When
I first heard that my advertising and film production
company, Captains of Industry, might be hired to write
and direct a video starring John Cleese, the idea
seemed incredibly remote—about as likely to happen
as the Knights of the Round Table riding across foggy
moors into my office, propelled by the hoof-beat
percussion of coconuts.
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John Cleese as Dr. H.Twain Weck, Director for the
Institute of Back-up Trauma. |
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I’ve
been a fan of Monty Python from the very first days
they galloped onto the American cultural scene in the
1970’s. I was there at the City Center for
Python’s New York debut, watching John Cleese walk
through the aisles during intermission, hawking a dead
albatross. His comedy had a certain Cleeseness you
could spot a mile away, just as you could spot the
Alfred Hitchcock touch in each of his classic films. Cleese, to me, was and is one of the funniest and most
original people on earth.
Do a video with him? Sure, and could you please
add Robin Williams, Tom Hanks and J-Lo?
But
like the layers of John Lennon’s Glass Onion peeling
away, impossibility began to give way to reality. My business partner Fred Surr and I are long-time friends of
Doug Feinburg, founder of multimedia and video
production company Thunder Sky Pictures. Doug received
a call from his old friend Jeff Weiner, an independent
marketing consultant working for an IT company called
LiveVault.
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Left, the author Ted Page in character as Bernie.
With John Cleese as Hilda. |
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| Left, John Cleese playing H.Twain Weck in his previous
life as an IT manager. At right is Michael Dorn as Twain
Weck's irate boss, Jankowski. |
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From left to right: Fred Surr, Director, John Cleese as
Dr. H.Twain Weck, Ted Page,Writer, Doug Feinburg,
Producer. Not shown is marketing guru Jeff Weiner
who's idea it was to hire John Cleese for a viral
campaign |
Weiner
wanted to create a web video to help launch
LiveVault’s new product, a disk-based backup system
for corporate data, and he wanted to do it in
‘viral’ way, creating a piece so funny that IT
managers would share it with friends. Brainstorming
with LiveVault managers, we created “The Institute
for Backup Trauma,” a rehabilitation facility for IT
managers who have lost their data and gone off the
deep end. Cleese would play Dr. Harold Twain Weck, director of the
institute and a former patient.
A few
days later, Doug, Fred and I were sitting in a
conference room awaiting a script review call with Mr.
Cleese. Even after his voice came out of the
conference phone I was expecting Doug to say, “Boy,
I really had you going.” But there was no mistaking
Cleese’s voice.
We were delighted when Cleese asked if the
scriptwriter was British; it seemed to him that only a
Brit could capture the nuances of language and humor
in the script. Little did he know that I had seen
almost all his movies, and knew the unique cadence of
his vocal patterns, from the gradually rising rant of
his architect’s sketch (“You hypocritical toadies
with your Tony Jacklin golf clubs!”), to the berserk
owner of a dead parrot confronting the beleaguered
pet-shop owner (“It’d be pushin’ up daisies if
you hadn’t nailed it to its perch!”), to the
desperately middle aged barrister in A FISH CALLED
WANDA (“We’re all dead, you know”). So writing
for Cleese was essentially like writing a cello
concerto specifically for Yo-Yo Ma.
Within
a week, after one more script conference, everything
was finalized. Cleese was happy with the script, and
the shoot date in LA was set.
While I would still occasionally panic and
blurt out the word “Burma” during meetings, it
seemed like the impossible was indeed happening.
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Cleese as Dr.Twain Weck, here rewarding a patient
at the clinic with a fish. |
The
first shot of the day involved Cleese in drag, playing
Hilda, the buxom-to-the-point-of-disability office
manager. Hilda was supposed to search a supply room
for some lost backed-up data tapes, but we
deliberately made the room so narrow that Hilda’s
gigantic Y-cup breasts knocked things off the shelves.
During rehearsal, Cleese improved upon the script by
heightening various physical maneuvers and scaling
back others. This aspect of the shoot was the most fascinating for me:
Cleese as a craftsman of comedy. Each little bit
required a great deal of choreography, and excellent
timing. He’s a true perfectionist who has a perfect
sense of what is and is not funny. Of course, I have
to admit that one of the reasons I wrote the scene was
to see Cleese act in drag. And I couldn’t resist
having a small bit part opposite “Hilda.” Believe
me, this is the stuff dreams are made of.
In
the next scene, Cleese played a younger Harold Twain
Weck, an IT manager who experiences the horrors of
Backup Trauma firsthand.
Michael Dorn, famous for playing Worf on Star
Trek: The Next Generation, leapt at the chance to
play Twain Weck’s fierce boss, Jankowski. After Dorn
intimidated Twain Weck with a particularly Worf-like
threat, Cleese improvised a hilarious bit, smashing
dental molds with his phone receiver while repeating,
“Not happy! Not happy! Not happy!” Dorn blew about
4 of his takes because every time he had to look at
Cleese he burst out laughing.
Next
up were a number of scenes featuring Cleese as the
Director of the Institute, showing some novel
‘therapies’ used to treat patients.
These included a straight-jacketed man bashing
his head against a tape drive piñata, a seal-like man
who was fed raw fish as a reward for answering Twain
Weck’s questions, and my favorite: a patient
strapped into a chair, eyes forced open a la Clockwork
Orange, being shown a “retraining film” set to
Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. We included a special hidden
frame message into this section of the video. Can you
find it?
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| John Cleese playing Hilda, office manager for Toothy Grins
Dental Supply. |
It
occurs to me now that laughter is the most
inexplicable of all feelings. It comes upon us all of
a sudden and makes our abdomens compress, forcing out
air in a sort of comedic Heimlich maneuver. Laugther
wells up within us because of things we see or hear,
but it is never one thing by itself – for example
– a Medieval Knight; but rather a Knight banging
coconut shells together while ‘galloping’ across a
landscape. Even then, humor might not happen unless
the look on the Knight’s face is serious and
earnest. The Minister of Silly walks, Cleese pointed
out at the LiveVault shoot, was silly only from the
waist down, serious from the waist up; one without the
other would not be funny. The bringing together of
things that don’t normally belong together must
somehow cross the wires in our brains, with laughter
being the resulting spark. Cleese just knows how to
make a lot of sparks. I wish today’s TV sitcoms had
even a small fraction of Cleese’s electrical storm;
if they did, they wouldn’t need mechanical laugh
tracks to cue us when something was supposed to be
funny.
The
sets, the costumes, the lights are all stored away
now. Cleese is back in his ranch in California’s
rolling hills of vine. In many ways the LiveVault show
was just one more production out of a million in
Tinsletown. But not for me. I have something I
didn’t have before. Something that will never be
auctioned on e-bay. I have a smashed dental mold from
Twain Weck’s desk. The holes from the missing teeth
make it a great pencil holder.
Ted Page is a principal and head scriptwriter at
Captains of Industry as well as an independent
filmmaker.
