Adam Sandler Was Afraid of Ripping Off Rodney Dangerfield
Inquiring minds like Joe Rogan’s want to know: How does Adam Sandler come up with the ideas for all of his movies? On this week’s Joe Rogan Experience podcast, he asked if Sandler started with a character? A premise? What was the silly secret behind all those blockbusters?
The Sandman didn’t have a definitive answer, but sometimes he just knew he had a winner on his hands. “Billy Madison, I remember I thought, ‘Oh, this could be great. A grown-up who does elementary school again. And that's a great idea — I get to be goofy, get to bully these little kids, then all of a sudden connect with these kids and have fun growing up again.”
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There was only one problem in Sandler’s mind. “Part of my head was like, well, Rodney (Dangerfield) did Back to School already. So everyone’s gonna say, I just ripped off Back to School. Rodney went back to college. How the fuck do we do it a step away from that?”
Could it be done while giving Dangerfield his proper respect? To ease his troubled mind, Sandler reached out to Tim Herlihy, his college dorm roommate and co-writer on many of his most successful comedies. “He’s just a great funny man,” Sandler said of the old pal whose films have grossed more than $3 billion at the box office. In this case, Billy Madison passed the Herlihy Smell Test: “If he goes, ‘Ooh, that’s good,’ then we go from there.”
Getting that positive reaction from Herlify was the key to moving forward with “Happy Gilmore, Wedding Singer, Bobby Boucher (from The Waterboy), all that shit,” Sandler explained to Rogan. “We just came up with a couple of lines of what we thought was an interesting idea and then we see if we can fill it out.”
Rogan marveled at how those same comedies can be savaged by critics but still score with audiences.
That’s because the audience “is all we thought about,” responded Sandler. “Thinking about kids laughing, I always loved that. Thinking of college kids throwing a tape in, sitting down, watching together. That was on our mind when we did it.”
Somehow, Sandler always believed he’d score big in movies even when no one else could see it. Even more than killing as a stand-up comic, “I wanted to get into the movies,” Sandler admitted. “I was fucking nuts, cocky as shit in my own weird way. I think a big thing that happened to me was I told my friends in high school I was gonna be fucking big. So I had to do it. I told the boys, I was gonna be fucking great.”
Fake it until you make it, said Rogan, recognizing the impulse.
“I dug a hole for myself,” Sandler explained, remembering the lies he told his boys. “‘I’m doing great. Robin Williams said I was fantastic.’ Robin Williams one night saw me eat it. And I was just like, ‘Oh man, I ate it in front of Robin Williams!’ But I changed the story. ‘Yeah, he liked that shit.’”
Sandler’s probably telling himself Rodney Dangerfield loved Billy Madison too.
