What Went Wrong?: Vol. 53/Whatever Happened to…? Vol. 6 – The Curious Case of Nia Vardalos

In early 2002, Nia Vardalos was a virtual unknown in Hollywood. Having attempted and failed to sell her life story as a sitcom, Vardalos set out to make a movie adaptation instead. Charming the likes of Tom Hanks and producer wife Rita Wilson, Vardalos wrote and starred in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a romantic comedy that made use of gross ethnic stereotypes in light of actual jokes or characterization. The film started slowly, but word of mouth built and it enjoyed a long run in theaters, where it ultimately grossed over 240 million dollars against a five million dollar budget. Almost overnight, Vardalos was the hottest thing in Hollywood.

Vardalos’ 2002 breakout hit film.

A boondoggle worthy of its own write-up.

When you are responsible for a film that grosses that much, you can pretty much write your ticket to do whatever you want in Hollywood. Vardalos used her clout to make a musical drag queen comedy called Connie and Carla, co-starring David Duchovny and Toni Collette. The film opened to mixed-negative reviews and grossed only eight million dollars domestically against a budget of almost 30 million. Just as rapidly as she had rose, Vardalos now began to quickly descend. Why Vardalos would follow up one of the biggest hits of the 2000s with a lavish drag queen musical is anyone’s guess.

Five long years would go by before Vardalos would appear in another high profile film, this time My Life in Ruins. Vardalos plays a tour guide who attempts to find herself or find love or something else corny like that while leading a group of tourists through Greece. Though the film actually surpassed its budget in terms of gross, it was met widely with scorn and derision. Roger Ebert called the film “superficial and unconvincing.” Scott Foundas of The Village Voice called it an “anti-comeback” vehicle for Vardalos. It didn’t help that the film opened against The Hangover, one of summer 2009’s biggest breakout films.

Vardalos’ most epic boondoggle came just after My Big Fat Green Wedding, however. Her first post-Wedding project was such an abject, embarrassing failure that it’s surprised she was allowed to make Connie and Carla or My Life in Ruins. It’s surprising she’s even getting the chance to make My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, which I’ll discuss later. Vardalos’ biggest public embarrassment came in the form of a CBS sitcom that debuted on February 24^th, 2003 and then quickly ended on April 13^th, 2003, less than two months after it began. That project of course was My Big Fat Greek Life, one of the biggest television disappointments of all time.

Vardalos’ would-be comeback vehicle references her hit film from seven years earlier in what was surely a great marketing strategy.

As stated earlier, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, after debuting in stage form in Los Angeles, was originally conceived as a network sitcom in the vein of Mad About You or Friends. After significant executive interference, however, Vardalos pulled the plug on the proposed television project and developed the film version with Hanks and Wilson instead (Wilson, who is of Greek heritage, had seen and lavished praise on the original stage version). Some of the network interference including changing the family’s ethnicity from Greek to Hispanic and/or casting Marissa Tomei in the lead role instead of Vardalos herself. After the noted success of the film version (which included an Academy Award nomination for Vardalos’ screenplay), Vardalos and Playtone Productions brought the project back to CBS, and they now had the clout to develop the project in the way they originally intended.

The production had quite a few things going against it from the start. Male lead of the film version John Corbett was unavailable

Actor Steven Eckholdt does not resemble actor John Corbett at all — a fact the TV adaptation should have just ignored.

to reprise his role for the television adaptation due to previous commitments. Corbett’s absence was especially notable as he was perhaps the most seasoned and best actor in the film. He brought a charm to the role that would be hard to replicate, much the same way he did in the HBO series Sex and the City. Corbett was replaced by Steven Eckholdt, an unknown actor who had appeared only in bit or recurring parts on various television programs. Instead of just ignoring this, the show made light of it continually, breaking the fourth wall in the process. What was meant to be a cute joke about Corbett not being in the series turned into a dumb meta-joke about Eckholdt looking nothing like the character originated in the film version.

Additionally, as noted earlier, My Big Fat Greek Wedding relied on gross ethnic stereotypes in lieu of actual jokes and or characterization. While a 90-minute film can get away with this in places, a sitcom needs real characters with real experiences and emotions in order to be resonant. This is the reason why shows like Seinfeld were great and shows like Two Broke Girls are terrible. There has to be more to a character than just being a Greek immigrant with an accent, and no amount of spraying Windex on things is ever going to change that. So after the show debuted to some 23 million viewers (an astronomical amount in 2003 and an unthinkable number in 2015), it quickly tailed off, to the point that CBS (television’s #1 network!) never bothered renewing the show for a second season.

CBS had some of the biggest sitcoms of the time on its airwaves. Two and a Half Men, Everybody Loves Raymond, and The King of Queens all drew massive numbers and continue to be popular in syndication to this day. Charlie Sheen, Ray Romano, Patricia Heaton, and Kevin James are all well known comedians/actors with large fan bases. Vardalos, coming off the second biggest hit of 2002, should have easily been able to turn her show into at least a two-season project. That it ended up being a seven-episode embarrassment is still mind boggling to me some odd twelve years after cancellation. It was a huge blunder of massive proportions and a big black eye for everyone involved. There will one day be a book about the rise and fall of this project, and I will be first in line to read it.

So whatever happened to Nia Vardalos? After her 2009 comeback vehicle My Life in Ruins again failed to become a hit, she wrote 2011’s Larry Crowne with Tom Hanks. That film also failed to gain any real traction in the box office. Vardalos has also made sporadic television appearances one shows like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Cougartown (which co-starred her real life husband, Ian Gomez), and Jane the Virgin, one of last fall’s biggest critical hits. Recently, it was announced that she would finally make a sequel to her breakout 2002 film, as My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 was commissioned by Universal Pictures, again to be produced by Playtone.

Next spring, Vardalos and Corbett will return in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, the much anticipated return of Toula Portokalos.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 is scheduled to open against Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice in March of 2016 as a clear example of studio counter-programming. I can’t imagine that, 14 years later, the film will be a big hit. Vardalos has had one of the strangest and most disappointing Hollywood careers of anyone expected to be the next “it” thing. With the exception of her appearances on already established television programs, she’s never once experienced anything resembling the success of her debut film. This is not to say I’m not rooting against Vardalos – I actually found her quite charming in her debut film. But at 52 years old without any kind of Hollywood success, I don’t suspect she’s going to get many more chances to breakout once again.

-Z-

Whatever Happened to…?: Vol. 5 – Josh Lucas

Though not a household name whatsoever, Josh Lucas came surprisingly close to becoming one in the early 2000s. Starring or co-starring in a string of critical and commercial hits like American Psycho (2000), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and Sweet Home Alabama (2002, and one of the highest grossing Romantic Comedies of all time if I’m not mistaken), Lucas was well on his way to becoming an A-List actor. With good looks and a charisma not terribly far off from that of Bradley Cooper or Ryan Reynolds, Lucas had the potential to become a bankable leading man in Hollywood, but never entirely reached that plateau. So, whatever happened to this guy?

Josh Lucas’ break-out role came in 2002’s Sweet Home Alabama.

Josh Lucas’ first high profile role was in the 1993 Frank Marshall survival film Alive, an Ethan Hawke-starrer that recounted the horrifying tragedy of a Uruguayan rugby team whose plane had crashed in the Andes. The role didn’t lead to much immediately for Lucas, but in 2000 he appeared in the critically acclaimed Laura Linney-starrer You Can Count on Me as well as the aforementioned American Psycho, which Christian Bale and future Lucas co-star Reese Witherspoon headlined. These high-profile roles in low-profile films, however, eventually lead to Lucas earning meatier leading man parts in much bigger Hollywood film productions.

Ang Lee’s Hulk was a disappointment from pretty much every angle.

Unfortunately, none of these projects had any real lasting power. Lucas’ most high profile role to this point in time was as the villainous Talbot in Ang Lee’s disastrous 2003 film adaptation of Marvel Comics’ The Hulk character, titled simply Hulk. The film, more an art house experiment than a true blockbuster summer movie, was not exactly a flop per se, but was considered widely disappointing by audiences, who panned nearly every aspect of the film. Marvel would reboot the Hulk film property a half-decade later to a better reception overall. It is hardly Lucas’ fault that Hulk was a borderline flop, however. He just happened to be in the wrong movie at the wrong time.

2005’s Stealth was another huge misfire, becoming one of the biggest box office flops in history to that time.

Just two short years after Hulk, Lucas was headlining a movie once again, this time in Rob Cohen’s even more disastrous Stealth, which co-starred Jessica Biel and Jamie Foxx. With Foxx hot off of his Oscar win for Ray and Cohen coming off both the Fast and the Furious and the xXx film franchises, Stealth was expected to do gangbusters at the box office. The late-summer release bombed in theaters however, becoming one of the biggest box office busts of all time at that point in history (it has since been easily surpassed by the likes of John Carter, Battleship, and The Lone Ranger).

Subsequent film projects for Lucas included Glory Road – the umpteenth white person/black person race-relations feel good sports dramedy. The film drew mediocre reviews and was controversial for its portrayal of legendary basketball coach Adolph Rupp but did solid box office, grossing just over 40 million dollars. Glory Road was released direct-to-video in many markets, however, because its subject matter (college basketball) was not deemed commercial enough for foreign theatrical release. Additionally, compared to other films in this sports movie subgenre such as Remember the Titans or even We Are Marshall, Glory Road is an almost completely forgotten movie.

Poseidon marked Lucas’ third high profile disaster in just three years, essentially killing his career as a leading man.

It was Lucas’ next role, in the mega-budgeted The Poseidon Adventure remake simply titled Poseidon, which sank his career for good. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen, who had delivered on entertaining summer fare in the past with works like Air Force One and The Perfect Storm, Poseidon was a 160 million dollar would-be blockbuster released in May of 2006. The high-profile release also starred Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss (who I’m sure all the kids were clamoring for) and featured cameos from awful people like Fergie. Though Poseidon was praised for its use of special effects (it was also nominated for an Oscar in this category), the film was an enormous flop, grossing just 60 million dollars domestically. Wolfgang Peterson hasn’t directed a film since.

High-profile work for Josh Lucas disappeared almost immediately after Poseidon flopped. He starred in several indie productions, including the non-Nicolas Cage film Stolen, the minor hit and Matthew McConaughey vehicle The Lincoln Lawyer, Clint Eastwood’s Oscar bait biopic J. Edgar (another outright flop), the Nicolas Cage film Stolen (yes, Lucas was in two movies called Stolen), and the critically reviled drama film Big Sur, a film that grossed a staggering 35 thousand dollars. Lucas was eventually given his own TV show however, where he starred in an episodic version of John Grisham’s The Firm, which had been adapted into a mega-successful Tom Cruise film in 1993. The television version lasted just one season before being unceremoniously axed by NBC. One critic referred to it as “tedious, but not terrible” which sounds about right.

Josh Lucas never made it big in Hollywood, and starring in a string of box office disappointments pretty much killed his budding high-profile movie career. He has three recent movies in the hopper, none of which looks to be released wide theatrically (one of them is even generically titled Space Warriors, which sounds like a SyFy original movie). Though I don’t imagine Lucas will ever have the sort of career he hoped would after being cast in high-profile films 10 years ago, he probably never imagined he’d star in a failed television version of a Tom Cruise vehicle ever. Lucas isn’t a terrible actor, but he isn’t terribly gifted in that department either. More charismatic actors like Bradley Cooper, Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Gosling, Patrick Wilson, and even Josh Duhamel have kind of usurped his career in the ensuing years. Though he didn’t hit it big, he’s at least still a working actor, which is worth something.

-Z-

Whatever Happened to…?: Vol. 4 – Maria Pitillo

The TriStar Pictures produced American remake of Godzilla was a hotly anticipated film back in 1998. Sony’s marketing team worked overtime, making sure the film was absolutely everywhere (I still remember the Taco Bell tie-ins and the awful soundtrack). The special effects looked, at the time, stunning. Godzilla’s creature design itself was a huge secret going in, with even the toys being blacklisted from release until a certain date so as not to spoil the “surprise.” Director Roland Emmerich had scored mega-success two years prior with Independence Day, one of the highest grossing films of the 90s (and the biggest science fiction film at the time since Terminator 2). Star Matthew Broderick had been a successful screen presence since the early 80s. Co-star Jean Reno was internationally renowned for his work in films like The Professional, an influential action film from successful producer and filmmaker Luc Besson. The weak-link, if there was indeed a weak-link in the pre-release hype for the film, was in its female lead and co-star, the little-known (and still little-known today) Maria Pitillo.

It is difficult to talk about Maria Pitillo’s career without also talking about Godzilla (1998).

Maria Pitillo never expected to get into acting. Raised in an Italian-American family in New Jersey, Pitillo only took up acting during a chance encounter with a summer theater troupe. After this experience, she began finding work in commercials in New York City in the late 1980s. She then gained some experience in smaller projects such as various CBS After School Specials (which I kind of wish were still around because they’re hilarious), but never took acting seriously until after appearing in 1992’s critically acclaimed Chaplin. After Chaplin, she gained higher profile roles in True Romance, Natural Born Killers, Bye Bye Love (which aired continuously on pay cable in the mid-90s), and the failed Greg Kinnear vehicle Dear God (the commercials for which still haunt me occasionally some odd 17 years after its release). Pitillo, who had never starred as a billed main character in a mainstream movie, was an unlikely choice then for Godzilla.

When the film released to absolutely dreadful reviews, a certain amount of scorn and hatred was reserved for Pitillo’s character, would-be plucky news reporter Audrey Timmonds. A character so dumb you’d think she’d be on The Walking Dead, Audrey Timmonds is the ditziest of the ditzy blondes. She provided absolutely nothing to the movie, and despite Pitillo’s up-for-anything style of acting, the script was just too bad to salvage the character. Broderick and Reno got off comparatively light, and both have gone on to continue the successful careers they already had. Emmerich bounced back not long after with projects like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 (though his recent White House Down was one of summer’s biggest flops). Godzilla was not well received whatsoever (to put it nicely), and the film quickly leveled off at the box office without so much as sniffing any of the all-time records it seemingly had its sights set on just weeks before release.

Pitillo starred with Matthew Broderick in 1998’s Godzilla, one of the worst blockbusters of all time.

I legitimately hate the Razzie Awards. I find them mean-spirited, unfunny, and unfair in many cases. I don’t think that Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt were bad in Interview with the Vampire. I don’t think it was fair to nominate Katie Holmes for her work in Batman Begins. I don’t find it particularly fair either that Nic Cage and Sylvester Stallone receive nominations every year just because it’s popular to harp on them (if anything Stallone and Cage are doing great work in not-so-great productions). I do, however, totally agree that Pitillo deserved the nomination and win she got for her role in Godzilla. She is abysmal in it, and I find it to be one of the worst supporting performances in any film I’ve ever seen. Godzilla is not a good film whatsoever, and Broderick looks like he is sleepwalking throughout the entire thing. But Pitillo is a different kind of awful. You can tell she’s actually trying, and there’s just nothing there whatsoever. I know the script is bad. I know that the shooting schedule was short and hectic. I know that director Roland Emmerich has expressed disappointment in his own work on the film. But Pitillo remains the absolute worst part of Godzilla, and that is very special in its own terrible way.

It is quite difficult to talk about Maria Pitillo’s career without also talking about Godzilla. The two are now and will forever be tied together. The horrendous failure of the film, a film which has zero defenders because of how truly awful it is, had the largest effect on Pitillo’s career out of any other major player in the production. Look no further than her post-Godzilla filmography and this bears out as true (as well as sad). Before Godzilla, Pitillo appeared in 17 movies. After its failure, she appeared in just three, one of which was a made-for-TV special. Her filmography since appearing in Godzilla is both sparse and sad. She appeared in three unsold pilots for various networks (one of which featured a pre-Two and a Half Men Jon Cryer), and her most recent credit is from a 2008 television show called Big Shots that lasted all of 11 episodes before cancellation.

Pitillo in 2013 — still very pretty.

So whatever happened to Maria Pitillo? Despite Godzilla essentially ruining her movie career, Pitillo seems like she’s doing just fine for herself I guess. She’s been married since 2002 and has a daughter. She’s described as a Yoga and running enthusiast, so she’s got that going for her too. Not everyone can have the level of sustained Hollywood success that someone like Sandra Bullock or Meryl Streep enjoys. Every once in a while (and probably more than every once in a while) there’s a Maria Pitillo out there, someone who never expected to become famous, and then flat-lined when her star-making role was terrible. Who knows, maybe 5 or 10 years from now we’ll ask ourselves what Blake Lively or Gemma Arterton are up to. I think we could certainly ask what Eva Green’s been up to for the last couple of years. During the whirlwind Godzilla production, Maria Pitillo probably felt fame and fortune within her grasp, but the two are fleeting and she just never quite made it. Had Godzilla been a good movie, then who knows how things would have shaken out for her. It wasn’t, however, and her career died on the table.

-Z-

Whatever Happened To…? – Vol. 3: Mara Wilson

I liked Zack’s new feature so much that I am usurping it for a segment.

Remember Mara Wilson?  She was everyone’s favorite adorable little kid in the ‘90s.  Too adorable.  Like kind of makes you want to puke adorable when you think about it in hindsight.  That really is not meant as a slam and it really is not Wilson’s fault.  The films she was in sort of forced her into that “child actor archetype”.

Okay, you still might be wondering who the hell I am talking about.  Remember the bizarrely popular Robin Williams film Mrs. Doubtfire?  Remember the youngest daughter who was probably traumatized due to the horrifying way Williams’s scam was revealed?  Yeah.  Her.

Yep. Now you remember.

To be fair, for a child actor about five or six years-old, she was pretty good, and the film seemed to use her well and she never outstayed her welcome.  I wouldn’t be surprised if that was why she gained some momentum and was cast in leading roles for the next few years (including preforming at the Academy Awards).

Following Mrs. Doubtfire, she appeared opposite of Richard Attenborough in the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34^th Street.  Reception towards the film was largely mixed at best and it did not do all that well in the box office.  She then appeared in Matilda as the titular character.  Based on the popular Roald Dahl novel, the film was critically acclaimed, but bombed at the box office.  Still, filmmakers were still enchanted with Wilson enough to cast her in the leading role of 1997’s fantasy A Simple Wish, another film that was critically panned and horribly bombed.

Was Wilson becoming box office poison or did she just pick poor movies?  Who knows, but she was still being lauded as a promising child actor.  In 2000, she appeared in another leading role in Thomas and the Magic Railroad.  Quite a surreal movie as it mish-mashed all the various versions of Thomas the Tank Engine into one.   Making things even stranger is that the tone is all over the place and the plot is over-complicated.  By now Wilson was getting into her teens and looking a bit too old for roles like this.  And, in Thomas…, she looked extremely bored with everything around her.  I am suspicious if that was a director-inspired decision.

Then, she disappeared.

Usually in Hollywood, no one ever truly disappears.  A big star one day might become a nothing the next, but at least they would randomly pop up in some hellish direct-to-DVD film in order to make ends meet (see: Edward Furlong).  But nothing from Wilson.  She was even at the point where she didn’t even have to audition for movies anymore.  Still, she walked away.  She likely went to school and continued living her life.

All of a sudden, and out of nowhere, Mara Wilson pops up in the popular web movie review series, The Nostalgia Critic playing herself.  Through happenstance, Wilson learned that the show had featured a few of her movies in a humorously disparagingly way.  She didn’t know it the show is largely don’t tongue-in-cheek and berated host Doug Walker for it.  The internet being the internet blasted her for her comments.  Walker, in an attempt at damage control, reached out to Wilson and invited her onto the show where she jokingly mocked him the way Walker does his reviews.  It was one of those “wait…what?!” moments when she popped up.  She has since gone on to occasionally contribute to The Nostalgia Critic and its related series.

Mara Wilson today

Around the same time, Wilson started to develop a presence on the internet including her semi-regularly updated blog, her Twitter account, and writing articles for Cracked.com.  She’s also launched a writing career in theatre and is currently looking into young adult publishing.  According to various interviews, her childhood acting career left such a sour taste in her mouth, that she has largely left that behind and is now focusing more on the “behind the scenes” stuff.

It is very unusual for a celebrity to completely disappear for over ten years to suddenly explode seemingly everywhere in the niche culture that is the internet.  And she seems extremely pleased the way things have worked out for her, and she is largely successful in her own right.  Good for her.

But what about Mrs. Doubtfire 2?  Surely her character is suffering from crippling insecurities stemming from trust issues with parents’ divorce and her father’s subsequent deception.  That’s a movie I want to see.

Whatever Happened to …? – Vol. 2: Kip Pardue

In the early 2000s, after the smash success of Remember the Titans, I really expected Kip Pardue to break out and hit it big in Hollywood. His portrayal of laid-back surfer/golden boy Ronnie “Sunshine” Bass was incredibly charming, and Pardue oozed charisma in the role. Before becoming an actor, Pardue attended Yale University, where he played football. He was also a model, doing professional work for Armani, Polo, and Abercrombie & Fitch. His acting career began with a supporting role in the lesbian-themed comedy But I’m a Cheerleader (which I had seen only after Remember the Titans) as a gay teen, and he was good in that role as well.

Pardue’s role in Remember the Titans brought him significant attention.

Film roles began to pick up almost immediately for Pardue, and in late spring 2001, he starred in what should have been his first real step to stardom, opposite Sylvester Stallone and Burt Reynolds in the would-be blockbuster Driven. Unfortunately, despite positive notices for Pardue, the film received an overwhelmingly negative response and subsequently tanked, becoming one of the biggest busts of the year.  Due largely to the film’s well-publicized failure, Pardue’s once promising career seemed dead in the water before it even had a chance to take off.

Driven was expected to be a big hit, but notably flopped in 2001.

Even after Driven bombed, Pardue continued to get film work, notably including a small role in 2002’s controversial dark comedy The Rules of Attraction. Pardue memorably played Victor, a globe-trotting, hedonistic college student who wins the affection of Shannyn Sossamon’s innocent, virginal Lauren. Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding the film didn’t translate into high box office numbers, and Rules of Attraction flopped as well. Pardue’s role in the film, however, is an absolute highlight, especially the following montage:

After Rules of Attraction, Pardue had a role in 2003’s Catherine Hardwicke-directed Thirteen, which gained both controversy and critical attention, but again failed to propel his career. After a few direct-to-video productions, Pardue then starred in 2005’s Undiscovered, opposite singer Ashlee Simpson. Undiscovered is notable in that it is the film with the largest second week drop off in ticket sales, at slightly over 86%. Ultimately, Undiscovered grossed just over one million dollars against a budget of nine million, making it yet another flop for Pardue. It was also his last theatrically-released film to date (what an ignominious end to a once-promising film career).

From 2005 to 2011, Pardue starred in a string of low-budget horror and comedy films, including the direct-to-video sequel Hostel: Part III. He worked on a low-budget comedy film with ex-SNL star Chris Parnell in 2010, and also did guest turns on both ER (where he had a recurring role in 2006-7) and House, M.D. But nothing he worked on was really substantial enough to cast in bigger projects. Then, in the spring of 2013, Pardue showed up on a sixth season episode of critically acclaimed AMC drama Mad Men, seemingly out of nowhere. Though his appearance was only one episode, it was nonetheless good to know he was at least getting some quality acting work.

Pardue, pictured right, acquitted himself quite well on AMC’s Mad Men.

I always thought it was a shame that Kip Pardue never broke out into the mainstream. Even now I think sometimes about how he lit up the screen way back when in Remember the Titans. He tried to work his way up to the A-list by starring in a failed summer blockbuster alongside Stallone, and who could really blame him for that? Pardue seemed unafraid to take on more controversial film roles, especially so in the case of The Rules of Attraction and Thirteen. Though it has been nearly ten years since he starred in a theatrically-released film, I hope Kip Pardue gets more high profile work, and I hope his guest spot on Mad Men leads to something more permanent for him.

-Z-

Whatever Happened to …?: Vol 1 – Rawson Marshall Thurber

In mid-June of 2004, the domestic box office was seized by the unlikeliest of candidates, a little comedy film called Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. In a season traditionally filled with 150 million dollar blockbusters with 100 million dollar advertising campaigns attached to them, Dodgeball went on to gross a very noticeable 114 million dollars against a miniscule 20 million dollar budget. Even better for Dodgeball was that it was met with generally high critical praise and seemed well-liked by fans. Eventually, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story was much more profitable than many of the films released within the same time frame, including the big budget franchise film Chronicles of Riddick, the middling Steven Spielberg drama The Terminal, the critically reviled The Stepford Wives remake, and the mega-budgeted disaster Around the World in 80 Days. Dodgeball director Rawson Marshall Thurber seemed primed to reap the rewards of making a successful, well-liked film.

A surprise hit upon release, no one expected Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story to be so successful.

Thurber graduated from film school at USC and began working a series of jobs in the entertainment industry (he collaborated on scripts and wrote/directed a small film called The Band in 1999). Before he directed Dodgeball, Thurber also created a series of NFL commercials for apparel giant Reebok beginning in 2002. One of which these ads featured prominently during Super Bowl XXXVII. The commercials, collectively known as Terry Tate: Office Linebacker, were a big hit, with downloads reaching seven million from Reebok’s website (quite a big number for the pre-YouTube time period, when many people didn’t have high speed internet connections).

And then, on June 18^th, 2004, Dodgeball was released, and I have to imagine it changed Thurber’s life forever. Previously mostly unknown, Thurber now had a massive hit film on his resume. I imagine he was bombarded with offers for script writing, directing, and producing gigs in the weeks after Dodgeball hit hard. His film, which featured the considerable comedic talents of Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Christine Taylor, and Jason Batemen, found him forming relationships with some huge names in the industry, particularly Stiller, who featured in some five films in a 12 month span from December 2003 to December 2004, many of them (Meet the Fockers, Anchorman, and of course Dodgeball) considerable hits.

I can’t even imagine who would have been cast in the Tom Selleck role.

And yet, it seemed like Thurber didn’t take much advantage of his newfound fame or Hollywood connections, because no high-profile post-Dodgeball film turned up in the aftermath of his success. There was some talk of a Magnum, P.I. film adaptation in 2006, which has since been shelved (probably indefinitely). I have to believe the mixed reaction to the glut of television-to-film adaptations of the mid-00s probably killed it off (was Starsky and Hutch, coincidentally starring Ben Stiller, the only successful one of those?). Otherwise, it seems like it would have already been made. Other than those whispers, things were pretty quiet regarding Thurber’s career in the years immediately after Dodgeball.

As the post-Dodgeball fame waned for Thurber, he began working on a small, independently-released movie called Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a film he directed, produced, and wrote the screenplay for (based off of a Michael Chabon novel of the same name). Released by Peace Arch Entertainment Group (a production company I have never heard of), Mysteries of Pittsburgh was filmed in 2008 and released in April 2009, where it met with negative reviews and dismal box office numbers. The story drew comparisons to two other independent films released in April 2009, including the flop Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Informant and the well-reviewed Greg Mottola film Adventureland.

Four more years went by with little reference to Thurber, and in this time period I continued to wonder what the heck happened to this guy and why his career had hit the dumpster so soon. A lot new directors who hit it big with a film go on to notable, successful careers. Guys like Sam Mendes and Greg Mottola built careers off of unexpected big hits, and even guys like Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (who have recently scored once again with the surprise hit This is the End) have had incredibly successful careers as well. For a long time I wondered whose cereal Rawson Marshall Thurber must have pissed in, because someone doesn’t just direct a 100 million+ hit film and then disappear.  And then…

Could We’re The Millers be the film to finally put Thurber back on the map?

A few weeks back, I caught a trailer for the upcoming comedy film We’re the Millers, starring Jason Sudeikis and Jennifer Aniston. As an aside, the film looks like it’s going to end up being quite funny, and has a shot to be a substantial late-summer hit in the vein of something like Little Miss Sunshine. When I looked the film up online to check it out in more detail, I noticed Rawson Marshall Thurber’s name attached to it, and was surprised to see he was working on a high profile project. Though We’re the Millers might just be a directing gig for Thurber (he doesn’t have a writing or producing credit for this one), it just might be the film to give this guy the career it seemed he’d have nearly a decade ago. Mystery solved, I guess.

-Z-