Word: apatower
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...every movie he produces, Apatow makes the director shoot and keep shooting, yelling suggestions at the actors until they're so worn down that they can't think of anything to say other than something personal - or funny. After a scene in Get Him to the Greek, director Nick Stoller runs off triumphantly, shaking his fists in the air. "We did it! We got Sean to make a gay joke!" he yells. "They got me. They turned me out," says Combs, shaking his head as he walks away. One night, with 1,300 extras at the Greek Theater...
...Once Apatow has a three-hour-plus version of the movie, he shows it to every funny person in L.A. and asks for notes. "Judd is like a feedback machine," says Feig. "He wants feedback of the person he doesn't even like or trust. And he's got the brain trust of comedy at the moment, old and new." The next stop is test audiences - 10 for Funny People. "We had a debate over how much is too much for a comedian to talk about his penis and testicles," Apatow says. "The answer there is, No amount...
...Then Apatow gets back inside his own head and agonizes over the final details. On the last day to make changes to the Funny People print, he is sitting in the office building in Santa Monica, Calif., that his assistants call the Apatower, mulling over which of several jokes to put in. One dilemma: Should Sandler dislike Mann's elder daughter because she doesn't laugh at his jokes or because she's old enough to have her period? Mind you, this is Apatow's real daughter who's playing the character - so when he asks me, as a warm...
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...