Dumb Luck (Demo Version)

TV en FRANÇAIS, The Demos 📺🇫🇷

Welcome to the second installment of the TV en Français demo derby, the world’s leading TVeF-themed dirt fling. In the pit today is “Dumb Luck,” TV’s rockin’, cloppin’ second track [we believe it is fair to say that this song “clops” along]. Our shovels are ready — let’s get flingin’!

***WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS DESCRIPTIONS OF VIOLENT ACCIDENTS, AND PICTURES OF THEM. ⛔️

A few thoughts…

KEITH: “Dumb Luck” was a key player in the release of TVEF. Technically it was the first single (it was released coincidentally with “Return The Favor,“ according to Wikipedia(?), maybe because although “Dumb Luck” was the bing banger on the record, it doesn’t best represent the overall vibe of this collection of songs). As the lead release, the one that the album rollout was putatively leaning most heavily on, it therefore received the most generous video budget of the albums singles. And what did we want to do with that nice, hefty budget? We wanted to give it to a director mostly famous for being one of the worst filmmakers in the world.

Let’s back up. When we talk about the formation of We Are Scientists — like, the real embryonic development of the project — we’ve got to go back to the Autumn of 1999. We’d just graduated from college and moved up to the San Francisco Bay Area, where we had big plans to, uh, drive around and listen to music and see movies while supposedly looking for housing or jobs for a while, I guess. We pretty much crashed on couches and spent a couple of weeks in what was essentially a halfway house for drifters in the Tenderloin (at one point, you returned to Utah for a minute and I lived in a hostel in the woods up in Marin County, until you came back to rescue me). We mainly passed our days at this one cyber cafe in the Mission, poring over Craigslist and Monster.com for entry-level jobs before giving up and driving to a movie theater and then to another movie theater. We soaked up pretty much every new film and album released in that stretch. 

And what a release window it was. Within about five weeks, we were treated to Being John Malkovich, Three Kings, Fight Club, and American Movie. It was a fortuitous time to find oneself otherwise-unfortunately aimless.  We were soaking it up and wanting to make some art ourselves.

I count all of these films as inspirational, but perhaps the one that galvanized me the most was American Movie. It’s a sad, weird documentary about a sad weird guy, Mark Borchardt, who desperately wants to make art despite the pointed lack of any evidence whatsoever that he’s got even a shred of talent. He’s a dreamer, but he’s a go-getter, constantly rallying his friends and scraping together the very modest budgets needed to make his legitimately crummy little horror movies, which include such unreleased busts as The More The Scarier, Northwester, and his magnum opus, Coven. These movies, they suck. They demonstrate a sub-amateur’s grasp of almost every element of filmmaking. Still, Borchardt is an almost heroic figure — undaunted in the face of constant opposition both conventional and cosmic, he perseveres in his struggle to actualize his artistic vision. Frankly, to a young idiot with like two songs under his belt, Borchardt’s indefatigable outlook was inspirational. 

And so, of course, when we finally had the means (and an accommodating video concept), we wanted to give the guy some work. What do you remember from the early days of concepting that video?

CHRIS: Oh boy! Not much in the way of granular detail. I know that the overarching concept would easily occupy the top spot on any list called Top Ten Cultural Inventions of Late 20th Century. I speak, of course, of the fail video. In typical We Are Scientists fashion — in fact for us it’s more of an ironclad rule than a “fashion” — we felt compelled to base the video on the song’s title, rather than on the content of the lyrics, as most bands would do (indeed, we prefer it if the video’s concept pointedly defies the lyrics). So, “Dumb Luck,” fail video, it makes sense. I don’t recall a whole lot beyond that, though, so I checked my diary (gmail). It looks like this is the treatment we gave our management to send to potential directors: 

The video should kind of emulate standard "fail" compilation videos, but with each fail starring us. It would maybe start out pretty standard (some testicle-crunches, pool-falls, whatever) but slowly escalate into incredibly mundane-but-somehow-catastrophic fails, in which the innocuousness of the fail is inversely proportional to the gore of the fallout (ie, Keith spills a cup of coffee on himself and sustains gruesome, face-melting burns; Chris opens a refrigerator door but pulls his own arm off, leaving a spurting stump with ragged, dangling meat-tendrils).  We're fine with the gore looking super-cheap, as long as they're unnecessarily graphic. 

You know, standard music video stuff, some testicle crunches. The pitch also included two YouTube links as references, both of which now go to pages that say “this video isn’t available anymore.” Was 2014 a hardier, less chickenshit time on the internet? What is this weak-tea internet we’re now stuck with?

Anyway, Mark Borchardt seems like a great, if wishful, choice, even in retrospect. Not only would making this video have completed one of our life-goals, but, considering his abortive canon up to that point, Borchardt would have realized a dream at the same time. Alas, twas not to be. Tell ‘em, Keith!

KEITH: Well, yeah, the short version of the story is that it turns out that maybe the reason Borchardt has never made a viable film isn’t so much that the universe was conspiring against him, but because he’s kinda a nut. We had about an hour long phone chat with him and an assistant/co-director who came off mostly as a proxy who would be carrying Mark’s lumbering corpse, Weekend At Bernie’s-style, over the finish line. By the end of the chat, we were fairly sure that if we were to fly to Wisconsin (where Borchardt is based), we’d be coming home with no video and a story not much different from what’s already covered in American Movie. A better use of our video budget would be to just make the video at home with a professional director and buy a new DVD of American Movie to remind us of the bullet we’d dodged.  

Another good idea we momentarily entertained in the interest of producing this video was to use the budget to send both of us to master of horror Tom Savini’s Make-Up Effects Program at Douglas Education Center, but the production timeline and budget for the “Dumb Luck” video didn’t quite allow for both of us to move to Pittsburgh, PA, for a couple of years to get an Associates Degree in gore make-up, regardless of how obviously well such a move would continue to serve us for the duration of our career.   

