INT: Reno 911- Miami

This
week, the cast of Comedy Central’s hit show “Reno 911!” make the leap from basic cable to the big screen with their
feature film debut, RENO
911: MIAMI. The movie’s got all the elements of the show, plus the nudity,
swearing and celebrity cameos that only an R-rated movie can
provide. Taking
a cue from BORAT, the cast of RENO 911: MIAMI decided to do their press conference while in character. Lieutenant
Jim Dangle and Deputies Travis Junior, Raineesha Williams, Cherisa
Kimball, Trudy Wiegel, Clementine Johnson, James Garcia and S. Jones
welcomed the opportunity to tell their side of the story. Here are
some excerpts.

Dangle:
First, I would like to say before we get going, we feel like we have
been grossly misrepresented by the Fox people. We’re not robots.
We’re not perfect robots made of wires and chips. We have foibles
and we feel like we’ve been misrepresented. There’s a lot of times
— a solid 30% of the time — we’re giving 110%.

Jones:
It’s about 34%.

Dangle:
33 or 34% of the time. You’re not seeing that. What you’re seeing is
boobery, incompetence, and the times that we actually have to blow
something up. That’s what you’re seeing. We don’t get a say in the
editing. What they do is they take all the footage, they hand it
over to Danny
DeVito. He gets drunk on Limoncello, then he cobbles it
together into a menagerie of lies. And I know that menagerie was not
the word I was looking for there but I’m going to just stick with
it.

Junior:
Cornucopia was a good word.

Jones:
Cobble was good too. I like cobble.

Dangle:
So let’s open it up.

What
did you think of the Miami Police Department and what was your
impression of the city?

Williams:
Well if you saw the movie,
then you know we didn’t even get to see the Miami Police Department
because they were quarantined, smarty pants!

Junior:
I’m sure they’re all fine men and women that do the same type job
that we do, albeit easier. Reno’s a hell town and they live in a paradise, so how angry can people
be there? Not as angry as in Reno, but I’m sure they’re fine men and women.

Kimball:
I do have to say I saw photographs of several Miami law enforcement officials and I was — disillusioned is probably a
strong word — but they did not have pastel blazers, they did not
wear muscle tees, and I didn’t know what to make of that.

Dangle:
Where were you hanging out? Cause where I was hanging out there was
a lot of pastel blazers and muscle tees. I was at a place called 12th Street
Beach. Have you been there?

Would
you go to
Miami
again if you got the chance?

Garcia:
Oh, hell yeah!

Kimball:
We’re not allowed to though, uh sir?

Junior:
They made it pretty clear they didn’t want us back.

Dangle:
They would not like us back right away.

So
where do you plan to go next?

Dangle:
We have been invited to go to Scotland Yard and I for one would love
to see Scotland.

Wiegel:
I’d like to see the yard. I don’t even have my own yard in

Reno.

Dangle:
Yeah, apparently it’s the largest yard they have. I look forward to
wearing a kilt. I look forward to the giant log toss that they do.
The gentlemen in

Scotland

— if you don’t know because you’re not cultured — wear skirts and
they get together and have contests where they toss each other’s
logs and I look forward to that.

Junior:
I will not eat anything stuffed into an intestine though, no matter
what they call it.

Johnson:
And you can’t take the bus there. We cannot take a bus to

Scotland

so we have to fly. That’s what I’m looking forward to.

Williams:
I don’t know if I’m really excited about any of it because I’m used
to the criminals that I’m used to where I’m from and in Miami, baby,
these people, they’re bronzed.

Dangle:
Slippery.

Williams:
They’re lubed up.

Wiegel:
Hairless.

Williams:
They smell of cocoanut oil. I mean they’re slippery and it’s hard to
arrest them, let alone…you wanna give all of them your phone
number.

Dangle:
But it is fun to try to arrest them.

Garcia:
Always screaming “Amnesty! Amnesty!” What the hell is
that?

Ms.
Johnson, did you have your tattoo removed?

Johnson:
See now, someone’s going to pout. Yes, I did. Yes, I did and it has
no bearing on my feelings for James. It’s just that that’s a
commitment I don’t want to make. My body is a museum or a wall of
graffiti and don’t get a hasty…

Wiegel:
It’s also full of crabs and STDs.

Dangle:
It’s like a Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum.

Johnson:
It is.

Dangle:
Am I out of line saying that? I meant that in a positive way.

Johnson:
No, you’re very much in line but listen, I’m sagging a little more
than I was a year ago when I got the tattoos, so James was starting
to look like a Bassett hound.

Junior:
Notice she kept her Steely Dan tattoo.

Johnson:
I kept my Steely Dan tattoo and I don’t mean to apologize to you.

Garcia:
All right, that’s fine, honey.

Kimball:
And you don’t want to take your work home with you too. I mean every
time you —

Dangle:
We don’t want to take our work to work.

How
did you guys become cops?

