You need to learn that, unless your lead character is written in a way that one of the 20 movie stars want to play him, your movie will not get made.
There were guys in 'The State' who would take one script and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and fight for it for a whole season, and after a couple of seasons, you realized that doesn't work. You have to just be willing to throw something away, no matter how good it is, and write a better joke.
You can't teach somebody how to be a good writer.
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 - we'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?'
We were going to do 'Reno 911!: New York, New York, Las Vegas,' which was like a 'Die Hard' set not in New York, but in the New York, New York casino in Las Vegas. We were really excited about being locked into the one casino and doing a bad action movie.
'The State' had never done improv. We used to go over scripts for weeks and argue about every joke. But I don't know how we would have scripted 'Reno.'
If one real working screenwriter had visited us in college and just said, 'This is what my day is like,' it would have been really helpful.
The 'Reno' movie is very solid. 'Balls of Fury' I'm pretty disappointed in - I blame myself. People hate both of those movies equally.
'Balls of Fury' was my first time directing, and that's a movie that I think parts of it are great.
'Balls of Fury' was a 45-day shoot when it probably - hindsight being 20/20 - probably should've been a 75-day shoot with all the ping-pong action.
