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gchun@starbulletin.com

MTV’s ‘Real World’ provides
fodder for gay wedding movie
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By Gary C.W. Chun

Norman Korpi prides himself as a button-pusher. He did it more than a decade ago when he outed himself on MTV as a member of the original "Real World" cast in New York City, and he's doing it again as a writer-director of a sneakily subversive video that sends up the reality television concept that drives "The Real World."

On the surface, "The Wedding Video" is an entertaining "mockumentary" of the making of Korpi's wedding video that shows all the real dirt on him, his hunky fiancé, the wedding planners and the guests, while mixing Los Angeles actors and former "Real World" cast members from throughout the series' 11 years.
The video will be featured Thursday, the opening night of the Adam Baran Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, with Korpi and other invited cast members featured during a pre-screening reception.

Korpi and his partner/co-producer/cameraman Clint Cowen have struck up a TV deal with Warner Bros. in hopes of distributing "The Wedding Video" to a gay-themed television network being put together by HBO and MTV.

"The Wedding Video" started as an idea similar to "The Real World," Korpi said last week by phone from L.A. "My business partner and I had $30,000 between us, so we decided, Why not make a video about video itself?"

Korpi had been shooting a wedding video for former "Real World" cast members Rachel Campos and Sean Duffy, who appear as guests in "The Wedding Video."
"Gay couples and weddings were becoming hot-button topics," Korpi said, "and I wanted to bring in a story line that even sophomoric straights could understand."
Korpi used the low budget to his advantage, as what was intended to be an elegant wedding buffet turned into a cheap "white trash" spread, complete with bologna loaf.
He said he and the "Real World" alumni gained a lot of on-camera experience while participating in the MTV series.

"It's improvisational 'dramedy,' and the network is very careful when they audition upwards of 60,000 people to find the right combination that can interact comfortably on camera," he said.

"And since we've all done this before, it was easy for us to make fun of it or add comedic elements to our on-screen characters. As 'The Real World' became this big cultural phenomenon, the whole notion of reality-vs.-perception blurred, where viewers think they know who we really are."

When shooting started three years ago, the bulk of the videotaping was done at a castlelike mansion in Beverly Hills that Korpi was living in while working as a commercial art director (one of his roommates has a comedic turn as a scheming wedding planner).

Of the "Real World" cast members assembled, Heather B. Gardner has a grand time with her role as a penny-pinching friend from New York who delights in finding out the shady truth behind Korpi's fiancé.

"Also, when (bride) Rachel was on 'The Real World,' she was characterized as a bitch, so she played her character along those lines. And people who saw the video felt sorry for Julie (Oliver), because while it looks like she's delivering pizzas back at her Birmingham, Ala., home, she actually runs a successful dance program."
There are also in-jokes aimed at MTV.

"The date of wedding was set on Aug. 1st, which is the same date as MTV's first day of cablecast, and in one montage sequence, I used the music from the very first video MTV played, the Buggles' 'Video Killed the Radio Star.'"

Korpi began writing two months prior to shooting, constructing the dialogue his cast would give as on-camera testimonials congratulating the couple on their upcoming nuptials in front of cheesy floral backdrops.

"I showed the first edit of the movie in 2000 to a group of friends in Honolulu," he said. "The early concept was to have the video occasionally stop, rewind and freeze as the tape's editors made comments off screen. It ended up so disjointed that I then took eight months to reshape the story. After all that, I must admit I'm super-amazed and proud of how it finally came together.

"Overall, I think 'The Wedding Video' makes a nice swan song to the pre-digital home video era, when Generation X was the first of its kind to be recorded like this.
"It was always my intention to come out if I made 'The Real World' cast. I was a struggling artist at the time, I wasn't getting a Tom Cruise-sized salary, so who was going to really care? And to do it on a global network, that was great!

"But I wanted something more because, since MTV controlled the editing of the series, it didn't show that we were actually a little more proud of our achievements, and I wanted to do something that would comment on those experiences that we had through our involvement in the show.

"While 'The Real World' has become so successful, it's the components, it's us, that are still struggling even after doing the show," he said. "I'm just glad that I found my own particular voice in comedy and can add my own contribution to the history of gay pride."
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