Interview: Santo Cilauro - Funky Squad
By Sean Lynch
Interview
with Santo
Cilauro
Star
& Creator of the TV series Funky Squad,
The Panel & The Late Show.
Read the Edited Interview - Click
Here | Bonus Interviews : Shaun Micallef | Tony Martin
While the UK have the Monty Python
clan, American's have Mark Burnett, there is only one Australian group
that has a success rate like no other when it comes to the film and TV
industry: Working Dog.
The former sketch show stars have single handedly paved the way in
original, creator driven comedies such as Frontline,
The Late Show,
The
Castle, The
Dish and most recently the ratings smash Thank
God You're Here.
Sean
Lynch caught up with the brains behind the operation, the intelligently
spoken and extremely clever Santo 'The Wog One' Cilauro, to talk about
Working Dog's latest Retro-DVD release Funky Squad.
Thanks
for getting up so early to speak with me, what are even doing up at
this time - shouldn't you be on holidays or something??
Early?
Are you kidding me? I've been up for a long time! We're kind of never
on holidays because what we do is kind of like being on holiday. I
mean, the production side of things gets a bit hard, but writing stuff
is always great fun - so this is our favourite time of the year, when
all the production is done...and we are just writing our stuff and
preparing for what we want to do next year and over the next couple of
years. It's very busy, but a very good time...
What
have you actually got on the drawing board at the moment [with TGYH finished]?
With TGYH
we're just sorting out a few things, they're shooting in London next
week for the British version of that show, so we're involved just a
little bit in over seeing that.
And we're just tinkering away with yet more
drafts on films and shows that we're preparing that we don't know
whether are going to go to air next year or the year after. We're
always working on something, and we like to gestate on ideas for a very
long time before we put pen to paper [laughs].
So
there's not another series of TGYH
on the cards? Is that over with for now?
No,
no - we won't decide that until next year, we won't really think about
that for another couple of months. We like to get it all out of our
system and then make a proper choice on it! [laughs].
Now the
new Funky Squad DVD,
the show is generally regarded as one of the few things that hasn't worked for
Working Dog. Personally I love it, it reminds me of a show from the UK
called Garth Marenghi's
Darkplace. How did you react to the negative reaction it
received back in '95 when it aired?
Because
we've been doing stuff for such a long time, it really doesn't mean
much at all. All I remember about the show is really enjoying it, just
loving it. In fact, it's probably been the most enjoyable TV show we've
ever
done. So it's neither here nor there what critics make of it, but what
people make of it.
We've
only ever gauged things on our own feeling towards it, and we did enjoy
doing it - we didn't want to do it forever - it's just we were in
between Frontline
series' and
thought we really needed an antidote to that focused satire. And we
thought, you know what let's muck around with this concept of cliche
and seeing how far we could push the envelope with pure cliche.
Well,
it wasn't the first time you had worked on the idea was it?
Well, Funky Squad was a
radio serial on Breakfast radio in Melbourne for a couple of years,
which we loved doing. Just packed with Naked Gun type
jokes, and we wanted to put it on TV we thought "Well, what direction
do we put it in?".
Do
we make it wall-to-wall gags? And then we realised that if you make it
wall-to-wall gags, you actually compromise the concept of cliche. And
we grew up absolutely adoring Starksy
& Hutch
and those kinds of TV shows. We just loved the concept of young,
undercover cops who 'speak the language of the streets'. I think 21 Jump Street
was out at the same time, and we just knew that it was the sort of
concept that was going to come around over and over again. It was just
an exercise in silliness really.
What I
quite liked about it was that it's almost too accurate of a 1970s show
in a way...
Well,
yeah, in a way it is. It was a bit of a bind, you go "Hang on, is it
funny enough?", because it's certainly good on the cliche and the
overall detail. And at the end of the day, I think that's what threw
people out a bit in that people though "Hang on, is it supposed to be
funny or was it legitimately made in the 70s?".
I know that we had a great time doing it, and I know a lot of people
used to have Funky Squad
parties as they were watching the show and things like that. The spirit
was nothing to analytical about what it actually does - it's just a
silly show where you do wear silly wigs, and we're all playing
-
not characters - but actors playing
characters badly [laughs].
So it was an odd kind of television show, but certainly something we
really enjoyed doing.
If
anything, it's just a chance to see Tommy G in pants that separate his
testicles...
[laughs] Of
course!
Is it
difficult to almost take a conscious backwards step and make the show
look purposely worse than it should be?
Well
sometime we'd stuff up on things like posters, like we had put in the
wrong era. Sometime we would have a Queen poster - and it shouldn't
have been in that era - and it makes you upset because you work so hard
to make everything so authentic. And not only authentic - but authentic
made badly. Like 'Crash-Zooms' that don't quite work, or bad
jokes that you need to freeze frame on at the end with bad
laughter - all that kind of stuff.
It is time consuming, and
in the end quite exhausting. You know, to make the quality of the tape
look like bad 70s film as well, it does take its toll. And, you know,
we did have to go around to our parents wardrobes and raid them and
make sure it was the right stuff from 1974. It couldn't be 1977 [laughs], it
couldn't be '69 - it had to be from that era.
The
great thing about Working Dog is the creative freedom you've made for
yourself through success. What's the difference between when you first
started and now, and how did you deal with that responsibility?
Well, when we first came to the ABC in the mid 80s to do D-Generation, we
didn't actually know what we were doing [laughs].
