I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell

It’s Day 3 of the Final Mix and I’m sitting here on the stage while our Sound Re-Recording Mixer, Chris David, works through the pre-dub on Reel Three. How’s that for a pretentious amount of film terminology? Yeah, suck it. With nothing to do but wait for the pre-dub to wrap up, I thought I’d address an aspect of the score that Tucker brought up the other day. This is what he said:

“What’s so funny is that sitting here writing, I can’t remember a single thing about the music in either scene. But I think that’s the point with most score. If it fits the scene perfectly, you don’t notice it, you just feel it, and it enhances the scene. I don’t know if this is making sense, maybe Nils can explain better, but I felt like the score brought out the essence of the scene in the music.”

Having spent the last two days mixing the sound for the first two reels of the movie, what has become most apparent to me is that score is not only a surgically precise enterprise, but it is the single greatest tool at the filmmakers disposal for elevating emotion. Effects, ADR, Walla all help, but they really only establish a baseline of emotion. They are a sonic basecoat on the tapestry that will become the sound design. Songs, or source music, often complement emotion in a scene beautifully, but rarely do they work perfectly or exactly. And it makes sense when you consider that most songs are conceived of and recorded on their own merits, for their own sake, prior to any consideration of their suitability for a movie that, often times, has not even been made yet. Score, on the other hand, is conceived of and recorded concurrently or after the fact by a composer hired by the producers of a film for the express purpose of complementing, elevating, and sometimes supplementing that film’s emotional content.
This is especially important for broad comedies like this one, where emotion tends to find itself buried underneath humor, despite emotion being the primary focus in some of those scenes often times. For instance, it is possible to have a sentimental character moment sprinkled with fat girl jokes, but if you don’t bring the sentimentality out sufficiently then it simply becomes “the fat girl scene”. By hitting the emotional spikes with complimentary tones, or creating those spikes with crescendo, the score helps to flip the focus.
Score also helps tip the scales in those scenes that, sans score, could be interpreted in opposing ways. Is he being mean because he’s mad? Or is he being mean because he’s sad? Is she crying tears of relief or tears of regret? Score takes the viewer by the hand, or the ear, and guides them toward the emotions the filmmakers intended to express and the conclusions they intended to reach.
This is the idea that Tucker was circling around when he wrote that “the score brought out the essence of the scene…” And it is this idea that requires a composer to craft his score with surgical precision. The fact that Jim Venable pulled it off in so many important scenes is a testament not only to his ability but to the magnitude of our excitement as well.
– — –
*There is so much to say about score that I have neither the time nor the expertise to discuss intelligently, so I figured I would leave you with a couple videos about Hollywood’s pre-eminent composer and two of his most important achievements.

We are coming up to the end of the post-production process, and this means it’s time to deal with distributors. I have written several posts about distributors; about what a distributor does and why you need one, and about how you get a distribution deal. In that post I described the different basic ways you can secure distribution. They are:

1. Get a rough cut done, put a bunch of distributors in a screening room, show it to all of them at once, and make a deal.
2. Show it to distributors one by one, and see if we can generate escalating deals that way.
3. Show it at AFM or Sundance or some other festival or film market, and sell it there.
4. Go directly to theater chains and try to make our own deal, essentially acting as our own distributor.

We thought about and debated each option, and decided on #1. Except we aren’t showing the rough cut to the distributors. We are going to show them the full, finished, final cut, replete with MPAA rating, in front of a real audience at a real theater. Why’d we pick this option? Basically, because we have an awesome movie that everyone who has seen has flipped shit over. There is no better way to make a distributor love a movie than to show them the audience loving it.
We are having the distributor screening on or about March 15th, which means we should have a distributor attached by, say March 20th, give or take a week because these deals always take forever to work out all the details. The distributor will probably want to make a big announcement in the trades before I can break the news on the blog, so expect to hear the “official” press announcement sometime in the first week of April. But once we close the deal, I’ll let you guys know and sneak you hints about who it is. And again, these dates are only rough estimates, and of course, as we go through this process, I will do everything I can to keep you guys as updated as I can, given the constraints I am under.
So because we are basically in a holding pattern until the distributor screening, unless something big comes up, I won’t be posting until at the very least March 10th or so. Also, I am going to be busy because I am going to Mexico from Feb 25th to March 1st for a wedding, and then to Germany from March 2nd to March 6th to promote the release of the German edition of my book. Nils won’t be posting either, as it is his wedding I am attending in Mexico.
What you need to take from this post:
-The blog will (probably) go black until right before the distributor screening in mid-March (then come back with a vengeance b/c of all the activity).
-Expect an announcement about the distributor in early April.
-Once we attach the distributor, then we’ll decide on and announce the release date (probably August or September, but that’s just a guess).
-Once the release date is announced, we’ll release a teaser and/or trailer.
-Then it’s a fucking race to the finish.
EDIT: Oh yeah, I’ll post this now since I will be in Mexico when it happens:

February 28th is the one year anniversary of this blog launching.
That’s fucking crazy to think about. I almost can’t even remember that, it feels so long ago. I have lived multiple lifetimes just over this past year. This subject requires its own post, I’ll do this later, but wow.
Comment and discuss

We get TONS of questions about the music in the movie, both in person at the screenings and through email/messageboard. I didn’t really understand why until I saw the movie with the score and the songs in it. Then it all made sense–the movie was like, at least 25% better with the right music in it.
I was kinda shocked. I mean, I knew music was important, but damn. It REALLY makes a difference. This movie was killing in screenings with the dogshit temp music we put in; I can’t wait to see how it does with the good stuff in.
There are two types of music in the movie: There is score, which I talked about some here, and there is what’s called “source” music.
“Score” is music that is written by a composer specifically for this movie. The composer we hired is really good. His name is James Venable, and he has done score for a lot of comedies.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect when he showed us what he had done, but goddamn–it was hilarious. Two very important scenes specifically, he just nailed the essence of them. I don’t even know what exactly he did or how he did it, I just know that when I watched them backed with his music, they were just…so much better. It was the same scene, amplified and accentuated.
What’s so funny is that sitting here writing, I can’t remember a single thing about the music in either scene. But I think that’s the point with most score. If it fits the scene perfectly, you don’t notice it, you just feel it, and it enhances the scene. I don’t know if this is making sense, maybe Nils can explain better, but I felt like the score brought out the essence of the scene in the music.
“Source” music is basically just the same normal songs you hear on the radio and have on your iPod. I think we are about 25% score, 75% source in this movie, so picking out the songs is a very important job.
You may be thinking “How hard is it to just find a song you like that fits the movie?” Well, finding the right song is not as easy as you think, but if that were the only thing you had to do, it wouldn’t be that hard. Shit, Nils and I could bang that out in a day just out of our iTunes. But like everything in movies, there is much more to it that makes it much harder than it looks.
Once you pick the song you like, you have to license all the rights, which usually means getting permission from at least two, sometimes three different people (or corporations), AND you have to negotiate the price, not with one person, but with all of them. At least half the songs we wanted for various scenes we couldn’t get because of price or clearances. Then the paperwork–ugh. You wouldn’t believe. It is such a clusterfuck.
Thankfully we have a person who does just this. He is the music supervisor, who is Chris Mollere on our movie. Most of the time the music supervisor doesn’t really have much creative input, but in our case, Chris actually picked out a majority of the songs. And he really got us good ones, and ones that were cheap too, which is not easy. For example:
I REALLY wanted the song “Highway to Hell” for a road montage scene. Well, AC/DC charges a shitload to use their songs, like more than our whole music budget, so that was a non-starter. Instead, Chris found us this obscure Australian rock band who sounds just like AC/DC, but are super cheap. The song he got was different than, but just as good as, “Highway to Hell,” and fit the scene perfectly. And in addition to being cheap, it comes with the added bonus that it hasn’t been in like 20 movies already. [So when you see the movie, hear it, and your friends think we are being cool and original, you can tell them we were just being cheap.]
And to answer the most asked question about music: Yes, we have all genres of music in the movie. Rap, hard rock, alternative, hair metal, indie hipster, blues, almost everything. We picked music that best fit the scenes regardless of the genre, so please, PLEASE stop asking me what kind of music is going to be in the movie.

