Nothing can cross divides and cultural differences like comedy. That’s part of how Megan Rico, a Catholic girl from Florida, found her place as a student at the Mormon-run Brigham Young University in Utah. “Two slightly different sects of Christianity,” she laughed.
BYU is where she became a three-season regular on Studio C, the hugely successful student-run streaming sketch comedy show. It’s also where she first met Kade Atwood, who was a director on the series. Now they’ve co-directed teen Catholic high school punk comedy Edie Arnold Is a Loser, which debuted Friday at South by Southwest.
Studio C is famous for its family-friendly content and is sometimes dubbed the clean cousin of Saturday Night Live. “One of the first segments Kade and I ever worked on was a segment for Studio C that was deemed too scary and never aired,” said Rico. “It was an interstitial bit where I played an alien that was disguising himself as a human. But the makeup was very scary, and the concept of bonking a human over the head and stealing his skin was a little scary.”
The pair stayed in contact after college. While Atwood was in pre-production on another feature, he reached out to his old classmate. “I asked Megan, ‘Hey, do you have any scripts?’ and that’s when she sent me Edie Arnold.”
What she sent him was a heartfelt and quirky high school comedy, in which responsible Catholic schoolgirl Edie Arnold (Adi Madden Cabrera) almost accidentally forms a punk band, all while trying to navigate school, boys, and her mother.
“Everyone has their coming-of-age story, and this was mine,” said Rico. “I went to Catholic school in Miami and was this weird, aggro, strange girl, and so this was very much born from that.” The punk element of the story “is a stand-in for the kind of art I was doing, which was drawing and writing and isn’t very cinematic.”
Atwood immediately loved it. “I told Megan, ‘This is an amazing script. But I’m not going to direct this,’ and then this other movie fell apart, I went back to Megan and said, ‘This script is great, I haven’t stopped thinking about it for two years, what if we make it together?’ Actually, I said, ‘How’s about we do it in two months,’ and she said, ‘You’re crazy. Let’s do it in three.’”
Rico admitted that she actually didn’t think much of the script, and believed it was “generic.”
“But then Kade read it, who didn’t grow up in the community I grew up with or with my mother, and he was like, ‘This is strange and weird and not generic and worth doing.’”
There were even some rewrites to explain some cultural details from the earlier drafts that, having been raised Mormon, Atwood just didn’t understand. He said, “‘OK, what’s the difference between a chapel and a cathedral, what is a cafetorium?’ I needed some explanation, and she went, ‘You don’t know what that is?’ ‘No!’”
It was a similar learning curve with the costume designer, who had also been raised Mormon. “There was this insistence that everyone wear dresses at church,” Rico said. “And that is not a thing for me.”
The specifics of Catholicism was one area to finesse, but so was the punk rock. Rico said, “The songs had to be catchy and good, but there was a limit to how good they could be and still be believable.”
At the same time, the band had to sound like a real first-time punk band, with no training or guidance, but not sound truly terrible. Atwood said, “We didn’t want them to be these child prodigy stars who pick up an instrument and are immediately incredible.”
At the same time, they have to get plausibly good enough to have a shot in the battle of the bands, and what Atwood and Rico stumbled upon was a really simple solution: Film all the songs in order.
Atwood said, “As the band is getting better, our actors who are playing the instruments are also getting better. That last song in the movie is that last thing we shot, and they were really, really great by that time.”
