Gregg Turkington talks On Cinema with Tim Heidecker ahead of Nov. 12 live KC show

Courtesy On Cinema

For what is ostensibly a quick-hit movie review show, Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s long-running TV and web series On Cinema has an astounding amount of lore. That probably comes as no surprise if you’re familiar with the two guys behind it.

Heidecker and Turkington are both known for character-heavy, avant-garde comedy, often with them improvising as lightly fictionalized versions of themselves. For examples, check out Turkington’s work as Neil Hamburger—a misanthropic Borscht Belt-style stand-up comic—or Heidecker’s recent run as the face of the Onion’s InfoWars takeover.

On Cinema presents the two performers as themselves, or rather two losers who happen to also be named Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington. They’re supposed to discuss recent movie releases, but episodes often spiral into rants and infighting over the pair’s latest failed business venture, romantic mishap, or legal entanglement (see Heidecker’s five-hour livestreamed murder trial, which got kudos from legal professionals for its surprising accuracy).

If you’re new to On Cinema, you may not be the right audience for the upcoming live show at the Midland.

But if you’re a fan (the show’s fans are legion, and as committed to the bit as Turkington and Heidecker), you’ll definitely want to be there. As Turkington explained in our conversation, what happens at an On Cinema live show—somewhat scripted but largely improvised, like the series itself—may or may not affect the show’s expansive canon.

Abby Olcese, The Pitch: This tour is an expansion of your tour from the spring. What’s changed about the content or format (if at all) between then and now? 

Gregg Turkington: It basically is just a continuation, but the movies we review, which is the meat of the show, change to reflect what’s in the theater. A few plot points were resolved on the tour in the spring, and now we have to incorporate them into the show.

How do you prepare for a live show? How does it play into the overall mythology of the On Cinema universe? Is it still mostly improvised? 

It could be fully canon. I tend to think of it as a souvenir of the show, but there’s some stuff in it that is based on what’s going on in the series, especially right now because we’re in the middle of airing a season and we’re trying to incorporate it the best we can.

It’s like a snowball going down a hill, picking up more snow as it goes. From show to show, there’s a new direction that something goes in, and it gets added into the next night’s show. We have an improv approach, and then what’s working sticks, but because it is a variety show, there’s other stuff that’s scripted out. There are some small supporting roles, but it’s mostly just me and Tim. We’re not going out unprepared; it’s just stuff that gets road-tested. It’s like a band with a song that starts at five minutes and by the end of the tour it’s eight minutes.

Courtesy On Cinema

What’s your favorite on-the-fly bit that became show canon?

There are so many. Last spring, we were reviewing a movie called They Will Kill You. We reviewed that and Tim kind of turned it into this kind of thing about him receiving an email with a heading that said “They Will Kill You” and taking it as a threat and going with that. It went off base in terms of sticking to a review for the movie, the paranoia that stoked in him. That was maybe the fourth or fifth show into the tour. The finale we have now also sort of took shape in the first few shows until we had something down we really loved.

You guys have a dedicated fan base who typically play along with you in their responses to your episodes. Does that energy transfer to a live setting?

On the internet, as I’m sure it’s no secret to you, people are generally kind of mean. But our fans have always been real nice, sweet, good people. They just want to play along and take part. They add a lot to it online. In-person, meeting these people is always great. They definitely are a cut above the fan bases I’ve seen for a lot of other things. Sometimes, as a season gets rolling, they speculate about what’s going to happen, and it’s surprising how often they nail it.

So, along those lines, On Cinema is distributed on a subscriber-based network (HEI) and clearly you guys have enough die-hard subscribing fans to support a live tour, which is great. What do you think that model says about where the industry’s at, and where it might be going?

The industry has almost made itself irrelevant. Take publishing; once, if a big publisher released a book, they’d have a whole team in place to support it. Now you probably just get an email that asks you to push it on Instagram for them. If you don’t have that team in place, and you’re not getting the vast majority of the income from a company, cutting them out makes the most sense.

