Inside ontheinside.info

You’ve lived in NY for eight years now, did you want to move to the city growing up?
I love the country, I grew up in Texas and North Carolina. But if you’re going to move to a big city, this is the one. There was always a bit of a New York fantasy in my mind. Early in my life, I wanted to be a gallery artist, move to New York, have an artist’s loft and walk around with paint smeared jeans. I was also interested in comedy. And certainly this is the place for that too, you know come here and be a Saturday Night Live writer or have a sketch comedy team.

How did you become a cartoonist?
I was pursuing art and comedy at the same time, but I never thought of putting the two together because I guess I was kind of a snob on both ends I guess. I was living in Boston in ‘98 when I saw this Frontline or Nightline special about the first ever cartoon issue of the New Yorker. I went out and picked up a copy at the newsstand and inside there was a contest form that the New Yorker and the Algonquin Hotel were co-sponsoring. You were supposed to send in your best cartoon idea that had to do with hotels, or hotel life. I spent a few weeks on it and sent some things in. Bob Mankoff, the current cartoon editor at the New Yorker, was the juror of the contest. I was one of the three finalists and got to come down to New York and I met Bob and a couple of the other cartoonists, and I ended up winning the whole thing. So Bob suggested I submit for the magazine. From then on I was doing three cartoon ideas a week and sending them down from Boston. And the third week I sold one, which was just a huge validation. I’d done everything to try to make the rent and to be a comedian and an artist, trying to get in those doors. So to get into a door like the New Yorker, especially something that I’d never intended to do, it really felt like, “ok, this is probably what I am supposed to do”. And so, after you sell your first one you can come down and turn in your ideas in person on Tuesday mornings to the New Yorker. You’re kind of in the club, at least enough to come in on pitch day.

And so you became a New Yorker?
Yes, but I should tell you the bad end of that story. I came down and was doing three ideas a week. You know I’d write a lot of ideas but I’d pick three good ones and pitch them every week. At that point Bob told me ‘you know most cartoonists do about ten a week’. So I started doing fifteen a week because I was wanting to be the young impressive guy. And that whole first year I sold a total of four. It wasn’t a meteoric rise, I definitely had to pay some dues. Each year got a little better, but I wasn’t able to make a living from it for probably four years. And the last four years I’ve been able to. But even now, I mean at the very best, when you turn in your ten, you’re lucky to sell one. So 90% of your stuff gets rejected every week. And that’s top tier, that’s if you’re really hitting, and there’s certainly weeks where you don’t sell any.

That ties right into the books you edited The Rejection Collection, right?
It was an idea I had when I started gathering a pile of rejected cartoons that I still liked. I knew all these other cartoonists who had been doing it for 50 years must also have huge piles of rejects. So I just talked to them and got all their favorites and we’ve done two volumes of The Rejection Collection now (volume 1, volume 2: The Cream of the Crap). Hopefully, we’ll keep going.

What kind of cartoon can we expect in the books?
A lot of the stuff in The Rejection Collection is right for this type of book but very wrong for the New Yorker. To me that adds a level of comedy to it—if you see a joke that’s really sort of tasteless and lowbrow or just stupid, you know the New Yorker’s not going to buy it, but the idea that the cartoonist did it, and actually pitched it to the New Yorker, makes it even funnier to me, like ‘what were they thinking’? These are cartoonists whose work is regularly in the New Yorker, and this is the stuff that they’ve never been able to sell to the magazine over the years. And most of it, yeah, most of it’s outrageous and racy and politcally incorrect.

Also the New Yorker cartoons are famous, but hardly anyone knows the New Yorker cartoonists. So it was a big part of the book for me to share these personalities. In both of the books we have photographs to show you what the cartoonist looks like and then questionnaires about their craft and the way they think. Volume 2 has an appendix about the life of being a cartoonist. A lot of people don’t realize that we’re scraping by, hoping to sell. And that’s my career in a nutshell. I tried a lot of stuff, I’ve been third shift convenience store and done construction and road work, and every other thing. It is the truth that something takes way longer than you think. Like the people who are “overnight successes” you look at it and they’ve been doing it for 10 years in one way or another.

