Scott: First off, it's a little unfair to equate Apatow-associated failures like Kicking & Screaming and Fun With Dick And Jane with successes like Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. He wrote, produced, and directed the latter films, so all credit should certainly be shifted in his direction, but he merely executive-produced Kicking & Screaming, which means next to nothing, and he's the credited co-screenwriter on Dick And Jane, which can often mean next-to-next-to-nothing. When the upcoming gay-panic comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry comes out, how much of it could you really credit to the great screenwriting team of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, whose script has been kicked around and retooled for so long that the end result will probably bear little resemblance to the original? Questions of authorship, especially as they relate to screenplays, bring us into some very murky waters.
But I'll happily take the bait on Talladega Nights—which Apatow produced and Anchorman's Adam McKay directed—because I consider that a case when the rambling, shambling improv quality mostly paid dividends. I can understand your frustration with the unevenness of improv-heavy comedies, and I share them to an extent I'll explain in greater detail later. But here, I feel the hits outweigh the misses. For one, the three main players—Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, and Sacha Baron Cohen—really excel under these circumstances, and I think something would be lost if you muzzled them with a conventional script. (Which film made better use of Cohen's abilities: Ali G Indahouse, or Borat? See what I mean? Improv wins in a walk.) The dinner-table sequence in Talladega Nights is an instant classic, and it's owed entirely to Ferrell and Reilly's ability to take a comic situation in crazy, unexpected directions.
You write, "My problem is that studios think they can throw a Ferrell and/or an Apatow at a terrible script and instantly make their problems disappear, but there's only so much either man can do." Assuming that your statement also applies to other reasonably skilled improvisers like Owen Wilson, Jack Black, and (to a much lesser extent these days) Ben Stiller, I'm going to take the glass-half-full side of the argument again. Granted, you don't want half-formed, poorly conceived movies to make it into production in the hope that one of these guys can save it with improvisation. And if that's become studio policy, it's certainly not something I endorse. However, without the likes of Ferrell or Wilson around to elevate schlock with their invention, you're left with just plain schlock. A forgettable little movie like Blades Of Glory couldn't be wispier in conceit, but watching talented people like Ferrell, Will Arnett, and Amy Poehler extract all the laughs they can from the world of ice skating is still a pleasure. And though Wilson is starting to a coast a little, his quirky readings used to make him the reliable bright spot of every movie he appeared in, from major roles in Shanghai Noon and The Big Bounce to scene-stealing minor ones in Meet The Parents and Zoolander.
I realize I'm playing devil's advocate here, to an extent. I wish there were more directors like Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Alexander Payne, Mike Judge, Terry Zwigoff, or David O. Russell out there to bring more cohesion and personal style to film comedy. If I have a complaint with Apatow, it's that he hasn't figured out how to use the tools of the medium to his advantage; his films have an indifferent look, and he rarely uses the camera as a key component in a visual gag. I certainly wouldn't mind it if Hollywood were suddenly flooded with directors who could channel Ernst Lubitsch or early Blake Edwards, or writers who could stand up to the likes of Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. Something like that would really shrink a Talladega Nights down to size.
And yet I feel optimistic about where improv-based comedy is heading, for a couple of reasons. The first is that directors like Apatow are getting better at harnessing improvisation and throwing out funny material that doesn't necessarily service the movie. For example, the two Knocked Up deleted scenes circulating on the Web—one in which Jonah Hill decries Ang Lee for not showing enough hot gay action in Brokeback Mountain ("a mouthful of Ledger" is a phrase for the ages) and another in which an irritable obstetrician rants in the delivery room ("your vagina is not the same as the one in 207")—are hilarious standalone scenes, but it would have been a mistake to wedge them into the movie. Improvisation can be wonderful, but it's also extremely volatile when it comes to pacing individual scenes and controlling the overall picture. Presumably, as we head further into this age where improv and sketch-comedy-trained actors and actor-writers seem to be taking over, good filmmakers will be able to get a better handle on how to make it work for them.
The other reason for optimism is that the next generation of improvisers is more exciting to me than the last. As the painfully unfunny likes of Robin Williams and Jim Carrey are getting old and gray, their replacements are looking much more promising to my eyes. I was serious when I said that Apatow is the exception that's becoming the rule: He's involved himself with Ferrell for years, and the troupe members he's employed in his TV and film projects alone are having a major impact on the direction of film comedy. It's exciting that a major studio would build an project like Superbad around commercially untested (but awesome) talents like Hill and Michael Cera, and the future looks bright for Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, Leslie Mann, Jason Segal, Romany Malco, and hopefully many others in the Apatow gang.
Do you still see no hope in these improvisational wizards revitalizing film comedy, or are you that committed a comedy auteurist?
Nathan: I wasn't really linking Knocked Up or 40-Year-Old Virgin or Superbad with Apatow's gun-for-hire work on Will Ferrell movies. I feel like you can't go wrong giving Apatow $20 million to make a movie with his formidable band of wisecrackers, cut-ups, and mischief-makers. I sincerely hope that the future lies in those kinds of movies. I'm merely saying that the present involves desperate studios thinking they can throw an Apatow or Ferrell at a weak script and still come up with a winner.
I think your statement that "Questions of authorship, especially as they relate to screenplays, bring us into some very murky waters" applies to almost all the films we've talked about. DVDs give audiences an unprecedented level of information about how movies get made, but it's still generally fuzzy about who contributes what to movies, especially once improv and script doctors enter the picture. For all I know, everyone involved rigidly adhered to every line of dialogue and stage direction in the script of The Ex, under penalty of death. So what I'm arguing is to some extent a matter of hearsay and inference.
Maybe improvisation isn't solely, or even largely, to blame for the arch randomness and shapelessness afflicting so much contemporary comedy, but as I've argued throughout this piece, it certainly appears to be a contributing factor.
I think there's a lot of common ground here. I think we'd both like to see more comedies with a strong authorial sensibility. I think we're both encouraged by the success of the Judd Apatow factory. I wouldn't even say I'm anti-improvisation. I just have an extraordinary number of reservations about the way improv is currently used, and I suspect that Hollywood will learn all the wrong lessons from Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, attributing their success to raunch, young characters, improv-skilled actors, and high concept, and not to a strong screenplay, heart, and multi-dimensional characters.
Am I that attached to the comedy status quo, that I can't embrace improvisation as an evolutionary next phase in the genre's development? Fuck no. It's not that I'm at all attached to the current state of comedy. I just worry that as low as comedy has fallen, it can always get worse. Alas, my curmudgeonly skepticism is melting away in the face of your sprightly optimism.
Dagnab it, I'm willing to give these crazy kids that make up comical business and cinematical-type tomfoolery out of thin air a chance. What do we have to lose, ultimately? Screenwriters have been suffering through Hollywood's longest death scene since well before the talkies arrived. Maybe it's high time we put them out of their misery and let these guys making $20 million a movie make up all their own dialogue anyway.
Final thoughts?
Scott: Yes, we do have a lot of common ground here, and that realization gave me a big laugh. We might split hairs a bit over the degree to which we like, say, Talladega Nights, but I'm guessing that our opinions about the films, the directors, and the actors we've discussed are more or less the same. We're both enthusiastic about what Judd Apatow and his troupe are bringing to comedy. We agree about the specific pleasures and pitfalls that can come from improvisational techniques. We both lament the paucity of writer-directors who have a strong, cohesive comic vision. So basically, the rift between us is that we have fundamentally different ways of seeing the same thing: You the "curmudgeonly skeptic" and me the "sprightly optimist."
Ever the optimist, I'm still fond of my point of view on this issue. There's no question that improvisation has contributed and will continue to contribute to the production of bad movies. We haven't even begun to see what Borat hath undoubtedly wrought, and it's probable that the same wrong lessons learned from Farrelly brothers comedies or American Pie will also be applied to Apatow's sweet raunchfests. Still, I don't think counting the sheer number of bad movies made in a particular style is necessarily a good indication of whether that style is fruitful. You might remember The Ex or a post-Farrelly stinker like Say It Isn't So, because your pop-culture mind is like a steel trap for crapola. But I think it's important to remember that while every era in film comedy—or any other genre, for that matter—has a lot more chaff than wheat, the successes define the time. Everyone remembers how great Adam's Rib is, but there were no doubt countless awful screwball comedies produced during the same era that are collecting dust in a studio vault somewhere.
My main point, then, is to say that I'm excited about the incorporation of improvisation and sketch-comedy traditions into studio comedies, and I'm excited about the new generation of performers who are making it happen. The two films this year that stoked my enthusiasm on that front were Knocked Up and The Valet. We've already talked plenty about Knocked Up, so you know where I'm coming from there. But The Valet is an interesting case for me, because it's a genuine farce, which is a form of comedy that never gets made anymore. Its director, Francis Veber, scripted the model French farce in 1978's La Cage Aux Folles, though his track record as a writer-director has been spotty to say the least; he's even foisted several awful Americanizations of his work (Three Fugitives, Pure Luck, Fathers' Day) on the public.
To my surprise, The Valet opened earlier this year to mostly good reviews (Metacritic score: 68), and I can understand to some extent why other critics liked it. Because arriving as it did among some of the haphazard, uneven comedies we've been discussing here—Blades Of Glory had come out a few weeks earlier—the film does stand out; its elegant mechanics are a pleasure to behold. The scenes actually build upon each other and lead to payoffs down the roads, rather than just trying to accumulate as much randomly funny material as possible. Veber is like an architect who knows exactly what his building's going to look like before he rolls the camera, and his whole elaborate construction would fall if a single brick were out of place. It's the antithesis of improv-heavy comedy, which might begin with the idea of a building—a sketch on a cocktail napkin, comparatively—but hasn't completely determined how it's going to get there.
Here's the problem, though: I didn't laugh once during The Valet. Not once. And much as I appreciated its construction, it was like taking a trip to a musty museum to check out the woolly mammoth; I left convinced that the farce just isn't a viable form anymore. The best of these improv-heavy comedies, like Borat or Knocked Up, provide an invigorating, fresh experience, and makes you believe that comedy as a form is moving forward. And for that reason alone, I remain cautiously optimistic about where it's headed.
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