Hello Internet

Best News Ever!

2009-01-02T13:25:00.001-08:00

How's Your News?, the television show from Arthur Bradford and the HYN crew, is going to air! Pictured: Sean Costello and Bobby Bird. Here is Arthur's email:

Hi Friends of How's Your News...

Happy 2009! Some of you may already know this, but I want to pass on official notice that our new series will begin airing on mtv Sunday Feb. 8th at 10:30pm. It will play for the next six Sundays at the same time and probably some other times as well.

This is very exciting news for all of us after a long road towards this goal. Please watch it and pass the word on to your friends. We're all really proud of how the show came out. We've worked hard to keep the spirit of the original shows intact in this new series and I think it's paid off. For the next month all of us at HYN headquarters are doing what we can to spread the word right.

Thanks for supporting the show this far. There's never been a show like this on television and there can be many positive outcomes if it succeeds. Of course, just seeing it on television feels like success to us, and we hope you'll join us in feeling happy about that...Arthur

- Please get in touch if you want to learn more about how you can help us spread the word, and check out the new videos on http://www.howsyournews.com/

- NY'ers, we'll be in town Jan 5-7 - get in touch if you want to hang! LA, we'll be there Jan. 7-9 - Hit us up, yo!

- oh yeah, we'd like to become your "friend" that magical place known as facebook! http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hows-Your-News/18204788315?ref=mf

Hook it up, get in touch, become a fan, and set your Tivo! This is going to be the best thing that ever came out of your television.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-16T18:40:00.000-08:00

Art by Gwen Barba who kicks ass.

Comic Con

2008-08-05T11:25:00.000-07:00

It went like this.

International Documentary Association

2008-08-05T10:51:00.000-07:00

Thomas Rigler was kind or misguided enough to invite me to participate last night on an International Documentary Association panel on alternative techniques in documentary storytelling. Everybody else on the panel was making or had already made interesting documentaries:

The moderator was Eddie Schmidt, a really smart guy who made the movie This Film Is Not Yet Rated about the boners at the MPAA. He also showed some excellent re-enactment footage of cavemen wagging their dongs at one another in a threatening manner. Dana Berry showed clips of the refurbished 25th Anniversary Cosmos he produced and directed for broadcast. It was like jellyfish in space. Steve Anderson showed a clip from his film Fuck, some really cool animation by old school animation supermaster Bill Plympton. Steven Boe showcased animation from the film he and his wife and partner are making, Mythic Journeys.

Since I hadn't made anything, I played Through the Eyes of the Pueblo, an episode of BBtv World. Xeni Jardin handed out Flip and other semi-disposable video cameras to kids in Guatemala, then used their footage to put together a multiple-first-person look at life in a rural village. And when talk turned to re-enactment in documentaries, I got to show an assembly clip of Heather's Ren Faire doc Huzzah. She spazzed out in the back row and tried to make me not show it right before it rolled, but it was awesome.

Super good times, and thanks to everyone involved. We're definitely going to the open IDA panel tomorrow night (at Kodak in Hollywood) on how to finish projects.

Thomas Rigler Is Clearly a Genius

2008-07-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

Because he just posted this incredibly incisive and intelligent review of The Royal Nonesuch on his Broadband Jungle Blog. You can find out more about him at http://rigler.tv. Also: quite the looker!

Code Monkeys #1 on Xbox Live

2008-06-03T13:17:00.000-07:00

Woah. Our promo-premiere episode "The Story of 420" is the number one TV download on Xbox Live. Thanks, nerds!

This Is How We Roll

2008-05-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

Enjoy a brief tour of the Monkey Wrangler office where "Code Monkeys" is made, set to Jonathan Coulton's great song of the same name.

Code Monkeys Season Two

2008-04-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

Season two of "Code Monkeys" premieres tonight on G4 with a very special 420 episode. Tommy Chong guest stars. Burn 'em if you got 'em, stoners.

MyMovieStudio

2008-04-18T21:39:00.000-07:00

New project! Michael Bertin had this idea for using crowdsourcing to develop, produce, and promote movies. I know! It's totally 2.0!

Right now we're using Ning for the back end, and Paul Petrunia's design company Extra Medium just made it look all sexy.

Post your pitch, rate pitches, and let us know what you think: MyMovieStudio

(07/16/09) UPDATE!

Yeah, we're not really doing this right now. Maybe later when you're not all poor, and want to bet a hundred bucks on the craptacular taste of your online friends!

A Call for Concert Boycotts in China

2008-04-04T11:23:00.000-07:00

My friend Martha in Costa Rica just sent me the following thoughtful call for artists, in the absence of meaningful response by the U.S. government or the IOC, to respond to oppressive and repressive policies of the Chinese government. Martha and I are both old enough to remember when South Africa was an apartheid state, and to remember the important role musicians played in changing world opinion about whether state oppression is, or is not, everybody's business.

If you agree with her, as I do, please copy and paste this and send it to artists you know and blogs that are updated and read more than this one!

In 1985 musician Steven Van Zant, distressed by his experiences in South Africa, organized a group of artists called “Artists United Against Apartheid.” This group recorded the song “Sun City” which was a call to boycott concerts at the South African gambling reservation until apartheid was abolished. This song brought, to many people, the knowledge that something very wrong was happening in South Africa, people who might never have thought about apartheid were suddenly being educated via MTV and the radio.

Apartheid has since been abolished in South Africa but the problems of oppression still hold our world back from fully realizing it potential as a global community. Particularly in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) which, at the time of this writing, is embroiled in a war of wills with the people of Tibet.

Since March 10th there have been between 4 and 1000 people killed in the Tibetan uprising in the PRC. The actual numbers of people killed is unknown because the PRC does not allow independent outside observers. The number of people who disappear into PRC jails in unclear and the number of people who simply disappear will never truly be known. The PRC is censoring their news and internet content more heavily than ever; one can only assume this is to cover up any blemishes which might mar their standing as the hosts of the upcoming Olympics to be held in Beijing, an event heavily orchestrated to present the PRC as a legitimate player on the world stage.

Today when there are thousands of people in the PRC protesting and laying their lives on the line for basic recognition and autonomy, only asking for a dialog and the PRC still attempting to silence the protesters through force wouldn’t this be the perfect time to recreate a project like Artists United Against Apartheid?

Though the song “Sun City” never made it to the top of the charts like is cousin “We Are the World” there is still a generation of people who remember these songs and what they stood for.

So where are the contentious artists now? Why are people still putting on concerts in the PRC, a government well known for its hard-line censorship and brutal people skills? Are we really at a point socially where we are willing to overlook the violence, restriction and oppression in order to make more money?

Ben Sisario points out exactly how lucrative the business of concerts by foreign music acts in China are in his November 25, 2007 for the New York Times. In this article Sisario makes reference to concerts being given in the PRC by Beyoncé, Eric Clapton, Nine Inch Nails, Avril Lavigne, Sonic Youth, Linkin Park, Talib Kweli, and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. For Linkin Park, their concert, one concert, in the PRC grossed $750,000 US. That’s as much as they might have made on an entire US tour.

More recently Celine Dion’s concert in Beijing was cancelled supposedly due to weather issues but coincidentally and more likely because of, she uses the same promoters who produced the Bjork concert in which Bjork uttered her now-famous “Tibet, Tibet” at the end of her song “Declare Independence just days before the protests and riots broke out.

In a time when foot-dragging politicians and world leaders are unwilling to potentially jeopardize their relationship with the economic Svelgali by making a statement for freedom and fundamental human courtesy perhaps it is the time for the artists of the world to stand up for the people who buy the tickets to their PRC censored concerts and say “I ain’t gonna play Beijing.”

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

2008-02-22T23:02:00.001-08:00

Return of the Muskrats

2008-02-09T21:29:00.001-08:00

That's who I'm partying with tonight.

Clancy Pearson

2008-01-31T16:11:00.000-08:00

Clancy just put up a new portfolio, which can be found here. Click only if you want to see what the scary future looks like.

The Cavalier Jew

2008-01-23T00:22:00.000-08:00

Jon Ross has a new one man show up. I went opening night, and it's fantastic. He puts it up at 8 PM on Sunday nights through March 16 at The Fanatic Salon, on Sawtelle Blvd. in Culver City. You can get tickets here or you can call 1 800 838-3006.

What Would Wolves Do?

2008-01-18T16:47:00.000-08:00

The would do what they do in this new video from Ryan Quincy. The band is indie rock ensemble Les Savy Fav, fronted by Syd Butler, whose sister is the hilariousexy Katherine Kendall of SpinDaily (link at right). I know some of these people; therefore by the transitive property I am also cool and sexy.

UCBcomedy.com

2008-01-16T16:34:00.000-08:00

Just got this message from the Upright Citizens Brigade, announcing their new site:

The switch has been flipped and UCBcomedy.com is live! Welcome to the UCB's third stage!

We've got the funniest sketches, series, music videos, live performances, pranks, and f'ed up found footage that the Upright Citizens Brigade community has to offer. What's more, we're rolling fresh videos out every day with a new original short every week. Our first original, "Shirts and Skins," featuring Matt Besser, Matt Walsh, Sean Conroy, and Joe Nuñez, will premiere tomorrow, with new originals every Tuesday. Every other day will feature new videos from groups all over the UCB community. Subscribe to the site or bookmark UCBcomedy.com and check in every day!

Please enjoy the comedy stylings of Matt Besser et al., contribute, and generally get with the program.

The Best Thing

2007-11-07T23:49:00.000-08:00

The best thing about working on a non-union show is that you still get to walk the picket lines with your WGA brothers and sisters! If you're curious about the issues around the current strike and would like a nuanced analysis, here you go: the AMPTP is being total dicks. My good pal crazy lady Cheryl Holliday just sent me this handy audiovisual guide to understanding more about how they are being dicks.

Working at Gameavision

2007-10-29T21:44:00.000-07:00

After a year of doing basically nothing, I started back to work today. I'm going to be writing (ahem, I mean "producing" or "consulting") on the G4 show Code Monkeys. It was created by Adam de la Pena, who is a really funny dude, and I'm going to be working once more with the hot-larious Laura Gutin. Good times. For more of those, you can make free with yourself with the old skool computer games at the Gameavision corporate site.

Boing Boing, Bad Fairies, and Timmy the Woodsman

2007-10-29T17:08:00.000-07:00

Browsing my way across the Internets a minute ago I happened on this piece of video shot by Danny Diamond in 2001. It's part of today's episode of Boing Boing TV. It definitely brings back some memories, good ones and sad ones. Please to enjoy:

Publishing New Books Online

2007-10-16T20:35:00.001-07:00

What about making the complete text of new books freely available online? I don't mean as a downloadable e-book, but in a format more like a blog?

Google Book Search, formerly Google Print, has publicly made a big start on the project or archiving everything printed, ever, but the response from publishers and authors has been mixed at best. (Here is an index of opinions for and against, and here is the Wikipedia article on Google Book Search.) Public domain manuscripts are fully readable through Google Book Search, but copyrighted works can be accessed only in snippets: enter a search term, and if there's a match within the scanned book, you're taken to the relevant section. If you try to keep reading, you're soon stopped; if you want to read more from the book, you have to enter a new search term. Needless to say, that search term is unlikely to take you to the very next page.

Google's position is that it is not violating copyrights, and that Google Book Search is a legal (and beneficial) exploitation of the fair use provision. I am no lawyer. It seems to me that there are reasonable arguments on either side of the issue.

But whatever the legal realities, I tend to agree with the Google point that "Google Print’s chief beneficiaries will be authors whose backlist, out of print and lightly marketed new titles will be suggested to countless readers who wouldn’t have found them otherwise." That gently worded quotation refers to writers like me. I am thinking that it would be great if The Royal Nonesuch were freely available online.

This begs the question of why writers and publishers are not leaping ahead of Google to make their new books available online for free browsing, just as they are already available for free browsing in bookstores and libraries. Doing so hardly costs anything; only a freak would actually want to read several hundred pages on a screen (hence the failure of e-books for serious readers); and if someone likes the book, Amazon is just a click away.

I've just sent my publisher a proposal to let me put up the text of my book. I'll post about how it goes!

I Finally Punched That Bitch in the Face

2007-10-09T20:25:00.000-07:00

So yeah, I finally punched Heather in the face.

Not that she didn't have it coming. Except this time she really didn't. She was asleep. In my defense—I know, I know, abusers always try to justify themselves, but I think this one is pretty good, as justifications go—so was I. These damn kids were driving their convertible too fast in my dream neighborhood (I am an old fart in my dreams), and I chased them down on foot. The kid driving didn't want to get out of the car, so what I was doing was this kind of rad move that entailed jumping over the door sill and punching him in the face, all at the same time.

Luckily I'm pretty feeble in sleep combat, so I didn't give her a black eye or anything. Just a little bruise on the cheek. She's still all pissed off, though. She's talking about trading me in for this dude. Bitch!

My Kid Could Paint That

2007-10-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

Amir Bar-Lev's new documentary opens tomorrow. I went to a screening a couple of weeks ago, and it's absolutely fantastic. The opening weekend is everything for a documentary release, so by all means hit it if you can.

Check out the official site.

Postal

2007-08-23T12:20:00.000-07:00

Okay so yesterday Alie emailed me a reminder that we had been invited to see a new movie that our friend Chris Coppola is in. I almost never go to screenings because I am basically a shut-in, but she got me on board and we went over to UCLA, where the screening was being held. I had no idea what the movie was about, didn't know anything about it except that Coppola was in it. We're sitting in our seats waiting for it to start, and I look over the shoulder of the film nerd in front of me, who's holding some kind of program, and realize HOLY SHIT! This movie is directed by Uwe Boll, the dude who beat the shit out of five of his critics in a boxing ring! And it has Vern Troyer in it, in addition to Coppola! Here I thought I was getting fucked into some kind of obligatory show of support for lame art movies kind of thing, and Coppola is in a movie by the single auteur I admire most.

The movie was fantastic. It starts with a 9/11 gag and goes from there, balls to the wall politics, comedy, and gore. There are also lots of hot chicks in it. In one scene one of them eats poo, but apparently that's getting cut out for the theatrical release, which is in October. Anyway: Postal. And fucking Uwe Boll.

