Wearing antennae and clothes that seemed to be scrounged from a dumpster, the woman on stage, on a movie set, greeted her audience: “Welcome to the 2011 Fuck Me Magazine Awards!” The crowd got suitably lascivious. They all had dilapidated layers and insectoid accessories of their own, outfits which turn oppressive when your movie set (also your apartment/venue) sits above a Kensington Market bakery in July. Occasionally someone would glance at the huge, idle fan with unscripted desire.
That scene dominated the last day of shooting on Bugs (a working title), the debut film by local comedy/art/performance duo Life of a Craphead. Over the past few years, Amy Lam and Jon McCurley have done countless sets of manic experimental comedy, organized cheerful public provocations like Please Copy Us Forever (“a performance where 30+ scripted characters promote themselves and sell crap in the middle of the all-way crossing at the Yonge and Dundas intersection”), and staged the 2009 play Double Double Land Land, where, as Carl Wilson put it, “Toronto was represented as a mediocre, mutated and impoverished place that was located right next to the wealthy and prosperous Tuba City, which is of course also Toronto.”
But they’ve never ambled into a project of this absurd magnitude before, one requiring tens of thousands of dollars at a time when it’s increasingly difficult to find funding for independent films. How can you do Tuba City on a Toronto budget?
Bugs’ bizarre world is populated by maladroit insects, unknowing social climbers pursuing various forms of one-upmanship. Its nominal protagonist seemed to be Dan, a weevil, who ends up hosting that aforementioned awards ceremony. After watching a jumbled sample of scenes, the plot remained a little opaque. One crew member told me that the movie is about “sex and violence,” and it superficially resembles Isabella Rossellini’s edutainment series Green Porno, but the co-directors suggested that all those bugs and their coital fixations are more like surreal, arbitrary symbols.
“If you make it about bugs, no one actually knows what bugs are like, and then you can make up anything,” said Lam. The film’s satirical elements seem to hinge not on insects or sex maniacs but obliviously self-involved characters acting out in familiar Craphead style. I watched actors repeat their dialogue for sound pickups:
“I’m going to kill you if you don’t let me talk at your school.”
“I invented a new drink. You should come over to my house and we’ll sit in the kiddie pool and drink it.”
Or, shouted while banging head against the ceiling: “I have no self-control!”
Most of Bugs was filmed at the Ossington gallery Xpace; Life of a Craphead had been working on several ideas for movies (such as The Second Biggest Asshole in the World Meets the Biggest Asshole), but when they were offered temporary use of that space for a show, they abandoned every existing concept and wrote a new script in five weeks. When I visited, the main room was completely transformed: the floor had become a hilly slope, with oddly flat trees leached of colour, and in one corner there was an incubator-like crevice full of prop eggs.
On that day, however, the cast and crew were all working in a sweltering warren of basement spaces. Actors got dressed or munched apples in a single collective room, applying their own makeup. Lam was steady, quiet, serenely confident; McCurley, compact and extremely fit (he sometimes finishes near the front of marathons) spent more time running around manipulating people.
The cast all volunteered, whether friends or curious amateurs or ACTRA members. Small portions of the budget were covered by a grant and severe debit card overdrafts, but the rest, as McCurley put it, came from “insane favours.” All the gear was donated. The professional crew received “one-thirtieth” of their normal wage. Production designer Laura McCoy was going to source costumes from H&M, but they were too expensive, so: “I just bought shirts in Chinatown and spray-painted them and cut holes myself. I like the way it looks way better.” One bug, who publishes a memoir called My Position: The Story of Shay, Sex Role Model, was going to be played by a classical pianist. His day job took him to Europe, and the role ended up with McCurley’s high school drama teacher Gerry Campbell, who happens to be the father of Neve.
Campbell senior told me a story from his director’s younger days: “Jon had written a show called Billy and the Monsters, I think he was in Grade 9 or 10 when he did it…it was part of a curriculum thing, and then we started touring it to local elementary schools. It was a very scary children’s play. We had at least one principal ban us from the school because children ran screaming from the auditorium. On that basis, though, we decided ‘well, this has promise,’ and we took it to the Toronto Fringe Festival and performed it at the Factory Theatre.”
Bugs is a similar act of extended improvisation. When I interviewed them later on in Kensington, Lam and McCurley told me that they have no post-production funding or distribution strategy yet. But they did offer helpful advice to a visitor named Igor, who overheard us and politely asked how to make it as an actor in Toronto.
That climactic scene at the Fuck Me Magazine Awards dominated the final day of filming. Its eight-legged MC would get the strangely dressed monochrome extras a little too excited, then not quite enough. At one point the directors said: “Less dancing; you’re dancing too hard. More wiggling.”
And maybe there weren’t enough of them? I looked up from my notebook to see a smiling Jon McCurley holding another ratty wig and distressed bug outfit. “Hey, put these on,” he told me.
Making a costume from the rags, I wandered dazed into the crowd of horny insects. They were alternately cheering, grinding and shouting: “Fuck me! Fuck ME!” It must have broken every possible rule of journalistic objectivity, but I joined in, not even feeling dragooned. My reaction was probably what Life of Craphead asked themselves after spotting another potential cast member: Why not?