We’re lucky in that people like what we do enough that by cutting out any sort of middleman, the dollars that come in are being spent on the product that’s going out. That’s really exciting. If someone sends us $7, they can see something on screen that their $7 went to 100%.

I always say I wish studios would learn from their mistakes and, instead of spending $300 million on a movie that might not make it back, give 300 filmmakers a million each. Audiences want something real. I went to a movie with my kid the other day and we saw four previews, and three of them had loads of CGI effects and big explosions. I think people might be a little tired of the explosions. It doesn’t draw me in.

Combining industry talk and show talk for a minute, one great long-running bit on the show is the Victorville Film Archives, your character’s collection of VHS tapes that Tim partially destroyed. When the show started in 2011, VHS tapes were a punchline. But now I have friends who legitimately love them and collect them. How does it feel to be unintentionally ahead of the curve on that?

It feels inevitable to me, as someone who collects records. There was this period when CDs came out that people were like, “Let’s throw our records in the dump because they’re obsolete.” The format might be obsolete but what’s on it is not. Vinyl came back because it was a superior format.

For VHS collectors, there are lots of low-budget movies, horror especially, that never came out on DVD or Blu-ray or streaming, and that’s what people are really excited about. Maybe not people collecting Kramer vs Kramer, because there’s no reason for that. Those tapes take up a lot of space, but there’s a charm to the way they look.

I think at the time we were talking about that for the show, that was the prime period for tapes being 25 cents at stores until they get thrown out. It made sense and is also conceptually funny that all this work goes into a movie, and VHS was such an innovative format when it came out. To see that reduced to being thrown out by the caseload, even though they still work, is a weird commentary on how people work in general, I think.

Courtesy On Cinema

I think it also speaks to what the show’s satirizing through your character and Tim’s, about the way a lot of people watch and talk about culture and art that deserves deeper consideration and attention than you’re giving it.

Yeah, exactly. That and self-appointed experts, where people search for areas of knowledge they can own as a personality that lets them be a big fish in a small pond, and treat that as enough reason to do it.

Speaking of ephemera, how do you guys source all the props and memorabilia your character has on the show? Are you just collecting stuff from people you know who’ve worked on projects?

I go on eBay when we get close to shooting a season, scroll through, and find stuff. I’m mostly looking for items from obscure rom-coms and failed action movies that aren’t very expensive. And we like it when my character has the wrong size. Like an XXL of some movie shirt. Also, our costume designer is working on different things, and if you’re a designer, you go to lots of thrift stores, and she’s always on the lookout for movie shirts and snags them year-round.

I feel like fans are pretty sure what Gregg’s (the character’s) Letterboxd top four would be. What’s your top four?

I love West Side Story a lot. I love Midnight Cowboy, Two-Lane Blacktop, and The Night of the Hunter.

The Night of the Hunter is probably my favorite movie of all time. I show it to everyone in my life.

It just… leaves me so emotional every single time I watch it. There’s nothing about it I don’t love. Have you ever seen the weird remake with Richard Chamberlain? It’s so rotten and misguided. They add this whole Pentecostal church angle where the preacher’s watching people speaking in tongues and stuff. When the kids take off on the river, that’s where it ends.

I feel like that kind of misses the whole point of the movie, doesn’t it?

Oh, totally. That movie’s gotten into my blood; I’ve made life decisions based on things that happened in it. I’ve watched it for years since I was a kid.

What’s a life decision you made because of Night of the Hunter?

Someone in LA on Craigslist was selling an original Night of the Hunter movie poster. Their mother had it since the 50s, she died and gave it to them. So I bought it, and lo and behold, it’s signed by Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters in green ballpoint pen. I couldn’t believe that I got this thing. The person in the ad was like, “There’s some scribbling on it; I dunno.” It was already framed. It’s beautiful to have it around the house.