Seeing the light in cancer story: Seth Rogen helps turn his friend’s screenplay into comedy-drama ‘50/50’
“You can’t pitch a comedy about cancer,’’ Seth Rogen said, recounting how his new film “50/50’’ got made.
“50/50,’’ which stars Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and opens Friday, tries to walk that funny-touching scalpel edge.
To clarify: The illness itself - what Rogen’s character, Kyle, calls “stage four back cancer’’ - isn’t cause for laughter. Rather, as is often the case, comedy stems from dark places. With “50/50,’’ the humor bubbles up from pain and clumsy human interaction. It turns out the premise of a massive, malignant tumor growing along a spinal column can provide plenty of laughs - if the material is handled carefully, and the jokes are among friends.
“To us that was never scary, the idea of blending drama and comedy, because we had all done it before,’’ said Rogen as he slumped into an armchair at the Four Seasons and harkened back to his days on the show “Freaks and Geeks.’’ The actor was in Boston with screenwriter Will Reiser earlier this month to promote their film.
“50/50’’ chronicles a chummy but otherwise distant friendship between Kyle (Rogen) and his cancer-stricken buddy Adam, played by Gordon-Levitt. When their tentative bond is suddenly saddled with medical tragedy, they tackle the situation, despite being awkward 20-something males already ill-equipped to speak of intimacies.
When it came time to convince a studio to green light “50/50,’’ it didn’t hurt to have the involvement of a heavy-hitter like Rogen, star of “The Green Hornet,’’ “The 40-Year-Old-Virgin,’’ “Knocked Up,’’ and “Pineapple Express.’’
“Having Seth attached not only as a producer but as a star certainly helped make the movie much more commercial,’’ said Reiser. In fact, Reiser, Rogen, and their producing partners didn’t even try to sell “50/50’’ based on an elevator pitch. “I just figured I’ll write it and then I’ll sell it,’’ Reiser said.
Not that Rogen even likes to “pitch’’ his movies. “None of my movies are really that pitchable,’’ Rogen said. As a producer, he’s more comfortable working with a completely written script. “Nothing we’ve done really looks good on paper. It was really awesome that Will was willing to just write. It afforded us a lot of creative freedom.’’
They both agreed that genre definitions and boundaries “get in the way.’’ They don’t go for discussions of “tone’’ either.
“We as filmmakers never talk about that,’’ Rogen insisted. “There’s never the ‘genre’ conversation. People like to know how to describe it to each other…’’
“For marketing purposes,’’ Reiser added.
“Right. We were pitching a movie a couple months ago and the studio called us after and said, ‘What’s the tone of the movie?’ and I said like ‘Go [expletive] yourself. That’s what the [expletive] tone of the movie is,’ ’’ Rogen, the more gregarious of the two, said with a throaty laugh. (Reiser, the cousin of comedian/actor Paul Reiser, is more modest and unassuming.) “How do you describe that when it hasn’t happened yet? The tone is whatever we shoot… . Aside from saying ‘it’s realistic’ or ‘it’s broad,’ I don’t know how to describe the tone until we complete it.’’
As expected, no major studio expressed interest. In the end, “boutique studio’’ Mandate Pictures, backer of off-beat comedies such as “Juno’’ and “Stranger Than Fiction,’’ financed the relatively low-budget, $8 million picture. The film also stars Anna Kendrick (“Up in the Air’’) as Adam’s newbie psychiatrist, Bryce Dallas Howard (“The Twilight Saga: Eclipse’’) as his distracted girlfriend, Anjelica Huston as his estranged mom, and character actor Philip Baker Hall as a fellow chemotherapy patient. The director is Jonathan Levine (“The Wackness’’).
Reiser said he was aiming for the feel of his favorite films by Hal Ashby, Paul Mazursky, Robert Altman, Billy Wilder, and Woody Allen. “Typically their characters are always grounded, they’re smart, they find humor more in the slice of life you’re examining in their more everyday scenarios,’’ Reiser said. “That for me was what I wanted this movie to be like. You’re seeing this guy go through this journey. It doesn’t have to be far-reaching, overdramatic. The stakes are real enough.’’ Had a big studio turned Reiser’s quiet script into a $100 million blockbuster, they would have probably gone “broad comedy’’ with wacky situations and goofy high jinks.
