Search Results for: Comedy

How to Be Aca-Awesome

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,345 words)

 

After getting her start in the Chicago improv scene, Kay Cannon went on to write for 30 Rock—where she was on staff from the very beginning—and New Girl, for which she was also an executive producer. Her debut screenplay, a quirky a cappella comedy, became the hit film Pitch Perfect. The sequel, Pitch Perfect 2, is in theaters now. Cannon and I spoke by phone about why a cappella is so uncool, the movie’s treatment of weight and race, and Cannon’s feelings about her own teeth.

You first got the idea for this movie while you were at 30 Rock, when someone wrote a line about Toofer having been in an a cappella group in college. You thought it was a complete joke. When you found out that nope, a cappella is real, you thought, someone has to make a movie about this! But what I find really interesting is that you started talking about the general idea of a movie about college a cappella without any specific story or plot in mind yet. I feel like some people would be hesitant to broach such an early-stage idea, even to friends. Is that always how you’ve operated?

Yeah, I kind of put it out into the universe. I’m around a lot of creative people, so you start to talk about ideas, and maybe somebody helps spark something. I actually think this one was kismet for me, because I had said something to Elizabeth Banks, who’s my friend, just in conversation. A long while later, and separate from what I’d said to her, her husband found out about this book, Mickey Rapkin’s Pitch Perfect, and thought it would make a great movie. So when I got the call from them to say, “Hey, would you be interested in writing this?,” it was just such a wonderful collision. Read more…

The Man Who Became Big Bird

Photo courtesy of Debra Spinney

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,430 words)

 

Caroll Spinney has performed Big Bird and Oscar on Sesame Street since the show launched in 1969, almost half a century ago. A new documentary, I Am Big Bird, follows Spinney’s journey from a somewhat difficult childhood—his father had abusive tendencies, and he was picked on in school—to becoming a childhood icon, not to mention a man in an almost absurdly happy marriage. Spinney’s wife, Debra, sat nearby (laughing and interjecting sporadically) as we discussed the film, the physical and emotional reality of playing these characters, and what kind of guy a grouch really is. Big Bird and Oscar made cameo appearances.

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The film features a lot of old footage that you and your wife, Debra, gathered over the years. What was it like to go through all those old tapes?

We didn’t look at any of it, although Deb had categorized it all. We gave the filmmakers many boxes of videotapes, literally hundreds of hours of television, because we’ve been taking videos since 1978. Before that, starting in 1954, I was taking eight millimeter movies, which is that blurry stuff in the film. An eight millimeter picture is just a little more than a quarter inch wide, so you can imagine when that’s blown up a million times it looks pretty soft. But it kinda makes nice footage for the story.

What was it like for you to watch the film after all that time?

It was interesting to see what they had picked out. We first watched it at home on the flat screen. But the next time I watched it, we were in Toronto in a theater with 300 people on a 60-foot-wide screen, and it’s a very different experience to watch it with other people than with just the two of us. You could hear their emotions, and you could tell they were using Kleenex at certain times. There’s about three moments in the thing that are quite emotional, I think partly due to the wonderful music that was composed for it. Read more…

Romantic Love: The Dominant Subject Matter of Western Popular Music

[Ted] Gioia shows that song lyrics about love, sex, marriage, and fertility can be traced all the way back to the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, and that once Jewish and Christian religious leaders came to terms with the iron determination of their own people to write and sing about romantic love, it quickly emerged as the dominant subject matter of Western popular music.

This tendency became overwhelming in 20th-century America. Both in the freestanding commercial pop songs of Tin Pan Alley and in musical-comedy lyrics, love is the near-universal theme. One can almost count on the fingers of both hands the number of standard ballads written between 1920 and 1960 that are not about romantic love, whether failed or successful. Even among such chronically disillusioned lyricists as Lorenz Hart, it is the singer’s desirable but unattainable ideal: This funny world/Makes fun of the things that you strive for/This funny world/Can laugh at the dreams you’re alive for. What is more, most of these perennially popular songs presuppose marriage as the natural consequence of love, sometimes implicitly but just as often explicitly, as in Ira Gershwin’s “The Man I Love”: He’ll build a little home,/Just meant for two,/From which I’ll never roam,/Who would, would you?

