If you weren't around for the premiere of Late Night with David Letterman in 1982, then chances are you're not aware how much he — and the team of writers, producers and comic talent that put on the show five nights a week — changed the face of late-night TV. Dave challenged, and in some cases, blew up the conventions of the talk-show genre and rewrote the playbook that Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson and the Jimmys — Kimmel and Fallon — are using today.
Although Worldwide Pants made its first foray into film production with the 2005 indie feature Strangers with Candy, Burnett has expanded the company's presence in the medium with two projects that also involve him personally. In September, he made his directorial debut with We Made This Movie, a funny, unsentimental coming-of-age comedy that he co-wrote with Beckerman. Worldwide Pants is a producer of that film as well as Burnett's next picture, which was announced in mid-October: an adaptation of Jonathan Evison's novel, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving.
Movieline spoke to Burnett about his move into film, which, as you might expect from someone who cut his show-business teeth on Dave's groundbreaking NBC show, has been anything but conventional. Working with a miniscule budget and determined to remain true to the film's do-it-yourself plot, Burnett and Beckerman worked with a cast of unknowns and crowd-sourced the music through Red Bull Soundstage. They also orchestrated an online premiere via an alliance with SnagFilms, which Burnett talks about in the interview.
There's also the plot of We Made This Movie. Available via iTunes and other digital formats, it is not your mother's coming-of-age movie. The film follows the exploits of Eric "LeBron" James and his crew of high-school friends in fictional Buckstown, NY, who plan to escape the drudgery of working in their local chicken-processing plant by making a Jackass-meets-Sacha Baron Cohen-style movie that will make them famous.
LeBron's hare-brained plan involves getting the movie into the hands of hometown hero Bill Pullman, who makes a memorable cameo in the movie, but even before that happens, there's a little catch. Like so many teens looking for fame in the age of YouTube, they have cameras but no talent, and their attempts to film comedy skits that, for instance, involve one character performing celebrity impressions while sitting on a toilet, and LeBron donning a chicken suit and walking through town with what looks like a massive erection end up being funny for all of the wrong reasons. But as you watch the teens' screen dreams bite the dust, another accidental — and realistic — movie emerges about friendship and coming of age in a small town.
Movieline: Tell me about your next project first. I read that you just bought the rights to an interesting book.
Rob Burnett: It’s this lovely little book called The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving that I’m hoping to adapt into a film. It’s by Jonathan Evison, and I just fell in love with it. It’s a beautiful little story about this guy who has suffered a great tragedy in his life. He gets a job as a caregiver and starts taking care of this kid with Muscular Dystrophy. The guy is emotionally paralyzed, and the kid is actually paralyzed. It’s very touching, but what I responded to is it’s not maudlin at all. It’s a kind of a buddy movie where they go on the road to find this kid’s father. If I can find a way to do it justice in writing a good script, it could be a nice little movie. I’m really excited about it.
That’s what I really like about We Made This Movie. In the way that good comedy tells the truth, this movie is unsentimental about dreams.
It absolutely is about dreams. There’s this adolescent energy about LeBron. He doesn’t want to go work at that chicken plant. He’s got big dreams. We’re living in a world right now where, in terms of making a movie, anyone can do it. But just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean you can. [Laughs]. You know? LeBron and his friends are very naïve. Even their plan is naïve: they’re going to get their movie in the hands of Bill Pullman, who’s from their hometown. And that alone is going to make them famous. I’m not sure Bill Pullman himself can get a movie made.
What we love about the movie is that they try and they persevere. Jon Beckerman and I wrote this together, and there’s a lot of similarity between this and Ed, the show we did on NBC for four years. There’s a real bittersweet quality to the movie. What these characters don’t realize is the thing they really have is each other. They have friendship. They have these high school bonds with each other. And in the end, that’s largely what their movie becomes about. They don’t realize that. They don’t set out to do that.
Jon and I have always been very interested in doing a coming of age movie. I love that time of life. Those memories you have; the bonding that goes on there. Your life is still wet cement. But we never quite found an access point until we got the idea: what about a group of kids who are trying to make a comedy film but accidentally make a coming-of-age movie?
