officehourslive

MORE Secrets of The 9th Annual

Added 2022-04-02 15:27:23 +0000 UTC

Fun show eh? man, oh man it's a treat to have Miles in there. He's so quick and funny and fits right in! Especially on a joke themed show! I hope you enjoyed it. and congrats to the finalists!

I had a fun week! A stand up set at Largo where I also was interviewed by Ron Burgundy - imagine my standup guy and Ron Burgundy talking for about 20 minutes - naturally Ron was totally enamored with my character and we could have talked for hours just being the worst blowhards imaginable... God it was fun... So nice of Will to ask me and we just laughed so much backstage talking about these two idiots... I walked offstage and almost ran right into Guy Fieri who I didn't know was there but greeted me with a gleeful "that was HILARIOUS!" OK Guy! I talked to him for a bit and there's no way to not like "the guy" - he was very INTO my comedy but didn't know who I was... I love this Shane Torres set on Guy and it really switched something in my mind about how and why we goof on people.

I've been really FEELIN my stand up guy lately and had some really funny pics from a photo shoot that's for... something... and I felt like he HAD to weigh in on the Will Smith Slap... i thought it'd be funny to have a really confusing, unhelpful take on the matter with the most serious pic possible... I knocked something out and BOOM.. it was a hit,... most people got what i was going for but man... are the replies a HOOT. More examples of the epidemic of willful ignorance and finding the comments section the place to display your confusion.... I showed it to Will Ferrell backstage that night and we were laughing at the idea that celebs have to come out with a statement... "where's your statement???"

Anyway the week STARTED with the chaos and glory of sunday night which, aside from the challenges I mentioned during the show, really fun! Some things I may not have mentioned:

There's obviously a lot of prep and discussion that goes on for a few months before the special. One night earlier in the year Eric and Gregg and I were texting (how many of the ideas take shape) and one of us mentioned that in the story of the show it could be funny if the special was set out in the doomed Hei Ranch, where no construction had gotten under way. We all loved it but immediately saw the challenges and dangers of setting the special outside in a remote location - We started scouting and found a few options. After an initial scout from our producer Katie and Gregg we narrowed it down to two locations.

We set out to visit along with Wes who brought a new contraption which would potentially give us high speed internet as long as we were in 4G range. The first spot we looked at (the one we ended up shooting at) was ok. it was kind of small, but pretty affordable with blazing 4G speeds. It wasn't perfect though, so I had my hopes on the second location which seemed much more production friendly. We headed to the second location and I even said as we're leaving, "we're not shooting here."

We got to the second location which had a much more baren, stark desert vibe but pretty soon Wes let us know it was just not viable. There was no signal at all... We headed back to the first location and re-assessed.... ok this could work!

But it would end up meaning we had to bring just about everything: Trailers, a mobile control room, build a small city for the weekend... and if it rained we'd be fucked.

Remarkably, just about everything we hoped would happen, happened... Thanks to an incredible crew led by our relatively new addition, Katie Dolan and director/writer Eric Notarnicola... we also had one of the best DPs in the biz, Marco Cordero, production design from Jillian Oliver... our first AD Ian Putnam... Costumes by Abigail Whitney... Makeup by Jenna Keller... and in the control room, there's Vera running sound cues and scoring it live basically, Dan Longino with the essential stills and clips... Wes and Justin running the streaming war room... so many people behind the scenes making it happen!

After it wrapped, at the end of the night, I was still a little upset about the streaming trouble at the top of the show and the last break before the finale was particularly stressful ( I felt like we were in break too long, as we were figuring out the specifics of the 't-shirt in the generator' story line... ) we wrapped, said our goodbyes and thank yous, had a slice of pizza and hit the road. i think i was a little sour on the evening, but in the morning i watched back and started getting nice feedback, and in the end was really happy with how it all turned out.

We could always use more time to prep (which just means more money) - -- something that always happens on the sunday is we have a plan to rehearse the show, kind of a cue to cue runthrough of the sequences... and we get about 3/4th of the way through and then we just run out of time... so usually the last 10 minutes of any special is very raw and improvised... we know where we want it to go and how we want it to end, but it's all pretty much off the seat of our pants... overall it's a really astounding to me that we end up pulling it off each year at all and it's a bonus that it works and it very funny! (to us! and many!)