How long does it take to conceptualize a single cartoon?
It varies hugely, sometimes an idea will come to you fully formed, instantaneously while you’re making coffee and you have no idea where it came from. And then other times you just sit there and grind it out and write a lot of really bad ideas and then eventually something comes together. I wish there was an easier way, cause it’s not easy, just sitting there, forcing myself to think of something. For example I’ll start thinking ‘igloos’. Then I go from there to ‘eskimos’ and from ‘eskimos’ to ‘whale blubber’ and maybe there’s a joke about you know some sort of blubber product and then that doesn’t go anywhere so you go back to ‘eskimos’ and say ok, I’ll do an eskimo on a sled and his dogs are, instead of dogs they’re cats. It’s a concept.

Can you take us through the pitching process with the New Yorker?
At the end of each week I take my best ideas and sketch up the best ten, you know, the ten that I can live with. I do that pretty quick, fifteen minutes a sketch probably, maybe less. And then if they buy one I have to do a finished version of it, art-wise. That can take hours, sometimes weeks.

Do the publishers ever send back the finished version?
Not really. You finish it to your liking and you take it in and occasionally they’ll point out something, like the fact checking-department will point out something. The classic is that your buttons are going the wrong way for a men’s shirt or a women’s shirt, or patterns on a bird’s wing are wrong. Their fact-checking department is pretty legendary at the New Yorker, for their articles, but also for the cartoons. But it’s kind of funny because you’re nit-picking about the plumage of a bird not being accurate but ignoring the fact that the bird is talking. Which is also not factually correct.

At what point do you come up with the caption?
That’s the bulk of what I spend my time doing, writing words. I don’t draw anything until I’ve got a good joke or a gag or a concept. It’s word based but there has to be some added element in the visual. Because I had a tendency, coming from a stand up background, to write a one-liner joke and then just draw somebody saying it. Which is not really a pure cartoon, there’s gotta be something in the visual that is essential to get the joke.

Would you say cartoon styles go in and out of fashion over time?
There’s a difference in the drawing style when you look at the old magazines. They were really rich and well-drawn, and today it’s almost better to be ‘badly’ drawn, in a way, it frees up the joke a little more. I tend to draw in an old fashioned way, kind of overly. And sometimes I have to bring it back to keep it funny, otherwise it gets real stale. Like you draw it too well and suddenly it’s not a cartoon, it’s a documentary moment.

But in my work, and in the New Yorker cartoons in general, there’s a dryness to the delivery that typifies them. To me it’s the equivalent of a stand up comedian who does his stuff with a straight face without overselling it with the energy of his delivery. There’s a lot of comedy that is about the momentum that you build in the room. Dane Cook might be a good example of this, it’s more about the energy of him as a performer rather than just the thought behind the joke. He’s almost surfing the audience’s energy, whereas a Steven Wright or somebody, almost lets the energy dissipate in order to focus on the next thought he’s going to give you. Two different things, I personally gravitate to the latter.

Do you perform stand up in the city?
Yeah occasionally. Mostly within the context of speaking as a cartoonist and showing cartoons. But I still occasionally write a random one-liner joke that I can’t fit into a cartoon so I try to tell it on stage.

Do you think New York is a good place to be a cartoonist?
Tremendously. I think what people like about the New Yorker, even if they don’t live here, is that it’s about New York. There’s certainly that element. Because people everywhere used to live here or maybe wished they lived here. So we almost have a responsibility to report in a comedic way what’s going on in New York. And just walking around, you constantly see typical New Yorker set-ups. You know, the hot dog vending cart with a scene taking place, or a homeless guy with a sign, that’s a classic, or even the crazy street prophets, all that stuff. The only thing you don’t see is the desert island, that’s not in New York much.

- interview by Thomas Collardeau, photo by Scott Gordon Bleicher.

See Matthew Diffee’s cartoons at the Cartoon Bank here.

Film producer Celine Rattray shares the struggles and rewards of film producing and running a company in New York.

