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Post by Afgncaap5 on Mar 20, 2006 0:23:47 GMT -5
Here, perhaps.
Alternatively, it could go on geocities or some other cheap web hosting site.
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Post by Donna SadCat Lady on Mar 20, 2006 1:25:18 GMT -5
Well, I'll start posting it here unless told otherwise. That way if there's any errors you can alert me and I can make changes. This is an edited copy, mostly a matter of removing repeated phrases and dividing run-on sentences, and so forth. Page 1.
Rhino interviewer: Hi, this is Jordan Fields in the studios at Rhino Entertainment with the RhinoCast. In the not-too-distant future, we'll be talking to--ah, that sort of pegged me as a Mystery Science geek, didn't it? I'm here with Jim Mallon, who is--what are you? President, CEO, what's your title there?
Jim Mallon: Well, I have been the president of Best Brains, Inc., which is the production company that created and made all 170-some episodes of Mystery Science Theater. I also was the voice of Gypsy and the puppeteer of Gypsy for 8 of the 10 years.
R: Prove that.
M: Oh ho. That's a surprise. She's not here right now, but maybe she'll come later.
R: Aw, that's a cop-out.
M: It is. Actually, one of the funnest things I ever did--we did a PR tour one time and we were interviewed by a station here in L.A., and they let Gypsy do the traffic report. And she said [as Gypsy], "Well, there's a crash over on Ventura, if you want to go see that," [in normal voice] and that was pretty fun. So there she is. She showed up.
R: I got it. All right!
M: I'm glad she came out. I didn't know if she would, but she did.
R: [joking] Hi, Gypsy, can I talk to Jim again? Hello? If you don't mind, before we even get to the beginning of the show, tell me a little bit about yourself and your own history, your path to Mystery Science.
M: The pre-history of Mystery Science and what I was doing?
R: Well, start at your days at Madison.
M: Okay, well, that's where I went to school starting in 1974. I explored a lot of different directions and ended up in the communications arts, which I considered the sewer of all majors. It's where you dropped down if you're not going to major in anything else. While I was there, I started doing street theater with this guy named Leon Vargent [sp?], who was this brilliant crazy man. We would go out on the Mall at the campus and do little performances every day for a couple of hours. One day the notices came out that the positions for Student Body president and vice-president were opening. So we put together the Pail and Shovel Party and decided to run a campaign to get that job. All we did was make fun of the competition and make light of the entire student government activity. But we ran such an effective campaign that we won in a landslide, and I became the student body president at Madison. I think I'm still the only two-term president that ever ran that student body. We were probably best known for bringing the Statue of Liberty to campus. We built the larger-than-life replica from the nose up and put it on Lake Mendota, which the campus wraps around, in the middle of a snowstorm in January. So the citizens awoke to the Statue of Liberty poking through the ice. Northwest Airlines changed their flight patterns so the passengers on their planes could see the Statue of Liberty as they were landing in Madison. That was something pretty fun to do.
More tomorrow. What do you think so far, sirs?
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Post by Donna SadCat Lady on Mar 20, 2006 10:37:33 GMT -5
Page 2.
R: It sounds like you and mockery go way back.
M: Yeah, I guess I have a history in that. I graduated from Madison in--I think it was about 1979. I got together with a high-school friend and we formed a production company. We made a horror movie called Bloodhook, about a deranged muskie fisherman in northern Wisconsin, who was grinding up tourists for special bait that muskies seemed to love. We made that film on a shoestring and it was a huge adventure. We ended up ultimately selling it to Troma, out of New York, which is a schlock film distribution company. It is in your finer video stores if you go look for it. From there I ended up eventually getting a job at KTMA-TV, which was a tiny little UHF station in Minneapolis. Back then we didn't have your iPods and your computers and your digital videos cameras. The only way you could make television was to either have a lot of money or get to a station. And that was my plan. I hired Kevin Murphy, who became Tom Servo, as my Chief of Photography. I don't think he'd ever shot a video camera before in his life. But fortunately, for the low-rent liquor stores and furniture stores that were the sponsors at KTMA, that didn't really matter.
