Oh yes, it's show tie. People say good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot
popcorn, and no monsters in the Protection booth. Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Got off? Hello, ho, Hi, this will be a weekend
of light and love and where you guys are here there? Okay? It's
had her reservations about coming, and I just said to them, we are
going to a cabin in the mountain, said this weekend. If it kills
us all, why would it? Why would it kill us all? So?
Where are the others? Thank you? God? Yeah, you guys.
I'm definitely not following this. I'll explain what I know. Hey,
folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host
Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking with Nick Roth. He is
the writer and co director of the new film Hanky Panky. It is a
film about a sentient napkin and absolute blast talking with Nick. Thank you so
much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed the interview. I want to
know more about you. Were you always faded to go into show business?
Destined? Had to tried to run away. Both my parents were in the
film industry. My dad's primarily a TV but also a film director, and
my mom worked in distribution. And so I did grow up in LA and
my wife and who is also the co director of Hanky Panky, Lindsey On,
also grew up in LA as a child actor, and so our whole
group of friends did. And I think that shows because that's who made Hanky
Panky was us and all of our like just local. When you grow up
in LA pretty much everybody you know is in and around the film industry,
where at least we were. And so I did try to go and become
an English professor for a little while and then realized that was a reallysn't even
that it was a bad idea. It was that I was running away from
a lot of things, and so I moved back to LA tried to bike
movies. And this is the one that got made. You have been in
movies and you've written a bunch of stuff that seems like it got made.
How did you make that transition from former English professor to now screenwriter? That's
really a long sokka. Actually that involves me going to China for a long
time, which was really crazy. Was basically I was working on my PhD
dissertation and my dad, who had directed. He'd been a director on the
American television show prison Break. I don't know if you're familiar with it,
but it was a success, but it was a huge success in China.
And so back in twenty thirteen, he got invited to China to pitch on
some movie ideas and was like, do you want to come with me?
Because I don't know what I'm doing in China. I was like, oh
my god, I love Chinese. Like I happened to be watching like an
old Chinese Kung fu soap opera called Legend of the Condor Heroes at the time
that I was obsessed with, and I was like, oh yeah, like
I'm your guy. And so we ended up living in Beijing for a few
months and working on some Chinese things that one way or another mostly fell apart.
But then at that point I was like, this is a lot more
fun than my PhD dissertation. I need to just keep making movies. We
were working on Chinese Indiana Jones. It was a huge rating, epic movie.
We eventually got kicked off of the movie by the Communist Party for not
being materialist enough. But the movies on Netflix now it's terrible. They should
have used scrap if they didn't anyway, So that's how I made the transition
from English want to be English professor's a screenwriter, nihes no I listen,
I tried to. I got good enough at Chinese while I was living there
to give a drunken toast in Chinese at a banquet, which was essential and
was a good survival mechanism there. But that's about as far as it didn't
stick when we put it that way. Now, from what I under say,
you were born in eighty five, you've got acting credits all the way
back to ninety five, so you're a child actor as well. Not really.
None of them are big or good or impressive, and almost all of
them are just like me working with my dad on stuff that he was working
on, especially in comparison to Lindsay, who was like a working child actor
at the time. She was supporting her extended family by the time she was
like, I don't know, seven or eight doing all of these commercials.
She estimates she has no there's no record of how many commercials she did as
a little kid. Because no one. There was no and there still isn't
like a there's no IMDb for commercials you've been in. So she thinks maybe
fifty to one hundred a few of them survived. She was in like some
Barbie commercials and stuff that were that exist on YouTube, but not me,
like I was. I don't know, I was not taking it seriously from
what I understand too, Hanky Panky is based on an earlier short that you
worked on. A lot of the core that would form the people who came
together for Hanky Panky, Like we did a lot of shorts together, music
videos Hanky Panky. The original short that we made was like for one of
those forty eight hour film projects where it was like you have a weekend to
make a movie and you pull like a prop and a character and a line
of dialogue out of a hat unrelated hat, and we pulled like napkin as
our prop, and we're like, what if we you only had We were
like, we gotta write it Friday night. We got to write and prep
Friday night, shoot the thing Saturday, edit the thing Sunday. And so
I don't remember who pitched it to take credit for it, but somebody pitched
like we should make let's just make the prop. Let's make the napkin a
talking napkin, And then we wrote this like very charming, little like sweet,
not horror based rom com that was like a couple trying to set up
their other friends who are very awkward and their opposites, but they would go
well together. This became the basis for the Sam and Diana thanky panky and
it's a very awkward double date. But then we go underneath the table and
see that their napkins are having a conversation that's much more crass and much more
like this. We're getting to the id beneath the pretense above the table.
