Word: apatower
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After he struggled for two decades in the worlds of stand-up comedy, television and movies, Apatow's plugging away suddenly paid off: he broke out as the creator of a genre of foulmouthed straight-man-love movies - the bromance. The first movie he directed, 2005's The 40 Year-Old Virgin, earned more than four times its cost at the U.S. box office. This enabled Apatow to produce all the scripts he'd been studiously stockpiling, making seven movies in 2007 and '08 - Knocked Up (which he also directed), Superbad, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Forgetting Sarah Marshall...
...Apatow's new movie, Funny People, is the one he hopes will turn him from a mass producer of comedies into a filmmaker. It has a tragic premise: Sandler plays a lonely, selfish comedian who has received a terminal-disease diagnosis. It's got no set piece to assure laughs - no chest-waxing like in Virgin, no crowning baby like in Knocked Up. It's complicated enough that it's the first movie Apatow has made that has a bad title, a bad poster and bad commercials. And if it doesn't do well, the creative freedom he has earned...
...Apatow, the goal was simple. "I wanted to see how funny I could be without making the choice that every 10 minutes something big and visual had to happen," he says. "People like the comedy more when they care about the characters. That's what I learned from the last two movies. This movie is just taking that one step further." For all his sex-drenched crudeness, for all the e-mails he sends me worrying about ulcers, Apatow is a bouncy, way-too-happily married dad who wants his audiences to know how great life is. And, more important...
...Comedy Nerd Because Apatow is a guy who can get into his own head, set up an office there and really go to work. A bearded 41-year-old in a uniform of striped short-sleeved Izods, he makes a lot of eye contact, has a friendly, nervous laugh and constantly plays with his right thumb. He seems more like a therapist than someone who sees one. But behind the approachable attitude, Apatow is superintense. He is rarely far from a Red Bull. On the nights he doesn't use sleeping pills, often the only way he can fall asleep...
...show off a collection of autographed photos he just bought in New York - Sonny and Cher, Siskel and Ebert, Barbara Eden. Then there's the album of autographs he sent away for as a kid that includes a surprising number of headshots of Paul Lynde. It's as if Apatow invited me over hoping I'd beat him up. (See the top 10 dubious SNL hosts...