TV

Michaline Babich Gives Us Some Sugar

“In TV you’re making wallpaper for people’s lives, so you may as well make it as diverse as possible,” said filmmaker and television producer Michaline Babich in a recent interview with AfterEllen.com, adding that she includes underrepresented communities in all of her projects.

Babich is the executive producer and director of the new reality series Gimme Sugar, currently airing on Logo, AfterEllen.com’s parent company. The show follows a group of friends in their early 20s as they navigate the lesbian club scene in Los Angeles. Of the five women featured, three are Asian Americans, and at least one identifies as bisexual.

“If I have the opportunity to expand people’s awareness, then to not do so would be a waste,” Babich said.

Babich has won awards for her documentary and narrative short films, including The Last Days of Jonathan Perlo (a 2005 official Sundance selection) and Solace (which won the 2008 Members Choice Award for PlanetOut and Gay.com). Solace is currently airing on Logo’s The Click List: The Best in Short Film. In May, Babich was named by Power Up as one of 2008’s 10 Amazing Gay Women in Showbiz, and she will be honored at their annual gala this fall.

Despite all the hype, Babich is very unassuming regarding her own work. Referring to Gimme Sugar, she said: “It’s not groundbreaking in any way, but just an entertaining show about lesbians. Straight audiences and gay boys love the show, and I love that it’s crossing over. People are watching it for pure entertainment, and that opens people’s eyes.”

The cast of Gimme Sugar

Babich grew up in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, where “being gay seemed crazy to some people.” So she’s happy that the show makes no issue of queer identities: “The fact that these girls are lesbians is not even dealt with on the show, but sort of moved past, so I’m proud of that.”

While no one on the show takes issue with the young women being lesbians, bisexuality is another matter altogether. Self-identified bisexual cast member Alex is frequently teased about her orientation by the other four women, some of whom go as far as expressing disgust.

But is it friendly ridicule or out-and-out biphobia?

Alex from Gimme Sugar

“Girls give each other a hard time if they smoke or wear the wrong lipstick. At end of day, it has more to do with being 20 and drunk,” Babich’s friend and fellow filmmaker Roberta Munroe (Dani & Alice) said of the apparently biphobic behavior.

“I never felt that they were really nasty about Alex,” Babich noted. “They tease Alex and think she’d be happier if she were with a girl, but they’re just giving her s— and Alex is OK with it.” Babich added that Alex agreed to participate on the show because she knows bisexuals are discriminated against and she wanted to represent them well. And in order to make Alex’s orientation clear and to depict her friends’ attitudes about it, Babich said the producers decided to include a lot of anti-bi comments from the rest of the group on the show.

All five women – according to Babich, who adores them – are pretty fierce. “There’s a level of fearlessness about them,” she said. “I recall Pam Post [Senior Director of Development and Production, Original Programming] at Logo saying that they have no shame about who they are; they just accept themselves. So they can be very brutal, because there are no holds barred.”

Either way, the show is certain to cultivate awareness about issues related to bisexuality. As Babich noted: “At least people are talking about it. It’s a sensitive subject.”

And Babich knows firsthand exactly how sensitive a subject it can be. “In 2000 I dated a guy for a short while and I stopped being invited to things,” she said. “Gay male friends were totally accepting of my journey, but lesbians were hard on me.”

For the past five years Babich has been in a committed relationship with her partner, Ellen, and before that she had dated both men and women. “I’ve never really labeled myself,” she said. “Others label me.'”

The inclination to label is, itself, something Babich hopes we can all move beyond. “We fear judgments, so we label,” she said. “I like to think in the future it will be more fluid, and people can do what they do without defending it or disappointing people.”

Overall, Babich said the feedback she has gotten about the show has been “totally mixed.” She noted that while gay men tend to love the show, “serious girls think it’s the stupidest show they’ve seen. And we’re all so serious. I’m guilty of that as well.” Still, Babich has also gotten plenty of enthusiastic responses from queer female viewers.

