Word: writes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Feedback Machine For all his master planning, Apatow as a moviemaker is known for his collaboration. His least favorite part of the process is writing, which for Funny People involved his speaking the characters' parts into a tape recorder. Even then, he'd call people for feedback. "The moment you think of a joke is the best moment," he says. "I put on a big show when I write something I think is funny. I'll talk about it a lot and call people and tell them, 'I thought of this joke where Steve Carell pees in his own face...
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...
...similar experience prompted French cardiologist Dr. Olivier Ameisen to write the highly publicized memoir The End of My Addiction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). A longtime alcoholic, Ameisen had checked into various rehabilitation centers at least eight times and attended nearly 5,000 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings, without being able to maintain sobriety. More than five years ago, he began taking baclofen, and since then, he says, he has consistently been able to abstain from drinking altogether or drink moderately in social situations, without having cravings or other addiction-related problems...