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"FacebookPinterest\n\nSeth Rogen feels he&amp;#39;s done &amp;quot;way too many movies&amp;quot; in the year or so since he became the kind of actor who is offered way too many movies to do, and while he knows this is a good problem to have, he sometimes worries a little. &amp;quot;I hate looking at my face,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;so I can&amp;#39;t imagine what other people think. &amp;#39;Guess what? There&amp;#39;s 5 million fucking Seth Rogen movies coming out in the next three months!&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nBut with a possible actors&amp;#39; strike on the horizon, Rogen&amp;#39;s got a limited amount of time to finish the films he&amp;#39;s committed to, so here he is\u2014in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the basement of a cold, dark, and drab municipal building that was once a county courthouse\u2014making another one, Observe and Report. He plays a mall security guard with delusions of crimefighting grandeur who stumbles upon some actual crime, and if the face full of fake cuts and bruises he&amp;#39;s sporting in the scene he&amp;#39;s shooting today is any indication, things do not go well.\n\nRogen&amp;#39;s been working more or less nonstop since the summer of 2007, thanks to Knocked Up and Superbad (based on a script Rogen wrote with his buddy Evan Goldberg at the seasoned age of 13). Knocked Up proved Rogen could carry a hit movie; Superbad proved he and Goldberg could write one. People had started referring to Rogen and his peers\u2014a familial, benignly cliquish collective of young actors, writers, and behindthecamera talent, many discovered and/or mentored by Knocked Up director Judd Apatow\u2014as a &amp;quot;comedy mafia,&amp;quot; but in the wake of those two movies, which made almost $300 million that summer, the mafia had a face, and it was Rogen&amp;#39;s.\n\nHere, suddenly, was a fully formed comedic hyphenate of multifarious gifts: a guy who at 25\u2014he&amp;#39;s 26 now\u2014possessed a little of Belushi&amp;#39;s frank, sloppy selfacceptance; a little of his comedy idol Adam Sandler&amp;#39;s volatile vulnerability; a whole lot of the counterintuitive charm that allowed Bill Murray to turn the audience into a coconspirator with every joke; and a hip, adroit, grenadelobbing delivery, a voice, that felt entirely new. And maybe because his breakout performance happened in a movie like Knocked Up\u2014a romantic comedy, albeit an almost caustically honest one\u2014Rogen has demonstrated that an actor who&amp;#39;s sheepish, shempy, and Jewfroed can ply his trade in the same jokester/leadingman gray area as more traditionally handsome funny guys like Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, and Vince Vaughn.\n\nBut despite the presence of a bona fide movie star, the set of Observe and Report is loose, casual, studentfilmish. Director Jody Hill, who&amp;#39;s 29 but looks about 18, shuffles around in a black fleece jacket, chomping cinnamon gum. A bigtime producer, Donald De Line\u2014ebullient and bald\u2014is on hand, but so are Evan Goldberg, who doesn&amp;#39;t actually have a job on the movie, and Sandy and Mark Rogen, Seth&amp;#39;s parents. Mark&amp;#39;s dressed as a cop; he&amp;#39;s playing the guard who lets Rogen out of a holding cell. This is his second appearance in one of Rogen&amp;#39;s movies\u2014he played &amp;quot;Father with Bat&amp;quot; in Superbad, chasing Jonah Hill and McLovin off his lawn.\n\nJody Hill calls &amp;quot;cut,&amp;quot; and father and son confer in the hall. Mark&amp;#39;s not sure how to deliver his one line, which is &amp;quot;Okay\u2014let&amp;#39;s go.&amp;quot;\n\n &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t know if they want it harder,&amp;quot; Mark says, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, &amp;quot;or more kind.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;Give &amp;#39;em options, dude,&amp;quot; Rogen says, and laughs. He has a great laugh\u2014convulsive, gurgling, utterly unselfconscious. It&amp;#39;s like a HannaBarbera sound effect, and if you hang out with him for a day or so you&amp;#39;ll hear it maybe 600 times.\n\nThe enduring clich\u00E9 about comedy is that it comes from an angry place\u2014that its most gifted practitioners are men (and part of the clich\u00E9 is that it&amp;#39;s virtually always men) who&amp;#39;ve learned to vent rage and pain and childhood trauma through humor, poking the cruel world in the eye, nyuk, nyuk. Good comics have to be fearless, iconoclastic, and the conventional wisdom is that their distrust of institutions usually begins in an unhappy home. And yet here&amp;#39;s Rogen, goofing around with his mom, instructing his dad in the finer points of spontaneous moviemaking. In a way, Rogen&amp;#39;s whole career undercuts the notion that dysfunction breeds comedy; his success is proof that you can be welladjusted and still be funny, that you can surround yourself with family, or with a surrogate family of likeminded collaborators, and be just as real and rude and ruthless when it&amp;#39;s time to make the jokes.\n\nIn Knocked Up, the banter between Rogen and his stoner buddies felt authentic and livedin because those actors\u2014Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Martin Starr, and Jason Segel\u2014were Rogen&amp;#39;s actual buddies. One day Apatow overheard them bullshitting about how Eric Bana&amp;#39;s performance as a badass superJew in Munich could make guys like them more attractive to women; when the cameras rolled, Apatow told them to have the discussion again, in place of what was in the script, a lessinspired rap about how looking like Jack Black could help Rogen&amp;#39;s character score.\n\nDirector Harold Ramis observed this process up close when he played Rogen&amp;#39;s character&amp;#39;s dad in Knocked Up. He calls from Chicago, on a break from postproduction on his next movie, the Apatowproduced Year One, and suggests that Judd&amp;#39;s way just makes more sense: &amp;quot;Shooting a movie isn&amp;#39;t about making final decisions,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s about creating choices for yourself that you later exploit in the editing room. Comedies in particular are cobbled together in editing\u2014the timing is adjusted, and many takes are put together in order to make a performance.\n\n&amp;quot;A lot of bad stuff gets shot when people are improvising freely,&amp;quot; Ramis says, &amp;quot;and that&amp;#39;s kind of encouraging. You learn you don&amp;#39;t die of embarrassment, or one bad take doesn&amp;#39;t kill you.&amp;quot;\n\nRogen&amp;#39;s been working this way since his first acting job, on Apatow&amp;#39;s Freaks and Geeks. In one episode, his character, Ken Miller\u2014the first of many deadpan, weedloving malcontents he&amp;#39;d play\u2014is dating a toughtalking tuba player from the school band. One night she reveals that she was born with both male and female genitalia\u2014packing, as Ken memorably puts it, &amp;quot;both a gun and the holster.&amp;quot; It&amp;#39;s the kind of awkward and indescribably tender moment Freaks and Geeks did better than almost any other show about high school kids, ever. But when the episode was in production, the writers were having trouble with the scene, so Apatow brought Rogen and the actress playing Tuba Girl into his office, turned on a video camera, and asked them to improvise it.\n\n&amp;quot;He said, &amp;#39;Have the conversation. You, pretend that you&amp;#39;re a hermaphrodite. You, pretend you&amp;#39;re being told for the first time. Go&amp;#39;\u2014which is basically the way we shoot stuff now,&amp;quot; Rogen says. &amp;quot;I was like, &amp;#39;Fuck, this is way easier than memorizing lines.&amp;#39; You just talk, y&amp;#39;know? Somebody&amp;#39;s telling you they&amp;#39;re a hermaphrodite. What the fuck? Really? I was like, &amp;#39;This is how we should be doing everything.&amp;#39; At the time, I didn&amp;#39;t realize it, but improvising is a lot like writing. According to Judd, that was the first time he thought maybe I was a good writer.&amp;quot;\n\nYou just talk, y&amp;#39;know? You show up, hang out, stay in the moment, keep it conversational, and the camera discovers a TV show\u2014or a movie that makes $100 million. It barely sounds like work.\n\nOne thing Rogen has figured out is that if you can make a movie for under $30 million, movie studios will not only give you $30 million but allow you to do pretty much whatever you want with it.\n\nA few years ago, Rogen and his friends flipped out over a microbudgeted, largely improvised comedy called The Foot Fist Way, in which Danny McBride plays an abrasive, deluded Tae Kwon Do instructor. They invited McBride and Foot Fist director Jody Hill to watch them shoot Knocked Up, and they got to talking about Hill and McBride&amp;#39;s filmschool buddy David Gordon Green and all the funny stuff he&amp;#39;d shot with them in college before going off to make somber, Terrence Malicky films like All the Real Girls\u2014which was how Green ended up directing Pineapple Express, an action comedy, written by Rogen and Goldberg, about a process server who witnesses a murder and goes on the run, accompanied by the guy he buys his weed from (Freaks alum James Franco).