Rassegna stampa di Neal Brennan

ADAM McKAY remembers exactly when he decided Neal Brennan was funny.
Mr. McKay, the director of “Anchorman” and “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” and a former head writer for “Saturday Night Live,” already loved “Chappelle’s Show,” the sketch-comedy program of which Mr. Brennan was a co-writer and co-creator. But it wasn’t until Mr. Brennan came to his office to pitch a movie with the “30 Rock” star Tracy Morgan that Mr. McKay was sold.
The movie idea was about a 1980s hip-hop star trying to reunite his old group — a kind of “Blues Brothers” meets the Sugarhill Gang. “The old rapper thing has been done a few times, and it’s tough to pull off,” Mr. McKay said, “but Tracy was just killing us, taking off his shirt, and Neal was just crazy playing off him. It may be the most entertaining pitch meeting I’ve ever had.”
Mr. McKay ultimately passed on the idea (funny concept, too thin for a movie), but Mr. Brennan’s performance stuck with him. “He was a comedy fan, but was very smart and very discriminating,” Mr. McKay said. “He wasn’t desperate,” never lunging for the obvious joke.
A few months later, when Mr. McKay was looking for someone to direct “The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard,” a new comedy about used-car salesmen that he was producing with Will Ferrell, Mr. Brennan was a natural choice. “He was by far the sharpest and most impressive person we met with,” Mr. McKay said.
He doesn’t always impress so immediately. Jeremy Piven, who stars in “The Goods,” said, “Neal is a lot more savvy and knowledgeable than you first expect from someone who looks like a kid.” Tall and lanky, with bright blue eyes and a goofy smile, the 35-year-old Mr. Brennan does indeed have something of the eternal teenager about him, particularly his haircut (Beckham-esque faux-hawk) and choice of attire (T-shirt, jeans, Nikes). As Ed Helms of “The Office,” who stars in “The Goods” as the leader of a 30-something boy band, joked, “I like to say that my character’s wardrobe was based on Neal’s personal style.”

Mr. Brennan grew up near Philadelphia, the youngest of 10 kids, which he likens to “being raised in a monkey house.” His father was a tax lawyer who fancied himself a joke connoisseur, and his five brothers, Mr. Brennan said, were all funny. When he was in high school, his brother Kevin started doing stand-up at the Improv in New York, and on weekends Mr. Brennan would steal into the city and hang out backstage.
“It was incredible,” Mr. Brennan recalled recently, sipping a bottle of San Pellegrino on the patio of a cafe near his home in Los Angeles. “I got to meet Jon Stewart, Dennis Miller, Ray Romano. Denis Leary once slammed a car door on my leg and told me to ‘keep smokin.’ It made that world seem attainable.”
After a brief flirtation with New York University’s film school (“I wanted to be Scorsese, but I hated film students”), he took a job working the door at a Greenwich Village comedy club. He earned $225 a week and shared a one-bedroom apartment on St. Marks Place with the comedian Jay Mohr. At night he would roam the streets, listening to the “Taxi Driver” soundtrack on his Walkman.
He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-’90s and got a job writing for an MTV dating show, and, later, two Nickelodeon variety shows. “I remember I wrote a sketch called ‘Hair Club for Boys,’ about these 10-year-olds with thick manes of chest hair,” Mr. Brennan said. “Which is funny. But apparently not to 10-year-olds.”
He didn’t fare much better with “Half Baked” (1998), a wacky stoner comedy that he wrote with his friend Dave Chappelle, whom he met at a New York comedy club when Mr. Brennan was 19. Reviews of the film were scathing, and it quickly disappeared. The experience left him an emotional wreck. “I literally needed to be on antidepressants.” He entered what he called his “fallow period”: working on a few scripts that were never produced, schooling himself on classic movies (he still harbored dreams of directing), “just kind of doing my homework.”
Then, in 2002, Mr. Chappelle called with an idea for a sketch show. Mr. Brennan was thrilled; sketch comedy had always been his favorite genre: “I remember watching ‘Saturday Night Live’ when Eddie Murphy was on. I was maybe 10. I’d hear my parents come home, and I’d have to run upstairs and get into bed. Finally I asked my mom — and this is such a weird, portentous thing for a 10-year-old to say — I said, ‘Hey, can you let me watch “SNL”? It’s important.’ And it turned out it was.”
