(The Broken Lizard team above, on the set of The Slammin' Salmon. From the far left corner, the five members are Steve Lemme, Kevin Heffernan, Erik Stolhanske, Paul Soter, and Jay Chandrasekhar. They're joined by co-star Cobie Smulders. )by Terry Keefe
I once shared a van ride with a few of the guys from Broken Lizard at Sundance, back in the mid-nineties, during their days promoting their first feature film, Puddle Cruiser, and what I recall most is that they were, for lack of a more colorful way to put it, cool dudes. They all seemed to be genuine friends and, most strikingly, lacked the need for verbal one-upmanship, or a desire to always be the funniest person in the room, that I've noticed amongst groups of folks in the comedy field when out in public together. They also felt like a real team, sort of closer to a tightly-knit rock band than anything you usually see in the film business, this side of Monty Python. And that spirit of camaraderie has clearly served them well. Some 12 years later, with three more successful features under their collective belts (Super Troopers, Club Dread, and Beerfest), they are all still working together, but more incredibly, they still seem like, from the short time we spent together this week at least, the same down-to-earth group of guys they were back then, even with a producing deal and suite at Warner Bros, as they now have.
As has been the case since the beginning, there are five official members of Broken Lizard: Kevin Heffernan, Jay Chandrasekhar, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske, and Steve Lemme. The group formed back in Colgate University, which actually puts them together for close to a mind-boggling two decades. They've shared writing credit on all their features and generally starred together in all of them as well. Chandrasekhar has served as director on their first four films, although Heffernan has now taken the helm for their newest, The Slammin' Salmon. The film is set to premiere this coming Saturday, January 17th at, appropriately enough, the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, at 10:45 (The screening is apparently sold out already, but check out the Slamdance schedule regardless. They've done more for American indie film than any fest next to their more famous counterpart and deserve the love.). The guys have described the experience of making the Salmon as "going back to their roots," as they raised the money to make the film independently and are heading to the mountain this year without a distributor in place. Although no one needs to point out we're in a rough economic time now, particularly for indie film, this is likely a project that the distributor checkbooks are going to come out for. I've seen the film with an audience now, and to put it succinctly, it plays.
(Michael Clarke Duncan as the Champ, above) The plot centers around one night at the Miami restaurant of the title, which is owned by former heavyweight boxing champion, "Slammin'" Cleon Salmon, played by the film's secret weapon, Michael Clarke Duncan, as the boss from hell who will literally kick your ass if you piss him off. And it doesn't take a lot to do that. Salmon has just returned from a trip to Japan and informs his staff that he's in gambling debt up to his ears to the Yakuza. He proposes a contest to his wait staff, in order to motivate them to sell more food: the top-selling waiter will get $10,000, while the lowest-selling waiter will have a can of whoop-ass opened on him by the Champ. I have to say that there is little I have seen in recent years which is funnier than watching Michael Clarke Duncan scream threats, poorly-composed (deliberately, by the writers at least) insults, and profanities at the top of his lungs, all of which he does throughout the Salmon. It's a career-redefining performance for him, and I could imagine a successful spin-off film of this character doing just about anything: an adventure tale, a love story, a pirate movie, a Dogma film. I'd watch any of the above. The merchandising possibilities are also endless. I would definitely buy a talking action figure of the Champ loaded up with his best insults, and I don't think I'm alone.
As always, the Lizards fill out the cast to strong effect. Heffernan plays the beleaguered manager of the Salmon, who also has the misfortune of being the Champ's brother-in-law; Chandrasekhar turns in his funniest performance yet in a Lizard film as the waiter known as "Nuts" who has forgotten to take his meds; Soter takes on dual roles as a wimpy waiter and his abusive twin brother chef; Stolhanske is a jerky server who is stuck with Will Forte's diner that won't leave; and Lemme is a former employee, who quit when he got the lead on a network series, and is now forced back into the service trade when inexplicably fired from "CFI: Hotlanta".
I met with Broken Lizard at their publicist's offices at Miller PR last week.
Kevin Heffernan: You have the advantage of having seen the film!
Just last night. I think it's going to play well everywhere.
Kevin: Yeah, hopefully. We just wanna get it out there and get someone to buy it.
Slamdance is a great place to be showing it.
Kevin: Yeah, we're psyched.
Are you going to hit the streets of Park City with guerrilla marketing, like you did with Puddle Cruiser?
Jay Chandrasekhar: I don't know. I think we're like -
Kevin: A friend of mine said to me last night, "Should I print out some fliers for Slamdance, and we'll go up and down the streets and hand 'em out?" I don't know.
Jay: The screening sold out in thirty minutes.
Paul Soter: I know. Ten minutes, I think.
