“HE SET THE BLUEPRINT FOR MODERNDAY FILM COMEDY”
IVAN REITMAN MEANT the world to me. He set the blueprint for modern-day film comedy, not just with his irreverent tone (slobs versus snobs) — but also because of his brilliant eye for casting, which most filmmakers will tell you is 70 per cent of the battle. His spot-on use of Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Rick Moranis, Arnold Schwarzenegger… the list goes on. He had a wicked knack for casting and always knew where the joke was.
Coming of age in the 1980s, his comedies were everything. I remember seeing Stripes in a movie theatre as a kid, and hearing those laughs — it literally made me want to “do that” as a career. But I really had no idea how to make “that" happen. All that changed, ironically, when I met Ivan Reitman. He had heard about my documentary Frat House from his son Jason and asked me if I would screen it for him in Los Angeles. After the screening Ivan asked me, point blank — “Can you write?” Obviously I said, “Yes. Absolutely.” Which may have been the only lie I told him over our 20year friendship. The truth was, I hadn’t written anything but the voice over my documentaries, but my belief is, if someone asks you something like that, just say yes and figure it out later.
So Ivan hired me to write and direct my first narrative feature, Road Trip. He was going to produce it under his brand-new deal at Dreamworks. But he did so much more than just "produce”.
He put Scot Armstrong (my co-writer) and I through comedy boot camp. We lived at a hotel in Montecito (close to where Ivan resided) and spent months working on our script. Meeting almost daily for his feedback and notes. In many ways, he was an absolute terror when it came to comedy. Constantly pushing us to make it better and funnier and tighter. It was the greatest film school one could ask for and the greatest reward was handing him a scene, watching him read it and hearing him laugh. He had the best laugh.
About a month before I was set to leave to go shoot the film, Ivan would take me to lunch every day. He knew I had never been on an actual film set before, so he was walking me through the first week. What to do. How to deal with the crew, the actors etc. It was beyond generous and beyond helpful. I would literally sit there and take notes. One day, we walked into [restaurant] Mr Chow for my “class” and Billy Wilder was sitting at “his” table on the left. Ivan said hello and paid enormous respect to Mr Wilder and then, without missing a beat, introduced me! It was fucking surreal.
While he wasn’t on set much (we were shooting in Atlanta), Ivan’s real footprint came in the editing room. We would sit in that tiny office at Dreamworks and pore over the footage and the edits. He wasn’t always nice about it either, which I came to appreciate. We had a lot of fights in that tiny room. The poor editor never turned around, never spoke up — he didn’t want to poke the bear. He would just hear the back and forth between Ivan and I as we argued over a minuscule edit. After one particularly brutal fight, there was a long, painful silence until I finally said, “These little rooms weren’t made for three Jews,” and Ivan just started to crack up. There was that laugh again, that laugh that meant everything. We went and had lunch at Art’s Deli and it was like it never happened. That laugh is how I choose to remember him.
THE LIST OF bold-name filmmakers that captured our interest as we came of age in Hollywood is more or less unending. But the list of filmmakers who ever took a serious interest in us is pretty short. And the most surprising of them all was Ivan Reitman.
“Half of this movie is the best movie I have ever seen.”
“What about the other half?”
“The other half is terrible.”
We laughed super-hard. He wasn’t laughing. We had just screened Spider-man: Into The Spider-verse for one of our movie heroes, Ivan Reitman. And he was about to spend a week helping us make our movie better, for no reason other than he thought it could be.
We had met Ivan years before. He had taken a shine to a couple of our movies and wanted to meet (at [Beverly Hills deli] Nate ’n Al’s, natch). This is the only time in our career this has ever really happened. An older filmmaker we looked up to reaching out and offering wisdom. We lapped it up like a giant plate of matzo brei.
What Ivan didn’t know is that the first director we ever saw behind the camera was Ivan. In a ‘making of’ piece that used to run on HBO about Ghostbusters. And what we remembered more than anything was his laugh. Warm, generous, and infectious. What could be better than being on the receiving end of that laugh? And what’s more, the way the piece was edited, he seemed like he thought everything
was funny.
This is not true.
That part had to be earned. Because Ivan wasn’t just interested in whether a movie was funny. He was interested in whether it was good.
He centred character and emotion in his films even when the premises were ridiculous. He saw the potential for the same in Spider-verse. He came to the edit. He sat for hours having coffee and discussing copious notes he took down. He had no reason to do this. He seemed to have been equally hard on his own movies. He told us how he had to cut out the first 30 minutes of Twins
because “it put everyone to sleep!” And what we learned from him is that loving a movie meant relentlessly challenging it to be its best self.
We did the notes. And lots of other people’s too. And lo, the movie got better.
We showed the next cut to some friends, and Ivan came. Halfway through, we looked over to see what Ivan was doing, but we didn’t have to. ’Cause we could hear it. We elbowed each other. Ivan Reitman was laughing.
What could be better?