Vince talks about having children

Vince Vaughn: I'm Ready for Kids – Really!

By Scott Huver
People.com

Vince Vaughn swings no more.

Now engaged to Canadian real estate agent Kyla Weber, Vaughn, 39, says he wants to start a family and settle down.

The funny guy even says he's ready for diaper duty. "It's the first time that I really want to have kids," he told PEOPLE while promoting his new comedy Couples Retreat.

"I've been very fortunate in my career, and my life has been about that for so long that you get bored of it. You're ready for your life to be about other people and other things," Vaughn said.

While filming the movie – costarring his longtime pal Jon Favreau and directed by another friend, Peter Billingsley – Vaughn spent time in exotic Bora Bora with his soon-to-be wife and members of his family. "We had a lot of fun, which was good, and my sister was there and my nephew was there," he says.

And his buddies have given their approval.

"I'm very happy for Vince. He's marrying an amazing girl," says Billingsley, the former child star of A Christmas Story. "It's a natural cycle of life that we all go in."

But Billingsley admits one thing is dramatically different from the days when Vaughn and Favreau – who starred in the 1996 Swingers – were making the Hollywood scene.

"The parties are a lot different than they used to be – that's for sure!" Billingsley says. "I still come with the point of view to have a great time, but it's kids and strollers and babies and clowns."

Vince graces the cover of Esquire magazine

Esquire
December 2008 / vol. 150 / no. 6

THE BIGGEST MAN IN THE ROOM

He’s also usually the funniest and best liked. So what’s VINCE VAUGHN so afraid of? BY CHRIS JONES

Photographs by Jake Chessum

VINCE VAUGHN LOOKS A LOT LIKE VINCE VAUGHN, ONLY BIGGER. He's tall enough to have to duck through doorways, as he just did, and wide enough to spend a lot of time walking sideways through tight spaces, like this steakhouse. He wears a pair of old-school Nike sneakers that could be used as war canoes. About six and a half feet higher up, his hair rises like a wave above the low-tide beach that is his forehead. (He calls it his fivehead.) His face is full, puffy enough to make him sometimes look as though he's fighting to keep his eyes open—not as though he's just woken up but as though he's never bothered to go to bed in the first place. His shirt is open at the collar, probably because it has to be. It's also open at the waist. Even from across this crowded restaurant, it's possible to see a jumbo slice of Vaughn's naked belly. It's too much to ignore, this great golden acreage, because he leads with it and because it's probably been kissed by Jennifer Aniston, standing on her tippy-toes. The man doesn't just occupy airspace; he fills it.

Click thumbnails for larger images.

Like many giants, Vaughn gave up trying to hide a long time ago. (He's a regular at this restaurant, a touristy joint on the busiest stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, and he's fine with the table in the center of the room, surrounded.) Unlike most big men, however, his stature doesn't offer him any protection, leaving him twice defenseless, omnipresent without being ominous: Nobody's scared of Vince Vaughn. He sits down and almost immediately people come to spend time in his shadow, beating even the waiter. The first is a kind of Gothic-looking girl, a photographer who delivers her pitch in a disturbing monotone: "I never come up to people like this, but I would love to take your picture," she says, her eyes staring hard into his. She hands him her business card, which disappears inside his paw.

"Okay, sure, thanks, that's really cool," Vaughn says before she melts away, because he's midwestern and good with people and refreshingly aware that his job carries certain responsibilities. ("I like talking to people," he says. "I really do. They're usually very nice to me.")

It's only later, thinking back about the photographer, that he says, "Did she think I would say yes? Like that's something I might do? Yes! Terrific! Let me come to your loft so you can take pictures of me tied up on the bed."

But that's Vince Vaughn's trick.

If, in our imaginations, there really were a star who might do that—if the public were surveyed about which actor was most likely to end up in some stranger's house after a night on the town, rummaging through the fridge and playing Wii Tennis for all his life—Vaughn would be him. Most people who saw him in Old School or Wedding Crashers or Dodgeball—most of the people in this restaurant, including the housewife who told him not to be scared when she leaned in and the guy out in the parking lot who clapped him on the shoulder like an old friend—probably caught themselves thinking, That guy's just a regular guy. That guy's just like me.

The truth is, Vince Vaughn isn't really like them. He's the biggest man in the room. And because of his size, and because he inherited from his salesman father a competitive streak as well as a knack for volume business, he is voracious in his appetites (steak and lobster and creamed spinach) and his desires (to be loved). He has an almost pathological need to please his public.

