Three Madmen With a Plan

Tom Green was riding a dog down Ventura Boulevard, and it wasn’t even the 28-year-old comedian’s own hound.

Moments earlier, the gangly, goateed Green had approached a stranger--an older woman with a cocker spaniel--and had wordlessly slipped the leash out of her hand. As she watched, stunned, he scrunched up his 6-foot, 3-inch frame, squatted over the dog and shuffled down the sidewalk as if on horseback.

Nearby, two movie directors--comedy auteur Ivan Reitman, 53, and newcomer Todd Phillips, 28--burst out laughing. Reitman is best known for directing or producing many ‘80s comedy favorites like “Animal House,” “Ghostbusters” and “Stripes,” and his company, the Montecito Picture Co., produced Phillips’ first feature: “Road Trip,” a $15-million raunchy comedy that DreamWorks releases May 19.

To hear Reitman and Phillips tell it, the process of making “Road Trip” was collaborative in a way that happens too rarely in Hollywood, with the elder filmmaker mentoring the younger as a way of honing his own skills and sensibilities. What made that collaboration outrageously fun, though, was the inimitable Green--a Canadian comic whose “The Tom Green Show” on MTV has a fiercely devoted following.

Green’s shtick appears simple: He acts like an idiot--or jerk, depending on one’s sensibility--and records how others react. The result is a wacked-out version of “Candid Camera.” Green has snorkeled in a shopping mall fountain to retrieve pennies (then taken the wet coins to the bank). He has duct-taped himself to a lamppost, drunk milk straight from a cow’s udder, and followed people down the street, commenting on their clothes through a bullhorn. He once ate a paste of Vaseline and human hair, and in “Road Trip” he nearly swallows a mouse.

Green’s humor is strangely intimate. His parents, for example, are frequent targets of his pranks. Once, he dumped a bloody cow’s head in their bed at 3 a.m. Another time, he spray-painted a lesbian love scene on their car. But lately, Green’s fans have been let in on something even more personal: Green’s battle with testicular cancer. He is currently editing “The Tom Green Cancer Special” for MTV.

The other day, Green, Reitman and Phillips sat down over breakfast at Art’s Deli in Studio City and talked with The Times about what’s funny, what’s not and what to do when a small rodent crawls into your mouth.

Question: How did you all meet?

Todd Phillips: I made a documentary, “Frat House,” which was at the Sundance Film Festival [in 1998]. Ivan’s son, Jason, raised his hand at a forum and asked me why I made “Frat House.” I didn’t know it was him, but I said, “This movie is an homage to these ‘80s comedies that Andrew [Gurland, the co-director] and I grew up on.” We had this idea of remaking ‘80s comedies as documentaries. “Frat House” was “Animal House.” We were also going to do “Stripes”--both of them Ivan’s movies.

Ivan Reitman: So at the awards, which “Frat House” won [the Grand Jury prize], I went up to Todd and we made a date to meet. Right away I could see he had a real good sense of where the laugh is--always the hardest thing to find.

Q: And how did you feel about being “remade”?

Reitman: I was both flattered and shocked.

Phillips: So when we got together, Ivan said one of his favorite parts of “Animal House” was when the guys go on a road trip. He thought there was a great college road trip movie to be made. So I got together with [co-writer] Scot Armstrong, and we started pitching around ideas. . . . It was amazing for me and Scot to be able to work with Ivan.

Reitman: From a purely selfish point of view, this was a great way to renew one’s self. Certainly I have a level of experience now, and I’ve made, fortunately, some films that people liked. Especially in humor, you need to find fresh ways to tell stories. And Todd really reminded me of myself, in my first years starting out. Then there was Tom, who does the hardest thing: trying to create comedy out of thin air. What happens on his show comes from the accidents of real life and people’s reactions to them.

Green: We’ve gotten better at figuring out how to plan the reactions and make them happen the way we want them to.

Phillips: What I like about Ivan and Tom’s take on comedy is that it’s based in reality, which is where I come from with documentaries. If you look at the first 20 minutes of “Stripes,” it’s so real. Once your characters are real and it’s founded in reality, you can go anywhere. That’s where Tom comes in. He takes that to the extreme: uber-realism.

Q: I want to hear more about how Tom provokes the reactions he wants. Because in some ways that’s what you’re all trying to do: elicit laughs when you want them.

Green: It’s sort of like pulling off a bank job. Our shoots look not planned, but there’s a lot of planning that goes into making it look not planned. We make ourselves look very nonprofessional, which isn’t too hard. My co-hosts are my real best friends. We don’t shoot with a large-format camera, but with a small hand-held thing. We don’t have a sound person, we just have a mike plugged into the camera. It makes it seem to the people I’m interviewing that I’m just this kid running around with a camera. It allows them to be a little bit more real with their reactions. . . . It is complicated in the sense that we have to get people to sign releases afterward.

Reitman: How many people let you use it?

Green: A lot of people say no at first, but then we go back. We sometimes pay people. We usually are able to convince them because the stuff that I’m doing never really makes them look bad. . . . I’m being a doofus and they’re being surprised by the doofus.

