Crooked Cynics, the duo comprising directors Tom Middleton and Jack Scott, has signed for exclusive U.S. spot representation with bicoastal Cultivate.Media, the commercial and content production company overseen by managing director/executive producer Mark Thomas and executive producer Stuart Wilson. This marks the first U.S. spot roost for the directors who hail from the middle of England, but have been raised on an all-American diet of World Wrestling Entertainment, MTV and The Mighty Ducks. The result is an oeuvre that includes the popular UK mockumentary series Community Patrol, and spots for Angi, Visit Florida, MeUndies, and a project for Arsenal starring the legendary footballer Ray Parlour in his new role…as a fashion designer.
“Our style is rooted in the delusions of everyday people,” shared the directors in a joint statement. “We let the self-deception play itself out without nods or winks to the audience.”
It was “Ray Parlour: Fashion Designer” for Arsenal that caught Wilson’s eye initially. He and Thomas were bidding on a sports comedy project at the time. “The spot succeeds or fails based on how straight Ray and the Arsenal team members play it,” Wilson said. “It succeeds brilliantly, because the audience expects something completely different from these footballers.” The directors hopped on a call with Cultivate, and while the project went away, the relationship clicked.
“Mark and Stu immediately grasped our sense of humor and what we’re trying to do,” Middleton recalled. “We appreciated what Cultivate is about in terms of developing and working with new talent to draw out the potential they see.” Scott added, “They’ve been great in helping us look at our work differently as well.”
“We see our role as nurturing and investing in directorial talent, growing them into filmmakers who can artfully bring stories to life,” Wilson said. “Emerging commercial directors like Crooked Cynics should be bidding on and winning some of the best creative opportunities in the industry, and we’re excited to introduce them to the U.S. market.”
Of the Crooked Cynics moniker, Scott said, “We showed my dad a list of our favorite names to call ourselves. He said you’ll never get a day’s work being called Crooked Cynics. That made us laugh. It was perfect.” Middleton affirmed that, “Me and Jack naturally take the piss out of ourselves, so comedy is really the only option.”
Scott and Middleton share a love for professional wrestling, and for the MTV shows they grew up on, like Jackass. “We’re also too weak to get in the ring, and too scared to be like Johnny Knoxville,” they said. “But we excelled at watching it on TV.” When they met through a mutual friend, Scott was working full-time as a commercial editor, cutting branded work for Adidas and the Olympics. Middleton was a band videographer, gaining lots of experience documenting reality in the U.K., U.S, and more.
“We started directing music videos together, where ideas often got all too serious,” Scott recalled. As music video directors, the guys found themselves succeeding in a medium where bizarre ideas were routinely treated with tremendous gravity. “It’s the things people have no sense of humor about that can be truly funny,” Scott said.
Clearly, Crooked Cynics are funny, having been featured in British Comedy Guide, popular comedy aggregator Mr Box, and having screened at a number of film festivals where they picked up the Top Short Festival award for “Best Comedy.” Together, they have worked with a wealth of award-winning music artists and BAFTA-winning comedy performers, but deep down all they really want is to be the WWE duo, Dudley Boyz.
“Crooked Cynics could very well become the winningest tag-team in sports-entertainment,” Thomas deadpanned. “And that’s a story they would tell with a very straight face.”
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More