“Portmanteau” is French for “coat rack”. Lewis Carroll appropriated the word in 1871 for Through The Looking Glass to explain two words merged into one; “chortle” is a portmanteau Carroll invented, while “Internet”, “blog” and “sexploitation” are three he did not. In the month of January, I’ll take a look at portmanteau films, where we find different coats hanging in the same closet, whether tailored by one filmmaker or the collaborative effort of several.

Short Cuts (1993)
Directed by Robert Altman
Screenplay by Robert Altman & Frank Barhydt, based on writings by Raymond Carver
Produced by Cary Brokaw
187 minutes

Misogynistic. Realistic. Bleak. Reassuring. The worst movie Robert Altman ever directed. His best. No two opinions of Short Cuts quite cotton, but in one word, the late filmmaker’s 30^th feature is exhilarating. Raymond Carver never published a novel before dying of lung cancer at the age of 50 in 1988, but he left behind 11 volumes of short stories and poems, many hinging on simple twists of fate in working class America. Altman had been sacked from a movie in Italy and on a flight home, discovered Carver’s literary world. Seeing his type of film on those pages, the director of M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye and Nashville met Carver’s widow, poet Tess Gallagher, who optioned nine of her husband’s short stories and one poem to Altman. With Paramount Pictures footing the bill, he teamed with Frank Barhydt on an adaptation. The studio read it and hated it.

Unable to get financing for what he was calling L.A. Short Cuts, Altman took a gig directing a low budget black comedy titled The Player. Embraced at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival as Altman’s comeback, producer Cary Brokaw stepped in to help raise roughly $12 million for Altman to make Carver’s world a reality. At a bare minimum, Short Cuts employs an expansive yet organic cast that rates as one of the finest ever assembled. Each of the 22 players is thrown the ball at some point and — given something special to do — score. But Altman’s spry touch keeps Short Cuts from sinking under the weight of any moral imperative, a lesson lost on portmanteau films like Crash. Ebbing between light drama and dark comedy, this orchestration of human behavior is a monumental achievement. Doc Pomus & Dr. John and Elvis Costello & Cait O’Riordan wrote the sumptuous jazz numbers performed by Annie Ross in the film.

Helicopters dusting for the medfly fill the skies above Los Angeles. A news anchor (Bruce Davison) and his wife (Andie MacDowell) are concerned by the chemicals, yet their 8-year-old son Casey is allowed to walk to school in the morning. A waitress (Lily Tomlin) upset by her boozehound boyfriend (Tom Waits) accidentally slams her car into Casey, who shrugs off the accident and returns home. The boy’s neighbor (Lori Singer) is a sensitive cellist whose jazz vocalist mother (Annie Ross) is past the point of giving a damn. At the nightclub where she performs, a financially strapped couple (Lili Taylor, Robert Downey Jr.) receives instructions from bourgeois neighbors whose apartment they’ve agreed to housesit. They’re friends with another couple: a pool man (Chris Penn) increasingly frustrated by the lack of attention from his wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a stay-at-home phone sex operator.

Casey ends up in intensive care, where his dad is visited by the father (Jack Lemmon) he hasn’t seen in 30 years. Neglecting to pick up a cake they ordered, Casey’s parents are harassed by the baker (Lyle Lovett). Casey’s doctor (Matthew Modine) suspects that his artist wife (Julianne Moore) broke their wedding vows three years ago and tries to get to the bottom of it. The artist befriends a professional clown (Anne Archer). She’s pulled over in full makeup by a motorcycle cop (Tim Robbins) who hits on her. Unfaithful to his wife (Madeline Stowe), the cop’s lover (Frances McDormand) has cut ties with her ex (Peter Gallagher), a pilot who dusts for the medfly and refuses to accept that his marriage is over. The clown’s husband (Fred Ward) goes fishing with his buddies (Buck Henry, Huey Lewis). The men discover a female corpse in the river and debate how soon they need to alert anyone.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 5,693 users: 87% for Short Cuts

Metacritic “Metascore” average among 22 leading critics: 79 for Short Cuts

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“Portmanteau” is French for “coat rack”. Lewis Carroll appropriated the word in 1871 for Through The Looking Glass to explain two words merged into one; “chortle” is a portmanteau Carroll invented, while “Internet”, “blog” and “sexploitation” are three he did not. In the month of January, I’ll take a look at portmanteau films, where we find different coats hanging in the same closet, whether tailored by one filmmaker or the collaborative effort of several.

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983)
Directed by Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam (segment: The Crimson Permanent Assurance)
Written by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin
Produced by John Goldstone
106 minutes

Proving that a glimmer from Monty Python is a supernova compared to what constitutes comedy in other galaxies, The Meaning of Life is a greater portmanteau film, even if it ranks as lesser Python. The group was born in the undergraduate revues of Cambridge, where Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Eric Idle were students, and Oxford, where Terry Jones and Michael Palin met. While touring New York, Cleese met an American illustrator named Terry Gilliam. Through writing and performing satirical sketches on British stage, radio and television in the late 1960s, the six formed a comedy troupe. After four hugely influential TV series and two ridiculously profitable feature films, the group ventured to Jamaica — where they’d written Life of Brian (1979) — unable to agree on their next movie. Python hit on the idea of stitching together material by using the meaning of life as glue.

As with Life of Brian, Terry Jones would direct and Terry Gilliam would provide the animation, as well as a fantastic short film titled The Crimson Permanent Assurance that grew into a 16-minute segment. Awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, The Meaning of Life would be the last time all six members of Python worked together, with Graham Chapman dying of cancer in 1989. Gilliam’s whimsical short, with rousing music by John Du Prez and delightful model work, is the #1 reason to see the film, which peaks at the 1-hour mark with a sketch so flagrant it transcends flagrance. Even with longer pauses between the belly laughs, the hand craftsmanship and relentless social satire of Python is all here, cutting down performers they’ve influenced — namely veterans of Saturday Night Live who’ve given the movies a try — with a thousand arrows.

In a “short feature presentation”, aging accountants in London mutiny against their corporate masters, raising anchor on the Crimson Permanent Assurance and sailing the building to pillage the financial world. As the feature presentation begins, six goldfish (Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin) in a restaurant aquarium ponder what life is all about. In the first of twelve sketches, surgeons (Chapman, Cleese) get to the business of delivering a baby. The patriarch (Palin) of a Roman Catholic family in the slums of Yorkshire explains the predicament of contraception to his several dozen of children in a song titled “Every Sperm Is Sacred”. A public schoolteacher (Cleese) instructs a class on sex education with the help of his wife. Sent to fight in the Great War, a sergeant (Jones) is distracted from a mission when his men insist on showering him with presents.

Examining middle age, an American couple (Palin, Idle) vacation in a resort with an authentic medieval dungeon, ordering “conversation” about the meaning of life from their waiter (Cleese), who suggests “Live Organ Transplants” as a topic. Two paramedics (Chapman, Cleese) perform a liver removal before the donor is dead; they convince his wife (Jones) to volunteer her liver as well by introducing her to a man (Idle) whose song about the galaxy demonstrates how futile human existence is. Death is explored when the grossly obese Mr. Creosote (Jones) arrives at a French restaurant but is unable to hold down his meal. The Grim Reaper pays a visit to a dinner party, where the guests mistake him for “one of the men from the village”. Wrapping up the sketches, a TV host (Palin) delivers viewers the meaning of life, interjecting her own commentary.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 22,708 users: 83% for Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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This month’s theme was hatched after yet another person with better taste than me recommended that I add the 2005 romantic drama Shopgirl to my queue. Looking for nine more films with similar themes, “Gloves”, “Art Gallery” and “Pilates” were all considered and rejected before I settled on “May December Romance”. So in the month of December, I’ll take a look at love separated by much more than just six months on the calendar.

The Good Girl (2002)
Directed by Miguel Arteta
Written by Mike White
Produced by Matthew Greenfield
93 minutes

Saying that The Good Girl is the best movie Jennifer Aniston has appeared in doesn’t give it nearly the credit it deserves. Pasadena native Mike White had pictured a career as a playwright in New York, but returning home, wrote two dark comedies — Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl — which helped land him a job on the writing staff of Dawson’s Creek in 1998. White showed his work to a college buddy named Miguel Arteta, who’d grown up in Puerto Rico and flunked out of the documentary program at Harvard before meeting White at Wesleyan University. A graduate of the AFI, Arteta was interested in The Good Girl, but White refused, hoping he could direct it himself. The pair tackled the controversial Chuck & Buck first and after several actresses got cold feet about playing Justine Fast, White suggested Jennifer Aniston for the part.

