The “Angry Bill” Takes: A case study

A couple of days before we published the first episode, Mat and I started to kick around some ideas for post-launch promotion. It was Mat’s idea to put together a little video of us talking straight to camera about the show — me in my office in Santa Monica, CA, and Mat in an Undisclosed Location. It seemed straightforward. It was straightforward. But it also proved to be a useful lesson in how an idea pushes itself along, spinning off other ideas in the process.

Let’s work backwards. Here’s the finished video:

Mat cut this together, as should be obvious, from our individual takes. My individual take, however, differed from his in the respect that when I flubbed a line — which I did a great deal, having made the preposterous decision to wing it — I got flustered. I got visibly and loudly flustered. There was some, and when I say “some” I mean “quite a lot of,” angry profanity. No problem: Mat would, I figured, cut around it. I sent him the raw video.

It was, I think, a couple of days later, in the context of another conversation entirely, that Mat said this, in our Slack:

He lobbed this up in the idle, speculative way of someone who’d had an oddball notion tickling at him for a number of hours but wasn’t quite ready to say it out loud. I can’t tell you how many times, in how many late night writer’s rooms, I saw this dynamic play out — somebody offering the rawest germ of a notion, a germ they weren’t quite ready to professionally endorse (I’m not really pitching this, this isn’t a pitch because this isn’t really an idea, it’s just a random thing), and somebody else immediately seeing where it could go, because sometimes it takes another, wholly separate working brain to recognize an idea springing up in the wild. I thought: Of course. At which point the whole enterprise took on a different flavor. We started to talk about the “Angry Bill Takes,” the way people talk about The Basement Tapes or The Zapruder Film.

We had other things going on at the time; by sheer coincidence, this happened to be almost the exact moment Episode 1 went live to the world, the culmination of seven months’ work on two continents.

So we didn’t follow up on it right away. We talked about launch issues for a bit, about infrastructural stuff like DNS propogation and subscription links. But clearly we both had this worm of a silly idea gnawing quietly away at our brains, because about an hour later I wondered whether some version of the outtakes might qualify as bonus content for the website. Some 90 minutes after that Mat, apropos of nothing, popped in to say “Sidenote — I genuinely think that the best example of ‘the hard work of creativity’ would be to upload your complete take to camera, unedited.”

We didn’t end up doing that. We got pulled away into other business, and I told Mat again that I trusted him and he should do whatever he thought worked. And when he came back with the results, I saw right away that he’d done something so much better than simply pouring out the raw takes: He’d edited the Angry Bill Takes, and his own, into little freestanding Warner Bros. cartoons, mini-arias of error and frustration. He built them from the raw material, giving them pace and rhythm, a beginning and middle and end. They became their own things. (The thumbnail frame on mine was a happy accident. Sometimes you get lucky.)

One of the things I love about the outtakes is that you see the difference between the way Mat, a performer, reacts to fluffing a line and the way I, a writer, do it. Mat simply lets the mistake float away into the ether, you can almost see him let it go, and then he goes again. And I — don’t do that. I get self-conscious. Hence the profanity. Which led to the final refinement: I messaged Mat to ask if he thought a torrent, or at least a rivulet, of angry cursing would present any problems with the social media platforms. Before he could answer, though — in fact, as soon as I pushed Send — I realized something: Whether or not there was a practical requirement that the profanity be bleeped, it’d be funnier if it was. I couldn’t explain why, but it just would be. I knew with 100% certainty that this was true: It had to be bleeped, because bleeped is funnier. This would end up being my contribution. I would have insisted on it, I would have fought him physically on it, if he hadn’t been some number of miles away in an Undisclosed Location. Fortunately, he agreed, immediately, which led to a highly entertaining 15-minute exchange on the semiotics of the “bleep” sound. We laughed a lot. We’ve laughed a lot, about a lot of things, making this podcast.

You start someplace, with something that may not yet be fully formed enough to call an idea. You end up somewhere else. Creativity is like this, when it works. And when it does, man, it’s fun.

/bb