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“MYSTERY TEAM” director, Dan Eckman
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 11:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City]
Our movie Mystery Team is the first full-length feature film by DERRICK Comedy, a sketch-comedy group I’ve been a part of for four years now. Our sketch videos have been viewed more than 100 million times online. We never tried to figure out “what plays on the Internet,” and when we did have shorts that became popular, we never tried to figure out what made them popular in terms of universal truths about Internet viewership. We viewed YouTube as a content delivery system and looked at our popularity on YouTube as a sign that there’s an audience out there for our dark, weird ideas. We basically tried to do what we’d want to do in any medium: write what we find funny and shoot it as well as we can.
Mystery Team is the story of three Encyclopedia Brown-style kid crime solvers attempting to prove themselves as real detectives by solving a double murder. It’s also the story of five people who came up doing sketch comedy on YouTube trying to prove themselves as real filmmakers by shooting a movie that harkens back to the Amblin genre comedies of the 1980s while maintaining our specific sense of humor. We feel like we’re in a unique position. While a lot of the industry is trying to work the Internet into their equations, we’re wanting to head in the other direction: toward feature-length films screened in brick-and-mortar movie theaters.
