![]() ![]() So I experienced a weird surge of both nostalgia and optimism when I discovered that part of The Onion Movie’s format involved recycling stories from the print publication as segments from the Onion News Network. The bar for The Onion Movie has been set so low that I was pleasantly surprised to discover that because The Onion Movie recycles some of the greatest hits of the print publication, it has something of an Onion vibe. It’s the kind of widely derided film that doesn’t attract cultists so much as apologists or weary, embattled defenders. But I also didn’t see it because it had a reputation for being quite poor. So I didn’t see The Onion Movie partially out of a sense of loyalty to my friends. At a certain point, Scott Aukerman was brought in but he sure isn’t putting this on his resume either.īy the time The Onion Movie hit DVD stores and Netflix in 2008, some five years after it wrapped production, it was an orphan whose ostensible creators had either taken their name off it, attempted to take their name off it, or distanced themselves publicly from the results. Over a period of years, the big question with The Onion Movie shifted from “Is it going to be good?” to “How bad could it possibly be?” The Onion took steps to distance itself from the movie, as did its screenwriters, my friends Todd Hanson and Rob Siegel. It’s about two/thirds of the runtime of the average movie and sure enough, when The Onion Movie was eventually snuck onto home video many years after its production, it only ran about 76 minutes. Even in my drunken haze, I realized that that was not enough for a motion picture. The co-director looked around uncomfortably and said that they had about an hour of footage. Looking back, that’s kind of a weird question but I was very drunk and feeling very festive. I remember cornering one of the film’s directors at the wedding of one of its screenwriters and asking him how long the movie was going to be. I held onto that conviction even as buzz on the production began to sour. ![]() So while I knew that sketch comedy movies were very infrequently successful, and more regularly embarrassments for all involved, I assumed that if The Onion comedy writers made a movie it would be funny and successful and good. I have enormously complicated feelings about The Onion as a whole but I’ve always loved its comedy unambiguously. If a book did big, big things for The Onion, then why wouldn’t a movie produced by David Zucker, the comedy God behind movies like Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane! and The Naked Gun do wonderful things for the paper as well ? When The Onion released Our Dumb Century in 1999 it was both the kind of timeless masterpiece that is reverently taught in satire courses in college and a huge best-seller that helped put the funky little satirical newspaper on the map. ![]() I would tell people that I worked for The Onion and they would immediately become more animated and excited. Even though I had nothing to do with the comedy side, I took enormous pride in being part of something so good, so necessary, so important and something that made so many people happy. It was a baptism by fire, a working education of the best kind. It was my graduate school, where I learned how to be a writer. For the first ten years at least, The Onion wasn’t just a job: it was my life. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |