your promises are dog shit.
Office Christmas Party should've been one of the more groundbreaking films of the past 20 years.
Groundbreaking is definitely the wrong term to describe something of its caliber and intended impact, but what I mean is that it should've been fresh. It should've offered a new way to explore what can be done within the confines of comedy. It was set up, from the announcements in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety, to be a hyperlink narrative - something that I've only seen referenced in relation to Robert Altman's expansive work of the '70s and his comeback period during the early '90s alongside Paul Haggis' rather simplistic Crash. The premise is a party - and we have a slew of characters we explore through, all of them driving the action to some extent. Unlike Altman and Tewkesbury's work, however, it had one primary focus: how an IT office copes with its impending closure through above-the-line people who seem to have it in for their personnel.
Maybe that was its downfall - maybe that was the reason why it was doomed to be one of the many line-o-rama comedies post-The 40-Year-Old-Virgin that we've been graced with. It had the talent necessary to bump its way into a fresh, if not exactly the most innovative, take on how comedy carries itself, ranging from comedy stalwarts Jason Bateman, Jennifer Aniston and Rob Corddry to rising stars TJ Miller, Kate McKinnon, Randall Park and Jillian Bell. It had the same amount of raw talent that drove Nashville into being more than just an acerbic look at celebrity culture and the music industry in the 1970s - all of these talents are improvisationally gifted, all of them coming up with new variations and feasible gags on the set right in front of my eyes.
I know there was something more in that movie's core than just "wacky Christmas shenanigans and office hijinks, hi-yuk!" I know that given its base premise and what the writers could do with the core story in particular, you could've had a raunchy Christmas comedy that not only made you laugh at the dumbest jokes possible, but actually made you feel like you were part of that in-group in the first place. That's how Nashville worked, right? It made you associate with 24 characters, no matter how inconsequential they were to the overall plot. Even your minor characters - the ones that mostly served to act as plot twists or as mere jokes - always interacted with the main story from the beginning. They help give it life. Office Christmas Party has about 20 named characters. Why does it only focus on five of them? Why do we know more about the core Josh/Tracey and Clay/Carol relationships than we do the others?
I guess I have to come to terms with the fact that I worked on a shitty comedy film that didn't live up to its potential, but I guess that's the price of being in this infernal industry: it's hard to get your foot in the door, but when you get those chances of proving yourself, you end up a joke, working on something that didn't live up to its potential.
A common joke amongst my in-group was that the movie wasn't going to turn out all that well. We all wished the directors and writers good luck with their two-month work at the wrap party, but the strange thing is that even after knowing that these people put their heart and soul into something that, frankly, felt cobbled together from five scripts, one of which had an Altman-esque ensemble cast-driven hyperlink narrative, most people simply didn't have much faith in the final product. When we all saw it, we all were laughing at the film, but mostly at the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that went on, from allegations of sexual harassment to nude scenes thrown in to make the film more extreme (and also with pay that kept lowering and lowering, from what I remember) to the constant 16-hour days we all put in at some point just to get this fucking thing done for Christmas time. As for the film proper, there were scenes in it that made us laugh - the Fortune Feimster/Jennifer Aniston banter about Undercover Boss before segueing into a part alerting Aniston's character about the party while shoehorning in the phrase "a bunch of BITCHES" in an attempt to give it meme status; a good deal of Kate McKinnon's shtick as the uptight HR representative Mary Winetoss - but nothing compared to recollections of what happened on set.
I guess that's the weird thing about Office Christmas Party is that it feels detached from reality, even after its core premise, after our activities on set, after everything you could think of - and yet TJ Miller's making the rounds, bragging about how he got to work with 300 extras in the same room. Just one catch though: 300 extras in the same room made the shoot days much longer. I get why background work is popular - it's plentiful, it helps provide atmosphere and, if you get both a good rate and a 12-hour day, you can easily make as much as the production assistants and stand-ins. Most of the time, however, the rate is often terrible in right-to-work states, it doesn't give you much chance to network with PAs or above-the-line people (especially when you're on a cattle call) and you get amenities that claim to be as good as crew amenities, but pretty much boil down to the stereotypical cheese-balls-and-a-spare-jug-of-water-from-catering set-up. It felt good being part of a core - that meant that I could partake in crew amenities on smaller days (read: non-party days) and I got a much better rate.
But it still angers me that other productions aren't following suit. It angers me that the cattle call itself is now being touted as a means of showing off that you've made it - that you have so much of a budget that you're just granted this dominion over the average working person trying to get into the industry and yet all you do is just trickle it slowly. Trickle it down, like you're Immortan Joe wasting thousands of gallons of water from his cliffside onto the people who need it the most. It especially sucks when you've been trying to jam your foot inside the door of better opportunities in the industry and yet all people see of you is just another shitty film school graduate who got on board too late.
