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Post by dudehitscar on Jun 17, 2022 13:42:20 GMT -5
And when we talked about this moment in his career, when he left the show in the ‘90s, I asked him if he had any regrets. JOEL: Yeah, it was, it was regrettable the way it worked out, but I don't know if I see any other way around it. Um, I was just having a real power, power struggle with my partner guy named Jim Allen. It's just mall and it just wasn't, you know what I mean? It wasn't working and I didn't know what to do other than, um, other than kind, you know, it was like this it's the King Solomon story. Right? Like, uh, I knew that if I stayed and embedded myself and tried to fight with him that it would pretty much kill the show, kill the baby. Right. And so by leaving, I knew that it would, it would live on, it would be okay. And I had a good deal set up, so it was okay. And I felt like I had kind of proved my point. I created the show and I, I thought, I thought it was the best thing to do for the time. I just wa it wasn't at all. I, yeah, we weren't working it out. I don' t know if I don't, again, that's a maturity thing too. Whereas if the situation had happened now, I think I probably have a few tricks to work around it, but I didn't, and I didn't think the other guys were really backing me. The other partners. I think they were, I felt they were really backing Jim. So I just didn't feel supported and felt like, yeah. Okay. I, I think I can walk away from this, but yeah, it was a huge, uh, tra kind of a public tragedy for me to have to go through it. And so it took a long time, a lot of time and a lot of long conversations with a lot of friends and therapists to kinda get it straightened out. And the thing that made the most sense for me was to come back to it. this is from the official transcript from the podcast but it's a bit off. www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/mystery-science-theater-reopens |
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Post by monkeypretzel on Jun 17, 2022 15:20:21 GMT -5
Matches up pretty well with the Nerdist podcast story where he said he felt like he wasn't being respected enough as the creator of the show by the others before he left, but I think this is the first time he's said flat out the other partners (Trace and Kevin) were siding with Jim against him. In his opinion.
He sees himself as the selfless hero (mother) willing to give up the show (baby) in order for it to continue to live, by drawing the parallel to the King Solomon story. He's lucky because most people who deal with loss trauma and grief have to reach the stage of acceptance, of knowing that what they loved is gone forever and it's never coming back, in order to move forward in life without so much pain. He got the show back, and his words ("public tragedy," "the most sense") indicate that to him, that was the only outcome that he would ever accept or be happy with.
Well, it's all his now.
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Post by mylungswereaching on Jun 17, 2022 19:44:00 GMT -5
IMO, it was the artist vs the pragmatists who wanted the show to do well. Maybe Joel's vision would have been better but maybe the audience would have hated it and the show would have been canceled even earlier.
That sort of thing happens all the time. Creative people want to create and do new things. Sometimes new things work and sometimes they don't. Other people find a concept that works and want to keep doing it. Experimenting within the concept instead of changing it all up.
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Post by dudehitscar on Jun 17, 2022 22:42:45 GMT -5
Matches up pretty well with the Nerdist podcast story where he said he felt like he wasn't being respected enough as the creator of the show by the others before he left, but I think this is the first time he's said flat out the other partners (Trace and Kevin) were siding with Jim against him. In his opinion. He sees himself as the selfless hero (mother) willing to give up the show (baby) in order for it to continue to live, by drawing the parallel to the King Solomon story. He's lucky because most people who deal with loss trauma and grief have to reach the stage of acceptance, of knowing that what they loved is gone forever and it's never coming back, in order to move forward in life without so much pain. He got the show back, and his words ("public tragedy," "the most sense") indicate that to him, that was the only outcome that he would ever accept or be happy with. Well, it's all his now. nothing new to the 20 folks here on this forum..... but I greatly disagree with your anti-joel spin on this and deflecting ANY criticism from the 'other partners'.. trace and kevin Joel leaving MST3K is mostly a joel vs mallon thing... painting Joel as the bad guy in that... given all we know about THE ENTIRE CAST felt about Mallon later seems really disportionatly spiteful towards Joel.. and I don't get why.. .you have clear loyalty to much of the old cast but none to Jim Mallon as far as I know so I'll ask you straight up.. Was Joel wrong to assert a level of creative control over the show despite what Jim Mallon wanted? Was Joel wrong in his fight with Jim Mallon over the movie? Was Joel wrong to feel that Trace and Kevin were backing Jim in that power struggle? Do you think that if Trace and Kevin knew how things would go when Joel left that they would have made the same choices? Do you think Jim Mallon cared about the old cast more than Joel personally and financially? I feel these questions are important to understand your perspective |
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Post by dudehitscar on Jun 17, 2022 22:48:42 GMT -5
IMO, it was the artist vs the pragmatists who wanted the show to do well. Maybe Joel's vision would have been better but maybe the audience would have hated it and the show would have been canceled even earlier. That sort of thing happens all the time. Creative people want to create and do new things. Sometimes new things work and sometimes they don't. Other people find a concept that works and want to keep doing it. Experimenting within the concept instead of changing it all up. How is Joel's vision different than what we saw in Season 4/5? As far as I've seen and read he didn't have some vastly different vision for the show.. you watch bad movies with puppet robots and riff on it...
