Picking the mind behind film spoofs

Bill Corbett was the ultimate voice of Crow T. Robot in Mystery Science Theater 3000’s final seasons.
Bill Corbett was the ultimate voice of Crow T. Robot in Mystery Science Theater 3000’s final seasons.

Brooklyn native Bill Corbett is an alumnus of Yale University's drama school. He has written plays (The Big Slam and The Stuff of Dreams). He wrote the screenplay for the Eddie Murphy movie Meet Dave. He also has a long acting resume. But his most enduring work will likely be providing the voice of a sarcastic robot.

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Nick Miller (Matthew Bruch), a physics teacher and amateur pilot who has built a time machine from a Commodore 64 computer and his airplane, is menaced by a corporate henchman Matthew Paul (Peter Harrington) in this still from 1994’s Time Chasers.

Since 1995, Corbett has been writing and performing wisecracks for Mystery Science Theater 3000 (known to fans as MST3K). During the final two seasons, he was the all-knowing (but none-too-bright) The Observer and operated Crow T. Robot, who helped Michael J. Nelson and Kevin Murphy's cyborg Tom Servo survive a seemingly endless selection of wretched films. For the last decade, Corbett has joined Nelson and Murphy in adding comments to films like Anaconda and Starship Troopers and Battlefield Earth through Rifftrax.com.

Thursday night, the three offered a live enhancement to the amusingly underwhelming 1994 time travel adventure Time Chasers, beamed to cinemas all over the country. (It will be replayed May 17 in select theaters in Little Rock, Benton, Conway and Fort Smith -- see fathomevents.com for details.)

Asked how he has managed to make a productive career out of adding sonic graffiti to movies with cruddy scripts, Corbett laughed and said, "You're making a lot of assumptions about 'productive.'"

"We do take care to try to do more than just the first knee jerk joke that we can come up with on the fly, even though we sometimes go back there anyway," he admits.

Back in Time

During the conversation, Corbett consistently expressed enthusiasm for some of the less than stellar films that he, Rifftrax and MST3K have featured over the decades. The thought of returning to Time Chasers might have seemed like drudgery, and Corbett says that most substandard films don't merit revisiting.

"Usually the half-life for bad movies is pretty short with me. I'd get their charms, and I'd have to watch them a bunch of times for RiffTrax and MST3K. I'd go, 'All right. I'm done, for another decade or so,'" he said.

"It was unique in the movies that we did on the whole run of MST3K because it was really recent [1994]. It was a very recent movie at the time. I think it was done only two or three years before we did it on the show. The people who did it were all alive and well and were somewhere between excited and horrified that we were doing it, mostly excited, and they were really good sports about it.

"Time Chasers has a core of competency, visually. It's shot pretty well. The bare bones of the plot, if you can stomach time travel movies at all, are not bad. It's not something super original, but it's not like you get so lost in the weeds. I don't think it's any worse than an average episode of Doctor Who in its use of time travel."

That said, Time Chasers features special effects that look like they were copied from an Atari 28 gaming system and a spectacularly uncharismatic leading man in Matthew Bruch.

"It is fascinating. The guy who's a star has not really gone on to other movies. He seems like a smart enough guy, and there must have been some talk between him and [writer-director David] Giancola about how, 'Hey, I'm in really good shape. Let's have me running around and biking and diving into water and taking my shirt off here and there.' I don't blame him for some minor vanity along those lines. He was a pretty athletic dude, but there's a cognitive dissonance to seeing that with a guy who was otherwise somebody you would not pull out of central casting. I'm not even saying he's bad looking or anything. I shouldn't talk. [But] that would not be a choice Hollywood would make. It's no sign of being a bad person or having a deficit in other areas of your life. In fact, it might mean you're really healthy in a way," Corbett says.

The writer-performer also adds that his approach to mocking films has changed since he stopped using a robot (OK, a puppet) to speak for him.

"Aesthetically or comedy-wise, I think it affected us without us even knowing it. We can't play the card of 'just fell off the assembly line yesterday' like you could with the puppets -- or the robots really -- which is what they were supposed to be," Corbett explains. "My feeling now, too, is that the premise of us forced to watch movies, which was the meta fiction of MST3K, is gone. Presumably, everybody knows we're doing these by choice. So you can't get away with just moaning about how bad it is for as long. I just don't find it as funny, so it makes me work a little harder to find something funny in that moment."

Corbett is quick to credit Giancola, who has also blessed the Riffer's additions to his films Radical Jack -- which starred Billy Ray Cyrus and Michelle Pfeiffer's sister, Dedee Pfeiffer -- and Icebreaker, which "involves terrorist intrigue on a ski resort in Vermont " and stars a pre-The Lord of Rings Sean Astin alongside Stacy Keach and Bruce Campbell.

Back to the Satellite of Love

Those who enjoy Rifftrax but miss original mad scientist Trace Beaulieu, "TV's Frank" (Frank Conniff), series creator Joel Hodgson and villain Mary Jo Pehl are in luck because the Rifftrax trio and others are scheduled to reunite for another nationwide live riffing on June 28. Those looking for details might not want to check with Corbett because, even if he had The Observer's powers, he can't offer much in specifics.

"It will be all shorts. But there might be one superhero involved," he says. "Things went on. The business part of it is a little more sane and reasonable now. We just kind of feel a lot better. As you get older and you let stuff go, you realize we had a good thing together. So, yeah, things are pretty good on that front."

Corbett consistently praises Beaulieu, who originated Crow T. Robot.

"I'm pretty good friends with Trace," he says. " I don't think either of us had a real plan or a real intellectual approach to it at all. He invented the character, of course -- he could do it from scratch. I think both of us used a robot-y standard, sort of sci-fi voice. We did a sort of flat to a more natural comedy delivery. I, of course, was working in his enormous shadow. He was amazingly talented. He was one of the performers I was most drawn to in that show when I saw it. [He was] doing Dr. Forester and Crow and knocking them both out of the park.

"So I was a little intimidated because he was beloved and justly so. I started with sort of an imitation of Trace, and little by little my colleagues told me to loosen it up and just be funny on my own terms. In the end, it was what the writers, including myself, did for the character that led me along. Since it was such a high standard, I felt that I couldn't go too far wrong if I kept working on my puppeteering chops, which were really pretty miserable at first."

Not Good Enough

For the longest time, it has been easy to assume that MST3K and Rifftrax were a sort of dumping ground for substandard flicks. Despite his enthusiasm for Time Chasers and Tommy Wiseau's astoundingly inept The Room, Corbett reveals that he groans at bad films the way everyone else does. Some films are simply too bad to mock.

"The vast majority of the bad movies that we come across that we look at ... we don't do," he says, "because they're not as much fun, and they're unpleasant, and they're ugly. They're way too violent, or they're misogynist. So we just don't want to tangle with that."

For example, the Little Rock-shot 1991 Stone Cold, starring the once omnipresent gridiron star Brian ­Bosworth, was trimmed to remove violence.

"It's such a time capsule of a personality and time when they made movies like this. It actually had a couple of sequences that we cut because it's a pretty violent movie. But it's just silly, this idea that there's this big muscle-bound guy who outsmarts everybody."

MovieStyle on 05/06/2016

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