With Aniston on board, another Wesleyan alum named Matthew Greenfield secured roughly $7 million in financing from Myriad Pictures. To accommodate Aniston’s schedule taping Friends in Burbank, The Good Girl was filmed in Simi Valley, with the actress clocking seven-day work weeks for a chance to break out of rom-com jail. Screened for the first time at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, The Good Girl posted strong reviews and turned a profit in limited release. With humor so dry it could keep paint from sticking, Mike White’s writing isn’t for everybody, injecting brutal honesty into the hijinks. But the quality of the material is evident by the talent of the cast assembled around Aniston, with John C. Reilly & Tim Blake Nelson shining in particular. Miguel Arteta captures the langour of Texas without making jokes out of the characters or their lives.

While not extraordinarily intelligent, 30-year-old Justine Last (Jennifer Aniston) realizes she’s wasting away as a clerk at the Retail Rodeo somewhere in Texas. Her co-workers pass the tedium of their day in a variety of ways. Gwen (Deborah Rush) keeps herself busy with work. Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel) slings subtle insults at customers over the p.a. system. Security guard Corny (Mike White) invites Justine to his Bible study group, which she declines by stating she prefers evenings to herself. Justine’s husband Phil (John C. Reilly) and his best friend Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson) are stoners who make a living as house painters. Justine is drawn to the new clerk, 22-year-old Holden Worther (Jake Gyllenhaal). Holden claims to be named after J.D. Salinger’s anti-hero and bonds with Justine over their shared hatred of the world.

Justine spurns Holden’s advances by reminding him that she’s married. He responds by quitting Retail Rodeo and writing Justine a lovesick note imploring her to meet him after work. When Gwen gets ill eating a batch of bad blackberries, Justine has to choose between accompanying her friend to the emergency room or meeting Holden at his designated rendezvous outside Chuck E. Cheese. Their intense affair is put on ice when Justine suspects that Bubba is onto them. Holden does not react well to the hiatus. Justine attempts to strengthen her marriage by taking Phil to Bible study, but changes her mind when she spots the motel manager among the saved. While Holden continues to fall apart and Bubba blackmails Justine with sex, the good girl clings to the hope that the baby she’s carrying will give her life some purpose.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 11,043 users: 54% for The Good Girl

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 71 for The Good Girl

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Logging in to Netflix Instant for a movie to watch is like being hungry and shown to a food replicator. It doesn’t solve my problem — it introduces one thousand new ones. Luckily, I can see which genres are rated higher in nutritional content, in this case, 4 or 4 ½ star ratings out of 5 stars. “Documentary” had a lot of those. So did “Anime & Animation”. In the month of November, I take another trip around the globe to sample recent animated feature films. Next stop: Melbourne, Australia.

Mary and Max (2009)
Directed by Adam Elliot
Written by Adam Elliot
Produced by Melanie Coombs
92 minutes

With its whimsical design and a sonorous screenplay, Mary and Max soars like a Dr. Seuss fable made for grownups. After winning an Academy Award for Best Animated Short with Harvie Krumpet in 2004, Adam Elliot made the rounds at Disney, Pixar and Fox with pitches that fell on deaf ears. Returning to Australia, he began rereading letters by a New York pen pal he’d been corresponding with since the age of 17. Elliot felt that his long distance friend of 20 years — Jewish, atheist, a sufferer of Aspberger’s Syndrome — had all the makings of a character for his next film. Elliot spent six months storyboarding Mary and Max and another year and a half writing a script while producer Melanie Coombs raised financing. Screen Australia, Adirondack Pictures (a New York based film finance company) and Film Victoria ended up bankrolling Elliot’s first feature film at roughly $8 million AUS.

Elliot served as his own art director and designed all the characters for what took 50 crew members 57 weeks to shoot inside a Melbourne warehouse. Mary and Max was screened for the first time when it was selected to open the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, a first for a claymation feature. Elliot’s characteristic clay figures border on the grotesque, but the strength of his writing suggests an award winning graphic novel more than a movie script. Mary and Max is the anti-Shrek, brandishing abundant wit and imagination to do more than entertain kids, exploring characters who struggle to get out the door each morning. The result pushes the boundaries of animation. Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna) provides the Seussian narration, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s vocal transformation as Max is superlative and even the hilarious product labels in the picture are worth a rental.

In the Mount Waverly suburb of Melbourne in 1976, a Narrator (Barry Humphries) begins “Mary Dinkle’s eyes were the color of muddy puddles. Her birthmark, the color of poo.” A painfully awkward child, 8-year-old Mary Daisy Dinkle (Bethany Whitmore) counts a pet rooster named Ethel as her only friend. Her favorite activities include drinking condensed milk and watching a cartoon called The Noblets, diminutive creatures that appeal to Mary because they never lack friends. Her father Noel works in a factory attaching strings to tea bags. Her mother Vera Lorraine Dinkle consumes liberal amounts of the sherry she uses in her recipes. Meanwhile, in New York, 44-year-old Max Jerry Horovitz (Philip Seymour Hoffman) also watches The Noblets. A chronic overeater who worships chocolate, Max has trouble sleeping and keeping pet goldfish alive.

Mary chooses Max’s name at random from a New York City phone book and writes him, including a Cherry Rite chocolate bar. Max is “confuzzled” by human beings and reacts to Mary’s letter by having an anxiety attack. Calming down, he answers Mary’s questions — like where babies come from in America — with candor. He also details his abhorrence of crowds, bright lights, sudden noises and strong smells, admitting that New York has all of these. Basking in Max’s words, Mary adopts a pen pal. She sends him chocolate. He advises her how to handle being teased at school. Max’s tension is diagnosed as Aspberger’s Syndrome, which adult Mary (Toni Collette) hopes to eradicate by studying disorders of the mind. She falls in love with her neighbor Damien (Eric Bana) and marries, but struggles with self-worth while a continent away Max continues to fight his inner demons.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 4,594 users: 89% for Mary and Max

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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In the month of July, I take a look at films released in my very favorite film stock and aspect ratio: black & white in anamorphic. Unless they’re being financed with credit cards, movies are rarely shot like this anymore because they’re impossible to sell to television. Yet these dreams sneak onto Turner Classic Movies every now and again …

Yojimbo (1961)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay by Akira Kurosawa & Ryûzô Kikushima, story by Akira Kurosawa
Produced by Akira Kurosawa
110 minutes

To watch a samurai picture by Akira Kurosawa is to read a book adapted by Hollywood in the ‘70s and ‘80s for what we take for granted as the modern action movie. Inspired by the idea of a helpless citizenry trapped between two factions who were equally despicable and corrupt, Kurosawa authored a script with frequent writing collaborator Ryûzô Kikushima that was financed by Toho Studios, home of Godzilla and the company which kept Kurosawa under contract. A blockbuster back home — where it became one of the biggest grossing movies ever in Japan — Yojimbo would be ripped off by Sergio Leone as the basis for the spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and remade by Walter Hill as Last Man Standing (1996), with Bruce Willis battling Depression Era gangsters. Neither comes close to eclipsing the majesty of Yojimbo.

Defining any one aspect that makes Yojimbo a classic is an exercise in futility. Toshirô Mifune anchors the film with a rough charisma and physicality that western action heroes like Eastwood, Stallone and Willis would become celebrated for. Composer Masaru Satô gives the film a medieval swing with a sensational musical score. Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa and assistant cameraman Takao Saitô collaborated with Kurosawa to give Yojimbo an eye popping visual sheen and depth, respectively. The trend to play graphic violence for the occasional laugh would outrage critics when it started showing up in American movies like Bonnie and Clyde, but executed so fluidly, broke new ground in terms of style. Beyond exploiting violence to sell popcorn, Kurosawa’s moral bearing is felt throughout Yojimbo, which mocks greed and actually condemns violence.

Somewhere in Japan of the 1860s, a samurai who offers the name “Sanjuro Kuwabatake” (Toshirô Mifune) wanders into a town held hostage by a war between two gambling houses.  Taking shelter with an old tavern owner named Gonji (Eijirô Tôno), Sanjuro learns that the trouble started when Seibei (Seizaburô Kawazu) promised his territory to his cowardly son. Seibei’s lieutenant Ushitora (Kyu Sazanka) took half the boss’s men and allying himself with the sake merchant appears likely to topple Seibei. The local constable greets mercenaries arriving in town and receives a commission for selling their services as a “yojimbo”, or bodyguard, to the highest bidder. War has also been good business for a coffin maker (Atsushi Watanabe) whose hammering has Gonji at the end of his rope.

