Hey filmmakers,

You ever have one of those gut check moments when you’re watching a film and you realize how much it’s forcing you to reevaluate yourself and what you’re doing?

I had one of those last night at a 10:45 screening of Greg Mottola’s Superbad. It’s a pretty fun little movie, but I probably don’t need to tell you that, since it’s gotten one of the biggest marketing runups in recent memory and is almost a guaranteed success (if not from first-weekend business, then certainly from word-of-mouth). Michael Cera and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who have rightly gotten a ton of pre-film hype, are both excellent in the roles, but the film belongs to Jonah Hill, who’s got this violent pent-up energy that’s perfect for a role like this.

So yeah, I liked it. But my experience with it wasn’t entirely pleasurable.

I envied it. I envied the writers for having written it, the actors for having had the pleasure of playing these characters, the director for having the opportunity to put it up on screen. Superbad was like the ultimate Revenge of the Nerds party, only I wasn’t invited.

My first screenplay was a comedy. I wrote it at age 12, just a year younger than Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were when they wrote their first draft of the script that eventually would become Superbad. Given that Rogen and Goldberg are two years older than I am (enough of a ‘what are you doing with your life’ reality factoid as any aspiring young writer could ever need), we probably wrote it at the same time, and yet their script has since gone on to become one of the hits of the summer. I don’t even think I have a copy of that first, never-titled screenplay. In fact, most of my writing has been in broad comedy of a sort, but for some reason, I turned away from that in college. Maybe it was the depressive cycles I went through then, or maybe it was the films I was watching, but I ‘matured’ away from writing all these fun little comedies I was writing and instead started turning out grim, obtuse magical realist brainfarts like the one I’m currently working on.

In retrospect, with a few hours worth of thought behind me, I take a great comfort in my feelings of envy - my desire, my overwhelming want to have been involved with this signals, as much as anything for me, my hunger for the filmmaking lifestyle. But there’s something more - there’s something about the way that the film connected with the audience that really got to me. I want to make movies that connect to their audience in this way.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m not going to drop everything I’m doing, develop a stand-up routine, make some viral videos and beg and plead the current top dogs of Hollywood comedy (the extended Judd Apatow family) to give me a chance to write them a screenplay.

After all, they’ve already got Clark Duke, who could be my twin:

But watching Superbad last night was a major gut-check moment, in as much as it’s this very simple, extremely unambitious work that nevertheless is a fairly daring piece of filmmaking. Like Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Superbad manages to both critique the norms of the broad Hollywood film comedy and surpass them. It takes what were obviously very real emotions and experiences for writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and it explores those very desperate feelings from a kind, humanistic place - the fantasy and the reality of being a codependent, socially awkward young man is here in equal measures, and it’s extraordinarily well articulated.

So what I’m saying is: I’m still working on (and nearing completion of) Proud Flesh. But. Don’t be surprised if my next script after that is a broad comedy.

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « Defining Moment #2: The Baseball Movies of the Early 1990s
• » Done.

• BROWSE / IN Miscellaneous
• « On the Lot, End of the Road.
• » Done.