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"FacebookPinterest\n\nYou might recognize 21 Jump Street and Project X screenwriter Michael Bacall from his role in Inglourious Basterds. He played one of the Jewish soldiers tasked with infiltrating enemy lines to scalp Nazis. Or maybe you don't. Bacall has been working in bit parts on TV and in movies since the '80s, but he's only now getting some boldfaced recognition\u2014for his writing.\n\n \"I started writing because I was so irritated with all the crap roles that were out there for young people, \" Bacall said. \"So a friend and I wrote a low-budget, independent movie [Manic], and it took a while for it to get made, but it was a mind-blowing experience that really launched me into screenwriting. I got very obsessed with writing after that and put most of my time and energy into that.&amp;amp;#x201D;\n\nIn 2007 Bacall was named one of Variety's 10 Screenwriters to Watch. But while he worked with Edgar Wright on 2010's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World script, this year his screenwriting is really starting to pay off. He's credited with the story and co-writing the script for Project X, a found footage film depicting \"the party you've only dreamed about \"\u2014which is true if your dreams include bouncy castles full of topless women, an Ecstasy-filled gnome, riot police, and arson. It earned $21 million in its opening weekend and Bacall is already working on a sequel.\n\nNow his gloriously bananas reinvention of 21 Jump Street is opening this Friday to considerable buzz. At first blush, a 21 Jump Street movie sounds like a terrible idea, and in less dexterous hands, it would be. The kitschy TV crime drama that left Richard Grieco and Johnny Depp fighting for wall space on the bedrooms of teen girls across America seems like an unlikely candidate for a reboot. But somehow it's been transformed into one of the year's funniest movies. To be fair, 21 Jump Street doesn't take place in the same universe as the old TV show; it simply snags the premise and takes it to fantastically foul-mouthed, absurdist heights. It's a smart move, especially given how skeptical audiences are of old properties (or board games) made new again. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum have a surprisingly sweet and funny chemistry, but without Bacall's manic script, 21 Jump Street wouldn't be the weekend's most anticipated movie. We talked with the writer/actor about his big year.\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Michael Bacall\n\nGQ: Don't disabuse me of this notion that I have of you and Jonah Hill doing bong hits and spitballing ideas for 21 Jump Street.\n\n Michael Bacall: Well, if you throw in a couple of really shaggy jam sessions on drums and guitar playing unbelievably poor covers of Black Sabbath songs, you're right about in the neighborhood. [laughs]\n\nGQ: You guys are friends in real life?\n\n Michael Bacall: We had known each other a couple years previous to working on this. I think we'd been introduced by a friend of mine who was producing a spec script that I had written, and Jonah was attached to it. Eventually, it fell apart at the studio, but we had met a little bit before that process and so we started talking. We had this mutual friend who was doing an action-comedy\u2014David Gordon Green was working on Pineapple Express around the time, and... I was definitely a little bit jealous because it looked so fun. Jonah and I started talking about wanting to come up with an action-comedy for him, and I've always been a huge fan of the buddy cop genre\u2014Walter Hill with 48 Hrs. and anything that Shane Black has ever done\u2014and we thought about the idea and we didn't have anything in the moment.\n\nHe called me about a year later and said, \"Hey, what about doing that with 21 Jump Street, which Sony has and they're interested in getting up and running? \" And I thought that would be kind of a fun and risky thing to do because people so immediately assume that a remake, reboot, retelling, rehashing is gonna be awful. And I get the same shivers too when I hear things like that announced... The shivers of horror [laughs] when I hear another remake announced, but it seemed like a really fun challenge to try to take that on and make it fresh and interesting and entertaining to people.\n\nGQ: I think it's also going to show to everyone that Channing Tatum is vastly underappreciated as comedic actor.\n\n Michael Bacall: Absolutely. Absolutely. He annihilates in the movie. It's as if we wrote the role specifically for him, which we didn't. We came up with the role years before he even saw the script. He just inhabits it so fully. I think it's gonna be a huge and pleasant surprise for everyone who sees it.\n\nGQ: It seems like the marketing has been really smart with building buzz with rolling screenings and now SXSW. People were obviously skeptical about a 21 Jump Street when it was announced. Has this buzz been a bit of a relief?\n\n Michael Bacall: Yeah, it's really fun... Not in the same way, but they also had a fun marketing push with Scott Pilgrim that was exciting to follow, especially the Comic-Con screening, and I think the Austin screening for Jump Street is going to be out of control. Really looking forward to that, and I think Sony's been really smart about how they're rolling it out. I finally joined Twitter after years of trying to ignore that lurking Internet beast, mainly just to kind of follow the reactions to the screenings, and it's been really enjoyable.\n\nGQ: It seems like a lot of the stuff has been reactions to what people have already been saying about Project X on your Twitter feed. So I guess we should talk about that.\n\n Michael Bacall: I've really enjoyed the Project X reviews [laughs]. Those are the first things that I kind of posted up there. Exploitation movie-making is not everyone's cup of tea, but I'm proud of the punk rock aesthetic, at least in terms of the structure and escalation of the party itself. That's just mostly what I contributed to, and I love that stuff. I think Nima [Nourizadeh] did an amazing job of creating a party that you feel like you're in, and by the end of it, you feel like you really, really want to get the hell out of there before you get pepper sprayed or arrested. Yeah, it's been really kind of fun to watch the different reactions critically to the script for those movies.\n\nGQ: I went to see Project X yesterday and it was interesting because, first of all, it was the middle of the afternoon so it was me and a bunch of NYU kids. I was the only woman... I overheard one of them saying that maybe it was based on the kid in Australia who destroyed his parents' house with a party.