WWY2K, Dir. Commentary: The Creation

THE IDEA

To understand why a group of young men would make a 150-minute film, with about 60 minutes of deleted scenes and outtakes, you have to understand what type of dudes you’re dealing with.

I’ve traveled the world and lived in four cities now, met zillions of people and crews…but I’ve never met a group of people as thoroughly funny and amusing as the kats I call my childhood friends. I’ve met some pretty funny people – my man Jeremy Bertrand of AF&PA comes to mind – but my top 7…

1. Rek Jamison
2. Tony Knight
3. Adam and Christian Thomas
4. Joab Scott
5. Mike Williams
6. Frank Smith

(...and Patrice Smith, also in the movie, is the funniest woman I know.)

…reveals that Mike (LI’s finest) is the only non-Buffalonian and five of the seven, plus Trice, were characters in the movie (Tony was in DC). Rek, mind you, is perhaps the greatest physical comedian alive today – I’d put money on it. And we all brush our teeth with some laughs. We’ve spent all of our lives on a quest to clown, often degenerating to antics so sophomoric that it’s initially shameful.

It was with this addiction to laughs and like-minded quest to clown, that we said, “Yo, we should make a movie.” It was bound to happen. Too many times, we’d be sitting at someone’s crib watching SNL and somebody would say, “Yo, wouldn’t it be funny if such-n-such happened, then dude took a such-n-such and did this-that?” So we said let’s do it. I told everyone to think of some ideas, meet me at my crib in the basement and we’d put together a psuedo-script.

THE SCRIPT MEETING:
So we’re all in the basement: Me, my lil brothers Adam and Chrish, The Smiths (Frank, Jared and Patrice), Rek, Joab and our idea noodlers (my lil sis Priscilla and her partner in crime Sahara).

Now although P and Sah (know from this point forward as PS for this blog) did not appear as characters (too cool for that) they have two very astute comedic minds. Their skill is not so much acting out humor, but noticing humor in very mundane, DL things: the way someone recovers from a stumble, one’s facial expression as they flinch, a contradiction in someone’s argument or actions -- the little things that can turn something funny into hilarious. So when ideas were being discussed the provided much needed building up and shooting down.

Anyways, a few people came to the meeting with characters. Redd wanted to be a Reverend and Frank had a hazy image of a pimpish dude in mind. And I came with characters of my own and a basic framework for how to try to get everything to connect into some semblance of a story. Don’t forget, we were 18-22 year old clowns, not USC film school grads…so a story for us wasn't exactly an Oscar-award worthy screenplay. We took mad liberties. And in the end, plausibility and weight was trumped by slapschtick everytime.

As we kept discussing these hazy characters, they grew to become pretty three-dimensional. When my Aunt Kim saw the movie she kept commenting on how so many of the characters took our fathers’ cardinal qualities, the cartoon aspects of their personalities…and she also said she noticed that many of the scenes seemed to be ripped out of our lives.

I know that sounds like a lil too much for a farce of a movie, but when I look back I can see our family/life experiences being played out.

Anyways...how we freaked it is: about two hours into the meeting we had our principal characters hammered out and some relative ideas for the scenes. Then we started assigning others to play characters and we said right then that we’d do this improv style…way before Larry David and “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.

That day, as characters developed, people would start acting them out and getting feedback. They try out a voice, a walk, an accessory...and everybody would weigh in with what they liked/disliked. As we were all doing that, I was thinking of where to shoot the scenes and how they’d be shot. I wanted to get a lot of Buffalo in it. The train stations, art gallery, people’s cribs, etc. And I started adding aspects to the story to get things to mesh, “yo frank, let’s make X your muscle-man and Y your yes-man.” “yo Rek, in this scene your gonna do X because 10 years ago K had got into Z.” “Yo Adam, say something like "Y" because in the R scene I’m gonna have you and Trice do H.” I added cameos too, more on that later. (I'm never above self-promotion)

After about four to five hours, we had the framework of a movie down on paper and set the shooting date a couple weeks later to give us time to go to the goodwill and pick out the most outrageous outfits ever and for everyone to polish their characters.