About a year ago I was in this space, introducing myself all over again to a batch of readers both new and old. There was a time between when Movie Poop Shoot.com ceased to be and when Quick Stop Entertainment.com took its place. It was an odd time, scraping one site entirely to make way for a new one, but I just went with it, thinking that there just had to be better things around the proverbial corner.
I couldn’t have been more right.
It wasn’t that Movie Poop Shoot needed to be torn down to bring up Quick Stop in its place because I can’t be more proud or happy about the kind of work that was churned out on a daily basis. I can’t speak for my own writing but I know that of the authors there who had a weekly presence I felt a sense of innate satisfaction that was once a joke in a movie had metamorphosed into an Internet juggernaut that challenged everyone’s sensibilities and assumptions about what you were going to get when you visited a site with the word “poop” in it; to be perfectly honest there was that issue to contend with on any given day.
My world of part-time movie trailer critiquing took a sharp left turn when I thought that broadening the column’s purview could yield some interesting fruit if I took a unique angle on the interview process. When I started out doing it I wasn’t interested in the people out to promote things that were about to hit within the week, I was more interested in those who were in the process of creating, getting some kind of insight into why someone’s movie was going to be good. So, I dipped my toe in it and found I could do it. All modesty aside, it’s still up for debate whether I’m any good at it. The point is, though, I’ve always wanted to keep this column evolving and when Quick Stop started a year ago I really made a concerted effort to try and enhance what I brought to the table. I hustled, I called, I made appointments, I endured the weekly ignoring by publicists (and unless you’re one of the one’s who’ve actually returned an e-mail or phone call, you’re all rotten little people who’ve got no grip on being human and are all suffering from a lack of sexual satisfaction in your personal lives) and agents alike, no person was above giving me the Heisman.
Herr EIC, Ken Plume, has been an instrumental key in making these problems a little less than mere quibbles. He’s had an enormous amount of experience in the cold shoulder business and has been a rock when I’ve needed to be convinced that flying to LA and strapping C4 to some flunky’s face was not an acceptable response to being told we’re just not the right kind of outlet for an actor to appear on and then have them pop up elsewhere on a shitageously inferior site.
That’s the other thing, too.
Ken has been grand about instilling a sense of purpose in what I’ve done in this space. I know what happens here will never change the world in any meaningful way, that because I run interviews with people who have projects none of you will ever watch I should still do it anyway because of what it could mean later on and I know, without any kind of doubt, he’s been right about thinking that it’s their loss as well when all I get is static on the other end of the line. For a good example of how we dealt with Fox and everyone else who let me know that they were going to be in desperate need of publicity when BORAT was getting its geek premiere last July at Comic-Con. I mean, to put this in greater perspective, I was one of the first to ever give this movie a resoundingly positive review months before its release but it was all for naught when lamer heads prevailed and Fox ordered a press blackout of sorts, Rolling Stone did an excellent piece on Sacha Cohen when the great comedic wave was crashing all around the public sphere, and we did what anyone else who were jilted would do: we did our own thing without their help. 10 Quick Questions was born out of this and it’s, perhaps, one of the greatest interviews I never had the chance to do. Since then we’ve grown the format a little bit more here and there but I still love the piece on the whole and I’m sure you would agree after you read this:
KEN PLUME: Do you have any comment at all about Bruno, an individual who has just scored a 42 million dollar paycheck from Universal, is going to be developing a movie based on a show that looks suspiciously close to what you do?
BORAT:
KEN PLUME: And, a follow-up, how do you feel about Austrians in general?
BORAT:
KEN PLUME: Your English is remarkably polished for a man that comes from a country where formal education doesn’t seem to be a priority. How did you get a grip on the basic Anglo particulars of the world outside of a totalitarian regime?
BORAT:
KEN PLUME: Some people have leveled some pretty serious allegations that your quest across America has shown a lot of your subjects to be poor representations of Americans in general and that you purposely selected targets to get the greatest comedic reaction. How do respond to that?
BORAT:
KEN PLUME: Looking at the movie now what do you think is the starkest realization you can make about what this film represents?
BORAT:
KEN PLUME: What was like trying to convince Larry Charles to go along with you on this journey of yours and was there any hesitation on his part to get involved in this production?
BORAT:
KEN PLUME: What kind of frustrations did you have to overcome in order to be able shoot the kind of film you wanted with the money you had and was there any give-and-take with managing your needs with the needs of the studio?
