On July 9th, 2024, content hub “Dumb Industries”, founded by Chris Gersbeck, hit an important milestone: The four-year anniversary, and the 49th consecutive monthly livestream, of “The Mads Are Back”!
The Mads are, of course, Frank Conniff and Trace Beaulieu from “Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K)”. Beaulieu, who also provided the voice of “Crow T. Robot” during Mystery Science Theater 3000’s initial run, portrayed evil mad scientist “Dr. Clayton Forrester”. Conniff acted as Forrester’s lab assistant and sidekick, “TV’s Frank.” Both Beaulieu and Conniff were writers on the show and have continued to collaborate since leaving MST3K.
Every month since 2020, Chris has hosted the show as Frank and Trace riff on staggeringly bad movies and shorts. You can buy the digital boxed sets for Seasons 1-3 on Chris’ site at Dumb Industries/The Mads Are Back. Season 4 will be coming out this week.
To commemorate the anniversary and the release of Season 4, I interviewed Chris about the creation and growth of Dumb Industries. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Dumb Industries: The Beginning
Dumb Industries is a content site with a unique and hilarious lineup of livestreamed and downloadable shows. Before the pandemic, Chris had already created “Dumb Productions” for live, in-person shows. When COVID hit, he began to work on podcasts and other shows and build out the Dumb Industries brand. Things really took off after the first “The Mads Are Back” online show.
Abbe (A): Tell me a little bit about your background; how did you first become interested in media and media production and how did you get started with The Mads?
Chris (C): So I went to SUNY Plattsburgh for Communications and I really wanted to be a radio DJ. When I graduated in 2005, satellite radio was starting to take over and then of course everything started going on the internet. The idea of being a DJ was kind of being phased out.
After I graduated, I moved back to New York City (where I grew up) and I just needed a job. I was playing drums in a band at the time and that was my dream. I wanted to be in a band and tour the world and make records. We all moved to Queens to this tiny apartment in Astoria. It’s a great dream to have and you should absolutely follow your dreams, but in New York City it’s really hard to do that and not have some source of income. Eventually I got offered a temp job at Bank of America and ended up being there for years as a tech.
In 2014, Astoria was an affordable place to live but there wasn’t a lot to do. Then, a Comedy Club opened in my neighborhood and it was just like “oh my God this is so cool I have a place to go to see live entertainment!”
I was always a huge comedy fan and one of the first shows booked there was “Frank Conniff’s Cartoon Dump!”. I’d never seen Frank Conniff do stand up. I grew up watching Mystery Science Theater. I think I was 11 when I discovered it in the mid 90s. It was the kind of show you discover and you’re like wait was this made for me!
A: We feel exactly the same way; like we’re the perfect audience demographic for the humor.
C: It was so hilarious and everyone was talking about it. The cultural references require a certain body of knowledge about pop culture and old movies and so it was totally my thing. I absolutely loved watching that show and I remember thinking this is my favorite show because I would be watching it by myself and being in hysterics. It was the only show that could actually make me laugh out loud; just sitting there uncontrollably laughing.
A: Yeah, we got hysterical too; MST3K’s “Space Mutiny” for example. We had to pause that movie over and over because we couldn’t breathe and had to catch our breath before starting it again.
C: I know, and that’s what it’s like; the feeling of hanging out with your friends. I was always a big fan. Then I saw Frank was hosting at the Comedy Club. I saw the show which was Frank hosting as “Moody the Clinically Depressed Owl” (see below).
Frank would go backstage, put the costume on and then hang out. He’d have standups on and then he would riff on old cartoons.
I was just starting to do open mics. I wanted to get into standup and I started working the door at the club. Then I took on their social media and booking acts. Frank and I collaborated a lot in one way or another. Hanging out at a comedy club all the time was an incredible springboard for syncing up with creative people.
Before the Pandemic
C: Frank and Trace (Beaulieu) started touring right around the same time.
A: Yes, we saw them at the Plaza Theater in Atlanta and talked to them after the show. They were amazing.
C: Yeah, so Frank said I’ll do whatever show you want me to as long as I’m in town. So about a year before the pandemic Frank had an idea to do open mic nights but for riffing on clips of movies. I thought it was genius. He said if you produce it, I’ll host it. We did that for a year and it was so much fun and the pandemic happened.
Livestreaming The Mads
C: I decided I wanted to produce podcasts and live comedy. I started working with the Risk! and the Keith and the Girlpodcasts. Risk! was one of the first live shows to go to Zoom. I saw how well it worked; The New York Times wrote an article about it. “Open Your Laptops, the Comedy Show is About to Begin”. I had such a great time working with them and I started doing editing and other freelance work.
One day, Frank emailed me to say that he and Trace were thinking of doing “The Mads Are Back” online and did I know how they could do that? Frank came up with the idea of livestreaming the show. I knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted the movie to play while The Mads riff over the video. I had no idea how to do that. When I started school, the idea of livestreaming wasn’t even a concept.
I told them let me do some research and figure out if this is even possible. How to sell tickets, for example. We did a couple of tests on StreamYard, I think, and then we tried some early kind of Zoom alternatives and none of them worked properly. There were lots of audio issues.
I was using Zoom all the time we tried it to see if that would work and it did. In June of 2020 we felt confident that we could sell tickets to this and it wouldn’t be a complete disaster.
