Latest news with #DanGregor
New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How to Craft a Dumb Joke That's Actually Funny
When the director Akiva Schaffer and the writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand set out to make a new version of 'The Naked Gun,' this time starring Liam Neeson, they knew they needed an interrogation scene. 'The whole assignment of the movie, the moment it was Liam in 'Naked Gun,' is: Honor the spirit of the originals, but now it's starring the 'Taken' guy,' Schaffer said in a video call. 'What can you make him say and make him do?' But their interrogation isn't just about Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr. delivering a hilarious monologue about the perils of going viral in prison in front of a bad guy's henchman (Kevin Durand). Instead, it became about an elaborate set piece. Once Frank gets the hospitalized criminal to confess, he asks an unseen colleague on a wire, 'Did you get all that?' The walls of the hospital room fall down, revealing it was all an elaborate ruse. But then Frank is caught in a trap. Turns out his style of information gathering isn't exactly legal. His fellow cop announces she's actually from internal affairs, and asks another unseen figure if they got 'all that.' The walls of her structure rise to show that the deception is twofold. But then it's revealed that she also broke the law, and so on. It's a complicated sight gag that the writers hoped captured the spirit of the original 1988 movie, which starred Leslie Nielsen and was part of the Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker stable of comedies. 'The essence of these movies is that hopefully there's a joy in the audience being like, 'I can't believe this is what they spent their money on, something this stupid,'' Mand said. So how did they accomplish a scene this ridiculous? Schaffer, Gregor and Mand broke down the steps of their comedic process. Step 1: Do your research Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Rachel Bloom and Husband Dan Gregor Set Rom-Com Pilot ‘Do You Want Kids?' at ABC
'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' creator-star Rachel Bloom and her husband, writer and comedian Dan Gregor, have set a comedy pilot at ABC called 'Do You Want Kids?' Bloom and Gregor co-wrote the pilot, which follows 'a husband and wife who in one universe have a baby and the other do not, and the many ways that huge decision alters their lives.' More from Variety ABC to Develop Drama Based on High School Forensics Club That Solves Cold Cases How to Watch the 2025 ESPY Awards Online Without Cable 'High Potential' Season 2 Casts Mekhi Phifer (EXCLUSIVE) More to come… Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week What's Coming to Disney+ in August 2025 What's Coming to Netflix in August 2025
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
For the ‘Naked Gun' Writers, a Guiding Goal: ‘What's the Stupidest Thing We Can Get Liam Neeson to Say?'
[Editor's note: The following interview contains minor spoilers for 'The Naked Gun.'] There are a few jokes that 'The Naked Gun' screenwriters and long-time partners Dan Gregor and Doug Mand are sad didn't make it into Akiva Schaffer's long-hoped-for new entry into the spoof canon. But mostly, the duo is thrilled about the stuff that did make it in there. All the stuff, really, enough to make a bona-fide, honest-to-God, true-blue spoof feature, the kind made by a studio and with a budget and giant stars and a full-fledged theatrical release. More from IndieWire 'The Devil Wears Prada' Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna Doesn't Mind Those Viral Sequel Set Photos Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver Screaming in 'Marriage Story' Being Used by U.S. Government to Scare Off Wolves For two creators (best known for everything from 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' to 'Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers') who can still easily and amiably recall the feeling of seeing 'Spaceballs' or the original 'Naked Gun' films for the first time, it's a dream come true. A silly dream, but still. We need those kinds of dreams these days. The film, starring Liam Neeson, is both a reimagining and a continuation of the classic 'Naked Gun' films of the '80s and '90s. In it, Neeson is Frank Drebin Jr., the grizzled cop son of original star Frank Drebin (the incomparable late Leslie Nielsen), who also happens to be seemingly genetically predisposed to wacky happenstance in his day-to-day life. When Frank takes on a big case, which inevitably brings him into the orbit of the alluring Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson), he has to use all his brain power (silly jokes) and muscle (a love of chili dogs) to save the day, get the girl, and make everyone laugh while doing it. Ahead, Gregor and Mand tell IndieWire about their hopes and fears around the film's reception (some sparked by this very website), writing for an Oscar nominee who can also punch a wolf, Pamela Anderson's otherworldly scatting, and the kind of jokes that could only live inside this delightful sort of package. The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. IndieWire: We're going to start with the big, scary one: What is it like when you see a headline on IndieWire ? Doug Mand: So we saw that. It was sent to us. [Laughs] Dan Gregor: And then we read the whole article. It's an amazing article. And he then goes into saying it's going to fix America, too. And I'll shoulder that burden. I will absolutely— Mand: Not me. Not me, I want nothing to do with either of those endeavors. That's too much. I'm barely staying above water myself here. Gregor: I always felt that America just needed a laugh, and that the only thing keeping