FCU: Fact Checkers Unit

Jeri Jacquin, Movie Maven

PETER KARINE, BRIAN SACCA andDirector and Co-creator DAN BEERS

The NBC Digital Studios series “FCU: Fact Checkers Unit” premieres on August 17 on www.factcheckersunit.com.

The digital series is based on a 2008 short film of the same name and reunites original cast members and co-creators Peter Karinen and Brian Sacca and features guest stars Luke Perry (“90210”), Alex Trebek (“Jeopardy”), Dave Navarro (“Jane’s Addiction”), model Karolina Kurkova , Donald Faison (“Scrubs”), Jon Heder (“Napoleon Dynamite”), Pauley Perrette (“NCIS”) and Zach Gilford (NBC’s “Friday Night Lights”).

“FCU: Fact Checker’s Unit” follows the adventures of two overzealous fact checkers – Russell (Karinen) and Dylan (Sacca) – who work at the popular Dictum magazine and stop at nothing to check the most absurd celebrity facts. No star is too big and no fact too obscure or arcane to run down for accuracy’s sake. The series will feature globally recognizable guest stars as themselves and check facts such as those concerning Luke Perry: (Is Luke’s house really haunted?), Alex Trebek (Does Alex shave against the grain?), Dave Navarro (Does Dave insist that the tears of a virgin, beetles and finger sandwiches be provided backstage at any venue he plays?) and Karolina Kurkova (Does Karolina use SPF 125 at the beach?).

Each episode will run approximately five-to-six minutes in length. Tom Bannister is the executive producer for the series from SXM and Dan Beers will direct.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., a leading mobile phone provider, and NBC Universal Digital Studio, teamed up to produce the scripted comedy which highlights the capabilities of the Samsung Galaxy S smart phone.

Peter Karinen and Brian Sacca

At NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, students pointed and laughed at Peter Karinen and Brian Sacca. Thus, in 2003, it made sense to start cashing in on this phenomenon and take to the stage at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatres in NYC and LA.  Their most acclaimed oeuvre, "Pete and Brian's One Man Show," simultaneously touched and offended capacity audiences on both coasts, and was an official selection of the 2007 HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen.  

Since then, Pete and Brian have written two almost-funny-enough pilots for 20th Century Fox, amassed an almost-impressive online following by making a ton of web videos -- including two seasons of the series "Single Dads" for Fox International Channels -- and have written for numerous award shows, including the MTV Movie Awards.   Their first foray into fact checking came in 2008, when their short film "FCU: Fact Checkers Unit" (co-created with Dan Beers and starring Bill Murray) was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival.  

They are currently developing two almost-original screenplays with Ben Stiller's Red Hour Films and "Zombieland" director Ruben Fleischer.

Now that you’ve read all that information and have gone to the site to see my favorite episode with Bill Murray, oh wait, I love the one with Donald Faison, dang, I like the one with Luke Perry too. Oh just see them all and wait each week to see who else falls under the spell of these FCU’ers.

Until then, follow along with an interview with the creators and stars of this hysterical new kind of comedy!! Hey everyone, thanks so much for joining us.

Q: How are you all doing today guys? Tell me a little about it, if I were a Martian coming from mars how would you describe your show.

Dan: I’m a writer and director and I’m 6’1.

Pete: I would describe FCU as a short form comedic web series about two over zealous fact checkers who take their jobs way to seriously. They work for DICTUM Magazine, which is a men’s magazine. They are universally hated around the office.

Brian: If your really from Mars and your listening to this blah-berb-pleep. I’d say our characters come a little bit from Peter and myself as comediennes. We’ve been performing in New York for a long time but are currently in LA. We started worked uptown and realized it wasn’t our scene. So we started working in the back of bars. These are people who work as hard as they can at a job but almost too hard to a fault. You can see it came from us.

Pete: What Brian didn’t mention is that there was a really smooth transition from working in the back of bars to the back of the Internet. We definitely take our comedy very seriously. Much like our characters take their jobs a little to seriously at times. You can ask Dan the director because we make his job difficult because we are difficult and anal.

Dan: I love these guys.

Q: What’s the weirdest celebrity fact you’d least like to investigate?

Pete: The hard part of answering that question is how do we be politically correct?

Brian: It would have to be something that deals with a bathroom fact or something with a hairy tongue.

Pete: I wouldn’t care to necessarily know what kind of deodorant Rosie O’Donnell uses. I’m not trying to imply anything.

Brian: I wouldn’t want to investigate how much extra skin would need to be removed from John Goodman since he lost all that weight.

Q: What’s the most fabricated fact you’ve heard someone say about you.

Dan: People would say sometimes that I have talent, which we think is a stretch.

