Splitsider: Talking Key & Peele With Series Director Peter Atencio -
I did an interview with my friend Natasha Vargas-Cooper for comedy website Splitsider. It’s really self-indulgent, but if you’re interested in directing sketch comedy, I go into a lot of detail about how I approached doing the show. Which premieres tonight at 10:30. Please watch it, or else I have to go back to making porn.
So anyhow, I’m really excited about seeing the world get to watch this show my friend Peter directed. At heart, he’s a filmmaker in every sense of the world. He’s thoughtful about every technical choice, and obsessive about the language. Furthermore, he knows what’s funny. And furtherfurthermore, he’s one of the kindest people I know.
This interview by my other friend Natasha (I have two friends!) is a great one. I love when good things happen to the right people.
Here’s Peter on verisimilitude as a comedic device:
Ben Stiller did things that were very ahead of his time on his show. I think he’s really under-appreciated as a director for how he nails the look and the tone of the things he’s parodying. That show and SNL’s commercial parodies were my earliest influences. I was always drawn to comedy that looked exactly like the thing it was making fun of.
Ha! Priceless.
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Urban Dictionary: “lonely sandwich” -
Just found this, more than a year after the term was coined onstage in Lake Arrowhead, CA. God bless the fan base.
“Me and Robot” by Wes
This photo is by my 4-year-old nephew Wes, shot this morning with his brand new Discovery Kids Digital Camera. He’s got an eye!
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We played the spot once, and when it finished, Jobs said, “It sucks! I hate it! It’s advertising agency ****! I thought you were going to write something like ‘Dead Poets Society!’ This is crap!”
Clow said something like, “Well, I take it you don’t want to see it again.” And Steve continued to go on a rant about how we should get the writers from “Dead Poets Society” or some “real writers” to write something.
” —Behind the Scenes of Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign (via implodr)
The biggest thing that bothers me about the “Cult of Jobs” is that people often seem to mistake the unfortunate, frequently counterproductive, side effects of the personality that made him great for the very cause of his greatness. Steve has long been, and always will be, one of my heroes, but I really worry that an entire generation of entrepreneurs is learning the folkloric lesson that the secret to success is to be a mercurial asshole who abuses everyone and listens to no one. There’s a reason people like Steve start successful companies: because they believe in themselves, envision their success unwaveringly, and don’t compromise. But there can be a dark side to that fanatical self belief: a disdain for the ideas of others. I think there are a lot of reasons for Steve’s late-in-life success at Apple, but I suspect one of the biggest is that he finally managed to surround himself with brilliant people (like Chiat Day’s Lee Clow) who knew how to handle him, curb his worst tendencies, and present important ideas to him in a way that he would accept.
(via buzz)
I’ve thought about this like Buzz has, but really, I don’t think it’s a concern. Entrepreneurs who take away these anecdotes of Steve’s sociopathic tendencies as instructive and critical to their own success are oblivious and no one will give a shit about them anyway. Watch this incredibly revealing documentary from his NeXT days in 1985 (probably the most intimate view of his process I’ve ever seen) and you’ll see a side of Steve that works well with others and weighs the ideas of others and feelings and things.
(via buzz)
Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola
I love how all five of these titans of cinema are fully-bearded except Scorsese (always the maverick) wears his beard on his forehead.
(Source: filmcrack)
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“That’s the whole secret, is if you hire great people and you don’t mess them up with a lot of analysis and conversation and speculation and nonsense—if you just get out of their way and shut up, they give you the performance that has made them the great performer that they are.” — Woody Allen on directing actors, from Woody Allen: A Documentary, which yes, of course you should watch