Some of the early scenes of the movie, where, for instance, the kids film the ‘Chicken with a Boner’ man-on-the-street segment and put up all those index cards with dubious ideas on them, seem to be inspired by ‘Late Show’ segments. That could have been Chris Elliott in a chicken suit instead of LeBron.
We actually shot some of the stuff Letterman remote style. We were out on the street shooting with real people. So, yeah, a lot of it was influenced structurally by the way we do Letterman. But what we thought was interesting was that, unlike Dave or Chris Elliott or Sacha Baron Cohen, our kids aren’t good at what they’re doing. If Chris Elliott were ever to do Chicken with a Boner, he would do it ironically because he’d be making fun of it. These guys are doing Chicken with a Boner as if it’s the funniest thing in the world.
In that scene where LeBron is suggesting that they shit into a taco and eat it, it’s so misguided. The thing is, it’s not that far away from the guys at Jackass might do, but whatever you think of the guys at Jackass, they’re really, really good at doing Jackass. LeBron and his friends aren’t even good at that. They’re not fearless, and they’re really not funny.
I really liked the scenes where LeBron and some of the other guys show up at their friend Smitty’s house and find him with his sick mother. To me, Smitty is the stand-up comic of the group and those scenes show that comedy often does not come from a pretty place.
The interesting thing and the challenging thing about the movie is we’re telling an accidental story. The kids are making a movie that they don’t know they’re making. So, in a different movie, if you’re telling the story of a character who’s taking care of a sick mother, at some point, you just cut to him with his sick mother. We couldn’t do that in this movie.
Smitty, in some ways, sums that up. He’s kind of a bastard. He’s screwing up the movie and not taking it seriously from the very first scene. But then we see that not only is this kid taking care of his sick mother, he’s taking care of his brothers, too. Clearly, the father is gone, and he’s holding this all together without a word. You start to see where all of this deep cynicism comes from. That’s kind of the trick of this whole movie. And I think to some extent Smitty’s character sums it up better than any of the other characters.
Where did you find such a funny cast of unknowns?
The cast is phenomenal. They’re all brand new, really. Arjay Smith, who played LeBron had done some television here and there. And Michael Charles Roman, who played Smitty, had done a lot of commercials as a kid. But the rest of them literally had to join SAG to be in the movie. We auditioned hundreds of kids for these roles. I had open casting calls at NYU. I auditioned 300 kids in one day. We did have casting directors in a traditional way. Barbara McNamara on the East coast, and Bonnie Zane, who cast Ed for us, found Arjay on the West coast. We wanted kids that were funny and could think on their feet, but who could also be a fresh brand that no one had seen before.
Given the idea of the movie, we didn’t want to have famous people in the cast. And that was kind of a guiding thought for everything we did. If you look at the direction, I didn’t use any dollies or cranes. The camera is always justified by being held by one of the characters. The movie is intended to have the look and feel of something the kids in the cast would have done themselves. And I think by and large, this is what it would have looked like had they done it themselves.
They’re convincing as friends. How did you get them to bond?
We shot this movie in 21 days.
Holy shit. Seriously?
Yes, that’s the appropriate reaction. And when you’re going to shoot for 21 days, you don’t have the luxury of time. If it takes four days to bond on the set, that’s 25 percent of your movie. So, I literally took all of these kids, and I had them live at my house for a week before we shot the movie. Translation: My wife is a saint. They all came to my house in Connecticut, and we also spent some time out at the beach in Long Island. And these kids, as only kids in their early 20s can do, became the best of friends very quickly.
In fact, I distinctly remember the first morning of the first day of shooting. We were living in a Holiday Inn Express in Shelton, Conn. God bless the people of Shelton. That’s all I’ll say. We had all moved to this Holiday Inn Express, and we were going to be there for 21 days. The first morning before we went to set, I looked over and I saw one of the kids fart in front of the other kids and not care. The other kids were cracking up about it, and I’m like, we’ve done our job. They’re bonded. Let’s go to work.
You made an interesting decision to premiere this movie online.
When we finished the film, we met with our agents at CAA and they said, ‘look, this is not a traditional movie. There are no stars. It’s not a horror movie. The concept is actually somewhat sophisticated. It’s not an easily marketed concept. So, they said, “We can do a limited run and hope you catch fire, but you will have to invest at least a few million dollars to give it a proper opening. Well, this whole movie cost $1 million to make, so—
It didn’t seem logical to take that path.