Seeing an opportunity to rid the town of its twin evils, Sanjuro challenges three hoodlums in Ushitora’s employ and dispatches them with his sword. Seibei agrees to pay Sanjuro the sum of 60 ryo to work for him. Seibei’s wife Orin (Isuzu Yamada) advises that it will be cheaper just to kill Sanjuro once the war is won. As the factions gather for battle, Sanjuro abandons his employer, climbing a watchtower to enjoy both sides killing each other. The carnage is postponed when an inspector from Edo arrives. During the ceasefire, Ushitora’s brutal but stupid brother Inokichi (Daisuke Katô) bids against Orin for Sanjuro’s sword. As the samurai plays both houses against each other, Ushitora’s shrewder and much deadlier brother Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai) returns to town with a revolver and a healthy suspicion of the interloper.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average 10,518 users: 96% for Yojimbo

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 2 of a bill featuring our friends the pod people.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Directed by Philip Kaufman
Screenplay by W.D. Richter, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
Produced by Robert H. Solo
115 minutes

Whether drawing up a ballot of Best B-Movies, Best Science Fiction Films, Best Remakes or even Super Cinema of the ‘70s, oddly enough, the intoxicating 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers would land on any of those lists. Based on a 1954 novel by Jack Finney, the 1956 film version hit multiple zeitgeists in its day, arriving at a moment when Americans seemed obsessed with invasion, whether from outer space or the U.S.S.R. Directed by Philip Kaufman and adapted by W.D. Richter, the remake boasts far more insidious wit, characters as contemporary as they are compelling and a brilliantly pitch black ending that in its own way, puts a stake through the heart of the ‘60s. It’s gleefully written, perfectly cast, jarringly made and more than three decades later, looks a lot like a minor masterpiece.

The Body Snatchers beautifully exploits a paranoia that seems wired into the American psyche: fear that others are coming to eliminate your way of life. The 1978 version could be interpreted as a warning against feminism or urban alienation, take your pick. Kaufman cast thoroughly offbeat performers in Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright and too cool for school Leonard Nimoy; as opposed to movie stars, their survival is far from assured. Kaufman employs discordant camera angles and sound effects but instead of horror, focuses on the characters and their doomed love affair, making the story intense without much in the way of gore or cheap scares. Michael Chapman handled the stark lighting while Thomas Burman and Edouard Henriques executed the unsettling makeup effects.

Seeking escape from the surface of a dying world, alien spores drift into space and reach the Earth’s atmosphere, raining down on the city of San Francisco. Taking home one of the strange pink flowers than begin to bloom, biologist Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) recognizes the pollinization of two different species to create a third. Unable to pry her dentist boyfriend Geoffrey (Art Hindle) away from TV sports, Elizabeth shares her discovery with Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland), a health inspector and her close colleague at the Department of Health. Geoffrey’s alienated behavior the next morning prompts Elizabeth to follow him. Distraught by the sinister changes she begins to detect in her boyfriend and in the city around them, Elizabeth is assured by Matthew that a friend — pop psychologist Dr. David Kibner — will have a logical explanation.

At Kibner’s book signing party, Matthew and Elizabeth meet up with another one of his friends, struggling poet Jack Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum). While Kibner (Leonard Nimoy) reveals that six of his patients swear that loved ones have changed into something less human, the doc believes our fear of commitment is at the root of the hysteria. Returning to the mud baths he operates with his New Age spouse Nancy (Veronica Cartwright), Jack drifts off to sleep and is wakened to his wife’s screams when she discovers a dormant being with an uncanny resemblance to her husband growing in one of the stalls. Matthew rushes to Elizabeth’s house and wakes her before she too crumbles to dust and is replaced by an imitation. The two couples realize that most of San Francisco is no longer who they appear to be and fight to stay awake long enough to escape.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 404 users: 89% for Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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The Gauntlet (1977)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Michael Butler & Dennis Shryack
Produced by Robert Daley
109 minutes

Whether The Gauntlet is one of the lousiest action movies ever made or a wickedly funny satire of lousy action movies, it certainly ranks as one of the more bizarre Clint Eastwood ever made. The most expensive Malpaso production up to that point in time with a budget of $5 million, it boasted top notch stuntwork and two over-the-moon sequences in which a house and a bus were each wired to explode with 250,000 squibs. Somehow, it all manages to look and feel like a low down dirty B-movie, as if made by a film company traveling around on a bus, making things up as they went along. Taking a story as old as It Happened One Night and refreshed as recently as Midnight Run, the plot proceeds in such a wildly idiotic manner that scenes practically beg for the Looney Toons logo and fanfare to precede them.

The Gauntlet can be excused as a drive-in movie, with moments of high intensity followed by stretches where you can go for popcorn, wander around and then return to your car when it looks like something is about to get blowed up real good. None of the banter between Eastwood and Sondra Locke (taking a role the studio pursued Barbra Streisand to fill) has any thought put into it at all. Even when the couple elicits moments of genuine affection for each other, it barely makes sense within the wacky mechanics of the plot, which builds toward one of the most ridiculous action sequences ever conceived. Frank Franzetta illustrated a fantastic poster that offers a hint into how seriously this picture was taking itself, but judging by what made it on screen, it’s hard to tell whether the filmmakers were in on the joke.

As the sun rises in Phoenix, disheveled metro cop Ben Shockley (Clint Eastwood) reports for work and is ribbed for looking so sloppy by his former partner Maynard Josephson (Pat Hingle) who’s been promoted to a desk job. Summoned before new police commissioner Blakelock (William Prince), Shockley is dispatched to Las Vegas to pick up someone named Gus Mally, who the commissioner maintains is a nobody witness for a nothing trial. Shockley discovers that “Gus” is actually Augustina Mally (Sondra Locke), a feisty hooker who claims that not only is someone looking to kill her, but that bookies in town have actually put a betting line on them never making it to Phoenix. As dumb as he looks, Shockley discovers there is indeed a horse named “Mally No Show” with 50-1 odds that are getting steeper all the time.

Shockley sneaks Mally out of jail in an ambulance but comes under attack before they can reach the airport. The couple seeks refuge at Mally’s workplace, but when Shockley calls the commissioner to request an escort, the entire Las Vegas Police Department shows up and blows the house to bits. Escaping in a storm drain, Shockley and Mally hijack a constable (Bill McKinney) who gets them to the Arizona border before he’s riddled with bullets. Stranded overnight in the desert, Mally reveals that she’s to testify against a sadistic john that sounds a lot like the Phoenix police commissioner. Realizing he’s been played for a stooge by his superiors, Shockley commandeers a charter bus, reinforces it with steel and shares his route with the commissioner, who prepare a reception for the couple’s bus in Phoenix.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 16 users: 81% for The Gauntlet

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Idiocracy (2006)
Directed by Mike Judge
Screenplay by Mike Judge & Etan Cohen, story by Mike Judge
Produced by Mike Judge, Elysa Koplovitz
84 minutes

Should I Care?
In a case as mysterious as lightning striking twice, the long awaited follow-up from Austin based animator and filmmaker Mike Judge was wrapped in a blanket and abandoned on a church doorstep by Fox, who committed the same offense on Judge’s previous film. Like Office Space, Idiocracy is an unpolished gem whose cult status has multiplied the more moviegoers find it. Thrusting a regular Jack and Jill from the present into a future where human evolution has regressed to the point where Beavis and Butt-Head would be considered the minds of their time, Judge whips up another potent and laugh-out-loud cultural satire. Its faults are glaring, but Idiocracy is funny, smart, dumb and unnerving all at the same time. Much of its ragged charm is generated by how low Fox set the bar on this film. Considering that its ideal presentation is a living room or laptop computer — where at most you’re investing a couple of bucks and 80 minutes of your time — the studio might have even known what they were doing.

Watching Idiocracy without socks not only boosts its entertainment value, it gives the viewer the ability to pause and process the data mine of comic material hidden in family trees, TV menus and billboards. The film is embarrassingly shy of post-production value, with special effects that look more abandoned than finished, as well as narration that suggests the movie was put in the rearview mirror by all those involved as quickly as possible. Idiocracy almost qualifies as a student thesis, but if that’s the case, this is the most hilarious and intelligently sketched student thesis of all time. Gently mocking the greed and consumption depended on by corporations, Judge avoids a smug or angry tone; like Office Space, his heart lies with the common man. But underneath the sight gags and occasional toilet humor lurks an acidic satire of those further down the evolutionary ladder, too lazy, dumb or irresponsible for planned parenthood and how that — at its most ridiculous extreme — could alter the future.

So, What’s This About?
In the year 2005, Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) is reassigned from an Army library and volunteered for “a human hibernation experiment” in which the military will revive him after one year of cryogenic sleep. Chosen due to his lack of family and how average he is, the army is unable to find a comparable female test subject and selects one from the private sector: Rita (Maya Rudolph), whose pardon for criminal charges and an arrangement with her pimp have secured her cooperation. When the army base is scuttled and replaced by a Fuddrucker’s, Joe and Rita lie dormant until the year 2505, when one of the many mountains of garbage mankind has left to accumulate crumbles. Joe crashes into the living room of Frito Pendejo (Dax Shepard), who we later learn earned his law degree at Costco. While Joe is able to understand everyone — whose English has devolved into a hybrid of hillbilly, valley girl, street slang and grunts featuring the words “ass” or “shut up” — Joe’s voice strikes those of the future as “pompous and faggy” and provokes them.

