Christopher Guest has built a career on the quirks of his passionate and unusual characters, from rock stars to dog-show emcees, while faithfully mimicking the documentary format. As he returns to explore the inner lives of sports mascots, Time looks at what makes his humanistic comedy machine run.
“Mascots and the Very Serious Business of Making a Christopher Guest Movie”
by Eliza Berman
Time
October 14, 2016
When Parker Posey got a call from Christopher Guest offering her a part in his next movie, she already knew the drill. Having appeared in all four of the faux-documentaries Guest had written and directed since 1997, she knew he”™d give her the basic character sketch””in this case, Cindi Babineaux, a mascot for a Mississippi women”™s college basketball team who”™s aging out of her tenure as Alvin the Armadillo””and it would be her job to fill in the details. “The nine-banded armadillo is limited,” she says, recalling her attempts to crack the character. “They”™re mainly roadkill.” She pauses. “That”™s an interesting angle.”
Finding the interesting angle on idiosyncratic subcultures and the Cindi Babineauxs that comprise them has driven Guest”™s work over the past two decades. Movies like Best in Show, about competitive dog breeders and trainers, and A Mighty Wind, about a folk-music reunion concert, have won the onetime Saturday Night Live cast member legions of devoted fans. His particular brand of comedy, which originated with the cult classic This Is Spinal Tap in 1984, directed by Rob Reiner and co-written by Reiner, Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean, applies the conventions of self-serious documentary filmmaking to unexpected, if not undeserving, fictional subjects.
In Mascots, Guest”™s first film in a decade, premiering on Netflix Oct. 13, he and co-writer Jim Piddock turn their gaze””with the help of a flock of returning cast members including Posey, Jane Lynch, Fred Willard and Ed Begley Jr.””toward the men and women who dance in poorly ventilated animal suits to bring smiles to the faces of amateur sports fans. Read more.