Like most people, when I first hooked up to the
Internet, I almost immediately went straight to the weirder and
nuder sites on the world wide web. It was after stumbling onto
a website devoted to a college student's recent navel piercing
that I started to think, somebody should do a TV show about this.
Meanwhile, Puppets Who Kill, a TV series idea I'd
co-created with former Muppeteer John Pattison, had been picked
up by Jason Alexander and was being developed for UPN. Somewhat
exasperated and frustrated by the process, and unable to sleep
one night because I was puppy-sitting, I blitzed together a proposal
for a show called Internet Slutts and had my agent send it off
to the Comedy Network the next day. A few days later I met with
Ed Robinson, who agreed that it was a cool idea, and he financed
a pilot.
(Why another show with puppets? Mostly it was because
I figured a couple of deranged puppet characters could get away
with saying more outrageous things about web sites than real
people could, and I also wanted the show to have a bit of a surreal
quality. Internet Slutts takes place in the real world, but Wally
and Murk, being puppets, have more of an outsider's take on things.)
Needing a couple of puppets, I drew two quick sketches
of the two main characters and went to see Ron Stefaniuk, a special
effects artist/puppet builder/ puppeteer/ set designer /magician
and an old friend who I often try to weasel favours out of when
I'm doing a project on a small budget. He agreed to build the
puppets as long as he got to be Murk and his best friend Frank
Meschkuleit got to play Wally. Since Ron is a very funny guy
and Frank is considered by many to be the world's best puppeteer,
I happily agreed.
I enlisted the help of fellow Canadian Film Centre
alumni Brian Stockton and John Gundy, and we borrowed the funky
office of a commercials producer to serve as our set. Brian and
I then went to work trying to find bizarre and intriguing websites
- something that turns out to be harder than it sounds. After
about a month of relentless surfing - typing unusual words into
search engines to see what popped up, hitting random links, making
up website addresses with oddball names and hoping they existed,
pestering friends - we ended up with about a dozen, and I got
to work on the script, which took a couple of weeks to write.
Meanwhile, Ron had painstakingly constructed two wonderfully
goofy and unique latex puppets.
The pilot was shot in one day and edited up at
the Comedy Network, and a few months later Ed gave us an order
for 18 episodes. We decided to try to shoot the series without
any outside assistance from the usual sources such as Telefilm,
various cable funds or advances from distributors. This gave
us a lot less money to work with, but a huge amount of creative
freedom.
Where the pilot was a random sequence of self-contained
sketches, the new episodes all have a theme and a character arc:
for example, in "Murk's New Thing," Murk is worried
that he's not hip anymore and goes to the web to find a new way
to look with-it. Each show having a theme made the search for
sites a bit easier, but just barely. We averaged 30 to 40 sites
visited for every site chosen - and then for legal reasons we
had to approach the chosen sites for permission to use their
pages. Amazingly, we were frequently refused - the owner of the
site often citing a desire for 'privacy.' Often we heard, 'How
on earth did you find me!?', as if the site was hidden away in
the deepest African jungle and not on the Internet and accessible
to anybody with a computer and a modem at any time.
I wrote 14 episodes and Brian Stockton wrote the
other 4. Because I was going to so many totally bizarre sites
I honestly expected agents from CSIS to begin monitoring my computer's
movements. Once they began charting my habits I figured it would
only be a matter of time before they broke down my door and hauled
me away for psychiatric assessment. All that happened was I get
a lot of unwanted email from porn sites now.
After visiting thousands of sites something became
quite apparent: the best were the ones that celebrated unusual
things with the utmost sincerity, such as the site devoted to
teaching women how to pee standing up; the location devoted to
trepanning, the practice of drilling holes in one's own head
to achieve clearer thinking; the star-struck dermatologist's
webpage devoted to celebrities with skin conditions; the on-line
questionnaire for folks who think they've been abducted by aliens...
All in all, it took about 5 months to collect the
sites and write the scripts - a process that went on even during
actual production. (Episode 18, "Amurkcan Gigolo,"
was finished the night before we shot it.)
Ron Stefaniuk designed and built the set - Murk
the drug-addled bicycle courier's grungy basement apartment.
Because we were dealing with hand puppets, which are operated
from below, the set had to be elevated six feet off the floor,
and platforms had to be built for the cameras and operators.
Our terrific director of photography Brent J. Craig built a lighting
grid and gave Ron's beautiful set a rich, complex chiaroscuro
look - something you almost never see when puppets are shot for
TV.
John Gundy, who's a wizard at these things, somehow
found a way to make the show possible with the very small budget
we had, and Allan Weinrib put together a production team of folks
who were somewhat inexperienced but on the verge of a bigtime
breakthrough.
We spent six weeks taping in an ad hoc studio we
put together in an old peanut butter factory downtown, shooting
with two cameras and a very small crew. (One of the sites we
use in the show, devoted to curiosities such as shrunken heads,
turned out to be originating from a computer in the seemingly
abandoned other half of the building.)
I directed 9, Brian Stockton 5, and John Gundy
4.
After wrapping the studio we spent another week
shooting in locations such as a tattoo parlour, an adult film
store and a charming little cafe - this time with one camera
and a minuscule crew. Once out in the real world we were amazed
to see how delighted and charmed people were by Wally and Murk.
Murk, intriguingly, turned out to be especially popular with
women. Several of the locations scenes involve the puppets interacting
with real people, such as comic actors Frank MacAnulty and Brigit
Gall.
We began editing at Partners and Regina musician/director/writer
Brett Bell began working on the incidental music.
The websites were first shot right off a computer
monitor. Then, for certain sites that required a clearer picture,
we used a Scando - a device that translates computer signals
into video signals. Finally, when required, we download stills
from various sites.
Due to time and production constraints, the puppeteers
almost never saw the sites they were referring to in their scripts
- they were kind of like actors in a special effects movie who
have no idea what they're reacting to until they see the finished
product.
Because Frank turned out to be a brilliantly hilarious
improvisor, we've added at least 45 seconds of his out-takes
to the closing credits of every episode. If we're lucky enough
to be picked up for a second season, Ron has vowed to prepare
a repertoire of seemingly spontaneous moments, so he can get
some screen time in the end credits, too.
