Word: apatow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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These people tend to be familiar faces. Apatow gravitates toward the same editors, directors and actors - a community, population 30 or so, known as Apatown. After Freaks and Geeks was canceled, he hired Rogen, an actor on the show, to write for Undeclared. "I don't think he even cared if any of us could write," Rogen says. "He just cared that we wanted to write and figured he could shape us into writers." Stoller, another young writer on Undeclared, was hired by Apatow to direct Forgetting Sarah Marshall despite having no directorial experience. Andy Dick, who got his start...
...Apatow often serves as a mentor to the young people in his comedy troupe. The advice he hands out is exactly what he learned from watching Carrey and Sandler: They succeeded by writing their own movies to star in, so start typing. He barely knew Jonah Hill, now 25, when he hooked him up with a scriptwriting deal. "I was living at home, getting my tonsils taken out, and I was getting an e-mail from Judd saying, Here's your Universal movie deal. Now write down 100 ideas," says Hill. "My parents were like, 'Is this guy touching...
Jason Segel, another Freaks and Geeks alum, says Apatow told him he was too weird to get cast in roles he didn't write for himself, so Segel turned his own breakup into Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Years earlier, on the Freaks set, Apatow instructed Segel to write the sad love song his character was supposed to sing and play on guitar. "This was Wednesday, and we're going to film on Friday," says Segel. "I said, 'But Judd, I don't know how to play guitar.' He said, 'You have until Friday. You'll figure it out.' " And Segel...
...Likes People" The thing about the people Apatow mentors is that they're all men. His films are about men growing up and men helping men grow up and men being just shy of gay as they tease one another about being gay as they help one another grow up. There are smart, successful women in the movies, but other than his wife, they never join the troupe. "We're all really uncomfortable around girls, for the most part," says Rogen. "I imagine that has something to do with it." This annoys a lot of critics, male and female...
...characters, after all, strive to be better people. "There's a thread going all the way from Freaks and Geeks to Funny People," says Shandling, for whom Apatow worked as a writer on The Larry Sanders Show in the mid-'90s. "That philosophy is, We're all doing the best we can in life. It isn't easy. It's just a little funnier than Buddha Buddhism." When I ask Apatow if he sees himself having a career like those of two filmmakers known for the dramedy mode - Woody Allen and James L. Brooks, who made Terms of Endearment...