Comment and discuss

At fairly regular intervals, I get people asking me about my take on movie critics, whether I am hoping for critical success, how we are going to approach critics, etc, etc.
I haven’t responded to any of these questions because I have been busy doing something critics don’t do: Actually making art. But since we are pretty much finished, and I have been laid up in my apartment for two weeks trying to get over pneumonia, I figure this is as good a time as any to discuss this issue. Here is my take:
Of course we would prefer it if critics fawned over this movie rather than disliked it, but in the end, none of the possible critical reactions–good, bad or something else–mean much at all to us.
This is because critics don’t matter anymore.
Many artists have been hostile to critics in the past. I know I DEFINITELY used to fit into that category. If I had written this blog post two years ago, I would have started off with something like the Murray Kempton quote, “A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield when the war is over, and shoots the wounded,” and then launched into a raging, rambling polemic about how much I hate critics, how worthless they are, how they are just failures at art and thus had to resort to writing about what other people make–all the standard criticisms.
That sort of thinking only makes sense when critics matter. When the critic has power, when people base their judgments on what to pay attention to based off the opinions of a critic, then lambasting idiot critics makes sense, especially if they haven’t been kind to you in the past. But the world has changed. In 2009 post-internet America, art largely succeeds or fails based on its own merits, not on the proclamations of critics.
It used to be that the only people who saw movies early were movie critics, those few people paid by newspapers and magazines to see and comment on new movies. And people read these reviews and they had a significant impact on the viewing patterns of people. The opinion of the critic mattered because it had consequences.
I don’t know precisely when or how it happened, but at some point over the past twenty years, the tide turned, and people stopped listening to critics.
Maybe it was because most of them became studio shills, enticed by expensive junkets and exclusive parties mingling with celebrities to write what studios wanted them to write. You can fool the public some of time, but if you constantly lie to them and tell them that some awful Nicole Kidman movie is worth seeing, and they go and realize it is complete shit, they’ll eventually stop listening to you.
Maybe it was because of the internet, and the democratization of distribution of opinion. It used to be the only people whose voices were heard were those who wrote for major publications. But now, anyone who can garner attention can get it, and people started giving their attention to the most appealing content providers, not necessarily the “big” ones. When forced to compete to get a non-captive audience, the movie critics found that they are just one voice of many, and no one gives any credence to their “expertise.”
Maybe it’s because marketing itself has changed, and because movies now open on so many screens and are often backed by huge advertising budgets, the voice of the critic is drowned out in the din of the louder voices.
Or maybe it’s because of any number of other reasons I am not smart enough to figure out, or a combination of those reasons. I don’t know the answer, but I do know that the shift happened, and the age of the professional critic is largely over.
This really isn’t up for debate; everyone from Patrick Goldstein to Roger Ebert, to everyone else who is commenting has seen the writing on the wall and admits it.
This demographic and cultural shift is a fact, so Nils and I, when thinking about our strategy for marketing, had to ask ourselves, “What do we do about it?”
Our answer was to focus all our efforts on things that spread organic word of mouth, and to largely ignore and disregard professional movie critics. It’s not that we hate them (or love them), it’s not that we care a lot or don’t care at all–to me, the movie critic is neither good nor bad, it simply is something to consider when devising the marketing plan for the movie. And from everything I have seen and read, movie critics just don’t matter, so we aren’t going to spend much time worrying about what they think or write about the movie.
We won’t be hostile to movie critics–of course we will invite many to early screenings, we will probably do something akin to a normal junket, and we would love to get good reviews–but no part of our marketing strategy or our ultimate success is dependent on them liking or disliking the movie. If they like it, great, if not, no big deal, the movie’s success isn’t dependent on anything they say or do.
It just makes sense to me: If critics just don’t matter to anyone else…why should we care?

Comment and discuss

Last week we finished up ADR with an all-day Walla group recording session on the soundstage at Wildfire Studios where we are doing the sound mix. What is “Walla group”? I will let the people at filmsound.org explain it:

The word “walla” was created in the old radio days when they needed the sound of a crowd in the background. They found if several people simply repeated “walla, walla, walla, walla” it sounded like people talking. The audience did not really hear the words, just the buzz of voices.


Today the walla group uses real words and real conversations. The walla actors come prepared. They have been informed of the period and locale of the film and have researched the local jargon and geography so that the background dialogue will be authentic. The material is mostly improvised.

