My 'Baloney' Has a First Name...
Brian Green, Staff Writer
There is a house on 7th Street where Robert Kurtz lives and works, but he is hardly the average entrepreneur feedback from viewers. In fact, Kurtz said working from his home. He lives in a homemade television studio, where a brilliant and creative original show is made. What Kurtz and his friends Nathan Gray, Bryan Storkel and Matt Zaller produce is part sketch comedy, part celebrity interviews, part short films, part completely random and 100 percent crazy and hilarious. The result: “Beef Baloney,” the best thing to happen to local late night television in a long time.
Kurtz and Gray came up with the idea for “Beef Baloney” during their college years. They had been friends at Booker T. Washington High School, and were sharing a house while Gray attended Oral Roberts University and Kurtz attended The University of Tulsa. Late night programs such as “Auction Line” inspired them to create their own late show, a “stupid, low-budget public access show just to be funny,” as Kurtz put it.
Storkel and Zaller joined forces and the show began to take shape. Finding a home network for “Beef Baloney” proved to be a hard task, though. The absence of public access stations in Tulsa, including public cable access, meant that network television was the only solution. After a year and a half of searching and negotiating, it looked as though NBC was going to air it immediately following Saturday Night Live every week. It wasn’t meant to be, though, as the plans fell through just two weeks before the premiere.
When the men purchased Paid Programming time from Fox later that same day, “Beef Baloney” had a home. To pay for the time slots, they produced free commercials for companies who then paid for advertising space during the shows.
In August, the show premiered and received very positive the show has had only received one negative email through sixteen episodes. The intended audience is Tulsans of both sexes in the 15-35 age group range, but the fan base is wider. “We’ve gotten a lot of emails from 50 year-old guys,” Kurtz said, “and we have a big following in small towns around Tulsa, some of which I had never heard of.”
The show is incredibly humorous and showcases the talent of its creators. The four men do it all, from writing and filming, to producing and editing. Kurtz said the creation process is fairly simple, where one per-son comes up with an idea and is put in charge of its production. Collaboration usually occurs when the other men chime in ideas and jokes for a presented idea, helping flesh it out.
A four minute skit takes one day to shoot and another day to edit. “It’s time consuming,” Kurtz said, “but it’s rewarding.”
Sometimes, strange things happen. On the Halloween episode, Kurtz was filming when he was attacked by an unidentified woman. She yelled “Beef Baloney” and licked him on the face. “It wasn’t really a lick, more like a wipe with her whole tongue. It was really gross and I felt violated, but I tried to make it funny.”
Currently, the men are trying to raise money to “take the show to the next level, get some national interest,” said Kurtz.
Kurtz had this to say about making the show: “Sometimes I just blink a couple of times, and I can’t believe it’s my job. One day I’m filming the craziness at Grand Lake on the Fourth of July, the next day I’m filming at the Opera, and then the next day at Trapeze School trying to take the camera on the trapeze.”
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