Production Diary - Attack of the Cookie People

Once a month I’m going to talk about a specific production, what it was like to film it, and what was involved in making it happen.  This month I’m going to talk about Attack of the Cookie People.

Attack of the Cookie People, like The Medea School of Melodrama and The Walking Stick, is a short film that was originally made for an SPC-TV production called Tape & a Stick. 

The basic idea was that each week there would be two objects that you had to include in your short film and there were three films per episode.  I think it was a cool idea, since there were multiple people who submitted shorts so you could see how others would use the objects.  However, it only lasted for three episodes – Tape & a Stick, Balloon & a Sock, and Soup & a Cow.  As one of the producers on the show (Morgan Thomas and LT were the others), I tended to do as many shorts as we needed to fill up the episode. Sometimes it was just one, sometimes it was more. 

Attack of the Cookie People was produced for the third episode: Soup & a Cow.  The objects were – of course – a bowl of soup and a cow (and I clearly work for the Department of Redundancy Department).  I think I filmed it because we needed one more short film for the episode – at least I hope that was the reason. I remember the shoot was one of those hey-let’s-film-a-movie-tomorrow type of productions that involved me writing a script the day (or night) before.  I really had no idea how to work in soup or a cow (which I obviously didn’t have), so I just let me mind wander - and boy did it wander!  It wandered over the woods, through the hills, and it just kept going until it got mired in the Valley of Ridiculous Plots.

The movie is about three college students – Vicki, Max, and Tim – who have to do an extra credit assignment to pass their biology class, and up lost in the woods.  This particular forest seems to be vast and apparently hard to navigate through - even though it appears to be the opposite - because there are multiple legends of groups who have entered the woods never to be seen again.  The first group the heroes meet is the lost tribe of Not-So-Pygmy Mimes who try to stop the heroes with an invisible wall.  The mimes are outsmarted, however, when the heroes trap them in a giant invisible box.  Unfortunately, they also “trap” their friend Tim, who doesn’t realize the box isn’t really invisible because the box is not actually real. 

Vicki and Max escape and meet up with a group of British Exchange Students who also famously got lost in those woods.  Max is hungry and gratefully accepts food from the British students. It turns out all they have to eat is cookies – all kinds of cookies including cookie pie, cookie sandwiches, and cookie soup (if you think that’s a silly way to work in soup then just wait to see how I worked in the cow!).  Max fills up on sweet-sweet-cookie goodness, but Vicki is suspicious of how a lost tribe of students just happens to have an incredibly large stash of surprisingly not stale cookies, and therefore refuses to eat any.

Meanwhile, the mimes – who start talking when it’s clear that Tim is an idiot who can’t understand anything that’s mimed – explain that the British Student Tribe survives in the woods by sacrificing people to the Great Cookie God and receives many cookies in return (ridiculous enough for you yet? Just wait, it gets better…or worse depending on how you look at it).  With Tim leading them, the mimes try to rescue the heroes, but totally mess it up.  Not only do they not save Vicki or Max, but one of them is captured as well.  Tim has an idea how to save them that involves finding a giant cow (there’s the cow!) and obtaining a giant glass of milk.  Of course the mimes just happen to know where a giant cow lives, and they all go there.

Vicki, Max, and Mime 2 are about to be sacrificed. Just when the Great Cookie God appears, Tim and the other mimes arrive with the giant glass of milk, which terrifies the Cookie God, and they save the day.  The heroes fight their way free and escape with Mime 2 back to the real, non-forest world, leaving the rest of the mimes to deal with the British students.  It ends with the heroes having been captured by someone else and being sacrificed to a different god.

So yeah, ridiculous story that is far beyond silly, and well into the oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-I-wrote-let-alone-filmed-that category, and like Frumpy Gets It, will probably never again see the light of day.  Although I may upload a few clips of Joe Ojeda’s brilliant and hilarious performance as Tim, simply because his comic genius should be shared with the world.

What was it like to film this god-awful script?  Well, it was almost as silly as the script itself. 

The actors met up at the SPC-TV station, and I ended up having to beg and plead for people to film with us because I wrote in a stupidly large cast.  There were quite a few reluctant actors who will not be named because I’m pretty sure they don’t want anyone to know they were ever involved in this production (or possibly any SFF things.  We’re not exactly a well-known or highly respected production company after all). 

Although most of the mimes wore black, the face paint was very light since I didn’t really have mime-appropriate make up (although Morgan Thomas did her best to make it look good).  The rest of the costumes were pretty much whatever the actors were wearing that day.  Joe, who played Tim, had fun dressing up in a t-shirt that said “plays well with self” and totally random pair of swimming goggles.  I also had a crap-ton (which I believe to be an official unit of measurement these days) of boxes and bags containing various kinds of cookies.

We caravanned to the nearest woods you could believably get lost in – Giant City State Park – and proceeded to choose a location that was not actually very wooded at all as the primary set for the film.  It was close to the road, yet also near a stream and a the trees were not really thick.  I'm not sure that even a blind, deaf, and dumb possum could get lost there, let alone two groups of people.  I could have chosen a different place, but that's just not how I roll apparently.  To quote one of the actors from The Gift Bearer, Russell Martin, “I are smart like toast”.  

We spent the day filming, having fun being silly, laughing at bloopers, and at Joe’s endlessly hilarious performance.  We also ate a lot of cookies.  In fact, I think the actor playing Max may have gotten “cookie poisoning” from being forced to eat too many cookies, including the disgusting cookie “soup” made from off-brand instant pudding and the cheapest (aka cardboard like) chocolate chip cookies ever made.

When the filming and clean up (the cookies made a mess) were done, we headed home.  I eventually edited it, put it together with the other films for the Tape & a Stick episode, then it aired on SPC-TV and probably hasn’t been watched again since I showed it to my parents and they said the 1960s slang version of wtf?!?.

Wow, I spent more time explaining the plot than talking about filming the movie.  Somehow that seems strangely fitting for this odd-little movie that can be best summed up as “stupidly hilarious”.