I don't really intend for this blog to be a place for pimping the stuff you can find on Cracked, but I did want to talk about this
Michael Ian Black video for a minute or two. Mostly because a lot of strange planning went into it, the kind of planning that wouldn't immediately be apparent by watching the video. I also don't really want this blog to be about "process," because in most cases that limits the fun. Also, it's probably boring to you folks. You can watch the video and love it or hate it on its own merits; how we got there is irrelevant. BUT, despite all this, I'm going to violate my own rules and write about the process of making this video because, dammit, I want to.
"Would you like a ten minute video interview with Michael Ian Black for your website?"
That was all we had to go on in the beginning. Representatives of MIB, (or Comedy Central, or Klondike, or VH1 for all I know), contacted us, as I imagine they contacted various other websites, and offered us a ten minute block of time one afternoon to interview Michael Ian Black about his new show. Maybe a hundred or so blogs had spots reserved one Monday afternoon, one after the other, asking Michael Ian Black, presumably, the same questions over and over again. [Sidebar, that must have been exhausting for him. All those interviews, rapid fire. God damn.]
We don't really do interviews, obviously. All we said in response was "Yeah, we'll reserve the ten minutes, provided you let us do whatever we want within those ten minutes." They said "Sure!" It was really Cracked Super Editor in Chief Jack O'Brien who made this decision. He agreed to the interview on the understanding that we would do something funny or wild or inappropriate with the interview. Then, (because of the timing of the interview), Jack went on vacation. This isn't common, Jack almost never goes on vacation. It just so happens that the timing worked out this way. He says "Yes" based on an idea he has, and then disappears after giving me a few notes about it. I'll call this
Road Block 1. The earliest version of this idea is Jack's, and he's not around to explain it to my simple caveman brain. I didn't want to let him down, which is made almost inevitable when I don't know exactly what he expects.
But, the good news, was that Jack asked if we could do something a little weirder than the usual interview, and they said "Yeah, totally, go nuts." They were enthusiastically behind us.
Now, once the interview was set and Jack was ballooning around the world, it was time to figure out what kind of sketch we were going to do and how we'd incorporate Michael Ian Black into it. With only ten minutes for the actual interview, and about five days to plan, we settled on this 'Interview goes from bad to worse to ridiculous in record time' angle, knowing that our eleven o'clock number would be the murder of Swaim. A decent idea for a sketch, I thought, especially given our constraints. Now, it was time to get MIB excited about it. I'm an enormous Michael Ian Black fan, so I was pretty stoked about what we'd be able to come up with. "He's doing a million repetitive interviews," I thought, "he'll be PSYCHED to do something new and exciting." I was all set to email him and explain the sketch and his part in it.
We're going to talk about celebrities for a second. Michael Ian Black seems like a really great person. In the brief moments where we spoke before and after the interview, he was incredibly friendly. I don't know too much about him because, like all moderately-to-super famous folks, he's surrounded by "people." That's the thing with celebrities. With one, beautiful exception, I've found this to be par for the course when dealing with celebrities out here. You get famous, and then you get handlers to deal with all the bullshit. That's the way it goes.
So, in the week leading up to the interview, I'm not emailing with Michael Ian Black, we're not brainstorming together. I'm not even explaining the idea of the sketch, because we're not even speaking. I'm talking to an agent, or a manager, or a public relations go-between. The lack of direct access to Michael Ian Black forms
Road Block 2. We're basically indirectly co-starring in a sketch together, but I have absolutely no access to him. This is not a sketch-writing style that I recommend for anyone.
He's a comedian. It would have been easy to explain what was going on, because he *gets it,* for lack of a better phrase. It is not as easy to explain to a bunch of handlers, PR folks and sponsors why a sketch about someone getting stabbed in the eye is funny. I had to sell a murder sketch to a bunch of people who wanted an interview. And I will say that my contact was very understanding, had a great sense of humor and was incredibly open to us doing something new. But all of the people to whom he had to answer were not.
"Okay...but maybe don't show too much blood."
"Sure.... But how about the death is an accident instead of a murder?"
"Hey, can the murder take place off screen instead of on?"
Those were their
actual concerns. My contact had to begrudgingly forward those concerns as they came, I could practically hear him sighing through the email. When I forwarded the concerns over to co-editor David Wong, his response was "They know we're not
actually murdering anyone, right? They know this is just pretend...right?"
And we conceded, every time. We'd say "Sure, no blood." Then the next day we'd get the email about the death being accidental and we'd say "You got it." A day goes by, they want the murder off screen so we say "No problem." We're happy to oblige, if it meant working with Michael Ian Black in some way. Then came the kicker.
With two days till the interview, my contact sadly sends over one last concern.
