If you’re the sort of person who loves conspiracy theories, hidden meanings, codes, ciphers, clues, and other mysteries that bear unraveling, then Room 237 is right up your alley. Director Rodney Ascher has put together a fascinating movie that will most likely change the way you watch Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining forever, or will at least make you search out some of the things that are discussed in this documentary.

Ascher, the director of the hilarious (and creepy) short from The S From Hell about the Screen Gems logo that was shown at Sundance 2010, is behind this clever documentary that mostly uses footage from Stanley Kubrick’s films (including The Shining, of course) to tell the stories of several different interview subjects: who each have a different view of the secret meanings of The Shining.

Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan, and Jay Weidner all believe that Kubrick’s 1980 film (based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel of the same name) is not just about a writer to takes his wife and young son to become the off-season caretakers at a remote hotel before he succumbs to the spirits that haunt the place. To each one of them, the film represents something different, ranging from Kubrick’s take on the Holocaust, to the plight of Native Americans who had everything taken away as the United States claimed the continent.

Blakemore, a longtime journalist, claims the Native American imagery throughout the film (rugs, portraits on the walls, even cans of Calumet baking powder with artwork of an Indian on the side) combined with the absence of any actual Native Americans in the film point to the fact that we have driven them entirely from their land and taken it over.

Cocks claims that the film is about the Holocaust, because Kubrick had always wanted to make a film about that event, but couldn’t figure out how to approach it. In his mind, Kubrick used this unique story to channel the Holocaust, particularly in the scenes where Danny has visions of past violence in the hotel, and the scene where the elevators spill forth gallons of blood.

Kearns believe that the film is meant to link to the Greek myth about the Minotaur at the middle of the labyrinth, which is why Kubrick included a large hedge maze which was not in the novel. She also claims that a poster in the game room advertising skiing at Monarch is meant to resemble a Minotaur, and is a clue due to the fact that the manager at the hotel explains to Jack why there is no skiing in the area. So why have a poster for skiing?

Other theories speculate that the movie is meant to explain that we never landed on the moon (the carpet pattern that Danny plays with his cars on is eerily similar to the design of Apollo 11 launch pad 39A), and these interview subjects can show you everything in the film from blatant erections, to piles of luggage meant to represent the suitcases Jews were forced to abandon in concentration camps, and the seemingly bizarre architecture of the Overlook Hotel.

While most of this sounds like an enormous load of horse manure (and it could be for all we know, given that Kubrick himself can’t exactly comment on these theories), Room 237 is an extremely fascinating film to watch whether you believe it or not. You will see things in The Shining that you never noticed before, and thanks to Carlos Ramos’ design and animation, you’ll be able to go inside the Overlook as never before.

By the time you get John Fell Ryan showing The Shining forwards and backwards at the same time while superimposed on itself, you’ll definitely find it interesting even if you are a skeptic, which I remain after seeing this film. Still, it is a highly enjoyable movie, and students of cinema should consider watching this just for the symbolism and imagery alone. I imagine double features of this movie follow by The Shining itself will become popular late-night showings at colleges around the nation. In fact, I’m going to fire up the movie right now and see if they can make a believer out of me.

The Upside: This movie will force you to see The Shining differently, whether you like it or not. It will also give you a deeper appreciation of Kubrick’s films, including (oddly enough), Eyes Wide Shut.

The Downside: It’s hard to buy all of these theories on face value, and since they can’t all be correct, you come away skeptical of everything.

On the Side: Rodney Ascher funded this film through Kickstarter, which is entirely awesome. He went over his goal of raising $5,000, and now his film has just premiered at Sundance. Pretty slick!

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Snuggle up with the rest of our Sundance 2012 coverage

Midnight movies at Sundance can be fun, often offering up bizarre and strange experiences. In the past that has included movies like Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (loved it) and Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (wasn’t so fond of it). The real thing to take away is from this section is that you never know what you’re going to get, just like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates.

With Grabbers, a UK film set in Ireland, you’re getting something very enjoyable, which will hopefully get picked up and distributed somewhere, even if it’s the Syfy channel or BBC America. I’d even love to see the Alamo Drafthouse pick up this movie with their distribution arm and turn it into a midnight event film. Why? Because the premise involves Irishmen fighting monsters while drunk. If there was ever a perfect movie for a theater connected to a bar, this is it.

Grabbers, directed by Jon Wright, was made through a myriad of funding options, including the UK Film Council Lottery, whose logo is appropriately a hand sporting crossed fingers. It takes place on Erin Island, where newcomer Lisa (the gorgeous Ruth Bradley) has used some of her holiday leave to take a post on the island while the Chief is away on holiday of his own for two weeks. She’s coupled with Ciaran (the talented Mr. Richard Coyle), a downtrodden, depressive officer who has a penchant for the bottle, and while he tells her that nothing exciting ever happens here, she tells him that it’s the quiet places you have to watch out for. Of course, she’s right. Little does she know that things are about to get very un-quiet at her temporary post.

As the film opens, a shooting star, meteor, or something from the beyond descends over the Earth and later crashes into the sea, observed by a fishing ship. Upon closer inspection, strange tentacles burst from the sea and kill everyone onboard, giving us our first glimpse of the grabbers. Local drunk and fisherman Paddy (the hilarious and scene-stealing Lalor Roddy) catches a more diminutive version in a lobster trap, and promptly takes it home. You know, because that’s where you take strange creatures As islanders begin disappearing, and we catch a few glimpses of the main beastie, our intrepid officers slowly begin to realize that something strange is going on. Paddy is attacked by the creature that had been living in his bathtub, although he strangely survives the attack. The same thing happens to Ciaran when he’s at the laboratory of local scientist Smith (Russell Tovey, equally funny), and they slowly discover that these creatures don’t like to feed on people when they’re drunk.

They also can only move around when the weather is wet, and with a huge storm approaching that night, a plan must be put into action. So, our two stalwart constables decide to throw a massive party and get everyone drunk. Nothing can possibly go wrong with that idea, right? To answer that question would be to spoil the ending, but you can probably surmise on your own what happens. But that doesn’t make Grabbers any less enjoyable. Ideally, you’ll be able to enjoy this film with a glass of whiskey in your hand and a pint chaser waiting on the table in front of you, but even if you have to see it sober, it’s a fun, small British film, complete with the requisite British humor and characters actors. It won’t set the world of horror films on fire, but it is highly enjoyable.

The Upside: The lovely Ruth Bradley. Seriously, we cannot stress enough how delightful and talented she is, as well as being extremely attractive.

The Downside: For a creature that devours people and spits out their heads, we don’t see the Grabbers nearly enough.

On the Side: Both Jon Wright and writer Kevin Lehane explained that this movie owes a huge debt to Tremors, and
they’re right. Still, a double feature of Tremors and Grabbers, doesn’t sound that bad, especially if drinks are
involved.

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One of the reasons that I love going to the Sundance Film Festival is that amidst the sea of angst-ridden romances, dramas that explore feelings that have long-since been forgotten about, and documentaries, you’ll sometimes find a gem that will change the way you see movies. Beasts of the Southern Wild was that film for me this year.

At face value, it’s a difficult film to fully explain. A society that lives off the grid from the mainland of a country ignores the warnings that their lives are in danger should the nearby levee break. They live in ignorant bliss, reveling in their lives and calling their home “The Bathtub” in a light-hearted mocking of the fact that a wall of water could come crashing down and destroy them all.

At the heart of the movie lies Hushpuppy, a six-year-old girl who lives near her father in a separate dwelling that allows her to live a wild, free existence with the other residents of the Bathtub. When she needs solace, she hides in a cardboard box in her stilt-supported home and draws pictures that will “Tell the world that there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub.” But despite their best efforts, the outside world does intrude on their existence. Wink, Hushpuppy’s father, goes missing one day, leaving Hushpuppy to fend for herself. When he finally does return, he’s wearing a hospital gown and a hospital bracelet, two things that are completely foreign to Hushpuppy. He ignores her, driving her to act out by burning her house down. This leads to an enormous fight with Wink, the first of many they have throughout the movie. But as often as they fight, they also have a lot of fun together. While they don’t have a traditional father / daughter relationship, it couldn’t be more clear that he loves her.

Hushpuppy comes to learn that her father is sick, and she begins to think that he might die and will leave her alone. She faces this possibility with strongly, but also doesn’t want him to die. Wink’s illness, an impending storm, and the release of prehistoric monsters aiming for the Bathtub frame the rest of the narrative of Beasts. 

The movie is part fantasy, and partially a reaction to a post-Katrina New Orleans, as many of the residents speak in a near-Creole dialect, and live in their own version of the Bayou. But in the map of the Bathtub and the surrounding area that is shown early in the film, it is clear that this area does not exist in our own world. It’s pure fantasy, grounded in a reality that we all know.

The movie is utterly amazing, and is powered by an incredible performance from Quvenzhané Wallis as the six-year-old Hushpuppy. Dwight Henry also turns in a terrific performance as Wink, both of whom are first time actors and residents of the Louisiana bayou country. The film itself is loosely based on the play Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar, which is about a young boy losing his father at the end of the world. She co-wrote the film with Benh Zeitlin, who also directed the film as his first feature.

Luckily, Fox Searchlight has picked up the rights to Beasts of the Southern Wild, and you can probably expect to see it at an art house theater somewhere near you in the coming months. It’s well worth watching, and will take you out of your own world, if just for a little while.

The Upside: This is a beautiful film mired in fantasy and reality with a powerhouse performance from Quvenzhané Wallis.

The Downside: Sadly, middle-America will probably avoid this film en masse as they won’t “get it.”

On the Side: According to Wikipedia, Hushpuppies are savory, starch-based foods made from cornmeal that is deep fried or baked in small ball or sphere shapes. And yes, they are very delicious (though not juicy).

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Snuggle up with the rest of our Sundance 2012 coverage

As George Bush once bastardized, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — [pauses] — shame on you. Fool me — [pauses] — You can’t get fooled again.” Although I have the feeling that the filmmakers behind The Comedy probably enjoy P.T. Barnum’s statement a lot more, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” By filling theaters full of willing film festival audiences at Sundance 2012, they’ve put together groups of suckers, just waiting to be taken in. Just heed our warning and don’t take the bait.

Does that sound drastic? It might, but I hope that a moment of drastic reading for you can spare you from 90 minutes of pain where the only Comedy is the feeling that the filmmakers are laughing at you behind your back. No doubt they would do the same thing upon reading this review. To quote even more (I’m going for a quota of three quotes in this piece, and here’s the last one), let’s remember what Mark Twain said in Huckleberry Finn, “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

While I’m not hoping that a bullet finds me for muddling through this movie and writing a review, it might have been sweet relief about halfway through watching it if I had been prosecuted.

The Comedy opens with a scene featuring spoiled hipster Swanson (Tim Heidecker) dancing around in slow motion with his male friends in their underwear, while they spew beer all over each other, tuck their penises between their legs, and clown around like buffoons. Like any modern moviegoer, you’ll think to yourself “Oh, this will be explained somewhere in this film. And it is. But the explanation will have your brain’s last caring cell dying as you come to this realization.

From there we jump to the massive home of Swanson’s father, who lies comatose and dying in a bed while tended to by a male nurse. Swanson, wearing flip flops, shorts, and loudly munching on an assortment of cookies and drinking whiskey watches from a nearby chair. He verbally abuses the nurse, subtly, about his job, asking him if he’s ever had his father’s shit under his fingernails, and if he’s trained how to handle a prolapsed rectum. That’s your introduction to Swanson.

