American Cinematographer - July 2014 - 20

Cinematographer
Blake McClure
and his
collaborators
used a long, thin
piece of black
wood to separate
historical figures
Will Keith
Kellogg (Luke
Wilson) and John
Harvey Kellogg
(Owen Wilson)
with an
in-camera
split-screen effect
for the "Detroit"
episode of
Drunk History.

I

Cockeyed Chronicles
By Jean Oppenheimer

The show opens with a title card: "All of the stories depicted
in the following program are based on real events." Then a second
card makes it clear that what will follow isn't going to be your typical
documentary: "It should be noted, however, that every storyteller you
are about to see is completely drunk."
Welcome to Drunk History, a half-hour television series that
premiered on Comedy Central in 2013 and recently began its second
season. Based on the Funny or Die Web series created by Derek
Waters and Jeremy Konner in 2007, each episode consists of three
historically accurate, fully fact-checked stories - such as the Scopes
Monkey Trial, the Lewis and Clark expedition, the art theft at Boston's
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the fall of the Alamo, Elvis Presley
meeting Richard Nixon - as told by thoroughly inebriated volunteers,
most of whom are personal friends of producer/director Konner and
producer/on-air talent Waters. (A medical doctor is always on hand to
keep tabs on the inebriated storytellers.)
"The toughest part of the show is that we have to shoot one
entire story, from top to bottom, in a single day," says director of
photography Blake McClure, who took home the ASC Award for
Half-Hour Series this past February for his work on the episode
"Detroit." McClure, who has shot every episode except the pilot
(which was photographed by Shawn Kim), explains, "Each story is
about 10 pages of script, which translates into seven or eight minutes
20

July 2014

[of screen time]. A full episode takes three days to shoot."
Each story is recounted by a different narrator, who sits in the
comfort of his or her own home. Shots of the narrator are intercut
with re-enactments of the historical incident, which are acted out by
celebrity guest stars dressed in period costume and who lip sync the
dialogue being spoken by the narrator.
The three stories that comprise an episode are usually linked
by city (for example, they might all take place in Boston), although all
the re-enactments are shot in and around Los Angeles. "Our locations manager, Dan Cooley, is crucial to the development and look of
the show," says McClure. "He finds these great locations and we
piggyback a few days in a row so we don't have to pack and move
the trucks every day."
The day AC visited the set, the cast and crew were holed up
inside a former youth correctional facility outside Los Angeles, reenacting an event from 1938 that involved a most unlikely trio: Adolf
Hitler (portrayed by "Weird Al" Yankovic), American boxer Joe Louis
(Terry Crews) and German boxer Max Schmeling (Tim Heidecker).
The latter two were vying for the World Heavyweight Championship
at New York's Yankee Stadium. Although the United States and Nazi
Germany were not yet at war, the match between the American
"Brown Bomber" and the German fighter had strong racial and
political undertones.
The sequence was conceived as the series' first black-andwhite segment. "When I think of Hitler, I think of black-and-white
newsreels," McClure notes. "Jeremy was wary; we didn't want

American Cinematographer

Unit photography by Ron Batzdorff, courtesy of Comedy Central. Additional photography by Jeremy Konner and Blake McClure.

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American Cinematographer - July 2014

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