FuzzyCo

We're not extending SINema, so tonight is your last chance to see Shaun Himmerick, Jared Logan, Erica Reid, and Andrea Swanson make some dirty and funny movies even dirtier and funnier.

tonight at 11 pm
Improv Kitchen
3419 N Clark St

I guess the pull-quote is "quick-witted improv vets".

Hey, it's the Channel 12 Action Eyewitness News Team! Oh, I mean, the cast of SINema!

We made some pretty big tweaks to the show between weeks 1 & 2, getting rid of the intermission, throwing out the "commercials", adding another short-form game, and sexing-up the whole show (replacing, for example, Cheerleader[s'] Beach Party with SuperVixens). I think we really took that half-step from pretty good to really good.

And hey, some people (well, one person - but if one is asking, ten are wondering) had asked what movies we're doing. The first week our feature was Cheerleader[s'] Beach Party (the name is different on the box cover and title sequence[1]) and we used scenes from Flesh Gordon and Trader Hornee for improv games. Week 2 our feature was the Russ Meyer classic SuperVixens and we added a 40s b&w short for games. I may tweak the short scenes for this week.

[1] I have a Kung Fu movie that has three completely different titles -- one on the box cover, one on the DVD menu, and a third in the title sequence of the movie.

Um, no, it's not "family movie night fodder". But it is a Metromix Best Bet. Again. Whee. The old name, but that's to be expected as the new name chases after it through the press-release ecosystem.

And we were also the subject of a cbs2chicago.com story (the .com is on purpose -- it was a web-only story): A Tale Of Two 'Dirty Movie Nights'.

Odd Obsession Movies owner Brian Chankin said Gerdes’ show using the name was never an issue for him.

"Really, it just was funny to me," Chankin said of the protests against the proposed other "Dirty Movie Night."

A nit-pick with the article: the show is a FuzzyCo / Lavender Cabaret co-production (it just felt a bit weird to keep reading "Gerdes' show"). And there are a couple sentences that I think Adam quoted me too well -- I need to learn to speak in sound bites, rather than conversational english. It's very likely that I actually did say, "a variety of classic sexploitation movies that we’ve overlayed with shorter scenes with some movies, that we’ve overlayed with Improv games" but I don't think that's what I meant. There's a lot of overlaying going on in that sentence. (For the record, the show features short scenes from movies used as the basis for improv games, and then a longer feature, which is presented with witty banter and green screen tomfoolery by the cast.)

Well, this has been an interesting week. The last thing I wanted to deal with the day of an opening night is a bunch of strangers yelling at me on the internets, but, well, we don't always get what we want. It turns out that our clever new show name was already in use in Chicago, as was pointed out by some of the other show's fans. Note to self: always google your clever new show names.

So we've been trading co-producer emails all week -- an early favorite for a name change turned out to be the name of a burlesque show in Detroit; bullet dodged there -- and we're proud to present the Lavender Cabaret/FuzzyCo co-producton -- SINema. I think I'll be using the subtitle Smutty Comedy and Comic Smut. Whee. Now I just have to order a new big poster from Kinko's and get it over to the Improv Kitchen...

So...

SINema
Fridays at 11 pm, through Feb 24, 2006
The Improv Kitchen, 3419 N. Clark

FuzzyCo also encourages you to check out the completely unaffliated
Dirty Movie Night
The last Saturday of the month, resuming Feb 25
hosted by Odd Obsession, 1659 N Halsted

Yippee!

Update: We've renamed the show SINema.

Well, poop. There was is another Dirty Movie Night in Chicago. The video store Odd Obsession hosts a night of "dirty movies, dirty film trailers, ... sleazy performers, free wine/booze/beer and cheese". It's a free monthly event and they don't seem to have done one since last summer October.

The show was evidently well-loved and I'm getting some nasty comments on my show announcement (presumably because of the press we got today).

Franky and I were both aware of the Odd Obsession show, but neither of us remembered the name of that show (we swear). Franky had even contacted the owner of Odd Obsession months ago to see if he'd like to be a sponsor of our show. He expressed some interest, but we haven't been in contact since. Franky says he mentioned the name of the show at that time. (But, of course, it's such a generic name, none of us can be sure now whether he said, "we're doing a dirty movie night" or "we're going to be doing a show, the name of which will be, quote, "Dirty Movie Night", end quote.)