us apart is a little bit of comedy. We're more than happy to do it. But I'm the first person to deflect and be like, 'It's a movie, guys. It's a silly movie. And what we do is silly.' But I will say this, talking to other people around LA, that is a little bit of the vibe, of people feeling like this has to do well so that other comedies and scripts will be bought. I do feel that there's a lot of people [who] want this to work. Mand: Even other studios and studio executives who are normally competitive are like, 'No, no, no, we all want your movie to do well.' Which is a very lovely place to be in. It's a genre, in the large category of comedy and the small category of spoof, that has been very neglected for a while. As passionate comedy fans, it would mean a lot to us to have that be back in a sort of meaningful, central place. Gregor: Meaning, in the theater. When I saw it last week, it was with a somewhat smaller group of press, and many of them are younger than us, 25-year-olds and such, and I wondered, 'How are they going to vibe with this?' And they really enjoyed it. Gregor: The generational divide on this type of comedy is really interesting, because it's disappeared for 20-some years. We noticed in some of our test screenings, people under a certain age, mostly teenagers, it took them a couple of minutes just to get the education on how these movies work. It's like, 'Wait, wait, he just lost his arms. Is that going to be a plot point?' And you're like, 'No, no, that's not important.' It's cartoon logic, you can always snap back to normal. But it took a moment for it to register [with that age group]. Hopefully, the ads are doing the education now, where people are understanding, 'Oh, this is really, really silly.' But I do think that there's a reintroduction of this type of comedy. , and it's one of the few times where I think a choice like that makes sense. You are setting up the logic, and you're setting up the expectations. Gregor: That's our hope with the intro, that it does feel like you almost have a little CliffsNotes of like, 'Oh, this is what a spoof feels like.' If we've done it justice, it should feel like you're in the genre of an action movie, a heist movie or a heist scene, and then something happens that's ridiculous, but we're still in the heist movie. Hopefully, that gets people in the mood for what they're about to see for the next hour and a half. What are your memories of seeing spoofs when you were younger? The 'Naked Gun' movies, 'Airplane!,' 'Spaceballs,' all that good stuff. Gregor: I mean, 'The Naked Gun' is actually my favorite of all of them. Mand: Mm-hmm, same here. Gregor: As a kid who grew up obsessed with this as a genre, Mel Brooks and 'Monty Python' were everything to me. 'Naked Gun' and 'Spaceballs' were everything to me. [I remember] moving to California and getting to drive down the highway where the two silos are, where in the beginning of the first ['Naked Gun' movie], Frank Drebin says, 'Everything I see reminds me of her,' and it's just those two giant boobs. I was driving to San Diego after the fires this year with my wife, because we were kind of escaping the fires and it was a very stressful time, we were kind of in a fight, and we're passing the boobs and I was like, 'The boobs are there. We should stop fighting now.' And we both looked at them, and we were like, 'Yeah, that's very funny. OK, you're right.' Mand: It's 'Spaceballs' and all the 'Naked Guns' that really left a mark on me. I remember, as a kid, knowing that maybe I didn't understand more than half of 'Naked Gun,' and still loving it. I remember the pistachios filling up outside of the car when they're on a stakeout and they can't open the door, and it's just a pile, and thinking, 'This is the funniest thing I'd ever seen.' Then coming back to it after starting to write sketch comedy in college and stuff, and there's a scene where Frank is questioning a guy at the docks for information, and it's the classic trope of the guy being like, 'Eh, maybe I've seen him, maybe I ain't.' And Frank offers him a 20-dollar bill, and before you know it, the guy from the docks is like, 'Well, why do you want to know?' And Frank goes, 'Ah, I forget. I can't tell you.' And now the guy from the docks is paying him, and it basically ends with the guy from the docks borrowing twenty bucks from Frank to pay him back for information he got from Frank. And I was like, 'This is a perfect comedy scene. It doesn't get better than this.' But literally every other scene in that movie is the best scene I've ever seen, comedy-wise. I love 'Spaceballs,' but I saw 'Spaceballs' before I saw 'Star Wars.' Mand: Same! So, the first time I saw 'Star Wars,' I was like, 'Eh, it's fine. It's not very funny.' Gregor: Yeah, it's 'Spaceballs' without the comedy. If I'm choosing between the two, why would I not just take the funny? But it's funny the way that a good spoof can still work, even if you're not completely caught up on what is the inspirational source material. Gregor: The first 'Naked Gun' holds up to this day; it is still as funny as it was in 1988. Most comedies, even the best ones, are dated within a couple of years, and with 'Naked Gun,' that did not happen. I think a big part of that was that they were basing it on already a throwback genre, 'Police Squad' is based on 'M Squad' and 'Dragnet.' These are procedurals from the '50s and '60s, and so they already had a timeless quality to them. That was definitely a big part of this movie for us, was to not try to be particularly topical, to hopefully feel like this is just a take on the last 20-some years of the genre of action movies, of detective movies. Our hope is that it has a little more longevity for not being topical. Mand: If we used a reference, we wanted the