He wants you to hear his name and smile as though by instinct; he wants you to see his face and laugh and not even know why. He wants you to see him everywhere you look and in the very next second to see in him whatever it is you want to see.
He's just opened his own factory. It's uncharacteristically inconspicuous, a low-rise lost among the transmission shops and burger joints just south of Hollywood. Only the parking lot out back betrays that something mountainous might be going on inside. There is a collection of big, expensive cars and a basketball hoop.

Vaughn is waiting for Jon Favreau to show up. They have been friends since meeting as actors on the set of Rudy fifteen years ago; by their collective force of will, they appeared together again in Swingers, the low-budget, vaguely autobiographical, smart, and funny film that Favreau wrote and Vaughn stole. Swingers was Vaughn's first real foray into the public consciousness. It was more than just a starring turn. Everywhere he went, he heard his catchphrases shouted back at him. He was on his way to becoming ubiquitous.

Today, Favreau and Vaughn are working together on a new script, one of the first projects housed here at Vaughn's nascent production company, Wild West Picture Show Productions. It's a comedy called Couples Retreat. It was Vaughn's idea. Had it been anybody else's, it probably would have been waved away like a fart, but because Vaughn wants to be loved, people want to love him back. They give him chances. It's about four couples who enter couples therapy on a tropical island. Who knows? Maybe it will be good after all. Favreau, fresh from the grand success of directing Iron Man, is writing the script, and every now and then, on days like today, they get together to bounce ideas off each other's backboards.

In the meantime, Vaughn has banked his second holiday movie, Four Christmases with Reese Witherspoon—because who can hate Christmas?—and he and his staff have been putting the finishing touches on a documentary, as yet untitled, that sounds fantastic.

A few years ago, Vaughn was traveling around Ireland with a friend when they found their way into troubled Belfast. It is a city with a lot of walls, most of which have been covered with murals, lamentations for what might have been and what once was. Visitors can tour them in the back of a black taxi, one of Belfast's few symbols of neutrality. Folded into the jump seat, lowering his head to window height, Vaughn saw the murals rise up like great ghosts in front of him, the centuries of war between Irish Protestants and Catholics captured in paint. He was enraptured. "They're beautiful," he says, "but they come out of such conflict. It's almost like blues music here. And what's most interesting to me is, there are walls that divide these neighborhoods, but from inside the taxi, they look identical. There's no way to tell them apart."

When Vaughn starts talking about the documentary, it feels like an elaborate setup for a joke, the build toward some improbable punch line. Because this is what we've come to expect from him: He is the clown. Only occasionally does he bristle at the label, because he is smart enough to know that it has served him well. (Earlier this year, Forbes ranked him as the best investment in the business, garnering more than fourteen dollars at the box office for every dollar he's paid.) But he would like to remind you, gently, that those same smarts compelled him to cold-shoulder most of the commercial films he was offered after Swingers. Instead, he chose to appear in a succession of smaller, darker movies with forgotten titles: A Cool, Dry Place and Clay Pigeons and Return to Paradise. Reprising the character of Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho nearly buried Vaughn under a reputation for playing malcontents and killers. "When Old School came about," he says, "it was really very difficult for me to get a role in that movie, because no one saw me as a comic actor." Other happy, lucrative jaunts followed, and now few people—despite his memorable turn in Into the Wild—can see him as anything but. So when he talks about his documentary on the murals of Belfast, about death and beauty and art and bombs and what makes us the same and what makes us different, you almost expect him to say, "Just kidding," and drop his pants. Isn't this the guy who was paid $20 million to make Fred Claus?

Maybe Belfast grabbed such a strong hold on him because of his struggles to hold his own opposites together. Or maybe it's because he was raised in a divided city himself: Chicago. He's asked the question that all Chicago natives must answer in their hearts shortly after they take their first breath, coloring their fates and their futures for the rest of their lives. It's the question that answers every other question:

Cubs or White Sox?

"I root for both teams," Vaughn says.

You can't root for both teams.

"I really do."

No. You can't.

He looks genuinely perplexed.

"But..."

No buts.

"I'm a Cubs fan," he says, finally and a little sadly, because that's a hard thing to admit. "As a kid, the Cubs were my team."

Now we're getting—

"That being said, when the White Sox won the World Series, I was rooting for them the whole way. I go to Comiskey Park, and I root for them against anyone in the American League and anyone in the National League except for the Cubs. And a lot of Sox fans don't respect that. And the same with Cubs fans. They think you have to root for one or the other."

They think that because you do.

"I've always rooted for both," he says, raising his hands, I don't know what to tell you. "Because I love Chicago most of all."

He sinks deeper into the couch, exhausted by his lies. Only seconds later, he pops back up, looking as though he realizes he's made a terrible mistake.

