Ben Stiller and Tom Cruise are working together again, this time to bring us a biopic of the awesome asshole Music Exec Les Grossman. As Stiller puts it:
Grossman reportedly responded: “To quote my great friend Kirk Lazarus, ‘I don’t read the script, the script reads me.’”
(ok, if anyone’s confused, you haven’t seen one of the best movies of the 00’s, and, really, IMO, one of the best comedies ever.)
(oh yeah, cite)
I loved Tropic Thunder and saw it twice at the movies. But I thought Grossman worked so well because he was a small part of a larger movie.
It’s like that (bogus) rumour about the Coens making a movie centred around Jesus from The Big Lebowski. Again, a great character in a great movie, but a movie about Jesus would get old fast.
That said, I trust Stiller’s instincts.
Hope springs eternal. I trust Stiller with this too, and I’m hoping that the rest of the cast will show up somewhere in the film. If it’s terrible, we’ll always still have Tropic Thunder.
Well, that was Tom Cruise’s best performance in years. Seriously.
When I first saw the title of this thread, I thought it was Les Nessman.
I’m also skeptical that the character can carry a whole movie.
Not excited. I agree with everyone saying that he was a good character in a funny movie…but I don’t think he can carry his own. The yelling would get real old real fast.
Les Grossman didn’t get where he is just by yelling. He also stroked and wheedled, lied and backstabbed, crushed dreams and screwed people - Les displayed the qualities that made him a legend in this industry…
Every great writer in Hollywood is going to be falling over themselves to contribute to this. They all have stories about some mendacious studio executive.
Exactly! All the stories they could incorporate would probably fill a dozen movies.
Btw, I said:
:smack: Of course I meant Movie Exec, but I was working on a music post when I saw the Grossman link and, well, brain damage.
Muahaha…I like the idea, but like others, am not sure it would last through a film. Part of the shock and awe of the character was the shock value of CRUISE doing that role. That shock would wear off after repeated outings, I think.
Maybe this should be a separate thread all together.
I can think of plenty of examples from television in which a secondary character was spun off for their own series out right (Frasier, the Jeffersons, Flo, Joey from Friends).
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of one feature-length film based on the same concept of spinning off of another film’s minor character. (crappily written, I know)
There have to be some though, right?
Don’t forget the dancing. They have to have several scenes of him dancing.
I hope we get the more restrained Stiller as director and not the push-the-joke-so-far-it-stops-being-funny Stiller. He had some good setups in** Tropic Thunder **but killed the funny so many times by not knowing when the joke was done. One sign of an artist is knowing when the piece is finished, and I think Stiller’s still working on that.
Just last weekend, we had Get Him to the Greek, with Russell Brand playing the same character as in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
The Scorpion King might qualify, though from what I understand that film had been in the works all along and someone got the bright idea to introduce the character in The Mummy Returns to help hype it.
Was going to mention Get Him to the Greek before Raygun99 beat me to the punch.* Oddly, Jonah Hill, who was also in Sarah Marshall, co-stars in Greek, but apparently as a different character. (I haven’t seen it yet, but I wonder if there’s any mention by Brand of Hill’s character looking a lot like that annoying waiter he met in Hawaii a couple years ago.)
*And I was going to get to use one of my favorite words, word “tertiary”…:mad:
Didn’t Queen Latifah’s supporting character in Barber Shop get her own movie (Beauty Shop)? I never saw it so that may have just been an assumption on my part that it was the same character.
But the big one that comes to mind is Steve Carell’s Evan Almighty spin-off from his pretty small part in Bruce Almighty (though as a character the connection was pretty flimsy).
**Evan Almighty **is a good example.
I don’t recall Queen Latifa’s character in the first Barber Shop movie but in the sequel, her scenes in the beauty shop, with near identical banter, is clearly a set up for that film. It’s more of a trailer inside a film than anything.
Hadn’t heard of the other films except Scorpion King.
Sorry about the hijack.
I can’t stand Tom Cruise but have to admit he was frigging AWESOME in that role in Tropic Thunder and at the MTV awards (Not Safe For Work- there are others), but he’s like garlic. Garlic’s makes other dishes great but you wouldn’t want it as the main course.
I think this is one of those things better in small doses. And this is coming from someone who thoroughly enjoyed the MacGruber movie.
An odd aside about Tom’s dancing. He seems to have really commited to the Les character, and I respect that. He atucally learned to dance the way real hip hop artists ‘dance’ and that shows commitment where a lot of other actors may have taken the lazy route, dancing the way a lot of white people think black people dance.
If I have any criticism at all, it will be that he tends to wiggle his booty too much. Men don’t wiggle their booties in hip-hop. The good news is, he seems to have gotten that under control, as I didn’t see much booty shaking in his performance at the MTV movie awards.
As you can see, I’m a huge fan.
Wow. I hadn’t seen that before and it was…terrible.
Not funny at all, very set up (obviously) but it was acted like it was set up. And to prove my point…it was a lot of overacting, yelling, and random and unneeded swearing. Not a good movie.
This is what would make it a good movie:
Three words: Mock-U-mentry. Interview real people about their interactions with Les and cut in vignettes of what actually transpired. Get movie execs and actors with great senses of humor (Speilberg, Lucas, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep) to tell stories about his backstabbing and swindling. THAT could be hilarious.
Exactly. My thought was that he’s going to be honored with theJean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscars and the documentary crew is making the vignette that will precede the award.
You were probably thinking of Grossman’s early years in the music business. The various artists who worked for his record company will have a few things to say as well.