'Inside Amy Schumer' Co-Creator Talks '12 Angry Men' Episode
If you thought Season 3 of Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer couldn’t top “Football Town Nights” and “Girl, You Don’t Need Makeup,” you would be wrong. This week’s episode featured a 20-minute black-and-white homage to 12 Angry Men in which jurors played by the likes of John Hawkes, Jeff Goldblum, Paul Giamatti, and Vincent Kartheiser decided whether Amy Schumer was hot enough to be on TV (meaning, does she give them a reasonable chub?). Inside Amy Schumer co-creator Dan Powell, who served as one of the 10 writers on the short film that Schumer co-directed with Ryan McFaul, talked with Yahoo TV about how it came together.
What was the inspiration for the sketch, and was the idea always to make it a full episode?
This was an idea Amy had in-between Seasons 2 and 3, and it was an extension of the “Focus Group” sketch that we used to kick off Season 2 — just sort of taking it in a more absurdist direction. Amy had pitched [executive producer/head writer] Jessi Klein and I the sketch before, but then we get a text from her at like 11 p.m. saying, “What if we make '12 Angry Men’ the whole episode, and I’ll direct it?” I guess Kevin Kane, who is one of the producers on our show and who is an actor himself and really familiar with that play and the movie, had been chatting with Amy and had made that suggestion.
It’s one of those ideas where had it been last season or first season, we probably would have said, "I don’t know if we’ve earned this.” But this season, it felt like, “You know what, this will have been our 23rd episode, and if feels like we’ve earned the right to step outside of our comfort zone and do something new.” We knew we didn’t want to make it the first episode. We made the very deliberate decision to put two episodes first that were in our traditional format, and then just kind of hit you with it third, so people aren’t really expecting it necessarily. We were actually going to put it even further back in the season, but when it turned out the way it did, we were like, “Ah, we want to get this out there."
How did you go about casting?
Well obviously Paul did something with us last season [playing God in "Herpes Scare”], and so we wanted to have him back. But honestly, most of the casting was Amy just reaching out to people that she’d met, and that she respected, and that she really wanted. This thing really was her baby — her and Kevin’s, to a degree — but specifically hers in that this was her idea, and she really took the first initial passes at the script and laid the groundwork for everything, and she co-directed it with our director Ryan McFaul. She really wanted it to visually represent the original Lumet film in as many ways as possible. So a lot of these things are shots that are taken directly from the movie. She worked so hard on this episode, and it really shows. We’re really proud of it.
What are examples of those direct shots?
There’s this great tracking shot where the camera follows the hands of the jurors in an overhead shot as they pass all of their ballots down to the foreman — that’s taken directly from the movie. The last shot of the jury room where everyone exits and then Juror #8, John Hawkes, goes and puts the jacket on Juror #3, who is Nick DiPaolo, and then they exit and it’s all done in a single take — that’s a great shot. The opening shot in the jury room when they first enter as credits are rolling, the camera follows Henry Zebrowski, who is Juror #7 to the fan and then it follows him over to the window as they open the door, then the camera crosses the room as Juror #3 sits down next to Juror #2, played by Chris Gethard — that’s all a single take, so it had to be really rigidly choreographed to get all 12 guys in and into their places while the camera’s moving all around.
We shot that entire episode in two days because obviously, with the cast that we had, we only had them for two days max. They were two very long days, but none of them were flustered or like, “I wasn’t supposed to be here this long.” They were all super into it and super game, and at the end of the second day when we wrapped, all these guys are hugging and you hear John Hawkes casually mention to Paul Giamatti like, “Oh we need to do something together again.” So we really couldn’t believe this is our basic cable sketch show, and we had people of this caliber on the set and really enjoying themselves the way that they did and delivering the performances that they did.
With 12 guys in the room, I imagine some moments were tough to get through without someone breaking. Maybe the dildo debate?
There were definitely moments when people broke, but I mean these guys are such consummate pros that they generally were able to wait until, “Cut!” In any shot, when you know you’re about to laugh, you know that “Cut!” is coming soon and then you can laugh, so there was lots of laughter every time after Ryan or Amy yelled cut.
Like after the older gentleman (George Riddle) talked about Angela Lansbury being a tight little number?
He was the one performer in the episode, I think, that we just got straight from an audition. We read a handful of actors, and his read was just so funny that he ended up getting the part. He was a real pleasure to have on set.
During her street interviews at the end of the episode, Amy joked about telling Comedy Central that people really wanted to see a remake of 12 Angry Men. What was the network’s response when you all pitched this?
Jessi’s the head writer, Amy is the star and wears so many hats — so usually I’m the one who has to go to the network and say, “We want to do this” and be the one to sell them on it. I had all my arguments laid out for why we’ve earned this and why we should be able to do this, and I was really expecting them to be like, “You want to break your format and do a full episode sketch, which is already super different. But then in addition, you want it to be in black and white and a parody of a movie that probably isn’t really on the radar of Comedy Central’s fans.” And then the biggest thing, of course, was explaining to them that Amy is hardly going to appear in it, that she’s going to appear briefly at the beginning without a line and then have a line at the end. We didn’t even know when we pitched it if there would be that man on the street at the end. We didn’t know if we’d have room for it. But to Comedy Central’s credit, it ended up being a pretty short conversation.
We brought up the idea before we sent them the script. They said, “We’re happy to read the script, and entertain it, and see what you guys have for us, and then we’ll go from there.” Then when they read the script they were like, “Yeah, we have no problem with you guys giving this a shot.” They were super supportive. I can’t say at any point that they were like, “Under no circumstances are you going to do this” or “We don’t want you to do this.” I really wish I could have more juicy stories about our fights with the network, but they’re incredibly supportive. I have no complaints.
Related: 'Inside Amy Schumer’: Details on the Massive Wine Glass Used in 'Football Town Nights’
These first three episodes have been so strong. How are you feeling about the rest of the season?
There’s something that is really going to surprise and tickle people in every episode. I’m super confident.
Is it a challenge to sustain that quality through 10 episodes? Or do you find that you have so much material…
We have an incredible writing staff, and of course Amy is hands on with everything. She has sort of a limitless supply of ideas. The thing is, at the beginning of the season, we hadn’t been renewed [yet] for a fourth season. So you go into it and you assume you’re going to get more seasons, but you never know. So every season, we go into it looking like we need to leave this all on the field, to use a clumsy sports metaphor. Everything that we want to do, we have to do this season because who knows what the future holds. We’re not saving anything. [Laughs.] And we also overwrite. In terms of the number of pitches versus what ends up on screen, there are 10 times more pitches than sketches that end up in the episodes. And in terms of sketches that are fully written, we fully write out 80 sketches and then pick 46 to shoot. That, in general, helps to keep the quality up and forces us to make the decisions about what we really want to put on TV. But ultimately we’re just trying to make people laugh and say what we want to say and have fun doing it.
Inside Amy Schumer airs Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m. on Comedy Central.
