Mooney (and friends) hit big screen
It is one of those rare hot and sunny July Sundays in San Francisco, but instead of soaking up the rays, a packed house is ensconced in the Independent nightclub’s darkness. What has brought hordes here for the first of two sold-out shows are “Saturday Night Live” star Kyle Mooney and Mooney’s normally behind-thescenes partner in “SNL” shorts, Dave McCary. The show, combining sketch comedy and video clips, closes with an audience Q&A that quickly gets to the real reason behind the pair’s Northern California visit when someone asks them to describe their new movie, “Brigsby Bear.”
“Friendship,” is one word McCary arrives at, an apt description of both the film and the forces behind it. Mooney and McCary have been pals since fifth grade in their native San Diego. Years before they joined “SNL” in 2013, their friendship led them to being among the co-founders of the sketch group Good Neighbors in 2007. The troupe’s McCary-directed YouTube videos garnered millions of hits and made them Internet stars.
“The movie obviously has this component of friends being creative together,” says Mooney. “That parallel was kind of hard to ignore.”
Mooney, 32, who cowrote “Brigsby Bear” with Kevin Costello (another middle-school friend), stars as James, a young man raised in total isolation by his parents, Ted (Mark Hamill) and April ( Jane Adams). The titular TV show, a cheesy, live-action children’s series starring a Teddy Ruxpin-like talking bear, is a constant in his life. James discovers the truth, that “Brigsby Bear” exists for him and him alone, only when circumstances force him out of his family’s desert bunker. Nevertheless, he is so attached to the show that he endeavors to make his own Brigsby movie, recruiting a cast that includes high school kids and Vogel (Greg Kinnear), the police detective investigating James’ strange upbringing.
“Initially, the seed (of the movie) was just, ‘What if a person is the only person to see a TV show?’ ” says Mooney, who is an avid collector of VHS tapes of 1980s and ’90s children’s series.
“He spent a lot of time sifting through these weird, obscure videos that probably very few, if any, people in the world were really watching,”
McCary says. “We’ll never know, because this is just a theory, but when Kyle would be watching these videos, trying to find really funny, surreal, bizarre, psychedelic moments, he would, by and large, be watching them by himself. That solitude with these weird videos may have seeped into his psyche of like, ‘I am the only one watching this show. Right now, this show is just for me in this world.’ ”
That familiarity with ancient video, not just Mooney’s but also McCary’s, who has spent many an hour watching highlights of what his friend has collected, seeps its way into “Brigsby Bear’s” bones. It is evident in the attention to detail given to the snippets of the “Brigsby Bear” TV series and to the lo-fi quality of the series. Cinematographer Christian Sprenger searched eBay for 30year-old broadcast-quality VHS cameras to better sell the illusion. Even the casting of Hamill adds a layer to the world James and his bear friend inhabit.
“It is kind of nice to have Luke Skywalker in your movie, because this movie is about fandom, it’s about nostalgia, and he represents that so well,” says Mooney.
“Brigsby Bear” premiered at Sundance and made an appearance at the Cannes Film Festival. Mooney and McCary are aware that they have a lot riding on it. Sure, they have jobs at “Saturday Night Live” at a time when it is experiencing a renaissance, but a “Brigsby” success could make Mooney a star, a la Mike Myers or Will Ferrell, and McCary a director occupying the spot Ivan Reitman once did.
But they are also aware that no matter what happens with the movie, it all comes down to that word McCary came up with at the Independent show, “friendship.”
“As friends and just personally, we’ve gone through rough patches of life, like anyone does,” McCary says. “You have those dips of excitement about life and through it all, I think we always came back to we could make videos with each other and be creative, no matter how intense something got. It’s how to get through when you are a creative person and you have friends to tell stories with and escape the real drama of your own life.”