Brian: My freshman year of college, there was a rumor that I was a devil worshiper. No one talked to me on the floor of my dorm because they thought I worshiped the devil.

Pete: you started that didn’t you

Brian: Yea, I did.

Pete: No one has made up anything about me, no one has talked behind my back, and everyone has told me the complete truth.

Dan. I heard Pete liked to drive down the street with a blindfold on from 2:30 to 4:00 p.m.

Q: What did the original idea come from?

Pete: The original idea came from; first of all you should know Brian and I started as serious actors at NYU. We switched to comedy when we realized people had been pointing and laughing at us for years so we became comedy companions. We hooked up with Dan and wanted to make a video with him. We came up with this Fact Checkers idea because the phrase Face Checker is fun to say. It sounds dirty. Like the word Unit, its fun to say. We like the idea of telling the story. Fact Checkers are really a minority group who have gone unheard for far to long. We gave them a voice.

Dan: Also, what’s really nice too is that these guys are in their offices and have their jobs but then they take it to the next level and go out each day and live out their adventures and fantasies also.

Pete: We like them because everyone is self-contained. You can watch just one and not get lost.

Q: How do you create the story with the actors?

Pete: I all depends on the celebrity. With Luke Perry we thought because he had a beard we thought ‘oh, maybe he thinks his house is haunted’ and we went with that.  With Alex Trebek, he is the one celebrity who we wanted the producer to be in. In the film we worship him because he’s the father of facts. We thought it would be cool to get him in our series.

Dan: When we called to ask, everyone was aware of the first film too.

Pete: The Trebek camp was aware and he was really interested in the series. We wrote that one in a little over 24 hours and we got it to him. He agreed to it as long as he got to dress like the Dali Lama.

Q: Newspapers and magazine have gone online. Do you think there’s a future for this?

Dan: I definitely think it appears to go that way. I think with films you’ll always have the big budget films that will be on the big screen. But this is an opportunity for us and for TV shows to go that way.

Brian: Your going to see more self-generated content come out, like this. Obviously Samsung helped us out with this and we couldn’t have done it without them. Before that we generated our own work and we think that will be an increasing trend. People getting out there and making professional quality work and it’s going to keep growing. I think that will translate over into television as well. You’ll see more shows get made specific ally for the Internet because people are watching on the Internet.

Dan: The opportunity for people like us is huge.

Brian: There is a specific group of people out there watching shows on the Internet. From a 12 year old to my father who watches videos more than anybody I know.

Q: I found your show hilarious, but is it harder or easier to be funny in six minutes or a two hours movie?

Peter: I think there are pluses and minuses. The pros are you can follow more of a sketch comedy format where you can have shorter jokes and your story lines don’t have to last very long. But I also think you can’t devote to the characters enough in the short time.

Dan: What is also hard about it is pace. We throw in 10 jokes a minute you have to be careful because you want to give the jokes time to play.

Pete: I think it is easier because they are short because we literally have to write less jokes and that’s probably why there aren’t any hour-long comedies on tv.

Q:  I’m wondering what are your own experiences with fact checking?

Dan: I’d written something before for Vanity Fair, little pieces back in 2006-7 and I got some calls at that point and time from the fact checkers there. They are very intense, they are intense people. I thought it was funny to get these phone calls. They call you and grill you about things for a story.

Pete: One of the benefits of writing comedy is that we don’t have to check ANY facts in anything we write. The less work comediennes have to do the happier they are. Brian and I are thrilled about that. We’ve met so many fact checkers since the original short came out they’ve all seen the original short film. So I want to send a message to all the fact checkers out there by saying you should spend more time on your job and less time watching videos.

Brian: We almost fact check each other but for comedy – we are comedy checkers. We say ‘hey man that’s not funny’ and I say ‘yes it is, I check it, that’s not funny’. We have spent the last seven years together so we’ve become lexicons of comedy because the last thing you want to do is steal someone’s joke. You want to change it though to make it seem like your own brilliant idea.

Pete: Its opposite for me.

Q: Is there a claim that you did ever follow up on and that you still wonder about?

Dan: Howard Hughes, whether he did bottle his own urine and drink it.

Brian: I’ve never checked anything because the only way I’d know is to go to Wikipedia, which goes against fact checking.

Peter: Also Brian, you don’t read so that would be a problem.

Q: Have you gotten more respect for FACT CHECKERS?

Dan: Everyone is very excited that this has been made possible.

Pete: The first day of shooting Brian and I were in bed with Luke Perry for a whole day so that’s a plus. Later when we shot with Donald Faison, he vomited luke warm soup into our laps 14 times. I’d like to think he was dedicated to his craft but that’s a con for fact checking.

