(via)
Executive producing a film entirely dependent on fan contributions, Stamatopoulos tells Flix everything we ever wanted to know about Charlie Kaufman’s next script in an exclusive interview.
This isn’t your average story. It goes back a few years when buddies Dino Stamatopoulos and Dan Harmon happened to find themselves at the presentation of an unknown scenario by Charlie Kaufman, which they absolutely loved to pieces. Today, the two of them – along with James Fino and Joe Russo – are heads of Starburns Industries, a small independent studio which specializes in stop motion animation and is based in a castle in Burbank, California.
Yes, you heard me. A castle. C-A-S-T-L-E.
Having left the brilliant “Community” behind, created by Harmon before he was fired by Sony this summer, they are jumpstarting a very interesting experiment. They want to turn their little studio (responsible for “Community’s” best episode, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”) into a magnet for major players in contemporary comedy, whose scripts they will hopefully bring to life.
"Anomalisa" by Charlie Kaufman, the script they had both loved all those years ago, is only the beginning. And what a beginning that will be! The project is especially intriguing, as it will be entirely funded through a Kickstarter campaign which has already reached it goal, but the more money, the better the outcome! At least according to the filmmakers.
Stamatopoulos, who’s been writing his own animation series for Adult Swim for the past few years, will be executive producing “Anomalisa” right along Harmon after trying his hand at “Community”, where he wrote and interpreted his favorite supporting character Starburns, obviously named after the studio the two friends started together.
We sat Stamatopoulos down over the phone a few days ago to answer all our questions about his upcoming project. And boy, did he give some good answers!
How’s the project going on Kickstarter? Everything’s going well, we’re 2.000 dollars away from our goal. [NOTE:While we were on the phone, the sum was nearing $198,000. When we got off the phone it had gone up to 199. It has currently reached $263,734 and is still going strong.]
What did you think was going to happen when you first started the campaign? We weren’t sure. We knew Charlie Kaufman was a big name and so was Dan Harmon, but we didn’t think it would go so fast.
It made half the money in the first 24 hours! It was amazing. We didn’t know what to aim for. We were afraid a higher goal would scare people away. We’re still trying to get more…
What about Charlie Kaufman? Charlie had nothing to do with Kickstarter. He was nice enough to let us option the story and then said, you know, yeah, whatever way you wanna make it, is fine by me. But he didn’t know it was gonna be Kickstarter. Charlie, he can sell anything – he just decided to do it this way so we don’t have to go to another studio and have them interfere so it will turn out exactly the way Charlie wants it. Once the money comes in, he will have absolute creative control over the project.
Why bypass the system? You’ve have done so many weird things within Hollywood. (“Synecdoche New York” for Kaufman, “Community” for Harmon, “Moral Orel” for Stamatopoulos). Yes, but you still have to go through networks. Even now, I’m not sure Charlie could have made that movie – things have changed drastically over the past few years. The money people will always want to change this, add that so they can make more money and we’re simply not willing to do that. Charlie wants to create the perfect Charlie Kaufman film, and for it to be something that he hasn’t done before – to be animated!
Was it always going to be animation? The script Dan and I saw was actually performed live. It was a radio play written for audio, and it used audio very well. Charlie wrote it under a pseudonym a few years ago. I remembered it and I always wanted to read the play again, so I asked Charlie for the script. When he sent it, I realized it would be an amazing stop-motion movie.
The description on the Kickstarter campaign is very brief – I’m guessing you’re not at liberty to say more? Nah, Charlie’s very private and part of the fun is gonna be experiencing it without knowing what it is. My best movie experiences have been going into a movie without knowing anything about it. Nowadays people are obsessed with knowing everything beforehand, but it just takes the fun out of it.
Yeah, like with Spider-Man where they essentially put the whole movie online... Yeah, it’s ridiculous, it’s like, why even see the movie?