And so years later when we were like, okay, we got to do
a feature, what feature should we make? And I was just like,
we could do a we could do a feature version of that of the talking
Napkin movie, but make it a horror movie. Well, okay, let's
try that. So how does this project come together? They just go out,
buy a camera, turn it on in your all set. No,
we didn't even have to buy the camera because we want a camera cow so
we couldn't afford a camera. We never bought a k We didn't buy anything
for this movie except the food that we ate, which in some horrific instances
was the prop food from what you can see in the movie. No,
we were just determined tell her high water to make a feature, because anyone
who has made a number of shorts, music videos, that kind of thing
will tell you that at a certain point you hit a wall where you can
do great with them. But we were never gonna win an Oscar for Best
Short Film, or maybe I don't know, I don't that wasn't what we
were trying to do with our shorts. Hanky Panky certainly wasn't going to.
So we were but you can you make a feature, you can actually people
might watch more people watch feature films. I don't watch shorts. I don't
ever turn on my streaming service and be like, I wonder what new recent
art house short films there are by young, up and coming filmmakers. So
we were like, let's make a short, let's make a feature, just
whatever feature we can. And so we had access to that cabin, that's
Lindsay's dad's cabin, and we had won this weird camera at slam Dance Film
Festival with a different short film that we had made, and so we had
this like cool, funky camera and then the camera company was like, here,
you can have lenses. And then someone else was like, hey,
if you shoot this in the dead of winter, when we're not shooting anything
else, you can borrow these lights. And so everything flowed from that.
We were like, if we have a camera and all of our friends are
actors and we have a cabin, we have lights, and I know we
can make a talking napkin movie. Let's just do that. The rest of
it really just writes itself, like at that point, like I'm taking the
screenwritting credit, but come on, cabin Napkin, A bunch of people got
to die, all right, let's just go do it. When did you
actually shoot this? Okay, So the dirty dark secret of Hanky Panky is
that we actually shot this many years ago. In some ways, we were
like, we should just tell people we did this in the pandemic. It
looks then everything will be excused. But we actually shot it in twenty sixteen,
and it just took a really long time to edit it, so we
didn't Lindsay and I edited it together. By the end, it was basically
just me years into an editing process trying to make the perfect masterpiece film out
of the hours and hours of absolute craziness that we shot in a blizzard.
And that's why I took a long time, that and me not knowing what
I was doing, and so it took it. Just something that's really nice
about not having any money or being or owing anybody anything on a project is
that you just you can walk away from it for a few months and come
back to it. And there was times that I walked away from it for
a year and would come back to it with totally fresh eyes and be like,
now I think I know what this movie is and re edit it and
be like Nope, that wasn't it. And then go walk away for another
six months and come back and be like, now I know what the movie
is and re edit it. And we really were able to find the final
like what this is a movie about, only because we just had infinite time
to abandon it income back to it over and over again. How did it
change during that evolution? A lot of earlier cuts were more focused on the
hanky in Hanky Panky, where Woody was really a central character. And I
love Woody, I love him as a character. He's an interventional alien trapped
in the or not of his own volition, in the body of a handkerchief.
And that's Toby who puppeted the handkerchief and also is the voice of the
handkerchief as well as playing Norm in the movie and work and puppeteeria, doing
a lot doing everything. Toby was all over this movie. I fell so
in love with his performance. I think it's so good and it's so like.
That voice and that persona on that napkin just became so real for me
that I think I spent too long trying to make this movie about the relationship
between Sam and Woody. And it wasn't until the pretty late in the game
that we were like, this is really no. We need to edit the
whole movie around it being a love story between Sam and Diane, these two
soul mens. Now it seems so obvious they are these soulmates who come together,
then they get split apart, but at the end they're gonna unlikely find
each other and come back together whatever. And that wasn't the initial It was
more of a It's always been an ensemble piece. There's a lot of Woody
on the cutting room floor being a body horny napkin that was that is funny,
But I think that's probably the biggest shift was to make it try to
make it as much more about This emphasizes the romance that's in this look.
It's a Christmas sci fi horror, cabin thriller, screwball absurdist comedy, but
also there's a bit of rom com in there, and that really had to
be drawn out in the edit. Where did the Cheers influence come from?
