RESPECTABILITY TOUR 2006-2007 director's commentary
Published · 19:11 · 984 views
About This Video
Director's commentary on the Neistat Brothers Respectability Tour, 2006-2007. Casey edited this sequence. Shot on tapes. They drove cross-country in a $1,200 Econoline van. The adventure was loosely based on Dumb and Dumber. Ariel Schulman worked on it with them; he is now a Hollywood director. The footage is the real proof of concept for what would become the Neistat Brothers TV show on HBO. A Hunter S. Thompson quote opens it: "All my life my heart has sought a thing I cannot name."
Transcript
all my life my heart has sought a thing i cannot name a remembered line from a long forgotten poem
so that's from uh hunter s thompson i don't remember where we found it and i love this
movie or whatever this is um commissioned by tom scott and andy
spade and this is the real sort of proof of concept
for the what would be the neistat brothers tv show and ariel shulman worked on this with us
and he's now a hollywood director has a movie coming out on paramount plus
in august kids movies starring owen wilson i don't know the name of it all right so casey's going to
connecticut to buy a econoline van and casey edited this
sequence here and shot it this is all shot on tapes [Music] we're driving cross-country maybe that's new jersey actually or long island at new york plates
1200 for that van i got the van dude it's so big and nice it's gonna
freak you out man this is the nicest shack and wagon you've ever seen so this
whole adventure is loosely based on dumb and dumber what we were doing was going to the plum
tv affiliates and plum tv was this tv network owned by tom scott who was one of the guys who funded this and who
funded the nystat brothers tv show and he's also a founder of nantucket nectar's the beverage company i don't have an insurance card
and he had a network of um television stations in luxury resort towns like aspen and vale and
telluride and that's where we're headed aspenville and that's mickey sumner
our friend friend of the studio she's a actress in her own right she's been in a bunch of movies she was in france's ha i see her all
that you see her all that you'll see her all the time she's like oh got the insurance they're emailing it to me now
okay i think she grew up in the same building as josh and ben saftey and that's how we know her i i'm pretty sure
we're waiting again we're still here we're still in kinko's back to the dmv with all of our proper
documents so now we can get in line yay so this is just you know about
bureaucracy and all yeah this is a part of being a closer part of being a filmmaker is all of this hell you have to go through for all these tiny details
like this van this 1200 van dated today it's an entire day in case he's explaining all of the little
hoops he has to jump through and werner herzog says one of the key skills to being a filmmaker is document forgery
and here you go and how illegal is this it's about as legal as it gets it's like the same as
printing money okay we're in line now everything seems to be going smoothly i think we have all the documents everything's cool as long as they don't
know i'm filming check this out okay it's now night time
we got the license plate so we're 100 oh i didn't ask casey's permission or tom scott's permission to put this on
the patreon so might be begging for forgiveness but i love this thing so much i just it has to go somewhere and there's so much
copyrighted music that and we don't have the original files so we can't remove it
all right so i think this is the first sequence i edited and shot and this music i believe is muse which
we were really into on this trip ariel shulman there he is the big hollywood okay director
and i hope you've seen dumb and dumber that's manny and he was our chinese doorman he was so great and i said can't your people make better boxes because this came from china
and he was from china too wow i gotta say these things are unbelievably great this was 599 dollars
for each of them they're briggs and stratton lawnmower engines one gear or maybe two gears like a centrifugal clear gear
or centrifugal like belt drive like a moped and they went 25 30 and they were unstoppable one break
they worked in the freezing cold oh yeah they're fitting and we bought two of them and drove them around in that van
all the way three quarters of the way across the country
[Music] and we never really had cameramen and ariel who like i said is now a hollywood movie director he's worked with jamie foxx and emma
roberts he's big time he was shooting for us [Music] so i say let him be honest let him put it right on the license plates new jersey the tollbooth state what does it say now the garden state
sure if you're growing smokestacks yes doubt get me wrong now i got nothing against new jersey i like the place
myself i used to live right across the river from jersey and i would wave to the people you know they couldn't see me it's a mile and a half but them i waved anyway
george carlin of course so i got a bunch of these i think i got all the magnets for the whole country and i think this maybe breaks down we
don't i don't finish with all the magnets [Music] this is my maiden start for the mini bite first pull the first pull ever
and i put bmw logos on mine because i have a bmw real motor shifter motorcycle not in any
way shape or form street legal those little dirt bikes have you driven across
any recommendations yeah yes uh you see us knowing you take it easy you want to take it for a ride
sure why not all right go for it man it's still on his phone
we gotta pack them in before the cops show up the guy at the gas station said that he was calling the police for filming
because uh delaware is a soft target so after 9 11 everyone said that it was like the first
power move of every powerless person in america oh this place is a soft target you can't film here
you know this is four years in the post into the or five years into the post 9 11 era so we're looking for a walmart
do you know where there's a walmart around here there'll be a road going that way and then
people do not know how to give directions in their own town because they don't know the names of rhodes because they don't need to know the names of the roads i'm the same here in
tapanga i don't know what the roads are called the expression on his face was i'm joking and you know i'm joking cool
thank you we couldn't make heads or tails of his that man's directions baltimore outside of walmart we just finished
lettering up the van for the respectability why are we pulled over the first movie
of the neistat brothers respectability tour for plum tv sponsored by jack spade is complete and we're gonna preview it
now so casey edited this oh chicken mcnugget um wallpaper
[Music] so yeah casey edited this on day one uh in the van on his laptop and we were watching this in the van this is the first finished sequence
and it's all still photographs this was like the i think it was before you could get an inexpensive dslr that
