Still a month out from its premiere, IFC's The Spoils of Babylon has gotten a tantalizingly bizarre promo in the form of a behind-the-scenes short about the ambitious project.
The eight-minute doc chronicles the exhausting three-year filming process and the production catastrophes that eventually led to it being shelved for decades -- only The Spoils of Babylon filmed this past summer.
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Producers at Funny or Die have gone to exhaustive lengths to make the project seem like the epic miniseries of yore. The Spoils of Babylon, as it is presented, was a sprawling telepic first tackled in 1978 that just so happens to star Tobey Maguire, Kristen Wiig, Tim Robbins and Jessica Alba. Here they're seen as other actors, subject to the whims of author Eric Jonrosh (Will Ferrell), unsuccessfully adapting his fictional novel of the same name to screen under non-union-friendly circumstances.
"He bought me a Snickers bar and a hat," moans one crew member, shortly after Haley Joel Osment is shown snorting an elaborate line of cocaine shaped into a peace sign.
It's a lot like peeling back the curtain on The Winds of War and finding Ali MacGraw channeling the kids from Lord of the Flies.
The Spoils of Babylon premieres Jan. 9 at 10 p.m.
