New Jim Mallon Interview

[someoneinatree]

m.youtube.com/watch?v=SWMDzjhSgGc&feature=share
It looks like one of the veterans from the MSTiecast recently interviewed Jim Mallon. I hope I'm not stepping on any toes posting this here (he said he was leaving the fandom after posting the Wade Williams interview), but since it's been online for a few days, I figured I can't be accused of stealing anyone's thunder by directing them to the interview. I have said some harsh things about Mallon over the years, but I do think he gets an unwarranted amount of hate in the fan
community, especially since MST3K is back and most of the show's former stars are still out there performing.

[Diet Kolos]

I can't currently listen, if anyone wants to give a rundown of if there's anything substantially new.

[brandonakaxerxes]

Noteworthy things:

1. Jim discusses his childhood and what got him into filmmaking.

2. His comedy influences. (Including "Laugh-In" of all things).

3. What working at KTMA was like. Before MST3K, he and Kevin worked on a series that was very similar to The Daily Show. Jim even notes that one of the producers of The Daily Show came from Minneapolis and wonders if their show helped inspire The Daily Show.

4. Jim states that Joel's original idea for MST3K was that Joel and the Bots would be discussing *trivia* during the movie, not making jokes.

5. Jim reveals why Joel was absent from one of the KTMA episodes. Joel flew out to LA to work on a project with Louie Anderson.

6. Comedy Central apparently asked The Brains to do some kind of special where they riff one of the State of the Union programs. Jim doesn't recall why such a special never happened.

7. The host asks if Jim has any involvement in the new series on Netflix, and Jim says "we have a little bit." Not sure what he means by "we", or what *his* involvement entails.

8. Episode 102- Robot Vs. The Aztec Mummy was the very first episode that aired, but Jim's recollection seems to be that it was in fact the first episode they ever *produced*. So... I dunno if Jim is misremembering, or if it's another 104 scenario.

9. Jim mentions that part of thew reason why they wanted to stay in Minneapolis to produce the show, as opposed to LA or NY (other than to avoid executive meddling, and not wanting to leave loved ones), was because they knew many of the actors they'd be making fun of lived in LA, and they wanted to avoid those people.

10. Jim cynically believes that the actors who took part in the conventions, only did so, not because they liked MST3K, but purely just to "take our checks". I guess he forgot that Russell Johnson and Kim Catrall actually are (or 'were" in the case of Johnson, RIP) fans of the show.

11. Jim's comments about the cast and crew wanting some kind of "severance pay" after the series, gives the joke about "severance packages" in episode 1013 - Diabolik a relatively dark tone.

12. The host mispronounces "Mary Jo Pehl".

[someoneinatree]

Please forgive me as I do a fair bit of assuming ahead, but I'm guessing the "we" Mallon is referring to is Consolidated Puppets Incorporated, the company Best Brains became after Shout! purchased the MST3K property. It is very possible that Mallon is the only person associated with CPI and that it's merely a holding company or tax shelter that had to be set up in order for Mallon to receive his payout. In the documentary on the season 11 boxset, someone with Shout! talks about acquiring MST3K and makes reference to "Best Brains" and "they," not Jim Mallon. It might just be a legal way to recognize that this is seen as the actions of a company and not a person, even if it's highly possible the company is just a person. I wish that the interviewer asked a follow up question about the nature of Mallon's contributions to the new series, but I'm going to hazard a guess that Mallon himself might not know the full extent. He probably had to turn over legacy resources or documents and might not know what impact, if any, it had on the new show. Mallon has never been that expansive on the interviews I've seen or read, so I don't fault the interviewer for that.

Personally, I don't think Mallon's comments on severance pay are anything other than what was probably accurate of the time. He said they never had the budget to have that set in place and I imagine that was the case. The show's national run had been on two small cable networks that only exploded in popularity after MST3K was no longer producing episodes for them. Josh, Trace, and, I believe, a few other cast members have made pointed references to the paltry paychecks they made on MST3K. The show's popularity exploded after the initial run, which is how Mallon was able to use it as a golden parachute for so long. Keep in mind that I don't agree with how the cast did not receive royalties and residuals, but I imagine any sort of severance Best Brains could have offered in 1999 would have been minuscule.

