Jason Blum made his name producing successful, low-budget horror films, but he could get an Oscar as part of the producing team for "Boyhood" (pictured); the Sundance Institute pairs composers and filmmakers at Skywalker Ranch; Simon Rich's "Man Seeking Woman" is one of the most bizarre sitcoms on TV.
'Man Seeking Woman' twists rom-com clichés into a surrealist nightmare
For anyone still reeling from a bad breakup, running into your ex’s new boyfriend might feel like meeting Adolf Hitler in the flesh — though it's highly unlikely that he or she would be dating the real Führer.
The new TV series “Man Seeking Woman” takes those feelings of heartbreak and turns them into literal and surreal scenarios to hilarious effect. The series comes from the comedic brain of 30-year-old writer and showrunner Simon Rich, based on his book of short stories titled “The Last Girlfriend on Earth."
The series follows a 20-something guy named Josh Greenberg, played by Jay Baruchel, on a quest to find true love in Chicago. (It's actually filmed in Toronto.) Along the way, in addition to meeting Hitler, he has a blind date with a woman who is — literally — a troll, and he time travels. It’s the kind of satire that works well in book form, but can be tricky to translate to TV.
Simon Rich stopped by The Frame recently to talk about adapting his book for TV and where he came up with the idea for these absurdist love stories.
Interview Highlights:
Can you talk a bit about how the idea for this series came about?
It really just started with me in my living room writing these short stories about dating in my 20s — and they were very unusual stories. But even though they were completely strange and surreal and featured time travel and trolls and aliens, they were actually — ironically — the most personal stories I'd ever written. They were super-autobiographical. The very first story I wrote for the collection is about a guy who finds out his ex-girlfriend is dating this older rich guy and he's really upset, especially when he finds out that the guy is Adolf Hitler, who is 126 years old and has faked his own death. His friends — none of them take his side — all think that this Hitler guy is pretty cool and he should just give him a chance. So I started writing these stories that were kind of [about] dating, but not so much the way dating actually happens — more about how it can sometimes feel.
When you're trying to adapt this for the FXX network, was it really important that you not dilute it by having characters comment on the preposterousness of the situation?
A hundred percent. When you're doing high stakes, premise-driven, absurdist comedy, you don't want people mugging and calling out the joke — that would murder it. That goes back to "Monty Python," at least. You always want to play the wacky premises as straight ahead as possible. But also, just on an emotional character level, it's vital that our hero is in every situation alone. When you're in your 20s and you're dating, it can feel like every single text and every date and every call is life or death. The fate of the world rests on every moment. But when you tell your friends about what you're experiencing, they tend to trivialize it and downplay its significance because — from their perspective — it's not that high stakes. I'm hoping with the show we can dramatize that disconnect — how dating can feel so high stakes and visceral for the hero, and so boring and inconsequential for all of the friends and family that surround him.
You worked on "Saturday Night Live." How does that help adapt your own writing for television? Are there other experiences in your past that helped pave the way for how you would adapt this?
When I got to "SNL," I was really just a magazine writer. I wrote stories for The New Yorker and I published a book or two, but I'd never really written for actors. Actors are a game changer, they have an incredible ability to elevate mediocre material. Working with actors really kind of changed my approach to writing. You start to think about every scene differently and you start to write with performers in mind. It really improved my writing. I feel really grateful that I get to do that kind of work.
When you get to the physical production of the show, what are the challenges about the world that you've created in your stories and the world you have to replicate on screen?
We're really going for a hyper-realist style. It's vital for the comedy to work and for the emotional stakes to work. Everything is played straight, which means the monsters can't be goofy, they actually have to be monsters. The aliens actually need to be from space. It can't look like a comedy-goof version of the genres. We actually try to commit to the genres. We try to hire people with actual genre experience. The creature creator is Paul Jones, a Toronto-based wizard, who has been working in the science fiction and horror genres forever. We brought him onboard and basically said, "Do your job. Do the thing that you're great at. Don't tone it down or goof it up just because we're a comedy show. When you're making a 126 [year-old] Hitler, make him 126 and make it gnarly." And he really delivered for us and did amazing work, week after week.
