ANATOMY OF A RIFF

 In which we examine a Cinematic Titanic riff that I thought was hilarious.  The public?  Not so much.

At one point in  “Doomsday Machine,” one of the astronauts says, “Remember those solar panels on the outside of the spaceship?”

I responded with this riff:  “…that we used to love so much when we were kids.” 

 I can’t explain why, but I thought this was one hilarious riff.  When we rehearsed the movie, I could never say the line out loud because I was always laughing.  When we recorded the DVD, I had to rerecord that line several times until I got it right because I always blew the take from laughing so hard.

Therefore, it must be a funny line, right?  I mean, after all, I’ve been working professionally in the comedy business for almost twenty-five years, so I bring a great deal of authority to the science of what is and isn’t funny, right?  

 Well, on a hot, muggy night last summer, Cinematic Titanic riffed “Doomsday Machine” in front of a live audience at the outdoor John Anson Ford amphitheater, right across the 101 from the Hollywood Bowl.  This was a very special night for me, an all-time highlight of my career in live performance.

The audience was incredible. They sent waves of unconditional love across the footlights. They laughed at everything.  Everything! They laughed at the sounds our scripts made as we turned the pages.  They laughed when we cleared our throats.  They laughed at our bottled water. And hey laughed at every riff we made in the course of a two-hour evening.

 Well, almost every riff.

 When the moment in the movie where the astronaut said, “Remember those solar panels on the outside of the spaceship” approached, I prepared myself.  I didn’t want to blow the line like I always did so I really focused my energy so that I wouldn’t laugh and thus trip over the line that I new would just slaughter the audience.  And at exactly the right beat, with perfect comedic timing and clear articulation, I precisely delivered the line, “…that we used to love so much when we were kids…”

And the tumultuous response from the audience was…

Nothing. 

Complete and utter silence. 

Not a single human being sitting under the stars that night laughed at the line that I thought was one of the funniest in the script.   And this was a crowd that had thus far shown a willingness to respond with joyful guffaws to everything we said.

Except for that one line.  My favorite in the script. 

As the years pass, I find that the more I learn about comedy, the more I find out how little I know. I don’t know if I’ve properly articulated how poorly that riff did on the night of that show last summer.  To really experience how badly that joke bombed, you had to be there. 

Warning: the last 13 minutes of Doomsday Machine is performed by a completely different cast!

The original tone of this movie, or the first 70 minutes, has a real collegiate sex romp element to it: think “Where the Boys Are” mixed with George Pal’s  “When Worlds Collide”. Even though “Doomsday Machine” deals with some heavy issuesm- or I should say the heaviest of issues, the destruction of the world - none of the characters in the movie seems very upset about it. I guess they do get a little miffed after the world finally “pops” but they’re already in deep space and there’s a cute girl on board for every boy. Everything about the film, up to that seventy minute mark, leads you to believe that there’s going to be one big “pajama party” once they get to Venus. Something inside me really wanted that to happen in this movie, too. I expected it – kind of like a good Doris Day film. But that is not the case, in fact the original “Doomsday Machine” was unable to be completed. From what little I found out about this movie on the IMDB, The original production ran out of funds and five years later, a different ending was attached: something much darker, with a completely different cast, and a whole LOT cheaper. You sort of have to see it to believe it.   I’m no historian but this must be one of the few times this has happened in the cinema. It’s true and very disorienting: one minute you’re watching Bobby Van and Mala Powers having a Technicolor space walk featuring some of Bobby Van’s zillion dollar delivery and the next minute it’s a washed out grit-tinted spaceship with astronauts wearing dark sun-visors so you won’t realize you’ve been “hoodwinked”. As a side note, the V.O. actors voicing the imposed ending didn’t even attempt to try to impersonate Bobby Van or Mala Powers, something I would have found  impossible to not even try to attempt.

I know other films have been repurposed with extra material to sort of “wrap around” the original movie with examples like Peter Bogdanovich’s “Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women” and the very inventive “Targets” comes to mind. But Doomsday Machine is different - it comes at you with such a “out-of-left-field” ending, and delivers it so bluntly, that it will make your head feel all squishy. Story-wise, the movie simply falls away from you, and drifts, dropping through an inky abyss and never, ever resurfaces. Weird.

Somehow, the fans of Cinematic Titanic have been able to swing with this strange film, as we performed this live last summer at the John Ford Amphitheater. It was sort of a “hail mary” play, because as I mentioned in my review of “The Wasp Woman”, we had to use it as we were put in a position where we didn’t have another movie available to perform. We did “Doomsday Machine”, crazy weird ending and all, and the audience, bless their hearts, ate it up. As a group, on that summer night, it was a bit like going on cinematic walkabout, and encountering some really scary terrain at the end, each twist added to the adventure, and when it was through, both the cast and the audience patted each other on the back and felt a little better about ourselves for weathering the experience. 

Still I don’t know If I would ever tempt fate again by performing this movie live, the ending just rubs my “showbone” the wrong way. Maybe if we gave a very strong disclaimer at the beginning I’d feel more comfortable: like “Warning, ‘Doomsday Machine’ is expecially challenging in that it’s ending makes no sense” or else “Achtung! Last 13 minutes of “Doomsday Machine” is a completely different movie!

I recently talked with the guys who run  MST3Kinfo.com, Brian Henry and Chris Cornell (better know as Erhardt4 and MSampo). I consider them experts, and so I asked them what MST3K titles did they feel were the most popular over the last 20 years. They offered  Manos, Santa Clause Conquers the Martians, and Mitchell from the red team, and from the blue team, “Werewolf”, “Giant Spider Invasion” and “Puma man”. Yup, MST3K fans like the weird movies. So it seems, it’s not just the riffing that makes it go, it’s also the films unique personality that has a job delivering the payload as well.  Movie riffing is building a show on the back of another show, and the movies we riff seem to work best if they have a kind of “warts and all” visage to them.  “Doomsday Machine” has these same type of blemishes, except maybe the “wart” in this movie is it’s last 13 minutes, and it’s not so much a wart as it is a big deformed transplanted head.  So, if you are a fan of the movie riffing form, I should be probably be promoting this movie to you by billboarding its weakness rather than its strengths. Wait a minute- that’s how I started this review.