The Ben Stiller Show is an American sketch comedy series that aired on MTV from 1990 to 1991, and then on Fox from September 27, 1992 to January 17, 1993.
Though the sketch series was short lived, it went out with the bang -
earning Ben Stiller
his first Emmy at the 45th Emmys in 1993, September 19.
Created by Ben Stiller, Judd Apatow.
Written by Ben Stiller,
Judd Apatow,
Robert Cohen,
David Cross,
Brent Forrester,
Bob Odenkirk,
Sultan Pepper,
Dino Stamatopoulos.
Starring Ben Stiller,
Andy Dick,
Janeane Garofalo,
Bob Odenkirk.
Theme music composer Dweezil Zappa.
PASADENA, CA - SEPTEMBER 19: Ben Stiller attends 45th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards on September 19, 1993 at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in Pasadena, California
Pictures: GettyImages
Judd Apatow and Ben Stiller
Pasadena, CA - 1993: (L-R) David Cross, Bob Odenkirk, Dino Stamatopoulos, Judd Apatow, Ben Stiller, Andy Dick, cast and crew of 'The Ben Stiller Show' at the 45th Primetime Emmy Awards, Pasadena Civic Auditorium, Pasadena, California, Sunday, September 19, 1993.
1993 Emmy Awards Governors Ball Party: Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo during 1993 Emmy Awards Governors Ball Party in Los Angeles, California (September 20)
HAVE A GOOD TRIP: ADVENTURES IN PSYCHEDELICS is a documentary featuring comedic tripping stories from A-list actors, comedians, and musicians. Star-studded reenactments and trippy animations bring their surreal hallucinations to life. Mixing comedy with a thorough investigation of psychedelics, HAVE A GOOD TRIP explores the pros, cons, science, history, future, pop cultural impact, and cosmic possibilities of hallucinogens.
The film tackles the big questions: Can psychedelics have a powerful role in treating depression, addiction, and helping us confront our own mortality? Are we all made of the same stuff? Is love really all we need? Can trees talk?
Cast members include Ben Stiller, Adam Scott, Nick Offerman, Sarah Silverman, Ad-Rock, Rosie Perez, A$AP Rocky, Paul Scheer, Nick Kroll, and Rob Corddry to name a few. Written and directed by Donick Cary. Produced by Mike Rosenstein, Sunset Rose Pictures, and Sugarshack 2000.
“I’ve always loved documentaries, real stories about real people,” Cary says. “I was at the Nantucket film festival about 11 years ago, and Ben Stiller’s on the board. Fisher Stevens was also there to launch The Cove, and we all ended up in a conversation about psychedelics and people’s experiences, which turned out to be so entertaining. The Aristocrats had come out a few years before, and I realized how much I liked this vibe of an extended dinner party, with everyone sharing a story.”
So began an off-and-on project that would stretch out over the next decade, as Cary undertook the work of securing interview times with a lineup of subjects that he estimates as somewhere between 75 and 100. The array of familiar faces making the cut ranges from standup and sketch’s usual suspects (Nick Kroll, David Cross, Sarah Silverman) to musical luminaries (A$AP Rocky, Sting) and late legends with an unexpectedly poignant presence (Carrie Fisher and Anthony Bourdain appear posthumously). “We were at the mercy of 100 celebrities’ schedules,” Cary says. “Someone like Sting would be available, but he’s got a concert tour and he’s doing a stage show in London and all this other stuff. He was great, though. We just had to wait nine months.”
Restricting himself to an 89-minute run time meant that he had to ditch the lion’s share of footage on the cutting room floor, a pain that years of “killing your babies” in writers’ rooms had prepared him for. Nevertheless, that left him with some great tidbits of his own. He says he’s got enough material for three or four more features, which might afford him a place for the clips with Whitney Cummings, Patton Oswalt, Bootsy Collins and Ed Ruscha, a cursory sampling of his unused favorites. Some A-listers, like Dave Grohl and Paul McCartney, just weren’t gettable. In other cases, Cary got the goods, but had trouble clinching permissions.
