“Will Reiser and writing about what you know: getting cancer”
From Patrick Goldstein at The Big Picture (LAT):
In show business, a business that revolves around youth and sexual vitality, sickness is viewed as a sign of weakness. It’s a bad career move. I guess that makes it all the more improbable that Will Reiser, after being diagnosed with cancer and enduring an eight-hour operation to remove a massive tumor along his spine, decided that he would use the experience as fodder for a comedy about — gulp — cancer.
The film, “50/50,” which stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt (as Reiser) and Seth Rogen, will make its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, with a nationwide release slated for Sept. 30. Thanks to Rogen, who plays Reiser’s womanizing best friend — an exaggerated version of their real-life relationship — the film has plenty of laughs, but it is closer to what you might call a soulful comedy, with an emphasis on how Reiser’s experience with cancer affects his relationship with his family, his girlfriend (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) and friends like Rogen.
As a young comedy writer, Reiser, 31, worked on the short-lived U.S. version of “Da Ali G Show,” where he met Rogen and his writing partner, Evan Goldberg, as well as future “Colbert Report” co-creator Ben Karlin, who all share producer credit on “50/50.” Not long afterward, in early 2005, Reiser found himself having hunger pangs and dizzy spells.
“I went on WebMD and diagnosed myself as being diabetic,” he told me over lunch at a Venice vegan eatery. “But after I saw a doctor, I discovered I had cancer. Even though the character in the movie has a cancer that’s actually more severe than mine, what the doctor tells him is taken 100% from the diagnostic reports in my files.”
You’ve heard the idea that writers use writing as a form of therapy? That would seem to apply for Reiser in the case of this story:
Reiser finished the script in 2008. It began floating around Hollywood, which has made a few memorable films about disease over the years but few comedies. It was getting lots of enthusiastic reviews from showbiz insiders but no bites from major studios, which saw the cancer angle as a big marketing hurdle. However, Rogen and Goldberg had made a deal to write an R-rated comedy for Mandate Pictures, the company that has produced such offbeat fare as “Juno” and “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.”
“Seth called me and told me about the script, saying it’s not the kind of movie I usually make — it’s the kind of movie you usually make,” recalls Mandate head Nathan Kahane. “When I read it, the story had such a profound effect on me that I knew we had to make the movie.”
Granted this project had some major assets going for it: Reiser was already a professional writer, one of his best friends was Seth Rogen, Rogen championed the script to Nathan Kahane at Mandate Pictures. And yet…
The story is a comedy about cancer.
Can you think of a concept seemingly less commercial?
But here is another case where all it took was one set of eyeballs. In this case Kahane: “When I read it, the story had such a profound effect on me that I knew we had to make the movie.”
You want to know how to write an original script that gets someone’s attention in Hollywood? One way is to tell a story that has a “profound effect” on them.
50/50 opens September 30.
For more of Goldstein’s article, go here.