Writing Movies For (Fun And) Profit: Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon share their insights

You may know Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon from Reno 911! or their earlier collaboration with The State, but did you know that they also have co-written screenplays that have earned more than a billion dollars in global box-office receipts?

They not only want you to know this, but they've also decided to share their insights with you in their new book, Writing Movies For Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!

Here's an ad they produced with Funny or Die (also featuring Rob Huebel and Brett Gelman) to promote the book's launch this week. Roll it!


 

Garant and Lennon have screenwriting credits for Night At the Museum and its sequel, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, as well as for Balls of Fury, Reno 911! Miami, Let's Go to Prison, Herbie Fully Loaded, The Pacifier, and Taxi (aka the Jimmy Fallon cab movie). Of course, it's the two Night at the Museum movies that brought in almost a billion dollars combined.

But as Garant told Time Out NY, it's not all a big joke:

“It’s a very practical, incredibly realistic book of, ‘How do you actually make a go of it in Hollywood as a screenwriter?’ The more you know before you get here, the better off you’ll be. There are a lot of books on screenwriting theory written by professors, but then you come to Hollywood and don’t have any sense of [it] as a business. And I think most [of us] want to be in the screenwriting business, not just sitting, theoretically writing screenplays that will never happen.”

If you're in NYC, then you can catch Garant and Lennon talking about the Hollywood screenwriting process on July 13, 2011, at the Paley Center.

Buy the book:

P.S. Buy it and support the troops?! Yes. Their Amazon.com page reports that Garant and Lennon are contributing part of their proceeds from the book to the USO of Metropolitan Washington, a private non-profit that helps active-duty military personnel and their families in the D.C. area.

Sean L. McCarthy

Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

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