Upcoming Events

2007-04-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I'm reading to open an event called BookSmart that benefits 826LA. Fiona Apple is the headliner. If there are any tickets left, you can get them through the 826 site.

And this weekend is the LA Times Festival of Books at UCLA. I've never been, but it looks like a good time. On Sunday I'm signing at the Borders and Book Soup booths, and there's a panel called Stage and Screen sandwiched in the middle there.

Booksmith and Book Passage

2007-04-12T14:04:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Booksmith and Book Passage for the warm welcomes and opportunities to read last week. Anyone in San Francisco or Marin knows that these are wonderful places -- give those indie stores your business! Thanks also to everyone who came out -- old friends and new.

Thank you and reading dates

2007-04-02T11:44:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone who came down to my reading at Book Soup last week! I have two more coming up, in the Bay Area.

April 5 at 7 PM
Booksmith
Sn Francisco, CA

April 6 at 7 PM
Book Passage
Corte Madera, CA

April 25 I'll also be reading as part of a benefit for 826LA. It's called Book Smart and will be held at Largo. A link for tickets will probably go up soon at the 826LA site. Keep your eyes peeled...the bill is presently top secret, but it looks (aside from the part where I read out loud out of a book) to be a pretty amazing show. Plus there's an auction where you can win excellent shit.

Starlee Kine Interview

2007-03-20T18:20:00.000-07:00

I think I met Starlee for the first time when she was working as a producer for This American Life. You may also know her from her work in The Funny Pages of the New York Times Magazine, or if you're in New York, from events she puts on there. She super totally rulz.

TRN: Starlee, what in the darned heck are you up to these days?

STARLEE KINE: I'm working on a book about self-help. It's going to be published by Riverhead Books. I'm going to all these self-help retreats for research. I just went to one in Napa Valley where I spent eight days bashing a plastic bat against a pillow while cursing my parents. It was great, like adult summer camp. I was very popular, which surprised me quite a bit. I thought everyone would treat me with suspicion and scorn. I'm also working on new Funny Pages about you, Glasgow, actually and your refreshingly positive attitude. I was working for awhile on an audio walking tour about heartbreak, which I'm thinking of picking up again. The idea is that you walk ew York while listening to people's stories of their hearts getting squashed there. I know it sounds sad, but I think it could've be quite nice. And I'd love to write a movie or tv show eventually. My boyfriend and I just broke up so I've been watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica lately, to try and not think about it too much. I'm totally sucked in, despite how nerdy I feel admitting this.

TRN: BSG is so the awesomest! I will geek down hard with you about it as soon as you get out here. I didn't know about it til season two was almost over, so I got to watch seasons one and two back-to-back on DVD, like two straight weeks of sitting on my couch and nerding. Heather even got (secretly) into it. Then my friend Larry had a party at his house for the first episode of season three, and we all watched it on his eight-foot digital projector. In sum, you need have no concerns about showing your nerd cards here, my friend. My attitude is more shit than you think, though. I'm like a French clown, smiling on the outside and crying on the inside. But you know what would make me smile on the inside? To know more about the events you put on in NYC. They sound cool. Please tell.

STARLEE KINE: I put on these shows called The Post It Note Reading Series. I do them with my friend Arthur Jones, whose this great illustrator I've known since my days living in Chicago. I moved to Chicago to work for This American Life, and I was a real grouch about it at first. I missed New York so much and thought Chicago didn't compare. I was wrong, of course, in the end. Chicago's a great town and I think allows young artists to flourish in this way that New York doesn't so much anymore. I lived there for five years, about, and then moved back to New York. To commemorate my leaving, I did this going away show that was called "Good Riddance Starlee Kine" since I'd been such a pain for so long. I put it on with my friend Xan, another friend Jorge told a 30 page story about the city's worst blizzard in history, Jon Langford and the amazing Theremin player Eric Mueller played some songs and Arthur did a fifty picture post-it note story about the abominable snowman. That's where the idea for the Post-It Note show first came from.

What it is that every three months or so Arthur and I gather up some writers, usually five in all, to write stories on a specific theme. The first one we did was on the Seasons, then we did a Halloween show, and just a couple weeks ago we did one on the theme of Self-Help (because I'm writing a book on that subject and am prone to procrastinating, and so Arthur, being the good friend he is, tried to get me kick-started on it by coming up with the self-help theme.) We write the stories and then give them to Arthur, usually much later than we're supposed to, and then he illustrates them all on Post-It Notes! He draws about 300 pictures in all. Then we screen the Post-it Notes behind each reader as they read. It actually works really well, the combination of the two. Readings, even great ones, can make you a little tired after awhile and so it helps to have something to watch while you're listening. And Arthur's drawings are just great. Each one is a lovely, little work of art. We've posted a bunch of the stories on a website Arthur made: postitnotesstories.com.

So that's the main event I do here in New York. I do readings and fake lectures occasionally too, although much less so now that the Little Grey Books has gone on hiatus. And I also teach radio classes sometimes at 826 NYC, which is the greatest institution in town maybe. Well, maybe that's going a bit far, but I really like it there.

TRN: Ooh, those Post-It Note Reading Series events sound really fun, both to attend and put on. There's something wonderful that happens when somebody illustrates something you wrote. I remember that with storyboard artists, just being like "Oh! This is a real thing here!"
when you see pictures of stuff that was just words.

The 826 here in LA is wicked cool, too. I don't get over there as much as I'd like, even though it's right around the corner. I like the kids, but I think my favorite part is all the hopeful young adults volunteering there. They have good attitudes and remind me not to be such a grouch. Will you send me a link or a scan of that Funny Pages article? I like including something my interviewees did to close the interview (check out Karey Dornetto's rad story below). Thank you Starlee and I hope we actually get to see each other again soon!

Starlee's recent story from the New York Times Magazine. Check out the cool proof marks! She is so legit.

Karey Dornetto Interview

2007-03-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

Do you know Karey Dornetto? I know Karey Dornetto! And if you don't you will in a minute. Ready? Okay go!

TRN: Karey Dornetto, you are hilarious and you have a new website at www.kareydornetto.com. Let's trade links! I know you only as a writer, not as a standup. When and where can I see you strut your hot shit on stage?

KAREY DORNETTO: Hey! I will totally trade links as soon as I figure out how to get a links section going. I am new to this shit, although I do know how to download things illegally. But I don't because I am not a thief. Okay I am. I will put your site up in my News section until I learn how. Okay. First question. Where do I slut it up? I do random shows here and there. The last show I did was at Westside Ecclectic in Santa Monica -- I didn't bite it too hard. I did a show at the Ramada Inn recently and bombed big time. How am I selling myself? I have a show coming up at Lucky Strike at 10pm on March 13th -- that's the bowling alley in Hollywood -- yep a bowling alley. I also will be doing a show at Akbar (it's a gay show...shhhhh!) soon. I also perform funny sets for my dog Mabel on a daily basis.

TRN: Cock and balls! I will be out of town for your show at the Lucky Strike! But keep me and my readers posted about your Akbar show (because tons of us are gay...shhh!). I wish I had been there to see you bomb at the Ramada. That rules. I would never have the fallopians to do standup. How did you get into it?

KAREY DORNETTO: Bombing is funny after you are off stage but really sucky when your are actually bombing. You would have loved to see the Ramada bomb, it was really really awesome. I bailed on half my jokes. Anyway. In college I had a notebook with jokes but never had the balls to try it on stage plus I was too busy getting laid, you understand. Instead I attempted to be an actor. I auditioned for local plays in South Carolina and North Carolina (where I was living) but never got in a damn thing until I saw something for a sketch group in Charlotte. Long ass story short, I became a member of this sketch group called The Perch. After doing that for awhile I decided to try standup. I took class at the Comedy Zone in Charlotte, the only way I knew how to get on stage and after the month long class we got 10 mins of stage time. Before my first show I got totally wasted. I a clip of it on my site (plug, plug) -- it is pretty embarassing. My act now is nothing like the first time I went up. I don't fall around on stage anymore or attempt to sing -- maybe I should. After living in Char, I moved to NYC and went up at all the open mics and bars, and eventually ran my own show (The Rape & Pillage Show) at this bar in Chinatown (Bar 169). Was that answer way too fucking long? I'm not sure. Do you edit these? You can cut out the beginning, middle and end...and this sentence.

TRN: No way, that answer kicked ass! Nice work! So you were doing standup before you started writing on shows. How'd you get into TV work?

KAREY DORNETTO: Well it goes a little something like this... I wrote this personal essay called Fat Basketball Diaries for an online web mag called Girlcomic.net and people really liked it. People being my friends -- comics and non-comics. At the time I was still in NY working at Bank of America Securities trying really hard to get fired to no avail and doing standup. I really really wanted to stop working at the bank and so I was like "Maybe I could write for TV and be a comedy writer." Luckily I knew someone who got me a meeting with writing agent in LA. He was nice enough to meet up with me. When I met with him I told him I was interested in a career in comedy writing and asked for his advice. He told me I needed spec scripts and all that jazz. He handed me some scripts and tossed me on the street but before I left he asked me if I had anything that he could read of mine. When I got back to NY I emailed him practically everything I had, including Fat Basketball Diaries. He dug my shit especially the Fat BBall story and he told me that South Park was looking for writers and he was going to send them my stuff but he gave me no promises. They dug it and I got an interview. I was going to fly back to LA in two weeks. That very same day I found out I was going to meet with the South Park people I got laid off from my 5 year trading floor banking job -- hello severance package. Also that very same day I broke up with my girlfriend (well not exactly but like two days later -- it was a crazy time in my life y'all -- no lyin') I booked a round trip ticket to LA for my interview with South Park and I ended up getting the job and I never took that return flight -- I NEVER WENT BACK TO NEW YORK EVER!! No I did but that's how it all got started. I hope you could follow that because I'm hungover and fuzzy.

TRN: That rules! Can we reprint your Fat Basktball Diaries story here? If so please email it. We are all about the OG shit.

KAREY DORNETTO: Thanks man! I would love for you to reprint it. I read you directed a movie (Undead or Alive: A Zombedy - I was on Matt Besser's website) and wrote it. pretty sweet -- I need to interview you. And I just read about it on your website too -- I'm no dummy. So are you doing strictly movies and books and such? How was Texas btw? Your movie was at SXSW right?

TRN: Yeah, the movie was at SXSW. I think it went pretty well, full theaters and some laughing, which is what I was hoping for. I used to live in Austin, and the visit back really made me miss the place. LA is pretty bullshit by comparison. For work I'm doing whatever they'll let me do...TV, movies, books, and turning a trick when I can. But this is about you! So I'm going to close this interview out with Fat Basketball Diaries! Thanks Karey! You are the shit!

Fat Basketball Diaries by Karey Dornetto

An article all about me? I don’t know if I can just write about myself, (I prefer to write about funnel cakes.) Well…maybe I can try to write about myself. Okay, here goes. It all started when I was a junior in High School. The year was almost over and summer was approaching. You see, I had played basketball since sixth grade and I was good. So good that in eighth grade I said that my goal was to be on the 1996 Women’s Olympic Basketball Team. Well, that didn’t happen – I still cry about it every night. I was athletic. I was fit. I wasn’t thin - I was 5 foot 4 and weighed about 140lbs (of solid muscle. Not really, but that’s what I’ll claim.) You could say that I was a big boned gal. I liked to eat Chee-tos, what can you do? So anyway, this didn’t really affect my game too much; although my jerk face coach called me a fat ass now and then. (A nice thing to say to a sixteen-year-old girl, huh?) I would reply with such cutting bon mots as ‘f-ck off’ and I wondered why he wouldn’t start me. Yes, he would not start me despite the fact that I was clearly the most talented player in the school. (That’s a whole other story.) Redneck bastard! Anyway, the year ended and that was that!

School went fine and I had a pretty good basketball season. The love life, (if you can call it that in high school,) was non-existent, which was fine because I went to a catholic high school and I was going to wait until I was married to have sex. Plus, I had plenty of time to be a drunken whore in college so my motto was, “IT’S ALL GOOD.” So, now to the point of my story: summer was here and so was my sister Kelly, back from her second year in college. My sister, (unlike me,) wasn’t ever chubbs. She was 5’8 and she got all the chicks…I mean…guys. She comes back from her sophomore year wearing big sorority letters across her chest and an additional 25 pounds across her ass. She was a big girl and at this point in our relationship we didn’t get along. We had shared a room all our lives and now we were doing it again and were not happy about it. So one morning I’m sitting at the kitchen table eating a cheese filled hot dog or something nutritious minding my own biz like all younger sisters do. You know, causing no trouble what so ever. Next thing you know, my sister and I get in an argument about something and we are yelling. I call her “a fucking fat ass FAT FAT ASS” and she grabs a fork and jams in into my thigh. I think she thought it was a chicken leg (she was hungry.) So then in a fit of rage I grab the phone and wing it at her head and nail her “a perfect shot - 3 points and the crowd goes crazy AHHHHH.” She was crying and I felt really bad but she did stab me and I did have a fork in my leg so we made up in front of our parents because my sister told on me - how unusual.

So that summer my family joined a gym. So Kelly started going thank goodness and I started going with her. The gym was called F.A.T., which stood for Fitness Attitude Training…how motivational. I thought it was appropriate because lots of fat asses went there. I started going everyday and became totally obsessed. Because once you start losing a few and it becomes noticeable and people start saying things to you like “wow you look really great. Have you lost weight?” It can be good and bad because you start thinking ‘well, I must have looked like shit before’ - but it does feel good to get noticed and for me it was great because I never had this before. By the time the summer was over I had lost 25 pounds and my sister got back to normal- thanks to me. If I wouldn’t have called her fat ass who knows where she would be today…I say on Rikki Lake.

