I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

If you’ve spent any time at all on the internet in the past five years surfing various blogs or chat rooms, or if you’ve perused your local book store’s humor section anytime in the last 36 months, you have almost certainly heard of Tucker Max.  In case you don’t happen to know who Max is, in a sentence he is the best-selling author of “I Hope The Serve Beer in Hell”, a collection of reportedly true short stories from Max’s wild and crazy lifestyle during his early-to-mid 20’s.

Max rose to ‘internet fame’ gradually over the past several years by posting his stories of drunkenness and random fornication on his website, and then cultivating the relationship with his fans by giving his growing audience a voice by providing a message board by which readers can engage him in meaningful dialogue about his writing, his lifestyle, or anything else.  As his audience expanded, his legend followed suit.

Well, after selling over one million copies of his book, which has spent three years on the NY Times Bestseller list, and after becoming the first internet writer to receive a six-figure advance for his next book, “Assholes Finish First”,  Max has made a movie that is loosely based on the wildly popular book of the same name.

I personally am not a huge fan of his work.  I read his message board and his blog frequently.  I admire Max for what he writes on his message board in terms of general commentary more than anything he’s accomplished commercially.  I have read his book and the stories are entertaining the first time you read them.  I find his writing style to be a little too conversational for my taste (inappropriate uses of tenses, etc), but it’s an easy read with plenty of humor.

So why am I writing about this?  Why did I choose to display an ad for Max’s movie at the top of this page, for free no less?

The reason that I am supporting Tucker Max and his movie is simple:  He made the movie the way he thought it should be made.  Whether it fails or succeeds, he owns the results.

Another reason I feel the need to recommend this is the fact that when I say that he made a movie, I mean that HE MADE A MOVIE.  Authors write books that are adapted into movies all the time.  There is nothing groundbreaking about that in and of itself.  But Max, according to what he himself iterated on his own message board, turned down an eight-figure offer to sell the script (because the studio would turn it into a pile of shit) and chose a relatively unknown director (Bob Gosse) over an unnamed, Oscar-winning person who had shown extreme interest after reading the script, simply because he felt that Gosse most shared his vision of what the movie should be.

Max was highly involved in every aspect of the film-making process, from securing financing, to picking a director, to casting, to location, to the marketing and distribution of the film.  He catalogued the experience on his blog, which is a fascinating read for anyone with even a slight interest in the movie-making process.

The thing is, most movies suck, and I haven’t been shy in voicing my disapproval of the efforts of Hollywood.  They are often poorly developed, shallow, predictable, uninspired and unstimulating.  Max has gone to every length within his power to make sure that this movie will be as good as it possible can be.  For that alone, this movie is worth seeing in the respect that it will be interesting to see how well those sentiments come through.  The point is, if I am going to liberally post negative things when it is appropriate to do so, I feel I must also support those who are trying to do things the right way, with the integrity of the art as the primary focus.

There is another reason that I think this movie will not only succeed, but exceed expectations.  That reason is the contribution of the co-writer of the script, Nils Parker.  To my knowledge, Parker has never written or produced anything of any commercial relevance up to this point.  However, I fully expect his contribution to the film to be what takes this movie from good to great.  Parker posts on Max’s message board using the moniker “Drunkasaurus Rex”, and his posts are always as sharp and witty as any professional comedian.  The decision to bring him on board with this project is probably the single most significant move Max has made with the development of this movie.

The movie opens Friday, September 25th in limited release.  They are self-distributing the film and will expand to more theaters in the coming weeks.  For the past several weeks, Max and his crew have been on a nation-wide tour promoting the movie on a wide variety of college campuses.  The consensus from those who have seen it is that this movie blows “The Hangover” away.  I personally have not seen either film, but I will be seeing IHTSBIH the first weekend it is at a theater in Grand Rapids, and will almost certainly have a follow up post shortly thereafter.

Here is a link to the Red-band trailer, released last week.  NSFW.

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