Soon we started talking about re-forming the comedy group, with the core being me, Kevin, Steve, and Alison Clapp. Ursula Hanson bowed out, saying her performing days were over. We added the Colgate actress Lauren Bright and an actor/performance artist named Josh Gladstone. I booked us a show on Monday nights at the Duplex, a cabaret theater on Christopher Street and Seventh Ave.
We wrote a show, shot some videos, and then hung out in our apartment for three days, smoking grass and pitching ideas for a name for the group. We decided on the Chocolate Speedo Team, but then abandoned that for Five Whiteys and an Injun. But when I went to the poster store I unilaterally changed it to Broken Lizard. I didn’t tell anyone why, but it was because I was hoping that the name would remind people of who I wanted us to become: Monty Python. Python begets Lizard. We made cards advertising the show that said, “Broken Lizard in Jolly Joe Triphammer Hits It Big!” Our first Monday night show sold out, which shocked the club. It was filled with Colgate grads, and they drank a ton, which also made the club happy. When they moved us to Wednesdays, more Colgate sellouts followed. When that crowd almost drank the place dry, we were moved into the Friday and Saturday night slots. The nightclub business is about selling booze, and Broken Lizard floated on the thirsty tongues of that Colgate crowd. Our New York shows were the same mix of monologue, sketch, and video shorts. After one show, a young guy who had run a sketch festival at Skidmore College approached us. His name was Dave Miner and he said he loved the show and wanted to manage us. There was one issue: Dave wasn’t a manager; he was only an assistant to a manager. But we were flattered, so we hired him anyway.
In June, Erik Stolhanske and Paul Soter moved to town and joined the group. Erik moved in with us on Bleecker Street, though the end of that apartment was nigh. After a year at Bleecker, we were told that our numerous noise complaints had made us “not a good fit” for the apartment. Not only would our lease not be renewed, but we were also expected to allow prospective renters into the apartment for viewings. When a Frenchwoman came to see the apartment, Erik and I decided to walk around with our shirts off to try to make her think we were crazy. Our goal was to spook her out of wanting to rent the place. She wasn’t fazed, and when we struck up a conversation with her, we found out that she owned a production company that made commercials and music videos. We quickly asked her for jobs, and she hired us as production assistants.
The first music video we worked on was for the band C+C Music Factory for their song “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).” My job was to pick up the models and dancers in the van, and then make sure they were happy all day. I hit on most of them, but none of them went for my bottom-of-the-show-business-ladder pitch. Still, I enjoyed that job.
We worked on a lot of commercials and videos, but our favorite project was a Japanese miniseries called Banana Chips Love. It was a story about a couple of Japanese teenagers who come to New York and get into a bunch of crazy misadventures. Both Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg were in the cast, though we were instructed not to tell either of them that the other one was in the show. I guess they were enemies. Erik’s and my job was to sit in the van and guard parking spots. It was a February night and the temperature was close to zero. Erik was in one van and I was in the other. We were bored and started cracking jokes on the walkie-talkies, but the assistant director broke in to tell us to shut the fuck up. So we sat in the vans and quietly froze in the dark while listening to AM radio.
New York City in the nineties was the center of the indie film revolution. Writers, directors, and producers scraped together small amounts of money, recruited skeleton crews, and shot films they hoped to use to bash their way into the film business. This was a time when you could make a movie for as little as $40,000, starring total unknowns, and Miramax might buy it and release it—not only in thousands of US theaters, but also worldwide. Before that could happen, though, your film had to get into either the Sundance Film Festival or the Toronto International Film Festival, the only two North American festivals that had proven to be reliable film sales markets for comedies. If Sundance accepted you, it was a signal to acquisition execs that the film was good and that they might have to compete for distribution rights. But getting into these festivals is not easy. Every year about 3,800 feature films are submitted to Sundance, with only 118 making the cut. That’s a 3 percent chance of success. By comparison, applicants to Harvard have a 6 percent chance of getting in.