The filmmakers had another selling point up their sleeves: The story of “50/50’’ is based on real events.
Reiser and Rogen became real-world friends on the American version of Sacha Baron Cohen’s TV program “Da Ali G Show’’ eight years ago. Rogen and “50/50’’ producer Evan Goldberg were working as writers, and Reiser was the show’s associate producer. In their early 20s at the time, the trio were the show’s most junior staffers, and became fast friends. Then, Reiser was diagnosed with cancer: Doctors discovered a giant tumor growing along his spine. Two years after his successful fight against the illness, the newcomer to feature film writing felt he had gained the proper perspective to write about the experience and began to draft a screenplay.
Not that he simply wrote down everything that happened. Reiser, 31, insisted that the film is “inspired by real events’’ and is not a true memoir. “I’d say that Adam is not as funny as I was back then.’’
“Easy …’’ Rogen joked. “No, I agree with that.’’
“Adam is very much an extension of who I was and how I was feeling,’’ Reiser continued. “I just suppressed everything.’’
“But he doesn’t act like Will,’’ Rogen, 29, added. “The real you complained more than the character. Not about the cancer, but about everything else.’’
As for whether Rogen was as much of a pothead as his character, Kyle, they did not say. But “50/50’’ includes a couple of scenes in which Kyle uses Adam’s condition to talk to girls in bookstores and bars, and even lure them into acts of sympathy sex. Truth or fiction?
“We joked about it,’’ said Reiser. “We never actually did it.’’ But he admitted that once the C-word - cancer - was out in the open, “women would give me a lot of attention.’’
Reiser said that the character of Kyle embodied the idea of how, at 25, men just can’t handle the looming death of a good pal. “Friends said stupid things. Sometimes insensitive. Ultimately, they cared; they just did not know how to… . You find out in the end, [Kyle] really does care.’’ Reiser turned to Rogen. “Seth and I, our dynamic back then was, I was neurotic …’’
“And …’’ Rogen added, finishing his friend’s line like the two had spent a lifetime together, “I would make fun of you for it.’’ His voice then became soft and gentle. “Which has changed somewhat over the years.’’
The two paused for a moment, their heads looking this way and that, almost at each other. A millisecond of intimate quiet settled into the room. Rogen continued. “Now you’re an egomaniac.’’
Then the joking resumed.
Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.
"Not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far, far away": Hanging with Nick Frost and Simon Pegg
from the feature story by Ethan Gilsdorf in the Boston Globe
Like Tolkien and Lewis, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are British and longtime friends. Also like Tolkien and Lewis, Frost and Pegg tell stories that please them. “Paul,’’ the latest film they wrote and in which they star, opens Friday. It’s about two British geeks who leave the pop-cultural convention Comic-Con, in San Diego, on an RV excursion through the Southwest, only to take on an unexpected passenger: the title character, a gray-skinned, big-eyed, Area 51 escapee (voiced by Seth Rogen). Greg Mottola (“Adventureland,’’ “Superbad’’) directed.
“We’ve written a film that we want to watch and laugh at with our mates,’’ said Frost, in Boston last week to promote the film. Unlike the socially-awkward, aspiring science fiction writer Clive Gollings he plays in the film, the cheery Frost sported dark-rimmed glasses that self-consciously bespoke “nerd.’’ “That’s always what we have always done. You find that there are pockets of ‘us-es’ everywhere.’’
Those pockets of fanboys and fangirls will have a hard time not whispering to their theater seatmates when they spot the dozens of dorky inside jokes riffing off of “Star Wars,’’ “Star Trek,’’ “The X-Files,’’ “The Blues Brothers,’’ and nearly every fantasy or adventure film in the Steven Spielberg canon, from “Close Encounters’’ to “Raiders.’’
“The movie is very much a tribute to him,’’ said Frost, who was 10 when “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial’’ was released in 1982; Pegg was 12.
