Inside Tim Heidecker’s Movie Review Show

“What is ‘On Cinema at the Cinema?’”

That’s a great question, but it doesn’t come with an easy answer. For those who have never seen the online movie review show, let me fill you in on the latest developments in the “On Cinema” universe and give you a better idea of what I mean.

It’s the “On Cinema at the Cinema” Season 16 finale, and our host, the belligerent, Trumpian grifter Tim Heidecker (the character, not the comedian), just lost his dad. Well, his adopted dad, Gabriel “G” Amato, an Argentine angel investor and the former benefactor of “On Cinema’s” dedicated online streaming platform, the HEI Network. After Amato became the top holder of HEI Points, the official cryptocurrency of “On Cinema,” Heidecker assumed his last name and elbowed out the blood relatives. But sadly, addled in advanced age, Amato accidentally poisoned himself with a 75-year-old can of cream of shrimp from the set of the 1950 comedy “Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town.” The prop was a prized possession of “On Cinema” film expert Gregg Turkington (the character, not the comedian). An impromptu funeral was livestreamed in his honor. Days later, dejected from the loss of family and funding, Heidecker moved from his room at Extended Stay America to a condo in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., and declared, for the third-ish time in “On Cinema” history, that the show is over for good.

See what I’m saying? A lot to unpack there, especially if you’re not caught up on the 170 “On Cinema” episodes, 12 “Oscar Specials,” the tie-in feature film “Mister America” and Heidecker’s five-hour criminal trial. A bit daunting? Sure, but those who know can’t get enough. Hiding in plain sight under the guise of a low-budget Siskel and Ebert knockoff is a meticulously crafted, decade-and-a-half long satirical tragedy about two egomaniacal lunatics who are willing to sacrifice a human life if it brings them a hair closer to becoming cultural authorities. What started as a joke project between friends grew into a wildly ambitious comedy enterprise, one that exists in social media feuds, courtrooms, music festivals and even Marvel blockbusters.

“On Cinema” launched in 2011 as a parody film podcast recorded between takes of Rick Alverson’s “The Comedy.” Turkington remembers it started solely to “make us laugh for a few minutes,” but a year later, it caught the attention of Adult Swim, and he and Heidecker committed to the bit and brought “On Cinema” to video. Adult Swim distributed the show on YouTube for the first 11 seasons before shutting down it’s digital production arm. Since then, “On Cinema” has lived on its own online subscription platform, the HEI Network.

During a season of “On Cinema,” Heidecker and Turkington appear in weekly episodes where they discuss two new movies hitting theaters that weekend, rating each on a scale of one to five bags of popcorn. Heidecker’s persona is a walking Truth Social post whose judgment of quality hinges on the presence of Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise (He famously states in the “On Cinema” intro, “When you got movies like Tom Cruise in them, you can’t lose!”). Turkington, the shlubby resident movie “expert,” knows virtually nothing about film outside of titles and run times. In one of his more pungent Season 2 takes, he awards the 2013 mega-flop “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” a perfect five bags of popcorn and predicts Jim Carrey will win the Oscar for best supporting actor.

“On Cinema” also hosts an annual “Oscar Special” livestream, which, over the course of roughly three hours, plays out like a deranged local theater production. What starts as a tribute to Hollywood’s biggest night with promises of up-to-the-minute analysis, inevitably spirals into unsalvageable disorder. For example, at the end of 2015’s “2nd Annual Oscar Special,” Heidecker, two bottles of champagne deep, spent the last 10 minutes of the broadcast stuffing his face with Chinese food and screaming nonsense into the camera before unceremoniously wandering off. The 13th Oscar celebration, deemed “The Last Oscar Special,” streams live on March 15 at 4 p.m. PT. Tickets can be purchased at heinetwork.tv.