\n\nGreen&amp;#39;s not exactly the first guy you&amp;#39;d think of to direct your carchase movie, but Rogen and his friends thought his stuff was cool, and they liked him, and that was all that mattered. The comedy mafia&amp;#39;s m.o. involves concentrating power in the hands of the talent by presenting studios with fully packaged projects\u2014this is the script, these are the stars, this is the director, take it or leave it. All they had to do was convince Green that he&amp;#39;d be shielded from saucespoiling studio interference.\n\n&amp;quot;To a guy who makes George Washington,&amp;quot; Rogen says, &amp;quot;$25 million is, y&amp;#39;know, a billion dollars. But to Sony, that&amp;#39;s like fucking one minute of SpiderMan. So they just don&amp;#39;t give a shit. They don&amp;#39;t even visit our sets. On Pineapple, I&amp;#39;d say 70 percent of the time, me and Evan were the most senior people onset. It has a lunaticsrunningtheasylum feel, in the most gratifying way.&amp;quot;\n\nIt hasn&amp;#39;t always been this easy.\n\nRogen was 16 when he got the part in Freaks and Geeks. &amp;quot;I thought, Well, there&amp;#39;s a type of guy you never see on TV,&amp;quot; Apatow says. &amp;quot;Back then his voice was really froggy and deep, with a thick Canadian accent, and he was so young and so angry, we thought, He&amp;#39;s gotta be on the show.&amp;quot;\n\nIn the beginning, his character was written as an antagonist for the female lead, aspiring burnout Lindsay Weir, played by Linda Cardellini. &amp;quot;It was the &amp;#39;funny strange friend&amp;#39; part,&amp;quot; Apatow says. &amp;quot;But we started to get to know Seth better, and we started writing to his actual personality.\n\n&amp;quot;I remember watching Seth&amp;#39;s scenes with [regular Freaks director] Jake Kasdan,&amp;quot; Apatow says, &amp;quot;and realizing, &amp;#39;He&amp;#39;s a leading man.&amp;#39; He&amp;#39;s this lovable Everyman guy, and he&amp;#39;s viciously funny, with a big heart. It became clear that he could carry the whole thing.&amp;quot;\n\nRogen had moved to Los Angeles from Vancouver, Canada, to do the show, which garnered critical acclaim and Proactivinfomerciallevel ratings and was canceled after eighteen episodes. Apatow then hired Rogen as both cast member and staff writer on his next project, a college show called Undeclared. &amp;quot;I thought, This is the perfect situation\u2014I have this show about college, and I can hire this hilarious 17yearold to write, and he can tell me if anything is bullshit,&amp;quot; Apatow says. &amp;quot;What I didn&amp;#39;t realize at the time was that Seth had never been to college, because I gave him a job on a TV show. But he wrote some amazing episodes. It became embarrassing, because you had this punk kid writing episodes that were as good or better than anyone else&amp;#39;s on the staff. And he wasn&amp;#39;t sitting in his room suffering and sweatin&amp;#39; blood over every comma. He was bangin&amp;#39; &amp;#39;em out quick and strong.&amp;quot;\n\nUndeclared premiered in 2001\u2014two weeks after September 11, when TV programs about smartass undergrads playing beer pong weren&amp;#39;t high on the nation&amp;#39;s todo list\u2014and was canceled after seventeen episodes. After that, Rogen spent a few years marinating in frustration at his L.A. apartment with people like Baruchel and Segel and Starr, fellow members of the Apatow troupe who were similarly hard up for work.\n\nHe got a small part in Donnie Darko, a movie he claims to have never understood, and a smaller one in an episode of Dawson&amp;#39;s Creek, a show he claims to have never watched. But what he really wanted to do was make his own movies. He and Goldberg had refined Superbad\u2014their Kevin Smith\u2013inspired script about two sexually frustrated teenagers named Seth and Evan\u2014into something they thought they could sell. They took some meetings, and everyone said they liked it but could never see making it. Or they suggested that Goldberg and Rogen rewrite it as a PG13 movie, so that kids could go see it. Rogen and Goldberg insisted that kids would see it anyway, that they&amp;#39;d be more inclined to see it if it were rated R, and that they wanted to make a high school movie that adults might also want to see, and the ecutives would smile and nod and ask if he and Goldberg were interested in developing one of the studio&amp;#39;s ideas instead. They did some rewrites on projects like a teen comedy set in ancient Rome, which never got made; the stuff they turned down was worse.\n\n&amp;quot;There was one,&amp;quot; Rogen says, &amp;quot;where the pitch was &amp;#39;teens at the beach.&amp;#39; I remember being like, &amp;#39;What do you mean, &amp;quot;teens at the beach&amp;quot;?&amp;#39; And they were like, &amp;#39;We just have this image. Of teenagers. At the beach.