Q: How does that experience compare to being in a movie like “Road Trip”?

Green: It was an interesting transition for me. First, I had a meeting with Ivan Reit-man, for crying out loud! And I’d met Todd doing some Pepsi commercials together. He was a young guy like me who wanted to go out and stir up [expletive].

Q: Your part in “Road Trip”--a college tour guide--was tailored for you, so it’s not like you had to try to be Robert Redford or something.

Green: [pouting] That would have been neat.

Reitman: We did offer him a bigger role--one of the four guys on the road. But because of his show, he didn’t have the time, so we made him our narrator.

Phillips: In hindsight, it was good. The part he plays makes the most of his working off of people. As a tour guide, he has a group of high school kids with him the whole time.

Q: There’s been a lot written--some celebrating, some lamenting--about the return of gross-out humor, particularly since last year’s “American Pie” did such good business.

Reitman: People said the same thing after “Animal House” 20 years ago. Go back and look at the silent comedies from 80 or 90 years ago, or the great comedy teams of the ‘30s and ‘40s--physical comedy is a very important staple of them all. The Marx Brothers, of course, had everything: one of the smartest-talking guys in the history of movies--Groucho--combined with a mute who only did physical stuff and a guy who misunderstood things and mangled the English language. You had this great team playing to all of our tastes.

The great cliche is about how damn tough comedy is. But of course, nobody really gives that any respect. Everyone says, [mockingly] “Oh, yes, I hear it’s very, very hard.” But if one person, for whatever reason, doesn’t find a movie funny, it truly isn’t funny for him. It’s such a visceral thing, laughing. So getting to the point where you can get an audience of 600 people laughing is really precise and intricate work.

Q: Can you give me a specific example?

Reitman: I showed Bill Murray my first cut of “Meatballs.” At the end of one scene, he said, “That’s a Canadian cut!” [Reitman is Canadian.] I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I’m delivering the laugh, and you’re on a reaction shot, focusing on somebody else.” At first I thought, is this a movie star who is upset that I’m not on his close-up? I realized, no, he’s just giving me an extraordinarily valuable lesson in making comedy work on film. He knew it instinctively because he was a performer. When I finally readjusted the edit so I finished the line on his face and then went to the reaction shot, the response was twice as big.

Green: The reaction shot is so important. You’re not just laughing at the joke. You’re laughing at the fact that somebody’s watching that joke get delivered. Certainly with slapstick, where somebody’s acting like a fool, that’s borderline uncomfortable and embarrassing. But if you see somebody watching that and feeling the same way you’re feeling about the reaction . . .

Phillips: [to Green] You use that on your show all the time. I saw one the other night, where you’re in the automated wheelchair in the supermarket--which is genius--dressed as an old guy, and you’re running into things. That’s pretty funny. But when you cut to the deli guys looking over the counter at you--that’s where the huge laugh comes.

Green: By showing other people saying, “He’s being an idiot,” you let the audience know that it’s motivated.

Phillips: Another reason why Tom’s stuff is so brilliant is that his audience is so in on it. They feel so involved, they’re so seeing it from his perspective.

Reitman: I also think they sense the danger of what you do, Tom. Because it is like walking on a tightrope without a net. It’s so easy to fail. Here’s a person who’s going to be as absurd as possible in very mundane situations and try to elicit humor from that. To do that takes real guts. Alan Funt did it, but he always had other patsies. This is more performance humor, and Tom is the center of it.

Phillips: Describe “The Undercutters.” It’s my favorite bit ever.

Green: We stopped at this pizza restaurant and I sat outside in a car dressed as a pizza guy. I had a plain pizza and a fishing tackle box full of cheese and pepperoni and condiments. So when I saw the pizza guy drive off, we followed him. We walked up to the front door right beside him. So when the people open the door to buy the pizza . . .

Phillips: [laughing] Tom says to them, “I can do better. Whatever he’s selling it for, I can beat his price.”

Green: The joke was originally supposed to be on the pizza guy, and the people in the house were supposed to just laugh along. But we went to this rough neighborhood in Long Island, and this guy was working in his garage and he was hammering something and he realized I was being an idiot. I said, “What did you order, extra cheese? I have extra cheese.” And he kicked my tackle box and grabbed his hammer and said, “I’m gonna [mess] you up!” and he started chasing me.

Phillips: Tom pushes it. He just doesn’t let it go. The guy has a hammer and he’s after them, and Tom and his cameraman are backing out, and Tom is saying, “But we can do better. We’re undercutters!” And the guy goes, “Get out of here right [expletive] now.” And Tom goes, “But we’re just trying to give you a better deal.” And then the best part: Tom finally turns around to the camera guy and says, “This is the line.” Meaning: “Now we’ve got to go. Run!”

Q: Is the rumor true that you dressed up as Hitler and crashed a bar mitzvah?