Joe discovers that in the future, water has been replaced by a sports drink called Brwando (“The Thirst Mutilator”), a dust bowl has decimated the economy and the number one movie in the country is Ass, which consists of nothing more than 90 minutes of a guy’s naked ass (“It won eight Oscars that year, including Best Screenplay”). Arrested for inability to pay his hospital bill, Joe escapes from prison by notifying a guard that he’s supposed to be getting out. His abnormally high intelligence brings Joe to the attention of President Camacho (Terry Crews), a five-time Ultimate Smackdown champion and porn superstar. Now the smartest man on earth, Joe is named Secretary of the Interior and tasked with fixing the economy in exchange for a full pardon. Employing the help of Tina and Frito, Joe figures out that irrigating crops with Brwando is the cause for the dust bowl. The practice is banned, but when his decision bankrupts Brawndo, Joe is sentenced to “rehabilitation” as the center attraction at a gigantic tractor pull.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Mike Judge was raised in the suburbs of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from UC San Diego in 1985 and embarked on a series of dull engineering jobs. Relocating to Dallas to pursue his musical career as a bass guitar player, Judge’s love for animation led him to create a two-minute short; titled Office Space, it featured a neurotic paper pusher named Milton being tormented by his smarmy boss. Office Space was screened at Animation Celebration, which was being held that year in Dallas. Judge’s work began appearing on MTV’s Liquid Television, which launched another animated short Judge had come up with titled Beavis and Butt-Head into its own program. The mega success of the show — vilified by pundits as everything dumb about TV and praised by David Letterman, Stephen King and others as anything but — led to a hugely successful animated film released in 1996, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America.

A live action version of Office Space written and directed by Judge was ignored in theaters, building a big cult following on DVD instead. Convinced that a high concept idea was needed to go over well at the box office, Judge came back with a sci-fi comedy titled 3001. Written with a gofer turned writer on Beavis and Butt-Head named Etan Cohen, Fox agreed to bankroll Judge’s next film at a budget of roughly $30 million. Shooting commenced at Austin Studios in May 2004, with Judge and Elysa Koplovitz — former VP of MTV Films who’d worked on the Beavis and Butt-Head feature — producing under Judge’s Austin-based Ternion banner. Once 3001 went before test audiences, the lukewarm response failed to garner the financial support from Fox to properly finish the film, which was shelved. Discarded into a handful of U.S. cities in September 2006 without any promotional campaign whatsoever, the bizarre saga of Idiocracy remained a mystery until Judge broke his silence during the press junket for Extract three years later.

How’d They Do It?
Interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross in August 2009, Mike Judge confirmed that the idea for what became Idiocracy began in 1995, while he was writing Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. “I guess I was just thinking about evolution and now that there’s no predators and everybody survives — where would it go? But, so I’d written down something about this idea. And then it was in 2001, I was at Disneyland and I was waiting in line at the Alice In Wonderland ride with my daughter and somebody — or both daughters I guess — and somebody behind me had a stroller and two little kids and her and this other woman with two little kids was passing by. I guess they’d had an altercation and they just start getting in this cussing match with each other, just, you know, ‘bitch’ this. But you know, just yelling and like ‘I’ll kick you ass and I’ll’ and I was just sitting there thinking wow, the Disneyland of that was envisioned, way back in the ’50s and, to right now.”

Judge elaborated in a July 2004 interview with The Dallas Morning News, “There was an article that didn’t get a lot of attention about how the crime-rate drop corresponded to about 17 years after Roe v. Wade. The theory was that a lot of unwanted kids weren’t born who would have been coming of criminal age.” Judge admitted this debate wasn’t one that was necessarily politically correct. “It gets into eugenics. To me, it’s just like all the people on The Jerry Springer Show, who’ve knocked up, like, five girls, and then their sons knocked up five and the responsible people waited to have kids.” Judge turned to Etan Cohen, who’d spent his term at Harvard pursuing a degree in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and writing for Beavis and Butt-Head, where Cohen started out as a summer gofer his freshman year. Upon graduation in 1997, Cohen moved to Los Angeles and landed a job on the ABC sitcom It’s Like, You Know before joining the writing staff of Judge’s award winning animated series for Fox, King of the Hill.

Etan Cohen — in a June 2006 interview with Variety — recalled, “Mike called me up and asked me to write Idiocracy – about a man who signs on for a sleep experiment and wakes up 500 years later, but a quirk in evolution has left him the smartest guy on the planet — which was insane. It was almost like film school, except Mike Judge was teaching the class.” Cohen suggested that in five centuries of devolution, the National Art Museum would have morphed into the National Fart Museum. In the world of Judge & Cohen’s script, every available space is covered with advertising — even clothing — while the Secretary of State ends each sentence with “ … brought to you by Carl’s Jr.” because he’s been well compensated. Nurses too dumb to speak diagnose patients with a console where pictures depict various ailments. Cash resembles a hillbilly version of a Master P album cover. Starbucks is still around, but has changed its name to “Starbuck’s Exotic Coffee for Men” to lure more customers.

In a September 2009 interview with Slashfilm, Judge admitted, “I realize that a lot of the things I’m doing don’t fit into the category so easily that people are comfortable with. You know, when we were writing the first draft, we’d start coming up with this stuff. And I think one of the first things that I had written, even when it was a treatment, was the billboard that said, ‘If you don’t smoke Carlton’s, Fuck You.’ Because there’s the billboard: ‘If you smoke, please try Carlton’s.’ So, when I was thinking about this idea, I thought one of the most fun things to do would be the advertising, you know? And when I moved to Austin, maybe a little before I moved to it, I had seen this sign that said, ‘Erotic Tan for Men.’ So, I was like, god, now there are tanning salons that are like, brothels or something. So, I just started thinking what if all these other places started sexualizing things, because people in advertising are always using sex to sell things. There’s already, like, ‘Sexy Scissors’ and Hooters and all of this stuff. And I thought, what if you just cut these people loose and they literally used sex to sell things.”

Judge continued, “It became really fun to write. And you know, looking back, I can see how it can look like an odd movie to come out of Fox I guess. But you know, they were pretty supportive of it up until the end. They also, they didn’t know how to give notes on something like this.” While Carlton Cigarettes and Wal-Mart did not permit their logos to be lampooned, they were the exception. “And as far as the products stuff, I remember writing it and going, ‘Oh man, there’s no way we’re going to clear all of this stuff.’ And I had a meeting with the lawyers, who were actually really cool and really liked the script. And in the Beavis & Butt-Head movie I couldn’t even have a bottle that was shaped like a Jack Daniel’s bottle. I couldn’t have, there was more, it was just ridiculous on that. But on Idiocracy, when we were talking about Starbucks, the lawyers said, ‘Well, it would help if you didn’t pick on just one company and if you did more than one.’ So, I was like okay, and that’s why there’s the whole red light district with Starbucks and there’s an H&R Block with ‘Tax Return and Relief,’ and all of that. But the other stuff, Carl Jr’s, that was all in the script, and I couldn’t believe it all cleared.”

Once Judge decided to cast Luke Wilson, he rewrote the script with the actor from Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tennenbaums in mind. “Luke is really funny. I think because he’s so good looking, casting people in Hollywood tend to want to put him in boyfriend roles. But he’s really funny. He does really good imitations. He could have been in sketch comedy.” Auditioning performers for the female lead, Judge saw Maya Rudolph and was concerned that the Saturday Night Live cast member might go over the top in a bid for laughs. Rudolph ended up winning the part. “I thought her acting was very much like real movie acting. She definitely gets the big picture. She was really fun to work with and this is her first big part in a movie.” Dax Shepard — from the MTV series Punk’d — wasn’t the physical type Judge was looking for in the part of the dim witted Frito. “I was imagining this big, heavy guy, but it wasn’t working and then Dax came in and read for it. Driving home I was thinking about how funny he was … He has no fear of the camera or of being in a movie. He lets it all hang out in a really funny way.”

With roughly $30 million in financing from Fox, what was then titled 3001 began shooting May 2004 at Austin Studios. Two still photographs emerged online and as of February, a release date of August 2005 was scheduled. Little was made public about the film, even when it finally escaped into theaters September 2006. There were no trailers, no press junket and no major ad campaign of any kind. There was no mention of Idiocracy on the Fox Movies website and if moviegoers who somehow knew about the film dialed Moviefone for show times, there was no listing for Idiocracy but for something called The Untitled Mike Judge Project. Fox opened Idiocracy in seven cities — Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Toronto — on a limited number of screens. Waiting to see the box office returns before expanding Idiocracy to other markets, the studio never did. Limited to 130 theaters, the new comedy from the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head and Office Space managed $444,093 in the U.S. and $51,210 internationally.

