Despite Avatar’s long-gestating sequel-and new logo-debuting this week, “Papyrus,” more than five years later, continues to leave a distinct, “tribal yet futuristic” mark on the movie franchise’s legacy. The sketch, which eventually ends with Steven stalking the graphic designer outside his home, quickly became an SNL modern classic and has racked up more than 18 million views on YouTube-a testament to its utter randomness, Ryan Gosling’s commitment to a niche bit, and the general absurdity of a billion-dollar movie attaching itself to an overused and often-mocked font. “Whatever they did,” Gosling screams before smashing a bottle, “it wasn’t enough!” “Like a thoughtless child, just wandering by a garden, yanking leaves along the way.” Despite a friend (Chris Redd) explaining the logo’s distinct modifications, Steven can’t accept its minimal differences. He clicked the drop-down menu, and then he just randomly selected Papyrus,” Steven tells his therapist, played by Kate McKinnon. It centers on a man named Steven (Gosling), who’s haunted by recurring dreams about the “professional” graphic designer who chose the generic font for Avatar’s logo. Shot in one night, the three-minute digital short “Papyrus” begins like a paranoid psychodrama and spirals into a third-act conspiracy thriller. “Normally, you can get a good read, but that’s why it’s so special working with Julio-it’s so hard to picture these things until you’re actually working with the footage.” Two days later, once Ryan McIlraith, Sean’s brother and coeditor, uploaded the material and saw Gosling “was giving this true cinematic performance,” Ryan says, both of them agreed: “This is going to be incredible.” “At SNL, the scripts have certain formats and they’re bare bones,” McIlraith says. Still, after various rounds of approval, video editor Sean McIlraith looked at the script ahead of production and struggled to grasp its comedic potential. “In many ways was like a surrogate for myself.” “I’m naturally attracted to people who are very obsessive because I’m obsessive,” he says. Though initially skeptical of fleshing out the Papyrus observation past its sentence-length substance, he began crafting a monologue for Gosling by leaning into his own tunnel vision. Over the previous year, Torres had grown used to expanding on whimsically ludicrous ideas, highlighting the sensitive and melancholic inner lives of outrageous characters-like in “Melania Moments” and its semi-sequel “Customer Service,” which cast the former first lady as a lonely housewife looking for connection. In an era of Reddit sleuthing and YouTube rabbit holes, “Ryan really latched on to that idea because he saw a character in it.” “The movie just felt so immersive and so technologically meticulous, which makes the choice of font even funnier,” Torres says. Until later that day, when Gosling approached him with the vision of a tortured and obsessed soul plagued by this hackneyed, rudimentary graphic design decision-nearly eight years after James Cameron’s epic had hit theaters. Torres had previously worked that observation into his personal stand-up material, but he had never quite considered its narrative potential. Inside a room that included that week’s host, Ryan Gosling, he brought up a tweet he’d written several months earlier about a very specific annoyance: “Every day I wake up and remember that Avatar, a huge international blockbuster, used the Papyrus font for their logo and no one stopped them.” At a Monday morning pitch meeting in September 2017, Saturday Night Live writer Julio Torres broke the ice with one of his signature off-kilter jokes.
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