There's a scene in "The Spoils of Babylon," IFC's six-episode miniseries satire starring Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, and Tobey Maguire, where Maguire is making love to his new wife.
The scene is a psychedelic depiction of frenzied passion, the sounds of orgasmic pleasure mixing with intense facial close-ups, fiery lighting, and limbs — an inhuman amount of limbs, all flailing and wavering.
While not that different on paper from what you might see on a network nighttime soap, there is one unique factor. Maguire's wife, Lady Anne York, is played by a mannequin (though voiced by Carey Mulligan), and the filming of the scene required the entire crew to surround Maguire with mannequin limbs, waving them furiously as the actor feigned sex with what was actually bits of hard plastic.
"The Spoils of Babylon," which also features Tim Robbins, Jessica Alba, Val Kilmer, Michael Sheen and more, is named for the fictional book on which the series is based — and parodies epic '70s and '80s miniseries like "The Thorn Birds" and "Shogun."
Each episode is introduced by the book's melancholy, past-his-prime author, Eric Jonrosh, a character influenced in part by Orson Welles' overweight-wine-commercial years.
Jonrosh is played by a bushy-bearded, fedora-topped, fat-suited Ferrell, who drinks several glasses of wine at once as he regales us with tales of the project's shoot, including how he slept with every member of the cast, and how the lead actress, his former wife (Wiig), was "very adventurous in all matters sexual."
The miniseries brings us inside five decades of the life of the Morehouse family, including oil baron patriarch Jonas (Robbins), his precocious daughter Cynthia (Wiig) and his foundling stepson Devon (Maguire), who becomes Cynthia's forbidden love.
Along the way they face wars, death, addiction, romance and loss, and all the life complications one might expect from a series this epic, rendered in the most ridiculous ways possible.
The identity of Lady Anne, for instance, was influenced by a certain aspect of '60s films and taken to nonsensical extremes.
"The decision to put that in the show was a bold one, because that could go either way," says Andrew Steele, the series' co-writer along with Matt Piedmont, who also directed.
"If you look at some '60s films, like some John Wayne films, they would pair him up with models and actresses that could barely act . . . and it felt like they were using mannequins as actors." To film this scene, Piedmont had the crew grab mannequin limbs and wave them around Maguire as he made love to what was actually just more fake body parts. "There was a shared recognition of just how surreal that was," Piedmont says.
Surreal was the mood throughout the shoot. Haley Joel Osment, who plays Cynthia's son Winston, describes a scene where Wiig's improvisation threw him way off guard. "There's a huge boardroom scene where we're speaking in front of these investors, and toward the end of it she just attacked me," says Osment.
"We were at odds in the scene, but [the script] didn't say anything about her attacking me and pulling me beneath the table. That came out of nowhere."
Piedmont and Steele wrote for "Saturday Night Live" back when Ferrell was on the show, and Steele wrote, and Piedmont directed, Ferrell's 2012 film, "Casa de mi Padre." Steele is also the creative director for Funny or Die, which Ferrell co-founded.
While brainstorming ideas for a possible third season of HBO's "Funny or Die Presents," Piedmont saw a hardcover copy of "The Thorn Birds," which he says was like "three phone books glued together," at an Oregon bookstore. "Any super melodrama that's pretentious and overwrought makes me laugh," says Piedmont. "So I thought, what if we did a fake book of one of these mini-series, that was like this epic melodrama?"
"Matt sent me a one-line text from Portland that said, 'The best-selling novel of all time, The Spoils of Babylon.' I fell in love with the title," says Steele. "I threw back at him the name of the fake author, and we just started spinning it out in e-mails and texts."
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