Plum Pictures is a company of three women, what do you each bring to the table that makes it work?
All three of us are very different. That has really helped us over the years because we bring different perspective on a script, on a piece of material, or on a cut of a film. We all come from very different angles and I think it’s having smart debates that has helped us do better work. I think Galt [Niederhoffer] is an intensively creative person, she’s someone who tackles everything from a creative standpoint. I come from a business background, so my approach to solving problem or to thinking about problems is to thinking about business solutions and how it will affect our business. And then Daniela [Taplin] is someone who is extremely personable and kind and good with people and she approaches problems from that angle. And so I think the fact that the three of us are very different is actually very good for the company.

How did you start the company?
When we started we wrote a 5-page business plan and looked for investors and we found our first investor who backed our company for the first three years in terms of salary and development money and then we put together a slate of films, and we basically optioned scripts for a dollar each and just try to find as many projects as possible and we got to a place where we had a slate of 10 films and probably half of them were no good and the other half were decent. Then we did everything we could to get them made and we got 2 movies made in the first year. One of them was Lonesome Jim and the other one was The Baxter, and then from that moment onwards it was really about keep trying to find great material, keep trying to get movies made, do good work, hope that little by little it will get acknowledged. And this year has been the most exciting year for our company because this year we had 3 movies at Sundance and they all sold in big ways, two of them to the Weinstein’s and one to Magnolia. It felt like a reward for 3 years of very, very hard work that culminated in Sundance. And then since Sundance, it’s been very exciting because people liked those three films and thought we did interesting work and we’ve been able to make 4 more films in the last 6 months which has been really thrilling because it’s really what it’s about—getting the movies made.

Can you tell us more about your experience at Sundance?

Sundance was the first time we had a bidding war. And the bidding war is the most thrilling and exciting thing a film producer can ever go through. I wish it on everyone because it’s an amazing life experience. We showed two of our films, one was Grace is Gone and one was Dedication and from the second that the screenings ended all the distrubtors were swarming around and approached us at various times and said “we’re planning to make a bid for your movie”. And then a couple hours later we went to a condo and there were distributors in every room of the condo, and we the producers with our lawyers would go from room to room and negotiate with all the different companies and the prices kept going higher and higher, till we closed. We actually closed both movies with the Weinstein’s. It was very, very thrilling that multiple people like and appreciate and want your film because all along the way of making the film, all you hear is ‘no’, you hear people not like a script, you hear actors don’t like a script, or directors don’t like a script, or you hear investors don’t like the script, or crews don’t like the script. You hear so many no’s along the way and usually these films, the reason they’re made for such tiny budgets is that the distributors don’t want to make them in a bigger way. So then to get to the point where all the people who said no along the way now want your movie because it came out well and it was well executed. That is very thrilling because you believed it for the two years you worked on it but very few people around you did. So it’s a really lovely moment.

How do you keep your faith against so many obstacles and no’s along the way?
I think you have to really love a piece of material. I think the lesson is you can’t get a movie made unless you think that script is extraordinary, because there are so many battles to get there that if you’re not completely convinced that it’s an interesting project from a creative and business standpoint, that this movie has a chance of breaking out and pleasing audiences, to me it doesn’t feel worthwhile. You have to have such belief. You need to have a belief in the piece of material, you have to have a belief in the director that you pick and the cast that you pick, you have to really see a vision for what the material is.

What do you look for in a script?
We look for material that we think is intelligent, that has something interesting to say. We look for material that is touching in some way, that will move people, will move them to laugh or cry or create emotion in people. We look for good roles because we know that if there’s a good role that makes it easier to attract a well-known actor and therefore easier for the movie to get made. I think we look for something that’s a little bit different to other things that have been made. We try to pick things that we think have something new and original to say. And then we look for something that strikes the balance of critical and commercial which is a hard thing to do because the two don’t go hand in hand: to find something that we think will be able to get into the festivals and will be able to possibly win awards but at the same time has a broad concept, and that people all over the country and all over the world might be interested in going to see. So we try to balance all these things and it’s hard. You get 50 scripts submitted to you every day and you’re lucky if once a month a great script comes along and you’re often competing against a lot of other companies to get that great script.

