On a gorgeous day in Beverly Hills last spring, sitting at a bistro, the guys from Entourage were back doing what they do best. Crudely insulting one another. Marveling at Vince’s latest female conquest. And running into yet another celebrity.
Four years after the HBO series about the Hollywood adventures of a movie star (that’s Vince) and his posse from Queens ended, a movie version will arrive on June 4 in the UAE. And Doug Ellin, the show’s creator and the film’s writer and director, was cramming the movie with a signature touch of the series: the celebrity cameo.
This day’s scene featured Armie Hammer as a jealous, obnoxious version of himself. He interrupted a lunch to inform Vince that he used to date Vince’s newest girlfriend, model Emily Ratajkowski. He coolly delivered a threat: “One day I will enjoy sneaking up behind you and snatching the life out of you.”
The creators of Entourage are banking that audiences will be drawn once again to these jokey insider glimpses of Hollywood. Enough to overcome the four-year absence of a modestly rated show and a failed run in syndication.
Hollywood has strip-mined its past for decades, rebooting long-dead TV series such as Mission: Impossible, 21 Jump Street and The Odd Couple for the big and small screen with new stars, writers and directors. But Entourage the movie represents a new breed, where the original cast and creators all come back.
Such shows, even ones cancelled just a few years ago, are increasingly returning in film form or as short-run series on the networks and the growing streaming sites investing heavily in new content.
Propelled by a Kickstarter campaign, Veronica Mars was released in theatres in 2014, seven years after CW pulled the plug. The Comeback and Arrested Development — two critical darlings from last decade — were resurrected by HBO and Netflix. Showtime has hired David Lynch and Mark Frost to update Twin Peaks, while The X-Files will have six new episodes on Fox. Even Full House, the nearly 30-year-old ABC sitcom starring Bob Saget and John Stamos, has been given new life as Fuller House by Netflix (sadly, without the Olsen twins).
Driving much of this trend is the changing nature of fandom in an on-demand entertainment world. “There is a passionate audience that doesn’t feel done with the characters,” said Michael Lombardo, the president of programming at HBO.
Even before Entourage ended its eight-season run in 2011, Warner Bros was pursuing a movie deal with HBO. The attraction: a storyline and characters that resonated with young men, the most coveted moviegoing audience.
“What’s it like if one of your closest friends became a giant movie star and you went along for the ride with him?” said Greg Silverman, president of creative development and worldwide production for Warner Bros Pictures. “What would that experience be like? That’s a high concept.”
And if built-in brand awareness comes with the project, at a time when it’s harder than ever to cut through the entertainment clutter, so much the better. The big studios, more than ever, steer away from original stories, preferring the cachet (and existing audiences) their films gain from TV shows, comic book characters and bestselling novels.
For Entourage, first there was the small matter of persuading Ellin.
His final contract with HBO called for a film script. But he didn’t take it seriously, assuming the clause was just one of those Hollywood accounting tricks for the network to justify paying him more.
“I thought it was over,” Ellin said. “I didn’t think we’d come back.”
But after a few years of post-Entourage decompression, the killing of two pilots at HBO and continual pressure from Mark Wahlberg (an executive producer of the show, whose exploits inspired it) and Ari Emanuel (Walhberg’s agent and the model for Jeremy Piven’s hard-driving, foulmouthed agent, Ari Gold), Ellin relented.
He couldn’t quit his creations, after all — a feeling many of his show-runner colleagues share.
“Once you’ve invented a world as an author, you feel proprietary about it,” said Carlton Cuse, whose credits include Lost, The Strain and Bates Motel. “So much effort goes into creating it, it’s hard to not want to continue to tell stories in that world.”
Especially when the show in question ends prematurely (at least in the creator’s mind). “I thought we got rushed, to be honest with you,” said Ellin, who had hoped to do another season.
Rob Thomas, the creator of Veronica Mars, did not agree with CW’s call to cancel his show after three seasons. He got his chance to revisit the fictional town of Neptune, California, after fans pledged $5.7 million (Dh20 million), and Warner Bros, which controlled the rights to the show, put in millions more for production as well as marketing and distribution. The movie collected just $3.3 million at the domestic box office, but its take from digital downloads helped it surpass its $6.5 million budget. “It’s the first thing in my career I’ve seen my back-end percentage on,” Thomas, whose other shows include Cupid, Party Down and iZombie, said with a chuckle.
That a loyal audience would agree to bankroll Veronica Mars speaks to the creative and business changes television has undergone in recent years.
Audiences may be smaller in a world of nearly 400 scripted series, but it’s that fragmentation that allows TV writers to take more chances. Freed from having to reach tens of millions of viewers, and the creative trade-offs that entails, they can draw more textured characters, inject nuance into plots and be more ambitious in filming.
“Not everything has to be a big tent, you can be a little more niche,” Thomas said. “And I think that invites fans to become more passionate about it.”
That fervour of a loyal few helps explain why Netflix resurrected Arrested Development seven years after Fox cancelled it, and just ordered another 17 episodes. For a movie like Entourage the economics are more challenging.
Entourage was one of HBO’s highest-rated half-hour shows, and some seasons the highest, during its run, but viewership still just topped out at an average of 8.3 million (including on-demand and digital viewing) during Season six. And its dismal performance in syndication, both on Tribune stations and later on Spike, raises a caution flag. But the film’s reasonable $25 million production budget made Warner Bros comfortable with the risk.
A major challenge for Ellin was to craft a story with movie-size stakes while not straying too far from what drew fans in the first place.
The second Sex and the City movie got that balance wrong, dispatching Carrie and her friends to Abu Dhabi, far from their New York milieu, according to HBO’s Lombardo. The domestic box office plummeted, to $95.3 million from the first movie’s $152.6 million.
“Let’s be clear, people want Entourage,” Lombardo said. “They don’t want to see Ari Gold in outer space; they want Ari Gold doing what Ari Gold does, which is yell and go crazy and be bombastic.”
In the movie, Ari, now head of a studio, decides that his first big movie will star Vince. But Vince insists that he must direct it. As the film goes over its $100 million budget, Ari hits up the Texas oil billionaire who’s financing the film (Billy Bob Thornton), who then sends his ne’er-do-well son (Haley Joel Osment) to Los Angeles to check on his investment. Needless to say, complications ensue. As Ari lectures Eric (Kevin Connolly), Vince’s manager and best friend since childhood: “If this movie tanks, Vince will not come back from this. Neither will I, and neither will you.”
The Entourage film, according to its makers, is ultimately about male friendship and loyalty. (A touchstone movie from Ellin’s youth is Diner.) Just now there are helicopters, yachts, crane shots and loads of cameos — more than 35 familiar faces, including Jessica Alba, Pharrell Williams, T.I., Gary Busey, even Warren Buffett.
“We’re staying true to the show and what it was — just a little bit bigger,” said Kevin Dillon, who plays Johnny Drama, Vince’s mooching half brother.
If Entourage succeeds at the box office, expect more instalments and more attempts by the studios and networks to reanimate other TV shows, complete with original casts and creators.
As Adrian Grenier, who plays Vince, said on set, “It’s a franchise that hopefully will never die until one of us does.”
Don’t miss it!
Entourage releases in the UAE on June 4.
