Meehan’s ‘Monster’
Comic makes impressive filmmaking debut with silly, sobering S.F. movie
Michael Meehan is passionate about San Francisco. A comedian in the Bay Area since comedy’s golden age in the mid-1980s, Meehan has now written and directed his first movie — “Hey Monster, Hands Off My City!”— that expresses his love for San Francisco and his anxiety over it.
“The city’s changing at a rapid rate, and we’re losing our cultural nuggets, in place of technological and business venture stuff that has no soul,” says Meehan. “This movie is an effort to capture the city and the things that are there before it goes away.”
The resulting movie is a fascinating combination of ele-
ments. It is, first of all, a celebration of Bay Area comedians. Meehan, who is 57, found roles for most of the comics with whom he came of age. If you know Bay Area comedy, you know these people: Larry “Bubbles” Brown, Johnny Steele, Bob Sarlatte, Mike Pritchard, Geoff Bolt, Mick Berry, Greg Proops, the late Kevin Meaney ... They appear in roles big and small, and each gets a chance to shine.
But “Hey Monster” is not a nostalgic look back, and it’s not all about the laughs. This is a work of art made on a budget, a beautiful-looking movie with a particular sensibility that mixes absurdity and zany humor with sober concerns. Scene after scene impresses with its comic inventiveness, its arresting brand of lunacy. We get this completely bizarre element of a 15-foot furry spider roaming the city in the dead of night. And then there’s this other idea at work, the notion that the city’s real monsters are wearing suits.
“There are these bigger, undefined monsters that assault us in all of our lives,” says Meehan, “and sometimes we don’t even know it until it’s too late.” “Hey Monster” screens Tuesday, May 30, through Friday, June 2, at the 4-Star Theatre in San Francisco.
The movie is very much in line with Meehan’s work as a stand-up comedian, expressing the distinct turn of mind that has been the hallmark of his humor from the beginning. He’s funny, challenging and unexpected. Steele, who is hilarious in the movie as a homicide detective, says, “Michael has always been an art comic. I put him in a class with Dana Carvey, Robin Williams and Paula Poundstone — and in terms of abstract, artistic vision, probably ahead of these people. He’s just a brilliant guy.”
Meehan was born in San Francisco’s Sunset District. As a kid he used to make lifelike dummies and throw them in front of the N-Judah to freak out Muni drivers. He spent six years in the Marine Corps Reserve and went to San Francisco State University. There, he found comic inspiration in a class he took on writing about science, turning in papers such as “A Brief and Pornographic Guide to the Copernican Model.”
He tried doing standup at an open mike show at the Other Cafe, a now-defunct comedy club in the Haight. “I went up one night and had a bunch of friends and people laughing. The second, with no friends, I bombed,” he says. It took him another year to get up the nerve to try again. “I said OK, if I fail 100 times, I’ll do something else. But I had some good success right off the bat.”
Meehan hit it at just the right time. It was 1984, and comedy was exploding. “There were tons of clubs in the city, so you could go around doing four sets a night, and two or three of them would be paying, so it was great,” he says. “Comedy was on fire.”
He was married and had a daughter, and so he always had a day job. “I was a greenskeeper at Presidio Golf Course. I’d go out all night, do comedy, then go to work and crash on the couch, then get up and mow the lawn, then go home and take an nap and go out and do more comedy. But that all came crashing down as my drinking accelerated and my wife divorced me.”
He was spiraling out of control, until 1992, when friend and fellow comedian Pritchard stepped in. “Pritchard drove me to rehab and put my 28-day stay on his credit card, and that started this whole new life.”
In the years since, Meehan has remarried, to Ann Borgonovo, a civil engineer, and he has continued working as a comedian. For some of that time, he also had a sideline as a professional trapeze artist, working with the group Trapeze World. Too tall and heavy to fly through the air, he worked as a catcher. “You’re upside down and get into the trapeze lock, so you lock your legs in and you’re hanging down,” he says. It was through his travels in the circus world that Meehan met contortionist Dwoira Galilea, who has one of the lead roles in the movie .
“Hey Monster, Hands Off My City!” had its origins in a one-man show Meehan performed at the 2011 San Francisco Fringe Festival. He shot it over the course of 2½ years, raising money in dribs and drabs. Postproduction took another year, with Meehan working closely with his editor, Brian Tuohy.
In total, “Hey Monster” cost only $100,000. It’s such a low-budget film that Meehan designed and sewed the costumes himself and made his own props. Yet it looks like a milliondollar effort. Also notice that, though it was filmed by many cameramen, it all looks of a piece, a product of the same consciousness, the same visual eye. And that eye is apparent from the first shot.
“Hey Monster” proves Meehan as a major homegrown talent. “For a first-time writer-director effort, this is certainly impressive,” says Steele. “This is a visual feast.”