THOMAS LENNON: It may have been. So you take a movie like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, which is a movie that’s packaged like a Mountain Dew campaign. You take a certain number of elements that appeal to this demographic and that demographic and it’s very much like an advertising campaign.
CHRIS NEUMER: Almost a product made to market.
THOMAS LENNON: Absolutely. It’s very interesting writing for the studios, the marketing tie-ins are a really big deal. In Herbie the Love Bug, the Volkswagen tie-in is humongous.
CHRIS NEUMER: Let me ask you this. As an actor and comedian, how does this affect your choices? How do you keep sane in that environment.
THOMAS LENNON: The way I do it is to I mix it up. I write big mainstream studio comedies with my partner Ben Garant. And then the TV show we do is a very culty sort of show where we have no interference creatively from the network. They are incredibly supportive. They let us get away with almost anything–you know, you’ve seen Reno. We have men kissing, people saying the N word, stuff that would never ever fly at other networks. As soon as we get absolute lose our minds frustrated with one aspect of it–the movie Taxi, we worked on pretty much consistently for three years and it still hasn’t come out yet.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s a remake isn’t?
THOMAS LENNON: A remake of a French film called Taxi, by Luc Besson.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’d assume that would speed up the process.
THOMAS LENNON: Absolutely not. That’s the other thing about working on movies, the commitment is years. That’s one thing that’s so frustrating about the process is that it goes on and on and on for years. There’s a movie we wrote called Balls of Fury, a high stakes ping-pong movie. We wrote it five years ago and now Sasha Cohen is attached to it. He’s Ali G. Ben’s going to direct it. It’s been now five years. It will be almost six years before we shoot a single frame of film.
CHRIS NEUMER: Somebody once told me, I don’t know if he was drunk or about to be fired or what, but he told me that the worst part about Hollywood is that everyone just wants to keep their job. No one wants to do a good job, everyone just wants to keep their job.
THOMAS LENNON: That’s absolutely true. There’s a tremendous amount of keeping your head down.
CHRIS NEUMER: So you green light movies that have already been made or that are proven success. Do you think the success of Dodgeball will help your ping-pong movie?
THOMAS LENNON: It was absolutely because of that. The movie had–there was one studio that was interested in it before Dodgeball made 30 million dollars–
CHRIS NEUMER: Which one was that?
THOMAS LENNON: Fox Searchlight. Immediately after Dodgeball was released, the Monday after, four other studios made offers on it and it had been sitting around for five years. Eventually it ends up at New Line. Here’s another sort of goofy sports movie, so…
CHRIS NEUMER: On the ping-pong movie, what type of aim do you have for it? Do you have a budget set?
THOMAS LENNON: It’s $20 million. That’s small for out here but enormous for us. When you consider that an entire season of Reno 911 costs five million bucks and this year we did sixteen episodes. To us it seems like a fortune, but the movie people are like, "Oh God, I don’t know how you’re going to do it [with that little money]," We also are shooting for 45 days, which to us is crazy.
CHRIS NEUMER: That seems long for a comedy.
THOMAS LENNON: We shoot a season of Reno 911 in 30 days, so you know we move real fast.
CHRIS NEUMER: I guess if you know what you’re doing… But you guys also don’t have to worry about camera setups with Reno do you?
THOMAS LENNON: Not really. The hardest part is the editing.
CHRIS NEUMER: Good, I’m glad you brought that up. Keep going.
THOMAS LENNON: When you improvise everything–we write a little tiny outline on 3x5 cards–and every scene there’s never any dialogue written for anything–so our takes are epic. There are takes that are a full-length beta tape. That’s 24-26 or 28 minutes long. Which then requires that we sit, one at a time and go through all this stuff.
CHRIS NEUMER: I have no acting training and I thought I had a pretty good concept of improv from talking to people at Second City and it was shattered when I spoke to Robert Altman about Gosford Park. At the time, Gosford’s screenwriter would launch into these long tangents about how he had written everything on screen whenever he’d be asked about the improv going on in the movie and that he wasn’t getting enough credit. So Altman said, "You don’t just get up on camera and make stuff up and say the first thing that comes into your head." He said that they’d talk about things before the scene and go from a mid ground, they’d need to get the props ahead of time, where do you guys fall in the grand spectrum of improv on Reno?
THOMAS LENNON: Well, I’d say for Reno, it really is the first thing that comes into our head. We shoot our rehearsal. We’re at our location, everyone’s in costume and we don’t talk through it much, because there’s nothing really to talk through.
CHRIS NEUMER: What type of crew do you have on Reno?