And then a friend, [filmmaker] Andrew Jarecki said there’s this place called Snag Films you should know about. I think he’d just made a deal with them to release Capturing the Friedmans. Andrew said, “You should really sit down with the CEO Rick Allen. Well, he and Snag really responded to the film. They got it, and I just had a good feeling. I liked what the company was doing. I felt like we were coming at a right time for them as well. They originally started out with documentaries. And now they really want to be the destination site for indie films on the web.
So Snag Films came up with this concept of an online premiere. And on Thursday, Sept. 20, we had a huge premiere at the School of Visual Arts theater in Manhattan. There were 650 people there. We had two screens. We had a red carpet. The turnout was amazing. There was tons of press and paparazzi. Howard Stern came.
How does an online premiere work?
The idea was that the premiere would stream online for free. So, at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time, our cameras went up, and we were live on the web. And we had been promoting this all along. So anyone that went to We Made This Movie.com could watch this thing through Snag films and check out the red carpet. We had interviews with the cast. We had Tom Cavanaugh and Michael Ian Black [formerly of Ed] come out and host it. Jim Gaffigan did stand-up. We did all these extras. And we had a tape of celebrities congratulating us in a backhanded way that was pretty funny: Ray Romano and Brad Garrett, J.J. Abrams, Julie Bowen, Kelly Ripa and Stephen Colbert.
Probably the biggest laugh on the tape came when my assistant, Justin Tasolides, who has the perfect look of a stooge, appeared on camera in the middle of all these celebrities to tell us to have a great premiere. And then the next person up was Tracy Morgan who said: “Who the fuck is that guy?” If you signed into the premiere, it was free and you got all this extra stuff. And then it goes to all the VOD sites: iTunes, Amazon and cable. That’s the distribution plan. We’ll see how we do.
You also had an interesting partner for the music that’s used in the film.
When we finished the movie, it cost about a million dollars. We had a big question about what we were going to do about music. We didn’t have a lot of money for music, but more importantly, big important music doesn’t fit this do it yourself movie. LeBron wouldn’t have access to some big song by Maroon 5. We thought wouldn’t it be cool if LeBron’s friends all made the music?
Someone we worked with said, there’s this website for up-and-coming musicians, Red Bull Soundstage. So Red Bull saw the movie and fell in love with it. It’s in keeping with the whole Red Bull brand of young people trying stuff. So, we got together with them and developed a contest to crowd source the music for this movie. We put four scenes up onto the Red Bull Soundstage website and said, “Here are the emotions we’re looking for in these scenes. You make the music and give it to us.”
I honestly expected 30 or 40 songs. We got 1,200 submissions from bands. And, honest to God, Jon and I listened to every one of them. And they were really good. We loved the music so much that we ended up putting 22 songs in the movie in places where we weren’t even going to put music. So we have a soundtrack that is unbelievable. We have 24 songs on the soundtrack: 22 from the movie and two that we used on the trailer. All of them are from unknown bands. All of them are from Red Bull Soundstage. And one of the bands ended up getting a shot on the Letterman show as a result of the contest.
Which band?
Of Gentlemen and Cowards. They’re college kids from Canada, and they were so excited. They were standing on the stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater and there’s Paul Shaffer. There’s David Letterman. It was everything that this movie is. The levels of it are so cool if you really think about it because the characters in the movie are all trying to become something. The actors that play those characters are in the same space. They’re all trying to become something. The musicans are all trying to become something. And though John and I are fairly established in television, as filmmakers, we’re also trying to become something. This is the first movie I ever directed. We’re all in this together. And the energy of that is very compelling.
I’m not your shrink, but I suspect you’re someone who has realized at least a good chunk of your dreams. If the kids in your movie were real kids, what would you say to them about how far they should follow their dreams? At what point do you acknowledge, okay, I don’t have what it takes to be a filmmaker. I’ve got to go to Plan B.
I’m probably the worst person to ask this question because I honestly believe if it’s in your bones and this is the thing that you want to do, then you have no choice but to do it. Maybe there comes a point where you have to feed yourself, and you’ve got to do something to get by, and you have to compromise. But I don’t think you’ll ever really be satisfied in your life unless you give that all you have for as long as you have.