Anyway, so I go back to school and it’s my senior year. It was unbelievable how I was treated now that I was thin. Teachers didn’t recognize me they thought I was a new student and when they found out who I was they couldn’t believe it. I said “It’s me, Karey, remember?” and I’d show them the nun tattoo on my bicep that they all loved and then they remembered. Guys were noticing me and I was like, “Now what do I do? Get naked?” I loved the attention so now I wasn’t just the witty chubby girl in the back of the classroom getting in trouble with the boys. I was a hot piece of ass...smack smack. But it wasn’t all pretty because I was crazy obsessed. I didn’t eat and if I did I would hurl and I was going to the gym after basketball practice and working out for two hours. It was a scene but no one had a clue as long as I looked perfect on the surface than I was perfect.

But I got a grip. I had a boyfriend for a little while and my basketball season didn’t go as great as I planned. My coach still thought I was a smart ass and would take me out whenever I missed a shot, (he wouldn’t do that to anyone else so I guess my weight loss didn’t seem to make him like me any more.) But all in all it was a good year for me and I got accepted into the University of South Carolina and I was ready to get the fuck out of my hometown. So I went to college and it was hard to stay thin and drink a twelve pack of bud light cans. So I would go out drinking on an empty stomach which is a great way to make your friends love you, (because everyone loves taking care of a stumbling wasted jackass.) I had issues but look at me now I’m so together. Well not 100%, but I always think about how losing the weight changed my life and it did. It is really great to be thin and confident, but sometimes I wish I would have kept the 25 pounds.

That was radical! Now go to www.kareydornetto.com. After that, go to Akbar on April 10 at 8 PM to see Karey rock the house!

New York Times

2007-03-14T17:35:00.000-07:00

I feel pretty good about this one, too. Thank you New York Times.

LA Times

2007-03-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

is kind to us as well. Thank you LA Times.

In other news, this weekend has been the festival premiere of UNDEAD OR ALIVE at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Saturday night was our first showing, and there's another tonight at midnight. If you're here in Austin come on down to the downtown Alamo Draft House theater.

LA Weekly

2007-03-06T21:42:00.000-08:00

...is kind to us. Thank you LA Weekly.

Seanbaby Interview

2007-03-06T06:50:00.000-08:00

Sean Reiley a.k.a. Seanbaby is a dude I met writing on a show called The Adventures of Chico and Guapo for MTV2. He is a comedy writer and Internet superstar in addition to being master of multiple weapon and fighting systems. As a level nine ninja, he has to sign a lot of NDAs. We are now embarking on a project so top-secret we won't even discuss it in this interview. His girlfriend is seriously smokin hot. I'm hoping he will include a picture of her in a superhero outfit with his first response.

TRN: Sean, you're here in town for a special type of nerd Olympics. Please explain the competition to my readers and let them know what kind of damage you plan to inflict upon the competition.

SEANBABY: I came to this hell hole of LA for VH1's World Series of Pop Culture, but judging from the NDA they made everyone sign, I'm probably under arrest for even telling you that much. Much less for saying that the answers were Gordon Shumway, Gymkata, Charles Grodin, and Yeast. I'm going to stay in town and name all the American Gladiators, but that's not for any trivia show. I'm just trying to beat my personal best of not naming all the American Gladiators.

TRN: Please describe your favorite fighting style.

SEANBABY: Muay Thai! I personally like grabbing someone by the back of the head and ramming my knee into their face at incredible speed. My favorite lovemaking style is a very slight variation on this. Both of them end with me crying and apologizing. I also like any fighting style that makes people shout things. Like "CHO!" or "waooooWATAAHHH!" or "Karate Attack!" And like before, that goes for boning too.

TRN: I hope someday to meet you on the mat or in a public steam room. Speaking of which, if Mr. T and Hulk Hogan, each at the peak of his fitness, were to meet in unlimited battle, which would emerge the victor? Take your time with this one, as simply reading the question may have caused damage to your central processing unit.

SEANBABY: Mr. T has the speed and the striking advantage, but if you're beating on Hulk Hogan, eventually the part of his physiology that responds to damage stops working and all your punches do is making him stronger. However, while Hulk Hogan says his prayers, Mr. T actually knows God personally, who comically gave Mr. T actual T-cell cancer, and then cured him. I imagine by the time they were actually done fighting, most of what we call civilization would be destroyed. Or all nations would have banded together to create monsters capable of defeating them. So I guess what I'm saying is that the fight would be evenish, then go unfinished due to their team-up against the combined achievements of the world's monster scientists.

TRN: I heard you just got an awesome new job doing some awesome shit for some awesome game. What the fuck are you doing?

SEANBABY: I'm not very good at knowing what's legal, and my seventh grade gay husbands will vouch for that, but I got the idea from reading the NDAs I signed that I can be killed in the face if I ever, for any reason, describe my job to anyone. But I can probably say that it's totally sweet and will change the way you and your Sony Playstation products will punch and kick together.

TRN: Mr. Reiley, we thank you for your time and for your inspiration.

More Sean Reiley can be found at www.seanbaby.com.

Laura Gutin Interview

2007-03-05T15:16:00.000-08:00

Laura Gutin is a TV writer and also the first person to read my book, back when it was just a manuscript. She now knows way too much about me. Let's find out some shit about her aside from what we already know, which is that she is hilarious.

TRN: Laura Gutin, you are now writing on a hot TV show about sexy surfer girls. This is a subject my readers enjoy. Please tell us about the show.

LAURA GUTIN: Indeed, I'm writing on a show about sexy surfer girls in Hawaiil, sexy EMPOWERED girls. It's a teen drama aimed at girls and young women, so we have to be really conscious of the messages we're sending to the audience. It's a change for me, coming from the sitcom world where you can just have characters go on dates and sleep together. On a show like this, dating and sex are a HUGE deal -- if someone has sex, you're going to be talking about feelings and what it all meant for a long, long time. None of our girls would ever have a one night stand -- unless something really bad happened to her as a result, and she learned a vaulable life lesson. It's hard for me to wrap my head around that one, since as you know, back in the day I had a ton of one night stands, and I never learned a thing.

TRN: I would like to go on your show and teach some valuable life lessons. Please notify the producers and talent of my availability for same, and in your next reply say the name of the show to that my readers can effect a Nielsen tsunami. Your mother is a famous historian. We would like to know how you decided on this freaky ass life of writing for the television instead of something respectable. Was this your destiny?

LAURA GUTIN: The show is called Beyond the Break and I know a lot of your readers are teenage girls, so thanks for the publicity. Let the Nielsen tsunami begin!

I was recently unemployed for quite some time, so I signed up with a temp agency to make a little money doing receptionist work. I reported for my first day at this insurance company and they fired me after an hour because I was fucking everything up. So, to answer your question about how I got into this TV writing business -- I'm not really qualified to do anything else.

I've been writing since I was a kid, from my tortured pre-teen journals to what I thought were pretty clever song parodies that I wrote for my singing group in college. My father has this sort of Great Depression mentality about money, and he was convinced that my English major would lead me to financial ruin. So near the end of college, I was trying to figure out how I could write and actually make a living someday, and TV writing seemed like a good place to start.

Everyone told me I should move to LA and find work as a production assistant -- it was a way to get into TV and move up. So I packed up the old Corolla and drove out here, and I got a job a few weeks later as the stage PA on the final season of "NewsRadio." I was so naive, I didn't realize how lucky I was to have my first job on a big sitcom. It was a pretty amazing time. I was making about three hundred dollars a week, but I got my first look at how TV is made. That's when I started writing spec scripts.

TRN: I am thinking about signing up with a temp agency right about now, but with half your charm and a quarter your wit, I might get punched in the face before I could even ask what I was supposed to do. I'm going out for staffing this year, so you have to hire me if you're running Beyond the Break in April. Do you have any advice for a writer like me who's hoping to get a break in Hollywood?

LAURA GUTIN: The temp agency thing is soul-crushing -- you must avoid it at all costs. They make you take these tests on a computer, doing tasks in Word and Excel. You start out cocky, and then realize you can't do most of the stuff they're asking, then you end up sweating profusely in your good "interview sweater."

As for how to get a break in Hollywood, I don't know how qualified I am to answer that. I know the way I did it - start at the bottom as a PA, do the work no one else wants to do, make friends with the writers, suck it up when someone tells you that their pizza came with onions when they specifically said no onions. Those first jobs can be pretty tough, so you just need to keep writing. When I got fired from the temp job after an hour, I just went home and wrote. I may be shitty at transferring calls, but I can write a pretty good script.

Oh, and my main advice would be -- don't be a douchebag. Be nice to people, and they'll help you out, and then someday you'll help people out, too. I'm still working my way up, but when I make it to the top, I'm gonna help the shit out of some people.

TRN: I will hope to be one of them. Thank you for your time, Ms. Gutin, and may we soon meet again either in a writers' room or at a restaurant where nobody fucks up anybody's orders.

Joost

2007-03-05T09:57:00.000-08:00

As a nerd interested in Internet video, specifically in when IP delivered video will be good enough to mount a legitimate challenge to traditional television, I naturally signed up to be a beta tester on the new Joost network. The password came a couple of days ago, and let me just say: holy shit. At full screen on a MacBook it pretty much looks like television.

Back in the 90s I tried, with some friends, to create a comedy channel on the Web. We did okay with it for three years, better than most of the venture-financed content catastrophes in that we started from nothing (we were self-financed) and for a while actually made more money than we spent. I want to try it again someday, and things like Joost get me really excited and hopeful that some of the ideas that didn't quite work back then will work now.

If you're interested in knowing more about Joost, Wikipedia already has a short article on the company.

Dread Central and WSJ

2007-03-03T13:27:00.000-08:00

Yours truly is interviewed by Johnny Butane of Dread Central, and this weekend the Wall Street Journal, while specifically advising against participation in my harebrained schemes, had nice things to say about The Royal Nonesuch. The review came with an apposite editorial illustration, above.

This Is What It's All About

2007-02-28T15:26:00.000-08:00

Two reviews for TRN came in today. My favorite is pictured above. Boldtype, a very cool monthly review, ran one almost as nice albeit more conventional. I will be very excited if people actually buy my book.

Making Mom Proud

2007-02-27T15:25:00.000-08:00

Here It Comes

2007-02-26T12:32:00.000-08:00

I just received from the charming Elizabeth Johnson at Grove/Atlantic a starter list of publications planning to review The Royal Nonesuch.

Wall Street Journal
Penthouse
Indy Men's Magazine
Deal Maker Magazine
The San Francisco Chronicle
TimeOut Chicago
LA Weekly
Time Out New York
New York Post

I hope they like the book, because then I will be an okay person! Plus maybe more people will buy it. Hot times.

We are so GQ

2007-02-24T17:42:00.000-08:00

TRN got a little press in the magazine most favored by well-groomed men. If you look real hard at page 192 ("The Essentials") of the March / Christian Bale is Hot issue, you will learn that in the month of March, while you will be talking about Kurt Anderson, you should be talking about my book. You will also see an inset of the flattering portrait of me that graces its cover. You're being alerted here because if you're my friend, you are probably a dirtbag who does not have GQ delivered to his home. In the same issue you will learn that it is okay to wear jeans to a dressy event -- as long as they're the right kind of jeans. Get with it, dirtbag!

In Memoriam

2007-02-22T20:45:00.000-08:00

Today I received the sad news that Timmy the Woodsman is no more. For the last week I'd been working on this piece of media with Danny Diamond, and it features Timmy in some characteristic moments. It was supposed to be a teaser kind of thing for my book, and I guess it still is that, but I offer it now in memory of Timmy. Ladies and gentlemen: Timmy the Woodsman.

Online Entertainment

2007-02-20T19:28:00.000-08:00

Today I had an interesting meeting with the online division of the agency that reps me, getting a picture of the ol' online entertainment space as it pertains to AS IT PERTAINS TO PUPPETS, MOTHERFUCKER! I really need to develop some new interests.

Spin Daily

2007-02-19T04:40:00.000-08:00

I already put this over in the sidebar, but by way of explanation, Spin Daily is the vlog hosted by my friend Katherine. Watching it makes me happy. She and her cousin Kendall put out one a weekday, which is way more work than you'd think, unless you think about it, in which case you realize it's a ton of work. Word on the street is that there's a hot Coco de Mer episode coming soon.

I've been thinking about it (vlogging, people, vlogging, in case you hit that last link) a lot lately, since a daily review is something I might want to do with my someday-to-come puppets. With 10 hours of movies a week to get to, watch, write reviews for, tape, edit, and post, it would be a lot like...oh shit, a real job!

Going Pro

2007-02-18T12:38:00.000-08:00

A much as I love the lame puppets I make, I'm finally taking the big step of getting some custom Movie Monsters made professionally by the greatest creature effects dudes ever, the Chiodo Brothers. I can't wait to put my hands up the asses of their creations.

Mattt Potter Interview

2007-02-16T00:49:00.000-08:00

The following interview with Mattt Potter (above, left) has been expurgated of its more offensive and defamatory sections. We here at The Royal Nonesuch leave it, in light of how disturbing the parts that remain are, to the reader's imagination how utterly horrifying the expurgated sections must have been. Mattt is a writer and filmmaker who also does some kind of crap for View Askew. He sort of explains it at the end.

TRN: Mattt, I've been doing interviews with artistes on my blog, and I'd love to interview you...check it out and let me know if I can do one with you! Email is how I've been doing most of them, makes it easy for the links and shit. Here's where they're at: www.theroyalnonesuch.com. [Don't click. You're already there.]

MATT POTTER: You technology wizard! An interview via e-mail! You are scaring the villagers with your demon black magic! What are you kids going to think of next?! In my day when we did interviews we sewed the interviewer and the interviewee up as one in a potato sack along with two hens and a field rodent of the interviewee's choosing. Together face to face we got to know each other REALLY well and good for a month. We ate, drank, slept, smelled each others guy breath and we tinkled and shat in that bag like MEN together. By the end of those long 30 days we were worse for wear but damn it, it was an interview that made Bob Woodward's work look like a crap from a 3rd grade retarded girl. So I guess what I am saying is....

Can I answer all your questions via wacky video response using YouTube? I got to some how one up you with this new e-mail method you are developing!

TRN: No, you fucking nerd, you can't answer all my questions via wacky video response using YouTube. Now, what are you doing to occupy your days? Clearly not enough, but my clamoring readers want to know anyway. Please include in your response your bio as you would like it to appear in cyberspace.

