Youtube daily report Jul 3 2017

Andrew Jay Cohen has one of the cooler origin stories you could imagine in contemporary Hollywood comedy. In 2003, he was hired as an assistant to Original Nerd of Comedy Judd Apatow on the instant-classic Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.

This weekend, Cohen makes his directorial debut with The House, a suburbia-set sendup of Scorsese's Casino that teams comedic heavyweights Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler. In between, Cohen's résumé is loaded with various roles on other beloved laughers. Undeclared. Neighbors.

"He cut his teeth in our world," Ferrell said fondly when remembering his House helmer's humble beginnings. "I remember when he worked for Judd. He was always in good spirits.".

Ferrell followed that last comment with a belly laugh, and upon meeting Cohen for coffee and croissants one hot and sunny morning in Beverly Hills, it quickly becomes clear why.

The 40-year-old Scarsdale, New York, native carries a contagious energy and unbridled enthusiasm for the craft of comedy — and by all accounts, life in general. And he's amiable as hell.

The motto Cohen has subscribed to since packing up for Hollywood at 21? "Don't be a d–k.

Just be cool and pay your dues." After graduating from Yale with a degree in film production, Cohen moved to Los Angeles with "delusions of grandeur" alongside his childhood friend Brendan O'Brien, with whom he'd go on to co-write Neighbors, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, and The House.

He landed an entry-level gig assisting a lit agent at CAA, and she was "awful," he said.

"Straight out of Swimming With Sharks." But it was an industry bootcamp for the wet-behind-the-ears transplant." I got humility, organizational skills, comfortable at a fast pace… and I learned how to lie," he laughed.

Cohen made a spec commercial for Nokia "that nobody asked for" and shopped it around CAA, and it ultimately helped land him his first film gig: in New York as assistant to Adrian Lyne on the auteur's not-so-funny Diane Lane-Richard Gere thriller Unfaithful (2002).

He helped Lyne construct a lookbook of cues for the movie, and did whatever the director needed, like read Olivier Martinez's lines as Lane spoke to him on the phone. "Adrian Lyne taught me so much about visual filmmaking," he said.

Back in Los Angeles, Cohen came across the job listing at another talent agency, UTA, that would change his life: "It said, 'Comedy Producer Looking for Assistant,'" he remembered.

"I was like, OK, I like comedy, I like producing… Yeah it was Judd Apatow for Anchorman. But back then he was 'failed TV producer Judd Apatow.' He'd had two shows canceled.

Then he'd had a kid [Maude], and now he's gonna produce this movie with these guys from SNL [Ferrell and head writer Adam McKay]. But that was the mothership.".

Cohen knew immediately that the classy San Diego-set comedy was destined for greatness. "It was a dream. Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, golden ticket. I was in the front row," he said.

"I had never seen anything like it, the way [David] Koechner, [Paul] Rudd, Will, Christina Applegate, Fred Willard, Steve Carell, the way they were constantly going and riffing with the type of improv that we take for granted now.

It blew my mind.". In addition to being at Apatow's beck and call, Cohen also shot behind-the-scenes footage for the film, and found his calling.

"I was able to watch the process, watch Adam McKay direct Will, watch Will shine, watch Adam shine behind the camera, yelling [lines] out. I was like, want to do that! I want to be that guy.".

Apatow then hired him to produce DVD extras for his two canceled shows-turned-cult classics: Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. "When he said you're gonna produce DVDs, I had a lump in my throat cause I was so excited.

I tell students, 'You gotta take it. Whatever the job is.

If you excel at it, even if it's just making coffee — if you make amazing coffee and remember the sugar and ice or milk, whatever they ask for — it's all weirdly a test of how badly you want it.".

Cohen wrangled the likes of James Franco, Jason Segel, and Seth Rogen to record commentaries for the episodes, and made lifelong friends in the process. He shares Los Angeles Clippers tickets with Martin Starr to this day.

And his relationship with Rogen would pay major dividends a few years later.

After those two stints in home video ("Because you have to test twice, never once," Cohen laughed), he was promoted to associate producer on The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), which marked Apatow's feature film directorial debut.