reference to be older and lame. We wanted it to already be dated, so it wasn't something that would feel stale in a year or two. Gregor: There's Janet Jackson references and Freedom Fries references. I mean, it's truly so dated. Going back to thinking about the 25-year-olds and the teenagers watching it, how would you hold those two things in your head as you're writing, that you want this to have sort of a weird timeless quality because it is a throwback, but you also would like to bring in younger people to the fun? Mand: This is something we talk about a lot, but I think you have to write to what makes you laugh first and foremost. The minute you're like, 'I want everyone to like this,' then you're making a movie for almost no one. That's the first goal, and then it goes joke by joke, and then you're like, 'Is this so specific?' And then is it so specific, but we don't care because we still like it? I remember watching 'Barbie,' and that's a billion-dollar hit film— Gregor: And what was the song that Ken played? Matchbox Twenty! That's as dated as it gets. Mand: And I'm just like, 'These jokes are for them or for their friends.' They didn't get huge laughs, but it didn't matter because you feel that you're in that movie and you're like, 'This is a joy to watch.' Gregor: It's the Looney Tunes lesson, which is you don't need to get every joke as much as you need to feel that the joy of the writing is there, because that part is infectious. I didn't know any of the opera references that they were making in Looney Tunes, but I could feel like, 'Oh, man, I feel clever for being a part of it. I feel like I'm being let in a little bit of a club.' People have wanted this kind of joy for a while — a 'Naked Gun' reboot has been kicking around in Hollywood for years, and there have been many iterations of star, writers, and director attached. Did you guys take anything from the other scripts, or is this just you and Akiva? Gregor: This is just us. Something that felt very important was that the only reason this movie exists in our minds is because Liam Neeson agreed to do this. We were dead set that we need to really honor that original 'Airplane!' template of only casting dramatic actors, and looking at it really, really through the lens of drama. But, we're comedians and we're friends with comedians, and it was very painful to tell all of our comedian friends, 'Fuck off,' but— Mand: We didn't have to use 'Fuck off,' but we did. Gregor: But I insisted! I said, 'Hey, come to my house. I want to tell you something.' With Liam, there's really nobody else in Hollywood who has both that gravitas and has not sort of smirked his way out of it with a Marvel movie. Mand: Or something lighter or something like that, which is totally fine. He's spent the last 15 years making these vigilante movies, making 'Taken' and movies like that where he is the lone man who is the only one who can get the daughter back or the only one who can— Gregor: Punch a wolf. Mand: So the whole approach of it for us three when we sat down was like, 'We have Liam Neeson.' And Liam Neeson has this body of work, so we have to go back into this body of work, and also movies that haven't been spoofed that he isn't in, all the 'John Wicks,' the 'Mission: Impossibles' that haven't been touched, which is also a gift for us. And Liam is not Leslie, and no one is Leslie. Leslie, he's a unicorn. And Liam is not trying to be that, so it was, let's lean into the fact that we have Liam Neeson here who is a generational talent, one of the greatest of all time, and he's doing these silly lines. That was the whole point, so it was less about the other scripts or projects before, and it was more just like, 'Liam's here, what do we do with Liam?' Gregor: The basic task was, 'What's the stupidest thing we can get Liam Neeson to say?' Mand: And we think we got him to say some really stupid stuff. Gregor: He's such a good actor actor, so he'd show up and really the first take would be perfect almost without fail. It leaves us all this space to give him alts and to play with it. Then, he had this thing that he would say, after the script would make him do something particularly embarrassing or awful, when they'd yell cut, he would go like, 'I'm Oskar Schindler, dammit, what's happened to me?' I think he had a really good time. There are so many little touches throughout the film that will delight spoof fans, running gags you just build on. There's one with Liam and Paul's characters constantly getting fresh coffees handed to them, then bigger coffees, then coffees. What is the calculus of writing stuff like that? Gregor: It's the math of heightening, where you're like, 'OK, we had the first joke where he's just wasteful, he's just tossing the coffee cup.' And then those throws get more and more aggressive. Then, likewise, it goes from how many coffees to now even bigger coffees. It can't plateau. That's the math of it. The one joke that we found on set was him driving against the green screen, and then our prop master just [handed him a coffee]. That's another one of the old-fashioned tropes of the genre, especially Mel Brooks would do this a lot, we're just acknowledging that we're driving on a green screen. To us, that felt like a really fun nod. The green screens have gotten a lot better, and so people don't always register [them], but I always feel like there's a little part of the back of your brain that is registering Uncanny Valley. It used to be that there was just a horse chase or something going on behind your carriage and you're like, 'That's fake.' With your background, I'm not surprised that there are some songs in here, including this incredible sequence of Pam scatting. Mand: Akiva can talk about this quite a bit, but it's something that I can say that I