Any regrets on that move, Chris? Ought we have pushed the release of TV En Français back two years to the summer of 2016, picking our music career back up after our graduation from TS’sM-UEP@DEC, where we’d (presumably) created and submitted the music video for “Dumb Luck” as our thesis project?

Looks like we also thought about skipping the hard work a degree from TS’sM-UEP@DEC entails, and getting the master himself.

CHRIS: “Any” regrets? When it comes to Tom Savini’s Make-Up Effects Program at Douglas Education Center, I have only regrets. As you say, a degree from Mr. Savini’s program, and the skills to which such as degree testifies, would have come in handy again and again over the last decade. Why, imagine what an absolute blood bath the “You’ve Lost Your Shit” video could’ve been. Or the “Fault Lines” video! Heck, there’s no way that, with degrees from TS’sM-UEP@DEC in our back pockets, we’d have put out a video for “Contact High” in which I didn’t accidentally drag you behind our Sling Shot by your bolo tie, you didn’t get your leg sucked into a Wave Rider’s intake then shot out the jet, and I didn’t get sliced neatly in two by the closing doors of Miami Metrorail. With degrees like those, there would also have been a scene in which an American crocodile, famished by his journey to Miami Beach from the Everglades, charged out of the surf and bit your head off, then crunched it like a ripe grape; and, doubtless, a scene in which my electric scooter broke down and I tried to fix the little engine myself, and got electrocuted so bad that my skin cooked to a crispy black shell, then I got hit by a van cuz the driver was smoking a doobie, not paying attention to the road, and my tar-black corpse blasted apart and you could see that it was still pink and wet inside. 

Of course, We Are Scientists isn’t famous in this industry for never making any mistakes: we’re famous for owning up to the mistakes we do make. May it always be so. 

Another thing I found in my diary (gmail) that I thought it might be nice to trot out is this list of scary moments for “Dumb Luck”’s video, proposed during pre-production by the props/effects guy who worked for the production company. 

1. A guy slam dunks a basketball and rips his arms off.

2. A dad plays catch with his son and his son throws the ball through him.

3. A girl is wasted and trying to take her shirt off and falls on a broom handle that punctures her skull.

4. Two buddies are sword fighting with cardboard spools and one smashes the others head off.

5. Jerry stabs Mark in the eye while fencing. When he pulls his sword out he pulls Mark’s eye out.

6. Maggie pulls a hang nail and it rips the skin all the way up her arm.

7. Jory tries to put up too much weight while bench pressing and drops the bar, decapitating himself.

8. 2 girlfriends are play fighting and one grabs the others hair a rips off a chunk of her scalp.

9. Daisy is a call girl / stripper and at a bachelor party goes into her inverted pole dance but slips and smashes her head like a falling watermelon.

10. Billy is opening an envelope with a letter opener and cuts a finger off.

11. While using a bandsaw Kai cuts his leg off.

12. A burlesque dancer pulls pasties off and it rips her nipples off.

13. A skateboarder slips and shoots his skateboard through someones chest.

14. sunglasses eye poke out.

15. Cutting vegetables and cuts hand off.

16. Apartment crescendo. John cuts his hand then turns and pokes his eye then impales himself then…...

17. Death by nail gun.

18. Surfer putting surfboard on rack turns around slicing a friends stomach open.

19. Hammering a nail and splattering the hand.

20. Hammering a nail then it bounces into his eye.

21. shooting each other into oblivion.

22. little girl blows a huge bubble and blows her head off.

23. Frisbee decapitation.

Some pretty old-fashioned ideas on this list, Keith! Some, like “Frisbee decapitation,” reflect the cozy side of Final Destination-era horror film-making. Some, the less savory side. 

But enough about the video, for Lucifer’s sake! What about this track, man? This demo contains some genuine treats. Love the tumbling harmonies in the final chorus! Did we leave those out of the studio recording after deciding we hated money??

KEITH: Chris, I think we just weren’t ready for those harmonies. To me, they feel way more of a piece with the arrangements in later songs, stuff like “Forgiveness” on Helter Seltzer and “Properties of Perception” on Megaplex. We were dipping our toes into the bubbling hot jacuzzi of that sort of vocal deployment, and our baby toes were still just a little too sensitive. It is funny, though, that we decided that those harmonies had to go, but that we’d go ahead slap a harmony over the entirety of the rest of the song. So many of the other idiosyncrasies of the demo are embellished, on the final version. That noodley guitar part that was clearly written to give the second verse a lift became the damn intro. The guitar solo is pretty much wholly written, which never happens in my demos, I think? Maybe I’m just conditioned to believe as much because our demos now almost always feature an over-the-top, utterly-unusable, improvised guitar solo? I guess we’ll find out as we comb through the rest of the TVEF slush pile.

On set at the “Dumb Luck” video shoot…

“I’ve never seen him like this…”

“As soon as I stop the bleeding, I’m gonna get that nickel out of the blender, by god!”

A rare moment of calm on the action-packed set.

A member of the crew is injured while grabbing a quick workout during his break.

The on-set gym seemed like a great thing to have… until it became a curse.

His friends call him Periscope!

A MAN’S VERY ARM, RIPPED FROM HIS BODY BY A BASKETBALL HOOP😰

It helps, in Horror, to have characters the audience wants to see dead.

Probably shouldn’t have gone poking around in the mayor’s tax records.

TV en Français: Deluxe (10th Anniversary Edition) is out May 10th. To preorder the double-vinyl, the zine, the t-shirt — any of that tasty junk — click through to this node.

⛅︎

C/K