Free | 23/6
Posted: 1/1/0001
Upright Citizens Brigade co-founder Matt Besser had never written a musical before 'Freak Dance,' his answer to perhaps Hollywood's cheesiest genre, but you couldn't tell that by the finished product: a movie that's been a decade in the making.Although 'Freak Dance' includes all the tropes and archetypes made famous by films like 'Breakin,'' 'Save The Last Dance,' 'You Got Served,' 'Dirty Dancing' and all of the 'Step Up' movies (they're making yet another one), creator Matt Besser doesn't call it a parody -- and it's certainly nothing like the 2009 dance movie spoof 'Dance Flick.''When they started casting for 'Dance Flick' I thought, 'Oh no! We missed it! I procrastinated too long and they're going to use all the jokes,'' Besser recalled in an interview. 'Then I went and saw it and realized they didn't have any of the same jokes. They took a different take on it.'Besser started writing the script for 'Freak Dance' back in 2001, when the original UCB theater in New York City was shut down by the fire department for not having a second entrance. As he and the other original UCB members (Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh) did improv shows to raise money for their new venue, Besser was reminded of the plots of every dance movie ever. Then 'You Got Served' came out and Besser realized that breakdancing was cool again but the movies about it were still terrible, relying on the same plot lines of the cheesy dance movies of his youth in the 70s and 80s. So he set out to write a good one -- not necessarily a parody -- but a story that builds on the cliched structure of dance movies in a funny way.'What did make 'Dance Flick' coming out a bummer was when I would try describing the movie to people and they'd say, 'I'm not interested in a dance movie parody,&