The “American Bro” Is an International Embarrassment. But here we are. Two weeks ago, the Adelphi University men’s lacrosse team thought it was a good idea to come barreling out of the tunnel before a game waving an American flag and blasting a Trump speech laid over some generic EDM. Lambasted and snickered at by liberals and the left.
Author Mike Sacks talks productivity, comedy and questioning one's life decisions when you're in the thick of creation madness.
You might be slightly baffled by the premise of the hilarious novel Stinker Lets Loose!, and its author is completely OK with that. “I kind of like the confusion because I think there’s too much explanation in the world sometimes.”
Against the author’s wishes, we’ll try to explain it anyway. Stinker Lets Loose! is the novelization of a 1977 classic trucker movie about a renegade trucker and his mischievous chimp tasked with delivering a six-pack of beer to President Jimmy Carter. (Think Smokey and The Bandit meets Every Which Way But Loose meets the most insane fever dream you’ve ever had.)
So here’s the thing: the movie that this book is based on doesn’t exist, nor does the book’s author, James Taylor Johnson. The entire project is the work of comedy writer Mike Sacks (who definitely does exist -- see evidence here.) Sacks conceived Stinker Lets Loose! as a two-for-one send-up of two things near and dear to his heart: trucker movies and the fantastically bad genre of movie novelizations. “It was just something I wanted to do to amuse myself and my friends,” he says.
It did a little more than that, landing on the Top 100 best sellers list on Amazon, becoming the basis for an audiobook on Audible that features the likes of Jon Hamm, Andy Richter and Philip Baker Hall, and, in turn, becoming the basis for live reading events that reviewers absolutely lost their minds over.
Pretty impressive results for something whose main goal was to be “intriguingly bad.” Entrepreneur spoke with Sacks about what it takes to make your idea a reality, even when everyone -- including yourself -- is asking, “What the hell are you doing?
Get fueled by your anger.
'I've been writing comedy for magazines and books for a long time. And I was just kind of tired of the hustle, tired of working on ideas I wasn’t crazy about and definitely tired of trying to come up with Trump jokes at midnight. I was paid for my work but I wasn't happy with the final product. I had a particularly bad experience and I thought, ‘Fuck it, I'm going to do what I want, how I want to do it.’ In no way am I comparing myself to geniuses like Richard Pryor or George Carlin, but people like that go through a schism -- they break from what they are doing and not happy about and just let themselves free and do whatever they want. And that's when people really succeed. You really do have to follow your inner compass and lodestar.'
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Be prepared to totally freak out.
'I wrote Stinker Lets Loose! in six months. Some nights I would be sitting there struggling on a scene -- a garbage scene for a garbage book -- and think, 'What the hell am I doing?' I thought I should be working on other nonfiction books, I should be interviewing people. But as tough as it got, I learned that there's a real difference between struggling through your own project vs. struggling through someone else's project. It’s like smelling your own child's diaper vs. another child’s diaper. Your kid’s diaper is going to smell fine no matter how bad it gets.'
You can find the time if you really want it.
'I have a full-time job, and to find time to do this I had to make sacrifices. One of the things I gave up was TV. I realized I would just sit there scrolling around for two hours trying to find something to watch. Giving up TV freed up a lot of time and I found that the more I wrote, the more I wanted to write. It becomes addictive to create. You get sort of a high from it.'
Abandon the way it is supposed to be done.
'My agent wanted no part of this project, which I understood. I’ve written several nonfiction books and published through the traditional route, but I decided to publish this under my own imprint, Sunshine Beam Publishing. There are so many layers and levels to get through when you go the traditional route. Even after your book gets accepted, it will take two or three years for it to come out, which is ridiculous. My girlfriend is a designer and she created the amazing cover and I took on the marketing, which honestly an author has to do even if they are going the traditional route. I had a very specific vision for this, and I knew I would have to do it myself to achieve it.'
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Let it go.
'You become stagnant if you work on the same project for two, three, four or five years. Time and time again when I’ve interviewed writers and creators for my nonfiction books like And Here’s The Kicker, people say that it’s never going to be perfect and at a certain point you have to pull the trigger and release it. You really do have to propel yourself.'
Be patient.
'When I finally put the book out it was met with total dead silence. That was my darkest 'Why did I waste six months doing this?' moment. But over the years, I’ve collected the emails of about 5,000 friends and people in the comedy world and sent out an email asking them to check it out. It’s not a huge list, but it is all people who are comedy geeks and have a high comedy IQ -- the audience for this book. Working at Vanity Fair, I see every day how much time and money is wasted sending books out in an untargeted blast. A few weeks after I sent the email, people starting buying it and getting back to me about how they liked it. That’s when I sort of breathed a sigh of relief like, 'OK, at least they get it.'
Be open to help.
'The guy behind the audiobook is Eric Martin. Two weeks after the book came out, he connected with me and said he thought it was really funny and asked if he could turn it into an audiobook. I said sure, it's all yours. I wasn’t really thinking much would get done because over the years I’ve had a lot of people say they want to do something and it never comes to fruition. But this guy ran with it. He sold it to Audible, which is big deal, narrated it and enlisted 30 actors to play all of the parts. It turned into an audio movie, really. I was just blown away by what he accomplished. It really was just a stroke of luck to have him get the sensibility so perfectly -- it was incredible really.'
Don’t be scared.
'I don't think writing should be seen as mysterious and scary to those just starting out. I think you just have to put yourself out there. There are so many online platforms where you can find out what works and what doesn't work. If you have talent, no matter who you are, you could potentially be read by as many people who read a story in The New Yorker. It’s an amazing opportunity and it’s all possible. If you have talent -- no matter who are -- you can do it and I think that's a good thing to know.'
In an unexpected twist, Sundance has become the launch pad for what 20 years ago was very mainstream fodder: the mid-budget, fairly smart international spy film. We saw it in 2014 with Philip Seymour Hoffman starring in the adaptation of John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man, and we have it again this year with Beirut, which, when it is working well, is of Le Carré caliber. This isn’t a particularly chancy film, unless the decision to go old school is considered such. It is still, however, quite good.
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We open in 1972 where Jon Hamm’s foreign diplomat Mason Skiles (what a name!) is friendly to all sides in Beirut. It’s quickly evident that his dominant skill isn’t fighting or shooting, it’s talking. Problems arise in the middle of a cocktail party when agents realize that his 13-year-old ward Karim is actually the younger brother of a terrorist wanted for the Munich Olympics attack. Just as the CIA wants to grab him, the older brother’s goons burst in, bullets fly and Skiles’ wife is dead.
Ten years later and the warm umber tones of Beirut are traded for the cold gray skies of Boston. Skiles, drinking a lot, is a low-level mediator for labor disputes (whomever director Brad Anderson cast as the sick-of-it-all shop steward is perfect) until he gets an urgent request to “come speak at a university in Beirut”. He knows that something big has gone south if he’s the only guy who can fix it. He gets himself loaded and gets on a plane.
Beirut in 1982 is divided into factions and on the brink of all-out chaos. (Though a specific date isn’t given, this story is set before that year’s massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, and the bombing of the US barracks is still a year away.) Tony Gilroy’s sharp script tips just enough of the “who is fighting who” in a short, witty rant from a taxi driver explaining why they are taking the scenic route. Wisely, a jaundiced eye is cast on all players: the Christian and Muslim factions, the PLO and the neighboring Israelis.
Today’s specific crisis is this: one of Skiles’ old buddies Cal (Mark Pellegrino) has been kidnapped, and he must be found at once or else all his intel will be blown. It’s a fringe group that has him, and they will only speak to Skiles. Turns out it’s grownup Karim (Idir Chender) and he’s convinced the Israelis are holding his older brother after a decade of successful terrorist attacks. The clock is now ticking: find the brother, get your man back.
A specific negotiating task to Skiles is like spinach to Popeye. He shakes off his drunken stupor and starts calling out plays like an American football coach. Gilroy’s dialogue is sharp, but he doesn’t push it (not everyone must be a showoff like Aaron Sorkin.) What follows is essentially a string of meetings until the final handoff can happen.
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Like any good spy tale, there’s the wounded man in the center, and Hamm (mostly bouncing off his CIA handler Rosamund Pike) has got the hollow hero thing down after seven seasons of Mad Men. It may sound like a low bar, but the non-plot bits in this movie aren’t a bore, which if you’ve seen a direct-to-video John Cusack or Nicolas Cage spy movie recently, you know isn’t always the case.
The conclusion’s big twist isn’t quite as sexy as it thinks it is, though one instantly forgives it for the outstanding needle-drop chosen for the final scenes. I have no doubt that we’ll see essays from both Israelis and Palestinians denouncing this film, as well as Lebanese critics decrying the use of their country’s bloody recent history as a backdrop for mere Hollywood spectacle. I don’t really have a defense for that last one, especially since the people of Lebanon barely feature in the movie at all. Perhaps this is commentary on American tunnel vision in foreign policy, or perhaps this is just a tightly focused narrative on a deadline. Or maybe as with so many things, there’s some truth on both sides.
- Beirut is showing at the Sundance film festival and will be released in the US on 13 April