.
Originally
inspired by one of his critically acclaimed Toronto theatre festival
productions, which drew an audience of four, Chris made a drastic move
and became one of the first actors in the world to bring internet
technology to the stage.
The new production, about a
show&about a show&which became a huge hit on the internet, sold
out its live one night only workshop booking in 85 minutes!
Chris returns to the Los Angeles stage for a 6 week run, bringing an innovation and style to theater seldom seen anywhere else.
Cute
With Chris: LIVE projects interactive elements with live performance
and may forever change the face, and popularity, of solo performances
in theaters worldwide.
Featured on the front page of
YouTube, iTunes, and Yahoo, the Cute with Chris internet series has
become a hugely popular weekly event that is seen by millions of
people, in dozens of countries all over the world.
The Star Phoenix calls Chris Leavins &the funniest guy on the internet today... with at least 100,000 views for each show.
Chris Leavins has been nominated for two Gemini Awards (1997 as Best
Supporting Actor and 2007 for Guest Performance in a television drama).
He
has been a cast member or guest star on some of Canadas most popular
and critically acclaimed television series including Traders (Gemini
Winner 1997 and 1998 Best Dramatic Series), The Eleventh Hour (Gemini
Winner 2002 and 2003 Best Dramatic Series), and Slings and Arrows
(Gemini Winner 2006 Best Dramatic series), which now airs in the United
States on the Sundance Channel.
Leavins appeared in the 1997 film The Hanging Garden (Winner of 4 Gemini Awards).
An
accomplished stage performer and playwright, his shows Posterchild, The
Captain, and The Best Play in the Fringe Festival Ever have been
performed live in theaters across North America.
He now lives in Los Angeles.
For anyone whos ever been frightened by solo shows&now is the time to get back in the water, and come to the theater!
Cute With Chris: LIVE opens November 7th and will run through
December 14, 2008 at the Elephant Theatre located at 6322 Santa Monica
Blvd. in Hollywood, 90038.
(Message edited by KrysiaB On 10/31/2008 7:04:22 PM)
Leavins amps up the competition for cuddly creatures
PROFILE. The Internet is overrun with photos of adorable pets doing adorable things, like kittens wearing neckties and dogs attacking sprinklers. More industrious sites have even been able to take these images and create new content, like ICanHasCheezburger.com’s infamous LOLcats. But there was one key element missing: cutthroat competition.
Enter Chris Leavins, a Canadian actor and writer based out of Los Angeles. On his weekly Web show, “Cute with Chris,” Leavins presents photos sent in each week by viewers of their pets and asks the audience to vote on which is cuter. The losers hear Leavins’ popular refrain: “All your dreams are dead.” Because if you’re not cute, you’re nothing. It’s all buoyed by Leavins’ unique wit and deadpan style of comedy.
Leavins started “Cute with Chris” two years ago after realizing Internet video could be utilized to enhance and promote his theater work. “I had no way to reach the people who were interested in my work and let them know that I existed,” he says.
The viewers are as passionate about “Cute with Chris” as they are about their own pets, and their interactions with the host make up a good deal of the content — with some, like Carm the crazy cat lady from Buffalo, basically becoming recurring characters. “I’m documenting a unique culture,” Leavins explains.
For the “Cute with Chris” audience members, their involvement runs deep, from online voting and commenting to submitting T-shirt designs. “I make fun of lonely people who live on the Internet,” he says. “But in reality, I am one of those.”
Between the weekly production schedule, cataloguing viewer-submitted photos and handling T-shirt orders — the project is completely self-financed by merchandise sales — “Cute with Chris” is beyond a full-time job for Leavins. But he does have other interests, as evidenced by his recent “Chris Leavins Story Hour,” a staged reading of original, non-cute-related material. “I really think there are many opportunities available through this new technology for artists to promote their work,” Leavins says. Interesting, sure, but what would Carm say?
