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Every Shot, Every Episode (2001), the first in the series and which takes the same physical form, slices the twenty episodes of Starsky and Hutch aired between 1975 and 1977 into over 10,000 individual shots spread across almost 300 CD's. The categories are looser, ranging across visual cues, individual characters, or plot twists (“EVERY ZOOM IN,” “EVERY YELLOW VOLKSWAGEN,” “EVERY BLUE,” “EVERY MOAN OF PAIN”), but the result is the same: the predictable plot mechanisms (rising action, climax, denouement) are dismantled and the connections between events are made obscure. The process unveils the clichés and repetition inherent in their formulaic sources: Wile E. Coyote will never catch the Road Runner, Starsky and Hutch will always bust the bad guys. The artists write that the material they use “employ[s] formulas or archetypes of human behavior...and constitute many of our earliest experiences with narrative.” The heart of these works is their turning that narrative into list or database form.

What that reveals, in the case of Every Anvil, was succinctly outlined by the writer Jim Supanick: “The dogged persistence in facing falling safes, every stick of dynamite, every anvil...the slapstick quality that kids tap into shows itself as Sisyphean repetition to the adult viewers who make the mistake of looking too closely...[reminding] us of the masochism ingrained in our own everyday lives.” Every Shot, Every Episode may be a bit more benign, given our distanced, ironic appreciation of the source material, but the conceptual (and literal) shake-up is a potent way of reimagining the overly familiar. As Jennifer puts it: “ItŐs a strategy for looking at narrative in a different way. Maybe more from the point of view of the maker or the production process rather than the spectator.”

The McCoys' extensive involvement with reorganizing available footage led naturally to a desire for more active re-creation. For The Kiss and Horror Chase (both 2002), the artists, instead of working with the original material, completely restaged scenes from Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2, respectively. The artists leave their place as editors to temporarily become both spectators—Body Heat and Evil Dead 2 are among their favorite films—and directors. Horror Chase, filmed on a Brooklyn soundstage inside a 1,000 square foot set constructed by the artists, is a one-shot horror picture. The camera stalks actor Adrian Latourelle (playing the Bruce Campbell role in the original film), who runs in fear down a hallway and into a bedroom, crashes through a door into a living room, runs past the kitchen into a bathroom and then a closet, dashes down a mist-filled hallway, and finally ends up back in the kitchen. The camera winds up exactly where it began, making for a forty-five second seamless loop that, in the final artwork, is manipulated to run fast, slow, and backwards according to a computer algorithm that randomizes its playback. Rather than working with the entire film, the McCoys show the chase scene—in this case the actor is trying to avoid an evil force that eventually possesses him—as the essence of the horror genre. The Kiss is an endless prolongation of the climactic moment in every romance film (though specifically taken from Body Heat), seen again through a computer program from random angles and at random speeds. Both films expand the issues raised by the “Every” works: as Timothy Druckrey writes, “In differentiating the original and its perverse double, the production takes the flash-back into the realm of the fetishistic...[it] is a kind of classic in limbo—part re-creation, part parody, part hijack, part homage.”

The same descriptors can be applied to Soft Rains and especially Our Second Date (2004), which again adds a personal variation to the proceedings. The work is another tabletop sculpture attended to by robotic cameras, but this time it recreates on one platform both the set (taken from Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend) and the screen (the Parisian movie theater the artists visited to watch that film on their second date.) Soft Rains collapses the space of film—its creation and reception—into one room; Our Second Date reduces it even further. Like the steel suitcases that contain Every Anvil or Every Shot, Every Episode, the interplay of creation, transmission, and reception in Our Second Date reveals a world every bit as rich and complex as our own.