&amp;#39; And we were thinking, like, &amp;#39;We&amp;#39;ve written a whole movie about teenagers&amp;#39;\u00A0&amp;quot;\u2014but it didn&amp;#39;t matter.\n\nThey did get to write for Da Ali G Show, which paid, Rogen says, &amp;quot;almost nothing,&amp;quot; but sounded great in a meeting\u2014preBorat, the whole Sacha Baron Cohen thing and how it worked was a mystery, and being the guys who wrote for him was like being friends with a magician. They still couldn&amp;#39;t sell anything\u2014not The Long D, a college movie about longdistance relationships, not the HBO pilot Rogen wrote with Jason Segel and a pre\u2013The School of Rock Jack Black. Mostly Rogen and his friends would sit around getting stoned and kvetching about their careers. It was a lot like the living situation later depicted in Knocked Up, Rogen says\u2014with a lot of the same people involved\u2014but the thwarted ambitions in play were more serious.\n\n&amp;quot;We all used to smoke weed all day instead of working, and we&amp;#39;d just play video games for months on end,&amp;quot; Rogen says. &amp;quot;But we all really wanted to work and make movies.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;I just remember feeling really bitter,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;We thought the stuff we were writing was funny\u2014and it&amp;#39;s pretty much the exact same stuff that we&amp;#39;re doing now\u2014and it just seemed crazy that no one else liked it. You start to question your own sanity. Like, &amp;#39;Our HBO pilot isn&amp;#39;t funny, but Entourage is?&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nApatow would slip Rogen some work when he could, delegating punchup work on movies like Bad Boys II and Kicking and Screaming to his prot\u00E9g\u00E9, slipping him a grand or two. Rogen worked four days on Will Ferrell&amp;#39;s Anchorman, which Apatow coproduced, and made $300.\n\n&amp;quot;Judd felt responsible for me and [Freaks and Geeks actor] Martin Starr because we left high school to do the show. He could be the guy that made, like, Todd Bridges go fucking crazy. Like, &amp;#39;Oh, I took Seth from high school and made him think that he could do something, and I failed. And if he robs me in ten years, it&amp;#39;s my fault.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nOne thing that did happen\u2014and one suspects it happened both despite and because of all the weed\u2014is that Goldberg and Rogen finished another screenplay, for Pineapple Express, which turned out to be about as soughtafter a property as Superbad was back then.\n\nThere were conversations in which ecutives actually asked if Rogen and Goldberg were married to the whole pot thing. In which it was suggested that Pineapple might stand a chance of getting made as a movie about two idiots\u2014hungry, forgetful, cottonmouthed idiots\u2014on the run.\n\n&amp;quot;I didn&amp;#39;t realize this, but weed is considered a genre,&amp;quot; Rogen says. &amp;quot;A weed movie&amp;#39;s like a horror movie or a scifi movie. To [studios] it&amp;#39;s a genre that only some people like. Which we just never thought of. When we were growing up, we watched movies like Friday and The Big Lebowski\u2014to us, those are the greatest movies ever. And before you&amp;#39;re steeped in the fuckedup ways that the actual business runs itself, you just assume, like, &amp;#39;Friday&amp;#39;s a rad movie! Why wouldn&amp;#39;t they want another movie like that?&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nFinally, something turned. Apatow cast Rogen as one of Steve Carell&amp;#39;s coworkers in The 40YearOld Virgin. His extemporaneous riffage (&amp;quot;You know how I know you&amp;#39;re gay?&amp;quot;) got huge laughs and contributed to the film&amp;#39;s gleefully outrageous spirit.\n\n&amp;quot;When we were making Virgin, Seth was a giant influence,&amp;quot; Apatow says. &amp;quot;His tone, and his belief in a brutally frank, funny, dirty type of comedy. I&amp;#39;ve certainly written some Rrated comedy, but Seth took it to a different level. He kept saying, &amp;#39;The dirtier I am with Carell, the funnier it is. He&amp;#39;s so uncomfortable when I do this stuff, and I think it&amp;#39;s a riot.&amp;#39; Carell thought maybe we were going too far.&amp;quot;\n\nAfter seeing Virgin, Kevin Smith wrote Zack and Miri Make a Porno with Rogen\u2014&amp;quot;his rhythms, his patois, his inflection&amp;quot;\u2014in mind. &amp;quot;The dude leapt off the screen,&amp;quot; Smith says. &amp;quot;I was like, &amp;#39;That is the fucking future. That dude is amazing.