Meet the Man Behind Those Team America-esque Donald Trump Videos

If you haven’t already, you should check out Hail to the Trump, a Team America: World Police-esque series of YouTube videos produced by Vanity Fair that imagines what the Donald Trump presidency might look like. With puppets. (Marionettes, to be exact.)

The man behind puppet Trump (and puppet Trump’s puppet hair) is Scott Land, the self-described Puppeteer to the Stars who helped bring the South Park creators’ 2004 film to life. Mediate spoke to him about how the project came together.

“It was similar to working with Matt Stone and Trey Parker on Team America,” said Land. They “thought puppets would be really easy,” but “when they found out how difficult it was, they didn’t know what to do.” He took over most of the film’s shots, operating marionettes in almost every scene of what remains the most expensive puppet-driven major motion picture ever made.

Hail to the Trump is produced by Condé Nast’s Rachel Samuels and written by ex-Saturday Night Live turned Vanity Fair scribe Bruce Handy. The first episode debuted on Nov. 9, and saw the president elect surveying the oval office with outgoing President Barack Obama. While puppet Trump sauntered around the set, kicking (and subsequently humping) the president’s desk after cracking a joke about John F. Kennedy, marionette Obama quickly grabbed a family photo and escaped.

“I already had the Obama puppet finished,” Land explained on the phone from his Las Vegas studio. “I’ve been playing him in my show for the last eight years.”

Like Team America, Hail to the Trump is satire that doesn’t go for the “typical jokes.” Land praised Handy’s writing, saying that he was actually “nice to Trump” but also “understood what the puppets can do.” Things like making the Trump marionette’s hair move and talk, or wiggling Obama’s exaggerated ears.

“I was doing a show in Los Angeles, and Morgan Freeman was there. He videoed it and sent it to the president. He wrote back and said he loved it,” Land recalled. “Obama was very sensitive about his ears. He’s always been that way, since he was a kid, and I obviously exaggerated that. But I didn’t really want to hurt him, or anyone else. This is just us poking fun. You truly have to be open to the idea of satire if you’re going to get into this market.”

Land emphasized this because he didn’t “want to deeply offend Donald Trump.” In other words, he didn’t want to get sued by the New York real estate mogul with a history of suing anyone who makes fun of him.

“The puppet has shifty eyes, and I made the upper and lower mouth move so that he could be a loud-mouth,” said Land. “He can growl, look scornful or thoughtful. I just wanted to do all the things that are stereotypical about Donald Trump that an actor can’t really do, but a puppet can.”

When he first discussed the project with Samuels and Handy, Land had already drawn up preliminary designs for a Trump marionette.

“I could see he was going to be running. It was going to end up, in my opinion, between him and Hillary Clinton. So I started building those puppets,” he said, adding: “I’m also working on Bernie Sanders as an angry character, which is basically Larry David from Saturday Night Live. That’s my out if I don’t use Bernie. I’ll make it into Larry David and find a way to sell it to him.”

Once the Trump marionette was completed and approved, Land went to Los Angeles and joined a small crew of five for a two-day shoot: “They made a beautiful set in Los Angeles with one of the guys I worked with on Team America. I drove there from Las Vegas and we knocked all the episodes out in two days. That was it. It was very straightforward.”

Did he do almost all the puppeteering himself, just like when he helped Stone and Parker complete Team America back in 2004? “I would do all the closeups,” he said. “From Trump and Obama, to Misty,” the latter being a redressed show girl puppet who served as Trump’s chief of staff in the second episode, “Kanye Attacks the Throne.” Otherwise, an assistant from his Las Vegas studio helped with the wide shots.

All the dialogue, jokes and scenes were fully fleshed out in Handy’s scripts. Yet since Land was put in charge of the action itself, no descriptions were provided. After all, as Land explained on the phone, “You never really know what the puppet is going to do until you do it in the moment.”

So “all the physicality was improvised” on set. Whenever Land performed a scene, he would monitor the marionettes’ movements in a monitor: “I’m looking in the monitor to see what the camera is catching. I’m directing the shot and myself while I’m doing it.”

To watch new and old episodes of Hail to the Trump, check out the Vanity Fair YouTube page.

[Image via screengrab]

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.