Quick: the summer of 2001—how did you spend your time? How about those dark days after September 11? And that hot summer of 2002? Know what I did? I spent a lot of that time writing and producing and directing and performing in and editing a feature called Babysitters. It was our first video project. And it was a feature-length video project.
Up until that point, Miller & Mullet had busked on Toronto streets and appeared in several variety and cabaret-type shows. I’d purchased a then-state-of-the-art one-chip Canon Ultura in the spring of 2000, and, with my trusty PowerMac 8600, I’d started exploring video editing and graphics. My vacation video, plus a couple of quick things I’d done for friends, led us to think we should immortalize our act on tape.
We made a number of decisions before writing that affected how the project turned out. Instead of doing shorts, we thought we should do a feature. A feature shot with a consumer-grade camcorder... with no budget. This was to be a head-first, eyes-closed jump into the deep end, without water wings or anything.
Why a feature? Everyone starts with shorts, so we thought it best to distinguish ourselves with a big project to start. This was pretty fuzzy-headed thinking, but you have to realize as a live act we’re pretty far out there—anti-comedy is our friend! We’ve never held back from doing anything on stage, so why do the same on video? We weren’t following any standard game plan. Youtube and web video didn’t exist like it does now, so short films were still a genre dominated by demo reels for film students and up-and-comers. Our first project had be a feature, which we naively thought would put us on the map.
First thing we did was figure out how long a feature is. This was a topic of some debate between Mullet and I. Eventually, with research, we determined that we needed something over an hour long to justify the description “feature,” so we aimed for 90-120 minutes just to ensure that we’d have a feature, even if we had to cut a few scenes or sequences. Our script, therefore, had to be around 120 pages at the standard rate of 1 page per minute. I think the script ended up being around 125 pages, and I think during production we shortened it to around 112 pages by not shooting a few things.
Never having written anything as long as a feature film before, we decided to use an older story as our framework for the script. This is a well-worn strategy, and I think it is a useful tool, especially if you’re writing in a genre or type of writing that you haven’t worked in before.
Mullet was keen to use Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, so he came up with some plot points loosely based on that story. Unfortunately, he was familiar with the TV version that skimmed the surface and left out the grosser parts, and I was going by the copy of the book I had, so our concepts of the story differed at the beginning and we had to spend time getting onto the same page. Overall, it was Mullet’s story—I followed the plot he’d created (we’ve continued to work in a similar mode, one of us as the main writer but now the other as sounding board/editor/cheerleader/occasional co-writer).
In hindsight, we were trying to stretch what should have been a simple little story over an overly complicated plot—like a fat guy squeezing into a tight t-shirt. I think this was the main flaw in the project, and it affected the rest of the efforts we put into it. Film and TV work best with simple plots—especially comedies where the fun isn’t in the story but in how it’s told and the characters living that story.
Mullet suddenly got a summer job in Alberta chasing dinosaurs, so we wrote scenes separately, with him in Drumheller and me in Toronto. We divided up the scenes, e-mailing them back and forth and rewriting and editing as we went along. Most of the time, we added stuff to the other guy’s scene, so the page count increased every day. I think we improved each other’s scenes, to a degree. Mullet rewrote Ed’s introductory scene from my brief ripping-off-the-hooker scene to the one we shot, a much longer trying-to-rip-off-hooker scene, for instance. I can’t recall anything I did to his scenes, but I was in a Groucho Marx phase and added a lot of one-liners and rapid fire type dialogue to everything I touched that summer.
The writing process was beneficial—it was the first time we’d collaborated on anything longer than 4-5 pages. We’d written sketches for a never-staged live show, we’d improvised a lot of live appearances, but we’d never written anything longer than a sketch. We learned how to work as a team, what each others’ strengths and weaknesses were, as well as our strengths. There was give and take, back and forth, but this grew as we learned to trust the other’s comedic instincts. Mullet was the chief writer on the script as he’d provided the plot and most of the characters, but the finished script definitely had my fingerprints all over it. The most interesting part of the process was that I ended up writing most of Mullet’s dialogue and scenes, and Mullet ended up writing almost all of my dialogue and scenes.
The weakness of our process was that neither of us stood back and acted as story editor, so by the time we finished, we had a shaggy dog story with a really convoluted plot and all the jokes you could eat. The basic plot was that Miller gets a job babysitting and leaves Mullet in charge. A creepy doll collector decides to steal the baby and Miller & Mullet spend the end of the movie getting the baby back, with the middle devoted to a long and confusing journey spent not finding the baby. To fit the plot over Gulliver’s Travel, we wrote a series of episodes. This allowed us have most of the cast come in for just one day and allowed us some room in dropping stuff if the schedule didn’t permit us to get things done in a reasonable amount of time.
Our influences are pretty obvious now, when I watch the finished project. The Gulliver story is not obvious unless you read the paragraph above where I explained we’d used it as our story’s frame (unless you caught the baby’s name as Lemuel...). In terms of how the structure, it definitely shows the results of us being huge Young Ones fans. I’ll go into our influences in a separate post at some point, but the style of that 1982-84 TV show certainly put a mark on what we were doing in 2001. For dialogue, we invoked the spirit of the Marx Brothers quite frequently. Ed has a definite Groucho streak going, and Mullet occasionally ventures into word confusion that Chico could have done.
Next time, pre-production on a no-budget feature.
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