I was very lucky, but I remember very distinctly the anxiousness and the angst I had in high school and college. I had no connections to show business at all. I grew up in a small town in New Jersey. My father was a dentist. I didn’t know anybody in show business, and I just had this desire to be a writer more than anything. I applied to law school, and I just thought, if I go there, it’s going to be horrible for me. And luckily, when I was 22, I got an internship at the Letterman show. Once I landed inside those walls, I thought, well, now I’m in show business. Good luck with anybody pushing me out because I’m not going any place. I got lucky and not everyone is going to get where they want to go, but what I always felt was, if one day I’m going to end up being a lawyer, the only way that would be somewhat palatable is if I left it all on the table on the way there.
What does Bill Pullman think of the movie?
I’ve got to say something about Bill Pullman. He is actually from Hornell, New York, a very small upstate town that would be similar to Buckstown, where he is an enormous fish in a very small pond. He’s a great actor — no question — but there are lots of great actors. What’s amazing about him is, he has a full sense of himself. When we described this movie to him and sent him the script, he completely got it. The first thing he said to us, was “I can’t get a film made!”
I thought that was so cool because in Hollywood there are guys that are a tenth of what Bill Pullman is, and if you gave this script to them, they’d be insulted in some way. And he was the perfect guy for this. This whole story is much less funny if it’s George Clooney or Brad Pitt.
There’s something about Bill’s scene with LeBron that grounds the film in a certain reality. He’s sitting there signing some crappy children’s book that he’s written, but LeBron and his friends can’t realize that. To them it’s “Oh my god, there he is: the gatekeeper!” Bill so nails the reality of that scene. I was blown away by it. Yes, he’s playing himself, but it’s a very nuanced performance. He’s a little put off by LeBron, but he’s polite. He’s fatigued. You can feel that he’s been through this before. It’s very, very real. In that scene, you’re watching LeBron’s dreams crash upon the shore, and I thought Pullman did a great job.
Smitty has a great line in the movie where he says that the actor pretending to be the guy who cured cancer will always be more famous than the guy who actually cured cancer. What are your thoughts on the future of fame? Is there a celebrity apocalypse coming?
I like that line as well. It’s true. There would be a guy who cured cancer and then Brad Pitt would play him in a movie -- and he would win awards. But to answer your question: celebrity and fame have always existed and will continue to exist. There’s some fascination with celebrity that is in the hardwiring of humans. Perhaps it goes all the way back to cave man days where some dude killed some Buffalo in a spectacular way, and he’s standing there telling everybody the story and, suddenly, that’s the famous guy. And I think technology has a weird effect on all of it because, now, not only is the dude telling you about killing the buffalo, he’s on a giant movie or video screen and is literally larger than you.
I think that all stays. But the thing that’s already changing is that the novelty of anyone being able to make a film or a YouTube video or a song is wearing off. In the early days of YouTube, it was, “Look at this! There’s a kid playing a guitar in his basement. He’s pretty good!” But now it’s gotten to the point where it’s more like, “Well, there are a lot of kids playing their guitars in the basement.” Eventually, it’s going to come down to how well you can play your guitar. That’s where this is all headed. At some point, you’re going to have to be good at stuff to get where you want to go.
So many YouTube videos are like mini traffic accidents. You’re watching them because there’s a certain amount of horror involved.
That’s exactly it. Imagine a world where baseball gloves cost $100,000. What would baseball look like if that were the case? And then imagine a world where, all of a sudden, baseball gloves become $10. What does baseball look like then? Baseball gets better because there are more people playing — there’s a bigger pool — but at the same time, there’s lot of baseball. The thing is, you and I don’t spend a lot of money going to watch guys in beer league baseball. We still go to watch the Yankees. That’s what’s happening with filmmaking. Everybody can do it, but now it’s all about distribution. You can make a movie, but now go and get somebody to watch your movie.
Has Letterman seen the movie?
Yeah, he’s been super supportive. It’s a Worldwide Pants production. It’s part of our company. I think our association with Snag and Red Bull is good for Jon and me, good for Dave and good for Worldwide Pants. We’re a company that should be doing things in new ways.
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