Word: apatow
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...rights, Judd Apatow should be a terrible filmmaker. His movies largely feature his friends and family, which is usually an invitation to lazy inside-joking. His subjects tend to be none-too-bright slackers and losers, which always carries with it the possibility of tiresome indulgence. OK, they're kinda dumb, but, really, isn't there something adorable in their stupidity? The fact is, however, Apatow, represents, for the moment at least, the best in American movie comedy. The 40 Year-Old Virgin somehow made rather touching and funny sense out of that eponymous condition and its protagonist's recovery...
...gigs at Yuk Yuk's (his retort to hecklers: "I'm 13. In 30 years, I'll be 43. You'll be dead"). He had even been paid by a mohel to write jokes. But ever since he dropped out of high school, Rogen has studied exclusively under Apatow...
After casting him in a small role in Freaks, Apatow started to think about keeping Rogen around when he improvised a sweet, funny scene in which his character wonders if he's gay after finding out his girlfriend was born a hermaphrodite. When Freaks ended after one season, Apatow tried to cast Rogen as the lead of Undeclared, a sitcom about college kids. The network, however, didn't think Rogen looked like a leading actor. "He was already approved to be in the cast, and they literally got angry at me for suggesting it," Apatow says. "And I said...
...that a full-grown man is spending a lot of time with a teenage boy. "I'm such a comedy fan that even though he's 16, I know I'm hanging out with one of the guys who's going to be one of the great comics," says Apatow. Rogen's co-stars felt the same way. "It didn't occur to me that when he was doing Freaks and Geeks he was a teenager. I figured he was actually 40," says Paul Rudd, the handsome guy who has played Rogen's goofy sidekick in the past two Apatow...
...after one season, Rogen didn't get many auditions. "It didn't bother me very much. I didn't think I'd ever be an actor," says Rogen. "I thought I was going to be a writer." All the time, like some sort of '70s-movie kung-fu master, Apatow was coming up with ridiculous writing tests for Rogen and Goldberg to pass: turn an idea of his into a movie in 10 days (even though nothing was going to happen at the end of 10 days); come up with 100 one-page-long ideas for movies (they...