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Almost a decade in the making, Backpack Picnic has undergone many permutations and seen many places to become what they are now: a sketch comedy troupe comprised of Mitch Baker, David Bewley, Rene Pinnell, Jeremy Lamb, and Shannon McCormick. In addition to their online show at ON Networks.com, they’ll also be preforming at this year’s Out of Bounds Improv Festival. That Other Paper Associate Editor Chad Hanna caught up with Rene Pinnell — Backpack Picnic’s director, producer, and editor — to talk about the troupe’s past and what they’re becoming.
That Other Paper Where did the name Backpack Picnic come from?
Rene Pinnell Well, we played around with a lot of names. See, we used to be called the Edmond Bulldogs, but we did a pilot for MTV and so they own the rights to that name and the characters we did for them. So when we decided to do something after that we changed the name. We had a bunch of different names. One of them was Fat Bird, which I thought was really funny. And the name Backpack Picnic just made Mitch — the main writer — smile. And if you actually say it out loud you kind of have to smile, especially if you say it fast. The full name is The Fake Cake Cookbook Backpack Picnic.
TOP And what’s your main role in Backpack Picnic?
RP I direct, produce, and edit.
TOP Is that your full-time job?
RP Yes. That is my job — that’s what pays the bills. Living the dream, baby. I have to pinch myself.
TOP And you guys broadcast through ON Networks. Tell me about that.
RP Yeah — ON Networks is a start-up company here in Austin. It’s not comedy-specific; they hope to be a media mogul that dominates the market in all areas. But they started off with primarily infotainment. Which sounds derogatory because it sounds like infomercials, but a lot of their programs are information-based, like cooking shows, how-to stuff. They have one that’s really badass on the history of video games called Play Value. We’re the only thing that’s not information-based, in the sense of one person interviewing someone else. So we’re a bit of an anomaly.
TOP You met up with with Mitch and Dave in 2005. What was the situation surrounding that meeting?
RP This all goes back quite a few years to the mid-’90s when there was a troupe in Oklahoma called The One Hit Wonders. It was seven guys, and it included Mitch and Dave. They played some shows and traveled around a bit. Eventually the producers from MADtv noticed them. The producers were like, “Come on down to LA and we’ll get you a show.” So they signed they with CAA, which is one of the biggest representation companies around, and everyone was all ready to get going with the show.
Then people started making a lot of creative demands on the artists — like tried to treat them like a boy band or something. Like, “You’ll be the quiet one, and you’ll be the bad boy.” And the troupe wasn’t into that at all. So The One Hit Wonders walked away from that. Then they started an online radio show through another dot-com thing. This was in ’99, so that was right before the bubble burst. So when it did burst, all the money for that thing went away.
At that point, the troupe the sort of fell apart, and Mitch and Dave decided to move back to Austin. Eventually they decided to start a two-man troupe just sort of out of boredom, and they called it the Edmond Bulldogs. I saw them perform in 2005 at the Out of Bounds Festival. They were one of the funniest things I’d ever seen — like cry-your-eyes-out, piss-your-pants funny. So I approached them afterwards and said, “We have got to work together, that was fantastic.” And as it turned out, Mitch was moving to LA in a couple of months. So we quickly threw something together, and he drove out of town the day after we finished editing it.
Fast-forward almost a year and the episode had eventually made its way to MTV. They saw it and were like, “Yeah! We love it.” So they told us, “Re-shoot it exactly the same way but with our equipment and our money.” So we did, and we learned a lot, and it was fun. But MTV ultimately decided not to do anything with it. A couple of months after that, I hooked up with a friend of mine, Keaton Clark, who represented another cool show on ON Networks called Dinner with the Band, and she thought ON Networks might be interested in our stuff so she put me in touch with the owners, Jen and Kipp — two really cool people with a good sense of humor — and they got excited about it. We’ve been doing episodes now for about four months.
TOP Shannon McCormick and Jeremy Lamb helped to start the Out of Bounds Festival. Is that how they got involved with you guys?
RP Yeah, they were some of the founding members of Out of Bounds Festival — they helped start something that’s the only thing of its kind in Austin. People should really get out of their house and go check out the comedy. I’m going to go every night this week.
Our show is this Friday, August 31 at 10pm at the Hideout. It’s going to be a neat show because it’s going to be the Edmond Bulldog’s Backpack Picnic Show, since it’s the first live show for us to do in transition between the two groups. We’re flying one of the dudes that was in One Hit Wonders down, and we’re doing a combination of our old sketches from the Edmond Bulldogs that people really liked with a bunch of new material from Backpack Picnic. We’re also screening three of our movies. So it’ll be a fun mix of what the Edmond Bulldogs used to be and what Backpack Picnic is becoming.
TOP On all the publicity I’ve read it says Out of Bounds is an improv festival, but what you guys do is obviously very calculated and well-written. Will you be doing sketch comedy at the festival?
RP Yeah, we’ll be doing sketches. On all the publicity it says “improv,” and then in little letters that you can hardly see — or that may not be there at all depending on the publication — it says “and sketch comedy.” Last year that was clearly written on all the publicity, but this year not so much. Improv plays a part in what we do, but it’s definitely secondary. We have a script that’s fairly fine-tuned, and then someone may be like, “But what if…” and we may take it in that direction.
TOP What is the writing process like?
RP Mitch Baker does all the writing, pretty much. Actually this next batch we’re doing — every month we do four episodes and that’s a batch — Shannon McCormick will be doing some writing, and one of our PAs, Blake, who’s a great animator, will be doing an animated episode. But the vast majority of everything else is written by Mitch. So he writes a script and sends it out to us, and we pick the ones that we think are the funniest as a group. And then I’ll talk to Mitch and I’ll ask him what he’s visualizing: How do these jokes play out visually? And then we all discuss the funniest ways to shoot each scene. And generally the script will change a little bit at that point. And then it changes again when we shoot it, because everyone has their own idea of their role. And then it changes again in the editing process.
TOP So you do about five drafts of each sketch?
RP About that, yeah.
TOP What’s one of your favorite sketches you’ve done?
RP [quickly] “Huge and Blurry.” I think it’s the best example of our absurdist-style comedy.
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