July 1, 2005
By Jeremy Lawrence
Could the Crazy Monkey troupe be the closest thing South Africa has to Monty Python or The League of Gentlemen?
Hardly! This insane simian is a different kind of animal altogether and in the next few months South Africans will get a taste of just how crazy this monkey can be when these four comedians release their first feature film, Straight Outta Benoni!
The members of Crazy Monkey - Brendan Jack, Gavin Williams, Trevor Clarence and Brett Goldin - have managed to achieve worldwide notoriety for the spoofing of the MTV series Jackass. The short Crazy Monkey inserts are regularly aired on MTV and on MTV Europe.
Brendan Jack spent six years slogging it out with fellow monkey Gavin Williams at The Jupiter Room, an advertising agency. Born out of the frustration of working "normal" jobs in advertising, and in between inventing freestyle couch surfing and other "extreme" sports, Williams and Jack came up with an idea for a posse of super-safe guys for an insurance company campaign.
"We were doing extreme freestyle stunts in the office and we started chatting about doing more with the ideas we had, but it was only when we met Trevor at a comedy evening that the whole MTV thing really started taking shape," recalls Jack.
Clarence, an upcoming director of commercials, suggested they take the idea for a series of skits which lampooned the extremely popular
Jackass series directly to MTV.
"It took us a while to track down the right people in London.
"They told us they liked the idea, but of course, it's kinda hard to imagine when you don't have anything but the pitch
. So they told us to go ahead and film some of it and then come back. We had to come up with ways to raise the money."
The solution came in the form of Trevor's production company which supplied a modest budget and post-production facilities.
"Initially, we had 20 scripts for skits that we shot over three days around Joburg. We didn't have much time, so if an old lady walked into frame while we were filming, she was in it," recalls Jack.
With the final product in the can, the group sent off the first offering with a little more than a bit of anticipation.
"They came back to us and were really impressed. Some of the sketches, like the ones with cellphones, they weren't that keen on, but the rest they started airing soon after. Some of the skits have even been dubbed into German," he says.
Recently MTV flew the guys over to London to present a couple of "Men Hurting Themselves" weekends, doing interviews and shooting footage of them being wicked-cool around London.
The monkey really got kicked into overdrive after a meeting with Ronnie Apteker of Internet Solutions, who offered the chance of a big screen debut.
The result, Straight Outta Benoni! will be released in October. The plot details remain a secret.
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