Dino Stamatopoulos
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Dino Stamatopoulos is your favorite comedy writer. Stamatopoulos has writing credits on some of the most cutting edge comedy shows of all time such as The Ben Stiller Show, writer/producer on Mr. Show with Bob and David and TV Funhouse. Stamatopoulos is a big part of the comedy world that came in during the 1990's. Since TV Funhouse ended, Stamatopoulos has concentrated on Cartoon Network animated shows with producing Tom Goes to the Mayor and now his own creation, Moral Orel.

Moral Orel is done in the stop motion animation style of the classic Davey and Goliath. Stamatopoulos has created the town of Moralton in the state of Statesota. It’s a very religious town and the main character is a pious but often confused 11 year old boy named Orel. His recent mix-ups have led to him selling his urine to the school sports teams because “Waste makes Haste” and bringing people from the dead with the Necronomicon because they are sinning by not being alive.

I got a chance to talk with Dino Stamatopoulos after he had a few drinks and was in the midst of writing the second season of Moral Orel.

Moral Orel airs Sundays at 12 am on Cartoon Network

Daniel Robert Epstein: Do you hear yelling?

Dino Stamatopoulos: Well, I’m in a bar. I’m walking outside. It’s just way too confusing with a jukebox, drunks and you.

DRE: First of all it’s great to talk to you because I would say you’re probably one of my favorite comedy writers. You worked on many of my favorite shows but I’m not exactly sure what you wrote for them.

DS: Good. Let’s keep it that way.

DRE: Robert Smigel gets written up every other day. So does Bob Odenkirk and everyone that you’ve ever worked with but not you.

DS: It makes sense because I worked on their shows. Mr. Show was Bob and David Cross’ show. TV Funhouse was Smigel’s show. As much as I did on it, it was still their vision. For a long time I was like, “I can facilitate other people’s visions but I don’t really have a vision of my own.” But now I found out by pure accident that I do. I just fell into this because I needed a job.

DRE: Did Moral Orel come about because of your cartoon experience working on TV Funhouse?

DS: I had the idea for Moral Orel before Adult Swim approached me. When I first had the idea I wasn’t sure it was going to be animated. For awhile I was really into the Thunderbird Puppets type thing that Team America was doing but I didn’t know Team America was doing it. Of course my version would’ve been scaled down. There’s this show called Joe 90 [released in 1968] that was done by the Thunderbird people. It was very creepy and weird with a lot of blank expressions. I liked that idea. I thought it would be great doing it that way. In retrospect, I’m so glad I didn’t because it would’ve been a little too much for the show.

With doing it in stop motion I’ve really come to like the character of Orel a lot. I don’t think I would’ve liked it as much if it would’ve been a shitty marionette on strings. The animators really bring it to life in an amazing way.

DRE: Moral Orel is probably some of the best stop motion animation I’ve really ever seen. Especially with the budget constraints you guys are on. Was it very important to you to make it as smooth as possible?

DS: No actually. At first I had to sell it by the idea that it was going to be a bunch of talking heads. We would set up these characters and just have them talk. That’s why a lot of the scripts are very dialogue heavy. We actually added action later when we realized that the animators are great and wanted to move the characters. You know they love doing it because they get paid shit. They’re way overworked, which I’m not completely happy about and hopefully we’ll get them more money next season. They really go above and beyond the call of duty. They love the show, they get it and they’re very passionate. After I realized that these shows are too dialogue heavy, we went back during the storyboard stage and put more action in because it was just so much fun to watch. We were so gleeful to see these things come alive.

DRE: I was surprised that you also direct the show as well as write it.

