Tribeca: Kate McCarthy Puts the Fun in Disfunction in “The Hicks Happy Hour”
The era of the variety show is behind us, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t rife with stories to tell. Like what about a family band variety show? It’s showtime, but the patriarch is nowhere to be found. As the saying goes, the show must go on, but how does a family go on? That’s the question director/co-writer Kate McCarthy asks in her Tribeca-premiering short film, The Hicks Happy Hour.
Ahead of the short film’s world premiere, Kate McCarthy sat down with Beyond the Cinerama Dome to discuss her lifelong love of ’70s variety shows, the world of the American Film Institute, and the inherent luck that goes into filmmaking. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Beyond the Cinerama Dome: I want to start with the concept for The Hicks Happy Hour and what your collaboration with your co-writer was like when you were putting together the script for the short.
Kate McCarthy: This is our thesis film for AFI, the American Film Institute, and we get started making these films like crazy early. It's a two-year program and we start working on them before the first year is done. Very early.
I was not quite ready to pitch my thesis. What I came up with was the concept of a mom trying to make divorce fun for her kids. That was the original pitch. It was always going to be about a family splitting up and a family in transition. It always had this plucky mom character who has a hard time with reality.
Courtesy of Kate McCarthy
Over the summer, between the first and second year of AFI, I was like, this doesn't really feel like me. I wanted to inject it with something that only I could do because, as a director at AFI, you're like, oh my God! Ari Aster's thesis film changed his life and this could change mine too! It feels like this big opportunity, this big debut.
That's when the ’70s variety show element came in because that time in American culture is a lifelong obsession for me. I realized that was actually a perfect container to explore the same themes about authenticity and performing versus living your life. I loved the idea of taking family dynamics out of the living room and exploring it through a family band, but what happens when dad isn't at the keyboard tonight? What do we do from here?
My collaboration with my co-writer, Michael, who's just such a dear friend of mine, he was sort of the keeper of the script. The story is by him and me. I just basically talked endlessly until it got to a point where he's like, I gotta go work on my own AFI scripts (laughs).
He was a huge ally to me in the early stages of figuring out who Jill is as a mother figure. He gave me so much support and gave me screenwriting resources that he got through his teachers because he was trying to get me to focus on who is Jill?
Forget the ’70s. What does Jill want and what is her problem? We did a lot of talking and formulating, like, okay, what's going to happen on this one night of this show? Then I would take it from there and actually bang it out.
I saw that you interned at SNL and other late-night programing. Did that come from your longtime love of ’70s variety shows?
You do your research! Interesting. It’s all sort of like a big soup together. I used to do comedy before film. Until like 2021 or 2022, I was all in on alternative comedy in the Brooklyn alt scene. I was writing and performing all the time.
As a kid, I was really into film. Really into the culture that came before me. SNL was part of that, of course. Obviously, that was such a turning point in American 1970s culture, so it all just sort of coalesced.
I think for a long time, I was just trying to figure out where I sit in that. When I was in college, I was going after all these comedy internships because I was like, I'm going to do comedy. Before that, I was a major theater kid, you know? In my 20s, I really landed on film. I was like, oh, this brings together all my skills. Everything informs everything. I think it's all one big tapestry.
courtesy of Tribeca
Going back to The Hicks Happy Hour, the set is absolutely incredible. Can you talk a little about conceptualizing the set and the costumes? Was it vintage? Walk me through a little bit of that, because that seems like a headache to put on as an AFI student.
I appreciate that you're seeing all of that and being like, man, it's a lot. Because it was a lot. I think the benefit we have at AFI is a long runtime. It's not like you're shooting this next month, you know?
My production designer, Yun Gu, is the greatest. The greatest of all time. No one works harder and is more thorough. She also has her own taste. She has great taste, but she has her own voice.
I think a strength of our ’70s film is that it doesn't feel exactly like a replica of something from that time. I really didn't want it to feel like a parody or a bad music video that's imitating the ’70s, you know?
It started with an email to Yun and my DP, Ariano Treviño Angelone, with a hundred YouTube links of all my favorite variety show clips. It was for them to get a grip on the era because everyone knows generic ’70s imagery. I really wanted them to know the language deeply, and what kinds of things would fly and what would never fly. Within that, I let them make their own choices.
