THOMAS LENNON: How are you doing?
CHRIS NEUMER: I’m doing well.
THOMAS LENNON: Wait, you’re the other Oak Parker.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s me.
THOMAS LENNON: What year did you graduate?
CHRIS NEUMER: ’93.
THOMAS LENNON: Oh, holy shit, you’re later. I was long gone by then.
CHRIS NEUMER: When did you graduate?
THOMAS LENNON: I was practically in retirement by then. Uh, ’88.
CHRIS NEUMER: My dad was actually a teacher at the high school. He taught on the fourth floor. Math. Room 437.
THOMAS LENNON: What was his name?
CHRIS NEUMER: Mr. Neumer. THOMAS LENNON: I, uh, I didn’t really excel at the math.
(Lennon drops phone)
THOMAS LENNON: You there? I got one of these RadioShack phones and they’re worth every penny. I really struggled through the math classes. I was in the remedial math down on the first floor with the special ed kids.
CHRIS NEUMER: Special ed, huh?
THOMAS LENNON: Yeah. And believe it or not, I struggled through that.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s amusing. When I told my dad that I'd be talking to you, his response was something like this, "Actor, huh? I didn’t see too many of those." Which is of course a shame for me. I would have loved to have some Dan Castelleneta or Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio stories.
THOMAS LENNON: I actually met him when he came back to the high school one time.
CHRIS NEUMER: Really?
THOMAS LENNON: He came and taught an improv class. They had all these actors come back to the school.
CHRIS NEUMER: And at the time, you recognized him for his masterful ability to sit quietly in a chair as he did in War of the Roses?
THOMAS LENNON: Exactly. He’s that guy. That’s a nice pull, good reference. I got a copy of your magazine, it’s cool.
CHRIS NEUMER: I was just happy I could finally use my Oak Park connection to get something good.
THOMAS LENNON: Or something.
CHRIS NEUMER: My girlfriend saw you on, I think, Kilbourn recently.
THOMAS LENNON: Jimmy Kimmel.
CHRIS NEUMER: Some show that started after midnight. She said you’ve got to get this Reno 911 DVD and I saw it for the first time about two weeks ago. I’d never seen The State or Viva Variety or Out Cold. I was a completely newbie to, uh, you. I was laughing my ass off from the very first moment of the very first episode all the way through. Doing my research on you, you seemed very excited that Comedy Central would allow you guys to use the N word.
THOMAS LENNON: Right out of the gate. I think it’s the first thing out of Kerri Kenney’s mouth. It wouldn’t go down in a lot of other places.
CHRIS NEUMER: But I was thinking about it and it seems like it’s about time. White people using the N word. It’s in vogue.
THOMAS LENNON: It’s come back around. Apparently, Bill Cosby just got in trouble for using it.
CHRIS NEUMER: I think you have to know your fan base.
THOMAS LENNON: You have to walk a very fine line with that. Bill got in trouble last week. I was out of town in Belize at the time, but people on the radio have been yelling about it. He’s in big big trouble.
CHRIS NEUMER: So continuing with my story, I saw it, thought you were funny, looked at your web-page on imdb and saw that you’d also had God knows how many supporting roles in every comedy I’ve missed during the last three years.
THOMAS LENNON: Apparently you don’t fly in airplanes much. If you flew coach in American Airlines, you would have seen every one of those.
CHRIS NEUMER: I actually ended up watching How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days yesterday because of this interview. I’d put it off for–how many years has it been out?
THOMAS LENNON: Rightfully so. It’s a horrible movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: I was surprised because there was a half an hour in the middle that I actually enjoyed.
THOMAS LENNON: Um, which part was that?
CHRIS NEUMER: Let me think. Well, for starters, I was smiling at a lot of Kate Hudson’s reactions. When she can’t figure out why this guy likes her.
THOMAS LENNON: She’s very charming.
CHRIS NEUMER: Congratulations on the new gig.
THOMAS LENNON: Oh yeah. Ben and I are writing The Six Million Dollar Man for Jim Carrey, Todd Phillips is directing. I like Todd's stuff, although I haven’t seen Road Trip, but I thought Old School was very, very funny.
CHRIS NEUMER: It has moments.
THOMAS LENNON: Old School has humongous laughs all the way through it. I’ve got to say, out of everybody that we work with, Todd is probably my favorite guy to work with.