\n\n Michael Bacall: I got the idea from [producer] Todd Phillips and [ecutive producer] Scott Budnick. They called me while I was in production on Scott Pilgrim. I was out in Toronto for about eight or nine months and also working on a second draft of 21 Jump Street at the time, so I didn't have time to write the first draft for Project X but I wrote a treatment that essentially structured the party and the escalation and the big party gags and how crazy it got. And that started my involvement, with them calling me up and saying, \"How do you feel about writing something about a kid who throws a party and [it] just gets so out of control and almost burns down the neighborhood? \" [laughs] I appreciate that kind of anarchy. I'm a big fan of the apocalypse.\n\nGQ: It's kind of mind-boggling to look at the teens in 21 Jump Street and Scott Pilgrim and then the teens in Project X. It's hard to grasp, because they're so wildly different. \n\n Michael Bacall: I think it is a difficult thing to grasp, but I've had a lot of experiences just researching with teenagers who come from different social situations who have different goals in life, and there really is that kind of range between how kids view the world and how they speak and what their attitudes are. When I was doing research for 21 Jump Street and going back to my old high school, I heard a lot of the things that you'll hear in Project X.\n\nBut at the same time, I've been researching a book adaptation that I'm working on right now for something called The New Cool, and this is a non-fiction book written by Neal Bascomb. I'm working on this for Scott Rudin, and that book follows a little bit of a Bad News Bears structure... [It follows] an underdog team through a season of the FIRST Robotics League, which is an amazing high school robotics competition, and it's kind of structured like any other organized sport. And these are the smartest, most involved, advanced teenagers that I've ever come across in my entire life, and there are thousands of teams full of these kids across the country, so I think we have this instinct to try to force our perception of teenagers into one thing or the other, but it's like any other age range in life. The range is spectacular in terms of how they view life, what their goals are, and the way that they kind of approach their teenage years.\n\nGQ: Similar to this situation, perhaps, you're kind of getting a lot of flack for it because you're one of the credited screenwriters, but there's also plenty of people on a movie that demand more boobs, more craziness, more fire. Do you feel like you're being unfairly singled out?\n\n Michael Bacall: Uh... I think everyone's entitled to their own opinion, and I can take the heat if somebody doesn't enjoy something that I'm involved with. I think it's a blast, and when I've seen the movie, whether it's with a test audience or a just kind of cruising in last Friday night, what's important to me is the people in the theater are having a really good time, and it felt a little bit more like going to a party instead of going to a movie, and I think that was our goal. I understand if people are flipped out over certain things in the movie, but I think at the end of the day, it's just a blast to see it with an audience and that's pretty gratifying.\n\nGQ: The Project X sequel has already been greenlit, and 21 Jump Street's set up for a sequel. Is that something you guys had in mind when you wrote it or the producers asked you to add?\n\n Michael Bacall: Without spoiling anything in the movie, I think when people see it, it's set up for a sequel, and that's an idea that Jonah and I had on day one... We had the idea for that really the first day that we grabbed a cheeseburger and talked about the basic story structure. We knew that there could be a fun way to set it up as a franchise, and that's just one of those things that remained in the movie kind of at the last moment there. And we're hopefully we're set up to do something fun with that.\n\nGQ: And for Project X, was that on purpose? You're already working on it?\n\n Michael Bacall: Yeah, I could never imagine that this small movie would have blown up into what it has, but yeah, we're off to the races on that and trying to outdo ourselves.\n\nGQ: You guys really pushed it to the limit in Project X. You put a midget in an oven. What's left? Necrophilia? \n\n Michael Bacall: I think we're just gonna need a bigger oven or maybe figure out a way to burn down the entire world instead of one block in Pasadena. I really don't know how we're going to outdo ourselves, but we're [laughs] kicking around lots of destructive ideas right now.\n\nGQ: What's really interesting is these found footage movies, it's like a way for people who didn't grow up with this instantaneous social media to grapple with it and think about it. An interesting example of this is the kid who plays JB\u2014we found out that he once appeared in a Bang Bros. porn. \n\n Michael Bacall: Right. How crazy was that?\n\nGQ: Did you know that?\n\n Michael Bacall: I had no idea. [laughing]\n\nGQ: Have you asked him about it?\n\n Michael Bacall: No. I was not around for most of that\u2014for all of that shoot. I did a little bit of work on the script before they went into production, but mostly my contribution was in the treatment phase, and I did a little bit of writing on the draft before they shot. I was working on 21 Jump Street and also the Les Grossman script and just buried at the time, so I really didn't even get to meet the guy until the movie was finished [laughs] so I haven't had a chance to talk to him about that yet. But I will.\n\nGQ: Les Grossman\u2014who would have thought that Tom Cruise as a balding, chubby Jew would take off?\n\n Michael Bacall: He just fully inhabits that role in such an incredibly forceful way. It's really enjoyable to rage behind that character, but he has some really terrific story ideas and I'm excited about that. I hope that happens at some point.\n\nGQ: Is that going to be the dark side of you coming out again?\n\n Michael Bacall: No, actually, well, the dark side's always there. [laughs] I think there's a lot of heart to the story that we came up with, and I think people will be surprised at the way we kind of made an emotionally affecting story around such a powerfully obnoxious, angry guy. That was a really enjoyable process. I liked getting to that place and trying to figure out who the guy was and where he came from and why he is like he is. I think if it happens, it'll still have that edge to it that made people love the character in the first place, but I think it'd be difficult to sit through a two hour Les Grossman curse-laden tirade, so we've gotta mix it up a little and come up with an emotionally affecting journey for him to go through."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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