While this movie is not so specifically set in time or place that it required the voice actors who comprised our walla group to research period or jargon, they sure as hell came prepared and improvised the shit out of their real words and conversations. Brought in by L.A. MadDogs–an ADR and Walla company with more than 800 films under their belt–our group consisted of five men and five women ranging in age from mid-20s to mid-60s.
Not that age mattered, because by the time the day ended we’d had 30 year olds playing 70 year olds, 60 year olds playing 20 year olds, and 40 year olds playing 7 year olds. Listen with your eyes closed and you can’t tell the difference. Listen while you watch them and you can’t tell if the salad you had for lunch was dressed with a psilocybin mushroom vinaigrette.
My favorite moment of the day came during the home stretch when the same woman, in her mid-30s probably, played in immediate succession 1) a young blond stripper with a southern lilt and an enormous belly button, 2) an offended old lady with a hearing impaired husband she improvised on the fly, and 3) an 8 year old boy with boundary issues. She thought for a minute before each scene, gathered herself, concentrated, and knocked it out of the park. And the funny part? Like nearly all the work of her nine fellow voice actors, everything she did is going to be fucking BURIED in the final sound mix. Sure, you’ll hear it, but you won’t know that you’re hearing it. All you will know, and it will be in retrospect, is that whatever it is you heard emanating from the background of these scenes sounded like it belonged there.
Still, knowing that all of their work product is going to be buried and that it doesn’t really matter what they say, these ten people worked their asses off and gave us something new and different to work with on every take. They didn’t just shout “walla, walla, walla, walla” into the mic like in the old radio days. They had actual snippets of conversation–with themselves, with each other, with groups of each other–that they tailored to the setting of each scene. Sonically, the conversations bounced off each other like so many super balls in a room made of trampolines. The most fascinating part of the whole thing, however, is the actual mechanics of the walla group.
Imagine a scene in a bar. The three leads are ordering a drink from the bartender and the area of the bar captured by the camera looks to be filled with 50-60 young, happy, drinking bodies milling about in the background. It is the job of the walla group to create the atmosphere you might expect from the activity of 50-60 young, drunk bar patrons, but in such a way that it doesn’t jump out at you or overpower the onscreen dialogue. And, in this case, they have to do it for nine minutes straight.
So, our ten voice actors get up and arrange themselves in three or four gender-mixed knots in front of and on either side of the microphone suspended a foot or two above them. They’re in several spread out knots because if they were to fan out the sound they’d create would feel detached, unconversational, and in a room far larger and less intimate than the bar setting we are in. Conversely, if they were all clustered immediately in front of the mic, it would concentrate the background noise and give the feeling that they were in a much smaller place with everyone on top of one another. This setting is somewhere in between those two extremes; hence the 3 or 4 knots.
As the scene rolls on the projection screen in front of them, the group launches into its improvisational conversation snippets and one of their ranks steps out to start conducting the group like an orchestra. The camera pans to the left and he motions silently for that side of the group to peter out. As the camera pans it lands on a part of the bar with a greater depth of field and more visible bar patrons. The conductor motions the entire group to lean in toward the mic but, of course, they’re way ahead of him. This goes on for another eight minutes.
What does all that sound like? Imagine you have mp3 files of every Seinfeld episode in your iTunes and you are hitting shuffle every fifteen seconds. Now imagine four other computers doing that at the same time.

Hello, Newman.
Hello, Jerry.
–shuffle–
T-Bone!
Yeah, T-Bone!
He’s not T-Bone! I’m supposed to be T-Bone! That’s my nickname!
You’re Koko the Monkey!
–shuffle–
Actually it was in gym class. I was trying to climb the ropes and Jerry was spotting me. I kept slipping and burning my thighs and then finally I slipped and fell on Jerry’s head
–shuffle–
Bro’s no good. Too ethnic.
You got something better?
How about the Mansiere?
Mansiere?
That’s right. A brassiere for a man
–shuffle–