Oh, and one of the commenters says that there was talk of having Odd Obsession's event at the Improv Kitchen. Well, they call it "your venue". I'm not the Improv Kitchen. They're just a rented venue. They've had no input into the name or content of the show. Lakeshore Theater. Franky rents the Lakeshore Theater to put on Lavender Cabaret. They don't keep him informed of every show that inquires about renting their space and he doesn't let them know about shows he's producing in other venues.

So, where are we now?

1. Oops. Sorry. We screwed up. I would never have knowingly "stolen" anyone's name. I'm confident in my and my cast's abilities -- I don't want to trade on anyone else's success. And if you know me, you'd know I'm accommodating to a fault. I would have been too afraid of the kind of ill-will we're seeing now to have done this on purpose. Next time a show name is proposed, I'll Google it, I swear.

1a. I'm double-sorry because the people who are so mad right now are our target audience. I bet they'd love the show if they weren't so mad about the name.

2. I'd prefer not to change the name, since listings info and such has already gone out, but I want to do the right thing. We're contacting Odd Obsession to see if they'd like us to change the name.

3. It's not much of a defense, but man, it is kind of a generic name. There's a Dirty Movie Night in LA, too.

4. The ideas in the show are mine and the cast's. While I had heard of the Odd Obsession event I've never attended one. I've been doing both comedy-over-video and working with burlesque shows since 2003, so when Franky came to me with the bare concept of "let's do a show at the Improv Kitchen with their green screen and dirty movies" I had plenty of ideas that I think will make for a fun, fresh, entertaining show. The cast were cracking each other up with their bits at rehearsal last night. It's a good show.

5. If you don't have the balls to leave your name or an email when you leave a nasty comment or threat of physical violence, then, you know, fuck you.

Update: We've renamed the show SINema.

Dirty Movie Night is a MetroMix "Best Bet" in today's RedEye (or as Jared said last night, "we're number two on the PowerPick, with a Star"). I'm not sure I actually understand that first sentence of the blurb, but I do encourage you to come and "get your dose".

And again, criminey. We actually ran through the whole show last night, in Shaun's living room, and tonight we tech at the Improv Kitchen for the first (and last, pre-show) time. I'm going to be tweaking the video right up until opening night, which is, I guess, regular. I'm always doing everything at the last minute anyway, so all that this show schedule has done is let me skip the weeks where I feel the nagging sense of dread that I should be working on the show, but don't.

And I'll throw in here that Saturday night you can come and see Erica and I try out some new characters at Don't Spit the Water (check the front page to see our heads wiggle back and forth). We'll be (versions of) Maya and Miguel (and I'm suddenly thinking that if I'm going to do things like link to their site that maybe we should have called them Daya and Diguel or something).

Update: I've found out about the other Dirty Movie Night from the comments here and I've posted a response.
Update2: We've renamed the show SINema.

So Franky made a poster, which is one of the great things about working with a producer. Usually it's me running around trying to do 10 things at once. With Franky on board, that's down to 6 or 7 things.

We're putting up this show, if you haven't noticed, on something of a tight schedule. I've only just finalized the video pieces we're going to use for opening night and now I'm sitting, an hour away from rehearsal, willing the DVD encoding to go faster so that I can actually show it to the cast. That's a downside of a video-based show. I seem to recall promising myself after both our hugely complex Sketchfest show last year and after our last run of the tech-heavy Neutrino Project that my next show would be simple, simple, simple. And yet here I am, up to my neck in DVDs and VHSes of old movies, watching a progress bar creep across a monitor.

I'm really leaning on my cast for this show. Andrea Swanson has done this kind of thing with me before, in Cinema 2.0. Erica is delighfully vulgar and is very kind to let me throw her into another show when she's already in rehearsals for a real play. Jared Logan is a treat as Kelly Paynes in Don't Spit the Water and brings a very-different (to me) stand-up comedy sense of preparedness to the show. And Shaun always brings the oomph. Shaun is the oomph.

Update: We've renamed the show SINema.

Well, Franky has put down the deposit, so I suppose I can start talking about the show. Lavender Cabaret and FuzzyCo are proud to bring you a new late night comedy-video-sexy extravaganza: Dirty Movie Night.

OK, first off, because this is you guys and not a press release, I've got to say that I'm trying to come up with a quick way to tell people that the dirty movies really aren't that dirty. We're going to be working with movies like 1977's Cheerleader Beach Party which has a lot of hare-brained cheerleader schemes and a bit of topless cheerleader showering. I don't want people scared off because they think the movies might be hard-core or anything.

