By DAVE ITZKOFF
AS production began early this year on his new comedy, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” Kevin Smith was still seeking an actor for a supporting part. So he asked for suggestions from his leading man, Seth Rogen, who was in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up,” two comedies written and directed by Judd Apatow, and one of the writers of “Superbad,” which Mr. Apatow produced. Mr. Rogen recommended Danny McBride, who appeared with him in “Pineapple Express,” another Apatow production.
Then Mr. Smith surveyed his “Zack and Miri” cast. Mr. Rogen’s co-star is Elizabeth Banks, who was featured in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Craig Robinson, who appeared in “Knocked Up” and “Pineapple Express,” also has a role. So does Jerry Bednob, another alumnus of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Ultimately, Mr. Smith declined Mr. Rogen’s suggestion.
As Mr. Smith recalled in an interview: “I had to actually stop him and go, ‘Shouldn’t you ask your boss or something? There’s a lot of people from his movies.’ ”
Mr. Smith’s predicament is just one part of a larger problem facing many filmmakers in the field of R-rated comedy: It is nearly impossible for them to make their pot-smoking, breast-baring (but heartfelt!) movies without in some way encroaching on the raunchy (yet tender!) turf that Mr. Apatow already owns.
That is the quandary facing “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” directed by Mr. Smith, and “Role Models,” directed by David Wain, two coming comedies with very different pedigrees and different approaches to the question: How do you avoid looking like pale imitations of Mr. Apatow’s formidable achievements?
“It crossed my mind at points,” Mr. Wain said of the looming Apatow presence. His voice filled with sarcasm, he added, “Basically, what I’m trying to say is: I’m as successful as Judd Apatow.”
For Mr. Smith, it would be understandable if he held a grudge against Mr. Apatow; his directorial breakthrough, “Clerks” — a film so dirty it was nearly rated NC-17 solely because of its dialogue — predated “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” by 11 years.
And he has grown used to hearing that “Zack and Miri” (opening Friday), about two pitiful roommates who fall in love while making a pornographic movie, could have come straight from Mr. Apatow’s slacker oeuvre.
Instead, Mr. Smith says he is grateful that Mr. Apatow’s box-office prowess has reinvigorated Hollywood’s appetite for R-rated humor. “I thank God for Judd,” he said, “because he shattered what I assumed was a $30 million ceiling.”
Mr. Smith said he had been kicking around the premise of “Zack and Miri” since at least 1997, when he contemplated a slightly similar movie for Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams. But he said he was not sufficiently inspired to write the screenplay until he saw Mr. Rogen in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”
“The dude had come into his own, and he just sounded like one of my characters,” Mr. Smith said. When the $148 million domestic box office of “Knocked Up” made Mr. Rogen’s stardom a foregone conclusion, getting the resources Mr. Smith needed for “Zack and Miri” — and casting Mr. Rogen — became easier.
“If I tried to make this movie 10 years ago,” Mr. Smith said, “I would have been making it for like two million bucks, and maybe we’d get the standard top-50-markets release.” Instead, he said, the Weinstein Company will open the film, which cost $24 million, in 2,800 theaters, backing it with a national print and television campaign.
For Mr. Smith, the challenge of working in a post-Apatow marketplace, and often the solution, is to come up with increasingly transgressive jokes that will surprise and amuse his audience. (Indeed, a simulated sex scene that had too many thrusts and a sight gag involving excretory functions almost got “Zack and Miri” slapped with an NC-17 rating; a few judicious trims avoided that.)
“After 15 years of doing it, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what makes people — my people — squeamish,” Mr. Smith said. “As time goes by, it gets harder and harder to find things that haven’t been done a zillion times before.”
Fellow comedy producers argue that while Mr. Apatow has a flair for over-the-top jokes, his collaborative filmmaking style is the true source of his success.
“He has an extraordinary ability to cast, and the luxury of spending the time with his actors, so that they are really able to work out the characters and the jokes,” said Peter Safran, a producer whose films include “Scary Movie” and “Meet the Spartans.”
