How Theater Kids Improvised Their Way to a Sundance Success With ‘Theater Camp’

variety.com:

Gordon Cox Theater Editor The movie comedy “Theater Camp” is one of those dreams-come-true success stories that sometimes emerge from the Sundance Film Festival: Scrappy indie movie debuts in Park City, the audience falls in love with it, and overnight the movie is picked up for a multimillion distribution deal. Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below: But the film’s four co-creators — Molly Gordon (“The Bear,” “Animal Kingdom”), Tony winner Ben Platt, Noah Galvin (“The Real O’Neals”) and Nick Lieberman — faced a lot of skepticism along the way.

Gordon, the co-writer, co-star and co-director of “Theater Camp,” detailed the movie’s backstory on the latest episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast, and she noted that one of the biggest hurdles was convincing Hollywood that a comedy about theater could be a success. “They just questioned, how could we make an improvised movie with theater?

Is theater something that people even want to watch?” said Gordon, whose inspirations for the movie included improvised comedies like “Waiting for Guffman” and dramas by directors John Cassavetes and Robert Altman.

It didn’t help that a lot of the cast of “Theater Camp” is made up of kids, tweens and teens. “It was so hard to get people to understand that kids could improvise,” Gordon recalled. “But I actually think they’re much better than adults, because they’re so free and not in their heads and not jaded.” The four creators of “Theater Camp” all met doing theater — Gordon, for instance, first met Platt at age 3 in a youth theater program — so the stage seemed a natural subject matter for them to skewer, lovingly, in the movie. “The stakes at theater camp are insane,” Gordon said. “You have this three-week period