CHECKING IN ON "I LOVE YOU BETH COOOPER"'S LARRY DOYLE

[MattBrady]

by Zack Smith

Larry Doyle has a resume that any comedy writer would envy. He’s been regularly published in such well-known periodicals as Esquire, The New Yorker, New York and Spy, and has also worked on classic animated shows such as Beavis and Butt-Head and The Simpsons, where he won two Emmys as part of the writing staff. Now, his first novel, I Love You, Beth Cooper, is being made into a feature film by veteran director Chris Columbus, starring Hayden Panettiere from Heroes as the titular character.

Cooper, which was recently released in paperback from HarperCollins, chronicles a night in the life of teenage nobody Denis Cooverman, who makes the titular declaration during his valedictory speech at his high school graduation. Unfortunately, Denis has never actually spoken to gorgeous cheerleader Beth…which makes things particularly awkward when she shows up at his house later…with her psychotic boyfriend on her trail. Along the way, Denis finds out Beth isn’t as perfect as he thought…and finally has a few high-school experiences worth remembering.

Doyle had come back from a visit to the filming of the film version of Cooper when we talked with him. “The filming is going to go through mid-May, I think,” said Doyle. “It’s not the first time I’ve been on the set of a movie, so that tiny thrill is gone, but I’m really happy with how it’s going. There are times when you can watch a movie being made and not be sure where it’s going, but here, I’m really happy with the direction they’re taking it.”

Doyle praised the filmmakers’ faithfulness to his novel. “It really is fortunate for me that they seem to have liked the book and the screenplay enough that they’re following it,” Doyle says. “On other films (I’ve worked on), the director seemed to throw them out on his whim day by day.” One painful example was the comedy Duplex, where he wrote the screenplay, got Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore attached to star...”and then a director was brought in at the last second who threw out about half the script with about six weeks left until shooting.”

He also served as the original writer on Looney Toons: Back in Action, which he felt was a case of “too many cookers.” “I think it’s one of those things where you’re doing a $120 million movie – no one seemed to have total control over it,” Doyle said. “I think it’s a much better movie than Duplex, but everyone had much higher aspirations for it (than how it turned out).”

Many critics noted that the novel of Cooper seemed like it was made to be filmed when it came out last year – and, in fact, the book was optioned by Fox Atomic before it was even published. Doyle said that this was a result of the book’s roots in teen cinema (a quote from a classic teen movie opens each chapter), though this did make for some challenges in the adaptation.

“It was written as a homage to teen films in general,” Doyle said. “The main concern I had with it becoming a film was that there were a lot of moments that satirized teen films, and in the transition from book to movie, we had to pull out a lot of specific moments that weren’t unique to it. There’s a lot of things that happen in the book that were just designed to be references to other movies, and I took a lot of those out, except where we went somewhere to the reference.”

Doyle, who had “a lot of fun” writing Cooper, kept the book’s action confined to one night to keep the story “fast and full of forward momentum.” “It’s this very simple story about guy following around this woman he’s idealized, and so that set limitations on me that kept this from being a 700-page book,” Doyle said.

Cooper features a comic connection in the form of the cover and interior artwork by Dork! and Milk and Cheese maestro Evan Dorkin, which chronicle Denis’ deteriorating condition from chapter to chapter. “It came out as part of the book because I proposed the book cover, because I thought Evan’s style captured that type of character best,” Doyle says. “It’s got comics in it because I like comics! I’m not sure how thoughtfully the incorporation of comics was in the book. I hope it comes across as being in the DNA of the story, but it’s not something I did deliberately. It just seemed appropriate to me. They liked that illustration so much that I proposed they used it as a chapter heading.”

Doyle actually has a background in comics, including work on the “Bad Publicity” strip in New York with Kyle Baker, one of his favorite cartoonists, and serving as an editorial director at the late First Comics on such books as their Classics Illustrated line.

Doyle said that he wasn’t against returning to comics “for fun,” but admits that it’s hard to make a career in that medium. “The experience of doing that – it would be hard to get past the flaws of the business models to want to do that again!” Doyle laughed. “It was such a weird and bad business, and a particularly bad business for creators of original work, that I don’t know if I’d want to get involved again unless I had the clout to overcome those problems.

“They own so much of everything that they take a lot of the feeling of authorship away – which they also do in the movies, but they pay you about 100 times more for the privilege!”

Doyle moved on from comics to magazines and eventually to Beavis and Butt-Head, where he wrote such episodes as “Choke” and “The Final Judgement of Beavis” (he also wrote two tie-in books, Huh Huh for Hollywood and This Sucks, Change It, both of which he admits were written “in exactly a week”). An example of one of his scripts that didn’t make it to air can be found here.

“It was a fairly easy job,” Doyle recalled. “You wrote it up, handed it in, and when it was done, they showed it to you. They never asked for rewrites – Mike (Judge) would get the script, and kind of use it as a blueprint for whatever he was going to do that day.

“That show was so much his thing – it’s his art, it’s his voices, he created the original story, the original characters, he still wrote most of the original stories – it seemed perfectly natural for him to do what he wanted with the material. And you can’t argue with Mike Judge about what Beavis and Butt-Head would do or say – not that you’d want to! I think you could argue that he elevated 99.9 percent of the scripts he did.”

Doyle then went on to work on The Simpsons, where he wrote such episodes as the Comic Book Guy-centric “Worst Episode Ever.” “The big difference on The Simpsons is that you’re there when you’re doing it,” Doyle said. “On The Simpsons, you’re there every day, working with 10-12 other people on the jokes, seeing the animatics and layouts, and hopefully making contributions all along the way.

“By the time I was done, I had worked on almost every aspect of it, from dialogue recording, to editing, to music scoring sessions – not doing them hands-on, but being there, and participating in the process.”

Working in animation gave Doyle a unique perspective when he moved into live-action screenwriting. “Animation scripts are much more complicated from a visual point of view,” Doyle says. “If you wrote screenplays the way you did animation scripts, they would all be 200 pages long! And you’d probably aggravate a lot of people in the process, because you’re also playing director in the script. You’d give camera angles, very specific examples of how to compose the shots, and in a live-action script, you have to pull back on that.”

Currently, Doyle is writing a screenplay for Disney, about to start work on his second novel, currently titled Go Mutants!. He’s also open to the idea of a sequel to Beth Cooper. “Maybe, if I can think of something people will like,” Doyle said. “The one thing I know is what I want the title to be: I Hate You, Beth Cooper. Now, all I need to do is think of what the story will be – the challenge, as a writer, is if I can think of something that does something different from the original story.”

In the meantime, Doyle urges fans to check out the paperback of I Love You, Beth Cooper. “The paperback has about 15 pages of submissions I got from people telling their worst high school stories, and the ones reprinted are just hilarious,” Doyle said. “So it’s worth picking up just to read those.”

I Love You, Beth Cooper is in stores now.

[Shonborn]

I've been meaning to check this book out for a while.

[JL_Amato]

This book was great.

I had no idea it was getting turned into a film though.

[Leland]

I HIGHLY recommend the novel! Very funny stuff, particuarly if you are a fan of '80s John Hughes films.

[Moonbeam]

Funniest book EVER and one of my favorite recent reads. And yes, it read like a movie -- a really good comedy. I hope that means it will translate well to film.

[NemesisPrime]

Excellent novel! I enjoyed this book thoroughly and I feel, along with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, it shows what teen fiction can do and how great it can be.

[CMadness]

Larry Doyle also worked on the 1989 Pogo revival.

[Rockin' Rich]

Doyle was also an editor at First Comics. Editor In Chief, in fact.

I saw him do a presentation of some of the new Looney Toons a few years back at a local college and they were terrific and he was quite funny.

That's all I've got.



http://jokebooks.blogspot.com

[jza1218]

I dug the book immensely

[caanan]

yes! That is some seriously great news. I loved this book. Any book that can make you laugh out loud - a lot - is a good book.

I thought this would make a great movie as I was reading it. Let's hope it will be great! Who's playing the hapless hero?