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PUPPETS IN SPACE
SPRING & SUMMER 2006- ISSUE NO. 19
Contents • Editor's Note
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SANDOW BIRK AND PAUL ZALOOM S TOY THEATER
FILM SPECTACLE
An Interview with Paul Zaloom
by John Bell
Paul Zaloom began his theater work in the 1970s with
Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, and then carved
out a career as a solo performer in New York's downtown
performance art scene of the 1980s, where he was known
especially for table-top object shows featuring a biting
political wit and an uproarious comic sensibility influenced
by Lord Buckley, Soupy Sales, and other masters of American
absurdism. In these years, Zaloom was showered with awards:
an Obie , a Bessie, and several UNIMA
citations. Zaloom
moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s to host the popular
science educational television show, Beakman's
World, but continued his work in live puppet theater from his
West Hollywood studio, and began teaching at such schools
as the California Institute of the Arts. His most recent
puppet spectacle, "The Mother of All Enemies," marks Zaloom's
venture into the venerable Middle Eastern Karagöz shadow-theater
tradition. In Zaloom's version, a gay, peace-loving Syrian
artist meets various forms of intolerant religious fundamentalism,
in a show suffused with Zaloom's ribald wit and acid
political commentary.
In 2002, Zaloom's connections to the West-Coast art world
led him to collaborate with artist Sandow Birk on an
award-winning "comic mockumentary," based on Birk's paintings
and drawings. More recently, Zaloom has collaborated
with Birk again, on Dante's Inferno, an animated film
using flat, cut-out puppets and a toy theater stage,
again based on Birk's drawings, which envision Dante's
classic Renaissance epic as a comment on the contemporary
mores of California, and the world.
John Bell: Could you explain how and why you and Sandow
decided to use a toy theater format for Dante s Inferno?
Paul Zaloom: We had made a mockumentary together
in phony Ken Burns style called In Smog and Thunder:
The Great War of the Californias, about a fictional war
between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The film was comprised
of digital scans and pans of Sandow Birk's paintings
and drawings, with accompanying comic narration. After
that project, Sandow did a reiteration of the original
Dante text of The Divine Comedy, using contemporary American
language and expressions. He illustrated his version,
set in a Hell that looks a lot like Southern California,
with drawings that took off on the great Gustave Doré
interpretations of the nineteenth century. When he did
all three parts of The Divine Comedy, he got excited
about making a film. To me, the natural thing to do was
to turn the drawings into toy theater. What else are
you going to do with drawings? It was a bit of a hard
sell to get the director, Sean Meredith, and Sandow to
go for this idea at first, but eventually I got them
to come around. Now they love puppets.
JB: How did the actual toy theater proscenium play a
role?
PZ: You see the proscenium from the beginning
in a long shot that flies over the paper audience's heads
as they take their seats. Then the front rag opens and
is followed by seven other curtains; this gag was inspired
by Joe Musil's fantastic toy theater museum in Santa
Ana, CA, where he does a cool thing with curtains and
swags opening and closing to music. Toy theaters have
to have a proscenium; that is what contains them, frames
them, and creates the context for the shows. It's funny
to have a frame in the frame: a theater frame in the
frame of a film. We designed the proscenium to have the
same aspect ration of the film's frame.
I say "film," but it's really high-definition digital
video. We had to go with high-def because of all the
lines in the drawings; conventional digital video would
have had those thin lines chattering and jiggling up
a storm.
JB: A number of scenes in Dante s Inferno use complicated
moving puppets (the helicopter, the spiral circle into
which Dante falls, the Cadillac, the skating scene).
How did you decide which figures to articulate and animate?
What special effects were you after?
PZ: Cheap ones, as usual, and I don't just mean money
cheap. I wanted to have as many cool effects and tricks
as possible. I love how you can create Hell using poster
board! So we were always looking for amusing ways to
animate the scenes and for the characters to react in
goofy, physical ways. In films like The Mask, faces are
made to contort like crazy; we do the same thing, but
with paper, in old-school, transparent, dumb-ass fashion.
JB: Did you use stop-action animation as well aslive-action?
PZ: No, and there is no computer animation in
the show except for the erasing of a couple of mistakes
that were intolerable. Having said that, we left in the
rods and strings and filament because we are from the
school of puppetry that likes all that crap and doesn't
try to hide it. Some may consider it distracting, but
that's because they are not used to it.