"I love Los Angeles, too," he says. "I don't own a house here right now. I own a place in Chicago. But I consider Los Angeles home as well—I moved here when I was eighteen years old, and this city's been very good to me. So many great neighborhoods….I might get a place here at some point. I spend a lot of time here, and I do like it. I like it a lot. I love it, actually. It's just that Chicago's where I'm from, you know what I mean? That's all it is."

It turns out, it's a lot of work being Vince Vaughn. There are a lot of plates to spin. Friends say that Vaughn is surprisingly political, routinely firing off opinionated riffs on world events. (Apparently his impassioned take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like listening to Khrushchev banging his shoe on the podium.) But those are private sessions, his few remaining dramatic outlets. The public Vaughn, the professional Vaughn, is the man in the middle, afraid to give anyone a reason not to like him. "I'm not running for office," he says. "I just want people to come to my stuff and escape and see me as a character, not as anything else." Seeing him here just now, his legs stretched like bridges across to the coffee table, the light catching the worry lines and lumps on his face, you get the feeling that even in Belfast Vaughn would always find a way to be the black taxi.

McCain or Obama?

"Not a chance," Vaughn says, and he jumps out the window.

There is only one question that Vaughn will answer without reservation. He answered it the night before, at the steakhouse, underscoring every elaborately constructed sentence, paragraph, and punctuation mark with a forkful of lobster meat, flashing across the table like a rapier. It was as though Vince Vaughn from the movies suddenly showed up, goofy and motormouthed and frantic, a machine with its own built-in momentum.

What's funny?

"I think it's when you have an insight that people can relate to, but you have a perspective that maybe they haven't thought of—that can be funny. If I'm saying a universal truth, but maybe it's something that people don't feel comfortable saying.... It's a strange take, but at the same time, what you're hitting on is kind of right. You can relate. That's the heart of comedy. You have to have a point of view. You gotta commit. And the more you commit to it, sometimes the funnier it gets. Like in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I'm convinced that something's going to go down."

Vaughn starts looking around the restaurant, jittery and bug-eyed, seeing imaginary vampire bats swooping down from the rafters.

"It's crazy, but the more I'm past questioning it, the funnier it is. Or in Swingers, I make such a big deal over how many days you have to wait before you call a girl. I think it's funny because I'm so particular, as though it really means the world to me. I have friends in real life, the way they see stuff, they can be so narrow in their perspective, it makes me laugh. You could have a friend who's dating someone and he can get hung up on the smallest thing. It's like..."

And here Vaughn starts shouting, hitting the table, and the people in the restaurant who've been pretending not to look at him stop pretending.

"She wrote me an e-mail! At the end of that e-mail it says, dot dot dot. What does that mean? No, no, seriously, if that was a period, that would be the end of the sentence. There's closure. Dot dot dot, there's no closure!"

He shrinks back down.

"It's that kind of commitment that makes it sort of funny. If I take an extreme, absolute position, that becomes funny. Because the reaction doesn't warrant the reality. It's just dot dot dot."

He swells up and starts shouting again.

"Dot dot dot? Who does she think she is? She's fronting on me! She thinks she's going to get one over on me? I'm going to call her sister. Because I'm not here to get played, dog."

Now with his hands up, in a calmer voice: "Slow down, man, it's just dot dot dot. It's just, like, to be continued.

"WHAT'S TO BE CONTINUED?!"

The timing, the delivery, the sheer size of his performance, they make the words so much funnier than they are—he's done what he has done so often before, taken mediocre material and given it a blast with cardiac paddles—and people in the restaurant are really laughing hard now, heads on their empty plates, tears in their eyes. Vaughn sits back, picks up his drink, surveys his audience, and he smiles that really nice smile of his. He's loving this. He's loving that we've fallen in love.

Favreau shows up and Vaughn makes room for him on the couch. He's just wearing a T-shirt and jeans, sucking on a mint for lunch, ready to go to work. It's funny seeing them like this, the two guys from Swingers at their ten-year reunion, a little older, a little fatter, a little tired-seeming and wrung out. Their lives have gone in different directions since then, in exactly the directions you might have expected watching them play themselves in that film: Favreau, at forty-two, is more serious-minded and restrained, with a house and a wife and three kids. Vaughn, now thirty-eight, is like that guy still sleeping on a water bed in the room above the garage. In their more honest moments, they probably look at each other and envy what the other has, but despite Vaughn's valiant stab at never being entirely one thing or the other, there are some parts of a man's life where you can't have it both ways. It's one or the other.