R: So how did you meet Kevin?
M: I think he was a grip and then key grip on Bloodhook. But also he and I had jobs at WHA-TV, which was the Public Broadcasting station in Madison. It was a pretty large place and we worked in different departments, but I think that's probably where I first ran into him.
R: So he was working at KTMA with you.
M: As the Chief Photographer. We ended up making the low-rent commercials. Then on the weekends and the evenings he and I worked on different television comedy projects.
R: Okay. Cut to, you--
M: Burning out.
R: Okay, you are burned out.
M: This is a true story. I was at a wedding in Seattle. I was kind of burned out because we were doing our full-time jobs and the comedy stuff, and it wasn't really getting anywhere. I talked to people up there because there was a lot of local TV production being done. That was the time of the rise of stand-up comedy. It came out of Vegas and Los Angeles, and clubs sprouted up all across America. The people in Seattle from KING-TV who happened to be at this wedding were telling me, "Go find the local comedians because they're all dying to get on television. Stand-up comedy is many things, but it pays horribly. They're all trying to leap over television where they perceive the money to be." The only person I knew in the local comedy scene was this guy Joel Hodgson. The reason was, the place where I edited the movie Bloodhook was right next door to his space. One day I'm out by the elevators and this guy walks over, and he's got a boutonnière on. All of a sudden a six-foot flame comes flying out of this boutonnière And that was my introduction to Joel Hodgson. So I got to know him, and when I was burned out at KTMA, and someone suggested, "Go to the local comedy community," that's when I gave Joel a call. We met at a place, as Kevin said later, that was fondly known for its sulfuric potato salad.
R: You were in my mother's kitchen?
M: A lot of mothers' kitchens. I just threw out the idea, "Look, we've got this studio. We've got a little bit of money. If you've got any ideas for a TV show, I'm here to listen." Then about a week later, he came in with two legal-sized sheets of paper. He had drawn a stick figure of himself and two stick-figure robots next to him. He said, "Ah, we should do this: host a movie, but we should leave the host in the movie." And that was the start of Mystery Science Theater. So I figured, it sounded kind of nuts to me, but it sounded interesting. Because KTMA was such a tiny little out-of-the-way station with no budget, it had a terrible film library. So it seemed like a nice match.
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Post by Donna SadCat Lady on Mar 20, 2006 10:46:01 GMT -5
Page 3.
R: When you say terrible library, you mean it didn't have many films, or it had a lot of films that were bad?
M: Both. It didn't have many films, and they were bad, really bad. Probably the cheapest packages that that station could buy. Ironically it turned out for us that was gold. They were some of the worst films ever made and we grabbed them. So we had a budget--the show budget was I think $75, might have been $50. Joel got $25, and Trace and Josh, who was the original Tom Servo, each got $10. We had a block of about three and a half hours to do the show complete, because then the wrestlers came in at the next block. So we had to get it done before the wrestlers came in. It was also interesting because the studio was tiny. It was right next to a metal fabricating place. If you listen to the original episodes, you can hear the sound of metal saws tearing through sheets of steel as they formed their products. So there wasn't any time to write the show, there wasn't any time to do multiple takes, those were straight-forward improv'd episodes. And they kind of showed that. But it was enough. After we had done 22 of those, and once again we were facing burnout, there was enough material that we could cut together the best 7 minutes. So we did that and got it to Joel's manager, a guy named David Campbell, who got it to Rick Leed, an agent. It was just coincidental, or the planets were lined up just right--HBO was just looking for material, programs, to start its first 24-hour all-comedy network. And we happened to be there...[inaudible - when it all started (?)].
R: Was that your intent? In the course of that first season, the KTMA season, did you always have an eye on taking it to the next level? What was your thinking when you started out? "We're going to go network with this," or, "This is just fun for now." At what point did you say, "Hey, this could be something else?
