Not really. I think I feel the same about it. I really have a healthy distrust for a lot of it. The most fascinating things in Hollywood are usually imported into Hollywood from somewhere else. This place, Lucasfilm here, is a perfect example of it. George Lucas was so outside the Hollywood system, you hear about the crazy stories of him trying to get films like American Graffiti and Star Wars off the ground. Once they got to the public, these film had so much impact that Hollywood had to accept him. It flowed through the Hollywood distribution system, but you can tell it was born out of a totally different place. My point is that Star Wars wouldn't have come from Hollywood system, because it was simply too inventive and just didn't look enough like the other product that was being made at the time -- like Zardoz.
Speaking of inventiveness, I know your background with gadgeteering and the production company, Visual Story Tools, you started with your brother some time ago. What's new with that?
We've got a really cool project that we're out shopping. It's repurposing movies by using digital effects, and we call it Jolly Filter. But right now we're just having meetings, so who knows?
We're doing that as our side project. For regular jobs, we've worked on all kinds of stuff and for all manner of clients: Jimmy Kimmel, Penn and Teller, Robot Wars, The Jim Henson Company, The Beatles, Discovery Channel, Disney, mostly our work has been in development.
Describe that. What's development?
Well, this is a fortunate byproduct of being the creator of Mystery Science Theater. Besides making money every time someone buys a box set of DVDs, I also get paid to come up with ideas. This has been fascinating to really get a glimpse of how Hollywood works. I got to work side by side with my brother Jim, who is wildly inventive and who, after 10 years, I still respect and admire.
It's fun, but it's kind of like being a concept car designer in Detroit in the '50s. They want you design something "way out" -- so you do, and it's really fun, you get to run amok. You design the car of the future with big fins and an acrylic bubble that's sole purpose is to rotate on a turntable at the car show -- or that's how it feels. Fortunately we negotiated to get most of the ideas back, we have about 3,000 concept drawings and storyboards, as well as scripts and "proof of concept" footage. Jim and I have agreed we will start to release these playful ideas sometime toward the end of next year. I believe our first book is titled "Rides and Attractions."
I think of all the gadgets that you would make, and you look at the world now and everyone is so gadget-crazy. Do you look around and feel like you were ahead of the game?
I do feel that way. I have to say I didn't anticipate that the world would be fabricating all these goofy things on a mass level. It was just what I was interested in at the time. I love the premise of an absurd labor-saving device -- such as a "fire detector with a snooze button." It's always such a nice way to construct a joke. But in today's world it's possible that someone would actually take an idea like that fire detector and then feel compelled to manufactured it in China, ship it to the States, and have it taking up shelf space at a Spencer Gifts. Not to be a kill-joy or anything but isn't all that stuff just more fodder for the landfill?
I can't help but think about in-flight magazine catalogs. My favorite one is a steak thermometer that phones you when your steak is ready.
That's a hilarious idea!
Because, if you're like me, you start a steak and you walk away from it.
Right. You can drive into town. "I gotta run into town, steak. Call me when you're ready!" That's amazing and funny, but it probably shouldn't be available to buy -- I don't want to make any loud fast rules here, but the world just doesn't need any more crap. We need to start making some decisions around our use of resources, and I vote that the steak thermometer that calls you on the phone be one of the first things to go.
Is the way you view movies different from the way most folks do?
I don't think so.
Did it change at all during the production of the show?
My first idea for Mystery Science Theater was really watching a movie with companions. That was really the heart of it. When you get an idea on its feet like that, it doesn't come out finished at all. It comes out in pieces, and over time it gets a momentum. I didn't really think of it as: "Yes! It will be Mystery Science Theater 3000 and it will have in excess of 500 jokes per show! It was much more simple and gentle. At that time, it was a radical idea just to have people sitting in silhouette watching a feature-length movie and saying things at all. I remember describing it as, "then the guy will get up, and go get something to eat or go to the bathroom and come back, and then one of his robot companions will roll in and mention that he just mopped up the ship, and then they would talk to each other and maybe say things about the movie."
That was as much as I knew about it when it dropped on me. It didn't come out finished. It was the people I was around, namely Trace and Josh, both funny and inventive in their own ways, that encouraged movie-riffing to bloom. Getting back to your original question about the way I view movies, yeah, as time went on I began to have affection for all these weird movies we were working with. I don't have the attitude like, "bad movies suck and I'm going to put my eyes out with a pen because I curse you, bad movie!" I like all movies, good and bad. The good ones I call great, and the bad ones I call horribly great.
Did you coin the term "movie-riffing"?
Yes'm, and that came much later. We were doing shows full time and I heard Dana Gould use the term "riffing" to discribe a joke session he had observed once between two comics. I'd also known about "riffs" in music: you've got jazz "riffs" and blues "riffs" and guitar "riffs." If you take those two meanings and put them together, you come pretty close to what Trace and Josh and I started doing to movies in the late eighties and early nineties. It made sense to me to label what we did as "movie-riffing" or just "riffing". To me "riffing" is using a movie as a springboard for other ideas, observations, and jokes -- sort of a moving, talking Rorschach test.
Because we really did it like you guys do at Flecks. We just turned on the movie we had never seen, turned on the camera, and sat down and did it. During all of channel 23, we never previewed a movie. That was the shakedown cruise that got it all together. It really came together when we cut a little sell package of Mystery Science Theater for Comedy Channel. It was the very best jokes, all strung together, from a period of 15-20 shows. That's when I really dawned on me where this was all going. The KTMA days were the incubator of it. Once we sold the show I insisted that we started writing the shows, in the hopes of bringing the entire show to the level of that little KTMA sell tape.
