The Aughts (and The Aught-Not- Haves)

Journal Entry:  June 23^rd, 2000.

Black Friday.

I could fucking kill Jane (*our Z.com exec). No fucking sense of humor.  They want to tone down our show.  It’s too much for their “little network.”  They can’t “take chances” like that. What’s the answer:  bring in the lawyers?  Try to convince her?  No.  I can’t understand it – she’s mad because an orange uses the word ‘cunt.’  And he’s not even calling a girl a cunt, he’s using it in the British sense of the word, calling male cherries ‘cunts.’ I don’t want to concede on anything. I’ll lie to her face and then shoot two versions.  It’s the only way I can live with myself.   It’s bullshit.  This is the show.  We did not misrepresent ourselves.  We told them what we were doing, they read the script, we all agreed on it, and now they’re afraid of offending people?  It’s the fucking internet!!?!

I condeded.  I took out the word “cunt” and replaced it with the word “Goggin,” which I told them was a British slang term.  It wasn’t, it’s the name of the English teacher Noah and I had in 9th grade.  So there. I showed them. But the show was so popular that I got money to do ten episodes, and in July I set up Snake Pit Animation Studios with my friend Roy Wood, who had gotten money from a site called Honkworm.com also to do stop motion.  We’d share resources and equipment and would have it for a year and could also shoot our side projects if we wanted.  Roy bought a baby anaconda, which we would take out and play with on occasion.  People would come over and ask why we were called Snake Pit, and we’d show them.  It was a fun place to work.  I could work for 15 hours doing one animation shot, I really got into it.  I’d even sleep at the studio a lot, working all night.  I just got so into the world of the characters I didn’t really want to do anything else.

Journal Entry:  August 12, 2000

The Fangoria convention today was a disaster.  It was cool to hear Rick Baker and William Friedkin talk, and I liked seeing Linda Blair with Friedkin.  But overall it was just a waste of money.  Save the Hitler Pez.

Jane (*the Z.com exec) is out of control.  She tries to take control of our show and impose her own views.  “Take it out, that stuff’s never funny.”  She delivers notes through an assistant  because she’s scared to tell us directly, probably because I argue every point into the ground.  And why is her opinion more valuable than ours combined?  They don’t think it works, we do – so who’s right?  Why can’t they trust us?  Isn’t that what they hired us for in the first place?  They’re not morally objecting to it, so what’s the problem?  The problem is everyone wants to put their paws in our ricebowl.  And they’re giving us money so they want to feel like their opinion matters more than ours. So frustrating.

At the Fangoria convention Rick Baker said he spent every waking hour of every day trying to perfect his craft. I’m insane not to do the same. He started when he was ten. I have to be the same way.

By October, 2000, Z.com was bankrupt.  Everything David Lynch predicted came true: all these entertainment sites that gave it away for free went belly up.  (DavidLynch.com, meanwhile, is still in business.)  Z.com called me begging for the computers back, cameras, anything, but I told them that we had signed contracts with the animators for 10 episodes and I was going to pay them for that, even if we were only going to make 7.  We all knew this was coming, as our lunchtime activity was going on fuckedcompany.com and seeing which dot coms had turned into dot bombs.  We knew Z.com was up there because they were spending so much money and still weren’t charging people to visit the site.  So we all kind of prepared for it mentally, and when it hit I had already pre-paid my crew members for the next few episodes so that the money was already spent and they had two months of security to find their next gig.  By October the show was done, and I now had this great work space paid through the following July.

The best way to jump start “Cabin Fever” was to hold casting sessions, even though we had no money. If we acted like we had money, we’d get it.

Noah and I decided that we should use the studio as a place to write since we were both living in small apartments, so we met there every day and at the advice of our agents wrote a T.V. pilot called “Teenagents.”  It was kind of like “Jump Street,” with young looking cops who go undercover busting teenage criminals, except they’re really irresponsible and cross the line and hook up with the high school kids.  We thought it was funny, but once again people felt it was “too weird.”  (I still want to shoot that one day…)

Right around the time the show finished, Evan Astrowsky, a producer friend from film school who I had done “Chowdaheads” with, came to me and said it was time to get serious and make “Cabin Fever.”  He was right.  I had written the script five years earlier and it had been sent everywhere for years and years, to no avail.  No one wanted to make it. But Evan read it and thought it was really funny and that I shouldn’t give up on it. He had just produced a movie for a million dollars and knew some people with money, so we decided to go for it.

The best way to jump start “Cabin Fever,” Evan said, was to hold casting sessions, even though we had no money.  If we acted like we had money, we’d get it. Evan was friendly with a casting director named Ayo Davis, and with her partner Joe Adams they put out in the acting breakdowns that we were casting a new low budget horror film called “Cabin Fever.”  Amazingly, people responded.  So we started setting up auditions and putting them on tape, telling them we were going to start shooting “in the springtime.” Snake Pit Animation Studios became the “Cabin Fever” casting office.  Actors would show up and have to sit in the waiting room with a bunch of animators from Roy’s show and a baby anaconda.  We figured it was good litmus test, if they stayed around to audition, they’d be able to make it through the shoot.

>>>NEXT: Getting Cabin Fever

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