BORAT:
KEN PLUME: Why do you think people, even I, are having a visceral reaction to this film’s material in general?
BORAT:
KEN PLUME: I am amazed by the groundswell of interest this movie has garnered as the film’s release date has come closer but do you think that your job, as an artist, is to simply reflect what you see or was there a germ in your mind about what you suspected you’d find when you plotted this film’s progression from pre-production to post?
BORAT:
KEN PLUME: Kazakhstan is situated right above Uzbekistan, the site for one of the bloodiest anti-government protests in Central Asia, hundreds of innocent people literally mowed down by government forces as the nation’s dictator, Islam Karimov, gave the directive to do so. Uzbekistan is enjoying the benefits of working with the United States by allowing detainees to be “interrogated†and “questioned,†and no doubt tortured, on Uzbek soil. Do you think Kazakhstan has the huevos to step up, do what’s right, one-up those Uzbekian lightweights and show them what oppression really means?
BORAT:
##We’d like to thank Fox Online Publicity for all of their help in setting up this interview.
##
Just unmitigated magic right there, kids. Never let it be said I don’t have it in me to take the piss out of a situation every now and then.
As well, there are some legitimate interviews who have really helped make this first year at Quick Stop worth all the effort I put into it on a weekly basis. Two people, actually, come to my mind as those who embody the essence of the conversational style in which I conduct my interviews: Darren Aronofsky and Andy Dick. The two couldn’t be more diametrically different from one another but if you were to look at the substance of each interview you could see that the thing I desperately try to do with every interview is keep it conversational. No, I don’t care about finding out gossipy bullshit. No, I don’t really care to know their stance on human rights in China. No, I could care less about what any individual does with their money. What matters, though, and this is key, is I start every interview with a genuine interest in the person and in the work itself. From there, I have a sheet of notes and pointers but everything is based by the sentence that has come before it. There’s nothing worse, and I am guilty of it, than shoehorning your question into a conversation. It should float to the surface naturally, on its own, and if you’ve done your work beforehand there are ways of making sure it slides in without a bump in speech.
From Andy Dick, then, there was a comment I made about the way in which his comedy comes off in general and of what people have come to ask of the man who, publicly, has been seen as a live wire:
CS: And people expect a certain kind of “Dickness,†if I may say so, and…
DICK: Yeah! They expect a certain vulgarity, a certain clowny goofiness but, to be honest with you, my roots are in grounded subtlety. My comedy roots really, believe it or not, are in grounded, subtle, almost sweet, and precious, comedy moments that are very real. Like Bob Newhart, Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. I was trained at Second City and ImprovOlympic where the motto is, “Truth in Comedy.†The comedy there was very grounded in reality.
I was just recording an episode of the Simpsons yesterday, playing myself. They said to me…I just have one line…and I just basically am Andy Dick trying to fit into the Blue Collar Comedy Tour and my line is, “Oh, I’m blue collar, I’m totally blue collar, my dad owns a shovel.†And I did it just like that. Really quiet. And they went, “Um, ok. Bigger! You can’t be too big in a cartoon.†And I’m like, “Ok. I’m blue collar. I’m TOTALLY blue collar, my dad owns a SHOVEL!â€
They’re like, “Really Andy Dick it up! Andy Dick it up! Bigger!â€
“I’M BLUE COLLAR. I’M TOTALLY BLUE COLLAR, MY DAD OWNS A SHOVEL!â€
And they’re like, “We love it.†What happens is the media, the people, the producers, the directors, the industry, the town, the audience, pushes you, pushes you, pushes you to be bigger, bigger, bigger. It’s up to the actor or the artist to say, “You know what? This is all you’re getting. Because this is how I want to be. This is how I want the character to be. This is all you’re getting.â€
And that’s why, a lot of the times, the big actors are so great…they’re so subtle. But sometimes it’s just because being big or being excitable is not in their repertoire. They’re just too cool for school. But, other times, it’s because they’re great actors and they’re making a conscious choice to keep it real and keep it subtle. Once “the guys upstairs†see that you can do the big stuff they don’t want you to be subtle. They just want you to be big, loud and goofy.
I was watching Robin Williams last night on Leno. He started off funny and manic and he got more and more manic until, by the end, he was screaming so much and so loud that he popped his throat. You could hear that he hurt his vocal chords.