Q: Are you hoping that the whole thing becomes a “Frazier” where people want to get involved, to be checked?

Brian: We would love that, we are just about to post a video asking people to give us facts they want us to check. We’ll check your facts for you.

Pete: And hopefully it will build into people checking other facts. There is plenty of room for more fact checkers.

Brian: I think you said that to stress the unit.

Dan: It would be great if we went on and did more and see other actors out there that wanted their facts checked by these guys.

Q: Do the celebrities know ahead of time or is it an ambushed?

Dan: No, it’s a scripted thing.

Pete: We also came up with fun stuff on the set. A couple of examples, the first one with Alex Trebek, he was saying a few phrases in Latin and spouting all this information. So Dan asked him ‘is there anything you don’t know?” and Alex says, “What I don’t know is not worth knowing”. When we shot with Dave Navarro he brought a couple of guitars with him and we said “that would be cool if he was playing guitar – but funnier if Brian was playing the guitar for Navarro” The only problem is Brian doesn’t play.

Q:  From the time you start writing the script till you finish shooting, how long is the process?

Pete: We wrote all the episodes in about six weeks. Then we had 12 days of shooting and then editing probably takes another 10 weeks or so. The pre production lasted longer than six weeks because we had to figure out locations and get the celebrities attached.

Brian: I was going to say one of the things with writing is that certain celebrities will be free at one point and we have to replace celebrities? But their schedules change so sometimes we have to start over again.

Pete: When we shot the original short film with Bill Murray and he looked at the script and said “nine pages huh? It took three guys to write this?”.

Dan: The overall process goes from mid-April and we are going to be ending this week!

Q: Are you finding it easier to get celebrities to want to participate in FCU?

Brian: I think actors love getting involved with things like this. Whether it’s lampooning themselves or do something they don’t normally do. We have a lot of talent that wanted to do this. It wasn’t a major struggle.

Pete: We were also aware of that when writing the episodes. Zack Gilford (Friday Night Lights) got to wear a super hero costume and fight crime. Trebek we get to worship like a god.

Q: Dream guest?

Dan: Obama

Brian: I want Murray back. He was the greatest to work with; it was a seven-hour comedy lesson. He just knew exactly what needed to happen to make it the best it could be. He’s hilarious, even in real life.

Pete: We improves with him, he directed us a little bit. We have brainstorming sessions with him. The firs thing we shot was when he finds us in his bathtub. That’s real terror you see on our faces seeing our comedy god.

Dan: Bill Murray is amazing. You can’t tell Bill to try anything you let him do what he wants.

Q: Do you think fact checking becomes less and less important?

Brian: I wouldn’t want to say fact checking is less important. I think certain journalists and bloggers are thinking it’s less important. I would think it’s more important. I think people care about the truth and not just write about the headlines.

Q: Russell and Dyan are unappreciated in the show. In your own life, have you ever felt that way?

Brian: You’re my new therapist! I know Dan has answers to this.

Dan: Under appreciated? I’m not answering this question. I’ll get in so much trouble.

Pete: I think every body else appreciates what we do almost more than we do. People say that we need comedy and make people laugh is so important. But Brian and I don’t want to do this its just the only thing we are good at.

Brian: I can’t get a real job with all this stuff on the Internet. If I went on a job interview as a job manager they’d say “are you crazy? I’ve seen you naked!”

Dan: There’s this video of Pete in a dress the entire video.

Pete: It’s a music video called “Pete’s Sweet 16” and I’m in makeup prancing around.

Dan: it was a whim

Pete: Under appreciated, definitely. Under dress definitely and underage in that video.

Brian: That’s one of the video’s that made Pete’s parents so proud.

Q: Do you think this is the new form of advertisement? It’s a smart way to promote your project.

Brian: I do think this is a smart way to advertise a product and I do think this is going to be a growing form of advertising in the next few years. I don’t think it will over take the commercial but people are going to make these videos whether or not companies are involved or not. But when companies get involved its better.

Pete: Your starting to see part of placement in every television show and every movies and I think audiences are more acceptable if done the right way and are not heavy handed. We have started looking for new sponsors and we want our new sponsor to be a woman’s deodorant and incorporate that into fact checking. We can lure actors with our feminine scent.

Q: Season one has eight episodes?

Brian: You really have to watch them 20 thousand times each. We labeled them after the movie INCEPTION. They are really deep. If you watch them you’ll see an underlying theme about Darfur.

Dan: Oh yea right.

Q: I have to say you’ve given me a lot of facts can I call later to do fact checking of my own?

Dan: We are hoping you do.

Pete: I have numbers for Dan. Phone, social security….

Brian: And his mother’s maiden name is…

Dan: I’m about an open world.

Thanks you guys!!