Huge thanks to Keith Shininger the amazing and dedicated webmaster of cannibalthemusical.net that is still up and running! Keith started the site back in early 2000’s and chronicled over 100 live productions of the Cannibal Stage Play as well as amassing lots of the hidden gems and mass favorite moments from Cannibal! There are still lot’s of juicy Cannibal morsels that can be found there for sure!! Go check it out - there might be a broken links, but lots of good stuff from back in the day!
This site was also the place my Shpadoinkle stories were previewed by many who eventually bought the book! So I am adding a large portion of Chapter 2 from Shpadoinkle! The Making of Cannibal! The Musical right here for your reading pleasure! In the future I plan to add some chapters from the still unpublished sequel to this book called Shenanigans: The Making of Orgazmo and the SP Pilot - so stay tuned and join our mailing list for updates on when those stories will drop!
Foreword
When I dove into the process of producing my first feature film right out of college, back in the 90’s, I gleaned as many books as I could find about the details of what it took to produce a movie or major creative project. The various books found helped our team patch together our own creative strategy and jump into the fire. So now with almost 20/20 hindsight, I recollect a grip of my own experiences specifically around Cannibal: The Musical, an uncanny project that has been taking me on a Trans-media journey through time.
Excerpt from Chapter 3 of Shpadoinkle: The Making of Cannibal! The Musical:
Considering Film School?
Do you need to go to film school if you want to learn? Certainly not. In filmmaking, most of the time you learn by doing, but school can help for lots of reasons.
The best thing about film school is working with other students who want to make films, too. Of all the arts, film is the most collaborative. It really helps to surround yourself with people who are interested in making films – helping you with your film and allowing you to help on theirs. Without question, making movies is one of the best ways to learn how to make movies. Naturally you’ll make mistakes. Things go wrong and you overcome it. So the process is a how-to and how-not-to, as you learn the steps to creating media.
Another thing for those considering film school is whether to learn all aspects of the craft or to specialize from the beginning. At CU we learned all aspects and were hands-on in every department. It was cool to understand what each job on a set entails. Learning all aspects ultimately helps you do other jobs better, especially producing and directing! Although, it can also be good to specialize, so you always have some skills to rely on for paying crew jobs.
If you specialize, beware of the ultimate good problem, which is getting pigeon-holed into one of these jobs that keeps you busy accepting grip work, while all the time you wish you were directing. If you make your living working on a set all day, you will often have little energy for anything else film-related. There is something to be said for the flexible bartender schedule that allows you to keep your creative schedule rolling if working on your own projects is what is most important.
Back in the ‘90s at the University of Colorado film department, students had a love/hate relationship with the teaching staff. There was a production department and a studies department, and these two departments had this huge rivalry with each other. So studies teachers favored studies majors and looked down on the production majors. Production majors thought most of the studies teachers were self-important wankers and that the studies majors were wasting their time listening to wankers interpret movies and/or preach factoids.
Although it is important to see the classic films from times past, a lot of film school pontificating can be self-indulgent. Most film theory books are written by professors who just like to talk about; what makes their favorite movies great. They have sweet jobs, however, and if I can’t make this book into a curriculum, I plan to write my next book on why my favorite movies are cool, to get a groovy teaching job that pays me to promote my own book!
We production majors found those studies classes to be a forum for all the self-important intellectuals who either reveled in memorizing facts too trivial for Trivial Pursuit (“Who was the cinematographer for Birth Of a Nation?”), or who buried you in bullshit lectures that dissected the compositional details of each shot beyond reason or comprehension.
Along with the douche bags, we were lucky enough to have the “grandfather of avant-garde cinema,” Stan Brakhage, teaching at CU Boulder. It was fascinating to hear Stan go off from the seat of his passion pants about his favorite movies. Stan’s discussions were fresh and from the heart and a joy to hear. Some of his own movies were the most brilliant pieces of color on light that I have ever seen, and some of his films were beyond my comprehension for better or for worse, depending on your opinion. More importantly, Stan played the parts of Noon ‘s father in Cannibal The Musical!
One of the other great things that CU offered film students was adversity. At the time, the CU film department was the least-funded department in the entire University of Colorado school system. We had this old school equipment literally from the ‘50s and ‘60s, while across the way, we could see the University of Colorado Golden Buffalo Orange Bowl Champion football team record and edit their practices with state of the art technology! But enduring 16-hour film shoots with Bolex cameras and cutting on Moviola flat beds really challenged us to overcome adversity. If there is one thing you must do when creating a movie (or any creative project), it’s overcome adversity and follow your creative vision. So every time something went horribly wrong, it was more great training for the hardships that creative lemmings must deal with.
My first production teacher was Don Yannacito, who played Humphrey’s father in Cannibal and had a nurturing Yoda-like quality in his teaching style. This was exactly what I needed as a beginner in film. It is important not worry about any criticism when you are making your first movies or experimenting in any medium. Do something that makes you happy and find your voice before worrying about critique! Don’t get stuck with a teacher that wants to put you on the spot in your beginning class. Don’t let them put you on the podium to sing a middle C in front of everyone. Just do your own thing and fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.
