Last night, Matt Walsh was on Conan to talk about Veep, which was fun and fine but then he dropped the red, white, and blue-striped bomb that he annually goes to Harlem Globetrotters' training camp to teach them improv and dunking (OK, not dunking). This does explain why each quarter at a Globetrotters game starts with a monologue.
Here's the latest trailer for Matt Walsh's improvised UCB movie High Road, featuring Ed Helms, Rob Riggle, Horatio Sanz, Kyle Gass, Abby Elliott, Lizzy Caplan and Zach Woods. It looks quite a bit more put-together this time around, with a plot and everything:
Glenn “Fitz” Fitzgerald (James F. Pumphrey) is a young man whose loyalties are split among his band, his girlfriend Monica (Abby Elliott) and selling weed. After his band breaks up, Fitz finds himself dealing pot out of his garage and bonding with 16-year-old neighborhood kid Jimmy (Dylan O’Brien). As his former band mates (Zach Woods, Matt L. Jones, Lizzy Caplan) begin finding success and [...]
That is some heavy shit to yes, and. The second High Road trailer is significantly bleaker than the High Road red band trailer. If anything, the new cut makes Matt Walsh's film look a little like an infinitely more realistic Knocked Up: unplanned pregnancy, police intervention and despair abound in the primarily improvised stoner flick. You know, as in actual life. On the flip side, you get to see more Zach Woods! The film premieres tomorrow at the Newport Beach Film Festival. "You're just a couple of liars in love. Maybe that's what makes you guys so perfect for each other," Lizzy Caplan's character opines to Abby [...]
Here's the first (red band) trailer for High Road, a new mostly improvised comedy by the UCB's Matt Walsh. It's got quite the cast: Ed Helms, Rob Riggle, Abby Elliot, Horatio Sanz, Lizzy Caplan, Joe LoTruglio Matt T. Jones, Kyle Gass, Zach Woods and newcomer James Pumphrey, amongst others. It's a stoner movie, which is fitting for this week here on the site, and it looks really loose and crazy. It's heading to the festival circuit, starting with the Newport Beach Film Festival on April 29th, and hopefully it'll be come available to watch for us non-festivalgoers at some point soon after that.
Brizzity Wiz schooled the nation on the history of the "comedy drug pushers" known as the UCB on Rock Center this week. Matt Walsh and Amy Poehler take us from their early days on the streets of Chicago and New York to their Comedy Central show and the opening of their own theater. It's a beautiful story, full of tragic challenges, like the time Matt Walsh turned down the chance to be the next James Bond. But it's also full of joyful humor, like the idea that anyone would offer Matt Walsh the chance to be the next James Bond.
To honor the UCB's 15 years in NYC and the opening of UCBeast, New York Mag checked in with about 50 alumni of the many-headed comedy hydra, who discuss everything from the troupe's guerilla improv days in Chicago (Horatio Sanz: "My idea was, 'How awesome would it be to be arrested in front of this audience, and have them thinking, Did they plan this? How did they get that cop car? What’s going on?'”) to the process of bringing long-form to NYC (Rob Corddry: "In 90 minutes, they changed how I felt and thought about comedy. It was punk rock — super dirty and loose.") Says Amy Poehler, [...]
How do you shoot an improvised movie? According to Matt Walsh, who is just finishing up work on High Road, with a lot of rehearsal time: "We had roughly 65 scenes and each scene had a paragraph of plot and character count: Who's in the scene and when they come in. And then for the comedy's sake, we had game in each scene so characters could find what was funny in each moment that the players could play around in. … We spent two weeks in the theater just working together. We improvised scenes that weren't even in the movie, but it helped solidify the characters and their [...]
Here's the second full trailer for Due Date, featuring a lot of new footage not in the previous one. Highlights include cameos by Matt Walsh and Danny McBride and a kicker involving cremains. The Todd-Phillips-helmed movie opens on November 5th.
Next Tuesday sees the DVD release of High Road, a new improvised comedy written and directed by Matt Walsh. High Road's cast is filled to the brim with comedy heavyweights, including Rob Riggle, Joe Lo Truglio, Lizzy Caplan, Abby Elliott, Zach Woods, and James Pumphrey, with the likes of Ed Helms, Horatio Sanz, Andrew Daly, Curtis Gwinn, and Rich Fulcher making appearances, as well. If a Guinness Worlds Record official had only made it to the set, Matt Walsh would easily have a "Most Funny People in One Movie" plaque on his wall for High Road right now.
I recently sat down with the cast and crew of the movie [...]
We’ve been getting a lot of emails this morning about a particular audience monologist that performed at the Assssscat at the Del Close Marathon on Sunday, August 14. In case you don’t know, the Del Close Marathon is the Upright Citizens Brigade’s annual improv fest in New York and Asssscat is the improv show that caps off the weekend. Last night, improviser Poupak Sepehri posted on her Tumblr about the show and in it linked to a video of the monologue, posted by improviser Stephanie Streisand. Having raised his hand and been chosen by the performers on stage to tell a story, the audience member in [...]
Looks like HBO is greenlighting Veep, the comedy starring Julia-Louis Dreyfus as vice president of the United States. Matt Walsh and Anna Chlumsky of My Girl fame round out the cast. I'm imaging the show as a kind of West Wing-meets-That's My Bush, primarily out of a deep-seated need for such a program to exist.