Here's what I think comes off as dark: I could be wrong, but haven't a few former cast members expressed their frustration with Mallon's lack of involvement in the last few seasons of MST3K, basically saying he did none of the work while enjoying all of the benefits? I could be misremembering, which is why I'm not identifying the folks I think have made comments given the delicate nature of the situation. Again, I'm not going to defend the way Best Brains was set up to only benefit management, but if Mallon only had limited involvement with the last two and a half seasons of the show because he was mourning for the loss of his daughter, it's pretty callous to be critical of him scaling back his commitment to a silly comedy show after he suffered the worst loss a parent can possibly have. I can only hope that this interview will make Mallon a less divisive figure in the community, but I don't think that will happen. Hating Jim Mallon in 2018 is kinda like hating Batman & Robin in 2018. In 1997, it looked like Batman & Robin killed off the superhero movie genre, but now we know that's not the case. We can still be critical of it, but condemnation is going a bit far.

[brandonakaxerxes]

Part of the reason why it's difficult to empathize with Jim's "we had a low budget, and couldn't afford to pay royalties or severances", is because he *has* had moments where he seems to not like the idea of others possibly making more money than him, or at least making a lot of money from other business ventures. For example, he turned down Trace's suggestion of producing a show idea of his because they only had enough money to produce MST3K. That's totally understandable. What *isn't* so excusable is, after Trace expressed interest in leaving the show to produce his show idea elsewhere, Jim told him, "You can't do that either, because your idea is now intellectual property". That's a pretty dick thing to do, and was one of the reasons for Trace leaving the show after Season 7 (the other reason, I believe being family-related issues).

Regardless of all that, I do feel bad for what happened to his daughter, and can't imagine what losing a loved one in a tragic incident would do to a person, but that incident happened *after* Trace's departure.

Also, didn't Jim initially have an issue with Mike, Kevin, and Bill starting up Rifftrax?

[someoneinatree]

May 21, 2018 12:18:36 GMT -5 brandonakaxerxes said:

Part of the reason why it's difficult to empathize with Jim's "we had a low budget, and couldn't afford to pay royalties or severances", is because he *has* had moments where he seems to not like the idea of others possibly making more money than him, or at least making a lot of money from other business ventures. For example, he turned down Trace's suggestion of producing a show idea of his because they only had enough money to produce MST3K. That's totally understandable. What *isn't* so excusable is, after Trace expressed interest in leaving the show to produce his show idea elsewhere, Jim told him, "You can't do that either, because your idea is now intellectual property". That's a pretty dick thing to do, and was one of the reasons for Trace leaving the show after Season 7 (the other reason, I believe being family-related issues).

Regardless of all that, I do feel bad for what happened to his daughter, and can't imagine what losing a loved one in a tragic incident would do to a person, but that incident happened *after* Trace's departure.

Also, didn't Jim initially have an issue with Mike, Kevin, and Bill starting up Rifftrax?

He had issue with Rhino handling The Film Crew while they were also releasing MST3K box sets since he believed that they were too similar, prompting Rhino to drop the releases and Shout! Factory to pick them up. A year later, MST3K also found its way to Shout! I can understand his motives, but ultimately think that all he did was hurt The Film Crew and the fans. I think he might've also pursued action against smaller riffing groups for having names too similar to MST3K.

[Diet Kolos]

May 21, 2018 12:18:36 GMT -5 brandonakaxerxes said:

Also, didn't Jim initially have an issue with Mike, Kevin, and Bill starting up Rifftrax?

Film Crew. While MST3K's license was with Rhino, Mike and Co. filmed 3 Film Crew episodes with Rhino, hoping to make it into a continuing series. Jim got wind of it and told Rhino not to release the Film Crew episodes, or he'd pull his license with Rhino. So they sat on the shelf for a few years until they finally got a release with Shout.

