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  MAKE SOME PRESET RULES FOR THE DREADED IMPASSE

  There will inevitably come a time when you and your collaborator will get to the place where neither of you is going to budge. We have accepted that in this place, neither person should be expected to act rationally and generously. Gridlock is gridlock is gridlock. So set your rules ahead of time about how to handle this kind of an impasse so you don’t have to make rules while you’re in gridlock mode. For us, impasse involves a basic two-part process. If the decision can be made by letting each have his way as an option for later, that’s the best path. For instance, if we are shooting a scene and disagree about how a certain element should be performed or shot, we will film both versions. Usually time tells us which one is better after we have cooled down and gotten some perspective in the edit room. But there are also times when we are in the edit room deciding which song should roll over the credits. For instance, I might think it needs to push the emotion and play against the final comedic beat. Jay might feel that choice is too cheesy and we need to lie back and be more subtle. And we can’t submit two versions of a TV episode to our network. So…how do we decide? Take a note from Regis Philbin and phone a friend. Bring in a group of your most trusted collaborators (co-workers, but also peers who do what you do and can give you advice). Show them both versions, without making a case for which one you personally prefer, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred the better version will prevail.

  But (I know, a second “but”) if it still is not clear, we have another way to settle it….

  PASSION IS KING

  If all else fails, you should know your collaborator and yourself well enough to understand that there is a deep, soulful reason you are in a working relationship with this person. You should trust that their instincts are just as valid as your own, and after the dust settles you each should objectively be able to evaluate yourself and the person across from you and see who is more passionate about their case. It sounds like an arbitrary distinction, but we use this tactic quite often and it works very well. Whoever believes more deeply gets to win this one. And know that the next one that comes around will likely be yours.

  PAY ATTENTION TO THE SIZE OF YOUR ENGINE

  It took us about twenty-five “get your feelings hurt” sessions to figure this problem out. It’s not easy to diagnose but it’s an important one. Our creative brains work at different speeds and have different strengths. These aren’t binary rules, but there are trends in the way we go about thinking and how we work, so it’s important to take note and give your collaborator the respect they deserve. For instance, my head is like a bundle of fireworks. It goes off without warning and can be annoying, loud, and dangerous to those nearby. But it can also be fun. That said, Jay has discovered that when I am firing away, my brain can move so quickly and with such fervor that it doesn’t allow Jay’s ideas any space to collaborate with mine. So Jay has learned how to let the fireworks go off for a while until it’s safe enough for him to get close and add his own ideas to the mix. Jay will be the first one to tell you how annoying it is, but in the end he knows he has to let me be me and obey my natural process.

  On the flip side, Jay’s ideas often come more slowly, in a more dreamlike fugue state. They usually take longer to develop, and they have a subtlety and sensitivity to them that can easily be trampled and smothered by my more brash and violent creative thought flow. So I have learned to shut up when Jay is birthing an idea, not trample all over it when my weird fireworks start going off, and give Jay the space he needs to let his ideas breathe and come to their resting place at his speed.

  It may sound like a lot of work and compromise and restraint, and it is. But when it works, and my fire and Jay’s precision come together on one big idea, it can be magical, and it makes the process truly worthwhile. You just have to set boundaries and get good at knowing yourself and your collaborator.

  KNOW WHEN TO SAY WHEN

  While some may argue that the greatest benefit to collaboration is that two heads are better than one, sometimes talking about an idea with your collaborator can kill the magic. Sometimes you need to strike out on your own for a project or portion of a project in order to get it right. Don’t be afraid to ask for this. In our creative life, this has been a hard lesson to learn. For instance, when Jay was writing a scene for our movie Cyrus that was giving him trouble, I offered a way to fix it that I thought was so obvious and Jay was just…resistant. I kept intellectualizing with Jay as to why the fix I was offering was the way to go, and it was baffling to me that he would not accept it. Finally, Jay turned to me and said, “I know that’s the way to fix it, but I’m trying to do something different here, and I don’t know exactly what it is yet. I can’t talk about it or explain it, but I can feel it, and I need you to let me figure this out on my own.” It was a bummer moment for both of us, but in the end Jay floundered around for a bit and then came up with something that was not only as good as the fix I offered but was a unique and inspired version of that fix and made the script that much better for it.

  * * *

  —

  Anyhow, the more we think about it, all of these ideas share the same basic score: respecting and validating your creative partner. Treating the relationship like a plant that needs water, care, and a shit-ton of forgiveness to flourish.

  And maybe some therapy.

  Never underestimate the basic tools that you can get from a few rounds with a good therapist.

  (PART 2)*

  We were pleased (though not altogether surprised) to discover that our individual Top 10 lists had quite a few crossover films. This was heartening. Our first step would be to compile both lists into one and simply remove the duplicate titles (Rocky, American Movie, Raising Arizona, Dumb and Dumber). This step immediately pared us down to sixteen films. From there things got tricky. How to get from sixteen to ten? We discussed and fairly quickly came up with a process of elimination via this simple question: “Which of these films can you simply not live with on our collective Top 10?” Our answers are boldfaced below.