Who decided we're going to name all these characters after Cheers characters and even do
our logo in that style right off the bat. That was in the short
because we didn't have time to name the characters, and so I think it
was probably me who was just like, okay, they're Sam, Diane,
Norm, Woody, Cliff, Rebecca go. And then when you don't have
time sometimes you just it works. And then we didn't really think about a
lot of people watch the movie and never catch that because it's it's buried,
especially if you're not, like a if a Cheers fan. But we wanted
to make sure that we owned that we did that, which is why the
Cheers logo on Hanky Panky was put in there. We want to make it
clear, so we're not like trying to steal the cast names of Cheers.
It's just we just ended up using it. As soon as I saw Harry
the Hat, I was like, oh, okay, we're going for this.
Yeah. So someone asked me at our at our film festival premiere,
someone said, what if there wasn't a character named Harry the Hat on Cheers?
And I was like, well, then we wouldn't have made the movie.
Hell came out of that. I don't know where that. I don't
know whose idea of the hat was or why there's a hat. I can't
remember where that came from. It's good, it's good for the big final
fight though. It's great. You need it. You need an antagonist,
and what better than a killer top hat. I don't remember. I should
figure this out so I can give credit to which member of our team was
the one who was like, what if there was a killer top hat named
Harry the Hat? But was our chilon? It's the best hanky hat fight
I've ever seen. Put the celluloid, thank you, thank you? Okay,
So this is the This remains one of our hot button controversies. Some
people and I don't want to name names, but one of those. One
of those names is definitely Seth Green thinks that the hat fighting napkin and Seth
and I have thought about this openly too long. I think perfect length could
be longer. What do you think it goes on for a really long time?
But I thought that was part of the joke. Yeah, I think
I think so that's that's a good sport in just giving me a fun,
hard, fun hard time about putting a four and a half minute handkerchief hat
fight scene into a movie with the string is just clearly visible. Yeah,
we just assumed that we could remove them like in the matrix, and then
we got into the editing room and it was just me trying to get rid
of them. There's a couple scenes where I was able to remove some of
the wires. But did you have to teach yourself editing to do all this?
I had edited and Lindsay had edited too, a lot of shorter,
simpler stuff we had taking on feature. I didn't realize that it wasn't just
like doing a bunch of shorts like it was. It really is its own
thing and keeping a story and a pacing, and we let these actors improv.
We let they were going to improv, and we got a lot of
improf which was great, and a ton of this movie is made up as
it goes, and a lot of people found some of the funniest bits,
like just live. But we also only could shoot with one camera, so
it's when you're shooting one camera with improv, it's just it's a challenge,
and it gives you a tremendous amount to work within the editing room, but
not the easiest stuff to work with. It's a lot different to keep the
whole thing working together in your head because you can't just do it bit by
bit, which I didn't know found out. So it was a teach yourself
as you gorus. I learned more about screenwriting from editing this movie than I
ever did in taking classes or I wrote on a TV show. I learned
a lot there, but not as much as in writing in editing. Hanky
pank, Well, not to get too nerdy, but what was your shooting
ratio? How much had you shot versus what? We came up with a
good question, and please we can get as nerdy as you'd like. Home.
Third, I'd have to go back because It's been a while since I've
messed around with this, but I feel like we shot like twenty five hours,
which like it's not even that it's that crazy or it's that much that
we shot twelve to one or whatever, but we really were very diligent also
about not letting that camera run because we had limited storage space and stuff.
So it's not like we were just freely that twenty five hours could have been
easily forty or fifty hours of a different kind of shoot. So it felt
like we shot alone. And the first cut of the movie was like three
hours long, which was a sort of intact version of the film that was
just a monster lots are running around in the snow and whole storylines that got
cut. You've already told me some of your challenges, but what else was
challenging about the shoot. The shoot itself was we were all staying in a
two bedroom cabin. It is very cold, it was we were at over
eight thousand feet of elevation, so there was like altitude to deal with,
and there were days where it was below zero and we were really dependent on
and we had no crew. Effectively, we were the crew. The cast
and crew was all there was like ten of us at any given time staying
in a cabin and that was and everyone who was there was who was there.
So it's like there are a lot of scenes where actors who are when
the camera facing the other way, they're holding the boom for the actor that
they're acting in the scene with. It was that kind of thing. Not
a lot of light in northern Utah and in the dead of winter. That
was a really big challenge just production wise, and so we were always battling
daylight and weather because if it was if we were getting good snow outside and
it was cloudy, we were like, we got to get out there.