From there, you watch as he idly drifts through life, hanging out with his equally dissociative friends (one of whom is portrayed by comic partner Eric Wareheim) who float through life drinking and performing esoteric comedy for each other. He also attempts to connect with “normal life,” from the perspective of someone who has grown up wealthy and privileged, by applying for mundane jobs on an impulse. He tries to get hired at a bar in a distinctly black part of town, offers a cabbie $400 to let him drive his taxi for 20 minutes, and eventually gets hired as a dishwasher at a small restaurant.

He also connects with people in an entirely detached manner, and when he finds a verbal sparring partner on his level of wit and rapport working at the restaurant (he asks her if they can use her vaginal yeast to bake bread, and she says she was directed to ask about his dick cheese), it seems like he’s made a tenuous connection. By after inviting her out to the boat he lives on, he sits idly drinking whiskey while she has a full-on seizure right when they begin fooling around. He then drops her back off at the pier and continues his meandering walk through life.

That’s about the size of things. There are moments where you begin to think that something more will happen, as when Swanson interacts with his sister-in-law or when he meets the waitress, but nothing changes and things continue as they were before. You can almost see the cracks in the shell that Swanson wears as he stumbles into a patient’s hospital room and combs his hair, but that’s as close as you get to anything deeper.

Sundance festival director John Cooper told CNN, “This is not a comedy. It’s dry and ironic, even from the title.” While chief programmer Trevor Groth added, “It’s a provocation, a critique of a culture based at its core around irony and sarcasm and about ultimately how hollow that is.” That’s not a statement I would agree with, and after sitting through this, I feel the Comedy is the fact that this film was accepted into Sundance, and that the filmmakers are laughing behind our backs. That’s the realization you come to while searching for any sort of deeper meaning.

The Upside: This is the first time I’ve seen an indication that Tim Heidecker is actually a fantastic actor. He’s able to deadpan his way through most of this movie, but there are moments where you can read a small semblance of emotion on his face. It’s not easy to pull off and he does it well. It would be fantastic to see what he could do with a proper script.

The Downside: The entire movie feels like an inside joke, one that the audience is the butt of. There is a lot of wasted potential, and a good story somewhere underneath all of this.

On the Side: This is the first movie to be released by Capcom Pictures, the motion picture arm of the video game company that brought you games like Street Fighter, Mega Man, and Resident Evil. Not sure if we’ll see The Comedy: The Game anytime soon.

Click here for more otherwise painless Sundance 2012 coverage

If you’re reading this review, then I’m going to assume that you’re already familiar with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, the talent behind shows like Tom Goes To The Mayor and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! With each iteration of entertainment they’ve produced, it seems like things get more off the wall and strange, and Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie is no different. It steps across every boundary you can imagine, and then some.

The premise behind the film is that Tim and Eric have been given a billion dollars by the Schlaaang Corporation to make a movie, and the film opens with a screening of that film, which is only three minutes long and stars a Johnny Depp impostor (they thought they had hired the real Depp) as Diamond Jim and sporting a suit made entirely out of real diamonds.

Between that and the makeovers they gave themselves (capped teeth and deep body tans), helicopter rides to the office, and a $500,000 weekly salary to their guru Jim Joe Kelly (Zach Galifianakis), they’ve squandered it all. And due to the fact that they didn’t read their entire contract, Schlaaang, headed by Robert Loggia (looking incredibly like the Cryptkeeper in this film), can demand all of that money back. Which they do.

In dire straits, the two of them go on a drunken bender full of drugs, body piercings, and more, which culminates in them seeing Will Ferrell in a commercial playing at the bathroom urinals offering the chance for someone to come and run the S’wallow Valley Shopping Mall and Pizza Court to make a billion dollars. With their salvation upon them via piss-soaked urinal cakes, they head out to run the mall and make their bill.

Once they get to the rundown, ramshackle, and rodent-ridden mall, it’s a far cry from the lush and thriving version pictured in the commercial. Bums make their home here, a wolf roams the pizza court, and stores like “The Used Toilet Paper Shop” are the lone tenants. But Tim and Eric take it in stride, adopting Will Ferrell’s nephew Taquito (John C. Reilly) as the caretaker, and they set out to turn things around.

Of course, in typical Tim and Eric fashion, what results isn’t a standard business plan, and a cavalcade of the extreme spews forth. Literally. There’s a very lengthy scene involving four young boys firehosing diarrhea from their asses onto Wareheim in a bathtub while being presided over by Ray Wise as the head of a Scientology-esque company in the mall. That sparked at least a dozen walkouts at the premiere. There’s also strap-on sex, an inappropriate relationship between Tim and a little boy, and more.

It all leads up to a climactic showdown with Schlaaang, including a heavily armed Loggia and William Atherton, who serves as Loggia’s second-in-command. When it’s all said and done, you’re left with a film that is part hilarious, part disgust, and about 30 minutes too long. The film opens with an infomercial starring Jeff Goldblum as “Chef Goldblum” who explains the wonder of Schlaaang’s Cinema Seating, which involves IVs, leg-spreaders, and an automatic popcorn machine. When that is one of the best parts of the movie, you wonder why they didn’t make the whole thing a collection of vignettes, much like Awesome Show, Great Job!

Hardcore Tim and Eric fans will likely enjoy this, but it’s fairly hit or miss. Wait for the video, and make heavy use of the fast-forward.

The Upside: When it hits, it’s hilarious. There are enough hardcore laughs out of this movie so that you can string together many minutes of enjoyment. The fake commercials are the best part of the movie.

The Downside: There are 30 unnecessary minutes in this movie, and it would have been a lot tighter if they had trimmed the fat.

On the Side: Love it or hate it, the movie will be available via On Demand on January 27, and in theaters on March 2. Direct to you from the minds behind Funny or Die.

Click here for more from Sundance 2012

It’s no secret that we love Mystery Team at Film School Rejects. In fact, the only thing that could assuage the pain we’re feeling that this movie isn’t coming to Blu-ray is to load the DVD up with special features. Wait, what? They’re already doing that? Well maybe they can just bring the entire Derrick Comedy team into our living rooms and perform the movie for us in person. That’s about the only way they can top themselves. Mystery Team director Dan Eckman sent us this exclusive image from the DVD extras. It’s a featurette called “Who Is Wally Cummings?: The story of an enigmatic, creepy, and disputably talented character actor who visited the set of Mystery Team.”

This is exactly why we love Derrick Comedy. We just hope they’ll be able to put another feature together, what with everyone become famous and well-known all over the place. What’s going to happen to the face of indie comedies when these guys are all owned by NBC? Do your part. Don’t let it happen. By massive quantities of Mystery Team on May 25th to assure a sequel. Keep hope alive!

Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema. Every week Brian Salisbury normally force-feeds you hot spoon-fulls of hot garbage from his personal celluloid landfill, but today I’m stepping in to blast your eyeballs and clog your arteries.  These stinkers may have fallen short of technically proficient from the time their scripts were greenlit, but they nevertheless occupy a special, greasy part of our hearts.  To make matters worse, we also provide a themed suggestion as to the tastebud-pleasing, artery-clogging snack item you should be cramming into your gullet as you watch the flick. Today’s film is not for the faint of heart, nor indeed for the faint of mind. Today’s film…is The Shadow.

The Shadow is based on famous character that originally ran as a radio program from 1931 to 1955 … let me repeat that for one second. It ran from 1930 to 1955. That’s a steady stream of stories for some 25 years. Amazing, right? Although he originally appeared as a narrator for Detective Story Hour,  The Blue Coal Radio Revue, and oddly enough, Love Story Hour, The Shadow came into his own in 1937 when he was given a show of his own, and voiced by a young and ambitious Orson Welles for one full year. The show continued without Welles, having several characters over the years, and branched into pulp magazine novels, television, comic books, and even four feature films from 1937 to 1946. But in 1994, a new version of The Shadow appeared, with Alec Baldwin at the helm. This was meant to catapult him into superstardom, which he’d toyed with on films like The Hunt for Red October and Miami Blues, but megastardom eluded him like … a shadow.

What Makes It Bad?

The camp factor. There’s an undercurrent of sinisterosity (another word I’m coining) in the original The Shadow radio serials, where Lamont Cranston really wreaks havoc in the lives of criminals. He drives plenty of them mad by talking to them without being there, making them think they’ve gone insane. There’s a complete recreation of this in The Shadow, where Tim Curry blasts away at the shadows with a Tommy gun, going completely bonkers in the process. Tim Curry is an amazing actor, I’ll grant you that. But his drooling, bumbling Farley Claymore in this film drove me nuts. He’s buffoonerific, and not in a good way. He becomes an agent of Shiwan Khan, but almost as a court jester. Khan is the real baddie here, although why he would ever agree to work with this nitwit is beyond me. There had to be better people to choose from. Claymore is also supposed to be working on the world’s first atomic bomb for the War Department as well, and how he got that job I’ll never know.

This was also Sir Ian McKellen’s first notable film role as well, having played Death in The Last Action Hero opposite Arnold Schwazenegger just the year before. Although he wouldn’t really appear on movie moviegoer’s mental maps until he played Frankenstein director James Whale in Gods and Monsters in 1998, I urge you to go back and watch him here in The Shadow. He’s terrible! And I mean terrible on a Gandalf-esque scale. Granted, he isn’t given much to work with, but he stumbles through this film like he’s hypnotized. Oh, wait. He actually is hypnotized through most of this movie. But still, it’s painful to watch. Thankfully, you know he has a lot better work ahead of him, and I’m just glad beyond belief that this wasn’t his swan song. Imagine closing out an entire career with a performance like this. He’s also a fairly odd choice for the role, coming off fairly meaty history in Shakespeare roles and BBC television. Surely there were some better choices for this role.

Likewise is the shrew-like nagging that Penelope Ann Miller brings to the role as The Shadow’s love interest, Margo Lane. In the radio dramas, Lane was The Shadow’s partner in crime-solving, but here the producers thought it would be fitting to give her mental powers. This completely blows any sort of tension over who The Shadow is between Cranston and Lane, because she figures it out pretty quickly. Where’s the whole Superman/Clark Kent/Lois Lane triangle love? That dynamic worked because of the entire “Will she find out?” dynamic, and that would have worked perfectly in this film, especially if they were gunning for a sequel. Instead Margo finds this out in short order, dreamily flitting through one of his dark and disturbing dreams where he relives the nightmarish life he used to lead as an opium druglord. “You’re not supposed to be here” he says to her in the dream, and that’s how I feel about her entire role in the film. Another actress probably could have nailed this … like Jennifer Connelly. She really looks good in period 1930s pieces like The Rocketeer and Dark City, so why not The Shadow? Miller smiles and utterly fails at charming her way through this film, where Connelly could have given us someone to care about.

Crime solving. Where is it? Sherlock Holmes battles a nefarious master of crime in the recent movie of the same name, and that’s exactly what The Shadow’s bread and butter was all through the radio dramas and the pulp magazines. But in this film, there isn’t a lot of crime solving going on. There’s a master plan at work, headed up by an evil mastermind, sure, but The Shadow doesn’t really spend much time using his detective skills. The fact is that there’s a telepath on a scale much larger than Cranston’s at work in New York City, and he doesn’t even realize it. That probably says more about Shiwan Khan’s skill than the lack of Cranston’s, but it still makes you wonder how he’s been able to operate under his nose for quite some time. They also both spent time under the tutelage of the same master, so you think there’d be some kind of mental “Oh, hi there” going off in Cranston’s brain. Perhaps it’s the fact that he spends a lot of his free time boozing it up as his alter ego, and dating women like Lane. Blurgh.