DS: Yeah, I’m directing it with Jay Johnston and Scott Adsit, who are great, but it’s my show. I have the final say on things. I give them director’s credits on certain episodes for different reasons. There was one that Scott did the storyboards for and he’s very into the performance of these little characters. He’s really good at expressing that. Jay is also very good in different ways. He’s good at giving the characters bits to do. It’s an interesting process. When we first started these shows, the animators had just come off Robot Chicken, which is a much broader show. So they were throwing in googly eyes and huge takes and just making the comedy a lot broader. We had to express to them that this was a more subtle show than Robot Chicken. It took two or three episodes to really get through to them because there’s so many ways you can animate a joke and a scene. We were very ignorant to the process when we first walked in. We were amazed someone would throw in such things when the script was written in a certain way. We realized things aren’t that simple. The animators don’t read the scripts because they don’t think verbally like that. They couldn’t read a script and get it in the way they were meant to. They see the animatics later and then they apply their animation. Whereas if I was performing, I would read that script over and over again and understand the possibilities.

DRE: So the direction mostly comes when you guys do the storyboards?

DS: That’s part of the direction. That’s mostly for the camera set up. For the first season we made a lot of mistakes with the storyboard and didn’t draw enough versions of the same scene. We just didn’t detail these pictures enough to show action because we felt the action was written in the script. But since the animators didn’t really read the scripts, we found out fairly soon that we have to go and act out these scenes for the animators on stage.

DRE: Really?

DS: Actually for Robot Chicken the animators get Seth Green on videotape acting out these characters so the animators can see exactly how they move. I don’t want to be that specific because I think the animators bring a lot to these characters. I don’t want to really nail them down to say, “Okay, this character has to make this exact gesture.” I’ve been very surprised and happy by the way some of the animators brought Orel and these other characters to life.

DRE: What’s it like writing again with Jay and Scott?

DS: The second season has been a little more difficult. The first season I wrote the first drafts of the show and they were 80 to 85 percent there. Those guys threw in jokes and bits here and there. That was fun and easy and happened very quickly. This season I’m having them and other writers write their own scripts. I’m finding it a little difficult to verbalize my point of view. I want to stray from the highly structured format of Orel learning something, misinterpreting it, and then his father getting angry for the wrong reasons. I want it to be based more on the town of Moralton and the other characters. Orel can still be a driving force, but in a different way. I don’t want it as structured. But it’s difficult for me to express myself. With Mr. Show and TV Funhouse, I could describe what I wanted to the writers because I was facilitating someone else’s vision. For Moral Orel it is more difficult for me to get the point across to everyone so it’s turning out to be a lot more work even though I have more writers on my set.

DRE: Who’s new that’s working with you?

DS: Mark Rivers is a great writer and really funny guy who does the music for the show. He wrote the theme song for Mr. Show and I believe he came up with one or two ideas for Mr. Show. Now he’s one of the best writers right now. He’s working on a couple episodes. Louis CK expressed interest in writing one. Bob and Bill Odenkirk have expressed interest. Charlie Kaufman actually had a great idea for one but he’s very busy. I might write it and bounce it off him a little bit.

DRE: I’m assuming you knew Charlie when he used to write for TV comedy shows.

DS: Yeah. We worked on The Dana Carvey Show together.

DRE: What is Charlie’s idea?

DS: Charlie had a really funny germ of an idea, which was based on his wife buying a horse from this woman. This woman sold it to Charlie’s wife only because she started loving the horse more than Jesus. I wanted to do a show where Orel has a pet of some kind because I wanted to bring his mother into the whole episode. I have this idea that his mother hates animals and wants them around only for eating. So I always liked the idea of Orel owning a dog. Right now it is still a germ but it’s going to be about Orel having this puppy that he loves more than Jesus and what he goes through because of that.

DRE: What was the inspiration for Moral Orel?