And mostly it's going to be us (us being my talented cast, which includes Shaun Himmerick, Jared Logan, Erica Reid, and Andrea Swanson) making fun of those movies. We're going to be doing a whole grab bag of making-fun-of-movies styles, from commentary (ala Mystery Science Theater) to dubbing (ala Cinema 2.0) to short form improv and drinking games. Whee.

The show is going to run Friday nights at 11 pm at the Improv Kitchen (3419 N Clark), starting January 27.

Well, we're coming to the close of our second run of Cinema 2.0 and we thought we'd mark the occasion with something special. Usually, of course, we show B-movies and replace the dialogue and soundtrack. For this show, we're going to show a good movie and replace the dialogue and soundtrack. Our movie next weekend (Saturday, April 24) is... dun-un dun-un/dun-un dun-un.... Jaws!

I've cut the movie down to a extra-taut hour for your late night viewing convenience and our talented cast will be improvisationally creating new dialogue for the movie while Ben Taylor and Todd Leibov improvoise a new score.

(This weekend we have the last Wild Card show of the Around Midnite Series, featuring the rock-your-socks-off musical stylings of Your Little Ponies. Get out and get some rock!)

If you came out to see Cinema 2.0 this weekend, thanks a lot. If you meant to but didn't, you lucked out because our projector wouldn't work and we had to cancel the show. Poop.

It's been a nagging worry of mine since I got involved with all these multimedia-heavy productions -- what do you do if the technology fails. I've seen regular improv shows go on even if the power goes out, but with these shows we're pretty much dead in the water if any one of several pieces of tech fail.

We had a rehearsal for Cinema 2.0 last night and Ben Taylor, our musical director, brought along his new toy -- his new iBook with GarageBand and USB keyboard. It sounds great! Ben, with Todd Leibov on lap steel guitar, will be creating an entirely improvised soundtrack for our improvised interpretation of Hero's Blood. Is it cheating that Ben went and found some loops with Asian drumming? Nope, just preparedness, I say. Preparedness and cool.

Oh, what a difference expectations make. Hero's Blood is a terrible Kung Fu movie, largely because there's very little Kung Fu in it (there's a little wrestling and some sword fighting). Really, it's a Chinese Historical Drama (and not a great one), but there's not a big market in the U.S. for CHDs, so it gets marketed as a Kung Fu movie -- the DVD even has a bonus "Art of Kung Fu Biography" (a short, written history of Kung Fu that scrolls quickly over a picture of Bruce Lee).

And so... it's a perfect Cinema 2.0 movie. I'll be sitting in with the cast again this month as we attempt to make (non)sense of this sprawling mess of a movie. Saturday, Midnight, at the Lake Shore Theater.

When I run into theater people around, they often start out the conversation with "Hey, too bad about WNEP."

"Too bad, but too good," I retort, nonsensically. I loved the old WNEP space (soon to be the home of The Playground) but it only held 60 people. Now we're doing the Around Midnite Series at the spacious Lakeshore Theater, so you and 299 of your friends can come see the shows and there will still be a few seats left.

And speaking of those shows, Cinema 2.0 is coming up tomorrow night at midnight.

I watched Bail Out the other night to do the scene breakdown for the Cinema 2.0 cast. Count yourself lucky that we're going to turn the original soundtrack off and make up new dialogue. It's a stinker.

Huh, David Hasselhoff's first movie role was a character named "Boner" in "Revenge of the Cheerleaders." It only got better from there.

Cinema 2.0 is tomorrow at midnight at WNEP, this month featuring "Sizzle Beach, U.S.A." Kevin Costner's first starring role. All the cheesy badness of a mid-70s T&A movie, combined with all the cheesy goodness of 6 of Chicago's finest improvisors.

Since Halloween is on a Friday this year, you'll likely be headed to 7 or 8 parties that weekend (since you're so popular, you devil, you). So the weekend before is the weekend to get started on all your spoooky movie goodness. Like, por ejemplo, with Fury of the Wolfman at Cinema 2.0. A man's girlfriend brainwashes him into becoming a werewolf. Or something. It's hard to tell, the dubbing of this 1972 Spanish movie is so bad. Fortunately, you won't have to deal with that, since you'll have our hilarious dubbing making the story something completely different.