[Time passes.]

MATT POTTER: Sorry dude, the fams and I all have been suffering from stomach bug the last few days. I'll get this to you over the weekend.

TRN: Hang in there.

[Way more time passes.]

MATTT POTTER: Hey Hey Glasgow Phillips you "dirty cunt" and I say that of course in the most affectionate way possible. So let's see here, you are writing some book about your days prior to the day you sat down and started writing it right? Or you already wrote it right? Wow-wee, that is exciting as I know for a fact that I starred in a lot of those days prior. So that means you got enough material in that brain of yours to write a whole book of OUR wacky adventures. Fuck all those other folks. I mean like the time you were over at my house when my parents were out of town and you suggested we create a woman via my computer? And my older brother Chet kept fucking with us? I remember that along the way we encountered many hilarious obstacles which gave the story an overall sense of silliness! I just can't believe neither of us wound up bagging that computer chick! She was so hot!

Speaking of hot, I'm actually writing a book of my own right now called The Oiled Fun Touch. It's a sensual massage book that I did with Ricardo Montalban. It's pretty much full color spreads of me and Ricardo lubing each other up with exotic Spanish oils. We talk a lot about the olden days as well in the book. Did you know that Hervé Villechaize has a really small cock? You'd think he'd have a big one right? The ol' "He may be small, but he's big in the pants..." routine. NOT THE CASE! Anyways I thought that was an interesting fact-toid. Ricardo and I go way back as he is my uncle's best friend's uncle. True story!

What else? What else? I could go on and on really, but all these sentences and words are making me sleepy. How about a video that explains the rest!? That sounds kind of fun I think?

Let's watch!

Media Alert! Media Alert!

2007-02-15T12:18:00.000-08:00

Your humble servant has been interviewed with regard to the zombie Western that's going to SXSW in March: eFilmCritic.com. This is the big time.

Hunter Cycles

2007-02-15T10:27:00.000-08:00

I spent the weekend with my friends Rick and Mary-Anne in Santa Cruz. Rick is a custom bike builder. Check out this baddo cruiser he made. They're getting ready for the handmade bike show up in San Jose in early March, and I was feebly helping them get a new website prepared. I can't remember jack about HTML (not that I knew much to begin with) so ended up just helping with the content and organization. But I still got a fresh Hunter Cycles hat and a wool jersey sized for fatties. Score!

Vera Duffy Interview

2007-02-12T17:47:00.000-08:00

Vera Duffy is a mistress of both combat and visual arts. She performs regularly as a wrestler with Lucha VaVOOM, the Los Angeles burlesque and lucha libre mashup spectacular, and she also designs their stylish posters and Internet presence. Bow down before her majesty!

TRN: Vera, your personal style is so elegant and demure that it came as a big surprise to me when I found out that you are a combat artist. Can you tell me how you first got involved with wrestling?

VERA DUFFY: You may now rise... Well, it all started elegantly and demurely enough. My twin sister Barbara and I had joined the Velvet Hammer burlesque troupe as French maids who picked up stripped-off costumes between acts. We were enamored with all aspects of neo-burlesque except actually de-robing, so we created that little loophole to get involved. When Lucha VaVOOM came along, the producers asked if we wanted to add a cat fight with some simple lucha libre moves. We kept up the training with a number of masters, and here we are, four and 1/2 ass-kicking years later!

TRN: What are some of your favorite moves for subduing opponents?

VERA DUFFY: My favorite moves involve flying through the air and landing on an opponent's shoulders (Huracanrana), cross-body (Plancha), and so on, resulting in a takedown. I often end a match with a Plancha Suicida, which is jumping off the top tier of the turnbuckle onto an opponent I've thrown into the audience.

TRN: Your Plancha Suicida is devastating. And as I mentioned, you also do lots (all?) of the graphics for Lucha VaVOOM. Can you tell me about some of your inspirations in either lucha or your artistic work?

VERA DUFFY: The Lucha VaVOOM posters were largely inspired by vintage Mexican lobby cards, found in books or on eBay. Sometimes I'd use an actual element - a nicely rendered Blue Demon or a sexy go-go dancer - or I'd take a cue from the layout or color scheme to keep my work authentic-looking. It was important to make the posters appear old by adding faux-torn edges, a layer of staining or some fakey crease marks. I'm very much into recreating vintage-style artwork for graphic and web design, especially if I can add a modern twist. For example, the opening page of DanaGould.com was inspired by circus side-show banners, but also has animated elements, rollovers and so on. These days, I'm working full time in animation (my sister and I co-wrote a short called Twincesses that is currently being animated - yay!), so I've cut my freelance design workload way down. Gotta have some free time for the devastating moves.

TRN: That's so cool! When and where can we hope to see some hot Twincesses action?

VERA DUFFY: Most of the work - design, voices, storyboard, and a third of the animation - has been completed, so we're hoping for a March/April due date. You can read all about it in our production blog! The episode follows the adorably quirky adventures of identical twin princesses Priddy and Ugalee. It's all part of the original shorts program for Six Point Harness, the animation studio my twin and I both work at, so we have a relationship with everyone who touches it, which is fantastic. Wow - being in the bossy position really puts to the test everything I've learned in this industry, from my P.A. days on up.

I wrote for Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon in my early twenties; doing Twincesses was a completely different experience. Mostly, because I've spent much of the intervening years performing. Not just wrestling (which has a ton of humor and story telling) but little cabaret acts and short films and live comedy sketches. Writing for a room, it didn't always matter if the structure or jokes were brilliant. That doesn't fly when you're the only one on stage, sweating to weak applause. I think that's why so many stand up comedians make great writers - they know how to write for themselves.

Having written both animation for other people and your very own super-great novel of which I've heard excerpts read by you, Glasgow Phillips, wouldn't you agree there's a bit of a difference?

TRN: Ms. Duffy, I would absolutely agree, and I want to thank you for sharing what you've been up to in this venue.

VERA DUFFY: Thank you, Glasgow, this was a treat!

VidLit

2007-02-10T01:17:00.000-08:00

So a ways back my literary editor Jamison asked me if any of the media discussed in The Royal Nonesuch was still around (yes, scattered), and we talked about making a little EPK compilation kind of thing for generating interest in the book. The idea turned into more like a movie trailer, something similar to what you can see at VidLit. Check out the site, lovers of convergent media, and thanks to Todd Krieger for the referral.

The upshot is that Danny Diamond is cutting the TRN VidLit right now, and he's going to talk Tony Lee into doing some light animation to pimp it out. Sweet! It should be going up here in a week or so. Liz at VidLit has been very generous in sharing tips on how to distribute the media once it's finished, and I hope she'll host it there, too.

Arthur Bradford Interview

2007-02-08T07:31:00.000-08:00

Arthur Bradford and friend

Arthur Bradford is the author of Dogwalker, a fine book of stories published by Alfred A. Knopf, and the director of How's Your News?, the most awesome piece of citizen journalism since totally fucking ever. He wrote Dogwalker all by himself but made How's Your News? in partnership with Susan Harrington, Ron Simonsen, Sean Costello, Bobby Bird, and Larry Perry, five reporters with mental and physical disabilities. If you haven't seen it, do so now.

TRN: Arthur Bradford, you are world famous as both a writer and filmmaker. Plus you have a very attractive hot lawyer wife and an adorable baby who's half dog and half human. We'll just take it for granted that you're on top of the world and ask: What's next for Arthur Bradford?

ARTHUR BRADFORD: Oh Glasgow, how can I reply to this overly generous portrayal of my life thus far? It is true that I have a hot wife though. Very hot. And my new child is hot too, in a different way, of course. I am currently trying my best to finish a new book and not looking forward to the questions which will greet it, something along the lines of, "Your last book came out in 2001, what the hell have you been doing since then?" ...Well, I've been moving about the USA and avoiding full time employment, that's what. And I work every summer at a camp for people with disabilities, where we have made a few films which we call How's Your News? We made a recently made a pilot for a big cable TV network, but, as you Glasgow know well, this only leads to a long waiting process...So, what is next? This fall we're moving to Portland, Oregon, where we bought a nice wooden house, and we're going to raise the dog-child amongst the hippies and fresh air there. I'm now the co-director of Camp Jabberwocky, the summer camp where the How's Your News? gang all met, so I'll be sticking around there every summer too. So the answer is: more of the same basically, mentally retarded people, writing, and videotape...what more could a guy ask for? You know what I'm looking forward too? The fucking release of your book! That will explain what people like you and me have been up to for that past ten years! Sort of.

TRN: Okay, now I'm more jealous than usual of the Arthur Bradford life. I could deal with it when you were in New York, a place that can basically eat my ass, but if you're going to Portland I'm pissed off. I want to go to Portland and live in a wooden house. I won't ask you anything about the book you're working on because I hate it when people do that. So give me an update on some of your How's Your News? team. How is Ronnie doing these days? I know he's been having some tough times. And Sue and Sean and Bobby and Larry and Jeremy?

ARTHUR BRADFORD: I have some good updates on the HYN gang, but I'll have to get to them tomorrow eve as I have jury duty early in the morning. I hope I get on a murder case, or something to do with drugs.

TRN: Can't wait!

ARTHUR BRADFORD: Okay, I'm back! Man, jury duty is wild. At least in Brooklyn it is. I was waiting around for three days straight and then got booted off some malpractice case. Ninety percent of the people there bring absolutely nothing to read. It's pretty weird because all you do is sit on benches and move from room to room and you'd think most people would bring a book or at least a newspaper, but the vast majority of us are content to stare at the wall. Anyway...Here's an update on the How's Your News? team:

Bobby Bird, Larry Perry, and Sean Costello

They are all, for the most part doing very well. I get phone calls from Sue, Ron and Jeremy (new team member) pretty much daily. They want to know the latest HYN news, which usually isn't much. Like I said before, we're waiting to see if our pilot gets picked up.

Ronnie has had quite a year. He found out he had leukemia about a year ago which really freaked him out, but was also kind of exciting for him since he is so fascinated by doctors. He's watched so many medical dramas, and suddenly he was at the center of one himself. The amazing thing was how much support he received from all over the world, literally. Friends and fans started writing to him, and his hospital room was plastered with hundreds and hundreds of cards. He went through chemotherapy, but that didn't work, so they set out to find a bone marrow donor and found one, which was lucky. Even luckier was that the marrow transfer seems to have worked, and now the leukemia is officially in remission. He's still very weak, but he's getting better. The most heartwarming thing of all about this is that when Chad Everett (TV star from the 1970s whom Ron is very obsessed with) heard about Ron's illness, he began calling Ron every couple of days. They would pray together and talk about Hollywood. He's called Ron over 50 times now. Ron keeps count. So, it's a nice story, for now anyway. He's still got a ways to go, but we sure hope to have him back on the team.

Bobby and Jeremy

Sue got in trouble recently for faking laryngitis in order to get out of work. She pretended to have no voice for eight weeks until someone caught her singing in the shower. She got in big trouble for that. Jeremy is bouncing off the walls waiting to hear about our TV pilot. He calls me every day. He doesn't like being made to wait. I should give him the number of the TV execs in charge...Bobby, Sean, and Larry are doing great, getting older like us all. Larry's almost 65! They're all pretty youthful though.

TRN: Those are fantastic updates! I'm so happy to hear that Ronnie's doing well. Sue faking laryngitis rules, I can't believe Larry is almost 65, and I seriously have no idea why you aren't giving Jeremy the phone numbers he needs. You have given an excellent interview, Mr. Bradford. Is there anything you'd like to add in terms of advice for young people pursuing ambitions in the arts?

ARTHUR BRADFORD: Advice for young people pursuing ambitions in the arts? Give it up! No, I'm kidding. Don't give up! Never! Actually, my advice is to really go for it while you're young. Who gives a shit what you do when you're 23? It doesn't matter. So take advantage of those loose years and do something risky. And ditch your TV and video games, seriously. You will have plenty of time to sit in front of a screen when you get older. Create something now, or at least go gather some interesting experiences. That's my advice from an obscure writer/filmmaker. Take it or leave it, what do I care!

TRN: Well said, sir. We thank you for your time.

Ron keeps it real

These Are New Puppets

2007-02-07T17:06:00.000-08:00

Hand sewn in Venice, California with character design help from Ryan Quincy. I'm not totally happy with my workmanship, but they're fun for making my hands argue with each other.

Patton Oswalt Interview

2007-02-01T14:19:00.000-08:00

Patton Oswalt is the workingest bee in the funhive. He's also notorious for donating his time to charity causes. Let's get to the bottom of these matters.

TRN: Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed for cyberspace! This is your first question. Every time I turn around, I see you're doing some damned benefit. What is it with you and all the benefits? Are you on some list where do-gooders just think they can put a harpoon in you every time they want some money for kids? Jesus.

PATTON OSWALT: “Jesus” is right. Do they think I’m made of concern for other people?

I’ve always been involved in philanthropies, in high school and all through college. I joined a frat for the express purpose of being able to put on huge, benefit comedy shows for a Children’s Heart Fund in the area at the time. I guess, now that I have some fame, and know some famous friends, I’m glad I can help raise more awareness and money.

And to balance out the universe, for every benefit I do, I commit three atrocities.

TRN: Nice anticipation of the next question, but everybody knows you joined a fraternity for the beer and spankings. Moving on. Buried in that reply is that you knew comedy was what you wanted to do from a young age, which seems to be a through-line with most of the people I'm interviewing. Did you go pro as soon as you got out of school, or was there an interval in which you weren't sure you were going to make it? Please feel free to tell about your best or suckiest day job, if you had one.

PATTON OSWALT: The “not sure I’m going to make it” interval came later, after I moved to the West Coast and saw the level of talent and commitment that was pursuing stand-up, especially in San Francisco in the early 90’s.

I started stand-up in the summer of ‘88 — that summer between freshman and sophomore year of college, when you’re not sure what you want to do, so you try a bunch of different things and see what sticks. And stand-up...stuck.

TRN: Who were some of the people on the circuit then? Do you still work with some of them?

