Top Five!

Let's do an experiment, right now: write down your top five movies of all time. These are what you consider the best movies you've seen, hands down. You know, top notch film-making – great writing, acting, directing, the whole works. Movies that you think everyone should see as a lesson in “great films”. For the sake of the experiment, I'm going to say the best movie I've ever seen is “Requiem for a Dream”. Now I want you write down your top five favorite movies of all time. These are what you consider the kind of movie that if it comes on TV on a Sunday afternoon, or if you're bored, you're gonna watch this movie, beginning to end – the kind of movie that you tell friends “Oh, I've seen that movie a million times”. For the sake of the experiment, I'm going to say my favorite movie is “American Pie”. Now that you have your two lists – compare them. Do you have any cross over between what you consider an example of “great cinema” and what you consider a “great frickin' movie”? My money says you have few, if any movies that have found a home on both of your lists.

This disparity, I think represents the problem that you get with a lot of intermediate improvisers. On one hand, everybody has a thing that they love to do: dinosaurs, mad scientists, pirates, whatever – something that really entertains them. At the same time though, everybody has a list of things that they think that they should be doing. Usually scenes about heartbreak, death, dying – you know, heady, “important” topics. Nine times out of ten, I would wager that when you ask people to list the five best movies of all time, they aren't even listing movies that they even like. 'Oh, “Citizen Kane”, “Casablanca”, “The Bicycle Thief”' they'll say, listing off a whole slew of movies that AFI or Roger Ebert or someone else listed at some point, that they think they should like. I've seen “Citizen Kane”, and it's a tad long and overwrought, and I'd wager to say that it's a bit over-rated (there, I said it – and by the way, no one was even in the room when he said “Rosebud” - deal with it). But we do improv the same way – we think we're supposed to be doing serious, dramatic scenes where we tackle the great mysteries and problems of the universe (especially longform, this is our biggest weak point). In fact, even though I think “Requiem” is an unbelievably good movie, I don't think I could ever watch it again – it's just too freaking intense. But we worry that if we don't like these cinematic masterpieces, we'll be seen as uncultured, uneducated, and worse, not interesting. Or as Keith Johnstone said: “'culture' is a minefield in which an unfashionable opinion can explode your self-esteem.”

I , however, could (and would, and have) watch “American Pie” or “Ghostbusters” a near infinite number of times and not get bored. Now are these the great examples of movie-making, the kind that changed the art of the cinema forever? Not even close, but they are fun and enjoyable, so isn't that what we should be striving for every time? We definitely shouldn't steer away from something important when we get there naturally, but isn't striving for that at full sprint the opposite of an organic discovery, even if it is in pursuit of some universal truth? We are, at our most basic, entertainers, but our first audience is ourselves.

This all runs back to that same basic lesson of improv: being honest on stage. These attempts to make deeper and emotional (and in our heads by extension, more interesting and enlightening) scenes are just another try at keeping our own internal truth from shining forth. We're afraid that if we do an improvised “American Pie”, that won't be seen as good or unique or clever compared to an improvised “Requiem for a Dream”. But that very move makes our improv not good because it's not real and honest. We should never try to guess what an audience wants to see, we should always try and do what interests and entertains us and do that to the best of our ability. Besides, which would you rather watch over and over again?

Better yet, which would you rather perform over and over again?