I grabbed a Red Eye on my way to my root canal this morning, expecting to find a short piece about Neutrino Project 30,000*. Instead, Cinema 2.0 was listed in the "bestbets" section. I love all my theatrical children the same, so I'm very happy. It was just... unexpected.

(I'm really trying to do my best to not say, "but it's not really like Mystery Science Theater so much-- we make up a whole new story." I think I need to just shut up and take a compliment and a little free publicity. Also, I never listed Nancy Drew in the press release, so Laura Baginski must have read this page to discover that piece of information. So she might be reading this. And I certainly don't want her to think I don't like the blurb. I'm tickled pink. I understand the value of such a comparison, especially in such a short piece. I just like to use the space available to me in this, my own forum, to try and explain the subtleties of my projects. And now I'm thinking that to the average person, a simple "it's like MST3K" might get them into the theater, where my lengthy, whiny nitpicking about exactly what the show is like might not. Hmm.)

Oh, and if you're worried about sitting through the whole movie, Nancy Drew is just 65 minutes long.

So, here's your weekend plans: tonight you're on your own. Sorry, I can't hold your hand all the time. Tomorrow night, Neutrino Project 30,000 at 8:30 pm at the 3 Penny (have I mentioned yet that the 3 Penny has a fully licensed bar? They do.), go have a drink some where, then wander up Halsted to WNEP for Cinema 2.0 at midnight (have I mentioned that WNEP is BYOB? They are.). See you there!

*Update: I'm an idiot. I was very clearly told that NP30K would be in the RedEye on Thursday. So now I'm looking for yesterday's RedEye. Oops.

** Double update: I've now been told that the piece was not in the RedEye at all, anyway.

Earlier this year I created and directed a show for the Playground's Directors Series called Cinema 2.0. I'm pleased to announce that Cinema 2.0 will be part of WNEP's Around Midnite Series this year, so it will play the 4th Saturday of each month, at 12:15 or so.

(As far as I know, only one other Directors Series show has played anywhere after its Playground run. So, umm, yay for us.)

Our grand re-opening is this Saturday, September 27. We'll be doing Nancy Drew... Reporter, a 1939 black and white film starring everyone's favorite plucky girl detective.

If you're in Chicago this weekend you'll want to head over WNEP at midnight Saturday night to catch an encore show of Cinema 2.0. The kids will be doing Destroy All Monsters -- a brilliant Japanese giant-monster movie with an all-star giant monster cast. And Japanese ladies in sparkly hoodies. And people who keep flying around in a rocket ship. I'm sure it'll all make sense.

(P.S. WNEP, not the Playground, where the run was. Halsted and Belmont. Halsted and Belmont.)

If you happen to be in St. Louis and aren't sure what to do, oh, 3 hours from now, come on down to CITY Improv at the Union Station and see Bare at the St. Louis Improv Festival at 8:30 tonight.

Well, we made it. Eight bad movies. Eight hi-larious make-em-ups.

Cool As Ice. What can I say. Vanilla Ice had one hit and someone rushed him into this movie, which is (vaguely) a remake of Rebel Without a Cause. It's painfully obvious at various points in the movie that they really only had 70 minutes or so of story and they padded and padded.

Emily Dugan went above and beyond rapping as "Papa Smurf" (as Vanilla Ice became in our version). Everyone in the cast got to show off the talents that they've developed over the last two months. Todd Leibov rocked out with the Casio RapMaster and Ben funked out on the bass. And then we had cake.

This was the only movie in the Cinema 2.0 series that was not available on DVD. My friend Merrie loaned me her precious VHS copy to dub for the show. She also loaned us the Cool As Ice soundtrack for our house music. (Merrie, get help.) I also threw the Gourds' version of Gin and Juice and Ben Kweller's BK Baby into the mix.

And... it's not over! We're doing a special show over at WNEP Theater as part of their Around Midnite Series. Saturday, May 31, at midnight. It's only $5 and we'll probably be doing a Japanese giant monster movie, since we didn't include one of those in this run. (I was publicizing a different date for a short while, but this is now the correct date.)

There's a new TV show called Kung Faux that's doing dubbed Kung Fu movies, cut down to half an hour, with rapper guest stars.

And we've got our own rapper guest star for Cinema 2.0 this week. For closing night we're doing Cool As Ice. Word.

