Jake Plunkett, the director behind some of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’s most iconic sketches, has landed his first commercialmaking home, joining the roster of bicoastal Good Company. The New Jersey native has spent the past six years at The Late Show, mostly losing Emmys to John Oliver, except for the one fluke year where he actually won.
Plunkett’s backstory makes no sense and makes perfect sense. He was working as a dancing waiter at a Jimmy Buffet-themed restaurant in Wayne, NJ when he had an epiphany that his true calling was not shimmying his way towards customers with the burger-of-the-day, but rather on a TV set. Plunkett cold-called MTV and asked if they were hiring. Fatefully, they offered him a position as an executive assistant. There he got the opportunity to hone his craft and learn the ropes, eventually working his way up to development executive where he stayed for five years.
After MTV, came a very short gig at a sports comedy show with Regis Philbin. It was among the lowest rated shows of the year. After allowing himself a 10-minute pity party, Plunkett decided to manifest himself a job at 30 Rock, where he worked around-the-clock at Saturday Night Live for two years. Both his burning ambition to be a director and his wife’s aggressive divorce threats redirected him to direct for The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore and for Robert Smigel’s Triumph the Insult Comic Dog Hulu special.
After his long-term relationship with a rubber rottweiler puppet was over, Plunkett landed at The Late Show where he’s directed and produced all of their major pre-taped sketches for the past six years. “Watching Colbert examine Paul Rudd’s hind legs to determine if he was best in show was the moment I knew Jake could tell a story in thirty seconds,” said Good Co EP Raquel Balsam referring to his “Sexiest Man Alive” sketch. “I immediately connected with Jake and we started to strategize about him jumping into our side of storytelling.”
Shortly thereafter, Plunkett found himself on set with a bunch of raccoons attempting to get them to recycle for Mentos new paperboard gum bottles via agency Highdive. “I’m thrilled to be starting my journey in this advertising space with Good Company,” commented Plunkett. “The massive range of work that Good Co produces at such a high level, as well as the range of services their in-house studio offers really appeals to me as a budding filmmaker. I look forward to the day I get to work with real life human actors, although for now the raccoons are taking my direction quite nicely. Well, except for Daisy.”
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More