“We did sit down with Ozzy [Osbourne], and ended up not using it,” Cary recalls. “He didn’t feel comfortable after he’d told his story. He was like, ‘I don’t think I want to be in a drug movie.’ Which was fine! We respect that from anyone, but man, he’s got some stories … I got on the phone with Susan Sarandon, and we talked for an hour-plus on two or three occasions. But we couldn’t get her to commit to doing it or not. She had such wonderful things to say – she knew Timothy Leary, you know. But I guess I couldn’t get her to feel fully comfortable about the project. Still, these are people we were ridiculously lucky to have a little time with.”
“The takeaway should not be that we’re advocating this for everyone, or that absolutely everyone should do drugs,” he says. “No one should get peer-pressured into taking it, because if you start with fear and trepidation, you’re much more likely to have a bad time.”
In his own soundbites as well as the ones he selected and arranged for the film, Cary urges care and preparation. Hunter S Thompson, William Burroughs, Michael Pollan, and Carlos Castaneda fill out his recommended reading list for squares curious about the ins and outs of consciousness expansion. He wants to demystify psychotropics, which could stand to benefit more people than previously assumed. “What’s been great in the last two or three years has been seeing a destigmatization and a more rational conversation about using psychedelics for therapy, or in therapeutic settings instead of party settings,” he says. “One of the big things we’re up against as humans is empathizing, being able to think from another person’s point of view. Psychedelics can help a person get out of their own box, and think their way into someone else’s.”
Ben Stiller and cowriter Robert Cohen on The Towering Disaster, the Poseidon Adventure spoof they wrote with David Cross and are resurrecting with a digital live reading starring Michael Cera, Don Cheadle, Bob Odenkirk, and Kristen Wiig.
Back in the early 1990s, when three friends were watching The Poseidon Adventure on laser disc while eating Italian food, it’s very unlikely any of them could have predicted the project they hatched that night would finally reach an audience 27 years later.
“I was going to say I was famous for my Italian dinners, but the reality is I don’t think I ever took the time for one since then,” Ben Stiller joked in an interview with Vanity Fair this week.
But on Saturday night, Stiller and former Ben Stiller Show writers David Cross and Robert Cohen will indeed unveil The Towering Disaster—their homage to the disaster movies of the 1970s produced by the famed Irwin Allen—with a digital live reading of their long-forgotten script. Among the all-star names scheduled to participate are Michael Cera, Don Cheadle, John Ennis, Will Forte, Regina Hall, David Koechner, Jack McBrayer, Michael McKean, Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Silverman, Kristen Wiig, and Henry Winkler, as well as Cross, Stiller, and at least one surprise guest. “There’s one bit of casting that literally no one else in the world could play,” a cryptic Stiller said.
Written by Cross and Cohen after that fateful night of Italian cuisine, The Towering Disaster was at one point earmarked as Stiller’s directorial debut. But, “for whatever reason, it never got made,” Stiller said of the project, which was set up at the now defunct Hollywood Pictures, a former subsidiary of Disney. “It was probably just too insane.”
He’s not necessarily wrong. The screenplay sets its action inside a high-rise hotel built in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on top of an active undersea volcano. As one might expect from its 1970s forebears, calamity is quick to ensue. Stiller plays a radical preacher in the script, a role that on paper sounds similar to the part Gene Hackman played in The Poseidon Adventure. (“I don’t know what you’re talking about; it’s a purely original character,” Stiller joked when the comparison was made.)
Image may contain Michael Cera, Michael McKean, Ben Stiller, David Koechner, David Cross, Sarah Silverman and John Ennis. Photo provided by The Towering Disaster.
In the years since the project fell apart, its creators moved on to bigger successes. Stiller’s directorial debut was 1994’s Reality Bites, released one year after The Towering Disaster sunk. Cohen has written and produced for a number of high profile comedy series, including MADtv, The Big Bang Theory, and Maron. Cross’s first major gig after The Ben Stiller Show was cocreating Mr. Show With Bob and David. But despite their individual triumphs, they’ve always considered The Towering Disaster to be the one that got away.
