29
Our friends to the south may have the iPhone and the eBook, but there's one thing they haven't had that we've had way longer and that's Trailer Park Boys: The Movie.
However, this particular cultural deficit was erased yesterday when the cinematic antics of Bubbles, Julian and Ricky started unspooling for 95 yuck-filled, R-rated minutes in three U.S. theatres — in Burbank, Calif., and Orange, Calif., and at the Empire 25 on New York's West 42nd Street.
It's phase one of a three-tiered launch for the movie, orchestrated by New York-based distributor Screen Media Films in association with CAVU Pictures, also from New York and known for its cred in breaking indie pics. After the loveable reprobates from Sunnyvale Trailer Park take Manhattan and sunny southern California (or so it is hoped), the mini-invasion spreads to five new cities on Feb. 1 – Phoenix; San Diego; Seattle; Bellevue, Wash.; and Manville, N.J. – and then to four more the week after – Bensalem, Pa.; Houston; Grapevine, Tex.; and Berkeley, Calif.
The hope is that The Movie eventually will play on as many as 60 screens Stateside. “It all depends on how the film is received in the opening weeks,” said Suzanne Blech, Screen Media's vice-president of sales and marketing. “We always knew we wanted to target the towns near the Canada-U.S. border where people are likely to have heard of Trailer Park Boys. Then, if we get some traction, we can move into the southern states, into the Bible Belt, into places where there really are a lot of trailer parks.”
To generate buzz prior to the California openings, the Boys — John Paul Tremblay (Julian), Robb Wells (Ricky), Mike Smith (Bubbles) — appeared at an invitation-only screening Wednesday evening at a Sunset Boulevard movie house in West Hollywood. Afterward, they headed to The Laugh Factory comedy club to be subjected, in the words of Isil Bagdadi, president of distribution and marketing for CAVU, “to a semi-light roast.” All of this was done with the support of the Canadian consulate in Los Angeles as well as Canadians Abroad, a non-profit organization tapped into many of the estimated 600,000 Canadian expatriates living in the Los Angeles area.
The U.S. debut has been a long time coming. The movie had its world premiere in October, 2006, in Canada, where the Boys have been cultural and criminal icons virtually from their get-go in 2001. At one point during its Canadian run, Trailer Park Boys: The Movie was being shown on an astonishing 206 screens. In its first weekend, it grossed more than $1.3-million – a record for the opening of an English-language Canadian film. By the end of its Canadian theatrical run, it had earned close to $4-million.
Selling the Boys to Americans won't be easy. Trailers for the film have been running on the Web and in selected markets for the last two weeks, but the TV series, a staple of Canada's Showcase channel for seven seasons, ran only briefly on BBC America, a digital service, in the spring of 2004. It was quickly pulled due to concerns about profanity.
As Mike Volpe, the Halifax-based co-producer of the movie and executive producer of the TV show, noted last week: “The U.S. is a tough market just because the language of Trailer Park Boys is so much a part of the show. For all the guns and violence that they're cool with, they're not really cool with language, oddly enough. We don't have any overt sex, which they'd be fine with, or any strong violence, which they'd also be fine with. But you can't really say the F-word at all.” (The movie, for the record, has not been censored for U.S. audiences; it's the same cut Canadians saw.)
Still, who knows? Thanks to the Internet and digital piracy, the show has developed something of a cult following south of the border, especially among 18- to 34-year-old males – the very demographic Screen Media and CAVU hope to attract. In fact, the movie was rapturously received last March at a one-off screening at the hipper-than-hip SXSW Festival in Austin, Tex. Afterward, members of the local TPB Fan Club showed up to quiz Volpe and the cast. “Those guys knew everything about the show,” he marvelled.
Blech's first TPB experience occurred in September, 2006, while attending the Toronto International Film Festival. Ivan Reitman, Canada's most famous Hollywood movie mogul, arranged a special screening to entice potential American distributors – and she went. Of course, Reitman wasn't doing it out of the goodness of his patriotism: The Montecito Picture Group, which he and Tom Pollock, former chair of Universal's Motion Pictures Group, started in 1998, was one of the movie's producers.
“What struck a chord with me with the picture was the heart,” Blech recalled. “You've got three numb-nuts … going from one zany scene to another, but they endeared themselves to you, and I believe that's why they're so successful in Canada: You end up caring what happens to these silly characters.”
Blech said she “fell in love with the picture,” but at that time Screen Media was focused on distributing movies to home-video outlets, TV stations and cable networks. It was only last year that the company decided to dip into theatrical distribution and to go after TPB: The Movie in earnest, eventually securing all U.S. distribution rights, including DVD.
Unsurprisingly, the posters and trailers for the U.S. market rely heavily on Reitman's credentials, touting: “From the Producer of Animal House and O ld School Comes the Trashiest Comedy of the Year.” Explained Blech: “Well, he's the only really known entity; the three boys are not known.” In fact, in the trailers, none of the lads is identified by his real name. Rather, they're described as: “Three Hardcore Criminals: Ricky, Julian, Bubbles. They've Done the Crime. They've Done the Time. Now They're Losing Their Homes. And They're Losing Their Girls.”
CAVU's Bagdadi admits this is a tough time to be launching a film from a foreign country with no known stars and with characters who are unfamiliar to the majority of Americans. “It's the Academy Awards period, right? There's a glut of pictures,” Bagdadi says. “But since it's a little different and light-hearted, the hope is it'll be seen as an alternative to that other stuff out there right now.”
Another obstacle has been the strike by the Writers Guild of America, which has kept many talks shows off the tube. “Jimmy Kimmel, Howard Stern – they're great friends and fans of Ivan Reitman,” noted Blech, “and they all expressed interest in having Ivan, as the godfather of comedy, introducing America to some newcomers. Alas, that's not going to happen.”
Still, the word has been seeping out here and there. The February issue of Penthouse magazine has a two-page article on the lads, including a Q&A. (Sample question: Has life changed since you hit the big screen? Julian: “It's a lot more difficult to break the law now because people are watching us on TV and in theatres.”)
Meanwhile, Volpe has his own hopes for the movie in the Land of Bush. If it performs well and the DVD (which is scheduled for release in April) is successful, it should spark interest in a sale of the TV series, profanity be damned. Hell, if America can warm to Ian McShane's extravagant oath-uttering in Deadwood, it can handle three foul-mouthed miscreants.
Canadians won't be seeing any new episodes this year, however. While the Boys did tape a one-hour special for Showcase last year, it's not going to air until the fall, likely in October. Volpe suggests “there are a couple of things up our sleeves in the trailer-park world,” including (or so he hints) a sequel to the movie. In the meantime, hard-core fans can save up for the DVD of season seven, out in April.
