Adam Gropman, reporting from Aspen

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on March 12th, 2006

Our own Adam Gropman is in Aspen, observing, as only he can, the goings on at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. He sent us a huge email… which we dropped into an HTML file. Enjoy.

Here’s an excerpt:

Our short played 7th our of 8 in the group and it did not get the huge laughs that we were accustomed to and perhaps expecting. While reaction was almost never consistently huge for any of the shorts that day, I think we came in a little cocky and with flighty expectations because our short has generally killed in terms of audience response at viewings around L.A. What we kind of forgot was that the very strengths that our film possesses can appear to be shortcomings in a screening of this sort. We followed 6 highly produced shorts, some live action, some animated. A couple of the animated ones seriously looked as if they had tens-of-millions of dollars worth of high-tech productions studios and massive computer consoles and Flame/Inferno digital effects machine behind them. One, called “Gopher Broke” looked like a Pixar or Disney release. It had a surprisingly old-school, little kid cartoon feel. It’s credit roll had like 30 guys under EACH different technical section, so sophisticated and undoubtedly expensive was their production. And then came ours. Our short was done lean, mean and pretty quickly, although our editor Marc Leidy was still enough of a stickler to do 17 takes of one particularly subtle and important segment, and I’m glad he did because the attention to detail certainly paid off. Anyhow, our short looks exactly like a threatening terrorist video, one in which hooded Arab Muslim terrorists hold an American or European hotage- often with guns prominently displayed- and make menacing and beliggerent threats and denunciations against the United States, Israel and whoever else.

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