Kevin: It's on Saturday night, at like 10:45 or something. It's a real nice slot.
Paul: Post-dinner. Some drunks and stoners'll be in there yellin' and whoopin' it up [laughs].
I remember with Puddle Cruiser that you guys also went out on a multi-city tour with the film, in a van, was it?
Kevin: Yeah, we didn't get distribution...so we got a Winnebago. We went from college to college in the Northeast, in the wintertime. January...
Jay: January.
Erik: Genius.
Kevin:...and we just four-walled it, and showed it in all the colleges.
Paul: We'd drive off the road sometimes.
Erik: Didn't we write Super Troopers while we were in that Winnebago?
Kevin: Some of the stuff. When we're on the road, we end up writing a lot.
Was the script for The Slammin' Salmon written relatively recently?
Kevin: No, we wrote it a while back. Actually, what we did is we started writing Beerfest and Slammin' Salmon at the same time, and one was designed to be like a studio kind of movie, with a higher budget, and then we were like, "We should write another one in case we move outside the studio system, then we'll have a low-budget movie ready too," and so, we wrote it at the same time. And so, it was kind of sitting there, and we'd take it out and rewrite it, and put it away. And then, when the Writers Strike happened, it was time to take it out, because we couldn't get anything going in the studios, because they weren't doing anything.
(Paul Soter, April Bowlby, Jay Chandrasekhar, Cobie Smulders, and Steve Lemme)It's a broad question to ask how you guys write together, but how do you write together?
Paul: It's always sort of an amorphous mix of hanging out versus working. And so, especially with something like Slammin' Salmon, we had the draft a long time ago, but we'd be hanging out and all of a sudden, somebody would start doing the Champ. For a while, there were places where we'd just start working suddenly, like if we were in a restaurant, we'd start talking about the script. And we'd come up with ridiculous shit that the Champ would say, or some scenario of the movie. And we'd write it down, and throw it into the mix, and so, it was a weird....
(Murmurs of consent from all the Lizards.)
Kevin: It was a very unique script for us, to finally sit down and make this film, really after it had a few years of being a back-burner project. But it has been kind of been cool that we ended up having a lot of time to flesh out different stuff and characters.
Is someone designated as the point person on the script who has to piece all these different ideas together?
Jay: Yeah, Steve was.
That's got to be the job from hell.
[General laughter.]
Jay: Steve was the point person on this movie. But we have had different movies where different people have been the point person. And it's tough, because you end up just being a scribe, writing down all the jokes. Everyone's laughing, and you're writing, putting it all down. You know, we used to have a system where we'd break up the script. We'd create an outline, which would have the scene and the jokes that would go in that scene, and we'd each write a fifth of the script, and then put it together, and the point man would try to make it smooth, and twenty drafts later you'd have a movie [laughs]. Now we break up the outline and one or two people go off and write it, so that it's a little more fluid, and then we still do twenty drafts to make the movie [laughs], but -
It seems like keeping a consistent tone would be one of the harder parts of the writing process you're describing. Is the rule basically that if it's funny, it can make it into the film?
Jay: No, it's more...things have to fit the tone of the movie, and fit the actual movie. That's the goal. But I mean, you know, we will throw in the occasional little bit that'll break the tone of movie a little.
Kevin, you've taken over the directorial reigns on this film, but the writing process with the group is clearly very collaborative. Is the directing process also very collaborative?
Kevin: It's very collaborative.
Paul: Yeah, that's just the way we work, and luckily, we've been able to figure out how to make it work.
You guys have stuck together a very long time.
Erik: We get in our fights, and we have our moments, but we come back and get together.
Jay: Well, what Kevin always did for me when I was acting [while also the director] was that he would direct my acting, so I would try to come in and do that for him, too. Because it's...the one thing that really falls off when you direct a movie is your acting. You don't really have the right amount of time for it. On this film, I found that what you get to do as an actor, is you get to sit in your dressing room and run lines with people, and try little things, so I was able to do things that I thought of for my character. When I was directing, we'd be shooting one scene, and I'd also be in the next one as an actor, but I was just thinking, "What are my lines? Okay, forget it, roll 'em, let's go." [laughs]. And so when I was actually acting in that next scene, it would really be the first time I thought about my acting for it. It's just not as good.
It kind of worked performance-wise for your stressed-out manager character, though.
Yeah [laughs]. Jay was sometimes the stressed-out guy on Super Troopers. I was the stressed-out manager on this.
(Above, Heffernan directs Soter.)
Erik: And it's nice to have Jay back in the peanut gallery with us [laughs].
Paul: Acting. Dicking around.
Jay: Farting, and flirting with girls, and doing whatever, it's fun [laughs].