Once again he captured behind-the-scenes footage, but was also now in charge of any of content shown on television screens in the film.

His claim to fame came when the producers weren't able to clear the video game Mortal Kombat until the 11th hour. Once it was finally cleared the day of shooting, he rushed to learn the game's signature special moves.

"That move you see in the movie [with Rogen and Rudd trading gay jokes as one of them pulls off the "heart rip" fatality], I learned that that morning. That's my cameo," Cohen boasted.

Like, 'Will I get fired if I can't perfect this special move? Is this what I went to Yale University and NYU Sight & Sound for?".

Cohen would serve as associate producer again on Talladega Nights (2006) and then a co-producer on Funny People (2009), where he continued to press directors McKay and Apatow, respectively, for intel and score fly-on-the-wall filmmaking knowledge.

All the while, he and O'Brien plugged away at writing projects, and they got their big break after approaching Rogen to help spur Neighbors (2014) into production.

Cohen remembers going on the set of The Guilt Trip, the actor's comedy alongside Barbra Streisand, where they pitched Zac Efron the concept in Rogen's trailer.

"I'm just like, 'Oh my God, this is the funniest face-off I've ever seen," he said. "It immediately felt iconic.". The inspiration for The House originally came from Cohen and O'Brien's days as lonely high school freshmen in Westchester.

The girls they knew had all started to hang out with older guys — a very universal, very real struggle for freshmen dudes — so they started spending their nights playing poker and craps at a friend's house.

"Originally it was the kids keeping it a secret from their parents," Cohen said. "But my manger was like, 'You write adults acting like idiots so well, why don't you make it about the parents?".

So The House became the story of Scott and Kate Johansen (Ferrell and Poehler), middle-class suburban parents whose teenage daughter (Ryan Simpkins) loses her full-ride scholarship to Bucknell because of shady small-town politics.

Desperate to raise the capital for tuition, Scott and Kate start a casino in the Brady Bunch-esque abode of their friend Frank (Jason Mantzoukas) — and things quickly go haywire from there, dismemberments and all.

Cohen said there have been real-life cases of in-home casinos that they looked at for production design, but they were no laughing matters. "It's super sad," he described.

"The photos are bleak, man. You see the plastic ties and all the stuff marked. Like it's so low-rent you could see it was born out of desperation. But I think there's a darkness in the movie that reflects that.".

Cohen and O'Brien brought the concept to Ferrell ("We were like, 'Let's Robert De Niro' you"), who immediately attached himself to the project — and subsequently helped lure his fellow SNL alum Poehler.

Cohen desperately wanted to make it his debut behind the camera, but for writers, "No one wants you to direct, ever," he said. "They're like, 'Couldn't we get a director who's made a movie before?".

Still, Cohen's long history of dues-paying in the comedy world endeared him to Ferrell and the Warner Bros. brass. Plus, there's that youthful vibrancy. "He brought so much energy and passion," Ferrell said.

"He was as amped on the last day as he was on the first day, and so excited to be making a movie, which I think is contagious to be around, especially if you've done a lot of movies.

It just reminds you, 'No this is really fun. This is really cool to be around.".

For more infomation >> From 'Anchorman' Assistant to 'The House' Helmer: Andrew Jay Cohen Climbs the Ranks of Comedy - Duration: 11:16.

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'Men in Black' Turns 20: How It Rewrote the Playbook for Movie Special Effects - Duration: 8:42.

On July 2, 1997, the sci-fi comedy Men in Black opened in theaters, introducing audiences to the extraterrestrials who secretly live on Earth and the straight-faced special agents (played by Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones) charged with keeping them in line.

While Smith, at the height of his film stardom, was the biggest audience draw, what really made the film click was the aliens: a delightful rogue's gallery of weird creatures living amongst and inside ordinary humans.

Twenty years later, Hollywood is experiencing a nostalgia for "practical effects," the art of creating effects in-camera with puppets and makeup — which is how effects artist Rick Baker designed the alien population of Men in Black.