Has nature decided to make me wither and die?
Groundbreaking is definitely the wrong term to describe something of its caliber and intended impact, but what I mean is that it should've been fresh. It should've offered a new way to explore what can be done within the confines of comedy. It was set up, from the announcements in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety, to be a hyperlink narrative - something that I've only seen referenced in relation to Robert Altman's expansive work of the '70s and his comeback period during the early '90s alongside Paul Haggis' rather simplistic Crash. The premise is a party - and we have a slew of characters we explore through, all of them driving the action to some extent. Unlike Altman and Tewkesbury's work, however, it had one primary focus: how an IT office copes with its impending closure through above-the-line people who seem to have it in for their personnel.
Maybe that was its downfall - maybe that was the reason why it was doomed to be one of the many line-o-rama comedies post-The 40-Year-Old-Virgin that we've been graced with. It had the talent necessary to bump its way into a fresh, if not exactly the most innovative, take on how comedy carries itself, ranging from comedy stalwarts Jason Bateman, Jennifer Aniston and Rob Corddry to rising stars TJ Miller, Kate McKinnon, Randall Park and Jillian Bell. It had the same amount of raw talent that drove Nashville into being more than just an acerbic look at celebrity culture and the music industry in the 1970s - all of these talents are improvisationally gifted, all of them coming up with new variations and feasible gags on the set right in front of my eyes.
I know there was something more in that movie's core than just "wacky Christmas shenanigans and office hijinks, hi-yuk!" I know that given its base premise and what the writers could do with the core story in particular, you could've had a raunchy Christmas comedy that not only made you laugh at the dumbest jokes possible, but actually made you feel like you were part of that in-group in the first place. That's how Nashville worked, right? It made you associate with 24 characters, no matter how inconsequential they were to the overall plot. Even your minor characters - the ones that mostly served to act as plot twists or as mere jokes - always interacted with the main story from the beginning. They help give it life. Office Christmas Party has about 20 named characters. Why does it only focus on five of them? Why do we know more about the core Josh/Tracey and Clay/Carol relationships than we do the others?
I guess I have to come to terms with the fact that I worked on a shitty comedy film that didn't live up to its potential, but I guess that's the price of being in this infernal industry: it's hard to get your foot in the door, but when you get those chances of proving yourself, you end up a joke, working on something that didn't live up to its potential.
A common joke amongst my in-group was that the movie wasn't going to turn out all that well. We all wished the directors and writers good luck with their two-month work at the wrap party, but the strange thing is that even after knowing that these people put their heart and soul into something that, frankly, felt cobbled together from five scripts, one of which had an Altman-esque ensemble cast-driven hyperlink narrative, most people simply didn't have much faith in the final product. When we all saw it, we all were laughing at the film, but mostly at the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that went on, from allegations of sexual harassment to nude scenes thrown in to make the film more extreme (and also with pay that kept lowering and lowering, from what I remember) to the constant 16-hour days we all put in at some point just to get this fucking thing done for Christmas time. As for the film proper, there were scenes in it that made us laugh - the Fortune Feimster/Jennifer Aniston banter about Undercover Boss before segueing into a part alerting Aniston's character about the party while shoehorning in the phrase "a bunch of BITCHES" in an attempt to give it meme status; a good deal of Kate McKinnon's shtick as the uptight HR representative Mary Winetoss - but nothing compared to recollections of what happened on set.
I guess that's the weird thing about Office Christmas Party is that it feels detached from reality, even after its core premise, after our activities on set, after everything you could think of - and yet TJ Miller's making the rounds, bragging about how he got to work with 300 extras in the same room. Just one catch though: 300 extras in the same room made the shoot days much longer. I get why background work is popular - it's plentiful, it helps provide atmosphere and, if you get both a good rate and a 12-hour day, you can easily make as much as the production assistants and stand-ins. Most of the time, however, the rate is often terrible in right-to-work states, it doesn't give you much chance to network with PAs or above-the-line people (especially when you're on a cattle call) and you get amenities that claim to be as good as crew amenities, but pretty much boil down to the stereotypical cheese-balls-and-a-spare-jug-of-water-from-catering set-up. It felt good being part of a core - that meant that I could partake in crew amenities on smaller days (read: non-party days) and I got a much better rate.
But it still angers me that other productions aren't following suit. It angers me that the cattle call itself is now being touted as a means of showing off that you've made it - that you have so much of a budget that you're just granted this dominion over the average working person trying to get into the industry and yet all you do is just trickle it slowly. Trickle it down, like you're Immortan Joe wasting thousands of gallons of water from his cliffside onto the people who need it the most. It especially sucks when you've been trying to jam your foot inside the door of better opportunities in the industry and yet all people see of you is just another shitty film school graduate who got on board too late.
Has nature decided to make me wither and die?
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