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nThere&amp;#39;s a scene in Virgin\u2014which ended up making more than $100 million\u2014where Carell, enjoying his first night of partying after four decades on earth, smokes pot out of an apple. At the first test screening, Rogen says, &amp;quot;the audience erupted in wild applause at the sight of a guy smoking weed out of an apple. And I remember Judd and I looked at each other and said, &amp;#39;We can make Pineapple Express.&amp;#39; If potsmoking works in a romantic comedy, people will buy it.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;That&amp;#39;s the debate that Seth and I have been having for the last six years,&amp;quot; says Apatow, who does not dispute Rogen&amp;#39;s characterization of him as an &amp;quot;antipot person.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He thinks we&amp;#39;re making a pot movie, and I think we&amp;#39;re making an antipot movie. In my head, [Pineapple] is clearly a story of how pot leads to Asian gangs trying to murder you.&amp;quot;\n\nThe really surprising thing about Pineapple isn&amp;#39;t its whateverdude treatment of illegal drugs\u2014between Harold, Kumar, and MaryLouise Parker as a single mom turned drug runner on Showtime&amp;#39;s Weeds, pop culture looks more like Amsterdam every day. It&amp;#39;s the way it mis the trademark banter of Rogen&amp;#39;s earlier films with elaborate and surprisingly violent action. It owes less to Cheech &amp;amp; Chong and more to Beverly Hills Cop, Running Scared, and especially the Charles Grodin\u2013Robert De Niro classic Midnight Run\u2014action comedies in which the action was no joke. The most cynical way of looking at this is that movies in which buildings explode and cop cars take flight tend to pay pretty well, and that playing Dale Denton\u2014who puts down the bionic superdope to pick up an AK47\u2014is Rogen&amp;#39;s lowkey way of auditioning for that type of work. But that&amp;#39;s not the way the movie plays; it&amp;#39;s funny and weird, and when people aren&amp;#39;t shooting each other it meanders rewardingly. Rogen says they always saw the film as being about the awkward and tentative bond that forms between Dale and his dealer.\n\n&amp;quot;To us,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;it was a movie about business associates who are trying to figure out whether or not they&amp;#39;re friends apart from the business.&amp;quot;\n\nIn other words, Seth Rogen&amp;#39;s big action movie is really a relationship movie, concerned\u2014like Superbad, like Knocked Up, like Virgin\u2014with platonic love and what happens when circumstances conspire to test that love. Whether anybody will buy Rogen as an action hero, even an ironic one, remains to be seen, but Pineapple should cement his status as Hollywood&amp;#39;s preeminent bromantic lead.\n\nRogen lumbers up the steps of his trailer. Evan Goldberg and Matt Bass, Rogen&amp;#39;s assistant and &amp;quot;wingman,&amp;quot; are watching Se7en on the trailer&amp;#39;s bigscreen TV. This is how Rogen spends most of his downtime\u2014halfwatching forty or so minutes of whatever movie they can find on cable, waiting for a P.A. to knock on the door and tell him it&amp;#39;s time to go back to work. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s almost like being on an airplane,&amp;quot; Rogen says. &amp;quot;A movie that you&amp;#39;d never watch in a million years, it&amp;#39;s like, &amp;#39;Ooh\u2014Norbit&amp;#39;s on. I can finally watch that.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nRogen grew up in Vancouver. He went to school with rich kids, the sons and daughters of lawyers and doctors, but his parents\u2014who met on a kibbutz in Israel\u2014were lefty social workers, which compared to everybody else&amp;#39;s parents basically made them bombthrowing anarchists. Rogen remembers his dad getting detained at more than one protest; sometimes he&amp;#39;d heckle a politician&amp;#39;s speech and the Rogens would show up on the news.\n\nIt wasn&amp;#39;t a typical upbringing, but it wasn&amp;#39;t traumatic, and over the years it&amp;#39;s paid off. Rogen got the sex talk from his mom earlier than anyone else he knew, which explains a lot. And he wouldn&amp;#39;t have started doing standup comedy at 13 if not for his parents&amp;#39; &amp;quot;fucktheMan, followyourdreams kind of attitude.&amp;quot; He performed at a lot of openmike nights in local comedy clubs, and although he was chaperoned at all times by his mom, he was still in an environment typically offlimits to 13yearolds, listening to other comics working as blue as blue got, and this, too, explains much about the type of man he became.