Tom Stern of The Andy Milonakis Show

MTV doesn’t have a deal with the DGA. They keep telling me that they’re working on it. But in any case I wouldn’t be telling you this except that the DGA found me out and sent me a letter saying they know that I’m directing it.

I have no idea. I really doubt it would be that because we hardly use any actors on the show, it’s all real people.

Yeah, maybe.

Jimmy Kimmel and Andy. Jimmy Kimmel was a big believer in Andy. He found him on the internet and brought him into Jimmy Kimmel Live. I was actually directing bits for Jimmy Kimmel Live and I did the first bit that Andy did on Jimmy Kimmel Live. From there it didn’t really work out with Andy on Jimmy Kimmel Live. His weird sensibilities didn’t really mesh with the show so Jimmy promised to develop a show and he asked me to come in and direct it. So I developed it with Andy. We put together an outline of what the show would be and we went and shot it and it came out really funny. MTV was really happy with it so they picked it up and then John Kimmel, who is Jimmy’s brother, came in as the head writer and Rob Anderson is the producer on it. We are sort of equal partners in terms of authority on the show. I try to make Andy’s sensibilities accessible if possible.

Yeah I know, it’s ironic. But over the years I have gotten a sort of innate sense of what I think will work comedically. Andy was actually a big fan of my film Freaked and when I first met him to do a bit for Jimmy Kimmel he was really psyched that I worked on it. It was flattering of him to say that. We are a pretty good fit. He’s a very funny, very creative guy but I think he definitely benefits from being guided a little bit. The show is improvisational to a certain extent but we have great writers as well. They come up with the ideas and sometimes they’re great and complete and we don’t really change them much. Others are just skeleton ideas and we just see where the comedy takes us when we shoot it. The other huge factor in the show is having this world of non-actors. That’s something that I really started doing in a big way on [Gerhard Reinke's] Wanderlust. That was a good show but again it got the short shrift from the network. The star of the show, Josh Gardner, and I went all around the world doing weird comedy with whoever happened to be there. Whether it happened in some tiny village in Bolivia or with some Thai cab driver in Bangkok. It gets us away from predictable shtick. Real people’s odd personas really brings stuff to life. You just get gold with a guy like Ralphie on The Andy Milonakis Show. He’s really a comedic genius even though he’s not that bright.

Jimmy’s kind of commandment was that it should definitely look cheap. It should look like Andy made it himself. So working with that as a framework, yeah, it’s supposed to look cheap but we do a lot of surreal stuff and it gets fairly sophisticated sometimes. But it’s all in the service of something that was put together on the cheap.

Not hard because I’ve done a lot of that stuff myself. I’ve become pretty good at [Adobe] After Effects over the years. I actually learned it on that show Wanderlust by doing animated maps. It was weird because I learned that during 9/11. I was in New York cutting the pilot for Wanderlust within a quarter mile of Ground Zero right when the towers came down. I just kept working but the air stunk of burning plastic and human flesh. That was very surreal. I like doing visual effects. It’s very Terry Gilliam of me. Then for the second season of Andy Milonakis we got this amazing guy named Mark Marek who’s actually a cartoonist of some renown. He’s a great After Effects guy and he’s doing most of it this year. But he totally gets the vibe so I don’t have to really explain it to him.

No, I’m happy and satisfied. I think the sensibility Alex and I had was maybe a little ahead of its time and that’s why we didn’t have more commercial success. Seth Green told me that The Idiot Box and Freaked really inspired him. That was nice to hear. The stuff that we did never got Alex and I famous. Alex is famous from Bill and Ted’s but the stuff we did never really did that well commercially so it is gratifying to see that comedy sensibility is out there and that makes what we more acceptable.

Oh yeah! Wonder Showzen is really funny. I know that guy Vernon Chatman, who does it.

Vernon Chatman is a really super funny guy. I worked with him on That’s My Bush. I was really impressed with him. He’s got a great comedy mind.

I’ve got mixed feelings about Freaked because it was such a bummer that it got really buried by the studio.