CHRIS NEUMER: Why?
THOMAS LENNON: There’s absolutely no bullshit with him. There’s so much bullshit when you write in the studio system out here. There are so many meetings about people’s motivations and tracking characters and his thing is, "Is it funny?" If it’s funny it’s going to be in the movie and if it’s not funny, it’s not going to be in the movie. And that’s it. He is an incredibly low threshold for bullshit. He’s a fun guy with a great sense of humor. He’s the best kind of guy with a sense of humor. He’s a tough guy and he’ll fight like crazy, but when he agrees, you’re done. We fight a lot, but they’re the kind of fights you have with somebody because they care.
CHRIS NEUMER: Not just because you’re being a jackass.
THOMAS LENNON: Not like the fights you have with a studio suit. It’s because they really care about what’s funny and stuff. I’ve not seen Road Trip, but pound for pound, Old School is really funny. We did about two and a half months on Starsky and Hutch, which basically constituted the shooting draft. Then Todd and Scot Armstrong came back in and through some stuff in. We were like, "Oh shit." You hate to see yourself do one draft of a script and then have somebody else come back in and change what you’ve done. But I have to say, some of the stuff they added was some of the funniest stuff in the movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: For example?
THOMAS LENNON: All the Will Ferrell double dragons stuff. That was Todd. He wrote that with his partner Scot. Honestly, I thought that was the huge, off-the-charts laugh of the movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: I just saw Starsky and Hutch recently, I’m a little bit behind the times. Well I’m sure you can imagine, trekking downtown all the time to see movies can be a bit of a time consuming pain. (pause) Just when you thought you’d heard everything, you get to hear a guy complaining about how far he has to go in order to see free movies well ahead of everyone else in America.
THOMAS LENNON: (laughs)
CHRIS NEUMER: So I saw it recently and I didn’t think that there were an enormous amount of laughs in the movie, but one thing that surprised me was the way that, I’m assuming it was Todd, he created a realistic world within the confines of the film. Everything that happened in the movie fit perfectly with the world that they created. It sounds simple, but you don’t see it in many movies. Some movies try to play off that they’re in reality or something else. This was a perfectly self-contained world.
THOMAS LENNON: That was a big thing for us when we came onto Starsky and Hutch. Ben, who plays Travis on Reno is my writing partner. Ben Stiller had read a script we’d written for a movie Jimmy Fallon ended up doing called Taxi. It comes out in October with Queen Latifah. He read that because he was thinking about doing it, but he couldn’t do it because he’d agreed to do Starsky and Hutch. He asked us, "Would you guys come in and work on Starsky and Hutch?" So we said, "Let’s take a look at the script." The script was set in right now, in the present. It was like Charlie’s Angels of something. They were these quirky guys in tight pants and it was right now.
CHRIS NEUMER: So they were left back in the seventies,
THOMAS LENNON: Exactly. It didn’t make any sense. So we went in and sat down and said, The problem with the movie inherently is that in 1975 Starsky and Hutch are the coolest guys in town. They can meet girls, they’re cool. Now, they’re idiots in pleather jackets and skin tight, plum smuggler jeans. So we said, if you want us to do this movie, it has to be 1975 or we won’t do it. And then everybody talked about it and it doubled the cost of the movie to do that. But they all agreed that it was what was best for the movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: So when I compliment the world it’s set it, that’s going directly into your pocket.
THOMAS LENNON: Pretty much, except we didn’t credit for working on the movie. So nothing goes in my pocket off that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Metaphoric pocket.
THOMAS LENNON: Our reward for Starsky and Hutch was getting to write The Six Million Dollar Man for Todd.
CHRIS NEUMER: I saw you also have Herbie: Fully Loaded to your credit as well?
THOMAS LENNON: Oh yeah. The newest Herbie the Love Bug movie. I think it starts shooting next month.
CHRIS NEUMER: With Lindsey Lohan?
THOMAS LENNON: Yeah. She’s getting herself into all kinds of trouble all the time these days. Endlessly getting busted for drinking somewhere or crashing her car into something.
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s hard enough to be eighteen without being a millionaire and a hot chick.
THOMAS LENNON: That’s the best kind of starlet. She’s the old-timey starlet.
CHRIS NEUMER: Russell Crowe if he were eighteen and female.
