Special Report: Chris Gore on Attack of the Doc! (2023)

Old. It should people pay good money to see this movie when they go out to a theater. They want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone for ten. Podcasting isn't boring if I were to just start apologizing for the things that we did wrong ten years ago, to show it never end.

G four was really one of the very last table channels ever launched. It was the end of this linear teble era before we got to streaming and whatever thing it is. We watched something unique, something different, something little meta, something that was turned the mirror back onto pop culture and kind of spitt it's basement, but then wipe it off and give you a kiss. At the same time. Doctor He was a TV host who was also a pr tounching assistant on another show.

Oh nice, molester Stash. Do know who that is? Right, Hyla B No, it's you friend sent me a series of VHS resume tapes. There was no one better than Whitney Commings until Olivia Mutton came on set. I am Olivia Munt.

She delivered un amazingly a dump a bunch of snakes on her with Olivia wearing the slave layer at Comic Code. In the making the floodgates that they were a far losing their minds. We were being hounded. It was also kind of subversive four chan dark comedy. We did stop that would not fly.

Go for a power girl. You're a whore, also more susceptible to getting paid. And then from there the wheels were off buns, another lightbulb. Right'll check out, and it's on fire. The world has been waiting for a half Chinese, half American girl diving and to a giant, chocolate filled creampie.

Right before we went love, Kevin had just shown me two girls one cut. Sex with dragons is one of God's special mysteries. I spent eight years researching space dragon sex and managing not all of those things that happened on the show. I don't swallow what Kevin would be acceptable by today's standards. It went from the fat suit gag.

One of our production management was gonna walk. I did a lot of on camera drinking. Try a beer from every shoot. People will look at a broadcast back then and think, oh, yeah, you can't do that anymore. Man.

We did it once, but now no more. You can't do that no more. Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. Our old friend Chris Gore is back.

He is talking about his brand new documentary, Attack of the Dock. It is all about Attack of the show. It was on the G four network. Remember that, kids. Hopefully you do.

If not, you're going to learn all about it in this documentary, which is coming out on April twenty fourth, to mark the anniversary of Attack of the Show coming out. I hope you enjoyed this interview. It was great talking with Chris and I can't wait to have him back on the show to talk about the film threat Sucks documentary. It was great talking with him, and I hope that you enjoyed this interview. Mister Gore, how are you, sir, Mike dude, It's so good to see you, So good to see you.

Oh my god, we've known each other since the nineties. I'm glad we bury the hatchet same here. Life's a lot easier. Yeah, no, hitting man, I'm too old to fight, So Chris, Attack of the Dock. You've been talking about this documentary for quite a few years now.

What was the final impetus to get it going a couple of things. One, I thought up this weird title because I was at south By Southwest Film Festival and I think it was twenty seventeen, and I've done a bunch of stuff film Threat and other TV shows, but I was always getting recognized for Attack of the Show in G four TV, and the big question I would get is whatever happened to G four TV? Whatever happened to the network? And I thought, I'm so sick of being asked this question. I'm just going to make a documentary and answer that very question.

So I just registered Attack of the doc dot com, I grabbed all the social handles, and I thought, I'm gonna make a dock. I did an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign, then did a second one that succeeded, and we started shooting in March of twenty twenty. And you know what happened. Yeah, the pandemic happened and we had to take a completely different approach. There were two wrenches thrown in.

One was the pandemic, which totally changed how we were going to make the dock. It turned into more of an archival documentary rather than on camera interviews. The second thing was the return of G four TV. That changed what we were going to do, and I thought we had one plan to make the movie. I changed my scriptment.

I said, here's the movie we're gonna make. I was inspired by films like You Don't Know Me, which is the documentary about Showgirls, or you may have seen the Belushi documentary. There are whole genres a genre of documentaries that are archival in nature. What you're seeing is from that period, and I thought, if I'm gonna I wanted to be a period piece. I want to bring people back to the simpler time when we were more united in geek culture and less divided, not just in geek culture but just even as a country.