We were just taking baby steps, and agreeing to stuff creatively that
you would never agree to now. But we were just getting a foothold and
you're saying "Ok, I know this is not the way I thought about it - but
I don't think that's the way the ABC makes them. So there's not much
you can do about it".
You try and hang onto every bit of success
you've got and use it as a bit of leverage for the next thing you do.
And in a way, it doesn't matter an enormous amount of how much success
you've had in your past, because they still look at what you've got to
offer and worry about it. I still think TV execs are motivated more by
fear than a desire to succeed. They're very worried about something
being a disaster.
We may have had success with something like TGYH,
but if we go to Channel 10 with a completley different project next
year - they'll be wary. You still have to do things in baby steps, and
our baby steps was basically controling your own stuff financially.
Luckily
for us, no one has any extravegant hobbies that suck up all our money.
All we used to do, we'd earn whatever we used to earn on The Late Show (or
something like that) and just not really spend it. So what would happen
is that we'd then think about doing Frontline
and we'd just make it ourselves. So, that's been our inadvertant
success story - just managing to not spending our money unless we were
spending it on what we really loved - which is actually making new
television shows. We ended up making The Castle on our
own, because of that.
In
terms of looking after the financial things, is that just something you
learned by doing - or you had a bit of help along the way?
You
just learn things through mistakes. You've also got to temper that
business side of things by following your gut creatively, and there
were lots of forks in the road. So there were always people coming up
to us a saying "Well, why don't you dismantle that group" or "Why don't
you come across and do this with us" - everyone was getting offers to
splinter off and do stuff and you just go "You know what, I know that
if I had an accountant or a financial advisors, they'd reccomend I do
that. But something inside my guts say Let's stick together guys.
We'll probably be making less money - but we'll be having more fun
doing what we're doing and mabye in the long run we'll reap some reward
in the end".
So there was a bit of that. And there were quite a
few decsions made early on that were tough at the time, but now looking
back at it, you just go "Thank God we did that".
The thing is, everytime we've taken a pay-cut is the time we've been
most rewarded by the experience we've gone through.
People
always say that 'The Working Dog model is one to follow because they
know the business side of things' - however, the reason The Castle
was a financial success was because the story was good. Yeah, you can
cut and dice the financial side of it all you want, but if the
quality's not there at the start nobody's going to go for it.
People go "How have you managed to sell TGYH to so many
countries around the world?". And you sort of think "Mabye because it's
a good idea".
So
there's no chance you're replacing Tommy G with Kyle Sandilands anytime
soon then [laughs]...
[laughs] I
think we're quite happy with the way things are structured at the
moment...
Back to
the DVD. Anything that Tony Martin has a hand in, there is usually more
DVD extras than there is Feature footage...
[laughs]
Spot on Sean, absolutely spot on! [Laughs]
Do you
ever feel any pressure to have to put a bit more effort into DVD extras
when Tony is setting such a high benchmark?
Look. Tony is...Tony is insane [laughs]. Tony and I
have worked so much together, we worked together on the Bargearse/Olden Days
DVD and we worked very hard on all the extras on that DVD. Mind you, I
only worked a fraction of the time he worked because he's a freak in
terms of that.
And he'll come running up to me going [excitedly]
"We've set the new record on the amount of Easter Eggs on a DVD!". And
I'm sitting there going "Tony...what's an Easter Egg??" [laughs].
We have a different point of view to Tony in that we like to present
stuff, and just put it out there. In fact, when we put out The Castle: Collectors Edition
- we wanted to put extra stuff on, but we didn't want to put it inside
the DVD. So we worked on the presentation of it. And we put
the
and extra stuff on it, like we wrote the music to the 'Bony Doon' song
and got a musician to actually write that out properly. We re-created a
lot of hard copy stuff on that as extras.
But it puts you in a bit of a bind. As in, should we include the entire
radio series that Funky
Squad
was based on? Do we put out a little guide on how we lost 15 kilos each
for this show? But you know what, in the end it's just best to put it
out there and let it live on in people's memories.
It's
also one of the few occasions that Tom, Jane [Kennedy] and yourself
(who are normally the head writers) were at the forefront of the show.
Any particular reason?
We were doing Frontline
at the time and we took a rest. I think Rob [Sitch] went to Harvard or
something for a year. And we the three of us probably had the most
genuine love
of 70s
television. So we really wanted to make a genuine homage to it. We
could have procrastinated it for a long time, but it was such a silly
idea it didn't need much lead up time or thought. And I'm glad we did
it, because it was one of the most enjoyable times - and at the end of
it, we put our wigs away and got onto another series of Frontline.
So does
that rule out any possibility of a Johnny
Swank TV show?
[laughs]
Aw Man! Are you kidding? Sean we've spoken about that so many times!
Every idea is never a dead idea with us - we always try and re-invent
it! We had the storyboards being made, we were thinking about making it
a cartoon - there was all sorts of ideas floating around for that Johnny Swank. But
don't be surprised if one day Johnny Swank appears in some kind of
incarnation.
Finally,
with the next Working Dog film - have you narrowed down any ideas yet
as to what it might be?
No,
not really. Obviously they are all comedies, but there's two or three
we're starting to narrow it down to. And I would say in the next year
or so, I reckon within next year, we will start making it. But I can't
be more specific than that - because I don't actually know! But we are
getting together now to write it - we all have little cells! Little
sleeper cells in which to write in!! [laughs]
FUNKY
SQUAD and THE LATE SHOW
are out now on DVD
Read the EDITED Version of this Interview - CLICK HERE
|
