MATT PIEDMONT AND THE SPOILS OF BABYLON
With so much short, bite-sized comedic content at your fingertips, it’s a rare experience to find something that is not only wickedly funny, but also artfully done. Funny or Die, a little comedy website once hidden to the masses, has joined IFC to bring the best jab at all of the art films and pompous directing I had to sit through for years in film school. The Spoils of Babylon is the film lover’s film and the comedy lover’s comedy, combining a passion for the greatest years in cinema with quite possibly the funniest cast ever assembled. This episodic mini-series spans multiple decades and genres of cinema, with extra points for its humor and sass. SLUG was lucky enough not only to get a sneak peak of the fully released mini-series, but also to pick the brain of one of its co-creators, Matt Piedmont. The project came together, as all the best do, in a completely serendipitous and out of the blue fashion. Piedmont was visiting an old and new bookstore in Portland, Oregon, and noticed that they had many of the old ’70s tomes “that were hardbound and huge, like three phonebooks glued together,” he says, with over-the-top, illustrative dust jackets. “I just started laughing out, loud and just as a joke, like we do all the time, I said, Oh we should do a mini-series like this. You know, like a Thornberg’s mini-series —fake one— and we should call it Spoils of Babylon,” Piedmont says, “I was trying to add my own title that was grandiose but seemingly meaningless.”