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"FacebookPinterest\n\n You probably don't like the Night at the Museum movies. Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant are aware of this, and they don't care. See, they wrote those movies, and guess what? They made $1 billion dollars in worldwide box office, all without your help.\n\n Garant and Lennon's new book, Writing Movies for Fun and Profit, is a handy how-to for aspiring screenwriters that details the difficulties of acquiring representation, arbitrating your screenplay credit, and why getting fired from a movie is great news. There's also free pitch ideas, an unproduced screenplay, and gossip about celebrities like Jackie Chan, Queen Latifah, and Billy Crystal. (He's a \"dick,\" apparently.) GQ spoke with the duo about their past with beloved sketch comedy team The State, their new book, and why they're not unlike Salieri.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n GQ: What made you want to write this book?\n\n Thomas Lennon: Who is writing these screenwriting books? Not actually writing for the studios in Hollywood. These are people that have one or a half of a credit on maybe one movie, or none. So they're all theoretical.\n\n Robert Ben Garant: Yeah they're professorial, and they're about cracking the story and character, and that's a big part of screenwriting, but it's a business, and there's a huge amount of information. After coming out of film school you get here, what you don't know could fill a book. And so, we tried to fill a book with it, like what you don't do, when do you pitch, what do you need a manager for, you know, like basic stuff.\n\n Lennon: Right, those other books are great for if you want to work on the craft of writing for yourself, or, you know, to write novels or indie films, stuff like that.\n\n Garant: We assume that you want to do that anyway.\n\n Lennon: We assume that you already work hard and are disciplined and are studying film and are writing screenplays over and over and over. We assume that, and we also, I think that a lot of the stuff that those other books try to teach is stuff that cannot be taught; I don't think you can teach someone how to come up with good characters or a story. You can teach them structure, which we do as well, but those books are like, \"Hey, come up with a story that needs to be told,\" but our book is about, \"Hey, you need to rewrite Act I and Act II by Thursday.\"\n\n Garant: And you need to have a meeting with Martin Lawrence first to see what he wants in his Act II.\n\n Lennon: Exactly. But yeah, so it's really much more about how the sausages are made.\n\n GQ: Your book is more technical in a way, than, say Robert McKee's books, but also more useful. Most people are familiar with you from \"The State\" and \"Viva Variety.\" Tell me a little bit about originally how you guys started writing in the studio system.\n\n Lennon: It's interesting, it was very much an accident, but I will say that our sketch comedy training was really the ideal practice run at writing for the studios, because when we were in The State, you only got your material in the show if you had written a ton of material, because so much would get thrown away.\n\n Garant: Every day. You pitch to each other every day at 3:00, and the guys who were more successful in The State were the guys who had more material, and you got more material in by writing more material, so every day we would generate as much new material as we possibly could, and then you would pitch it to a room full of people that you were basically in direct competition with.\n\n Lennon: Yeah, if your sketches got on the show, it meant that theirs would not.\n\n Garant: So you learned pitching, you learned writing, you learned rewriting, you learned to not necessarily stick by your guns every time, but it's much easier to throw your script away and write a new one, rather than try to convince these 11 other people that your skit is good, and that's really what taught us how to work in a studio, so when we got here, we were very used to writing something and making it the best we could possibly make it, sitting down with somebody who says, \"Yeah, I liked about half of it,\" and then you go, \"OK,\" and you throw away the half they don't like and write something better, which is what it is like to be here. We moved to Los Angeles, Tom and I, for season three of \"Viva Variety.\" While we were here we met Paul Young, who we still work with, who had the rights to a book called You Are Going to Prison, and Paul Young was a State fan that knew that we were kind of dark and funny, and so he said, \"Can you make this into a movie?\" And we said, \"Yes, of course! What is it?\"\n\n Lennon: Then we wrote a script that was so insane...\n\n Garant: It was crazy. It was nonsense.\n\n Lennon: It was blithering nonsense, but it was so funny that people around town were like, \"Look, this movie's unproducibly stupid and crazy, but it's really funny so you have to read it.