CS: God…
DICK: That’s what happens. The audience laughs at your manic-ness and they’re going to stop laughing unless you up the ante and go even more crazy and that’s a trap we fall into as comedians. We’re so desperate to get that laugh that we’ll just keep screaming louder, dancing harder and faster until we’re sweating and panting with blisters on our feet and vocal chords. Yeah, it’s a problem that I have.
###
This interview has always stayed with me because I cannot look at the man and not think back to when he told me this about what other people in power want from him. He has to do it because it pays the bills but it’s just unbelievingly frank and open talk like this that makes all the transcribing of audio after the interview is done, worthwhile. I may not catch these things on the fly but uncovering these gems are a blessing when you get them.
So, too, then with the crowning achievement this past year with one of the best, and again, no superlative bullcrap aside, written, acted and directed movies in the past decade. Only given fifteen minutes from Darren, where nearly a year before I was laughed off the phone when he made the rounds to tell people how the editing was going, and I tried to be one of the sites to get some phone time with the man as the words “poop shoot” surely sunk my chances of that happening, when the film finally came out I still hang my writing hat on those little minutes. To hear Darren speak about his work so casually, to not have any front of being the kind of auteur that could probably afford to do so, you start to admire the guy’s sheer tenacity as an individual, as a person, to stay with a project long after he could have easily given it up with nary any person denying that he every right to do so. He’s just a person who wanted to do something and he’s a person who believes in the idea that death is something a lot of people in the western world would just care not to deal with. His comments about what the movie, at its core, means just sum up why it is that I am one of the luckiest people to be here writing for this site:
STIPP: Do you think…myself I have two daughters, and it wasn’t until I had them when I started to feel pings of my own mortality. I’m scared to do a lot of things and I think I have a problem with death. As you were working on this did you find that, as a society, we have a problem with death? With talking about it, accepting it?
ARONOFSKY: I think we’ve completely hidden it…Ignore it and face it with complete hubris even though it’s going to win. Eventually it wins over everyone.
We just completely deny it.
That was the interesting thing…When me and Rachel and Hugh would go to these hospices we would meet these caretakers and doctors and they would all say something astounding which was a lot of these young people when they got closer to death…something amazing started to happen to them; something similar [to what happens] to Izzie in the sense that they started to see something infinite in the finite reality in front of them but they had no vocabulary to talk about it. They had no way of explaining of what was going on because there’s just no education, and there’s no spiritual support structure in the west to help us with it.
So, as they’re going down this path the ironic thing is that the families, who are healthy, are so indoctrinated into western medicine and science are like, “You’ve got to fight. You’ve got to keep fighting. You’ve got to fight.â€
Even when, at a certain point, there is no more of a fight. It’s over.
And that’s the line that’s really hard; it’s when it’s ok to let go because, ultimately, it IS ok to let go because eventually we’re all going to die. But a lot of these people, a lot of these families, become really really tough and what happens, the tragedy of it all, that the person who’s dying actually dies in a much more lonely place because they can’t at all communicate with their families. And THAT, to me was the tragedy. That informed the whole plot of the film.
In THE FOUNTAIN you have Izzie who is actually approaching some type of understanding and trying to reach her husband who is just doing the typical, normal response of like, “No, I’m going to solve this problem. I’m going to fix it and you’ve got to keep fighting.â€
So, I think in the west right now we’re completely cut off from having any type of tool or any way of understanding that what makes us human and what makes us alive is that we will die and mortality is actually a part of our humanity…and that dying can actually be a part of our spiritual path.
[Darren smiles]
How about that? Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
###
Darren was just affable in ways that defy common US Weekly logic but make perfect sense in this realm here: we’re all just people. Some celebutards would have you believe it is all about the money and the glitz and the horrible stories about how wonderful it was to work with this or that person. At the core of it all, none of that matters but what can matter is how one person’s art, diffused through their personality, means something to them.
I toil in these things called interviews and I’m happy that I have one of the best gigs going as a reviewer of movie trailers but it’s every one of you out there who point and click that make it worthwhile and it’s the support of Ken Plume and everything that he’s done this year to try and make this a place worth visiting every day that just keep me coming back every week, regardless of how much I am positive there is no one reading this column judging by the lack of reader mail, to bring you my thoughts on the matter.
So, Happy 1st Anniversary, Quick Stop. May the publicists be friendlier this year, may the interview subjects be more plentiful and may God help me to try and land that one person from the thing from that film that’s opening next week which may or may not end up being huge…
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