THE ANIMATION SHOW YEAR 4 Theatrical
Steve Dildarian
Animator, “Angry Unpaid Hooker” (2007)
Interviewer: Taylor Jessen
Date: 5/30/2008
Via phone from Los Angeles
Animation Show: A quick life story please, a short precis of where you’ve been and how you got to where you are now?
Steve Dildarian: Oh, I’ve always done advertising until recently – grew up in Jersey, went to Glassboro State and then School of Visual Arts in New York. I’ve forever been doing TV commercials, a lot of beer commercials. Budweiser’s been my main thing for a long time, and then through that, got some other opportunities, and started drawing, and then a bunch of different things that led me to making this short animated film. So, kind of series of events lead to me stumbling into animation by accident, almost.
AS: When did you say to yourself “Good grief, I gotta get into advertising” and when did you say “Hey look at me, I’m in advertising?”
SD: You know, honestly, I knew in high school that I was going to do comedy writing of some kind, and went to college actually to try to get into TV writing, then just kind of switched. I think it seemed more realistic for me to go to New York instead of L.A. at the time. So I thought advertising made sense, and before you know it, I started doing well in some of my classes. So in the back of my head, writing TV shows was always plan A, but once advertising kind of took off, it was hard to turn back. I started doing Little Caesar’s commercials when that was popular – “Pizza Pizza.” Then the Budweiser lizards thing caught on and that ran for years. So, you know, I was enjoying it enough, and getting enough creative freedom, where I never missed not doing TV. You know, a lot of the advertising I ended up doing was more like comedy writing and sketch writing. So I had no complaints.
AS: That’s really interesting that you felt more free. I mean, weren’t the client breathing down your neck at all?
SD: You know, I was lucky enough to fall into some pretty great agencies and great clients. You know, doing Little Caesars’ Pizza when that was popular, that was as good as it got at the time. That was the funniest stuff on TV. So, it was an ideal situation to be in, and then that opened up doors in other agencies. And Budweiser, almost at the point of it being a joke, their stuff is sketch comedy more than it’s advertising. It’s not really even talking about the beer or anything about the product. It’s two lizards saying they’re gonna kill the frog. You know, so it was really just character-driven, dialog stuff. It was just as fun as you can ever hope for in that business.
AS: You name-check The Honeymooners as a major influence. Was that being recycled on TV when you were growing up?
SD: When I grew up, that was on every night of the week at 11:30 after The Odd Couple. So those reruns, that was just a stable you know, on Channel 11, New York area, every night for most of my growing up.
AS: Lucky you.
SD: Yeah, they don’t play it anymore I guess. I don’t see it out here. That show, I guess it was just the character, and maybe that’s why I do a lot of character-driven stuff, and a lot of underdog stories I tend to write. But just, Ralph Kramden in that show, without over-thinking it, to this day it makes me giggle as soon as he comes on screen. I don’t even know how to explain it, especially when I look back at the episodes now. I didn’t think about it growing up, but now you watch it, and it’s like “Wow, that stuff is pretty out of touch with the way people are now.” (laughs) A lot of the stuff is timeless comedy, but a lot of it is like, the way the wives are treated, and the attitude – threatening to punch your wife – you know, you don’t see that a lot.
AS: Yeah, the givens for any comedy premise in those days have changed a lot.
SD: Yeah, that show just stuck with me. I was in the Honeymooners fan club. I still carry my card in my wallet – the Royal Association for the Longevity and Preservation of the Honeymooners [RALPH].
AS: That’s pretty hardcore.
SD: Yeah, and I used to work at this pizza place where a lot of the guys knew the show really well, and as far as trivia goes, I’m probably a little rusty now, but you couldn’t throw too many things at me that I wouldn’t know.
AS: Well, unfortunately I can’t test you on that, my knowledge of it is minimal. You know, I have the complete Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief memorized, but we all memorize things in different directions. How did the thing begin to bite at your heels again where you decided you wanted to do something that could – well, was the making the animated short and attempt to get the short out there in pursuit of TV or did you just make the short as a one-off?
