The cop didn’t answer. He just cocked his head and then mumbled, “Uh, never mind.” His partner looked at him like he was crazy, but Cop One just dragged his partner off and mumbled, “Just have fun. Have a good night.” I closed the door, unsure of what exactly had just happened. Maybe they had bigger fish to fry? After all, Albuquerque was the per capita murder capital of the country. Fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang again. Standing there were eight Albuquerque policemen. Oh shit. They’d called for backup. Cop One smiled. “Super Troopers, right?”
I said, “Yeah,” sheepishly.
All of the cops shifted on their spots, happily. “Can we come in and party? We’re huge fans,” Cop One asked through grinning teeth.
I swung open the door and in they filed. People in the party who had just seconds ago been smoking joints were shocked. But the cops adopted nonthreatening poses and made everyone feel fine. After about an hour of partying, the cops had to go and asked us for a group picture. Yes, some of my more adventurous college friends were holding bongs in the back row. The cops asked us not to share those pictures, and we didn’t. That was the moment when we came to realize how big an impact Super Troopers had had in the law enforcement community.
Doing boat races in real life was fun, but we wanted to give it a visual twist in the movie. We were inspired by the time when, back in New York, Erik, Steve, and I were waiters together. After our shift one night, we, along with Chef Dave, went to a bar called Richter’s. Chef Dave was a little man, but he talked a big game about his beer-chugging prowess. Richter’s had two glass beer boots, so the challenge was set. It was Chef Dave versus Erik in a boot chug.
Erik, Lemme, and I laid down our night’s wages on the bar, some $360 in all. Then, Chef Dave, in what felt like a pointless display of machismo, said that you were disqualified if you spilled a drop. To which we said, “Obviously.” But Chef Dave had an ace up his sleeve. The chug began. Chef Dave was fast, but Erik was faster. No shit. Colgate, right? As they got to the ankle of the boot, Erik kept guzzling, but an air bubble formed, which caused the remaining beer to explode all over his face. Meanwhile, Chef Dave casually turned his boot sideways, which dissipated the bubble and allowed him to finish his chug without spilling a drop. Chef Dave knew the secret of the boot and collected our money as he laughed in our faces. Though poorer, we were impressed. More importantly, we had a memory that would come in handy later when we invented “Das Boot!”
I first met Lee Haxall when she was my editor on Arrested Development (more on that show later in the book). Lee had an innate understanding of Arrested’s rhythm, and since Broken Lizard’s rhythm was similar, I hired her to cut Dukes, and then Beerfest. Heffernan and I sat with Lee for a few months and got a two-hour cut that we liked. When we showed it to fifty of our friends, we knew we were on to something. We trimmed ten minutes from the film and then set a date to test it. One day before the test, we screened the film for Warner Bros. president Jeff Robinov. Jeff typed into his BlackBerry during the whole screening, which made me sad. Did the movie really mean that little to him? After the screening, Jeff said, “I think this is really funny. It is funny, right?” he asked, since he did watch it alone in a room. Having seen the response of our fifty friends, I told him that I was confident that it was. Then he said, “Here are my notes.” An assistant walked up with his typed-up notes, fresh off the printer. Jeff hadn’t been texting; he’d been writing notes the whole time. Big relief.
The next day we tested the film, and the scores were great—better than The Dukes of Hazzard, which were the highest scores we’d had to date. Enthusiasm at the studio was high.
For the promotional tour, Warner Bros. arranged screenings and keg parties in all of the major cities across America. Before we arrived, beer pong tournaments were held, with the winners earning a chance to play Broken Lizard when we came to town. We played every night for six weeks, and we became great—pro ball. Of the hundreds of games we played, we lost fewer than twelve. It was glorious to listen to cocky college kids talk trash before we smoked them. We had swagger and very few stood a chance.
