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Princess Bride part 2
🕑 Added 2020-03-06 07:44:16 +0000 UTCSorry this one is so late. I am the lead in two different major theatrical projects at the moment. One having completed a grueling tech process and now performing every night. And the other one just ramping up. Plus regular obligations to ongoing projects, and shooting a couple commercials. It's been a crazy few weeks for me. I am bone achingly tired. But it actually feels quite nice to cozy up to my laptop and write a few paragraphs to my favorite bunch of people, which is all of you lovely folks.
I hope you guys enjoy Princess Bride. It reminds me to a certain extent of the early episodes of the show, where we took broader liberties and did more comedic bits within the framework of the story, as we slowly figured out the format. As stories spiral off the rails, I am often constantly re-framing the narrative to focus on the elements that I perceive as becoming central to the story as it evolves. In this one, the nature of the relationship between Wesley and Buttercup became clearly the new central pivot, hilariously because of a one-off joke that Andy made about having "loved a mermaid". This is the kind of silly line that we often interject, but if accepted as a piece of improv and built off of, becomes the spark that can light up a whole new kind of story. Those are the kinds of moments I most love on this show, when a thoughtless detail is explored in depth and becomes a fundamental element of a new direction in the story.
And it's funny to me that I didn't see it beforehand, but Buttercup's passivity was begging to be explored in the context of the reroll. Especially in the light of Princess Bride's semi-metaness (with a modern story with in a story) and loose relationship to time (with anachronistic language and bits of anti-fantasy humor within their fantasy world) which gave us some license to play with a more modern ideas cast against the black and white simplistic sincerity of the original.
Which is a long winded way of saying that we never intended to make a spoof of Princess Bride, it sort of happened naturally. But once our story took us this way, tearing down the Wuv, Twue Wuv of the original, and investigating the blankness of its sole female character and her absolute lack of agency became the thing we just had to do, even though it wasn't an aspect of the movie that we were really thinking about when we started. Their can be a meanspiritedness, when an adaptation uses the innocence of an original work against it (Paul Verhoven's brutal teardown of Starship Troopers, reframing its naivite as naziism), but in this case we did it with wuv, I mean, love.
And left it in an interesting place. Clearly, there is a sequal to be had here. But with the backlog of possible sequels we have, I'll probably only do it if there's strong demand. You let us know.
Ok, we'll hopefully be back next week, to catch us back up to our regular schedule. I'm actually not sure which movie will be next, because we have two classic 90's action movies currently in the works, and depending how recording goes this weekend, I may audible which one gets put out first.
Love, Paulo
Comments
David Boyd
Late or not, every show is a treasure. Thanks for taking the time to make the rerolls happen.
Shawn Hlebasko
Can't wait to listen, I promise any shade I throw on Twitter is in the best possible spirit, I know you're a busy guy, it must be hard being awesome.
