Mean Girls director Mark Waters C’86 is taking Mean Girls director Mark Waters C’86 is taking a shot at R-rated comedy with Bad Santa 2 a shot at R-rated comedy with Bad Santa 2 this Thanksgiving—and still trying to figure this Thanksgiving—and still trying to figure out out his place in ever-evolving Hollywood. his place in ever-evolving Hollywood. By Molly Petrilla By Molly Petrilla DIRECTOR GONE

40 SEPTSEPT || OCTOCT 20162016 THETHE PENNSYLVANIAPENNSYLVANIA GAZETTEGAZETTE Photograph by Ethan Pines C’92 BAD

THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE SEPT | OCT 2016 41 ere’s what directing a big-budget When the first Bad Santa came out Suddenly a story about mother-daughter Hollywood movie is like, at least in 2003, Waters was starting work on relationships felt personal. Hif you’re Mark Waters C’86 mak- Mean Girls and had just finished Freaky When the movie turned a $140 million ing The Spiderwick Chronicles in 2007: Friday—a Disney remake of the 1976 origi- profit, Waters jumped onto Hollywood’s You show up to shoot in Montreal just nal. Both movies starred Lindsay Lohan. radar as someone who could pull off a before the leaves have left the trees. It Both dealt with familiar teen issues (moms popular family film. “And obviously it’s turns out to be the rainiest fall in recent can be so annoying! popular girls, ugh!). something I’m attracted to,” he says. “I history—freezing cold, too. Both quickly entered the teen girl canon. like the idea of trying to please the par- You get used to standing outside in Waters knows that Bad Santa 2, due ents and the kids.” your jacket, water slipping down your out this Thanksgiving, is his first chance Besides, the real-life Waters is more hood, the chill knocking into your bones, to show audiences and studio execs that Freaky Friday than Bad Santa 2, at least waiting for any break in the rain so you he can make funny movies for adults. according to Andrew Gunn, a producer on can film something. When one finally It’s the first raunchy, R-rated comedy both movies. “He’s got daughters. He calls comes, you run the actors out under he’s ever done. his wife ‘Bunny.’ They live down in Laguna,” umbrellas, shoot a scene, and mutter to “It means that in the future, people he says. “It’s all very squeaky clean.” your director of photography, “Yeah, I aren’t going to say, ‘Oh, Mark Waters, he In explaining Waters’s resume, Gunn don’t think we can see the rain in that.” can only do family films or teen girl mov- says it’s easy to be typecast in Hollywood You coach a kid who’s playing identical ies,’” Waters says. At least, that’s the plan. as the person who can do X thing. Studio twins and has to argue with his invisible executives want a director who’s already second self. He’s also having trouble pull- Waters broke into Hollywood 20 years made family comedies to direct their ing off an American accent. ago with a very different type of family next family comedy. They don’t want him One studio president hires you, another movie from the ones he’s made since. for their next R-rated drama. shows up for script development, a third The House of Yes stars Parker Posey Of course, Waters has nothing against for the actual production process. You and Josh Hamilton as twins who turn the teen girl movies, either. He likes making edit the movie with a fourth executive, Kennedy assassination into foreplay for them, and he says it isn’t hard to under- then plan its release with a fifth. Each of their incest. (Sample lines, delivered by their stand the characters, even as a middle- those five bosses has a different idea of mom: “Jackie and Marty belong to each aged man. “We’re all teenage girls, you what the movie should be. You fight every other. Jackie’s hand was holding Marty’s know?” he says. Waters laughs at this, day to keep your own vision for it intact. penis when they came out of the womb.”) but he isn’t kidding. “A hair-pulling experience” is how Waters adapted Yes from a play with “The fact is, everyone is insecure, every- Waters sums all this up. “But no one the same name. His version had a $1.5 one has body image issues, everyone has cares at the end of the day because the million budget, one location, five actors— issues about popularity. Boys are just better movie came out well and it made money.” and soon a splashy debut at the 1997 at hiding it, but we all relate to these things.” Just over $162 million, to be exact. It also Sundance Film Festival. landed a near-perfect rating from Roger “It was a feeding frenzy,” says Jessica Mark Waters doesn’t assume that you’ve Ebert: three-and-a-half stars out of four. Tuchinsky, Waters’s former agent and seen every Mark Waters movie out there. So that’s what happened the last time current producing partner. Studios bid for He goes to football games at his daugh- Mark Waters made a movie in Montreal. the movie and agents scrambled to land ter’s high school on Friday nights. Of the 10 feature films he’s directed, he Waters. “Everybody was like, who’s Mark Friends say he talks to the screen in movie says it was the toughest one to pull off. Waters? How can we get to Mark Waters?” theaters (“don’t go in there!”) and has an But this past winter he went back to the Tuchinsky remembers. He became her insanely loud laugh—an ear-popping “HA!” shivery Canadian city and shot another first client, and she represented him for Even after 20 years in Hollywood, “he’s movie—one with a smaller budget, dirty the next nine years. as regular a person as I know,” Tuchinsky jokes, and hard edges. One that may redi- But instead of chasing more indie suc- says. “Some directors are mercurial— rect his 20-year career in Hollywood. cess, Waters followed Yes with a PG-13 such assholes. Mark’s the most easy- It’s a movie about Santa, but not the romantic comedy starring Freddie Prinze, going, friendly, nicest guy who knows jolly one. The alcoholic, thieving, pissed- Jr. (Head Over Heels), then drove further exactly what he wants.” off one. Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa. into the family-friendly lane with Freaky As Waters himself puts it: “I am some- For the past two decades, Waters has been Friday. He’s hovered there ever since, body who’s brutally honest, yet in a very making movies that families want to watch right up until Bad Santa 2. friendly way. It leads to having really together and teen girls want to crawl inside. How did he go from sibling incest to a good friends, but also some people going, Spiderwick has goblins, faeries, trolls, and PG comedy about body-switching mother ‘Man, I can’t handle Waters, I have to get a PG rating. Mr. Popper’s Penguins (2011) is and daughter? Waters says he took on away from him.’” based on the beloved 1938 children’s book. Friday partly at the urging of his wife, On set, he says that brutal honesty is Vampire Academy (2014) came from a YA fic- actress Dina Spybey Waters. He inter- aimed at himself rather than the actors. tion series. A handful of romantic comedies viewed for the directing job while she They get gentle encouragement instead, show love at its PG-13iest. was pregnant with their first daughter. and he tries to keep it short and simple.