Green: [looking stricken] No. I thought that rumor died down when everyone thought I was marrying Monica Lewinsky, but it’s still irritating to hear, because it gives a false definition of what it is that I do. It’s mean-spirited. Something that hurts people. We don’t do that.

Q: [to Reitman] When you talk about the history of comedy, in some ways you’re saying we’re all still laughing at the same stuff we always did. But I’m wondering if you think young people today have a different comic sensibility.

Phillips: I think they do. Young people have been so inundated their whole lives with media that I really think adding a level of realism is what they need. I think that’s what makes Tom so appealing to them.

Reitman: My sense is we’re laughing at the same things we’ve always laughed at, but the language of the filmmaker and the performer shifts. We’ve had voices of various generations: the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy in the ‘40s, Bob Hope, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in the ‘50s. In the ‘60s it was a really odd group: the Smothers Brothers, Dick Gregory, even Shelley Berman. Each used a language of their time. . . . They’re spectacularly funny, but they don’t quite speak to us the way they spoke to people at the time. I think Tom Green--and I’ll say it even in front of him--is one of these new voices.

Phillips: Adam Sandler, Tom Green and Chris Tucker--that’s now.

Green: The way we started our show is a lot different than a lot of comedians out there. It wasn’t coming from the comedy world so much, though I love Monty Python and “SCTV” and David Letterman. I did stand-up comedy, but only for a couple of years. My show really developed from the grass-roots level. I was a skateboarder, and I incorporated that attitude.

Q: What attitude?

Green: If you’re a skateboarder, you hang out in underground parking garages in Canada because it’s so cold you can’t go outside. Security guards come and kick you out. And this is every kid growing up in America, too, getting kicked out of shopping malls for loitering. Kids have this authority issue, and my show addresses that. Kids see me getting into conflicts every week and they say, “Holy [expletive], that’s me.”

Q: Do you want to be a movie star? Your show seems to thrive on lack of control. But movie sets are usually very controlled places.

Green: I enjoy making people laugh. That’s why I originally started falling off my chair in second grade and getting kicked out of class for being a goof. One day I thought, “Geez, it would be funny if I could figure out a way to trick somebody into paying me to do this.” Then I found I enjoyed the whole process of making comedy.

Phillips: Tom prepares meticulously for total chaos. He gets himself ready so he can go out and let anything happen. And I think that’s what you do on movies too.

Green: That happens clearly in “Road Trip” with the mouse. I knew, going in, that a lot might happen with that mouse. I didn’t know, necessarily, if it would go in my mouth. I was surprised the first take when it actually walked in.

Reitman: Not as surprised as us!

Green: I knew I was willing to let it go in there. I knew I was going to try to let it go in. I remember we shot some stuff one day where the mouse was on a park bench and I was grabbing it and scooping it into my mouth. After we’d done the shot 20 times from different angles, the problem was that as I was talking to the mouse, it was actually crawling in before I could grab it and throw it in. So I think it really did like it in there.

Q: Todd talks about how you use reality in your humor, but you’ve had a scarier brush with reality with your cancer.

Green: Want to see my scar? [He lifts up his shirt to reveal a pink line reaching north of his navel to his rib cage.] It was a big testicle, like a watermelon. [Everyone laughs. Without missing a beat, Green orders a sesame bagel with cream cheese.] No, really, they had to take my lymph nodes out to see if it had spread, which it hadn’t. We’re actually doing a special show on it.

Phillips: His loyal fans have been on the Web site [https://tomgreen.com] kidding him about it. I read one e-mail with the subject headline, “Sometimes you feel like a nut.” That’s their way of saying, “Get well.”

Green: When I first found out about it, I wasn’t in any way ready to make jokes about it. I was really embarrassed. . . . When I had the testicle removed, I told work I was having a hernia operation. It wasn’t until I realized I was going to be out of it for a few months and I decided to do a show that it became so much funnier. The cameras follow me around before the surgery and right into the operating room, where I actually have a close-up with doctors explaining what’s going on. The jokes come from the nervous tension leading up to it--and dinner with my parents before. I’ve realized this is really one of the best bits we’ve ever had. I mean, holy [expletive], a cancer show? This beats painting my parents’ house plaid!

Q: And you started a fund to raise money for research?

Green: Yeah. It’s the Tom Green’s Nuts Cancer Fund. We could have called it Tom Green’s Nut, in the singular. But we didn’t, because we started the foundation before the nut was removed.

Q: [to Phillips] Do you have more Tom Green movies in the works?

Phillips: Scot Armstrong and I are working on a movie with Tom in mind, though we haven’t told him about it yet. But I think any time you can form solid relationships, it makes for a comfortable, exciting environment where you can try anything. On “Road Trip,” Tom came to me a million times and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if. . . ?” and we tried it.

Green: And you just edited it all out later.

Phillips: Not true! Even with the mouse. It was scripted that Tom would just dangle it over his mouth. And then he put the whole thing in.

Q: And did the mouse really poop, like you imply in the trailer?

Green: It took a poop, yeah. It was a proud moment for me, truly pushing the envelope.

Reitman: [laughing] Welcome to the big time.