Consider this the "Special Features" section of the DVD. Here is a breakdown of the characters we each played. There's a link to watch the film in the previous posting.
We only had five people (the maximum allowed), so we each had to play multiple parts. Of course, we had to make it look like there were twelve men on the jury, so we created this composite shot of all the characters sitting at the table together.
First I played Mr. Confused. Dave did a great job making me look like I have hanging jowls.
Next I played Mr. Rushed. I cracked a joke about someone shaving their head to make their characters look different. Everybody jumped on that idea and decided the bald one should be me. They offered a cash incentive for the razor job, and the amount kept going up all night. When it got to $56 I caved.
Dave is a great makeup artist, and he's the kind of funny, creative guy everybody wants on the set because he keeps us laughing all night. He made his Mr. Foreman a wonderful Wilford Brimley-esque character.
Then Dave shaved his beard down to a goatee and took time away from doing our makeup to sit in a chair as Mr. Sleepy. That's my hairy monkey arm picking lint off his shoulder.
Murray and I co-wrote the script, then Murray directed and still put in performances as three characters, although one of those characters ended up being cut from the show (see final paragraph below). Here, he put several pounds of slimy products in his hair and turned out a great performance as the creepy Mr. Macabre.
Then, Murray shaved his moustache and sat down as the blustery, insulting Mr. Loudmouth.
The workhorse of the night, though, was Greg. Not only was he the cinematographer and the editor, but he put in four characters. Here he slicked his hair, and what started as a Vincent Price impersonation kept getting more over the top until he did nothing but squawk "yes" and "no". This character was improvised while shooting, and wasn't even in the script. Even though he says "no" more than he says "yes", we lovingly named him Mr. Sycophant after a character that had been cut from the first draft.
Greg's next character was the droning Mr. Details, our tribute to Ben Stein.
In his third role, Greg tightened a necktie until he could barely breathe, and played the stammering Mr. Nervous.
The role that took the most preparation in hair and makeup was a silent one. Greg got a large Charles Manson-esque 'X' scarred on his forehead and posed for a photo as the defendant, Mr. Psycho.
Murray's brother Tom stepped in at the last minute to fill the fifth position on the film, and he did a great job in the lead role. Murray said Tom was good at doing a Jimmy Stewart kind of character, so I wrote his part with 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' in mind. Tom nailed the part from the beginning.
With more lines in one character than the rest of us had in several characters combined, we probably didn't need to give Tom another role, but he graciously stepped in as the ever-silent Mr. Stressed, whose part was whittled down until he was nothing but background to keep the film inside the 3-minute time limit. Here you see him holding his hat to the left of Greg's Mr. Sycophant.
In the interest of time, we ended up cutting what I thought was one of the funniest bits in the film. For Murray's first character of the night we connected a smoke machine through the back of his suit and gave him a cigarette. He oozed smoke from every fold of his clothing, and sat enshrouded in a thick haze, coughing and complaining that the room was getting too stuffy. Then the silent Mr. Stressed got so irritated with the smoke he poured water on him to put him out. In the editing room we had a lot of cutting to get the film under three minutes, and the smoke machine whined through the shot, so it got the axe.
Additional postings about this film on: January 22, January 19, January 15
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