JB: About how many puppets were created for the filming?
PZ: Hundreds. There were 43 different sets, designed
and constructed by Sandow and art director Elyse Pignolet.
They worked for months building at least 400 puppets
and figuring out how to do gags and gimmicks. They did
a remarkable job, creating this vast array of stuff and getting tons
of hot glue burns along the way. They made so many Dantes
and Virgils that we decided to use them all, in a scene
about identity theft.
JB: Did the toy theater form suggest specific ways of
doing things that wouldn t have come up if you had simply
been making a normal animation film?
PZ: Yes. For one thing, the fact that it was
a theater meant that some shots were reverse shots and
showed the audience. In a way, the puppets are even cruder
than animation, but I'm crude, too, so it works for me.
We had some interesting experiments that worked out pretty
well. For example, can you have a flat puppet start to
turn, cut to the next shot halfway through that turn,
and pick up the cut with a new puppet facing a different
way finishing the turn? Does that work? It does, and
that's pretty exciting.
JB: Were there aspects of the toy theater form that appealed
to the content of the Inferno show?
PZ: As we wrote the show, we put everything in the script.
Pretty much every frame was described. I wanted to write
down everything you would see because then we knew exactly
what to build. You cannot tell a flat piece of paper
to turn around and face the other way like you can an
actor, because the piece of paper may not have paint
on both sides. You may want a big size of a puppet for
a certain shot to play with scale. All of that had to
be planned out in the smallest detail so the building
can happen. We also wanted to have an accurate shooting
script so we would be prepared once we started shooting.
We still changed lots of stuff on the fly while shooting.
JB: How many puppeteers worked on the shoot? How long
did the shooting take?
PZ: We shot the film in two sections: one thirteen-day
shoot and a subsequent two-day shoot. Twenty-two people
came in to puppeteer, and 26 actors subsequently did
voices, some for as many as six or eight characters.
We used a lot of improv people from Second City and other
comedy groups, lots of L.A. artists, and our pals, too.
It was a lot of fun, but as one of the producers, I can
say it was nerve wracking, too: you hear the clock ticking
pretty loudly. But we got done on time. The two lead
actors, Dermot Mulroney and James Cromwell, play the
voices of Dante and Virgil respectively. It was great
having very talented and experienced guys like those
two in the show. But I'm the only actor on screen. I
play God and the Devil typecast, as usual!
JB: Did you storyboard everything first, or was there
improvisation involved in the shoots?
PZ: Sandow and Elyse storyboarded everything by taking
digital photos once they got done with a set, which helped
immensely. They did a shot for each cut in the script.
Then, once in rehearsal, we would improvise some stuff,
as well as on the stage while shooting, but the puppets
don't allow for lots of ad libbing. Charlie McCarthy
they ain't. We did a lot of preparation for the shoot,
and that was a good thing. But we still changed a lot
of lines on the spot because I guess I am never done
writing.
JB: How is shooting a film version of a toy theater show
different from performing a live puppet show?
PZ: With a film, you try to get it right for the camera,
so you do a few takes, and then you move on. Problem
solved (or not, if it stinks). With a live show, you
keep doing it over and over, trying to solve the problem
every night. Also, hitting the marks with the little
puppets is so precise that we'd close one eye to hit
our marks. I learned to do that on the closeups on Beakman:
If you use just one eye, you can hit the spike easier.
Two eyes show you two places close up; one eye shows
you one.
JB: How does this project connect to the California paradigm
that Sandow used for In Smog and Thunder? In other words,
how do you connect the Renaissance Italian context of
Dante s work to the present-day world of California?
What kinds of ideas did this connection yield?
PZ: The problem was: How do we interpret the
text? Sandow and Marcus Sanders took the original and
paraphrased it into today's vernacular and culture but
didn't really change the content of the scenes in the
book. When we began trying to convert that text into
a puppet show, it became clear we had to reconceive all
of the scenes. They just were not going to work or be
interesting if we didn't. We wanted our Hell to have
car dealerships and obese people gorging at strip malls,
obnoxious Fox News reporters and corrupt lobbyists, money
launderers, insider traders, and Spiro Agnew. We were
interested in making a political satire in the spirit
of Dante, who put all his political friends and enemies
in The Divine Comedy.
JB: How long is the final film?
PZ: I have no idea. But I'm really hoping feature length
(ha ha!).
John Bell is on the theater faculty at Emerson College,
Boston. |
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