There are two ways to get into Sundance or Toronto. You can send your film in and hope one of the programmers takes a liking to it. Or you can hire a sales rep to advocate on your film’s behalf. If your film gets in and is deemed commercially viable, the sales rep’s job is to negotiate offers from distributors. Sales reps and filmmakers are in it together, because no one gets paid unless the film sells.
At the time, there were four highly influential film sales reps: John Sloss, John Pierson, Bob Hawk, and Cassian Elwes. Savvy filmmakers sent these guys rough cuts of their films before sending them to festivals, because if one of them championed your film, you stood a much better chance of getting in. That said, sales reps can’t make a festival program a film it doesn’t want to.
Indie film is high-stakes gambling, and only a few make it all the way through to the big prize. The landscape is riddled with the bones of films and filmmakers who racked up huge debts, only to be rejected by the major festivals and then forgotten. If you don’t get into Sundance or Toronto (or, maybe, Cannes), your chances of selling your film drop precipitously.
In 1989, Steven Soderbergh took his indie film Sex, Lies, and Videotape to Sundance and sold it to Miramax for $1 million. The film grossed $25 million domestically and started a DIY indie film gold rush. Distributors now looked to Sundance to find the next big thing, and filmmakers jockeyed with one another to be that next big thing.
In 1991, Richard Linklater shot Slacker on 16 mm film for $23,000 and sold it to Orion pictures. Kevin Heffernan and I saw the film at the Angelika Theater on Houston Street in Manhattan and left excited. The movie had a structure and rhythm all its own. It was cool, smart, funny, and really entertaining. And what was this place? Austin, Texas? Could you really make a film for $23,000 ($65,000 after the 35 mm blowup) and get it released in theaters? Slacker showed us that someone close to our age was in the game and nailing it. If Linklater could do it, maybe we could too.
Heffernan and I saw Clerks in 1994 (again at the Angelika), a film shot on 16 mm black and white for $27,000 and acquired by Miramax at Sundance. More evidence that people our age were doing this.
The Brothers McMullen was next, shot on 16 mm for $28,000. It was acquired at Sundance in 1995, this time not by Miramax, but by 20th Century Fox, which released the film through its newly created indie label, Fox Searchlight. When the film grossed over $10 million at the box office, Hollywood took notice. There was real money in this low-budget game.
Robert Rodriguez bested everyone in the “how low can you go” contest with his film El Mariachi, which he made for a reported $7,000. He shot the film in Mexico and sold his blood to buy raw film stock. Kevin and I loved the film, but you couldn’t make a feature for that in the US. No way. Regardless, how much these films cost or, more specifically, how little, had become a key part of the press’s story. The lower you went, the more press you got.
The last film I’ll mention is Quentin Tarantino’s million-dollar debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992). We loved that film. Loved. The dialogue was tough and funny and weird and specific. The action was visceral and everyone was a badass. We still imitate Joe, the crime boss: “How about a little . . . Rémy Martin?” We went to see it again the next day, and then bought it on laser disc. To this day, Reservoir Dogs, This Is Spinal Tap, and 48 Hrs. are my three favorite films.
Caught up in the thrill of the independent film movement, Broken Lizard soon started talking about making our own film. The problem was that the technical gap between video and film was huge, and we
didn’t have any idea how to bridge it. Then, luck intervened. My friend Karan Chopra was at a restaurant in the Village when he saw a stack of brochures for a summer film class at NYU. The next night, he handed me the brochure.
“You should do this.” It was a six-week class called Sight and Sound, where you learned how to make silent black-and-white 16 mm films.
Here’s the thing. Karan and I were close friends, but this is not how we interacted. We were too cool to ever be this thoughtful. So I just shrugged and said, “Naw. No, thanks. I’m good.”
But Karan wouldn’t give up. “If you want to do this for a career, you’ve got to learn how it’s really done.” That landed. This was one of those seemingly random moments in life upon which everything hinged. If Karan hadn’t gone to that restaurant and found that brochure, I never would have taken that class, and I never would have learned how to make movies. I might have still tried to make it as a comedian, but I never would have dared try to direct a film. The technical side of filmmaking was too intimidating. I’d been on movie sets before and was mystified. What were all those people doing? What was all that equipment for? That NYU class demystified it for me, and the reason Broken Lizard was able to make its first movie was because of the technical knowledge I began to learn in that class. I learned how to load a camera, how to use three-point lighting, and, most importantly, how to edit. I made five silent black-and-white films. One was about a couple that meets in Washington Square Park, and then they get old together. Another was about a wizard. All were meant to be funny and they got good laughs. I loved that film class and I earned an A-. Energized, I applied to graduate film school at NYU, USC, UCLA, and the American Film Institute, or AFI. I was rejected everywhere. People laugh when I tell them that, but I feel for admissions staffs. How’re they supposed to know who is going to go on to be a successful filmmaker and who is not? I thought my work with Broken Lizard and in Sight and Sound made me a good fit, but they did not. In truth, half of the current, working directors went to film school and half did not. As a side note, I’ve lectured at many of these schools since, and I love being able to tell the students the tale of how I couldn’t get in.
So now what? I had made friends at NYU with a guy named Kevin Cooper who was getting his film degree. Coop had served in a military intelligence unit as an interrogator and had been part of a group that went through Manuel Noriega’s house during the invasion of Panama. I brought Coop to a Broken Lizard show, and he hit it off with the group. He started taping our live shows and eventually became our director of photography on our video shorts. This took a huge weight off my shoulders, since acting and directing is difficult, but acting, directing, and camera operating is impossible. With Coop aboard, the quality of our shorts made a huge jump. When Coop needed to make his thesis film, we collaborated on a half-hour Broken Lizard short called The Tinfoil Monkey Agenda. We shot the film in Florida, with Coop’s future wife, Deanna, producing, and Coop and me codirecting—he chose the shots and I directed the actors. It was a fun shoot, and our first taste of having a real crew.
In the film, the United States sends a four-man military extraction unit into a Central American country called Palogna to capture and interrogate their dictator, General Manuel La La La Gamboa. A CNN news crew is embedded with the soldiers and reports live along the way. It was basically Wag the Dog, four years before that film came out. No, they didn’t steal it. No one saw our film.
For the edit, we split time between rooms at NYU and the editing house where I was working, Film Video Arts (F/VA). Since we couldn’t afford to hire an editor, Kevin and I did it ourselves. I’d work my manager’s job from ten A.M. to nine P.M., and then we’d edit from ten P.M. to four A.M. When we ran into a problem, we brought in more experienced editors for advice. It was ad hoc film school, but it worked. Sometimes, we’d cut so late, we would just turn the machines off and sleep on the floor. More than once, we woke up to mice staring us in the face.
The finished film was pretty good, though not great. The jokes and performances hinted at our future, but its thirty-minute length prevented us from getting into festivals. Festivals want shorts that are eleven minutes long or less because they want to group a bunch together into ninety-minute blocks. They will make an exception for a longer short, but only if it’s ridiculously good, and ours wasn’t. Making things worse, no one in show business wanted to watch our film either, because thirty minutes was just too much time to commit to unknown filmmakers. If you want the most people to watch your short, make it between ninety seconds and two and a half minutes. Remember the Budweiser ads about the guy who buzzes his friend’s intercom and says, “Whassup?” Before it was an ad, it was a two-minute short made by Charles Stone. This hugely popular short made its way around the executive suites of Hollywood and gave Charles a legitimate feature film career that continues to this day.
Ditto for the South Park guys. In 2000, we went to Los Angeles for meetings, and before each one, the executive would say, “Have you seen Clooney’s Christmas card?” George Clooney had seen an animated short created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone and had commissioned them to make a raunchy video Christmas card inspired by their short. That ninety-second video was hilarious and turned into South Park, which launched Trey and Matt’s careers. By contrast, our thirty-minute short was viewed by almost no one and failed to advance our careers at all. The one saving grace was that we learned a lot about filmmaking, so it wasn’t a total loss. When I showed the film to my father, he said he thought it was sometimes funny but that it didn’t look like a real movie. Dad never lies.
Meanwhile, our sketch show was killing it. We were selling out every show and got a big win when Comedy Central paid us to film one of our sketches for their interstitial programming. They hired an outside director, which we thought was smart, since we felt that I could never direct something that would go on real TV.
While the final result was solid and professional, and it was cool as hell to see ourselves on TV, the shot selection and timing didn’t quite feel like us. That convinced me that we could never outsource directing again.
Soon after, MTV called. They were making a sketch show, and rather than audition individuals like SNL did, they were going to hand over the reins to an already formed comedy group. Our manager, Dave Miner, learned that MTV was going to choose between Broken Lizard and the State. This is hard to believe, but at the time, we were the only two comedy groups of note working in New York City. (UCB hadn’t formed yet.) The State was made up of eleven NYU grads, and though we’d never seen their act, we liked our odds. Our show was smart and we were getting huge laughs. Plus, we were the only comedy group that was making videos, so we thought that we were more TV ready.
MTV came to our sold-out Friday night show and we killed. There was raging, boisterous laughter throughout the whole show. I talked to the MTV execs after and they were glowing with enthusiasm. Our careers were about to take a big leap forward. Though they didn’t mention it, we knew that they were going to see the State the next night. On Saturday, we had another show, which went great, but our minds were across town, wondering—how was the State doing? Couldn’t be as good as us, right? It’s not possible to do a show as good as the one we did.
Sunday came and went, and we heard nothing. Monday was more of the same—silence. Finally, Dave Miner called with the bad news. MTV was moving forward with the State. Wow. Okay. Wow. We were crushed. The TV landscape was full to the brim with sketch shows. There was SNL, The Kids in the Hall, In Living Color, and now, The State. We could bang our heads against the wall, but it was pretty clear there wasn’t need for another sketch show. With TV closed off to us, our only hope was to turn to feature film.
This was a critical moment for Broken Lizard because it changed our approach to show business from reactive to proactive. Instead of waiting for MTV to give us our break, we were going to make our own break. That attitude shift set the course for our careers. Our private reaction to M
TV was crisp. Fuck you. We’re funny. You’ll see.
CHAPTER 7
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Puddle Cruiser: How I Made a Film, When I Wasn’t Sure How to Make a Film
We were pissed off (about MTV) and convinced that we could make a film that could compete with the other DIY first features we were watching in theaters. But nothing quite prepares you for making your first feature. Sure, shooting shorts is helpful, but feature scripts are ninety-minute-plus stories, organized around the three-act structure. As a sketch group, we told stories lasting between ninety seconds and five minutes, so we had no idea how to expand to feature length. So we decided to follow in the footsteps of the Zucker brothers and Monty Python by making a sketch movie. We met for days, listing the various sketches we thought could be converted to the big screen. The problem was that we had sketches that took place in ancient Greece, in Hell, on a castle wall, on a fly strip, and so on. Each sketch would require a different set and would be very expensive to do well. When we examined the films Clerks, The Brothers McMullen, and Slacker, we found that the common denominator was simplicity of location—a mini-mart, apartments in New York, the town of Austin.
And then I remembered something I had been working on back at Colgate. It was sixty pages of a feature comedy script called Felix and Suzanne, which was based on my college relationship with my girlfriend, Denise. When everyone read it, the reaction was good. The whole story took place at Colgate, which felt very manageable. If we could add a few more characters, we thought that this could be our first feature. We wrote, rewrote, and rewrote again, and fifteen drafts later, we had the script, which we renamed Puddle Cruiser.
The story is about a college guy, Felix, who starts a casual relationship with a girl, Suzanne. Suzanne is still in a long-distance relationship with her high school boyfriend, Tracy Shannon, who attends a nearby college and plays rugby. Eventually, Suzanne breaks up with Tracy to date Felix full-time. While in bed, Suzanne jokes that Tracy wants to kill Felix.
Mustache Shenanigans Page 9