\n\nSometimes, when his mom wasn&amp;#39;t looking, he&amp;#39;d smoke a joint with the other comics backstage\u2014&amp;quot;Nothing I wouldn&amp;#39;t have been doing if I was out at a high school party,&amp;quot; he says\u2014and sometimes he&amp;#39;d sit with them after he finished his set, watch them have a drink, and they&amp;#39;d tell him he&amp;#39;d killed it. He still thinks these guys were some of the funniest people he&amp;#39;d ever met, still talks to some of them. (&amp;quot;Most of them,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;got busted with mushrooms fifteen years ago and can never get into America now.&amp;quot;)\n\nI mention that Judd Apatow has similar stories of formative comedynerddom: As a kid, he&amp;#39;d go around with a tape recorder, interviewing his heroes about their craft, sitting at the feet of guys like Jerry Seinfeld.\n\n&amp;quot;Yeah\u2014he&amp;#39;s played me a lot of those tapes,&amp;quot; Rogen says. &amp;quot;But Judd seemed to be a lot more miserable when he was a kid than I was. It&amp;#39;s clear that [comedy] was like a coping mechanism for him\u2014his parents would argue, so he&amp;#39;d turn on Saturday Night Live. It seemed a lot more rooted in depression rather than just fascination.\n\n&amp;quot;Judd always looks at me and goes, &amp;#39;I don&amp;#39;t get why you&amp;#39;re funny,&amp;#39; &amp;quot; Rogen says. &amp;quot; &amp;#39;Nothing really bad has ever happened to you.&amp;#39; But then again, if you talk to Bill Hader, Steve Carell\u2014those guys had great childhoods.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;I had a lot of weird financial worries when I was a kid,&amp;quot; he says after a second. &amp;quot;We weren&amp;#39;t poor, but all my friends were really rich, and we were just kind of middleclass. So I think if there was any kind of dark, driving force behind it, for me, it might have been [a need] to get some sense of financial security.&amp;quot;\n\nAnd you thought you&amp;#39;d attain that by doing standup comedy\u2026\n\n&amp;quot;\u2026which is retarded,&amp;quot; Rogen says. &amp;quot;It shows how little I actually knew. I&amp;#39;ll be a rich standup comic!&amp;quot;\n\nRogen&amp;#39;s looking at his own face again, in a makeuptrailer mirror. The makeup artists have scrubbed the fake blood off his hands, removed his prosthetic bruises with an oily salve. Rogen has wondered aloud how Eddie Murphy does it\u2014all those Klumps movies, all those hours in the chair. Now a female makeup person is taming Rogen&amp;#39;s stubble, the fiveo&amp;#39;clock shadow that made him the only kid in his high school class who could buy beer and cigarettes. It&amp;#39;s an involved process\u2014creams, powders, two different razors.\n\n&amp;quot;I once read a thing with Woody Allen,&amp;quot; Rogen says, &amp;quot;where they asked him, &amp;#39;Which do you like better\u2014acting or directing?&amp;#39; And he said, &amp;#39;Directing, because I don&amp;#39;t have to shave.&amp;#39; That&amp;#39;s how I feel about writing sometimes.&amp;quot;\n\nBesides Rogen&amp;#39;s parents, the other special guest onset today is Jody Hill&amp;#39;s girlfriend&amp;#39;s dog, Little Bear\u2014Hill&amp;#39;s watching him while his girlfriend&amp;#39;s out of town. Little Bear is 50 percent Shih Tzu, 25 percent poodle, and 25 percent bichon, a little Ewok Peter Frampton, still a puppy, not yet fid.\n\n&amp;quot;My girlfriend wants a dog more than anything in the universe,&amp;quot; Rogen says. (Her name&amp;#39;s Lauren; she&amp;#39;s a TV writer; they met before he was famous; they live together.) He&amp;#39;s managed to hold her off, for now, by saying they can get one if she lets him get a motorcycle, something he doesn&amp;#39;t even really want: &amp;quot;It had to be something,&amp;quot; he reasons, &amp;quot;that she really doesn&amp;#39;t want me to have.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; says Sandy Rogen firmly.\n\nWe talk about the pet thing, how it&amp;#39;s always a rehearsal for the havingkids thing. You think it&amp;#39;ll postpone the conversation, but\u2014\n\n&amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; Rogen says. &amp;quot;It kind of evolves the conversation, right? Leslie Mann&amp;quot;\u2014his Knocked Up costar, and Judd Apatow&amp;#39;s wife\u2014&amp;quot;told me that. She said, &amp;#39;Don&amp;#39;t get her a dog, or you&amp;#39;ll have to give her a baby.&amp;quot;\n\nHe ambles off to go shoot a scene in which Ronnie talks to a stern police sergeant about becoming a cop. It&amp;#39;s a minor moment in the film, a plot mover\u2014the joke is that Ronnie&amp;#39;s playing it cool, like joining the force is something he&amp;#39;s merely considering, when in reality this is his fifth attempt to apply.\n\nRogen plays the scene a little differently each time, modifying the questions he asks the interviewer. Under &amp;quot;Experience,&amp;quot; he wonders, should he include, &amp;quot;like, blackops kind of shit?