Writing a screenplay's not rocket science, but I was in a bar, and the bartender came up to me and said, 'I saw 'Night at the Museum,' and the thing about him and his kid brought me and my kid together.' Something like that... it's like, 'Oh, right. That's why we're doing it.'
Robert Ben Garant
What happens is, you write a spec, people get it, they see your writing, they see you're good, they bring you into their office, and they say, 'Boy, that spec was really good - we'll never make that in a million years. We have rights to the board game of Monopoly. What do you think about a Monopoly movie?'
The 'Reno' movie is very solid. 'Balls of Fury' I'm pretty disappointed in - I blame myself. People hate both of those movies equally.
My college years are a blur.
'Reno' was originally going to be a sketch show, with the cops as a transitional element.
There are a huge amount of people who sell a TV pilot every year, but most of them never get produced. It's very easy to make a living and never get anything produced.
In cop shows, the police don't get to rag on each other and rag on their commander and rag on the person they just pulled over. That was all 'Reno' was, and I think that's all cops do 90 percent of their day.
You'll be in the checkout line at the supermarket, and there will be one of our movies in between the Certs and 'The National Enquirer.' That's where some of ours end up.
You hear a lot of writers talk like writing is therapy or some kind of magic art, but it's a business.
There's a studio formula of making a movie that Betty White fans and Ice Cube fans are going to love, so it's a really broad brush.
I don't think people realize how many scripts you write that go nowhere.
L.A. is like an oil rig. It's not pretty. It's awful. The air is bad, the view is bad, the people are bad.
I write manically.
We joke a lot about how, in Hollywood, the writer is one step below the doormat. That's not self-loathing. That's true!
People fight in New Orleans about what's the best po'boy, and Domilise's always comes up. It's the best one I've ever had.
Sometimes, when people don't like our movies, we're like, 'I'm with you.'
Paul Rudd's a really weird, silly, silly man. He gets on 'Friends,' and he gets to show, like, one tiny little window of how truly berserk he can be.
We had a great run on 'Reno' - 87 episodes and a movie. Not too shabby.
Movies are very, very good to me; What do I need TV for?
The good thing about being a writer is that you don't need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work, and if you're not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it's probably not a business for you, anyway.
I never really saw 'The Kids in the Hall' until after we started 'The State.'
I would say, A, you can't really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it's something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.
When I walk out of a movie that's actually good, I write emails to anybody I know who was involved with it.
If a movie has three decent scenes and a decent character, I think, 'OK, at least they got that guy right.'
Most movies were always terrible.
When we were doing 'Viva Variety,' we knew, 'Boy, this really cracks us up, but this is not for everybody. This is a little weird.'
Sketch shows change gears so drastically every two minutes. I think sketch shows are for sketch fans; they're not really for everybody.
I think with any movie, directing is more in the preparation. You just have to prepare for everything that's going to happen.
Sometimes when you do a whole script, you hand it off, and it gets rewritten by a bunch of people, and people don't really get that much of a sense of how funny you can be.
If you have a writing partner that you don't share a work ethic with, it's doomed.
Not a lot of movies have their own feel.
I go into movies I hate, and that movie will make $500 million.
It's much easier to get your material out to the public now than it was in 1988, when you basically had to get onto cable to have a joke heard across the country. Now all you need is an iPhone, and you can get your joke heard across the country.
There is so much that I love about all aspects of making a film or a TV show.
A lot of times when you're trying to do improv, everybody's doing a different style.
It's always hard to watch bad actors improv on your skit.
I think our 'Reno' cops are, basically, if you made us make fun of ourselves at a party. That is what we would do. We would do those characters and not really think about it. We didn't develop the characters; everyone just put on a name tag and started improvising.
We're writing movies that people buy without thinking about it.
Telltale signs that your movie is going to go bad is, one, the producer of the movie flees the country.
Nobody mentioned this in any of the reviews, but the reason we came up with that plot for 'Reno 911: Miami' is because we thought it was just the stupidest title for a movie that we could think of.
'Reno 911: Miami!' is a terrible, terrible title, and all the reviews - good and mostly bad - nobody pointed out how stupid a title that was. But you can hardly come up with a sentence that's more awkward.
There were guys in 'The State' who would take one script and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and fight for it for a whole season, and after a couple of seasons, you realized that doesn't work. You have to just be willing to throw something away, no matter how good it is, and write a better joke.
When we first started to write our first movie, 'You Are Going To Prison,' we wanted it to be crazy and unique, brand new, our voice, not like anything that'd ever been before. It took us about a year to write our first script.
You need to learn that, unless your lead character is written in a way that one of the 20 movie stars want to play him, your movie will not get made.
You can't teach somebody how to be a good writer.
You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that's going to sell and get made... I've never heard of anybody that happened to.
We were going to do 'Reno 911!: New York, New York, Las Vegas,' which was like a 'Die Hard' set not in New York, but in the New York, New York casino in Las Vegas. We were really excited about being locked into the one casino and doing a bad action movie.
'The State' had never done improv. We used to go over scripts for weeks and argue about every joke. But I don't know how we would have scripted 'Reno.'
If one real working screenwriter had visited us in college and just said, 'This is what my day is like,' it would have been really helpful.
'Balls of Fury' was my first time directing, and that's a movie that I think parts of it are great.