"We're like the Sunshine Boys," Favreau says. "Did you ever see that? He's Walter Matthau."

Favreau looks at Vaughn. "Or maybe you're George Burns."

"Jon's my favorite writer," Vaughn says. "Even collaborating now with Couples Retreat, my job is just to help shape it. He's really the guy writing it."

"But Vince was smart enough to say, Hey, I'm at this point in my career, instead of just fielding gigs, let me generate my own material. It was about a year and a half ago, after the Spike Awards—"

"The Mantlers," Vaughn says.

"We won this award—"

"The Golden Mantlers."

"We were inducted into the Guys Hall of Fame. So we went to the Dresden of all places, where we hadn't been in years, and Vince laid out what he was going to do with Wild West and some of the ideas he wanted to pursue. He mentioned Couples Retreat. And I have a perspective on that, being married with three kids..."

"Are you done having kids?" Vaughn asks.

"Yeah, I'm done."

"You're not going to pull the goalie ever again?"

"No. Joy says, 'It's wife number two if you want more kids.'"

"Then you would have to move to, like, some Islamic country where you could have another wife," Vaughn says.

"Or nowhere. I could do the Hollywood thing, just hit reset."

"Or you could move into Warren Jeffs territory."

"I could set up a compound?"

"Yeah," Vaughn says, "a compound. That was so disturbing. You see all these little girls who look like extras from Little House on the Prairie. It's like Half Pint's been putting out for everybody...."

"Polygamy seems appealing," Favreau says, "but then I've been watching that show Big Love, and you realize it's the same headaches."

"It's triple the headaches. Triple the nagging. Triple the question, What are you thinking?"

"Yeah, one marriage is enough," Favreau says.

"You have to pick out three sets of blinds."

"Anyway," Favreau says, "I'm in that place, coming from that perspective now. I couldn't write something like Swingers today, because I'm so far out of that."

"No, you have a good imagination," Vaughn says.

"No, Swingers, a lot of that stuff was stuff you'd said or stuff I'd heard about, and it gives you a personal take on the stuff. When I write, I need that."

"It blows my mind, seeing where Favs has gone with his career," Vaughn says. "I mean, Iron Man? Are you kidding? That's incredible to me, thinking about us not that long ago, sitting at the diner, trying to figure out how to get the money to make Swingers."

"Now that we both can make movies more easily," Favreau says, "the hard part is, What movies do I want to make? What means something to me? The challenges have changed. It's a lot different for us now. It's like being a short-order cook instead of being a chef, when you could pay such close attention to every part of the process. How do you bring that same quality when people are lined up around the block waiting for you to serve something up?"

"That's well said," Vaughn says.

"Before, we had all the time in the world...."

And as Favreau continues to talk—Jon Favreau is smart as hell, by the way; he should charge admission to watch him change a diaper—Vaughn continues to listen. Not just casually. He's really listening, as though someone's grabbed him by the shoulders.

"... it's important to remind each other who we are and what we like..."

Vaughn, who's hardly ever quiet, stays quiet, and a look crosses his face. It's not wonder. It's more like revelation.

Favreau keeps talking:"... you're either selling or you're buying..."

And Vaughn keeps listening, because now it feels as though Favreau is talking directly to him, as though there is nobody else in the room. Here are two friends, magnetic poles, sitting on opposite ends of the same couch: the one who's grown up and the one who's refused to settle down; the one who takes risks—because Iron Man could have destroyed Jon Favreau, that could have been the end of him right there—and the one who returns to the same well; the one who commits and the one who lies awake at night worried that someone might think ill of him. While their world is easier now than ever in some ways, it's harder, too. Sometimes they must feel split in two. Vince Vaughn has money, he has fame, he has power. He has the love he's always gone after. But what's he going to do with it?

"... that ray of clarity..."

And just then, Vince Vaughn looks the way a big man looks when someone stands up to him for the first time in his life. He looks like a man who knows that he can cover only so much ground, that even giants have their limits. He looks like a man who knows he will have to pick a side. He looks suddenly smaller. He still looks a lot like Vince Vaughn, only built to scale.

'Wild West' showoffs

Vince Vaughn gathers some stand-up pals and hits the great open road intent on roping in a lot of laughs.