That’s what it sounds like. Five Seinfeld episodes at once. A cacophony of semi-intelligible conversation about absolutely nothing relevant. The best part is that the semi-intelligibility of walla group combined with it getting buried in the sound mix allows you to say almost anything you want.
My favorite example of this is a scene where one of Real Tucker’s assistants is standing in the background having a conversation with another guy. I told the voice actors covering that fake conversation to pretend they’d hooked up with each other the night before and that the guy playing Tucker’s assistant should say to the other guy, “I’ve never seen a hairless asshole on a Greek man before.” After several reassurances that that was, in fact, exactly what I wanted them to say, they did it.
And it was AWESOME.
In the final mix you won’t be able to make any of it out, but I’ll know it’s there and it will provide me with an immense amount of joy each time I see it. Once that scene ended and we stopped recording everyone in the control room and the sound stage cracked up. When the laughter on the stage finally died down the co-owner of L.A. MadDogs looked back through the glass at us still laughing in the control room and said, “so it’s going to be one of THOSE types of movies.”
Indeed.
Comment and discuss

Tucker asked me a while ago to write something for the blog about what I thought of the film. And by “while ago” I mean OVER a month ago. I’ve put it off because I couldn’t figure how to write anything remotely insightful or interesting about it without getting into specific details that would potentially spoil aspects of the plot, etc. Then Scott Braun wrote his review and proved this could be done; and quite eloquently at that. Subsequently, I felt like a loser. (Nice job Suapyg. Seriously. Well put. Hey, can you play “Eruption”? I can. So go fuck yourself
Well, now that all this time has passed….
I still don’t know what the fuck to say. But here’s me trying:
The bottom line is that there has not yet been a film like I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL. Not that I’m aware of, at least.
To be clear, I don’t mean to say that it’s “the best” or anything like that. It is not perfect. THE BIG LEBOWSKI is perfect. CITIZEN KANE is perfect. But for a genre film about debauchery, it just kind of “vibrates at a higher wavelength,” if that’s not too heady of a way to put it.
Of course, I knew this going into it. In fact, I knew this after my first time reading it, which was before I had ever even heard of Tucker Max (sorry bro, but take it as a compliment to your writing…. I know you will). I’ve read every “Teen Sex Romp,” “High School/College Drinking Comedy” and “Coming of Age Party Epic” that’s come down the pike since “American Pie.” And I signed on for this one because it was so vastly different.
But anything even remotely groundbreaking is a double-edged sword. Especially in a small-minded town like Hollywood, where “social proof” is not only pretty much the sole barometer of success, it’s the fucking judge, jury, and hangman in terms of getting your film out there. History has proven that a lot of innovators get stuck holding the bag. That’s the problem with breaking ground: all that work just makes it easier for everyone else to rush in after you. The same person who can’t tell you who Nikola Tesla was, will gladly tell you that Thomas Edison “invented” electricity. Columbus “discovered” America… you know the sticky parts of that one. Copernicus was almost executed for PROVING that the earth revolves around the sun. 400 years later the Catholic church finally issued an apology. Not to mention that a guy called Aristarchus figured it out with no death threats, let alone fanfare, about 1,400 years before that. I bet the guys that actually broke down the fence at Woodstock got arrested, but the 90 thousand people that rushed in after were just stoked they got to see Jimi Hendrix for free.
My point is, if you do something first, it’s just that much harder for others to understand it. And humans, by nature, fear that which they can’t easily understand. Thus, it will be easy for those predisposed to detraction, or those who hate Tucker, or those who just can’t think for themselves, to take the piss out of this film. But those with a bigger picture of the world around them will see that it is, in its own way, groundbreaking. It is NOT perfect. But it’s really good. It’s paced well, it’s thoughtful, it’s original, it’s full of shit you’ve never heard or seen before, and the big laughs are huge. EPICALLY huge. It’s acerbic, and angry, and funny and touching all at the same time. I first watched it with my girl. Then immediately ran it back and watched it again alone. Then the next day I showed it to a room full of friends. It killed.
But all that being said, I have no idea how it will be received, because there’s no prior precedent. And as any lawyer will tell you, that makes things a lot more difficult with the ol’ “jury of your peers.”
So if you want my opinion, this movie is great. If it gets a wide release, it’s going to make everyone on the planet uncomfortable. If it doesn’t, it’s going to be because it made a few narrow-minded pussies with deep pockets uncomfortable. About 2000 years ago, Cato the Elder said “After I’m dead, I’d rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.” I like that quote. A lot.
But here’s hoping this film doesn’t go the way of Cato…
And frankly, I doubt it will!
Comment and discuss