The Venture Bros: Escape to the House of Mummies, Part II
The boys continue to warp and shatter the structures and expectations of form. It was funny enough that they put a fake “previously on The Venture Bros.” at the top of the show, but then they put a fake “next week on The Venture Bros.” at the end. So we’re apparently watching the second act of a three-part episode, what would in normal circumstances be released on DVD as The Venture Bros. Movie.
What makes this monkeying with structure great, of course, is the way it frees up the writers’ creativity. Why bother explaining how the boys got into the room with the spikes, or how Dean’s head got removed, or how Edgar Allen Poe got roped into this mess — that was all explained in Part I. And how will they get away from the bad guys, what will happen to the second Brock, how will Dean’s head get put back, all that will be explained in Part III. Right now, we’ve got the tumultuous, everything-in-motion Part II.
Of course, all that motion and calamity is the “B-story” this week. In the foreground is Rusty’s childish contest with Dr. Orpheus. The science/religion conflict that sparked in Episode 1 explodes into flames here, continuing Season 2’s theme of taking background ideas from Season 1 and making them the foreground here. Rusty abandons his family and tortures his friends, Dr. Orpheus fools his daughter and puts her into a coma, all for the sake of this contest. The goal of the contest? “Who can be the smallest,” of course, again, making the metaphoric literal. And when they both lose, they only do so because they both win! They’re both the smallest men!
And while it’s true that Orpheus is a know-it-all, I too felt the urge to correct the deity when he made the mistake of confusing Argos and Cerberus.
I once wrote for a comedy show, and the sketches for the show were developed as though the show were taking place in the late nineteenth century and were being written for the vaudeville stage. The producers insisted that each sketch must have a premise, development of the premise, a satisfying conclusion to the premise (called “the payoff”) and then a final “switcheroo” that they called “The Button.” This strict adherence to 100-year-old comedy rules helped ensure that every idea the writers had would eventually be turned from something everyone thought was funny to something no one thought was funny. After a few weeks of observing just how deadening this process was, I raised my hand in a meeting and said “I’m sorry, didn’t Monty Python prove, twenty-fiveyears ago, that you don’t need any of this crap? Why can’t we just think of funny ideas, keep them going for as long as they’re funny, then cut away when they’re not funny any more? Won’t that make the show fresher, more unpredictable, cut out all this dead time, and keep all the sketches from feeling exactly alike?”
It was questions like this that have kept me from working in television comedy for the past ten years.
So it’s good to see The Venture Bros., in its second season, being so voracious in its appetite to expand the boundaries of the possible in television.
The Bentfootes, day two
A long day, set in the apartment of 
r_sikoryak and his wife Kriota Willberg, creator of The Bentfootes.
Mr. Urbaniak showed up sober this time, but soon was seen pouring some mysterious liquid into his “morning coffee” from a ceramic jug marked “X X X.” We had nine pages of dramatic scenes to shoot but he simply couldn’t concentrate on the actor he was performing opposite and instead kept wandering off his mark to grab some more Dunkin Donuts “Munchkins” from craft services. Finally we had to simply write the other actor out of the scenes and strap Mr. Urbaniak down to a chair, turning all the scenes into a long monologue.
We had 60-minute tapes in our digital cameras, and we just pointed the lens at our lead and kept rolling. He was angry at first at being strapped to the chair and started swearing, yelling and shouting the most alarming imprecations. The demon alcohol was coursing through his veins and we got it all on tape as he went from outraged to pathetic to finally weeping openly, calling for his “mommy.” That took from 10 until 2, giving us four hours of random shouts, curses, animal noises and rueful sobbing to somehow turn into nine pages of snappy dialogue and action. It was real, but was it art?
After lunch, we untied Mr. Urbaniak, who was now sober and seemingly ready to work. We got a couple of takes of a scene where he must stand at a table, but standing became too much for him and all subsequent takes had to be with him sitting down. Because he is incapable of memorization, his dialogue was taped to the forehead of the actor opposite him. He insisted that that is the way “Brando” did it, and then produced a clipping from the New York Post where a critic referred to him as “the nerd Brando.” (this is true, I swear, he never stops talking about it.)
Soon, a kind of tiredness had washed over Urbaniak to the point where he could no longer remain at the table and the scenes had to be moved to a couch. He asked if perhaps he could do all his scenes lying down, with the rest of the set tilted on its side to make it look like he was “really” sitting up, but we had neither the budget nor time to do that today.