Dangle:
You know, a lot of us end up in law enforcement sort of when life
has painted you into a corner. I know for me when they took away my
real estate license is when I really decided it was really time to
make a difference.

Kimball:
That’s a wake-up call right there.

Wiegel:
I started in yogurt sales and I was there for about 45 minutes
before they asked me to leave.

Dangle:
Trudy’s mother was also apparently her first cousin we’ve just found
out.

Wiegel:
Third. Third cousin which makes family reunions a lot simpler.

Dangle:
Shorter.

What
was your favorite flavor of yogurt?

Wiegel:
Oh, I wasn’t there long enough to try the yogurts, sweetie. I took a
piece of body hair and I won’t say from where and I put it in one of
the cones and I played a game there called “find the hair” and I was trying to
do a promotional thing for the owner of the place. They didn’t
appreciate it.

Officer
Kimball, the documentary seems to raise some questions about your
sexuality.

Kimball:
Look, I enjoy a good game of v-ball with my lady friends, okay, and
I can Oprah and Gayle it up as much as I want to, okay? That doesn’t
mean I’m hopping and skipping and jumping and having panty games and pillow fights and whatever those women do. I enjoy getting
physical with my sisters and my lady friends.

Junior:
She sometimes enjoys filming it for her Myspace page.

Dangle:
For Myspace, page too, yeah.

Kimball:
That page was deleted and I did not put that page up. There was
somebody going around claiming that she was me and you know that
hurts.

Dangle:
Really? She had a lot of access to the stuff in your house.

Jones:
I now have that footage on my Myspace.

Dangle:
Oh?

Jones:
I have that, Kimball’s footage – Cinephallus.com. From my Myspace.
So I have Kimball on mine.

Dangle:
Cinephallus, which means someone who enjoys cinema.

Your
movie is being released by the same studio that released Borat.
Do you feel any pressure to live up to those box office
expectations?

Dangle:
Do we feel pressure? Did that do well?

Junior:
I think if we did we would have brought a bag of sh*t here.

Kimball:
It did really well for that country, wherever he was from. I think
that was the only film they ever put out.

Dangle:
We’re under constant pressure. We’re in a constant state. Our
adrenaline’s up. When you’re facing death every 45 seconds, you know
your adrenaline’s up and you basically are constantly working with
an erection of terror which leads to a lot of the goofs and things
that you see happen, you know.

Wiegel:
Plus I take a handful of Prozac first thing in the morning and in
the afternoon I couple it with some a couple licks of Pro and I
throw in a Depakote or two so my level of adrenaline is always on
10. You let me actually get that all the way out.

Dangle:
Yeah, I know, I thought it was going to get worse and you were going
to start to talk about Mr. Marcypants who lives in your mouth.

Wiegel:
He’s actually a bird and he lives in my ear.

Since
the

Reno

911! TV show has aired, what has that done for the crime rate in

Reno

?

Johnson:
It’s brought it straight up to level 10.

Dangle:
The one thing that the program’s doing…it used to be people
would yell something at me like, “Hey faggot!” And now
it’s more like, “Hey Dangle, you faggot!” So there’s
some name recognition out there, which has to count for something,
right?

Junior:
It’s helpful because now you can duck. Now you know it’s coming
at you.

Dangle:
Yeah. Hey, there’s a Sprite can headed for my head.

Garcia:
It’s odd to have a perp ask you for your autograph while you’re
trying to shove him in the car. That’s one thing that’s how
it’s changed.

What
impact has it had on your lives and did you ever imagine being in a
movie?

Williams:
Well let me answer that and say this here: I was born with a face
for the screen. You understand what I’m saying? From the minute I
got in the world, I was like, “Girl, look at your face!”

Did
any of you feel exploited by how the movie showcased your body?

Williams:
Why you looking at me?

I’m
not looking at you.

Dangle:
No, no, you were looking at her.

Junior:
No, you looked right at her.

Wiegel:
We needed special shoes to go on beach patrol.

Williams:
Thank you! It wasn’t like when they said, “Who wants to be on
beach patrol?” We were like, “Pick us! Pick us!” No.

Wiegel:
We did do that.

Dangle:
Yeah, you did.

Wiegel:
It was a different contest. I thought it was who could raise their
hand the fastest.

Dangle:
Can I point something out? A lot of people have been commenting,
including King Magazine, about Raineesha in the thong on the beach.
That’s not a thong. That was a regular, full back swimsuit. I
don’t know what happened there.

Williams:
We had to pick it out of a bin. You just get a suit out of the bin,
you put it on. When in

Rome

…

Dangle:
Part of it just got caught in
Donner Pass
there.

Garcia:
Got sucked down like sand through the hour glass.

Williams:
You know, why am I on trial because I got a nice rump shaker. Why?

Dangle:
But they do take things out of context. For example, if you look at
the picture, it looks like I’m constantly wearing a G-string made
out of candy, prancing around trying to have a tickle party with
Jones.

Williams:
You weren’t!

Dangle:
It happened three times.

Junior:
We were only there for 72 hours.

