I finally watched The Sweatbox

...and I don't think it was particularly good, and it just made me want to watch The Emperor's New Groove again!!!

Look - I'm glad I finally took the time to watch The Sweatbox. It's been recommended to me many times in the past, but it doesn't at all resemble the movie friends and acquaintances have described to me over the last decade or so.

The way I heard it, this was a documentary with unique insights into a uniquely crushing and terrible production. The conditions of making the movie were nightmarish, a mountain of material was left on the cutting room floor, and there's executives crawling everywhere like roaches. Or something. I was under the impression that I would see executives immiserating a film production.

What I saw instead was something a lot less focused - a kind of badly-framed documentary which managed to catch a lot of people saying, perhaps, a lot of very vulnerable and even embarrassing stuff. It completely lacks the connective tissue it would need to frame those vulnerable moments productively. It's neither close enough to production to answer my questions about how the rewrite really went down... nor far enough away from the production to put these people's big emotions into context.

It also completely fails to capture how most of the creatives felt once the film had shipped - sometimes without their involvement, because they got so sad about the reboot, they quit. Because it's lacking this connective tissue to narrativize their decisions, grief, or even regrets, the whole thing felt extremely sanitized to me. Nothing at all like what my friends have been saying!!

I suspect that the biggest reason for this is that most of the people I've spoken to about this movie do not care much about The Emperor's New Groove, and either didn't see it before watching The Sweatbox, or watched it in order to watch The Sweatbox. On the other hand, I am a hardcore The Emperor's New Groove Liker - when I saw this as a kid, probably age 11, it changed my life completely.

It has some of the sharpest comedy writing of any Disney film. In particular, it is full-on "two guys yammering" type dialogue, which is my favorite kind of comedic voice performance, and something I've tried to capture many times in my own work. It also has some genuinely phenomenal vocal performances... especially from Eartha Kitt and Patrick Warburton, the two villains. Furthermore, with its recurring VHS pause motifs and frequent fourth-wall-breaking, it was probably the first "meta" storytelling I'd seen in my life. My baby brain was blown wide open by this movie.

Most of all, it reminded me of my then-favorite book, The Pirates' Mixed-Up Voyage, which is this gnarled-up card tower of self-referential jokes and wordplay. It formed the original template for my sense of humor when I was six or seven years old. It's very odd how I can trace the exact lineage of works which taught me "what comedy is"... but I can, and these two things were both in it. TENG worked for me because it has the same hyperverbal quality I adored in that book (and still try to use in my own work today).

So when I'm watching The Sweatbox, I'm not watching a train wreck - I am watching the troubled development history of a movie I've probably seen thirty times. So I'm never gonna be the person who says "I have to watch The Emperor's New Groove so that I can watch famed documentary The Sweatbox." For me, that is very fortunately impossible.

The thing that surprised me the most: the material left on the cutting room floor is, as far as you can tell in this documentary, dogshit. I got the sense from friends that the amount of material the team was forced to throw out was a tragedy - and it was, they should never have been allowed to get that far with it - but the scraps we see are just unambiguously bad. Nevertheless, the majority of the movie consists of the staff grieving that material. In a few cases, they even leave the production because they were so dedicated to the thrown-out plot that they can't get behind the movie's new direction.

There's one example I'm going to return to over and over again: the original film's portrayal of its villain, Yzma. Yzma is still the final film's villain, but she had musical numbers in the first version of the movie which were thrown out. We see Eartha Kitt, her voice actress, and her animator, Andreas Deja, openly grieving this material and describing it as much more "deep" than the material in the final film. The crazy thing to me, though, is that the Yzma material we see from the original is just miles and miles more sexist, obvious, and boring than the still fairly sexist material she got in the final film! Her big solo musical number was just Yzma singing that she was old and decrepit and therefore hated the young and the beautiful. It seems like really bad stuff!

I don't think I would have liked it anywhere near as much as I loved her role in the final film, where she's much sillier, more lighthearted, and... well... not exactly a spotlessly depicted female villain, but definitely an insanely well-written one. Eartha Kitt's performance is stunning, and she has monologues in the final film which I literally performed as monologues in theater class when I was in middle school. I loved Yzma's writing to death when I was a kid. I used to recite nearly all her lines out loud in an empty room while watching the film. This, specifically, is the comedic writing that really changed my life. When I got to college, another woman and I both bonded over the fact that we could each recite this monologue from memory at the drop of a hat:

I wouldn't have liked her cut musical number at all! It's not deep! It's just cringe!

Throughout the documentary, we get to see people expressing grief like this for material which, to me, is just obviously inferior to the version of the film they actually shipped. Some people's grief makes perfect sense to me. Roger Allers, for example, was very obviously the champion of the canceled version, and very graciously and generously talks through his grief with the camera in a way I really appreciated. Sting, too, is clearly very frustrated that the rewrite cut nearly all his material from the film.

But when I'm watching this doc, I'm just thinking... oh my god, these musical numbers don't sound very good! It's not a generous thought, but it's kind of hard not to have if you actually like the movie they shipped!

The grief the director and Sting are expressing should probably be experienced more as a commentary on the difficulty of the creative process and the tragedy involved in any project reboot - strong feelings expressed in the heat of the moment - rather than some genuine proof that revision processes or even stakeholder processes are fundamentally fallen and pointless. I tend to see my peers taking a lot of anger toward executives away from this movie... but as someone who's been on canceled games before, this grief was much more mundane to me. This kind of thing really, truly, happens all the time in entertainment. You can build processes to mitigate it, but you're always gonna feel this way when your stuff is cut.

It doesn't mean that nobody should be giving you notes to cut it, though.

