Last weekend’s press junket for Where the Wild Things Are was like an extended debutante ball– a strangely rigid and somewhat superfluous ceremony by which a crowd of adult strangers decide when a girl has become a woman. To help shepherd their baby into the world, Spike and his band of cohorts fielded questions from a deluge of revolving journalists for three days in a dimly lit nook of the Beverly Hilton.
With many of these interviews lasting no longer than 3-4 minutes, it’s unsurprising that variation was scarce. “What was it like working with Spike?” became a nauseating refrain in the endless hours of Max Records’ interrogations. Sometimes there’d be curveballs, like when a bald Scotsman posed pseudo-esoteric questions dancing around the periphery of awkwardness, like this one: “Where does Spike end and Adam begin?” On the other end of the odd question spectrum, we scratched our heads as a spaced out Japanese lady muttered almost (but not quite) poetic non sequiturs about Spike being a 39-year-old man in a 9-year-old boy’s wolf suit. Spike, I have to say– you handled it all with admirable charm.
At least the set-up was comfortable– Warner Brothers hired the fantastic crew behind Space 1520’s pop-up shop to construct a fantasy haven of barren branches and dry leaves for the occasion. Led by Stephen Hill (seen above, sticking his face in a Wild Things comic foreground), the pop-up boys whipped together a glorious woodsy environment that magically obscured the sterile conference rooms playing host to this unique set of alien interactions.
When I swung by on the press event’s final afternoon, lunch was a fancy buffet (a contradiction that Shawn Records reveled in) where Spike’s dad, Arthur, told us how he’d posed as a studio executive during several interviews, until his cover was blown by an intrepid journalist who recognized him as the elder Jonze. Max loaded up on exotic desserts before heading over to Catherine Keener’s place for a sleepover with her son, Clyde, and everyone parted ways as the ceremony finally came to an end. Where the Wild Things Are had undergone the media’s rigorous rite of passage and was finally on her way to the world at large.
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Fine work with the disposable camera!