What’s the schedule right now? Charlie’s pace, you know? I mean, we would like to start immediately but I don’t know how much time he’s gonna have, we’ve certainly started to talk about things, even though we don’t have the money yet. Some preliminary ideas. I don’t think he’s gonna come full force till we know we have the money for sure. But he’s a very particular producer and writer – hopefully we’ll get started before the end of the year.
Charlie will have full creative control, right? So who else will be in it? Charlie is certainly gonna be involved as much as he wants, most probably during pre-production when we’re doing the animatics, which is a mixture of storyboards and voices, as we figure out the exact shots. And doing the voices of course – he will be there for all of that. But Duke Johnson is gonna be overseeing the whole process as director, because he’s more experienced in animation. [NOTE: Johnson directed “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”] Dan and I will be there too, to offer suggestions.
Any idea who’s gonna do the voices? Without divulging too much, he has the actors who did the voices for the radio play in mind, assuming they’ll agree to do it. They were amazing. [NOTE: A quick search revealed the radio play starred David Thewlis, Tom Noonan and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It’s quite possible they haven’t been offered the parts in the animated version yet, but we thought we’d mention it all the same.]
What about the release? Do you have distribution plans yet? We want to open in theaters, maybe get a wider release. In the Kickstarter campaign we said it would be a 40-minute movie but Charlie found some extra scenes in the final draft that I hadn’t seen, so now it looks like it’s over an hour. Which is another reason why we need to keep going with the money after we reach our goal. If it’s over an hour it will be much easier to get it to the theaters. So we’re up to anything, streaming, Netflix or whatever.
There will definitely be some interest from festivals… Definitely. Yeah, I mean we’re definitely open to that.
What are the plans for Starburns Industries after “Anomalisa”? Right now we’re mostly focusing on stop motion, Dan and Justin created “Rick & Morty” which is amazingly funny and is probably gonna be a series in Adult Swim. We’d like to break out to live action and do more, but we’re at baby stages. We’re definitely hoping the Charlie thing will help, optioning this script. We have a great line-up of writers coming up: Louis CK, Robert Smigel, David Cross, Dan Harmon obviously, and then I might sneak my way into it somehow. Yeah you know that’s another reason why we wanted to do it ourselves. We own it and any money will come back into the company so we won’t have to do another Kickstarter for the next project. Hopefully this will be the beginning, the seed of a series of writers getting exactly what they want.
A farewell to “Community”
We spoke to Stamatopoulos a few hours after “Community” was nominated for Best Script, which was pretty ironic considering almost the entire creative team pulled out, along with Stamatopoulos who publically quit his job in support of Dan Harmon’s dismissal. Before the interview drew to close, we couldn’t help but bring it up:
Congrats on the nomination. Yeah, I just heard about that! Chris McKenna! [NOTE: for the amazing episode “Remedial Chaos Theory”] I wasn’t there so much for the writing, but Chris was definitely a major force last season, as was obviously Dan. So it’s great this episode was nominated. And I think it’s nominated for a Hugo, too.
You think there’s a critical mass where comedy can get too mainstream or too popular and can’t be as pure as it was first intended? There are people who can write too “out there” but at the same time be very commercial. I’m a little fringier than… I don’t have that attitude – that commercial comedy has to be bullshit. I just can’t write it! I don’t know how. I’ve never been a commercially successful writer. I’d love to write something for a wider audience. I’m actually surprised that people are sometimes shocked by what I write.
With Dan Harmon, my understanding is that the show got in trouble because they wanted him to be more commercial but he didn’t…? Right, they certainly wanted him to do it and he did it the first season, at least in my opinion. He’s now looking for a project he could do in a more commercial manner, where he wouldn’t have to be up till 5 o’clock in the morning writing… just do a normal sitcom, but funny. [NOTE: The project was just announced it’ll be produced by FOX.] I think that he got into the idea of deconstructing a sitcom – it was a fun game to him, and turns out it was a fun game to a lot of people. That became a part of “Community”.
Have you talked to Dan about the Emmy thing? No, and I guess everyone found out about that today, right?
Yeah, everyone was probably sleeping when it was announced. Yeah. He’s probably still sleeping. [laughs]
.
