By Helen Adamopoulos
The video shows women sporting cowboy hats, chaps and bandanas tied around their necks. They ride horses and face off against each other with shotguns and revolvers. There’s kissing, kidnapping and competition. What’s going on? It’s all part of a teaser for Cowgirl Up, an upcoming series from the Chicago-based, Web-based video distribution company tello LLC.
Tellofilms.com—a site intended to deliver content for, by and about lesbians—describes Cowgirl Up as an all-girl Western comedy. It chronicles a weekend at the exclusively female Double D Ranch in the La Quinta desert in Southern California. Two teams of women visiting the ranch compete against each other at riding, shooting and tracking, each group hoping to win the silver belt buckle. Tello CEO and Cowgirl Up Executive Producer Christin Mell said the characters are “ordinary, everyday folks who just want to get out and have some cowgirl fun.”
The series, which will premiere in late January (the specific date is yet to be determined), is also lesbian-focused. Mell said the two women who own the ranch are partners, and a couple of lesbian romances factor into the plot.
“It is a definitely a lesbian-driven project,” Mell said. “It’s not just a girl-power all female thing. We really tried to do our best to get some actors who are openly gay.”
The series got its start last June when tello was looking for a big project, Mell said. Nancylee Myatt, Cowgirl Up writer and executive producer, came up with the idea.
“I’m a gigantic Western fan in the true sense of fanatic,” Myatt said. “The cowboy culture has always sort of been a part of who I am.”
Myatt said she already had a screenplay on hand about women hanging out at a ranch. She revised it for the web series, cutting it by more than 40 pages and dividing it up into episodes.
“It really sits somewhere between Blazing Saddles and City Slickers,” she said of the final product.
Myatt also played a major role in securing the filming location. She said she made arrangements with a friend who manages a facility with land for horse trainers, ranchers and polo players in Southern California.
When it came to casting the 12 cowgirls, Mell said she and the other producers already had some actresses in mind. As an example, she mentioned Mandy Musgrave, who acted in the series South of Nowhere. Musgrave plays Dakota, a “hotshot young gun.”
“Since it was a comedy, we wanted to make sure the people we were getting were funny,” Mell said. “It was really us sending out e-mails to people we wanted to work with.”
Mell said the filming took place over two consecutive weekends in October. The producers did encounter some scheduling snags. One actress missed her plane to L.A. and had to be replaced at the last minute, Mell said. That’s how Maribeth Monroe—who used to act for the Chicago comedy theatre The Second City—ended up playing Meridith, an English businesswoman who gives up getting pampered at the spa to spend the weekend at the ranch.
Monroe said she thought the concept of the series was fantastic. She summed up Meridith as a competitive, funny and flirty woman who isn’t quite sure why she’s at the ranch. Since Cowgirl Up is her first Western, Monroe said she had a lot of new, “really exciting” experiences. She fondly remembered riding horseback, shooting a gun for the first time and learning to lasso bundles of hay.
“I would do it again in a heartbeat,” Monroe said.
Myatt also remembered Monroe and the others riding horseback as a highlight of the filming process, especially since some of them were experiencing it for the first time.
“They were all really funny, and they were really brave,” she said.
Nicole Valentine, tello’s chief marketing officer and Cowgirl Up executive producer, said she was similarly impressed with the actresses’ bravery when they went to the shooting range and tried out their guns for the first time. She also mentioned a scene where two of the actresses do a Native American dance around a fire pit, complete with feathered head gear and a dressed-up Chihuahua.
“It was absolutely hilarious,” Valentine said. “It ended up being a really wild scene to shoot.”
The series is currently in the post-production stage, Mell said. After the premiere next month, Mell said viewers can expect one new eight-to-10-minute episode each week. It looks like there will be six or seven episodes.
In order to view Cowgirl Up, tello’s users will need to subscribe to the site’s new premium content section for $3.99 a month. Doing so will also give viewers access to other web series, such as “3Way” and “Brunch with Bridget.”
In the meantime, tello will tide its audience over with snippets like the teaser already posted on the Web site. Mell said actress interviews and a trailer that reveals a bit more information than the teaser are on their way. Mell, Myatt and Valentine all said they’re happy with how the project has turned out so far.
“Tello Films is very proud that we were able to embark on this project,” Valentine said. “We’re very excited for 2011, given the technology we were able to put in place. We’re really excited for people to check it out.”