(Jay Chandrasekhar's character of Nuts, above, probably should have taken his meds before coming to work.)
If there's a creative discussion you guys have to have on the set, do you all sort of huddle together somewhere, away from the rest of the cast and crew, to talk about it?
Kevin: Yeah, yeah, it's those moments when we realize something like "This line's not working," you know? And then we have to talk. I was sort of like, "Get those guys out of their dressing rooms, they're playing their video games, what the fuck?"
[General laughter all around.]
So, we'd get everyone together, and somebody would come up with a better line. It was also good, the fact that we were in one location, because everybody was there and accessible, and people weren't spread out. It worked out really well.
I imagine you have to keep a united front up in terms of decision-making, as far as how the rest of the cast and the crew see you guys. Because there is the danger of people trying to play each of you against the others.
Kevin: Yeah, but I think over the years, we've been very good with that. You see on other projects that you work on, people undermine each other or whatever. But we've always managed to avoid that.
Jay: With other people, with the other actors, though, the rest of us don't really give them direction. I mean, the director is the guy who does it. Because then it gets a little confusing for them, because who the fuck are they supposed to listen to? We'll help each other come up with jokes, but ultimately, if the director wants something a certain way, then that's the way it has to be.
Since improv is obviously part of your background, do you guys typically do a lot of variations from take-to-take?
Kevin: We've always been kind of hampered, in that we've never had the luxury of doing that many takes. We've always been budget-hampered, and on this one, very much so. We shot in twenty-five days, and it was a very limited time. But I think we got a chance to do, you know, a couple of takes where it was scripted, and then I think everyone had a little freedom to try different things. Which was nice. I think in this movie, we did have budget constraints, but because we were all in that one location, it did free up a little bit of time. With no company moves, I think people had the opportunity to do a little more improv-y type stuff, in that stage-play kind of way. Which was a good feel.
There are a lot of advantages to being in one location, but you also had to keep a lot of people there all the time. Because the location was supposed to be a crowded restaurant and one single night. Lots of continuity things to worry about also.
Kevin: Yeah, it was tough.
Erik: And it was a huge deal with the background and the extras. Because you have access to these background actors for a few days, and so you're like, "Okay, I'm shooting in this direction and it's supposed to be 9 PM in the world of the movie. I've got to make sure that everyone who is supposed to be dining from 9 to 10 is in that shot." That's when I really didn't envy you, Kevin.
Kevin: Yeah, it's like if we're doing a scene in the kitchen, and if somebody is gonna walk through that scene, you've got make sure the continuity is always right. There's a lot of house-of-cards shit with this type of continuity.
Did you have Michael Clarke Duncan in mind from the beginning for the role of the Champ?
Kevin: We didn't know who we were going to get. We actually wrote the thing with Mike Tyson in our minds. It was Mike Tyson.
Did you think about actually trying to get Tyson?
Kevin: Well, we couldn't get insurance if we got Mike Tyson. [laughter] So it was like -
Jay: The face tattoo kind of somehow negates the funny in my mind.
Kevin: Tyson was a model, you know, and so we kind of wrote the voice, and we thought about that. And then we got to the point of shooting, and we were like, "Who the fuck is going to play this part? Who can do this?" He's got to be incredibly terrifying, and yet, have these flights of fancy in the dialogue, and do these funny things. And with Michael Clarke Duncan, I don't think any of us had seen him do these types of things before.
I certainly haven't.
Kevin: And we were like, "I don't know, but he looks great. And he's a movie star, and whatever." And he came in, and he just started improvising. And we thought, "Oh my god, the guy's awesome!" Last night, that's the first time I ever saw him with an audience. But I thought it killed, at that screening.
It did. The audience loved him.
Jay: I called [director] Adam McKay up and talked to him about Michael, because they worked together on Talladega Nights. And Adam said that Michael was an incredible improviser. I asked, "Can he do lines? 'Cause we've got huge monologues." And he said, "The guy's great."
Erik: And he was unbelievable. Honestly, like, he had a great improv for every take.
Kevin: And a different one. I tried to do it a little bit of justice in the outtakes at the end, in some of the takes where he would speak Spanish, and do other funny stuff. I was like, "Michael, you should be doing more of this shit," and he said, "Nobody asks me." So, hopefully, people will see this movie, and let him do more, because the guy's unbelievably talented. You can't find a guy that scary and that funny at the same time. It's just not...they don't exist.
What were some of your own restaurant waiting experiences?
Jay: Steve and I have waited tables at a place on the Upper East Side called Busby's. And we would just...we ran the place [laughs]. And so we would just order the customers their vodka soda and their Bloody Mary, and then also one for me, and you'd just drink, and you'd steal/eat food. Whatever they didn't eat, you'd shovel into your mouth. And we had a chef who just a total, total prick, yelling at us all the time. So we had to get our revenge. But yeah, we just wrote down stories from that time. And Steve went on...he had a longer waiting career, so he had more waiter jokes.
