Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer

Jason Friedberg (born October 13, 1971) and Aaron Seltzer (born January 12, 1974) are an American-Canadian film director and screenwriter team known for making parody movies that have received extremely unfavorable reviews, but have generally done well at the box office. They were part of the writing team for Scary Movie and Spy Hard, and have written/directed films such as Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, Vampires Suck, The Starving Games, Best Night Ever, and Superfast!.

Their career of spoof filmmaking began when Friedberg's father showed Leslie Nielsen a script his son had written to parody spy films, which resulted in 1996's Spy Hard. Thereafter, the duo worked as freelance screenwriters, selling dozens of scripts though all but one of them never went into production. They then penned the script that became 2000's Scary Movie, though they were then credited as two of the film's six writers as their draft underwent revisions by four other authors. Frustrated that most of their work went unproduced, Friedberg and Seltzer chose to direct films based on their own scripts rather than sell them to other directors or producers from 2006's Date Movie onward.

The duo have often been strongly criticized for their style of humor, regarded as lazily capitalizing on passing trends and mistaking fleeting references for jokes. Their work has often been nominated for Golden Raspberry Awards, though the two have never won one themselves. Some of the films the pair have personally written and directed have become regarded as some of the worst films of all time. In spite of their negative reception, however, most of their films have performed quite well at the box office.

Biography

Interviews with the duo are rare, but in an exclusive 2014 interview with the publication Grantland, their background was discussed: Seltzer is part of a Canadian shoe salesmen family from Mississauga, Ontario, and Friedberg, who was born in Newark, New Jersey, was raised in Paterson, New Jersey and is the son of director Rick Friedberg. Seltzer and Friedberg met at the University of California, Santa Barbara and bonded over their love of film, especially comedy. Both are Jewish.^[1] They did not attend film school, with Seltzer majoring in art history and Friedberg in history, but decided to try a career in the film industry after attending a class about Martin Scorsese in their last semester.^[1]

While writing screenplays at night, both spent the day attending jobs to pay their tuition, selling homemade T-shirts, starting their own food delivery service, and opening shoe shops in Los Angeles. When Rick Friedberg made the comic instruction video Bad Golf Made Easier with Leslie Nielsen, he showed his son's script for a spy film spoof to him. Nielsen approved, and this led into 1996's Spy Hard. Seltzer and Friedberg then spent some years as screenwriters for hire, with Seltzer estimating the duo sold "upward of 40 scripts". The only finished project was an uncredited rewrite to the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Maximum Risk (1996), while an unproduced Liberace biopic (unrelated to Behind The Candelabra) introduced them to future collaborator and producer Peter Safran. In 1998, Safran managed to sell to Dimension Pictures a horror film spoof spec script of Seltzer and Friedberg named Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween, later reworked by four other writers under the title Scary Movie. The film was a sleeper hit in 2000, and brought much attention to Seltzer and Friedberg.

Tired of many unmade projects, as Regency Enterprises could not find a director for their romantic comedy spoof, Seltzer and Friedberg opted to direct Date Movie (2006) themselves.^[1]

Filmography

Year	Film	Directors	Producers	Writers	RT Approval Rating	Metacritic	Budget	Worldwide Gross
1996	Spy Hard			Y	8%	25/100[2]	$18 million	$26,960,191
2000	Scary Movie			Y	54%	48/100[3]	$19 million	$278,019,771
2006	Date Movie	Y	Y	Y	7%[4]	11/100[5]	$20 million	$84,795,656[6]
2007	Epic Movie	Y		Y	2%[7]	17/100[8]	$20 million	$86,865,564[9]
2008	Meet the Spartans	Y	Y	Y	2%[10]	9/100[11]	$30 million	$84,646,831[12]
	Disaster Movie	Y	Y	Y	1%[13]	15/100[14]	$20 million	$34,816,824[15]
2010	Vampires Suck	Y	Y	Y	5%[16]	18/100[17]	$20 million	$80,547,866[18]
2013	The Starving Games[19]	Y		Y	0%[20]		$4.5 million	$3,889,688[21]
2014	Best Night Ever[22]	Y		Y	0%[23]			$289,511[24]
2015	Superfast!	Y	Y	Y			$20 million	$2,075,731[25]

Date Movie opened with $12.1 million and earned $48.9 million overall.^[26] Disaster Movie opened with $5.8 million and earned $14.2 million total in the United States.^[26] Vampires Suck, which opened on a Wednesday, earned an estimated $19.7 million in its first five days.^[26]

Awards and nominations

Recurring cast members

Actor	Date Movie	Epic Movie	Meet the Spartans	Disaster Movie	Vampires Suck	The Starving Games	Best Night Ever	Superfast!
Diedrich Bader			N		N	N
Carmen Electra	N	N	N	N
Adam Campbell	N	N
Matt Lanter				N	N
Tony Cox	N	N		N
Ike Barinholtz			N	N	N
Crista Flanagan		N	N	N	N		N
Nicole Parker			N	N
Jennifer Coolidge	N	N
Fred Willard	N	N
Jim Piddock		N	N
Tad Hilgenbrink		N		N
Amin Joseph							N	N
Nick Steele	N	N	N	N			N
Jareb Dauplaise		N	N
John Di Domenico			N	N

Criticism

The critical reception of Friedberg and Seltzer's films has been extremely negative.^[32][33] Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans were rated the two worst films of 2008 by The Times.^[34] Additionally, every film they have directed has made it into Rotten Tomatoes' "Worst of the Worst" for the 2000s, only one scoring a spot outside of the bottom 25.^[35] The pair appear more often than any other person on the fan-voted list of "The 50 Worst Movies Ever" in noted British film magazine Empire; almost all of their films appear with a rank, and all are mentioned in the full review text.^[36]

The duo are frequent nominees of the Golden Raspberry Awards. The first was a Worst Screenplay nomination for Epic Movie at the 2007 Razzies^[37] and the following year the pair were nominated for Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay for both Meet the Spartans and Disaster Movie.^[38] At the 2011 Razzies, Vampires Suck was nominated for Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, and Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off or Sequel.

Critic Josh Levin of Slate commented that "Friedberg and Seltzer...are not filmmakers. They are evildoers, charlatans, symbols of Western civilization's decline..."^[39] Josh Rosenblatt of The Austin Chronicle said that "Writer/directors Friedberg and Seltzer are a scourge. They're a plague on our cinematic landscape, a national shame, a danger to our culture, a typhoon-sized natural disaster disguised as a filmmaking team, a Hollywood monster wreaking havoc on the minds of America's youth and setting civilization back thousands of years."^[40] Austin critic and animator Korey Coleman, of Spill.com and Double Toasted, has claimed that he is "bothered" by the duo's films, as he believes they are dumbing down the film industry and popular culture in general.^[31]

Critic Nathan Rabin also gave their films an indignant condemnation, saying:

"Spoof movies, as practiced by the cultural blight that is Seltzer-Friedberg, aren't just troubling from an aesthetic viewpoint. They're horrifying from a moral standpoint as well. The parody of the Zucker brothers and Mel Brooks is defined by love, knowledge, and appreciation: The Zucker brothers and Mel Brooks love, know, and appreciate the source material they're spoofing enough to get all the details perfect. The comedy of Seltzer-Friedberg, in sharp contrast, is defined by contempt: contempt for the attention span, intelligence, maturity, and frame of reference for the audience, and an even more raging contempt for the source material they're spoofing. Friedberg and Seltzer aren't writers; they're comic terrorists who cavalierly destroy what others create for their own ugly self-interest. Their success is entirely dependent on making comedy a dumber, crasser, less dignified place.^[41]

References

External links

• Jason Friedberg on IMDb
• Aaron Seltzer on IMDb