That was my intention, and also too because I was there. I was on the show at least once a week, if not a couple a couple of times a week. I love the show. I was a fan of the show who was also on the show. So I would watch what.

I would watch a little episodes of attack of the show. I'd watch everything but me because I know what I said, I'm boring to me. I want to see what comic books Blair Butler's talking about, what tech Kevin's talking about? The comedy that Kevin and Olivia, they were just so magical. I just wanted to watch I want to watch it as a fan.

So this movie truly is made by fans. Everyone who worked on the movie, Bobby Schwartz, the producer, editor, Walter Aureyas, Anthony ray Bench, Philly you Banks, the whole team. They're all like super fans of Attack of the show that watched it when they were kids. The team who worked on it were all G four super fans, which was great. But like I went with Michael Moore's rule because I was in the dock a lot more in earlier cuts, I said, when in doubt, cut me out, you have to cut me out.

I'm the bookend, I'm the gateway in It's not my story. It's really this is four fans, and it's made by fans. But I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to make. Like I had a twenty five page scriptmant, I had a director's statement of this is the movie we're trying to make. I had these very clear questions that I interviewed over twenty subjects, who were all people who worked behind the scenes, including John Riber, who was the key executive in G four TV and Attack of the Show.

The two directors genjie Keene and Alan Wu, who collectively directed more than a thousand episodes of the show, other key people behind the scenes whose stories had never been told. So I had all these clear questions for them. From the very beginning. It was like, I would need Zach Selwyn to do songs. He will be the Greek chorus of the movie, and I had just topics that I wanted him to hit.

He did such a great job. By the way, the soundtrack will be available on Spotify the same day that it's on video on demand. It's the original score by Austin Smith, and there are additional songs that didn't make the cut of the They're like ten songs by Zach Selwin that are on that soundtrack. There were certain events that occurred, like the naming of Attack of the show, right, Like the original name was supposed to be game Time, which I think is it's not like a sport show. It's terrible name.

But it's like, we don't have footage of that. How are we going to tell that? So I went to literally the executives who run Second Life, and I said, could you do some animation in second life so we could recreate these moments where I have no supporting footage, no archival footage, and they did a bunch more than we needed, but we used it sparingly. But what's funny, A Second life is very two thousand and five. It's one of the oldest metaverses, so it's in.

I really wanted you to feel the era, feel like the old tech. I had a modal razor. Do you remember that phone? Trying to text with that or trying to text with phones where you've just got the numeric keys, It's crazy. So I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to do.

I did all the interviews, We did cutdowns of the interviews, like there was a process for it. And I've made films before, but really I love being in the director's chair. I've got other movie I'm working on right now that's too early to talk about, but I'm excited and this is it just feels very natural for me because I'm very specific about what I'm looking for, even the idea. There is a post credit scene, and the credits are a little longish because it's all alphabetical by first name, every person, every backer that supported it is in there, but we have some entertaining stuff happening during the credits. It's really like a love letter to the show, and it's for the fans, the fans of the original show, and I wanted to leave a legacy of this was a great era.

Sure, we can't do a lot of that stuff on TV now you would be canceled or getting a lot of trouble. But I don't think we should be looking with a present day lens on things from the past. You can learn from it, for sure, and you can still be entertained by most of it. But I wanted to offer my vision for it and then keep myself get out of the way. The addressing of the potentially controversial stuff I thought was handled so well because you didn't even need to bring it up, but that you did talked about it, said this is what the hera was, this is how we worked, and that great song that supports that.

I love that everyone on the show at a sense of humor about themselves. They killed me a couple times during the show, more than once I got murdered. I don't know what their obsession was with that. They were always they were trying to get rid of me. I think everyone had a sense of humor.

Everyone just like it was and looked it was blue behind the scenes working out a film crew and where you're going crazy hours, where you're at a convention, you're at CS, you're at E three, you're at San Diego Comic con, or you're overseas in Tokyo. It's how do you release tension? You just you play goofy, you joke out with each other. Kevin I would always I would tell him, don't make it easy for me. Don't make it easy for me.

