Cinema Pandemica

2020 began well for me – mostly because it was when I first saw Tom Hooper's adaptation of Cats, the musical about cats who really want to sing at you about what their whole deal is before other cats come out to sing at you about what their whole deal is.

If you've never seen Cats, I want to make it clear that I mean my summary literally. The show has approximately as much "plot" as a Stan Brakhage experimental animation. In lieu of incident or forward momentum, a spandex-clad (on stage) or horrific-CGI-fur-covered (on screen) performer grabs focus like (music starts) "Hey, it's Grumplestiltskinorin, the farting cat! Oh, a profligate farter, this generous gent! When it comes to methane, he's no skinflint!" (tap dance solo) and that goes on for five minutes before someone else is like, "Look, here's Boloborintina, the overdue library books cat!" and it starts all over again.

Point is, I laughed for two hours straight when I first saw Cats – I don't know if any "real" comedy has ever given me quite as much joy, and it really seemed like 2020 was off to a wonderful start.

Then, of course, lockdown happened, and America's long slide into a septic tank of misery got rocket-powered.

But this isn't a newsletter about misery. It's about pop culture and coping with life, so let's focus on our core competencies. In lieu of "normal" human interaction (which was liable to kill you), those early Covid days were filled with Zoom calls with friends – Taskmaster games with folks at my podcasting network; movie trivia sessions with my movie pals; general trivia sessions with my work pals; calls with old college friends I hadn't seen in years; and regular check-ins with our good friends close to home.

One such call, with our friends John and Mary, somehow devolved into an impromptu puppet show, when we discovered that 3/4 of us owned puppet versions of ourselves.

Allow me to provide some mitigating context. My puppet self came from what used to be called a "Monkey Reel," which was a produced segment on the Emmy telecast designed to quickly say the names all of the nominated writers for Comedy/Variety programs – since these shows tend to have staffs of 10-20 scribes, it was a way of making the endless lists entertaining. (It was always one of the most consistently funny parts of the Emmys, which is probably why the Emmy producers cut it, in their endless quest to make the show duller. You can see some examples here.)

Anyway, the point of this arguably-cuttable digression is that, one year, The Daily Show reel concept was "everyone as puppets." So I had a puppet me lying around. Why did John and Mary have felt doppelgangers? Who knows. They're just puppet folk, I guess. My wife, Audrey – arguably a more sane human than the rest of us – did NOT just happen to have a puppet of herself lying around, but she made up for it with a paper bag.

After a giggle-fit hour of puppetry, John started trying to convince us that we should do an all-puppet production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show on Zoom, with little cardboard sets and all the trimmings. John is the kind of friend both good for, and frustrating to, an ADHD mind such as my own – because if you throw out an interesting idea, he'll encourage you to ACTUALLY MAKE IT, rather than my preferred way of operating, which is to ponder it for a while, and then get exhausted just thinking about it and turn my attention to whatever else is directly in front of me.

John, however, wants to actually follow through on things, like a real weirdo. So, in part to distract him from what sounded like a lot of work, I steered him toward a different idea we'd been tossing around – a regular weekly clip show.

My friends had done big communal movie nights for years (although they really exploded during Covid, with lots of remote watch-alongs) and they nearly always included an edited pre-show of trailers, commercials, and weird esoterica, much like you'd get at trendy dine-in theaters like the Nitehawk (in fact, my friend Tom occasionally edits said preshows). These clip collages were almost always my favorite part, so I'd been thinking "Why not make the whole plane out of the black box?" No, sorry – I meant "why not make the preshow the show?"

Thus we started Cinema Pandemica. (Or, as John's animated titles subtitled it, "the occasional symposium on curiosities & esoterica.)

It's not like there's anything new about this kind of curated video dumpster diving – stuff like The Found Footage Festival has done something kind of similar for years, as has my friend Kevin with parts of his Kevin Geeks Out shows, or The Museum of Home Video which also rose up during lockdown (and eventually played a few things I edited for Pandemica). At its heart, it's not much different than an evening of showing your friends a bunch of YouTube videos. But this was our high-gloss, edited version, that we broadcast to our friends every Sunday night (invite-only, since our transformative mash-ups nonetheless flouted copyright in ways that risked the ire of platform watchdogs).

Early on it was mostly John and me, trading off weeks in the month, each doing our variation on a theme like "frightening" or "circus" or "food," and we'd troll our memories and the vast video libraries of the net for stuff that caught our fancies. Later on, we'd start to do more one-offs about specific topics that interested us – a few of mine included The Muppets, The Marx Brothers, Stephen King, and newspaper comic strips – you know, the sorts of things I yap about in this newsletter. Still later, things got more conceptual. For instance: near Valentine's we did a version of Cinema Pandemica that was split into four 15-minute segments, each by a different editor/curator. For my segment, I'd discovered that there were like 5 or 6 different Peanuts specials about Valentine's Day, so I edited them all together into one Charlie Brown nightmare. Then there was my Christmas Pandemica, which drew from all kinds of holiday programming, but also included fake bumpers to commercials that got odder and odder over the course of the show – early on the sponsor was groats you could use for holiday gruel, but by the end the show was sponsored by "HEY, LOOK BEHIND YOU! No, seriously, someone was right there!"

Recently I said "eh, fuck it," to the idea of copyright strikes and uploaded a couple of these more conceptual Cinema Pandemica installments to YouTube, just for posterity. Some were immediately blocked, but a couple of favorites made it through, including DTV (my version of MTV, where I used found footage to edit new "music videos" for some songs that inspired me) and Dantasia (stringing together a lot of odd old animation with some mostly-instrumental accompaniment). Do both of these installments play better if your perceptions have been chemically altered in some way? Perhaps. But I think they're fun no matter what state you're in.

All told, we did Cinema Pandemica every week for at least two years, maybe three (apologies that pandemic brain makes my exact sense of time fuzzy), and at the peak we'd have about fifty people tuning in, many of whom ended up editing their own contributions – leading to the ultimate culmination: an "exquisite corpse" episode where about 25 of us contributed 1-2 minute clips, where each new clip was inspired by the last several seconds of the previous one, all strung together to make one stream-of-consciousness installment.

I'm not one prone to think much about the specialness of anything I've done or been a part of, which is why it took Audrey to encourage me to write about this, and to reflect on how amazing it was that we kept it up for so long, and how cool it was that people who'd previously had no interest in video editing were inspired to take part – but I'm glad she did. It really was a wonderful thing, and a testament to the value of creating something "just because."

Sure, it had indirect "practical" value, in that it got me excited about video editing/production, which is something I've transferred over to my "professional" world, in my podcast's "FlopTV" pay-per-view video series, and also in other Flop House videos or comedy sketches I've done in my spare time.

But mostly, the lesson was that there are two things that will always help get you through a shitty time – a community of friends, and the joy of making something. Especially something to share. That's a lesson that was great to learn back then, and potentially also helpful to remember now and... let's say... I dunno. For the next four years. No particular reason.

Eventually Cinema Pandemica petered out, as all things do (though I have an unfinished one about movie special effects that I SWEAR I'll eventually complete). But it was there when we needed it, and it – or something else – will be there when we need it again.

For earlier posts, check out the archive. In my other life, I’m a podcaster. Listen to my show The Flop House, here. In my other other life, I’m an Emmy-winning comedy writer. If you’re looking to staff, get in touch! And if you love the newsletter, you can always consider tipping me, by enrolling in the paid tier!