Interview in the Irish Times
Here's the text of an interview I did that just came out today, apparently. I didn't realize it was going to be an article jointly about the book and Television Without Pity, but there you go.
Sick of wasting countless hours sitting through the latest Hollywood blockbusters? Don't have the time for the extended director's cut of another re-issue? Anna Carey gets some quick-fixes from 'affectionate snarks'
That usual post-Christmas state of feeble-minded sloth may not just be the result of eating too much turkey and a whole jumbo tin of Roses. It could be the result of watching too much bad television.
How many hours do most of us spend slumped in front of the box over the festive season, sitting through preposterous blockbusters and cheesy TV dramas? How many hours do we waste? The answer to both of those questions is probably too many, but help is at hand.
Cleolinda Jones, an American postgraduate student, has condensed some of the biggest films of the last decade into Movies in Fifteen Minutes, a book filled with amusingly shortened movie-scripts for bloated blockbusters such as Titanic and Gladiator.
Jones's accidental career as a movie parodist began last summer when, on a whim, she wrote a satirical mini-version of the critically panned Van Helsing on her website, www.cleolinda.com.
"I didn't even realise it was going to be a series until I did 'Troy in Fifteen Minutes' the next weekend, and the following Thursday, Orion got in touch with me about doing a book," says Jones. "Seriously, it was crazy. It was the literary equivalent of being discovered at the soda fountain in the morning and given a walk-on role that afternoon."
Jones kept writing movies in 15 minutes for her site (although all the pieces in the book are new ones which have never appeared online) and quickly acquired a large fanbase of her own. But some fans of the movies she mocks haven't been impressed.
"The feedback from Harry Potter fans was overwhelmingly positive. I have to say that. But then 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in Fifteen Minutes' was linked on [ popular Potter fansite] Mugglenet, which resulted in a huge amount of traffic, and . . . that's when the trouble started," says Jones.
"It was at that point that I started getting the weird hate mail - comments that I should be 'put down', that I'm a 'loser' and a 'fag'. You haven't lived until you've gotten strange and inaccurate death threats from Harry Potter fans, I guess. That said, the funniest complaint I ever got was early on, from a Van Helsing fan asking how dare I make fun of this movie. I mean, of all the movies to champion . . . that one?"
But Jones isn't the only writer who's allowing us consume trashy films and TV programmes without actually having to watch them.
The mother of all snarky pop-culture websites is televisionwithoutpity.com (TWoP), which offers hilariously cynical (and very detailed) episode summaries of some of America's most popular television programmes. Perhaps its greatest charm is its treatment of guilty televisual pleasures - as they say, "we watch so you don't have to".
The site was founded in 1998 by Tara Ariano and Sarah D Bunting, who were inspired by Danny Drennan's magnificently bitchy online "wrap-ups" of Beverly Hills 90210 to start their own site recapping Dawson's Creek. The site currently covers 26 shows, from the sublime (The Sopranos) to the ridiculous (Charmed), and attracts over a million visitors a month.
Among those visitors are the producers of the programmes mocked by the site. Several programmes, including The OC, have included affectionate references to TWoP writers and their work in various episodes, and West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin famously - and clumsily - attacked his TWoP critics in an episode of the political drama after engaging in a debate on the site's message boards.
Rob Thomas, creator of the excellent US cult hit, Veronica Mars, is a self-proclaimed fan of the site who has posted several times on the boards. But Bunting plays down the site's influence. "I do think that showrunners are aware of us, but only in the sense that they're aware of the internet as a critical and viewer . . . force, I guess, is the word.
"Rob Thomas definitely knows about us and likes what we do, and we've had other writers and producers get in touch with us and let us know that they follow what we do, but I don't think we, TWoP, have all that great of an influence except by dint of being a website, which is now an area of response that TV execs and creators just generally pay attention to."
While TWoP's recaps are a handy way of catching up if you miss an episode of a favourite show, the site and Jones's writings also offer a new way of enjoying a cultural product - second-hand. I always loved reading the hilarious TWoP recaps of syrupy family drama 7th Heaven, but nothing on earth could persuade me to sit through an actual episode.
So does writing about pop culture in such detail change the way the writer consumes it? Bunting thinks it does, and not always in the ways one might expect.
"Writing the recaps . . . actually makes you more sympathetic to the constraints of the TV medium, not less. At least it did in my case. Because when you take aim at a given show or scene or actor, when you've done it long enough, you do it knowing that there are limits to how perfect it can be made."
It's still a demanding task. Looking after the site's lively message boards has been too stressful for some writers, but Bunting herself felt burned out by the terribleness of the show she was recapping.
"I gave up recapping Dawson's Creek because I was living in Canada and couldn't get the episodes in a timely fashion, but to tell the truth I was starting to get a little fried, just by how unrelentingly shite the lead character was and how sexist the character set-ups were."
Since its inception, the site has moved on from pure mockery of trash TV to covering genuinely good shows. "Snarking [ at shows] is easier from a writing-recaps standpoint, [ but] as a site editor I want to give users shows that they're interested in talking about and reading about,"says Bunting.
"Generally speaking, the site is about our love-hate relationship with TV as viewers, and sometimes, the love side of that is stronger - Buffy, The Sopranos - and sometimes it's just sheer hate, like 7th Heaven."
But in general, when you're mocking movies or television shows, there has to be a bit of love to go with the hate.
"I think the concept of affectionate snark is an important one," says Cleolinda Jones. "There's a way to enjoy the absurdities of movies and TV and pop culture without trashing them to the point where you start to wonder why you're watching in the first place. I think there's a misconception that I only parody bad movies, or movies I disliked, and the truth is that I love Van Helsing, which is kind of brilliant in its badness.
"And, again - real life is absurd anyway; it's naturally going to be even funnier if you condense it into a two- or three-hour movie. Besides, you have to like the movie enough to bother with it, really - I'm sure I could write 5,000 words on Catwoman, but who really wants to?"
And sometimes, even the worst programmes can surprise you. "I think the most fun is when a bad show puts up a good episode," says Bunting. "You have the insults ready to go, but then there are a few nice moments or you feel touched by what they're trying to do, and . . . but after years of covering [ Dawson's Creek], I covered this one episode, a Christmas episode, where they did almost everything right, and I felt almost pride in the show's staff, like, 'That's how you make a TV show. Good job!' "
Movies in Fifteen Minutes, by Cleolinda Jones, is published by Orion/Victor Gollancz (£8.99). See www.cleolinda.com andwww.televisionwithoutpity.com
