From Osbournes drama to dyke drama: Katherine Brooks and Jennifer Lane have spent two seasons chronicling the oddball reality of Ozzy's family. Now they're hoping to make their own lesbian sitcom a reality. (television).

Even a season working on Temptation Island could not prepare director Katherine Brooks and director of photography Jennifer Lane for the surprises in store with Ozzy Osbourne and his family on The Osbournes. In the first season of MTV's groundbreaking show Lane and Brooks were camera operators, and "we were discovering it all as we Went along," remembers Lane. "Ozzy would just crack us all up." At other times, however, "there were amazingly powerful moments, like when Ozzy puts his arm around Jack when they're watching TV and Jack leans his head on Ozzy's shoulder."

By the second season, premiering November 26, Brooks was directing, instructing Lane where and when to point the camera. "You're watching life unfold," explains Brooks, who comes from a directing background. "So you direct the camera to them rather than direct them. Being in their house is like watching it at home. It's very interesting and very entertaining."

Much as they enjoy working on The Osbournes, Brooks and Lane have ambitions outside reality TV--notably, their lesbian serial, The Complex. Using Lane's own camera equipment, the two of them, in conjunction with fellow neighbors and friends, wrote and shot a 30-minute pilot for the proposed series. "Jen and I live in a lesbian Melrose Place," says a laughing Brooks, whose credits include lesbian feature The Blue Door and the acclaimed short Dear Emily. "There's so much drama in the complex, and one night we were sitting around with cosmopolitans in our hands and decided to make a show based on the people we love and hate in the building."

They came up with five characters--a cowgirl (played by Brooks), a troubled femme, a girl-next-door type, a sexy butch, and a yoga girl--whose stories would intertwine in the sitcom-cum-soap opera. "What lesbians need to see are some real characters," opines Brooks, who lives upstairs from Lane on the same level as Complex producer Kelly Roy. "Although some of the characters are dramatized or comedic, The Complex is based on real lesbian life. There's a lot of sex, drama, comedy, twisted love affairs, falling in love, punching, and cheating."

The two seem to be on to something. One week the Web site for the show had 30,000 hits from around the globe, and the first episode will be streamed online in December. "There is clearly an audience," says Lane, who adds that The Complex was taken up by Florida-based gay cable network C1TV before it went out of business. "You can watch fishing shows for hours, you can cook at home and shop at home, but there is no dedicated channel for millions of people who want to watch themselves. We are excited at the potential."

Jenny Wall, a lesbian with seven years of experience in the marketing department at HBO, joined the team as executive producer, with a view to getting funding for the first 13-episode season and funding a distributor, whether broadcast TV, cable, or direct-to-video. "I left HBO because I wanted to devote my time to making gay and lesbian entertainment visible to those in Middle America," says Wall. "I am from Iowa, and I know what a dearth of lesbian entertainment there is."

Meanwhile, Brooks and Lane are also at work on a feature called Loving Annabelle, a modern update on the black-and-white German classic Madchen in Uniform, in which a Catholic schoolteacher falls in love with one of her students. "It will be a bigger-budget lesbian film," says Brooks, who plans to start shooting--with Lane as her camerawoman--in April. "And Sharon Osbourne has said that she wants a cameo."

Goodridge is U.S. editor of Screen International.