"Mystery Science Theater 3000" went off the air 17 years ago, but the cult TV show never lost its appeal. Now it's coming back; writer/director Gary Ross has never been happier as a filmmaker than when doing research for the Civil War drama, “Free State of Jones.”; a federal judge in Colorado dismissed the last of the lawsuits filed against the Cinemark movie theater chain in relation to the mass shooting in Aurora.
'Mystery Science Theater 3000,' RiffTrax & the MST3K reunion
“Mystery Science Theater 3000” went off the air 17 years ago, but the cult TV show never lost its cult appeal. On June 28, most of the show’s alumni will take part in a reunion in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the series was born, and on movie screens around the country.
The show sprang from the brain of Joel Hodgson, a standup prop comic working in Minneapolis in the late ’80s, who was given an unglamorous time slot at the local independent TV station. Trace Beaulieu, who knew Hodgson through the local comedy scene, got a call in 1988 to come down and help put on a show.
“He had a little set put up, and a couple of robots laying on the floor,” says Beaulieu, “and he said, ‘Why don’t you go pick up those puppets and we’ll start doing a show?’”
The very thin premise was that Hodgson was a custodian, sent into space with his robot buddies by two mad scientists, and forced to watch godawful movies. This provided the comedians an excuse to savage some of mankind’s greatest cinematic sins.
“It was very much like being trapped in a spaceship,” Beaulieu says. “We were trapped in a studio watching bad movies.”
The show caught on and found a rabid following. It was picked up by Comedy Central and later moved to the Sci-Fi Channel — lasting a total of 11 seasons and even yielding a feature film in 1996. But in 1993, Hodgson left the show under a cloud of conflict with its producer. Michael J. Nelson — a longtime writer on the show — took over as host.
After the show was canceled in 1999, everyone went their separate ways, but the call of mocking bad movies was like a siren song. In 2007, Hodgson formed a new group called Cinematic Titanic, a video-on-demand format modeled on “Mystery Science Theater.”
Meanwhile, in 2006, Mike Nelson and his robot pals from “MST3K” — Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett — formed RiffTrax.
“We’re about to celebrate — I guess? — ten years,” Corbett says.
“I’m gonna celebrate,” Murphy counters.
“... or mourn ten years,” says Corbett, laughing.
RiffTrax sidesteps copyright issues by offering mp3 commentary tracks, which fans can play alongside DVDs of everything from “Harry Potter” to “The Avengers.”
“We’d been looking for, and had been frustrated by the idea of being able to do more current, first-run films,” says Murphy, who voiced the robot Tom Servo on “MST3K” for nine seasons. “But then, here comes the age of podcasting, and suddenly realized we just have to do our commentary in the form of a podcast, and teach people how to sync it up with the latest Hollywood films, and boom — we’re off and running.”
Murphy says lampooning movies — new and old — just became a way of life for everyone who graduated from “Mystery Science Theater.” He blanches at the question: What would you be doing if you couldn’t do this?
“Boy, that gives me nightmares when I think about that,” Murphy says.
The “MST3K” reunion show — which will be simulcast in movie theaters around the country — offers a rebuttal to fan speculation that there were two warring factions created in the wake of Hodgson’s departure from the original series.
“Actually, nothing like that ever really existed,” Murphy says. “All of us worked together in different iterations, and some of us liked some of us more than others. But, generally, I think that we all ended up being reasonably good friends.”
But as Hodgson admitted(in a 2014 interview for the podcast “Pod People,” there was certainly pain to be healed.
“My journey with it has been really weird, because I left the show and I didn’t really want to,” Hodgson says. “I felt kind of like I was getting pushed out. The funny thing is, and the kind of the strange blessing of it all is, that it’s just kept going. And so it’s really been great just to be able, in my own time, to come back to it.”
Last November, Hodgson announced he was resurrecting “Mystery Science Theater 3000” with a brand new cast, including Patton Oswalt as a mad scientist and Jonah Ray, from “The Nerdist Podcast,” as the new host. At $5.7 million, Hodgson’s Kickstarter campaign became the highest-funded film and video project in the site’s history. It’s a reflection of how beloved the show was and is, and how — even though “MST3K” didn’t invent the idea — it’s basically the gold standard of movie riffing.
Beaulieu, who’s been doing his own live riffing around the country with another alumnus — Frank Conniff — says the show seems to be more popular than ever.
“We keep meeting little kids who’ve been introduced to the show by their parents, and they absolutely love it,” Beaulieu says. “So the humor is kind of timeless. Funny is funny.”
And bad movies are bad movies.
“Yeah,” he says. “They don’t get any better.”
The "Mystery Science Theater 3000" reunion will be seen in several Southern California movie theaters. Click here for locations.
Why Gary Ross quit 'The Hunger Games' to do 'Free State of Jones'
In Gary Ross' new film, "Free State of Jones," Matthew McConaughey plays Newton Knight, a medic in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. As dramatized in the new film, Knight deserted the army and led runaway slaves and other white deserters to launch a guerrilla war against the Confederacy.
