He opened his laptop, where the desktop image was the Wu-Tang logo rendered in rainbow colors so that it looked like the Apple logo from the 80s. Rogen clicked on a folder marked ESCAPE, revealing hundreds of documents inside. Whenever he and Goldberg have an idea for a movie, Rogen explained, they start compiling lists of “ideas for anything: characters, scenes, lines, twists, turns – it could be as general as, like, ‘someone is locking themselves in the closet trying to hide,’ or it could be like, ‘OK, this character has been like that his whole life. … ‘”
Over time, whether they’re in the same room or emailing each other, as they did during the pandemic, Rogen and Goldberg will sculpt those lists into outlines, then sculpt those outlines into scripts: ” You start to say, ‘OK, these 10 things could go together,’ Rogen said. “Or, ‘OK, that’s a piece from a movie,’ or ‘If we want all of these ideas in one movie, what character could support that? “”
He scrolled through the file. “These are our ‘Escape’ files – oh, Jesus – dating back to January 2016,” he says. He glanced at a first list. “It’s totally changed,” he says, opening another. “These are gags,” he explained. Rogen and Goldberg had collected dozens of Keaton-worthy ideas, which he asked me not to reveal. He scrolled to another document, dated February 2019 and titled “Boarded Action Beats” – “These are gags that we started to draw,” he said.
Working with an illustrator, Rogen and Goldberg made what was essentially a digital flip book illustrating each scene from “Escape.” “We literally script every second of the movie,” Rogen said. A three-word open-ended gag I saw in a May 2019 list – deliciously centered on something you could buy at a hardware store – had been scripted in an elaborate action sequence. Rogen showed it to me frame by frame, recounting as it went. “She’s trying to get from there to there… these guys are chasing her.” … ”His finger tapped the right arrow. “She catches this guy, he falls, bam, whoop!“
Even in flip-book form, the scene was funny. “We need to know if these jokes are working and if the timing is right,” Rogen said, “and you can’t read a board and see if people are laughing or not, because I’d be the one to say, like, ‘He throws the thing, she bounces off the door, she hits him in the face. “He laughed. “We have to be able to see this!”
There is a story Mark Rogen recounts the beginnings of Seth’s career: When the family first moved to Los Angeles, for “Freaks and Geeks,” Seth signed on with a manager and an attorney, and after a while, “his attorney threatened to fire him, because Seth continued to to be offered various concerts and to say: “I” I don’t do that, it’s not a movie that I would go to see and it is not a movie in which I want my friends to see me. ”
Rogen’s self-confidence is perhaps the most enviable thing about him: the fact that with rare exceptions, he never seemed to be working on exactly what he wanted to work on. Rogen once recalled that his friend Jonah Hill had approached him for advice after being offered a role in a “Transformers” sequel. “I can see if Steven Spielberg calls you, asks you to do something, how hard it is to refuse,” Rogen told an interviewer, recounting the exchange. But in this case, he said to Hill, “Do you want to do a movie about fighting robots? Make your own movie about combat robots. You can do it. It’s on the table now. This story is echoed in “Yearbook,” in a chapter where Spielberg himself actually invites Rogen and Goldberg to collaborate on a project inspired by the 1984 sci-fi film “The Last Starfighter.” The same idea had occurred to them before, and they decided that they just preferred to create their own version. Rogen isn’t too concerned in the book with petting the powerful. There’s also a funny story about George Lucas – that moments after meeting Rogen and Goldberg in 2012, he expressed his confidence that the world would end later that year (Lucas, via a representative, denied this account) – and an even funnier story about Nicolas Cage posing as a white Bahamian for a possible role in “The Green Hornet,” bellowing an improvised dialogue in a Caribbean dialect.
