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"  In an earlier version of Bridesmaids, the girls-behaving-badly anti-rom-com that broke all kinds of records this summer, the women actually made it to Vegas for that bachelorette party. The midair mishap we saw in theaters? The one that led to an emergency landing and an air marshal escorting our maids of dishonor off the plane? That wasn&amp;#039;t in the original script. Instead, the girls arrive safely in Vegas and sit down to \u00ADdinner at an overpriced Sin City restaurant. &amp;quot;It was this hilarious \u00ADsequence about Kristen [Wiig] having no money in Vegas,&amp;quot; says Judd Apatow, the film&amp;#039;s producer and one of the unlikely males behind this very female-oriented comedy\u2014a cinematic game changer that shook up Hollywood doctrine on estrogen-fueled comedies. &amp;quot;And so Kristen&amp;#039;s character makes a point of not \u00ADeating any food at this expensive dinner. And then they agree to split the check evenly.&amp;quot;  Apatow, 43, the man best known for such bromances as Knocked Up and Superbad, is still laughing as he tells this story. &amp;quot;She pays $90, and all she ate was bruschetta,&amp;quot; he says. Despite his obvious enjoyment of the scene, he pushed to cut the whole Vegas sequence from the script. In the wake of The Hangover, the Strip scenario felt musty, and he suggested something go awry on the flight instead. How late in the process was this major rewrite? &amp;quot;Late enough,&amp;quot; Wiig tells me, &amp;quot;that I was like, `We are fucked.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; But Apatow&amp;#039;s biggest contribution\u2014not to mention his most controversial\u2014was probably the now famous gross-out moment in the bridal shop. After eating lunch at a third-rate Brazilian-style steak house, our heroines visit a swanky boutique to shop for bridesmaids&amp;#039; dresses\u2014and are hit with a sudden case of food poisoning so potent it would make Seth Rogen blush. There was more to this scene, by the way\u2014a bit that found its way to the cutting-room floor, in which some of the \u00ADladies end up getting sick in the owner&amp;#039;s office. &amp;quot;I \u00ADbelieve there was a shot where vomit just created a stripe across one of the family photos on her desk,&amp;quot; Apatow says proudly. &amp;quot;It went on and on.&amp;quot; Wiig and her writing \u00ADpartner, \u00ADAnnie \u00ADMumolo, \u00ADinitially resisted Apatow&amp;#039;s idea, but he persuaded them to just shoot it and judge its merits afterward. &amp;quot;We were nervous about what it sounded like on paper,&amp;quot; Wiig admits. &amp;quot;But Judd said, `Write your version of it.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Excessive or not, the scene was interpreted by many as a \u00ADblatant olive branch offered directly to Everydude: a crass \u00ADexcuse to get anyone with a Y chromosome to buy tickets to something called Bridesmaids. Not so, Apatow insists. &amp;quot;Kristen&amp;#039;s character sincerely doesn&amp;#039;t want these women to know that she&amp;#039;s poor, and so she takes them to a really cheap restaurant. We see a lot of movies with people puking. But this is funny because it comes from character. We&amp;#039;re rooting for her to pull out of her situation.&amp;quot; Apatow exhales, as if he&amp;#039;s exhausted by having to defend himself against critics and pundits of gender politics. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s very easy to think that my main role in the development process was adding some of the raunchier elements,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;But I think \u00ADpeople would be shocked to see all of the outrageous jokes \u00ADKristen pitched over the years.&amp;quot;  Making $165 million at the box office, Bridesmaids, directed by Freaks and Geeks cocreator Paul Feig, is the highest-grossing R-rated female comedy of all time and a likely Golden Globe contender come January. It&amp;#039;s worth noting that Bridesmaids is also Apatow Productions&amp;#039; highest-grossing film to date. It made more money than The 40-Year-Old Virgin ($109 million), Superbad ($121 million), and even Knocked Up ($149 million).  