PATTON OSWALT: Well, Blaine Capatch was the emcee at the first open mike I ever did, and he’s one of my best friends to this day. And Dave Chapelle started around the same time I did — he was 14 and I was 19. But he wisely left the scene early. The Washington, D.C. stand-up ethos, at the time, as pretty lame. Guys in their mid-30s who’d spent the first six or seven years of their careers — their peak creative and exploratory time — focused on nothing but honing a clean six minutes for The Tonight Show. Then Johnny retired, and the whole thing collapsed for them.

TRN: Blaine Capatch is hilarious. I love his emceeing of Lucha VaVoom and am jealous that you are BFFs. Can you tell us any of the projects you're involved in that you're most excited about right now, and to close, do you have any hot advice for the young people who aspire to a career in the comedy arts?

PATTON OSWALT: The two things I’m most excited about now are being the lead voice in Ratatouille, the new Pixar movie. Getting to work with Brad Bird — and I know this is a cliché — but it’s been amazing, and edifying, and now I feel smarter than before I met him. Also, I’m writing a screenplay for Adam McKay’s company that I’m really excited about. We’re having a lot of fun doing it.

This is a form e-mail I send out to young comedians who write to me, asking for advice. I’m sure about 1 in 100 take the advice, but the one that does will do okay:

Yes, this is a form e-mail. Because I get asked this question a lot:

"How do I become a comedian?"

The answer is very simple. It's so simple, that no one can ever accept that it's the ONLY WAY. But rest assured, the lucky few who understand how simple it is, and go and do this simple thing, ALWAYS succeed:

Go onstage a lot. Go onstage as much as you can.

Don't read books on comedy. Don't take comedy classes. Don't ask anyone how you should write material, or what they think of your material. Develop on your own.

Go onstage. A lot. Every night. If there isn't an open mike in your town, start one.

And then go onstage. A lot.

That's it.

I’m sure it's the same with painting, or writing, or anything creative. You have to want to do it. A lot.

TRN: Patton, thank you. And kids, you heard the man. Find a stage and get on it. For more about Patton and to see which benefit he's doing next, direct your browser to www.pattonoswalt.com.

My Kid Could Paint That

2007-01-31T11:24:00.000-08:00

Amir Bar-Lev's movie My Kid Could Paint That, the doc about four-year-old painter Marla Olmstead, was bought by Sony Pictures Classics at Sundance. As we like to say around here: Fuck yes. This means it will be a little while before Amir and I can have a thoughtful tete-a-tete in this venue about a writer or filmmaker's responsibility to nonfiction subjects, but that's something to which all fans of hilarity can look forward.

Actual Book Cover

2007-01-31T01:07:00.000-08:00

Okay so this is the actual cover of The Royal Nonesuch, sans jacket flaps full of descriptive material and lies about how awesome I am. Carson and I were both sort of sad that his cover didn't work out, but he got paid, I had fun, and I really dig this one. The best part is if you really like it you can rip it off the book, lay it flat, and play it like tragicomic Candyland. Click it to enlarge (if you want).

Sam Maccarone Interview

2007-01-29T11:11:00.000-08:00

TRN: Sam Maccarone is a crazy clown and also a very hot dancer. His last gig was directing TV The Movie (reviewed here), a new sketch movie par excellence. He just got back from doing Stern in NYC. Let's get to know this fucker! Sam Maccarone, please tell the children about your first job in entertainment.

SAM MACCARONE: Fuck yeah, let's get to know me! My first official Hollywood job was as an extra in the 1993 classic Michael Keaton hit Sleepless. I drove all the way down from Yosemite (6 hours) because I thought I was bigtime. I had been in Los Angeles about 6 months before and had grabbed one of those little pieces of paper on the side of a telephone pole that said "be in films." After meeting with a woman named Jolla, I was told I had a big future in Hollywood. I was told that Bill Cosby had started his career as an extra. I thought, "Hell, if Cosby did this..." Jolla quickly took 150 dollars from me (an official Hollywood evaluation fee!), then another 300 (for official Hollywood photos) and then took my head shots herself in the back of a shitty Hollywood office. A nice white bed sheet was all she needed to put behind me and I looked SHARP! Six months later an extras casting director saw my shitty picture and booked me for this shitty film. I smoked weed all the way down, combed my hair in the Sunset Denny's, and began my career in the ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel, acting surprised in a suit that I had borrowed from my dad. I remember thinking, "Wow, Michael Keaton must be on cocaine," because he was sucking real bad and looked really tired. He asked for a 10 minute break, and came back on fucking fire. Then, in a big scene at the end I weaseled my way in front of the camera...and ended up tripping Gena Davis. She fell on her ass and I thought I would never work again. That was the first of many "I will never work again" moments in my career.

TRN: We should open a talent management business! Now tell the children how you went from being an extra on Sleepless to making groundbreaking shit like Captain Jackson vs. El Scorpiopopo. Please also tell the children what Captain Jackson is, in case they don't know.

SAM MACCARONE: (Note to you: I was so fucking high I wrote Sleepless, and it's really Speechless.) Before I moved to LA I made about 20 short films in my backyard...Yosemite is a rad set. When I came down here I had a bunch of VHS tapes with shorts on them that started getting passed around town. Someone at MCA/Universal saw one I made called Hoby Chow and got hold of me to direct rap vids. I made a bunch for the label and while I was doing that I made a short film called Disco Masters. It was about this low rent disco dancer named Eddie Spender who could transform into this superhero if he drank beer. He was the disco master. Someone at MTV saw it and greenlit a show for me in 1998. I ramped up the violence, gay jokes, and drug humor, and they fired me in 6 months. That's about the time I met Dian Bachar at a Christmas party. We have the same lawyer, David Krintzman, and he introduced us. I took the fallen Disco Masters, put Dian into it as the main bad guy, changed drinking beer into smoking weed, and changed the hero's name to Captain Jackson. We put out 3 episodes on a site we ran called bongcaster.com and it did really well. We crashed every server we were ever on and I got written up in High Times a bunch. That was rad. Then, in 2000 we went to shoot episode four. It was called Psycho Vampire Midgets and we hired a new actor to play Dr. Screwloose (replacing comedian Barry Sobel). The actor's name was Dennis Fimple and he was a veteran TV and film actor. He was cool to work with but he died halfway through filming so it never got finished. I might finish it one day with Flash animation.

TRN: Man, that's terrible. I never knew what happened. Were you working with some dudes from Bloody Midgets, and if so, how were those guys to work with? I have some recollection of going to a bar over in the Valley where you were doing a shoot, and some Little Person got in a brawl with Preston Lacy. Am I getting all that right?

SAM MACCARONE: Yeah, those guys were fans from online that offered to make and episode with us. It's the whole reason we wrote that episode. Yeah, that brawl totally happened. There was this little guy named The Real Deal Holyfield and he was drinking Hennesy all day on our tab. That little fucker got so wasted he started insulting women. He mouthed off at this one chick and Preston told him to fuck off. That bastard ran up Preston's body and started punching his head!? Preston, who has no problem fighting people who mouth off at him, beat that dude's ass! We tossed him on a Southwest super-saver and he was back in Florida at his mom's house six hours later with a knot on his head. Then the guy saw Jackass the Movie and called Preston to apologize and say he had a great time filming!

TRN: Alright! Now that's the kind of behind-the-scenes action I like to hear! Now let's talk some about TV the Movie, which as you know I was totally stoked on. I know you just got back from NYC promoting it. You got any tales you'd like to relate, and when can people check it out?

SAM MACCARONE: Ah yes, TV the Movie, or Television the Film, as I like to call it. I went to New York with Steve-o for five days which is always interesting. I fell asleep in the plane on the way there and got a whole beer poured on my head, but it was sweet. And I got revenge on the way back when I dosed him with a Xanax and a Tylenol PM and cracked a Foster's over his face. We wrote an incredible rap for Howard Stern and got a rap deal with Universal to make a comedy rap album. Kind of like Weird Al...but a hell of a lot weirder! And we know we suck at rapping, that's the joke. Check out steveo.com. We shot and edited our adventures as we went and the shorts are in his video gallery. You can't miss them, and you shouldn't miss them.

Also, it was pretty funny when we were shooting TV the Movie in Florida. It was one nightmare after the other. We had a shitty Colombian producer named Juan Carlos that wanted to shoot in Florida to impress some of his Cuban friends with the Jackass guys. So we truck out there during fucking hurricane season. Me and Preston Lacy had just shot Pledge This out there and had the same thing happen. The weather is sunny one second, then pounding rain and lighting and wind two seconds later. And that's exactly what happened to us during TV the Movie. We were shooting Miami Mice, which is a spoof of Miami Vice with Weeman and Tony Cox from Bad Santa, and out of nowhere we're in the middle of a torrential downpour. We sat in our trailers and smoked weed as this shit crashes down for hours. Pretty soon there's a foot of water and we have to pack up everything and bail. But we have nothing to shoot and a full crew and actors. Our shitty producer knows the Bang Bus people so we went to the Bang Bus headquarters to try and shoot a sketch in the Bang Bus. And it's still pounding rain like crazy. Me and Steve-o were doing blow in the back of the Bang Bus parked in a warehouse trying to write a sketch to shoot, and this fucking douchebag crew member sees us and quits!? Said he couldn't be a part of this movie. Then, we order five topless chicks from a service to shoot this crappy sketch in the bus, and while we are back there Steve-o gets naked and has all the chicks beat his ass with a leather belt with their tops off. It's pretty lame and pretty rad all at the same time. Well, the stupid chicks reported us to their service and the next day when we show up to set in Miami, we learned that every extras service in Miami has banned us because of the shit we pulled the day before. We sent a poor crew member to a shitty Florida strip club to find topless chicks for this condom commercial that stars Steve-o. The only chick we got didn't speak a word of English and had the worst boob job I've ever seen. But it kind of makes the scene funny.

Clip 1 featuring Sam as Captain Jackson
Clip 2 featuring Dian Bachar in two roles. DO NOT MISS THIS.

And this is my scene in Clueless. Clueless is where i got my SAG card. Amy Heckerling picked me from 200 extras and Taft Hartleyed me for this scene. That was shot in 1994.

Sam in Clueless

TRN: We're going to be all kinds of multimedia on this motherfucker. What's next for Sam Maccarone? I'm trying to pull together a fund to make $500k movies. Can I count on you to deliver one?

SAM MACCARONE: I'm starring in a film called Gangsta Rap: the Glockumentary that opens in theaters on March 2nd. Too Short is in it, and so is Clifton Powell. I play Scott, the band's fucked up manager. I'm totally hardcore! Check it out and come see it in droves!

Sam in Gangsta Rap

I'm also in Les Claypool's Electric Apricot, coming out in a few months. And hell yeah dude, I'll deliver something so fucking incredible for $500k. Me and Dian are writing Roommates the Movie right now...so...maybe it'll be that! Here's a still from TV the Movie. I play Dick Weston Fernandaz and Dian is Cathy Ace, a transgendered news reporter.

TRN: Thanks man. I think we got this wrapped up, and I think it's my favorite so far! Stay bad and give my love to Dian.

TV the Movie Official Site

Ryan Quincy Interview

2007-01-23T19:17:00.000-08:00

Ryan Quincy is the animation and technical supervisor at South Park. This is his short film Out There.

TRN: I love your personal work so much. When I watch Out There by myself, I start crying. This is going to sound unsophisticated, but can you explain to a non-animator how you work? I know you make paintings and I know they move in your movies, but how do you separate the elements, and what programs are used in the transition from paintings to finished films?

RYAN QUINCY: Thanks a lot, man. With the animation featuring my characters the last couple of years, I've used Flash software. When I was figuring out how to do the Dios (Malos) video, my wife suggested I give Flash a try because she always tells me what to do and I'm pussy
whipped like that....plus we already had it on our computer, so it was the most accessible, and I was able to pick it up fairly quickly.

Ryan's video for Dios Malos.

I was reluctant at first, because most of the flash animation I'd seen looked too crisp and clean...too automated, too souless...and the goal was to translate the look of my paintings and character designs through flash without compromising too much. So I was pleasantly surprised when it worked, and the guys in Dios really liked how the video turned out. So did my two year old son, so when it came time to do Out There, I stuck with Flash.

The process consisted of scanning in the artwork (painted backgrounds, hand drawn characters, body parts, props, etc.), adjusting it some in Photoshop and Illustrator, and then importing it all into Flash and animating. So, there you have it, the boring truth to my animation. Hopefully that's not too unsophisticated an answer for you...

TRN: How did you wind up doing a video for Dios Malos? Had you been thinking you wanted to do a music video, or was it something that just came along?

RYAN QUINCY: I met their keyboard player, James Cabez deVaca a.k.a. Jimi Camaro, through my brother. Dios is from Hawthorne, same hometown as the Beach Boys. Dios saw my artwork and asked me to do some t-shirt and poster designs, which was a lot of fun. They're really cool guys. They had just completed their 2nd album and were looking for video ideas for their first single, they asked if I was interested in doing an animated video, and I said, hell yeah. I had always wanted to do an animated video, and this was the perfect situation, because I really liked the band and their music, and I had complete artistic control.

TRN: Have you always known that you wanted to make animated films, or was it something that grew out of painting and character design? I guess I'm curious about how you got started down the road you're on artistically. Can you shed any light on how you came to be doing the kind of work you're doing now? You can separate that into "professional" and "personal"...though I know there's a lot of technical overlap, there's a huge tonal difference between the work you do at SP and the work you do yourself.

RYAN QUINCY: I see the paintings, drawings, characters, and animation as all parts of the same body of work. They have similar motifs and recurring themes. From a very young age I always loved to draw, make up characters and stories...and that eventually led to wanting to see my characters move and act, so animation was the next road to take.

I didn't seriously pursue animation until I moved out to L.A. from Nebraska. The college I went to didn't have an animation program. It only offered one animation class, which I took and liked enough to keep with it. After about 5 months in L.A., pounding the pavement, I finally landed a job with an animation studio that did work for MAD TV. We did stuff like Raging Rudolph, which was if Martin Scorsese had directed the Rankin Bass Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer...and Gumby Old Men, Dennis the Menace II Society, Sex Toy Story...you get the idea. Anyway, that job came to an end and then I heard that the South Park folks were looking for animators for Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, so I applied and thankfully got a job. I've been with them ever since and it's been a blast. As for my personal work, I've focused more on the subtle humanistic stuff...with a cast of creatures whose lives are melancholic and somewhat bleak, but they have short bursts of hope and joy.

