Paul Dinello is the titular boss of the movie version "Strangers With Candy" as director, but he is quick to credit co-creators Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert with the laugh fest that is his motion picture debut.
"We each bring something different to the table," said Dinello in a telephone interview, "Each of us has a strength. We put together loose scenarios for scenes, then we improvise in characters' voices. I can't imagine it working with any element missing."
Like Jerri Smart, Paul Dinello is a New Jersey native, from industrial Bayonne, across from Manhattan. Dinello credits his mother for his creative inspiration and his movie ambitions.
"My mother was a film fan with the oddest tastes," he reveals. "She would bring home Jean Genet movies on one hand and historical stuff like `Metropolis' on the other. "She kept a little black-and-white TV in the kitchen so we could watch movies without interruption. Imagine sitting and watching `Pulp Fiction' with your mother."
Dinello acknowledges that his loved "The Three Stooges" and Buster Keaton above all, but he also appreciated Kurosawa's Japanese classics at a very early age.
Dinello met Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert when they were all hired on the same August day in 1987 for Chicago's famed improvisational comedy troupe, Second City. They toured with the troupe for two years and began writing together. Their first television collaboration was "Exit 57," a sketch comedy series for HBO's Downtown Productions. The trio starred and received CableACE Awards for Best Writing, Performing and Comedy Series during the show's Comedy Central run from 1995 to 1996. Sedaris developed the character of Jerri in that series.
The movie version of "Strangers With Candy" was first seen at film festivals, but at Sundance 2005 that suddenly changed.
"It's got like a second life since we were picked up for distribution at Sundance," he reports. "We all like to take our pokes at the current administration, but I don't see this as a political film. We weren't out to make fun of any specific group. We just wanted people to laugh."
