1996
Joe's Apartment
Director: John Payson
Comedy, Fantasy, Musical
Cast: Jerry O'Connell, Megan Ward, Billy West, Pepa, Moby, Nick Zedd, Rick Aviles, Dave Chappelle, Tim Blake Nelson
Release Date: July 26, 1996
Production Company(s): Geffen Pictures (under Warner Bros.) / Blue Sky Studios (animation) / MTV Films
Grossing: $4,619,014
Budget: $13 million
In 1988 John Payson produced and was the composure for a segment on the MTV game show Remote Control which ran from 1987-1990 for 5 seasons and was MTV’s first original non-music video programming. Colin Quinn was a presenter on the first season. Adam Sandler wrote for the show and appeared on camera until he left to be a writer on SNL. Denis Leary wrote and appeared on camera as well. The show was created and developed by Joe Davola who started at MTV as an associate producer. He left MTV for Fox Broadcasting Company where he took a job as the Senior Vice President of Development. In 1993 he returned to MTV as senior vice president of development and production where he started MTV Films, MTV Home Video, and MTV Productions. He recently founded AwesomenessTV and produced Smallville, One Tree Hill, and many early Nickelodeon sketch shows.
In 1989 Payson was an animator on the MTV series Just Say Julie, a comedy and music video show starring Julie Brown, which ran from 1989-1992. Payson was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Title Sequences.
In 1991 Payson was a creative supervisor (as well as a segment writer for one episode) of Liquid Television, a half-hour animated show that aired on MTV from 1991-1994.
In 1991 Payson also produced a 6-minute TV short called Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions, which was originally supposed to be turned into a pilot for an animated series. The short was directed by Henry Selick who went on to direct The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1993. Selick made the short while he was working freelance for MTV making their station IDs.
In 1992, Joe's Apt. aired on MTV as a 2-minute short film. The film starred Arija Bareikis and Mark Rosenthal as Joe. Rosenthal later voiced the cockroach in the feature version of the film. The film was produced by Christina Norman, who went on to work her way up in MTV and then move to VH1 and then OWN, and was executive produced by Abby Terkuhle who was the Creative Director at MTV from 1986-1997 and was the founder and president of MTV Animation from 1997-2001, the network’s full-service production studio. MTV Animation produced Aeon Flux, Beavis and Butt-head, Daria and Celebrity Deathmatch, which all aired on MTV, as well as Beavis and Butt-head Do America, which Abby also produced. Prior to that, he was a film segment producer for NBC’s Saturday Night Live and a producer for Showtime/The Movie Channel. "He spearheaded MTV’s award-winning, in-house advertising, and on-air promotions" and was behind Liquid Television, which Payson had previously worked on. Joe’s Apt. won a CableACE award for Short-Form Programming Special that year.
In 1993 Payson was credited in the music department as a drummer on a short film called Pool Days by Brian Sloan, who in 1997 made I Think I Do. Pool Days was part of a trilogy of films by 3 different directors under the title Boys Life: Three Stories of Love, Lust, and Liberation distributed by Strand Releasing in 1994.
In July of 1996, MTV released their first MTV Films Production, Joe’s Apartment. Written and Directed by Payson, the film was based on his 1992 short film. The film starred Jerry O'Connell and Megan Ward. Billy West, who voiced Doug (1991-1994), voiced the main cockroach, Ralph Roach, and Dave Chappelle, Tim Blake Nelson, and Rick Aviles all voiced supporting cockroaches. DJ, producer and singer Richard "Moby" Hall, also known as Moby, appears in the film as a club DJ in one of his first movie roles. The film also features a cameo by Pepa from Salt-N-Pepa.
According to a review of the film by Paghat the Ratgirl, Joe’s Apartment was based on the 1987 Japanese movie Twilight of the Cockroaches by Hiroaki Yoshida.
The film was executive produced by actor Griffin Dunne, Judy McGrath who produced multiple MTV award shows and in 2004 became the CEO of MTV Networks, and Abby Terkuhle, who also executive produced Henry Selick’s Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions, and other MTV short films or series including Books: Feed Your Head with Sherilyn Fenn, Timothy Hutton and Aidan Quinn, Toon-O-Rama, an anthology of Bill Plympton animated shorts (Plympton also directed music videos including a video for Kanye West’s "Heard 'Em Say" (2005)) and the series The Head. Other producers included Bonni Lee, who also produced The Dark Wind directed by Errol Morris in 1991, a narrative film about a Navajo police officer is mixed up in drug smuggling and murder on the reservation, and Diana Phillips, whose first major producing job was on Blue in the Face (Wayne Wang’s follow up to Smoke, that he wrote and directed with writer Paul Auster who also wrote Smoke). She went on to produce Alfie and Death at a Funeral.
Joe’s Apartment was produced by Geffen Pictures, founded by David Geffen, the founder of Geffen Records, and future co-founder of DreamWorks. Geffen operated Geffen Pictures as a division of Warner Bros., and as a result, following The Geffen Film Company's shutdown in 1998, Warner Bros. now owns the company's library. Graphic Designer Saul Bass created the logo for Geffen Pictures.
Carter Burwell was the composer for the film and also worked on Fargo the same year. He was the composer on most of the Coen Brother’s films thereafter. The Cinematographer Peter Deming shot all of the new series of Twin Peaks as well as Mulholland Dr., My Cousin Vinny and I Heart Huckabees. Carlos Saldanha, the supervising animator, went on to direct the Ice Age franchise, the Rio franchise, and Robots.
Joe's Apartment was the first feature film animated by Blue Sky Studios. Producers at 20th Century Fox were impressed enough with Joe's Apartment to acquire Blue Sky, and eventually, the studio became a feature-animation company, animating films such as the Ice Age films and the Rio films.
Joe’s Apartment bombed when it was released on July 26, 1996. Opening to 1,512 theaters but earning a dismal $1.8 million in the first weekend. The film closed all screenings in the middle of August and finished with only $4.6 million in sales and a $13 million budget. The other films out that weekend were Kingpin, A Time to Kill, and The Adventures of Pinocchio. The reviews were almost unanimously negative. Roger Ebert gave the film 1 star and Janet Maslin’s review for the New York Times was titled ‘Bugs as Cute as (Let's Say) Pigs? Well, They Sing.’ Joe’s Apartment was featured in Siskel & Ebert: The Worst Films of 1996.