What was originally pitched as a “Saturday Night Live” sketch about MacGyver’s stepbrother who diffuses bombs using pieces of poop and pubic hair is now a feature-length movie titled “MacGruber.”
“It got a big groan in the room,” said Jorma Taccone, the writer and director of the film. “Then it was three or four weeks of me re-pitching it to Will (Forte) being like, “˜Come on, let’s do it,’ and we did it. Comedy’s about perseverance, I guess.”
Nine sketches and one Super Bowl commercial later, “MacGruber” is hitting the big screen Friday.
“MacGruber” was written by Taccone, John Solomon and Will Forte (who also stars as MacGruber in the film), three UCLA alumni who have worked on “SNL” together for the past several years; Solomon and Forte initially met in a massive undergraduate history class about Western civilization.
MacGruber is an ex-special operations agent who is called out of retirement to help defeat the evil Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer), who threatens to use a nuclear warhead to destroy Washington, D.C. If this sounds far-fetched and generic, then the writing team has done its job in making “MacGruber” an ’80s action movie spoof in everything from the fashion to the soundtrack to the wildcat roars that play every time something explodes (and boy, are there explosions).
Following a screening and question-and-answer session in the James Bridges Theater last month, Taccone, Solomon and Forte were all visibly exhausted, having just completed a five-day, five-city college tour, concluding fittingly at their alma mater. But work-related exhaustion is not foreign to them.
“We’re at work (on “˜SNL’) at least 90 hours a week,” Solomon said.
All agreed that the schedule made it difficult to fit in the extracurricular writing for the “MacGruber” script, but would take advantage of the off weeks from “SNL” by holing up in Forte’s apartment in New York City, ordering in food and spending the whole day writing.
“The “˜SNL’ schedule is insane as it is. We just had to carve out time wherever we could,” Forte said. “We’d have all-nighters on Tuesday and wake up and do a little more and nap and have a table read right after that with very little sleep. That’s where some of the crazy stuff from the movie comes from. Our minds were in weird places.”
There’s certainly crazy and weird stuff in the movie (in a good way), but the writers’ talent in quickly writing quality humor is apparent in the rapid-fire wit of the movie, a style akin to that of a brief, live sketch. The extended length and (generous) R rating grants it much more raunchy leeway than cable television, and it doesn’t shy away from guts and gore.
Forte, the star of the film, graduated from UCLA in 1992, majored in history and was a member of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. Forte said he gained 40 pounds his freshman year.
“I carried that through for the rest of my years,” Forte said.
Forte grew up in Northern California and, after getting rejected from his dream school at Berkeley, came to UCLA not knowing what to expect, but said that he couldn’t imagine how different his life would be if he hadn’t come here.
“It was one of the best times in my life,” Forte said. “This school is such an important part of my life. I love this school, and I wouldn’t be the person I am today without it in many different ways.”
Forte’s MacGruber is a simultaneously selfish, moronic and lovable character, who will unflinchingly put himself first in life-or-death situations. And it’s these conflicting traits that make him so funny. In the original sketch, MacGruber is essentially only seen briefly barking out bomb-dismantling orders, so Forte had to make some adjustments in the way he played him, especially considering that in the movie, we see MacGruber in real-life and romantic situations.
A question weighing on many people’s minds is how “MacGruber” will stack up to other “SNL” sketches-turned-movies. “The Blues Brothers” and “Wayne’s World” are two of the more critically and commercially successful examples of this, but there have been massive failures, too. “The Ladies Man” and “It’s Pat” failed to deliver on both fronts. People have voiced varied expectations for “MacGruber,” such as how a 30-second sketch could possibly be stretched into a full-length movie.
“It was a bummer to me there was that stigma to that,” Taccone said. “It got me really excited feeling that we were an underdog.”