Morbid as it may sound, what first attracted me to Greg Glienna and Jim Vincent’s 1990’s independent production, Meet the Parents, was that their script called for a dog to be killed. Granted, this is merely another in a long line of humorous gags in their film, but the truth of the matter is that this was a defiantly original move.

"Oh yeah," laughs Glienna, who was given ‘story by’ and ‘associate producer’ credit on the ‘00 remake. "That was the first thing that Universal had us write out for the new version of the film. You can’t kill a dog in a mainstream movie."

Call it the Turner & Hooch effect.

"Well, you shouldn’t really kill a dog in an independent film either," Vincent points out (Vincent also received ‘associate producer’ credit on the ’00 remake).

"But we did!" Glienna exclaims mischievously. He places the event in the proper perspective though, "We were just brainstorming. It was like what horrible things can happen when you meet the parents?" One of those things turned out to be that the would-be groom threw a stick out into a lake, and the family dog drowned chasing it.

While this was amusing to see in the film, it wasn’t anywhere near as funny as the joke Glienna had originally intended to use, a joke referred to as the "popsicle gag". Sadly, time constraints didn’t allow for the popsicle gag to be filmed.

"We were going to show [the lead character] Greg throwing a stick into the lake. Everyone was going to assume that the dog would drown or choke, but he’d keep bringing the stick back to Greg," Glienna explains. "Then in the car ride home, Greg was going to be asked to hold a popsicle stick that his girlfriend’s sister had finished. The plan was for him to throw it out the window, and the dog would follow, chasing the stick."

Strange as it may seem, none of the comically inspired events that occur on-screen to Glienna and Vincent’s straight man, Greg, happened to either of them.

"Wasn’t married then," Vincent smiles.

"Since then I’ve had a lot of people tell me their own experiences that I wish I could have incorporated in the film, but there wasn’t ever anything specific that happened to me," Glienna says. "The hard part is getting the idea in the first place. The rest [of the writing and brainstorming] evolved over a four month time period."

The writing phrase concluded with a tightly wound plot involving one would-be-groom, Greg (as played by Glienna) traveling from his home in Chicago down to a small town in Indiana to meet the parents of his fiancée, Pam (Jacqueline Cahill). Once at Pam’s parents’ house, in the span of a weekend, Greg manages to clog the toilet, break a cherished victrola, cause Pam’s mother to almost lose an eye, kill the family dog, climb into bed with Pam’s sister and push the family to the brink of destruction.

The tone of the original Meet the Parents was strikingly different from that of the newer version. Where the original wanted to play simply for laughs (it ultimately ends with Pam’s father taking off after Greg with a 12 gauge shotgun), the new version seemed to be more intent on making the audience feel awkward and then finishing with a standard Hollywood happy ending.

"The tone of the original is reality," clarifies Vincent. "It’s a real event that is taken to the extreme."

And, for the record, Glienna states, "I didn’t come up with the idea of having [Ben Stiller’s character] named ‘Focker’."

Calling Stiller’s character ‘Greg Focker’ was a funny, but undeniably cheap gag, for which neither man wants to take credit.

"I thought it strained the credibility a little to have [Greg] just walk in and everybody’s like ‘Focker this’ and ‘Focker’ that," Glienna says. "That’s just so mean. You’d expect them to be nice to the guy."

With the script in place, Glienna (who wrote, directed and starred in the original film) and Vincent (who produced and co-starred) could turn their attention onto the filming of their urban myth.

Was it a particularly difficult shoot? "Have you ever tried to make a feature film for $35,000?" Glienna asks me. "It’s not easy." A brief pause, and then, "Obviously, it’d be nice if we could have had an extra hundred grand, we could’ve added camera movement then..."

"And spent more time on the set-ups and lighting," Vincent chimes in.

However, despite a few minor problems, filming wrapped after two weeks of production.

"Once someone forgot to change the [camera’s] batteries," Glienna recants. "We’re [fifty miles outside of Chicago] and we have to run all the way back downtown [to get them]."

"The cast was sitting around calling us names," Vincent says of the affair.

"We had so little time," Glienna says, shaking his head, "We just shot as we went."

"Getting the house [to film in] was the hardest thing," Glienna remembers. "It was a friend of my mom’s. We didn’t have a house until two weeks before shooting. We were desperate. This friend of my mom’s, we paid her like $100 and she was fine with the move. Two days into shooting, she realized the major mistake she’d made. It was strenuous. We were moving all of her furniture and she and her son were living in the house while we were shooting. It’d be two o’clock in the morning and they’d be trying to sleep while we’d be shooting. ‘Can you guys stop shooting now?’"

"Unfortunately," Glienna continues, "We wanted to do some reshoots three weeks later and it turned out that [my mom’s friend] had totally repainted her house. It was a whole different thing."

"New carpeting even," Vincent says.

"We couldn’t go back and shoot," Glienna laughs. "Ah, the world of low budget filmmaking."

After overcoming these stumbling blocks, Glienna and Vincent put together their final cut of their film. Over the course of the next three years, Meet the Parents played to enormous success around Chicago and in different film festivals throughout the world ("We made $12,000 in a single week at one theater in Chicago," Glienna notes).

Universal Studios finally optioned Meet the Parents in 1995.

"What happened was Steven Soderbergh saw it, loved it and wanted to direct it," Glienna says simply. "Jim got [a copy of the film] through to [producer] Nancy Tanenbaum. She shopped it everywhere and everybody passed on it. She got it to Soderbergh, he loved it, so he took it to Universal and that’s how it got through the door... They passed on it originally [though]."

Soderbergh ultimately dropped off the project though, after becoming overwhelmed in the pre-production of Out of Sight.

"But then Jay Roach got passionate about it, " Glienna says. And even then "Universal just didn’t believe in it. They sat on it for a long time. I don’t know why, you’re not going to find a more commercial premise... Everyone can relate to [this plot]."

And relate they did. When Roach’s Meet the Parents was finally released in the fall of 2000, it grossed a reported $170 million in America, allowing Glienna and Vincent to lay claim to creating one of the biggest comedy releases ever. Their version of Meet the Parents isn’t available on video or DVD, a source of irritation to both men, but something that they are working on feverishly to change.

"Hopefully our film will be on video before the Meet the Parents’ sequel," Vincent smiles.

For more information on Glienna and Vincent’s Meet the Parents check their web-site at

www.meetthefilmmakers.com