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Vice Blog

YOUR HIGHNESS SNEAK PEEKS - BULLSHITIN' IN BELFAST

"A Stella, draft." Several hours had passed since my connecting flight landed in Northern Ireland. A casual stroll around Belfast left me to surmise that its city center is a slightly less bomb-worthy Times Square. Women in earthtones shopped for makeup and earthtone attire, while men followed them around carrying their shit. The consumerism didn't seem bound by a corporate-lorded algorithm run amok, however. A wintery civility, the humbling gift and curse of the region's isolation, kept it in check. Belfast. Yeah, I can get drunk here, I thought, and I repaired back to the bar at my hotel. It was prep-time; a bartender was probably drying and inspecting a glass. "No," he said. "No Stella. Don't carry it." The bar, outfitted in the purple, red, and silver of a celestial brothel circa 2015, stocked everything. "No. And you won't find Stella much here in Belfast." Why? "Because of the white foil on the bottles. The locals call it 'beater,' cause the hooligans, troublemakers, get lit on it then go home and beat on their girlfriends." I wondered if a few skins might find out that the bar had a rolling 24-hour tab for invitees of the set, wondered if a few might wander in for a quick 'allo. I settled on an Irish whiskey and swilled it down. Emptying my coat pocket, I ordered another, and on the bar placed a notepad and some jagged contents forgotten en route.

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"So. You here with the movie filming nearby?" asked the bartender. "Know what it's about? That guy? Danny? Donnie? Seems like a nice enough fellow. Been in several times." On the plane over I had finished reading an old screenplay for Your Highness. It was a kitchen-sink version that effortlessly--as if for the purpose of creating unfilmable shits and giggles--summoned a Kraken-like budget, some $200 million over what was allocated the production here.

This was in October 2009; after six months, the shoot was nearing a wrap. Common sense said having members of the press out for a visit was a sign that Universal Pictures was optimistic. Sentiment among various cast and crew was a little different. In the months ramping up to production and in the hours ahead, their enthusiasm could be collectively summed up by a chuckle of excited competence and a quiet belch of disbelief. "Honestly, if we'd been behind by a month," Danny McBride told Vice many months later, "I don't think Your Highness would have been greenlit. The ship had sailed before the studio execs could pull it back. [laughs]" His metaphor carried an ironic if unintentional bite. Your Highness' sets and headquarters were located at Painted Hall in Belfast's Titanic Quarter, where the titular ship was built.

But his admission was due to the fate of two high-concept genre films Universal released that summer of 2009: Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell and Land of the Lost, a pricey "tentpole" costarring McBride that attempted to bank on countless families getting baked together, had both gone kerplunk. And back in Ireland, the industry's outlook on Universal's 2010 slate was that it rippled and gambled in unusual creative freedom.Your Highness was then part of a line-up that included Green Zone, MacGruber, Scott Pilgrim, and The Wolfman (which director Mark Romanek left over budget differences). All of those films went on to similarly underperform, yes sexually, except for Your Highness, which had its release date pushed back to accommodate special effects work. This is a way of explaining how an original hard-R $50 million fantasy-comedy, with so much mead sploshed upon medieval chainmail crusted with crypto-zoo blood, comes to open in 2011, the most derivative, and likely worst, year in Hollywood's history.

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I sat at the bar and contemplated the weird relief of being here, on the set of a major motion picture I actually wanted to see. A few guys at the bar made small talk about films and tele. They weren't familiar with Eastbound & Down, the first season seemingly hadn't crossed over, despite a kindred short-order format and bucking darkness shared with the great UK comedy series (Brass Eye, The Office, Darkplace, Mighty Boosh, etc.). They were, however, fans of Pineapple Express, and Your Highness was not so much a reunion as the next collaboration between James Franco, director David Gordon Green, and co-writer McBride, headlining his first big film. The cast also included Zooey Deschanel, whom Green directed in All the Real Girls, playing a hot Rapunzel-like bitch with no idea how to use a fork, and, in the timing equivalent of a double-eclipse, Natalie Portman, as a loner warrior in a thong.

I asked for the time and my last drink (or so I thought). Shortly, I needed to walk over to the hotel restaurant. A supper was planned, a Bilderberg-type engagement with the heavyweight forefathers of online geekdom. Drew McWeeny (formerly Moriarty of Ain't It Cool), Deven Faraci (then editor of CHUD), and Quint (Eric Vespe of Ain't It Cool) would all be there. Part of me, the pale me addicted to clickety-clicking links and scanning RSS feeds like bible-codes, anticipated the meet-up as much I as anticipated pissing hands free among the countryside's livestock. For a decade plus, I regularly filtered through hundreds, shit, maybe thousands, of casting rumors, reviews, scoops and screeds, written by each of these guys, the Sultans of Spoiler.

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It wasn't outside the box to suggest that their writing and influence, bunched with Harry Knowles', had nudged the mainstream blockbuster into the genre and comic book realm over all combined deadwood critics, and over most filmmakers under thirty-five. Surprisingly, Hollywood had listened attentively to their work, jotted notes, opened up the doors, exchanged numbers. And then proceeded to flood movie blogs with exclusive marketing materials, turned some of them into all-out marketing depots, set up rushed franchise derricks to mine every drop and dollar of geek faith. The studios' chum had an odd effect on discourse, too--creating conflicts over publishing rights to posters and jpegs that made the conflicts in The King of Kong seem nuanced. But those three guys had kept on trucking. And every once in a while, a film like Your Highness and Where the Wild Things Are, which was days from release, popped up to remind everyone how it could be. I fully planned to tuck my knees up, sprout feelers, and roll into the restaurant to express these concerns, possibly in a newly leaked future-ancient language from Skywalker Ranch. Of course, if they were submerged in the violent bass of digesting marbled meats snapped from prop swords used in the film, that was fine too.

Dunluce Castle

I ordered another, but the bartender was attending to a new patron farther down. He made up two deadly concoctions, all foreboding red bodies capped in froth, fit for Killer Klowns. "Mr. McBride," I said. "How's the shoot going?" "Oh, hey man. It's going fucking great. You ought to try these," said McBride, drinks in hand. "I've had some time off, so I took one of the black cab tours. Basically, we didn't even know where Beflast was before we flew out. This place is filled with some fucked-up history." And beer segregation. "Before you go out to the set, you gotta check out Giant's Causeway. That's where they shot the cover to Houses of the Holy." It was on my itinerary tomorrow, along with a stop by Dunluce Castle, a 14th Century landmark of cannon rubble and sea mist, used for a sequence in the movie. Some semi-familiar faces from the Eastbound crew began to appear. McBride and Co. were in the middle of a prolonged birthday celebration for his then-fiance, now-wife Gia. A round of shots punctuated introductions. "David was saying…," McBride started. His eyes found the items on the bar. A pewter wizard laid supine next to a small wood carved teepee. I was drunk, like an old Ethiopian man who transfers instructions for a new sport to a cocktail napkin. "I go like this," I said, placing the teepee over the wizard. "And then I light a joint, blow some smoke to the wizard." "So you brought that shit," he said. "Alright. Cool."

HUNTER STEPHENSON

Check back for next week for more behind the scenes bullshit from Your Highness.