[Udvarnoky]

I did not know until today that Jim had lost his daughter while the show was still going on. For whatever reason I had mistakenly understood that this occurred in the years after the show went out of production.

With regard to the financial disagreements, I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle, although I still find the position of the performers more credible. This is the first time the financial petitions from the performers have been characterized as “severance.” Jim makes it sound as though they just wanted him to cut a big fat check that the company’s coffers could not support. In that light, his position to deny them the request seems reasonable.

The problem is, his version doesn't pass the sniff test. I think what the performers wanted, because they’ve pretty much said as much, was some sort of stake in the company, and therefore royalties/residuals. It is possible they were attempting to get retroactive stake as well, which indeed would have meant an immediate payout. Perhaps that part would have been unrealistic. But the fact remains that the performers ended up with no stake in even the continued revenue the show earned for subsequent licensing deals. That’s got squadoosh to do with what the Best Brains bank account looked like in 1999, is a reasonable grievance and is pointedly something that Jim did not address.

I also think there’s another side to the story where the AMC offer was concerned. Jim says that the performers elected not to pursue the offer because of their desire to move on to other projects. I have no doubt there is some truth to this, but I suspect it was a coefficient rather than the whole equation. I think if the performers were on better terms with Jim where the business side was concerned, they might have felt more incentivized to continue the show. I think after ten years of being Jim’s employees rather than his partners, they decided it was enough when he still refused to budge, especially if they felt that they were doing more to produce the show than he was at that point.

May 21, 2018 2:44:52 GMT -5 someoneinatree said:

Josh, Trace, and, I believe, a few other cast members have made pointed references to the paltry paychecks they made on MST3K.

Josh’s beef was more specific than the fact that his paycheck was paltry – everyone’s was, relative speaking, at the time. But Josh was the only holdover from the KTMA era who was not cut in at all when Best Brains was founded (Joel and Jim had 45%, while Kevin and Trace got 5% each). It is objectively true that Josh made as much a contribution to the show at that point as Kevin and Trace did, yet the choice was made not to reflect that on paper or in attitude.

As to why he was being treated as less than a peer, Josh was given the line that he was very young, had not yet paid his show business dues, and should have felt grateful to be there. (It also seems clear at this point that Josh was seen as an annoying teenager by a team that was on average a decade older than him.) Things came to a head when Jim mistakenly left payroll information on Josh’s desk, and Josh discovered that he was being paid not only less than the other performers, but less than the secretary. (Josh was paid $200 a week.) This ended up in a blowout fight between Josh and Jim. Josh left, and Jim told the rest of the Brains that Josh had been snooping around the files. The gang was inclined to believe Jim’s version because, again, there was very likely some ageism going on with Josh at the time.

That said, the rest of the Brains are as implicated in this as Jim is, in my mind. What is interesting about Josh’s departure story is the way it echoes Joel’s. Obviously it was on a different scale, as Joel created the damned show and that schism was over something more fundamental, but the themes are the same. When Joel talks about how he left because Jim anointed himself as the director of the movie, he makes a point of saying that Kevin, Trace and the others seemed to be going along with Jim's idea. If Joel’s peers had been more inclined to stand up for Joel’s role in the show, and there was more than Joel resisting Jim, things might have gone a different way. But you can throw that logic right back at Joel: if he had stood up for Josh’s role in the show all those years earlier, perhaps Jim wouldn’t have had the seemingly unilateral authority he grew to have at Best Brains.

Josh’s situation suggests that there was a certain attitude at the studio from day one that possibly could have been confronted before things got to the point where key creative players felt unappreciated and found it necessary to leave. My take is that there was some real skeeviness with the Best Brains power structure right from the beginning; it was just convenient to look past it when the guy getting stiffed was the punk kid no one really got along with anyway. But it’s telling that pretty much everyone ended up having perceived equity issues aimed at Jim by the end of the show’s run.

(If you haven’t heard Josh’s side of the story, he gives it between 1:02:10 – 1:21:16 in this interview. As you’ve probably guessed, he puts to bed the spin that he left MST3K on good terms. He also says that the stories about him resisting the scripted approach to the riffing the show took after KTMA are equally false.)

