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Moguls can count. They know that 1998, which was to be Godzilla's summer, became the merry months of Mary. There's Something About Mary, the Farrelly brothers' $25 million gross-out romance with no big stars and no visual wizardry but a pruny chest prosthesis, earned $176 million at the domestic box office. The film's success had three quick payoffs. It sent studios rushing to get a new batch of comedies ready for summer '99. Its ribald humor raised the bar, or lowered the standard, for what was acceptable in a mass-market comedy. And it made people feel good. "I got belly laughs I couldn't hold in," says Stacey Snider, president of production at Universal. "Moviegoing is supposed to be a communal experience, and there's nothing more communal than laughter."
So, naturally, the movie to beat next week is Sandler's Big Daddy, in which the hottest comedy star of the moment teaches a stray five-year-old how to pee in public, toss sticks in the path of in-line skaters and smash cans of SpaghettiOs on the supermarket floor to get a discount on damaged merchandise. The film, directed by Dennis Dugan, is damaged too: it's standard Sandler sociopathic humor with a lethal dose of climactic treacle. Critics get perplexed when the public rejects smart youth comedies like Go and Election (which lace their rude wit with complex characters and formal ingenuity) to wallow in the Sandler sandbox. But his huge constituency is as loyal as Moonies. And hey, somebody's got to make the stupidest comedies around.
Somebody else--two brothers, in fact--had to make the movie at the top of Hollywood's high-hopes list this summer. It's not the Will Smith western Wild Wild West, which opens just before July 4, but a little comedy from Snider's studio: the no-star, no-scruples, no-prisoners American Pie, an $11 million gross-out romantic comedy that makes its debut a week later. The cast of this high-school comedy about sexual anxiety skews younger than the early-30s characters of Mary, and that's fine with Universal, which wants to grab the loyal teen audience before conquering the whole world. But it's the Did-I-just-see-what-I-think-I-saw gonadal gaggery that has Hollywood thinking Mary 2.
The Farrellys' notorious hair gel gives way to a gaudier spread: the penis-in-a-sweatsock opening scene, the semen in a beer cup that an unsuspecting guy drinks, a striptease and double premature ejaculation seen on the Internet, the Niagara of diarrhea one finicky fellow suffers--in the girls' bathroom--and, for dessert, the desperate erotic defiling of Mom's apple pie. (Don't blame us, parents; we're just messengers alerting you to the scenes your kids will be memorizing next month.)