“Every once in a while over the years I would think about it,” Stiller said. “Probably whenever I showed my son Poseidon Adventure for the first time. ‘Oh, there’s that crazy movie we were going to do.’ And then, thinking about, Oh, this would be funny now, still.”
As Cohen recalled, it was Cross who pushed for the live read to happen after he put together a similar reunion of Mr. Show. “David reached out to me a couple of months ago and just said, ‘Wouldn’t this be great?’” Cohen told me. In keeping with the ’90s of it all, the script had been stored on a floppy disc. “He and I cleaned it up a bit, and then sent it to Ben—who immediately, and to our joy, was so into it. That’s how the train started to roll,” Cohen added.
By all accounts, the cast came together pretty quickly, especially once the live event was fitted with a charitable component: a ticket for the reading costs $12.50, with proceeds being split between the Equal Justice Initiative and Direct Relief, an organization focused on the coronavirus pandemic. After it initially streams at 8 p.m. eastern time on Saturday, a capture of the event will remain available for 48 hours. But what the future holds beyond that is unclear.
“I think it would be a great end of the story, but we’ve loosely joked about this maybe being a Netflix comedy feature or something. But one step at a time,” Cohen said. “I think that would be really the greatest thing ever.”
For his part, Stiller is simply hoping to do his younger self proud. As a kid, he saw The Poseidon Adventure about 10 times in the movie theater; he credits it with sparking his interest in making films himself.
“I’ll tell you a little anecdote, because Poseidon Adventure is truly one of my favorite films of all time,” Stiller said as our interview was winding down. “When I had the opportunity to work with Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums, it was a dream come true for me. The whole shoot, I was waiting to get up the nerve—because he’s an intimidating guy—to tell him how much Poseidon Adventure meant to me. So, two days before the shoot was over, finally, there’s this quiet moment. I said, ‘Gene, I just want to say it’s just been amazing working with you—and I didn’t say this before, but really for me, Poseidon Adventure is probably one of the most important movies for me, ever, because it really made me want to be a filmmaker, to be in movies, and I saw it multiple times and it just really, really changed my life.’”
Hackman, Stiller recalled, took a moment, looked at him, and said, “Oh yeah. Money job.”
“Then he got up and he walked away,” Stiller said, as Cohen expressed delighted surprise at the story. “My world was shattered. So this is my chance to, somehow... I don’t know, I have to live it out somehow. I have to make it right. It’s not a money job for me.”
Besides, he concluded, “Even if it was a money job for Hackman, it was the most incredible money-job performance I’ve ever seen.”
Ben Stiller wrote a Foreword for the book by Ahmed M. Badr, While the Earth Sleeps We Travel. Stories, Poetry, and Art from Young Refugees Around the World.
It's a collection of poetry, personal narratives, and art from refugee youth around the world.
All four stories from Stephen King's most recent novel "If It Bleeds" will receive adaptations to film and television.
Ben Stiller will be a producer, director and protagonist of "Rat".
The story centres on a frustrated writer named Drew Larson. Every time he tries to turn a good idea into a novel, something terrible happens. After receiving inspiration for a new book, abandons his life and family and he heads out to an old family cabin in the woods to get it done.
There he finds a talking rat. The rodent offers a deal to help him finalize his book, but that deal has some consequences. The rat offers to get rid of his writer’s block in exchange for one of Larson’s loved ones dying.
Severe storms occur and he makes a Faustian bargain with a rat to alleviate his writer’s block. Larson believes it was done in a dream state of delirium, but finds when he returns home that he made a rat pact.
Ben Stiller had no idea he was casting a future president when he
grabbed Donald Trump and Melania for a quick cameo in Zoolander.
But Trump apparently never forgot about it, Stiller tells Molly
Jong-Fast, Rick Wilson, and Matt Wilstein in the latest episode of The
New Abnormal.