42 SEPT | OCT 2016 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Faster or slower or attack her more. He ean Girls is still the title that fol- and allure of, ‘Wow, these people are liv- finds that those nudges often change a lows Waters’s name in articles ing life at a different level than I am.’” clunker into the right note. Mand tops his IMDB page under “I was definitely enamored with it and “He’s a very good actor’s director,” “Known For,” yet he almost passed on it kind of pulled into it in a bad way for a Gunn says. at the time. Fresh off of Freaky Friday, short time,” he adds. “Then eventually I Waters has been working with actors he didn’t want to direct any more scenes came out and realized I need to define since the early 1990s, when he moved that started with locker doors slamming. myself as who I really am.” from acting in plays to directing them. “But the script was hilarious,” he says But first those wealthy friends exposed He’d never been a movie buff, but he also of Mean Girls, which was written by Tina him to something transformative. On started visiting his older brother Daniel on Fey and going by Homeschooled when he weekend trips to Manhattan, where many sets around that time. A screenwriter whose first saw it. “It was R-rated, too. Filled with of his new friends had grown up, Waters credits include Heathers—the 1988 dark cussing. Regina George had more ‘fucks’ and his fraternity brothers would get comedy featuring croquet, murder, and big than Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. I was like, this wild and … go to the theatre? perms—and Batman Returns (1992), Daniel is kind of great, but I’m cautious about it.” Up until then, he’d only seen plays at his was “the hottest writer in show business” In Mean Girls, the main character Cady own high school, and he thought they were in those years, Tuchinsky says. (Lohan) emerges from homeschooling cheesy. In New York, he went to off-off- But on sets that he’s too polite to name, to attend a clique-y high school. She’s Broadway productions at The Performing Mark saw his brother’s funny scripts drawn to the queen bee group, led by “evil Garage. “There was an edge and a provoca- drained of their punch. The actors in a human form” Regina George and her tiveness that I couldn’t deny and that ended flailed, and often directors refused to “army of skanks.” After some backstab- up becoming my inspiration,” he says. toss them a life raft. bing and subterfuge, Cady learns it’s Back at Penn, Waters enrolled in a theatre “I remember having this moment of better to do her own thing. class called Movement and Mime. He direct- insight: If I could learn about these cam- Fey eventually toned the script down to ed a skit at the end of the semester and put eras and cranes and shit, I think I could PG-13, and with Waters directing, Mean on a solo performance of Samuel Beckett’s do this,” he says. Girls became a cultural touchstone that’s Act Without Words. He still remembers the He started making Super 8 short films still spawning YouTube tributes and may rush of that first time on stage. and got into the American Film Institute even hit Broadway as a musical soon. “You get a lot of approbation from with one called Betrayals. It follows a “If you’re an empathetic human being, performing,” he says. “It’s like why kids couple who use their “weird obsessions,” you can relate to what goes on in Mean pick up a guitar and join a rock band: Waters says, in place of having sex: choco- Girls,” he says, “including the idea that because girls like it. So there’s a thing late for her; autoerotic asphyxia for him. you would be attracted to the Regina of like, ‘Girls are really interested in me Waters thought he’d made a comedy, Georges of the world, do anything to be after I come off stage. I don’t know why. but he says the head of the American close to that, then realize it’s something But I think I might do it again because Film Institute told him it was “a great you don’t want to be a part of.” it seems to have that effect.’” dark drama with very strong cinematic images” and accepted him into AFI’s Master of Fine Arts program in directing. In the 20 years since he graduated from AFI and began making feature films, directing has meant telling Jim “If you’re an empathetic human Carrey to shove fish into his pockets so being, you can relate to what penguins would follow him around. It’s been helping Tina Fey find the perfect goes on in Mean Girls.” “mean girls” and holing up in a tent with Billy Bob Thornton and Kathy Bates after rehearsal to punch up scripted lines. “If he weren’t a director,” Tuchinsky says, “I think he’d be a coach for an NFL It’s a feeling Waters struggled with He took a few classes at the Wilma team. He can get the best out of each himself at Penn. He came to Philadelphia Theater in Center City and performed individual performer.” from Indiana, the valedictorian of a high there in Orphans, which proves he must Extending the analogy, she says Waters school class in which only half of gradu- have been a decent actor. Right? shows up with a clear plan for each day of ates went on to college. “You know what I was?” Waters says. “I shooting, but also leans into any changes “I was a scholarship kid who was sud- was like a TV actor on an NCIS episode that arise. It’s his job to make quick, con- denly at the big show,” he says. “For me, where you’re like, ‘He’s very pleasant to fident decisions—and often more than Philadelphia was the Emerald City.” look at and says his lines without stum- a hundred cast and crew members are He joined a fraternity, met “a lot of rich bling.’ But that’s not good acting, and I waiting on the answers. kids,” and got “sucked into the romance was aware of it at the time.”

THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE SEPT | OCT 2016 43 When he graduated from Penn in 1986 reviews. “I’m not going to go back and So how does Waters keep himself from with an economics degree, Waters used re-edit the movie,” he says, “so it means getting discouraged and disillusioned the money he’d saved from bartending nothing to hear that somebody doesn’t with Hollywood, aware of its contradic- at La Terrasse to travel around Europe. like it. It’s nothing but a negative.” tions, hearing no so many more times He lived in Berlin and taught English, Sure, there have there been times when than yes? then moved to San Francisco to launch the feedback was so bad it bummed him “I am discouraged and disillusioned an acting career in 1988. out. When he made the rom-com Ghosts of by Hollywood,” he says. “But I’m also an “For years and years, I was poor as ever,” Girlfriends Past in 2009, its leading man indefatigable optimist.” he says. He survived on one steak burrito Matthew McConaughey was still a shirtless, He knows that success in Hollywood a day, carving it up to last for three meals. bongo-playing punchline in real life. “The was never promised. Even with his AFI He also juggled three jobs, including bar- tending for a catering company. One day he showed up to work at a ritzy wedding in Palo Alto and found “The greatest movies that I want to himself waiting on a bunch of guys he knew from Penn. make haven’t been made. The best “They were like, ‘Waters, what are you doing serving crudité?’” he remembers. scripts I have are movies that are “It was slightly embarrassing, but I was willing to be poor to be able to do the considered to be too tricky or too creative work I wanted to do.” strange or unplaceable.” Even with 10 feature films on his directing resume, an 11-year-old production company (Watermark Pictures), and a new chance to make bawdy adult comedies, Waters movie tested really well,” Waters remem- pedigree, there was no system that let admits he’s still “trying to find my place” bers. “People loved it. Then the reviews came him start as an eager young assistant in Hollywood. out and they were just savage.” and work his way up to director. He had “I’m into things that work best on a low He says the disconnect between what to squeeze into the business on his own and medium budget—kind of the middle reviewers like and what audiences actu- through whatever gaps he could find. class of filmmaking—which really has ally enjoy extends to getting movies “It’s very easy to just pull up your stakes been squeezed out,” he says. “I’m never made in the first place. and leave,” he says. “Most people I went to going to be the guy who wants to do Thor “It’s extremely difficult to get these film school with are like that. But if you 3 or one of those big-budget, major tent- things set up,” he says. “That’s something adopt the attitude that you’re never giving pole movies. That’s not my style. I’m into people don’t understand. They look at your up and you’re never going to leave, through character and comedy.” resume and say, ‘Oh, these are the 10 mov- attrition you can sometimes have success.” Waters’s personal favorite among the ies that he chose to do because he wanted films he’s made, Just Like Heaven (2005), to do them more than any other movie.’ stars Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo “In fact, the greatest movies that I he original Bad Santa is about as as meet-cuters with a twist: she’s a spirit want to make haven’t been made. The upbeat as a bee sting. Billy Bob but not a full-fledged ghost, and only he best scripts I have are movies that are TThornton plays Willie T. Soke, an can see her. A.O. Scott declared it “a bit considered to be too tricky or too strange alcoholic con man who poses as Santa too thin and gooey” in his New York Times or unplaceable.” in department stores by day, then robs review, yet in the next sentence said it’s Right now, for instance, he’d love to them at night. also “impressively nimble and cheery.” make a movie about when the Harlem Willie beats up some teenagers, talks in The movie has a 75 percent “fresh” score Globetrotters beat the Minneapolis at least half-profanity, and wets himself from users on Rotten Tomatoes and a Lakers in a 1948 exhibition game, push- more than once. His advice to a third- 56 percent from critics. For Mr. Popper’s ing the NBA toward integration. But he’s grader who asks for a stuffed animal: Penguins, the “rotten” reviews actually had trouble getting it in motion, even “Wish in one hand, shit in the other. See outnumber the “fresh” ones. after the #OscarsSoWhite push for more which one fills up first.” Waters tends to ignore stuff like that. He diversity in Hollywood. But among those who prefer their doesn’t read bad reviews. If he does wander “That’s the dirty secret,” he says. “They Christmas movies with peppery bite, it’s onto a review site like Rotten Tomatoes or say, ‘We want more diversity, but we can’t become a holiday classic. Wedged between Metacritic, he’ll sort the reviews so that only sell diversity overseas.’ And since they Elf and Love Actually in November 2003, the good ones show up, and look at those. want to make movies for the foreign mar- when all three movies came out, it was an This isn’t theatre. He can’t make adjust- kets, they’re saying yes with one hand obvious antidote to all the sappy love and ments after reading the opening-night and no with the other.” good cheer. Critics liked it, too.

