Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where we’re unpacking snack attacks, and living life to the max. I’m the writer rhyming for no reason, Jon O’Guin, and today’s post is…hyper unstructured. To be honest with you, I didn’t really have an idea for this, until I was actually trying to actively DISassociate from the blog: one of the things going and seeing Dune reminded me of was that food-related stuff has consumed a LOT of my mental energy and time over the last few years, leading to me just…not getting involved in stuff. I’ve been reading less fiction, watching fewer movies and TV, and I think it’s part of why I’ve been having a rough couple months: I used to describe myself as “a creature of narrative, a consumer of stories”. So, in my weekly goals session (which I have almost every Wednesday at the moment), I set myself the goal of “consume three pieces of narrative media”: Read a book, watch a movie, whatever. Which I didn’t get around to STARTING until Sunday when I caught Dune. So I quickly had to cram in some stuff Tuesday night after I hammered out the post  13 hours before my next session. So I decided to watch some Netflix, and finally see what Schitt’s Creek is all about. And proceeded to knock out 4 episodes that evening.

A little, Moira, but to be fair, that’s probably the sleep deprivation.

And while I was watching it, I was taken slightly out of the show by a detail of the casting I had learned from some trivia listicle about it a while back: that Twyla, the waitress at the local café/diner, is the daughter/sister of Eugene and Dan Levy, respectively.

“Daughter/Sister” is a disconcerting thing for me to write, but I assure you, it was only because I was tired.

And while I was being amused by that, it triggered another memory: the food. Food in TV shows is almost never actually eaten on camera. And sure enough, in the first 4 episodes, despite going to the café multiple times, we never see the Roses eat. So I figured we’d talk about why that is, and a couple big counter-examples.

What Tangled Ribs We Clean

So, why don’t people typically eat on camera? The answer is very simple: because it’s too much of a hassle, and they don’t want to get anyone sick.

One of the things that’s sometimes easy to forget when watching a show is that temporally, TV shows are often Frankenstein-esque creations, cobbled together from scenes and shots that might have fairly little to do with each other in terms of when they were recorded. The last scene of an episode, or even a SEASON, could be the first thing shot. They might take Person A’s take 35 of a line/reaction, and person B’s take 3, recorded an hour beforehand. That makes it hard to be consistent when recording and eating: you might not be in the same position as you were in an earlier shot, the food might have gotten cold, or it might be a continuity issue: there are shows where you can watch an actor’s plate get FULLER as the scene goes on, because they decided to use earlier shots for the back-half of a scene. Imagine this shot, from the scene we talked about with Chimaek:

Beautiful people eating food indifferently is a core principle of Korean TV.

Now imagine that it’s supposed to be her FIRST bite of the drum-stick: that means every time they re-take that shot, she needs a new drumstick to take a first bite out of.

This is, interestingly, a problem I’ve both run into, and been mostly able to avoid as a stage actor: food is often fake for us, but it CAN be real much more easily: live performances are almost only one-take affairs, so we don’t have to worry about the food position or assortment…but on the other hand, we often don’t have full kitchens or microwaves back stage, so it’s not uncommon for food to be cold.

And you can run into unforeseen difficulties, especially if things go a little weird. When I was in college, one time the stage manager forgot to get an apple for me to bite into in my scene. So instead, they went and grabbed a candy bar out of a vending machine. Which was fine, maybe even a little better, as I was playing Cupid and explaining how human food is so much more interesting than the same food the Gods eat on Olympus…except it was a Snickers bar. So I made my proclamation, took a bite, and then couldn’t continue my speech, because my mouth was now full of caramel. (I covered, pretending to be in bliss, and announcing (to warn my scene partner, and for a laugh) “ooh, the nougat”, as I took a couple seconds to chew and swallow before continuing.) And while that can infuse a lot of of-the-moment chemistry and excitement, it’s hard to work with in film, since it throws off the rhythm.

Now, does this mean actors NEVER eat? Of course not. There are too many movies FOCUSED on food for that to be true, but it does mean that the cast and crew have to be more aware of the effect and nuances the food will add, and build time/precautions for it. OR, they can NOT, and run into the stuff that happened in the following movies:

The Suicide Squad Almost Makes A Man Sick

John Cena, in The Suicide Squad (which is the newer one, the older one is Suicide Squad without the The) plays Peacemaker, a character best summarized by the director as “a douche-y, bro-y, Captain America”, a darkly comedic figure, whose schtick is that he’s a ruthless killer…and a fragile, easily manipulated idiot, with the classic line: “I cherish peace with all of my heart. I don't care how many men, women and children I kill to get it.”

A man without irony. Other than the hat, that’s pretty iron-y.

Anywho, at one point in the movie, he eats an empanada (a kind of Latin hand-pie. If you’ve never interacted with one, imagine a Hot Pocket with Mexican flavors) on camera. And then that scene took 31 takes. Meaning he had to eat 31 empanadas. For context, empanadas regularly clock in somewhere between 250 and 300 calories, meaning he had to eat around 9,000 calories. He noted that, while he didn’t throw up, he might have if they needed another take.

Who Knew All This Cocaine Would Lead to Bad Decisions

A similar, but more intentional incident, occurred during filming of The Wolf of Wall Street. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a film about how Wall Street execs do a bunch of cocaine and  commit a bunch of crime, and how their hubris alienates them from their friends and loved ones, leaving them with no one…whose ending a lot of people forget because they make the “doing a lot of cocaine and committing a bunch of crime” part look REALLY FUN.

The classic “Don’t do this REALLY COOL thing” issue of moralizing.
"Sure, I made millions, and had decades of drug-fueled parties but-”
”Say no more, I am ALREADY investing in Shiba-coin.”

At one point in the film, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill (two of the male leads) have a physical fight, and according to Jonah, Leo, who is fitter than him, was a little rough during the scuffles, beating up Jonah.  To get revenge, Jonah kept intentionally flubbing a line during a scene where the two are eating sushi, forcing Leo to eat more of it. Now, the story gets told different ways: Martin Scorsese, the director, says he specifically advised them to NOT eat the sushi, given the number of takes he was going to need, and that Leo got sick after around 10 takes of eating the sushi anyway. Jonah says it took closer to 70-100 takes. (This has been corrected in some versions of the telling that over the course of the takes, Leo had to eat 70+ pieces of Yellowtail, which does sound more believable).

What everyone agrees is that Leo did in fact get sick, and had to ‘relieve himself’ into a nearby garbage can by the end of the day’s filming.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Like I said, I didn’t have a plan for this, and there are plenty of listicles you can find that talk about this to a greater extent. But I really felt I should have some third example, and I wanted one that played against the grain: so many of these stories are about the difficulty of eating food during movies: Diane Lane talks about how one of her movies, the food scenes felt like “algebra” or “trigonometry”, because they had to be so precise about the amount of food or drink in a scene, the angles of bites and so on so that when the shot was taken from a different angle, it matched what had happened before, etc.  So for something completely different: did you know Werner Herzog ate his own shoe once?

Werner Herzog, if you don’t know, is somehow the perfect example of how the “straight man” archetype can sometimes be the funniest and most interesting thing in a scene. Werner is a German filmmaker, with a notoriously distinct voice and speaking pattern. You may have seen him as “The Client” in the first season of The Mandalorian.

A man who spoke for millions.

He was also the villain in the first Jack Reacher movie, and  he does a fair amount of voice-work, based on his famously dry and nigh-apocalyptic pronouncements. Here’s a line of his discussing the jungles of Peru in a documentary about the difficulty of making one of his films:

“It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever... goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that God, if he exists has - has created in anger. It's the only land where - where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at - at what's around us there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban... novel... a cheap novel.”

Like I said, very fun guy.

Anyway, a few years before that quote, Werner ate (some of) one of his shoes. The specifics are contested, but the narrative goes like this: during the 70’s, Werner had made a new friend, an aspiring fellow film-maker named Errol Morris. Morris was, at the time, conducting a lot of various interviews and visits to sites for POTENTIAL films, but every time the two encountered each other, it was for a different movie…when the prior one had never been made. According to Tom Luddy, Werner then flippantly joked “If THIS movie ever gets made, I’ll eat my shoe.” (According to Morris, Werner never uttered the line, and what followed was a publicity stunt cooked up by Luddy, a previous instructor of Morris and associate of Herzog’s) Errol DID end up completing the film, called “Gates of Heaven”, about the actual BUSINESS of running pet cemetaries. And, following its completion and airing, Werner Herzog went to California, where he had Alice Waters, the queen of California’s culinary scene for the era, help him cook one of his leather shoes, which he ate live in front of an audience, explaining that the process was to help inspire potential young filmmakers in the audience: yes, filmmaking is hard. Yes, it might seem like a dumb idea. But people will come to see it. It will speak to people in ways you can’t understand. And it can even motivate people to do extreme things like eat their own shoe.

The recipe they came up with was “simmer for several hours with garlic and herbs”, which is…I feel, the most obvious recipe you could imagine. Though I did love the flair Herzog used when highlighting that he didn’t eat the sole of the shoe “because when one eats chicken, they throw the bones away”. Like, solid line.

Which is a fairly inspiring note to end this on, I guess, and speaks to the kind of base reason that any of the people involved do any of this: One of the explanations John Cena gave for eating the entire empanada in the take was to make future takes easier: they could avoid continuity issues, if he just ate the whole thing every time. Jonah and Leo would go on to be friends after Jonah’s prank. The day my apple was replaced, the show was being judged, and my improvised “the nougat” line was specifically complimented by the reviewers as a great moment of detail-focused writing that spoke to Cupid’s character as a reckless and self-indulgent twit…rather than, as it was, an actor quickly covering a technical issue. ‘We choose to make movies not because it is easy, but because it is hard’, as it were.

Was this anything? Who knows. The point is now YOU TOO are infected with the brain-worm to know that if a character is actually eating on screen, then the people involved are putting in a lot of extra work. If they’re not, that’s fine too: not every production can or SHOULD spare the time and money on it. Schitt’s Creek isn’t ABOUT the food: the café is a place for the family to be (at least in the first few episodes) trying to fit in somewhere they don’t belong: the booth is too small, the menus too big, their orders are pared down by their interfering family…it’s not important if Moira eats her egg whites and steamed spinach, it’s that she’s more comfortable there than she was in the first episode, and even MORE comfortable by the next one: it’s an early barometer for their growing acceptance of the town as the place they are, at least for now, stuck.

Anywho, liked the first 4 episodes, may check out more of it later this week, but THIS weekend is jam-packed with conflicts, so we’ll see.

MONDAY: WE MAKE FUSION PASTA: SOUTHWEST MEETS…TECHNICALLY ITALY, BUT MORE AUTHENTICALLY, LIKE, VIRGINIA.

THURSDAY: I JUST TOLD YOU ABOUT WERNER HERZOG EATING A SHOE. YOU THINK I HAVE A PLAN?