A: Just to clarify, you mean that you had to have the ability to first show everybody on camera, do the intros and then be able to show the video and audio of the movie at the same time Trace and Frank’s mics were on with no delay and no sync problems?
C: OK when you lay it out like that it’s like that sounds like an impossible task. Everyone thought oh that should be a simple thing yeah just put a movie on and talk over it! We switched to StreamYard quickly after we launched the Mary Jo Pehl. (also an MST3K alumna) show. Whatever issues we’d had with them had been resolved by that time. We can just do it all in a browser and that’s when we switched and that’s what we’ve been using ever since.
So, we put tickets on sale at the end of June for the July show of “Glen or Glenda” and we sold something like 800 tickets in the first 24 hours. We all thought we might have something here. When we went into it, we thought let’s just charge $10 and make it super easy and cheap and affordable for everyone.
We also included a free download if they can’t watch live or just want to save it on their hard drives.
A: We have all 49 of them on our media server.
C: Oh I love that. It was really important to us that it’d be affordable and no different tiers of pricing. We didn’t want someone who paid more money to get a better or different experience.
C: Every viewer is equal, exactly, and that was Trace and Frank’s approach when they were doing live shows. Everyone pays the same price, there’s no VIP passes. They would just hang out in the lobby before and after the shows and just talk to whoever wanted to talk to them. Frank was like “we’re all the same gang, these are our people.”
The first show happened and if you watch it in the intro I don’t even turn my mic on. I just welcome Trace and Frank and that’s it. I was busy making sure that everything would actually work. We didn’t get into any kind of bells and whistles or snazzy graphics. We were so nervous about all these people watching us do something live. For that first show we sold close to 3,000 tickets.
For the Q&A after “Glen or Glenda” people were submitting tons of questions in the Q&A. I started feeding them to Trace and Frank. By the way, when Frank first emailed me, I wasn’t going to host the show. I had zero plans to even be on screen or on mic or anything. I just wanted to be behind the scenes. Then I thought maybe I should just turn my camera on so people don’t just hear my voice feeding questions.
So the first show happened and it was a success and by show night we decided to do it once a month.
A: I’m so glad you did because I missed them.
C: Yeah, that’s how The Mads Are Back livestream was born.
Dumb Content Growth
A: So after producing and hosting The Mads, you started to add other content like art classes with Jackey Neyman Jones, the daughter of the man behind “Manos: The Hands of Fate”. For those of you who have not experienced the glory of The Mads riffing “Manos”, which some call the worst movie ever made, you can buy a download on the Dumb Industries site.
Did you reach out or did people see the success of The Mads back and asked how can we get in on this?
C: It was honestly never really my intention to expand or build a roster of MST3K-adjacent people. We started booking guests on the second episode but we didn’t plan it. We were doing “The Tingler” with Vincent Price. A week after we announced it, I got an email from his daughter Victoria Price. It was so cool but when I first saw it I thought someone was coming after us for copyright reasons.
A: I would have thought the same exact thing.
C: She’s said hey I saw you’re doing this thing; I loved MST and I’d love to be a part of this somehow. I told Trace and Frank and we agreed to ask her to be a guest on the show and she agreed. Even after that we still didn’t think we would have a guest every month. Then we announced the next show and Jonah Ray (also a former MST3K-er) emailed Trace and Frank to say he’d love to come on the show. That’s how having a guest became an every-month type of thing.
A: You’ve had some amazing guests like Dana Gould.
C: Yeah, a lot of my heroes which has been a little nerve-wracking. When we had Mike Nelson (former writer and host of MST3K) on for the first time I thought “how is this my life right now? I’m getting to not only host and produce a show with Trace and Frank but other iconic figures.” It’s still kind of nerve-wracking.
Then Mary Jo Pehl was next in line for the MST3K people that we wanted to have on. We all hit it off during the livestream but it never crossed my mind that she would want to do something regularly. Then Kevin Smith (not the director, our friend Kevin who was running The Mads Facebook group) shot me a message about Mary Jo and told me she might be interested in doing something.
I was appreciative that he even suggested it but I also didn’t want Trace or Frank to think I was going to start doing shows for other people and take time away from them. Eventually she sent me an email “Hey I was talking to Trace to see if you might be available to do some other production stuff and he suggested I reach out to you.” We started talking weekly calls and very quickly became good friends, and now she’s a regular.
A: So what’s in the future for Dumb Industries?
C: I would love for Dumb Industries to just keep expanding as it has. I like working with the group that we have right now. It’s very intimate and easy and everybody is like minded. Nobody wants to be “excuse me I’m a star now and so I need special treatment”. The goal has always been to be accessible, affordable and fun. Same thing with The Mads; we never wanted anyone to feel like they were left out. To this day, if anyone can’t afford a ticket to something they can just shoot me an email and no questions asked. People don’t take advantage; I get maybe five a month. That’s the way things have unfolded over the past four years. The new shows happen organically, when they’re supposed to happen. My goal has never to go out and find other shows and start creating new stuff. Everything has come about because we’ve wanted to do it and we knew we had a way to facilitate it.
A: Well Chris, I look forward to what comes next for Dumb Industries and wish you the best of luck!
C: Thanks for the interview Abbe and thanks for being a fan.
