Matt And Ben Script Pdf
Matt and Ben, Mindy Kaling, Brenda Withers, Overlook Press, 2004,, 715. It started with a script for the film that became Good Will Hunting, slaved over by the bright young dreamers (protrayed in this play's premiere by the female.
- 'Absolutely delightful and deliciously spiteful! Sharp and clever, Matt & Ben succeeds!' - The New York Times.
- Mindy Kaling & Brenda Withers as Ben Affleck & Matt Damon, respectively, on the TV show 'Cold Pizza' as.
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.
Script Matt And Ben Pdf
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?' ' (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. 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.
It's the story Hollywood has glamorized, publicized, and bombarded us with-how it all began for the two young men, now famous for the tabloid coverage of ther on-again-off-again romances, their big budget smashes and flops, and their 'Project Greenlight.' It started with a script for the film that became Good Will Hunting, slaved over by the bright young dreamers (portrayed in It's the story Hollywood has glamorized, publicized, and bombarded us with-how it all began for the two young men, now famous for the tabloid coverage of ther on-again-off-again romances, their big budget smashes and flops, and their 'Project Greenlight.' It started with a script for the film that became Good Will Hunting, slaved over by the bright young dreamers (portrayed in this play's permier by the female playwrights) in their run-down apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1996. Or was it This hilarious, scathing play takes us back to the pivotal moment when the finished script that would change their lives.fell from the ceiling while they were working on something else. The laughs come at a manic pace, in this delightfully venomous play that has taken off-Broadway by storm.
'Matt: This is an excellent script. This is the best script I've ever read.
If Ben put this here as a joke, if Ben wrote this, then I have severely underestimated his talents. Ben: Hey, hey check this out! ( Ben chugs an entire bottle of Veryfine apple juice.) One motherf.cking sip! Matt: Okay, Ben did not write this.' It's kind of bonkers that Good Will Hunting, an incredibly touching and brilliantly done film, was written by the original f.ckboys: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Mindy Kaling (!) and Br 'Matt: This is an excellent script.
This is the best script I've ever read. If Ben put this here as a joke, if Ben wrote this, then I have severely underestimated his talents. Ben: Hey, hey check this out! ( Ben chugs an entire bottle of Veryfine apple juice.) One motherf.cking sip! Matt: Okay, Ben did not write this.' It's kind of bonkers that Good Will Hunting, an incredibly touching and brilliantly done film, was written by the original f.ckboys: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
Mindy Kaling (!) and Brenda Withers have a different idea of what happened. It involves a script falling from the ceiling.
And it is hilarious. (And gender-bending.) 'Ben: I keyed your car. Ben: Yeah, and this woman saw me and I didn't want her to call the cops so I, uh, got in your car and pretended like it was my car and that I had just keyed my own car.' It, obviously, could be hard to picture. I'm sure I would give the actual first run of the play five stars. In fact, now I just really wanna see the play. But I'm more than happy to settle for this.
Bottom line: this play should Not be forgotten. It put Mindy Kaling, one of my all-time fave authors, on the map! Bonus, it's so fun. You should totally read this. (PS: If you're interested, you can see Kaling and Withers perform the beginning of their play at ).
Mindy Kaling is an actor, writer, producer, and director. She currently stars in the Hulu original comedy series “The Mindy Project,' which she also writes and executive produces. Before 'The Mindy Project,' Mindy was best known for her work on the critically acclaimed, Emmy Award-winning NBC show “The Office.” In addition to directing, producing, and portraying celebrity-obsessed Kelly Kapoor, M Mindy Kaling is an actor, writer, producer, and director. She currently stars in the Hulu original comedy series “The Mindy Project,' which she also writes and executive produces. Before 'The Mindy Project,' Mindy was best known for her work on the critically acclaimed, Emmy Award-winning NBC show “The Office.” In addition to directing, producing, and portraying celebrity-obsessed Kelly Kapoor, Mindy wrote 18 episodes of the series, including the Emmy nominated episode “Niagra.” In 2011, Mindy penned the comedic memoir Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (And Other Concerns), which continues to be featured on New York Times’ and USA Today’s best-seller lists. Mindy’s second memoir Why Not Me? was released in September 2015 and launched at #1 on the New York Times’ best-seller list.
In 2005, Mindy made her film debut as the object of Paul Rudd's unwanted affections in Judd Apatow’s THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN. Most recently, Mindy lent her voice to the character Disgust in the Oscar-winning Pixar animated film INSIDE OUT alongside Amy Poehler and Bill Hader, and was seen in THE NIGHT BEFORE alongside Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. She will next begin production on OCEAN’S 8 alongside Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett and Anne Hathaway. Mindy was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2012. In 2014, she was named one of Glamour’s women of the year.