That's what it's going to look the best, so abandon whatever. The shooting
schedule was run into the blizzard and try to shoot in the blizzard. Nobody
got badly hurt, which is great. At Ashley did get a little hypothermia,
and my buddy Nick Richard you get a little altitude sickness and had an
asthma attack, but other than that we were pretty safe. How was it
working with your significant other directing this? We worked a lot together, never
as co directors, but we just worked together as writer producer or actor,
writer, actor director, we worked pretty well. You'll notice that doctor Cran
and Rebecca are never in a scene together in this film. That the only
two characters I think who never interact because we were like, well, they
can't because one of us needs to direct the scene if the other one is
in it. So we cleverly Doctor Crane literally randomly walks out of the room
like right before she walks in the one time they're technically in a scene together,
and then he and then a spoiler Illert doctor Grinn's immediately killed after that
important because I was like, I gotta die, well, I'll just die
first so that I can direct the rest of the movie. Lindsey was really
much more the director on this in terms of working on performance with the actors
and working with the DPS on designing shots, and I was the sort of
I was more of a director in the ad or produce oriial capacity of I
was scheduling the days and figuring out what order to shoot things in, how
long it would take, and doing a lot of the sort of more technical
stuff and then working as the kind of like a writer directory show runnery working
with actors on the script and like making things make sense of as much as
they could, and pitching alts and jokes constantly during We got a lot of
great cutting room floor runs of just stupid stuff that I was shouting out for
people to say, we weren't doing the same exact job. We had split
up the jobs. Yes, and then she was also like really working on
the aesthetic and the design and focused on costumes and wardrobe, while I was
mostly just like trying to make the script as funny as possible at any given
moment. It's good. Sounds like a good division of labor. Yeah,
we just stumbled into it, honestly, out of everything was built out of
necessity. Nothing about this movie was it was designed or what would be perfect
if we did that. Everything was just like, here's what we got.
Let's do our best. Go right. So, once you find the movie
through the editing process, and that long process, it sounds, do you
then show it to the rest of the folks and get notes on that or
what's your process afterwards? You only ever get to see something for the first
time once, right, and so we were very judicious throughout the process the
years of editing it of being like, okay, let's show it to Christina.
Now let's show it to Jacob. Now, let's show it to And
so it was really pretty much one at a time with different cuts that we
figured where to bring people in. Nobody saw it before it was like cut
down to well under two hours, but after that it was there was like
there was one hundred and eleven minute cut that was we showed that to some
movie. I showed Seth and Claire at some point, and everybody had really
helpful feedback in notes at various stages. And then you try to not show
it to them again for a while so that they can get fresh eyes because
getting that, like when you're editing something, just watching it with a new
person sitting over your shoulder watching it will make you fully revisit how you are
watching the movie and you really see it through their eyes and how it plays
for them. And you can only do that once per person, and we
didn't want to show a lot of people, especially early cuts, so it
was a very careful, lengthy selection of one at a time showing people So
when is the first time and where do you see it with an audience?
Okay, so I'm also an adjunct professor at California State University, Northridge.
Shout out to seasun and the first time we watched it with a big audience,
as I showed I was teaching was this would have been in the last
fall I was teaching a which one I think it was History of American Cinema
with the first class that I showed it to, which was great because that
was it's mostly seniors. It's all cinema majors basically, and it was pretty
nerve wracking. I invited the cast and crew, a lot of them came
out, and that was the first time we showed it to a room full
of strangers because that was October, and it played really well, like we
got laughs out loud start to finish, which is all you're hoping for when
you make a comedy, because there is nothing worse than like just sitting in
silence, and then you just feel so oppressive. So we were just like,
please let people laugh, Please let people laugh, Please let them laugh.