The press began speculating about what had happened. There were several theories. One was that Idiocracy was so awful that no one involved wanted to be associated with it. Mike Judge could not be reached for comment. Publicists for Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph maintained that their clients were unavailable for interviews. In August 2005, a reader giving the name “Delicious” had submitted to the website Ain’t It Cool News a review of a test screening he/she claimed to have attended several months previous. “Not only is it not funny, the acting is atrocious. I’ll give it to Mike Judge for trying something completely different for this movie, trying not to copy Office Space, but man, I can’t see this movie coming out into theatres, if not just straight to DVD.” A self-professed fan of Office Space who’d been looking forward to the screening, the scooper added, “I must also say that I wasn’t alone in the audience I was at. People sitting around us were saying things, and not mincing words, about how bad the movie was. People were actually MAD about seeing a movie that was FREE!”

Another theory was that Fox buckled under pressure from corporate sponsors. Kim Morgan — a contributor for MSN’s film blog The Hitlist — posted a rave review of Idiocracy on her blog Sunset Gun and speculated the cause of its media blackout.“No one knows for sure, but I’m thinking that attacking Starbucks, Fuddruckers, Carl’s Jr. and Costco had something to do with it. Oh yes, and Fox News, can’t forget that beacon of ‘fair and balanced’ broadcast journalism. Fittingly, this is exactly the kind of DEVO inspired treatment Idiocracy is mocking — that big business rules and there’s very little we can do about it. So, like Judge’s Beavis and Butt-head, his now classic Office Space and his TV Show King of the Hill, Idiocracy (and the predicament it fell into) is both darkly hilarious and deeply sad.” Luke Thompson — who also posted a positive review, for E! Online — told Fishbowl L.A., “It was obvious the studio killed it. Usually, movies that don’t screen for the press are promoted up the wazoo with misleading trailers, posters, etc., but this wasn’t promoted at all. It’s possible Mike Judge or somebody else pissed somebody important off.”

Still another theory was that Judge might have had a dispute with Fox over final cut. In retaliation, the studio might have slashed his post-production budget and dumped the film into theaters to fulfill their contractual obligation. Tim League, founder of Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas in Texas, supported this theory by revealing to the website Cinematical that his exhibition contract only specified Idiocracy be run for one week — two weeks is the standard for a new release — at only a 35% share for Fox, which League considered uncommonly low for what distributors typically ask for in the first two weeks of a major release. He added that in spite of requests he’d fielded from film festivals seeking permission to screen Idiocracy, Fox had apparently turned those requests down. League commented, “I’ve never seen anything like this. A studio releases a movie and then doesn’t want anyone to see it. Marketing it should be a no-brainer, with Mike Judge’s pedigree and Luke Wilson starring.”

In a chat with Chud.com in November 2006, Dax Shepard was stumped about the fate of Idiocracy. “I don’t know. There are all kinds of conspiracy theories surrounding it now, but there are a couple of issues. One is that it tested poorly, and they base all their P&A funds on how well it tests. But what they didn’t step back and think about is that the people who go see a free test screening on a Saturday night are the people being made fun of in the movie, so of course it didn’t test well. And then I think there are also issues with all the corporate attacks and Rupert [Murdoch, founder of News Corp., which owns Fox] being a very immersed guy in the corporate world, globally. That has to do something to do with it.” Shepard added, “The only perplexing thing about the Mike Judge movie is, why did they make it? The ballsy thing, in my opinion, was making the movie. The movie was the script — they knew what it was going to be. I don’t understand them making it in the first place. It doesn’t shock me that they didn’t know how to market it, but I’m shocked they made it.”

Promoting Extract on Collider.com in September 2009, Judge offered his theory on who or what killed Idiocracy. “I think it was a combination of — I don’t think anyone was out to get me — I think the combination was just kind of incompetence and just not knowing what to do with it. They tried a few ads, it didn’t look very good, and then I think what happened is they said, ‘Okay, Office Space made a lot of money on DVD. Didn’t do a lot at the box office. This is like that, what did we do wrong on Office Space? Well, we spent money promoting it. That was a waste of money because everyone found it on their own anyway, so let’s not spend anything. Let’s not even call Moviefone and give ‘em a title.’” Judge added, “So I just said, well, I’m not going to lift a finger to do any press. I don’t want to talk about it to anybody. ‘Cause I really don’t know why they’re doing this. I don’t own it. It didn’t bug me as much as it does some people because I just kind of, in a way, I ended up getting — without doing any interviews — getting a lot of press about how it didn’t get any press. So maybe it wasn’t a bad idea. I don’t think that was their plan. I don’t think it was a master plan to dump it on purpose. I mean, they did dump it.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Beavis Creator Sees a Funny Future and Films It” By Jane Sumner. The Dallas Morning News, 30 July 2004

“Mike Judge Is Getting Screwed (Again)” By Brian Rafferty. Esquire, June 2006

“Etan Cohen” By Steven Kotler. Variety, 22 June 2006

“Sooner or Later, Mike Judge Extracts Success” By Lisa Rosen. The Los Angeles Times, 3 September 2009

“The Mike Judge Interview” By Hunter Stephenson. Slashfilm.com, 9 September 2009

“IndieSeen: Time For Mike Judge To Go Indie” By Jette Kernion. Cinematical, 22 October 2006

“Dax Shepard Ponders Fox’s Idiocracy” By Devin Faraci. Chud.com, 15 November 2006

“Mike Judge, Finding A Comic Extract in the Office” By Terry Gross. Fresh Air, 25 August 2009

“Mike Judge talks Office Space, Idiocracy and Extract” By Steve Weintraub. Collider.com, 1 September 2009

Dogma (1999)
Directed by Kevin Smith
Written by Kevin Smith
Produced by Scott Mosier
130 minutes

Should I Care?
Hijacking various Judeo Christian symbols and myths to comment on the hypocrisies of religion, Kevin Smith’s fourth film certainly isn’t lacking in ambition. What it does lack is the resources and craftsmanship to pull any of its ambitions off. But en route to the kind of bug-eyed badness rarely seen in major motion pictures, Dogma hits a few bumps in the road: it’s provocative, it’s fearless, it’s in a class by itself. This cultural satire seems infused with the reckless abandon of the Delta fraternity from National Lampoon’s Animal House, who’ve decided they’re going to be thrown off campus anyway, so they mind as well take as many members of the status quo down with them as possible. That’s not to say Dogma is funny or should even be muttered in the same breath as Animal House, but you almost have to give it an incomplete grade. It’s all attitude — with some sound arguments directed toward religious lemmings — in search of a movie. “Incomplete” sums it up.

There seem to be endless pages of myth Smith forces his characters to explain for purposes of plot; none of it’s funny and none of it really moves the story anywhere. For the female lead, the filmmakers lobbied for and were saddled with Linda Fiorentino, whose barroom languor is a laugh killer (Janeane Garafalo would have been ideal). Smith’s trademark Jay & Silent Bob characters — fixtures at the corner store in laughers like Clerks — seem awkwardly dropped into a film that takes place around churches and engages in spiritual debate. As in any Kevin Smith film, the ones oriented around brutally honest and wackadoo dialogue (Chasing Amy) are quite good, while the ones with characters exchanging gunfire (Mallrats) are woefully bad. For a film with spurts of intelligence and the determination to inspire discussions of God, Dogma is inexplicably a member of the gun club. This approach ends up being a bullet to the head of what might have been a great film.

So, What’s This About?
After successfully persuading a nun in an airport that religion is a fraud, Loki (Matt Damon), the Angel of Death, cast down from heaven by God, and his buddy Bartleby (Ben Affleck), a journalist who got Loki drunk centuries ago and convinced him to quit his job, learn that a Catholic church in Red Bank, New Jersey looking to boost attendance has offered to forgive the sins of all who pass under its arches. This is the loophole in religious dogma that the renegade angels have been waiting for in order to escape banishment in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, an Illinois abortion clinic worker named Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) struggling with her faith is visited by the Metatron (Alan Rickman), the herald who does the Supreme Being’s talking because to hear the actual voice of God would cause human beings to explode. The Metatron gives Bethany the task of stopping Loki and Bartleby, whose return to heaven would invalidate the word of God and destroy all existence.