Is this nitpicking? Hell yes it’s nitpicking, because I’ve seriously had to think of things I don’t like about this movie. I’ve seen this movie dozens of times, and the poster emblazoned one of my walls when I was in college, and when you love a bad movie so much, it’s hard to remember what’s bad about it. Sure, Khan’s henchmen are all idiots, Peter Boyle’s dimwitted cabbie is slightly annoying, and I won’t get started again about the irritability that Penelope Ann Miller brings to the screen, but you sort of ignore these things when you love something, am I right? The fact that I’m watching this again right now as I write this, knowing all the lines in advance, prove that you can pull this off.

Why I Love It!

I’m a complete sucker for old-time radio junk. Those people churned out stories constantly, in some cases several times a week, and came up with extremely novel and clever ways to keep a plotline running forever. Give me a road trip and satellite radio tuned to the “Classic Radio Shows” channel, and I’m in heaven. Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, Jack Benny, The Whisperer, The Whistler … these are the amazing characters of yesteryear that just don’t exist anymore. Amazingly, when the gave Lamont Cranston and the story of The Shadow a reboot in 1994, they did it right. It wasn’t all jazzed up with ridiculosity (a word I want to stake a claim on), and they nailed what was right about the guy. This was a character so iconic that he helped spawn The Whistler, Batman, The Green Hornet, and a slew of others. Plus he had the ability to cloud men’s minds, making him one of the first heroes with an actual superpower, and not some techno-gadget that did all the work for him.

In the radio series, Lamont Cranston was a wealthy playboy, who ambiguously gained the power to cloud minds while traveling through Asia. Radio drama were lucky enough to be able to explain a backstory like that with just a few words, but in the movies you have to flesh that out with visuals that make an impact. With the movie, they decided to overhaul Cranston completely, and turned him into disaffected ex-soldier with a much darker background. He’s made a fortune dealing in opium in Tibet, and is a vicious warlord. There’s a single scene where he’s hacking and slashing his way through enemy soldiers, bathed in blood. It’s oddly disjointed, because it’s the practically the bloodiest scene in the film, but it lets you know that this isn’t going to be your grandfather’s Shadow.

Cranston, known as Ying Ko in Tibet, eventually gets taken in by The Tulku, a mystic man who aims to turn him into a force for good. And who better for the task since he knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Cranston resists, fights with a mentally controlled, anthropomorphic living dagger called the Phurba, and eventually succumbs. He trains with the Tulku for seven years, learning how to hone his abilities and make brains cloudy with telepathy, erasing any trace he’s around them, except for his shadow, which is something he’ll never be able to hide. He then takes his new skills, and his remaining drug fortune, to New York City where he wages war against the criminal underbelly, hiding in the shadows and building a network of contacts in the process. Contacts that wear a special ring, and know the password response to “The sun is shining.” Which is, “But the ice is slippery.”

The film nails radio bits like this perfectly (making me want my own The Shadow ring in the process), and gives us the best image of The Shadow to date. When he’s in his guise as the character, he looks nothing like Lamont Cranston. He’s got a bigger nose and beadier eyes, which are projected mentally by Cranston. In fact, he looks a lot more like Daniel Baldwin than Alec Baldwin during these moments. He also sports a black trench coat with a huge, red-lined, billowing cloak that would make Batman jealous, wears a large slouch hat, covers the lower half of his face with a red scarf, and sports twin automatic pistols .45s in underarm holsters. In other words, he’s an armed badass with mental powers. When he eventually squares off against Shiwan Khan, a baddie from the radio days and a descendant of Genghis Khan, the two of them engage in an epic battle of willpower. Khan much more skilled than Cranston in the brain arena, and he’s hypnotized an army of henchmen and hidden an entire high-rise building from sight in the middle of New York City. Pretty impressive stuff from Khan, where Cranston rarely uses the ability to hypnotize people. Even so, The Shadow’s eerie laugh that echoes around the screen when he’s confronting a bad guy is sheer perfection.

And how can I talk about this movie without mentioning Alec Baldwin? He owns this role, pairing both the dark and sinister actions of The Shadow with the flip, gadabout town attitude of Lamont Cranston. He’s got a definite sense of humor throughout the film as Cranston, but he’s completely deadpan and as serious as a heart attack as The Shadow. They’ve peppered the film with other characters from the series, namely the aforementioned Peter Boyle as Moe Shrevnitz and Penelope Ann Miller as Margo Lane, but this film is carried on the back of Baldwin’s performance, with some kudos to Jonathan Winters’ portrayal of Police Chief Wainwright Barth as well. I would have liked to have seen more of his training in Tibet, but with only two hours you have to get the Shadow in New York pretty quickly to establish him there, so I get it. There’s a whole world he already has established by the time the movie takes us to New York, and they did such a good job with it that I want to see that too. Who else works within his vast network of informants and assistants? Only The Shadow knows.

Sadly, the film was meant to be a summer blockbuster from Highlander director Russell Mulcahy for Universal in 1994, but it flopped. The budget was $40 million, and it only pulled in 48, killing the plans for a sequel. Still, when this old school radio drama catapulted off of the pulp pages and onto the screens of the multiplex, it never left my imagination. And yes, I even bought some of the toys from The Shadow toyline … which were bargain-binned quickly at 80% off. Score! There’s supposedly a new version in the works with Sam Raimi producing. Not surprising considering the fact that Darkman looks a lot like The Shadow.

Junkfood Pairing: Corn Dogs.

Corn Dogs. Delicious meat inside, crusted with a golden, thick, breaded shell. That’s what you need when you watch The Shadow. It’s a classic American food, just like The Shadow is an American original, and it’s deep fried in fat … just like America. You have to work to get to the good stuff, ignoring the cholesterol-clogging qualities of the outer shell, but once you get inside there’s a juicy hot dog on a stick waiting for you. You can attempt to dress up that shell with fancy mustards, or in this case you should really use some sort of sweet and sour sauce as a nod to The Shadow’s Asian origins, but you really want to power through that and get to the goodness of processed sausage.

Cheech and Chong broke up in the mid 1980s, and to the world of marijuana-based humor, that was like losing Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. They’d had a successful run since 1969, and had just decided to call it quits. Cheech left to pursue a successful television and movie career, while Chong was devastated and eventually dabbled in television, music, and his son’s glass company … which was later raided for selling bongs and earned Chong some prison time. But in 2008, the two finally reunited and went on a highly successful comedy tour, which was filmed and turned into the upcoming DVD/Blu-ray/VOD/Xbox Live/Playstation release Cheech & Chong’s Hey Watch This, which appropriately hits on all platforms on 4/20.

The first VCR we ever got was purchased by my dad from his younger brother back in the very early 1980s. It was the size of a Buick, was a top-loader, had a wired remote control … and came with a battered VHS copy of Cheech & Chong’s Up In Smoke. So before I was introduced to the mainstream world of movies, I had repeated viewings of Cheech & Chong. That is, until my mother discovered what Up In Smoke was all about. Plus it had boobies in it, so that was curtains for my Cheech and Chonging. But I recently had the chance to sit down with them, which was a bit surreal. Who knew we’d see them together again?

Watch the video below where they talk about what a long, strange trip it’s been to 2010, what’s next, when we’ll see another Cheech & Chong narrative movie, and other various weirdness. I apologize for the less-than-stellar camera setup, but this was recorded in an empty office at The Weinstein Company, and my gaffer was off for the day. Blaze on through and give it a watch.

“It wasn’t as good as the book!” That’s the usual refrain you’ll hear from people who watch adaptations and then scowl at them later. Luckily, you won’t have to do that since Disney’s upcoming, Tim Burton-directed Alice in Wonderland is meant to be a sequel to the book. That’s all well and good, but what if you’ve never read the book? What if you’ve missed the countless other adaptations and are worried about going in without the benefit of knowledge? We’d never do that to you, dear readers. So press on, arm yourself with an education in Alice in Wonderland and go in forewarned. You’ll be able to chuckle knowingly at the obscure characters, and tip your hat to the small nods to Lewis Carroll. You know, if you were the kind of person who wore a hat and tipped it.

The Book

Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson made up a story to entertain three young sisters (one of whom was named Alice) while on a rowing trip in 1862. The real-life Alice (10 years old at the time) asked Dodgson to write the story down for her, which he finally did two years later. He presented her with a handwritten manuscript entitled “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”, complete with his own illustrations. However, he had also decided to nearly double the story in size and publish it on his own, and in 1865 “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” first appeared, with new illustrations by John Tenniel. Dodgson also used his pen name Lewis Carroll for this publication, which was explained in Moron Cohen’s “Lewis Carroll: A Biography” as this: Lewis was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll an Irish surname similar to the Latin name Carolus, from which the name Charles comes.

The initial print run of 2,000 books sold out quickly, and it has been in print ever since and translated into more than 125 languages. Pretty impressive for a goofy story that Dodgson / Carroll based loosely on his friends and the locations around Oxford. It also spawned a sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There” in 1872, and since then there have been numerous other Alice-inspired creations, including books, movies, television shows, songs, comics books, and more.

The Story

If you haven’t read the book by now, shame on you. It’s a completely fun and perfect example of literary nonsense. It’s about a young girl named Alice (shocker, right?) who is sitting in a garden one day when she sees a White Rabbit wearing a vest scoot by. He’s checking his watch and complaining about being late, so what would you do if you saw an animal doing this? Naturally, you’d follow it. Alice does, right into his rabbit-hole, and this sends her tumbling end over end in an impossibly long fall. When she lands, she’s in a corridor full of doors, all of them locked. There’s one small key on a table, and she finds out that it opens a tiny door in the room, but it’s much too small for her to fit through. She soon finds a drink labeled “Drink Me,” which causes her to drink, and soon afterwards a cake that says “Eat Me” on it, and that causes her to grow.

However, when she’s huge she cries because of her predicament, and when she’s small again she soon finds herself swimming in a pool full of her tears. Before long she’s on a shore somewhere, and she runs into the White Rabbit again, while small-sized. In fact, there’s a lot of growing and shrinking in this book as Alice also drinks a potion she gets from the White Rabbit which makes her huge, and two halves of a mushroom that she gets from a Caterpillar smoking a hookah, which  makes her larger and smaller as she wishes. Very psychedelic. Soon she returns to normal size, and is off through a forest where she meets a Duchess and a Cook who receive invitations to play croquet with the Queen of Hearts from a Footman who looks like a fish, and a Footman who looks like a Frog.

Despite this interruption, the Duchess and the Cook are fighting with each other, without much regard for the baby that the Duchess is nursing, and when things get crazy the Duchess throws the baby at Alice, who escapes with it. However, back in the woods, the baby turns into a pig and runs away. I swear to you, I’m not making this stuff up. Afterward, Alice officially meets the enigmatic Cheshire Cat who talks and can vanish at will, and who will also be at the Queen’s croquet match. From here she heads on to the Mad Hatter’s tea party, after being warned by the Cat that both the Hatter and the March Hare are both mad. In fact, everyone there is mad, according to the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

Alice soon finds the Hatter’s tea party, which is attended by the Hatter, the March Hare, and a Dormouse. Time has stopped for the Hatter, since the Queen accused him of murdering it, so it’s always six o’clock teatime at the table. Alice endures a lot of buffoonery, and is asked by the Hatter “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” She doesn’t have a very enjoyable time, and she soon leaves in a huff. She spots a tree with a door in the trunk, and heads through it and finds herself back in the corridor of doors. This time, she gets her sizes right, snatches up the key, shrinks down, and heads through the tiny door and into a beautiful garden. Unfortunately it’s also the garden belonging to the Queen of Hearts, who is fond of ordering beheadings.