Some of the references are more “sci-fi 101,’’ said Pegg, who plays Clive’s best friend, the wannabe comic book artist Graeme Willy. That’s to make sure average moviegoers and not just hardcore genre geeks will buy tickets. “We had to make this film appeal on a broad level because it cost a lot of money. Because of Paul, really. He’s expensive. It’s like hiring Will Smith, literally, to get Paul on the screen.’’
But Pegg promised the film has plenty of obscure references, too. “It’s replete with gifts for those who know their stuff,’’ he said. “For the faithful.’’
One such nod: “Duel,’’ an early Spielberg film, is listed in red letters on the movie marquee seen toward the end of “Paul.’’ “ ‘Easy Rider’ is on double bill with that,’’ said Frost. “The street we were [shooting] on was the street where Jack Nicholson meets Peter Fonda.’’ Be on the lookout for even more abstruse references, and cameos.
In fact, geeks might bring bingo cards that replace numbers with such items as “swooning Ewok,’’ “mention of Reese’s Pieces’’ “Mos Eisley cantina music (played by country band),’’ “dialogue from ‘Aliens,’ ’’ and “bevy of metal bikini-costumed, ‘slave girl’ Princess Leias.’’ Drinking coffee in a hotel suite overlooking the Charles River, the two stressed that the point of “Paul’’ was not to ridicule those who collect samurai swords or speak Klingon (as both characters do in the film), but to celebrate them.
“We never wanted to make fun of it,’’ said Pegg. “Obviously those kind of fans are our bread and butter and helped get us where we are. We didn’t want to then turn around and say ‘Ha, ha. You big bunch of losers.’ ’’ Clive and Graeme are portrayed as mildly, and endearingly, dysfunctional and codependent, but ultimately good guys with big hearts.
Both actor-writers long ago established their geek cred. Pegg costarred with Frost in the cop-action movie spoof “Hot Fuzz’’ (2007) and the “zomedy’’ “Shaun of the Dead’’ (2004). Pegg cowrote both films and more recently voiced the character Reepicheep in “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.’’ “Young Scotty,’’ from “Star Trek’’ (2009), is his highest profile role to date. He will also star in the planned sequel. Both have acted in the forthcoming “Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn,’’ and when the Spielberg-Peter Jackson motion-capture juggernaut hits screens later this year, each of their stars will rise even higher into the dweeby firmament.
On the “Paul’’ set, they also geeked out on special effects required to bring the pot-smoking, wise-cracking space-dude to life. Rogen (“The Green Hornet,’’ “Knocked Up’’) shot a video reference version of the movie and recorded dialogue on a sound stage, but never joined the actors on location. Instead, Pegg, Frost, and the rest of the cast, which includes Jason Bateman and Kristen Wiig, acted with “a child, a small man, a ball, a stick with balls on it, some lights,’’ said Pegg. “All the way through I was thinking, this is never going to work.’’
Lining up sightlines between the eyes of humans and the yet-to-be generated CG Paul (to establish believable connections between the characters) caused the biggest headaches. “How do I know where to look?’’ Pegg said. “But it worked.’’ (“You see Ewan McGregor looking at Jar Jar Binks,’’ he added, taking a swipe at the “Star Wars’’ prequels. “He’s like looking above his head.’’)
If one geek fantasy is finally to defeat the bully, get the girl or boy, and find fame or fortune with your secret passion, then “Paul’’ fulfills the dream. Not to spoil the ending, but Willy and Gollings do become rock stars in their own realm.
Another holy grail is that geeks might get to hang with real wizards, orcs, hobbits, superheroes, or robots. For two hours, “Paul’’ brings this pipe dream closer, too.
“We always see these characters in fantasy environments. We see Gollums in Middle-earth and all the ‘Star Wars’ animations are in the ‘Star Wars’ universe,’’ said Pegg. “The context fits the sprite. But in ‘Paul,’ we wanted that character to be in an environment that was totally, literally, alien to him.
“And that makes him seem even more real, because you don’t expect to see him.’’
Ethan Gilsdorf, author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks,’’ can be reached at www.fantasyfreaksbook.com. 