One of Trey Parker’s first movies was called Screaming Beavers of Sri Lanka, and the teacher nearly laughed him out of the room when he pitched it to the class. But the teacher just didn’t understand Trey’s vision for Screaming Beavers. Naturally, Trey came back to class with a super campy version, complete with crappy cut out sets, a crappy beaver puppet, funny special effects and a sweet little beginner movie.
When you get to the intermediate stage, that’s the time to start learning the basic rules of film, in terms of technique and story. When you have some confidence rolling you are ready do your own movie and receive full critique! That’s when we had Jerry Aronson step in. Jerry was our gay New York Jewish film professor, who was loving yet overbearing, and a perfect foil for the film student that will eventually work with film executives one day. Jerry taught us the importance of having a beginning, middle and end to any film, which was a crucial lesson.
He also taught us that creative notes are inevitable on first screenings, so it is important to always leave in a few red herrings before the final cut. That’s right. Leave in a couple of mistakes – throw the teacher or critic or exec a bone that they can focus on so they don’t force you to make too many changes that you don’t want to make! Not that you shouldn’t always be open to critique, but sometimes the smoke and mirrors can help when you are trying to preserve your vision. I saw this translate for Trey and Matt during Team America, when they wanted to make the kinkiest puppet sex scene ever. To accomplish this, they knew they had to take it absolutely as far as they possibly could, because whatever they did, would get tamed down heavily by censors.
There was no question that meeting great people was the most important benefit to getting a film degree. In fact Jerry Aronson even pointed everyone out to each other in our first intermediate class and said “Look around the room, everyone, because the people you see here you will be getting to know very well and probably partnering up with for all kinds of projects.” I was in disbelief as I surveyed the room full of geeks, but was happy that he wasn’t telling us that half of us would fail out.
That was the class where I met Ian Hardin. I met Trey Parker and Dian Bachar in an acting class. Matt Stone was a semester ahead of me in Intermediate Film, and it turned out that we had extremely similar short film concepts. I had wanted to do a movie about people getting dosed from “electric bananas.” It was to be my love letter to Donovan’s “They Call Me Mellow Yellow,” but it turned out that Matt beat me to the punch with an electric banana detective movie that starred Trey. So it was only a matter of time until Matt and I were pals. I decided to make “The Search for Shamu” for my intermediate film, instead. This was a National Geographic-style short about a Yuppie Trapper/ researcher, starring Dian as the Yuppie, with Trey as the Australian narrator. It was a five-minute movie, which is a perfect length for all first films. Conquering that challenge of telling a story in five minutes hopefully prepares you for the long form.
For Advanced Film, Ian, Matt and I were all in the same class, while Trey had a job working at the equipment rental desk. That’s when people started gelling with each other creatively. It was another process of like-minded individuals finding each other through various classes and projects that kept us all busy. I really got to know Trey and Matt on a night shoot for our friend Amy’s film. Trey was on camera, Matt was dolly grip, I was 2nd Assistant Camera, and we were shooting all night in a local restaurant. Like most student film shoots, it took hours and we knew we’d be working until sunrise. We had plenty of donuts and coffee to keep us up, but what really kept morale high were the continual dirty grandpa jokes. Trey and Matt were just now bonding for the first time, which consisted of them continually riffing from one sick dirty grandpa joke to another, and then repeat again twenty times. They beat dirty grandpa jokes into our brains until breakfast, while they became fast friends.
After a few semesters, we all had a bunch of short films completed and a circle of friends to work with. Trey had talked about making a feature film about Alferd Packer, the only convicted cannibal in US history. Alferd was the legendary “Colorado Cannibal,” a cult figure among students on many college campuses in that state. Our school boasted a grill named after Packer, and celebrated Alferd Packer Day on the third Friday of every April. Coming in clueless from California about Alferd’s legacy, I recall being shocked and amused that my new school would invite a local radio station to broadcast from a beer drinking barbecue complete with a cannibal look-a-like contest and several types of meat eating contests billed as the “main event,” while this loud band from Berkley called Primus jammed away.
Trey, a native of Colorado, had grown up with the story of Alferd Packer, and believed it had the makings of a perfect musical. Trey had been certain his idea could be executed for about ten thousand dollars, and he was ready to shoot it in his back yard during Christmas vacation. However, it was an oddly un-white Christmas that year, and we were far from ready to shoot a feature in any case. Months passed, and talk of the Alferd Packer feature had faded. By May most of us had focused on our semester’s 16mm projects, and Trey was in pre-production for his big wedding day.
Friendly Tips
- Your first film(s) should be made purely for fun, experimentation and self-expression. At some point after that, you need to practice telling a short story with a beginning, middle and end a story with a “set up” and a “pay off.” Usually, the shorter the film, the better it will be, especially in the age of Internet video.
- Learning all aspects of filmmaking from sound to camera, from lighting to acting and ultimately to writing, directing and editing will make you a better producer and all around team player once you decide to specialize in any one field.
- I have heard a lot of people say that once you learn the rules, then you can break them. But it is easy to break the rules if you don’t know them, too. So learn as many rules as possible and then strategize from there.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Don’t let schooling interfere with your education. - Mark Twain