And even though I eventually got some improv experience, his jokes were going so by so fast while he was doing a segment with me, I could not keep up. He really was born and bred in a lab to be a television host, and the chemistry between he and Olivia was just it was just palpable, and you just saw it every show. When did you actually start on attack of the show? I had done this game show for IFC called Alternate Film fed Attic, which is where you and I crossed paths. Again, that's a story for another time, but it's a great story.

So I just was not happy with doing television I felt like I never got to be myself on camera. It was always this overproduced here's the joke, you're gonna say, you walk over here to this piece of tape. And I just was unenthusiastic about television. I preferred writing books and doing internet stuff. And a guy named Gavin purcell I had done a national enquired TV segment for him.

He came to my house in the early two thousands and he remembered me. And I was a big fan of screensavers X play. I watched G four TV. I was addicted to it. He calls me up out of the blue and says, hey, we're looking for a movie guy on the screensavers, and I thought, okay.

This is March of two thousand and five. He brings me in to have one meeting and he says, look and they it's the worst money I've ever made in TV, but the most funny I ever had. He says, well, I'm just gonna offer you this job. We have this segment called TV Doosday. We want you to host it.

So I said, look, I have three requirements. One, I want to be able to say whatever I want within reason. Obviously I'm not going to swear, but I want my opinion is my opinion, So I want to be able to say what I want in my own words. Okay, funny, Funnily enough, I made friends with the Standards of Practices Guy Keith, and I found out later that I could mispronounce swear words. There are episodes of the show where I called I called a director a total shit feed and found out I could say that, So I said, I want to be able to say whatever I want.

My opinion is my opinion. I want to be able to wear whatever I want, so I would wear film threat T shirts and T shirts from friends of mine who had bands, or like comic bookstores like the Comic Outpost in Northern California. And I also said I wanted to be able to keep the DVDs that I reviewed, and he said, I can let you have the first two, that's fine, but we're going to keep all the DVDs. Would keep it in what we call our producers library in case we need footage, which I found out later was the library where the producers would steal DVDs and take them home for themselves. But I think it kept me more honest that like when I said bye.

I legitimately went to buy the movies that I recommended as a buy on attack of the show. So there you go. It was March two thousand and five. I was on three episodes of the Screensavers that I was on all all like not all the episodes, but I was on every week all the way up until the very end. I lasted from the beginning of the show to the very end of the show.

You talked about how this became this archival documentary and my god, the editing. Tell me about your editor and tell me about the process of that, just because I can't even imagine how many cuts per minute you have going on it. Aaron Bobby Schwartz is producer along with myself were and edited the doc. Did an incredible job. Bobby, who is He's talented.

He's one of these gifted kids. Thats just talented. He's in his mid twenties and he did this right. But he also is a comic book artist. He has a company called Dual Animal Productions where he's doing an anthology comic book.

I'm helping him with that. He came in and he didn't necessarily see himself as the editor of the dock initially and I'm like, no, dude, you are go. And so it was really about breaking it down into piece as we started by first, we're going to build a library, and there were other editors that helped, Anthony ray Bench, Philip you Banks, our producer, Walter Areas. We built this library hundreds of hours broken down by category. I'm like, if we're going to make an archival doc, we have to be organized.

And that took almost a year just to get organized. Then we had the scriptment so that we could pull if we needed something, we knew exactly where it was. So I feel like one of my strengths is just being an organizer and coming up with processes. It's how I'm able to have such an output. And I'm also my life is very scheduled.

My calendar is full in all good ways. But that just kept us on task and Bobby just knocked it out of the park. And it was always like this weird creative where the two of us would get together would just start. The problem is we'd get together to have a meeting and there would be like thirty minutes of meeting and then two hours of effing off because we're just trying to make each other laugh, and we wanted to make a movie that also not only did it address more serious issues and other layers things happening in the culture, how things have changed, but also to remind people. I want to bring people back to that era, and I wanted to in a way reflect the tone of the original attack of the show that tone in some of the bits.

