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Starring: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler, Ving Rhames, Christopher Walken
Directed by: Barry Levinson
Screenplay by: Steve Adams
Release Date: April 30th, 2004
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and sexual/crude humor.
Box Office: $13,562,325 (US total)
Studio: DreamWorks Pictures
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Tagline: When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.
Tim (Ben Stiller) and Nick (Jack Black) are best friends, neighbors and co-workers, whose equal footing is suddenly tripped up when one of Nick’s harebrained get-rich-quick schemes actually succeeds: Vapoorizer, a spray that literally makes dog poop, or any other kind for that matter, evaporate into thin air.
Tim, who had poo-pooed Nick’s idea and passed on an opportunity to get in on the deal, can only watch as Nick’s fortune—and Tim’s own envy—grow to equally outrageous proportions. The flames of jealousy are fanned by an oddball drifter named J-Man (Christopher Walken) who takes it upon himself to help fix Tim’s situation, but only causes Tim’s life to careen more wildly out of control…taking Nick’s with it.
About The Production
“The interesting thing about envy,” director / producer Barry Levinson observes, “is that it’s part of the human condition. We try to deny it, to hide it, to cover it up, but it’s in all of us. Early on, when I read the script for ‘Envy,’ I thought it was an interesting fable-like story about two best friends. One says, ‘I have this great idea; come on in with me.’ His friends answers, ‘Are you crazy? Of the 50 terrible ideas you’ve had, that has to be the stupidest. The next thing you know, that stupid, little idea becomes worth millions and millions of dollars. Where do they go from there? I thought that was worthwhile exploring in a comedic fashion.”
Screenwriter Steve Adams admits, “I generally want the scripts I write to be about things that concern me, too, and this story began with my own envy of other people’s successes. I found out it’s a common theme. When I would talk to other people about it, they knew just what I was talking about. In this case, it is the kind of envy that comes between two longtime friends who share everything…even their jobs. They are just everymen—guys who work together, come home, and wistfully dream of having more. Then this thing happens and one of them does get more…much more.”
Ben Stiller and Jack Black star as the two best friends who find themselves on very divergent paths. Stiller plays Tim Dingman, who passes up an opportunity to get in on the invention of a spray that makes poop disappear, appropriately dubbed Vapoorizer. Jack Black plays the man behind Vapoorizer, Nick Vanderpark, Tim’s best friend and now—thanks to grateful dog owners everywhere—filthy rich neighbor.
Stiller offers, “Tim Dingman is living a rather mundane existence, with a wife and two kids, and a job at a sandpaper factory. He’s a real practical guy, not much of a visionary like his friend, Nick Vanderpark. Nick is always coming up with inventions that are going to change his life, and Tim is the naysayer who thinks Nick has his head in the clouds. And, of course, Tim is wrong, tragically wrong. Tim becomes so driven by envy, it screws up his friendship. But what’s really eating away at him is that it’s his own fault. He had every opportunity to get in on the deal, so there’s that constant, nagging thought of ‘If only I had made that one decision…’”
Jack Black asserts that his character remains blissfully unaware of the envy gnawing away at his best friend, Tim. “Nick assumes that the Dingmans are as stoked about his newfound wealth as he is. He thinks they are happy for him…like if the team you were rooting for won the championship. Well, the Vanderparks have just won the Super Bowl of dog poop. They’re not just rich; we’re talkin’ stinking, filthy rich. They build a palace and have people attending to their every need. Nick even has the best hairstylists from Milan, so now the ‘do’ he has—you know ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory?’—it’s part Oompa Loompa and part Little Lord Fauntleroy. It’s quite fetching, if I do say so myself,” Black laughs.
“Ben and Jack are terrific, the way they play off each other,” Levinson says. “Their energies are so different, which served us well for this movie because you want that collision of personalities. It allowed for these two characters to have a very interesting dynamic. Ben is great at building a slow burn, while Jack has the more expansive character. And for Ben, playing against that required more restraint, which I think is very hard to do.”
Despite their different approaches, Stiller and Black have only admiration for each other’s acting style. Stiller remarks, “Jack is really good because he doesn’t question it; he just goes for it. He commits to it 100 percent, which makes it a lot more fun to play opposite him.”
Black reciprocates, “Ben’s total commitment to whatever he’s doing is really impressive. There were times we’d be in a scene and I’d be in my own world. All of a sudden, I’d look over in his eyes and think, ‘He’s really listening. He’s totally in it.’ That’s what I tried to pick up from him—how to stay totally in the scene and in communication with the other actors.”
Tim’s envy might have burned itself out were it not for an oddball stranger, who calls himself J-Man, fueling the fire. Christopher Walken, who stars as J-Man, calls him, “a genuine bohemian. It’s hard to define, but he is reasonable in his own way. He sees an opportunity to make some money, but it’s not stealing. He thinks of it as a reward—they’re gonna give it to someone, so they might as well give it to him. He’s basically harmless, though.”
Barry Levinson says that he was thrilled to have Walken in the role, noting, “Chris is a really great actor, and extremely funny. He has a natural sense of comedy, but in a different way from what you might expect. He has a total commitment to any role he is doing; you can see it in his eyes. He is completely focused and just embodies the character. What makes him so great is he has such a command that he can find the essence of things in ways that continually surprise you. He had a line that was ‘Good for you, good for you, good for you,’ and he turned it into, ‘Good for you, good for you, good for you.’ It wasn’t meant to be hugely funny, but in that moment, he extracted something from it that wasn’t on the page. As a director, those moments are quite extraordinary.”