The campaign for Beerfest made me nervous. I realize that the film had the word “beer” in the title, but we had endeavored to make the smartest, funniest drinking movie ever. Yet, reminiscent of Puddle Cruiser, our Beerfest poster had two hot blondes on it who were not in the movie. Further, the TV ads seemed to emphasize the noise and the action, not the intelligence and the wit. We expressed our concern, but our marketing executives were the same exact ones who had absolutely drilled the Dukes campaign, so maybe they knew better? And to be clear, this is not science. There is no right answer. We all looked at the materials and we made decisions together. And the marketing team chose the campaign they believed would reach the widest audience and make the most money.
Then, when a release date opened up that was a mere three months away, Warner Bros. gave us a choice: Either take this early date or wait nine months for the next opening. They promised to spend a lot of money on the campaign to make up for the short window. It didn’t quite work. In the end, Beerfest made a ton of money on home video and pay-per-view, but the theatrical results, especially considering the high scores, were disappointing. As successful as Super Troopers was, we weren’t exactly movie stars yet, so the noisy campaign plus the short exposure period didn’t bring our fans to the theater. This is only my opinion, but had Broken Lizard been less impatient and taken the later date, and had we had a more sophisticated campaign, I think our theatrical results could have been big. A few years later, we saw the campaign I wish we had had when Warner Bros. promoted the film The Hangover. That’s how you sell a party movie without stars.
A few weeks before Beerfest opened in Germany, my old pal Kevin Cooper sent me an article from a Munich newspaper that detailed a movement to ban the film there. Though the writer of the article had yet to see it, he was certain that our film would make German culture look bad. To which we said, “It was probably the Holocaust that did most of the damage.” In the end, the film did not get banned, and Germany would go on to become one of our biggest markets. In fact, last year, we held a Beerfest tournament in Chicago and two guys flew in from Berlin. What a joy it was to listen to them gush over Bierfest in their real German accents.
Beerfest initially had a different type of fan than Super Troopers. We were suddenly being approached by clean-cut Republican-looking types who felt we had made a movie for them. One young Republican said, “I heard you made another movie, too, though it’s supposed to be some kind of a stoner movie, right?”
“Super Troopers?” I asked.
He pointed. “Yeah, that’s it.”
To which I said, “I guess I can see why you think Super Troopers is a stoner movie, but, truthfully, they’re probably both stoner movies, since grass played an integral part in the creation of both.”
Beerfest, at its core, is an ode to binge drinking. And I’m fine with that. It’s easy to look back on your high school, college, and postcollege years and judge them harshly for the amount you drank or drugged. I’m not willing to do that. Those years were fun and I loved them. I’m lucky—frankly, all of us in Broken Lizard are lucky that we don’t have the alcoholic gene. Were we drunks? Yeah, and for decades, but it was never a problem. And I wouldn’t change anything, because it was fun and bonding and partly responsible for the beginnings of a whole lot of lovely marriages. Yes, some people can’t handle booze because they can’t stop drinking it. Yes, some people drive drunk, and some beat their lovers, wives, and children. But most don’t. Most people drink a little bit on most nights, and more on the weekends—sometimes to get drunk, have fun, and then get up on Monday and go to work. I don’t drink like I used to because I have a wife and kids and a job. But when I didn’t have all that, and I could drink as much as I wanted, I still never beat my girlfriend. So it all depends on who you are. Is beer responsible for fights at football games? Sure, but it’s also respon
sible for an intensity of friendship that can only be forged late at night in a rush of alcohol, grass, and whatever. If you read the newspaper, most of the stories about alcohol are about the evils of binge drinking. What about some stories about the joys of drunkenness? In TV and movies, we spend a lot of time focusing on addicts because their plight makes for good drama. But they’re in the vast minority, and maybe less time should be spent on them. And to be clear, I’m sympathetic. I have a good number of friends who quit drinking because they had trouble with it. And that’s good. Don’t drink if you can’t, but the media shouldn’t make the rest of us feel bad about it when we don’t have the same issues.