TRN: They are melancholic, but that's what I like so much about them, even though it makes me cry. So much of what I look at or watch is really loud, visually and aurally, and your work takes me back to a time when I myself was dreamier—you know, as a kid. Do you see yourself expanding on this body of work for some time, and letting it live as a universe of paintings and shorter works, or would you like to bring elements of it together as a feature, book, or show sometime? Or all of the above? I guess I'm asking where you feel like you're headed artistically...not that you have to be "headed" somewhere other than where you are...I just mean, I know I have these vague ideas of things I might want to do, and I'm wondering if you'd like to share any of yours.

RYAN QUINCY: I'm currently working on expanding the Out There universe into something bigger. The short was just an introduction to that world. I'd like to do a feature length deal that could possibly lead to an episodic affair...we'll see. Those characters are occupying my mind most these days, so, yeah, I'm continually chipping away at this body of work in hopes of having my own art show where you could see my paintings, drawings and animation all together. It doesn't have to be in some fancy gallery. Maybe even have it at a 7-11, where you can enjoy a slurpee and some nachos while you look at the work.

To see more of Ryan's work go to www.ryanquincy.com.

This Is How It Looks

2007-01-23T12:01:00.000-08:00

...when a bunch of kids make puppets and go totally batshit. Mitchell took a bunch of pictures. Good times.

Jon Ross Interview

2007-01-22T22:19:00.000-08:00

Jon Ross is a comedy motherfucker. He used to play cruise ships, that's how gangsta he is. I'm not sure whose shoulders he's sitting on in this picture.

TRN: Jon Ross, you came up the old school way, through standup. Tell the kids a little bit about that, and why they should (or shouldn't) stay at Harvard and keep trying to get on the Lampoon staff.

JON ROSS: First of all, I’d never presume to tell anyone who got into Harvard what they should or shouldn’t do. Oh, wait, yes I would. But only presuming I thought I knew what they should or shouldn’t do. I don’t.

It’s funny to me, amazing in a way, that the way I “came up” is now considered the “old school” way. It’s amazing because when I first stepped onto a stage to do stand-up, way back when, a comedy scene didn’t even really exist. And it certainly wasn’t some well-known and well-worn path to Hollywood. I mean, there was Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Robin Williams. That was about it, except for a few nameless comedians you’d see from time to time on Johnny Carson. Nevertheless, they inspired us. But a club scene barely existed. None of us knew from working comedians. We all just started doing it because… I don’t know, we just wanted to stand in front of crowd of people and make them laugh. It was wild back in those days because the whole thing was developing around us as we were doing it. It was like riding a wave. And then it just started exploding. Clubs were opening everywhere, stand-up comedy was all over the TV and my contemporaries started becoming stars of TV shows and movies, not to mention multi-millionaires.

TRN: Multi-millionaire sounds “good.” Why did you ease out of stand-up?

JON ROSS: It was getting to be the late 80’s and I was starting to get frustrated by it. The clubs that were opening were gigantic and in malls. The crowds that stand-up attracted seemed to get younger and dumber. And the comedians seemed to get less original, less smart and less interesting, as if they were just doing impressions of other comedians they had seen. This in turn attracted even younger even dumber crowds. I had decided that what I really wanted was to be a serious actor. I moved to L.A. to pursue that, but I kept doing stand-up because that was the only thing I knew how to do to earn money. I wasn’t having much success, either as an actor or a comedian when the people who were re-casting an HBO show called Not Necessarily the News saw me on stage and auditioned me for the part of the news anchor. The material I was supposed to audition with was pretty weak so I punched it up and supplemented with material from my act. When I finished auditioning I told them that I wanted to be considered as a writer, too. I ended up not getting the anchor job but I got hired as a writer and peripheral cast member. And that’s how my career in L.A. started.

TRN: Did you have a hot agent and shit like that?

JON ROSS: From that job I got an agent and a manager. The manager kept telling me to write a spec script, that he could get me a job writing on a sitcom. But I told him I didn’t want to write for a sitcom, I wanted to be on a sitcom. I’m sure part of my resistance had to do with fear. Sure, I wrote sketches for TV, but I didn’t know the first thing about writing a sitcom script. So when the HBO job ended I kept auditioning for stuff, but I didn’t really land anything. Then I guy I knew from stand-up was going to be doing his own comedy talk show on cable (on a channel that later became Comedy Central) and he asked if I wanted to come to work writing for that show. So I wrote and performed some on that show.

When that ended I went back to trying to get acting jobs, but they were few are far between. I studied acting diligently and auditioned my ass off. But time and again it was the comedy writing jobs, jobs I generally never looked for, but that came to me through friends, other stand-ups who had now become writers, that kept me alive. They were all mostly short-term gigs. Eventually I hit a low-point and had to take a day job. But then a friend, a stand-up whose one-man show had been turned into a pilot that got picked up for six episodes as a mid-season replacement, offered me a job writing on his show, even though I didn’t have a spec script or an agent or anything. I was getting old and I was tired of being a broke loser, so I happily took it.

TRN: You may have been broke, by friend, but you were no loser. The kids need to hear this stuff about the roller coaster of life. How was that first sitcom job?

JON ROSS: I liked the job and I was actually good at it. The show failed, but I got encouragement from the people I worked with, so when it was over I wrote a spec. That spec got me an agent and that agent got me a job on another sitcom. That sitcom failed miserably. I moved over to another sitcom, mid-season, and that one was an even bigger disaster. It was like I had been helicoptered onto The Titanic. When that failed things looked pretty grim. My spec was old and I couldn’t bring myself to write another one. My agent had lost faith in me and had basically written me off. But one of the guys I had worked with on one of those failed sitcoms ended up running a cartoon on Nickelodeon and brought me in. It was fun while it lasted, which was about six months. When it was over I was out of work again for a while.

TRN: I’m out of work. How did your out of workness end?

JON ROSS: A stand-up friend of mine was a semi-regular on Hollywood Squares and always hated the jokes they gave her. She got into the habit of calling me from her dressing room and getting me to do a punch up session on the phone with her. She started paying me for it. Ultimately it led to me getting a job writing jokes on Hollywood Squares. That’s what I was doing when one of my oldest, best friends from stand-up, Jonathan Groff, called me to say that he was doing a show about a bunch of animated lions. He said that it wasn’t union, so they could maybe pay me a grand or fifteen hundred to come in one or two days a week. That’s how that started and you know the rest.

So what's the upshot of all this? Have I answered the question? I guess something that I've always felt pretty strongly was my identity as a stand-up, even after I had mostly stopped doing it. You'll notice that along the way most every break, every opportunity that came my way came because of my relationship with other stand-ups (or former stand-ups). I took stand-up very seriously and I had a reputation as someone whose act had a lot of integrity. I was prolific and my material was intelligent and I paid a lot of attention to detail. As much as I wanted to be an actor, I guess it was apparent to everyone but me that what I really was was a writer.

Over the years as stand-up became more and more popular what I felt I was seeing was people who were getting into it as a career choice as opposed to as an art form. The whole thing seemed to become less special and more generic. Maybe that’s just my old man bitterness.

TRN: It’s nice to have company.

JON ROSS: But let me also extoll the virtues of stand-up comedy. It's amazing and kind of unique in that you have absolute and complete control. You are everything: writer, actor, director, editor. When it goes right you get all the credit. Of course, conversely, when it goes bad you get all the blame. And maybe the greatest, most unique thing of all is the instantaneous feedback. You immediately know if something works or not. And because you're the one in charge if something doesn't work you can keep on trying it different ways until it does work, or you finally decide to drop it. I think my experience as a stand-up always gave me a certain amount of confidence (maybe cockiness better describes it) in a writers' room. Because I had actually been out there, had earned a living and made my bones out there—standing toe to toe with drunken audiences, with cynical audiences sitting there with their arms crossed daring me to make them laugh—I felt entitled in a writers’ room to weigh in on what I thought was or wasn't funny.

Of course I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention the lifestyle. Being on the road, being a sort of circus sideshow performer starting getting difficult once I got into my mid thirties. But when I was in my twenties? Traveling around? Working just an hour or two a night… and in nightclubs? Drinking, partying, sleeping with audience members and cocktail waitresses? What better childhood could a boy ask for?

And finally, the truth, I think… because standing up in front of groups of strangers and trying to make them laugh is such an unnatural and not-normal thing to do and is so difficult to do (at least to do well), especially when you’re first starting out, I honestly think you kind of have to have something a little bit wrong with you to do it. You kind of have to need to do it more than you want to do it. In that way, not to be too cliché or cornball or anything, I think stand-up sort of chooses you more than you choose it.

TRN: I’m glad it never chose me, because it looks terrifying. But I love the lore. You standups have a shared experience the rest of us don’t have, almost like you fought in a war or something. With each other you’re always like, “Oh, you remember that time at the Chuckle Hut?” and it makes me wish I’d been at the Chuckle Hut. Got any favorite tales from the road you’d like to relate?

JON ROSS: That's interesting that you should say that about having fought in a war. That's exactly how I've always thought about it. In fact, my stand-up friends and I always referred to non-comedians as civilians. I guess to a certain extent there’s an element of fraternity in every profession—people always want to talk shop. At a party two truckers will end up talking to each other about interstates and which truck stop has the best she-males. But with us, the fact that what we were doing was such a preternatural high-wire act with such incredible highs and crushing lows, and the fact that we all were so completely obsessed with what we were doing (and let’s be honest, with ourselves), other comedians generally ended up being the only people we could talk to. All any of us ever really wanted to talk about was comedy and other comedians were the only other people we could really relate to. I have to say I miss the days of being utterly and completely obsessed with what I’m doing, though that definitely comes with a price. And when comedy is your business you tend to get clinical about it, which in turn anesthetizes you to it. So the stuff that comedians laugh at tends to be the shocking stuff—you know, the racist, sexist stuff—which we can really only do with each other. I guess that's kind of what The Aristocrats is about. [Ross is one of the comics who tells the joke in the movie. -Ed.]To a large extent the same thing is true with comedy writers. You know what it’s like. After you spend enough time in a writers’ room with a bunch of people who are all super bright, funny, quick, jaded and thick-skinned, normal conversations with regular people can be tricky. It's like when you've been driving on a freeway at 80 mph for hours and hours. When you finally get off onto the surface streets you have to be careful because you have a tendency to speed. Suddenly 25 mph seems like you're standing still.

God, there’s a million stories, but they’re mostly way too long to write up for a forum like this. Maybe for my memoirs someday. I actually think somebody put together a book that’s a collection of stories from the road. (I couldn’t help myself, I just looked it up. It’s called I Killed—True Stories of the Road From America’s Top Comics. Hmm. I might have to order that.)

TRN: I’ll have to check that out—that book, and then your memoirs. (Only assholes write memoirs, though...) In the meantime, I know you’re on Andy Barker, P.I. right now (faithful reader, that’s a new show that’s coming to NBC in the spring), and what with the lovely wife and kid and everything you’ll want to ride that pony to syndication. But what kind of thing would you want to do after that, in seven seasons—your own show? Or if circumstances permitted, would you rock the stage again?

JON ROSS: Ride it into syndication. Ah, from your mouth to God’s ears, my friend. I’m not sure about my own show. Forget about whether I have the talent and the smarts, I worry that I don’t have the temperament to be a showrunner. I constantly marvel at the way Groff is always able to keep an even keel, especially when I hear the unbelievably stupid shit he ends up having to deal with from the studio and the network. I don’t have the patience. I just don’t suffer fools gladly. I’d wind up telling them that if they knew anything about writing they’d be doing it and that they should just stick to making pointless phone calls and taking pretend meetings. And then that would be that. But who knows? My whole career I’ve sort of been afloat on the river of karma without a paddle, if you know what I mean.

As far as “rocking” the stage again, I think my stand-up days are behind me. I actually started giving some of my material to a friend who still performs. But I wouldn’t rule out a one-man show. And you thought only assholes wrote memoirs!

Puppetmasters

2007-01-22T00:11:00.000-08:00

Hilarious day (yesterday now)...put on a kids' puppet wrestling workshop at the Hammer Museum with the generous help of Scott Mitchell and a bunch of volunteers from 826LA. Yesterday Mitchell and I built a puppet wrestling ring out of PVC, and this morning we ran around getting felt and tube socks so all the kids could make their own puppet wrestlers. Mitchell ran the hot glue station and has burns all over his fingers. I believe the character pictured is named Funny Bob. The matches were videotaped...we should have something up in a few days on the 826LA website, and I'll put it up here, too.

Many thanks to everyone involved!

Vanessa McCarthy Interview

2007-01-21T18:57:00.000-08:00

Vanessa McCarthy (pictured, drinking with Timecat) is one of the funniest writers I've ever worked with. She's also beautiful and apparently well-adjusted, either of which alone would make her highly unusual in the world of comedy writers. Add to this that Vanessa is modest, and she was kind of "Eeehhhhh..." when I asked her to do an interview (but under pressure she said she would), and you have enough awesome to make you want to barf.

TRN: I know you've been at this comedy thing for a while, but I understand your first passion was tap dance. Is there anything you can tell me about that and how you made the transition from tap to writing?

VANESSA McCARTHY: Well, when I used to tap, I had a partner. His name was Dave and I called him Mexican Dave. He was thirty five years-old and I was ten. I was an unlikely leading lady for Mexican Dave, but our dance teacher must have seen the potential in pairing the swarthy Latino with the fat pre-pubescent girl. Mexican Dave was never the least bit inappropriate, in fact, as a team we thrived and found we had one important thing in common: the love of tap dancing. We brought down the house in many a rec room, until I left tap in 1987 when I started high school and realized if my friends found out my hobby I would be shot.

As a writer, I don't work with a partner. I put myself out there on the page, but there is no Mexican Dave to back me up. That's been the hardest part about becoming a writer. Learning to be alone creatively without the security of an adult Mexican man dancing behind me.