One other thing I’ll say in quasi-defense of Jim is that, unless things changed over the years, he had no more ownership of MST3K than Joel did. That means Joel is just as guilty of holding out on the other Brains, yet you never see the finger pointed at Joel, only Jim. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Joel is seen as more deserving of his stake in MST3K. We tend to be more sympathetic to the creative guys than the business guys. I shouldn’t speak too confidently without knowing exactly how much control Joel had after he left, but I doubt he was utterly powerless to do anything but collect mailbox money from the DVD sales. As always, these things are probably more complicated than they are portrayed.

At any rate, this was a fine interview. It's alwas nice to hear Jim talk about MST3K, since he side usually gets the least playtime. And I’m happy for him that Blood Hook is now on Blu-ray in what sounds like a lovingly crafted release. I didn’t necessary anticipate that we’d get a reference quality transfer of Blood Hook, but I’m pleased that we did.

May 21, 2018 2:44:52 GMT -5 someoneinatree said:

Again, I'm not going to defend the way Best Brains was set up to only benefit management, but if Mallon only had limited involvement with the last two and a half seasons of the show because he was mourning for the loss of his daughter, it's pretty callous to be critical of him scaling back his commitment to a silly comedy show after he suffered the worst loss a parent can possibly have.

Unless there’s some particularly appalling statements I’m not familiar with, I would counterargue that it is callous to frame the grievances of the performers in this way. The objection, as I understand it, is that Jim was the only one with any stake in the program. Perhaps his stepping away cast that disparity into even sharper relief, but considering that Trace has stated that arguments with Jim over ownership were a reason he left the program, I think it’s fair to say that this friction with the cast predated Jim’s horrible personal tragedy.

[someoneinatree]

May 21, 2018 17:05:02 GMT -5 Udvarnoky said:

I did not know until today that Jim had lost his daughter while the show was still going on. For whatever reason I had mistakenly understood that this occurred in the years after the show went out of production.

With regard to the financial disagreements, I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle, although I still find the position of the performers more credible. This is the first time the financial petitions from the performers have been characterized as “severance.” Jim makes it sound as though they just wanted him to cut a big fat check that the company’s coffers could not support. In that light, his position to deny them the request seems reasonable.

The problem is, his version doesn't pass the sniff test. I think what the performers wanted, because they’ve pretty much said as much, was some sort of stake in the company, and therefore royalties/residuals. It is possible they were attempting to get retroactive stake as well, which indeed would have meant an immediate payout. Perhaps that part would have been unrealistic. But the fact remains that the performers ended up with no stake in even the continued revenue the show earned for subsequent licensing deals. That’s got squadoosh to do with what the Best Brains bank account looked like in 1999, is a reasonable grievance and is pointedly something that Jim did not address.

I also think there’s another side to the story where the AMC offer was concerned. Jim says that the performers elected not to pursue the offer because of their desire to move on to other projects. I have no doubt there is some truth to this, but I suspect it was a coefficient rather than the whole equation. I think if the performers were on better terms with Jim where the business side was concerned, they might have felt more incentivized to continue the show. I think after ten years of being Jim’s employees rather than his partners, they decided it was enough when he still refused to budge, especially if they felt that they were doing more to produce the show than he was at that point.

May 21, 2018 2:44:52 GMT -5 someoneinatree said:

Josh, Trace, and, I believe, a few other cast members have made pointed references to the paltry paychecks they made on MST3K.

Josh’s beef was more specific than the fact that his paycheck was paltry – everyone’s was, relative speaking, at the time. But Josh was the only holdover from the KTMA era who was not cut in at all when Best Brains was founded (Joel and Jim had 45%, while Kevin and Trace got 5% each). It is objectively true that Josh made as much a contribution to the show at that point as Kevin and Trace did, yet the choice was made not to reflect that on paper or in attitude.