In short, “On Cinema” is a film review program in the same way that InfoWars is news. But, as you could probably tell, it really isn’t about movies at all, but rather the two nutcases who desperately want to convince you they know anything about them. The “On Cinema” engine is fueled by a constant tug of war between the bickering hosts, who take turns yanking the spotlight into their corner. For Heidecker, that means spouting deepstate conspiracies or promoting scammy wellness products, like meal replacement vapes or vaccination-reversing protein shakes. For Turkington, it means exhibiting poorly produced video packages or flexing his movie expertise in a segment called “Popcorn Classics,” where he analyzes titles from his collection of church-basement quality VHS tapes. These include forgettable flicks like the 1992 Sean Connery vehicle “Medicine Man” and the 1998 Billy Crystal comedy “My Giant.”

“On Cinema’s” most defining quirk, however, is that it operates on the principle that the hosts are real people living in our world, and the story of their lives, which trickles in between incoherent film takes, acts as the driving narrative. Heidecker and Turkington essentially live out 80% of the story off camera and report back each week. This cycle is the axle on which the “On Cinema” wheel spins, and it was conceived out of time and budget constraints in their earliest days.

“In the first couple of seasons of the show, I was excited about the idea because we never had any money. Even with Adult Swim, you have a day to shoot (a full season),” Heidecker explains. ”I could tell these stories about what’s going on in between the episodes, and you didn’t have to shoot any of that stuff. The audience could imagine it. You could create characters that live outside of the show but live in the world. And that started, ‘Oh, these guys have lives outside of the show.’ Well, not really Gregg, but my character. And that got to be like, ‘That was amazing. Let’s do that again.’”

In the day-to-day, this manifests in social media beefs and typo-ridden press releases about what our hosts are up to in the off-season. One of the most extreme examples of “On Cinema” colliding with the outside world is when Heidecker runs for district attorney of San Bernardino in Season 11, an odyssey chronicled in the 2019 film “Mister America.” Another comes in Season 7: After Turkington is cast in Marvel’s “Ant-Man,” a jealous Heidecker secures a vanity role in Fox’s “Fantastic Four.” Heidecker says the films’ respective directors, Peyton Reed and Josh Trank, are both fans of “On Cinema” and were happy to bring their fictional feud to the big screen.

As is true with most “On Cinema” storylines, these plots start small and inch forward across several seasons before they go supernova in cataclysmic fashion. The series’ most ambitious plot starts with the Season 4 introduction of Dr. Luther Sanchez. To start, he’s just Heidecker’s creepy acupuncturist who occasionally appears as a guest contributor. But in Season 9, Heidecker and Sanchez put on the Electric Sun Desert Music Festival as a way to promote Heidecker’s new EDM group “DKR” and sell their highly unregulated vape pens. This plan, of course, nosedives, and the caustic cocktail hiding in the vapes kills 19 concertgoers. In the fallout, Sanchez hangs himself in jail, but Heidecker goes to trial for 2nd degree murder, which you can watch in a highly detailed, five-hour reenactment.

Outside of a few essential beats, every line of dialogue in the trial is completely improvised. This is also true of all 16 mainline seasons. Series director Eric Notarnicola, whom Heidecker describes as “the adult in the room,” says the “On Cinema” set is much like a “playground” in which his stars can, within reason, mold the story in real time however they see fit.

“Sometimes we will just discover things, and then when it’s working, we do more of it, and when it’s not, we’ll pump the brakes,” Notarnicola says. “It’s nice to have that freedom. By not having things scripted, it allows us to make really quick adjustments on the fly.”

Despite the outward complexity of the “On Cinema” narrative, Heidecker says the extensive improvising comes easily, because after 16 seasons, the show’s cadence has become “our language.”

Turkington agrees, adding, “That’s one thing that’s nice about creating the characters yourselves, is that we know the characters inside and out. We know exactly what’s going to come out of them when something is fed into them. And so you don’t really have to think or have endless meetings or discussions. You just kind of know these people.”

Sometimes, what seems like a minor improvisation in the moment can impact “On Cinema” for seasons to come. Additions like Heidecker’s second wife and the eventual mother of his child, Ayaka, were added to the show “minutes before” cameras rolled. Turkington’s Victorville Film Archive, the “largest VHS collection in North America” and the production banner for in-universe spinoffs, was conceived as Turkington spoke it into existence during filming.

