Portrait of Seth Rogen, Judd Apatow, and Adam Sandler.
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Then Apatow gets back inside his own head and agonizes over the final details. On the last day to make changes to the Funny People print, he is sitting in the office building in Santa Monica, Calif., that his assistants call the Apatower, mulling over which of several jokes to put in. One dilemma: Should Sandler dislike Mann's elder daughter because she doesn't laugh at his jokes or because she's old enough to have her period? Mind you, this is Apatow's real daughter who's playing the character--so when he asks me, as a warm body in the room, for my opinion, I keep quiet. On the last day of sound-editing, I suffer through a painful hour in which Apatow can't decide on the third song during the closing credits--which no one in the theater will stay long enough to hear, other than maybe the people in the room who are making this decision.
These people tend to be familiar faces. Apatow gravitates toward the same editors, directors and actors--a community, population 30 or so, known as Apatown. After Freaks and Geeks was canceled, he hired Rogen, an actor on the show, to write for Undeclared. "I don't think he even cared if any of us could write," Rogen says. "He just cared that we wanted to write and figured he could shape us into writers." Stoller, another young writer on Undeclared, was hired by Apatow to direct Forgetting Sarah Marshall despite having no directorial experience. Andy Dick, who got his start on The Ben Stiller Show, has had small roles in a handful of Apatow's projects. "Judd has given me a chance from when I was a nobody to when I have publicly reduced myself to being less than a nobody by my public, drunken, stupid-ass shenanigans. I literally started crying when he told me he wanted me to do a part in Funny People," says Dick, who indeed starts crying. "Everybody in this town is worried about who they associate with. Nobody is that good."
Apatow often serves as a mentor to the young people in his comedy troupe. The advice he hands out is exactly what he learned from watching Carrey and Sandler: They succeeded by writing their own movies to star in, so start typing. He barely knew Jonah Hill, now 25, when he hooked him up with a scriptwriting deal. "I was living at home, getting my tonsils taken out, and I was getting an e-mail from Judd saying, Here's your Universal movie deal. Now write down 100 ideas," says Hill. "My parents were like, 'Is this guy touching you?'"
Jason Segel, another Freaks and Geeks alum, says Apatow told him he was too weird to get cast in roles he didn't write for himself, so Segel turned his own breakup into Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Years earlier, on the Freaks set, Apatow instructed Segel to write the sad love song his character was supposed to sing and play on guitar. "This was Wednesday, and we're going to film on Friday," says Segel. "I said, 'But Judd, I don't know how to play guitar.' He said, 'You have until Friday. You'll figure it out.'" And Segel did. "It's sort of like having a great sensei from one of those old karate movies," he says. "He's like Mr. Miyagi. You don't know why you're doing 'wax on, wax off,' and he says, Show me 'wax on, wax off'--then you've sold a script."
"He Likes People"