I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

I get distracted on the internet and end up researching bizarre topics with far too much gusto.

A passing reference on the commentary on The Bob Newhart Show Season 3 DVD (the rental of which was a consequence of another research project) had be reading about the McMartin Preschool Case, the longest court case in US history.

If you’ve seen Capturing the Friedmans you’re familiar with the idea… the two cases were both part of the 80s “Child Abuse Accusation/Repressed Memories” dance craze, bopping to the beat of shoddy police work and overzealous child psychologists. But the Friedmans case seems to have had some kind of basis (if the movie is to be believed)—The McMartin case was based on the accusations of a mentally unbalanced mom—who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and according to this article who had an “obsession with her son’s anus.” That article, a couple of pages in, describes the investigating psychologists using sexually explicit dolls and puppets to coerce confessions out of the “victims.” Really, really fucked up shit. Never run a day care center… especially if you find yourself in the mid-1980s.
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Today’s obsession is the urban legend of the “Hungarian Suicide Song” aka “Szomoru Vasarnap” aka “Gloomy Sunday,” a song written in the 1930s that supposedly causes people to commit suicide when they hear it. (I was searching for the most depressing song ever written.) When I finally tracked down an mp3… expecting ghouls to manifest in my room… I discovered I already knew it… it’s on an Elvis Costello album for god’s sake. Further probing showed it was a big hit for Billie Holiday back in the dizzity as well (All the jazz & blues fans reading roll their eyes for my obliviousness… and go back to rolling their eyes at their musty, empty apartments that reek of sour milk and friendlessness.)

I haven’t found a recording of the original Hungarian lyrics yet, though I have found many covers. My aim is to do a techno club remix of the Suicide Song. Music hacks with an excess of keyboards, jack-hammer beats and a desire to launch a wave of hypnotic self-destruction in the glowsticks n’ poppers set should contact me.
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One last research project summed up briefly—Sliders was not a good show.

My living room (as seen in The First Steps and Cakey!) is no longer Cheerios-box, school-bus yellow. With the assistance of Mitch Magee, we spent 2 days repainting it “Harbor Haze” (though “November” was considered) which he described as depressing, rainy-day blue. I think it’s a marked improvement!

As you mave have seen last night or at channel102.net we decided to retire Cakey! The Cake from Outer Space early and stop making the show by self-cancelling with a seven minute episode (coincidentally the same time as the other puppet show and our rival for the top slot Puppet Rapist did the same thing).

I really like making these 102 shows… it’s the first thing I’ve worked on in a while that I really get into and get nervous about when they’re screened. However, we haven’t taken any time off in a year—we jumped from one show to another without stopping—and the strain of doing (for us) a really technically involved show was wearing on us. Since we’re only a three person crew… who all kind of live together and shoot in the apartment, it was getting really claustrophobic.

I think both Kirk and I had a lot of other Cakey stories to do (Duncan becomes a superhero, Duncan joins the football team, Cakey runs a-foul of a paranormal expert, the science fair, etc.), but they just took so much time to shoot and edit. Our actor for “Dad” is moving to LA next month as well.

I don’t really want to be “out,” but maybe we’ll individually trying working with different crews or on our own projects. Or not do anything, who knows.

Thanks for following Cakey.

Purchased in the last 2 days for Cakey! episode 4 –
Hershey’s Syrup
Two tubs of generic Cool Whip
Generic Cocoa Puffs
Men’s Henley (size 4X)
Yellow American Apparel T-shirt (found at a street fair—$2!)
Medical cloth tape
Fishing Line
Shaving Cream
Red Food Coloring
“The Cake Bible” (loaned to us)
Syringe and Stethoscope (loaned to us)
Contact Paper
Clear double-sided adhesive squares
(an impulse purchase, not actually needed for the show)

I recycled a sheet of felt, paint, 2 feet of plastic aquarium tubing and a torn sheet I had earlier.

We shot for 4 hours yesterday and knocked out two scene. We’re shooting tomorrow morning and hope to knock out one big scene and a special effects shot.

This is going to be one dilly of a king-sized show.

Every time channel 13 reruns the American Masters biography on Bob Newhart, I end up renting a lot of episodes of The Bob Newhart Show. I don’t think it’s particularly hilarious, but I get obsessed with them. It’s so… weird.

Even Cakey, when it was a far wackier idea, was going to have lots of incongruous Bob Newhart references in it. All that remains from that idea is the title typeface.

Obviously, a big part of it is the rocking Lorenzo Music-penned theme song, which is a summer jam and a half. I also like to see Suzanne Pleshett before she morphed into the vessel of the voice nightmares are made of. (Marcia Wallace pointed that out in her commentary track… S.P.’s voice has dropped 5 octaves since the 70s.)

I think it’s also strange that every bit part actor on the show later became cartoon voices. I only just realized after hearing the commentary track that one of the therapy group patients is the Country Crock voice-over man. And I just realized RIGHT NOW the old lady in the group used to play Dobie Gillis’ mom.

Regardless of all this, look at the menu for this DVD

Isn’t the most awful thing you’ve ever seen? It looks like the illustrator drew the bodies in Illustrator and then slapped overexposed screen captures of the faces onto the oversized blank heads. Somehow, even using a photo for the face, that looks nothing like Bob Newhart.

The first season DVDs didn’t have this… just minimalist drawings of the inside of Bob’s office in brown, burgandy and harvest gold. It was downright classy.

The flip of the DVD (there are 5 episodes of either side of the disk, you actually have to flip it over to get to all of them—seems bizarrely old fashioned like it’s a goddamned laserdisk or something) has similar “portraits” of Jerry and Howard.

In the words of that gorgon from the deep…

“OH, BAAAHHHHHB!”

MURDER?
Is this the end of Cakey? Who is this knife-wielding stalker?

FIND OUT at Channel 102!

We’re taping our second day (and first exterior) of Cakey! episode #2 tomorrow morning at 8 AM with our special guest star of the episode, Mark Sam Rosenthal. We taped all of Huskey’s business before he had to fly out to LA for pilot season and Gavin has already shot five hours last weekend in our apartment. Lou Fernandez ended up saving us at the last minute by loaning us an essential, hard-to-find prop (I dashed to Brooklyn to pick it up right before the actors arrived).

Bill, Kirk and I talked this weekend and at that time (after a long and technically difficult shoot) it seemed like we all wanted to kill the show. The biggest problem is working with—and around—the puppet. Cakey the puppet is just a head, basically, with an opening in the bottom for a hand to go in. If it had a body (like a Muppet), it would obscure the hand and maybe even head of the guy operating it. Cakey is also very stiff and can’t open its mouth without a lot of effort. He also smells terrible and under hot lights, reeks more the hotter it gets.

Later in the day, Kirk and I came up with a pretty good idea for #3 that would fix a lot of our “hiding the puppeteer” on set and in post issues as well as be quick and easy to shoot. So, I’m a little more optimistic about continuing if the audience wills it. As the screening is on a Tuesday (killing the UCB element by being scheduled opposite Harold Night), I can’t be all that confident we will be even though this episode is a lot more coherent (at this stage) than episode #1 (which was a collection of weird in-jokes and justifications for them).

We still have to pick up the tail end of the episode… also outdoors… with Gavin’s sister this weekend. Keep your finger’s crossed we don’t get snowed out. Or we’ll have to pull a Block.
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A couple of Cakey! mentions in strangers’ blogs:

PuppetVision
A Canadian puppet blog mentioned Cakey right after the screening and then included us in a weekly round up of puppets on the web (along side 102’sPuppet Rapist). Also has a lot of great puppet-related links for resources that I wish I saw when we were building Baku.

Yodelling Llama
Interesting writer does a round-up of 101 and 102’s prime time. Calls Cakey “funny” and “quotable”

The retooling of the Channel102.net went up tonight thanks to Will Hines coming over and hammering out the particulars we’ve been IMing back and forth about since last weekend.

Some tweaking is needed, but 90% of it is in place.

Channel 102

I spent this weekend looking for jobs on Monster, MediaBistro, and the “positions available” subsections of the Viacom and Columbia U sites while Kirk was working the graveyard shift at his work for the Oscars*... together we represented the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” yin-yang of employment.

A new week dawns and I haven’t sent out any resumes. I was too sucked into discussing what to do with the 102 website with Will Hines and testing out different ideas. The site has gotten much more complex in the last month since adding in a private IMDB for all shows and now dynamically generated png titles in any font as well as larger show thumbnails are on the horizon.

I decided to revise the logo first. I had to recreate the logo before when I was doing the UCBT calendars and 102 was on the back… there weren’t any 300 dpi images of it handy, so I just copied it in illustrator. Rounded square, bold sans text and go.

It’s pretty obviously a TV GUIDE parody as well, which I wasn’t that into, but the main issue I had with it were the rounded corners on a flat sided box. It’s supposed to resemble a TV, but TV screens stop being rounded in the 60s, and even then they had bowed sides (as did the original TV Guide logo).

I bowed the sides of the rounded-corner box to be more aesthetic and replaced the “channel” text with Microgramma—a typeface that it both very retro (‘51) and futuristic (used on all versions of Star Trek, Space 1999, and the Sub Pop logo), but most importantly WIDE. Getting a symmetrical balance in an aggressively unsymmetrical combination like “102” is retarded difficult. In Tanek, I added space between the 1 and the 0 to balance out the wide “2” (I also could have used a font with wide serifs).

In future revisions, I’d want to do something with no relation at all to the TV Guide logo. One text experiment, which might be adapted somewhere else, is using overlapping versions of characters made of horizonal lines (I did this in Illustrator) to simulate the look of video de-interlacing and the crunky stuff you get in overcompressed DV on pause.

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*Hooray for John Canemaker, my former professor at NYU for his Animated Short win. He was a very nice and interesting teacher; I wish I wasn’t such a shitty, lazy student in college.

Are you a teenage girl who loves quizzes and excessive graphics in your blog and/or message board signature? Would you like to pretend to be?

Feel free to download, link to channel102.net and plaster the web at large—

(While you’re at it, why not add Cakey as your friend on MySpace!)
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I made, but am far less enthusiastic about this one——since the MrGhost site is half-done and pretty cruddy looking. I also get regular emails announcing I’m at 95% usage of my bandwidth or some such crap. Feh.

We have a script for Cakey and our first day of shooting is tomorrow. Kirk and I wrote it during the commercial breaks of “Project Runway.”

Brian Huskey is leaving for LA on Saturday, so we have to shoot his whole bit in 2 hours or something.

This is just a friendly reminder that the February screening of Channel 102 is coming up next week, and we’d really like for you to attend.

If you’re unfamiliar with the 102 process, here’s what happens: Each month,102 screens ten (or nine, or eleven) five-minute homemade TV shows. Five of the shows will be returning from last month (see the
previous episodes online – channel102.net); around five (or four or six) will be brand new shows.

The audience votes on their favorite five, which return the following month with a new episode. Any shows with a lower vote total than the top five get cancelled—no more episodes will be made.

This month, we’ve submitted a new show called “Cakey! The Cake From Outer Space.” It’s starring Brian Huskey, Gavin Speiller, and a magic talking cake. Behind the camera, the crew was Bill Buckendorf, Kirk Damato and me (the same team that made “My Wife, The Ghost”).

We don’t know 100% if it will even be shown at the screening, but we’re telling people about 102 now so they can plan ahead. If it IS shown, we need your votes.

Regardless of whether we’re in or not, 102 is a great experience and a fun show. We hope you can come.

Channel 102 (www.channel102.net)
Monday, Feb. 27 at 8:30 p.m.
Anthology Film Archives – 2nd Street and 2nd Ave.
$5

I’m now 2 weeks behind on Project Runway... and I’ve been very resolved not to check the Bravo site and blogs for the spoilers. Since Kirk’s the one with cable and he’s in LA all week, I have no where to watch ‘em.