No one has said there was some drastically different vision of the show that Joel was pushing for and that is why he left...
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Post by mylungswereaching on Jun 17, 2022 23:18:36 GMT -5
IMO, it was the artist vs the pragmatists who wanted the show to do well. Maybe Joel's vision would have been better but maybe the audience would have hated it and the show would have been canceled even earlier. That sort of thing happens all the time. Creative people want to create and do new things. Sometimes new things work and sometimes they don't. Other people find a concept that works and want to keep doing it. Experimenting within the concept instead of changing it all up. How is Joel's vision different than what we saw in Season 4/5? As far as I've seen and read he didn't have some vastly different vision for the show.. you watch bad movies with puppet robots and riff on it...
No one has said there was some drastically different vision of the show that Joel was pushing for and that is why he left...
It doesn't have to be that different. It just has to be more expensive like what happened when he actually did get the chance to make all the calls himself. Just differences of what is important and what is not. |
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Post by intonyeon on Jun 18, 2022 20:37:39 GMT -5
It was regarding the movie tho, was it?
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Post by Diet Kolos on Jun 19, 2022 10:00:45 GMT -5
It was regarding the movie tho, was it? Thank you! Someone finally remembered this vital piece of info. It was never about the direction of the show, it was about the direction (literally and figuratively of the movie). By late '92, Joel wanted to go independent with the movie. Jim wanted to go the studio route. They'd just turned down Paramount for a big deal that would have given the movie a big budget but almost no creative control. Plus Jim insisted on directing. So Joel left, they kept pursuing a studio, Universal, for over 2 years until they finally signed off in Jan '95. Production ran from March-April with a scheduled release of Fall 95. And we all know how that went. On the TV side, their long flirtation with Universal prob didn't help their popularity at Viacom (parent company of half of Comedy Central at the time) especially when Viacom bought their earlier spurned movie partner Paramount in March 94, all when MST was up for renewal at the network for season 7. |
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Post by CrowTrobotfan92 on Jun 19, 2022 10:47:12 GMT -5
So….. I guess Jim really did have a reason to Joel’s departure after all?
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Post by monkeypretzel on Jun 19, 2022 19:39:05 GMT -5
I was just surprised that Joel believed Trace of all people was backing Jim when it's well known Trace has never particularly gotten along with Jim then or now.
Yes, it was about the movie, but how could that tension not have affected day-to-day life at Best Brains? The show did change in significant ways after Joel left, not just on the surface but in the way it was written and performed outside the theater, in the host segments. Would it be such a stretch to say that those changes were made, and were indeed possible, because Joel was no longer there? Not judging here on whether those changes were good or bad, just different to what Joel would have done, and what he does with MST now proves it.
