“I watch that all the time”: the comedy Judd Apatow calls a perfect movie
Comedy is a genre that tends to move in cycles and adopt whatever the latest craze is before running it into the ground, which played a huge part in establishing Judd Apatow as arguably the single most prominent name in Hollywood comedy in the early part of the 21st century.
That was hardly apparent from the beginning, though, after his first forays into creating his own comedic content didn’t go to plan when Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared were both cancelled after one season. Apatow and his colleagues ended up getting the last laugh, though, after the majority of them went on to become stars in the years to come.
Paul Feig, James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Kevin Hart, Jay Baruchel, Linda Cardellini, Charlie Hunnam, Amy Poehler, Jake Kasdan, Mike White, and Nicholas Stoller all worked on at least one of those shows on either side of the camera, and it would be an understatement to say they’ve done alright for themselves over the last two decades.
Apatow’s status as the director of The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, as well as his producing position on Anchorman and Superbad, helped usher in the ‘Frat Pack’ era of studio comedy, with his regular troupe of performers frequently working together on a string of raunchy hits that more often than not blended gross-out gags with plenty of heart.
His influence may have waned in recent years after the boom period died down, but Apatow’s favourite comedy of all time predates his involvement in the industry by quite a distance. More than being a standard vehicle designed specifically to extract laughs from an audience, it was a full-blown cultural phenomenon.
Earning close to $250million at the box office and earning ten Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Actor’, Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie followed the misadventures of Dustin Hoffman’s Michael Dorsey, an immersive actor who finds himself in such a struggle to find work that he adopts the persona of Dorothy Michaels and ends up winning a part in a vaunted soap opera.
To Apatow, comedy has never been done better on the silver screen. “Tootsie is a perfect movie,” he informed Rotten Tomatoes. “I watch that all the time.” Unfortunately for the writer, producer, director, and occasional actor, he laments modern releases of the 1982 classic coming without Pollack’s commentary track, which left him “up in arms” as a self-confessed “comedy nerd”.
Commentary track or not, Apatow will defend Tootsie to the death as the living embodiment of cinematic perfection that’s never been bettered by anything else in his estimation, as well as a movie that he finds himself happy to rewatch on a regular basis.
