Matt And Ben Script Pdf
By Matt Damon and Ben Affleck: Ben and Matt: early draft script in text format: imdb.com: video, dvd, cd, books, cabletv: A Good Year: by Marc Klein (based on the novel by Peter Mayle) Daily Script: april 29, 2005 unspecified draft script in pdf format: imdb.com: dvd, book: A Good Year: by Marc Klein (based on the novel by Peter Mayle) Daily.
ALTHOUGH her name is not mentioned in any of its forms - J. Lo, Jenny, Jen -the inescapable image of Jennifer Lopez hovers over the clever Off Off Broadway satire 'Matt & Ben.'
' Set in 1995, when Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were struggling actors, the play has Ben fantasize about being famous. 'I'm going to meet Daisy Fuentes,' he says. 'I like Latin women.' ' The line gets a huge, easy laugh because we are all saturated with too much information about the couple sometimes known as Bennifer. Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers, the women who wrote the play and also appear as Ben and Matt, turn celebrity overload to their advantage, embracing our shared image of the actors - Matt is the smart one, Ben is cute but dumb - even as they send up the embarrassing amount of trivia we carry around about movie stars. The play shrewdly connects to its audience by tapping into our encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. 'Matt & Ben' (now running at P.S.
122 in the East Village) had its premiere a year ago at the New York International Fringe Festival, at the very moment when the Ben and Jen Show was about to overshadow the Legend of Matt and Ben. Despite the hovering spirit of J. Lo (the line about Latin women has been added since the Fringe performances), it's the Legend that is central to the play. We all know the story, of how two best friends came out of nowhere to win an Oscar for writing 'Good Will Hunting,' their first and so far last script together. 'Matt & Ben' depicts the only plausible explanation: the screenplay fell from the sky. Actually, here it falls from the ceiling into Ben's shabby apartment, cluttered with beer cans, nachos and a framed head shot of himself.
'Gigli' is a bad, boring movie. Any romantic comedy about a smart lesbian mob enforcer who falls for a bumbling male mob enforcer who has kidnapped a brain-damaged young man is probably going to stink. But it's not unwatchably, off-the-charts, 'Showgirls' bad. It's 'Hollywood Homicide' bad. Like this summer's excruciatingly dull Harrison Ford film - a widely panned box-office dud - 'Gigli' is the kind of big-budget turkey that's never hard to find. Only Ben and Jen overload can account for the savage critical response.
The heads of critics and audiences are bursting with icky echoes of the couple's hourlong 'Dateline' interview, in which they pretended to be surprised at the media attention, and with images of her flashing what is inevitably described as her 6.1-carat pink diamond engagement ring custom made by Harry Winston. People magazine, Jay Leno and the rest of the adoring infotainment industry maintain the pretense that celebrities matter to us personally. The creators of 'Matt & Ben,' with their fond but pointed sendup of celebrity overload, understand that while we're insatiably fascinated by stars and their bizarre spectacles, we don't care in any profound sense.
To us, the Ben and Jen Show is a real-life popcorn movie, a humorous diversion; the ring only proves that Harry Winston can be gauche too. That attitude helps the play speak to a younger audience raised on movies, television and entertainment gossip, for whom 'Saturday Night Live' and 'Mad TV' are bedrocks of popular comedy. It's not surprising that 'Matt & Ben' was the only play at this year's United States Comedy and Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. Its irreverent tone and the blithe way the women assume male roles would have fit right in with the stand-up comedy and sketch humor all around it. Like the campy, now-aging 'Real Live Brady Bunch' play and the current 'Avenue Q,' the adult puppet musical that nods to 'Sesame Street,' 'Matt & Ben' represents a theater that appeals to a younger generation's pop cultural assumptions, a forward-looking theater that is not snobbish about movies, television or US Weekly. The play's biggest laughs come when its creators are lampooning the familiar smart-Matt, dumb-Ben images. Withers is dressed like a preppie, in khakis and an Oxford shirt.
Kaling sits at the computer typing their work-in-progress, a screen adaptation of 'The Catcher in the Rye,' and asks for help with spelling. Matt has just auditioned for a Sam Shepard play; Ben is insulted that Matt thinks he doesn't know who Sam Shepard is. 'He was in 'The Pelican Brief,' ' Ben says. 'I love that guy. With the wrinkles?'
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' (That exchange may seem to encapsulate the difference between traditional, serious drama and Hollywood-driven fame, but think about how Mr. Shepard himself veers between the two worlds and it's evident that the lines blurred long ago.) We get the in-jokes, laughing with perfect hindsight when the intense Matt warns his slacker friend: 'Look, Ben, you can't just coast this way forever. It won't get you anywhere.' ' We understand that when Gwyneth Paltrow (played by Ms. Kaling) stops by, she is a visitor from the future. She drops the name of her then-boyfriend, Brad, whom she calls 'a hunky leading man who can't read.'
' 'Brad Pitt can't read?' ' Matt asks, in case there's the least doubt about his identity, but the line is hardly necessary.
Advertisement Of course we remember that Gwyneth was with Brad before she moved on to Ben, who later moved on to Jen. Some of us even remember that Diane Sawyer then asked Ms. Paltrow on 'Good Morning America' if the rumors were true: was she appalled that her former boyfriend was with Ms. The implication was that Ben had moved from a princess to a vulgarian. Paltrow loftily replied she didn't talk about her own relationships, much less other people's.
(O.K., she gets to be the princess for that.) More to the point, this is the kind of useless information we have collected, and that the creators of 'Matt & Ben' exploit so well. With their success, Ms. Kaling and Ms. Withers are in some small danger of begetting a media legend of their own. Read anything about 'Matt & Ben' and you'll hear the story of two Dartmouth schoolmates and aspiring actors who, while rooming together in New York one hot summer, stayed indoors reading celebrity magazines that featured Ben Affleck's rehab saga on the covers. They began improvising. Like Matt and Ben themselves, they wrote a script they could act in.
Matt And Ben Affleck
The Legend of Mindy and Brenda was born, and the media cycle goes on. So far, the real Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have had nothing to say about the fictional Matt and Ben, at least not publicly. They are not known to have seen the play. They've had other things to do.
Affleck turned up on 'The Tonight Show' with Jay Leno - the sacred shrine of celebrity worship - doing massive damage control. He read from the bad reviews of 'Gigli' and laughed off tabloid rumors that his engagement was on the rocks because of his widely reported visit to a strip club in Canada. Like Hugh Grant redeeming himself on the Leno show by acting abashed after he was caught with a hooker, Mr. Affleck arrived with a transparent goal: to make viewers admire his self-deprecating wit and honesty. The savvy, celebrity-saturated audiences for 'Matt & Ben' would see through that strategy in a flash. But as the play's authors and audiences know, that doesn't make the spectacle a bit less entertaining.