It&amp;#039;s a stunning victory for any filmmaker\u2014a comedy headlined by women, mostly unknowns, making that kind of money is unheard of. Christopher Hitchens&amp;#039; slander that &amp;quot;women just aren&amp;#039;t funny&amp;quot; may seem moldy in the age of Tina Fey, but Hollywood suits still seem gun-shy about telling stories from a female perspective, especially if those women use the (gasp) F-word. &amp;quot;Historically, women have not been the first adopters of any R-rated raunchy humor,&amp;quot; says Donna Langley, cochair of Universal Pictures. &amp;quot;If you look at who drives the box office numbers at these films, it&amp;#039;s men. Up until Bridesmaids, the general consensus was that women preferred comedy a bit softer.&amp;quot; When the \u00ADstudios do take a chance, the film needs to be brought in at a price. The Cameron Diaz vehicle Bad Teacher earned $96 million, but its budget had been capped at a tight $19 million, with Diaz taking a \u00ADsubstantial pay cut to keep everyone else&amp;#039;s exposure low.          Comedy club (From top right, clockwise) Heigl and Mann in Knocked Up, 2007; the women of Bridesmaids, 2011; Steve Carell and Catherine Keener in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, 2005; Apatow; NBC&amp;#039;s Freaks and Geeks, 1999. Further complicating the math is the old chestnut that men won&amp;#039;t buy tickets for a film top-lined by a woman. (Opening weekend audiences for a romantic comedy are typically 80 \u00ADpercent \u00ADfemale. Bridesmaids opened with a comparatively guy-heavy 65 percent to 35 percent split.) &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s an anxiety about \u00ADwhether or not there is enough of an audience,&amp;quot; admits Hutch Parker, chairman of New Regency, the studio behind this month&amp;#039;s riff on \u00ADfemale vulgarity, What&amp;#039;s Your Number?, starring Anna Faris. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s been hard to find female actresses who can hold the \u00ADcenter of an action film, until Angelina came along. It&amp;#039;s somewhat of an \u00ADunfair bias.&amp;quot; Wiig has admitted to feeling the weight of Holly\u00ADwood on her film&amp;#039;s back: that if Bridesmaids didn&amp;#039;t succeed, they&amp;#039;d somehow take the blame for snuffing the ember of female \u00ADcomedies altogether. Apatow is more pragmatic. &amp;quot;Most comedies aren&amp;#039;t good,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;If there&amp;#039;s a good one, everyone goes.&amp;quot;  That this cinematic revolution would come in part courtesy of Apatow seems particularly sweet, since this is a man so often criticized for drawing his female characters in two dimensions. Apatow&amp;#039;s newfound reputation as an unlikely feminist for a post\u2013Funny or Die generation should cement itself come early 2012 with the launch of HBO&amp;#039;s hotly anticipated series Girls, for which he is a producer. It&amp;#039;s a far cry from 2007, when Katherine Heigl took a swipe at him in Vanity Fair, saying that Knocked Up portrayed &amp;quot;women as shrews, as humorless and uptight... I had a hard time with it, on some days.&amp;quot; The comment was so \u00ADobviously off script that the magazine put the quote on the cover.  Still, Heigl wasn&amp;#039;t alone in her critique. Slate writer Dana \u00ADStevens called Knocked Up &amp;quot;a male fantasy.&amp;quot; Mike White, who wrote for Freaks and Geeks, complained in an interview that he was disenchanted with Apatow&amp;#039;s portrayal of women. Watching the film today, it&amp;#039;s hard to see what the fuss was about. In Knocked Up, Heigl plays a successful TV producer and on-air personality trying to keep her job, the kind of in-touch-with-herself woman unafraid to tell her baby-daddy how badly she wants to get laid in her third trimester, even after she complains that the whole act must look like something out of National Geographic. Meanwhile, her sister, Debbie, played by Apatow&amp;#039;s real-life wife, Leslie Mann, gripes about her marriage to Pete, played by Paul Rudd, but her justifications are writ as large as his. If she&amp;#039;s angry, it&amp;#039;s not because she&amp;#039;s premenstrual. It&amp;#039;s because she expected her husband to be at least as strong as she was.  The revolutionary thing about Bridesmaids isn&amp;#039;t that it features the kind of raunchy gags we&amp;#039;re used to seeing the likes of Jonah Hill perpetrate; it&amp;#039;s that none of these women are fighting over a man. &amp;quot;The movie isn&amp;#039;t about hair or nail polish,&amp;quot; says Rose \u00ADByrne, who plays \u00FCber-bitch Helen. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s about female friendship. It&amp;#039;s also unusual in that it&amp;#039;s about a woman in her thirties who doesn&amp;#039;t have her shit together. Normally movies are about people in their twenties who are polished and perfect.&amp;quot; Apatow was never really good at polish. He grew up on Long Island, a nerd for comedians like Albert Brooks; in Los Angeles, a teenage Apatow awkwardly waited outside of Steve \u00ADMartin&amp;#039;s house, hoping for an autograph. Steve Martin eventually came out and snubbed him. Apatow dropped off a nasty letter, and six months later an autograph arrived in the mail. It read, &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t realize I was talking to the Judd Apatow.&amp;quot; After high school, \u00ADApatow enrolled at the University of Southern California to study screenwriting but dropped out to focus on his stand-up comedy.  &amp;quot;All of my jokes were about not being able to meet anybody,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t have any insight into anything\u2014even my own insecurities.&amp;quot; At the time, he was roommates with Adam Sandler, and at night Apatow would sit by Sandler&amp;#039;s bed and drill him with questions about women as Sandler fell asleep. Of the nighttime storytelling, Apatow says, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s two variations on insecure men.&amp;quot; Later, Sandler would hire Apatow to help him with women\u2014\u00ADspecifically, to rewrite some of Drew Barrymore&amp;#039;s dialogue for The Wedding Singer, &amp;quot;to try to make her as funny and multidimen\u00ADsional as every other character in the movie,&amp;quot; Apatow says. Women were schooling Apatow on set even then. One of his first jobs was writing jokes for Roseanne Barr. Apatow was then in his early twenties, and he&amp;#039;d sit at her breakfast table, pen in hand. Apatow would toss out a joke, and she&amp;#039;d tweak it. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;d say, `That&amp;#039;s the area, but here&amp;#039;s the real joke.&amp;#039; I was writing jokes about stretch marks. I didn&amp;#039;t even know what a stretch mark was.&amp;quot; Apatow&amp;#039;s best work has always stemmed from the personal, be it the backstage showbiz machinations of The Larry Sanders Show or the lived-in high school alienation of Freaks and Geeks. If he&amp;#039;s even more successful these days, perhaps it&amp;#039;s because there&amp;#039;s \u00ADalmost no distinction between his home life and his work. The marital arguments in Knocked Up and Funny People? Sometimes the words Leslie Mann speaks are ripped directly from the \u00ADcouple&amp;#039;s bedroom dialogues. Naturally, the daughters in those two films are played by their own children, Maude and Iris. Not surprisingly, Mann has done some of her best work with her husband. She owns the second half of 2009&amp;#039;s Funny People, where her character does the most unlikely thing a woman can do in a major studio picture: has an affair with an ex-boyfriend on a whim. She&amp;#039;s so unhappy that she chooses to blow up her life simply to make something happen. &amp;quot;Being married to an \u00ADactress,&amp;quot; Apatow says, &amp;quot;you see the stack of scripts, and you see how badly written most of them are.&amp;quot;  Apatow is currently shooting an untitled 2012 film, a sort of sequel to Knocked Up, with Mann and Rudd reprising their roles as the same married couple with two kids, trying to stay \u00ADtogether. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s about a moment in your life where you take stock of where you&amp;#039;re at and are deciding how you feel about it,&amp;quot; Apatow \u00ADexplains. &amp;quot;How did we get here? What are we going to do now?&amp;quot;  It&amp;#039;s also about technology and how Generation Z interacts with it\u2014inspired, in part, by Apatow&amp;#039;s daughter Maude, who has an enviable 12,895-and-counting Twitter followers. She tweets \u00ADoften, about The Real Housewives and about her dad&amp;#039;s \u00ADmovie \u00ADrecommendations and about how sometimes her \u00ADpotato chips taste like halibut. Dad was not always convinced his daughter should be on Twitter. &amp;quot;She dances around it, she gets a half-\u00ADapproval,&amp;quot; Apatow says. &amp;quot;And then, when we say, `We don&amp;#039;t know if you should be doing this,&amp;#039; she flips out and says, `Dad, I&amp;#039;m \u00ADalready doing it! It&amp;#039;s fine!