Last night's Cinema 2.0 movie was Invasion, a rather odd sci-fi movie from Canada, starring Campbell Scott and Tom Everett Scott. (The first thing everyone says when Tom Everett Scott makes his first appearance on screen: "Hey, wasn't he in That Thing You Do?" The second thing everyone says: "Why is he kissing his sister like that?")

Invasion is something of a parody of '50s sci-fi movies and has lots of odd images and moments. The audience laughed all the way through (as they have for every Cinema 2.0) but fairly often they were laughing at something on screen, not at the cast's wit. The cast, understandably, felt a little slighted and would prefer to not to be outdone in wackiness by the movie itself. And it's very true that I think our best movie was last week's Harrad Experiment, which is a very plain movie (mostly just people talking) which gave the cast lots of room to create.

So, a lesson for the future (if there is a future for Cinema 2.0). But, and still, the audience was laughing.

The future, for now, for Cinema 2.0 is that next week is closing night. We've got a special treat in store. For now I'll just say "Robert Van Winkle". There'll be some sort of closing night party I'm sure.

Addendum:Two things I forgot to mention: when I went downstairs to warm up with the cast at 7:48 there were about 7 people in the house and so I made noises about "the house looks a little light, but I'm sure we'll have a great energy anyway, yadda, yadda, etc, etc". When we came upstairs at 8:02 or so, the house was pretty full, so the question was moot. I'm glad all those people showed up right on time.

And the suggestion for the night was "Mathematics." I had told the cast that I was going to get a completely random suggestion and that they should ignore it as quickly as possible. They got back at me by using math terms constantly and vigorously.

Best. Cinema 2.0. Ever. (so far -- two weeks left)

Whew. That was some hot, hot Cinema 2.0 action.

The movie this week was The Harrad Experiment, a 70s drama about "free love" and it's consequences. It's notable for being Don Johnson's first starring role, for lots of nudity (which was already edited out of the DVD version I have), and, of interest only to improv-history buffs, for an appearance by Ace Trucking Company, an improv group that included Fred Willard.

The suggestion was "History" which hovered around the show all night, but the main action hinged around an off-handed comment from Homer as "Professor Snodgrass" that a murder had been committed on campus. Don Johnson became an undercover cop who was toying with the affections of the woman pretending to be his wife.

Yay!s go to Ben and Todd for their tight, pointed playing, to Michael for the theme song ("The History of Your Life") which popped up at crucial moments, and Phillip and Andrea for the torturous relationship of "Don" and his "wife".

Like I said up top, only two weeks left for this funny, funny show. Next week: Canadian Sci-Fi.

I was in Phoenix over the weekend for a festival, but I made it back in time for Cinema 2.0 by flying out very early on Sunday morning. I had just enough time to dub the VCDs of the Harrad Experiment for next week and print off the screen breakdowns and do the character assignments and head over to the theater.

This week's movie was Hell Comes to Frogtown, a post-apopalyptic* movie starring "Rowdy" Roddy Piper.

We had a few cast-members' parents in the audience and when I mentioned that in our re-show warm-up, Trish said "Oh no -- whenever I get warned to keep a show clean, I always get really dirty." That proved to be true for everyone, not just Trish. It was a dirty, dirty show. Of course, it's probably my fault for picking a movie that features Roddy Piper in a remote-control chastity belt.

I asked for a suggestion of a minor household problem and got "leaky pipes". That became the problem that led to the apocalypse that led to our movie. In a world without water, Roddy had the special ability to create water. From his, you know, thingy. Yeah, it was a little weird. Oh, and he was rushing a fraterity, also.

The show was very blue, and the voice work was a little sloppy, but in terms of creating a new plot for the movie that actually made a little bit of sense, this was one of our best efforts so far. And Trish singing snippets of Culture Club songs was bee-you-ti-FULL.

* When I was in school, the Purdue Exponent had a movie review that included this misspelling, and now whenever I say "apocalyptic", I think "apopalyptic" in my head (apopalyptic is a world after pop music, I suppose).

This week I'll link to Megan's Cinema 2.0 movie trivia early, rather than waiting until we've already shown the movie to entice you with trivia, since that doesn't actually do any enticing.

This week's Cinema 2.0 movie was The Green Hornet, with Bruce Lee as Kato. There was an upsurge in interest in Bruce Lee after his death and so the producers of the old Green Hornet TV show cobbled together several episodes with loose connecting material into a feature length movie. As before, Megan Pedersen assembled a mass of trivia about the movie.