Dangle:
And it only happened three times and you see one of them.

Wiegel:
And every time that candy underpants… I think it melted in your
crack.

Garcia:
It’s real humid down there.

Wiegel:
So you have to change them often.

Kimball:
And I think in general it’s a misrepresentation in that, you know,
the ways we screwed up. Okay, you know, we screwed up. You know, it
took a lot longer time for us to do all that screwing up than the
movie insinuates. And it looked like that all happened in two hours.
It really took a lot long to make all those things go wrong.

Have
you gotten any criticism from animal rights activists for what
happened to the whale?

Dangle:
Yes, yes we have gotten them but you have to look at it like this.
To the Eskimos, giving someone blubber is like the best thing you
can do…

Wiegel:
Even though it doesn’t feel that way.

Dangle:
Even though we made it rain down, a little bit has been taken out of
context. People are also upset about the chicken, that we fired 800
or 900 rounds of ammunition at a chicken. The glass is half full
because we also never hit it. Ever.

Johnson:
The whale was dead when we got there.

Dangle:
Take that, Pam Anderson.

Wiegel:
That chicken didn’t die until I locked him in the car with the
windows rolled up on the way back to the station.

Johnson:
Shhh! Shhh!

Dangle:
Uhh, we were going to cover that up.

Garcia:
We saved somebody a lot of fees on cremation with the whale. Okay?
It was dead like Clementine said. What’re you going to do with it?
Try to haul it away? We cremated it for free basically. We did
somebody a service.

Dangle:
There’s no guide book.

Jones:
Opinions are like people’s butts. Everyone’s got one. Okay?

Wiegel:
That’s not true. We have this guy Ray at the station who shot his
butt off by accident.

Dangle:
There’s no guide book. Okay? The whale’s a perfect example that
there is no guide book for law enforcement.

Was
it intrusive having cameras following you around?

Williams:
I would say if a camera was following you around all day every day,
do you know what kind of stuff we would catch you doing? How many
times we would see you in a candy thong? Come on, now.

Dangle:
Sooner or later, you and all of your friends would be masturbating
with the windows open. It happens. It happens every single day.

Wiegel:
Sometimes several times a day. I’m actually kind of lucky because
when we first got to

Miami

, I was driving the wrong way down a one way street going like 40
and I hit this dog. Thank God the cameras weren’t there.

Who
started in the Reno Department first?

Dangle:
Garcia’s probably been there the longest, which is weird because
he’s never really been promoted. Do you know why that is?

Garcia:
Well, because I guess I’m not the right looking type Latino. They
seem to be intent on those type of things, minority hirings and
such, and I’m pretty comfortable where I am and I like what I do. I
don’t need to be all highfalutin and being the boss and driving a
better car and get a better parking space than you. I’m a regular
person and that’s where I like to say. I don’t have to go showing
off.

Dangle:
You’re also a pretty angry weirdo.

Junior:
And also you shoot about two kids a year. They frown on that sort of
thing.

What
was the enticement to do a film version?

Williams:
It wasn’t that we wanted to do anything. When we first signed away
our lives, it was after a lot of Midori and Red Bull, okay?

Dangle:
Don’t make decisions on Midori and Red bull, people. Don’t do it.

Williams:
‘Cause you’ll sign away your life and the next thing you know, baby,
they got you everywhere doing everything and ain’t nothin’ you could
do about it. Everybody got paid but us.

Junior:
We signed these waivers. Dangle told us that we were getting wave
runners.

Dangle:
I did not know what a waiver was. I thought it was a two person jet
ski. Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t go to journalism college like all of
you smarties.

So
the studio got you liquored up?

Wiegel:
Yeah, I thought it was a handwriting contest.

Junior:
It was for basic cable. They told us the show was Heroes on Patrol.
They said it was going to make us look like hard-working crime
fighting heroes. Then Mr. DeVito, sitting around with Clooney and
his limoncello.

Dangle:
Goblets of Limoncellos.

Junior:
Discussing the liberal agenda said, “Hey, we can make these
hard working, red state citizens look like fools. Let’s do it.”

Dangle:
And then we’ll split the money and get Limoncellos.

Williams:
Now I will tell you this. If I had my way and I could re-edit this
movie into what I wanted to be, my cousin has one of these editing
machines, I would get that guy who does all the scary voices in the
movies, “Seven people. They’re cops and here they come.”
You know, the girls would come in, break it down, break it down,
break it down, break it down. It would be a completely different
movie, completely fabulous, if I had my way.

Dangle:
So you’re saying voiceover would make it seem better.

Williams:
I’m just saying, that guy…

Dangle:
No, I agree. I think you’re right.

Wiegel:
I’m glad we didn’t have to edit it because I barely know how to work
the f**king Dell computer we have at the office now. And if we had
to use one of those editing machines, I don’t think there’d be a
movie.

Kimball:
That might not be a bad thing.

Questions?
Comments? Manifestos? Send them to me at [email protected].