At the end of the movie, one exec admits that his negative feedback should probably have come way sooner... which I agree with... but just mentions that he was trying to protect the germ of the idea in its infancy. Where the documentary fails is that it doesn't ask him any further followup questions.

The thing I'm really complaining about is this documentary's inability to ask follow-up questions. It gets a lot of mileage from following up with Allers, but nobody in the movie ever bothers to ask or explain why, really the critical negative feedback arrived late from executives. How unusual was the very very long leash they put Allers on after his work on The Lion King? Can we get some honesty here on what was going on politically where they let him tread water for so long before killing his vision? Why was preproduction so borked on this movie? Why was Sting writing songs before the plot was locked? There's more answers to these questions on Wikipedia than in the documentary.

Because we're missing these questions, we're not really getting a narrative about Disney process - just a collage of momentary impressions from different moments in production. In fact, I think the documentary's scattershot, inconsistent perspective makes it kind of hard for me to learn the things I want to learn about executive note processes in general! "Why did you give your negative notes so late?" would have told us so much. Did anyone ever ask? Why or why not? Did they even know to ask at all?

What I think people are reacting to in this movie is not the clarity of its vision into a creative process, but the way that we get to see a couple people deliver VERY hot takes mid-stride. Unfortunately, these hot takes are often edited together kind of weirdly - sometimes for shock! In particular, I'm thinking of the odd section where so many Eartha Kitt interviews are edited together that she starts off grieving the detail lost in the original version of Yzma, who she thinks was made shallower in the final version... then ends the montage praising Yzma's new direction completely, highlighting her simplicity in particular. It's a contradiction the doc never digs into. Why didn't anyone ask her to talk through her changing experience of the character in a narrative way, from her own perspective? Did it even occur to them?

Here's some specifics I would have liked to learn. Some of this stuff is actually answered on Wikipedia, in a way that makes it clear how little the documentary communicated:

What specifically was the best by beat run of the original plot? How busy was it really? There's one scene where we see a younger man in a green shirt pitching the new story... did he write it? Can we get an interview with him? How many new versions of the story were there? How did they test them against one another? Can we see the full list of any goals or pillars or reference lists established to drive the work on the new plot? What were the rules of the rewrite story room, who was actually moderating it, and how did they do that work? How long did the rewrite take and how did they run it concurrently with character design and animation to hit the 1.5 year extended timeline?

This movie seems to give people who don't work in entertainment a very acute horror that I simply cannot feel. Instead I've come away feeling like its perspective wasn't close enough to teach me what I wanted to learn... but simultaneously not distant enough, in the end, to accurately reflect on the story editorial process. It feels like it's also showing a truly insane amount of seething Sting, which is great, but it sometimes feels like him being the only honest participant in the documentary is pulling attention away from the places where the actual action was taking place. This is because the movie was made by Sting's wife!!!!

What I come away with in the end is that Trudie Styler, who's married to Sting, wasn't the right person to make this documentary. She doesn't even try to ask the right questions, she doesn't achieve the right perspective, she doesn't narrativize much of what she's capturing in a productive way, and she has a tendency to ship details that make the production look bad rather than details which illuminate how the production actually worked. Which is wild, because she has a ton of experience making films as a director and producer herself. I was surprised she didn't capture this stuff.

That said... she was only able to make this documentary because Sting required it in his contract. She was the only person who could have made it. So there's no universe where we actually get a spicy and honest process-oriented documentary about how Disney handles a crisis. There is no world where I like The Sweatbox, because there's no world where it's good.

One of the reasons I'm so passionate about this - besides the fact that I actually like TENG - is that I've gotten exec notes myself in games, and I feel like I would have plenty of interesting things to say about stakeholder processes! Surely these Disney guys would have, too. The relationship between a creative lead and the stakeholders who hold the checkbook is always complex. Sometimes, stakeholders do give really bad advice. Sometimes they give crucial advice. It really, really depends on the process - how the team gets that advice, how the team's leaders transmute it into actionable goals, and how or even whether the team is allowed to push back on any of it. Being a good editor is about creating an environment where power dynamics feel suspended, and writers are pressured to improve while also feeling the safety to push back. I did this for a living. It's hard to do and worth investigating closely!

From the view of a games gremlin who has gotten my own exec notes many times in the past: the exec notes in this film seem way better than anything you get in games! They seem called-for, helpful (if awkwardly phrased - the scene where they argue about Pacha's family is wild), and in the end correct! So if I agree with the notes, then I want to know more about where the process broke down.

Immediately after finishing The Sweatbox, I just went and watched The Emperor's New Groove again. I'd spent the entire time I was watching the documentary just dying to watch it. Maybe this was time 30, or 40, or whatever... I've seen it so many times that an audio file of the dialogue is playing in my head at the same pace it's playing in the movie. This whole thing is so familiar to me, it's part of my DNA in the same way that certain moments in Monty Python are. Back in pre-smartphone culture, when being a preteen nerd meant annoyingly quoting movies, this is one of the ones I quoted!

This time around, I did spend a lot of time reflecting on how - for better or for worse - they took a movie which was trying to get super into a Burbank understanding of Incan mythology [derogatory] and turned it into a familiar, deeply American, Bugs Bunny style madcap cartoon - complete with diner scenes, a 50s housewife-ass subplot, and characters made out of rubber bouncing off of walls and trampolines. In the last year and a half available to them, they retreated to territory they clearly knew better and felt more comfortable in: screwball comedy, Flinstones-ass family dynamics, big brass band goofball score, metacomedy sequences, and "just two guys yammering" dialogue.

Was this really a retreat to safety? Why did it work so well for them? Who proposed it? How did they arrive at it? You can find some of this stuff on Wikipedia, but it's not in the documentary I saw... because there's no universe where this documentary knows how to ask those questions.