It is a lesson that Mr. Wain, the director of “Role Models,” has heeded: his film (opening Nov. 7), about a pair of aimless adult-escents ordered by the courts to work for a Big Brother-like mentoring program, stars Paul Rudd, a supporting player in both “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” (Mr. Rudd, a longtime collaborator of Mr. Wain’s, also helped write the script.)
The cast has other actors associated with Mr. Apatow’s repertory, including Ms. Banks, Joe Lo Truglio and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who shall forever be known as McLovin from “Superbad.”
Mr. Wain points out that many of these actors were his friends first. “With pretty much every part,” he said, “it’s like: ‘Who do I want to work with on a day? Who’s fun to hang around with, and who are the funniest people we know?’ Those happen to be the people that I’ve worked with over and over again, many of whom also work in Judd’s films.”
And Mr. Wain may be entitled to a bit of payback: it was “Wet Hot American Summer,” his low-budget 2001 homage to sex-crazed summer-camp comedies, that helped establish Mr. Rudd and Ms. Banks as comedic performers.
On “Role Models,” Mr. Wain said, he preferred to work with familiar actors because he constructed the movie from a mixture of scripted and improvised scenes — a strategy Mr. Apatow frequently employs in his films. But Mr. Wain said this approach was the result of having time and money to make the movie (which Universal Pictures said cost less than $30 million), and not Mr. Apatow’s influence.
“If there’s a great idea, but it involves switching gears on the shoot day, I can make that judgment call,” Mr. Wain said. “This is funnier idea, so let’s throw out the props and waste the film we already shot and start a new way.”
Gross-out gags and improv comedy cannot quite cover up the fact that like many of Mr. Apatow’s films, “Role Models” and “Zack and Miri” are about male protagonists who are nominally grown up but must be dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood.
This thematic overlap may stem from the similarly demoralizing suburban childhoods that the creators of these films shared. “We’re all generally not the most athletic kids, the most popular kids, not the best-looking kids,” said Mr. Rudd — who, despite his chiseled good looks, said he could “understand the plight of the nerd.”
It’s also evidence that filmmakers are not merely imitating Mr. Apatow but also influencing one another as well as Mr. Apatow’s young disciples.
Mr. Rogen said that when he and Evan Goldberg wrote the script for “Superbad,” they looked to “Clerks” for its “very honest, dirty, natural-sounding conversations, with a very simple emotional story line. That’s exactly what we’re being credited for pioneering, and it’s just not true.”
He added that “Clerks” was “just the first movie we saw where we were like, ‘Wow, these guys are having the conversations that we’re having,’ as pathetic as that might be.”
Comedies about stultified males are likely to remain popular, Mr. Rogen said, as long as young men continue to feel uncertainty. “It’s so funny,” he said, “when I look at these characters, they don’t seem particularly underdeveloped in any way to me. They seem exactly like everyone I know.”
The downside for actresses who appear in these comedies is that their roles are not likely to get bigger or more fleshed out. “The women are essentially having to play mother to their boyfriends,” Ms. Banks said. In these guy-friendly films, she said, “they don’t really write the women. They need to hire people to come in and improv, and come up with something interesting to do.”
But as long as Mr. Apatow’s films remain profitable, there will be strong financial incentives for studios to keep making movies like them. Mr. Wain said that “Role Models” could be “the absolute colossal bomb of the year, and it will still outgross everything I’ve ever done, combined.”
Likewise, Mr. Smith said it was “very safe to say” that “Zack and Miri” would be his highest-grossing film to date, adding, “For that, it only has to make $31 million.” (“Dogma,” which grossed $30.6 million, currently holds that honor; “Clerks” made slightly more than $3 million in 1994.)
And if “Zack and Miri” should break that personal record because filmgoers mistakenly believe that Mr. Apatow collaborated on it, Mr. Smith said he could live with that.
“If somebody’s walking in, seeing that trailer and going, ‘Oh, it’s from the same people that did “Knocked Up” and “Superbad,” ’ I’m fine with that,” he said. “I have no pretense of, ‘No, it’s from the guy who made “Clerks”!’ Whatever gets them in the door, man.”
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