Accompanying Bethany in her journey are two “prophets”, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith), New Jersey dope peddlers on a business trip to suburban Illinois in search of the town from the John Hughes movies. Dropping naked from the sky is Rufus (Chris Rock), the thirteenth apostle still upset he was omitted from the Bible; among Rufus’ revelations is that Jesus was black. In a strip club, the gang meets Serendipity (Salma Hayek), the muse. Bethany learns that she was chosen to save mankind because she is the Last Scion, the last surviving heir of Jesus Christ. Plotting against her is the demon Azrael (Jason Lee) who God cast out of heaven for refusing to take sides against Lucifer; as Azrael sees it, the end of existence beats spending any more time in hell. Azrael is assisted by the Stygian Triplets, who under the guise of street hockey punks have incapacitated God, a skeeball fanatic who took human form and was caught by the imps on the New Jersey boardwalk. The fate of mankind now rests in Bethany’s hands.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Kevin Smith was working in a convenience store in his hometown of Red Bank, New Jersey when on his 21^st birthday, he went to see a movie: Slacker. Impressed that Richard Linklater made a critically acclaimed film in his hometown for next to no money, Smith answered an ad for an eight-month program at Vancouver Film School. There, he met Scott Mosier. Dissatisfied that the course was all theory, Smith dropped out after four months, but made a deal with Mosier that whoever finished writing a script first would get help from the other to make the movie. The result was Clerks, which Mosier produced and Smith wrote, directed and co-starred. It was shot in Smith’s workplace on a budget of roughly $27,000, self-financed using eight credit cards, portions of Smith’s college fund, the sale of his comic book collection and insurance money he and his buddy Jason Mewes collected when a flood damaged their car. Nearly rated NC-17 for its sexually frank dialogue, the comedy was acquired by Miramax Films and launched Smith’s film career.

Smith had already begun scribbling notes for another script. Titled God, he was influenced not only by certain comic books or standup comedians who commented on spirituality, but his own irreverence for his Catholic school education. Retitled Dogma, the technical challenges of the project spurred Smith and Mosier to get more experience before producing it. A poorly received mainstream comedy for Gramercy Pictures (Mallrats, 1995) and an enthusiastically received indie romantic comedy distributed by Miramax (Chasing Amy, 1997) followed. With the cache to attract an all-star cast and as much as $10 million in financing from Miramax, Smith finally produced Dogma. But the work in progress received such an outcry from the Catholic League that Disney sold the picture back to Miramax. Lions Gate Films stepped in and pushed Dogma to respectable box office and the best reviews of Smith’s career.

How’d They Do It?
During his stint at Vancouver Film School and before he wrote Clerks, Kevin Smith was scribbling notes for a script he hoped would spread the word of God in the way Smith knew best. In the liner notes for the special edition DVD of Dogma, he wrote, “All I knew was that I wanted to talk about the differences between religion and faith, and that I had to employ the Plenary Indulgence loophole as a plot device. The idea of the Plenary Indulgence had fascinated me since childhood, when my parish celebrated a Centennial. We received a special dispensation from the Pope decreeing that on the day of the parish’s hundredth anniversary, those who walked through the front door of the church would have all sins erased from their souls, giving them a clean slate, as it were. You might not think this would mean much to an eleven year old kid, because how much sin could he possibly be steeped in? But being educated in a Catholic school can make a kid feel like even the Venial sins (the tiny transgressions like white lies and hurtful sentiments expressed behind your parents’ backs) are one-way tickets to Hell.”

Smith cited his Catholic education as an influence, as well as the comic book Mage by Matt Wagner and the comedy of George Carlin and Sam Kinison, who reached into their Catholic roots for material. The initial idea was for the protagonist of God to be a high school jock. Rufus the 13^th Apostle and Serendipity the Muse were also there. In the summer of 1994 — after Miramax picked up Clerks but before it was in theaters — Smith started a first draft of what he was now calling Dogma. “A high school jock no longer, Bethany became a woman, and she was a stripped in a nudie booth joint, where she met Jay and Silent Bob (enthusiastic clients, to say the least; hilarity ensues). Arazael was introduced only in the last thirty pages of the script, after having been referred to as ‘the Shadowy Figure’ most of the time. At the end of the flick, in an effort to keep Bartleby and Loki from passing through the archway, Bethany blew up the church (imagine the shit I would’ve gotten from the Catholic League for that). But aside from those major differences (and pages and pages of dialogue; the first draft — dated Aug. 4, 1994 — was 148 pages long), everything’s pretty much the same as it is in the finished film.”

As far back as Clerks — when Smith slipped a title card into the end credits that read: “Jay and Silent Bob will return in Dogma” — he planned on making the film. It didn’t happen right away. “Scott Mosier (my producer) and I decided, after reading the first draft, that this was not a flick we wanted to tackle as our sophomore foray. We agreed that it was beyond us (probably still is), and that it’d be best to let it sit on the back burner, until we had enough talent to handle it properly. So we went ahead and made Mallrats in ’95, and during the course of that year, I took another pass at Dogma — this time adding an orangutan for Jay and Bob to hang out with, as well as shifting Bethany’s job from a strip club to an abortion clinic. In ’96, I took another pass at the script, this time dropping the orangutan and rewriting the flick to include Joey Lauren Adams as Bethany (we were dating at the time). Following that pass, I started writing Chasing Amy, and summoned Ben Affleck to Jersey (you could do that in those days) to read the first thirty pages of the script. He asked for something else to read on his way back to Boston, as thirty pages of Amy wouldn’t cover the trip. I gave him Dogma.”

Ben Affleck became vocal about playing Bartleby in Dogma. Smith polished the script with that in mind, as well as Jason Lee performing opposite him as Loki. Chasing Amy would be screened to raves at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1997 and Miramax gave a green light to Dogma at a budget of roughly $6.5 million. By that time, Jason Lee’s schedule had filled up. Smith turned to a buddy of Affleck’s named Matt Damon, who’d shown chemistry with Affleck in the dailies of a yet to released film Smith had godfathered at Miramax titled Good Will Hunting. Linda Fiorentino took a break from the press tour for Men In Black in the summer of 1997 to campaign for the part of Bethany. Impressing Smith and Scott Mosier with her grasp of Catholicism, the role was rewritten for an actress in her mid 30s. Smith offered Holly Hunter the role of God, but having just portrayed an angel in A Life Less Ordinary, the actress demurred. Alan Rickman was a fan of Chasing Amy and once he joined the cast, suggested his friend Emma Thompson play the Supreme Being. Thompson agreed.

Assuming he’d cast Samuel L. Jackson as Rufus, Smith was sold on Chris Rock after meeting the comedian. For the role of Serendipity, Miramax encouraged Smith to meet with Salma Hayek. “Salma Hayek was a meeting that I initially didn’t want to take. Serendipity had to be whip-smart, and I wasn’t sure if Salma was that at all. Imagine how stupid I felt when I found out she was a Poli-Sci major who could quote the Bible, chapter and verse. Add to that the fact that she was incredibly adorable and very sweet, and I went from resistant to slavishly devoted.” Smith chased George Carlin to appear as Cardinal Glick. The comedian’s manager maintained that the part was just too small for Carlin to work into his busy schedule. Booked with Carlin on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Smith slipped him the script; Carlin would agree to join the production. Emma Thompson chose to stay in England and have a baby. With God uncast, Smith would offer the role to Alanis Morissette, who had turned down the part of Bethany coming off a concert tour but was now game to join the cast.

In addition to loading the picture with bankable names — actors the studio expected to slash their fees for the creative privilege of working on cutting edge material at a prestige company like Miramax — Smith and Mosier were given an experienced director of photography. They had met David Klein at Vancouver Film School and used him to shoot Smith’s previous three pictures, each of which were savaged in various corners for looking terrible. No one accused Wes Anderson of making shoddy looking films and his director of photography Robert Yeoman came on board Dogma. Smith recalled, “Yeoman was really kind about the other films. Because I was like, ‘What did we do wrong? Why do they look so bad?’ And he was like, ‘Well it’s not like you did anything wrong, you just shoot everything against the wall. You know, and like, you line up people and shoot ‘em against a wall. If you just kind of go to the right, go to the left, you’re getting some depth and suddenly it opens up a little bit more.’ And he said, ‘That’s something we should definitely go for on this movie. More depth, left and right.’”

Dogma commenced shooting April 1998 in Pittsburgh, a city the filmmakers were drawn to for St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, which served as location for the climax. In addition to the challenges of shooting a 165-page script in roughly 50 days, Linda Fiorentino and Kevin Smith would both admit difficulties working together. Smith commented on the message boards of his View Askewniverse website, “The interesting thing is, I never had to give a line reading to Alan Rickman unless he asked (which was maybe once or twice). Instinctively, the man knew how things should sound. We never had a problem. Linda, however, would sometimes read a line from another movie altogether, and for the first few days of shooting, her energy didn’t match the text nor anyone else’s in the cast. It was like she was in a different flick.” Smith added, “And while, as I’ve said, I don’t regret casting her, like Chief Brody said in Jaws 2 I never need to go through that hell again. Honestly, I gave very few line readings on Dogma. Linda was the only person who complained about it because she was pretty much the only recipient.”

