Danny Roane First Time Director
Andy Dick, James Van Der Beek, Bob Odenkirk
Written and directed by Andy Dick
Made for cable
Lionsgate 2007
84 minutes
Danny Roane First Time Director validates “You know Dick about making a movie.” Andy Dick (NewsRadio, Less Than Perfect) stars, wrote, and “directs” himself in this mockumentary about a minor and hasbeen sitcom star (can you say typecasting?) whose career is in the toilet and decides to make his own movie. Danny Roane First Time Director is the documentary about Danny Roane making that movie.
Why is it that movies that pretend to be low budget look even more low budget than the real thing? This is the case in Danny Roane First Time Director with its purposefully badly lit sets and bad camera work. The main weakness of Danny Roane though is writer Andy Dick who doesn’t even give his Roane the faintest glimmer of a possibility of the chance of a hope in hell his movie will be good. Consequently, any jokes about Hollywood, movie making, and so on pretty much fall flat. This and the fact it doesn’t take Dick more than 5 minutes to get a bodily function “joke” in, less than twenty to get to supposedly funny racial slurs before he spends a good ten minutes on butt hole bleeding jokes
At the twenty minute mark of the Danny Roane First Time Director DVD you get the so old it was created before the camera was invented joke of the guy losing pages of his screenplay and losing more and more of them as he tries to pick up the first ones. This is a scene you wish had happened to and not this movie. Cue spraying vomit scene at the fifty minute mark.
Although the wheels were never on Danny Roane, they fall off the movie within the mockumentary when Roane starts filming, discovers there is alcohol on the set, falls off the wagon after 4 years, vanishes for three days and decides to make the movie a musical.
To be fair, there is one good bit on this DVD:
Actor: “I’m not talented, I’m just and actor.”
Roane: “Well, that didn’t stop that ugly kid from Fame.”
Lady: “Which one?”
Roane: “Exactly.”
Danny Roane First Time Director is a ray of hope for every untalented writer and director who wants to make a movie: If this made it to cable TV and DVD, anything can.