TRN: I think that's especially true of comedy. You can easily tell if an idea is sad or scary when you're by yourself—it's a lot harder to tell if it's funny. That's one of the things that I think is so great about "the room" (as, for you kids, the conference room where working comedy writers are fed like veal calves is called)...people laugh or they don't, and that's how you know. Aren't you now starting on a partner project, though?

VANESSA McCARTHY: It's true. I am starting to write a feature with my husband, but his name is also Dave, so I feel good about it. I wouldn't consider partnering with anyone not named Dave.

TRN: Daves make good partners, that's for sure. I've been there myself and it was beautiful. Your current Dave is hilarious and also handsome. Thank you guys so much for the jokes on that movie I got to direct last summer. Did you know you were going to do this kind of work as soon as you quit tapping? Or were you like me and did other shit before you decided to try this out? I know you grew up in the Bay Area like me, I know you went to Santa Barbara, but don't know much about how you ended up in LA. Tell! Feel free to describe lame or excellent jobs on the road to your current life.

VANESSA McCARTHY: I always knew I wanted to write but I didn't know what to write. Right after I graduated college I worked for a porn distribution warehouse in Oakland. I did the books (only!) for them. As it turns out, the porn industry is kinda scummy and not that awesome, so I decided to make the move to LA. It's hard to get a job in the business if you don't know anyone, but I finally found a great industry job working reception for Robert Redford’s production company. I was so happy. The only problem was, I was a retarded receptionist. I remember I had to type an address on a mailing label and it took me like thirty times to get it right. Also, the coffee I made tasted like ass. I was quickly fired. I was so devastated. How was my movie ever going to get into Sundance? Not like I had written a movie. But I would… someday. Actually, at the time I loved sitcoms, so after I was fired I decided to get serious about writing them. Soon I landed a writer’s assistant position on a UPN sitcom that lasted for six episodes. After a couple of other jobs in the same vein, I got a writer’s assistant job on Friends. The next year the exec. producers let me write a script for the show. Then I was off and running.

TRN: That seems hard to believe about the porn distribution business being scummy and not that awesome, but I'll take you at your word. And now you are indeed up and running...I must have seen David Spade shaking it silky-style in the Terms of Engagement promo five times watching football yesterday.

VANESSA McCARTHY: You were clearly drunk when you watched those promos because the show is called Rules of Engagement. (Not to be confused with the Sam Jackson thriller.) It's about three guys in various stages of relationships. It's definitely funny. The cast is great and Patrick Warburton and David Spade are hilarious. I would love for it to do well because it is a fun place to work, it's close to my house, and I get the Sony discount.

TRN: Vanessa McCarthy, we here at TRN wish you and Mssrs. Spade and Warburton the best on Terms of Attraction. (No wonder I couldn't find it on my Tivo listings...duh.)

Timecat having his way with housemate George.

Cheryl Holliday Interview

2007-01-19T17:01:00.000-08:00

Cheryl Holliday is a writer and producer whose oeuvre encompasses work on Martin, Costello, King of the Hill, Father of the Pride, and Still Standing, to name just a few. She takes care of everybody who works under her like they are baby chickens. In case you think I'm an asshole, she's the one who put this rad picture on IMDb. I believe it was snapped at The Jungle Palace, a.k.a. the secret hideaway of Siegfried and Roy. This interview is part of our ongoing series exploring the backgrounds, motivations, and methodologies of entertainment's greatest minds.

TRN: Tell me about your mother.

CHERYL HOLLIDAY: She was the person who held our family together when we went bankrupt and had to live in a condemned house. She drove my brothers and me to the library sixty miles one way every week. Once, in a pounding storm. She wouldn't turn back. We crawled there at about 20 miles an hour. She kept my and my brother's thirst for knowledge alive by doing that. Books were worlds we lived in.

She's really funny. When she went to get a new car ten years ago and the salesman asked her what she wanted, she said, "A living room sofa on wheels." She got a Buick. Just a few days ago I gave her a gift in a small box, and she said, "That looks too small to fit a sweatsuit." She told me about her sex life once: "All I have to be able to do is hold my stomach in from the bed to the lightswitch."

She is a nurse. Has been for almost 50 years. She has amazing stories about the process of dying, having watched dozens of people pass away. She's really smart, but doesn't have a very big vocabulary and constantly mispronounces words in such a way as to create much better, more colorful hybrid words. ie: Happenchance. "If I come upon it happenchance." Flustrated. A blend of flustered and frustrated. And, phantom, instead of fathom, like, "I just can't phantom that."

She was a champion barrel racer and the rodeo queen for Harper County Kansas.

She's annoying. She tells me how long to zap things in the microwave, EVERY TIME we're together and I need to use the microwave. She rewrites history, forgets the horrible things and remembers being at places she wasn't. She thinks Oprah is the be all and end all. She always thinks she hears the "news" about things before anyone else. So, like, months after something has happened, she'll tell me about it, because she just read it in a magazine. This was worse when she lived in Muskogee, Oklahoma, because she seemed to think they were on the cutting edge. She once MAILED ME dental floss with a note saying, "This is that wonderful new dental floss I was telling you about. I don't think they have it in LA yet." It was called "Glide."

Is that what you were looking for?

TRN: Oh my God yes! Here is question #2. Growing up rich, with so many connections in Hollywood since childhood, it must have been really easy to break into entertainment. Can you tell me about when you decided you were going to be an entertainer? By the way: please give my love to your mom.

CHERYL HOLLIDAY: I began doing Zsa Zsa Gabor impressions when I was 3. When I was 12, I was absolutely, deeply in love with old movies and movie stars. I was the only 12 year old who knew who Ronald Coleman was. My grandmother, Ruby, had an old scrapbook of pictures she had cut out of those 1930s and 40s movie star magazines, and I would spend hours gazing at the beautiful people. She gave it to me, and I cherished it for decades.

So, I don't know when I "decided" I was going to be an entertainer. It was part of me, from a very early age. I fantasized constantly about accepting an Oscar.

I lived a life that was pretty insular, though. I was afraid of almost everything. And most of my life until coming to LA was just years of me working at jobs for low pay and always dreaming of what I wanted to do, but terrified to make any move toward doing it.

In college I wanted to major in theater, but my parents wouldn't pay for school if I did, so I majored in Radio and TV hoping to be an announcer. I was really troubled for much of my youth. I was lost and tortured by my feelings of being gay and I lived inside my head. I was terrified of everything. The day I loaded my Mercury Comet to move from Tulsa to Illinois for my first job out of college, I cried like a baby.

I moved back home a year later and got a job at an oil company drawing gas and oil lease maps. I answered an ad that said, "Can you write small?" And, it turned out that I had an OCD about how tiny I could write. So, it seemed perfect. At that time I was around 25. Other friends had graduated college, started careers and gotten married. I lived at home and made $800 a month as Bartleby the Scrivener.

I got involved in community theater in Tulsa, and I was sort of an invisible person. I was always really funny, but I was never the star. I was the person in the background. Once, when I was working the lights for a play, one of the actors got really drunk and you could hear him throwing furniture backstage. They went on with the play, with the director playing the guy's part while holding a script. Later, at the post show hang out, all the actors and crew were abuzz with the gall of this one drunk guy. Someone said, "He will never work in this town again." I laughed. How absurd, I thought. But I just got stared down by the people who were stars in Tulsa theater.

Finally, I entered a stand-up comedy contest and won. It was in a 300-seat theater and I brought the house down. I was hooked. I knew I had to do this.

So I moved to Houston, where there was a developmental club, and did stand up for 6 years. While there I met Sam Kinnison, worked alongside Bill Hicks, and encouraged a waitress named Brett Butler to get on stage. But even there I was unsure of my abilities, and even, at one point, as a major comedy player in Houston, I spent weeks in bed crying when a very low-level agent (the girlfriend of a comic) "fired" me for working at a club that was on the "banned" list. I felt my career was over. Also, I got dumped by my girlfriend. It just made sense to leave.

I moved to LA in '88 hoping to get my own sitcom. I came with my friend Tom Hester. We drove my Toyota Tercel across the desert and moved into a 1 bedroom apartment together. At the time, there was an oil bust in Texas, so housing in Houston was UNBELIEVABLY CHEAP. My 1 bedroom apartment with laundry facilities, pool, AC, was $125 a month. Our 1 bedroom in LA was $695. We were both on the road, so we seldom were there together. After a year, Tom went back home and I moved into a 2br and got a roommate. But in order to afford it, I had to be on the road ALL THE TIME. In '90 I was going to pack it in and move back to Oklahoma and live with my mother and work at a shoe store. A friend who was a writer encouraged me to write a spec script. I did, and I got an agent and a job, and I have been working ever since.

All this time, I had tremendous fear and anxiety. I lived in my bed when I wasn't at work. The path to not being afraid started in 1998, when the show I created was named the worst show of 1998 by Entertainment Weekly. I got a job after that that paid more than I was getting as an executive producer, and I understood that I would survive. Then I got on some wonderful meds, and that helped a lot.

But, honestly, it is a constant battle. I worry a lot, even when I'm asleep I have really bad anxiety dreams in which I'm either fired or I show up at work and someone else has taken my office and everyone is just ignoring me. Not all my dreams are bad—just recently I had a dream that a writer, Anya Kochoff, had trained a possum to say the word "anniversary." I have no idea why I had this dream, but it didn't involve me getting fired or replaced, so I liked it.

It's not as bad as it once was, and I have a lot of happiness and joy in my life. And I can be fearless if someone I work with and love is being treated badly. But I sometimes still have crippling fear.

That was probably more than you needed, but I can't just say in one sentence when I decided to go into show business. It was a really windy road of me failing at everything else. It took years of therapy and lots of medication before I had the balls to say: "I am a writer, I am going to do this." Side note: When I was just writing my spec and did not have a paying job as a writer, whenever I would talk about my writing, my family would roll their eyes, like, "What a fucking loser." They think I didn't see them, but I did.

TRN: Thank you, Cheryl. That's the kind of real shit that will inspire anyone who needs it, and I for one thank the Jesus that you didn't go hide your light under a shoebox. Ladies and gentlemen: Cheryl Holliday.

[WILD APPLAUSE FROM THE CROWD.]

Props Out

2007-01-18T15:28:00.000-08:00

To Amir Bar-Lev and Carson Mell, two dudes whose films are being screened at Sundance this week. My Kid Could Paint That is Amir's feature length doc about Marla Olmstead, the talented little girl who paints controversial pictures. His first feature, Fighter, about two Czech survivors of World War Two, is insanely great, so this one probably is, too. Carson's Bobby Bird is the filmic antecedent/accompaniment to his illustrated novel Saguaro. It's in the shorts program. This is another of his animated shorts (and my favorite) called The Writer.

Rob Cohen Interview

2007-01-15T11:25:00.000-08:00

Rob Cohen may be the single most hilarious dude on planet Earth. He has worked as a writer and producer on many of your favorite shows. I'm fairly confident that in this picture he is attired as an ensign on the Starship Enterprise.

TRN: So, you got shot in the foot one time.

ROB COHEN: Yes. It was in grade 10 (10th grade for you idiots), and I was out shooting cans and bottles with a friend whose dad owned a sporting goods store. We were in the middle of nowhere, and his gun went off. I felt a huge pain in my foot, looked down, and saw not a trickle, but a geyser of blood and tissue flying sideways out of my foot. I realized I had been shot, and after a few minutes of stupid high-school genius thinking what to do, we decided to get to his home a few miles away to get help.

Problem one: we were stopped on the way by the Provincial Game Wardens, who arrested us because someone had been complaining about "kids shooting at cars" (not us!). They threw us in the back of their car, and started grilling us, and I was so scared, I decided it wouldn't help our alibi letting them know I was bleeding all over their floor mats because I was shot. They finally let us go, took the guns, and when I staggered to my friend's house, tried to dig the bullet out with the nail file of some nail clippers. Bad idea.

TRN: Already you have revealed your identity as not only the toughest writer in Hollywood, but a Canadian to boot. That backwards grade shit is a dead giveaway. How did a young woodsman like yourself find his way into Hollywood? Typed up a spec script on a typewriter made of hand-cut logs and since then it's all been gravy?

ROB COHEN: Short version: was a fuck up at home, drove down here on a whim, realized I had nothing to go home to, and ended up working illegal jobs. CUT TO: 8 years later, I fluked into getting a P.A. job on the Tracey Ullman show.

TRN: Clearly we're building that fence on the wrong border. Please tell your favorite illegal job story or tell us more about the "fluke."

ROB COHEN: My favorite illegal job story would probably be how I worked the grill at Carney's hot dogs on Ventura Blvd. and would not only live off of "bad orders" that I would call in from a pay phone on my break, but how I also ended up being David Hasselhoff's personal "grill guy" when he would come in, and he would ask for me by name, but only because I was, according to him, "the only guy that spoke English."

TRN: Tell another illegal job story! Or what you're looking for in a lady.

ROB COHEN: One night, around midnight, I was called to a woman's house for a delivery. She said it was urgent I bring some Cristal champagne, some expensive caviar and a small bag of Lay's plain potato chips over ASAP. I grabbed the stuff and raced up Laurel Canyon to her house. All the lights were off outside, so I had to use the delivery van headlights to see her doorbell. Rang it. Nothing. Rang again. Nothing. One last time, then I assumed it was a bad call, when behind me, I hear someone say "hello." I leap out of my skin, scared shitless, turn and see a woman, mid-50's...totally nude. She is standing in the dark, at midnight in the hills (where it was about 50 degrees), and tells me she was so excited about me coming, she couldn't wait inside. Then she asks if I brought the chips. Not the champage, not the pricey caviar, but the small bag of Lay's. I say "yes," she grabs them from the bag...(wait for it) then rips it open and starts smearing the potato chips all over her boobs and crotch, moaning like an animal. She is literally grinding chips inside herself, while I stand there, stunned. A beat later, she stops, and in a totally normal voice asks me "how much?" I tell her the price, she pays me, gives me a five dollar tip, then takes the champagne and caviar and disappears back into the night.

TRN: Was that an illegal job story, or what you're looking for in a lady? Also, I need a picture of you.