But the film also used computer graphics to supplement, and sometimes replace, Baker's tactile creations. To watch Men in Black now is to see Hollywood's transition from practical effects to CG… and to understand why filmmakers are circling back.

Baker, who won one of his seven Oscars for Men in Black, has described the film in multiple interviews as "design hell." By that, he doesn't mean that working on it was a total nightmare — after all, he returned for two sequels — but that his creative process was continually stalled while he waited for director Barry Sonnenfeld and executive producer Steven Spielberg to hash out exactly what they wanted.

"There were so many people involved in the designs and nothing was getting approved and time was a-wasting," Baker said in a 2015 video interview.

Sometimes, this meant that designs he spent months building were suddenly scrapped, like the insectoid alien from the film's climactic battle, which was replaced with a CG creature.

(Take a look at Baker's giant puppet version here.) But other puppets make it onto the screen with memorable results, like Rosenberg, the dying alien hidden behind a human face.

That alien, nicknamed "Chucky" by Baker, was performed by two different-sized puppets, the larger of which had articulated lips and blinking eyes. The dialogue was synced digitally with the puppet by a computer program, as shown in the video below.

A minimum of computer animation was used on that alien, while only slightly more was used for the "worm" aliens, ultimately one of the franchise's most popular creatures, who began their lives as simple rod puppets in Baker's studio.

Other characters were a more equal blend of practical and digital effects. Take "Mikey," the first alien to be unmasked in the film.

As shown in the clip below, Baker spent 10 months creating an 8-foot-tall alien suit to be worn by a real actor, with a head and body parts controlled by 10 remote operators.

Even so, the design team couldn't figure out a way for the creature to run quickly, as required by the script. So the practical Mikey is replaced by a CG Mikey partway through his brief scene.

For most of Hollywood history, special effects didn't work like this. If a director needed a cast of aliens, those aliens had to be designed, created, and made camera-ready in the months leading up to the shoot.

By the time filming wrapped, the creature designer's job was done, and the aliens on camera were the ones who made the final cut.

If the director wasn't happy with how it looked, his only option was to reshoot it — much like George Lucas shot extra footage for the Star Wars cantina scene, including new aliens designed by Baker.

In contrast, digital effects enable the designers to do much of their work in post-production, inserting characters and design elements into scenes after they've been shot.

On Men in Black, the studio tried it both ways: they hired a massive crew of makeup and creature artists to make aliens in the months leading up to the shoot, and then employed Industrial Light and Magic's team of digital artists to create the remaining aliens, and add realistic touches to the existing puppets, in post-production.

That giant preproduction period, once standard on sci-fi and fantasy films, is incredibly lavish by today's standards. It's much more efficient and affordable to create a majority of the effects digitally, after the cameras have stopped rolling.

Men in Black was made just at the cusp of Hollywood's full transition to digital, which was heralded by previous ILM films Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Forrest Gump.

With the next few years, The Phantom Menace and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring would serve as bold announcements that practical effects were a thing of the past.

Except, they weren't — not really. Baker designed aliens for both Men in Black sequels and continued to work in Hollywood, often in collaboration with digital artists, until his 2015 retirement.

That year, he lamented the loss of the "big jobs" that "don't exist anymore," but acknowledged that the industry had been changing for some time.

Coincidentally, 2015 was also the year that Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened in theaters — a film that used the promise of "practical effects" very heavily in its promotion.

Audiences who felt that the original Star Wars films looked better than the prequels (whose ambitious, early CG has objectively not aged well) were thrilled at the return of animatronic droids and actors in alien masks.

That said, the approach taken by director J.J. Abrams on The Force Awakens is much closer to Men in Black than it is to The Empire Strikes Back.

Abrams' practical creatures and effects were heavily supplemented with digital in post-production. And that's the case with all of the recent blockbusters that used practical effects as a selling point, including Mad Max: Fury Road and Spider-Man: Homecoming.

There's no going back to the old way, when characters and effects looked basically the same on-set as they did on screen.

However, filmmakers are now recognizing that there's value in the old-school approach, when actors could really interact with a film's fantasy elements.

