Yes indeed it's the triumphant return of MNPP's
Daisies Ways Not To Die series! Wherein we celebrate the gorgeous technicolor slaughters of the television show
Pushing Daisies, with some assistance from the show's creator Bryan Fuller.
And my apologies to yall over the unexpected brief hiatus with the series. Early Summer late Spring vacations got in the way. But here on the fourth Thursday of May we're jumping back in, both stumps first. And
we've got a super duper amazing surprise in store for you at the end to make up for the wait! But for now, death comes for us in the form of...
MNPP: So whose sick idea was this grisliness anyway, and what buried layer of depravity begat it?Bryan Fuller: The central murder mystery for “Window Dressed to Kill” was actually based on a true tale of window dressing intrigue, sans murder mystery. So really it was based on the fantasy of how certain events might have transpired in the true story if one of the parties involved had homicidal tendencies. Essentially, if you are a window dresser named Erin and/or Coco and you ever took credit for windows you didn’t dress, this is about you and your alleged shameful deeds. Shame on you, Erin and Coco (allegedly).
MNPP: Y’all always made gratuitous violence so whimsical! What were the priorities with these specific corpses’ decoration? (so close to desecration…)Bryan Fuller: The priority for the gratuitous violence on
Daisies was almost always comedy. We come from the
Looney Tunes School of Violence and appreciate the opportunities for extra credit – as much as BS&P will allow. Erin Embry’s bludgeoned ice-water death in the fountain was relatively free of human debris so Broadcast Standards & Practices were not as concerned with that death as they were Coco Juniper’s death by escalator. They forbade us from showing any kind of grizzled hamburger meat stumps hanging from her torso. Why am I forever denied my grizzled hamburger meat stumps? But I was thrilled with the “CHIP-CLIP” style body bag cincher for halved corpses and Coco’s fumbling search for her legs whilst on the Mortician’s slab.
As an aside, this was my favorite note from BS&P for this episode:
"Page 47, sc. 46 - While “Dick” and “Dicker’s” is acceptable when used as a name and place throughout, please eliminate Erin’s and Coco’s unacceptable use of “Dick” here."
MNPP: Besides just the occasional notes from the higher-ups, what sort of difficulties – special-effects or budget or time limitations - did y’all face getting your vision for this episode out, and what do you wish in retrospect you could’ve done here that you didn’t?Bryan Fuller: I will forever want for grizzled hamburger meat stumps.
Stumps aside, we were really able to do everything we intended with this episode. When we were breaking the story, I poked my head into
Bill Powloski’s (our Visual Effect Supervisor) office and told him he needed to start thinking about a computer generated Rhino. He grinned from ear to ear and gave me exactly what I wanted.
That last sentence sounds dirty, but I’m okay with that.
MNPP: Every episode’s stuffed with homage to previous pop touchstones – what ones stick out to you in this specific episode? Why’d you love these moments in their original happenstance? And what made them seem like a good fit for the Daisies world?Bryan Fuller: The chief load-bearing homage of this episode was, of course,
SAVANNAH SMILES, the story of a spry young girl who is inadvertently, accidentally kidnapped by petty car thieves.
The movie is schmaltzy as all get out, but somehow found a place in my heart, mind and developing creativity that had just as much to do with this film as the company it kept when it was released – a year that also brought us BLADE RUNNER, John Carpenter’s THE THING, E.T., TRON, CREEPSHOW and POLTERGEIST.
God bless you, 1982.
This was the second time we tried to tell a SAVANNAH SMILES backstory with Olive Snook. We originally were going to feature this homage in the Young Olive story in the episode BAD HABITS, when Olive was still in the nunnery. But ABC felt Young Olive being a high-profile kidnapping victim was too dark, too early in the season. So we put it in our back pockets and pulled it out for “WINDOW DRESSED TO KILL.”
In addition to SAVANNAH SMILES, we had shout outs to JUMANJI with the hey-ho Rhino escape and RAISING ARIZONA with the prison break, all peppered into the story with the age-old debate “Who’s the real man? Superman or Clark Kent?”
MNPP: If you had to choose one single thing from this episode to frame and hang on your wall – a scene or a costume or a reaction-shot or a line of dialogue - what’d make the cut?Bryan Fuller: Without hesitation, it would be songbird Kristin Chenoweth’s cover of Lionel Richie’s HELLO. (
Watch the clip here)
Kristin was recording
her Christmas album between PUSHING DAISIES season one and two, and took it upon herself to record a wish list of songs she would like to sing as Olive Snook, each one with a personal introduction by Kristin addressed to me. So essentially, I have my very own Kristin Chenoweth album – which I have to say is one of the biggest highlights of my PUSHING DAISIES experience.
MNPP: Two other things that happened behind the scenes while shooting this episode… go!
Bryan Fuller: Gushing to
Richard Benjamin about my undying love for his 1979 masterpiece “LOVE AT FIRST BITE.”
Pigby the Pig refusing to cooperate with her trainer and pulling poor Anna Friel around the Warner Brothers back-lot at any given whim.
MNPP: And finally, if you gotta go, and we all gotta go, would you wanna gotta go like this?Bryan Fuller: No, thank you. Not a fan of bludgeoning or losing the lower half of my body in the teeth of an escalator. I’m sticking with orgasm-induced aneurysm.
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