Some time ago, we showcased a skit, one of many of ours fitting snugly in the "abortive joke" sub genre. In it was featured a man of vague ethnic parentage whose undefined but seemingly dearth-influenced culture, we decided (owing to one of our better but purely accidental instances of impromptu backstory), places inordinate emphasis on over-sized objects as a form of humor; shoes, stock animals, pinecones, and so on. Regarding the latter, our stock fish-out-of-water foreign character posed the question to his erstwhile conversational partner: "What kind of tree is making such huge pinecone?"
Well apparently, life imitates our meager art: there are, we have discovered, indeed such things as produce massively oversized pinecones, and they go by either the mundane name of bunya pines, or the aggressively delightful name of Araucaria bidwillii. With this revelation in mind (and surely, there will be little else that will be able to occupy it for the near future), I am announcing the official renaming of The Proper Villains to The Bidwillii Bros.
Expect varied and drastic measures to promote ourselves under the new and improved monicker; a haunting trademark will soon adorn coffee mugs, t shirts, and soon too, hopefully, everything from cell phone skins to feminine hygiene products. So frenzied shall be the attempt to propagate our name, for naught but the sheer love of the featured word, that I predict there will be no recourse ultimately but to stage a massive press conference, wherein our brief but forgivable careers will culminate in a stunning and audacious live-broadcast wherein we stand at three points on a stage and simultaneously shoot each other fatally, to ensure that we never live to dishonor the name.
The sincerest fact of the matter is that we, like in all endeavors, conducted no research nor cogitated in advance on any significant portion of the script, such as it was. Indeed, even on those few days where we can devote our spare time to rewrites and editing, most of it is occupied by Nick having to comb each page for and to remove the many passive-aggressive barbs I unvaryingly direct at our director and actors in each script, subtly slipped into the slug and action lines on every page. Think, INT.- JUSTIN'S FETID APARTMENT or Suddenly, Kyle's corpselike visage assails the screen. It's pretty great.
A minor aside is how happy I am that, after nothing short of hours of cajoling, I finally managed to compel Écouter Kyle to begin an otherwise innocuous scene with a stifling moment of black lead-in, followed by a Law & Order-style metal-clang "shocking" sound effect, something I have wanted to accomplish for ages. Basically I'd start a kid's show like that.
Sadly, there was to my infinite chagrin, no eerie turn-of-the-century harmonica-laden blues music featuring a gravel-voiced old black vocalist to play in the background, which I thought would be somehow ideal for this scene. At least, until the "troubles" begin at about 2:25, at which point we were delighted to find that Final Cut Pro supplied us with an ideal stock recording of a humming bird supping on a flower's nectar. Perhaps someday, should we be supplied something suitably public domain (probably very doable, given the anachronistic nature of my mad master vision) a director's cut type edition can happen.
I'm not really sure why the "big pinecone" guy made his debut as part of this strangely meta joke about editing one of our own films, but I can only assume it was a desperate conflation of several ideas caused by the pressure of having absolutely no time to devote to these things. What other mischief I might have deemed an ideal vehicle for the guy I'm not sure, but I distinctly remember at one point entertaining a primitive scenario wherein this character had some kind of voyeuristic obsession with watching people prepare pancakes, so maybe having him vapor-lock in this oddball non-sequitur is just as well.
Good night, and good luck.
--Keith R.
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