DS: I originally wrote it about 11 years ago. I saw Iggy Pop perform in New York and I was just blown away by him. I saw this guy jumping around like a 12 year old boy. I knew he had performed and acted in some movies and television shows so I thought, “I want to write a sitcom for him.” He was at the same agency that I was and I just wrote the sitcom on spec. It had him playing a 12 year old boy like The Beaver who gets into all these messes. Things like him trying to get into bars wearing a fake moustache. Basically the joke was that he was miscast. I thought the idea of him acting with other little 12 year old kids would be funny. Much in the same way TV Funhouse was funny because puppet animals were working with real animals. I basically wrote the episode where Orel drinks his own urine for Iggy. I had a meeting with Iggy in New York. I explained this idea to him and he kept looking around. I said, “Iggy? Are you paying attention at all?” He said, "Sorry dude. There’s so much pussy around I can’t really concentrate.” So I gave him the script and he looked at it. It was just titled, “Iggy.” He went, “Whoa, thanks,” like he was really touched that I wrote the script for him. He went away and I never heard from him again. I don’t know if he ever read it.

But I liked the script enough to send it around. I even got some work off it. But then I decided to revamp it as a cartoon. So the structure of that Iggy script was basically what Moral Orel has become. Then with the state of the world right now and the religious right, I thought it would be apropos to focus on the religious aspect. I wanted to write something that made me laugh. To me what’s really funny is the misinterpretation of religion and Christianity especially. It was pretty obvious that Davey and Goliath would be a good medium to send up as well but I don’t like thinking of the show as a parody.

DRE: I don’t see it that way.

DS: That’s because in reality Davey and Goliath wasn’t that focused on religion. They just threw in the moral at the end. It was more about a normal kid just getting into trouble. But it was a perfect medium. We definitely used Davey and Goliath as models once we decided to do it in stop motion.

DRE: What I like is that Orel is played as an actual good character. He’s not like a Satanist in disguise.

DS: Right. He’s very innocent and he wants to do good. I was a lot like him when I was a kid actually. I went to church and I felt very passionate that God was in control of things. I suppose God-fearing is a good word to use. I wanted something to happen after I died and God was my ticket. I went to public school and I’d look around at the other kids and think smugly, “I bet I’m the only one who’s thinking about God right now. I’m so much better than everyone else.” Orel is a much nicer than I will ever be.

DRE: How’s God going for you now?

DS: God is a little more abstract now. I don’t really believe in Jesus Christ as our Lord. I do believe that there was probably a guy named Jesus or maybe Jesus was based on a few guys out there. I have a feeling they were probably cool guys who were misinterpreted very early on and it just got worse.

DRE: Are you or Cartoon Network worried about Christian fundamentalists attacking the show?

DS: Yeah I am because I like the show. It’s a job that I really love having. We’re on Adult Swim, which is a Turner Broadcasting show, which is made deep in the Bible Belt. I don’t want petitions or letters or phone calls at all. Though I appear that I’m against Christianity as a whole, I’m just against the misinterpretation of it and how it’s used in a very lazy way. I think there are a lot of lazy parents out there who don’t explain things to their kids. I remember that I went to a Greek Orthodox church when I was a kid and I didn’t understand a thing. The priest was speaking very fast in Greek. The whole idea was that as long as you’re in church, everything’s fine. God will soak in you like you’re a sponge. I suppose it did but not in the right way. I like what some of the Bible teaches except when you get into the St. Paul sections. He ruined Christianity for everyone by glorifying the Crucifixion, which wasn’t that cool when it comes down to it.

DRE: I heard you wrote one of my favorite Mr. Show sketches, The Audition.

DS: Yeah, that was an idea that came from when I wrote a play in Chicago and we would perform it every weekend. After the play, the real fun came when me, Scott Adsit and a few other people would get on stage and do fake auditions just for fun. The Audition came from one of those bits. It was one of those things that always stuck with me. I actually used to do it at real auditions back when I thought I could be an actor, which I couldn’t. It made people very uncomfortable during the audition process.

DRE: I used to scream quote, “No!” really loud from The Audition. The point I was getting at was when I interviewed David Cross one time and I asked him who wrote the sketch where the pharmacist sells weed. I had heard that whenever it’s a sketch about pot, it was probably Brian Posehn. He said, “Nah. It was probably Dino” but he couldn’t remember exactly. Then I was reading the Mr. Show book that Naomi Odenkirk wrote where whenever you’re mentioned it is something like “I was dropping acid with Dino in the Caribbean.”