“Chappelle’s Show” was a pop-culture phenomenon. It addressed topics like race, drugs and sex with a bluntness rarely seen on American television. “Our creative chemistry was pretty explosive,” Mr. Brennan said. “Dave used to say we were like thrill killers. He’d write a joke, I’d go further, he’d go further.” The show, Mr. Brennan said, was also “racially ambidextrous” — the product of a black man from the Maryland suburbs and a white man with a love of Public Enemy and Spike Lee, who bonded over everything from Errol Morris films to the Wu-Tang Clan.
At the heart of Mr. Brennan’s hip-hop and “Frontline” aesthetic lies an interesting contradiction. His favorite funnymen (Mr. Murphy, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock) haven’t always made great films, while his favorite filmmakers (Oliver Stone, Paul Schrader) aren’t necessarily funny. With “Chappelle’s Show” he managed to bridge the gap. At its best — the much-discussed “black white supremacist” sketch, for instance — the series combined screwball mayhem with the sting of hard truth. For all its instant catchphrases, the brilliant Rick James vignette — directed by Mr. Brennan and featuring confessional monologues, fanciful re-enactments and “Rashomon”-style competing narratives — could have been, in terms of technique, an Errol Morris movie.
“Chappelle’s Show” made its debut on Comedy Central in 2003, and was for a time the best-selling DVD series ever. Two years later Mr. Chappelle signed a two-year contract for a reported $55 million, but the pressure of defending a show that cast a darkly humorous eye on race relations against accusations of minstrelsy became too much to bear. (He later explained to Oprah Winfrey that he felt as if some white viewers had begun to laugh at him, not with him.) And so one day Mr. Chappelle disappeared, fleeing to South Africa.
“Before Dave left, things had been awful between us for a long time,” Mr. Brennan said. “Once the show became this cash cow, everyone who worked for him kind of played his ego against me and against the show. It was a very clichéd, ‘Behind the Music’ kind of thing — money, credit, paranoia, suspicion. It was so unnecessary.”
Mr. Brennan learned of Mr. Chappelle’s disappearance while on set. “I felt beyond betrayed,” he said. “I would have signed a lifelong contract with Dave. He was one of my favorite comedians, we’d been best friends for 15 years. It was painful. It will probably be the biggest personal disappointment of my life.” (An e-mail message sent to Mr. Chappelle’s representative was not answered.)
These days the two are back on (awkward) speaking terms, after a chance run-in last summer at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood. But asked if they might team up again, Mr. Brennan is unequivocal. “The relationship is charred. I don’t think Dave ever wants to be in showbiz again, and I wouldn’t want to work with him. We did the best thing we could have possibly done, and it still ended terribly. What else is there to do?”
After “Chappelle’s Show” imploded, Mr. Brennan began work on a script for a romantic comedy called “50-50” (about God and Satan battling over a couple in the hours before their wedding), which he said he recently sold to the producer Ivan Reitman. He also started doing stand-up, which, despite all his years on the comedy scene, he’d never really tried. He found it cathartic. “So much of show business is a gauntlet of rejection,” he said. “But with stand-up, you can prove, quantifiably, for that night, that you’re funny.”
It also helped hone his instincts for what audiences want — laughs, and plenty of them. It’s this philosophy — minimum quiet space, maximum jokes — that Mr. Brennan brings to bear on “The Goods.” (During shooting, he made it a point to set aside his own sensibilities, which means few “Chappelle’s”-style riffs on race or class.) The film stars Mr. Piven as Don Ready, a hired-gun used-car salesman who is given three days to turn around a failing dealership. In conversation Mr. Brennan pays lip service to the script’s “big” themes (independence vs. stability, the decline of American labor), but he said that in his mind the plot exists mainly as a vehicle to tell jokes.
“Honestly, most comedy stories are pretty thin,” he said. “I mean, does anyone look at ‘Blazing Saddles’ and go, ‘I was really worried about that town’? Were you worried Ben Stiller wasn’t going to get Cameron Diaz? You’re going to remember the jokes.”
“The Goods” is the first bottom-up project from Mr. Ferrell and Mr. McKay’s new production company, Gary Sanchez, and it features the raunchy, improvisational spirit the duo has come to be known for. (Mr. Ferrell makes a brief cameo as a sky-diving Abraham Lincoln impersonator, armed with a preposterous beard and a large purple sex toy.) And though the financial risks are relatively small (the budget was only $14 million), for Mr. Brennan — a rookie director undertaking his first major project since the biggest setback of his professional career — the pressure is still great.
“It is kind of laughable how massive the stakes are,” he said, in fact laughing. “The nice thing about being a writer is that either way I’ll be able to write. But it’s still a big bet. It’s almost like I had a biopsy, and America is holding the test results.”
And if the results come back bad?
Da The New York Times, 9 Agosto, 2009