by Brian Lynch
I am a very lucky person.
I get to write screenplays for a living. I have gotten to take meetings with Jim Henson's production company for MUPPETS screenplays, with Warner Brothers about LOONEY TUNES movies, hell, I've talked to production companies about everything from CURIOUS GEORGE to G.I. JOE to...um, DUKE NUKEM.
Will any of these movies get made? Hell no. No, that's where my luck runs out.
Don't get me wrong, there WILL be another LOONEY TUNES live action movie (Joe Dante's directing, Brendan Fraser's starring), a DUKE NUKEM movie (starring The Rock, from what I hear), and CURIOUS GEORGE, THE MUPPETS and G.I. JOE will ALL have their day at the Cineplex, I just won't be writing them. For the last two or three years, it's been easy enough to sell screenplays and get paid for working with favorite childhood heroes (The Muppets are also my, um, adulthood heroes too, sadly), but it's been quite the effort getting the movies made. Each jolly fun venture into Hollywood is a column in itself, and rest assured I'll go into detail on each one in the future.
One of my screenplays HAS been turned into a movie, mind you, and I was lucky enough to direct it. Kevin Smith was nice enough to executive-produce BIG HELIUM DOG back in 1997, and this R-rated sketch comedy movie (which is about as far from THE MUPPETS and LOONEY TUNES as you can get) was a joy to write, rehearse, film and edit...
...the test screening for the movie, that's a different story entirely.
See, Miramax, the company that gave Kevin the money to waste on me, liked what they saw in BIG HELIUM DOG. But it was a sketch comedy, which really hadn't been done in a while, and some of it was quite offensive, so they wanted to have a test screening for it, see how it played in front of its target audience.
For those of you who don't know what a test screening is, think of it as filling a theater full of people, having them watch a rough cut of the movie, and then having them fill out a questionnaire, detailing what they scenes they liked best/didn't like at all, which characters were their favorites, whether or not they'd recommend it to a friend, etc.
I have been "lucky" enough to attend screenings of WAYNE'S WORLD 1 and 2, BEVERLY HILLS COP III (with director John Landis and his son sitting behind me...I do believe I heard the boy say "Daddy, this is the worst thing you've ever been involved in" halfway through), and Robert Townsend's METEOR MAN, which, that night, I cleverly renamed "crap."
So Miramax sent some of their "people" to wait outside of theaters in New York and grab people coming out of the whatever movie they had paid to see, and asked them if they saw any of the movies Miramax deemed similar to BIG HELIUM DOG. If they HAD, then they were invited to a special screening of a "new independent movie." I remember three of the movies being Kevin's first three films, and another being SOUTH PARK. If you've seen BIG HELIUM DOG, I invite you to explain to me how it is like CHASING AMY. I mean, Kevin's in both, and both are love stories involving Ben Affleck falling for a lesbian, but beyond that, I don't get it.
Anyway, I sat in the back of the theater while a roomful of strangers (so packed that people were sitting in the aisles, pretty sweet) watched my movie.
Technically, three things could have happened to BIG HELIUM DOG as a result of that screening:
-The audience loves it, laughs straight through, and Miramax releases it.
-The audience stares at it poker-faced, heads cocked like confused dogs, and Miramax tells us they don't want anything to do with it.
-The audience likes it, laughs, we edit it based on their reaction, hold another test screening, see what happens.
When I was at the WAYNE'S WORLD screening, I knew it was going to be a hit because the audience, who didn't know the characters before seeing the movie (I think I was the only one in the damn theater that had watched SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE) didn't stop laughing from beginning to end. WAYNE'S WORLD 2 had a mixed but enthusiastic reaction, hell, BEVERLY HILLS COP III played very well, considering it sucked (I think people were just excited to see it months early...so was I, until about 10 minutes in), but METEOR MAN, wow, the audience YELLED AT THE MOVIE, and half the theater left before the "film" was done. I didn't blame them. My write-up on the opinion card was SO HARSH, the movie people called my dorm room the next day and asked if I was serious. Honest, they couldn't believe it was THAT BAD. They tried to play the race card, suggest that maybe I didn't like it because I wasn't black. The poor bastard on the phone proceeded to shoot off a series of "black films" and asked if I liked them, and I told them I LOVED each and every one (even if I hadn't seen it, I didn't want them thinking whitey just didn't get the subtle genius that is METEOR MAN).
I sat in the back of the theater for BIG HELIUM DOG. The movie started, the first seven minutes played like gangbusters, I kinda expected that, the pre-title sequence is pretty strong, and you couldn't hear every other line because of the laughter. The rest of the movie played great too, it had its up and downs, sometimes the joke went on too long, some scenes didn't work, but for the most part, the audience, comprised entirely of twenty-somethingers, no older, no younger, laughed throughout. I looked to my friend Vin, who helped make the movie, and Scott, who executive-produced it with Kevin, and we smiled the smile of ages.
Actually, that's not entirely true. Scott didn't smile so much as wonder why I was grinning like a loon at him. But I knew why I was loon-grinning, oh yes. The audience liked the movie, only two people left the movie before it was done, we were golden.
And then they did the post-screening audience-chat, or "focus group."