SD: Well, basically, after the Budweiser lizards were doing well, I got some opportunities to write some pilots down here. So I was kind of doing that each year, slipping in one, and I got to write a couple of scripts for different networks, but they never really went anywhere. And I was kind of keeping the whole thing at arm’s length, really doing advertising as my main job, and over those years, different projects came up. Like I said, it was kind of an accident that I ever did any animation, ’cause I did this one project for Budweiser where I ended up drawing, and on the side during that time I started painting, and I started doing these little acrylic paintings. So for the first time I was doing visual things, and people liked it, and I got a kind of distinct style the way I drew characters. So that was put in the back of my head, and over those same years I started getting in the booth and doing voices, and, you know, I’ve been doing advertising for ten years, and never once got behind the mike, so out of nowhere, people liked my voice, before you know it, it was in this donkey commercial in the Superbowl where the donkey wanted to be a Clydesdale, and that was my first voiceover job, and before you know it, everyone’s asking me to read the voice.
So, as opposed to ten years ago, when I was just a writer writing things, suddenly I realized “Hey, I can draw stuff, and I get can in the booth and read it.” And then I started tinkering around with iMovie, and then I realized I can edit, and before you know it, I was like, I was waiting for an opportunity to do something with all these things. And basically this script I wrote, Angry Unpaid Hooker, I was going to do it live action. I just wrote it ’cause I thought it was a funny story. I had no plans. I’m not particularly a student of animation, or honestly, even though I’m a big fan of it, I’m not drawn to it, but with this particular project, it was like, “Maybe animation works. If nothing else, I can make it.” I didn’t have the resources or the wherewithal to get a film crew together and try to shoot it live action. I’m like, let me just see if we can string a few still frames together and make it move.
AS: It’s a studio in a closet, that’s the process, man. You can do it all. You can do that now.
SD: It’s amazing. It’s a really story of Mac and the way the software lets you do things. This project would never exist if we didn’t have Photoshop and iMovie. Those two things made us start a whole career.
AS: And probably thousands of others as we’re speaking right now. They’re going for it. Is there any touchstone for artists in terms of the way you draw? I mean, it kind of reminds me in form and execution of some of the work of Tom Snyder Productions. You know, Dr. Katz.
SD: Ok, yeah. Well, I wouldn’t – Dr. Katz, you can draw some comparisons, maybe in the tone and all, but the look of the drawings…I’d have to look at that again, I love that show, but uh, I wouldn’t think that it looks too much like it, especially with the jiggley thing they always did.
AS: Yeah, I know, it more reminds me more in the terms of the pacing and the improvisational quality.
SD: Yeah, okay, ’cause as far as the drawings, even though we are a little more polished with it now, it’s all based on just my drawing style of pretty flat, 2D, lack of knowledge of perspective and things like that, and even though we got it down now it was a hard to thing to replicate. ’Cause you know whenever a good illustrator tries to go backwards and draw poorly, it shows. It looks like you’re trying to be crude and looks like you’re trying to make it look bad, and with my stuff it’s always me as a non-illustrator doing my best to make it look super-realistic. And if I’m drawing an old man with a cane it’s going to look silly, and to a trained eye that looks awful. The perspective’s off, the limbs are wrong, it makes no sense, but to me, I couldn’t draw it any better if I wanted to. So, it’s like a weird finished product I think, where it’s naïve and crude, ’cause it just has to be, but there’s an attention to detail and an effort to make it perfect.
AS: It’s got this great sheen of “I am trying,” which is very charming.
SD: Yeah, that’s what I always said about the style. It’s like, you know, if a five-year-old kid spent a year on a drawing, that’s what it would come out like. He’s just really trying to make it perfect and put a lot of thought into it. That’s kind of the look we settled on. Beyond that, it’s just a style of the show. I think the purity of that is in everything. The voice-overs, I try to cast relatively real people, and keep it not self-consciously improv-y, but just natural. Try to you know, paraphrase each take so it’s not like, reckless going-off-on-tangents improv as much as just keep it fresh, keep everyone on their toes, and read the lines different each time. The jokes are on paper, I know the beats we’re trying to hit, but if you have sharp actors who can just reinvent it every take, hopefully it’s got a fly-on-the-wall quality where it feels a little bit like real life more than most animation, at least popular animation where it’s you know, very much line-by-line reading. The actors are never in the same room. With ours, everyone has to be in the same room.
