Is Spoof Dead? « Making the Movie

5Jun/090

Is Spoof Dead?

Artful writer Craig Mazin makes a very serious analysis of the spoof genre:

Over the years, from David and Jerry and Jim’s initial films, all the way through ’til now, it seems one thing has remained constant. When producers and executives talk about spoof, they truly believe that the best way to approach the genre is to go after as many current movies as possible in one film. They believe this despite the fact that the funniest and most successful spoof films haven’t done that at all…and indeed, have done the opposite.

When we made Superhero, David’s and my intention was to return to the good old-fashioned right way of spoofing something. Take one movie, maybe toss in one other for variety’s sake, and spoof it.

Was it importantly to be “fresh” and “current” with the spoof? No! Scary Movie came four years after Scream, and Airplane came a full 23 years after Zero Hour (which no one had seen anyway).

Was it important to go crazy with pop culture jokes and references? No! Aside from a couple of random swipes in Airplane, most of the pop culture jokes were aggressively un-hip, like the cameo from Ethel Merman. Scary Movie? Same deal. A few random references here and there, but few and far between.

So we made the movie we wanted to make. And we were proud of it. Sure the ending wasn’t great (we scrapped our initial planned ending and rewrote a new one a week before shooting in order to make our budget), but we could address that with some reshoots. It woudn’t be the first time…there are always last minute rescues in spoof…

But the first test audience had some other problems with the film. They wanted to know why we were spoofing a movie that hadn’t come out last year, or even the year before. And they wanted to know why we were only spoofing one or two movies. And they wanted to know where all the crazy pop culture stuff was.

In short, they wanted it to be more like the spoof movies that, according to the dollar-votes that box office receipts represent, they did not actually like.

And that’s when I knew I was screwed. I was in the same zone that David and Jim had found themselves in with High School High and Mafia. I was a dinosaur. The knockoffs had changed the game. They hadn’t succeeded while doing it, but they had done it anyway.

The audience, largely kids, had been primed with expectations of a “last year’s movies in review, plus whatever celebrity has been acting like a jackass!” and they didn’t get it.

The studio directed us to try and give it to them. What ensued was a frantic attempt to re-engineer the film to be more like the very spoofs that David and were trying to avoid. We shoved more movie references in, we dumped a boatload of pop culture references, and the studio (and this one really hurt) changed the title from Superhero! to Superhero Movie.

I disagree with him on one point. I do think spoof can and should include satire.