44 SEPT | OCT 2016 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE On the Bad Santa 2 set with Billy Bob Thornton and Kathy Bates.

Fans have been campaigning for a depth to the movie that other directors his first film onward, he’s always been sequel ever since, and Thornton alluded may have missed. It’s the same balance the same person: completely normal and to a second installment back in 2009. between laughs and heart that Gunn says refreshingly easy.” The sequel bounced around Hollywood turned Freaky Friday into a hit. Waters has been thinking about doing for the next six years with various direc- “Mark is really good at weaving togeth- something a little different soon. He’d tors attached. Then last November, news er funny characters and physical comedy like to direct a full TV series season (“It’s broke that it was really, finally, actually without losing whatever deeper theme kind of like the independent film move- happening, and that Waters would direct. the movie might have,” Gunn adds. ment of the ’70s is now happening on TV,” “I think that certainly internally, within When Bad Santa 2 comes out this he says) or maybe show up at Sundance the business, people were like, ‘Really? November, it will be exactly 13 years since with a small-budget movie—a veteran Mark Waters?’” says Gunn, who pushed for the original debuted. This time it will go now instead of a rookie. Waters to get the job. “But funny is funny. up against a Brad Pitt spy movie (Allied) “I think Mark can do just about anything,” And I think it was also deliberate on Mark’s and a new Disney CGI-fest (Moana) at Tuchinsky says. “It just has to interest him.” part to just want to stretch out a bit.” the box office. Will people still find a But what about his legacy—that pesky Tuchinsky, who’s executive producing sinful Santa funny? Audience tastes are word that haunts so many people? the movie along with Waters, confirms constantly shifting, so it’s impossible to “I don’t necessarily think like that,” he there’s plenty of raunch in the sequel— predict whether the sequel will outshine says. “I just enjoy getting the work out. The and a “very hard R” rating. its predecessor or miss the mark. thing that appeals to me is that I’ve created “Take the first one and push it a hun- Tuchinsky knows that Waters will be a body of work and people can watch my dred times further,” she says. “I think fine either way, though. movies 50 years from now and hopefully the fans will be happy. I think if this is “In Mark’s career he’s had ups and still gain some enjoyment from them. your introduction to Bad Santa, your jaw he’s had downs,” she says. “He’s been “That’s kinda cool,” he adds. “That may drop.” the most sought after director and the pleases me.”◆ Amid all the deviant debauchery, she least sought after director. He’s been a Molly Petrilla C’06 writes frequently on arts and

JAN THIJS JAN says Waters also brought an emotional newbie, he’s been the old guard. But from culture and other subjects for the Gazette.

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