\tThat Twins<\/em> is anything more than a fictional three-day rental from Blockbuster only <\/em>makes sense as the flop-sweaty byproduct of accidental genius, birthed in a nameless executive\u2019s washroom and inspired by the gun-to-the-head threat of unemployment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \tThat Twins <\/em>makes any sense as an actual movie is due in no small part to Ivan Reitman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \tOf the holy trinity of comedy filmmakers spawned by National Lampoon\u2019s Animal House<\/em> \u2014 its director John Landis, writer Harold Ramis, and producer Ivan Reitman \u2014 Reitman is the most inscrutable. Landis is loud and raucous, a devotee of the Marx Brothers; Ramis was a Zen master whose Groundhog Day is regularly cited<\/a> as an agnostic ode to religion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What about Reitman?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even though he\u2019d already directed some Z-grade Canadian horror and earned his producing stripes on early Cronenberg films, Ivan Reitman was not the name everybody was squinting for in the Animal House <\/em>credits, even though it was his baby. He desperately wanted to direct it, but Landis had more clout behind the camera. Reitman knew he was in the right time and the right place. It was the same gilded instinct that made him sit up and notice the shaggy improv show he caught in Toronto years earlier, The National Lampoon Show<\/em>, with ready-to-pop players like John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and some other guy\u2019s brother named Bill Murray. Reitman knew he was still on the bleeding edge of a new age in comedy, but he was starting to slip. So the summer after Animal House<\/em>, he directed Meatballs<\/em>, a bog-standard camp comedy salvaged by a Ramis rewrite and a Hail-Mary starring debut from Bill Murray, still young enough to be known as \u201cThe New Guy From SNL<\/em>\u201d but still Bill Murray enough to only let everyone know he was on-board by showing up<\/a> the first day of shooting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \tFive years later, Reitman direct the highest-grossing comedy<\/a> of all time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \t Ivan Reitman\u2019s filmography speaks for itself. Ghostbusters. Kindergarten Cop. Stripes. Junior. Dave. <\/em>And, of course, Twins<\/em>. Yet it doesn\u2019t inspire the same deep-dive explorations as his contemporaries\u2019 work. He doesn\u2019t have an immediately identifiable stock-in-trade style, like Landis. There\u2019s no philosophical stream that gently carries all his movies in the same direction, like Ramis. Even as a character in the Second City\/National Lampoon boom of the late 1970s, he\u2019s a squarer peg than the rest. According to Chris Nashawaty\u2019s essential account, Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, <\/em>when Reitman showed up for the first rehearsal of The National Lampoon Show<\/em> and started peeling off his winter wear, Bill Murray put it back on him piece-by-piece and steered him out the door again. Besides a few familiar faces like Murray along the way, it\u2019s tough to nail down what makes an Ivan Reitman movie an Ivan Reitman movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \tBut the first five minutes of Twins <\/em>does an admirable job explaining it as it explains how Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito could come from the same human mother. A genetic experiment, of course. Borrowing the best bits and pieces of Top Men and creating the perfect child. But nobody counted on the leftovers making a child of their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \tThat\u2019s it. A few minutes of part-prologue, part-fairy tale and we\u2019re off to the races. Grown-up Arnold decides to find his brother. Grown-up DeVito cheats on his girlfriend with his neighbor\u2019s wife. The comfortable rhythm of 1980s comedy \u2014 montages set to songs found nowhere beyond the soundtrack, a scene in a bar lit only with neon and cigarette smoke, a superfluous crime subplot that turns the third act into an action movie \u2014 takes over. The toughest pill has already been swallowed. The late-game revelation that the twins have Force-grade telepathy strong enough for them to track each other hardly even registers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \t\u201cI called it my domino theory of reality,\u201d said<\/a> Reitman in a Ghostbusters<\/em> retrospective for Vanity Fair. \u201cIf we could just play this thing realistically from the beginning, we\u2019d believe that the Marshmallow Man could exist by the end of the film.\u201d There is nothing so overtly unbelievable as 100-foot junk food in Twins<\/em>, but the approach is no different. Ghostbusters <\/em>opens with a haunting. Books float. The Dewey Decimal System is ruined. We never see what <\/em>scares that poor librarian, but before we can wonder too hard, Bill Murray smarms his way across the screen and grounds us in welcome familiarity. It\u2019s easy to forget because it\u2019s such a cornerstone of 1980s pop culture, but Ghostbusters<\/em>, simply put, is absurd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \tOn the screen, Twins <\/em>takes fewer dominoes to believe. Off screen, it took a multi-million-dollar gamble for anyone to even consider it. In 1988, Arnold Schwarzenegger was not a funny man, at least as far as studios were concerned. If he wasn\u2019t holding a gun or David Patrick Kelly off a cliff<\/a>, nobody wanted to see him, or so The Powers That Be thought. So for his comedy debut, Arnold sought out the director of Ghostbusters<\/em>, a movie some 19 spots higher<\/a> than The Terminator <\/em>on the biggest box office successes of 1984. Reitman was won over by his unexpected charisma and intelligence, neither of which had gotten much screen time by the late 1980s, and they made a very risky deal. Along with Danny DeVito, Reitman and Schwarzenegger wouldn\u2019t take salaries on Twins<\/em> in exchange for a sizable percentage of the profits. With a relatively low budget of around $16 million, the studio didn\u2019t have much to lose. For their bravery, Arnold, Ivan and Danny earned record paychecks<\/a> on a historic deal that no studio will ever agree to again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \tIvan Reitman made Arnold Schwarzenegger believable as a comedy star, but there were more challenges ahead of him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \tKindergarten Cop<\/strong> <\/em>(1990) boldly plays Reitman\u2019s style backwards. The Slightly Outlandish Prologue, in this case, is devoted to Action Arnold, complete with big guns and an \u201880s mall. The movie treats Comedy Arnold as the baseline, the grounding, even though it was only his second time top-lining a comedy. It\u2019s all fish-out-of-water, but the confidence is wise and welcome. Comedy Arnold is fresher, friendlier, making the obligatory third-act action business more surprising and lending it unexpected weight. Fair credit goes to the casting. As far back as Stripes<\/em>, which began<\/a> its life as a doomed Cheech and Chong movie, Reitman mentions casting as one of his obsessions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \tJunior<\/strong> <\/em>(1994) sidesteps the whole Arnold-Schwarzenegger-Does-Not-Have-A-Womb problem by leaving most of the science to Emma Thompson. Nobody bothers explaining how that\u2019d work because it isn\u2019t important and can\u2019t be explained<\/em> (see also: how Ghostbusters 2<\/em> pretends all of New York City didn\u2019t see 100-foot junk food wreck Manhattan). But make Emma Thompson, of Shakespearean import and British accent, a geneticist who seems to have no problem with such logic and the audience suddenly doesn\u2019t mind it either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \tDave<\/strong> <\/em>(1993) bets it all on the same principle. It\u2019s not the number of dominoes, but the size. If you can buy that Kevin Kline is a presidential impersonator so good that he can successfully double for the president in front of the nation, you\u2019re golden. Sigourney Weaver\u2019s first lady sees through it before long, reminding us what we\u2019ve fallen for, but by the end, you still believe that she\u2019d fall for him, too. Actors like Kevin Costner and Warren Beatty were considered for the dual role, but they couldn\u2019t have sold the wide-eyed warmth like Kline did. We believe it because we like him and we\u2019re just as na\u00efve to it all as he is. And he\u2019s just as excited to see Schwarzenegger in a cameo as we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \t\u201cFor some reason, I get attracted to difficult premises,\u201d said<\/a> Reitman on the objectively bizarre set of Junior.<\/em> “I mean, they’re somewhat gimmicky: Ghosts exist and you can zap them; Arnold and Danny are twins; a man who looks like the President takes over and does a better job. But I try as hard as I can to find a level of reality in the fantastic premises that I latch onto.” It’s a rare admission from a filmmaker who speaks more often as a producer than director. That\u2019s likely why the same article references a well-publicized swipe at him a few paragraphs later: \u201cHe is a businessman, not an artist.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \tIt\u2019s as unfair as it is incomplete. Any allegation that he\u2019s \u201cnot an artist\u201d comes from a superficial comparison to his contemporaries. Unlike Ramis and Landis, Reitman\u2019s work does not easily lend itself to video essays. He probably won\u2019t get a film school<\/a> named after him. He doesn\u2019t show up in as many books about Saturday Night Live<\/em>, the National Lampoon or Second City to offer drug-addled anecdotes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \tBut what Reitman does better than any other comedy director is sell the unbelievable. For the child actors in Kindergarten Cop<\/em>, he established<\/a> the \u201cFive Reitman Rules of Filmmaking: listen, act natural, know your character, don\u2019t look in the camera, and discipline.\u201d While obviously aimed at keeping 4-year-olds on task, those rules work as a primer on Reitman\u2019s whole approach. If you can make it real, you can make it funny \u2014 but never, ever wink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \tThere\u2019s more to explore in Reitman\u2019s technique; he disguises improv better than any Apatow-acolyte working today, for instance. But for a crash-course in Reitman 101, try Twins<\/em>, a comedy that\u2019s now 30 years old, that shouldn\u2019t be anything more than a background gag in another movie, but miraculously still is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Hollywood lore and its IMDb trivia page, Twins was dreamt up during a desperate bathroom break by two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":10737,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/2013-07-19-224.png\")
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