Friday, February 21, 2014

... Jim Henson used to say about the ancient-but-still-edible vaudeville schtick that was the heart of THE MUPPET SHOW.

According to the NY Times, Adam McKay, director of ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES, has replaced all 763 jokes in the movie so that the studio can re-release it. The movie was shot improvisationally, so he has the outtakes to make a new, raunchier (not, he says, necessarily better) movie with the same plot.

Post production has got orders of magnitude easier. It helps when your movie has already grossed over $123 million and you can afford it. But this sort of thing is only plausible when it takes only a few keystrokes to move a sound effect. When I was in film school, everyone spent months building their sound tracks for their short films. Now I go into a room with the mixer and we do the sound effects while we're mixing the movie.

One thing I learned shooting my last short, WINTER GARDEN, is just how good actors can be at improvisation. I had a cast of veterans, headed by Enrico Colantoni, and they did all sorts of fascinating things in rehearsals once we got through the script and got into improvs. It's easy to see that shooting with a digital camera gives you more takes. It's surprising and fun to see what possibilities that opens up. Additional takes are still not free -- the clock is still running. But if you can add a few more takes, that means you can shoot the script pages, and then fool around for another take or two. Sometimes you'll find something amazing. Something you might catch a really great moment. 

8:08 AM

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