In the Queen’s garden, Alice comes across three gardeners who look like playing cards, and they are busy painting white roses with red paint, because they’d planted the wrong kind. However, the Queen comes across the entire group and yells “Off with their heads!” to just about everyone when she discovers what they’ve done. However, Alice hides the gardeners in a flower pot, and the Queen invites her to play croquet with her. It’s a bizarre game, with flamingos for mallets, hedgehogs for balls, and playing card soldiers serving as the arches. She endures this for awhile before running into the Cheshire Cat again, and he immediately pisses off the King of Hearts, and his execution is ordered. But he makes his body disappear, and everything devolves into a debate over whether or not it’s possible to behead someone who has a head that’s not connected to anything.

Good lord, this is almost as long as the book. So, to sum it all up quickly, Alice then goes to meet a Mock Turtle, hears his story, meets a Gryphon, watches a bunch of lobsters dance, attends a trial about the Queen’s stolen tarts,  is chased by the Queen’s soldiers, and when they begin attacking her, she wakes up next to her sister. It was all a dream. OR WAS IT?!

On the Next Page: The Characters, the other adaptations (X-rated and otherwise), and more >>

Do you enjoy swordfights, ancient Rome, and boobs? I thought so. Those are the main ingredients of Spartacus: Blood and Sand which premieres January 22nd on Starz. We talked about this series before, but that was six months ago when it was “coming later”. Now it’s “coming in less than a week,” so prepare your cable boxes, satellite dishes, DVRs and all that jazz. I just watched the first episode for this series, and it goes above and beyond what you’re probably expecting. These are the most graphic sex scenes I’ve ever seen on television, even if it is cable. There are copious amounts of nudity in this show. And by nudity I mean full-frontal nudity, both male and female, and lots of girl on girl sex. The trailer they showed us just this morning featured more breasts than a weekend in Vegas, and one scene with a girl pulling on another girl’s nipple ring. With her teeth.

Paying attention yet? If not, consider this: in one scene, Lucretia (Lucy Lawless) and her husband Batiatus (John Hannah) use their slaves as foreplay in what Lawless calles “the fluffer scene,” and yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Buck-naked slaves are getting them both ready for sex. executive producer and head writer Steven S. DeKnight said that the show’s sex and violence (and yes, there’s also a ton of violence in this series) go together “like peanut butter and chocolate.” So just to recap: yes, this show is about Spartacus, the legendary leader of a slaver leader against the Roman Republic in early 70s. B.C. 70s. However, they’ve considerably augmented things with tons of sex and nudity, and buckets upon buckets of blood. Who’s complaining?

Additionally, Starz has already announced, before the first episode has even premiered, that Spartacus will be returning for 13 new episodes in a second season, which will begin shooting this year. The second season will be called Spartacus: Vengeance, so that will probably take the edge the mystery out of viewers wondering if Spartacus (played by newcomer Andy Whitfield) lives to the end of this season. Sam Raimi and his longtime partner Rob Tapert are producing, which should be a lot easier, now that Spider-Man 4 ain’t happening. DeKnight thinks the show could run for six or seven seasons, which is somewhat hard to imagine right now, but I’ll endure the season and save that judgement for later. Tune in this Friday to see what the hubbub is all about.

If you haven’t seen HBOs incredible, Tom Hanks and Steve Spielberg-produced miniseries, Band of Brothers, then I want you to stop reading this right now and go out and buy it. It’s available on DVD, Blu-ray, and probably multiple other formats at this point. The good news is, this post will still be here when you get back. Okay, seen it? Good. First of all, it’s hard to believe it’s been 9 years since BoB came out. I first saw this on HBO, then on a ginormous VHS set, then on DVD, and I just received it for Christmas on Blu-ray, and I usually re-watch the thing every year, and I love it. Now, they’re heading to another theater of operations with a new 10 part miniseries about the war: Japan.

The Pacific follows the true story of three different marines: Robert Leckie, Eugene Sledge, and John Basilone as they receive training, fight in their first battles, as they get deeper into the conflict, and what happens when they return home after V-J Day. It’s not exactly the same experience of Band of Brothers, and it looks a lot grittier than that series. It doesn’t have the same background material that series did with Stephen Ambrose’s impressive books Band of Brothers and Citizen Soldier, but is instead based on Helmet for My Pillow, by Robert Leckie, and With the Old Breed, by Eugene B. Sledge, with additional material from Red Blood, Black Sand, by Chuck Tatum, and China Marine, by Eugene B. Sledge, as well as from John Basilone’s private letters.

When asked about the importance of Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg said “I had a sense in Saving Private Ryan that I was establishing a template based on the experiences of the veterans that were communicated to me, and the very few surviving photographs by the great wartime photographer Robert Capa. I combined those to make a 24 frames-per-second representation of terror and chaos. Although we’ve done the same with The Pacific, it does have a different “look” to it than Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers.” Hanks went on to explain that, “After that HBO blip at the beginning, this was our story to tell with our own pacing.” They began talking about this project in earnest when they both worked on The Terminal, so this has been six years in the making.

Actor Jon Seda who plays John Basilone said “We realized how important this was … to be the voice for so many men, the real heroes. We had to get this right.” They had Dr. Sidney Phillips, an actual WWII veteran from the Japanese theater, serving as an advisor on the show, and he said “You were trained and trained and trained endlessly, and the general idea was that ‘If every man does his job with his weapon, to the best of his ability, then everything will be all right.’ I think that concept generally proved to be true. When you finally get through boot camp, you’re prepared for the rest of your life.”

They showed us a series of scenes from the show, and it looks simply fantastic. If you enjoyed Band of Brothers, you’re going to love this one. If you need any extra convincing, that cute little redheaded kid Joseph Mazzello, who played Tim Murphy in Jurassic Park is all grown up, and he plays Eugene Sledge in the series.

Do you go back and listen to old podcasts? I find myself listening once, and then deleting them. I mean, you need the space, right? Will you’re soon going to have a reason to listen to one all over again … only this time you can watch it. And it’s not just any podcast, it’s a podcast that’s in the Guiness Book of World Records as the world’s most downloaded podcast. If you haven’t already guessed from the artwork above and the very telling headline, it’s The Ricky Gervais Show. They taken the existing podcasts, and simply animated them in a sort of Hanna-Barbera style. Thirteen episodes will appear on HBO starting February 19th.

If you haven’t listened to the podcasts (which are hilarious, by the way), Gervais and Merchant basically serve to prod Pilkington into spilling his gems of wisdom about everything from evolution to philosophy. Gervais splits into his high-pitched, pealing laughter each time, and Merchant chuckle amiably while trying to get Pilkington to explain just a bit more. You honestly think that these have to be scripted and that Pilkington is a plant, but they both assured us that it’s all real, and that the Karl you get on the podcast and in the show is the exact same Karl that exists in real life. “I’ve seen him blossom from an idiot into an imbecile,” said Gervais. “It is the Karl Pilkington show. Make no mistake about that.”

The style of the show, which features the trio talking in a pseudo-studio and often breaks away for audio-appropriate narratives, looks very simple, and each character is drawn as if they were taken from a different period of animation. Gervais said of the Wild Brain produced look of the show, “We wanted the design to be a bit retro, because if it was too spiky and trendy, it would be too off-putting.” I don’t think he realized that wow … seeing him look like Fred Flintstone while cackling is a bit off-putting. I don’t know what viewers who haven’t heard these podcasts at all will tune in expecting, but from what I remember they were hilarious.

And just in case you’re wondering, yes … Monkey News is in the show.

]]> http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/tv/ricky-gervais-gets-animated-for-the-ricky-gervais-show-kkelly.php/feed 7 http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/news/hoo-ah-al-pacino-as-dr-jack-kevorkian-kkelly.php http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/news/hoo-ah-al-pacino-as-dr-jack-kevorkian-kkelly.php#comments Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:59:01 +0000 Kevin Kelly http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/?p=63225 You don't hear from Dr. Jack Kevorkian as much since he's been paroled from prison in 2007. But with Al Pacino along for the ride, it's likely that you'll hear a bit more about him this year.]]>

You don’t hear from Dr. Jack Kevorkian as much since he’s been paroled from prison in 2007. He was originally sentenced to 10 to 25 years for second-degree murder. He’s still kicking around, and even though he’s terminally ill with Hepatitis C, he’s run for Congress (he lost) and he regularly speaks about tyranny and the criminal justice system while campaigning to turn assisted suicide into a medical service. And he’s also being portrayed by Al Pacino in a biopic directed by Barry Levinson this April 24th. And they’ve made him look almost just like the real Dr. Jack.

You Don’t Know Jack also stars Susan Sarandon, Danny Huston, John Goodman, and Brenda Vaccaro and takes viewers back to 1990 (which seems like a billion years ago) when Jack was in the news every five minutes with his “Mercy Machine.” The film focuses on his ramp-up to assisted suicide, and the resulting court case and prison sentence. “I don’t think a lot of people can say they know Jack Kevorkian,” said Pacino, who didn’t meet with Kevorkian prior to the role. “When you see the image that was portrayed of Jack at the time, you get a very different picture than who he actually is. He is more than meets the eye, and that’s part of the appeal. It’s a portrait of a zealot that we don’t see that often.”

One thing is for sore, this looks infinitely more watchable than 88 Minutes or Righteous Kill, and Pacino looks like he’s going to chew up a lot of scenery in this. Which we welcome. Give us back the barking Lt. Vincent Hanna from Heat. That’s the Al we like.

If filmmakers and television producers have their way, Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans will never fade into the distant past. Every few months, a new project is announced that focuses either on Katrina itself, or more often the aftermath that the city is going through. However, HBO’s Treme is the first time I’ve actually felt like some compelling “dramatic entertainment” might have come out of it.

This hour long drama will premiere in April on HBO with an 80 minute pilot episode, and will run for 10 episodes during its first season, which star John Goodman, Steve Zahn, and Wendell Pierce, among others. The show gets its name from the Faubourg Tremé neighborhood in New Orleans, which is a colorful, crime-ridden section of the town that was only moderately hit by Hurricane Katrina. It will attempt to show what life is like from the point of view of the musicians, chefs, Mardi Gras indians, and other locals as they deal with life in the aftermath.

One good reason to watch this, real-life New Orleans resident John Goodman looks like he’s getting as close to his “Walter” character from The Big Lebowski as he’s ever been. The f-bombs are plentiful, and he’s got enough attitude to fill a room. Steve Zahn is a personal favorite, although it doesn’t look like he’s reaching too far beyond the “lovable dimwit” he often portrays, although that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s plenty of New Orleans jazz and zydeco throughout, which the characters admit acts as a hook for the program, but I’m interested in seeing the lives of Louisianian who have exchanges like this:

Her: “And you come home smelling like pussy.”

Him: “That ain’t pussy … that’s barbecue.”

Her: “Barbecue?”