AS: Yeah, in your basic corporate animation structure, you hardly ever get actors all working at either the same time, or, God forbid, in one room and doing huge takes.
SD: Yeah, we have to; it’s really the stamp of the show. It drives everything.
AS: Okay, so tell me, give me a quick precis of – between 2006 when you first finished the short and going through development in several different places to where you are now.
SD: Once we made the film, I was pleasantly surprised with the reaction it got. I would have been happy if anyone just thought it was watchable, but people really latched on to it. First, the person who’s my agent now, Greg Hodes at Endeavour, saw it, and to me it would have been nice enough if he just liked it and said let’s talk, but he just flipped for it, and he says “We gotta go into business together, and this is going to be a TV show, there’s no doubt in my mind.” And that enthusiasm just never stopped.
AS: You gotta love that.
SD: Yeah, it was amazing. It kind of really caught me off guard. And while we started doing that, and before long, he had meetings at 20th Century Fox, and they were interested, and before anything was official or really happening, the HBO Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen said we got in, which I thought was ridiculous. Like, “Really?” (laughs) Like, it was one thing after another and then, before you know it, I got a call two days before the festival that says “We want to make sure you here, we’re going to give it an award.” I’m like “Are you joking? This is something I made on my laptop.” And they said “You know, it’s so crude and underdone, we can’t give it best short film, so we’re going to invent a new category of best animated short, which we’ve never done before, because the judges want to make sure it gets something.” I said “That’s amazing. I’ll be on a plane tomorrow.”
AS: That’s lovely.
SD: So I went, and went by myself, ’cause no one could make plans that fast.
AS: Did they make you a special plaque?
SD: They made me, yeah, it’s like a glass pointy plaque. That was nice. But just being there was amazing, just to be in that kind of environment where there was such a supportive atmosphere, partly because, I don’t know if you’ve been to that festival, but you know, no one really has a sense of competition that I’ve sensed, ’cause everyone’s doing their own thing. There’s improv groups next to stand-up comedians next to filmmakers next to animators. So it was more comparing notes of what everyone does in a supportive way. So for me to have so many people to come up and say “Wow, that’s the most original thing I’ve seen in a long time,” it was really amazing. And I knew in the back of my head that things were gonna happen ’cause you can’t fake enthusiasm. I can just tell the way people were reacting, it was beyond anything I kind of expected, and I knew in my head we stumbled on it by accident, just by not knowing any better, and then being limited by our talent and our knowledge. You know, it was just me and my girlfriend trying to string together some stills against an audio track and kind of stumbled on an interesting look.
AS: What form does the series take, and how’s it going to play on HBO?
SD: I probably, they probably don’t want me getting into too much detail -
AS: No, that’s cool, whatever you can.
SD: In general, we’re just, you know, telling Tim’s story. The short film is not completely indicative of the kind of stories we tell, ’cause…if you’ve got a character who’s calling every week…it’s a strange thing to build on (laughs).
AS: (laughs) This is not gonna be the big comedy premise. “The prostitute will not leave…”
SD: It’s not too far off though, it is him getting into some pretty messed-up situations and making some bad decisions, but usually from the fault of others around him and getting bad advice. But it’s just a guy who can’t catch a break, and I was pleasantly surprised at how the more I thought about it, it took on a life of its own and the world just fell into place. And you know, getting back to something like The Honeymooners or something, when you got something with a strong foundation of a character that works it’s not hard to add the layers and develop the world around him without trying too hard or over-thinking it. It’s just, what’s that guy’s life like? What happened to him tomorrow when he wakes up after him and his girlfriend have talked about this incident, you know? Life goes on.
AS: Is it gonna come out in tens, fifteens, half hours?