\" So people kept passing our script around, and suddenly we had this reputation as screenwriters, which we're not\u2014we're sketch comedy guys.\n\n Garant: Yeah, and it's another lesson that we talk about in the book\u2014I think that a lot of young writers, they don't teach you this. You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that's going to sell and get made... I've never heard of anybody that happened to. What happens is, you write a spec, people get it, they see your writing, they see you're good, they bring you into their office and they say, \"Boy, that spec was really good\u2014we'll never make that in a million years. We have rights to the board game of Monopoly. What do you think about a Monopoly movie?\"\n\n Lennon: Right. Why don't you make that work?\n\n Garant: And so you need to know that going in, and you also need to be able to write all the time. So when somebody looks at you across the table and says, \"What do you think about a movie where Miley Cyrus switches souls with a basset hound?\" You need to be able to sit there and figure out how to make that possibly shootable.\n\n GQ: Did you guys know that you wanted to write films even before you were approached about You Are Going to Prison?\n\n Lennon: I guess I considered myself just sort of a sketch comedian, you know? Actual screenwriting hadn't really occurred to me as a viable job\u2014I didn't really know anything about it.\n\n Garant: No, I liked writing, and I loved movies, obsessively loved movies, but I had never made the leap of thinking I would actually come out here and write stuff. I don't know if I had a plan at all, really.\n\n Lennon: We didn't know anything about... I never thought I would write the way that I write for the studios now, which is like, not little novels, but be someone who literally is more like, you know, sometimes I guess we describe, we're more Salieri than Mozart. This book just shows you how to be a happy Salieri.\n\n Garant: Yeah, a court composer. Salieri died miserable, in a big, giant, beautiful house with servants, and, he did really, really well, all until he tried to take his own-\n\n Lennon: He was tortured by the genius of Mozart, but...\n\n Garant: But so what?\n\n Lennon: I think he had a pretty good life right up until Mozart was on the scene. So that's what our book is showing you: how to be a court composer.\n\n GQ: Some of the films you've written have had a lot success, but do you guys aspire to more acclaim? Is that something you care about?\n\n Garant: Like, acclaim? No. Because honestly, the stuff I do that I love, like Reno 911 and The State, is just as hated as the stuff I do that I'm not proud of, like Herbie: Fully Loaded. The shit gets dumped on my best work, in my opinion, as much as it does my less good work.\n\n Lennon: I would tend to agree. Acclaim? Fuck acclaim. I was going to say, I thought the Reno 911 movie was pretty amazing.\n\n Garant: And people hated it. But I know that Tom and I both do keep saying\u2014and for fun, I write in my spare time, too. So for a living I write stuff that I know is gonna sell to a studio and make a lot of money at the multiplex, and on my vacations, you know, Tom and I did Reno 911 just to do something that we knew we had control over, and we could make it cheap and good. You know, Tom's in a movie that's shooting in August, it's like a little, low-budget comedy that he's doing with Rob Riggle.\n\n Lennon: Garant's got a horror movie that I think is going.\n\n Garant: We write little stuff to stay sane, and we write little stuff because we have the money to spend a month or two writing a screenplay, and if it doesn't sell, that's okay. But I'm writing this because I want to make it awesome, and if it doesn't sell, that's all right.\n\n Lennon: The book is literally if you want to write for the studio. That's what the book is.\n\n GQ: Meaning if you want to make money, essentially.\n\n Both: That, too.\n\n Lennon: Or, just honestly being a working person who works for the studios. It's a minefield and there's tons of stuff you need to know. And people mess it up all the time.\n\n GQ: Walk me through that first pitch meeting you were in. The first time you were in the gauntlet, what was that like?\n\n Lennon: We were really well prepared for pitching, again, through years of being on The State. Because you really need to, when you pitch, it should feel like a performance, and a pretty great performance. And we've recommended the book even to people, if you just want to be a writer, I don't care, for pitching, for writing dialogue, you should take an improvisation class. It's super important. So we were weirdly sort of, I think people were not expecting us to, they were just like, \"Well here come the writers,\" but we both were coming out of a sketch comedy background, so when we pitch a movie, we play every character in the film. You act it out, you perform it\u2014you do a 10-minute performance of the movie.