The songs that Zach was doing some of the contrast but have like moments, So the moments of levity mixed with moments of somberness as well, and some of the sad things that happened behind the scenes. When did you have final picture lock on this? Oh God? We had final picture lock mostly final picture lock back in October, and we played it for students at in Tucson as part of this The Tucson Film Infestival wasn't our premiere, but we played it there like we're gonna show it to these students, because I did a screening at San Diego Comic Con in twenty twenty two, but it was more rough. Then we tightened that based on notes.

We showed it again and then we had to change a bunch of little things. For legal things you would never notice. But there's this great law that there's this great argument called fair use that documentary filmmakers will use, which allowed us that. So between that, then we had to do color correction, all this, it's not like a simple thing. Then we had to get it ready to release.

So even though we picture lock last year, getting into the point where we could actually get it into the distribution pipeline is a whole other battle. We wanted to do it right, and I thought he were getting close to the anniversary of the launch of G four TV. Why don't we just put it out on that day. It'll remind people of G four TV and attack of the show. So April twenty fourth, two thousand and two is when G four TV launched with Palm that played for two weeks, and the movie is coming out of the same date in twenty twenty three.

I thought it was magical. But yeah, from locking picture to getting it released, there are a whole other thing. It's a different job than directing a movie. Releasing a movie ask any indie filmmaker. Getting it across that finish line is like a herculean effort of things like but you got to go through quality control with the distributors, they'll pick it back.

Like we could do a whole other interview just on releasing a movie independently, much less getting it made. Yeah, because I imagine you have to worry about, oh, was their music playing in the back of that clip? Do I have to clear that as well? All that kind of thing. It's all an original score, and then there were things that had to be covered.

We had a masterful sound mixer that just did an amazing job and helped us a lot with that, But that was always my concern. Then my other concern is because look, you can be sued for any reason. If Comcast Universal has a problem with the movie, they could come after me. We did put a little funny thing in the credits. Thanks for not suing us.

I hope that holds up. I think that ultimately anyone that's worked on G four, passed and present will look at this as a pay It preserves the good things about G four. It questions some of the things through present day lens. But it truly is my love letter to that era, to everyone I worked with on the show. The fact that it was the most fun I've ever had, but the least money I ever made.

I just I learned so much and just being able to be myself on camera. I hope that and I really do believe this that Attack of the Show and G four TV inspired a generation of YouTubers to just say, I know a lot about movies, I know a lot about comic books. I'm going to go off and just do my own channel. I'll talk about video games and I love it. I really think the legacy of G four and Attack of the Show is everyone on YouTube talking about things they love and things they're passionate about.

Now. I know you didn't make a lot of money working on the show itself, but now as a documentary filmmaker, just your bank account must be just flooded. Now I tell my butler to take the checks over to the bank. No, just to be clear, I mean, any indie filmmaker will tell you this. Yeah, I'm I don't think I'm gonna get rich from this thing.

It's and that never was the plan. The plan was just a break even and just lets I just want people to see it because I feel in our divided times, people need to be reminded of things were we were united behind and remind people of a time that was like a very recent history where we would debate about all kinds of things in pop culture or in the culture in general, but then we would walk away respectfully. And I don't know if we've lost the ability to do that. Is concerning to me as someone who's a father to a son and a daughter, and I see the world and the way it is now, and if we can, just if we could just figure out this one thing, how do we talk to each other respectfully, whether it's online, which I know we don't know how to do, or face to face.

Let's try to do that, because once we get past that, we can solve all of the problems that confront not just our country but the world. We can solve all of it if we can, if we can figure that out. I'm not saying this movie is going to have anything to do with that, but I just wanted to break that up. Look, I don't you know me, Mike, I'm pretty unpretentious about this stuff, but I do. I have aspirations and I to like just touch on certain themes without telling you what to think or how to think.

You walk away thinking what you like about the movie, and I hope you're just reminded if you're looking for member berries, there are plenty of them. And if you're looking for deeper themes, they're there if you look further. And I hope you just laugh and have fun watching it. So you say it's coming out on April twenty four, across the whole spectrum, any place that is streaming, your YouTube, your Apple, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it'll be on Vimeo first.

