The movie comedy “Theater Camp” is one of those dreams-come-true success stories that sometimes emerge from the Sundance Film Festival: Scrappy indie movie debuts in Park City, the audience falls in love with it, and overnight the movie is picked up for a multimillion distribution deal.
Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:
But the film’s four co-creators — Molly Gordon (“The Bear,” “Animal Kingdom”), Tony winner Ben Platt, Noah Galvin (“The Real O’Neals”) and Nick Lieberman — faced a lot of skepticism along the way. Gordon, the co-writer, co-star and co-director of “Theater Camp,” detailed the movie’s backstory on the latest episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast, and she noted that one of the biggest hurdles was convincing Hollywood that a comedy about theater could be a success.
“They just questioned, how could we make an improvised movie with theater? Is theater something that people even want to watch?” said Gordon, whose inspirations for the movie included improvised comedies like “Waiting for Guffman” and dramas by directors John Cassavetes and Robert Altman.
It didn’t help that a lot of the cast of “Theater Camp” is made up of kids, tweens and teens. “It was so hard to get people to understand that kids could improvise,” Gordon recalled. “But I actually think they’re much better than adults, because they’re so free and not in their heads and not jaded.”
The four creators of “Theater Camp” all met doing theater — Gordon, for instance, first met Platt at age 3 in a youth theater program — so the stage seemed a natural subject matter for them to skewer, lovingly, in the movie. “The stakes at theater camp are insane,” Gordon said. “You have this three-week period in your life where everything feels like the biggest deal in the entire world. Are we going to be able to pull off this show? Can I hit an A minor? Can I learn this step?”
The quartet made a proof-of-concept short in 2017 that eventually led to the feature. Improvisation was always at the center of the idea. Gordon, who’s appeared in comedies including “Booksmart,” explained that the concept was inspired by something that often happens in movie comedies: “You always have ten minutes to make a scene your own — to do an improv version. I’ve always had this dream of, ‘What if the whole movie was those ten minutes?’”
Still, “Theater Camp” had a tight “scriptment” — halfway between a script and a treatment — outlining exactly what happens in each scene, including some specific dialogue and jokes (not to mention the songs that are part of the original musical at the movie’s climax). On the new episode of “Stagecraft,” Gordon relived shooting the movie at a defunct summer camp last year, and explained how the cast, which includes Amy Sedaris and Ayo Edibiri, came together.
She also recalled the girlhood crush she had on her longtime friend Platt. “I remember watching him sing for the first time,” she said. “All of the Platts, in the beginning of their vocal journey, have this amazing rasp. Ben sounded like how he sounds now, but as if he smoked 20 cigarettes a day. He was this raspy, gorgeous singer — and I fell for him fully!”
To hear the entire conversation, listen at the link above or download and subscribe to “Stagecraft” on podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Broadway Podcast Network. New episodes of “Stagecraft” are released every other week.
Read More About:
Source: Read Full Article