Erik: Steve once worked at City Crab, at 19th and Park, and he left after we sold one of our films. He kind of quit, saying, you know, "Fuck you," and then it took a long time to get paid, after we sold our movie. He had to go and ask for his job back, and he went back to waiting tables. Like in the film. They were all making fun of him.
I don't want to give too much away. But I love the little homage to Rocky III towards the end of the film.
[general laughter]
Jay: At first, we were thinking, "Not everybody's gonna get that." But the guys who are obsessed with movies, like we are, they love that shit. That's why we do stuff like that.
Jay: It's funny as shit, too.
Paul: We put a lot of care into writing the Mariah Carey version of "Eye of the Tiger."
Erik: The punch [the Champ throws at the end] looked pretty vicious.
Paul: It looked real last night.
Jay: So vicious!
I was going to ask about that.
Paul: How we did that shot?
Yeah. I couldn't find a cut in there. It looks like a real punch.
Paul: We shot it in reverse.
Jay: And...it works.
Were you guys able to keep a straight face when Michael started going off with the screaming the first time you heard him? Because anything he says while yelling seems hilarious.
Jay: Yeah, he's so funny when he gets angry. You know, I mean, yeah, it was challenging. But you were also scared of him [laughs].
Erik: Yeah, it was very easy to get into the terror of it, too, because it was terrifying.
Jay: The voice is so loud, and it's coming from so deep, and there's something primal about it that makes you wanna do what he says.
[General laughter]
So, you have a lot of new projects going. Do you know which is the next one in the cue?
Jay: We wrote a movie called Road Scholars, where we play college professors. The senior class plays a prank on them - kidnaps them, strips them naked, and drops them off two hundred miles from school. And the movie's sort of somewhat like The Warriors in that we're trying to fight our way back to school.
Erik: They're these sort of academic, egghead guys who are completely up their own asses [laughs], and now they're dealing with the real world, not being able to sort of figure out how to get by. So, yeah, we like that a lot. We hope that's the next thing we do.
Are there going to be little posses coming after them, like in The Warriors?
Jay: [laughs] They're out in the middle of nowhere. They're going from the wilderness, to a weird rural area. They fuck up everywhere along the way, and....there's people coming after them, yeah.
If you really want to do a Warriors homage, you've got to have "In the City" at the end.
[General laughter. The Broken Lizards briefly harmonize Joe Walsh's "In the City."]
Is there some secret that's kept you guys working together, and getting along, for all this time?
Erik: Bills.
[general laughter]
Paul: The majority of what we do with our work is what you do with your friends when you're dicking around anyway. There's very little separation between what we do for a living and what we would do socially, and so it'll always be fun to do. It never feels like punching a clock.
Jay: It's just a job we enjoy.
How much test-screening do you do of your films while finessing them?
Jay: This one, we screened it about three times for three different audiences. Saw what worked, videotaped it, you know. Audiotaped it.
Paul: But, you know, you bring in friends, and I don't know if that's a great barometer, because they know you, they want to laugh, they want to be helpful, and so it's not really like just an audience of regular people, judging the movie for what it was. And I think that even though we had some friends there last night at the screening, that was the first time where I got the sense of "Okay, this is just a film playing in front of an audience, who are not invested to feel one way the another about it," and to have a very good response was, for me, "Okay, I can relax because it plays well, and it's fine, and it works."
Do you ever get back to Colgate to speak?
Erik: Two years ago, they were bringing in the new freshman class, and they brought us back. They showed Super Troopers, and they had a question-and-answer, and they threw a dinner for us downtown.
Paul: Up until a few years ago, there were still some of us who lived in New York, who were close by, and so they would say, "Hey, we're gonna screen this, do you guys wanna come up?" Not as much in the last few years, since we're all out here now. But, you know, it also got to be a point where we were still young enough to go and have a screening and party and feel like we fit in somehow at all [laughs]. This last one a couple of years ago, it just was very striking how suddenly we realized we don't belong there anymore.
[general laughter]
One last question: Super Troopers 2? I've heard it's coming?
Jay: We're halfway through the script. We're gonna finish it, polish it up, figure out how much it's gonna cost, and we're gonna talk to Fox. Hopefully, they'll wanna make it!
FIN.
SOME UNBROKEN BROKEN LIZARD LINKS FOR YOU:
Official Website
MySpace Page
The Slammin' Salmon TRAILER below (Note: This is the Red-Band Trailer, which has some profanity, or cusses, if you will.)
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