  American Movie

  Raising Arizona

  Same Time, Next Year (JD)

  Tootsie

  Rocky

  Hoop Dreams

  Margaret (MD)

  The Crying Game

  Dumb and Dumber

  The Cruise

  Starman (JD)

  Henry Fool

  The Horse Boy

  The Black Stallion (MD)

  You Can Count on Me

  Close-Up

  * To be continued…

  “I’M THE SHORTEST person here. Including the girls.”

  “I don’t think…I’m not sure that’s…well, even if it’s true, who cares?”

  “I do. It’s hard to meet people. There are so many people. This place is huge.”

  “It’s not that huge.”

  “Mark, don’t tell me that a school with fifty thousand students isn’t huge.”

  (Pause.)

  “Sorry. You’re right. It is kinda huge.”

  “Thank you.”

  (Then, a sneeze. Not from me. Or Mark. But from my roommate Ed. Sleeping about four feet from where Mark and I are lying in my twin bed. Except we are not children anymore. I am a freshman in college. And I am having an incredibly hard time.)

  “Bless you, Ed.”

  (A muffled “Thank you” emerges from underneath Ed’s covers. He is nice enough to not be bothered by Mark’s frequent overnight visits during this time. He is also nice enough to simply turn his back on us and not point out how utterly strange it is that two grown brothers are sleeping in one twin bed.)

  “Jay, if you want to just ditch it all and come home I don’t think it’s a bad thing.”

  “I do want to come home.”

  “Are you sure?”

&n
bsp; (Pause.)

  “No.”

  “Well, you have a month left of this semester. You can…ride it out and see how you feel after that?”

  “Probably a good idea. I just…”

  (Pause.)

  (I take my time here. I don’t have the words for it. But it doesn’t matter. This is the not the first time this conversation has happened. And Mark doesn’t need the words to understand what I’m feeling. How I want to be grown-up enough to stand on my own. But how I also miss our tight-knit family and sense of security. How the thought of coming home feels beautiful but also like a failure. So instead I simply cry for a little bit into Mark’s armpit. This moment does two things. First, it makes Ed even more uncomfortable. Second, it actually makes Mark feel good. That he can provide some care and comfort for me, the person who has been doing that very thing for him, pretty much nonstop, since he was born.)

  Three months earlier, in the fall of 1991, I had left our home in Metairie to attend the University of Texas at Austin on a full scholarship. I was smart, responsible, and genuinely excited. I thought I’d be fine.

  But within the first few weeks, my well-being became a major concern for my family. I began calling home more and more. I struggled with making friends and finding my way on such a huge college campus. While our mother wanted to comfort me, she couldn’t bear to hear her son suffering, so she quickly became of little use on the phone. Our dad was a rock. He was full of smart, confidence-boosting advice for his first-born son. He did everything right. Yet in the long run, our dad’s confidence and ability to see so clearly what the solutions were to my problems only made me feel worse for not being able to enact those solutions. I simply could not take myself out of the spiraling depression in which I found myself. When I spoke with our mom, I was aware that my suffering made her suffer twice as badly. Talking to Dad made me acutely aware that I was not as confident and well equipped to face the world as he was.

  So I started asking for Mark when I called home…the nacho-eating, skater-banged, Iron Maiden–listening, prepubescent ball of confused hormones. And there was something in the reckless confidence of Mark’s youth that was exactly what I needed.

  And this is where the first big turn in our relationship came. As the long-distance phone bill skyrocketed, so did our closeness. And so did Mark’s ability to make me laugh, loosen up, and remind me of that childlike confidence with which I had led Mark for so many years.

  So, at age fourteen, Mark began taking cheap Southwest flights by himself on weekends to visit me in Austin. There, we would go see live music. Hang out in coffee shops and meet weird early-nineties Austin people. Take in every indie film that came through town. Mark would do keg stands at my friends’ parties, and I would recklessly join in. We were a bit of a circus act of sorts that people wanted to get to know. My confidence started to rebuild itself and my social life started to grow. We met new people and did all kinds of new things (like smoke weed together for the first time) and began to dream about our futures together the way we did when we were little kids. It was a grand reconnection of the Duplass Brothers as we were before I left for college, but now Mark was ever so slightly in the lead, taking care of me for the first time. It was a dynamic that formed rather quickly but stuck for many years to come.

  Perhaps the most important thing this period taught us was how wonderfully complex and shape-shifting relationships can be. Until that point we were certain that, because our relationship began a certain way, it would follow that dynamic forever. Instead we were forced to reexamine what it meant to be truly intimate with someone. That sometimes we would be required to be different things to each other. That we’d have to remain open to what the other one needed, allow him the space to change, and learn how to grow with him to accommodate those changes.