By Michael Ordoña, Special to The Times
Photo by Wally Skalij
The Los Angeles Times

HAVE you heard the one about the movie star who suddenly decided to put together a cross-country comedy tour? The stand-up comics would be seasoned but not nationally known, playing 2,000-seat venues when they were used to 30-seat houses. They'd go to Southern and Midwestern cities off the beaten (laugh) track. From conception to launch would be only six weeks. And they'd play 30 cities in 30 nights.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time," says a smiling Vince Vaughn in a poolside room at the Casa del Mar hotel in Santa Monica. He admits the tour, captured for the big screen in the upcoming road documentary "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights -- Hollywood to the Heartland," due to open Friday, was both impulsive and a labor of love. "I wasn't thinking past the fact that this is going to be different and exciting and fun," Vaughn offers. "The hard technical work fell on other people; they were the ones making the calls and doing stuff. But it was really a story of all of us pulling together and doing our parts."

For years, Vaughn had been putting together one-off stand-up nights as benefits in cities where he was shooting movies. But packing four comics, production staff and a film crew into three buses and winding from Hollywood through Texas and Tennessee to Illinois was no laughing matter. So he surrounded himself with close associates, including his sister, Victoria, and best friend, Peter Billingsley, as producers, and longtime friend Ahmed Ahmed, who was instrumental in assembling the cast.

Ahmed says, "We were all having dinner at this steakhouse in Chicago when [Vince] was finishing 'The Break-Up,' and we were getting ready to do this benefit, and he said, 'Why don't we take this show on the road? What are you guys doing next month?' "

John Caparulo adds, "When Ahmed asked me, 'Do you want to do a tour with Vince Vaughn across the country, 30 shows in 30 days?' it's like, 'Hey, do you want to go to the Super Bowl?' 'Uh, yeah, all right.' A month later, we're on a bus. It was an insanely good opportunity."

"The one thing I like about these guys who I saw through watching Ahmed is that they're kind of telling true stories," says Vaughn of Caparulo, Bret Ernst and Sebastian Maniscalco. "Somehow these guys being able to laugh at real stuff from their experience, maybe there was healing for the audience."

With the whole cast crammed together for 30 days, though, first-time feature director Ari Sandel said he'd occasionally hear raised voices.

"Sometimes you'd walk on the bus and they'd be in a huge debate," he said by phone from Los Angeles, "about who the best linebacker was . . . for like seven days. I've never seen people yell so much . . . it was insane."

"We had high-class problems," admits Egypt-born, America-raised comic Ahmed. "We were on a nice bus."

"Ours was like a prison bus," grumbles Billingsley.

"It was like a Bangkok prison," agrees Ahmed.

Billingsley laughs and says, "You guys would run out of food and you'd send [Ahmed] out there at, like, 3 o'clock in the morning to try to get food from our bus."

Ernst, whose comedy is the most physical of the group, says, "It was like some 'Lord of the Flies'-type [stuff] because they would guard their things: 'What are you doing here?' 'We don't have any Yoo-Hoo.' 'You can't have any Yoo-Hoo!' "

The film took shape around what Sandel called "the five minutes before and the five minutes after" the comics took the stage, revealing some of their techniques and insecurities. Sandel, Vaughn, Billingsley and the production team chiseled down 600 hours of footage.

"I've known Ahmed for eight years; I've seen his act a million times," said Sandel. "But it wasn't until I actually was on tour with him and interviewed him and saw him prepare -- for the first time, I really understood what it was he'd been doing the last eight years."

"I was surprised every night," adds Ahmed, whose material often concerns his experiences as an Arab American, including blatant racial profiling. "I try to make it self-deprecating so I'm not attacking the audience; it's more making fun of myself. [Afterward] the guys would say, 'You killed; you had a really good set!' "

Perhaps not surprisingly for a group of guys with such dynamic energy, chaos was always part of the plan.

"We'd change it up every night," says Billingsley of a slate that would occasionally include guests such as Jon Favreau, Justin Long and "Wedding Crashers" costar Keir O'Donnell. "We'd have the four comics, and like, two acts in between. Vince would sing karaoke sometimes; he'd do a scene from 'Swingers' with an audience member."

In one of the film's more poignant sequences, the comics complain about their accommodations -- then come face-to-face with dozens of people displaced after Hurricane Katrina. But Vaughn shrugs off talk of traveling difficulties. Meeting people who had lost everything put the travails of a seat-of-the-pants comedy adventure in perspective.

"Both of my parents worked for a living, so I know what it's like to have real pressure and real problems," he scoffs. "Real pressure is having to feed my kids, 'How am I going to make the mortgage?' I benefited from having grandparents who were farmers and immigrants. So I was never like, 'Oh, this is so hard.' You're on a bus going to make people laugh."

On the Road With Vince Vaughn, Not Just for Laughs

By DAVE ITZKOFF
Photo by Stephanie Diani for The New York Times
The New York Times

WHEN you buy a ticket for a Vince Vaughn movie, you know pretty much what you’re going to get. The story of a sarcastic if affable guy, with a self-satisfied grin and immaculate sideburns, who wins over the guys and gals with his smart-aleck comebacks and learns a few life lessons along the way, possibly after finding true love or being barraged with dodgeballs. The kind of guy he inhabits so completely, in movies like “Wedding Crashers,” “Swingers” and “The Break-Up,” that he couldn’t possibly be anything but a nonchalant cynic in real life.

So it came as a surprise on a recent Sunday morning to find Mr. Vaughn, 37, sitting in the lounge of a Hollywood theater, choking back tears. The catalyst for his Hillary Clinton moment? He was recounting a trip he took in 2005, when he packed a tour bus full of young comedians on an ad hoc cross-country journey that would lead, among other places, to a trailer park for Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Alabama and benefit concerts for Hurricane Rita victims in Texas.

“It was very hard for me,” Mr. Vaughn said, struggling to maintain his composure as he recalled the trip, “because it’s one of those situations where there’s no answer of how to solve it, but these lives are destroyed.”

“I’m not a politician,” he added. “I don’t have the answer to anything, but I do like to make people laugh. Can’t we all be on the same side with the stuff, versus having comedy that’s so acidic and meanspirited and dividing? That’s just not my nature.”

While it is only natural to be skeptical of any celebrity who supports a cause, Mr. Vaughn’s latest film, opening Friday, a documentary about his 2005 expedition titled “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights — Hollywood to the Heartland,” engenders a different kind of disbelief. It suggests that behind the acerbic satires and skirt-chasing farces, the show’s M.C. might have an earnest side too.

With little fanfare Mr. Vaughn has in recent years made occasional visits to American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and organized comedy shows to benefit the Army Emergency Relief Fund. (Mr. Vaughn’s older sister Victoria was in the Army Reserve.)

In September 2005, following the release of “Wedding Crashers,” he decided on a more ambitious project: a tour that would travel from Los Angeles to Chicago, featuring stand-up comics he had discovered through the comedian Ahmed Ahmed, a friend he met on a 1990 after-school special.

“He was like, ‘What are you doing for the next month?’ ” Mr. Ahmed said, recalling his invitation to join the tour. “And I said: ‘Nothing. You’re the one with a career, remember?’ ”

Through visits to Los Angeles clubs like the Comedy Store, Mr. Vaughn rounded out the group with John Caparulo, Bret Ernst and Sebastian Maniscalco. Their monologues mine personal material about decidedly middle-class experiences — fixing cars under the guidance of a stern father, shopping at Ross department stores — which plays to the widest variety of audiences.

Mr. Vaughn was capable of organizing the trip, but that doesn’t completely account for why he chose to take a colossal pay cut to spend a month introducing his “Wild West” ensemble, re-enacting the occasional scene from “Swingers” onstage and sleeping in the back of a tour bus.

Certainly, Mr. Vaughn acknowledged, the decision stemmed partly from the boredom he felt with his career at the time. “I could keep trying to do these same kind of comedies,” he said. “You know how it’s going to go, and you can get an audience with it, but then I feel like a hamster on a wheel.” (Sometimes, however, the audiences don’t flock to the theater, as this past holiday’s “Fred Claus” proved.)

Friends of Mr. Vaughn said the trip — with an itinerary that included stops in Oklahoma City; Nashville; Little Rock, Ark.; and Birmingham, Ala. — was also inspired by his desire to bring entertainment to places too often dismissed as flyover territory.

“He thought it was very important to take this on the old blue highways, before the interstate system passed all the towns by,” said Dwight Yoakam, the country musician and actor (who described his camaraderie with Mr. Vaughn as “probably one of the more disparate pairings” in the entertainment industry). “Vince really has an understanding of what goes on between Nevada and New Jersey, and he’s cognizant of the real world, versus the one we exist in, in our vacuum on either coast.”

It can be easy to forget that Mr. Vaughn was born in Minnesota and raised in the Chicago suburbs of Buffalo Grove and Oak Park. The son of a manufacturer’s representative for toys and video games and the grandson of a dairy farmer, he enjoyed an adolescence informed equally by the hip-hop of NWA and the country of Buck Owens.

Mr. Vaughn said his career and extracurricular choices were not reflections of a political stance. “I am truly more of an independent that anything,” he said. “I don’t agree 100 percent with either side on everything.”

If people feel strongly enough about an issue to act on it, he added, “I respect that, but that’s not my journey. My journey is to try to do stuff to make people laugh.”

