Letter From LA

Houston's Internet comedy trio lampoons TMZ & Lost: Meet Team Tiger Awesome(you'll laugh)

The Houston-area raised comedy trio of Nick Mundy, Clint Gage, Michael Truly aremaking plenty of web waves.
The guys in cartoon form. From left to right, Michael Truly, Clint Gage, andNick Mundy.
Team Tiger Awesome has lampooned everything from TMZ ...
the Lost finale.

Editor's Note: Former Houstonian and High School for the Performing and Visual Arts grad Ellie Knaus is now an actress and writer in Los Angeles. She will file periodic reports about the entertainment industry and life in LA for CultureMap.

Were you one of the millions of people who caught: “L*O*S*T — The Last 10 Seconds of Lost”? I’m not talking about the season finale on ABC.

I’m referring to Team Tiger Awesome’s series of online comedy sketches that created fever pitch buzz in the weeks leading up to the primetime finale. It garnered the attention of The Huffington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Deadline Hollywood, and TV Guide. It has drawn more than THREE MILLION hits thus far.

Who are the men behind the new media magic?

Team Tiger Awesome is a three-guy comedy group that writes, produces, shoots, performs in, and edits its own material. And yes, moms and dads, they are actually making a living doing it.

Meet Clint Gage, the level-headed dude next door: Michael Truly, the artistic swashbuckler (No, seriously. He lives on a boat); and Nick Mundy, the wrecking ball of fun. They have hundreds of followers on Facebook, Twitter, and the blogging site Tumblr. They tackle all formats: Web series, comedy shorts, television, and film. I’ve even seen them perform a radio play.

How did this Los Angeles based comedy team form? They met by way of Texas.

Let’s flashback to 1992. Nick Mundy, age 11, and Clint Gage, age 10, live on the same block in Spring. They aren’t friends. Mundy invites Gage to participate in a neighborhood game of football. Gage, sensible even at the age of 10, politely declines; tackle football on cement doesn’t interest him. Eventually, after weeks of Mundy’s badgering, Gage caves in and agrees to play.

The game ends when a kid gets tackled into a mailbox and breaks his collarbone. As a result, Gage spends his wonder years terrified of Mundy. In the summer of 2001, Gage walks into CompUSA as a printer representative and reconnects with Mundy, who happens to work there. The guys bond over a common interest: Filmmaking. Mundy graduates from University of St. Thomas. Gage studies at Texas Christian University where he collaborates with Michael Truly on his senior film project. Mundy parties with the guys at TCU on the weekends.

The Texas stars align and you have Team Tiger Awesome.

Well, not exactly. Mundy moved to New York for a year, and when the three finally reconfigured in Los Angeles, they hung out and drank a lot of beer. It wasn’t until the winter of 2006 that their collaborative juices started flowing and they shot a trailer for an upcoming party. They posted it online, and by lunch the next day, the trailer had more than 500 hits.

“So, that got us thinking,” says Mundy, “maybe we should do something, you know, actually worthwhile.”

It’s been a very big year for Team Tiger Awesome. In addition to the success of “L*O*S*T,” they were invited to host an episode of AtomTV on Comedy Central. Their latest comedy sketch "Lil' TMZ" premieres this week on Cracked.com.

I’ve worked with the guys a half dozen times and I’m always impressed by their laser beam focus. They are 100 percent invested in their work 100 percent of the time. Plus, they have the imagination and skill to stretch their budget. We shot the James Cameron spoof “Avatar’d” in their living room. It has racked up over 225,000 hits on Comedy Central’s Internet portal Atom.com. I’m excited to see what they’ll do with a feature film budget.

And while TeamTigerAwesome is based in Los Angeles, Gage and Mundy are Houston boys at heart. Clint daydreams about the original Ninfa’s Restaurant on Navigation, just south of downtown.

“Get the fajitas with chicken a la Berry,” he insists. “It’s floating in butter and every kind of hot ass pepper you can imagine. Spectacular.” And don’t get them started on their beloved Astros. They spend the baseball season cursing their TV set, Miller Lite cans strewn at their feet.

Watch Clint Gage as a contestant on Wipeout Tuesday at 7 p.m. on ABC 13. Follow Ellie Knaus' blog at myprincipality.com and twitter @EllieInLa. Check out her work with TeamTigerAwesome at ellieknaus.com.

See Team Tiger Awesome's latest comedy sketch "Lil TMZ':

It's the Lil' TMZ Playset! -- powered by Cracked.com

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Movie Review

Star TV producer James L. Brooks stumbles with meandering movie Ella McCay

Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Emma Mackey in Ella McCay.

The impact that writer/director/producer James L. Brooks has made on Hollywood cannot be understated. The 85-year-old created The Mary Tyler Moore Show, personally won three Oscars for Terms of Endearment, and was one of the driving forces behind The Simpsons, among many other credits. Now, 15 years after his last movie, he’s back in the directing chair with Ella McCay.

The similarly-named Emma Mackey plays Ella, a 34-year-old lieutenant governor of an unnamed state in 2008 who’s on the verge of becoming governor when Governor Bill (Albert Brooks) gets picked to be a member of the president’s Cabinet. What should be a happy time is sullied by her needy husband, Ryan (Jack Lowden), her agoraphobic brother, Casey (Spike Fearn), and her perpetually-cheating father, Eddie (Woody Harrelson).

Despite the trio of men competing to bring her down, Ella remains an unapologetic optimist, an attitude bolstered by her aunt Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), her assistant Estelle (Julie Kavner), and her police escort, Trooper Nash (Kumail Nanjiani). The film follows her over a few days as she navigates the perils of governing, the distractions her family brings, and the expectations being thrust upon her by many different people.

Brooks, who wrote and directed the film, is all over the place with his storytelling. What at first seems to be a straightforward story about Ella and her various issues soon starts meandering into areas that, while related to Ella, don’t make the film better. Prime among them are her brother and father, who are given a relatively small amount of screentime in comparison to the importance they have in her life. This is compounded by a confounding subplot in which Casey tries to win back his girlfriend, Susan (Ayo Edebiri).

Then there’s the whole political side of the story, which never finds its focus and is stuck in the past. Though it’s never stated explicitly, Ella and Governor Bill appear to be Democrats, especially given a signature program Ella pushes to help mothers in need. But if Brooks was trying to provide an antidote to the current real world politics, he doesn’t succeed, as Ella’s full goals are never clear. He also inexplicably shows her boring her fellow lawmakers to tears, a strange trait to give the person for whom the audience is supposed to be rooting.

What saves the movie from being an all-out train wreck is the performances of Mackey and Curtis. Mackey, best known for the Netflix show Sex Education, has an assured confidence to her that keeps the character interesting and likable even when the story goes downhill. Curtis, who has tended to go over-the-top with her roles in recent years, tones it down, offering a warm place of comfort for Ella to turn to when she needs it. The two complement each other very well and are the best parts of the movie by far.

Brooks puts much more effort into his female actors, including Kavner, who, even though she serves as an unnecessary narrator, gets most of the best laugh lines in the film. Harrelson is capable of playing a great cad, but his character here isn’t fleshed out enough. Fearn is super annoying in his role, and Lowden isn’t much better, although that could be mostly due to what his character is called to do. Were it not for the always-great Brooks and Nanjiani, the movie might be devoid of good male performances.

Brooks has made many great TV shows and movies in his 60+ year career, but Ella McCay is a far cry from his best. The only positive that comes out of it is the boosting of Mackey, who proves herself capable of not only leading a film, but also elevating one that would otherwise be a slog to get through.

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Ella McCay opens in theaters on December 12.

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