Career Criminal — Pitch Trailer
I'll probably never direct another live show, but I still get ideas for them all the time. One of the ways I used to pitch shows was to make mockup videos, posters, and other promotional material to help describe what the show would look like. Since I mostly worked in improv with minimal sets and costumes, it was helpful not just for the producing team but for the actors as well to have an idea of the atmosphere and general vibe of a show. I would supplement this with a (ridiculously exhaustive) show document and a "reading list" of TV shows and movies.
This is a pitch video for the show I had intended to serve as the follow-up for True Blue, Career Criminal. Criminal would have been another improvised drama, but where True Blue was a police procedural inspired by Broadchurch, True Detective, and Homicide, Criminal was inspired by the films of Nicolas Winding Refn and Micheal Mann: slick, stylish stories about professional criminals operating at a high level and the toll their work takes on their personal lives.
Honestly, I'm a little relieved I'll never actually have to figure out how to make the show work! Creating, investigating, and solving a mystery in an hour is relatively simple—credibly portraying bank robbers, safe crackers, and hitmen in the same style would have been extremely difficult to pull off.
Nightcrawler (2014)
This poster was more an influence on CC than the film itself, though I do think it’s a great movie and is definitely in conversation of great modern LA crime movies.
Walking out of the theatre after a Fringe performance of True Blue, two ladies behind me in the stairwell were arguing over how much of the show was improvised: essentially, one was trying to convince the other that the entire show was made up, which she declared was impossible. “They must have known something!”
At the time I relished this uncertainty of what was “made up” and what was scripted. (For the record, the only thing we knew beforehand was the structure of the show—what scenes come when and roughly in what order—and who was playing the two detectives and the victim. The content of each show was unique and created on-the-fly each time.) For Criminal I wanted the magic trick to be a bit more apparent and I struggled with how to communicate this in a clever way. I considered starting each show with a poker game and the cards of the winning hand dictate the plot or character beats. I even toyed with the idea of throwing a knife at a dart board marked with plot cliches and character traits (positioned upstage, of course!) but I probably would never have been allowed to do that in a black box.
Drive (2011)
Of course, when I say “inspired by the films of Nicolas Winding Refn” I don’t mean Valhalla Rising. Has any film so completely defined a director’s style than Drive? While the Pusher trilogy and Valhalla are certainly stylish, Drive’s neon colours and vaporous script left a permanent mark on his following work. Only God Forgives and especially Neon Demon & Too Old To Die Young all exist in that same pitch-black world of selfish, violent people preying on those outside the outsiders.
While True Blue was, by necessity, pretty much wall-to-wall dialogue (it takes a lot of talking to figure out a mystery) I wanted Criminal to have a lot more breath. In a mystery, it’s exhilarating to watch two detectives wriggle out a problem while driving from place to place, or to talk a suspect into a confession. In Thief and Heat, Mann lets you watch his crews work with little time given to explaining what they’re doing: they are experts, and they expect you to keep up. Again, I’m not sure how I would have tackled this: would an audience really have watched someone crack a safe in mime for three minutes? If there was sufficient tension, brought about by lighting, sound design, and character—yeah, maybe.
I never knew what was going to work and some things didn’t: right up until opening night of True Blue we had a chalk drawing of the corpse on the stage for the whole show, and the less said about my “Kaiju attacks the city while a couple go through a divorce” concept the better.
Thief (1981)
Heat gets all the attention, Manhunter has more style, Collateral has a rare Tom Cruise heel, but Thief still feels like Mann’s masterpiece. Similar to the Cohen’s Blood Simple, it’s a statement of arrival that all his following films live in the shadow of. Even something as superficially different as Last of the Mohicans can be boiled down to a core essence: competent men doing a complicated job expertly, sending fissures through the lives of the women they’ve cajoled, lied to, or otherwise captured into their orbit.
Career Criminal would have only worked on the strength of its characters and the verisimilitude of the magic trick of improv: that suspension of disbelief and the agreement between the audience and the performers. Could we have recaptured that accelerating, how-are-they-gonna-figure-this-out tension of True Blue in a show with a less recognizable structure? Or would the show have just been a stylish mess? (Like, it should be said, some of the work of the directors who inspired it.)
I’ll never know.