We borrowed a cattle prod from Mr. Urbaniak’s security team and used it to “wake him up” just before a take. Our lovely and talented DP Melissa G. would say “rolling” and I would crouch near Mr. U as he dozed off. I would thengesture to Melissa, who would whisper “action” and I would jab Mr. U harshly with the prod, thereby getting him through another take before he started tilting forward again in a manner to indicate a strong desire to sleep.
Finally, he was incapable of delivering any dialogue at all and all his dialogue had to be given to another actor, who had to do the scene by herself with Mr. U slumped against an apple box in her eyeline. We changed the dialogue so that lines that used to be Mr. U’s, like “You killed my mother!” and “Give me all you got!” were instead the other actor saying “You may think I killed your mother, but in fact I did not” and “I suppose you now want me to give you all I’ve got; well, you have another think coming.”
Squid, who was running sound and serving as clapper/loader today, finally stomped off the set when Mr. Urbaniak dumped a hot cup of coffee on his head during one of his slumpings. Now my evening will be spent trying to coax him back to the production.
Attention, Venture Bros. fans
You will, in all likelihood, enjoy Mike Mignola’s The Amazing Screw-On Head.
The Bentfootes, day 1
Mr. Urbaniak relaxes during the shoot with an admirer.
The crew was ready, the cast members were in place, the atmosphere was electric. It was our first day, shooting a brand new movie! Somehow, news of our humble location had shot across the world on the internet, and scores of the teen girls I like to call “Jimmers” were already camped out outside the doors of the studio. Why don’t these fresh-faced, nubile young ladies have boyfriends? Or school? Or parents?
Everyone was riding a high that only months of preparation and keen understanding of the script can bring. The only thing missing was our star.
His call time was seven am. Seven came and went, and then seven-thirty, eight and nine, then ten. I paced the floor of the studio and worked out the camera moves for the umpteenth time. Squid, our DP, and his crew were starting to get testy with me. They were champing at the bit, ready to shoot.
At 10:30, a roar went up from outside. The cast and crew rushed to the windows to see a huge crush of humanity swarming over the hood and roof of Mr. Urbaniak’s custom-built Hummer, 32 feet long and featuring a wet bar, a sauna and a hot tub. Mr. Urbaniak had tried to get me to go “cruising” with him one night in this vehicle, but I had just seen Al Gore’s movie the night before and could not bring myself to get into this behemoth. It was a lucky thing, as that was the evening that a twelve-year-old girl almost drowned in the hot-tub (she was not the only one in hot water that night).
Studio security, using cattle-prods and machine guns (rubber bullets only! My contract insists upon no fatalities to fans!) cleared a path through the Jimmers from the Hummer to the studio doors. After that, of course, he had to make it through the studio itself and all the hangers-on and sycophants that naturally cling to a star in the middle of a meteoric rise.
He got up to our studio around 11:00am. His subdued demeanor and unwillingness to take off his dark glasses made me fear the worst: he had shown up drunk once again, if not worse.
He staggered over to the craft services table and collapsed. A melon ball, lodged in his ear, had to be extracted with a plastic spoon.
This was an inauspicious beginning indeed to our seven-day shoot.
The scene was a simple one. Mr. Urbaniak (we named hischaracter “Jim” to make it less confusing for our lead) had to simply watch a pair of dancers run through a routine. No acting required. We found a chair for Mr. U to sit in and blocked out the rehearsal. Barely able to keep his head upright, and certainly unable to discern the dancers, who were over ten feet away, a PA held a stick with bright day-glow orange tape attached to guide the star as to where to direct his attention (the PA will need to be removed digitally later).
Now we were running over six hours late and we didn’t yet have a take in the can. Mr. Urbaniak was incapable of remaining upright, even when harnessed to the chair, and insisted on holding a huge prop “martini glass” because he thought it was “funny.” (“It’s a comedy, right? Then LET’S BE FUNNY!” is his motto.)
We ran through a total of sixty takes as the sun set and Mr. Urbaniak slumped further and further down in his seat. When a large rope of drool began to make its way to the floor, I knew it was time for medical intervention. A couple of shots later and our star’s arms starting moving again without the aid of what I call “Muppet sticks”.
That’s when the trouble really began. Although the script merely calls for “Jim” to sit and watch the dance, Mr. U could not restrain himself. Pacino-like, he ignored his blocking and text (or lack of it) and launched himself into the scene. Normally I encourage ideas from my actors, but this was utterly contradictory to the intent of the scene. First he started pestering the actress playing the choreographer, then he started “giving notes” on the dancer’s performance. This wouldn’t have been so bad, but for some reason his “notes” all revolved around whether or not the dancer’s nipples were “visible” enough for his liking in the cold room.