Walken says that one of the aspects of the story that intrigued him was the missed opportunity. “What if you had the chance and didn’t take it? It’s knowing that you were in the right place at the right moment and didn’t know it. I think that’s what happens in Tim’s case, and probably in a lot of cases.”
That missed opportunity not only threatens Tim and Nick’s friendship, but Tim’s marriage to Debbie Dingman, played by Rachel Weisz. Weisz offers, “The Dingmans have a very normal life: They’re not blissfully happy, but they are happy; they are not wealthy, but they’re not poor either. Their best friends, the Vanderparks, live across from them and there's not much to distinguish the two families—their houses are the same, even the two husbands’ jobs are the same. The only difference between them is that Nick is a dreamer, always coming up with these crazy ideas, but this time one of them pays off in billions of dollars. Debbie had wanted Tim to invest in Nick’s invention, but he refused, so she can’t help but be furious. If the Dingmans had just invested $2,000, they would have been as rich as the Vanderparks. The envy that creeps into their lives is very destructive to their marriage. But,” she adds, “it’s also about how money can make you crazy. In this movie, money makes everyone lose their minds.”
Amy Poehler, who plays Nick Vanderpark’s other half, Natalie, agrees, “Once Nick and Natalie become rich overnight, they lose touch with how they appear to other people. They start to live and dress in a way that’s absurd, but in a nice way. What I found most funny about Nick and Natalie is that they think experiencing something vicariously is the same as actually experiencing it. They are totally oblivious to how envious Tim and Debbie have become. They assume that everyone—especially their best friends—would be really happy for them. I also liked how Natalie always supports Nick in his inventions, even though there were probably a lot of failures that came before Vapoorizer. She’s a dreamer herself, so it’s kind of sweet that the couple who are the dreamers are the ones who hit it big.”
Once the Vanderparks do hit it big, one of their more ludicrous decisions is not to move, but rather to build a huge mansion on the exact spot that their tiny house had stood in a suburban cul-de-sac. Levinson says, “Nick is worth a few hundred million dollars and builds a mansion—not somewhere else—but directly across the street from his best friend. So you have this little modest house and on the other side of the street is this fabulous mansion. Nick is not thinking about what it’s doing to Tim to have this giant mansion staring him in the face every single day when he walks out to go to work.”
Black affirms, “To Nick’s way of thinking, having Tim still living right across the street is awesome; it’s the best of both worlds. He could have moved to someplace like Beverly Hills, but that would have been phony. That’s just not him; he’s keepin’ it real.”
The design of the Vanderpark mansion allowed production designer Victor Kempster to let his imagination run wild, envisioning how someone with loads of money, but little taste, would decorate his home. “The house is outrageous, perverse, baroque… It’s completely debauched," he laughs. “It looks like one of those giant hotels gone terribly wrong,” Levinson adds.
Adding to the strange juxtaposition of a literal palace in a middle class neighborhood were some typical suburban trappings. Kempster notes, “I started by showing Barry several different kinds of suburban backdrops, and then I threw in the capper: the gigantic network of power lines looming over the neighborhood. He absolutely loved that. It gave the mansion’s location an even more bizarre identity. What I loved was the absurdity of it. Someone with millions of dollars is very unlikely to build a mansion in the exact spot he lived before, but even more unlikely to build one under those massive power lines. I mean, it’s utterly ridiculous.”
The exterior of the mansion was a façade, while the interiors of the house were mainly shot in a huge mansion in Beverly Hills that had all the over-the-top elements Kempster was looking for, including an indoor bowling alley and an indoor swimming pool. In keeping with the Vapoorizer’s primary use, Kempster incorporated a canine theme for the décor, showcasing gigantic, brightly colored paintings on the walls featuring cavorting cartoon-like canines. There were also statues of dogs and a huge marble statue of Nick on his prized horse, Corky.
“Barry and I thought about how someone would react to having a gazillion dollars overnight,” Kempster comments. “We decided he would want all these boy toys, so for the exterior of the house we built a carousel, a go-cart track, an area for archery, a batting cage and, in the center of it all, Casa Corky, Nick’s palatial home for his beloved horse. Corky’s barn was designed to be a smaller version of the mansion.”
Costume designer Gloria Gresham, who has collaborated with Barry Levinson on ten previous films, was also able to let her designs run the gamut of taste for “Envy.” She offers, “This was probably the broadest comedy I have done in years. Barry did give me one major direction for Jack Black’s costumes: ‘Think of Ralph Cramden with money,’” Gresham relates, referring to the character from the classic series “The Honeymooners.” “Jack was open to everything,” Gresham continues. “Nothing was ever too much. Ben, on the other hand, played a more conservative character, so it all worked out.”
Gresham also notes that the color palette reinforced the contrasting lifestyles. “We wanted to keep the ‘everyman’ palette muted, so you will see some denim, gray, beige and washed-out green. Then, as the money comes into play, the colors become bolder and the costumes become more flamboyant.” “There is a real cause and effect with money,” Levinson says. “It’s part of the American dream, and countless people who have come up with some invention and hit it big have lived it.”
In today’s television culture, what would the selling of any new invention be without those ubiquitous infomercials? Vapoorizer is no exception. “Shooting our own infomercial turned out to be a lot of fun,” Levinson states. “The infomercial has become so much a part of our culture, touting all manner of products. I’m sure if you took the infomercial in our movie and put it on television, people would be calling in.”
 Production notes provided by DreamWorks Pictures. |
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Envy