Just the Feebles
A puppet film for adults, from New Zealand’s bad boy, Peter Jackson.
By Sheldon Teitelbaum
A horny hare erupts ina gushing “wet spot,” presaging his messydoom from a fatal sex scene. A journalist fly gives new meaning to the profession of “muckraker™ as he spoons in enormous, dripping dollops of excrement at the base of a grungy backstage toilet bowl. And Sid, the manic depressive elephant, gets slapped with a paternity suit bya chicken (you should see the offspring!)
Welcome to a world in which the Muppets are turned on their heads and reamed from behind by a depraved iconoclast from up over Down Under, Peter Jackson, New Zealand's naughtiest young filmmaker, has deliberately produced and directed a film (backed with reluctant gumption by the New Zealand Film Commission) which actually makes a sheep's breakfast seem palatable. Meet, those of you who feel you must, the horribly disgusting and only occasionally redeeming Feebles
Jackson's second feature to date (his first, BAD TASTE, has. inexplicably, become something of a cult favorite among splatter comedy afictonados), JUST THE FEEBLES offers a quick and steamy descent into the sordid underside of the late Jim Henson's ingratiating creations, combined with an aesthetic sensibility gleaned. it often appears, from Art Spiegel’s GARBAGE PAIL KIDS. Hollywood independent Southgate Films picked up the film for U.S theatrical and video release at Milan’s Mifed film market in 1989. and plans regional openings in major territories this fall
Jackson (lett), director, co-producer and co-writer, inspects Cedric the Boar, a drugdealing psychotic, during foam rubber construction by puppet builder Richard Taylor.
In a telephone interview, Jackson explained that he had produced the film, originally tiled MEET THE FEEBLES. with about $1 million, close to three quarters of which had been loaned to him bythe New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC), However, the commission had no wish to actually invest inthe film, receiving in turn a stake in its earnings “They decided it wasn't their sort of movie,” said Jackson “But they felt they had to support me because of the response to BAD TASTE. It’s really not their sort of film, and quite a few members of the commision don't like it-—they declined, in fact, to have their name put on the credits.”
The Feebles “legend” begins in 1987, as Jackson was putting the finishing touches to the special effects work of BAD TASTE. Allegedly influenced by the lingering after-effects of solvent-based glue fumes, he and puppet designer Cameron Chittock began considering the droll possibility of doingan all-puppet film. One in which “they're dirty little creatures, taking drugs and all that stuff.”
Six months later, at work on a horror feature script to be called BRAIN DEAD with fellow Wellington writers Stephen Sinclair and Frances Walsh, Jackson got the itch to direct a short, Sinclair and Walsh pitched an idea for a late night adult TV series called UNCLE HERMAN’S BEDTIME WHOPPERS, Jackson mentioned puppets, and the die was cast-—-they would produce a puppet film as a potential pilot. “The whole idea,” recounted Jackson, “was to make a sleazy puppet film. What really happens to Miss Piggy and Kermit when they go to their dressing rooms? Their public image is not, of course, what they are really like. That's the kind of thing you sitaround with friends and jokeabout, But as we got serious, we completely left the Muppets behind. We knew we'd be courting lawsuits if we got anywhere near the Muppets in terms of content. Also, it didn’t really interest us to stick to the Muppets. There's nota single character meant to parody them directly.” Chittock set to work creating some twenty cut-rate puppets. while the rest of Jackson's co-conspirators brainstormed characters. The NZFC declined to fund the concept, requiring the production to put up $12,000 of their own money for development. Shooting began in April 1988 with an all-volunteer crew. Jackson's mother was called in to do costume work and catering, a friend’s house was used as a location, and in short order two-thirds of a Feebles short film was completed. The production subsequently went on hiatus as Jackson attended Cannes with BAD TASTE, generating interest in BRAIN DEAD. In October, 1988 producer Jim Booth, Jackson and Walsh, with a London-based sales company called Perfect Features Limited, took the BRAIN DEADscript and a seven-minute Feebles promo to the Mifed Film Market in Milan. A Japanese investor snatched up both, But Japanese were not inter- Sted in a Feebles TV series they envisioned a full-length feature film When BRAIN DEAD got postponed, the Feebles were suddenly pushed to the fore But to get the film to the 1989 Mifed, the project had to begin production within six weeks, A story outline was put together, and the Film Commission was subjected to yet another pitch this one accompanied by earnest promises that (unlike the case with BAD TASTE) budgets would be balanced and deadlines met. The filmmakers were joined by local actor/ writer Danny Mulheron, and together they churned out 120 pages of script in twenty days
Puppeteer Ramon Aguilar, beneath the floorboard sets, manipulates Robert the Hedgehog, the wide-eyed innocent who discovers the dark side of the Feebles.