I was super-tired Sunday, from the Party of the Century™ (as Trish was calling it), so I forgot to do the character assignments until the last minute. The character assignments? OK, here's your behind-the-scenes look at how much the cast does or doesn't know about the movie before-hand:

At each show, I give the cast members a VCD of the movie for the next week. They can watch them as much as they want (though I think most people are watching them once), with or without sound (I think the cast is split 50-50 on this). One cast member watches the movie carefully and does a breakdown of the scenes of the movie and which characters are in each one -- something like "5:00 - driving in the car - Green Hornet & Kato, 6:30 - kung fu fight - Kato, Bad Haircut, Blue Jacket". (One of the tricky aspects of doing the scene breakdown is coming up with names for the characters that make sense if you've only watched the movie with the sound off.) They then email that breakdown to me.

So then Saturday or Sunday (late!) I take that breakdown and assign characters to each cast member (both to keep big vs. small parts fair over the run, and to make sure that no one has to do a scene with themselves in the course of a show). I hand those assignments and copies of the scene breakdown to the actors when they get to the theater Sunday night, so they have time to ask questions like "which one was Bad Haircut?"

(I get kind of pre-emptively defensive about whether or not some decision I've made about a show makes people think it's "really improv". I don't think our prep work takes away our "improv cred". Discuss.)

So anyway, I got a suggestion of an animal ("anteater") and the movie gradually became about the quest of The Puce Anteater (and his Australian sidekick, Bricko) to get a bite to eat. What is it with these guys and food? Does the cast not eat dinner before they come to do the show? Discuss.

Trivia note: Phillip Mottaz has now played both Bruce and Brandon Lee. Creepy.

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.

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 Se�or) Celluloso to kidnap the heroine to force her to jump out of his (evil) birthday cake.

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.)

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.)

I've got the poster done for Cinema 2.0 and I've put up a little web page for the show. It's not a FuzzyCo production, so I really should have just put the files together and then handed them off to Holly to put on the Playground site, but sometimes I get a particular kind of lazy where I figure it's just easier to do it myself. I'm guessing Megan will fuss at me and I'll have to fix it later, but I wanted to get something up.

I was in my photo studio (i.e. my front hallway) taking pictures of a microphone and videotape to Photoshop some sort of videotape/microphone hybrid for the show poster (quite frankly, my ideas were a little too close to the Twisted Flicks logo). At some point, I decided to pull the videotape out of the case and try arranging the microphone in loops of videotape to see what that would look like. My cat Latt� decided that was the best cat toy she had ever seen and attacked it with both vim and vigor. And... voila, a poster image is born. It almost makes sense, in a kind of "reordering the movie via the playfulness of improv, represented here by a cat" kinda way.

I got asked by email about Cinema 2.0, "I'm curious...where did you come up with an idea like that? Is that someone else's from NY* or did you think of that yourself?" It's hard to tell by email if the question is snarky or sincere, but I'll go ahead an tackle it: the idea for Cinema 2.0 was one I had on my own, even though other people have had the idea, too. And I even know most of the influences of this idea:

When I was in high school in Adelaide, Australia, I saw a show where they projected a movie and three live performers dubbed new, scripted dialogue for the movie. It was very funny and was one of my first experiences with fringey theater and really stuck with me over the years. (I wish I could remember the name of the show. The movie was a low-budget robot monster movie, and the new script had the Australian government creating a new man for the upcoming Australian bicentennial.)

Years later, after I had been doing improv for a while, I saw Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily?, where Woody Allen wrote a new egg-salad-oriented script for a Japanese spy thriller movie. Remembering the live dubbing performers from the Australian show, I thought "you could do that live, with improvisors." And promptly put the idea in the back of my head.

It's an idea other people have had -- LA Connection did their Mad Movies in LA and on TV, Jet City Improv does Twisted Flicks in Seattle, and there's Mr. Sinus Theater in Austin, TX. (And there's a much longer list of scripted movie dubbings -- What's Up Tiger Lily, Firesign Theatre's Hot Shorts and J-Men Forever, Hercules Recycled, etc.)

But I think we're going to come up with our own spin on it. If nothing else, it's improv, and so the particular group of performers we have will necessarily shape the nature of the show.

* I assume they're referring to the FuzzyCo production of The Neutrino Project, which was created by the group Neutrino from New York. I try to be extra careful whenever I talk about The Neutrino Project to credit Neutrino for the concept.

