Which Lie Did I Tell? (21 page)

We ended with a couple of funny poems, so we’re starting with a couple of funny scenes. I wrote in a
Premiere
article that I thought
There’s Something About Mary
was the best movie of 1998. The Academy, in its infinite wisdom, ignored it totally, partially because it has always ignored the two kinds of movies that are hardest to get right—
comedies and adventure films.

Peter and Bobby Farrelly are the youngest of the screenwriters in this section. Their credits, prior to this, were
Kingpin
and
Dumb and Dumber
and lots of TV they sold that was never shot. I have read their latest effort,
Me Myself and Irene,
which stars
Jim Carrey as a cop with a split personality and
Renee Zellwegger as a girl trying to deal with her boyfriend(s) problems. I don’t make predictions, but if it is not a tremendous success it will mean the world will have ended.

Brothers, early forties, the Farrellys live and work in Providence, about a mile from each other. Married with families, they meet five days a week around noon, work till six or later, alternate on who types.

Ed Decter and John J. Strauss, TV writers and friends of theirs, had written the
original screenplay of
Mary,
suffered through endless years in development hell. The earlier script began with a guy wondering what had happened to his high school love, then hiring a detective to find out. The detective finds her, falls in love with her too, and lies that she is fat with many children. That notion was something to hang on to, the Farrellys felt.

And they took it from there.

When they were wondering what kind of tragic thing could happen to the guy who hires the detective, help came from an unexpected source. Years before, one of their sisters had given a party, and a cool guy who
was there got his dick caught in his zipper. We are talking twelve-year-olds, remember, and after an hour or so, their father, who is a doctor, and their mother, a nurse, were aware that a guest had been in the upstairs bathroom for a very long time.

They went in, the father freed him, and they drove the kid home, telling everyone he had taken sick.

And never told anyone.

Then, a couple of years ago, their father came clean, and they realized that someday they would have to try and work that into a movie.

The character of Ted was Ben Stiller, playing seventeen, with braces Szell would have been proud of.
Cameron Diaz—do I have to tell you Cameron Diaz played Mary?—well she did, also at seventeen. Ted has come to pick Mary up for the prom, there’s been a scuffle with her brother, Warren, who is retarded. Mary needs a strap fixed so she heads upstairs with her mom. Ted has a bleeding lip that needs tending. So he makes the famous request to Mary’s dad about using the bathroom.

A few final explanations. Screenplays are written, like plays, in a kind of shorthand.
Stage directions, that kind of stuff. We all tend to settle on our own
particular
stuff. The few you might not know are these:

INT. means we are looking at something interior.

EXT. means we are outside.

POV. means point of view.

(O.S.) means offscreen. You are hearing someone talk, but not seeing the speaker.

SNAP FOCUS. I never used it but I assume it means when something vague suddenly goes to a very sharp image.

The rest you can figure out for yourself.

A great comedy scene.

Let me ask you something—what’s
your
favorite moment? Here are three of mine. This for openers:

And this:

She’s a dental hygienist, right, of course she’d head for the Bactine.
Do you know how much that would hurt?

And:

I just love the character for being able to come up with, in that situation, a line of that quality.

I think this is the scene that makes the movie.

Look, there is, as we all know, no “best” anything. Never forget that in the eighteenth century, the leading literary critics felt the greatest writers
of all time
were
Homer,
Sophocles, and Richardson.

This movie hits me as hard as it does because I am—as so many of us are—Ben Stiller. Taller, sure, and I never wore braces, but my high school days involved living with a deaf mother who told me I caused her deafness, only releasing the truth, that I had nothing to do with it, when she was dying, and a drunken father who stayed in his second-floor room for four years, only venturing out to pledge sobriety, a ruse for his driving to the liquor store for another long supply. And you get through that fine, you tell yourself you’re lucky, a lot of people have it worse. And, boy, do they. I had a nice house, there was Minnie who worked for my family and cared if I survived, and how many people get to go to Bears games or camp in the summertime? But I couldn’t bring friends home, not with that secret on the second floor, and I didn’t date, because who would go out with me, and my schoolwork went to shit and I stayed home a year faking sickness and as I lay there what I thought of was how beautiful
she
was going to be, and how good our life together.