TOM LENNON: How are you doing?

TOM LENNON: That’s good to hear. Wait, you’re the other Oak Parker.

TOM LENNON: What year did you graduate?

TOM LENNON: Oh, holy shit, you’re later. I was long gone by then.

TOM LENNON: I was practically in retirement by then. Uh, ’88.

TOM LENNON: What was his name?

TOM LENNON: I, uh, I didn’t really excel at the math.

( Lennon drops phone)

TOM LENNON: You there? I got one of these Radio Shack phones and they’re worth every penny. I really struggled through the math classes. I was in the remedial math down on the first floor with the special ed kids.

TOM LENNON: Yeah. And believe it or not, I struggled through that.

TOM LENNON: I actually met him when he came back to the high school one time.

TOM LENNON: He came and taught an improv class. They had all these actors come back to the school.

TOM LENNON: Exactly. He’s that guy. That’s a nice pull, good reference. I got a copy of your magazine, it’s cool.

TOM LENNON: Or something.

TOM LENNON: Jimmy Kimmel.

TOM LENNON: Right out of the gate. I think it’s the first thing out of Kerri Kenney’s mouth. It wouldn’t go down in a lot of other places.

TOM LENNON: It’s come back around. Apparently, Bill Cosby just got in trouble for using it.

CHRIS NEUMER: I think you have to know your fan base.
TOM LENNON: You have to walk a very fine line with that. Bill got in trouble last week. I was out of town in Belize at the time, but people on the radio have been yelling about it. He’s in big big trouble.

TOM LENNON: Apparently you don’t fly in airplanes much. If you flew coach in American Airlines, you would have seen every one of those.

TOM LENNON: Rightfully so. It’s a horrible movie.

TOM LENNON: Um, which part was that?

TOM LENNON: She’s very charming.

CHRIS NEUMER: Congratulations on the new gig.

TOM LENNON: Oh yeah. Ben and I are writing The Six Million Dollar Man for Jim Carrey, Todd Phillips is directing. I like Todd's stuff, although I haven’t seen Road Trip, but I thought Old School was very, very funny.

TOM LENNON: Old School has humongous laughs all the way through it. I’ve got to say, out of everybody that we work with, Todd is probably my favorite guy to work with.

TOM LENNON: There’s absolutely no bullshit with him. There’s so much bullshit when you write in the studio system out here. There are so many meetings about people’s motivations and tracking characters and his thing is, "Is it funny?" If it’s funny it’s going to be in the movie and if it’s not funny, it’s not going to be in the movie. And that’s it. He is an incredibly low threshold for bullshit. He’s a fun guy with a great sense of humor. He’s the best kind of guy with a sense of humor. He’s a tough guy and he’ll fight like crazy, but when he agrees, you’re done. We fight a lot, but they’re the kind of fights you have with somebody because they care.

TOM LENNON: Not like the fights you have with a studio suit. It’s because they really care about what’s funny and stuff. I’ve not seen Road Trip, but pound for pound, Old School is really funny. We did about two and a half months on Starsky and Hutch, which basically constituted the shooting draft. Then Todd and Scot Armstrong came back in and through some stuff in. We were like, "Oh shit." You hate to see yourself do one draft of a script and then have somebody else come back in and change what you’ve done. But I have to say, some of the stuff they added was some of the funniest stuff in the movie.

TOM LENNON: All the Will Ferrell double dragons stuff. That was Todd. He wrote that with his partner Scot. Honestly, I thought that was the huge, off-the-charts laugh of the movie.

TOM LENNON: (laughs)

TOM LENNON: That was a big thing for us when we came onto Starsky and Hutch. Ben, who plays Travis on Reno is my writing partner. Ben Stiller had read a script we’d written for a movie Jimmy Fallon ended up doing called Taxi. It comes out in October with Queen Latifah. He read that because he was thinking about doing it, but he couldn’t do it because he’d agreed to do Starsky and Hutch. He asked us, "Would you guys come in and work on Starsky and Hutch?" So we said, "Let’s take a look at the script." The script was set in right now, in the present. It was like Charlie’s Angels of something. They were these quirky guys in tight pants and it was right now.