Ben recalls how
Trump even derailed an interview during the last campaign to talk about
Zoolander 2. Trump “started going into detail about, you know… in the
culture, people don't care about male models anymore,” Stiller recalls.
Not that Stiller is particularly gratified by the attention.
“Everybody has their own theories about whether or not [Trump] still
wants to be president, but I think it's gone so far now. People's lives
are being affected. And really, to me, it's not funny anymore. It's
kinda just like, it's a little bit insane,” Stiller says. The
actor/writer/director/comedian also discusses his work as an advocate
for refugees, what it’s like to play Michael Cohen on SNL, what he
wants to see from Joe Biden if he wins, and what are the boundaries of
comedy in 2020. (“Tropic Thunder probably would not have been made...
It would be tone deaf right now to make it,” he says.)
Plus!
Rick, Molly, and George Conway talk about whether Tucker Carlson will
run for president (yes, with Eric Trump as a running mate); whether a
war criminal is about to become a new Trumpworld star (unfortunately,
that’s a yes, too); and whether our commander-in-chief actually gives a
shit about the troops he’s supposed to be leading (hard no). As George
says, Trump “expressed more concern about how he was perceived walking
down that ramp at West point than he did about the fact that the
soldiers that he spoke to that day could go to Afghanistan and get
killed, because some Russians are paying money to the Taliban.”
In a recent interview with "The New Abnormal" podcast, Stiller discussed today's politically correct culture and its impact on comedy and movie-making. The actor-director noted how there are several movies — particularly satire — that were made just a few years ago that could not be made in today's climate, including his controversial hit, "Tropic Thunder."
Asked about the impact of today's "preposterous politics" on comedy and movie-making, Stiller, said, "Honestly, I don't know if it's the politics as much as just the atmosphere of the political correctness now and everybody being afraid to say something that's offensive."
"Comedically, it's definitely challenging," he said, adding, "I think it's much tougher now, and when I think about movies that I've worked on in the past, and I look at them now, definitely there are jokes and scenes and that I go, 'Oh, I don't know if we could have gotten away with that today, at all.'"
Specifically, he noted that "Tropic Thunder" — which included Robert Downey Jr. playing an actor who was playing the part of a black man and Stiller who portrayed an actor who played a mentally challenged character — likely wouldn't have been made in 2020.
He said that he could understand those feelings "contextually" today, however, he noted: "But at the time — that's the thing to me that's so complicated about how we approach what's appropriate and what's not in terms of the timeframe that it was made. It doesn't necessarily mean that anything was more appropriate at another time but you have to look at the context and realize that that's what was happening."
The Trump cameo
The discussion then turned to President Trump and his many cameos in TV shows and movies — and about whether to cut his his appearances from those productions, which some anti-Trump people have suggested.
Stiller directed the 2001 comedy movie "Zoolander," in which Stiller played the title character Derek Zoolander, an empty-headed, full-of-himself male model.
Among several celebrity cameos were Donald Trump and his then-girlfriend Melania Knauss. In the movie, Trump says of the main character, "Look, without Derek Zoolander, male modeling wouldn't be what it is today."
Ben Stiller said Trump and the future first lady were included because of where the filming occurred.
"We were shooting at the now defunct VH1 Fashion Awards," Stiller said, "and as people were coming up the red carpet, we pulled them aside and asked them to talk about Derek Zoolander, and so Trump and Melania did that."
He, of course, had no idea at the time that he was filming the future controversial president.
Now, in the current environment where no one wants to be offended by anything they see or hear, especially when it comes to Donald Trump, people are suggesting that Stiller cut the Trump cameo from the movie.
"I've had people who reached out to me and said, like, 'You should edit Donald Trump out of "Zoolander,"' and all that," Stiller told the podcast.
Stiller, no Trump fan himself, noted that the controversy over Trump is similar to the fights going on over movies and TV shows that could not be made today.
Noting the Trump cameo in "Zoolander," Stiller said, "But at the end of the day, it's kind of like, again, that was a time when that exists and that happened."