Cut to him at his local bar with his buddies: “Daaaaaaaaamn.”

Wendell Pierce said  that after talking up New Orleans so much while working on The Wire, he’s embarrassed that this long after the hurricane, New Orleans still hasn’t come close to recovering. He compared it to post-WWII Europe, and it remains something difficult for people who haven’t lived there to imagine. Let’s hope Tremé changes that.

Where has Claire Danes been, you might be asking? If you’re not asking that, I’m asking it for you. Unless you were one of the lucky few to see her in Me and Orson Welles, then you probably haven’t caught a glimpse of her unless you saw Stardust back in 2007. You’ll finally be able to see her again the first week of February in HBO Pictures’ Temple Grandin. She plays Temple, the title character’s 1995 autobiographical book, Thinking in Pictures: My Life With Austism.

You might not have heard her name before, unless you work in the slaughterhouse industry. She achieved fame by designing humane, sweeping corrals that were designed to keep cattle calm while being led to slaughter. It might sound morbid, but she actually has respect for these animals and felt that we owed them at least that much respect. She’s since designed more than a third of the livestock-handling facilities in the United States. She’s also been mentioned in Oliver Sacks’ book An Anthropologist on Mars, and appeared on numerous news and television shows, but this has been my first introduction to her.

Danes emulates Grandin’s quirky mannerisms and speech patterns down to a T in what will probably garner her a few nominations, based on the trailer. We listened to the actual Temple Grandin speak about this project, and it’s uncanny how close Danes was able to mimic Grandin. Even though the film is set in the 1960s, Danes’ portrayal is spot-on to the real-life Grandin. According to Danes the biggest challenge was being able to “see the world as an autistic does, even if it was in a sort of limited fashion.”

Temple Grandin premieres on HBO on February 6.

I was listening to Craig Ferguson of The Late, Late Show speak last week about being on late night, earning his pilot’s license, and his upcoming autobiography, which he’ll be having different famous people read excerpts from until it gets released on September 22nd. He was genuinely a very engaging guy, not a “douchebag” himself (to use one of his favorite words) and additionally dropped many f-bombs during the conversation. Not that dropping the f-bomb is a sign of coolness, but he wasn’t dropping them to be incendiary or shocking. You get the feeling that he’s the kind of guy who lets them fly when he’s chatting up his buddies on the weekends. Plus, his Scottish accent makes it that much cooler.

But his whole presentation got me to thinking about 1996′s HBO movie The Late Shift. If you haven’t seen that, it’s an extremely good luck at the Leno/Letterman “war’ over “The Tonight Show.” It starred John Michael Higgins as David Letterman, Daniel Roebuck as Jay Leno, and Kathy Bates as the extremely ball-busting, bitchy Helen Kushnick, Leno’s manager. In fact, she won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for her role. If you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth watching, and is available on both Netflix and Amazon. You can also pick up Bill Carter’s book, which the movie is based on, pretty dirt cheap if you can settle for a used book.

But what about the new late night wars? Fallon vs. O’Brien vs. Ferguson? And with Leno getting his own 10PM show this season, it’s a four way battle for control of the nighttime television set. Surely they’ll be poaching guests from each other, and trying to one-up each other with skits and bits, and we want to see the brutal behind the scenes warfare that goes on. The gritty, underhanded moves, the punches to the gut with brass knuckles, the short-sheeting of the beds, the pissing in the coffee pots … all that jazz. Bring us some dirt, late nighters!

If you want to read the conversation with Craig Ferguson, it’s all below. When you’re done with that, go pick up The Late Shift. You won’t be sorry.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Good morning, everyone.

THE AUDIENCE:  Good morning.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  First of all, let me say my wife is standing by me through this very difficult time.

(Laughter.)

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Buenos Aires is lovely at this time of year.  Did you get a pizza?

THE AUDIENCE:  Yes.  Thank you.

QUESTION:  Where did the pizza come from?  It was really good.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  From Joe Mantegna’s place in the Valley. What is it?  Taste of Chicago, it’s called.  It’s good, and it has a TV connection.  Do you know what I mean?  It has — it’s owned by a guy in TV.  It’s a restaurant owned by a guy in TV, something I will never do.  Why? Because I don’t have that kind of money.  I will answer
any of your questions, not necessarily honestly.  Yes, sir.

QUESTION:  When James Frey was on, before he came on, did you have to guarantee him that you wouldn’t “Oprah” him, and did you really have that kind of rapport where you understood what he had done?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I think the question you are asking me politely is can I read.  And, yes, I read his book.  And, no, I wouldn’t accept any guest on the show ever with
conditions like that.  That’s not acceptable to me, so no.  He came on, and I liked him.  I liked him, and I talked to him.  I wasn’t — I wasn’t that interested in
talking about A Million Little Pieces because I felt it had been done to death.  And I had just finished reading the new book, so I wanted to talk about that, which is
scandalous.  Have you read it?  Oh, you really should read it.  It’s really — he’s a very bad boy.  Yes, sir.

QUESTION:  Speaking of scandalous books, can you tell us about yours?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  My book is reasonably priced and available on September the 22nd.  It’s an autobiography, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

(Laughter.)

It’s an autobiography by someone in show business.  I hear it’s great.  I love that — you know, I had to — it’s a little bit different from the James Frey thing in
the sense that a lot of it, I just couldn’t remember, so I made it up.  But I admitted that right away.  It’s just the story of how I ended up here, which surprises me as
much as anyone.

QUESTION:  Would you want to do a 10 o’clock show, or are you looking at that across the aisle and going “Good luck with that”?

QUESTION:  I don’t think people are ready for cussing puppets at 10 o’clock.

(Laughter.)

I don’t know.  I kind of — I am mystified by many things in life, and that one, I don’t really understand what’s going on there either, but I’m no — I don’t program
television.  I’m just the pretty one that reads the prompter.  I don’t — I don’t do that.  We don’t have a prompter.  We do, I guess.  Hello.

QUESTION:  Still, has the shark gotten a very big head now?  Is he sort of, you know –

CRAIG FERGUSON:  The shark puppet?

QUESTION:  Yeah.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I’m actually thinking about getting rid of puppets altogether.  Yeah, see?  That reaction right there, that’s what I’m looking for, controversy.  “No
puppets?  That’s it.”  To the presses that don’t exist anymore, tweety tweet.

(Laughter.)

No.  I am very undemocratic on the show.  Like, when there was a lot of votes for the pig, I had the pig resign from the race just because it made it more interesting for me.  But I don’t know.  I’m getting bored with puppets.  If I can’t think of anything else to do with them, I’ll have to let them go the way of all flesh.

QUESTION:  And did you hear from Ahmadinejad about his actual win?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  No, he didn’t win, either in my puppet or in Iran.  He didn’t win.

QUESTION:  When you have one of those metaphysical monologues like the one on why everything sucks –

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  — is this something that you are just, like, sitting in your house like that day or in the dressing room just ruminating on it?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Dressing room, you say?

QUESTION:  Well –

CRAIG FERGUSON:  No, I’m not.  I get a quarter — a mirror to get my little tie on.

QUESTION:  I think — is this something that you are coming up — is this something you are thinking about for days, or it’s just like, now I know why everything sucks,
and you write down some points, and you give the to (inaudible) –

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I don’t write it down.  I swear I don’t.

QUESTION:  I know you don’t write the whole thing down.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Right.

QUESTION:  But I thought you wrote down, like, some bullet points.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  No.  That particular little nugget of fury was just there in the moment.  I think what happens, one of the luxuries of doing a television show every
night, it’s almost like you had an outlet of where you could just broadcast your thoughts.  Perhaps something on the Internet would be popular in the same way.  It’s
really — it’s — you know, that’s why I never would Twitter because I’ve got an hour to fill every fucking night.

(Laughter.)

What the hell else am I going go to say?  “Going to say things about things.”  So it’s really just me — it’s me doing that.  That’s all it is.  And so I think there’s a
part of it which is retro in the sense that it’s someone just talking on television — you know, television, which they used to do back in the day, and another part of it
is extremely contemporary.  It’s the broadcast of unedited thought, which is, you know — which is causing the newspaper shortage.

QUESTION:  Do you have a fear that this isn’t going to work?  I mean, do you say “Oh, my God, this is going to be just awful”?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I never thought about it until right now.

(Laughter.)

QUESTION:  Is that what fuels you, though, is, like, I’ve got to make sure that it does land, it is funny, it is –

CRAIG FERGUSON:  No.  I don’t think it matters because I think, if it doesn’t work, that’s interesting.  And I think that about the show, that if we do it and it
doesn’t work, it goes in anyway because then I have to — like, I’ll give you an example, and probably this is a horrible example to give.  But the other night, I was
talking about Dave’s show, and I got the name of Dave’s show wrong.  Now, what I could do — I said — what is it I said?  “Late Night with David Letterman” is what I
said, which is apparently not the name of his show, and I got into trouble saying it.  Now, what’s more interesting is to watch a sweaty vaudevillian try to get out of a
situation like that rather than cut it and make it pristine.  I think that’s — I don’t have the patience for that, and I would prefer as a viewer to watch the mistakes.  I am my own blooper reel as it happens.

QUESTION:  You said before that no one is more surprised about your success than you are.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  What did you think your life was going to unfold like when you were 12, 13 years old?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I — well, at 12 and 13, I thought I would be an astronaut.  By 17, I thought I would be dead by the time I was, you know, this age.  It’s a constantly
changing thing for me.  I don’t — I think for everybody, I don’t think just for me.  I think if I could go back — I mean, actually, in the process of writing the book, you
kind of do go back and think about these times and what I thought.  I don’t know.  I always, kind of, half expected I’d end up doing something in show business because it was tolerant of drunkenness and you could meet girls. But, you know, I’m married, and I’m “teetotals,” but I’m still here because I don’t know where else to go.

QUESTION:  Craig, how familiar are you with the history of late night?  Have you gone to YouTube and looked at clips of Jack Parr or Steve Allen?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I did that when I started, but I don’t do it anymore.  I don’t — I don’t really — I don’t think it — I don’t think it really helped that much for me.

QUESTION:  Do you see yourself as part of that tradition? You just made a reference a minute ago to talk, and that’s how it used to be or what they used to do.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Right.

QUESTION:  Do you see yourself as a part of that tradition, I guess?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I don’t know.  I think it’s probably unseemly and not quite for me to — I don’t have the perspective.  I’m sitting — you know, in the very literal sense, I sit here, and you sit there.  So you get to see it from there, and I get to see it from here.  I don’t know that it’s really for me to decide where I sit in that world.  In my opinion, you know, to be honest what I think about my show, I think my show is probably closer to “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” than anything else I’ve seen, and that is an aspiration.  That’s a great show.  I don’t — I don’t know where we are, but wherever we are, we won’t be that next week.  I do know that.  That’s why the puppets won’t stay forever.  It’s important to keep moving.  There was a point, you know, when I had a sound board, and I was always doing the sound board, and people asked about the sound effects, or there was, you know, the cheeky monkey thing.  We have to keep moving because I’ll get bored, and if I get bored, then I think we start doing retakes when I make a mistake, and then — and then — then the rote sets in, you know.  Then there’s focus groups and then committees about “I don’t know about this joke.”  Like, I don’t — I don’t know.  And who the hell thought it was about a joke?”  This is what I never understood.  When people say “Oh, that’s funny.” And I go, “Well, did you ever say it to a room full of people?”  Because that’s the way you are ever going to know.  And when you say it, it’s done.  It’s gone.  So
bad jokes, good jokes, staying with it, me being part of the tradition, which was the original question, I don’t know.  It’s not for me to say, I guess.