It is that showman’s compulsion, friends say, that may explain the origins of Mr. Vaughn’s comedy tour. “He’s not an artist who sits alone with a typewriter; he’s a guy who works the room,” said the filmmaker and actor Jon Favreau, a “Swingers” co-star and longtime confidant, who appears in the documentary. “It’s all about being a carnival barker, and he loves the challenge of going into a new environment.”

The environment itself provided a substantial challenge over the course of the tour: Katrina touched down days before the inaugural performance, on Sept. 12, 2005, and several planned appearances along the Gulf Coast were canceled.

“I said, ‘I don’t care if there’s 50 people down there,’ ” Mr. Vaughn recalled with a sardonic laugh. “They’re like, ‘They’re evacuating the city.’ Oh, O.K.”

An additional show planned for Beaumont, Tex., had to be canceled when Hurricane Rita hit there. It was rescheduled in Dallas as a benefit matinee.

Meanwhile the comedians who joined Mr. Vaughn on the road discovered that the documentary form demanded a greater level of personal confession than their stand-up routines. Mr. Ernst talked about his gay brother, a frequent subject of his jokes, and his death from AIDS in 2001. During a stop in Las Vegas, Mr. Ahmed, a Muslim of Egyptian descent, revisited a jail where he was held on vague charges for 12 hours in 2004.

“We didn’t really know how much the documentary would focus on these guys’ personal lives until we went on tour,” said the film’s director, Ari Sandel, an Oscar winner for the short “West Bank Story” and a friend of Mr. Vaughn’s.

“It’s one thing to be friends with somebody and to ask them questions,” he added. “It’s a totally different thing to have a camera in front of them. After a while, you run out of a lot of typical questions after the first three or four days. Then the questions start to become a lot deeper.”

When the tour came to an end on Oct. 11, 2005, the comedians came home to the modest crowds and two-drink-minimum clubs they were accustomed to playing, returning with newfound confidence but also with uncertainty about how involved Mr. Vaughn would remain in their careers. “I don’t even know how to get hold of him,” Mr. Maniscalco said. “Talk to Vince? How? If I wanted to call him, he doesn’t even have a number.”

Mr. Vaughn had his own battles to fight: first with the Weinstein Company, which was to distribute the documentary until Mr. Vaughn became dissatisfied with a proposed advertising campaign and reclaimed the film.

“We all know when we see the posters that a studio can put up, like, ‘Get ready to laugh!’ ” Mr. Vaughn said, smirking while resting his chin on his fist. “Or ‘Here comes the funny!’ That makes me go, ‘Oh, God.’ ”

(In an e-mail message, the Weinstein Company’s Harvey Weinstein wrote, “The parting on ‘Wild West’ was very amicable and we wish the project the very best.” The movie is now being distributed by Picturehouse, the specialty division of New Line Cinema and HBO.)

Since Mr. Vaughn has finished the tour and the movie, there remains the question of how he should satisfy the restlessness that both projects were supposed to stave off. “The biggest challenge, when you’re at the point Vince is at, is finding something that piques your curiosity enough to engage you, because you could try your hand at anything,” Mr. Favreau said. “If he wanted to record an album as a singer, I’m sure he could figure out a way to do it. It’s just a matter of what he wants to do.”

For the time being Mr. Vaughn is talking about bringing his comedy tour to the Northeast and Northwest. And he is currently shooting another holiday-theme comedy, “Four Christmases,” in which he and Reese Witherspoon play a couple attempting to visit all four of their divorced parents and their spouses in a single holiday, and for which Mr. Vaughn will receive a producing credit.

While he may not be ready to swear off the disingenuous characters he so easily embodies, Mr. Vaughn is hopeful that the “Wild West Comedy” film will help reconnect him to his earlier sincerity and drive. Reflecting on his formative days as a professional actor, he said: “I was so excited if I got anything. I was 18 years old. I thought, ‘Man, I’m on “China Beach” for five lines.’ I thought that was awesome.”

As he looks at the field of younger talent coming up behind him, Mr. Vaughn said, he often encounters performers more interested in image than authenticity. “It seems like if you say you take an acting class, that’s not cool,” he said. He slipped into the whispery, dispassionate voice of the stereotypical pretty boy he says he never was: “I’m just a natural. I never studied.”

The documentary, he said, “is a counter to all of that. Who’s hot and who’s not? Who cares? Otherwise, we’d all be models remaking ‘Gone With the Wind.’ ”

Vince Vaughn & Cast Interview, Wild West Comedy Show

Posted By: Sheila Roberts
Movies Online

MoviesOnline sat down with Vince Vaughn and stand-up comedians Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, and Sebastian Maniscalco at the Los Angeles press day to promote their new movie, “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights -- Hollywood to the Heartland.”

