Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (6 page)

And ironically, as the studios aped Harvey’s Mira-magic, Harvey started hatching posters and marketing campaigns that looked a
lot
like the generic studio sells he’d
railed against back in the day. Look at the
Pulp Fiction
poster: Uma Thurman lying on that bed, the epitome of sexy and cool—a daring image in a thematically committed ad campaign. Now look at the Miramax posters from 2000 forward: The majority feature encircled famous faces positioned around or near a title treatment, with a tagline hinting at a plot. The marketing campaigns once so imbued with the Miramax attitude were being test-marketed to death until all that remained was a Denny’s-like picture menu poster. Gwyneth Paltrow in
Moons Over My Hammy.

There was no more Us vs. Them: We had simply
become
them. Like me, Harvey had started out wanting some chocolate milk, and he’d ended up being so concerned about running his milky empire that he sometimes seemed to forget what good chocolate milk even tasted like. Why use real cocoa and cane sugar when high fructose corn syrup is cheaper? After all: It’s what our competitors are doing …

As the studios started making bolder choices, it felt like the visionary they were emulating was going in the opposite direction, opting to simply “buy” his openings, too. Sometimes the marketing costs were even double the budget of the film we were selling—as was the case with the five-million-dollar
Clerks II
and its ten-million-dollar marketing budget. Up was down, black was white, and the mission was muddled. It used to be all about
art
films at Miramax—art films that earned because they were simply better, or at least different. It had devolved into a desperate
business
, where art was rarely mentioned anymore and marketing spends crept higher and higher, with money blown on costly, competitive TV spots. I was now working for what was essentially the same kind of studio we once fought so hard against
and were so proud to be different from. There
were
no more differences.

I’d become almost ecumenical in my thinking, waging a never-ending cinematic battle between art and commerce for my very artist’s soul! I was an old man who thought in terms of indie vs. studio. But the tough shit? There was no indie. There was no studio. There was only Disney. And Universal. And Warner Bros. And Sony. And Paramount. And Fox. And one day, there’d just be a vast omnistudio—or a
network
, if you will—in which everyone in the audience would hold a share of stock and a small popcorn. All necessities provided. All anxieties tranquilized. All boredom amused.

There’s a foreshadowing moment in
The Dark Knight
when Harvey Dent observes, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” But perhaps the words of another fictional philosopher might apply a little better.

“We have met the enemy,” as Pogo used to say. “And he is US!”

I
t started with Dante and Randal, the register dogs of
Clerks
. It continued with T.S. and Brodie, the varmints who infested
Mallrats
. It was the very foundation of
Chasing
Amy
. But I never had a name for it until
Dogma
, when Jay referred to Silent Bob as his “hetero life-mate.”

Over and over, my films focused on these intense male friendships that basically functioned as same-sex, sex-free marriages. These bromance flicks weren’t like the raucous R-rated comedies of my youth, where wisecracking antiheroes took on the establishment, pissing in the faces of college or the military, boobs flying everywhere. The View Askew films earned their R ratings for potty-mouthed frank talk between dudes about sex with their girlfriends who didn’t understand their love for geeky shit, and how they felt about
Star Wars
, and maybe even, from time to time, each other. None of those flicks ever made more than thirty
million dollars at the box office, even with the brilliance of the Miramax marketing team behind them. So if you made ’em cheaply enough, you could enjoy a modicum of success—that modicum never surpassing thirty million.

Then Judd Apatow and the Universal marketing department shattered the bromance glass ceiling with
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
,
Knocked Up
, and
Superbad
, taking similarly themed R-rated comedies to hundred-million-dollar grosses. The type of flick I’d popularized was suddenly in vogue; when I saw this happening, I figured I was finally gonna get a piece of that pie. So I pitched
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
to Harvey over breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel, and he green-lighted it then and there on the title alone. Harvey dug the story of two platonic friends who’re so hard up for cash that they make a skin flick to pay the rent. When I told him I wanted to cast one of the buddies from
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
to play the lead, Harvey was into it. When that kid’s star-making turn in
Knocked Up
turned him into the now-bankable Seth Rogen, Harvey was ecstatic.

Made for thirty million dollars,
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
should’ve been an easy fifty-million-dollar layup for the company that once figured out how to sell a movie to the masses about a chick with a dick. Indeed, the internal scuttlebutt at the Weinstein Company, and even in the movie business in general, was that we’d do one hundred million at the box office—just like Seth’s
Knocked Up
and
Superbad.

“This is gonna be your breakout movie,” people would say. “It’s gonna make Apatow money!”

But aside from Judd himself, the Weinstein Company and I were missing a crucial ingredient in our home-brewed
Apatow stew: We didn’t have Universal’s marketing department.