The movie was directed and co-written by Ross, whose film credits include “Seabiscuit” and the first “Hunger Games” movie. Ross approached making the film the way a graduate student might take on a dissertation — through years and years of studying and reading and writing. In fact, Ross has created a website to accompany the film that highlights not only his decade of research, but also some of the liberties he took in dramatizing the true story.
The movie has polarized and mostly disappointed critics. “Free State of Jones” also struggled at the box office, opening this past weekend to just $7.6 million. But Ross tells The Frame he didn't expect a blockbuster or universal crowd-pleaser.
If I was trying to make a film that was about consensus or to be digestible or to be hugged by the largest cross section of the populace it probably wouldn't be this movie.
Below are more excerpts from the interview with “Free State of Jones” director and co-writer Gary Ross. He joined John Horn as the movie was hitting theaters to discuss his research and comment on the film's reception.
Interview Highlights
How much time did you spend on researching "Free State of Jones"?
The period where I was just working, and then I ended up studying at Harvard with John Stauffer and I just read, [was] two years. That was as exhilarating a time as I have ever had in my life. There was almost a liberation in reading for reading's sake. Normally when you do research as a filmmaker, [you think], Well, maybe I'll use this piece in this scene or this piece in that scene. You're always reading for the sake of assembling a story. This thing was so enormous and I needed so much context and there was so much to understand that that process stopped. I was just learning. That was honestly an incredibly exhilarating time for me. I call it an academic mid-life crisis. I disappeared into it.
There's worse mid-life crises to have.
There are! There was no sports car, so that's good. But I did, I completely disappeared into it. That was a wonderful experience of its own right.
Was it always the story itself that kept you motivated? This is a story of a remarkable man who did an amazing thing at an incredibly difficult era of American history that really wasn't well known and widely understood. Is that what kept you going or was it something else?
I think that and also a larger sweep even beyond him. This is social history. It's not a king or a president or a general, it's a normal guy who doesn't leave much written record. I was very moved by a guy named Steven Hahn, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a book called "The Nation Under Our Feet," which was a history of black political struggle from slavery to the Great Migration. He was able to document the most amazing things with just fragments of written record. I realized how encompassing the war on the ground was, and what this felt like from the ground up, and what this alliance and this coalition between Freedmen or between slave networks and Southern Unionists was. That became enthralling. So it wasn't just learning about Newton [Knight], it was learning about the world around Newton as well.
What role do you think popular culture plays in making sure that those stories are shared and understood? We live in a world where it's easy for audiences to conflate and confuse entertainment with truth.
That's why I do the website. Now we live in a world where we get so much of our history, whether we like it or not, from popular culture. Then we get a lot of it from Wikipedia, which even though it's self-curated by different people with different agendas and pieces of information, we rely on it as if it is always accurate. It's very often not. So the democratization of history is wonderful in some ways and fraught in others. I found that it was necessary to be rigorous in the research because I have a big responsibility. People are going to see this. I'm probably the first movie to deal with Reconstruction since "Gone With the Wind" and "Birth of a Nation," which were horrendous in the way that they dealt with Reconstruction. And who knows who's going to be able to deal with it after me. I don't see a lot of other Reconstruction [projects] lining up behind me. So I honestly look at this and think, Yeah, there's a big weight on my shoulder.
You're trying to do three different things at the same time with this movie and that is be accurate to history, be comprehensive about the issues of the time, and be entertaining to a movie audience. Sometimes those are not executable at the same time.
Do you want me to rank those in order of importance?
Well, I guess. Which one loses and which one wins and how do you balance that in terms of creating a fiction that tells the truth?
I think that it is entertaining. I think that it is a riveting story. I think it is completely engaging. But I would never put something in this movie for pure entertainment value. It would sacrifice what I feel the truth to be and what I've done research on and what I feel like I can substantiate. The first thing is that it be true, and that truth doesn't always mean literal. You have to fictionalize certain things and you can't always be specifically literal, but you can always tell the truth. For example, the character Mahershala Ali is an amalgamation of a variety of different characters who were plausible or existed in that era. I support that with a lot of sources on the website that aren't necessarily particular to Jones County. They're particular to other places though. There's a really simple example in the movie where there's a log bridge that was built by slave networks to navigate through the swamps. I got that from a woman named Margret Storey who's a wonderful historian at DePaul University who chronicled Unionism in Northern Alabama — not Southeast Mississippi. That log bridge did exist in Northern Alabama to aid and abet Southern Unionists in a coalition with slave networks. I borrowed that from Alabama and I put it in Mississippi, but it doesn't mean it's not true, it just means it's not specific. It was that kind of thing.
When you were making this movie, how conscious were you of the fact that you're a white filmmaker working with a white actor about a pivotal moment in black American history?