shot video so casey this is [Music] all still photographs i can't believe that little laptop didn't i can't believe it was able to make it
[Music] so shot in december 2006 but we didn't finish making it until 2007. [Music] [Applause] it's 5 24 in the morning we've been driving for 17 hours straight and it's
like torrential noah's ark rain on top of that the wind is blowing us all over the highway
so it's a lot like driving a jet ski or a um or like a a mississippi riverboat that
goes 65 miles per hour we've been on the road for 19 and a half
hours we're in nashville at the americas best value in we started here today
now we're here that's far no way we're still here that's like halfway we're never gonna make it here
it's halfway no [Music] endless fun [Music] this is filmed backwards those guys walked out backwards and then we reversed it i don't know why
this is nashville i'd like to make a request but i don't know much about country music
can you do that um that cowboy song like kid rock we are not doing cowboys
[Music] yeah new yorkers in nashville [Music] oh so this is a tradition in this place you sign the wall it's got plexiglass in front of all the
pulled pork or something so we used to do this a lot we used to do these little like um i don't know
what you call a requiem or um we just honor our fallen [Music] directors movie directors like i did a video where i had written on my hand it was like when bergman died i wrote ingmar bergman and then his birth year
and death year and so i think while we were on this trip you'll see who we're honoring here
robert altman died and robert altman made a famous movie called nashville
and we didn't know this at the time but rel's current girlfriend now who has been his girlfriend for a decade or
something her grandmother wrote nashville and won the academy award and rell's girlfriend's name is hayley
benton gates oh hi how are you you just caught me making vantage cheese sandwich
using some camembert cheese from normandy i thought i'd spread it using a pizza hut card
great for traveling on the road and spreading cheese it goes great with some fresh chala bread shabbat shalom
it goes great with two clementines in an arizona iced tea so rel brought all this wonderful food i
think his mom claudia just gave him her credit card and he went to this place called cicharella it's a fantastic fancy grocery store and
he had bags of this wonderful groceries that kept us alive
you guys got another person with you yeah my brother i have no idea he told us to sit in the car and hang out for a sec i don't know what's going
on there he looks like he's he looks like he's in big trouble over there 20 below zero so van got a little overzealous and uh
took out the motorcycle we were gonna write tire marks spell jack spade out in this field entire mark looks like he got
through the top of the j these are van's tracks down here and then he exited by going up here it went all the way around
all the way around all the way around to there oh he's walking the bike
he's blocking the fight and the cops are leaving the cops are i was 31 years old at the time
so the name of this tour is the respectability tour
[Music] about five months ago casey and i went on live tv and played a little prank since then everybody including the plum tv staff has been paranoid that we're going to humiliate them so we called this trip the respectability tour to
make everybody feel better and it kind of worked tom we're sorry this is still a respectable tour we're trying to do
something respectable you should have seen how nice we were to the cops we were very cordial to the officer i don't think we broke any laws i think there's just procedure
and here's dan what happened he never saw me riding it on the roadway that's what happened this is a jack
you're not in trouble are you yeah i got a ticket for like unlawful motor
vehicle use on an interstate or something and i just paid it i was a couple hundred bucks it's illinois it wasn't expensive i joined the cub scouts
when i was nine and the reason i joined is because they had this contest every year called the pinewood derby
now the pinewood derby was a miniature car race that took place in our school gym and every kid got a pinewood derby kit that you built your car out of
in the kit was a brick sized hunk of pine four plastic wheels and four nails that you used for axles and i think i
was the only kid who built his own car and i came in almost last both years i competed
we lived in a defense contractor town so my competition were dads and these guys designed nuclear submarines they were all engineers they
would put the wheels on a lathe and make them super narrow and super fast but there was a category that had
nothing to do with the engineering of your car and it was called the best looking category and i always thought that i could win this
best looking category so one year i did my best imitation of a le mans class bmw race car that i had seen on television
now i was only nine years old so i had no power tools so i had to hand carve this wooden block into the shape of a car
by the time i was finished my hands were all cut up i painted it with the only paint we had at my house which was like green red and
orange tempera paint and to get it shiny i slacked it with my mom's clear nail polish
i ended up losing every single race and the winner for best looking car wasn't me it was this kid named patrick his dad carved him a perfect
perfect vintage jaguar grand prix race car it was hunter green with red white and blue racing stripes
these bumps are not rocks or bad pavement they're ice
so we just almost got in a very serious car accident we're going 65 miles an hour black ice everywhere there was two cars
in the middle of the road they had been in an accident there was a man standing there waving his arms we only had maybe
three seconds warning i hit the brakes the whole car skidded because we're on ice so i gently swerved around them as gently as you could swerve without
losing control of the car and we made it past them safely but there's no doubt in my mind and i think that people in this car would agree with me that someone
behind us crashed into him that little blue van took me like an
entire day to make and it had working lights on it and i don't know who has it now i hope someone has it and i hope i
signed it and dated it so that's the end of uh part one
can't find part three but i'm gonna do my best to find it and i guess part two is next
Products & Tools Mentioned
- Briggs & Stratton mentions — engine brand, logos referenced
- BMW mentions — brand logos referenced
- Jack Spade mentions — Andy Spade's brand referenced
- Nantucket Nectars mentions — beverage brand referenced
People Referenced
Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Scott, Andy Spade, Ariel Schulman, Mickey Sumner, Josh Safdie, Ben Safdie, Werner Herzog, George Carlin, Robert Altman, Hayley Benton Gates
Films & Media Referenced
- film by Safdie brothers referenced
- Robert Altman film referenced
- band mentioned
- TV network referenced in Respectability Tour context