DS: I actually didn’t write the pharmacist sketch. Brian probably did although I hate to say that in case someone else did. It’s a great sketch though. Most of my sketches probably aren’t about drugs. When you’re on drugs, you don’t really write about drugs. You write about other things like Young People and their Companions was written on drugs.

DRE: I love that one.

DS: There’s no reason anyone’s differentiating between young people and companions. That whole idea started because I was camping with my friend, Brent Forrester who is a comedy writer. We actually got lost and we were on acid and he said, “I can read it in the paper now. Two young people lost in the National Forest.” I said to him, “Well, you’re young. I feel very old. I’d rather just be called your companion.” We just laughed about that and that’s where that idea came from.

DRE: So if you wrote that one you probably wrote the Pre-Taped Call In Show.

DS: Yes, I actually wrote that one with Brent as well. Brent came to me with that idea when we were both writing for The Ben Stiller Show. I just started laughing immediately because I thought about how confusing it would be. We actually had to draw visual graphs to show exactly how that show would be done and the problems involved with it. It was actually a fun mathematical process to come up with it.

DRE: How’d you get started in comedy?

DS: At Columbia College in Chicago. A lot of great people came out of there like Scott, Jay and Andy Dick.

DRE: I read that you used to do bits with Andy.

DS: Yeah, we were a two-man act for a long time. We did this live stage show where we integrated video. We would walk off stage and into the video. It was actually similar to Mr. Show but a little looser and less structured.

DRE: Like Andy himself.

DS: Exactly. It was frightening because I was the more structured of the two of us and I’m not very structured at all. I was hanging out with Andy the other day and I thought, “Hanging out with Andy is a lot like taking a hamster for a walk without a leash.” You really have to stay on top of things. He just follows his heart to a fault.

DRE: You’re credited on so many sketch shows, were you a guy who was brought in to help fix sketch shows?

DS: Well I saw the first season of Mr. Show while I was working on The Dana Carvey Show and I thought, “Wow. This is the best thing I’ve seen ever.” I moved to LA specifically to do that show. I don’t think I was brought in for any other reason except they enjoyed my sensibility, I asked them if I could be a producer because I felt very passionate about the show. What I saw on the first season were sketches that I thought were very well written and well performed but they could’ve improved a little on the production end.

DRE: Oh absolutely and you all did it.

Are you concentrating on just Moral Orel right now?

DS: I’m mostly concentrating on Moral Orel although ever since the first season I want to do even more with stop motion. I really want to do stop motion animation with a more serious tone. Still making it a comedy but a darker one. I’m a big fan of [John] Cassavetes and how he concentrated more on the performance and the characters. I want to do that with stop motion in a way with recording the dialogue in a very free manner, not necessarily in a sound studio. Maybe take a microphone out into the real world and have actors perform in real locations and get real sounds and not worry about shooting them correctly. I guess it’s sort of like what Nick Park did with Creature Comforts. But the actors can overlap each other and get emotional and still make it funny and comic. In the Christmas episode of Moral Orel there are moments where I feel like these characters are more real than actors on film can ever be.

DRE: How is Moral Orel doing?

DS: I don’t know how it’s doing. I’m obsessed with the Internet and it’s really helping me procrastinate against writing. I google Moral Orel all the time and I get a very diverse response. People either love it or hate it. So I don’t know how it’s doing really. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, which could be saying a lot or not saying much at all.

DRE: It’s a lot.

DS: I’m very happy with it and I will take blame or credit because it’s definitely my sensibility and it’s what I pictured when I thought of the idea.

DRE: I think it’s going to catch on.

DS: I’ll never know if I’m a good writer or a bad writer. I only know if I’m happy with what I write. I’m not usually happy with what I write and I’m very happy with Moral Orel.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Dino+Stamatopoulos/