Jim Cummings is tired of the bullshit. Perhaps he has been his entire career. He’s been writing and directing short films since 2009, but it was his 2016 “Thunder Road,” that brought him wide attention and acclaim.
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Starring himself as a police officer eulogizing his mother, then singing and dancing to the Bruce Springsteen track at her funeral, the short is centered on Cummings’ raw, tragic yet hilarious performance, all captured in one take. He would eventually go on to write and direct a feature version in 2018 that fleshed out the character and allowed Cummings to further showcase his twisted sense of humor and pathos. After following this up with “The Wolf of Snow Hollow” and “The Beta Test,” Cummings and producers Thomas Cross and Dustin Hahn return to short form with this year’s “The Last Brunch” and most recently, “Is Now a Good Time?”
Again written, directed, and starring Cummings, “Is Now a Good Time?” follows a day in the life of a Marvel/Disney employee tasked with fulfilling an ill child’s dying wish by showing them a never-before-seen copy of “Captain America 4.” As expected from the work of Cummings, what’s pretty darkly comic to begin withturns even darker, but closes by pushing home a poignant and timely message about the corporate bastardization of arts and entertainment.
Speaking to IndieWire, Cummings said he’d seen these wish fulfillment stories popping up on Reddit and viewed them in a positive light, but when he heard about someone dying during their private showing of “Dune: Part Two,” he couldn’t help but laugh.
“They had a fan that wanted to watch the film, and he died halfway through,” he said. “And so that PR campaign of like, hoping that people would see it as this beautiful thing for this person who wanted to see the film then became this joke on the internet of, ‘Well the movie is too long.’ It’s like the exact opposite of what these corporations would want. We saw it as this perfect lens with which to talk about the stuff that we love to talk about — what makes good movies, what is a good use of our time here on the planet, and why movies are important, and what movies we really value.”
The short was funded through a Seed & Spark campaign that allowed Cummings and his producing partners the autonomy they needed to speak truth to power. Discussing the current challenges of the film and television industry and how artistic voices are being hindered by studio executives, Cummings said he wanted to push back and maintain his independence.
“I think all of our stuff is punching up,” he said. “I think all of our future stuff will be more explorations of how it feels to be a prisoner in the court of Versailles, which I think we all feel. Like there’s this kind of invisible firing squad around us at all times. That we’re gonna get kicked out of the industry if we don’t toe the line. That’s how it feels to work at these giant legacy corporations. And it doesn’t make very good artwork.”
At the same time, Hahn said this alone is enough of an impetus for him to want to go out and make “good artwork.”
“I feel the most like an artist right now in my frustration in this corporate world,” said Hahn. “It’s demoralizing because I think so many artists have so much to say and we shouldn’t have to be talking about this so much. And Jim shouldn’t have to be making movies about how terrible the industry is over and over and over again. He does a great job doing it, but there’s so many more things we want to talk about.”
Cross was similarly inspired by the short’s message, but felt the laugh-out-loud conceit is really what sets it apart.
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“I think that the industry as a whole is just kind of becoming a massive PR machine at the expense of most of the artists’ humanity,” he said. “And that’s what I liked about the short is that it kind of touches on that and speaks truth to power without being preachy or fucking boring, which most of that stuff often comes across as and this was so funny, like watching it at Tribeca with the audience, it was like watching stand-up comedy.”
Cummings thinks audiences are hungry for a laugh, especially at a time when there’s so much debate around what can and can’t be said with comedy. In his opinion, everything is on the table so long as it’s “funny, if it’s actually working and it’s not mean-spirited, and it’s something that is poignant.”
Putting it in a larger context, Cumming said, “Comedy is the mind sneezing. It’s involuntary. And if you can make something that’s funny while also doing this stuff that’s incredibly inappropriate about one of the big six corporations — I mean, look at Vera Drew with ‘The People’s Joker.’ There’s such a thirst for not toeing the party line.”
Like Drake with DC/Warner Discovery, Cummings and his team were able to get around issues with Marvel/Disney using parody law. Despite naming the companies, which is legal since it’s based on a true story, no intellectual property under the Marvel/Disney umbrella actually appears in the film. In risking legal backlash, Cummings told IndieWire that he hopes to prove to other artists that it is possible to stand up to tyrants.
“When ‘The Interview’ came out,” Cummings said, referencing the 2014 Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg comedy, “I remember Barack Obama got up at a press conference and he was asked about the Sony hacks and North Korea and all this stuff and he’s like, ‘The scary thing is not Sony having the largest hack in history and how terrible it is. The scary thing is that young artists might see this and think, wow, I can’t say anything bad about North Korea.’ And that was very poignant of Barack to talk about the nature of artwork and like artists and what we should be focused on.”
Eventually “Is Now a Good Time?” answers the question posed by its title with an unequivocal yes. Now is always a good time to embrace the things you love no matter who wants to stop you. Despite the difficult era the film and TV industry seem to be navigating, Cummings is determined to keep exploring his craft on his own terms, if for no other reason than to inspire others to do the same.
“What keeps me going is making that promise of ‘Jim is a good filmmaker that we should keep our eye on’ true,” he said. “Because that rumor got spread a lot when my first movie came out and I really want to give ammunition to people who are going through hell.”
“Is Now a Good Time?” is now available to watch on X, formerly known as Twitter. Watch below.
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