Everyone was getting a little testy, but I kept the camera rolling, hoping that something, anything, might be salvaged from the day’s shoot.
Mr. U then grabbed the dancer and, well, let’s say he “did something inappropriate” that involved touching what I like to call “her breasts.”
The choreographer, outraged by this breach of etiquette, had had enough. Star or no star, she would not stand idly by and chuckle at the brutish antics of Mr. U. She took him aside, where an argument quickly developed. I caught the whole screaming match on film, and it’s good that I did, as that was it for Mr. Urbaniak today. He stomped off the set and headed off into the night with a Jimmer.
So, Day 1 was exciting, but of course now I’m going to have to stay up all night to revise the script. Mr. Urbaniak is the star and lead, and now the story must be changed to keep up with his destructive whims.
Of course I could fight him, but then someone else would be directing this turkey.
The Bentfootes
Here’s a real rarity for the pages of this blog: notes from an actual film shoot.
The Bentfootes is a “mockumentary” about a fictional American family who, for the past 200 years, has toiled in the margins of American dance, all to no avail.
Why to no avail? Well, because each generation of Bentfootes, for one reason or another, just hasn’t gotten the breaks. Sometimes it’s lack of talent, sometimes it’s being ahead of the times, sometimes it’s cruel twists of fate, sometimes it’s over-reaching. And sometimes it’s because you get hit by a bus.
The Bentfootes was conceived as a dance piece by Kriota Willberg (Mrs. R. Sikoryak), and is now being expanded into a feature-length film, written and directed by yours truly (toddalcott), with a piece of animation by r_sikoryak and starring none other than James urbaniak, with a cameo appearance by Gary “gazblow” Schwartz. It’s a regular Livejournal lovefest!
Mr. Urbaniak plays Jim Raritan, the “producer” of the movie you’re watching and the boyfriend of Susan Bentfoote, the “last Bentfoote,” whose tragic death is the catalyst for Jim to make a documentary about Susan and her family. It’s a funny, bittersweet meditation on art, life, and what it takes to “make it” in American culture.
Today’s work consisted of: watching the music documentary Dig!, in order to remind ourselves just how patchy a movie can be technically and still get by on story and content, and watching a rehearsal of two of the dances to get some ideas for camera placement and how many different takes we’re going to have to do for each dance to cover all the action.
Our schedule is very tight and our budget is, well, nonexistent. We’re shooting James’s days starting on Saturday, and the big crowd scenes where we need everybody in one spot at one time next Wednesday. That is, unless James has to shoot an episode of “Kidnapped” that day, in which case I will simply blow my head off and not worry about the movie any more.
Wish us luck!
In projector news, the store I ordered the bulb from said that it would take a week for the new bulb to come in. That was over two weeks ago, and now I’m in New York for two weeks shooting this movie. So it will be quite some time before I am reunited with my beloved projector. But I shall my hands quite fulll with this no-budget film shoot.
Anything Else revisted, incredibly
Christina Ricci has seen the future. Or maybe the past. It’s a little confusing.
LJer dougo has sent this utterly flabbergasting piece of analysis.
For those of you unable or unwilling to click on the link, I’m going to repeat the gist of the information here anyway, just because I think that it will be a healthy exercise for me to do so, that I might slowly get myself used to this idea.
A while back, I typed up this little piece on Woody Allen’s Anything Else, referring to it as “Woody Allen’s low point.” Normally I find that when I don’t like a great director’s movie, it’s because there was some other level to it that I couldn’t appreciate, but Anything Else is one of those movies where you’ve really, really got to be a glutton for punishment to have to want to watch it again, because there honestly doesn’t seem to be anything going on under the lame, disorganized comedy you’re watching.
