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judd apatow Likes to keep stuff. He even says that he is a hoarder. But unlike a regular hoarder, he insists that all the things he keeps are wonderful – and neatly collected.
“I save everything, but I don’t have it in a mound in the middle of the house,” says the writer-director. “I’m the Felix Unger of hoarding. Everything is very well taken care of.”
Apatow fans — and comedy fans in general — get the benefit of this personality quirk with Tuesday’s publication of “Comedy Nerd,” an immersive, 570-page, photo-filled memoir from every chapter of his career.
It is filled with behind-the-scenes snapshots of the set, script fragments, notes from network bosses, essays, film posters, and miniprofiles of his fellow comedians. His late-night thoughts for “Knocked Up” are typed. blackberry and a photo Adam SandlerOld fake ID.
“I feel like just making this book justifies hoarding,” Apatow says, laughing. “I saved it for a reason. I wasn’t wrong by not throwing out my photo.” billie jean king “Since I was 10 years old.”
Network Notes and Email
The producer, director and writer of the films “This Is 40” and “The 40-Year-Old-Virgin” were inspired to create the book by similar memorabilia-filled offerings from the Marx Brothers and “Saturday Night Live.”
He spent a year combing through his photographs – 400,000 of them – mementos and clippings, then scanned everything into his computer and presented the entire book in a raw manner. He spent the next year writing essays and captions.
He says, “The idea was that the experience of looking at the book would be as if I were sitting over your shoulder explaining to you what things are and telling you stories.”
Apatow includes memos from network standards — “Just a reminder that Ben’s dancing shouldn’t be sexual,” one reads about “The Ben Stiller Show” — as well as Garry Shandling’s note-filled revisions to a script for “The Larry Sanders Show” and a page from an unproduced screenplay written by Owen Wilson. Apatow revealed that Paul Rudd had a very funny but lost cameo.bridesmaids,
It features an increasingly sarcastic email exchange over a long-forgotten comedy sketch between him and writer Mark Brazill in 2001, and has an alternate opening setup for “Anchorman” – a group of anchors who turn out to be a parody of the movie “Alive” when a plane crashes on a snowy mountain.
Andy Ward, Apatow’s editor and executive vice president and publisher of Random House, said it was a book that only Apatow could have created – he is a visual thinker, a savvy collector, and a comedy obsessive.
“There’s a photographic element to it. There’s a kind of scrapbook-found object element to it. There’s advice about life in comedy,” says Ward. “If you know him, it’s just true to who he is and I think that’s how he approaches what he does.”
Apatow isn’t afraid to show the times where he was a fool. He says, “I think a lot about all the people I got a chance to collaborate with and how magical those times were. So I’m also very happy to show where I was stupid or terrible because that’s part of the journey.”
‘It’s always an experiment’
There are pages dedicated to TV shows that were never made, like “North Hollywood,” about three friends trying to break into show business, which would have starred Amy Poehler, Kevin Hart, Jason Segel, January Jones and Judge Reinhold.
It looked like fun, at least judging by the pictures of a party during the shooting of the pilot that show people getting stoned. “Do people want me to show them photos of them smoking heavily in the year 2002?” Apatow asks. The answer is yes.
Failures despite the writer’s dependable instincts litter the pages of “Comedy Nerd,” which has given us the TV shows “Freaks and Geeks” and “Girls” and the Oscar-nominated movies “Bridesmaids” and “The Big Sick.”
He says, “The hard thing about comedy is that it’s always an experiment. And everyone has a completely different opinion about how the story should be told and what’s working and what’s not working.”
“So a lot of people who have careers in this business are learning how to have those conversations that I didn’t do well. For several years, I became very emotional and resistant. That led to a lot of cancellations.”
making people laugh
Apatow’s rise coincided with the emergence of innovative new voices who became part of his troupe – Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Rudd and Segel. Apatow says, “I think there was a new kind of comedy being created, and the business had to work somewhat hard to catch it.”
Apatow doesn’t think the business of comedy is that easy these days, despite the widespread appetite of many streaming services.
“I don’t think it’s better, it’s just as weird in a different way,” he says. “It’s all just an experiment, and there’s no way for anyone to know if something will work or not. That’s why we all bump into each other all the time.”
Apatow is donating all proceeds from the book to those affected by the Los Angeles wildfires. He lost his old home in Pacific Palisades; Its ruins are one of the first images in the book. Incorporating it into a charity work also helped make “Comedy Nerds” easier to understand as magazines and photographers allowed Apatow to use his work at no cost.
“Everything in the book was donated. Normally you have to pay for reprints of all these photos and articles. But when I told people where the money was going, everyone gave me everything for free.”