SD: The way we’re making it is a half hour show, comprised of two segments.
AS: Variety, when they talked about the series mentioned that HBO hasn’t done any animation since Spawn. If that’s true, that’s fascinating. I mean, that a network in this decade would not have poked their fingers in the animation pool for such a long time.
SD: Yeah, it’s true. I don’t know much about the details of that, but I know at least how they reacted to my piece and they thought it was a good fit because when I talked about it always it was like, “I want to do an animated show that really has no business being animated. There’s no reason for it.” We don’t take advantage of the medium, we don’t do any things you couldn’t do in live action. It’s a pretty understated show, and it’s a dialogue-driven show. It’s about a guy living his life in the city. So, I think a lot of those things just fit with their overall taste level, and you know, the kind of stories they want to tell.
AS: Is there a date for initial broadcast?
SD: Uh, that’s stuff seems to be elusive, but I know they’re saying September now.
AS: It is always an elusive thing, this scheduling dream. How deep in production are you now?
SD: Little past the halfway mark. We started back in last October and nothing’s finished finished, but we’re a little more than halfway through.
AS: Did they give you like, a commitment of thirteen or twenty-six?
SD: Yeah, we’re doing ten, ten episodes, which is more than enough. I mean five would have been plenty. It’s just a lot of work, and you know the first time out, when you’re trying to make the right impression, you know, you don’t want to overwhelm the production too fast. ’Cause at this stage, I’m trying to be personally involved as much as I can, and there are only so many hours in a day.
AS: You’re Tim, correct? How many other people in the cast, the voice cast?
SD: Uh, it’s pretty small, we try to have about eight people that we just rotate and bounce around but half of us are just friends from San Francisco who I used to work with and know from advertising, so me and MJ, who plays my girlfriend on the show, plus Bob Morrow and Matt Johnson, you know, Bob plays Debbie the hooker, Matt plays a bunch of roles. That’s half of it, so it’s really non-career voice people, and then the rest of it we supplemented with people in L.A. who are amazing and some of the roles they’ve taken on have just put such another layer on the show that wasn’t there before. So now we’ve got a good little group and we don’t want to mess with it too much. We don’t want a big string of people coming in and out, cause the good ones, they can have enough range were, you know, you don’t feel it. You don’t notice there is only one guy in the whole episode doing half the roles.
AS: Right. How many in the animation crew?
SD: Uh, we’ve got a pretty small group. It’s like maybe 18 people - just a couple of illustrators, couple After Effects artist, editors. It’s a small little group here.
AS: In terms of the look, has anything leaked yet that anybody can look at to see what the show is going to look like?
SD: I don’t think. No, not as far as the show version, it’s just the short films that kind of float around. You know, that’s a pretty good indication of where it’s going, but the short films are a little more primitive looking. We cleaned it up a bit. You know, you want to tell realistic stories about the city, you don’t want it to be so crude that you can’t get lost in that world a little bit. Plus in the shorts, I drew everything. Now I just draw the faces. I was convinced that my drawings are not as good as I believed.
AS: (laughs) Well, is there anything people haven’t asked you about it yet that you wished they have?
SD: People haven’t asked me too much only because we’re just getting started here as far as – you know, the show and the shorts are in a way two different things. The show is a lot of new characters, unexplored territory, really working on this dynamic between things, and the shorts are just really just Tim just getting into… I don’t even know if you saw all three, Angry Unpaid Hooker was the first of three shorts for me.
AS: Yeah, is there a place online where one can see all of the earlier work?
SD: Yeah, I’ve got just the three shorts. I’ve got them on… {editor’s note.. we’ll post a clip shortly. This link is down}
SD: But yeah, the shorts, it’s all inspired by that, and we made a conscious effort to not make it too polished, ’cause that’s the charm of it, was how under-produced it was. So compared to, you know, most other shows, it’s going to look pretty raw. Compared to the shorts, it’s going to look pretty slick.
AS: (laughs) Well, awesome. Well, Steve, thank you very much for talking to me. I really appreciate it. Good luck with the production.
SD: Thank you.
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