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Mile High Movie Roast’s farewell marks end of era for B-movie comedy

First there was Mystery Science Theater 3000, the cable-access cult hit turned Comedy Central series that became an unexpected career for its hosts and creators.

Then, as other comedians realized how easy it was to copy the format — layering live, running commentary onto Z-grade sci-fi flicks — smaller versions sprouted up around the country, including in Denver.

“I loved that it was interactive,” said Matt Vogl, who co-founded the Mile High Movie Roast show with comic Harrison Rains. “The audience came dressed in costumes, we gave away custom posters and had contests, and the instant feedback just made it exciting.”

Now, Mile High Movie Roast, Denver’s longest-running comedy show, is calling it quits after 14 years, 150 movies, five different theaters and roughly 50,000 cans of Dale’s Pale Ale (as well as “several liver transplants,” Vogl joked). The culprit?

“Shows like ours are being shut down because movie studios don’t like people talking during their movies,” he wrote in a Facebook post announcing the final Mile High Movie Roast (formerly Mile High Sci-Fi) on June 28 at the Oriental Theater. “We’ve been fearing this for a while, but now it has happened and we are out of options.”

While the creators of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and its digital offshoot, RiffTrax, have forged their own business models for movie-roasting, many small shows around the country are suffering the same fate as Denver’s.

“In Austin (Texas), Master Pancake Theater has been doing it longer than we have,” Vogl said. “Those guys are brilliant, and their show’s going away for the same reason as ours. Doug Benson had his version of it. And there have been other shows at the (Alamo) Drafthouse that are going away. It’s a whole genre.”

Vogl said the informal cease-and-desist notice from Colorado’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema — where Mile High Movie Roast had previously been running — was “pretty abrupt.” He doesn’t blame them for passing along the message from various movie studios, who pushed back against the practice of mocking older, poorly received titles with a live audience. (A Denver spokeswoman for the Alamo confirmed the no-hard-feelings sentiment but did not reveal the names of the studios.)

But Vogl is still disappointed. Mile High Movie Roast is one Denver’s best-known comedy brands, having been performed everywhere from the Denver Comic Con to Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and welcomed a who’s-who of Denver comics as guest-hosts.

The combination of live performance with theatrical exhibition is a vaunted tradition stretching back to the first “Rocky Horror Picture Show” shadow-casts of the 1970s. They were all inspired, in part, by culture-jamming, DIY programs in the nether regions of the radio dial, where radio DJs would take bong hits and talk over old films on TV. In-the-know listeners could tune in and sync the media, turning down the volume on their TVs while holding their radio speakers close, Vogl said.

It was a thrilling, subversive form of counter-programming that gave terrible rubber-monster movies new life. And it continued to work because shows like Mile High Movie Roast were able to select films whose copyrights had lapsed into the public domain, or that were cheap enough for them to afford.

That’s become nearly impossible in the internet age, where every last event on the calendar is searchable and every lapsed, low-quality property is a revenue opportunity.

“We were showing ‘Iron Eagle’ a number of years ago and were told we couldn’t show it on DVD, only the 35 millimeter print, because the art looks better,” Vogl said, pausing at length before continuing. “It’s ‘Iron Eagle.’ Does anybody really care?”

The inherent challenges of movie-mocking are part of its appeal, said Kevin Murphy, a Mystery Science Theater veteran who voiced the role of sarcastic robot Tom Servo. He’s now one of the principals at RiffTrax, which figured out how to monetize movie-mocking in the digital age by offering audio-only files (essentially, podcasts) that could be automatically synced to various films via the RiffTrax app.

“We’ve been doing three, sometimes four live events a year now, and it’s been great for us because we’ll do a Kickstarter to bankroll the movies,” Murphy said of RiffTrax’s simulcasts, which appear in 650 theaters nationally thanks to Denver-based Fathom Events (known for simulcasting concerts, opera, ballet and more).

“The upfront costs of these things are huge and we’re a tiny little company that can’t afford to lay out that cash without support,” he said. “Fortunately, we have some of the most loyal, dedicated fans in the world. They’re not wide, but they’re deep.”

The same is true for Mystery Science Theater, which has continued to live an impressive life after going off the air in 1999, following nearly 200 episodes and (somewhat ironically) a feature film. Creator Joel Hodgson crowdfunded two more seasons of the show, which have aired to acclaim on Netflix with new host Jonah Ray. Hodgson has presided over multiple national tours, comedy festival appearances and more.

“We were able to do a lot during the Kickstarter (campaign) to kind of manage people’s expectations,” he told The Denver Post in 2017, just before an MST3K tour stop at the Paramount Theatre. “In this new iteration, I got really lucky because Kickstarter kind of bought and paid for the show, which allowed us to completely make the show I wanted to make.”

Not only was MST3K’s Kickstarter campaign a success, it also set a new record as the highest-funded film and TV crowdfunding campaign in history. An initial ask of $2 million to produce three new episodes was met within a week. Less than a month later, it had ballooned into nearly $6 million in donations.

That’s impressive by B-movie standards, but it’s modest compared to the resources required for many Hollywood licensing deals.

“Our very first Kickstarter began because we wanted to see if we could get enough money to coax the people who made ‘Twilight’ into letting us license it into a large show,” RiffTrax’s Murphy said. ” ‘Twilight’ for me is sort of the holy grail, the perfect film for us. But I don’t think doing a big blockbuster — like ‘Anaconda’ or ‘Starship Troopers,’ as we’ve done — has ever really thrust us into a whole new realm of success. There’s a ‘quality of bad’ that a big film can’t always deliver.”

The Mile High Movie Roast model typically finds them routing 35 percent of the door revenue, as well as a fee of roughly $300, to the studio that owns the rights to the film.

“That’s what’s always made this difficult, since we’re not doing this full-time,” said Vogl, whose day job is as executive director of National Mental Health Innovation Center on the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. “We could change our model to be more like RiffTrax kind of thing, but they already occupy that space.”

Even with a better model, it’s is not an easy space to be in, Murphy said. Sensitive filmmakers and distributors often jealously guard their catalogs from movie-mockers, unaware of the new life it can give a film (see revivals of “The Room” or “Miami Connection”).

“I probably still go through 20 films before finding one that works for us,” Murphy said. “We start with a price limit as to what we can afford, and how much we think we can make, and then we look at how silly or riffable it is. It’s always a creative challenge because it’s not just film commentary, it’s a piece of comedy.”

Vogl won’t reveal the title of the final Mile High Movie Roast on June 28, but promises that he and Rains have been cleaning out their closets to find vintage, limited edition movie-roast posters (usually custom-made for one of their events) and merchandise to give away. He likens the crackdown on movie-roasting shows to the music industry in the Napster era, when labels threatened or sued individuals who illegally downloaded music online.

“Their heads are stuck in the sand because they think they can somehow make the world go in reverse,” he said. “When you look at the younger generation of movie viewers, do they ever just sit on the couch and watch a movie for two hours? No way. And studios are not listening to people who say, ‘Look, we love movies, but we want to consume them differently. We want a different relationship with them.’ “

That’s clear in the ongoing success of the MST3K tour, which returns Colorado with shows in Durango, Denver and Colorado Springs, Feb. 13-16, 2020. As Vogl noted, movie-roasting is an organic evolution of something that people love, and it’s not going anywhere. Why can’t we just love it the way we want to?

“The centerpieces of these shows are still their films, which aren’t getting shown anywhere else. And they’re still getting paid,” he said of the studios. “They’re just killing something that unleashes people’s creativity. It’s really frustrating.”

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