know that they did in the first audition. The time that they met, Pam actually said she did scat in high school, and she did some for him, and it was wildly endearing and sweet, and she just went for it. This was something that we knew we were going to do pretty early on. Gregor: Do you remember the Kim Cattrall video? Oh, do I. Gregor: So it's very much that, that's certainly where we started from, where it was like, 'OK, that's maybe the funniest thing anyone can do.' Mand: But we're not going to be as funny as that, but what's the second funniest thing we can do? But that's Pam being unreal and a gift. Pam just kind of dove into this thing head-first and really wanted to be great and wanted to be silly and poke fun. That song was a lot of trial and error of what's going to play as silly versus what's not going to play as, like, is she really good at this? Gregor: We recorded that as a real track with her beforehand. The amazing artist Liz Gilles basically coached her through it and helped us write some of the very musical stuff. We can write in the script 'and then she scats,' but what the hell does that sound like? The word 'Ski baba, do baba, la ba da da,' somebody still has to write that. The very first time that it was all performed [as a whole] was the very first take on set, so the whole crew was seeing this as a real performance. And Pam got a standing ovation on set from the audience of crew and cast who were just like, 'Holy shit, that was spectacular. That was amazing.' In edit, we kind of jumbled it up and mixed it around. I'll say our saddest thing is that there was just the best scatting of the 'Super Mario Brothers' underwater theme, and that was in all of the cuts until the 11th hour when Nintendo said that they weren't going to let us do it. If you got to see an early cut, you would've seen her scatting the 'Super Mario Brothers' underwater theme. And that really, really, really tickled us. That brings to mind — and this is one of the few movies I would ask for this — what are things in the movie that you would hope that people really can look out for, and maybe they look out for it in their second watch? Gregor: This is not a spoiler or like an Easter egg kind of joke, but the detail that I continually love more than anything is when Frank is angry at Beth for deleting his old episodes of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and it's just the sound effect of him slowly clicking through an old TiVo. We actually did dig up the old TiVo sounds, and they have this weird, dated quality. Mand: 'Bloop… bloop bloop.' Gregor: There's like a water drippy kind of sound to it. I love that detail so much. Mand: I'm tickled by the movie. I still can't believe they made it. I can't believe that we're here right now in London about to go see a premiere of it. It's hopefully stupid at every minute. Gregor: Oh, keep an eye out for the beaver. That's the Easter egg for the original movie that we're happy we got to sneak in here. Going back to the hope that this is a success for comedies, but also specifically for spoofs, what are your big hopes for what this might do to the spoof market? Gregor: I hope it brings us back, spoofs very specifically, but even just the concept of a very big, silly movie, and that comedies can just be fun. Mand: [There can be] comedy-forward movies, not an action movie with jokes, a kid's animated movie with laughs, a romantic comedy, just like a movie that is here to make you laugh. So, spoof or no spoof, just the idea that it's just a comedy and there's just not as much fear of doing it. I feel like there's just become so much fear, that it's got to be comedy on top of something else as opposed to just being like, 'The point of this movie is to make you laugh, and hopefully feel things as well.' Like the original 'Naked Gun,' you're rooting for that romance, hopefully, that happens in our movie. It's one of the tricks of these movies… that you may forget that the plot is there, but if you do it correctly, if you look at it, the plot makes sense, and the love story is something you actually care about. Not too much that it's getting in the way of the jokes, but just enough to root for it. It's a comedy-first movie, so my biggest hope is that that starts to happen a little bit more. It just starts to drip out a little bit where people can just be like, 'These are jokes.' Gregor: It's also a weird byproduct of the disintegration of the monoculture. You need a baseline to spoof, and with fewer baselines, it's harder to find those things. But a friend of mine described this as 'a fresh Mario board with untouched coins,' and I like that metaphor. Yes, this is a pre-existing genre, but there's this whole area that hasn't been touched.' And the longer we've been away from it? I mean, God, the superhero genre is so ripe for spoof at this point, too. OK, I guess that's what I'm throwing my hat in the ring for, if they let us. [Laughs] A Paramount Pictures release, 'The Naked Gun' is now in theaters. 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The Independent
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Liam Neeson explains why sex scene in Naked Gun ‘was a first'
Liam Neeson discussed filming a 'strange' sex scene with co-star Pamela Anderson for the upcoming film The Naked Gun. The actor described the scene, which involved a snowman, as specifically choreographed and his first time working with an intimacy coordinator. Neeson admitted to using a body double for a nude scene in the film. The film's writers, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, referred to the segment as the 'strangest sex scene' of Neeson's life. Neeson and Anderson's on-screen and off-screen chemistry has sparked dating rumors, which Neeson has not directly addressed.
