Adam Sandler finds print interviews irrelevant
HOLLYWOOD - In the end, I got no closer to Adam Sandler than lunch with his manager, Sandy Wernick. The lunch was meant to convince me of the futility of attempting a Sandler story in the first place. Sandler doesn't do print interviews, hasn't done them for two years, although there is no apparent flash point for his having gone silent.
There is instead the general sense among what is known as "Team Sandler" that Sandler doesn't need the media - and by media they mean film writers who have dismissed Sandler as a fluke, or worse, a public-health risk. Their criticism, for now, is irrelevant: Combined, Sandler's past three movies, all made at relatively sane prices, have grossed about $400 million domestically.
Sandler is no longer just a movie star, he's a genre unto himself - a brand - and it is clear that he understands how best to reach his customers. His latest, "Little Nicky," a big-budget, special-effects-driven comedy in which he plays the son of the devil, which opened last weekend. At 34, Sandler is by many accounts a hard-working, grounded, soup-to-nuts participant in his product, guiding everything from the script to the cutting of the trailer.
With Team Sandler on a winning streak, he is attached as producer to a number of comedy scripts around town. His Happy Madison Productions is developing feature scripts for other former "Saturday Night Live" cast members.
"SNL" alumnus Rob Schneider's surprise 1999 hit, "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo," is the blueprint for Sandler's emergence as a producer, insiders say, because Sandler was able to take a comedian who couldn't sell tickets and a concept that most dismissed as one-note and get a nice return on the investment. ("Deuce" grossed more than $65 million and did brisk home-video sales.)
Sandler has also formed an online entertainment company, Shnorff.com, to produce animated and live-action programming in alliance with the more-established Mediatrip.com.
As a recording artist, Sandler has put out four comedy albums, which have sold an impressive 4.4 million copies combined, according to figures from SoundScan, which tracks nationwide album sales.
Although I believed Wernick when he told me no one who worked with Sandler would talk about Sandler, I had to experience the rejection firsthand. Sure enough, nearly everyone I called either didn't return calls, dismissed me out of hand, or had to "check with Adam" first and then dismissed me out of hand.
There is talk that "Little Nicky" will end Sandler's streak of hits. At a cost of $80 million, far more than any of his previous movies, "Little Nicky" is surely a commercial risk if not an artistic one - particularly for New Line Cinema, with whom Sandler has a two-picture deal. It's estimated that Sandler's fees account for roughly a quarter of the film's budget. On it's opening weekend, it got trounced by "Charlie's Angels," but still managed to pull in a respectable $18 million.
An optimistic Michael DeLuca, head of production at New Line, says "Little Nicky" can do for Sandler "what `Ghostbusters' did for Bill Murray," meaning vault him into another stratosphere of box-office stardom.
The fact that Sandler wasn't doing any print media for a movie that cost $80 million didn't seem to concern DeLuca. "It's funny," he said. "I never thought of these articles as . . . marketing tools."
"The question is, `Will Adam grow?' " says a manager familiar with the grooming of comics into mainstream movie stars. "If you don't, that (young) audience is going to pass you by at some point. . . . Young people are going to change, and you're going to be out."
The intelligentsia continue to treat Sandler not so much as Sandler, but as Sandler-as-metaphor - the symbol of a wider malaise in mainstream comedy, the victory of crude over that which has heart and intelligence.
"At this time in world history, we all inhabit a planet in which the biggest star is . . . wait for it . . . yes, I'm serious . . . Adam Sandler," wrote the venerable screenwriter William Goldman last year in an article for Premiere magazine.
But not everyone is sure that's a problem. At a Writers Guild Foundation symposium in Santa Monica last year, James L. Brooks weighed in. He is the man behind such unimpeachable mainstream hits as "Terms of Endearment," "Broadcast News" and "As Good as It Gets," in addition to such TV classics as "Taxi" and "The Simpsons."
"To me, he's a very edgy comic," Brooks said. "I think a lot of the hope for Hollywood is which way these guys who get an audience like that choose to go in their careers, and that's going to shape everything for everybody."