Frank Conniff - Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever

Is it possible to be in a location where you are freezing your ass off and yet are still in the right place at the right time? That is what happened to me. I was in Minneapolis in the late 1980s. Back in those days, New Yorkers who messed up their lives through a combination of self-medication and stupidity were sent to Minnesota to think about what they did. It was the land of 10,000 rehab centers. I was sent there because I had sniffed too much blow, drank too much booze, smoked too much pot and eaten too many tabs of acid. And on top of all that, I had a drug problem.

(If you want to know more about my chemical dependency, I recount all the sorted details in the anthology volume, "Boring Tales of Addiction and Recovery That Everybody's Already Heard a Million Fucking Times Already.)

So I was exiled to the Midwest, and without any artificial stimulation to take up my time, I had to find other things to do. So instead of pissing my life away, I came up with another plan: why not pursue my dreams? So I started attending open mics in Minneapolis comedy clubs and began working towards the show business career that had previously only existed within the defunct DuMont Network that broadcast inside my head.

And here is where the being-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time part kicks in. The Twin Cities comedy scene in those days was amazing, and I met and became friends with local comics like Lizz Winstead, Joe Keyes and Maria Bamford, and also other comedians who became future coworkers: Michael J. Nelson, Bridget Jones, Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein, Mary Jo Pehl, Paul Chaplin and Joel Hodgson.

Joel, Trace and J. Elvis, with the help of Kevin Murphy and Jim Mallon, started a show on a local UHF station called Mystery Science Theater 3000. This was in 1988 and at first my only participation in the show was to look at it from afar and be jealous of everyone who was a part of it. Then in 1989, the show made the leap from local station TV 23 KTMA to a brand new start up cable network, The Comedy Channel. This enabled me to be envious of my friends on a national scale. But then in 1990 when the Comedy Channel became Comedy Central, and J. Elvis Weinstein left the show, there was an opening, and on head writer Michael J. Nelson's recommendation, I was given the job. Even now, when I look back on this series of events, I am so overwhelmed by how lucky I was that I become jealous and resentful of myself.

Ever since then, my advice to younger comedians and comedy writers who want to break into television is simple: Become a huge screw-up, develop a life-threatening drug habit, be forced to leave your hometown and move to a Midwestern city, then randomly and fortuitously get hired to work on a TV show that goes on to be considered a classic. That is my advice. Its idiotic advice, but advice nonetheless.

I was initially hired to be a writer on the show. Then it became apparent to everyone that the camera loved me, and I was assigned to play TVs Frank, the bumbling yet lovable henchman to Dr. Clayton Forrester, the mad scientist hell-bent on world domination played by Trace Beaulieu. But then I was given a third job to watch and screen the movies and make recommendations as to which films we should riff on episodes of the show.

As a result, I watched many, many, many shitty movies. I could try to remember all of the celluloid water closets I viewed, but I dont think my psyche could survive such a tortuous thought experiment. So I have narrowed it down to twenty-five films. I will talk about the effect they had on me and how those films changed my life in no way whatsoever. I will mention a few other movies that we didn't riff on MST3K and also talk about any other useless crap that happens to pop into my head.

When youve been traumatized by awful cinema, you need to share the experience and purge your demons somehow; unfortunately, psychological counseling that treats victims of bad movie overexposure is a scarce commodity, so writing this book is the closest thing there is to therapy for me

But just to cleanse our palate, before we talk about bad movies, I will focus on a good one, the Stanley Kubrick masterpiece from 1957, Paths of Glory . At the end of that magnificent film, a singer comes on stage in front of an audience of hardened war veterans who are ready and eager to heckle her. But instead, she sings a sentimental French ballad that leaves them all in tears. So what this audience thought would be awful and worthy of ridicule turned out to be beautiful and sublime. That is the exact opposite of the experience we had watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 films. No movie that we ever riffed left us moved and emotionally devastated to the point of tears and disabused us of the notion that we were going to make fun of it. I bring this up only to warn you that the kind of transformative effect that comes from experiencing a great work of art is not something you are going to read about in this book.