I guess I considered myself just sort of a sketch comedian, you know? Actual screenwriting hadn't really occurred to me as a viable job - I didn't really know anything about it.
— Thomas Lennon
Writing studio movies is the best job in the world... it's awesome.
The first record I bought with my own money was Rio.
It's such a great thing to work with people and not have a plan.
All studio movies are the middle of the Bell curve. The only way to do something is to do it yourself. And the only way to do that is to not take any money from anyone or take as little money as possible from anyone and that's it.
The more people's money you take to do something, the more inputs you get.
Our reward for Starsky and Hutch was getting to write The Six Million Dollar Man for Todd.
We did one pilot for FOX which was about this couple that moves to a town, and we play everyone in the entire town. So it was like a Peter Sellers film.
If you're a studio writer, the funny better be on the page.
Nobody in Hollywood ever sets out to make a bad movie ever but about 99% of the time, that's what happens.
Yes, I am complimented on my work in Kids in the Hall once or twice a week. It's a nice feeling.
I feel like I'm the most well-adjusted character on the show, even though I'm sure the other actors would tell you the same thing about their characters.
The only guaranteed way to make something not very funny is to make it vague.
I was on the speech team, we called it forensics.
You hate to see yourself do one draft of a script and then have somebody else come back in and change what you've done.
Don't write something that is your passion project because all it will do is get the passion stomped out of you.
There was so long from when we did the pilot and then when the show was eventually picked up by Comedy Central - and, in fact, we had to shoot the pilot twice.
Kerri and I met at theatre camp when were 16 years old, which is pretty lame. The rest of us met when we founded the State at New York University in 1988. Most of our adult lives have been spent bickering with these people.
That's the other thing about working on movies, the commitment is years. That's one thing that's so frustrating about the process is that it goes on and on and on for years.
When you do a movie in the studio system, there's a committee. A committee of six or seven people you answer to. There's two or three producers, a studio executive and one or two people above that studio executive.
Super Troopers is hilarious. Everybody always thought we somehow - we did Reno way, way before any of us had seen Super Troopers. It sat on the shelf for a couple years.
Old School has humongous laughs all the way through it.
