Not at all news per se, but something we found pretty interesting.
Is Judd Apatow using his buddy, fellow comedian Garry Shandling’s erstwhile life crisis as the basis for his new film, “Funny People,” starring Adam Sandler as a selfish dying stand-up comic who get’s a second chance at life, but doesn’t learn a thing?
Jeffrey Wells writes on his site:
A screenwriter friend has heard that Judd Apatow‘s Funny People is either based upon or partly inspired by “a profound crisis of some sort that changed Garry Shandling and sent him into the pursuit of Zen and other pursuits/remedies. He’s one of Apatow’s closest friends and was a major shit during the making/ heyday of HBO’s Larry Sanders Show. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Apatow and Shandling are obviously close, but at a recent NYC appearance, he revealed just how close.
“I bought his house when I was working on ‘The Larry Sanders Show.’ The set for ‘It’s Garry Shandling’s Show’ was based on Garry’s actual house. So when I bought Garry’s house, I basically lived on the set of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show.”
Apatow said the way Shandling took events from real life and used them for inspiration was influential on his work as well.
“But I never thought about writing about my life, because I couldn’t think of anything less interesting than my own life. But slowly during ‘Freaks & Geeks,’ I would slowly pitch out stories from my young life. Then when we did the scene with Martin [Starr] watching the ‘Dinah Shore Show,’ I realized it was probably my best work and that maybe I should work up the courage to do more personal writing.”
Possibly? It seems to make sense. Shandling was always said to be a not-too-distant version of the character he played in on TV — an insecure prick that would belittle everyone at every turn — so Wells’ quote seems to match. Adam Sandler’s unapologetic asshole character, George Simmons, is much like that character as well. He’s a deeply troubled comedian, who like Shandling, was never married and for Simmons’ anyway, resents the audience. And Shandling kind of disappeared for a few years there. Maybe he was trying to find himself and didn’t learn a thing? Who knows, but we loved “The Larry Sanders Show,” so all of this positing and hearsay is intriguing to us. Make of it all what you will, but it doesn’t sound like a large stretch to us.