THOMAS LENNON: It’s a relatively small crew by TV standards. When we originally shot the pilot we used a crew like Cops would have had a crew. A guy with a boom mike, a beta cam and a light on the beta cam. We’ve gotten away from that a little. Now we might two cameras rolling. When we shoot the morning briefing now we sometimes have three cameras rolling because there are so many people in the scenes, it’s really hard to cover without people needing Dramamine to watch the coverage of the scenes. But we really don’t talk about it at all. Once in a while we talk some things about a little tiny bit, but for this kind of thing, talking about it generally doesn’t make it funnier. It actually makes it feel a little more stale. It makes it feel a little stiff. I think you can tell on the show when some things been rehearsed or we shot the first rehearsal.
CHRIS NEUMER: Where’s the difference?
THOMAS LENNON: You can feel people waiting or you can feel people thinking about things which never feels very real. For our show to feel real, it has to feel like these things are just coming out of people’s mouths as they’re living it. Those are the moments that are the most successful. We’ve gotten to the point where we don’t really rehearse at all, because it never helps. By the second or third time we shoot something, it’s never as funny as it was the first time. If it wasn’t funny the first time, we generally shoot it two more times just as a courtesy and then move.
CHRIS NEUMER: I guess I should know that. I should know you shoot more than one take, especially with Carlos ruining all the takes he does.
THOMAS LENNON: He ruins so many takes it’s not even funny. He laughs so consistently through out the show, you can see it all the time. He laughs a minimum of 4-5 times every episode and that’s not even counting the 30 or so times we cut out. And the weird thing is he’s almost always laughing at himself. It’s never at what someone else does, no one ever makes him crack up but him.
CHRIS NEUMER: Is this a "We love Carlos, we put it up with it thing", or is it just incredibly frustrating to have him laughing all the time?
THOMAS LENNON: He laughs so consistently through out the show, you can see it all the time. We love him and we put up with him, but… ahhh… I wish he was better about it some days.
CHRIS NEUMER: You write, you do acting, you improv, do you find that any of these are more tailored to your natural talents?
THOMAS LENNON: I’ve got to say that the most satisfying is the improvisation. Because it’s so immediate. When you write a script–you write these jokes that go through a production, almost an assembly line. They go passed producers and directors and actors and things like that. By the time you do them they’re so stale to you. It’s like, "Oh My God, we wrote this 2 1/2 years ago. Reno is really great, we shoot the rehearsal, maybe we do a second take because we missed something, edit it and it’s on the air two weeks later. It’s an immediate rush that you can’t really get anywhere else. Of course, the satisfying thing about writing scripts is that before the script has been shot when you finish, to you it’s perfect. The tricky thing about that is that it goes away very quickly when other people get involved.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s seems like it could be really disheartening.
THOMAS LENNON: It certainly can. It’s tricky. The general policy, other than a committee at the studio, there are committees of writers who write every movie. Here come two guys off the bench, then they hire two of your buddies and fire you. Then they fire your buddies and hire you back on. It’s sort of a round robin process.
CHRIS NEUMER: And in the end, you get the credit for the movie if it fails. And the studio execs who actually cut out all the good material sit back and wonder why it failed.
THOMAS LENNON: It’s very cutthroat to get credit on those huge failures.
CHRIS NEUMER: I guess it means a significant amount of cash.
THOMAS LENNON: I guess it does, but this is the first year we’ve gotten credit on any films. We’ve got two movies coming out that we have credit on. So I’ll have to get back to you on that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, next time we talk, you’ll be in the 310 area code.
THOMAS LENNON: Um, yeah, I’ll have to let you know how it goes. Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’ll let you know in eight months how it goes.
CHRIS NEUMER: You’re from up here in Chicago, how do you like living in LA?
THOMAS LENNON: It’s, you know, there’s absolutely no reason to ever visit LA unless you’re going to work in the film or television industry. I can’t think any reason why anybody would want to come here or even look around or stay over night. It’s an absolute one-trick pony kind of town.
CHRIS NEUMER: Don’t forget the ability to be one with your car.
THOMAS LENNON: You get to be one with your car… which is terrific. Hours and hours of time in the most congested city. I actually think in a couple of years, LA is going to be undrivable.
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s getting worse somehow?
THOMAS LENNON: It’s pretty close as it is. It’s going to turn into Blade Runner. We’re all going to move to the off-world colonies soon.
CHRIS NEUMER: I don’t think I know any Chicagoans who moved to LA and have anything positive to say about the city.
THOMAS LENNON: There’s really nothing to say.
CHRIS NEUMER: Santa Monica is about the best you’re going to do.
THOMAS LENNON: But it’s cloudy there every day. Don’t believe the hype.
