Filmmaker Lance Bangs has built an impressive resumé working behind the camera. Since starting in the early 1990s, Bangs has directed music videos for Sonic Youth and Arcade Fire, shot standup specials like David Cross‘ Bigger and Blackerer, and served as a camera operator for MTV’s Jackass. Now, with the launch of Vice Media‘s new cable network Viceland, Bangs is helming Flophouse, a documentary series chronicling the underground comedy scene in various cities across the country. As each episode travels to a new location, the story is told from inside one of the titular flophouses, where up-and-coming comedians live and work together, and always seem willing to offer a couch to their fellow comedians out on the road. Bangs recently spoke with us on what brought Flophouse to fruition, as well as its role in Viceland as a whole.
Your new show, Flophouse, really drops the viewer right in the middle of this underground comedy world that a lot of people aren’t going to be familiar with. How did this all come about?
I spent a lot of time in the ’90s and 2000s traveling with bands in the underground music scene, and there’d be these regional scenes with things happening in Minneapolis or Austin, Texas, or Athens. Then, in the mid ’90s I started doing things with the guys from Mr. Show, shooting stuff for David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, and would tour with them. So, I’d see this rise of younger, weird, interesting people going into comedy rather than indie rock, and I started putting on events at comedy festivals where I’d bring in performers I was interested in, and show clips of things that I’d made that never got released, or that we got shut down by. Through that I met a circle of younger comedians from other parts of the country, and I was fascinated that you could have a regional scene in Denver or New Orleans, and that you didn’t having to run to New York or L.A. right away. People were kind of living in shared apartments or group houses, and there’s a circuit where people would just crash on a couch or a mattress on the floor, then, in turn, when they came through town, you could help them put on shows.
[Later], I went to go visit Solomon Georgio in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, and at the time his roommates were Eric Dadourdian and James Austin Johnson, and there’s a comedian I like from Seattle named Danielle Radford who was crashing on a mattress. She’d just been hit by a bus, and was waiting to get her settlement from the city figured out and doing physical therapy there on that mattress. Then, I came back a couple days later, and this kind of striking woman, Marcella, who I think had came out of Houston, was crashing there. Just the turnover rate of people that wanted to come down to an open mic or do comedy in Los Angeles, or try and pitch ideas for things, that they’d just sort of have this open policy of supporting their peers while letting them hang out and socialize. So, we’d meet people at one shoot in San Francisco that were visiting from, let’s say Denver, and I knew I wanted to go film the rest of the world that was around them in Denver.
Did this idea just sit in the back of your mind before an opportunity came about to develop it?
In the fall of 2014 we started secretly building this TV network. Spike Jonze is the creative director and this really sharp character Eddie Moretti, who’s someone I respect and have worked with over the years, was running things. We got asked to start figuring out how we could build a TV network together, and we had this incredibly fun process where we’d try to figure out what you’d put on at 10 o’clock on a Thursday? What do you do to fill all this time?
This was also something where we didn’t want to do things at first like reality TV or scripted, we wanted to go out and explore the world and find out what was important to people. What I thought about emotionally with the lives of the comedians I liked who were in their 20s and just starting to figure things out, and they have these communal situations where they support each other. I wanted to document and show that and then throw a big house party and have standup going on and showcase some of these people. Like you mentioned earlier, it’s not something you could assume other people knew existed, but it was something I wanted to find and discover, then show other people.
When you go city to city and move the production into these people’s actual houses, how much of the standup that ends up in an episode is curated by you?
The truth is, it’s definitely reflecting my personal taste. It’s the comedians I’m interested in. In any region or city, there are people doing more normal club material, whacky voices, or other things that don’t really excite me. So, I’m steering it towards the people I find most intriguing or the most interesting and booking them for the show. Then, once we started shooting in multiple cities, you realize that if this is the one time we’re going to go to New Orleans and everyone that’s trying to do interesting comedy there, we’d make the show longer and allow more people an opportunity to jump up and do time. We’d do two shows a night, basically. Then we could meet more people and involve more of the community, getting a larger sense of things, rather than just booking three to five comedians.
Going into each city knowing your preferred regional comedians, what kind of work goes into finding the actual houses to film in?
It’s been a great mix of my own friendships within the comedy world — a friend of mine, Jen, who knows the comedy world. She lives in Portland and has been very helpful. There was also the woman who booked the Bridgetown Comedy Festival, who had seen everyone’s audition tapes and knew who was out there trying to do stuff and knew who lived in what part of the country. Her name was Charlene. We started talking to them about, say, if we go to New Orleans, what are the places to go to, or who are the most interesting people that have a group house or a place to go to and film in. Ideally, it is a place that people do existing shows at, you don’t want it to the first time they’ve ever had a show there.
Also, there’s a guy named Sam in Denver, that, in the way that Black Flag had things figured out in the early ’80s and would share that information with Hüsker Dü and The Minutemen about how you could go play this pizza place in St. Louis and they’d pay you 200 bucks, he’s sort of figured that out for contemporary comedy touring. And there’s people that have learned from him, like some of the great comedians in L.A. that are younger, who were very open about helping us with “Oh, we gotta find this guy and put him on the show in Atlanta.”
What kind of creative freedom were you afforded in conceiving a new show on an entirely new network?
There really is a tone that Spike’s been able to infuse throughout the things that we’re making. Things are driven from a sense of humanity and curiosity about the world, and what it feels like to be alive right now from all these different perspectives. So, in the edit, that would become more important to focus on what it feels like to be these people. How much does it cost to rent here? How do you earn that money each month? What does the kitchen look like, and how long can you crash in this kinda place before getting burned out and over it. We tried to have as much like that into the piece as possible, rather than design backdrops and edit a five-minute chunk that you might get on another outlet.
You’ve directed a lot of standup specials, which obviously plays well into making Flophouse. How has your experience with music videos factored in?
I think that on each shoot I’m kinda curious about new ways of approaching things visually. I taught myself to fly drones, and was flying those around at most of these shoots, getting aerial coverage, then dropping down to shoot the performance. Then seeing what I could do to walk small, hand-held cameras through the crowds to make it feel like you were a partygoer. I think when you see good parties in movies or TV, it never feels like what it’s like to be in the room, and I genuinely feel like there’s moments in some of these episodes of Flophouse that feels like to be stuck sitting on a couch while there’s people all around you.
Anything big and exciting in the upcoming season you want to mention?
I would say one of the things I’m excited about is that a lot of the people I discovered doing this show are now finding ways to do other shows with Vice. We tried some stuff with Curtis Cooke, with Clare O’Kane, Brandon Wordel, Josh Androsky, a lot of these people that turned up in the footage who are great, interesting characters, that when we started shooting they didn’t have representation or managers and hadn’t been on TV before. Now, we’re finding ways to make more things with them, and maybe explore the world through them.
Flophouse premieres Thursday, March 3 at 10:30 p.m. ET on Viceland.
