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>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until June 15th.
As usual, Judd Apatow has a funny idea. While his chauffeured Chevy Suburban pokes its way through early-afternoon traffic toward Santa Monica, the writer-director decides that it might be a good time to send a menacing e-mail to Ryan Seacrest.
Hunched over his BlackBerry, Apatow -- best known for his work on a flop TV series, Freaks and Geeks, and a hit movie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin -- taps out a terse message to Seacrest, who has a small role in Apatow's new film, Knocked Up.
To: Seacrest, Ryan
From: Judd
Subject: Idol Tix
Hook me up. There's still time to trim your scene.
Satisfied, Apatow hits "send" and chortles. Seacrest had offered him American Idol tickets -- but then failed to write back when Apatow attempted to take him up on it. Now, Apatow is trying again, and he's taking bets. "Let's see how long it takes Ryan Seacrest to e-mail back," he says, folding his furry forearms. "I'm saying within half an hour."
From the back row of seats, Jonah Hill, a rotund twenty-three-year-old comic actor who's along for the ride, chimes in: "I'm calling an hour and a half."
Not long ago, Apatow was in the middle of an agonizing losing streak. A comedy prodigy who scored a manager at age nineteen and abandoned a promising stand-up career to produce The Ben Stiller Show (and then to work on The Larry Sanders Show), he was making smart, deeply empathetic television that critics adored but almost no one watched -- the classic high school dramedy Freaks and Geeks, the college sitcom Undeclared and then several stillborn pilots. "I just thought, 'Maybe there's not many people who get this' -- that this is a niche, like a college band," Apatow says. "Hüsker Dü never sold many records." The stress of battling with NBC executives as head writer on Freaks and Geeks left Apatow with a herniated disc. He found himself unable to laugh without excruciating pain, and he landed in the hospital for spinal surgery. When Fox -- which had already canceled The Ben Stiller Show -- did the same to Undeclared, Apatow sent the network a framed copy of the show's appearance in Time magazine's "Ten Best TV Shows," accompanied by a note: "How can you fuck me in the ass again when your dick is still in there from last time?"
Back in the SUV, just four minutes have passed when Apatow's BlackBerry buzzes: Seacrest is on the case. "Yeah, baby!" Apatow shouts, raising his fist in semi-ironic triumph.
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He shouldn't be surprised: It's hard to imagine anyone ignoring his calls these days. Two years ago, Apatow popped his directorial cherry with The 40-Year-Old Virgin -- a film that managed to combine superbly crafted dick jokes with uncommon sympathy for its Aquaman-doll-collecting title character, played with puppy-eyed soulfulness by Steve Carell. Made for $26 million, it was a career-altering hit for Apatow, grossing $177 million worldwide, helping usher in a new wave of foul-mouthed R-rated comedies and -- perhaps unfortunately -- making "Do you know how I know you're gay?" every frat boy's favorite barroom query.
Already a definitive chronicler of the trauma of adolescence, Apatow turned to the pain of perpetual adolescents fumbling toward adulthood with 40-Year-Old Virgin. "I don't imagine American men ever found it easy to grow up," says Apatow. "But now you can delay it your whole life." Suddenly, it seemed he had a hand in every great comedy coming out of Hollywood. As a producer on the Will Ferrell vehicle Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, he had the idea to change the script from a preposterous farce (news anchors crash-land on a mountaintop, where they fight a war against a group of chimpanzees) to the story of Ron Burgundy's struggle to find love. The same boobish pathos is at the heart of the Apatow-produced Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which grossed $148 million.
In Knocked Up, Seth Rogen -- who's been working with Apatow since Freaks and Geeks -- plays another stunted man-child forced to mature. He's a pudgy, unemployed, bong-toting slacker who accidentally impregnates a blond goddess, played by Grey's Anatomy superhottie Katherine Heigl, during a one-night stand. Then he tries to transform his life to become worthy of her.
Apatow himself grew up long ago. Never much of a partyer -- weed gave him panic attacks -- he hangs out mostly with his wife and kids. "I don't generally bring young comedians everywhere I go," he says. "I am not building a posse." A former obsessive workaholic, he radiates an avuncular calm now, despite an insane schedule: In addition to directing Knocked Up, Apatow is producing at least seven films this year, from the ersatz music biopic Walk Hard (directed by Jake Kasdan) to the uproarious teen-sex comedy Superbad (which co-stars Jonah Hill and has a smaller role featuring Rogen, who co-wrote the screenplay).
Apatow finds writers, actors and directors who share his tastes and keeps them around in what former Freaks star Jason Segel calls "an insulated little world," inviting improvisations and suggestions. "He creates this atmosphere of openness -- anyone can say anything," says Rogen. He has also served as a mentor, nurturing Rogen and collaborator Evan Goldberg's Superbad screenplay for nearly a decade, and teaching Segel (now on CBS' How I Met Your Mother) screenwriting from scratch. "He literally took me into his office and sat me down and showed me how to do an outline and how to do a beat sheet and how to write a script," says Segel, who's currently filming Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a comedy he wrote that Apatow is (of course) producing. "He said, 'You're kind of a weird guy, and that's the only way you're going to make it.'"
Apatow is thirty-nine, and he can look a couple of years older on a bad day -- he's in relatively trim shape, but his hair and close-cropped beard are graying. Fending off brain-dead notes from network execs has left a few extra lines around his blue-gray eyes, which can appear icy when not warmed by laughter. Just above his bulbous, almost W.C. Fields-ish nose is a deep, circular childhood scar. He's wearing jeans, high-tech running shoes and a crisp brown polo shirt, which he just changed into for an appearance on Tavis Smiley's PBS show ("I'm gonna start calling you butter, 'cause you on a roll," the host told Apatow). Before that, he was wearing his usual striped Penguin polo, much like the one Carell rocks in the poster for 40-Year-Old Virgin. "I'm so bad at dressing myself that I just got a bunch of these," he says.
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Apatow grew up in the upper-middle-class town of Syosset, New York, on Long Island's North Shore. (In his stand-up routine, he mocked the comfort of those surroundings via imagined letters to a Sally Struthers-sponsored Third World kid: "Dear Miguel, how are things in the village? Is the drought over yet? Today my mom made me clean the pool. I hate her!") He was the kind of kid who was picked last in gym class -- "sometimes after girls or after people with broken arms," he says, sitting in an ergonomic chair at his desk after arriving at his Santa Monica offices. "It was depressing to be told you sucked at something every day for years and years, and you could never seem to dig your way out of it. Nothing was more important. It was what made girls show interest in you, it related to who your friends were. It was a daily public humiliation. It was brutal."
By the time he was ten, he had found his salvation -- and life's work -- in comedy. "I wanted to be a stand-up comedian, and I was really serious about it," he says. "The first comedy I liked was the Marx Brothers. I lost my mind about them. I think on some level I was attracted to people telling authority figures to fuck off." After the Marx Brothers, Apatow got into Bill Cosby, George Carlin and Steve Martin, who became an obsession. Before his family had a VCR, he'd use a cassette recorder to tape the audio from Saturday Night Live.
A career in show business seemed attainable: Apatow's grandfather, the late Bob Shad, had a distinguished career in the music industry, founding two small labels and producing albums by Lightnin' Hopkins, Janis Joplin, Ted Nugent and many others. Apatow's dad worked at one of his father-in-law's many labels for a while, and then got into real estate; his mom and dad also owned a Long Island restaurant. Judd's parents separated during the summer between his eighth and ninth grades. "Everyone's parents got divorced on Long Island," Apatow says. But he acknowledges that he works with the same writers and actors over and over partly because he doesn't want to see his on-set families break up.
When he was a junior at Syosset High School, Apatow started his own comedy-themed show at the school's radio station, and he managed to set up a series of interviews with famous comedians, including Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno and Garry Shandling -- almost fifty in all. "I think most of them were probably irritated that this child with this eight-foot tape recorder had shown up," Apatow says. He breaks into a vicious imitation of his teenage self, stammeringly interviewing Leno in a high-pitched, Joey Buttafuoco-accented voice: "So do you think when you, maybe, started, in a way, did you think you would be, like, funny? Kind of, maybe, do you think?"
In reality, Apatow -- who still has a trace of that Long Island accent in his rapid speech -- knew just what he was doing. "He gravitated toward showbiz," says retired Syosset teacher Jack DeMasi, who was Apatow's adviser at the radio station. "I've seen a thousand kids do that, and they become accountants. But it was clear from the way he was conducting his interviews that he was learning the business, he was learning what he needed to know to be successful."
Apatow went on to attend USC film school, though he dropped out after a year or so. DeMasi remembers that his application included a story about a "nebbishy guy" whose one moment of glory was starting the Wave at baseball games. "That identification with those kind of characters has fueled where he's gone with his comedy since then," DeMasi says. "There was always that sense of pathos."
Hanging on the wall by Apatow's desk are several pictures of his wife, actress Leslie Mann, who is tall, blond and gorgeous (she plays the drunk who throws up on Carell's face in Virgin). There are also photos of his two daughters (including one shot with Gwen Stefani), a picture of him and Carell with Dan Rather -- and a portrait of the late Warren Zevon, wearing shades and laughing during the sessions for his final album. Apatow is a huge fan, and he got to meet Zevon once in the Nineties, trying to get him to score a movie that was never made. During the meeting for the project -- which was supposed to star Owen Wilson and Rip Torn as Alcoholics Anonymous members -- Apatow casually mentioned that he was waiting for the studio's feedback. Zevon looked at him and asked, "What do you care? Why would you change anything for the studio?"
Apatow was taken aback: "It hit me -- 'Oh, he's an artist! He doesn't give a shit what anyone says.'" Since then -- for better or worse -- he's tried to follow that example.
>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until June 15th.