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Post by mylungswereaching on Jun 19, 2022 19:44:29 GMT -5
I was just surprised that Joel believed Trace of all people was backing Jim when it's well known Trace has never particularly gotten along with Jim then or now. Yes, it was about the movie, but how could that tension not have affected day-to-day life at Best Brains? The show did change in significant ways after Joel left, not just on the surface but in the way it was written and performed outside the theater, in the host segments. Would it be such a stretch to say that those changes were made, and were indeed possible, because Joel was no longer there? Not judging here on whether those changes were good or bad, just different to what Joel would have done, and what he does with MST now proves it. It most certainly would have been different. Better, worse or the same, who knows? I'd bet that most of the disagreements were money and workload. It wouldn't surprise me if Joel wanted only the best which meant a lot of money and long hours of work. It's possible that Trace and Jim were on the same side of the argument for totally different reasons. |
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Post by intonyeon on Jun 20, 2022 9:47:35 GMT -5
The movie was probably the biggest misstep of the original run. I’m a fan of it since it’s still a entertaining look at the show and I’m a big fan of This Island Earth, but it’s ultimately a failure. Perhaps Joel was on to something there. (And besides, maybe a movie was just straight up a bad idea anyway?)
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Post by Diet Kolos on Jun 20, 2022 10:11:17 GMT -5
The original IDEA of the movie wasn't bad. It was supposed to be moderate budget movie, have big musical numbers and action and set pieces sequences off the SOL.
They described it as their version of The Muppet Movie. The Mads go to a Mad scientist convention in Las Vegas. There's a subplot about Crow riding a motorcycle like in The Great Escape. Something involving The Amazing Colossal Man catching the SOL.
What Universal ended up agreeing to finance was...an episode of the show with a slightly higher budget.
It was really just bad timing. In the early 90s, studios were much more open to financing "medium" budget movies. 10-20 million. And about oddball stuff. There's a 1992 John Goodman Universal movie called "Matinee" that I think is a good example of what I'm talking about.
After about 1993, with smaller studios either collapsing (Orion) or getting merged into bigger companies, the movie business changed. Big tentpole movies with 50+ million budgets became the bread and butter of studios and smaller budget, riskier movies got left by the wayside and their budgets funneled into bigger projects.
So by early 95, MST the movie was only given a $2 million budget.
Had they signed with Paramount in 92, we might've gotten a movie with a scope of, say, the original Wayne's World. It might not have been to the Brains liking, but it would've been the Big Hollywood Production they were looking for.
Heck, if they'd signed with HBO for a TV movie back in 1991 (which was what HBO pitched to them at the time and got them thinking about making a movie), it probably would've turned out ok, too.
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Post by monkeypretzel on Jun 20, 2022 10:19:56 GMT -5
To answer that long list of questions simply:
I believe that Joel and Jim both have large egos and both are convinced that the way they want to do something is the best way to do it and/or the only way it should be done, which of course leads to conflict. I think the other partners and the non-voting employees of Best Brains were often uncomfortably caught in the middle of trying to serve two masters and/or trying to negotiate a peaceful path forward.
I think the TV show would have been over after Season 6 had Joel gotten his way about the movie. If it had been successful they wouldn't have made more TV, and if it had failed, Best Brains would have gone bankrupt. I think that yes, Jim was more concerned about keeping Best Brains going as an employer than Joel was, because one of his stated reasons for wanting to partner with a studio for the movie was because that way everyone could stay employed instead of having to let people go in order to have the funds necessary to produce it independently. (It would have been interesting had they gone to crowd-funding and selling shares back in the 90s, like Trace and Kevin said, when they did their movie commentary with Jonah, was suggested and briefly considered. But who knows if the world was ready for that 30 years ago?)
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Post by Diet Kolos on Jun 20, 2022 10:32:00 GMT -5
The irony is, they had to lay everyone at BBI off anyways with the mess of Season 7 and Comedy Central dragging their feet on if they were officially getting a new season or not.
That's why Jef Maynard didn't come back for Season 7, Jim made every employee reapply for their old jobs when the Season 7 contract finally came in. He felt disrespected and started his own company.
And then everyone got laid off AGAIN after they were officially cancelled (only to be retired AGAIN when Sci-Fi signed them up in mid/late 1996.
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