A pair of Dogma test screenings were held December 1998 in Philadelphia. The only major criticism was that at two and a half hours, the film was running too long. A screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1999 compelled Smith to cut two scenes: a musical routine in a strip club where Serendipity inspires her customers to break into the theme from Fat Albert, and a speech by Jason Lee, who’d agreed to appear as the evil Azrael. While Smith’s fan base eagerly awaited his fourth film, the New York based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights — which opposes “anti-Catholic” depictions in the media and counted 350,000 parishioners as members at the time — were not amused. President William Donohue commenced a petition drive to pressure Disney to sever its affiliation with Miramax Films due to the studio’s perceived track record of insulting their faith.. The Catholic League had targeted ABC with one million signatures in opposition to Nothing Sacred, a sitcom about a hip priest played by Kevin Anderson. The series was canceled in 1998 after 20 episodes.

In April 1999, Disney CEO Michael Eisner sold Miramax co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein back their political hot potato for $14 million, allowing them to seek another distributor. In Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures, Smith lamented, “We had Matt and Ben following Good Will Hunting, a movie that made $125 million, plus won them a writing Oscar. MGM watched it and passed. Columbia watched it and passed. Universal watched it and passed. Edgar Bronfman Jr. watched it himself, and was just like, ‘There’s no way we can put out this movie without seeing our stock drop.’ The unsung villain of all this is Blockbuster Video. Because Blockbuster has made it their mandate that they won’t shelve an NC-17 film, and then you have a company that takes up 85 percent of the video business, maybe more, it’s tough. Every distributor who’s looking to the ancillary market to make money or make up what the film didn’t make theatrically, has to take that into consideration.” Lions Gate Films — gambling on prestige films like Gods and Monsters or Affliction deemed uncommercial by Hollywood — agreed to distribute Dogma.

Promoting his film on The Charlie Rose Show in November 1999, Smith elaborated, “The Catholic League I think is upset because it was a Disney movie initially. This is my feeling. The film was a Miramax movie and by virtue of that it was a Disney film. The Catholic League as you know is an organization, they’re heat seekers; they love to go after stuff that raises their profile. Doesn’t necessarily go after things that are really, intentionally attacks on the faith, or the church, they go after things that they feel attacks them as Catholics. They feel that Disney attacks Catholics constantly, whether it’s with Nothing Sacred — the TV show that was on ABC a little while ago — or Priest — the Miramax movie that was out a few years ago — or Disney’s same-sex health benefits policy, or the alleged gay day they have at Disney World every year. Always going after Disney. And we were just the ripe, luscious opportunity for them to go after Disney, that week. We were kind of the target du jour.” When the film was screened at the New York Film Festival, hundreds of Catholic demonstrators picketed the Lincoln Center.

Critics returned the best reviews of Kevin Smith’s career. Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Dogma is like an underground comics version of the eternal struggle among the inhabitants of heaven, earth, and the hell below. As the writer and director, Smith adopts a ‘what if’ stance, skewing some of the tenets of Catholic theology to create a storyline that looks at the religion from the other side of the rabbit hole. The film is funny, contentious, blasphemous, and surreal.” Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly: “The screenplay is another foul-mouthed rehearsal of Smith‘s near-Dickensian genius for the slacker patter of his generation. Yet though Dogma plays like a live-action comic book for boys, it’s also shot through with wisdom at once juvenile and wizened, coupled with a sweetness of temper…” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “If the film is less than perfect, it is because Smith is too much in love with his dialogue. Like George Bernard Shaw, he loves to involve his characters in long witty conversations about matters of religion, sexuality and politics. Dogma is one of those rare screenplays, like a Shaw playscript, that might actually read better than it plays; Smith is a gifted comic writer who loves paradox, rhetoric and unexpected zingers from the blind side.”

Kevin Smith’s fans and the free publicity pushed Dogma to $30.6 million at the U.S. box office. Smith credited his cast for that. “At least in that first weekend, because we had, like, almost a nine million dollar opening weekend on only twelve hundred screens, you know, we didn’t have the typical kind of two thousand, twenty five hundred screen opening most films have. But this is a niche film. You know, this is a true independent film, which is why it sucks so hard to see it kind of get snubbed at the Spirit Awards this year. This represents everything that independent film is: It was shot on the cheap. It was a movie that lost its distributor and had to find another distributor, a distributor that is a very — a true independent distributor, not owned by somebody else, Lions Gate. People were working inexpensively and the content is not subject matter that appeals to everybody. Yeah, it’s very funny — hopefully — it’s entertaining, but it’s still about religion for God’s sakes, and who goes to see movies about religion anymore? Particularly ones that aren’t big budget.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Dogma (Special Edition). DVD audio commentary by Kevin Smith, Scott Mosier and Vincent Pereira. Columbia Tristar Home Video (2001)

Down and Dirty Pictures. By Peter Biskind. Simon & Schuster (2004)

“OnFilm Interview: A Conversation With Kevin Smith and David Klein” By Bob Fisher. Kodak, November 2008

Humpday (2009)
Written by Lynn Shelton
Directed by Lynn Shelton
Produced by Lynn Shelton
MPAA rating: “R for some strong sexual content, pervasive language and a scene of drug use”
Running time: 94 minutes

Should I Care?
Lynn Shelton provoked more than one journalist to crown her “the female Judd Apatow” in the summer of ‘09. Her micro budget coming out as a filmmaker has little in common with The 40-Year-Old Virgin or Knocked Up. Humpday is more like the female version of The Blair Witch Project. Instead of two dudes and a girl getting terrorized in the woods, Shelton explores the relationship between two college buddies and how wide open the window is on the possibility they would actually take that relationship to the next level. That’s scary. In spite of its abrasive premise, this is a surprisingly tasteful movie, smart, spot-on emotionally, superbly performed and funny. Whether Shelton will be any more successful than The Blair Witch bros at applying her DIY touch to another film remains to be seen, but she catches lightning in a bottle here.

Working from a budget she scraped together from grants and donations, Shelton wasn’t left with much else to put on screen except frank dialogue about sex and the evolving nature of adult relationships. It’s a target that she hits dead on. With a script workshopped in collaboration with her actors (Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard & Alycia Delmore), the results are like a much less jokey or pop culture obsessed Clerks (1994), with Humpday coming close to being as amusing as Kevin Smith’s debut. Shelton smartly avoids fanning a debate between straight versus gay and focuses on her honestly drawn characters. Instead of jumping from one location to the next, scenes are permitted to play out with the natural pace of a dinner conversation, growing more revealing the longer they’re allowed to continue. The result is a small but perfect comedy.

So, What’s This About?
The plans of Ben (Mark Duplass) and his wife Anna (Alycia Delmore) to conceive a child go awry when Ben’s buddy Andrew (Joshua Leonard) drops in for a visit at two thirty in the morning. While Ben has added a few pounds employed as a transportation planner, Andrew has been in Mexico, working with locals on an art project of some sort. In an effort to get to know her husband’s bohemian friend, Anna cooks them dinner the next evening, but Andrew lures Ben to dine at the home of a polyamorous couple (Lynn Shelton and Trina Willard) that he just met. There, conversation turns to an amateur porn festival called Humpfest. Scoffing at Andrew’s ambition to make his own “erotic art film”, Ben gets challenged to expand his suburban horizons. Stuffed on fettuccini, wine and weed, the guys agree to have sex with each other and film it.

Not buying that her husband needed to chaperone Andrew all night, Anna urges Ben to explain why he left her at home with pork chops. He apologizes, but maintains that even though they’re starting a family, they shouldn’t close themselves off from having new experiences either. Sobered up, Andrew lets his buddy off the hook for their art project by claiming he doesn’t want to wreck any havoc in Ben’s newly domesticated life. Being stereotyped only makes Ben more determined to go through with it. He feels confident his wife will let him participate in the porn movie, but chickens out giving her full details of his planned participation. Having a drink with Anna later that night, Andrew unknowingly fills that information in. Explaining to his wife that this is something he feels he has to get out of his system, Ben books a hotel room for him and Andrew to go through with their business.

Who Made It?
Lynn Shelton was born and raised in Seattle. An interest in stage acting led her to the University of Washington, where Shelton graduated in 1987 with a B.A. in theater. She spent the next nine years in New York City, discovering that instead of acting, her true passion was photography. Shelton earned an MFA in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where she started making short films. Opting to raise her son in Seattle, she returned to The Evergreen State with her husband. Without really knowing anyone in the Seattle filmmaking community, Shelton was awarded a grant from 911 Media Arts to complete a short film, about a miscarriage. She learned to craft narrative films by working as an editor-for-hire on a couple of shorts, as well as a feature titled Outpatient (2002).

Shelton’s feature film writing and directing debut We Go Way Back (2006) — financed by The Film Company, a Seattle non-profit film studio — concerned a 23-year-old nagged by her former 13-year-old self.  It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Slamdance Film Festival, but Shelton’s experiences working with a large crew spurred her to create a looser, faster, more actor friendly environment on her sophomore film, My Effortless Brilliance (2008). Employed as a still photographer, Shelton met an actor named Mark Duplass. Inspired to create a movie with him, Shelton pitched an idea about two straight buddies who attempt to have sex for an adult film fest. Self-financed with grants and favors and shot over 10 breezy days in Seattle — with actors using a structured premise to base their improvisations — Humpday became a sensation at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, winning a Special Jury Prize.