TOM LENNON: Exactly. It didn’t make any sense. So we went in and sat down and said, The problem with the movie inherently is that in 1975 Starsky and Hutch are the coolest guys in town. They can meet girls, they’re cool. Now, they’re idiots in pleather jackets and skin tight, plum smuggler jeans. So we said, if you want us to do this movie, it has to be 1975 or we won’t do it. And then everybody talked about it and it doubled the cost of the movie to do that. But they all agreed that it was what was best for the movie.

TOM LENNON: Pretty much, except we didn’t credit for working on the movie. So nothing goes in my pocket off that.

TOM LENNON: Our reward for Starsky and Hutch was getting to write The Six Million Dollar Man for Todd.

TOM LENNON: Oh yeah. The newest Herbie the Love Bug movie. I think it starts shooting next month.

TOM LENNON: Yeah. She’s getting herself into all kinds of trouble all the time these days. Endlessly getting busted for drinking somewhere or crashing her car into something.

TOM LENNON: That’s the best kind of starlet. She’s the old-timey starlet.

TOM LENNON: Her handlers have to put out fires all the time.

CHRIS NEUMER: It’s amusing for all of us. Let me ask you this, this is the biggest topic I’ve got for you. I’ll say this, I consider my literate and fairly smart. There seems to be an interesting contradiction to comedies. It seems as though as success is defined for comedy, by the public at least, as the big movie. The Old School, the Starsky and Hutch or the Me Myself and Irene. Now to me, most of the big movies are really bad. It’s the lower budget productions and the TV shows are good.

TOM LENNON: What’s a good–it’s funny because I’m involved in movies like that both as an actor and a writer. Other than the Todd Phillips stuff, they’re not movies I would ever go and see. They’re not movies I would see. What would, for you, be the last really funny movie you saw?

TOM LENNON: Written by my buddy Stuart Bloomburg.

TOM LENNON: I did the table read of it, but I didn’t see,

TOM LENNON: That’s pretty funny.

TOM LENNON: Super Troopers is hilarious. Everybody always thought we somehow–we did Reno way, way before any of us had seen Super Troopers. It sat on the shelf for a couple years.

TOM LENNON: Right. Broken Lizard guys came out and said, "Why’d they set it in Reno and wear the same outfits as us?" Well Super Troopers isn’t set in Reno, so I don’t know why they’re always saying that.

TOM LENNON: Jay Chandrasekhar, yes, said that.

TOM LENNON: No, I did not.

TOM LENNON: I competed on speech team against Hinsdale. I was on the speech team, we called it forensics.

TOM LENNON: Not debate, you do scenes from plays. It’s incredibly macho and whatnot.

TOM LENNON: (laughs) Oh yeah! Oh sure. It’s a big deal. It was a big deal at the time. We took it very seriously.

TOM LENNON: That’s the–The real issue is very simple. The more people’s money you take to do something, the more inputs you get. When you do a movie in the studio system, there’s a committee. A committee of six or seven people you answer to. There’s two or three producers, a studio executive and one or two people above that studio executive. There’s the director and the writers, who are the absolute bottom of the totem pole of what anybody gives a shit about. So to do a movie in that system you absolutely must be willing to compromise. The only guaranteed way to make something not very funny is to make it vague. Being very, very specific is the only real way to be funny. And in big studio movies, the really specific humor gets sanded down into vaguer stuff. You throw out the high hand and the low hand and you get the middle part of the curve. All studio movies are the middle of the Bell curve. The only way to do something is to do it yourself. And the only way to do that is to not take any money from anyone or take as little money as possible from anyone and that’s it. Sorry, I was just feeding a squirrel and it jumped at me.

TOM LENNON: Eating–feeding, I mean feeding.

