“Inside the Twisted Minds: How Johnny Wickham and Mike Capes Turned Chilling Fears into Hilarious Thrills in SYS 529”
Johnny Wickham
I think our big thing was if it made us laugh, it was in. It worked, it passed the litmus test there. And I think that’s what they did too. It was, you know, in the height of those, it was Jerry Zucker, David Zucker and Jim Abrams. And I think with them, if it made the three of them laugh, it was in, that was like, that was the audience.
Mike Capes
Yeah, that was in there. That was in their books, surely you can’t be serious. Yeah, they said if it made them laugh, they felt good about it. I think that’s where Johnny and I were coming from. It was like, you know, every time we made each other laugh, we would have these table reads and people would be just, you know, laughing the whole time. And then we had a, when we started getting it out to people to get involved with the film, we were feeling really good about it too. Because, you know, we got a special effects guy who’s Steve Johnson, who’s a legend in the in the practical effects industry. And we were really excited to have and he sculpted Slimer for the original Ghostbusters. And we got the script out to him through our producer Nick. And then all of a sudden, he wanted to get on a zoom with us. And when he did, he’s just sitting there smoking his cigarette and with his cat walking around, he just he looked, he’s just laughing to himself. And he goes, guys, I have read thousands of scripts. He’s like, I worked on Ghostbusters, for Christ’s sake. This is the funniest mother effing script I’ve ever effing read in my effing life. He just went off. And then we were kind of and then he called me later and said, I had a phone call with my friend in the industry of 40 years. I said, let me just read the screenplay to you. The first 15 pages over the phone. And he agreed to it. He says, I read the first 15, we ended up reading the whole script over the phone to him. And he goes, and he was laughing the whole way through. So that was giving us a lot of confidence that what we felt was working, was working. And, you know, and then our biggest rule was, look, you know, we love films like Ghostbusters. They’re comedies, they’re high concepts. But the characters every the world plays it straight. It’s not you don’t want to have a high concept and then put a hat on a hat and have a bunch of people trying to be funny in crazy town with crazy people. We had high concept, but we grounded it as real as it could be within the, you know, the concept of an invisible dinosaur. But these people were reacting just like a human would if this was happening, too. So that was the big challenge.
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