M: That's a really excellent question. I think in the back of everybody's mind there was always this thought that maybe this could go somewhere. We didn't really know how the show was working for people for a long time. We would make the show, and they picked the slot opposite 60 Minutes, I think it was like 6 p.m. on Sundays, where people watching that station were pretty low. I think there was one person or maybe two that were watching! The show would air, and then Monday would come, and there'd be nothing in the media, and there'd be no phone calls. We'd say, "Well, we did it! It was out there." And then we'd do another one. But then I got the bright idea to put up an answering machine, and we put the number up in the show. That's when we first got a sense that this show was really striking a chord, because that tape would get filled within an hour after the show was broadcast. And it was people that were enthusiastic, but on a level of enthusiasm that said to us, "Well, something's going on here." That really gave us a boost because we just didn't know. It was fun to us, but we had no idea how much people were really liking it.
R: With most shows, when they're successful, a fan club emerges. You guys actually beat them to it, didn't you?
M: Yeah. Well, right away, once that phone thing worked, we got onto that. We thought, "Well, let's get a fan club going." We started “The Binding Polymer,” which was the name of the newsletter, and it just had completely silly and stupid articles in there. A Minneapolis Tribune writer turned out to be a huge fan at the time, and he did a full-page spread. They sent the reporters out with a photographer, and did a really nice piece. So we were really doing well locally. I mean, this station had nothing going for it, and all of a sudden this one little show that we pulled together was getting full-page attention by the local media. That gave us a boost. But by the end of doing 22 of these episodes, we were once again fatigued and burned out. Joel in fact had been contacted by Louie Anderson and was spending part of his time out in Los Angeles working on some projects with him. I had a pretty strong sense Joel was ready to move on to something else. And I didn't blame him. It was exhausting doing this show and it didn't really seem to be going anywhere. That's when we decided to put together "The Best of" 7-minute reel. And it was quite possibly 7 minutes of "best of" material! That was what was brought to HBO's first incarnation of what ultimately became Comedy Central, something called the Comedy Channel.
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Post by Donna SadCat Lady on Mar 20, 2006 10:55:54 GMT -5
Page 4.
R: So you found yourselves at the Comedy Channel, the first season. I think during the second season they merged with their rival network, HA!
M: Right.
R: And became Comedy Central.
M: No, first they became CTV, but then they were sued by the Canadian company of the same name, and then they became Comedy Central.
R: Well, so you find yourselves there. But you stay in Minneapolis, right? They're not whisking you out to produce in L.A.
M: Well, they wanted to. First of all the executives at the new-formed channel wanted us all to move out to New York to make the show. Their studio was inside their corporate building, in the center of their corporate office, with their corporate desks all arranged around it, with these wall panels that would open. The ceiling was about 8 feet high, which, if you know anything about TV production, is not ideal, because of all the heat the lights generate. We took one look at that and, aside from the fact that we didn't want to move out there, it was like, "This is going to be crazy to try to make the show in here." So we made that a deal-breaker. We said we couldn't do it. So then they said, "Okay, fine, you can make it." But then they said, "We're not going to pay you any money, or next to any money, to do it." And our really good agent said, "Okay, don't pay them very much, but they become owner of the copyright," and that made all the difference.
R: I bet it did. My God, yeah. And then doing the show in Minneapolis over the years--you were at Comedy Central for seven seasons--away from the parent looking over your shoulder, it must have been kind of nice.
M: Very much so. It was. We had a couple of things going for us: obviously the physical difference, and then the cold. There were great sections of the year when those executives dared not come to Minneapolis because it was so freezing. One of the things that was really cool, and it was sort of a historic thing--when that network started, they were busy trying to figure out how to fill 24 hours a day with comedy. They really couldn't do the kind of supervision that happens today with shows, where usually an executive is assigned, an executive lives on the set, and an executives gives notes. We sort of scooted under that radar. Then, because of the fan support which was fantastic right from the get-go when we started on that network, and because we had really good media reviews, that kind of insulated us. Then of course they really had to make an effort to come see us, and they mostly didn't. And that was fine by us.