&amp;quot; The actor playing the policeman rolls with it. &amp;quot;You can just leave that blank,&amp;quot; he deadpans. Hill calls &amp;quot;cut,&amp;quot; Rogen comes back behind the monitors, watches the playback. It&amp;#39;s the only time I&amp;#39;ve seen him look uncomfortable\u2014as he watches himself act, he purses his lips, flares his nostrils, makes a sort of tequilashot face. Then he laughs and the tension is released. I ask him where the &amp;quot;Experience&amp;quot; thing came from; he says he just read it off the jobapplication sheet they gave him to hold in the scene. &amp;quot;I draw from life,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I read the props that are put in front of me. We&amp;#39;ll take ideas from anywhere. I&amp;#39;ll take ideas from the camera guys. I don&amp;#39;t give a shit. Between everyone, usually someone&amp;#39;ll have an idea that works.&amp;quot;\n\nIt goes on like this\u2014Rogen shoots some stuff, makes the crew laugh, watches a little playback, sits in a director&amp;#39;s chair and taps out messages on his iPhone. It feels like the most lowimpact moviemaking process imaginable, and it seems like Rogen could go on working this way forever. Creative freedom! The flow of ideas among trusted collaborators! Hey, let&amp;#39;s try that line the key grip suggested! What&amp;#39;s not to like?\n\nBut the latitude he&amp;#39;s got right now is due entirely to the streak he&amp;#39;s on. There&amp;#39;s always the possibility that it won&amp;#39;t last\u2014that at some point in the future, audiences will decide that after 5 million fucking Seth Rogen movies, they&amp;#39;re tired of looking at his face.\n\n&amp;quot;That&amp;#39;s the existential question,&amp;quot; Ramis says. &amp;quot;How does your career change as you age? Seth is already a man, but what kind of man will he be at 35? What will his life concerns be, and how will that manifest on the screen? Who will Adam Sandler be at 60? It happens to all of us, you know. I&amp;#39;m 63 years old myself, and I&amp;#39;m not Egon Spengler anymore. But as a director, I don&amp;#39;t have to worry about my image, in that sense. Actors do have to worry about it.&amp;quot;\n\nIn the best of all possible futures, maybe Rogen will be the Woody Allen of Generation ox when he&amp;#39;s 35\u2014acting, writing, unlikelysexsymboling, creating his own material, making his own lane. Maybe Knocked Up was his Play It Again, Sam and Pineapple Express is his Bananas, which would put him about five years away from making his Annie Hall (and about twentyfive years away from making his The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, but let&amp;#39;s not go crazy with the parallel).\n\nBut maybe, somewhere down the road, Rogen will be offered the kind of money you can&amp;#39;t say &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; to for some broad, bloated, intheformoffunny blockbuster\u2014one of those seemingly can&amp;#39;tlose propositions like The Cat in the Hat\u2014and he&amp;#39;ll take it, and it&amp;#39;ll destroy his scruffystoner cred before he has time to leverage it into a long career. Rogen&amp;#39;s aware that this can happen; he&amp;#39;s a student of comedy, and he&amp;#39;s watched more than a few comic actors make that wrong turn that leads to greenscreen familyfilm hell.\n\nFor now, you at least get the sense from talking to Rogen that he&amp;#39;s enough of a comedy nerd\u2014and has seen enough of Norbit\u2014to have learned from the mistakes of those who&amp;#39;ve preceded him into greenscreen hell.\n\n&amp;quot;For serious actors,&amp;quot; Rogen says, &amp;quot;I think it goes the opposite way\u2014you get sucked into doing really shitty independent movies, and the next thing you know you&amp;#39;re in some humiliating movie that you took no money for. The comedyactor version is, yeah, I&amp;#39;m the Grinch. Or I&amp;#39;m playing the KoolAid Man in a movie or something like that.&amp;quot;\n\nThere is not, for the moment, a KoolAid Man film in development. But Rogen says he did pass, just the other day, on &amp;quot;some gigantic specialeffectsdriven epic movie.&amp;quot; He&amp;#39;s been advising his friends to do the same. Jonah Hill, Rogen says, just turned down a part in the sequel to The Transformers. &amp;quot;I can see if Steven Spielberg&amp;#39;s calling you, asking you to do something, how that&amp;#39;s hard to turn down,&amp;quot; Rogen says. &amp;quot;But what I said to Jonah was, &amp;#39;You want to make a movie about fightin&amp;#39; robots? Make your own movie about fightin&amp;#39; robots. You can do that. That&amp;#39;s on the table now.