Like many a movie lover and even some Hollywood insiders, Ron Shelton, a writer-director of classic sports comedies, found himself going through comedy withdrawal last fall and winter, when the studios left farce off their schedules and stuffed them instead with protest films and message movies.
"Shouldn't we be desperate for laughs when it's dark and gloomy?" Shelton asks, over the phone from sunny Ojai, Calif. "Shouldn't we want comedy in the winter? And who ever said that serious movies can't have a sense of humor?"
But the comedy drought ends this summer. June, July and August will offer a cavalcade of reigning comic luminaries in promising star vehicles. They include Steve Carell as a doofus secret agent in Get Smart; Eddie Murphy as a tiny spaceship captain in Meet Dave; Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in Step Brothers; Adam Sandler as an Israeli commando turned hairstylist in You Don't Mess With the Zohan; and Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder, the potentially gut-busting tale of actors in a Southeast Asian war movie who get caught up in real combat.
In recent summers, comic-book revivals such as Batman Begins and Superman Returns turned out dour or melancholy. But this month, Jon Favreau and Steven Spielberg have injected some madcap slapstick into their action-hero blockbusters, Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Don't look for deep reasons for this turnaround, Shelton cautions. "This business is reactive. It's all about what happened a year or two or three before. I used to be told I could never make another R-rated comedy, even though all my R-rated comedies were successful. Then Wedding Crashers comes along in the summer of 2005, and all you can make is R-rated summer comedies.
"Comedies, relatively speaking, are
ComediesComedies[From Page 1c]
not terribly expensive. They're not driven by special effects or computer graphics, so they're considered great counterprogramming against the films that are."
Will the string of spoofs, burlesques and crazy comedies for weeks to come mark a happy ending for Hollywood's yearlong famine of top-drawer farce? That depends not on the marquee names pulling audiences into the theater but on the craftsmen who are supposed to spark them into life.
The pool of comic talent available to big-screen producers is as broad and deep as it was in the 1980s, when Bill Murray, Steve Martin and John Candy came into their own on film.
