July 26, 1996

I talked earlier in this series about HARRIET THE SPY and how it was a Nickelodeon production that sort of had its roots in an interstitial-turned-special-turned show made by quirky, creative people with vision. A major cable network farm-teaming artists and giving them opportunities. Now we have JOE’S APARTMENT, the first theatrical film from Nick’s older-sister network MTV, expanded from a CableACE Award-winning 2-minute short they’d used as filler. Writer/director John Payson had worked on the animated intros to MTV shows including Remote Control, The Big Picture and Just Say Julie, plus been a producer on Liquid Television and the Henry Selick short Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions. That’s great work and an incredibly cool world to come out of, but does it translate to knowing how to write and direct a mostly live action feature film?

In this case no. Maybe yes in other cases, I don’t know.

In the feature version the titular Joe is played by Jerry O’Connell (STAND BY ME) in only his fifth movie, even including “uncredited kid at beach” in POLICE ACADEMY 5: ASSIGNMENT MIAMI BEACH. He’s a hapless dork who takes the bus from Iowa to New York City and has kind of the “Living For the City” experience.There’s a joke that he’s narrating his trip as a letter to his mother but he gets interrupted by three different muggings.

The movie is premised not only on the city’s reputation as a crime-ridden hellscape, but also as a refuge for art weirdos thanks to rent control. Joe meets a guy named Walter Shit (Randee of the Redwoods himself, Jim Turner) of the band Shit by being the only person to check on him laying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood (as an art project). It’s Walter who finds Joe the titular apartment because they happen to be walking by when an old lady is thrown to her death out of her window and Walter pushes Joe to pretend he’s her son.

The place is a dump, but he’s too naive to notice, and it also takes him a while to see that there are objects constantly moving around, carried by swarms of roaches. He does wacky things like almost eat them in his cereal, and there are plenty of fun gimmicky shots like a POV from inside a fake Joe mouth.

There is groundbreaking-for-the-time computer animation for many of the roach visuals, but I’m glad they also use real roaches, puppets and herky-jerky stop motion, so it still has a hand-made, indie sort of feel. The roaches talk in sped up voices like The Chipmunks or the mice in BABE. Voices include Billy West (Ren & Stimpy), Rick Aviles (MYSTERY TRAIN), Reginald Hudlin (director of HOUSE PARTY and COSMIC SLOP), BD Wong (MYSTERY DATE, JURASSIC PARK), and Tim Blake Nelson (AMATEUR). They do a couple musical numbers performed by the group Rockapella.

The building is owned by a senator (Robert Vaughn, BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS) who wants to knock it down and turn it into a prison, so he sends a thug (Don Ho!) and his nephews (Jim Sterling and Shiek Mahmud-Bey) to torment Joe. He needs money to not get kicked out, so he montages through a series of disastrous jobs including deliverer of pizzas, drummer for Shit, copy shop guy and cleaner of urinals, but most of these get fucked up by the roaches. He also meets and falls for an angelic community garden organizer named Lily (Megan Ward, TRANCERS II and III, ENCINO MAN, PCU), but she’s the senator’s daughter. And he has talking roaches.

Comedy bits involve awkward ways of hiding the roaches, and handling used urinal cakes while he lies that they’re a miraculous new type of mulch for her garden. There are a few very dumb jokes that don’t fly now, like the pizza restaurant is called Ritardo’s and a guy fondles the women’s lingerie he’s secretly wearing under his suit, but they honestly don’t feel like edge-lordery, just clumsy attempts at irreverence. I don’t think it’s a mean movie, but its good-hearted New York transplants are too oblivious and bland to invest in, and I did not personally laugh at any jokes that I can remember.

I guess the cleverest thing would be the way the roaches use garbage from the apartment as props in their musical numbers.

Or maybe the stop motion roach porn on the TV. Even at 80 minutes it gets boring fast, so I found myself most interested in the visual evidence of alternative culture. Though he doesn’t seem like it, Joe is supposed to be into cool stuff, so we see his Fantagraphics comics (Hate, Jim, Idiotland, Love and Rockets), his Big Brother magazine, his posters for Soundgarden/Pearl Jam, Beastie Boys, Suicidal Tendencies, Sonic Youth (I had that same one), Butthole Surfers, Rancid, a sticker of The Prodigy and various t-shirts. I bet he’s gone to some of the same tours as Elijah Wood’s character from FLIPPER.

Also there are cameos by Paul Bartel, Moby, underground filmmaker Nick Zedd and wrestler Bam Bam Bigelow. Pepa from Salt ’n Pepa plays Lilly’s friend.

Of course being MTV the soundtrack includes Soul Coughing, Diamond D, Moby, The Rentals, Green Day, an end credits song by De La Soul, also one by Bill Laswell’s band Last Exit. Weirdly, though, I read that there was no album released? Can that really be true?

MTV also wasn’t fucking around about hiring a crew for Payson: music by Carter Burwell (BLOOD SIMPLE, BARTON FINK), production designer Carol Spier (THE DEAD ZONE, THE FLY, DEAD RINGERS, NAKED LUNCH), cinematographer Peter Deming (EVIL DEAD II, HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE, HOUSE PARTY). The last one really makes sense now that I think about it, so many POV shots from down low, and it’s even EVIL DEAD like in the sense that it’s one actor on a set looking around seeing things move. On a technical level it’s a well-made film on the lower budget end. It’s just… not compelling on other levels. And the surface, with its focus on filth and bugs and shit and piss, was not that appealing to most people either. Many critics seemed repelled in the almost universally negative reviews.

Despite MTV’s promotional powers, the movie was a huge flop and didn’t come close to making back its budget in theaters. Unsurprisingly it did not launch a feature film directing career for Payson. He did direct two episodes of Arli$$ though, and two of The PJs (a good stop motion show) and a video for The Residents. His last credit on IMDb is a 2002 episode of My Guide to Becoming a Rock Star (an American version of a British show about a rock band).

It was MTV’s only film released through Warner Bros. and Geffen Pictures, because then Paramount Pictures bought Viacom. This is not one of their better pictures, though it’s kind of a rare one in that it did grow out of actual MTV programming, alongside BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD DO AMERICA, the JACKASS saga, and AEON FLUX. Unfortunately they never did movies of Jimmy the Cab Driver, Randee of the Redwoods or Total Request Live. A few of their releases include DEAD MAN ON CAMPUS, ELECTION, THE ORIGINAL KINGS OF COMEDY, BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, HUSTLE & FLOW, GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’, THE FOOT FIST WAY and HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS. I was amazed to learn that WHO’S THE MAN? was not one of theirs, since it’s basically YO! MTV RAPS: THE MOVIE. They missed out on that one.

The movie’s biggest (only?) legacy is that it was the first feature film work for Blue Sky Studios. Founded in 1987 by Chris Wedge and five of his co-workers after their employer MAGI was sold, they expanded on computer animation software they’d been developing and used it to create animated logos and commercials, including the first computer animated M&Ms. 20th Century Fox was so impressed by their work on JOE’S APARTMENT that their visual effects company VIFX acquired majority interest. They did FX for movies including ALIEN RESURRECTION and FIGHT CLUB, and by 2002 they were doing the animated feature ICE AGE (with Wedge as director).

Slam Evil Summer connections: Vincent Pastore has a small role, as he did in WALKING AND TALKING. Dave Chappelle (THE NUTTY PROFESSOR) and Godfrey (ORIGINAL GANGSTAS) provide roach voices.