« February 2003 | Main | April 2003 »

March 31, 2003

"Loitering"

Cinema 2.0 just gets better and better. I swear.

We finally had a decent-sized house this weekend. 25 or 30 people, I think. (I'm awful at estimating numbers of people. You'd think I'd be better after staring at audiences for so many years. But I'm not.)

The movie was One-Eyed Jacks, a Marlon Brando Western. The Marlon Brando Western. As part of her efforts to promote the show, Megan dug up a ton of One-Eyed Jacks trivia.

I asked for a suggestion of a petty crime and got "loitering." So rather than being a fearsome bank robber, Marlon Brando (as voiced by Dan Izzo) became a convicted loiterer. Just before the show, Dan was trying out his bad-on-purpose Marlon Brando impression, but at the suggestion of some others in the cast he used his awkward-teenager-with-braces voice, which I think made it 200% funnier.

Last week's movie had a cast of dozens, often with six or seven people on screen at the same time. This movie, especially after I cut it down from the original two and a half hours, is very much a three-person show (Brando, Karl Malden, and the girl -- brilliantly played by Trish as a French exchange student who couldn't speak French). So I was very happy that everyone got in some great bits as minor characters who were only on-screen for a line or two.

Posted by Fuzzy at 11:00 PM

Surprise

This happened on Wednesday, but I've been busy enough I haven't had a chance to post it until now -- I went over to the Virgin Megastore after work to see if I could pick up one of the new backlit Game Boy Advance SPs (I'm addicted to Advance Wars right now, so backlighting is important because... it just is, OK?) As we turned the corner into the video game/video area there was Ron Jeremy, hairy as all get out, signing copies of Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy. There were, oh, 2 or 3 people waiting to have their copies signed, and it was on sale, so it seemed like a shame not to grab a copy (as well as a copy of the first season of Futurama) and have it signed (just Porn Star, not Futurama).

I had to spell "Fuzzy" for him. We'll chalk it up to how noisy it was with the TVs blaring in the video section.

Posted by Fuzzy at 5:30 PM

March 24, 2003

Almost

Well, I was almost in a short indie film.

Shaun did an independent film this last summer and through the contacts he made doing that movie he keeps hearing about new projects. This last week he was asked by a screenwtiter friend of his to help cast this short. Through extreme nepotism, I made the cut.

We went to the camera guy's house today for a read-through of the script and discovered that there had been some confusion and some of the roles had already been cast. Well, one role. Mine. So... no movie magic for Fuzzy this time.

I stayed at the reading to help out by reading a different role, also already cast, but the actress couldn't make the reading. (Yeah, actress. Everybody at the read-through already made all the jokes.)

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:28 AM

Robot vs. Aztec Mummy vs. "Birthday Party"

We had our great review come out this week, but we were up against the Oscars and the NCAA Basketball Tournament and the War -- so we had a pretty small audience tonight.

The movie was Robot vs. Aztec Mummy, a flashback-heavy Mexican monster movie about a mad scientist who builds a (rather clunky) robot to defeat an Aztec mummy so he can steal its treasure.

I asked for a suggestion of a gathering and got "Birthday Party". The movie became about the quest of our hero, Domingo, to turn the abandoned chocolate factory in his basement into a rec room, and the struggle of Doctor (or Seņor) Celluloso to kidnap the heroine to force her to jump out of his (evil) birthday cake.

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:10 AM

March 23, 2003

Reason #72 to Support Gilda's Club

If you weren't one of the dozen lucky people in the audience at the LAUGH benefit this morning at 10 am, then you missed Bare doing our whole show in nothing but a pair (each) of Sirens-logoed boxer shorts.

Jackie Stone said she'd give Shaun $10 if we did it, and we're never ones to pass up an easy ten-spot (even if we have to spend twice that to buy boxer shorts from the merch table).

After a while, I forgot we weren't wearing hardly any clothes. We were doing our "Pagaent of History" show, with the suggestion of "Stalin" and it was tricky enough to keep track of the actual details of Stalin's life and our invented history and what I (wasn't) wearing sort of fell by the wayside.

Posted by Fuzzy at 11:38 PM

March 21, 2003

Busy Weekend

If you're like me, you've got a busy weekend planned. What will you (meaning me) be doing?

Posted by Fuzzy at 2:02 PM

March 19, 2003

First Review

The New City just came out and Nina Metz gave us quite a nice write-up. We're #1 on New City's "5 Shows to See Now" list this week, too.

(The review is one of those mildly frustrating, to a producer, reviews that is very positive, but doesn't have any great quotes to pull out and put on a poster -- "often quite funny" seems to be the best pull-quote.)

(Also, after years of fighting to get FuzzyCo productions recognized as such, even though we rent at other theaters, this show, which is part of the Playground Directors Series, is being listed as a FuzzyCo production. Which it isn't. Oops.)

Posted by Fuzzy at 10:40 AM | Comments (4)

March 17, 2003

Excellent timing

I just got my Mouse Beard Fred t-shirt in the mail. (Hey, wait, why did I have to buy a shirt featuring a character I created?) It's excellent timing because the heating in the building evidently hasn't caught up with the suddenly warm weather here in Chicago and my long-sleeve shirt was tooooo warm. So now I'm stylin' in a shirt featuring a caricature of me if I had a big beard with a mouse living in it.

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)

"Marrakech"

Yay! Cinema 2.0 opened last night and went very, very well.

The movie we did was Laser Mission, a confusing mess of an action movie, starring Brandon Lee (Bruce Lee's son) near the beginning of his ill-fated career and Ernest Borgnine phoning in his role to pay the rent.

The suggestion was Marrakech (the city in Morocco), which got treated very lightly. That is, the cast mentioned Marrakech once or twice but it didn't affect the course of the show that much. Don't get me wrong -- it was still all improvised, but I wonder what the audience thought.

In the plot that developed, Brandon Lee's character was a chef, fighting through hordes of competitors to cater a bar mitzvah. Hi-larious.

The band sounded great. The cast sounded great. One character got dropped, but someone else picked it up right away, so there were only a few seconds of mouths moving on screen with no voices. Noah did a great job on gun shots and cymbol crashing (the only two sound effects we have). The audience was smallish, but totally into the show. My friend Merrie stopped by in the middle of the show to drop off opening night flowers (thanks!) and was surprised when I told her later that there were only 15 or so people there. "From the lobby, it sounded like a full house," she said.

Posted by Fuzzy at 11:26 AM

March 16, 2003

Too much time

I've got three hours until I need to be at the theater for the opening night of Cinema 2.0, and for once it's too much time. I've got nearly everything ready (the movie, cast gifts, cords and cables and microphones and so on and so on) and I'm kinda bouncing around trying to find things to do. I guess I could clean the bathroom.

Posted by Fuzzy at 3:51 PM

March 14, 2003

Listings

We're listed in the Reader and in Lawrence Bommer's Opening Nights column in the Chicago Tribune, so that's good. Here's what Bommer wrote:

Beginning Sunday is this 90-minute film/theater event inspired by the Woody Allen classic "What's Up Tiger Lily?" and the recent "Kung Pow" martial arts spoof. The weekly evening entertainment features the talents of seven improvisors as they "dub" in the voices and Foley effects for a relatively unfamiliar B-movie. The selection will change weekly as will the score, always by Ben Taylor's live band.

Director Fuzzy Gerdes sees it as Chicago irreverence in a new format. "The great advantage is that it's all live and unscripted and even more anarchic than Allen's calculated travesty. To keep it unpredictable the cast won't see the movie beforehand." That's why we can't announce it either.

Just a couple quibbles (I don't know why I quibble with free publicity -- am I brain-damaged or something?) I didn't say that quote. Not that I mind. Don Hall has been helping out, in his Pit Bull PR guise, with press contacts for Cinema 2.0. Lawrence called Don earlier this week seeking quotes from me for that column. Lawrence was a few hours away from deadline (some days it seems like all writers are a few hours away from deadline. I work with writers. I know this.) and when Don couldn't get ahold of me or Megan (we both work at the same place and things are busy at work right now) Don took material from this journal and the press release and presented it as a quote from me. Yay, but there are a couple of things Don didn't know at the time:

I haven't seen Kung Pow and I really didn't think about it all when I was working up Cinema 2.0 (I've posted about what I was thinking about.) And the cast will have seen the movies once or twice before the show. The main reason we haven't publicized a complete list of movies is that I've been been behind schedule and didn't have the complete list set until yesterday.

The really interesting part is that Don managed to capture my real feelings about the show. I don't think I would ever say "calculated travesty" but I do want the show to have a very loose, wild feel to it. That's part of why we're doing eight different movies instead of repeating the same movies several times (as others do -- not that there's anything wrong with that).

Posted by Fuzzy at 4:48 PM

Yelling (for me)

Lost an entry to random browsery-ness, so I'll put this back up in bits, so I don't lose anything:

Cinema 2.0 opens this Sunday, and I couldn't be more excited. We got our traditional eve-of-show "everyone is tired and listless and the director yells at them about focus and committment" rehearsal out of the way on Wednesday night. We've got a quick tech tomorrow afternoon, and then we open.

Posted by Fuzzy at 3:41 PM

March 13, 2003

Genres for Cinema 2.0

A question I've actually been asked: "But Fuzzy, how do I know which week to come to Cinema 2.0, in case I don't like kung-fu movies or something?" The answer, of course, is that you should come to every performance of Cinema 2.0 because we'll be doing 8 different movies and every one will be brilliant.

But to actually answer the question, I've posted a short page with Genre Descriptions for the movies.

Posted by Fuzzy at 5:23 PM

March 12, 2003

Vegas, baby!

Sorry if you've sent me email in the last few days and I didn't get right back to you. I just got back from Las Vegas. I'd like to say I'm rested and tan, but CCC had me in my hotel room all day, editing video like mad. They worked me like a dog, I tell you. A dog!

And I'm sick. Poor little me. Cough, cough.

But, I won $20 at blackjack (my first time ever -- ain't never had one lesson!) and the show went well. Worth it? You bet. (Bet. Get it? Vegas. Gambling. Oh, why do I bother with you people?)

Posted by Fuzzy at 4:56 PM

Done!

Matt posted this in the comments of the last entry in the "Hey, I'm in a Movie" journal, but I'll repeat it here:

It's been a long road...but the post-production process on Dancing With Gaia was completed on Sunday, March 9, at about 7:00 PM.

While producer Dallas Trinkle was throwing back beers with Robert Rodriguez at SXSW, editor Andrew Merczak and I were putting the final
finishing touches on the film, along with composer Brian Crane.

The final running time of the film is 57 minutes. You should be getting an email from us within the next six weeks with more information about when you can expect your very own copy of DWG (sorry to be so vague; I'm still getting answers on the turnaround time of duplication, etc).

Thank you all for your hard work in making this movie come to life. When I watch the film, I see the wonderful energy and art that every person contributed. This movie is truly a collaboration, and every one who was a part of it added their own spice to that recipe. It was a true pleasure working with you, and I hope that we can all do it again. See you for the sequel!

matt

Posted by Fuzzy at 4:44 PM | Comments (1)

March 4, 2003

Mouse Beard Fred

Back in November I did the Sybilization solo improv performance thing and in one of my shows I created (as one does in an improv show) a character named Mouse Beard Fred, who was a creepy guy who had a mouse named Malcom living in his beard. In the show, he tried to attack a woman who turned out to be a kung fu expert and easily handed him over to the police. Who then put him in a box, that being, as far as I can tell, the standard punishment for attacking women in that improv world. (Often, describing an improv show is like describing a dream -- "it made sense at the time.")

My friend Noah Gigex saw the show and was so taken with Mouse Beard Fred that he informed me after the show (informed -- not asked) that he would be making a cartoon character out of him. And it seems he has. And plastered him on a variety of Cafe Press merchandise.

Joey deVilla has this "theory that in the infinite set of universes -- the multiverse -- there was one particular universe in what happened to us right here was being watched as a TV show over there. We then made a solemn vow to live in such a way that we kept our ratings up." I think ratings are pretty high right now on the Fuzzy Show.

Posted by Fuzzy at 4:14 PM | Comments (1)

March 3, 2003

I'm with the band

We had our first Cinema 2.0 rehearsal with the band -- WOW! Adding music to the mix adds so much. I already knew that Ben is great to work with (he's been running for the Neutrino Project) and Todd seems nice, too, and has the best multi-instrument setup I've ever seen.

We were missing almost the half the cast because of the Dirty South Improv Fest, but I was impressed with the energy that the remaining four cast members were able to bring to the show. Even big crowd scenes and fights sounded OK.

I've picked most of the movies for the show and now I'm just slogging through editing them (I've set an arbitrary limit of 75 minutes, figuring that's about how long this show will be funny for. I'd hate for it to be funny for 75 minutes and then go one for another 15.)

Posted by Fuzzy at 2:32 PM

"Pez"

Well, we closed the Neutrino Project, but this time for good (for now). Yay! So now I'm down to, like, three projects. What will I do with all my copious free time?

Closing night was marked, for me, by sudden last-minute panic. At 7:50, we were down an actor (someone just not-showing-up) and a runner (via poor planning on my part). We pulled Jackie Stone-Kulhan out of the audience (under my mistaken impression that this was the second time she had seen the show) and did some hurried and confused reorganization of the teams to cover the lack of a runner. Then at 7:55, just after we had everything covered, the missing actor showed up and Lance, who wasn't scheduled to be there, arrived to lend a hand. So we were extra covered. Yay!

So then as I playing a short for the audience before we started the actual show (a rehearsal set from Seattle with Shaun and Kevin Mullaney making out) Lance appeared at my side to ask if I had an extra charged battery, because one of the camera guys had discovered that his battery was dead. Unusually for me, I just froze. I knew I had an extra battery, but I couldn't think where it was or how to go about remembering where it was or how to get it. It only lasted 30 seconds or so, but it was a moment of blind panic. Eek.

So then we got the suggestion of "Pez" and started the show and things went very well. My crew (Andrea, Sean, and Tim) had a great set of scenes about life change and discovering new love. Michael Starcevich's team did a "meta" set where they were playing actors in a Neutrino Project-like project. One of the audience objects that team 4 borrowed (have I mentioned that? Team 4, who stay in the theater to vamp while we're waiting for the first tape to arrive, borrows objects from the audience that then show up in their scenes) was a woman's divorce papers(!). So Shaun and Elizabeth were a newly divorced couple who got drunk on (also audience borrowed) champagne and rekindled their romance. And our other guest star, international heart-throb Alex Fendrich, had to choose between Jens (Jen Ellison and Jennifer Shepard).

After the show, I got a chance to talk to Crazy Monkeys alums Elliott and Brandon who surprised me by showing up out of the blue. Shaun and I (and Liz and Ben Taylor) started the Crazy Monkeys back in the day, and it's always cool to see old Monkeys.

So... we're done. Until May at least. Thanks to everyone who came out to the shows, and thanks to everyone (31 people, by my last count) who acted and cameraed and ran and teched for the shows.

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:14 PM | Comments (2)