Hexed was one of the first spoofs of the ‘90s erotic thriller movement. Were you ahead of the game there?
People say that. The thing that’s odd about it is that wasn’t a spoof. It was an original story, but then the studio’s marketing and the way that their notes were cutting the film, it winds up being translated into a spoof, and it isn’t. A spoof is a parody of something specific and you can recognize it. I prefer the word satire actually.
You could say that “Sledge Hammer” is a satire of Dirty Harry, but that’s very recognizable. “Bullet in the Face” isn’t a satire or spoof of anything specific. Those characters aren’t parodies of a character in its own universe, but I don’t know. I follow my own leads and my own penchants so if you’re saying I’m ahead of the curve, that’s fine.
They said that about “Sledge Hammer” certainly, that it preceded a lot of other things. People started doing more violent cop comedies after “Sledge Hammer.” They started incorporating more the Dirty Harry and gunplay and people being gun obsessed. I think that’s fine. In the current animated show “American Dad” apparently he talked to his gun a couple of times so I’m very proud to say that I started that dialogue first with men talking to their weapon.
Well, Colbert talks to his gun too.
Then they need to pay me royalties. I was there first. Just like Maxwell Smart spoke to a shoe first, I was the first for a man to address his weapon.
That’s a good distinction between spoof and satire because with Hexed I got the genre, and maybe you wrote it as a comedy before the serious version of the genre became popular.
Yeah, I was just writing it as a love story. I’ve been involved in bad relationships with wackos. Now on Twitter a few of them follow me. There’s a woman dressed as a Klingon who’s a cook and sends me insane things, so whatever.
Thankfully I’m not going to visit her city. If you want to call it a spoof, you can but I didn’t intend it as that. “Bullet in the Face,” when I say somebody saying it was a spoof, maybe it was because it was played a little broadly than it was written. To me it was just its own universe. The idea was one that they came to me with. Someone at the network came to me with an idea that wasn’t working.
It was kind of an ‘80s spoof about a German cop and that was about it. I threw everything out and just used that premise, reinvented it, came up with characters, the face change and all of the other things from it. I tend to like to work in my own universe and a lot of people are spoofing things from the ‘80s. A lot of people don’t have that point of reference and that’s the danger sometimes when people do too many parodies that they don’t exist on their own.
Yes, I wrote a long article about the problem with spoof movies today.
Oh, well good, we’re in the same boat. Part of the reason “Bullet in the Face” got the response from the audience that it did, when you talk about the difference between then and now, when ABC wasn’t sure about things with “Sledge Hammer,” they showed it to a live audience and that was the decider.
When he blew up a whole building to get one guy, and some of the (at the time) more edgy things, the audience got it instantly. The moment he pulled out his gun and talked to it, they started laughing. “Bullet in the Face” wasn’t shown to a live audience. It wasn’t tested in a way. The only time it got the response was when it hit the air and the response from the audience was good. It exploded on Twitter. We didn’t have Twitter back then. People had to write snail mail and that took a long time, especially the letters to “Sledge Hammer” because it took a long time for people to cut each letter out of the newspaper.
It exploded on Twitter so they didn’t know what the response would be. It was only people individually watching it in rooms and that’s no way that you present a comedy or evaluate it. You always have to show it to an audience. The audience response was good. Even when they were tweeting WTF, one of the TV critics said, “Anybody with questions wondering what’s going on in TV tonight, send your questions to this guy” and they put my Twitter info. My Twitter following went up by 1000 people. So that’s kind of fascinating to see the immediate response from social media which didn’t exist obviously in the ‘80s.