In the end, though, the most important feedback for Babich was from her three aunts – sisters of her mother, who passed away when Babich was very young. “They are the closest women in the world to me,” Babich said. “One works in a library in Vermont, one works in a warehouse, and one works for a construction company, so they’re not exactly marching in gay pride parades. But they loved it and that really meant a lot to me.”

The idea for Gimme Sugar was a joint venture between Babich and Michelle Agnew, a top promoter for lesbian nightlife in Los Angeles. (The two women executive produce the show along with Scott Stone.)

“Michelle runs several clubs,” Babich explained, “and she noticed a shift a few years ago, with young girls coming out in full forces. Many people have wanted to make a show like this for a while, but Michelle had unique access to this community.” Babich met the show’s stars – who are actually friends in real life – when they rounded them up to make a casting tape. She said that after editing the tape, the producers “felt like it represented a unique perspective.”

Over the years, Babich has worked at many aspects of filmmaking – acting, operating cameras, recording sound, and heading up the art department – in addition to writing, directing and producing. She said she is most passionate about directing, because it is so creative.

In addition to Gimme Sugar, Babich has worked as a producer for Bravo’s Welcome to the Parker and Fox’s Nanny 911. She is also producing the upcoming season of Million Dollar Listing, a reality series about three high-end real-estate agents in Los Angeles that will air on Bravo in August. “One agent on the show, Madison, talks about being a bisexual male,” she said. “I’m proud of him for doing it and interested in how people will respond to him.”

For someone so embedded in the world of reality TV, Babich isn’t a huge fan of the genre. “I don’t really watch TV,” she said, “and when I do, I’d watch 30 Rock over any reality show.” But she added that she loves her work as well as the people with whom she works.

So, how did she wind up in this particular segment of the industry? “What I like about reality TV is the immediacy of it,” she said. “You can just go out and start shooting and in six months you have something. I sold a scripted pilot to CBS a while back and our no took two years.”

Babich wasn’t always planning on a career in film and television. At NYU she earned a master’s degree in media ecology, which she describes as a combination of communications theory and philosophy. She did, however, take some film classes while she was there.

She wound up in Los Angeles when an acting gig required her to head out there for some re-shoots. That was 11 years ago, and she decided to stay: “I had been saying for years that I should move here, and I just made a snap decision one morning, and I’m happy I did it. I love New York, but L.A. is more laid-back. I stay out of the fray and craziness and competitiveness.”

Babich is taking time off this summer to work on developing two documentary projects. “I’m always pitching other reality shows,” she said. She will also be working on a script for a feature about a high school girl, which will also include a lesbian character.

Only six episodes of Gimme Sugar have been shot thus far, and all in the span of five weeks, due to budgetary constraints. But Babich has plans for more: “Everyone is hoping Logo will want a second season. We want to follow more of the girls’ lives and friendships, including outside the club.”

Shooting in a club environment proved to be a particularly challenging aspect of making the show. Night clubs – even those that don’t sport throngs of shrieking lesbians – are noisy environments. The Gimme Sugar crew had to resort to heavy-duty headsets to counteract the din. “We alternated between the kind they use for sporting events and the ones with the big, red earphones, like for shooting ranges, which look ridiculous.”

To boot, the action all happens at night, so Babich and crew were working into the wee hours. Then, as a show runner, she had to be up at the crack of dawn each day.

The long hours are one reason why Munroe considers Babich an unsung hero: “We all know who Dick Wolf is, who Greer Shephard [producer of The Closer, Nip/Tuck] is, because we see their names repeatedly. We’re so celebrity-focused. And we’re focused on the [Gimme Sugar] girls and their antics, but someone worked 20 hours a day to make it happen, and that’s Michaline.”

Gimme Sugar airs Monday nights at 10 p.m. ET on Logo, and is available here on AfterEllen.com.

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