Well, it turns out that dougo has discovered that there may, in fact, be something else going on under that lame, disorganized comedy. Namely, a (work with me here) time travel comedy, wherein Woody Allen plays the older version of himself (Jason Biggs), who comes back in time to save his younger self from following his own life’s path. Now, suddenly, the ending, which doesn’t work on any level as is, starts to take on a whole new comic dimension. (In the movie, Woody tells Jason to join him on a new job in LA, then panics at the last minute and says that he can’t go because, of all things, he’s shot a police officer and is on the lam. It makes a whole lot more sense, and is funnier, if, for some reason, Woody’s time machine is failing and he ducks out on Jason in order to get back to his own time. Christ, the movie almost becomes Back to the Future.) (It would also make sense that Jason Bigg’s character is actually from the 1950s, which would explain his love of torchy jazz and his anachronistic attitudes about present-day NYC.) (Jesus, now that I think about it, maybe there was a third part of the movie, all about Jason’s life in the 1950s, which he escaped in order to get to what is now our present. Then his future self comes back to rescue him from the 2000s. Now that would have been some kick-ass movie!)
Now, ordinarily I would file this under “people with too much time on their hands” but, well, I guess I’m one of those people, because, the fact is, there is something of a precedent for Woody Allen movies starting out much more “experimental” than they finish up. Woody lore is rife with alternate endings, scrapped productions, replaced cast-members and and even completely re-done movies. Annie Hall was, they say, originally a three-hour movie about a man’s inability to experience pleasure, and contained a substantial murder mystery. And was actually shot that way, and became the Academy-Award-winning classic only in the cutting room. (And the murder-mystery part was later re-made as Manhattan Murder Mystery.)
Also, Woody has always been playful with genre devices whenever his narrative needs a goose. Just a casual perusal of his titles comes up with deft employment of ghosts, time travel, flying saucers, fairies, voodoo, spiritual displacement, The Gods and magic (especially the “Chinese Box” trick, which comes up at least four times in his work, and which he uses again in the upcoming Scoop [which looks wonderful, by the way]) (And let’s not forget, before Woody was a comedian, he was a magician.)
It makes perfect sense that Anything Goes might feature a character from the future, and it also makes perfect sense that Woody would decide it didn’t work and cut it out of the movie at the last minute, leaving behind, yes, another romantic comedy, although one a far cry from Annie Hall. And the only people who might know about it are the actors in the scenes cut out and the crew who shot them, and they could easily be sworn to secrecy. He works with the same crew members for decades sometimes, they wouldn’t say anything (not that anyone would ask), and even an actor as grouchy as Sam Shepard becomes tight-lipped and stoic when asked why they were cut out of Woody Allen movies. So who knows?
Character Design, part II: The Comics
What is it? What makes these two guys so bewitching? Is it their trenchcoats? Is it their grace and skill? Their evident cool in the face of extreme danger? Their animal-like nature?
Or is it the talent of the artists, the quality of the line, the starkness of the lighting, the mastery of the shading? Is it that both figures, although hefty with three-dimensional weight and mass, also paradoxically border upon complete abstraction, a collection of shapes and shadows?
In my daily life I have no interest in thugs or demons and my idea of a personal hero is someone like Thurston Moore, but these two big lugs consistently make me want to stop what I’m doing, take a load off and look at some comic books.
Venture Bros: Hate Floats
1. Great title, and illustrative. The characters are separated and teamed with enemies and strangers, and find unlikely alliances due to the only thing they share: a desire to destroy their enemies.
2. High level of carnage. Could be the bloodiest so far. Last week’s episode with the fourteen deaths was hysterical, but this was almost like real violence. Truly disturbing. I’ve never seen an eyeball out of its socket, animated, much less see a “point-of-view” shot of the same thing.
3. Any TV show that includes perverse references to Superman, Turk 182 and “Winged Victory” can’t be all bad.
4. Rusty buys Dean a speed-suit. It’s red. And it didn’t occur to me until they were half-way through their purchase that Dr. Venture’s suit was once red too, but he’s worn it every day of his life since he bought it as a teenager. Now it’s faded to what my old apartment building decorator called “Desert Rose.”
5. Terrific episode-long piece of sustained action. Really, everything cuts together beautifully. It’s not just funny, it’s also genuinely exciting.
6. The most important thing, the show is completely transforming itself. Last season, a good deal of the humor was the humor of disappointment, where they set up the action cliche and then deflate it by having something mundane happen. Here, they set up the action cliche and then turn it on its head, pump it up, twist it inside out, increase the tempo and turn it into something that manages to be both parody and the real thing at the same time.
7. The sustained narrative. I cannot stress how different it makes everything.
Contest!*
Favorite / Least favorite character designs.
I’ll go first.
I don’t know why, but I find this character endlessly appealing. Best-designed character on animated television today. Not even the other characters on the same show stack up, with the possilbe exception of a couple of the villains.
