You may remember last month when David Cross did an interview with ThePlaylist in which he called working on Alvin & the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (or ‘The Squizznizzeaqu3l,’ as I like to rep it on MySpace) “the most unpleasant experience I’ve ever had in my professional life.” (For which a bunch of people ripped on him. Hey, shut up, he’s a comedian. Comedians complain about stuff. Honesty and whining is like 98 percent of comedy†). He was on Conan the other night, and he didn’t shy away from his previous assertion, and in fact went into more depth as to what it was about the experience that he hated so much. Turns out it was a particularly Jewy Jewess who made him dress like a pelican. Poor Victoria Jackson, she told the same story and no one believed her.

“I would say in all honesty it was the most miserable experience I’ve ever had. In my professional life. It was miserable, not because of the cast and the crew, who were great, but I was forced, at legal point, to spend a week on a cruise ship. It was terrible. There was no reason for me to be there. If you see the movie, and don’t… first of all, “Chipwrecked.” It’s a pun. [sarcastically] And 5-year-olds love puns. They love it. They love wordplay. And it’s a big commercial for Carnival Cruise Lines. And they thought, ‘won’t it be fun to get David on there?’

“And for the scenes that take place on the cruise ship…. I am always in a Pelican mascot foam rubber outfit where you cannot see any of my flesh, nor do I have any dialog. [picture of that after the jump]

[Asked why they didn't use a stand in] I tried that line of logic and reason, but there was one producer — everyone else had my back, and the director was like oh that’s fine we don’t need him, and I was in London, I was trying to shoot Todd Margaret at the time — and they’re like oh, you have to go and shoot this. Actually, she was more like [whiny voice]. And there’s this one producer, and I won’t say, but she is the personification of what people think about when they think negatively about Jews.”

“This woman, she represented everything people hate about the Jews. She made me go on a boat, which I hate. I can’t stand boats. What kind of a person goes on a boat? The air, it’s salty, makes me wheeze. And the ocean, with the rocking, and the pitching, and the rolling – feh! Oy, and don’t even get me started on the food. It’s HAWRIBBLE, and such small portions…”

Anyway, not to be a poop-stirrer, but Oliver Noble (FilmDrunk senior Jewish correspondent) pointed out that while no female producers are listed on IMDB, there’s only one female producer listed on the studio side in Variety:

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Cross and a Chipette share horror stories about working with Richard Gere

David Cross rightly gets a lot of nerd street cred for his comedy, his work on Arrested Development, and his show (The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret) on IFC, which is kind of like a lesser-appreciated version of Louis CK’s show. But he’s never been shy about saying he does those Chipmunk movies to pay the billzz$ (speaking specifically of his now-famous blog post about trying to trade his artistic integrity for a small cottage upstate, but realizing the “rural rube” who owned it wouldn’t accept his indie cred as currency). Which makes it a little more interesting that he now seems fully soured on the experience, telling ThePlaylist that making “Chipwrecked” (the Squ3quel) was the most unpleasant experience of his career.

“I’m contractually done,” he said during press rounds for his television show “The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.” “I was contractually obligated to do three, which is kinda standard.”

“This last film was literally, without question, the most unpleasant experience I’ve ever had in my professional life,” he says of ‘Chip-Wrecked,’ where he reprises his role of record executive Ian. Without naming names, he says, “It’s safe to say I won’t be working with some of those people ever again. Not the actors. And the director [Mike Mitchell] was great. We got along. There were a couple of people, though…it was just a really awful, unpleasant experience.” Which isn’t to say the entire ‘Chipmunks’ experience has been rotten for him. “I got recognized in China,” he says, listing off the places ‘Chipmunks’ has taken him. “I got recognized in a teeny tiny town in Mozambique. In Zimbabwe. Botswana. It’s crazy.”

Excluding the creatives, you have to assume he’s talking about a team at the production company (Bagdasarian Prod, Regency Enterprises, and TCF Vancouver, according to IMDB) or at Fox. Or maybe he means Andy Serkis. I hear that guy can be a real f*ckin’ prima donna. But man, you’ve never seen CGI chipmunks so life-like!

[full interview at ThePlaylist, Todd Margaret starts January 6th.]