Yun looked at so many sets and then took what she knew from that, combined with our script, to make it specific to a family host of this TV show. What is that home stage for them going to look like? What does it look like when other acts have their own stage pieces or set pieces? We just did a lot of research.
Yun is really crafty. For example, she found on Facebook Marketplace that someone was off-loading a huge roll of astroturf. She was playing with the idea of artificiality on stage. Artificial meets nature. There are fake plants and fake nature on the family's home set. She wanted them to be standing on these grassy, astroturf platforms.
courtesy of Tribeca
So she went and found this cheap astroturf, but then it was so heavy. She and her friend Oscar, another production designer friend, picked it up, and the astroturf was so heavy that the car couldn't drive on the highway. They had to take side streets home with it hanging out of the back.
When they made it home, we couldn't get it out of the car. All the production designers showed up and we were seriously stumped. It was too heavy. We couldn’t even lift it out of the car. Like, is it going to be stuck in there forever? I think Yun is so crafty and will do whatever she needs to to make it exactly how she wants it. She has incredible taste. The set is just a combination of research and her little magic voice.
Then we had an incredible costume designer, Sofi Kaufman, who we hired in part because she is a very professional costume assistant. She had all these connections with costume houses and she went to find vintage pieces. We're so lucky that the pieces that were available were perfect for the film.
I think that's a major part of filmmaking. You just get lucky. It’s like, is your production cursed or is it blessed? I think when it came to costumes, like the sibling duo, Donny-and-Marie-type characters, Sofi just happened to find those insane matching rhinestone sets at some costume house. We were off to the races.
You mentioned that a lot of AFI projects are launching points for careers. There are recent movies like Luckiest Man in America and Late Night with the Devil that are one episode of TV mockumentary-esque films. As I was watching this, I was like, I could do an-hour-and-a-half of The Hicks Happy House. Did you write it in the hopes that it could be adapted into a feature in the future?
When we were developing the thesis, we were so stressed about just making the thesis that I don't think we were like, well, let's keep in mind the feature. We were sort of building the plane as we were flying it or whatever. This was not a case of I came to AFI with this script ready, and I knew it was going to be my proof of concept for a feature.
If we meet someone at Tribeca or elsewhere who wants to give us a bazillion dollars, then we would absolutely turn it into a feature or a series, you know? There's no plan to make it anything bigger, but it's nice to hear that people are down for that.
courtesy of Tribeca
I think the big thing is that, with an AFI thesis, you just want to prove your competence. You want to seem like you could put me on a set and I could run it. I could direct an episode of TV. I could be hired to direct your feature or you could give me money to make mine. I think having your voice is like a cherry on top.
When I was at my most stressed about this film, and I got very stressed, people reminded me that this doesn't have to be the perfect story. It doesn't have to be a bulletproof film. It just needs to show a little bit of who you are and prove that you know what you're doing. It doesn't hurt that my team really knows what they're doing. I think we all make each other look like we know what we're doing.
Like you mentioned, Tribeca is right around the corner. You played at the American Pavilion at Cannes, that was your first screening. Then Tribeca would be your world premiere, right?
The American Pavilion Emerging Filmmakers Showcase at Cannes was a showcase. Tribeca gave us special dispensation to screen at that. AFI Fest has a conservatory showcase section where we showed it, but yeah, Tribeca is our true world premiere. In competition at a festival.
Then, truly a week later, we're having our international premiere at Raindance in London, so that’s exciting. We also won the College Television Awards for comedy series. That's where we've been so far.
Are you going to Tribeca and Raindance? Did you go to Cannes?
I'm trying to do it all, man. I am, because I just feel like this time next year, there's not going to be a reason for me to go to Cannes or go to London. I did go to Cannes, which was an amazing, major learning experience.
For Tribeca, I'm going to be there the whole time. I used to live in New York and I haven't been back in five years. When I left New York, I was an aspiring alternative comedian, so this is very exciting to come back in style with a film at Tribeca and as a filmmaker. It's a real testament to life, time, and just letting time do its thing.
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