Yesand.com article

NEUTRINO: STRAIGHT TO VIDEO
By Hugh Sinclair
YesAnd.com
April, 2003

The suggestion this particular night was "sumo" as the cast trotted offstage except for two who remained behind to chat with the audience until the first reel of video was run into the booth, delivered primavera, and began playing. What followed for the rest of the evening was a delightful ménage a trois of story lines that almost seamlessly alternated until all three intersected in a final satisfying segment. This is despite the interference of drunkards, security guards, and technical problems.

THE NAKED TAPE
Neutrino distinguished itself at The Upright Citizens Brigade Theater by holding the record for most wins in the New York City Cagematch, an ongoing longform improv competition. In March of 2002, they created the Neutrino Video Harold, winning Cagematch for another five weeks straight before continuing to develop the form with month-long runs at UCB.

Originally, the format involved a cast and crew that numbered 22 including professional technicians. From run to run, however, the cast has gotten more savvy and comfortable with the process and has since used only improvisers (now totalling 16) in all capacities. Not only acting, the players are responsible for setting up the tech before the show, location scouting, sound tech, camera work, and all other aspects of the filmmaking. Neutrino has found that improv is too intrinsic to have it be any other way.

"You can learn what a RCA cable is and how to run an RCA cable through a camera," says Kurt Braunholer, one of the original members along with Steve Buck and Bob Wiltfong. "You can't teach someone [who is strictly a technician] how this moment needs to have music or how to help make connections for the audience."

The camera work is especially innovative, given that the cinematographers have no chance to review the work. All editing is done in the can, often quite imaginatively. Ptolemy Slocum's style is most easily recognizable as he uses all the tools available, including some film school taboos: broken axis, jump cuts, and camera flares are all likely to show up in his work.

CHAOS AND THEORY
Sitting in the theater, the audience has little, if any, idea of what is raging just outside as three technical crews and their respective casts quickly compose scenes in front of the camera and run them in. The method is guerilla as they work the surrounding areas and its denizens. Regardless of what they encounter, they stick to it with the tools that improv offers them.

Wiltfong and Buck were canvassing passersby for their reaction to the word "sumo" when they strayed upon a homeless guy smoking up a joint who preferred not to be filmed. On another occasion the management of Gristede's confiscated the tape they had just shot as part of company policy that forbids filming in their stores. (Actually, the security guard tackled Braunholer who was attempting to get the contraband out of the store). The crew had to run outside and quickly reshoot a new scene and send it into the theater.

"For me it is always extremely scary whenever a tape is running late and the audience is watching dead air," says Buck. "That always freaks me out and creates a great deal of anxiety."

As a team was shooting in the nearby McDonalds, director Jason Mantzoukis had to distract the manager in order to let the team continue shooting. Buck remembers that he kept acting in the scene, "but the whole time, I'm glancing over the cameraman's shoulder to see if we are about to get kicked out, or worse."

Some merchants, like the staff at Daniella Ristorante, enjoy playing along. In a recent show, the maitre d' not only played along with Rachel Biello and Mantzoukis as a couple not able to pay their bill but even allowed them to wash dishes in a later beat. Other merchants are critics. A pizzeria in the neighborhood allowed the team to film a sequence featuring Eden Riegel, that week's special guest star (known to fans of All My Children as one half of Daytime TV's first lesbian kiss.) Neutrino was uninvited to perform there the following week because the owners didn't enjoy the scene.

CITY LIMITS
Braunholer says that the burnout rate for the show can be high, usually capping a run at about two month's time (the current run has run approximately three months). The team has to play in real locations thatthey scout beforehand, which prevents the outlandish invention that isusually possible in improv, while playing characters that are basicallythemselves rather than playing against type.

"It's frustrating as an improviser," says Wiltfong. "You want to have a full palette. Even if the scene is served by a different [character] choice rather than playing who I am, I have to stick to the reality."

These limitations can create a ceiling for the actors. While the tenets thatthey learned at UCB remain, their mantra of playing things as real aspossible, things can only stay fresh for so long. The troupe has beenincorporating guests to extend their possibilites including mutant hybrids Chengwin and Chunk and internet porn personalities Ric and Nina of Feel Free NYC who had sex as part of their improvised segment.

The Chicago Improv Festival will offer some new challenges, with newlocations. They will also get to see their Chicago counterparts, produced byFuzzy Gerdes' FuzzyCo, perform a set. In the final hour of the evening, bothcrews will get together to improvise twenty-one short films implementingseven camera crews simultaneously.

Neutrino seems to always be taking the experiment to the next level.