ROB COHEN:

TRN: Similar question: is that a picture of you, or what you're looking for in a lady?

ROB COHEN: What I'm looking for in a lady: someone who is cool, appreciates nerdy things, and has a sense of humor, but not at the expense of my crotch.

TRN: Thank your for participating in this important archival project.

Exciting New Project

2007-01-15T11:22:00.000-08:00

This is that thing I was talking about. Today inaugurates an exciting new phase of this blog, in which interviews with comics, comedy writers, and other clowns are posted for the edification of young people considering careers in the comedy arts.

South by Southwest Film Festival

2007-01-11T22:55:00.000-08:00

My silly zombie movie got into SXSW and it's going to premiere there. That's in Austin. I used to live there. It rules.

In the meantime, I am being such a huge turd. I do have one fun new project started that will begin appearing here soon, but for the most part I am sitting around with my thumb up my ass. This evening's viewing: Snakes on a Plane. There are a lot of snakes on the plane.

Happy New Year...

2007-01-01T02:12:00.000-08:00

...from lovely Los Angeles. Pictured above: a palm tree in full flame, courtesy of the drunk dudes who were shooting fireworks off their porch near the party we were just at. Please pardon the long interruption in service. Just got back from two whole weeks of rest, relaxation, and familial fun in Crested Butte, Colorado. Highlights in addition to general good times and hilarity with family, significant others, and friends included:

1. Cutting down a Christmas tree with my dad. He was just a few of days out of back surgery but thought it would be a great idea for us to set out at dusk into the snow and tromp a mile in snowshoes carrying an ax, tarps, and a rope, cut down a tree, and drag it back to be trimmed. He was right. It was totally awesome, one of those unforgettable father and son mini-adventures you think you can't have after thirty, but you can.

2. Dogsled. No shit, we went dogsledding. It was exactly as great as you'd think it would be.

3. Adventures in fire. The fireplace at Bert and Happy's opens on both sides. My dad (the one with the bad back, which he says is fine, and apparently it is) chucked a new log in on one side and sent a totally burning one out the other side into the living room. The burning log got stomped out okay and would not merit mention, but afterward he decided to vacuum up the cinders, which resulted in a fantastic in-vacuum-cleaner conflagration and black cat-hair-and-plastic smoke blowing out the ass of the machine, necessitating evacuation of middle floor of the house.

4. Pine marten! Is that the cutest motherfucker ever or what? I know it's not cool but we left some snacks out for him, and then he went and got his best friend the other pine marten (not pictured) and they snacked down, cavorted, hopped, played pattycake, and performed misc. other actions of the type featured on Cute Overload.

5. Oh shit! I almost forgot to show you my new tattoo! My friend's wife gave me this pretty little thing at the party where the palm tree caught on fire. That was New Year's, not Christmas, but lists are fun. The knuckles say "GOOD TIME."

America's Best Comic

2006-11-29T12:52:00.000-08:00

That's what I'm going to see at the UCB Theater in Hollywood tonight. Matt Besser and some other dude are making the giggles at 9:30. It's only five bucks. I have to say that this whole commie notion of making laughter a right, not a privilege, really pisses me off. Laughing should be really expensive, like cocaine used to be. Kind of takes the fun out of it when any asshole with five bucks can have some. Ideological problems aside, I'm going to try to have a good time. See you there, fuckers!

Books and Fancy Dinners!

2006-11-20T23:05:00.000-08:00

Grove/Atlantic, the company that's publishing The Royal Nonesuch, brought me up to Seattle and the Bay Area last weekend to meet local booksellers and distributors. You know all that shit you hear about how the literary scene is all fancy dinners with charming people engaged in witty conversation? All true. Nice hotels, too.

The other writer along for the ride was a cat named Steven Hall who has a book coming out soon called The Raw Shark Texts. I got an advance copy. It's kickass smartypants postmodern English action, plus it has a flip-book built right into it. You're going to want to get it when it drops, which I think is April? His publisher, Jamie Byng of Cannongate (G/A and Cannongate are publishing the book in partnership), has already sold it into twenty-four languages or something like that. They've been on the road for weeks. In other reading news, I weaseled a copy of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, which is also awesome, though since it won the Man Booker Prize that's kind of old news. More smartypants English action, this time on the postcolonial tip. Really beautiful; it made me have feelings and want to go to India. Luckily I was alone in my hotel room, so nobody saw.

Pictured above: Deb Seager, lovely lady about town and head of publicity for G/A; Andrew Leland, who runs Believer; and Eli Horowitz, who runs McSweeney's Books. I think the latter two are twelve and fourteen, respectively. Fuckers. Photo credit: Roy Remer of Publishers Group West. Thanks Roy!

Best Movie Ever

2006-11-09T22:25:00.000-08:00

I just got back from the extremely fancy red-carpet premiere of the best movie ever, TV The Movie. It was directed by a dude I know named Sam Maccarone and stars him, Dian Bachar, and a bunch of Jackasses, plus fucking Lee Majors (for you children: he had a little show called The Six Million Dollar Man back in the day, and he was married to Farrah Fawcett, who once was not terrifying but lovely). This is a prejudiced opinion, but I swear to goodness it completely rocked. And I even had that thing where it's somebody you know who made it so you're even half hoping it's not going to be awesome, because inside you're a bad person? But then it's so much fun you're just completely psyched for them? If I were making say a movie review show with monsters, TV The Movie would receive two full, round Monster Balls.

Book Jacket Comp

2006-11-06T22:29:00.000-08:00

Carson continues to be the shit. This is his more developed sketch for the jacket of The Royal Nonesuch. While you're here on the Internet, head on over to his site and get yerself a copy of his illustrated novel Saguaro.

Movie Monsters

2006-11-03T18:17:00.000-08:00

Okay, so this is that test I did with that INCREDIBLE background we've heard so much about. This is some high tech, high quality critical action, and you get to see it right now. Considered: How to Eat Fried Worms, Jackass Number Two, and Employee of the Month. Please note that neither I nor my custom mittens have seen any of these films. You are not advised to base any movie-going decisions on the opinions of said mittens.

If the video link isn't working yet, it should about an hour after the post. YouTube.

AFM

2006-11-02T11:13:00.000-08:00

Just got back from the American Film Market in Santa Monica. It's an extremely exclusive multi-day event, if you don't know. To get in there, the main requirement is that you are a shady foreign dude who's ready to move some rom-coms and slasher flicks into the back rooms of countries where women wear tents to the grocery store. I saw a trailer of my movie screened, and I heard some people laugh. Hoping those were related events...

Hey! I got a bad review!

2006-11-01T10:14:00.000-08:00

Like you give a shit! This one's from Kirkus, which is the other early-review publication. Highlights!

TV scripter Phillips had scads of talent, it seems, but little idea of how to apply it....Fresh out of the bucolic and positive-vibe-emitting environs of Marin County, Phillips published a roundly acclaimed novel at the ripe young age of 24....wound up in California with a couple of friends, putting together a series of random cultural business ventures. They formed Certified Renegade American Product (CRAP) as an umbrella company to start ultra-indie film festivals that acted like self-proclaimed “barnacles” on the outskirts of Cannes and Sundance. They started a consulting business called Quiddity, a particularly ‘90s entity that gave the spectacularly non-business-savvy Phillips and his coworkers the chance to be paid ridiculous amounts of money to formulate new names for companies or products. Not much came to fruition....A mundane account of a pampered kid trying to find himself that offers nothing particularly illuminating, artful or self-reflective.
—Kirkus Reviews

Check it out, though. I'm a "scripter" and I used to have "scads of talent." Scads, I tell you! Maybe someday I can write book reviews! This is the craziest part: You're still so excited you want to pre-order it right now!

Hey! I got a good review!

2006-10-30T08:24:00.000-08:00

Like you give a shit! But this is my blog, so here are the highlights of the first (starred, like good job in grade school) review of my book, The Royal Nonesuch, in Publishers Weekly:

The hipster cultural economy of the dot-com boom is skewered in this hilarious coming-of-age memoir....Phillips embeds his off-kilter moral journey in an unsparing comic portrait of underground Hollywood, with its schizophrenic hustlers, desperate pitching, deluded financial projections, lascivious Sundance parties, bad indie films and more-alternative-than-thou poseurs who denounce corporate co-optation while angling to be co-opted. He surveys this freak show with a mordant, cutting wit that delivers insight and pathos along with the laughs.
—Publishers Weekly

I know. You're so excited you want to pre-order it right now. If you were wondering, I haven't decided whether to put bad ones up. I think probably, with rebuttals.

Puppet Test

2006-10-29T05:54:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I shot a test/demo with the little hand puppets. Being a puppeteer sucks, and not just in the obvious way, i.e., if you tell people you're a puppeteer, they go "Hahaaa LOSER!" You also have to hold your arms up in the air (duh) and they get really tired, plus it's hard to read off the script page and watch the monitor at the same time. I'm super terrible at it, but the thing I am worst at is doing the voices. My INCREDIBLE background worked, though, and my amigo Larry the Actual Editor is going to cut the test for me. It's not going to be anything special, but it should work as a demo. "So, what would that be like, puppets reviewing movies?" Like this...only with better puppets, voices, and jokes. "I see." If I don't hate it too much when we're done, I'll put it up here.

Carson Mell

2006-10-28T08:39:00.000-07:00

These are sketches for the cover of my book, done by my friend Carson. Is he the shit or what? I wish I could draw that well.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping (NSFW)

2006-10-26T01:12:00.000-07:00

Okay so I haven't shot the Movie Monsters demo yet, and I made some new and different monster puppets out of a t-shirt and a couple of plush toys—those Ugly Dolls which yeah I know are everywhere, but c'mon, they're still rad! The new puppets are now stuck in a fancy white birdcage the ladyfriend bought at Goodwill a couple of weeks ago. They look like they really want to get out. I think she upset the guy at the register pretty badly when she bought the cage. He asked if she was going to get a bird, and she said no, she was going to put her stuffed animals behind bars. "I don't think I've ever heard of anybody doing that," he said, not in a congratulatory way. For the record, I thought it was pretty fucked up, too, but seeing it won me over. You can't see the new puppets yet, though, or the INCREDIBLE background I made to go behind them, because all that shit is super top secret.

In the meantime, I'm posting some of my early work before one of my "friends" posts it. Boy, am I already sorry about this. Did I mention that it's Not Safe For Work? Because unless you (like me) work at home in your underwear, it's not.

Meet Your Critics

2006-10-19T00:07:00.000-07:00

I haven't named them, except the red one I think is named Red. Yep. I can't use these particular dudes if somebody actually orders the puppet movie review show, because the puppetmaster who made them (Monster Puppets, get yourself a couple!) owns the likeness rights. I presume any buyer would want entanglement-free puppets. But I'm going to make a little demo of what the show might be like, using these clowns. One way or another the demo will end up on these Internets... maybe... right... here! I can use these two for public access TV, the Monster Puppets guy said. He's super nice and lives in Alabama. Alie and I have a nefarious plot to make some public access excellence. Tentative title of our imaginary access show: "Alie and Friendseses." Also making a little progress on the Magic Reader. Yay! In the words of Matt Drudge: DEVELOPING...

Paste Eating

2006-10-17T07:37:00.000-07:00

So every time a project winds down I find myself wondering what to do next with my life, and I spend weeks or months doodling in my office and doing things like this (starting a blog) instead of actually working on anything in particular. I do work a little, but kind of like a 5-year-old works with construction paper—with occasional intensity but also lots of spacing out and paste eating. Here is my current development slate:

MOVIE MONSTERS
This is a movie review show hosted by puppets. I think I'm really going to make this one (but I always think that about all my projects).

FANTASIE!
This is a feature. It takes place in the land of Fantasie! You have to put the exclamation point after the word every time you write or say it.

THE AFTERMATH CYCLE
This is a ten-volume cycle of novels about life after the End of the World. Should take a couple of weeks.

THE MAGIC READER
This is a kids' educational project.

I think they're all awesome, but it's no wonder my Hollywood agent thinks I'm a fucktard. If you have any feelings about which of these the world needs most, please feel free to email me. Your opinion carries more weight than you might think.

In titling this post, I realized that all three posts so far have involved food or eating things. That will stop. I'm still recovering from the longest fast I've ever been on, which was something like 21 hours. I was trying that hippie cayenne lemondade thing. Not that I believe my colon is crowded with "toxins." It's crowded with action figures, but that's all. I tried the lemonade thing, which I admit is gross, because my friend Dennis and I are in a race to see who can lose 10% of his bodyweight first. The nearly day-long fast represented a significant personal victory—a personal best, in fact. The first time I tried it, I only made it until lunch. But I will beat Dennis. I will beat Dennis. I will beat Dennis.

Gingerbread Architecture

2006-10-15T22:48:00.000-07:00

Today we made a gingerbread house. Then all these assholes came over and had a party in it.

Come Taste My Cookies

2006-10-14T16:13:00.000-07:00

Huzzah!* That's a screengrab from last weekend, when my lady friend sent me solo into the time-traveling fantasy of Casa de Fruta (actual name of venue; meaning, of course, House of Fruit) to gather some b-roll for a Renaissance Faire doc she's working on.** Specifically, she wanted b-roll of hot ladies all crammed into their shit and delighted to discuss same, which you can bet your ass I found. This bawdy wench kept singing, "Cookies! Come taste my cookies! Firm, round cookies! Come smell my cookies! The only thing that smells better is my (indicating cookie vending cart) box!" You should have heard the filth at the chocolate-covered frozen banana booth. The ladyfriend sent me alone into the wormhole because NO DOGS ALLOWED, and Nemo was along for the ride. They cooled it in the parking lot for a couple of hours.

This right here will be my blogging venue for the foreseeable future, because Wanted Undead or Alive is pretty much wrapped up, and using the MySpace platform to do anything but holla back (and forth) with friends makes me want to set my face on fire. I do have a profile there; if you don't know me but would like to be my pal: WELCOME TO FUNSPACE. I'm sure that in no time we will be like BFFs, and then be all IMing each other to say things like "hey what r u doing?"

*This first blog entry isn't going to make much sense until I actually import the tape described and take a still from it.
**Okay I did it.