Within scant weeks, a crew was assembled and an abandoned railway shed was pressed into service as both studio and workshop. The set was clevated four feet off the floor to permit the puppeteers full access to holes created by moveable floor boards, or specifically cut into the set. Puppeteers Richard Taylor and Tania Rodgers joined Chittock in the puppet workshop, and with puppet engineer Steve Greenwood, Ruckland puppet master Jonathan Acord and newly arrived Ramon Aguilar, a veteran of Mexican TV, theychurned out the requisite cast of 96 puppets, some of them necessitating up to five operators, “We had a largely untrained crew,” recounted Jackson. “Only two had ever done any puppeteering in their lives. They trained six or seven others on the spot.”
The puppet cast of JUST THE FEEBLES ran the gamut from hand-held to marionettes, rod-controlled, cable-controlled and full-sized. The job of costuming them fell to Glenis Foster, including the manufacture of fullarmy fatiguesfor a platoon of amphibians used as “cannon-frogger™ in a setpiece parody of THE DEER HUNTERand FULL METAL JACKET
As in animated cartoons, voices were recorded first and the film was shot to “playback,” with the puppeteers miming the pre-recorded tracks Seven original songs were written and performed by Peter Dasent, formerly of the New Zealand band “The Crocodiles,” who was then living in Australia. Jackson said this qualifies his film as a musical
Less than a week before principal photography was slated to begin, in mid-April, the polished script was turned over to the New Zealand Film Commission, which promptly withdrew its funding. Although they would later reconsider, the plug would be pulled on at least two other occasions, making JUST THE FEEBLES. for Jackson if not his colleagues, “the hardest thing | have ever done. The commission went through hell with us—and us with them. Not to mention working with puppets, which was really tear-your-hair-out time.”
Harry the Hare, MC of the “Feebles Variety Show,” handsome, witty, charming, and stricken with a fatal sex disease, determined to go on, prays to his frog savior
Puppeteer Eleanor Aitken manipulates Fly, the muckraking reporter who gets 8 scoop on a set of the Feebles toilet
Jackson operated his own camera, which was a problem because he likes to move it around far more than proved possible on JUST THE FEE- BLES. “I found myself restricted to having relatively stationary shots because just tothe left or below the frame line were people’s hands. I couldn't swing the camera around. Yet seventy percent of the film was shot hand-held. We got tiny movements —of a puppet's head, or a hand gesture—to give ita bit of life.”
Jackson also found it increasingly difficult to stick to schedule. JUST THE FEEBLES went over schedule and budget by three weeks, and the filmmakers were given the brakes by the now increasingly irate film commission, “I think they felt very trapped,” recounted Jackson, “in that we gave the impression we would be shooting forever and they would helplessly be reduced to signing checks. We simply underestimated how long it would take to shoot the puppet stuff. We were only getting a minute and forty seconds a day instead of the two minutes a day we had promised.”
Appeasing the NZFC meant there would be no time to film the picture’s all-out climactic “Feebles Massacre.” Said Jackson, “The relationship with the commission was very messy at that point. We were concerned they would sack us if we went against their wishes, so the writers—four of us—decided we’d put everything we earned back into the film to finance a secret week of shooting. We never lied to them, but we made it seem like we’d stopped shooting and started editing. We simply felt it would be stupid to have a film like this without a payoff.”
That week cost Jackson and his cohorts about $20,000. The film was shot secretly at night, and Jackson would stumble into the editing room in the mornings to cut the picture the commission had thought was already in the can. “By then,” said Jackson, “our relationship with the commission was at an all time low. But we did postproduction on schedule and budget, and proved we were not complete jerks. The film is selling well and might make its money. All is forgiven—not forgotten, but forgiven.”
Whether theatre-goers prove as magnanimous is still anyone’s guess. JUST THE FEEBLES is fairly hard-core. “We never set out to make porn,” said Jackson, “but rather a satire of porn. Our approach throughout the movie was a parody. If you make a film as excessive as this, you have to make it funny. I think it is very funny, and that helps dilute the harmful effect.”