How do you make the close to obtain rights to a script that you like?
When we talk to our filmmakers, we let them know that the chances of it getting made are higher with us, with our company. We make 5 movies a year and we’re very quick from the moment that we option the script to when the movie gets made. For us we put our energy behind fewer projects. I think some bigger producers, also from studios, might option a hundred scripts and only make 10. We really say if we take the project, we’re taking it on to make it, not to develop it.

Can you describe your duties on set?
Pre-production is actually probably the most important part of the producer’s job. Pre-production is planning every part, every logistic of the shoot. In pre-production you hire the crew, you plan the schedule, you plan the locations, you plan the order of shots and you really plan every aspect of what the shoot will be, so if a movie is very well prepped, theoretically a shoot should go very smoothly. I think one of the things that we’ve learned is to have long pre-productions periods. If you prepped a movie very well, all you’re doing during the shoot is dealing with new problems that arise that were not anticipated in pre-production.

For example, a rain storm sets in and you have to choose to go to another location because you can’t shoot in your exterior location. So you have to decide how to move that schedule around. Or an actor is having a disagreement with someone so you have to step in and resolve, or you have an unhappy crew member. There’s a hundred people working on our movies and there’s always tension between different groups. The producer tries to identify that problem and step in and solve the problem. Part of it is morale and making sure the people are happy and bringing coffee to the crew, making sure the people are having a good experience. And then a part of it is also being the right hand to the director and being there by the monitor and when a director may have missed something because they’re looking out for a 100 things, suggesting some different ways you might do a take that will help you ultimately in the edit room because if an actor for example has done 3 or 4 takes that are intense in one direction but you think it might help you to have an alternative, you’re the one to maybe suggest it to the director.

And then also keep an eye on costs in general, so depending on the length of the day of your shoot or what time you have lunch, if you go into overtime at lunch or at the end of the day- you have to make a decision as a producer sometime: do you keep going for a couple of hours to get that shot and we go into overtime, or do we move that shot to the next day and if we move the shot to the next day what does that mean for tomorrow, and weighing decisions ultimately with the good of the movie as your number one objective but then getting the movie delivered on time and on budget being a secondary very critical objective also.

Why did you choose to start Plum Pictures in New York?
To me what’s so exciting is the creative community that’s here with fantastic writers and directors and actors. And then I also feel the energy of New York, people and the pace is very exciting and moves you in this really exciting rhythm. So it feels like a dynamic place to start a young company.

What did you learn from the movie industry since you started?
How completely really difficult it is. Everytime a movie gets made, even a terrible movie, it’s a miracle. Getting a movie made is like pushing a huge rock up a hill and you’re the only one pushing. I think with every movie, between actors getting a different offer on something else, or the financiers keep changing their minds, for all the things to go right and a movie to actually get made to me is a miracle. Every single movie I made, on the first day of the shoot I have a massive relief because i feel nothing more can go wrong now, no person can change their mind, the movie is happening. It was much harder than i thought when I started out.

When we were just starting out, we were thinking it’s so hard to get something made so we need to have 10 at any point just be lucky enough to have one, and a very good friend of mine introduced me to Oliver Stone early on in our company and he was like “no, no, no, 10 is not enough you actually need to have 30 developments to actually get one made’. There’s really a lot of truth to that, it’s extremely hard to create the momentum to get something to happen. Which ties it to what we were talking about earlier that you need to have such a belief that it’s something that is worth making.

Who are people in the business whose careers inspire you or who you look up to?
There’s a couple of people who I really admire in film. I really admire Scott Rudin because he has extraordinary taste. He has great taste across independent films and studio films. He really seems to fight for directors and protect directors and get their visions realized and he just has such extraordinary taste across everything; books that eventually get made into films, plays and remakes and original screenplays. We have a much much younger company than his, but he’s certainly a role model and inspiration to us. I really admire Anthony Bregman who is a younger producer but had made fantastic films and is also a wonderful human being and a great father and a great husband and is someone to that seems to balance it all and I really admire him for that.