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nThat&amp;#39;s the mindset behind The Green Hornet, due out in 2010. Rogen&amp;#39;s going to play the titular crimefighter, a debonair protoBatman brought to life by Van Williams in a &amp;#39;60s television series best known for introducing the Englishspeaking world to a pre\u2013Fists of Fury Bruce Lee. Yes, it&amp;#39;s a comicbook movie (although the TV show was actually based on a radio drama), and yes, it&amp;#39;s going to cost something like $70 million to make, and a healthy piece of that will undoubtedly go to Rogen, and there will probably be action figures and lunchbos available, and Rogen&amp;#39;s even going to pack on some muscle for it, with help from trainertothestars Harley Pasternak, whose list of celebrity clients includes Jessica Simpson, Robert Downey Jr., and, confusingly, Michael Chiklis\u2014but none of that is the point. &amp;quot;I would never do something just because of the money,&amp;quot; Rogen says, &amp;quot;or because my &amp;#39;team&amp;#39; thought it was a good career strategy.&amp;quot;\n\nHe wants to make a superhero movie not because Hollywood&amp;#39;s got superheromovie fever at the moment, not because Iron Man made a billion dollars, but because he&amp;#39;s a comicbook freak\u2014that was what he and Evan Goldberg bonded over, long before movies entered the picture\u2014and because Sony let him and Goldberg write the screenplay. They&amp;#39;re working on the second draft right now\u2014last night a bunch of the Observe and Report folks went bowling, but Rogen stayed home, working on the script with Goldberg until eleven thirty. They don&amp;#39;t split up the work\u2014usually Goldberg types, because he types faster, but they talk out every scene together. It&amp;#39;s a process Rogen says he still enjoys more than &amp;quot;all the [other] strange things I get paid to do.&amp;quot;\n\nRogen likes the idea of making a superhero film based on a relatively obscure property. &amp;quot;There are very few people who have a preconceived notion of what the movie should be,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;The infrastructure for rabid fandom is not there.&amp;quot;\n\nStill, the nerds carp; when Rogen was announced as the star of the film, online Hornetheads protested almost immediately, and Rogen had to convince Sony &amp;quot;that these thirteen dudes on Aintitcool.com don&amp;#39;t represent 13 million people.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;People are having the same reaction I did when I heard they might do a Green Lantern movie with Jack Black,&amp;quot; Evan Goldberg says. &amp;quot;I was like, &amp;#39;Really? That&amp;#39;s a pretty cool idea\u2014too cool to be made into a comedy.&amp;#39; But what we&amp;#39;re doing\u2014it&amp;#39;s got a fun attitude to it, but we&amp;#39;re trying to make it superreal, like the Bourne movies. We want the action to be really intense.&amp;quot;\n\nIt&amp;#39;s late in the afternoon now, and Lauren&amp;#39;s here. She&amp;#39;s got enviable bone structure, a lot of brown curly hair. She finds Little Bear right away, sits in the hallway with Mark and Sandy with the dog on her lap.\n\n&amp;quot;You&amp;#39;re so good,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;You haven&amp;#39;t even tried to bite me once.&amp;quot;\n\nRogen sees this happening. He walks over, looking like a man who&amp;#39;s just realized he&amp;#39;s probably getting a dog soon, whether or not he wants one.\n\n&amp;quot;Does it feel that different?&amp;quot; he says to Lauren, indicating the dog. &amp;quot;This is what it would be like.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But I&amp;#39;m already touching you less.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;I know,&amp;quot; Rogen says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m already a third banana.&amp;quot;\n\nHe moves in closer; she pats his belly, reaches out to take his hand, but keeps an arm around the dog.\n\n&amp;quot;It triangulates your relationship,&amp;quot; Sandy Rogen says. And for a moment, with the sun warming the courthouse&amp;#39;s terrazzo floors, there they are, Seth and Lauren and Little Bear, triangulated. Jody Hill walks by, sees Rogen and Lauren smiling at each other.\n\n&amp;quot;That&amp;#39;s a goodlooking family,&amp;quot; he says.\n\nRogen looks at Lauren. Is he thinking about his future? About this triangle as a home from which comedy could spring? Then he looks down at Little Bear and says, &amp;quot;This dog doesn&amp;#39;t even know he&amp;#39;s about to get his testicles chopped off.&amp;quot;\n\nAlex Pappademas  is a GQ staff writer."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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