As to why he was being treated as less than a peer, Josh was given the line that he was very young, had not yet paid his show business dues, and should have felt grateful to be there. (It also seems clear at this point that Josh was seen as an annoying teenager by a team that was on average a decade older than him.) Things came to a head when Jim mistakenly left payroll information on Josh’s desk, and Josh discovered that he was being paid not only less than the other performers, but less than the secretary. (Josh was paid $200 a week.) This ended up in a blowout fight between Josh and Jim. Josh left, and Jim told the rest of the Brains that Josh had been snooping around the files. The gang was inclined to believe Jim’s version because, again, there was very likely some ageism going on with Josh at the time.

That said, the rest of the Brains are as implicated in this as Jim is, in my mind. What is interesting about Josh’s departure story is the way it echoes Joel’s. Obviously it was on a different scale, as Joel created the damned show and that schism was over something more fundamental, but the themes are the same. When Joel talks about how he left because Jim anointed himself as the director of the movie, he makes a point of saying that Kevin, Trace and the others seemed to be going along with Jim's idea. If Joel’s peers had been more inclined to stand up for Joel’s role in the show, and there was more than Joel resisting Jim, things might have gone a different way. But you can throw that logic right back at Joel: if he had stood up for Josh’s role in the show all those years earlier, perhaps Jim wouldn’t have had the seemingly unilateral authority he grew to have at Best Brains.

Josh’s situation suggests that there was a certain attitude at the studio from day one that possibly could have been confronted before things got to the point where key creative players felt unappreciated and found it necessary to leave. My take is that there was some real skeeviness with the Best Brains power structure right from the beginning; it was just convenient to look past it when the guy getting stiffed was the punk kid no one really got along with anyway. But it’s telling that pretty much everyone ended up having perceived equity issues aimed at Jim by the end of the show’s run.

(If you haven’t heard Josh’s side of the story, he gives it between 1:02:10 – 1:21:16 in this interview. As you’ve probably guessed, he puts to bed the spin that he left MST3K on good terms. He also says that the stories about him resisting the scripted approach to the riffing the show took after KTMA are equally false.)

One other thing I’ll say in quasi-defense of Jim is that, unless things changed over the years, he had no more ownership of MST3K than Joel did. That means Joel is just as guilty of holding out on the other Brains, yet you never see the finger pointed at Joel, only Jim. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Joel is seen as more deserving of his stake in MST3K. We tend to be more sympathetic to the creative guys than the business guys. I shouldn’t speak too confidently without knowing exactly how much control Joel had after he left, but I doubt he was utterly powerless to do anything but collect mailbox money from the DVD sales. As always, these things are probably more complicated than they are portrayed.

At any rate, this was a fine interview. It's alwas nice to hear Jim talk about MST3K, since he side usually gets the least playtime. And I’m happy for him that Blood Hook is now on Blu-ray in what sounds like a lovingly crafted release. I didn’t necessary anticipate that we’d get a reference quality transfer of Blood Hook, but I’m pleased that we did.

May 21, 2018 2:44:52 GMT -5 someoneinatree said:

Again, I'm not going to defend the way Best Brains was set up to only benefit management, but if Mallon only had limited involvement with the last two and a half seasons of the show because he was mourning for the loss of his daughter, it's pretty callous to be critical of him scaling back his commitment to a silly comedy show after he suffered the worst loss a parent can possibly have.

Unless there’s some particularly appalling statements I’m not familiar with, I would counterargue that it is callous to frame the grievances of the performers in this way. The objection, as I understand it, is that Jim was the only one with any stake in the program. Perhaps his stepping away cast that disparity into even sharper relief, but considering that Trace has stated that arguments with Jim over ownership were a reason he left the program, I think it’s fair to say that this friction with the cast predated Jim’s horrible personal tragedy.

I should have clarified my memories of this interview I can no longer find. It was conducted circa 2003-2006 and the subject implied that Mallon's lack of involvement and engagement might have played a part in the show ending. Perhaps this person was one of the Brains who wanted Mallon to pursue the AMC offer. I should have also taken into account the extant grievances they had with Mallon leading up to that. Unless I missed it, I'm surprised the interview didn't touch on Mallon's time with mst3k.com, which, to me, demonstrated that Mallon was really out of his element in figuring out what to do with the brand and how to keep it relevant. It didn't help that around the same time that both Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic were out giving fans what they wanted (riffing) and the website was offering Flash cartoons three years after people stopped caring about Flash cartoons. I have no doubt that Mallon had the best intentions in mind, but it seemed clear that Best Brains was inadvertently holding MST3K back.