How do you balance it all?
It’s very hard. When you’re in production it’s usually all consuming and your life stops. All my friends have become patient with me that they understand that I don’t return calls for a couple of months. And my family understands, and then when you’re not in production and you have more time on your hands you try to make it up to everyone, being able to spend good time with your husband, and friends and family. So it’s definitely a balancing act. It’s difficult. I had a movie that I made this summer, where in a period of a week I forgot one of my closest friend and my dad’s birthday because we were shooting nights and I was so tired, so I don’t always do it well.

How has it been like working with so many great actors?
The last couple of years have been incredible, we’ve worked with so many actors… John Cusack, Billy Crudup, Mandy Moore, Tom Wilkinson, Lucy Liu, Matthew Broderick, Virginia Madsen, Hilary Swank, Matthew Perry, Michelle Monaghan, Benjamin Bratt, William H Macy- that are extraordinary but also some actors that I’ve admired since I was a young girl. This year we made a movie with Alan Alda who for so many years I’ve been watching in films and on TV. To be able to experience the work of someone like that and watch them on the monitor and see how professional and hard working they are. That was a particularly exciting experience to me, to see someone who’s 71 years old and who has no reason on a $2m film to work that hard and yet he’s there every day on time working as hard as he could possibly work with so much enthusiasm and so much to give. It’s really thrilling and gives you so much faith in filmmaking.

What is your view on the indie film industry today?
I think there are a lot of big challenges. One of very positive things that happened over the last few years is that Wall Street have invested a lot of money into films and into independent films and it’s probably easier than ever to get Wall Street financing for independent films. There’s so many ways to access money, so you’re no longer dependent on getting movies made through the studios or the distributions companies. So that’s been really exciting development for independent film producers.

One of the challenges that have come with that is that so many movies have gotten made and are getting made and so many new distribution companies have also come up that right now the marketplace is incredibly crowded. And it’s crowded in the studio world and it’s also crowded in the independent world. And as a result of this, from September 1st to Christmas this year, there’s 8 new releases every weekend and the market is flooded with films and it’s so hard for any films, even studio films to stand out, that let alone your little independent. It’s very very difficult and you see it this season, so many good films have gotten completely lost because of the crowded marketplace. So I think that’s a real challenge, I think it’s probably harder than ever to make a little indedpendent film without a big star and have that film succeed. Your independent film really needs to be a small version of a studio film to have a fighting chance. Also the execution needs to be perfect. Eight years ago a small independent film that maybe didn’t look that good production-value wise might have succeded if it was a good story, but in this day and age with the crowded marketplaces you need to have it all. You need to have extraodinary performances, extraordinary production value. It really needs to be A+ along every aspect to have a chance to succeed.

How do you see your career evolving?
I think we want to continue to do films that we really believe in, that we think are good films to make, i think we’d like to do bigger budgets films because it’s been a great and exciting challenge to do $2-3 million films but it’s the idea of what you can do production-value wise with a $20 or 30 million film is really exciting to us as producers. So we’d love to try and see if we can get a bigger film made and what the challenges and the logistics of production are on a film like that. So that’s what I hope we will do in the next year or so. And I think we’d love at some point to do a television show although I’m sure that has its own sets of challenges and difficulties.

How many films do you see a week?
I love to go to the movie house at noon on a Saturday or a Sunday and then spend the afternoon there and see two or three films in a row. It’s really my favorite thing to do on weekends. I try to go and see every film that comes out, whatever the film is, you always have something to learn, you always discover an interesting theme, or an interesting way of editing a film or an interesting actor. I feel like you always have things to learn by seeing a movie. There’s no movie that comes out that I wouldn’t be curious to see if i had enough time. I typically see at least 5 films a week and then I read a lot of scripts on top of that. But if a week goes by where I’ve seen less than 5, I would feel unhappy about that week.

- interview by Alvina Collardeau, photo by Samantha Gattsek

See Celine Rattray’s profile and favorite NY places at http://ontheinside.info/celine-rattray.