That really derailed my career. I got really depressed and it was horrible. One year we were on top of the world because at 26 years old we directed a pretty sizeable feature and we thought we were hot shit. Then the next thing you know Joe Roth leaves the studio and the new guy hated the film. It was awful experience and we were so mortified. I had a couple of really bummer experiences in Hollywood after that. I wrote this film, American Werewolf in Paris which was a really good script and I was proud of it. I was supposed to direct but that didn’t happen after Freaked got dumped by the studio. They thought I was a pariah. They hired some hack to direct it and they rewrote it like 12 times and turned it into the biggest piece of shit ever. It was so awful. That film was just so terrible that it was embarrassing. They made money off it so that helps but it was a bummer.

I think the Idiot Box was pretty funny and Freaked had some really funny stuff in it too, but it’s definitely not the movie I hoped it would be. It just didn’t quite gel. As a whole it doesn’t really come to life as much as I had hoped. I would do a much better job now with everything I’ve learned since then.

Yeah I did.

I’m a lot more normal now than I was when I took off my pants at The Chimp Channel.

We had creative differences. I had high hopes for that show and we sold it to them based on it being an edgy show like The Simpsons. But TBS at that time was really conservative and even though they said “Yeah we want it to be like The Simpsons” when push came to shove they wouldn’t let us do anything. We were doing a Jerry Falwell joke and we weren’t allowed to say the word God on the show because that might offend religious people. It was nuts! I was getting so frustrated with that and I was doing a lot of drugs. The first day of shooting I went to the set and I had a brainstorm. I thought it would be so great if I just took off all my clothes and made a mission statement to the camera. It turned out they didn’t think it was all that funny.

It was good old cocaine. I was out of my mind. After some of those other bad experiences in Hollywood I got really bitter. I dropped out of the business for a year or so and played in a rock band. I was so tired of the Hollywood game and I decided that I would just not take it seriously at all and really just live on the edge. I guess I was playing by a fairly common rule, John Belushi style. It ultimately set me back and I burned a ton of bridges. But I was able to crawl back slowly and I’ve been working consistently ever since then even though I was reduced to being more of a hired gun for a while.

I’ve got a friend named Tony Barbieri who I was buddies with through that whole crazy period. He had a friend from college named Daniel Kellison who is the older brother of Rob Anderson who is my producing partner on the Milonakis Show. Daniel and Jimmy met and they had this idea to do The Man Show which was happening right around the time that I was doing The Chimp Channel. Daniel loved the Chimp shorts that I’d done for TBS. So I met Jimmy and he wanted me to do these Chimp bits. But I didn’t have a lot of time because The Chimp Channel was starting. After I got fired from that, I went back to those guys and was like, “Still want to do those chimp bits?” So I did some chimp stuff for the first season of The Man Show. I wrote them with Tony Barbieri and they were really funny. One of the most gratifying things that’s happened recently is I heard that Ethan Coen [one half of the Coen brothers] is a big fan of those chimp bits I did on The Man Show.

That came back to me through my editor, Katie McQuerrey, who worked for the Coen brothers. She said that one day that Ethan came in with his laptop computer and said “This is the funniest thing in the world. Check this out.” It was a bit I did for The Man Show eight years ago. It was basically a Charles Bukowski-style bar, with all these drunks played by chimps. This drunken louse of a character would just tell dirty jokes to the bartender in this filthy little dive bar. It was pretty funny.

It’s both. I shoot everything, I have a cameraman too but with the man on the street stuff I operate one of the cameras. I do a lot of directing when we’re on set to get the neighbors to give funny performances. One of my specialties is working with non-actors and trying to get them to do funny things. But editing is definitely huge. It’s always been a huge part of getting the timing right and creating certain jokes. It was probably more so on Wanderlust because we would shoot a ton of footage and really create a lot of it in the editing room. With Andy it’s not quite as much that way because things are thought out. We assemble it and then we tweak. Sometimes we do entirely new jokes in the editing room but not all that often. Last year Andy did a bit called Goggle Man where he just ran around in this ridiculous superhero costume and got into some screaming match with an old lady in the neighborhood. I saw the way she was screaming at him and I thought it would be funny if she suddenly fired lasers out of her fingertips and incinerated him. So I did that effect on my laptop computer in the editing room and it turned out pretty funny. I had him reduced to a heap of ashes and she walked away. That’s an example of coming up with a joke in the editing room.