&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; How old is she? &amp;quot;Thirteen.&amp;quot; One gets the sense that Apatow goes along with it because he&amp;#039;s proud of her; because Twitter feels like a less nerdy, teen-\u00ADapproved form of the kind of lonely joke-writing he did in his childhood bedroom. &amp;quot;Her tweets are very succinct,&amp;quot; Apatow says. &amp;quot;And they&amp;#039;re very sharp. One of the tweets was something like, `I wish none of my friends were on Twitter so I could say horrible things about them.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; He lets out a big chuckle. &amp;quot;I think it helps her find her voice.&amp;quot; Helping women find their voice seems to be Apatow&amp;#039;s \u00ADspecialty these days. Case in point: his latest project, the television series Girls, which might \u00ADsurprise fans of The 40-Year-Old Virgin\u2014a movie about a man-child who surrounds himself with action figures and emotionally stunted buddies who say things like, &amp;quot;You know how I know you&amp;#039;re gay? Because you macram\u00E9d yourself a pair of jean shorts.&amp;quot; The series follows four recent college graduates who are living and working in New York City, and it plays more like a mumblecore take on The Mary Tyler Moore Show than a Sex and the City prequel. Having seen the pilot, I can report that this is \u00ADsurely the only show on television on which a young woman talks about the digestive perils of snorting coke and then drops a \u00ADFlaubert reference. Girls was created by Lena Dunham, the indie-film darling whose Tiny Furniture was a surprise hit at Sundance in 2010; the movie&amp;#039;s story line, about postcollege malaise, reached into \u00ADApatow&amp;#039;s chest and yanked hard. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a sucker for an odd-bird lead character,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Insecurity mixed with arrogance is \u00ADalways very appealing to me.&amp;quot; He sent Dunham a fan e-mail and later came on board as a producer for Girls. While the two even cowrote an episode together, their collaboration consists largely of late-night phone calls. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s not afraid to dip into the vault of personal experience,&amp;quot; Dunham says. &amp;quot;He told me a story about how he once said to a girl, `I love you and just want you to be \u00ADhappy.&amp;#039; And she said to him, `See! It&amp;#039;s always about what you want!&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; (A version of that story made it into an episode.) Dunham praises Apatow not just for script advice, but for holding firm on the sexually and morally adventurous tone she established in the pilot script. &amp;quot;Judd understands that a girl can push her sexual boundaries and not be a whore or a cutter,&amp;quot; Dunham says, adding that she now calls Apatow for off-screen \u00ADromance advice, too. She recently asked him, &amp;quot;Do you think it&amp;#039;s okay for me to date that guy if he said that thing about my boobs?&amp;quot; Still, if the man who made a joke by showing the top of a \u00ADbaby&amp;#039;s head emerging from a birth canal in Knocked Up seems like a surprising choice to champion female writers and performers, Dunham disagrees. &amp;quot;Knocked Up is really about love,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;His movies are about people trying to get closer to themselves. He&amp;#039;s the perfect match for a story about being 25, \u00ADbecause that&amp;#039;s all 25-year-olds are interested in. The other problems they \u00ADencounter\u2014money issues, conflicts at work\u2014don&amp;#039;t matter.&amp;quot; For his part, Apatow doesn&amp;#039;t claim to know any more about the female condition today than he did as a young comedian sitting beside Adam Sandler&amp;#039;s bed late at night. He says he wouldn&amp;#039;t be making movies and TV shows about women if he didn&amp;#039;t have the right women in his circle. He offers up an analogy: &amp;quot;Spike Lee doesn&amp;#039;t make movies about Jews from Long Island. You have to find someone great to collaborate with.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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