State Penn in Black & White (1988)
Comedy. Pixelvision . Black & White Video. 30 sec. (approx)

Cast: Scott Duprey

Written & Directed by Carlos Sanchez Lopez

Once again, we removed the black frame around the Pixelvision image to save bandwidth. The other change we made was kicking the brightness of the picture up a notch or two.

A little ancient history for the kids:

The joke behind this spoof is that in the late '80's, Sean Penn was constantly getting locked up for beating up people trying to photograph him or his wife at the time, Madonna. He also allegedly punched a gang member working as an extra on the set of the movie Colors.

The spoof name State Penn is a play on words referring to Sean Penn's criminal record: in the U.S., a prison is often referred to as a "state pen," which is short for penitentiary or penal facility.

Some thoughts from the auteur :

The lesson to be learned from this movie is less is more. We kept trying to top ourselves with each movie we made, but while fun to make, some of the later Pixelvision ones are bloated and meandering. Chicago Jones 4 was probably the peak of these Pixelvision efforts; after that we sort of lost perspective. It's better for your movie not to have any dead spots, so that every shot and scene advances the story and keeps the audience entertained than to keep in every little thing that was fun to shoot and is only entertaining to your inner circle. By the way, since we couldn't dub in sound, I also told Scott to do his own sound fx because I thought it would be funnier than me doing them off camera. Let me know if is. -- Carlos

Related Potluck Episodes:
Some Stuff We Had Lying Around : Movie Trailer Spoof (ca. 1987)
Some Stuff We Had Lying Around : Chicago Jones 4