  In short, we accidentally started learning way back in the early nineties how to become the husbands, fathers, and partners we ultimately wanted to be.

  THERE ARE SO many things wrong with this movie. Ralph Macchio is still playing a high school senior even though he’s pushing thirty. Mr. Miyagi’s formerly subtle, well-placed quips of wisdom from the first film are now a relentless barrage of New Agey self-help schmaltz. Daniel’s new love interest is an Okinawan girl who takes his jokes literally, missing his already unfunny humor (but adding an unintended aura of borderline racism to the entire film!). The young villain is an inherently unthreatening individual who cackles at inopportune moments like a bipolar hyena. A former friend of Mr. Miyagi’s named Sato speaks in an unintelligent guttural fiasco that can only be described as “evil guy voice.” The best moments of the first film are overtly recycled, functioning less like fun callbacks and more like thinly disguised, sad approximations of their former selves. The plotting is generic. The music is pushed. The performances are stilted. The pacing is awful. This film is simply not good.

  But there’s a moment a little more than halfway through the film that has always fascinated us. One that we have revisited often throughout the years. It takes place just after the death of Mr. Miyagi’s father. He is sitting by himself on a beach in one of the few simple, elegantly composed shots of the film. He occupies the left side of the frame. The right side is empty. As the score settles into a subtle, ambient position that suggests it will lay back over the next few minutes so as not to compete with an important moment, Daniel walks up and sits in the empty portion of the frame.

  For the next few minutes, Ralph Macchio delivers a monologue about the time he lost his father. How it made him feel. His sense of regret for not telling his father more often that he loved him. But also how he believes, deep down, that his father understood how much Daniel did care for him. Even though he didn’t say it enough. And that Daniel has learned to be okay with this. The score lays back in all the right ways. The monologue is a nuanced wave of elegant restraint and raw emotion. Ralph nails it with a naturalistic display of loving support for his friend, appropriately colored by his own personal remorse. Even the wind seems to kick up at all the right moments, as if the universe is itself a collaborator in this epic cinematic moment. And as Daniel nears the end of his speech, you can’t take your eyes off of him. Until you do. Because you soon notice that Mr. Miyagi’s lips are beginning to quiver. And his eyes are welling with tears. And Daniel sees it too! And he feeds on it as he nears the climax of his story! They work together like the perfect team! The chemistry is impeccable! And the tears may not hold. But the lips outright tremble now! As Daniel finishes his story, he reaches out for his friend’s shoulder, and just at the moment…a single tear falls down the right side of Mr. Miyagi’s face. The score peaks. The wind dies down. The scene ends.

  What. The. Fuck.

  How did that happen? Like a golden cloak shimmering in the midst of a veritable sea of dog shit, this utterly perfect scene emerges from the cesspool that is The Karate Kid Part II. And all of our snark…all of our judgment…all of our criticisms of the movie…they are at once all thrown back in our faces. And we are forced to eat the very shit that we once threw. Because we cry with this film now. Genuinely moved by it. And shocked that a moment of such greatness can occur in a vacuum.

  Mostly, though, we are humbled. And we remember that making a decent piece of art is incredibly difficult. It requires every possible skill set you can muster, and then it requires a lot of luck on top of that. So every time we hear Peter Cetera’s over-the-top theme song, we remember that The Karate Kid Part II is simply trying to be “the man who will fight for our honor.” We remember that this fight is a noble one in and of itself. So we try on a little respect. We let the snarky criticism go. And we celebrate the wonderful four minutes that this bizarre, confusing film gifted to us.

  * We realize that we’ve already mentioned the Karate Kid movies twice and you’re barely into the book, so we just want to make it super clear that we’re not overly obsessed with them. Our obsession is perfectly appr
opriate for our age range.

  WE ASKED SOME of our good friends what they wanted us to write about in this book. Nick Kroll came back and said he appreciated how we always seemed to harbor these weirdly researched pockets of “dork wisdom” that he has found useful over the years. That we were artists who also had these bizarrely old-school, pragmatic approaches to life’s problems. So, thanks to Nick Kroll, you are going to get some unsolicited, dorky advice. If you don’t like these bronze nuggets of wisdom, feel free to tweet a picture of dog shit at Nick Kroll now. But if you’re interested, keep reading.

  Let’s say you are an artist who likes to make weird art that probably won’t make money. If this is you, we love you. Or you’re an inventor of odd ideas, or a start-up that is not guaranteed to work. If this is you, we need you. You’re awesome. But your road could be hard. And you need to be able to live cheaply until you “hit” (or maybe live cheaply forever). So you need a smart plan. You need to guarantee that you have as much time as possible to make your real work instead of dying a slow creative death in a crappy day job in order to pay your outlandish living expenses. To this end, here are a few tips: