Hey folks, here is an interview that Anton Sirius did way the hell back during Toronto, but that I lost... and was never published on AICN. Who is Dan Clark? Heh... Well just read and find out... then become a fan...
Greetings, star kinder! I am back, with a little bit of flotsam from the film festival. It seems that I forgot to transcribe my chat with Dan Clark, who wrote and directed and starred in that madcap midnight romp The Item, as well as being a children's show creator and Peabody Award winner and one HELL of a model American. I'll keep this relatively short and to the point, rather than bore you with tales of his days as an underwear model. Besides, reading about someone doing underwear model poses in a crowded bar doesn't have quite the same oomph as actually seeing it in person. But if you fine folk insist, I can type up the rest of the whole, crazy mess. Be seeing you!
Anton Sirius: So what could you possibly have been thinking… er, what was the inspiration behind The Item?
Dan Clark: We have this little company called Wandering Monkey Entertainment. When we first came to Los Angeles we couldn't get work to save our lives. Do you remember the show Night Flight? We called it Bong TV. We all worked on it, and it was two hours of weird clips. It was music videos, and student films… it was hit and miss. I used to watch it when it was on the USA Network, when I was a kid, I loved it. Then when I got to Los Angeles that was the only job I could get, was segment producer on Night Flight. They gave you $250 a pop and you'd go find a bunch of weird shit, slap it together. So it was mainly finding and editing, finding and editing. We proposed these hosts for the show that would be these puppet characters. They didn't like it. So I shot a demo to prove to them that it would rock. And I got Billy Barty, famous little person, and I got Corky Nemec from Parker Lewis Can't Lose who was looking to do something, and they agreed to be in this weirdo thing. So I made this freaky little thing, and the Night Flight people hated it. But we floated it around Hollywood, just cold mailings because we didn't know anyone, and we got a development deal at MTV and HBO and NBC. We didn't have an agent or a manager or a lawyer, we didn't even know what a development deal was. That's how we started to get little gigs and stuff. I wrote PSA films for Fox Kids Network for a while and I won the George Foster Peabody Award. Then I did some bumpers for MTV and they were kind of successful, and Fox saw the bumpers and asked me if I would do a pilot. So I did a puppet sitcom pilot called "Beyond Family". I wrote it and directed it and played the two lead puppets, and my partner Don produced it. It had a lot of gratuitous vomiting in it. Fox thought it was just obscene.
AS: I guess they hadn't seen Meet the Feebles then.
DC: No, they hadn't. I had.
AS: See, if you'd shown them that tape beforehand…
DC: Mine would have looked like Little House on the Prairie, yeah. So, they hated it and they told me to go away. "Thanks for wasting all that money, Dan. Piss off with your barfing puppets." But the Jim Henson company saw it. They always thought we'd be Ren and Stimpy to their Disney because this is what we were doing. They loved it! And we'd already become friends with Sid and Marty Krofft. They were sort of the godfathers of our company. So then Henson offered us an overall deal, a first look deal where they would give us a big chunk of dough and then they would have first dibs on anything we created for the year. But I fine-tuned that contract and made them stipulate that it had to be for children or family. It had to be a kids or family product, and anything outside of that they wouldn't have first dibs on it or any rights to it, they couldn't look at it or anything like that. So they said "Yeah" and they gave me a bunch of money up front. We were really broke and kinda stupid because we really wanted to make a little movie. But we're very effects driven- we like creatures and 3D animation... but we like lo-tech hi-tech. We like to use really expensive machines to create a kind of Terry Gilliam-esque environment. So we decided we were going to make a little movie, and at the time everyone was ripping off Reservoir Dogs and doing hip little movies about a bunch of dysfunctional criminals who turn on each other and shoot each other, and I kind of dug those movies, but there were so many of them. And I wanted to do that, but I knew that if I did that I'd be one of those guys doing that. And I was stuck. So what do I do? So I thrashed around for weeks, bitching about it to my friends. "Should we do it? Should we make a little..." "No!" And then I looked at us, as personalities and as performers... 'cause we're not Harvey Keitel, you know, it's going to be pretty sad. We're not going to play gangsters very effectively. But we all wanted to act in it- most of us are Second City trained, and we all have acting backgrounds. So I was walking around Sunset Boulevard at 2 in the morning, and someone was shooting a movie in front of a bar, and the movie was Swingers. I looked at them shooting, and I had money in the bank, I had suddenly become rich but I hadn't spent any of it yet. So I watched them shoot Swingers for a few minutes, and hung out around the set, and I just become insanely, psychotically jealous, and I went home and I called all my friends, woke everybody up and said "That's it! We're making a movie!" And then I crashed watching the Seven Faces of Dr. Lau, which I grew up on and was one of my favorite movies as a kid.
AS: That's a great movie.
DC: And I liked the scene where the rich guy who's ruining the town goes to the circus, Tony Randall's weird circus, and he goes into that room and there's the serpent in a cage, little stop-motion, cross-cut, primitive George Pal stop-motion with a nice little hand puppet, and they have this exchange, this philosophical discussion, and the serpent takes on his facial characteristics and has the little rubber cigar in his mouth and blows smoke. Well, that scene had always stuck with me, and I thought "Oh! Ohhh!" So that was the leap-off point. And then I knew I wanted to do something that was goofy, that took the piss out of that 'bunch of dysfunctional gangsters' genre. And I was tired of John Woo wannabes, just exhausted by this Sam Peckinpah through John Woo, back to America, dogs eating each other's vomit thing with guns. There were a lot of good, modern, hip-hop, blacksploitation flicks happening that I think were doing really neat gun action. But it wasn't happening in the wide-angle lens arena. So I decided to embrace this parody of the big gun moment. So I would never reload, and I took all the arcing tension out from between shootouts and threw that in gratuitously. And I like anime a lot, and I was always interested in trying to include copious amounts of blood the way anime can. We couldn't do those lovely ribbons of blood, that sort of thing, the way anime can, but we could fill fire extinguishers with fake blood and tape them to people.
AS: (laughing) I was going to ask you how you pulled off some of those shots...
DC: Fire extinguishers! Fire extinguishers full of blood! It's horribly messy and smelly. So those were all the inspirations for the movie, and all that just came together. And I'm a Peter Greenaway fan, and I like how Greenaway color-codes everything...
AS: I actually just came out of 8 ½ Women.
DC: People are hating it! Did you like it?
AS: I loved it! Greenaway's fantastic! (Here we digressed and talked about Greenaway. Verdict: He rocks.)
DC: Anyway, two things I got from him: One, Greenaway always color-codes everything, but we had no budget. I said I was rich from all the Jim Henson money, but rich is relative. So I figured I could make everything orange. We wouldn't have the full palate, but we'll have an orange room, a gray room and a green room. And I'll make sure that most of the characters have different colored hair, and that will be my Greenaway homage. And I got Howard (Drossin) to do a score for us that was very much Michael Nyman inspired. Howard's really great, and it's his first movie, and he's classically trained, and he's a Michael Nyman head like I am. So we were able to figure it out, and we did a real plodding, marching Michael Nyman thing. And I didn't do any pop culture references. No references to TV shows or media, and I never mention what city they're in. That's another thing I like about Greenaway's films too, that there's no context.
AS: While we're talking about the music, I have to ask you about that really awesome junglish Powerhouse cover that you use a bit of. What is it? Where can I get it?
DC: It won't be in the actual movie, since we just got a festival license. It's a rip-off that we manipulated from Mortal Combat.
AS: Really?
DC: I think it's the scene where they're arriving, and the first scene of training camp I think.
AS: I don't think that's it, there's no Raymond Scott in Mortal Combat. You know Raymond Scott's Powerhouse? Carl Stalling used tons of Scott for his Warner Brothers, Bugs Bunny stuff.
DC: Which scene? The shooting of the drag queens?
AS: No... yes, right at the beginning of that.
DC: Our music editor grabbed that. I don't know what it is. E-mail me later, if you really want to know.
AS: Oh. OK. I do want to know.
DC: We're going to go through music hell, when we take this to tape. We're going to have to cut about 15 minutes from it.
AS: Oh! That's too bad.
DC: It's too long.
AS: No it's not.
DC: Yeah, it's flabby sometimes. I've watched it with a couple of audiences, and even the audiences that liked it thought I was over-blabbing on them sometimes. I'll tell you what scene it is: it's the scene right after Alex and Rita are standing in front of the life-shell talking about picking up Chinese food, and then Alex walks into the living room and they're all sitting around freaked out, it's all the conversation they have before they decide to open the life-shell. All that character stuff and exposition and background is dealt with in the desert, and then re-addressed at dinner. I have a cut without that back at the house, with some other trims here and there, and it works. Actually I've successfully cut just under ten minutes from it, and I think it's zippier.
AS: What's the final running time going to be then?
DC: Right now it's 103 minutes. So it could be cut just a little tiny bit.
AS: I thought those conversations were part of the whole vibe, though. You take the pop culture references out of that dialogue from all the Tarantino rip-offs and what have you got left?
DC: You've just got people talking to each other. Yeah, I know... it's interesting. A lot of very crass distributors have said to our executive producers "Take out all the talk, leave the violence, we're in business." I get beat up over it a lot. The Variety review, the first paragraph pointed out the irony of me making kids television shows, then making the Item. Second paragraph is "This movie needs to lose 15 pounds right away." And that's a diss that I got around the Internet a lot. So it kind of worked on me. And I messed with it, and I kind of think it's successful a little shorter.
AS: Well, I haven't seen the cut version, only this one, so...
DC: You'll just have to wait and see.
The Item should be out on video some time next year.