QUESTION:  Craig, you’ve become like the guy who talked about how great it is to be an American, and you are about the only one who does that who doesn’t have a
right-wing radio show.  How important is that to you? How important was it for you to write the book and (inaudible) –

CRAIG FERGUSON:  It’s very important to me.  It’s very important to me as an immigrant and as someone, you know, who had to fill in a lot of forms and pass a test to be an American.  It was — I am very proud and very — and very pleased to be an American.  It’s an easier sell now than it was maybe a year ago to say to people how great it is to be.  I noticed it, really, when I was out doing stand-up around the country and saying how proud I was to be an American.  And the audiences, when people were in large groups, they would respond very positively to that, but when I was talking to people one-on-one, there was that kind of low-morale period, which I think — see, America to me was — when I was — when I was — we are talking about when I was 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 years old.  It was astronauts and NASA and all of that stuff, all of that kind of, you know, very positive image of America.

So whether I wrote the book about becoming an American, I also — I wanted to write that, but that’s a singular thing.  There’s always something — there’s something
else attached to becoming an American, too, which is — and I’m sure most of you will have either contact with an older member of your family or a relative or somebody who became an American or certainly some of you.  And there is a melancholy attached to it.  There is a strangeness attached to leaving your past and making the new country your present, and I wanted to not shy away from that, too.  So it’s — but it’s very important to me.  It’s a very — it’s the defining — it’s the defining thing of my own weltanschuaang, if you like, that America, for me, is a philosophical and emotional decision and not just — it’s not just jingoistic.  I think it’s certainly not just political.  It’s not a donkey or an elephant.  It’s a flag and an idea.  It’s a dream.  It’s a belief in fairness of opportunity.  It’s very important to me. It’s something which — it’s the only thing, maybe, that I have difficulty playing with in any — in any kind of iconoclastic way on the show because it’s such an — it’s
such an important thing for me that I have trouble making fun of it, which that’s okay.  Other people can do that. It’s not my job to do — to make fun of everything.  I’ll
just do what I do.  But it’s very important to me, to answer your question.

QUESTION:  Craig, your pizza –

QUESTION:  I wanted to ask you one question.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Let me just — sorry.

QUESTION:  I wanted to ask you.  I was watching you with — I think it was James Spader — CRAIG FERGUSON:  James Spader, yeah.

QUESTION:  — which had nothing to do with James Spader, but do you ever, when you are doing these interviews night after night, sort of find yourself losing the
concentration?  You are kind of glossing over a little bit because you are doing so many of them, you know?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.  Yeah, sometimes.

QUESTION:  How do you bring yourself back?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  How do you bring yourself — I don’t know.  Usually, there’s somebody waving, going “We’ve got to go to a commercial,” or something like that.  I did drift a bit when Spader was talking, but he went on, to be fair, like, 50 talking minutes.

(Laughter.)

And I was kind of like, man.  You don’t want to actually look at your watch, but yeah.  I liked him, but it’s just like, it’s probably right here, right now.  I’m saying
stuff I think are very important.  Half of you have drifted off in the last 10 minutes as well.  You know, it comes, and it goes.  But, most of the time, I see the job
as the way that I’ve always seen the job, which is, I’m the host.  I should be polite and make you feel welcome and then listen to what you have to say, and that’s my
job.  You know, I’m the host.  That’s it.  Sorry. Yeah.

QUESTION:  Your pizza delivery came with a joke about newspapers, but do you still read them, and would you like to make a plea on their behalf?

QUESTION:  Please.

(Laughter.)

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I do enjoy newspapers.  They are — yeah, I read newspapers.  I tend to — I tell you, the newspaper I find difficult is — the thing about newspapers is that I tried to cancel my subscription to the Sunday New York Times just because it was coming to the house and it’s enormous.  And I canceled it three or four times, and it still comes, which, I think, is a sign of how desperate newspapers have gotten.  Even if I say “Please, don’t send me it,” they are throwing it.  I don’t know.  I don’t know how this goes.  It’s sad.  It’s sad that newspapers are in trouble.  I don’t know how much trouble they are in.  You maybe know more than I do.
I read them because I need to know stuff.  I have them in the office.  They are there when I go in, and I look at them.  And my eye twitches a bit if I look at a screen
too long, but that might just be me, being an old dude.

QUESTION:  You talked a bit about not — over here — about not sort of being aware of your place in this long history of talk shows (inaudible).  When it goes wrong, it’s all — Carson was really well known for that. Usually, when you get people from the U.K. and we ask about, you know, their influences, invariably, they are
American.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Right.

QUESTION:  What kind of comedy influence, television comedy influences, did you –

CRAIG FERGUSON:  For American comedy influences?

QUESTION:  Yes.  Well, is that true of you as well?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Yes, of course.  I mean, you mentioned Johnny Carson who is the — is the Tiger Woods of what I do.  He didn’t actually create it, but it’s his, you
know.  He’s the defining player.  He’s Babe Ruth.  Do you know what I mean?  That it’s his game.  And the comedy influences that I love here in America are — Robin
Williams is someone who I always loved his work, particularly early on or just in his stand-up now, Steve Martin, when he was doing stand-up, Bill Murray, a lot the old “Saturday Night Live” guys.  You know, there’s a ton of them.  There’s a ton of them.  There’s too many. You can just name off names for a half an hour.

QUESTION:  Do you also think that there’s a difference in stability?

QUESTION:  Would you think that the subject or the style of topicality in American humor has changed in the years that you’ve been doing it?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I don’t know.  I don’t know.  It’s — I think humor — I understand that it’s your job, but I find it very difficult to define, you know, because it’s
completely fucking subjective.  You can’t.  You know, it’s like if you say 25 percent of people think this is funny, and 5 percent of people think this is funny.  And
then, well, I’m in that 5 percent.  I think this is funny.  Should I cross over to, you know, be part of a larger group?  It’s just, I can’t — I can’t –

QUESTION:  What about American audiences, have they gotten more sophisticated compared to European audiences in the form of news and political humor?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  My — my — the audience I see at night, the one in the studio, they seem — they seem to know as much of what’s going on as I do, but they may just be laughing so that I don’t look awkward.

(Laughter.)

I often think that, actually.

QUESTION:  Is that a change because of Colbert and Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, do you think?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Maybe.  Yeah, I guess.  You probably know more about this than I do.  It’s just that they are all good at what they do.  Yes, I think maybe.

QUESTION:  Craig, on your right.  Do you — you’ve gotten past the point in your career of — at CBS of worrying about renewals from minute to minute and all of that.
You seem established now.  No one asks any questions about the future.  So that the question that comes now is what sort of ambition do you have long-term?  For anyone at 12:30, it becomes the question.  Do you want to do this job for five years and then go into doing independent movies?  Do you want to replace David
Letterman?  Do you want to jump to another network and make lots of money there?  Is that sort of where your thoughts are right there?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Let’s talk about money.  Say that money thing again.  Make lots of money where?

(Laughter.)

QUESTION:  The Internet.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  The Internet, yeah.

(Laughter.)

Ambitions.  I don’t want to be poor.  I don’t want to be rich to the extent that all I care about is keeping my job.  I don’t care enough about keeping my job right now.
That’s good.  That makes me effective at what I do.  I don’t — I don’t want to be frightened of getting fired. So, to that end, I suppose my ambitions are that I spend
less than I earn –

(Laughter.)

– because, look, the truth is we are all in a precarious business.  You mentioned the newspapers.  We cover entertainment in whatever way we do that, and I don’t
want to be frightened.  As writers, to be frightened, you will become ineffective.  I don’t want to be frightened. So I don’t want to have the ambition of a time slot or a
number of dollars.  Frightened.  Do I want to make a lot of money?  Fuck, yeah.  But I want to make it at the expense of — look, I’ve met a lot of rich people who are
douche bags.

(Laughter.)

I don’t want to be that.  I don’t want to be that.  So –  or any more of that than is necessary.  So I hope to, I  suppose in some way, try and maintain some — if I have  any, some type of integrity.  I want to be able to look  at myself in the mirror.  That’s my ambition.

QUESTION:  Hey, Craig.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Yes, sir.

QUESTION:  When Jimmy started into the 12:30, did you  watch him a lot, and did you kind of feel for him?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I was wondering if anybody would ask me  that.  I watched Jimmy.  In his first week, I watched  maybe 10 minutes of it, and I remember, during that time,  Jimmy Kimmel, who is a very nice man, gave an interview. He said, “We all watch and anybody of the late night guys  says that they don’t watch another show is lying.”  So I guess I’m lying, but the truth is I don’t watch the  other late night shows not because of any other  reasons, I have a child and a TiVo.  So I –

(Laughter.)

I don’t watch the other — you know the shows I  see?  I see “Duck Dodgers” and “MythBusters.”  That’s what I fucking watch because I’ve got an  eight-year-old son, you know.  I watched Jimmy,  and I liked him.  I thought he was good, but I  stand by what I said the last time, that I never thought we were in competition, and I don’t think we are in competition now.  The last time I talked to you guys, I said I thought Jimmy’s competition was “Adult Swim,” and I still believe that.  I think my competition is sleep –

(Laughter.)

– or the ShamWow commercial or whatever the hell is on cable or the — you know, whatever video game.  Actually, I don’t think a lot of my audience play — I don’t know.  I don’t know.  I just do what I do.

QUESTION:  You don’t get caught up in the ratings between you and him?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I look at them, but the truth is I don’t understand them.  I glance at them, but the truth is — I don’t know how many of you — I know that David Poltrack — I’ve seen him around. Now, David understands ratings.  I know some — Michael, you understand ratings.  I don’t really understand them.  When they say people age 18-34, and then they go 18-49,  I said, “Well, what?  So the people in the 18-34, are they in the 18-49? Or is this different people that are not in the 18-34?”

(Laughter.)

Then you go, “Do all ratings stop at 49?”

(Laughter.)

And they do.

(Laughter.)

You go, “I’m 47.  So in two years, I’m fucked. Fuck you.  No.”

(Laughter.)

So I know that doesn’t apply.  So I don’t really understand how it works.  I know it’s important because everybody writes about it like it’s — like it’s religion, but all I know is this.  The numbers can change dramatically, and people get pay raises.  Here’s what I do know.  Here’s what I do know, and this is probably the wrong thing to say in a room full of journalists.  But it seemed to me — I don’t know if this absolutely accurate, but when Jay was shit-canned from NBC, he was the leader in all numbers, and then they fired him.  I don’t want to get fired.

(Laughter.)

So perhaps keeping your head down is what you should do with the numbers.  I don’t understand how it works, but it clearly has — it matters. Yet I don’t know why.  I think the truth of it is this.  I think it makes you sound clever if you talk about them, and I think that’s what a lot of people do.  “So, you know, in the 18 to” — and then you sound clever.  I understand that.  I want to sound clever, too, but I swear to God, I don’t understand it.

QUESTION:  With all the publicity over the late night upheaval that’s going on, how do you feel about like facing the fact that you’re just kind of doing what you’re doing, flying under the
radar?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I’m flying under the radar.  I mean, I do what I’m doing.

QUESTION:  Are you glad you’re not a part of that whole conversation, or do you want to be a part of that conversation?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I think about both.  I think I want to be.  It’s like I don’t want to go to the party, but I want to be asked.  You know what I mean?