Well, sure. I'm completely aware of it, but I also think that's some of my responsibility. I don't see it as like, Oh don't tell that story because you're a white filmmaker, or Don't tell the story of class struggle and the potential alliance between class issues and racial issues. I didn't see that as, Oh, you better avoid that. No. Join that. That's my responsibility. I can avoid dealing with issues of race in America, but I really read, learned and studied a lot about it. I actually have a more acute responsibility because I know a little something. I quit "The Hunger Games" [series] to do this. I took no money to make it. It isn't like this is some frivolous concoction of mine. This is kind of a life's work. It's something I've studied very hard and something I care deeply about and something I do consider a responsibility.
As you said, this is maybe your life's work. You've put so much of yourself into this film. The New York Times loved the movie, but a lot of critics not so much. What's it like when, having spent so much time making the movie, the people whose opinions matter are divided over the film?
The A.O. Scott review was really moving to me. That was in the New York Times. But a lot of these things like on Rotten Tomatoes — it's like a den of film nerds. I think it's called den of geeks or film geeks-dot-com. It's just like a kid in a Quentin Tarantino shirt in his mother's basement with Chinese food all over him banging away [on a keyboard]. So I don't know. I think I feel fine. In a lot of ways it is very liberating. I wanted to put this into the world for the record. It was very important to me to make a film about Reconstruction that sets the record straight. It was important for me to tell a story that was comprehensive and epic.
Movie theater chain again found not liable for Colorado shooting
In 2012, James Holmes, a 24-year-old former PhD student from San Diego, went into a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora, Colorado with multiple firearms and began shooting. He killed 12 people, wounded 70 others and sent a shudder through movie fans who had to worry whether dark movie theaters are safe.
Holmes was convicted of murder and attempted murder and sentenced to 12 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Now, in two separate legal matters — one in state court, and one in federal court — the theater chain Cinemark was found not to be at fault for the attacks. In May, a jury found that Cinemark, which ran the Aurora theater, could not have prevented the rampage and was thus not liable in a civil action. Then, on June 24, a federal judge dismissed a similar case. In that case Cinemark was alleged to have violated a Colorado law for not exercising reasonable care to protect its customers.
Ted Johnson is a senior editor at Variety, and he covered the trial of the Aurora shooter. He spoke with The Frame host John Horn to explain how the two more recent cases focused on whether the movie theater was negligent.
Interview Highlights
What was at issue? What were the plaintiffs' accusations?
Were they not paying attention enough to what safety procedures they could actually put in that theater? Could they have put an alarm on the exit? Could they have employed more security officers on that evening back in 2012 which would have perhaps made some of the losses, injuries and deaths less when James Holmes burst into the theater?
The plaintiffs were arguing that the theater could have and might have alarmed its doors or had armed security. Was the deciding issue that Mr. Holmes would have bypassed those things regardless, or that he was very much planning to do this and those steps wouldn't have meant anything?
Yeah, I think it's probably a combination of both. To prove a negligent claim within the state of Colorado, the plaintiffs in the case — those being the families — had to prove that the theater's negligence was the "proximate cause" of the victims' injuries. The judge took a look at that threshold and said, Wait a minute — the theater was not the proximate cause of the victims' injuries, it was James Holmes, the shooter. He premeditated it and who knows if they had those security precautions in place, [whether] that would have mitigated the injuries or mitigated the deaths that evening. He pretty much rejected the whole idea that the movie theater was negligent.
You covered the trial of James Holmes. How did he get into the theater and what did he come into the theater with in terms of guns?
He came into the theater in military garb and had several weapons with him. He came through a side door in the theater. There was evidence that he scoped it out beforehand. That again is a defense for Cinemark, that they couldn't have anticipated that something like this would actually happen. I think the irony in this case is that now that there has been this shooting, it raises questions about what kinds of security theaters should have. What is the precaution that they should take in order to make themselves not liable should something like this happen again?
I guess then the court's decision in this most recent case is probably good news for theater owners. At the same time a lot of states are passing looser gun laws. I can remember a couple of examples over the last year, like the "Straight Outta Compton" premiere, where guests had to go through metal detectors. Where do theaters stand in terms of checking people who are coming into their auditoriums?
It's so interesting because after a [Louisiana] theater shooting [when] "Trainwreck" opened last summer, a number of security professionals posed this question: What should theaters actually be doing right now? The whole idea of metal detectors, they dismissed that. A lot of the security professionals dismissed that out of hand. I'm not so sure that they would now. It would be an incredible expense for movie theaters across the country, but there have been so many of these mass shootings since then that it goes back to the definition of a foreseeable incident. Cinemark argued that what happened at that Aurora, Colorado movie theater was unforeseeable. The judge and the jury in another civil case really sided with Cinemark's position, but the more that we see of these theater shootings, the more a plaintiff could come around and say, This is within the realm of possibilities because we've had a number of these theater shootings and you should have taken greater precaution. Perhaps that precaution in the future is going to be metal detectors.