There’s a Method to Disney’s Dumbness

Last spring, Disney Films Chairman Joe Roth was looking at the wealth of highbrow Oscar fare being released by rival studios at holiday time. It was a bounteous feast for any serious adult moviegoer, full of dramas set in prisons and mental institutions, as well as gloomy tales of doomed lovers, charming sociopaths and poverty-stricken families.

But what if you were a teenage boy, Hollywood’s most loyal customer? If you could be momentarily distracted from listening to Kid Rock or surfing the Net, would you race off to catch “Angela’s Ashes”? Or would you prefer an outrageous comedy about a bumbling fish-tank cleaner who house-sits for a world-class male escort and--thanks to a series of nutty plot developments too goofy to possibly explain--becomes a male gigolo?

Hence the arrival this past weekend of “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.” With ex-”Saturday Night Live” regular Rob Schneider starring as the novice gigolo, “Deuce” opened No. 3 at the box office, taking in $13 million, a tidy sum for a film that was made for a modest $18 million. Its surprise success, despite a spate of negative reviews--Variety described the film as reaching “new depths of gross-out stupidity”--is yet another sign of the power of lowbrow youth comedy in Hollywood.

For Disney, it represents a carefully calculated attempt to build a new comedy franchise while wooing young moviegoers with counter-programming at the height of the holiday Oscar season.

“If you’re a 40-year-old woman looking for a drama, there’s 10 different movies to see in the next couple of weeks,” says Roth. “But if you’re a 15-year-old boy, there’s only one youth comedy to see, ‘Deuce.’ Go look at who’s in movie theaters and you’ll see the ratio of teens to adults is something like 9-to-1. And we basically have that audience to ourselves.”

It’s a plan Disney followed last holiday season, when it released Adam Sandler’s “The Waterboy,” which went on to become a huge hit, grossing $161 million domestically. The strategy was pioneered by marketing-savvy Miramax, which released its “Scream” horror comedies in early December, attracting legions of teen moviegoers while adults were off seeing Oscar hopefuls.

“Next to summer, in terms of availability for young moviegoers, the holiday season is the best time of year,” says Roth. “They’re getting out of school but they’re not out shopping like adults, so they have a lot of free time on their hands.”

Sandler’s Second Could Be First

Of course, Rob Schneider is no Adam Sandler, so Disney isn’t expecting to break the bank with the young comic’s first turn as a top-billed star. But with the film on track to make $50 million, the studio could establish Schneider as a new comic franchise. The key is economics. The average studio movie now costs $55 million; most youth comedies cost a third of that.

Sandler’s early movies, “Billy Madison” and “Happy Gilmore,” cost about $11 million each. Even “The Waterboy” cost less than $25 million to make.

But Sandler’s phenomenal box-office success has priced him out of the low-budget arena. His next film, “Little Nicky,” due next year from New Line Cinema, is budgeted at $75 million-plus, making it far more difficult for New Line to make a hefty profit. Other studios have had trouble building new comic franchises. Universal, which made the early Sandler movies, let him go, mistakenly thinking he wasn’t a star. Paramount had a big success with “Wayne’s World” but mixed results with other Lorne Michaels-produced films by “SNL” graduates. On the surface Schneider seems unlikely star material. He spent four years at “Saturday Night Live,” but labored in the shadows of better-known comics like Sandler. His TV series, “Men Behaving Badly,” was a flop. Schneider largely owes his career momentum to appearances in Sandler’s past two films, first as the “You can do it!” guy in “The Waterboy,” then as a pizza delivery man in “Big Daddy.” Like Sandler, he doesn’t do interviews with the lowly print media; instead he’s been doing TV appearances on “The Tonight Show,” “Regis & Kathie Lee” and “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.,”

When Schneider was filming “Big Daddy,” he already was hatching the idea for “Deuce” with writing partner Harris Goldberg. Schneider showed the first 40 pages of the script to Sandler early this year, who encouraged him to complete it. When it was finished in March, Schneider took it to Disney. It attracted the attention of Buena Vista Motion Pictures Co-President Todd Garner, who helped oversee a quick three-week rewrite.

The studio hired first-timer Mike Mitchell to direct the film, but gave him plenty of comedy expertise backup. The movie was produced by veterans Sid Ganis, producer of “Big Daddy,” and Barry Bernardi, executive producer of “Inspector Gadget,” while Sandler and partner Jack Giarraputo served as executive producers.

The film finished shooting Sept. 7. Disney had a trailer in the theaters a month later, cutting it so fast that the filmmakers rearranged their shooting schedule to make scenes available for the trailer. The trailer was an instant hit.

But Disney ran into one roadblock that could still damage the film’s box-office potential. Since its core audience is 15-year-old boys, the film was designed as a PG-13 movie, the rating for all Sandler films as well as both “Austin Powers” hits. But each time the studio submitted the film to the Motion Picture Assn. ratings board, it came back with a R. The board objected to made-up slang words, including “manwhore” and “hebitch,” used by Eddie Griffin, a black comic who plays Deuce’s pimp in the film.

“It’s completely unfair,” says Roth. “ ‘Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me’ was far more suggestive. This is a sweet comedy with no sex. But the MPAA didn’t get Eddie Griffin’s character at all. To get a PG-13 we would’ve had to cut his entire character out of the movie, even though he uses words that you can hear on TV at 10 p.m. every night.”

Disney continued advertising the film on TV shows geared to teens until the film was given an R just before Thanksgiving, so it was able to reach a big chunk of its target audience. But marketing experts say the film might have had an opening in the $16-million-to-$18-million range if it had been rated PG-13.

Still, the “Deuce” team says Schneider is on his way to comic stardom. “When kids see Rob, they look at him as one of them,” says Ganis. “They relate to his comedy.”