That's why director Bill Condon insisted on having actual props built of the talking clock, candlestick, and teapot in his live-action Beauty and the Beast, and why puppeteers were hired to help create realistic animals in The Revenant.

In Baker's words, "I think there's a real difference when you know that something's really happening.". Just look at that tiny, dying alien from Men in Black; in a matter of seconds, the puppet's performance tells the story of a whole life.

That's the kind of effect that any director strives for, and whether it's achieved with digital rendering or foam latex doesn't matter in the end.

For more infomation >> 'Men in Black' Turns 20: How It Rewrote the Playbook for Movie Special Effects - Duration: 8:42.

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Weekend Box Office: 'Despicable Me 3' No. 1 With $75M; 'Baby Driver' Runs 'The House' Off the Road - Duration: 5:58.

This years fireworks display at the July Fourth box office was decidedly mixed, led by Despicable Me 3 with $75. 4 million from 4,529 theaters.

In an surprise twist, the threequel came in notably behind expectations for Universal and Illumination. Heading into the weekend, most had expected Gru and his minions to rake in $85 million-$90 million.

While Despicable Me 3 didnt get entirely sunk by sequel fatigue, it proves another cautionary tale for Hollywood.

Despicable Me 2 likewise opened over the Fourth of July frame in 2013, grossing $83.5 million for the weekend proper and $143.1 million in its five-day debut (that year, the holiday fell on a Thursday, which is more advantageous than a Tuesday).

And in summer 2015, spinoff Minions opened to a huge $115.7 million over the July 10-12 weekend.

The third installment follows Gru (Steve Carell) as he meets up with his long-lost twin brother, Dru (also voiced by Carell). Together, they take on a diamond thief (Trey Parker).

In a major win for Sonys film studio, Edgar Wrights Baby Driver rode to a five-day debut of $30 million from 3,226 theaters after opening Wednesday.

Sonys TriSTar Pictures, MRC and Working Title partnered on the original movie, which is proving to be a powerful antidote to summer popcorn fare.

The critically acclaimed heist thriller stars Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Jon Hamm, Kevin Spacey and Jamie Foxx. Sony puts the budget at $34 million.

This years big July Fourth dud is New Line and Village Roadshows The House, starring Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler. The R-rated debuted in sixth place with $9 million from 3,134 theaters, one of the worst openings of Ferrells career.

The House, about an everyday couple who open an underground gambling establishment when their daughter cant get a college scholarship, wasnt screened in advance for critics. Thats never a good sign.

And when reviewers did see the movie on their own, they were far from impressed. Im so disappointed, and especially for the actors. The movie just didnt connect with a broad audience.

Clearly, there is a trend of these kinds of comedies not working, says Jeff Goldstein, president of domestic distribution for Warner Bros., New Lines parent studio. Warners wasnt entirely banished from the July Fourth picnic, however.

Patty JenkinsWonder Womanflew past the $700 million mark at the global box office in its fifth weekend, and is now the top-grossing movie (whether live-action or animated) helmed by a woman who had sole directing duties.

The films hold is simply exceptional, says Goldstein. Wonder Woman placed No.

4 behind Transformers: The Last Knight, which fell 62 percent in its second weekend to $17 million for a creaky domestic total of $102.1 million.The Last Knight, a victim of sequel fatigue in North America, is far bigger internationally, grossing another $68 million from 44 markets this weekend for a foreign total of $327.8 million and $429.9 million globally.

Disney and Pixars Cars 3 rounded out the top five domestically, plunging 60 percent in its third weekend to $9.5 million for a total $120.7 million (yes, it is also suffering from sequelitis domestically).

The threequel has earned an early $53.1 million offshore for a worldwide tally of $173.8 million.

Several prestige players continued to make gains. Focus Features Sofia Coppolas The Beguiled moved into the top 10 to rest at No. 8, earning $3.3 million as it expanded into a total of 674 theaters in its sophomore outing.

Michael Showalters The Bick Sick, placing No. 12, dazzled with $1.7 million from 72 theaters in its second weekend for a per-screen average of $23,550 and domestic total of $2.2 million for Amazon Studios and Lionsgate.