“Our friend’s parents had moved out from New Jersey, and he was telling me that they moved all their furniture and everything into a storage locker in Victorville because it was cheaper until they could buy a house here,” Turkington recalls. “So that was on my mind, storage locker in Victorville. And then we’re talking, and that’s the city that came out of my mouth. I think that happens a lot.”

While a significant chunk of the “On Cinema” story is shaped during production, there is a development process that proceeds every season. The scaffolding for a fresh chapter starts in a group chat. This stage isn’t so much a dedicated brainstorming session, but rather an ongoing conversation to keep the universe alive while working on other things. As filming approaches, Turkington, Heidecker and Notarnicola meet up for formal writing sessions, which start with establishing what happened “the day after we last saw them, up until whenever (the new season) is going to come out.” Most of what makes it comes from Turkington and Heidecker acting out scenarios, jokes and storylines as they would happen on camera, material that is organized into a season bible for production.

While “series bible” gives connotations of a concrete blueprint, the season arc is in constant flux. Heidecker says “On Cinema” subscribes to the Vince Gilligan style of “painting himself into corners,” and most times, they are “flying blind just like the audience” on what the resolution of the season will be. It’s certainly risky, but Turkington says they’re used to thinking quickly. He explains that there are “major, major developments” in “every season” that someone came up with “the day of shooting.”

“That one at the banquet hall (Season 13) ended a different way,” Turkington recalls. “Because we’re doing all these shows through union rules, we had an end time of 6:00 p.m.. It was like 5:45 p.m., and we were about to film. We had something a little more complicated, and Tim came up with another idea that was easier but also changed the story. It turned out to be for the better.”

The “Oscar Specials” function similarly. While armed with a script to guide the way, all of the moment-to-moment action is off the cuff. Some specials are developed along with the season, but this year’s show was “not really planned at all” until a month or two before start time. Notarnicola says the “Oscar Special” prep consists of planning out the major segments, organizing guest appearances and preparing graphics. Because of scheduling and budget restraints, there is only time to run through the first half of the plans, while the rest is all “up in the air.” The quick turnaround inflicts “pure terror and panic” in Notarnicola, who has “nightmares” that the special completely falls apart. But after 16 years, their process has yet to fail them.

Another major decision that must be made before every season and “Oscar Special” is the forum in which they will take place. “On Cinema” has a build-it-up-burn-it-down story cycle, which, in the context of the show, sees Heidecker and Turkington scrambling between seasons to throw together enough resources to make it back on the air. Season 13 was done as a “Good Morning America” spoof hosted in a creepy event space. The following season was a take-down of bro-ish, Joe Rogan-like podcasts, and the Oscar special that followed was formatted as a hype business conference.

“With a comedy project that’s been going on this long, it can be challenging not to go back to the well too much,” Notarnicola explains. “So we try to try new things, and a lot of that involves shifting formats too.”

“What We Do in the Shadows” star Mark Proksch, who portrays the embarrassingly untalented celebrity impersonator Mark Proksch, says playing in the “On Cinema” sandbox is his “funnest thing” he gets to do as an actor. He describes the difference between Notarnicola’s set and something commercial like “What We Do in the Shadows” as “night and day,” although if all TV could be like “On Cinema,” he would “much prefer that.” For Proksch, the creative freedom of “On Cinema” reminds him of the golden age of TV comedy, when shows weren’t bogged down by the rulings of people in “quote, unquote, creative development.”

“That’s why you would have such iconic, great shows that we still watch today,” Proksch says. “You know, ‘Dick Van Dyke Show,’ ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ is because the idea of creatives was pretty nonexistent. They appreciated that the talent was going to do what the talent does.”

Outside of its creative processes and sprawling narrative, “On Cinema’s” most unique aspect is its fan base. If you go into the comment section of any “On Cinema” episode or social media post, you will find hundreds of people playing along. Divided into two tribes of alliance, the “Gregg-heads” and the “Tim-heads,” devoted observers will react to the show with feigned sincerity, mimicking the cadence and ideology of their preferred host. For example, a “Gregg-head” on Season 15, Episode 1 writes, “Can’t believe they got Gregg Turkington for this episode. He knows how to be a real buff.” A “Tim-head” gushes on the same episode, “Tim, im a big fan of your work feel free to message me anytime. How are.”