Part of the challenge of "Man Seeking Woman" is that it takes the conventions of romantic comedy drama and completely subverts them. Do you feel as if it's a little bit of a struggle to get the audience to understand the conceit of the show?
We're definitely asking a lot from our audience. There's a version of this show we could have made where it's constructed closer to something like ["The Secret Life of] Walter Mitty," where the fantastical, surreal elements of the show are depicted as dream sequences or as digressions. When you're watching something strange happen on the show and then you find out it was all a dream, it just feels lower-stakes, less visceral, less emotionally intense. So we wanted it to actually be happening just like on some of our favorite animated sitcoms like "The Simpsons" or "South Park." The supernatural, surreal aspects of those shows are literally happening. Kenny is literally being murdered repeatedly and Homer Simpson really does go to outer space. We wanted to attempt a live-action show that had that level of surrealism. But we know it's unusual, it's a strange one and we're really grateful to be on the air at all. I hope people find the show, but I understand why some people might be confused or even annoyed by it.
"Man Seeking Woman" airs Wednesdays at 10:30 on FXX.
Composers get a Sundance education at Skywalker Ranch
It’s not easy for budding film composers to get a foot in the door, something not lost on the Sundance Institute. Twice annually, the Institute’s Film Music Program gives composers the opportunity to gain hands-on experience scoring either feature or documentary films at the Composers Labs held at the sprawling and picturesque Skywalker Ranch in Marin County. The most recent lab focused on music for documentaries.
Even though film is made up of images and sounds, images can tend to take priority. But sound is just as important, says Tabitha Jackson, director of the documentary film program at the Sundance Institute:
It carries so much emotion and so much of the story in films that if you don’t get the sound and imagery right in speaking the language of cinema, you’re not going to be heard properly.
Out of the 450 composers who applied for the labs this past year, only 10 were selected. Linda Oh, a New York City-based bassist, was one of them. Oh was paired with filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross and given a chance to practice writing music cues for their latest documentary, “Western” — a non-fiction film that follows the lives of residents of the border town of Eagle Pass, Texas. It screened last month at the Sundance Film Festival.
Over the course of the eight-day lab, Oh wrote cues for the film while attending workshops and completing assignments related to film scoring. She gained valuable insight from Skywalker Sound staff, including sound designer Pete Horner. Toward the end of the program, Oh and the other composers in the lab had the opportunity to see their work come to life in a scoring session.
The Sundance Institute’s Tabitha Jackson says these labs allow the participants to think differently about what sound and music can do to a film — and the experience can be demanding:
There’s some robust critique that goes on both of the composer’s work and the filmmaker’s work. But it’s done in this safe space so it feels like a very constructive place to be.
Though this is an educational opportunity for the composers, in some instances they do go on to work with the filmmakers they are paired with in the lab. That didn’t happen in the case of Oh and the Ross Brothers, but the siblings said their experience of working with Oh did change how they view film scoring.
Meanwhile, Oh is back in New York City, applying what she learned at the lab to the job of scoring a short film by Sabrina McCormick called "A Good Egg."
Oscars 2015: How 'Paranormal Activity' got Jason Blum to the Academy Awards
Jason Blum spent his formative years in the film business working under Harvey Weinstein at Miramax. In recent years he's made a name for himself and his company, Blumhouse Productions, with successful, low-budget genre films such as “Paranormal Activity,” “Insidious” and “The Purge.” Now, Blum is heading to the Academy Awards as a nominee for having been a producer on the Best Picture hopeful, "Whiplash."
Blum recently visited The Frame's studio to chat with host John Horn.
Interview Highlights:
How did "Whiplash" come to be, given your background and history?
