“It was what we were into and what we had access to,” says Coppola speaking over the phone from her home in TK. “It wasn’t a comedy show. I don’t really know how they let us develop it.” A student at Cal-Arts at the time, Coppola tapped her friend Zoe Cassevetes to co-host. Very loosely, the theme for the show was, well, all-things hi-octane: muscle cars, monster trucks, and stunt double drivers. In other words, girls getting rowdy in cars. (Coppola drove a vintage 1969 convertible GTO back then. “It would stall in the intersection of LA and I couldn’t fix it,” she says. “I was kind of a poser to have that car, but it was fun.”)
Filming was DIY not because it was trendy, but because there was no budget. The visuals are shoddy and lo-fi. The editing is janky. But it allowed Coppola and Cassevetes to experiment. Cassevetes recalls the bloopers with fondness. If a camera got in a shot, that was ok: it became a part of the show’s personality. “We were the very beginning of mixed media. We weren’t trying to start a revolution or anything, but we didn’t have any money to start a show. We were like ‘Let’s take these cameras and let’s do these fun things,’” says Cassevetes. “I don’t think anyone else had really used a digital video as a TV show at that point. We didn’t care about making it look gorgeous or anything. It was really about the spirit of the show, the guests, and two young hot badass chics in a car.” Coppola shares that sentiment. “It was very scrappy and homemade,” says Coppola. “We were just getting our friends to help us.”
Their friends, a circle of impossibly cool and very famous freaks and geeks, certainly did help, especially those in music. “When fun is involved people are really open to doing crazy things and that is magic,” says Cassevetes. Throughout the series, there is a recurring segment titled Thurston’s Alley in which Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore interviews people in a downtown New York alley. “There was an alley by where Kim [Gordon] and Thurston lived right off of Lafayette,” says Coppola. “They would do interviews there with Johnny Ramone.” The Beastie Boys got in on the action, too. In episode two, Coppola and Cassavetes play caricatures of talk show hosts in a fictional segment called Ciao LA and interview the rap group’s dopey cop characters from their music video “Sabotage.” Here, the rappers discuss stunts and being abducted by aliens. For this, Coppola and Cassavetes are dressed up in classic Chanel skirt-suits. (“Sofia had the hookup,” says Cassevetes of the garb.) The likes of Blondie and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who had some iconic opinions on cars in episode three, also make appearances. “Cars are a sort of metaphor for evil sins in this city and everything that disgusts me and sucks my soul out,” he says. Cassevetes has vivid memories of Flea jumping into the pool in his child’s toy car. “He couldn’t get out, and we all had to dive in to save him!” she says.