"Hey, can you just not kill anyone at all?"That’s the cost of indirectly working with someone famous, I suppose. That person has sponsors, and those sponsors have obligations and responsibilities and a ton of other things that I can't even fathom. I get that. I'm sure all they wanted was a bunch of internet interviews to GET HYPE and BUILD BUZZ, and then Cracked comes along with our stupid anti-interview and fake blood. We probably seemed like a lot more trouble than we were worth. We've all got jobs, and they were just doing theirs.
But, by that same token, I was going to do mine.
I explained to our contact that it looked like they were, from the beginning, trying to gradually turn our sketch into an interview. It seemed as if they were trying to surreptitiously rob this sketch of everything that made it stand out. They wanted to water it down to the point of uselessness and, I explained, that we'd sooner not do the interview. I pointed out that, hey,
you guys contacted
us. We're not an interview site. If you object to our approach, well, you should have done your research better, because you'd have found that it's completely in keeping with our sensibilities.
The email I sent was difficult. Not emotionally, or anything, it's just always hard when you need to explain a joke to someone. I had to explain the sketch about four different ways, each time emphasizing how a) the murder is fake and b) MIB will not be the one murdering, so it won't reflect poorly on him in any way and c) DID I MENTION THIS IS ALL MAKE BELIEVE?!?!
Our contact, always supportive, forwarded the info along, helped fight our battle and got the sponsors or handlers or whomever to capitulate. With a day remaining, we won this little war. Yay us.
Still, problems certainly existed. We still didn't have direct access to Michael Ian Black until the interview itself. For all I knew, he didn't even know we were doing a sketch, he just assumed we were another interview. Also, the sponsors and handlers wanted to make sure plugs for various projects were still in place. These were problems. All I had was ten minutes with Michael Ian Black. We needed to come up with a series of questions that would a) appease the sponsors and b) work for our sketch.
If you're wondering what it's like to write a sketch before you have the lines of the person you're playing opposite, I can tell you it's incredibly difficult. I couldn't very well sit there and write out lines for Michael Ian Black. I couldn't say "Now say 'Use anti-blood'" or anything. So, first, for my own benefit, I wrote out what an idealized version of the sketch would look like. I thought "If I could give MIB lines, what would they be," and I wrote out a little script. Next, I needed to write a series of interview questions that would, in theory, lead Michael Ian Black to give answers that were roughly in line with the idealized script I'd already written. I had to just sit down and write up a set of leading interview questions, ask them, and friggin' pray that Michael Ian Black's answers would be usable in the footage. This was delicate, because if he said something like "This feels like a prank" or "What are you doing" or "I'm hanging up the phone," the sketch would be ruined. But I still needed my answers.
Road Block 3. And you know what?
Road Block 4, too. I'm not a smart guy. This was a confusing pain in the ass.
Luckily, Michael Ian Black is unflappable. My greatest fear--that he'd get turned off by the questions and cancel the interview-- never came to pass, because he was prepared to answer any stupid question I asked. So thank you, Michael Ian Black, even though I'm positive you're not reading this.
Once we had the raw footage of his answers, everything became instantly more manageable. We no longer had sponsors and handlers to deal with and there was no more mystery of what he was going to say. We had his answers, it was just a matter of writing a script based off of those answers. That's cake. I can totally write a script where half the dialogue is already there. I wrote up the script, sent it off to Michael and Abe for rewrites and we were ready to shoot. We realized we needed a scene before the interview, so Michael and I improv'd a few times and, after a couple of hours late one Monday night, we'd wrapped filming.
Michael and Abe really made this project sing. Not just with the improv stuff in the beginning, but the filming and, god damn, the editing. Here's something I didn't know a few months ago and am very quickly learning.
Editors are Writers. Editors are Writers. Editors are Writers. It can't be overstated. They have as much control over the story as the writers and the actors, maybe more. An editor can ruin a film by screwing up the written timing, or an editor can bring a film to another level by building off of the raw materials. Thankfully, our editors are outstanding. They took the raw footage of MIB, the sketch footage that we shot, the audio of both and made something, in my opinion, that's really great. In editing, they straight up
created moments. Awkward silences, weird faces, different beats, it all comes down to the sharp editing that Abe and Michael have perfected. The comedic timing of their editing is impeccable, and it's the editing that took this sketch from a B- to an A.
This post would get even longer and more unreadable if I sat here pointing out specific brand new moments that they created, but brother, you better believe I can go on and on about it. Instead, I'll stop now. I just wanted everyone to know exactly what went into this project. That some Guy said "Do you want to interview Michael Ian Black," and Jack, Michael, Abe and I took it and sprinted to this particular finish line.
