Over a lazy lunch with Mike Wilson, creator of local stoner laff fest 4:20 Austin High, he cut through the smoke and said the movie would have been a different deal if it hadn’t been under the influence of shorts-producing duo Beef & Sage, aka Will Elliott and Kirk Johnson.
The film-making pair met at UT and found a similar taste in comedy. Elliott explained, “I would sit down and try to write a Lost-type script and it wasn’t happening. It just felt like work. Then I would write a spec script for something like The Sarah Silverman Program and it was effortless.”
In classic Austin style, they both graduated, and got jobs to pay the bills while they worked on projects. “I think I can speak for Will, We were both really depressed,” said Johnson. He quit his job and the pair started producing a short a week as Beef & Sage. “We’ve been cranking them out and using those shorts as a platform for other commercial work.”
YouTube has obviously rewritten the game for makers of shorts, and with dedicated humor platforms like Funny or Die, the possibilities and the competition are heavier than ever for people working on short funnies. So why the appeal, as opposed to short form drama? Johnson said, “You can make somebody laugh in the first ten minutes, whereas it’s going to take 15 to make them cry or feel anything.” What about horror shorts? “You can just murder them and they’ll be frightened. But it’s much easier for us to make people laugh.”
Unfortunately shorts will rarely pay all the bills (“We haven’t mastered the Lonely Island level of virality,” said Elliott), so Austin High presented them with their first opportunity to go full-length. That said, there was one slight hitch. That job Johnson quit? It was working for Mike Wilson, who just happens to be producer and star of … Austin High. Fortunately that just meant Wilson knew how good Johnson is, and he has put a lot of the credit for the final product at the hooves and roots of Beef & Sage. Johnson said, “He had put together the financial end, so we didn’t have to worry about that. We just had to focus on the writing end and producing it.”
Not that the script was a breeze. Johnson said, “Our first draft was 179 pages, because we wrote it separately and come back together and we would just brainstorm more ideas. It just became Dances With Wolves, which we were ready to shoot.”
For Elliott, it was more like Lord of the Rings. “Keep in mind that the story has 50 speaking roles, so we’d be off in our own corner writing full, fleshed-out stories for every character.”
“It should have been The Wire,” said Johnson, “like the first season of an HBO show. We’re still trying to pitch that.”
The bulk of filming actually happened in 2010, and by the time they’d made room for improv on set, there was a lot of material that never made the final cut. “You ever heard of chicken wire karaoke at Beerland, where they just throw food at you?” said Johnson. There’s a shot in the trailer of Elliott in his underwear, singing ‘Danny Boy’, getting pummeled with what his co-writer called “basically shit. … He got covered head to toe, and we didn’t even use the scene.”
The final product retains the spirit and the biggest themes: The downtown condo boom, the first flush of food trucks, and the rise of the pedicabs. True, you can’t make a movie about contemporary Downtown Austin without mentioning them, but they turned out to be a lot easier to write about than to film. “The three female pedicabis, they’re tiny,” said Elliott. “Mike’s daughter, she’s probably 75 pounds, and seeing them trying to get started was pretty rough.” One of them was donated by Pedicab Pete “who’s very hard core about pedicabs,” said Elliott. “He gave us the whole rundown about, ‘No, that’s not a real pedicab.’ He was very adamant about only showing real pedicabs.”
For Johnson, that kind of my-way-or-the-highway approach is something else that defines the ATX. “Everyone has their vision of how it should be,” he said. “That is very Austin. You don’t get that in Dallas or Houston.”
Austin High screens April 20 at 11:55pm at the Alamo Village, and April 21 at 4.20pm (natch) at the Alamo Ritz, and is now available on VOD and on DVD at selected stores.
See more of Elliott and Johnson’s work at Beefandsage.com
This article appears in April 20 • 2012.
