Interview (Part 2): Craig Mazin
Craig Mazin is a successful screenwriter in the comedy genre whose movie credits include RocketMan (1997), Scary Movie 3 (2003), Scary Movie 4 (2006), Superhero Movie (2008), The Hangover Part II (2011), Identity Thief (2013) and The Hangover Part III (2013). With fellow screenwriter Ted Elliott, he hosted the informative writing blog “The Artful Writer” from 2004–2011. Currently Craig and screenwriter John August co-host the popular weekly podcast Scriptnotes for which the pair recently celebrated their 100th recording.
I recently spoke with Craig about his background, some of his writing projects, the state of the movie business and the screenwriting craft. Today in Part 2, Craig discusses two movies he directed and his work in the spoof movie field:
Scott: One early project that jumps out at me, looking at your list of films, is The Specials, which you directed. Look at the cast in this movie — Rob Lowe, Jaime Kennedy, Thomas Haden Church — James Gunn wrote it. What was the background on that movie?
Craig: I became friends with Jaime Kennedy somewhere along the line. I can’t remember how, but I did. He had done Scream. I think probably because we were in the Dimension world together, because I had done the Wayans Bros., and Jaime Kennedy had done Scream. I’d been talking about maybe directing something, and he was friends with somebody, who was friends with somebody, who had got this script from this guy, James Gunn, who was living in New York. Basically, he had done a Troma movie, and I’m not sure what else.
I read the script, and I just thought it was hysterical. So I just called him up. We all got on the phone. I was like, “This would be great to do. We should do it.” So we all agreed to do it.
We did a stage reading. I put together a stage reading with everybody, and we got some good actors to show up to that. Then we found an independent financier who put up $1,000,000 — or at least I think it was $1,000,000. Then everything went bad, basically.
The tough part of it was, we had $1,000,000 and I think we needed a little bit more than that to make that movie. Even worse, because of the nature of the financing, for whatever reason, we basically had three or four weeks for prep, and then we had three weeks to shoot.
This was before digital video, so we’re shooting in film. We’re shooting short ends. I wanted to shoot it hand‑held. We couldn’t afford the camera that was light enough for our DP to hold, so we couldn’t shoot hand‑held.
We were shooting six to eight pages a day. But the thing that killed me more than anything was that we just didn’t have time to prep. I was trying to figure out what the costumes were for the next day. We had a huge cast. It was like every mistake you could make doing a little, cheapo independent film, we made it. I personally made a gazillion mistakes, God knows.
Still, there are little moments of that movie that are some of the nicest things I’ve been involved with. It looks like shit, and there’s chunks of terribleness in it, because I often didn’t have time to even shoot coverage right, and I often didn’t see the production design until the morning I was supposed to shoot in that location, but it wears it heart on its sleeve. There’s a lot of stuff in there that’s really sweet.
Scott: You directed another project, the 2008 movie Superhero, which you also wrote.
Craig: At the time, I had been writing some other things for Bob and Harvey [Weinstein]. I had adapted “Harvey,” the play that “Harvey,” the Jimmy Stewart film, had been based on. I was adapting a Philip Dick short story for Roberto Benigni, who was between Life is Beautiful and Pinocchio. I was working on this nice, elevated material. I felt very proud of myself, and happy, and then Bob called me up and said mockingly, “You’ve got to do this, blah, blah, blah.” I did it, and, on the one hand, it was awesome, and, on the other hand, it was terrible.
I mean, the awesome part was I got to work with David Zucker and Pat Proft and Jim Abrahams, and learn spoof and parody from the guys who invented it, from my heroes. I got to work with Anna Faris, who’s amazing, and Regina Hall, who’s terrific, and Charlie Sheen. Just really cool people.
The downside was, I got shoved into a spoof hole for years. The truth is that those movies are very, very hard to do. They’re really hard to do. They’re thankless.
By the time we got to Superhero, we were jammed because the Weinsteins, who had been owned by Disney and had all the benefits of the budgets which went along with that, were no longer there. The budget for Superhero was less than half of what it was for the Scary Movies. It showed.
My relationship with Bob was tumultuous, as is often the case with him. That was rough for me. Frankly, it just wasn’t a very good idea for a movie.
Again, there are sequences in that movie that I think are terrific, and there’s a lot of stuff in there that I sort of directed with a gun to my head, that I didn’t want to do. What can I say? It was a really unhappy experience for me.
Scott: Scary Movie 3, Scary Movie 4, Superhero Movie, you talk about going down the spoof hole. What do you think the status of spoof movies is nowadays?
Craig: It’s bad. It’s really bad. Scary Movie 3, there’s a ton of great stuff in that movie. I think Scary Movie 3 was the best movie that did with David, Jim and Pat, and I think there’s some terrific stuff in there. Good jokes, good parody, some smart humor to go along with the stupidity… you know, for David Zucker and Jerry Zucker to say, “Scary Movie 3 is a terrific spoof movie” is something that makes me very proud, so I love that.
But spoof movies have drifted so far away from what they were when Jim and Jerry and David kicked off the ZAZ style with Kentucky Fried Movie and Airplane!
They just got really junky and really disposable. They became obsessed with pop culture and immediacy. The audience would sort of poo‑poo the fact that they’d just seen junky retreads of whatever movies just came out, but then we’d get angry if they weren’t there, and call the movie stale.
It’s still bad. I don’t think there’s much going on in the spoof world today that’s of any interest to me, or to anyone. Part of that, I think, is because spoof is now something that happens in the moment. Everyone spoofs and parodies everything on the internet, and it happens immediately, and then it’s over. There’s just no reason to see a movie.
I mean, Airplane! was a singular spoof of Zero Hour, a film from the ’50s that nobody had even heard of. The thought of doing something like that today is just impossible for the studios to comprehend.
So no high hopes for feature spoof films, unfortunately.
Scott: That’s a really interesting point. Just the immediacy and the universality of the internet, and all the YouTube videos. That’s probably one of the major reasons why that’s cut into the possibility for spoof movies nowadays.
Craig: Yeah. It’s been a perfect storm of that, plus a kind of flooding of the market of crap. I certainly was part of it, towards the end there. I don’t think Scary Movie 3 is crap, personally. I think on Scary Movie 4 we did a pretty good job. Superhero is half good, half crap. I could feel it, sitting in the theater, running Superhero, and the audience saying, “But where are all the other movies you were going to spoof?”
I’m thinking, “I don’t want to do that.” I just don’t want to do the, “Let’s spoof 1,200 movies, and not do jokes, but just repeat what was in them.” It’s a mess.
But, as David Zucker often remarks, he gave an interview in 1995 or something in which he announced that spoof movies were dead. A few years later, Scary Movie came out and made a gazillion dollars.
Tomorrow in Part 3, Craig reveals some background on The Hangover movies as well as the hit comedy Identity Thief.
Please stop by comments to thank Craig and ask any questions you may have.
For Part 1, go here.
Craig is repped by CAA.
Twitter: @clmazin.