We had a milestone Cinema 2.0 rehearsal this weekend -- the projector at the Playground works! Yay! It was great to be in the space, working with the actual setup.

The cast is right on track -- nowhere near perfect, but that's why we have rehearsals.

There's still plenty of tech work to do, too. I don't want the movies to be over 75 minutes, so that means editting. And I need to get the poster designed -- I've designed the poster for every Directors Series show except Sybilization, and I didn't want to skip that for my own show, but it's one-more-thing-to-do.

Did I say Movie 2.0? I meant Cinema 2.0.

Shaun reminded me of the A-B-C rule last night. The A-B-C rule is why there are so many businesses named, for example, A-1 Locksmith -- people tend to start at the beginnings of listings and read until they find something good enough. So the earlier in the listings you can be, the better. Sometimes I think that the only reason every show isn't named the Acme Show is that Shakespeare didn't have to deal with getting listed in the Reader.

We had our first AYUMDS rehearsal last night. I had assigned the cast homework of coming up with possible titles for the show, and the main contenders were Dub, Movie 2.0, and Dubby McDubDub and the Angry Giant. I had a quick meeting with Producer Megan this morning and we settled on Movie 2.0, with Homer's tagline "You took the words right out of my movie."

We were scheduled have rehearsal at the Playground, and I had planned out some exercises to transition the cast from "standing-up and moving around" improv to "sitting around and just using our voices" improv. But the Playground was double-booked and the other event won, so we had the rehearsal in my living room. Which precluded doing any "standing-up and moving around" improv at all.

I have confess that, even though I knew about the venue change on Friday afternoon, I somehow (please see "emotional rollercoaster" below) managed not to plan for a all-sitting-down rehearsal. So the first few minutes of rehearsal were a little rough (pattern games? What was I thinking?). Bad director, no cookie.

But we did a bat and that went well (note: it's hard to take notes on the bat. Because it's dark.) And then dove right in to watching scenes from The Phantom Creeps and dubbing them. We learned a lot in just a few hours about what kinds of skills we'll need to work on. Overall, a great start.

(noun and verb, get it?)

Yesterday we had the AYUMDS auditions. It was hard to pick just 6 people, so I picked 7. And it was hard to pick just those 7. There were lots of great auditions. All day I've been walking around with the nagging feeling of "Yeah, the people we cast are great, but people I didn't pick were great, too. Why can't I have a cast of 17?"

The great and horrible thing about improv auditions is that you're not selecting for specific parts. Instead of a rather specific "we've got our Hamlet and our Polonius, now we just need to pick the right Gertrude, etc." it's a very squishy question of "goodness" and "energy levels" and "kinds of play." And in the case of this show, "funny voices".

The cast we cast:
Andrea Swanson
Dan Izzo
Emily Dugan
Homer Marrs
Michael Starcevich
Phillip Mottaz
Trish Conlon

And I have to get ready for the AYUMDS auditions this weekend. If you haven't already signed up for the auditions, why not?

I have plenty of work to do for the show. I work with Megan Pedersen, who produces the Playground's Directors Series and at lunch when she mentioned that it looked like the first DS show of 2003 was going to fall through because of the director's other projects and that the Playground was getting a donated video projector, I threw out that there was this movie dubbing show I've always wanted to do, and since The Neutrino Project was closing (it's not), I'd have plenty of time to direct it.

Next thing I know, Megan got the board to approve the show, we've got auditions scheduled, and now I have to do the damn thing.

Last night I spent a bunch of time on-line buying copies of re-dubbed movies. For example, I reference Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily a lot in relation to this show, but I realized that I didn't own a copy to be able to show anyone what I was talking about.

Here are some good things: I've been thinking about this show for awhile and I've got plenty of ideas about how I want it to work. Megan -- it'll be nice to work with a producer that's not me (or Shaun). This show's gonna be just plain fun -- that's a plus.

Auditions have been announced for the As Yet Untitled Movie Dubbing Show. This is a show I'll be directing as part of the Playground's Directors Series. The show will feature "live improvisation over a variety of pre-existing projected movies. A cast of six improvisers will provide the improvised dialogue and sound effects accompanied by a live band which will create an original improvised score, thus transforming the film into an entirely new viewing experience." (Megan Pedersen wrote that. She's smart.)

If you're reading the Neutrino Project journal only, entries about the AYUMDS will be on the FuzzyCo mainpage and on the AYUMDS-specific archive.