The big question surrounding films like Beerfest is, does the film reflect culture or affect culture? Animal House came out in 1978 and dramatically affected the next twenty-five years of fraternity drinking life and, frankly, drinking life everywhere. At Colgate, we emulated and imitated the Delta house in several of the things we did. We had toga parties, pulled crazy pranks, drank competitively, and some of us were careless about grades (not me). We had a guy named Mongo. Did this behavior exist before Animal House? Probably, but Animal House supercharged it.
Likewise, Beerfest didn’t invent binge drinking, though it did help organize it. Now we see videos of people who throw their own Beerfests, complete with organized teams and uniforms. And at the end of the night, when they’re hurling in the bushes, is it because of the movie? Maybe partly. Hey, the Greeks drank until they vomited and we laud them for their culture. There’s a joyous intensity that comes from drinking beer, wine, or liquor that is both irreplaceable and important to some people’s lives. Okay, I’m one of those people. And the rest of you know who you are too.
Making a party movie has its benefits. Bouncers know Beerfest, which makes us royalty on the entrance line. Further, the film is popular with bartenders and waiters, so when Broken Lizard is there, the bar never closes. Or it closes, but they let us stay and they keep pouring. So, not bad.
At the end of Beerfest, there’s a scene where we run into Willie Nelson in Amsterdam. Willie tells us that he’s headed to a supersecret pot-smoking competition, but his teammates, Cheech and Chong, missed their flight. Willie asks us if we’ll sub in for them in the competition. We agree and go into the door of Potfest. It was a joke and we never planned on making the film, but since then, we’ve been inundated with questions about the film. And we’ve actually written thirty pages of a draft, so . . . who knows?
CHAPTER 17
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Television: Or, Models Talking Tough
In the years after Super Troopers came out, most of my focus was on getting more films made. But there was also something new in the mix: TV. In these creatively dark days when the major film studios have all but abandoned stories where the main characters are not wearing tights and capes, television has filled the void.
Television directing is a creatively different beast from film directing, in that in TV, the head writer is king. My goal when directing television shows is to give head writers the best goddamned episodes of their shows they’ve ever seen. And when I turn in my “director’s cut,” they get to see how I see their show. But after they’ve watched my cut, they’re free to change whatever the hell they want to about it because it’s their fucking show. If you can’t make peace with that creative relationship, then TV directing is not for you.
TV is very satisfying because of the speed of work required. Unlike a film, which can take years from script to screen, television must often be written, shot, edited, and broadcast in only a matter of weeks.
I’ve directed a lot of television, but here are a few of the highlights:
UNDECLARED
In 1997, NBC executives attended a screening of Puddle Cruiser at Sundance and hired Broken Lizard to adapt the film for TV. Our half-hour pilot about funny, intellectual drunks and stoners at a northeastern school (Colgate) was called Safety School. NBC loved the script and green-lit the pilot. As we were casting, we made the decision not to act in it, both because we wanted to be available to make films and because we felt swearing was an integral part of who we were. I admit that that decision was probably dumb.
With a new cast in place, we shot the pilot, edited it, and presented it to NBC. The response was great. Safety School was an internal hit at NBC, particularly with the younger employees. We heard that the older execs were nervous about its edgy content but rattled enough by the youth-quake of support at NBC that they were having serious conversations about picking our show up. A meeting was scheduled for me with then NBC president Scott Sassa in his massive New York City office. It was a hot day in early May, but I decided to wear my lucky red flannel shirt to the meeting. The problem with this shirt was that there was a one-foot round hole in the back of it. When I walked into Scott’s office, I made sure to never turn my back to him. Scott and I spoke about budget and about shooting the show in Toronto, a place I had already scouted. The conversation then moved on to whether we could fucking handle the enormous responsibility of delivering twenty-six episodes a year. When the meeting ended, I smiled and backed out of his long office like I was saying good-bye to a king. He must have wondered what that was about. In the end, my lucky shirt didn’t come through, as NBC did not order our show.
Two years later, my agent called to tell me that Judd Apatow wanted to meet. I didn’t know Judd, but I thought that The Larry Sanders Show, which he had been head writer of, was the funniest, most interesting show in comedy history, so I went. I met him on the set of a pilot he was shooting called North Hollywood. The show was about young actors and starred Kevin Hart, Amy Poehler, Jason Segel, and Judge Reinhold. Judd told me that he had seen and loved Safety School and thought we had gotten a raw deal. Then he asked me if I would direct an episode of his college comedy, Undeclared.
The set of Undeclared was fun and loose, and the cast was young. Seth Rogen was eighteen. Jay Baruchel and Charlie Hunnam weren’t much older. The guys had a lot of energy, and they were constantly cracking tons of mostly excellent dirty jokes. At times, it was like herding hungover cats. But they were good too, and authentic. When you added in the writers, we had a set full of young, funny, talented people who were mostly newcomers to show business.
Judd once asked me to sit in on his “notes call” with the network. The network had read his draft and wanted to tell him their notes. He and I were on speakerphone, listening to the executive talk about her view of the episode’s plotline. Judd interrupted her, loudly yelling, “No!”
Confused, she said, “What?”
“No! Bad note. Next!”
The call went on like that for ten minutes. After we hung up, I said, “You might want to at least pretend to respect their notes.”
He smiled. “No. Fuck them. They’re wrong!”
We had fun on that show, but Fox couldn’t quite figure out how to corral an audience, so it was canceled after seventeen episodes.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
In 2002, I met with the writer Mitch Hurwitz about his new show, Arrested Development. I watched the pilot and was intrigued. It was funny, and really smart, and weird, and Ron Howard was doing a voice-over. I was bold at the time, cocky from Super Troopers, and, frankly, unskilled in the ways of show business, so I told him what I really thought. I said that his show was great, but that it might be overcut. Had he considered a slightly slower pace of editing? Mitch seemed surprised by my candor, but he hired me anyway, saying, “Okay. Direct one and show me what you’re talking about.”
I directed four episodes in the first two seasons: “My Mother, the Car,” “Beef Consommé,” “Altar Egos,” and “Justice Is Blind.”
Working on that show was pure joy. Every actor was great, every writer was great, and the directors were all pretty good too. As Rob Lowe says about The West Wing, “It was a murderers’ row of talent.”
In addition to the amazing main cast of Jason Bateman, Will Arne
tt, Tony Hale, Jeffrey Tambor, David Cross, Michael Cera, Jessica Walter, Alia Shawkat, and Portia de Rossi, I also worked with the great Henry Winkler, Jane Lynch, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Liza Minnelli.
We thought we were making the funniest show on television. One day, when I was running a bit behind, the line producer approached to ask me if I was going to finish my work for the day. I looked at her and said, “This is art. We’ll be done when we’re done.” If that makes me sound like an asshole, I swear I didn’t mean it that way. What I meant was, This is high art, and it can’t be rushed. Who cares if we finish today’s work on time? We can always come back tomorrow.
In a film, you need anywhere from 20 days to 120 days of production. So falling one scene behind doesn’t mean much, as you can always find a day to make it up. Television, on the other hand, works on a regimented schedule. For a half-hour show, each director has five days to shoot his or her episode. If I don’t finish my day’s work, I either have to make it up in the remaining four days or add a sixth day of shooting. If I need a sixth day, then the next director can’t start his or her episode on time because I’m using the crew for the extra day. Adding a sixth day also means that the producer has to pay the crew for that extra, unbudgeted day. If every director goes over one day on their episode, the cost over a season would be enormous. But no one explained this to me.
A few years later, when a friendly line producer finally did, I said, “Oooooooooooh!” After that, I focused my attention on becoming a far more efficient director. Today, I almost never go over. That said, being on time at the expense of quality is silly and counterproductive. There’s an old show business saying: “No one ever went to a movie because it was on time and under budget.”
Today, my motto is “I shoot as fast as quality will allow.”
Mustache Shenanigans Page 24