Heidecker attributes the fan participation to “On Cinema” coming “into its own at the same time that Twitter came into its own.” It was “revolutionary” to him that “these characters could exist outside the confines of the show online and talk to each other that way.” It was only a matter of time before the fans started to “jump in and play along.”

It’s ridiculous to think that, after watching a mainstream drama like “The Pitt”, fans would take to X and express their gratitude for the hard-working doctors at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. However, this sort of interactivity and commitment is extremely valuable. In today’s industry, TV’s biggest hits, like “White Lotus,” “Heated Rivalry” and “Severance,” are successful largely thanks to the online chatter that surrounds them. Heidecker and Turkington took meetings with “various networks” and “industry folk” about acquiring “On Cinema” before deciding to distribute the show themselves. During these discussions, several executives said they wished their viewers were as invested as the “On Cinema” fans.

“They all said the same thing, ‘What you guys have is what we wish all of our shows had,’ which is people interacting in all these different forums,” Turkington remembers. “’This is what we try to build with our shows and can’t.’ But then it was funny, because they said that, but none of them wanted the show.”

Heidecker knows it’s for the best. The last thing he wants to do is “pitch a fucking TV show,” and feels the traditional Hollywood channels have no desire to do “anything interesting with the stuff we have as ideas.” Proksch agrees, insisting that any sort of wrangling by a network would be the “kiss of death” for “On Cinema.” But he thinks Hollywood could learn from what they’ve been able to build.

“I don’t want to disparage my best friends, but you know, we’re not three hip, young TikTok stars,” Proksch says. “We’re three character actors, and so I think they look at that and think, ‘Well, we can’t market that to young people.’ They couldn’t be more wrong, because the majority of our fan base are people under 30.”

Doing it all on your own comes with challenges, however. One of them is getting people to pay $6 a month for a HEI Network subscription after “On Cinema” was free on YouTube for 9 years. Heidecker thinks, because of services like Spotify or Netflix, “art has been so devalued.” Streamers provide catalogues of content for around $15 a month, so to some, $6 a month for one show seems like a lot. But unlike Spotify and Netflix, “On Cinema” subscriber revenue isn’t lining executives’ pockets or funding second-screen content; it all goes back to funding production and employing union crews.

Turkington uses a memory of a recent Paul McCartney concert to color in his frustrations with fans who refuse to pay.

“I went to see Paul McCartney at a stadium in Vegas recently, and I wanted some water. I got in this line, and they were selling water for $7.99 a bottle,” he remembers. “I’m like, ‘Well, Jesus Christ, that’s a lot.’ But the line is filled with people doing this. You know, if you just turned the tap on, I would have been as happy with that in a cup. I don’t know, people just kind of go, ‘Oh, okay.’ But with this, so many people take it so personally, like, ‘Oh my god, I had to pay $5 for this?’ And it’s like, geez, you should see how many people worked on that.”

As the HEI Network celebrates its fifth year online, big things are on the horizon for “On Cinema.” Outside of “The Last Oscar Special,” a must-see event for any film buff, the show is coming to L.A. for the “Five Bags of Popcorn” tour, which hits the Wilshire Ebell Theatre on April 17. As for the HEI Network itself, Heidecker wants his subscriber base to “double or triple” in the next year or so. Although it’s still a very new idea, he also, eventually, sees “other types of content” coming to the HEI Network. Heidecker admits it “might be a little painful at first,” but he’s committed to using his production capabilities to support emerging artists.

Notarnicola says when Heidecker was pitching “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!,” it took the influence of Bob Odenkirk to get eyes on what eventually became a wildly influential piece of TV comedy. Since Heidecker is “always looking for opportunities to help the next generation,” the HEI Network could be his opportunity to do that for the foreseeable future.

“I think it’d be incredible to have it as a resource, as a third-party production studio that can platform young voices and artists and comedians, and create the kind of things that you might not see on TV or on YouTube or elsewhere, that needs a little money to make,” Notarnicola says. “So I think it’s a cool opportunity to do that in the future, and we haven’t started doing anything like that yet, but I think we’ve put in place a structure where we could begin doing that at some point.”