(Laughter.)

It’s like that feeling.  I kind of — I kind of don’t know.  See, what I think we’ve been doing at this show is — I hope what we’ll be doing at the show is deconstructing and deconstructing and deconstructing the format, and the more we deconstruct the format, if we are successful in doing that, the more we separate ourselves for good or ill from the format.  The format is tired. The format is tired, and it is old.  And look, here’s the reality.  I’m another middle-aged white guy telling jokes late at night on TV wearing a suit, and that’s tired, you know.  So I want to mess with it.  Because that’s who I am, I want to mess with it.  I want to poke it with a stick.  I want to do it.  So I don’t know if I’m — I swear I don’t know if I’m part of it.  I kind of would like to be.  You know, I kind of like to be, “Hey, what’s going to happen with that?”  And then another part of me thinks, well, then I’ll end up like that.  Then I’ll be important.  Then I’ll be worried about the fucking 18-18 1/2 demographics.

(Laughter.)

I don’t want to be.  So it’s a conflict a little bit.  I’m conflicted a little bit with it, I guess.

QUESTION:  Do you think that joining the elite of the late night crowd –

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Yes.

QUESTION:  — leads to isolation?  Does it remove you from the very humor that you based your whole career on?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I don’t know if five guys is a crowd.

(Laughter.)

QUESTION:  When you look at Carson and people like that, they withdrew so far.  I mean, he was brilliant.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  But at the same time, he lived in a cocoon.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  I don’t know.  I have no experience, and I’m not qualified to talk about Johnny’s life.  I do know this, that being on television every night has made me crazier than I was when I started.  I’m certainly crazier than I was four, five years ago without doubt, but I’m okay with it.  But I’m definitely — there’s definitely been a shift.  I don’t know where it leads to.  Does it lead to isolation?  Maybe.  I don’t know.  I don’t know.

QUESTION:  Do you have any friends who are –

CRAIG FERGUSON:  No.

(Laughter.)

QUESTION:  Who are not entertainment people, but that you have a really good time talking to and the conversations are funny, and you think, “Man, I wish I could just put this person on the show because” –

CRAIG FERGUSON:  No.  See, that’s the reason why they’re my friends not in show business.  It’s very important for, for me.  It doesn’t have to be for anyone else.  Please understand today if nothing else, I’m pushing nothing.  I’m pushing no manifesto.  I’m here to talk about the show because I make a show which is on television and you’re television critics, but I’m not pushing anything.  But for me, I don’t want everything to be about TV.  I don’t want everything to be about show business.  That’s why I go — by the way, I’d like to announce I got my pilot’s license on Friday of last week.

QUESTION:  Mazel tov.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Thank you.  And I’ll tell you why I like aviation, because it is the complete opposite of show business.  In show business you bullshit, you bullshit, you bullshit, and that’s what you do, and that’s how get ahead.  In aviation, you bullshit, you fucking die.

(Laughter.)

You’re gone.  So when Andy says to you in show business, “Can you do that?”  You go, “You bet I can.”  When Andy says to you in aviation “Can you do that?”  You better tell the truth because if you can’t, you know, you’re on the local news, and that’s that.  So I –

(Laughter.)

I like to keep an area of my life, a lot of my life, involved in more rational areas than show business, and most of my friends, not all of my friends, but most of my friends, exist outside of
show business.

QUESTION:  You had Cheryl Hines on a couple of nights ago, and you had her mother there, and it seems like the demographic within the audience is completely changing.  Do you find that you do get a wider swath of, like, ages?  And are they letting you go much farther as you go along in terms of the jokes and stuff like that?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  It seems to come and go — it comes and — it’s a come and a go.  I don’t — I don’t — again, I don’t think I’m the best qualified person to talk about the demographics of my show.

QUESTION:  But you’re seeing the reactions on the stage.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Yeah.  I see the studio audience, but it changes so much.  The other night, I went out, and there were like 14 or 15 women in the audience who were all wearing very nice sundresses.  So I brought them all down in the front because they all looked lovely, and I thought everyone else should see how lovely they all looked in their sundresses.  Then I thought, “Oh, fuck.  I’m going to get in terrible trouble for this.”  “Sexist bastard showing people in sundresses.”

(Laughter.)

But I don’t — the audience that I see, which is the studio audience, which is actually about the size of the audience in here.  I don’t know how many people are in the room.  It’s not much bigger than this.  This is who I see every night.  So it can change wildly if you got a college group in or, you know, an old folks tour or something like that.  It’s like some nights, I go out and go “Ugh.”

(Laughter.)

– but that’s the way it is.  It’s all right. Yes.

QUESTION:  Can you talk about who’s been your favorite guest and who has been your worst.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  No, I can’t.  I can’t talk about my favorite and worst guests.

(Laughter.)

Because I like to think I’m a bit like a doctor. At a certain point there’s a Hippocratic Oath. But my favorite guest is Betty White, and my least favorite guest is an actor, who I’m not saying his name because fuck him.

(Laughter.)

KATIE BARKER:  We have time for one more question.

QUESTION:  I’m curious, you say you don’t watch David, but he’s a colleague –

CRAIG FERGUSON:  He’s my boss.

QUESTION:  He’s your boss.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  Do you have sort of a friendly spirit of one-upmanship with him in the same way that, say, Stephen Colbert was always trying to one-up Jon Stewart and vice versa?

CRAIG FERGUSON:  What a lovely idea.  No, I don’t have that with David.  David Letterman is more than my boss.  I’m going to give you an exclusive story now.

(Laughter.)

David Letterman, no matter what the numbers have ever been, ever, in the past — how long has David been on CBS, 30?  And then there was Bill — how long did he do — there was like 30 years.  David Letterman is the king of late night television. All right.  Now, I know there are press releases and other people that can prove to you scientifically that that’s not fucking true, but I’m telling you that’s true.  So David Letterman — how can you have upmanship?  That’s like me saying, you know, I go out in the golf course with Tiger Woods and (gesturing) I’ll show him.  That’s David fucking Letterman.  You know, it’s a different — it’s a different thing.  And I’m very happy to work for him and to work close to him, but if there is — if there is a successor to Johnny, then, of course, it’s David.  And so it’s not that really.  My relationship with David Letterman is that I sit at his feet, and that’s what it is.  I’m kind of his bitch.

(Laughter.)

In the modern parlance, you know.  I sit at the feet of the master, or I’m his “bee-atch,” whichever way you want to do it.

(Laughter.)

KATIE BARKER:  Thank you, everyone for coming out and getting cozy with us.  We have Craig for a couple minutes, and then we’ve got to get him back to the show.

CRAIG FERGUSON:  Thanks.

Last night I was invited to a screening of a pilot for a television series as part of the Independent Television Festival, and it might just be a peek into the future of television development. Directors and feature films have been going down this road for years, and you’ve seen the results. Festivals like Sundance and SXSW swell with independent films, studios get into bidding wars for the hot movies, directors get plucked from the indie freshwater stream and dunked into the saline-rich waters of the studio ocean, and the wheels of film-industry keep on turning.

But what about television? It’s an expensive landscape to develop in, but Sex Ed: The Series was created solely as a spec pilot, and creators Tamela D’Amico (director/producer) and Ernie Vecchione (writer) shot it in 11 days using Panasonic HD cameras, and put together a fairly impressive cast that includes Joanna Cassidy of Blade Runner and Six Feet Under fame. During the question and answer session, it was very clear that they were looking for a cable network to step in and buy the series, and they were eager to put it through the development process. It was a bit rough around the edges, but you could easily see it turning into a series on Showtime or Starz.

The premise is fairly straightforward: it’s set in a sex education class at a small college somewhere in Anytown, USA, and there’s a multicultural gaggle of students that weighs heavy on the Caucasian side, with a few token students of other ethnicities tossed in to try and balance the mix. In the first class, ballsy Professor Trevase (Cassidy) tells the students “If you don’t like me, get out!” … and everyone leaves except for the main cast. Their first assignment: partner up and sculpt each other’s genitals. Predictably, everyone has a different reaction to this, and things play out accordingly. There’s a nugget of a possible overarching storyline at the end of the episode when Cassidy reveals to dreamy blonde student Dean (Matt Barr) that she has brain cancer, and she swears him to secrecy. Future assignments listed in the press notes include: threesomes, penis envy, breakups, and more.

Is this a harbinger of things to come? Television development isn’t any more expensive than shooting a feature film, and in some cases it might be significantly cheaper. Last night’s pilot wasn’t quite a full hour, and if you’re working on a half-hour sitcom, you could cut that in half. Plus, it has to look attractive for a network. It’s a like a live-action storyboard for a pitch session, making it that much easier to say yes or no. Will it change the fact of television development? That remains to be seen. But given the turbulent ebb and flow of independent movies, it makes sense that creative types might try their hand at putting a series together on spec.

We’ll see if Sex Ed: The Series gets picked up anywhere, and budding writers might want to check out the full script for the pilot, which was posted online.

When I was a kid growing up in Texas, I used to have to beg my parents to let me stay up late enough on Saturday nights to watch Doctor Who, which came on our PBS station and was like three hours long. In the UK, the show was broadcast in four one-hour segments, but in the US those were all mashed together into one very long episode. When you’re twelve, trying to stay awake through three hours of BBC special effects can be taxing, but I always managed. Then I’d be hauled to church the next morning, bleary-eyed and full of dreams of one day being Tom Baker.

David Tennant apparently had the same dreams I did. We were both born the same year, although the mileage looks a lot better on him, and he grew up watching Tom Baker scarf around as the time-traveling time lord. Unlike me, however, he was able to meet him in person. “I’ll tell you, I was probably about nine years old, and my mother had taken me to a bookshop in Glasgow. Tom Baker was there in the full getup, hat, scarf, coat and everything. God, he must have been boiling hot. Anyhow, my mother bought me some Doctor Who book that had this sort of mini-poster of him in it, and I shook his hand and had him sign it and everything.”

So was it predestined that he’d be playing the Doctor one day? No. That’s ridiculous. But, it’s a pretty cool story. I asked him if he held on to that autograph, “You know, I think it’s probably in a box somewhere. I might have to find that and see if it’s worth anything!” Since he’s leaving Doctor Who this year after doing four “specials,” he might want to hock that thing on eBay if the offers don’t come rolling in. But if a Doctor Who movie is indeed on the horizon, maybe he won’t need to.

Dr. Cole Abauis makes a compelling argument about Funny People over in his review, and when I saw the film a couple of weeks ago, I felt exactly the same way. I mean, this movie is an Apatow film, and it stars Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jason Schwartzman, Leslie Mann, Eric Bana, a slew of other funny people (including a few moments of Ray Romano that are funny than all of Everybody Loves Raymond) … but it just doesn’t stay with you like Anchorman or 40 Year Old Virgin.

Is it the sign of a more mature film when you’re not quoting lines from the movie, mere minutes after having seen it? I hope not. The only person that really stuck with me from that movie was Aziz Ansari as Randy, who is barely in the movie. In fact, if you want a ton of Randy comedy,  check out the elaborate website they made for his character. It’s got a lot more material on it than Ansari has in the film.

But, I digress. I’m not here to tell you review the film all over, I’m here to tell you about the junket. Funny People does deliver on its title, as their are actually funny people in the movie. The junket delivered as well, and we got to sit down and talk with the main players in the movie. So read on after the break for our interviews with the funny people of Funny People. Even Eric Bana. Did you know he used to be a stand-up comedian in Australia? Well, now you do. Read on.