There were Kim Possible dolls in the stores for a while, but I thought they blew it; they gave her real hair, which seems beside the point to me. The point of her hair seems to be that it remains in its solid Jennifer-Aniston wave, not that you could imagine running a comb through it.
I often bring up character design when discussing animation and my wife starts looking at me like I’m speaking Chinese. In some recess of her psyche, there is no “character design,” there’s just what people look like. And yet, to pick only one tiny example, I would say that a good reason for the relative success of A Bug’s Life over Antz was purely character design. Theirs were friendly and fun-looking, ours were comparatively “adult,” sophisticated and even a little creepy-looking.
The bottom line for character design, for me, is “when I look at this character, do I want to know more about them, or less?”
Case in point.
My other favorite, Sally Impossible, I could not find of image of online.
Hmm — Kim Possible, Sally Impossible? More than coincidence?
Animators: no fair nominating your own creations.
*not a contest
My Superman
Because I was up for this gig. Along with ten thousand other writers, I’m sure. Jiminy, thing was in development for 19 years, they must have asked everyone on the planet at least once.
Anyway, I never got to the pitch stage (wait a minute, I wasn’t up for this gig after all — I was up for Batman vs. Superman — so this idea never would have worked anyway –)
Anyway, I had this idea. And now that the official WB/DC approved movie is out, I know that they’ll never do my idea. But I still think it’s a great idea and here I share it with you.
The executive I spoke with at WB was interested, of course, in “re-inventing” Superman. So I set my mind to that task and came up with this.
WHAT DOES SUPERMAN KNOW ABOUT HIMSELF? Superman knows that he is the Last Son of Krypton. He knows that his father, Jor-El, was a scientist who predicted that Krypton would explode, and that Jor-El stuck him in a rocket-ship and sent him to Earth where he could be safe. More than safe, actually. Jor-El did all this because he loved him so much.
HOW DOES SUPERMAN KNOW ALL THIS? Well, in the 1978 picture, young Clark finds a glowing green crystal in the barn and takes it, logically enough, to the Arctic, where he throws it in the water and it grows into a crystal palace. And Jor-El comes on in a hologram projector thing and tells young Clark about all this.
Okay. Here’s the pitch. What if — oh, how screenwriters love sentences that begin with “What if — “
WHAT IF JOR-EL IS LYING? What if everything that Jor-El puts in his message to Clark is a lie? What if Kal-El is not the last son of Krypton, what if Jor-El was not a scientist, what if Krypton did not explode, what if Jor-El isn’t even Superman’s father?
Well, why would he lie to young Clark like that? Because Jor-El killed Superman’s father. Because Superman’s father was the Wise and Good King of Krypton, and Jor-El killed him, and put his son in a rocket-ship and sent him off to God knows where, and put this message in the green crystal tucked inside the blanket on the rocket-ship so that Kal-El would never come looking for him. He put on this act of being such a kind father, such a loving father, all so that dumb little Kal-El would never think to go back home, looking for Krypton, to find that Jor-El is, in fact, an evil usurper who is running the planet into the ground.
Which, in fact, is what has occurred. Jor-El, like our own president Bush, is an evil, greedy dictator, always using up more, more, more. And he’s been gradually taking over other planets, spreading his evil all over the galaxy. He’s got an army millions of soldiers strong, always expanding his influence, Rome-like, across the universe.
And now he’s gotten to Earth.
And Superman finds out (somehow) that Jor-El is still alive. He intercepts a space-telegram or something. And he goes out to the moon or something to meet up with his beloved Daddy and there’s Jor-El with a whole army of soldiers, and THEY’RE ALL SUPER. And they fight Superman on the moon, grab him, shove him down, ram a piece of Kryptonite into his mouth and take off for Earth, to kill everyone on the planet and turn it into another Kryptonian outpost.
And Superman has to do something about that. Because he finally realizes, after a lifetime of misplaced, mopey homesickness, that he’s not a Kryptonian. He’s an Earthling.
It’s The Chalk Circle all over again.
Anyway, so that was my idea. When the Bryan Singer picture got greenlit, I knew it was dead, but I brought it up to a friend at DC once because I thought it would make a good “Elseworlds” series. His eyebrows shot up to a fair distance above his head when I got to the big twist, but he said it went “too far” in re-writing the Superman ethos and that they weren’t doing the “Elseworlds” stories any more.
So there you have it. I have another story that involves Batman, Superman and a surprise twist, but maybe I’ll save that for the next issue of Bizarro.