Matthew Berdyck Talks About His Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim Projects
It seems like it was a whole lifetime ago that I pitched my first TV show to Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. That was back when I was funny, when things weren’t so serious. Today, as the founder of ToxicWasteSites.org, lots of things are still funny but not in a good way; funny like a compound fracture.
Today, I almost wish I had never made that show because it’s become such a huge point of contention for so many obsessededly fiendish people. One guy, has spent years obsessing over every detail of that pitch, looking to take away what I consider to be not only a wonderful accomplishment but one of the biggest, most heart wrenching career failures of my life. It still hurts.
Most people, when they start out in the industry, work from the bottom up. Somehow, I managed to break into the industry like black masked burglar pulling off a jewel heist, through the roof, by a rope, dressed in black, and dodging lasers.
In November of 2011, when I got the e-mail from the VP or the network, Kieth Crofford, I was in shock because it had been only ten months into my film career. The previous February marked the first time I have ever touched a video camera.
When the development director solicited my show, a surreal comedy project which featured me dressed up like a Big Foot, hopping concert gates to get interviews with celebrities, in Big Foot language, I quickly realized, oh shit, I have no idea what I am doing.
As the legend goes, right in the middle of editing together the pilot, my hard drive crashed, leaving me with nothing but old renders, test footage, and random pieces of film I’d made while I was trying to crash course learn my craft. I was so poor I couldn’t even afford a backup drive. Today I have about 10 redundant backups of my film career, by the way.
The show I’d ended up delivering was not what I had originally intendend. Scott Little, the then Director of Comedy Devlopment was actually angry at me, “What’s going to happen if we give you money to make a show, are you going to lose the footage?” It was an extraordinarily unfair statement, since only months earlier, after the completion of the initial project, I’d ended up homeless and destitute, desperately holding onto my hard drives for dear life.
My show was part of a two-part pitch, involving an animated project called Freak-A-Holic, but that project had hilariously devolved in ego battles between artists and stars, so there was no chance it was ever going to get made.
In fact, I’m almost absolutely sure that if I would have not had Sergio Aragones of Mad Magazine involved, I never would have got my pitches to begin with.
Sergio was wonderful, everything I expected him to be; dark, witty, hilariously arrogant, and amazingly generous. None the less, I had done something absurd that caused the industry to notice me, right away.
At the end of it all, they passed, and I was given a parting gift of development advice, probably the most valuable information anyone had ever given me up until that point, advice to directly applied to my very next project, Blame Reagan, a graphic first person film about homelessness, later released in 2013.
I would end up creating and writing one more show, tentatively called CSI: Deep Space: Arkansas, later submitting it to Adult Swim, but by then, I was so far down the rabbit hole of making my homelessness documentary, that my comedy career went by the wayside.
I guess one could say my wotk with Adult Swim was the first stage of the Saturn 5 rocket of my career. Once it was released and burned in the atmosphere, I continued towards the stars and never looked back, to today, where I’ve falled out of orbit and burned in the atmosphere, in a white hot flash.