\n\n Garant: And the other thing that The State really prepared us for was, you know, with The State we were kids, and especially season one, one of the goals was just to have enough material for six episodes of the show. Which when you're 20, that's a lot of material, that's a lot of sketches. So we went from doing like, one show every three months, to suddenly needing like two hours of material that we had to write in like, two weeks. So what we learned to do is that when somebody would come in with a sketch that was not so good, you figured out in a room how to make that sketch work. You really figured out like, okay, this sketch is flat, and Papa Goulash, it's got one joke and it's that Papa Goulash, \"You can pop a corn but you can't Papa Goulash!\" And we were like, well, how do you actually make that a minute and a half? And so we learned, and so when you sat across the room and somebody said, \"Yeah, this prison comedy you wrote is great, but there's no way 20th Century Fox is going to do an NC-17 rape comedy. But we're doing this Martin Lawrence thing where's he's a big basketball player. What do you\u2014\" and we're like, \"Okay, yeah! We can make this work. We can spin it this way.\" And so The State also trained us to make other people's terrible jokes work, which is the other part of the game when you're here.\n\n Lennon: Another thing, I think probably the biggest thing that a couple decades in sketch comedy taught us is\u2014and it's a big thing in the book, is\u2014don't take it personally. Because in The State, we would literally rip each other's work to shreds, all day, every day, and then we'd go to a bar. It was like Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, we'd just clock out at the end of the day. But we would rip each other\u2014I mean, I had more screaming fights with Ken Marino than any person I've ever met in my life, and yet I'd still consider him one of my best friends. And not taking criticism of your writing personally is an enormous step towards surviving the studio system.\n\n Garant: And if you can learn to be incredibly passionate about your work without fighting for it just because it's yours, that's a huge thing that a lot of writers I've seen who've come here and failed, it's guys who are hung onto a line of dialogue or an idea for the wrong reasons, for like these emotional reasons, and not because it works or because it's good, but just because they wrote it. So you have to be willing to throw stuff away and replace it.\n\n GQ: How did you guys come together as a writing team?\n\n Garant: Inbred Brothers was the only thing that we wrote together on \"The State,\" we weren't a team at all, yet.\n\n Lennon: A little bit, even then not that much. But the fact of the matter is, when it came to writing a State movie, when it went from being the TV show to the movie, it became way less fun, and the meetings of people that wanted to get the movie going dwindled down to me, Garant, and Mike Jann, in Mike Jann's horrible little apartment. I think a lot of the group just lost interest because it wasn't as fun as writing sketches and doing the TV show. It was a long, arduous, boring process.\n\n Garant: And The State made a really bad movie deal, with a company that's now defunct. It was an arm of Disney, which is the last\u2014probably now, looking back, it's like, \"They did a deal with Disney?\"\u2014it was the last possible place that we should have been, and they started with 11 people every day meeting at 11:00 to think about The State, movie, and after about two weeks it was me and Tom and Mike Jann, and then they flew us out here to yell at us for coming up with terrible movie ideas. Literally we were like hungover New Yorkers in black suits, around a pool at the Universal Sheraton...\n\n Lennon: Getting yelled at by Disney ecs.\n\n Garant: Their idea, by the way, in hindsight, was a great idea.\n\n Lennon: They wanted us to do a movie about the whacky guys in the Stanford marching band.\n\n Garant: Looking back as an adult, it was a great idea.\n\n Lennon: We were too stupid at the time to see how good of an idea that was.\n\n Garant: We're like these New York snobs, but it taught us everything.\n\n Lennon: And eventually we did crack the movie.\n\n Garant: And eventually we were smart enough to actually quit, which I can't believe that at that age we had the balls to say, \"We don't like this movie, you don't like this movie; why are we doing this movie?\" And we walked away from that deal, but it proved that me and Jann and Tom could work together. We'd had our first kind of weird taste of what it's like to be in a horrible situation with the studio, so we were game to try to do it again.\n\n GQ: One last thing, guys: Would you tell the Billy Crystal story?\n\n Lennon: I don't think that it's a good idea.\n\n Garant: Yeah, I don't know that it's a good idea. We pitched him an idea, we pitched him Analyze This 2, we pitched him and De Niro, and we were both terrified of De Niro, and oddly enough, De Niro was the nice one."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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