They got it and they laughed, and that was a huge boon of
confidence for us because yes, they're my students, but they do not They
had nothing to prove to me, you know what I mean, Like nobody
those kids are hard to please. It is not like they're gonna just laugh
because they're like, let's make our professor feel good. They don't give a
shit. So I was I feel like we earned those laughs, and that
felt really good. That's great. And then what happens after that. We
were at some sort of small and local film festivals and had a couple good
screenings at those, and somewhere along the way, like a sales agent approached
me. That's John Lepper at Saiphuno Ventures. Shout out to John, who
then got us an offer from a distributor who signed the movie, and that's
Desktop Entertainment. And so now the film, like miraculously, it feels like,
will be on Apple and Google and Amazon on April nineteenth, which is
barreling down on us very quickly. And it feels surreal only because I've been
loudly telling everybody this is a real movie. We're gonna get this movie made
the whole time. But I don't know if I meant it. I was
just saying that it was my job, as I'm the guy who believes in
the project, and to try to carry it over the finish line. By
the end of it, like I said, I was the only one working
on it. Still in twenty twenty three or whatever where it was. I
was like doing color and sound by itself. But the whole time I had
been the one and being like, oh, yeah, guys, this is
gonna be a big movie. We're gonna get this and we're gonna get it
released, and everyone was like okay, sure, And literally, at one
point one of our we had three dp's because I couldn't get it depeated give
us a month of their time. So I was like, I do I
can get three different dps to do a week each. That's how we got
the movie shot. One of them. I sent a thing to inviting him
to the screening and it was the first time I talked to him in a
couple of years, and he thought I was joking and I was like,
oh no, this is a real Oh I finished the movie. He was
like, what it's been years. I assumed that we just that was fun
to do, and then it never got and I was like, no,
it's done. We edited it. It's a movie now. So is the
name of the movie hanky Panky the movie or just hanky Panky. It's just
hanky Panky. We specify the movie a lot because look, it turns out
that there is. This makes sense. There's a rather large underwear company called
Hanky Panky, and so we don't want there to be any confusion. We're
not underpants, We're a movie. They're under They should be called Hanky Panky
the underpants, and we could be called Hanky Panky the Movie. So what
are you working on now, you mean besides Hanky Panky two? Yes,
just teaching and writing a lot of different stuff. But honestly, I said
that facetiously, but honestly, Hanky Panky two has It's very hard for me
not to I did write an entire outline and I can't stop thinking about it.
And now I want this movie to do really good, mostly just so
that somebody might help us raise actual money to make a sequel. That would
be really excited. And also I want to do a Hanaka horror movie called
dreddel So I'm writing that in my spare time. Oh that sounds amazing.
Will the murder weapon be made out of clay? Everything's got to be made
out of clay. I haven't really cracked that one yet. I'm trying to.
I just I got the title and that's about it. But I feel
like I can get like the rest of it, Dreddel. Once you have
that, what else do you need? Oh, you get a poster made
up and there's the Dradel with some blood coming off of it. You're all
set. Yeah, get Eric Roberts a star in it. You're good to
go. Blood coming off the dradl My thoughts exactly. Yeah, Okay,
we'll make an offer to him first, it's been in a talking cat.
He'll be an easy get. I'm sure. Nick. I have to tell
you, I really enjoyed the movie, had a great time with it,
and I could just tell that you guys were having a great time making it.
That was a big part of our hope is that we would put ourselves
in this kind of ridiculous situation of just all being stuck in this cabin together
and hope that some of the intense zaniness of our experience would make its way
onto screen. Do you have a social media presence or a website or anyplace
where people can keep up with the movie and you so for right now,
I've just yes, like at Hanky pankydmovie dot com and Hanky at Hanky Panky
movie at everywhere else there is. We have all of those things, they're
small right now. Hopefully we're going to start launching some like a proper media
campaign in a few days actually for April Fool's where we'll be releasing some good
stuff and then hopefully those things start to grow a little bit and take off
after that. But yeah, we're on Instagram, tick to. I made
a LinkedIn page where everywhere you're very serious about this. LinkedIn is great,
guys. Shout out to our not our sponsors, but maybe they'll hear this
and give me another month free of premium or whatever. If you're trying to
reach film critics or distributors or whatever, they're all those people are on LinkedIn.
They're all there. I use LinkedIn more than any other writer I know.
Nick Roth, thank you so much for your time, and thank you
so much for making Hanky Panky. I appreciate it so much. Thank you
for giving me any outlet to continually talk about this movie. I've seen it
so many times, I had to watch it a million times. I'm done
watching it, but I can now just talk about it endlessly. I appreciate
that so much. My baby does the hangy panch mob. My baby does
the hangy panky thing. I saw walking on down the line. You know,
Babs really fasted in beating, and I think e's a I S lesson.
So my babe, it does I hang it, babe, fell my
by does expage. My baby doesn't anything ibbe think my babe, I start
walking on down the line. He knows something very presented, a really bad
maybe you know he might be It does a hag than he'll mappy. It
does a explain lady doesn't think that's not gonna one time. Stop stop sh