How’d They Do It?
Humpday had its genesis in Lynn Shelton’s desire to collaborate with actor/filmmaker Mark Duplass on a movie of some sort. The two had known of each other through mutual contacts in the Do It Yourself filmmaking community and finally met in the summer of 2007, when Shelton volunteered her services as a still photographer on a low budget movie titled True Adolescents that was shooting in Seattle with Duplass in the cast. Shelton recalled, “We just had a lot to talk about and knew we wanted to work with each other in some capacity. And then watching him act on that set was just completely inspiring — I just loved the way he worked as an actor. Not only was he tremendously talented but the specific style that he worked in and [how] generous he was with the other actors and how he seemed to bring the best out of everybody and make everybody go deeper than they might have gone otherwise.”

At the 2006 Maryland Film Festival, Shelton became friends with Joe Swanberg, director of the micro budget LOL (2006) and Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007). Visiting Shelton and Duplass in Seattle, Swanberg related his experiences at their city’s amateur erotica festival, HUMP! Shelton recalled, “He said that long ago he’d become completely desensitized to straight porn — growing up in the age of the internet, a young guy just watching it all the time — and had never sought out gay porn before, so here he was sitting in this theater being forced to watch gay porn and he just found it absolutely compelling. He could never describe exactly why.” She added, “It wasn’t as if Joe was like, ‘I need to have sex with a man!’ but it was fascinating that this very straight guy was just like, ‘Boy, that was really an interesting sight to see!’ Some little switch was flipped for him, and at that point I thought, ‘Well, this just seems very amusing to me that this straight guy is so interested in gay porn,’ and that was what got me going in that direction of straight guys and gay porn and gay sex.’”

Duplass sent Shelton a script he was hoping she’d direct starring his wife, Katie Aselton. That never came to pass, but about a month later, Shelton called Duplass with an idea. “It took me a little while to get the nerve up because I was a little worried about how he would react, I wanted to pitch it just right, but basically I said: ‘The idea is two best friends from college, ten years later their lives have sort of diverged, but the basic premise is they decide they have to try and have sex together, two straight friends.’ He sort of paused for half a second and then said, ‘Okay! Sounds great!’ The interesting thing was that I originally had seen him in the other role, this idea of the wild, adventuring nomadic artist, very charismatic. He immediately said, ‘I’ve got to play the domesticated dude. That’s just where I am in my life right now and that would be more interesting for me.’ So I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to need help finding the other guy because I don’t know anybody as charismatic as you and he needs to be at least as charismatic as you.’”

Mark Duplass had met Joshua Leonard at the 2005 Woodstock Film Festival, where he and his brother Jay Duplass were screening their film The Puffy Chair (2005) and Leonard — best known for his role in The Blair Witch Project (1999) — was presenting a short he’d directed. Duplass revealed, “I knew enough that [there] are two essential ingredients that I wanted out of someone playing opposite me. The first being that we just have great natural chemistry and it looks like we’re buddies, and that we have an affection for each other, and you really would believe that they’re long-time friends. I knew we had that. We had instant chemistry when we met. What I also wanted in there was someone who could match me, because I’m a very dominant Type A aggressive person, and when I knew we were going to be improvising, I knew I needed someone who was my match, essentially. I knew that about Josh. He’s just very intelligent, very Type A. We both have big tempers and we would have explosiveness together, so it was like a totally natural fit.”

Shelton enthused, “The thing that was so beautiful is that when I first gave Mark the idea — it took me a few days to build up the courage to actually pitch it to him, the whole idea, because I totally didn’t see how he would say yes — and not only did he say yes, he said, ‘I don’t see how we can succeed doing this.’ We didn’t want to make a movie that was going to be just sort of a broad farce or slapstick comedy, we really wanted to make it only if we could do it in a believable way.” Duplass claimed, “I honestly didn’t have any hesitations. I mean, when we made this project, the bromance and that sort of zeitgeist wasn’t really around as much. It’s happened. I guess we lucked out making a movie about a subject that was interesting and that people were talking about at the time. That really wasn’t at the forefront of our brains, and in terms of me being maybe hesitant or reserved, the only concern I really had was that we would make a movie that was flippant with the sexual politics, and I didn’t want to trivialize any of that stuff.”

In addition to taking a chance on content that fell outside the norms of mainstream film, Shelton committed to trying a radically new approach to production. “After experiencing the traditional model of filmmaking with my first feature, I wanted to try creating a totally actor-centered atmosphere on set with my second feature film. It was really an experiment to see if I could capture a level of naturalism that would be so high, it would almost feel like a documentary. So instead of writing predetermined dialogue for characters that I thought up in my head, I decided to start with the people I wanted to work with and then handcraft characters custom designed just for them. I invite the actors in very early on in the process, when the film is still a loose story, because the actors will be heavily involved in the development of their own characters and I need to know who those characters are before I can cement how they will behave in each scene of the film.”

She continued, “The film organically evolves from that point on. By the time we get to the set, everyone has a detailed backstory and they are all intimately acquainted with their own characters. Instead of a proper script, we have a detailed outline of all the scenes. We know the point of every scene, and the emotional map of every scene, but the actors come up with the actual words on their own. With the right casting (as well as a very high skill level in the editing room), I have found that this kind of highly structured, highly directed improvisation can give me both the naturalism that I crave as well as the structure that I love.” With a day job was teaching part-time at the Art Institute of Seattle’s digital filmmaking program, Shelton applied for grants and collected donations from friends and family to self-finance Humpday. She claimed her budget ended up “less than a million dollars but more than 10 dollars.”

Collaborating with director of photography Ben Kasulke — who’d shot each of Shelton’s previous films — Humpday rolled June 2008 in Seattle. Utilizing two Panasonic HVX-200 digital camcorders, a schedule of no more than 12 days was allotted. To accomplish this, Shelton realized she needed help. An assistant director was hired and two co-producers — Steven Schardt and Jennifer Maas — were brought aboard to run the set. Shelton explained, “You’ve basically got two camera operators, you’ve got your DP and you’ve got a second camera operator, and eighty percent of the time I was the second camera operator, and you’ve got one sound person and then you’ve got maybe a couple of other people in the next room, basically that’s it on set along with your actors.” Editor Nat Sanders — who Shelton had met on the festival circuit — came up from Los Angeles to cut Humpday with the director over two and a half months. Sound department head Vince Smith would be tasked with composing the film’s sparse but quirky musical score.

Humpday would be invited to the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, where it notched a nomination for Grand Jury Prize. Critics marveled over the movie as well. Robert Abele, The Los Angeles Times: “That Humpday is able to avoid standard-issue homosexual panic jokes almost entirely for something more thematically pointed — the bumpy humor of men who crave intimacy and change but can only articulate it as a ridiculous challenge — is a testament to Shelton’s filmmaking intelligence.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Funny, yes, but also observant and thought-provoking.” Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “It is all the more remarkable for having been conceived by an empathetic woman with no apparent ax to grind and a sensibility tuned to the minutiae of straight-male bonding rituals. Men may be from Mars and women from Venus, but some observant Venusians understand the brute fundamentals of Martian psychology.”

Magnolia Pictures acquired worldwide distribution rights and planned a national on-demand release via their Ultra VOD platform. In a limited theatrical release in the United States July 2009, Humpday got enough ink to run up $407,377 at the domestic box office. Lynn Shelton remained grounded about her future plans. “Aside from doing right by this film and hoping it gets out into the world, I just want to keep making movies. It’s really as simple as that. I don’t have any specific goals — I don’t want to leap into the studio system, I just want to be able to stay in Seattle and keep making movies and not bankrupt my family. If it provides me with a broader range of options for budgets and a broader range of people, that would be a lovely side effect. Frankly, I’m a very actor-centric director, so my biggest fantasy would be for actors that I respect to see this film and want to work with me.”

Where’d You Get All of This?

“Humpday. Sundance 2009 Preview w/Director Lynn Shelton” By Karina Longworth. Spoutblog, 15 January 2009

“Lynn Shelton: Humpday” FilmMaker Magazine, 30 January 2009

“Lynn Shelton and the cast of Humpday” Comingsoon.net, 6 July 2009

“Interview with Lynn Shelton, Director of Humpday” By Melissa Silverstein. The Huffington Post, 8 July 2009

“Interview: Lynn Shelton on Humpday” By Sean Axmaker. Parallax View, 9 July 2009

“Mark Duplass Talks Humpday and Future Projects” By Hayley Hosman. The Daily Californian, 22 July 2009

Humpday. DVD audio commentary by Mark Duplass & Joshua Leonard and Lynn Shelton. Magnolia Home Entertainment (2009)