Two weeks before theatrical release, the movie’s moniker that he’d loved so much had become an albatross: Networks were refusing to play the
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
TV spots in primetime after one of the commercials ran during overtime of a televised game, prompting a father to call and complain that his school-aged son had been exposed to the term
porno
while watching family-oriented entertainment. How the kid would’ve noticed our spot sandwiched between all those family-friendly, liver-killing barley beverage and dick-stiffening pill commercials I’ll never know, but it spooked Harvey into changing the TV spots. If you saw a commercial past nine
P.M.
, it was for
Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
If you saw a spot before nine
P.M.
, the movie was called simply
Zack and Miri.
One sounds like it should be banned in a few countries, the other sounds like you could take your grandma to see it. I’d argue that we didn’t need primetime spots, anyway, because the hard-core subject matter meant the mallrats couldn’t even buy tickets to something else and sneak into our flick. One night, while watching
Saturday Night Live
, the spot that ran wasn’t even for
Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
It was straight-up
Zack and Miri.
Friends who marketed for competing studios would send me e-mails warning against the almost weekly changes in the selling approach. They said it was clear we were searching for a story, but if we didn’t pick one, we couldn’t educate the public about the concept. It’s a bromance! It’s a boy/girl love story that’s a little naughty! It’s an R-rated romp! It’s doomed!

For the first time in my career since
Mallrats
, a flick I made received some billboards and bus-stop posters … all of which featured stick-figure characters against a white backdrop. We’d butted heads with the MPAA’s ratings board over what an acceptable poster was, and, stymied at every turn, eventually wound up with the low-concept approach. It had an attitude but told no story. When you drove by the marketing materials, you didn’t know what was being sold.

It was starting to feel like what had happened to
Grindhouse.
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez made a double-feature exploitation flick complete with fake trailers and postproduced effects to make the prints appear aged. But what should’ve been an easy open netter shocked the film community when the Weinsteins dinged it off the pipe and sent it into the stands. But after seeing how much more they needed to educate the potential audience about
Grindhouse
when all was said and done, surely the same fate would not befall us. I mean, we had Seth Rogen for God’s sake.

But despite the presence of Rogen,
Zack and Miri
did
not
get knocked up with a box office baby full of money. There would be no brass ring—not even a brass cock ring. The flick opened to just ten million on Halloween 2008. The scuttlebutt about
Zack and Miri
being my biggest earner turned out to be true, though: The flick earned a couple hundred thousand dollars more than
Dogma
to become my then-highest grosser.

But more than just the disappointment I felt in not reaching that magic hundred-million number that everyone insisted
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
could reach, that flick
turned out to be the self-imposed beginning of the end for me as a filmmaker. I’d shot to relevance from obscurity making art-house films like
Clerks
and
Chasing Amy
—films that pushed at the edge of the envelope and said something new that had never before been cinematically expressed. But while it’s a really sweet and charming dirty little flick full of funny shit that rests comfortably on the shoulders of Rogen and Elizabeth Banks (who knocked it out of the park),
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
is not me pushing at the edge of the envelope or imparting anything new; it’s really just me running out of shit to say in movies.
Clerks
,
Mallrats
,
Chasing Amy
,
Dogma
—these were screenplays full of ideas that’d been fermenting for decades before seeing paper or celluloid, before a career in the movie business was ever even entertained. They were birthed in the daydreams and whimsies over a previous lifetime spent living at 21 Jackson Street back in Highlands, long before I ever imagined making movies myself. But as of 1994, I no longer
had
to dream about cinema: I simply
made
it, using all those dreams that were bursting at the seams.

But I haven’t lived a life since then. I entered the dream factory in 1994, and by
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
in 2001, I was making movies about making movies. I was eating my own tail.

There’s a lot of tail-eating going on in
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
, since it’s really just the story of how we made
Clerks
, projected through a wet-dream prism, with Scott Mosier conveniently recast as a girl I fuck on camera in the back room of a McJob and fall in love with by the final reel. I tried to capitalize on someone else’s success and forgot what got me invited to the party in the first place: the fact
that my shit used to be
different
. Suddenly, I felt dirty, realizing I’d gone into career-management mode, just treading water, not saying anything new. I was making movies for the sake of making movies, saying funny shit, but nothing new. And when I realized that, I realized I was nearly done making movies for a living.

I was nearly done fighting someone else’s war, too. At Miramax, we were trained to see it all as Us vs. Them. We were the rebels at Miramax, and the studios were the Evil Empire, filled with soulless Darth Vaders who lorded over the movie business on Star Destroyer–size soundstages and back lots. Art was carbon frozen and shipped off to rich Hutts to hang inert and lifeless on palace walls. And the whole time I was looking out at a galaxy of what I was sure were the bad guys, I never noticed I was standing on the bridge of the Disney Death Star.

But even as the phantom menace was slowly revealed and the Sith would hit the fan, I was still a loyal Padawan to my Jedi master, Obi-Weinstein. When Peter Biskind’s book
Down and Dirty Pictures
painted him in an unflattering light, Harvey tasked me with writing a “Harvey’s a good guy!” editorial for
Variety
. My pen a lightsaber, I ran through the infidels with my words.

Here’s how good a cocksucker
I
can be when I really believe in the cause …