Oh, bother.

Comedy Central passed on My Wife The Ghost, which we had been dealing with for the last seven months after they optioned (is that the right term) for their broadband site, “Motherload”.

We get a kill fee for the scripts we wrote, but no new episodes will be made. Nothing will air.

Cakey is finally done taping… Jesus. We will have it done for the Feb 102. We need to pick up a shot and record voice overs and ADR. I promised Kirk I won’t talk too much about Cakey lest I give away the story. But we’ve shot in 5 locations over 3 months… too much for a 5 minute show!

Given the unpredictable audience voting as 102 enters its second year in a new venue (divorcing itself from the UCB improv scene), I will play Cassandra and predict that, despite top notch production, a laugh-filled script, and hilarious (UCB-affiliated) actors, we will not get voted back for a second episode. Since we’re losing 1/3 of the principal cast to LA pilot season for the entire month of March, that would save on a nightmarish gauntlet of scheduling… but I don’t think I’d make another pilot if Cakey bombs. I would be too heartbroken.

Neil Casey and I went out to Brookyn on Friday for the “release party” of Kupperman’s new comic, Tales Designed to Thrizzle from Fantagraphics.

I had a couple “blasts from the pasts” over the weekend. I almost never respond to “remember me from way back when” emails on Friendster or people googling you. Most of the time, flatly—I don’t remember. Second, I don’t see the fucking point? Like a lot of people I know, I’m trying to bury my hometown memories deep and surpressing them. I see no reason in reviving high school… it was an awful time. College, for the most part, too. No thank you.

Beyond that, thinking about my past just makes me embarrassed at what waste I’ve made of any potential I might have once had. My life in the present isn’t anything to write home (or ex-homeroom classmates) about… just depressing.

Despite that, I got an email from a CTY camp chum of 14 years past who’s moved back to NY and is now a lawyer… Whatever. So we’re going to meet for drinks on Friday. I’m not sure why I agreed to meet… maybe its because she’s local and I actually do have fond memories of camp (but I don’t have fond memories of my one man show about those fond memories, Riot Nrrd).

The same day, I got an email from “bryk” asking for me to do some art for his website. And I was like “I wonder if it’s Dan Bryk, the Canadian singer-songwriter I saw at Maxwells in 2001.” And, it was. Totally weird… I don’t even think he knew that I knew who he was.

His opening line of the email to me was “I’m fucking depressed.” Brilliant. Anyway, check out his tunes. I used to own Lover’s Leap, but gave it to someone as a last minute birthday gift. Some of the tracks sound like Sloan. Will Hines said it reminded him of Wilco.

Being a slow thinking, I only just caught on this week that I have a class to teach the same time as Channel 102 this month. So, for the first time since it started, I’ll miss the screening. I’m bummed, but at least I don’t have anything in.

Kirk will be presenting his collaboration with Rob Lathan, Standing Tall.

He also did significant featured extra work (unless he got cut) in Will Hines and Matt DeCoster’s The Block, which I also did middling background work on. I lost my sais, so Madame Fuck-You-Up was armed with an ice scraper/windshield brush instead. Will renamed me “Madame Spruce-You-Up.”

Next month, we’ll have Cakey in, for sure. We’re filming the last scenes this weekend.

This weekend I went to a shoot for Kevin Hines & Dave Lombard’s project Gears, which is so technologically elaborate I have no idea what it’s about. We did 3 hours of shooting this Saturday in front of a green screen and I got one of my lines in the can.

This month we’ve been occupied with My Wife, The Ghost for Comedy Central. We signed the contract last week to guarantee we get paid regardless of whether they greenlight it or not. We’ve sent in three scripts, that have all passed the first level of approvals. Our fate now lies in the hands of the president of East Coast Development. So, keep your fingers-crossed.

