Comedian and former Air America personality Marc Maron has shot a pilot presentation with Ed Asner playing his father.
Maron said on his "WTF" podcast Monday that the pilot reflects his own life: He plays a man with cats who records a podcast in his garage in which he interviews comedy stars and dissects his own life. His podcast guest in the pilot presentation is "The Hangover" star Ken Jeong, Maron said.
Wouldn't you know it: Jeong has also appeared on the "WTF" podcast.
Asner's agent, Michael Greene, told TheWrap the pilot presentation shot last week over two days.
Maron said he shot the show for Fox TV Studios with production company Apostle (headed by Denis Leary and Jim Serpico), and that the show is executive produced by Olivia Wingate and Serpico.
"I pitched my relationships with women, my ex-wife, my father, my producer and we created a sort of show world," Maron explained. "We got an idea, we decided to shoot a mini-pilot as a presentation, because the money's not there to create a pilot, but this is the way the industry works. … So the production company gets the studio to kick in some bread, and, on a very minimal budget shoot this mini-pilot."
The presentation shot at his house — nicknamed "The Cat Ranch" — where he records the podcast in real life as well as on the show. He said of shooting a scene with Asner: "I'm on my driveway with Ed Asner and within about ten minutes he's calling me a bastard and a c—sucker and just being a cranky old f— that he is and he was genius."
Maron's co-writer is Duncan Birmingham, creator of the blog-turned-book "Pets Who Want to Kill Themselves."
Upright Citizens Brigade actress Angela Trimbur plays Maron's girlfriend, and the actors playing her stoner housemates include Matt Jones, best known as Badger on "Breaking Bad." Erin Daniels of "The L Word" plays his cats' veterinarian.
The excitement of the shooting may have been stressful for the cats, one of whom pooped on his bed, Maron said:
"So no matter what excitement we find in our life you will always be brought back down to earth by something, and on that day it was just a very sort of decisive and strategic bit of cat s—."
