Jorma Taccone has spent his career tethered to Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer. The trio -- friends since high-school days -- are staff members on "Saturday Night Live." They're known to YouTube devotees for their outrageous "Digital Shorts," including the Emmy-winning "D- in a Box," in which Samberg and Justin Timberlake croon about their extraordinary attributes.
As much as Taccone enjoys his pals' company, he's long thought about striking out on his own. And now he has. To get there, however, he had to let them make a monkey out of him.
Taccone, 32, appears as a sociable simian named Chaka in "Land of the Lost," a sci-fi comedy based on the 1970s cult TV show of that title. Chaka befriends a park ranger and his assistant -- played by Will Ferrell and Anna Friel -- who have been sucked into a space-time machine and land in an alternate universe populated by prehistoric creatures.
On the TV show, Chaka was played by a 9-year-old boy, "so obviously they went in a different direction," said Taccone, who is 5-foot-8-1/2. "You can tell I'm a short person by the fact that I added the half."
The monkeys on the original series were really hunched over, so Taccone, already worried about being too tall for his role, decided to super crouch over. He straightened up after receiving a note from the movie's producer, Marty Krofft, who, along with brother Sid, created the TV series, warning him, "You're not going to like yourself when you see the movie."
Taccone wears a huge prosthetic over his face, covering his entire forehead. The more than three hours a day he spent in makeup was largely spent blending the prosthetic so that it fit seamlessly with the rest of his face.
Sticklers for detail, the Kroftts hired a UCLA linguist to create a language for Chaka and his kin. It's called Pakuni, and it was spoken on TV. Taccone learned the 300-odd words and speaks them, although the script calls for him to only grunt or jibber.
Friel translates what he is saying in the movie.
"Based on her translation I would go back to the Pakuni dictionary and make up sentences that go with her translation. What Anna translates is much more eloquent than what I am saying. But I am definitely trying to speak it correctly," says Taccone, joking that he went to all that trouble for "the five people out there who will notice."
Taccone was destined at birth to go into show business. He is named after his father's friend, Jorma Kaukonen, the Jefferson Airplane's famed guitarist.
"I went to a guitar store once to meet him. I was so excited," Taccone said of his namesake.
Both his parents are in the arts. His mother, Sueellen Ehnebuske, is a graphic designer. Dad Tony Taccone is artistic director of Berkeley (Calif.) Repertory Theater and has the distinction of having commissioned Tony Kushner to write "Angels in America."
As a child, Jorma often appeared in plays directed by his father. He was bawled out for wearing a Swatch watch during a walk-on role in "Waiting for Godot."
"I was just blown away by everything my dad was doing, every play," Taccone recalls. "It was amazing to be able to go as a young person to the theater and see these visuals and how creative it could be. More than anything, it was realizing you could do that as a life path."
After graduating from UCLA Film School, Taccone stuck around Los Angeles for five years with Samberg and Schaffer making short films that barely paid the rent.
"It wasn't until I got 'SNL' that my parents told me they were a little bit worried," he said, "like that I would have food to eat."
As a kid from Berkeley who wasn't allowed to watch TV when he was growing up -- "I had to sneak in to watch 'Sesame Street' " -- Taccone could never "in a million years" imagine hobnobbing with celebrities like Ferrell.
"It feels so foreign still, what I am doing," he said. "I think what really helps to be able to adjust is the fact I am with my two best friends from Berkeley. No matter what happens and how crazy things get, we are still in this insulated best-friend bubble."
Samberg has become the face of their sketch-comedy troupe the Lonely Island, while Taccone and Schaffer write and direct "Digital Shorts." Much like Taccone's parents, the "SNL" staff encourages him to express himself artistically. The "SNL" shorts Taccone has been responsible for include "Barbara the Crazy Mail Lady," "Giraffes," "Sloths" and "Business Meeting."
"The show is a huge opportunity because it happens so fast," he said. "They are really encouraging. If you have an idea and want to try something, you can just bring it to the show. The fact that they allow us to direct and edit ourselves, well, that kind of opportunity doesn't happen in show business all that much."
(E-mail Ruthe Stein at pinkletters(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit the San Francisco ChronicleHigh Profile
Post new comment