No, they totally get it. [MTV executive] Tony DeSanto is a huge fan of the show. It’s the best relationship I’ve had with an executive because he really loves it. Their notes are not bad at all. Sometimes they’ve got actual good ideas.

It’s not expensive. There are a lot of producers on it so there’s a fair amount of above the line fees going out but in terms of production it’s pretty inexpensive.

Not really. I think it went up a little bit just because people’s salaries have built-in increases. We have a fair amount of staff helping to organize everything but the actual crew is very small. It’s just me, a cameraman, the cameraman’s assistant, a gaffer and that’s it. There’s really no other crew.

I think a lot of it is because we’ve got these new outlets for comedy. Comedy Central and MTV2 need to fill programming so it gives people who are more interested in being creative than writing mainstream sitcoms a place to work. You get less money for working for cable television shows but you definitely get way more creative freedom. That’s where people who have sensibilities like mine end up because we’re not the type of people that think Everybody Loves Raymond is particularly funny.

I totally want to do scripted show. I want to do longer format stuff like features again. It’s just really difficult to get back there. I really love this kind of hybrid where we’re half scripted, although Andy Milonakis is more scripted than most people think. Apart from the man in the street stuff, we do write the concepts and come up with a lot of lines beforehand. But I really miss doing longer format narratives because that is what I yearn to do the most. I have a new show that’s just got picked up by Adult Swim.

I did it with my friend Peter Girardi who has a company called Funny Garbage. It’s called Saul of the Mole Men and it stars Josh Gardner. It is about a mission to the center of the earth. A drill ship crashes and our hero Saul, an idiot geologist, is stuck in the middle of the earth with these mole man creatures. The creatures look like Sid and Marty Krofft monsters. It sounds like Land of the Lost but it is very weird, strange and funny. The episodes are 11 minutes long and Adult Swim just ordered 20 episodes. I think we should probably be shooting in the summer and it will probably be premiering in the fall.

No it is Adult Swim’s first live action show. It’s shot mostly in front of a greenscreen. We create surreal animated backgrounds that look like our version of the center of the earth with lots of volcanoes and churning psychedelic skies.

I probably won’t have time to personally do them but I’ll definitely be supervising them. It’s going to be the same level of quality as Andy Milonakis because that’s the only way we could do this show.

Yeah but then unfortunately we couldn’t get MTV to let us put it on the Freaked DVD. They wanted an enormous amount of money even though they’re probably never going to put it on DVD themselves.

Yeah, I guess there’s always that possibility but I’m not holding my breath. I think the Freaked DVD did pretty well. I don’t think it made anybody hugely wealthy. Certainly not us, but it’s just a cult-y thing, it never had any mainstream awareness. It’s really hard for it to sell an enormous amount.

No, it’s just that they don’t make many features anymore. It’s hard to get them financed. I wrote a script called Bad Pinocchio, which I really would love to do. It’s a horror movie version of Pinocchio. I thought it was really good but it’s hard to even get agents excited about it because if it doesn’t fit the formula of a slasher film then they don’t see how it’s going to make money. There’s very little imagination in the feature world.

It was really exciting, although I got to say I didn’t really think the film was all that funny especially back then. It didn’t seem that edgy compared to what we were trying to do at college but a lot of people really loved that film. It certainly opened a lot of doors for us. I was still going to classes and he was off in Arizona shooting a real feature film with future superstar Keanu Reeves.

I do have ideas for some serious films but there will probably be some comedy in everything I do. My hero was Stanley Kubrick and I always had the desire to do more heady stuff. But comedy is what I’ve always gravitated toward. My ultimate yearning is to be Stanley Kubrick.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck