I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell

Here we go, without anymore delay, watch the trailer:

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, Green Band Trailer

After you watch it, buy tickets for The Premiere Tour.

A few things about the tour:

-No, there are no tickets available for DC yet. We have to get the contract back from the theater before we can sell ticket, and they are taking forever, so those will probably go on sale Wednesday or Thursday.

-Austin is a free screening for UT students only, the only screening like that. So no tickets available there. I will further address this issue later this week.

-Yes, the tickets are only $10. I know we could have charged $20 or even $30, but we decided that if the point of this is to reach out to fans and experience the movie with them, then we should make the price as low as possible to include as many as possible.

-Yes, the $10 includes all the promised swag; tshirt, pint glass, etc, etc.

-Yes, Nils and I will be at every screening, do a Q&A, sign anything, and take pictures.

-Yes, some of the actors and assorted other people will be at some of the screenings. No, no one is confirmed yet.

-If you intend to get tickets, I would hurry up. We gave the hard core fans a jump on them and started selling yesterday, and most cities are getting close to sold out. If you miss out on Premiere Tour tickets, you can always see it when it opens nationwide on September 25th.

OK, for those of you who care, here are my thoughts on the trailer:

1. This is the tamest thing you will ever see with regards to this movie, because it is the green band trailer. A green band trailer has to, in theory, be able to be shown to all audiences. Thus, we can’t have any curse words, no nudity, no violence, nothing really at all in there. Trying to make a green band trailer was almost impossible. We nearly gave up a few times. But I think in the end the guys at Intralink pulled it off as well as it could be done. If the trailer feels a little tame to you, please understand we HAD to make it that way to approved by the MPAA. The red band is coming in a month or so, and it will make up for the (relative) tameness of the green band trailer (personally, I think our green band is more raw than the red band for most comedies, but whatever. I’m biased).

2. I love the jokes in this trailer, and I think the exchange between Drew [Slingblade] and the girl is hilarious, “What is your porn name?” “Scott Peterson.” But the best part is that even though the trailer is funny, we only give away like 5% of the jokes in the movie.

Pretty much every comedy that has come out over the past 10 years has all the best jokes in the trailer. Not this one. Part of that is simply because we CAN’T put the best jokes in a green band trailer because they are R rated, but another part of that is a philosophy that Nils and I decided on early in this process and have stuck to: We are going to run this movie the way we would want it to be run if we were fans. I’ve written about this before–I hate it when the trailer ruins the movie, so I won’t be part of a movie that does that. Yes, the trailer is funny. But trust me, the movie is even better, as it should be with comedies.

3. One of my favorite aspects of this movie is the way we did the lighting. Most normal Hollywood comedies are lit to be very bright to make them feel “cinematic.” We made a conscious decision early on to eschew the standard broad comedy look and instead to make this movie feel more more intimate and authentic. It’s supposed to be lit in a more natural way, to give the feeling like you are the fourth member of the group instead of just watching three people on screen.

4. Some fans are going to hate the trailer, and the movie, and be pissed off. This is absolutely to be expected. No matter how we did this movie, there would be a portion of existing fans who are going to be disappointed by it. This happens to every band when they go from small and local to big and popular, it happens to every writer when they change mediums, it happens to every single artist who does anything new and different–some people hate change, and when change happens, they get upset about it.

In fact, this happened to me once already. My book came out in 2006, after my website had been up for four years and I had a pretty large internet-only fanbase. When it came out, there was a small but loud minority of fans who hated the book–they said it was a betrayal of my “early stuff,” they decried me going mainstream, they got upset at the new book cover imagery–all the standard crap. And of course they all yelled as loud as possible to anyone who would listen that the book would fail because of this. I ignored them and wrote the book I wanted to write, not the book they were “demanding” of me. A million copies sold later, it’s obvious who was right.

The movie will follow the exact same trajectory: 90% of my fans will like or love it, 10% will hate it, but most importantly I think this movie will open me and my material up to a huge new audience who never would have seen or heard of me before if I had stayed exclusively to the written word, just like the book vastly expanded by audience off the internet-only crowd I started with. It’s going to be funny to watch so many new people “discover” Tucker Max. An overnight success, seven years in the making.

The new website that Carrot Creative designed is fucking hot, and launches at some point either today or tomorrow, and I will post tomorrow about the Austin and DC stops.

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