‘Community’ Stunt Coordinator Ben Scott On Choreographing Bits For Laughs – Emmys
Stunt coordinator Ben Scott has followed up such SAG Award-winning work in X-Men: First Class with his now Emmy-nominated role in the stunts for Yahoo!’s Community.
The comedy came with a certain set of challenges. “This one scene we did required one of our leads to wear six, good-sized bullet hits,” Scott says. “I was telling him some information on the gag and he looked at me and said, ‘What squibs are you talking about?’ I had to laugh and take a breath.” Laughing constantly on set seems to be one of the tougher occupational hazards Scott bears, but it’s something he’s learned to deal with after gigs on such comedies as Key & Peele and The Goldbergs.
Scott, who’s coordinated but also done stunts himself on films like American Beauty and The Shawshank Redemption, got the Community job after running into former collaborators—Community director Adam Davidson and first assistant director Bob Roe—while working on the Paramount studio lot. On Community, he’s constantly trying to find the right tone on a series that is relentlessly tongue-in-cheek yet also calls for stunt work more characteristic of a drama—for example, the paintball scene in the “Modern Espionage” episode of the most recent Season 6. Paintball fights are a favorite recurring trope throughout the seasons of Community, and this one involved a ballroom setting and 20 stunt people. “We did the first rehearsal and I mistakenly had all of my team getting knocked down or shot,” Scott says. “It looked like the whole place was being shot up like in a battle scene—not funny. The director, Rob (Schrab), who is awesome, pulled me over and said, ‘Can you tone down some of the killings? Just not funny.’ ” Scott worked with his team to choreograph various visual gags that would make the scene fit with the overall tone of the episode.
Scott has various other projects lined up, including a Western to be shot this fall, but no project excites him more than Preacher, a TV movie that he says “is going to go off the charts! Jeff Imada and Johnny Koyama did some really great fights with a mix of martial arts and street brawling. I can’t wait to see it put together.”
The project, written by comedy duo Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, has been labeled a drama. Laughs or no laughs, Scott’s got this.
To see the stunt coordinator’s handiwork on Community, click play below:
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