THOMAS LENNON: Her handlers have to put out fires all the time.
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s amusing for all of us. Let me ask you this, this is the biggest topic I’ve got for you. I’ll say this, I consider my literate and fairly smart. There seems to be an interesting contradiction to comedies. It seems as though as success is defined for comedy, by the public at least, as the big movie. The Old School, the Starsky and Hutch or the Me Myself and Irene. Now to me, most of the big movies are really bad. It’s the lower budget productions and the TV shows are good.
THOMAS LENNON: What’s a good–it’s funny because I’m involved in movies like that both as an actor and a writer. Other than the Todd Phillips stuff, they’re not movies I would ever go and see. They’re not movies I would see. What would, for you, be the last really funny movie you saw?
CHRIS NEUMER: It defeats the entire purpose of the question if I admit I saw The Girl Next Door and laughed so hard I woke my girlfriend up when she was sleeping next to me.
THOMAS LENNON: Written by my buddy Stuart Bloomburg.
CHRIS NEUMER: Was he the guy in the editing room stealing things off Eli?
THOMAS LENNON: I did the table read of it, but I didn’t see,
CHRIS NEUMER: Eli Roth was–well, one of the characters in the movie was supposedly based off him. One of the writers was again supposedly in an editing room writing down stuff the real Eli said and putting it to use in the script. They created one whole character, a high school film nerd, who basically is Eli.
THOMAS LENNON: That’s pretty funny.
CHRIS NEUMER: It is pretty funny, but apparently, Eli was upset about it. But I was going to say something like Super Troopers.
THOMAS LENNON: Super Troopers is hilarious. Everybody always thought we somehow–we did Reno way, way before any of us had seen Super Troopers. It sat on the shelf for a couple years.
CHRIS NEUMER: Over at Fox.
THOMAS LENNON: Right. The Broken Lizard guys came out and said, "Why’d they set it in Reno and wear the same outfits as us?" Well Super Troopers isn’t set in Reno, so I don’t know why they’re always saying that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Jay is saying that?
THOMAS LENNON: Jay Chandrasekhar, yes, said that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Did you know he went to Hinsdale Central?
THOMAS LENNON: No, I did not.
CHRIS NEUMER: I think we figured out that we didn’t play tennis against each other in high school, but that we definitely had a meet against each other. He was doing press for Super Troopers and I refused to talk to him for five minutes on general principles. I found it amusing. The publicists did not.
THOMAS LENNON: I competed on speech team against Hinsdale. I was on the speech team, we called it forensics.
CHRIS NEUMER: Like debate?
THOMAS LENNON: Not debate, you do scenes from plays. It’s incredibly macho and whatnot.
CHRIS NEUMER: Wait, you can compete in that?
THOMAS LENNON: (laughs) Oh yeah! Oh sure. It’s a big deal. It was a big deal at the time. We took it very seriously.
CHRIS NEUMER: So back to the question, it seems like you have big comedy–Don Petrie big. There’s a guy I know, a Chicagoan, Greg Glienna, he actually wrote A Guy Thing. He and a friend of mine, Jim Vincent, did the original Meet the Parents and Greg was complaining that the first thing the studio did when they bought the script was to take out all the offensive stuff. But particularly the part where a dog was killed. It’s like find all the stuff that makes it hip and edgy and then take it out. Studio-ing it down.
THOMAS LENNON: That’s the–The real issue is very simple. The more people’s money you take to do something, the more inputs you get. When you do a movie in the studio system, there’s a committee. A committee of six or seven people you answer to. There’s two or three producers, a studio executive and one or two people above that studio executive. There’s the director and the writers, who are the absolute bottom of the totem pole of what anybody gives a shit about. So to do a movie in that system you absolutely must be willing to compromise. The only guaranteed way to make something not very funny is to make it vague. Being very, very specific is the only real way to be funny. And in big studio movies, the really specific humor gets sanded down into vaguer stuff. You throw out the high hand and the low hand and you get the middle part of the curve. All studio movies are the middle of the Bell curve. The only way to do something is to do it yourself. And the only way to do that is to not take any money from anyone or take as little money as possible from anyone and that’s it. Sorry, I was just feeding a squirrel and it jumped at me.
CHRIS NEUMER: Feeding or beating?
THOMAS LENNON: Eating–feeding, I mean feeding.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well done… if it was intentional.