[brandonakaxerxes]

He also says that the stories about him resisting the scripted approach to the riffing the show took after KTMA are equally false.

But.... didn't that come from Josh himself in an interview many years ago?

[someoneinatree]

May 21, 2018 20:01:58 GMT -5 brandonakaxerxes said:

He also says that the stories about him resisting the scripted approach to the riffing the show took after KTMA are equally false.

But.... didn't that come from Josh himself in an interview many years ago?

No. Before the Ken Plume podcast, Josh would hint at behind the scenes drama, but never said anything about difficulties adjusting to writing the riffs. Also, the narrative of him not being able to handle writing for the show makes no sense when you take into account that he went to Hollywood and found great success as a writer.

[brandonakaxerxes]

May 21, 2018 20:05:17 GMT -5 someoneinatree said:

May 21, 2018 20:01:58 GMT -5 brandonakaxerxes said:

But.... didn't that come from Josh himself in an interview many years ago?

No. Before the Ken Plume podcast, Josh would hint at behind the scenes drama, but never said anything about difficulties adjusting to writing the riffs. Also, the narrative of him not being able to handle writing for the show makes no sense when you take into account that he went to Hollywood and found great success as a writer.

Did some digging, and found this old interview:

web.archive.org/web/20080724121702/http://www.d1041111.dotsterhost.com/mst3k/special-events_interview_josh-weinstein-part1.html

Q (Forrest): First, I want to thank you, Josh, because it really means a lot to us fans that you're willing to share your MST3K memories with us. We’ll start with this: What was more fun to do, make up lines on the spot as you did in KTMA episodes, or writing the jokes ahead of time?

A: It was definitely more fun to improvise – primarily because it meant watching a really crappy movie once instead of six or seven times. Less work = more fun. However, just like all improv, it’s more fun to be the one doing it than it is to watch.

[Ford Prefect]

May 21, 2018 12:31:24 GMT -5 Diet Kolos said:

May 21, 2018 12:18:36 GMT -5 brandonakaxerxes said:

Also, didn't Jim initially have an issue with Mike, Kevin, and Bill starting up Rifftrax?

Film Crew. While MST3K's license was with Rhino, Mike and Co. filmed 3 Film Crew episodes with Rhino, hoping to make it into a continuing series. Jim got wind of it and told Rhino not to release the Film Crew episodes, or he'd pull his license with Rhino. So they sat on the shelf for a few years until they finally got a release with Shout.

Does anyone have a source for the whole "Mallon Killed The Film Crew" story? Every time I've tried to look it up I've come to a "citation needed" dead end. In a Kevin Murphy interview I read a while back, he made it sound as if the people at Rhino who were interested in the project left the company and the new person that came in was no longer interested in distributing any TV shows on DVD, much less their project. That seems to line up with the mass migration of TV shows on DVD going over to Shout and other distributors in the mid to late 2000's. Management changes in general seem to be a problem for the guys. It killed the show at Comedy Central, then again at SCI-FI. The early projects at SCI-FI.com sound like they ended because of management changes. Plus Mike had to deal with that at the end of his HarperCollins deal. Anyway I'm not saying Jim Mallon definitely had nothing to do with it, but I think that it's interesting that he's not just cited as one cause of Film Crew ending, he's usually the only cause of it ending. Personally I think it was just made at a bad time and Rifftrax had a better business model overall.

[Udvarnoky]

Jim began licensing to Shout! Factory at the start of 2008, whereas the The Film Crew episodes were produced, I think, in the 2005-2006 arena. That doesn't make the transition of personnel from Rhino to Shout! irrelevant, of course. Like you I'd be interested in getting an elaboration of this oft-repeated story.