It was a complete aberration. In fact, initially I was very skeptical. We have a great executive who runs production for us, his name is Couper Samuelson. He gave me the "Whiplash" script and I read it and I said, "Buddy, what are you doing? We make scary genre movies." He said, "I know, but I really love it and I wanted you to do it." And I said I was really on the fence about it. He very cleverly knew that one of my favorite filmmakers is Jason Reitman, and he was friends with Helen Esther Brooke, who works with Jason. And I think he secretly gave the script to them and said, "Would you guys come on to produce this, too?" They read it and loved it and they agreed to come on to produce. He came back to me and said, "What if you were able to produce this with Jason Reitman?" And I said, "I'm in."
Having worked with Harvey Weinstein on high-quality art films and then making your own low-budget horror films, did one prepare you better for the actual physical production of "Whiplash" than the other?
The low-budget production workhouse that we have prepared us for the production of the movie. We used a lot of our people — our production designer, our sound mixers. We really used all our crew and our system. We make all our movies for $3 million-to-$5 million and we shoot them all in L.A. And because we have such volume doing that, it was relatively easy to insert "Whiplash" into that system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYkuvB2f5XU
Why do you shoot in L.A. when "Whiplash" is set in New York?
We shoot in L.A. for a few reasons. First of all, when you make movies with the budgets we work with, there aren't very big incentives. It barely pays for the people that you have to travel to that state. More importantly, we do it because one of the ways we keep movie costs inexpensive is everyone works for scale or free. We take no producing fee and all the actors work for scale. And I think that it's one thing to ask an actor to work for scale and invest in the success of the movie if they get to say goodnight to their kids, but if they have to go to Vancouver or Louisiana and they're not making any money, it's a lot tougher sale. So I think we get a level of talent that is much, much higher because we keep most of our productions in Los Angeles.
You have made a film that is nominated for Best Picture. J.K Simmons is a favorite to win the best supporting actor Oscar. At the same time, you have your genre films that sometimes open with $20 million-to-$40 million at the box office. Which one is more satisfying; The awards attention or the box office results?
I have an answer to that question, but I'm not going to tell you what it is [laughs].
I know you. And it's the money not the hardware.
It's nothing to do with the money, for sure, but I get a lot of satisfaction. To me, the money represents winning a game or winning a puzzle. What motivates me is looking at a puzzle and putting the pieces together and making them all fit. There's a deep amount of satisfaction that comes with being the underdog and winning. Part of the fun of opening movies big is that our budgets are so small, there's a real thrill in that. Obviously, there's a real thrill in being nominated for an Academy Award, I would say that they're very, very close — one is not a clear favorite in my mind.
How did it feel to be at the Academy Awards nominations luncheon?
It felt great. It felt really exciting. The funny thing was [that] "Paranormal Activity" led to "Whiplash" in a very long circuitous way. It makes me smile to think that little movie could lead to sitting in a room with Clint Eastwood. I think it's kind of terrific.
What's the short version of how "Paranormal Activity" got you to "Whiplash"?
When you make successful movies people return your calls and listen to what you have to say. Before "Paranormal Activity," if I said I had a movie about a drummer, people would laugh at me. After "Paranormal Activity," people still laughed but a few didn't. So, when you have success in one thing, you get a little traction in something else.
How does the critical and award success of "Whiplash" benefit the genre films?
It definitely turns around because I don't make genre films to make money. I love genre movies ... To me, what's really important — whether you're making "Sinister" or "Whiplash" — is if the movies are great. That doesn't mean I only make great movies. I've made plenty of movies that haven't been great, but we strive to make great ones and different ones. I think "Whiplash," to a large degree, says to our genre filmmakers: Look, we're trying to make quality across all labels.
You've made sequels to "Insidious," "Paranormal Activity," "Purge," "Sinister," "Ouija." How about a "Whiplash" sequel? Is it impossible? Have you guys even discussed it vaguely?
It's definitively not possible. I am here to say: We are not doing a sequel to "Whiplash." [laughs] I'm looking forward to working with [writer/director] Damien Chazelle again on a new idea.