Terry Teachout writing in Commentary about love songs, and music historian Ted Gioia’s new book Love Songs: The Hidden History.

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The Moment When President Obama Realized He Needed Luther

-From Zadie Smith’s New Yorker profile of Comedy Central stars Key and Peele. Keegan-Michael Key reprised his role as Luther for President Obama’s weekend speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

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David Letterman’s Reluctance on Becoming an Actor

Photo: Alan Light

D. Zucker: You know who came in to read for Ted Striker? Bruce Jenner came in to read.

J. Zucker: That’s right. That was funny. And David Letterman tested, too. Letterman was really funny, because… I’m not sure why he tested. I think maybe his agents pushed him to come in or something, because he really didn’t want to. It’s funny, because Letterman’s a satirist and a comic, and he doesn’t take himself seriously enough, in a way, to be an actor.

D. Zucker: Yeah, he didn’t want to be an actor, although—I don’t know if you remember, but he actually came in to read for Kentucky Fried Movie.

J. Zucker: Oh, did he really? I’d forgotten about that!

D. Zucker: Yeah. So we knew him from then, and every time he came in to read, he would have us cracked up for five or 10 minutes before he actually went through with the reading.

J. Zucker: I think acting, to David, there’s something phony about it. I don’t know if he thinks about it that way, but I just feel it’s not his thing. But he actually wasn’t bad. He’s just not an actor. He looked great, and his comic delivery for all those lines was good, but I’ll never forget when we were on the set and did a screen test with him. One of his managers was there, and I sort of came up to him with a big, optimistic smile and said, “Well, I think we’re making an actor out of him!” And his manager’s response was, “Fat chance.” [Laughs.] I must’ve drawn the short straw—and I say that because nobody wants to tell someone that they didn’t get the role—but I ended up being the one to call David and tell him. And he was just relieved. I’ve never seen an actor so happy to be told that he didn’t get the role. A few years later, though, we ended up going on Late Night With David Letterman, all three of us, and we showed the clip of his screen test for Airplane!.

— From The AV Club’s oral history of Airplane!, which looks back on how the hit 1980 comedy was made.

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Surely You Can’t Be Serious: An Oral History of Airplane!

Longreads Pick

The original creators and cast of the satirical disaster film Airplane! share stories about how the hit 1980 comedy came together.

Source: The AV Club
Published: Apr 17, 2015
Length: 62 minutes (15,708 words)

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How McLovin Was Cast From a Camera Phone Headshot

Christopher Mintz-Plasse at Comic-Con, 2013. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

[Allison] Jones began her career with the two-beats-and-a-punch-line sitcoms of the nineteen-eighties, but, in working with Feig and the director Judd Apatow, she was required to try something revolutionary: find comedic actors who, more than just delivering jokes, could improvise and riff on their lines, creating something altogether different from what was on the page.

In the process, Jones has helped give rise to a new kind of American comedy. In 1999, she cast Seth Rogen, James Franco, and Jason Segel in the critically acclaimed, poorly watched teen series “Freaks and Geeks.” The show, created and written by Feig and produced by Apatow, was a coming-of-age story set in the suburban Michigan of Feig’s youth. Jones won the show’s only Emmy, for her casting. Several years later, she met with a young, sweaty Jonah Hill, who was desperate for an introduction to Apatow. She told Apatow that Hill was weird and hilarious. That sufficed; Apatow expanded a cameo part for Hill in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” as an odd but lovable eBay customer. Two years later, Hill was cast with Michael Cera in “Superbad,” a raunchy teen comedy that Apatow produced. It was left to Jones to find their nerdier-than-thou friend McLovin. Jones posted notices seeking high-school students in L.A. After seeing thousands of candidates, she caught a glimpse of a camera-phone head shot sent in by a sixteen-year-old named Christopher Mintz-Plasse. She called the director, Greg Mottola, and excitedly said, “I think I found McLovin; he’s like Dill from ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ ” Jones told me, “You could tell he was a kid who probably had seen the inside of a locker.” Since then, Mintz-Plasse has starred in six movies.

Stephen Rodrick writing about casting director Allison Jones for the New Yorker.

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The Nerd Hunter

Longreads Pick

How “Freaks and Geeks” casting director Allison Jones is reshaping American comedy, one outsider at a time.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 6, 2015
Length: 25 minutes (6,490 words)