TOM LENNON: It may have been. So you take a movie like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, which is a movie that’s packaged like a Mountain Dew campaign. You take a certain number of elements that appeal to this demographic and that demographic and it’s very much like an advertising campaign.

TOM LENNON: Absolutely. It’s very interesting writing for the studios, the marketing tie-ins are a really big deal. In Herbie the Love Bug, the Volkswagen tie-in is humongous.

TOM LENNON: The way I do it is to I mix it up. I write big mainstream studio comedies with my partner Ben Garant. And then the TV show we do is a very culty sort of show where we have no interference creatively from the network. They are incredibly supportive. They let us get away with almost anything–you know, you’ve seen Reno. We have men kissing, people saying the N word, stuff that would never ever fly at other networks. As soon as we get absolute lose our minds frustrated with one aspect of it–the movie Taxi, we worked on pretty much consistently for three years and it still hasn’t come out yet.

TOM LENNON: A remake of a French film called Taxi, by Luc Besson.

TOM LENNON: Absolutely not. That’s the other thing about working on movies, the commitment is years. That’s one thing that’s so frustrating about the process is that it goes on and on and on for years. There’s a movie we wrote called Balls of Fury, a high stakes ping-pong movie. We wrote it five years ago and now Sasha Cohen is attached to it. He’s Ali G. Ben’s going to direct it. It’s been now five years. It will be almost six years before we shoot a single frame of film.

TOM LENNON: That’s absolutely true. There’s a tremendous amount of keeping your head down.

TOM LENNON: It was absolutely because of that. The movie had–there was one studio that was interested in it before Dodgeball made 30 million dollars–

TOM LENNON: Fox Searchlight. Immediately after Dodgeball was released, the Monday after, four other studios made offers on it and it had been sitting around for five years. Eventually it ends up at New Line. Here’s another sort of goofy sports movie, so…

TOM LENNON: It’s $20 million. That’s small for out here but enormous for us. When you consider that an entire season of Reno 911 costs five million bucks and this year we did sixteen episodes. To us it seems like a fortune, but the movie people are like, "Oh God, I don’t know how you’re going to do it [with that little money]," We also are shooting for 45 days, which to us is crazy.

TOM LENNON: We shoot a season of Reno 911 in 30 days, so you know we move real fast.

TOM LENNON: Not really. The hardest part is the editing.

TOM LENNON: When you improvise everything–we write a little tiny outline on 3x5 cards–and every scene there’s never any dialogue written for anything–so our takes are epic. There are takes that are a full-length beta tape. That’s 24-26 or 28 minutes long. Which then requires that we sit, one at a time and go through all this stuff.

TOM LENNON: Well, I’d say for Reno, it really is the first thing that comes into our head. We shoot our rehearsal. We’re at our location, everyone’s in costume and we don’t talk through it much, because there’s nothing really to talk through.

CHRIS NEUMER: What type of crew do you have on Reno?

TOM LENNON: It’s a relatively small crew by TV standards. When we originally shot the pilot we used a crew like Cops would have had a crew. A guy with a boom mike, a beta cam and a light on the beta cam. We’ve gotten away from that a little. Now we might two cameras rolling. When we shoot the morning briefing now we sometimes have three cameras rolling because there are so many people in the scenes, it’s really hard to cover without people needing Dramamine to watch the coverage of the scenes. But we really don’t talk about it at all. Once in a while we talk some things about a little tiny bit, but for this kind of thing, talking about it generally doesn’t make it funnier. It actually makes it feel a little more stale. It makes it feel a little stiff. I think you can tell on the show when some things been rehearsed or we shot the first rehearsal.

TOM LENNON: You can feel people waiting or you can feel people thinking about things which never feels very real. For our show to feel real, it has to feel like these things are just coming out of people’s mouths as they’re living it. Those are the moments that are the most successful. We’ve gotten to the point where we don’t really rehearse at all, because it never helps. By the second or third time we shoot something, it’s never as funny as it was the first time. If it wasn’t funny the first time, we generally shoot it two more times just as a courtesy and then move.