When you've made your name by starting a website named after yourself and selling a book called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell that documents the ways you (hilariously) got drunk and took advantage of various women on countless sexcapades, you may have a bit of an ego. When the film version of your book grosses a measly $1.5 million in the US and Rotten Tomatoes drops a dismal 24% rating on it, your ego should be wounded. Not for Tucker Max.
In an interview with AskMen.com, Max, who has a Law degree from Duke University, had nothing but the worst of things to say about his marketing team, the producer, and the 'man' as a whole for the failure of his film.
Max insists that the utter catastrophe that was his film release couldn't have possibly been a sign that the movie simply 'sucked' as he gracefully put it. No, no, on the contrary, unlike his failed attempts at turning his book into a television show in which FOX and Comedy Central took too much artistic control, Max had full command on the creative side of things with this project so the quality must have been superb. He sums up his approach to the film perfectly in explaining that, "we knew that the hotel sh*t scene would be, like, epic, so we built it around that. We built the story and then put in the best stuff that fits it."
Seems like a foolproof approach.
Don't worry if you're worried that some of the best stories missed the cut in this one, Max knows how you feel-- "Obviously I’d love to shoot the butt sex story, I’d love to shoot the Vegas story. There’s a ton of stuff, but you’ve got to pick. It’s always better to have too much material than not enough. But, I mean, we’ve got to put those in sequels if we do them." Oh right, the sequel that countless production companies are lining up to throw down big bucks on...
But for Tucker Max, a big studio wouldn't have been worth it. There was just too much artistic value in his masterpiece to risk losing anything to the man:
"Look, here’s what people who don’t create don’t understand, is that once you take money from the machine, the machine owns you. And I was just never ever going to let that happen."
Wise words-- one can only imagine how many cheap sex and poop jokes the machine would have added to promote sales.
Even worse, Max projects the frightening possibility that large companies like FOX would have cast talented people in his film.
"This movie, if we had sold it to [FOX] Searchlight, they would've put Seth Rogen and Dane Cook in it, and they would've cut all the f*cking balls out of the jokes, and they would've brought in some sh*t bird to rewrite the script who would've had Tucker have a girlfriend and this and that, and then it's like they own everything, they may have fired me… I would've stabbed somebody if they had done that. They would've fired me off the movie because they own it — I don't own sh*t anymore, but then I'm the one who has to live with all their creative decisions."
It's sad that such a genuinely hilarious book could be the product of such a genuine asshole. Speaking of which, the interview ended with some good news--
"Another book, Assholes Finish First is coming out next year and then English release [of the film] is New Year's -- UK release."
Cheers to you Tucker, and better luck next time.
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