The Tarantino Story, Part 3- “Bounty Law”

In our last episode, I told the story of how I was lucky enough to get to meet Quentin Tarantino on the set of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” to deliver the original prop art I did for him. During our conversation he told me about his idea to do a parody of the fictitious “Bounty Law” TV show that Leonardo DiCaprio‘s character was supposed to have starred in back in the late 50’s early 60’s. I told him we should pitch that to MAD and see what happens.

What happened was the folks at MAD thought it was a great idea, so in March of this year we started working with the team at Quentin’s production company Magnum Opus on putting together a parody of “Bounty Law”. This would be no small task, since there was no actual TV show to parody. Quentin gave us a pretty detailed description of what the show would have been about, and what the character of “Rick Cahill” would have been like, but with no actual show to watch it would be a challenge. One thing we were all on the same page about, we wanted to make it seem like this parody was created in the early 60’s when the TV show was supposed to have been on the air and popular, and we’d pretend like MAD either never printed it and had found it in a drawer somewhere recently, or we were reprinting it from 1962. It was around this time that Suzy and the staff pitched the idea to use the cover art I did for the movie for the cover of the actual magazine. DC management gave that the green light, and the idea of doing a more complete “retro issue” was starting to take shape.

To write the script, MAD tapped emmy-nominated writer and producer Andrew Secunda. Andrew has written for film and TV, and is known for “The Other Guys” (2010), “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and “The Goldbergs”, among many other things. The folks at Magnum Opus invited us over to their studio to see footage from the film to help us out on the parody. That’s how, on April 16th of this year, Andrew, MAD editor Allie Goertz, MAD Art Director Suzy Hutchinson and I visited Quentin’s production studio in Hollywood.

You’d assume Quentin Tarantino’s production studio to be some glamorous, glass-enclosed playground of movie magic. You’d be wrong. It’s an unassuming little house in a residential area of Hollywood. There we met several people working on the movie (no Quentin, though) and they showed us several black and white clips from the film. No spoilers here, but if you’ve seen the movie what we saw was a much expanded version of the scene from the TV show with Leo and Micheal Madsen as a sheriff, the interview scene with Leo and Brad, and the “ad” scene you see in the film’s credits with Leo. Visually these were very helpful for me, and it likely helped Andrew get a better idea of the basic feel of the show.

Afterward the MAD crew discussed our thoughts about how to approach this over an early lunch. We were all in agreement that, without a real show to spoof, it would be best to make fun of the basic genre of the TV “oater” western, and Andrew would work some of the specifics from the scenes we saw into the story. I definitely planned on drawing Madsen’s character:

I told the story of my set visit and Quentin’s favorite panel from a MAD parody that had a non-sequitur cameo by Lucy from Peanuts, so we all knew Lucy would make an appearance in the parody:

After lunch we headed back to the MAD offices where Suzy pulled out some classic MAD parodies of westerns from that era, including “Bananza” (“Bonanaz”) from MAD #73, Sept 1962 (Earl Doud/Lou Silverstone & Mort Drucker) and “The Virginiaham” (“The Virginian”) from MAD #99, Dec 1965 (Lou Silverstone & Mort Drucker). Since the idea was to make it look like that era’s visuals, we went over the layouts, how the margins were handled, the fonts, etc. Suzy planned on also doing a retro table of contents, letters page, etc.

Back in the studio, I took a closer look at the parody art of the early 60’s in MAD, mostly done then by Mort, to see what kind of look and materials were used. Back then, Mort mostly used a type of paper called “dou-shade” for these jobs. Dou-shade was a heavy bristol sort of board that had diagonal line patterns in it that were invisible until the board was treated with one or both of two different chemical washes. There was a 45% right angled line and a 45% left angled line. When you used a paintbrush to brush on chemical #1, the right angled lines appeared where the chemical touched the board. If you brushed on chemical 2, the left angled lines appeared. Layering both chemicals on top of each other and you got a crossed pattern of both lines. This allowed the artist to create different values and effects but kept the art “camera ready” with no need to create a halftone. Mort would draw and ink on the duo-shade board, then use the chemical washes for value effects.

I wanted to create the same effect with my work for this parody. However Graphix stopped making the duo-shade paper around 2009 or so. I needed to create the same look digitally. It SHOULD have been easy, but I screwed it up.

Warning! Shop Talk Ahead: What I did was scan in a panel from MAD that used the duo-shade technique, and then created a pattern of lines the same thickness and the same distance apart on a layer in PhotoShop. I did one right angled and then duplicated it as a left angled pattern. To make it more organic, I used a splatter brush and some filters to make the lines a little imperfect and broken up here and there so it wouldn’t look too slick and mechanical. I also reduced the opacity slightly to give it a faded effect. Then I just painted the areas I wanted to have the patterns appear with solid gray on my art, and turned that into a selection, inverted it, and deleted the results on each layer of pattern. The results were two different patterns that would sometimes overlap for the cross pattern:

That should have worked fine, but where I messed up was the scaling. In order to get good and close to make the line patterns accurate, I scanned those MAD panels in at 600 DPI. However I was doing the art at 300 DPI, and I did not properly resize the patterns to compensate. So, when I dropped the patterns in, they were twice as close together as they should have been, and the lines twice as thin. This made the pattern too tight, and the effect was more like a “ben day” dot pattern. It looks okay, but it was not the effect I wanted. By the time I printed out some samples to have a look the piece was done and the deadline too close to redo it. Oh well.

I allowed myself to channel Mort Drucker a bit on this one, where I usually try to keep his influences to a minimum in my work. There are a few hands drawn in this parody that are more or less Mort hands. However you might see more Wally Wood than Mort in a lot of these panels, especially the secondary characters:

Now that the issue is out, when you see it the first 12 pages have a spot on retro 60’s look, complete with vintage ads, table of contents, letters page, etc. Peter Kuper played along with a dead-on Antonio Prohias style homage for his Spy vs. Spy. Suzy and the MAD art crew really outdid themselves with the visuals. Everything is picture perfect, right down to the fonts, the typeset marginal jokes, the slightly skewed print job on some pages and a realistically yellowed page color with the browning edges. A virtuoso job!

This whole process was a total blast. Andrew did a fantastic job on the script, and it was a joy to draw. If this was among the last of my work for MAD, it is a good way to go out.

SHAMELESS HUCKSTERING DEPT: I just added both a print of the cover and signed copies of MAD #9 to the Studio Store. Get ’em while they are hot.