R: And in all other respects, to what extent were they involved in the creative process? Did they give you notes, were they constantly asking you for revisions, or did they pretty much leave you alone?
M: They pretty much left us alone, which was just fantastic. Part of it was, we had done 22 episodes. We had a pretty good idea of the chemistry of the show and how it worked. So we knew what was a deal-breaker and what wasn't a deal-breaker. Part of it was, it worked, and I think those executives were so busy doing other things they didn't need to tweak this one. This one was doing fine. Part of it was a gift from the gods, I think.
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Post by Donna SadCat Lady on Mar 20, 2006 10:58:56 GMT -5
Page 5.
R: Taking a break from the chronology of the show, what is it about bad movies that people love to watch them? Why do people enjoy watching bad movies?
M: Boy, that's an excellent question. I think that there's a tipping point when you're watching a movie. I think everyone, by and large, gives a movie the benefit of the doubt; they're going to commit to the time to watch it, they want it to be a good experience. If a movie is sort of good, you walk away going, "Ho hum, this wasn't really the best use of my time." But when you get a bad movie, where it goes beyond the tipping point, where it's so bad it actually becomes its own entertainment again, then I think it's interesting. All we did, I think, was confirm the sort of thoughts that people have when they're watching a bad movie. "This is outrageous! How can they be saying this?" And then going further, throwing out comments to the screen and so on. I think we were just fortunate to capitalize on that phenomenon.
R: Had that ever been done before, to your knowledge?
M: There were some precursors. I'm thinking of What's Up Tiger Lily? maybe.
R: [Woody Allen] took a Japanese film and he dubbed his own script, he recorded a new soundtrack. Not quite the same. He didn't let that movie play out like you guys did.
M: I don't think what we did exactly had ever been done before. Joel would reference a Disney movie where you could see characters in silhouette in the front of the theater or something.
R: Bugs Bunny, I think, does that too.
M: Right. So there may be some things. But I think Joel was very original with that concept.
R: And who were the other players? Tell me a little bit about the other players on the team.
M: Originally it was Joel Hodgson, of course, as Joel. It's a funny story. We needed people to run these puppets that he had invented, so he called up two guys he knew from the stand-up community. One was Trace Beaulieu and the other one was Josh Weinstein. They had no idea what they were doing when they walked in that studio. They hadn't been assigned puppets or anything. Trace walked over and saw this sort of rudimentary Crow, and picked him up and in a sense breathed life into that robot. But they had no idea that day what was going on. Joel had just said, "Hey, why don't you come down and help us out?"
R: So there were never any established characters that they had to then fill or voice?
M: In a way, those guys developed the personalities. Kevin Murphy, who was our chief of photography or whatever ridiculous title we gave him at that station, was Cambot originally, and then after the first season became Tom Servo.
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Post by GoFigure on Mar 25, 2006 13:59:25 GMT -5
I thought that one of Jim's most interesting comments was that it was hard to retain all of the extremely talented cast members because, at some point, they all started wondering about the next step in their careers. Unfortunately, any MSTIE could have told them that their next step would be total oblivion.
It's unfortunate, really, because I believe they were all extremely talented, and I understand their desire to move to other things, but only Jim, Kevin, Mike and Bill seemed to really understand the show's uniqueness enough to stay around to the bitter end.
I don't mean to sound negative about that, but I propose that the only people who really care about what happened to Joel, Trace, Frank and Josh are MSTIES, and they really have to work to find any mention of them. Try talking to the average non-MISTIE about the brilliance of Frank or Trace, or the genius of Joel, and all you will get are blank stares. Sad, really.
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Post by Dablone on Apr 13, 2006 10:38:41 GMT -5
You're so right.
Jim made it seem that that the remaining cast members (during the Sci Fi years) wanted to leave the show for greener pastures. The fact is they were cancelled. I bet they would still be part of Best Brains if the show hadn't of gone under.
......and what the hell is a boutineer?
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Post by mstgator on Apr 13, 2006 17:23:32 GMT -5
boutonnière: a flower or bouquet worn in a buttonhole
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