But what a weird thing you learn as an indie filmmaker is if you're a big studio, you can say my movie comes out on this date. That it's not so true for indie filmmakers. You're in a queue of movies for them to schedule. But it will be on Amazon, Prime Video, Voodoo, Apple YouTube, like you said, you'll be able to just you can rent it, I think it's three or four dollars, or you can buy it and you can watch it anytime and relive those memories. Attack to the dot dot com.

We're going to post all the links to where you can get it. We are going to do a Blu Ray release in July, right before San Diego Comicon. Our backers will get their Blue Rays before that date. We're going to be selling them there. This is loaded the I wanted to provide basically the ultimate collectible for fans, so I have the cutdown like the unedited, but they're like cutdown interviews with every interview subject the mini podcasts which with everyone we interviewed, we've got.

There are thirteen easter eggs that are going to be crazy. I hope you can find them all. There's a link in Second Life. We did these recreations and anime in Second Life. There's a link where you can go in Second Life to the original Attack of the show set in Second Life that actually physically exists.

It was built and from the Blu ray you can find the Secret Lake and you can go into Second Life and you're on the set of Attack of the Show. I really feel like I have an understanding of nerds because I am one. I grew up in an era where like I would hide my long box of the comics because it wasn't cool to be a nerd. I built Aurora model kits. I remember the smell of the glue.

I grew up at a time when nerds were bullied that you just for liking things like Marvel comics and video games. So now nerd culture nerd culture is just mainstream now, but there was that time. So I feel like I have a very deep understanding of people who grew up as nerds and what the struggle is. And it would bother me as a kid when I had nerdy friends who were all across the spectrum, so to speak, and it really bothered me when they would be teased and bullied at whatnot. I grew up during that time and it was definitely for my opinions about a lot of different things.

And what I've always loved about nerd culture is it's a big tent. Everyone's welcome, come on in. What do you love? Fine, you're into funco pops, Sure have at it. It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter. I know some people talk about some negativity in the nerd space. I think it's a very very small percentage of trolls, but it's for the most part, just a very accepting group of people. That's at least my interpretation of it. What my experience has been.

The one last question for you. Last time we spoke, we were talking about the film Threat documentary what's the late Us on that poster you can see right behind me here. We actually did a sort of a teaser poster for it. Oh, there's a cut that exists, Film threat Sucks. Now I'm a more involved creative producer.

I did not direct it. It's directed by Ethan Minsker, who I believe is a really talented not just as a film director but as an artist. And we have a cut that I think we're very close. You're in it. You haven't been cut out?

You should check out the latest cut. We did a bunch of this sort of puppet animation for it. It's also very tight ninety minutes. We planned to submit to festivals, and I hope to debut at a major festival next year with film thread Sucks. And then there's another documentary that I planned to shoot before the end of the year.

Tell you about that. That's a really interesting one. Yeah, we'll have to catch up. Are you at now? Are you in Michigan or California?

Oh? No, I'm still in California. The weather's great, but the Michigan in me. I still consider myself an honorary member of the Michigan Bafia. My attitudes are still Detroit attitudes.

I've lived here longer, for longer part of my life than I have from Michigan, but I can't get the Michigan out of me. It is what it is. By live in Pasadena, California, I love it. I live in an area where could walk to everything and it's beautiful. But my heart is still Michigan.

What can I say? Next time you come back, let me know and I'll get to Margharita. Oh my god, yes, the last time we hung out, dude, Not just Margharitas. We'll go to Gusoline Alley. Oh, it's just my favorite.

Just the bars and just the people. What I love is Michigan. People are no nonsense. But I've found my pieces of Michigan and the people that are my friends just a group all over the spectrum where just all have that everyone has a sense of humor about themselves. You have to.

If you're gonna hang with me, you better have a sense of humor about yourself. Chris, always great talking with you. Thank you so much, and best of luck with this. Thanks so much, Mike, You're one of the great ones. And I love your show.

Thank you so much. Her assess her sant santeracturate, Santra hass m h Utius Saturn and natura retious this addsis serve Saturn and stay utekers