When the New Yorker’s Twitter account announced that the cast of Arrested Development would be reuniting for 9 to 10 new episodes followed by a movie, I thought it was either the movie blogging equivalent of “MAN LANDS ON MOON” or the most epic troll job in New Yorker history†. After all the times they’ve already convinced us to kick the football, I’m still not sure I believe it, but all signs point to it being real. The short version is that they’re planning nine to ten “where are they now”-style episodes, with Showtime and Netflix negotiating to air them next fall, as a precursor to a film (which still doesn’t have studio backing, as of yet).

Here’s the long version, from Entertainment Weekly:

EW has confirmed that the producers of Arrested Development is in talks [sic] with Showtime and Netflix about airing a limited number of original episodes that will update fans on the Bluth clan.

Hurwitz told attendees at the New Yorker Festival Sunday in New York that he wanted to shoot nine to 10 episodes that would air next fall and catch audiences up on the characters’ lives since the series ended in 2006 on Fox. The episodes would be produced by 20th Century Fox TV, which was responsible for the original single camera series.

Hurwitz’ hope is that the limited series would serve as a walk-up to his long-gestating movie. “I have been working on the screenplay for a long time and found that as time went by there was so much more to the story,” he said at the festival, which was also attended by Development stars Bateman, De Rossi, and Cera, as well as David Cross, Will Arnett, Jeffrey Tambor, Jessica Walter, Tony Hale, and Alia Shawkat. Ron Howard, one of the comedy’s producers, even participated via speakerphone. “In fact, where everyone’s been for five years became a big part of the story. So, in working on the screenplay I found that even if I just gave five minutes per character to that backstory, we were halfway through the movie before the characters got together. And that kinda gave birth to this thing we’ve not been pursuing for a while and we’re kinda going public with it a little bit. We’re trying to do kind of limited run series into the movie.”

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It's a little known fact that Lobster Dog is also a Never Nude.

The only people who love Arrested Development more than twenty and thirty-something college types are webmasters, who’ve been milking the non-news of a possible Arrested Development movie for traffic for going on three years now.  It’s hard to milk something that long, but we bloggers are known as much for our strong wrists as our misshapen skulls.  The last we heard from anyone who might know (i.e., not a cast member speculating on the part of the production they wouldn’t know about at an unrelated press conference) was in October, when Mitch Hurwitz said the script was in the process of being written.  But now David Cross says — and again, this is during an interview with a cast member related to another project — that he doesn’t think it will happen.

“(I)t’s not going to happen,” Cross told me the other day when I spoke to him about his new stand-up special, ‘David Cross: Bigger and Blackerer,’ which premieres on the new cable channel Epix on Saturday (Friday night) at midnight ET.

“Way too much time it’s been (since the show ended),” he told me. “I mean, there’s so many people involved. Everyone’s doing their own thing, you know. And everybody’s aged. It’s just not going to happen. I’m sure I speak for everybody when I say we’d love for it to happen, we’d love to work on it, but just I don’t think… not going to happen.” [TV Squad]

Does this mean it won’t happen?  No.  But it’s true, they are aging.  Michael Cera and Maeby will probably have a nazi sex tape in the news by the time this thing comes out.  But there’s a simple solution: just make it a reboot and replace everyone with new actors, like Jaden Smith and Channing Tatum, right guys?  …Guys?

Here’s an oldie-but-a-goodie David Cross video dealing with newspapers in Atlanta and squagels.   I can’t help but combine his rants and wonder, will there be squagels in heaven?  I should write a letter about this…

DAILY CIRCLE JERK LINKS

• Ufford’s open letter to annoying Lost fans.  |WarmingGlow|
• Chinese gangsters have taken to carrying revolvers that fire 12-gauge rounds oh God my penis is hard. |GammaSquad|
• Canada releases a “superhero sex ed video game.”  What, Canadian parents don’t explain the bears and the moose to their kids anymore? |ComicsAlliance|
• Videos of absurd video game glitches, including the one where your character has sex with a woman. |UnrealityMag|
• The youngest Oscar nominees in history. |InsideMovies|
• Five bizarro websites. |CollegeHumor|
• The hottest Lacy Schnoor photos and videos on the internet. |BleacherReport|
• Feature about that fan-made Lord of the Rings movie online. |Urlesque|
• Steven Seagal shoots kids, a gif. |ScreenJunkies|
• 25 awesome homemade guitars. |HolyTaco|

[Young Ricky Gervais via ThatisSoGay.  After the jump, a screening of the latest Twilight movie in 5 seconds]

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