You’re a fucking fool if you don’t download a Dad’s Army or Vicker of Dibley wallpaper right this second.

British Sitcom Wallpaper

Will Hines said they look like something I might do. Yeah, if I was in a horrible car accident or had a debilitating stroke like Matisse, Hines! Thanks a lot!

While the top 10 Britcoms mention on the list are truly stomach churning (at least the ones I’ve heard of) and 11-100 ripe with injustices ( The Office, which I don’t even like, at slot 25—well below Father Ted, Keeping Up Appearances, and ugh, Are You Being Served?)... I also recommend this Brit-Blogger listing the ones he wishes were listed. Note how many of these bottom-feeders were remade for the US airwaves.

I am DYING to see an episode of The Gnomes Of Dulwich.

My favorite terrible Britcom didn’t make anybody’s list, Home to Roost. Why on earth does Channel 13 show it?

First off, if you live in New York, get your ass to Film Forum and see One, Two, Three. It actually was at Film Forum a couple years ago (I just checked… 2002, yipe!) when Billy Wilder died (at age 95! double yipe!) and now it’s back for his “100th Birthday.”

This movie is pretty terrific and pretty gloves-off for the time (1961-2).... and it made me laugh at Nazi jokes again. It was drubbed mercilessly by critics when it came out for being tasteless and Cagney’s difficulty with the material convinced him to retire from movies for 20 years (he required 52 takes for one of his monologues… but he talks nonstop for about 10 minutes).

There’s some dud scenes in it, granted—Cagney’s wife is a useless character who feels kind of tacked on and changes her mood randomly as it serves the plot and there’s some tedious shit where a guy wears a dress and the US MPs are after him. The strong presence of Coca-Cola and PanAm Airlines is weird; I read somewhere they provided the funding. They probably wouldn’t today based on how satirical (and casually Nazi-friendly) the script is. The man playing the president of Coca-Cola is doing an Anthony Atamanik Georgia accent. See it, see it, see it!

We submitted two scripts to Comedy Central on Monday, and they very quickly got back to us with changes…

Overall, the scripts were well received and they requested a third script that “explains” the show which initially they wanted to skip. We don’t want to do an “origin” story, we’re pretty firm on that, but we have to do a basic script that tells you who Jim, Rosalie, Sally, and the neighbors are. There was a specific request from our executive producer for scenes of wife-beating. It’s a classic.

I took out the script for our first 102 show and we’ll probably jump off from there. Jump off a bridge I mean!

We’re at the writing stage for My Wife, The Ghost for Comedy Central’s Motherload web thing and finding an awkward go of it after sitting around waiting for a contract for five months.

We pitched six story ideas for our initial offering of scripts (for two-to-three minute episodes), and they picked their two favorites. We will write them up and they can request rewrites and then decide from the scripts whether to order/produce eight more scripts (our “season” is ten shows).

If they don’t like the scripts (after the initial two), they can walk away from the project (in this case, no episodes of the show will appear on Motherload, but we can take it to a different network and pitch it there.)

The episode pitches they picked are “Jim goes on a blind date” and “Beatniks move into their apartment,” to give you the one line summary. I’m writing the first draft of “Beatniks” and find myself asking anyone I come across “What’s so funny about Beatniks?” The more specific question is what’s so funny about beatniks that hasn’t been made fun of before… Since the one note we got from our CC producer is to be “darker” in these scripts than in our 102s.

Most Beatnik jokes from their own era are basically the dumb guy/stoner caricature we have now (“I don’t mean to freak you out, but your organ’s broken and your monkey’s on fire”). There hasn’t been much made of their heroin use… or their weird homoeroticism/misoanthropy… but how to.. make it… funny.

Burroughs shooting his wife in the head…
Ginsberg oogling and groping underage boys…
White suburban youth aping the style and mannerisms of black jazz musicians…

Bleah… what I wouldn’t give for a Cappio.

TA DA!

Comedy Creates Originals For Motherload

(One of these days, the media will realize Bewitched is actually a 60s sitcom.)