After BEVERLY HILLS COP III, the filmmakers/studio knew I didn't like the movie, and invited me and a group of 20 other people that didn't like the movie to sit and chat about what they had problems with. I didn't get chosen for the focus group after METEOR MAN because, well, everyone in the theater hated the movie. Picking the 20 that hated it THE MOST would have been difficult. Anyway, the point of the chat after COP III was to find out what they should edit out. The point of the chat after BIG HELIUM DOG was to see if Miramax should even bother buying it.
And something funny happened during that focus group "rap session." You ask a bunch of students from NYU to pick apart a movie, and, well, they like to show off their knowledge of film. After all, years of sitting in a classroom being fed film theories, they're gonna wanna spew it back. And call me bitter, but the very people that were JUST LAUGHING at the film were suddenly excited to pick it apart. Here's some of the comments I remember---
"Why is the lead character so dumb? It's annoying how stupid he is?"
This person was correct, the lead character was stupid. He was kinda supposed to be. It's like asking why Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels were so stupid in DUMB AND DUMBER. I was going to say something, but I had to remain mum while these guys picked apart the movie.
"It didn't have much a plot, really. I like movies with plots, and this didn't have one".
It was a sketch comedy movie. It was a sketch comedy movie. It was a sketch comedy movie. It was a sketch comedy movie.
"This movie constantly rips off Monty Python. I mean, it's just sad. And I haven't even SEEN Monty Python so that's how bad it is".
This was my favorite. It made me laugh out loud, so much that everyone turned and looked at me. I waved.
There was ONE GUY in the focus group that said he liked it. He appeared stoned. I remember him proclaiming "You guys are dumb, it ruled." I thank him, if he's reading this. I would like to suggest he maybe learn a sentence OTHER THAN "You guys are dumb, it ruled," because after the first five uses of this as a retort to EVERYTHING that was said, I think Miramax zoned out.
So there you go. The audience laughed throughout, 19 out of 20 people in the focus group picked it apart, and when we got the opinion cards back, well, they were mixed.
This was depressing. After a year of working on the movie, I thought the test screening evening would end with Miramax shaking my hand and saying "WE RELEASE THIS EPIC IN SIX MONTHS, LET'S GET STARTED ON MAKING THE TRAILER, POSTER, AND BREAKFAST CEREAL". Instead, they said that they SAW the audience reaction, they know it had potential, all we had to do is re-cut it and try again in a few months.
And I gotta say, after being in the editing room for months and months, and then in the sound mixing studio, etc., etc., the idea of going BACK to the editing room didn't sound too appealing. And hearing those snooty twenty-somethingers rip apart a movie that they had just laughed at for an hour and a half, I was down. And broke; I hadn't had a paying job in over a year. My lunch for two weeks consisted of going into a movie theater near the editing room (actually just an abandoned building with a Steenbeck editing bay on the second floor), showing them that I had a coupon books FOR said theater (it was a Christmas gift), but using said coupons to buy a hot dog and a bottled water from the concession stand, and going back to edit.
And suddenly, I got an offer to rewrite a movie for Fox Searchlight. They had read a script I did called MILLER MINOGUE and wanted me to turn a screenplay they had into a "MILLER MINOGUE"-lite kinda deal. And I would get paid. Not much, but it was SOMETHING. I was going to be flown out to California. After the test screening, I honestly thought my career in film was done. And now, an actual movie studio was going to fly me out to LA for meetings. I needed a break from BIG HELIUM DOG, so I took the job, with every intention of going back to it as soon as I was done with Fox Searchlight. Probably be a matter of a month or two...
...but then my managers, whom I met soon after the BIG HELIUM DOG test screening, and my agent, who I met through Kevin, read a Muppet spec script I had written for fun, sent it out to everyone in Hollywood, and Hollywood liked it. I flew out there and met with EVERYONE, started getting paid for more and more writing gigs, and BIG HELIUM DOG took a backseat AGAIN. What was once a timely sketch comedy movie was quickly becoming a dated period comedy. It actually seems quaint when I watch it now. BIG HELIUM DOG will eventually be released on video and DVD, as soon as I have time to make those edits that Miramax wanted years ago.
Did I miss the boat on BIG HELIUM DOG? Probably. Since my doomed screening, I've learned every comedy film goes through multiple test screenings, to help edit, and sometime re-shoot scenes until the comedy works. THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY, for instance, had a shitload of screenings before it was released. And the first one went HORRIBLE. But the Farrelly Brothers took notes during said screening and re-cut the film based on audience reaction, shaping it into one of the biggest comedies of all time.
Me, I bolted from my first movie after ONE SCREENING. Ah well. What can I do now?
Edit it again...okay, sure. Release it as a special two-disc set with tons of deleted scenes and new sketches? Okay, you got it. Eventually. But personally, I'm dying to do one better.
I want to take some of the money I've made from the big studio jobs, and find OTHER PEOPLE that want to put some money into one of the scripts I've written, and make a SECOND MOVIE. I have a few screenplays that are near and dear to me, and could be made VERY cheap...God knows I know talented people that can help...
...so yeah. I'm gonna try again. I've already had my freshman slump, let's get to the sophomore hit.
And so help me God, we'll have test screening after test screening to shape it into something great. And I won't run. I won't run. I will hit the film-world raw dog once again, but goddamn it, I won't bail.
Stay tuned.
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