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.
Ben and I had been writing a period piece TV show for the FX Network. It was about guys in the very beginning of stag films and pornography set in the 1930s Los Angeles. We thought that was the greatest thing ever.
Honestly, I like improvising, because the jokes are just always really fresh - it's not jokes that you wrote weeks and weeks ago.
I feel like I'm the most well-adjusted character on the show, even though I'm sure the other actors would tell you the same thing about their characters.
I must say I read the script for Memento, and I thought it was amazing and going to be a big hit. The script was so good.
I was on the speech team, we called it forensics.
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.
It's such a great thing to work with people and not have a plan.
Kerri and I met at theatre camp when were 16 years old, which is pretty lame. The rest of us met when we founded the State at New York University in 1988. Most of our adult lives have been spent bickering with these people.
My Muse is a tiny, faerie like creature from Gnardgnanesh: a country that only exists if you wish it to. He's about 4 inches tall, greenish, and resembles a little twig.
Old School has humongous laughs all the way through it.
Our reward for Starsky and Hutch was getting to write The Six Million Dollar Man for Todd.
People love that monkey torture.
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.
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.
The best thing that happened during the filming of Out Cold is that I forged a friendship with Lee Majors that endured for almost 12 weeks.
The first record I bought with my own money was Rio.
The more people's money you take to do something, the more inputs you get.
The only guaranteed way to make something not very funny is to make it vague.
There was so long from when we did the pilot and then when the show was eventually picked up by Comedy Central - and, in fact, we had to shoot the pilot twice.
They also said they might put a couple episodes of Viva Variety on the Reno DVDs. Hardly anybody watched those.
We did one pilot for FOX which was about this couple that moves to a town, and we play everyone in the entire town. So it was like a Peter Sellers film.
We shot 2 seasons back-to-back, and once you're sort of in a groove, it's easier to just keep going instead of stop shooting, so it's been kinda nice.
When you consider that an entire season of Reno 911 costs five million bucks and this year we did sixteen episodes.
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.
Yes, I am complimented on my work in Kids in the Hall once or twice a week. It's a nice feeling.
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.
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