Alex Karpovsky & Teddy Blanks Launch Short Film Series About Therapy, "SHRINK"
Featuring Successful Artists Recounting Their Experiences, Series Premieres on National Psychotherapy Day. Therapy takes time. The self-knowledge and understanding that patients take away from the therapeutic process can be profound and invaluable, but it takes countless hours before those discoveries manifest. Sometimes it even takes years.
If only there were a way to abbreviate that process!
Actor/filmmaker Alex Karpovsky and designer Teddy Blanks, who collaborate under the moniker Spielbergs, have created a short-form series in which smart, charismatic, and creative people distill their decades-long experiences with psychotherapy into two-minute snapshots.
The first season of Shrink makes its online debut today, National Psychotherapy Day, and features interviews with Sarah Silverman, Susan Orlean, Lena Dunham, Natasha Lyonne, Kimberly Pierce and Gary Shteyngart.
Shrink is bright, colorful and artfully designed. It is composed of talking head interviews intercut with playful, yet surreal footage that provides a metaphorical context to stories told by the "patients". All of this is set to a catchy and hypnotic original score by electronic band Tanlines.
In the first season of Shrink:
Sarah Silverman talks about her childhood depression and passes along some of her therapist's most helpful aphorisms.
Susan Orlean tells us how her decision to get a divorce finally allowed her to start telling her therapist the truth.
Natasha Lyonne confesses that she's not really a big fan of therapy, although it has provided her with one life-saving bit of wisdom.
Gary Shteyngart endorses Freudian Psychoanalysis, which gave him the courage to finally release his first novel, and in the process gives every would-be writer some choice advice.
Kimberly Pierce gives a masterclass on psychodrama, a therapeutic approach that involves role-playing.
Lena Dunham reveals that extensive therapy - and keeping herself very, very busy - helped her manage her Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
Watch the entire series of Shrink at Spielbergs.video
Alex Karpovsky has directed numerous feature-length films and TV shows. As an actor, he played the role of Ray Ploshansky on HBO's Girls and has appeared in over fifty films, including the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis and Hail, Caesar.
Teddy Blanks is a co-founder of the Brooklyn-based design studio CHIPS, where he creates title sequences for film and TV. He is also a singer and songwriter, and has composed film scores for Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture and Alex's film Red Flag.
Together as Spielbergs, Alex and Teddy have directed music videos, commercials, short films and a segment about therapy called Last Session for Amazon's The New Yorker Presents starring John Turturro and Charles Grodin.
Percussionist Jesse Cohen and guitarist/vocalist Eric Emm are Tanlines, an electronic music and indie rock duo from Brooklyn, New York. Tanlines has released two critically acclaimed studio albums: Mixed Emotions (2012), and Highlights (2015).