Funny People is in theaters today.

Adam Sandler (George Simmons)

• On his character: “This guy that I play is leading a different life than I live, but there are some things that come close to home. God forbid, if I get sick, I’ll have a different experience than this guy did. In my real life, I have a lot of people to talk to.”
• On stand-up: “Doing stand-up when you’re 42 years old … there’s a lot more pressure. When I was in my 20s, my goal was to be a movie star … I was pretty crazy, I don’t know why I was like that. When you’re 20 and you go onstage and nobody laughs, you’re like ‘Well, those people just didn’t get it.’ But when you’re in your 40s and nobody laughs, you go, “Oh my god. Why am I here?’ You’re too dumb when you’re in your 20s to realize good and bad.”
• On Judd Apatow and comedies: “I’ll tell ya, when I go out to dinner with Apatow, I laugh like I did back in the day. When I watch movies now, I don’t laugh as much as I did when I was 15 and it wasn’t my profession. I tend to go to comedies first, and then break them down and figure out why they’re funny.”
• Judd breaks in: “And then we go see Orphan.”
• On seeing other comedians: “The best thing around my life right now is that I’ve been around, I mean I’m not like Bob Hope or anything, but I’ve been around long enough to be like if I see someone else kill I don’t get jealous, I go ‘That guy’s good.” But 20 years ago if I saw someone else kill I’d go, ‘Oh god. I’ve got to figure some shit out.’”
• On what’s next: “It was a lot of work, this movie. When I finished it, I hugged Apatow, and I was very relieved to have a break. I don’t know how these other actors go movie to movie and lose their minds in their roles and have a real life. I was happy to jump back into my real life with my wife and kids. But if something else comes down the road that Apatow feels is right or I feel is right, I’m sure I’ll jump back in there. I’m doing a movie right now with a bunch of my comedian friends called Grown Ups, but I like having those breaks.”
• Judd: “And then I’m going to ask Adam to do My Left Foot 2.”

Judd Apatow (Director/Writer/Producer)

• On living with Adam Sandler back in the day: “It’s weird back in the day because you’re friends with people, but then you get mad when they move ahead of you. I remember when I lived with Adam, he got this Visa commercial (Adam breaks in and yells “Mastercard!”), oh Mastercard commercial. It was big and expensive and Adam was funny, and I remember thinking ‘Why wasn’t I the Mastercard guy?”
• Adam interrupts and reminds Judd that he stole a Jim Henson audition from him: “That’s right … Jim Henson was doing this reality show where you would drive around the country with your own video cameras and … “
• Adam: “Yeah, but at this time you were already saying you didn’t want to be on camera anymore! You were already saying you wanted to be a writer, where I was like, ‘What? What’s a writer?’”
• Judd: “But, I didn’t end up getting it ultimately, because Jim Henson says ‘I lacked warmth.’ And when the guy who taught you how read tells you lack warmth … I was devastated! I still haven’t recovered.”
• On the fake movies within the movie (Merman, Re-Do, etc): “What’s funny is that most of the movies we did at some point were made by Tom Hanks. These are all kind of second-generation copies of his movies.”
• Adam: “By the way, I swear to god, I was showing my mom some of the fake movie stuff on my iPhone, and I showed her the Re-Do scene where my head is on a baby, and I swear she said this. She goes, ‘You were a very cute baby.’” (the room breaks up in laughter)
• Judd: “And after we shot all of these fake movies, there was this moment where we go, ‘We could actually make these movies!’”
• On optimism in his movies: “There’s always a moment in everyone’s life where they have to decide if they’re going to evolve, and make some sort of change. We’re all in the middle of a midlife crisis. I like to make movies that have a hopeful message, that show some potential for redemption. The point of this movie that it’s really, really hard for this guy, harder than for most people, and you root for him to pull it off.”

Seth Rogen (Ira Wright)

• On improv: “There’s always a lot of freedom. We’ve all gotten just a lot better at it, I think we all know a bit more now about what will make it into the movie and isn’t just masturbatory exercises. There was a lot less aimless improvising on this set than we would normally do.”
• On his Undeclared episode with Adam Sandler, where he plays a similar role: “It was a little weird. I always think that’s neat that what they canceled as a TV show, they now make as a giant movie. That was the first time I’d met him, and it was really awesome that he’d do that! At the time I was in my late teens, and it was the thrill of a lifetime to have Adam Sandler appear in something you’d written. I’d actually think about that a lot while acting in the scenes, I’d think about how I felt the first time I met Adam. One time when I was like 17 or 18 I went out to dinner with Judd and Jim Carrey and Garry Shandling and then we all went to go see Gladiator together. I don’t think I said one thing the entire night, I just had this goofy smile on my face. I tried to put myself back into that place while making this movie.”
• On being competitive: “I can’t even watch sports because I could really not give a shit who wins. That’s how non-competitive I am. I watch people I do that and I’m like ‘Wow, imagine caring. I can’t even imagine what that would be like. It’s great when your friends are doing well.”
• On stand-up: “I remember one night Jonah and I both performed at the Improv, and we both did pretty good, and I was like ‘Wow, we’re kind of getting the hang of this!’ Then Louis C.K. goes up and just kills. I mean, he destroyed the audience. Just killed. So we were really just able to see the difference between what we do, and what they do. The guy has been doing stand-up for like 20 years, and he’s incredible.”
• On The Green Hornet: “I’ve decided we’re never going the movie, we’re just going to promote it for the next ten years.” (laughs)

Jonah Hill (Leo)

• On improv: “We had like a year or so to work with Judd and each other to kind of refine our characters before we started shooting. Before we would work for like a couple of weeks, and then start shooting.”
• On writing comedy: “Certain people we’ve met along the way have a joylessness to their comedy writing. For us we laugh and have a good time while we’re doing it, but for some people it’s like solving a math problem. I tried to make Leo seem like that in this movie a few times. Some of the most joyless people I’ve met have been comedians. Like Seth.” (laughter)
• On being competitve: “I can’t tell you how much joy it legitimately brings me when one of my friends does well, even if it’s something I would be interested in doing as well. Seth and Schwartzman and I have known each other for a really long time, and they were both successful way before I had any success, and I was super happy for them.”
• On learning the business: “When Seth and Evan were making Superbad, they were super-inclusive to every part of the process and allowed me in. They’d be like, ‘Hey, we’re writing. Do you want to come write with us?’ They definitely helped shape what I want to do with my career. And even with Pineapple Express, which I had no involvement in, they’d be like ‘Come and write with us, give us some notes.’”
• On doing stand-up in the film: “It made me appreciate what we get to do every day. It just made me realize how much it’s like apples and oranges, being funny doesn’t mean you’re going to be a great comedian, and being a great comedian doesn’t mean you’re going to turn in a great performance in a movie. I respect what they do too much to all of the sudden try to capitalize on it and jump into that world.”

Leslie Mann (Laura)

• On doing love scenes with her husband’s old roommate, Adam Sandler: “It was a little bit strange … and Judd tells me he was aroused watching these. Maybe that’s his way of dealing with how uncomfortable he was while filming. What’s funny is that I actually met Adam before I met Judd. I was at some club and he wrote me a note on a napkin in ketchup that said “Hey, nice back” or something like that. His friend brought the note over, and said ‘Why don’t you come over?’ I didn’t go over, and a couple of months later I’d met Judd and we were at a party, and Adam was there. It was awkward between Adam and I that night.” (laughs)

Eric Bana (Clarke)

• On working with the Apatow club: “At first it sounding very intimidating and nerve-wracking, but in true professional fashion they made me feel so welcome. I mean, right from the get-go when we started performing, I felt like it was okay to contribute. They made me feel relaxed and I was able to get in there and get my hands dirty.”
• On his former stand-up life: I was pretty burned out on comedy by the time I’d walked away from it, even though no one here had really seen it. It was more about opportunity. When I came over here I was offered dramatic roles. I don’t watch comedies and think, ‘Wow, I should get back in there. I could do that.” But working on this, I’ve been thinking about it more. It’s like opening up a closet and trying on some clothes and going ‘Wow, that feels good.’”
• On Star Trek: “I was a very lucky man last year, I got to do Star Trek and this movie. That was a really fun year to do both of those movies. The whole Star Trek thing has been nothing but a blast and a great, fun ride. But unfortunately no, Nero won’t be back.”

Aziz Ansari (Randy)

• On doing stand-up for the film: “They shot hours of stand-up, there’s going to be so much extra on the DVD. They’d even follow us when we were practicing while we were working on our characters. There’s a ton of footage, although I don’t know what will end up on the DVD. They shot like four shows and this big show at the Orpheum. Some of that will probably be on it.”
• On Randy: “Judd just told me to make him cocky and confident, and then later we came up with ‘What if he had a DJ’ and ‘What if he was like really dirty and all of his jokes were about sex?’ Yeah, I don’t think it’s as much a dig at any particular comedian but … I was like, what if Soulja Boy did comedy. That’s why he has a dance, he has a DJ, and all that. People really respond to that high level of energy in comedy, when you run out and you’re like ‘Who’s ready to laugh their dick off?!’ Then I go back and watch my own comedy and I’m all (low voice) ‘So, I was like walking down the street the other day.’ Who cares about that?”
• On fame: “Human Giant kind of became my calling card, and that helped me to get parts in like Scrubs and Parks and Recreation and all that. I don’t think I’m famous at all.”

Aubrey Plaza (Daisy)

• On auditioning for the movie: “I just decided to try it, and I had my friend shoot me doing some stand-up and we sent it in.”
• On joining the Apatow group: “I was really intimidated before I met everyone at the first table read, but after that I felt really comfortable. They welcome me into their family and made me feel totally at ease.”
• On Scott Pilgrim: “I just got back from Canada, up there with Edgar Wright and Michael Cera. I play Julie Powers, she’s kind of like an antagonist to Michael Cera’s Scott Pilgrim. She’s like a bitchy record store employee. I don’t get to fight, although there is a lot of fighting in the movie.”

Holy crap. If you haven’t seen the blood-tastic trailer for the upcoming Starz original series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, you need to do so. In fact, you can do it right after the break. It’s over the top and filled with sweaty men cutting chunks of flesh out of each other with all sorts of weapons. There’s blood, tons of nudity of both the female and male variety, (Lucy Lawless may even get fully naked, according to her), and lots of testosterone flying around. If you loved 300 and/or Gladiator, this is right up your alley. In fact, it’s so far up your alley that you might be sitting a bit uncomfortably right now.

The series is produced by Sam Raimi, he told us yesterday that he’ll have to vacate that seat for his directing duties on Spider-man 4. But his longtime producing partner Rob Tapert will be handling the reins, which is a bit of a return to the days of Hercules and Xena. If you listen to the Army of Darkness DVD commentary, you’ll hear Sam Raimi sort of half-heartedly apologize for the scene where two topless women are dragged offscreen by two skeleton warriors, and he blames it all on Tapert. Does that mean we can thank him for all of the gratuitous nudity in Spartacus? We hope so. Although it was a bit disturbing to learn that some of the men on set were not “very well endowed,” so they created a fake penis prosthesis for those scenes, and they appropriately called it “the Kirk Douglas.”

Check out the trailer for the series below. Spartacus: Blood and Sand will begin airing on Starz in 2010.