In the spirit of the old west variety shows, Vince Vaughn (star of “The Break-Up,” “Wedding Crashers,” “Swingers,” “Fred Claus”) took the stage at the Music Box Theater in Hollywood on September 12, 2005 and began an unprecedented comedy tour featuring stand-up comedians Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, and Sebastian Maniscalco. Vaughn played host to the ensemble of comedians and performed improvisational sketches with surprise celebrity guests that included Jon Favreau, Justin Long, and Keir O’Donnell.

“Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights -- Hollywood to the Heartland” chronicles Vaughn and the comedians’ journey as they travel more than 6,000 miles and perform 30 shows in 30 consecutive nights in cities across the U.S. The documentary gives audiences a rare opportunity to experience Vaughn and his team as they bring their unique styles and perspectives to regional audiences throughout Western, Southern and Midwestern states.

With rousing onstage performances and behind-the-scenes interviews, the engaging grass roots documentary breaks down the true essence of each comedian’s life-altering experiences, and the personal and professional challenges that will unite four comics, one movie star and legions of fans from Hollywood to the Heartland.

Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights -- Hollywood to the Heartland Tour” is the first documentary film release from Wild West Picture Show Productions. It’s directed by Ari Sandel and produced by Vince Vaughn. Executive producers on the project are Peter Billingsley, Victoria Vaughn and John Isbell. John Pisani and Sandra Smith serve as associate producers. Dan Lebenthal edited the project.

The genesis of the movie came in the summer of 2001 in New Orleans when Vaughn decided to host a live comedy show at the French Quarter bar One-Eyed Jacks. That night would eventually lead to similar shows in Dewey Beach, Maryland during the production of “Wedding Crashers” and in Chicago during the production of “The Break-Up.” It was during the preparation for the Chicago show – a benefit for the Army Emergency Relief Fund – that Vaughn first entertained the idea of taking the show on a full-blown tour across the country.

“I really wanted to take a high quality show to places that normally didn’t get live variety shows,” explains Vaughn. “Growing up in Illinois, you usually had to go to New York, Los Angeles or Las Vegas to see a show. I thought it would be fun to bring the show to smaller towns like Little Rock, Lubbock, El Paso and Tucson. Also, selfishly for me, I love driving through America and seeing different landscapes and cities that I have never been to before.”

“The type of show we are doing just isn’t done anymore,” says Vaughn. “It’s a different skill set and a different feeling to perform live on stage. I really enjoy interacting with and relating to a live audience. Performing improv and sketch comedy every night would provide me that opportunity.” With comedians Bret Ernst, Sebastian Maniscalco and Ahmed Ahmed having all performed in the Chicago and Maryland comedy shows, Vaugn tapped the trio along with John Caparulo to join him on his Wild West Comedy Tour.

Although the four comedians Vaughn selected for his tour were all close friends and regulars at the Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip, the foursome’s comedic style and material is as diverse as their backgrounds: Egyptian-born Ahmed Ahmed’s material focuses on his lifelong struggle with racial stereotypes; Sebastian Maniscalco’s insightful observations on the absurdity of the modern man are influenced by Midwestern values; acerbic wit is the calling card of small-town Ohio boy John Caparulo; and Italian alpha male Bret Ernst specializes in high energy, physical comedy.

Vaughn, Ahmed, Caparulo, Ernst and Maniscalco are five very funny guys and we really appreciated their time. Here’s what they had to tell us about their recent adventure:

Q: Can you talk about the experience of doing this movie and then seeing the final product?

AHMED AHMED: Vince came up with the idea. It was kind of last minute. It was like this idea came up and he said, ‘You guys want to go on a tour?’ and like maybe a month later we were on this bus. The experience was great being able to perform in front of really large crowds. We weren’t expecting it to be a movie to be honest with you. We were just going show by show. We really weren’t looking at the outcome of the tour. We were just like ‘Let’s try to be funny every night.’ And then we finished the tour and we were like ‘Okay. That was great. I would do it again.’ And they had cameras on the bus and they shot the whole thing and then it was cut into this film and they showed it to us and the next thing I know it’s a movie. It was really just a blessing to be part of the whole experience.

JOHN CAPARULO: The surprising thing for me really was I remember when we were out on the tour. We were just out there living our daily lives on the bus, you know, which is pretty boring. I’d get up at 2pm and I had breakfast and did the show. I remember thinking when we were on the tour ‘Are they going to have enough footage to make anything with this?’ And I remember they told me when they were getting into the editing process, they were like ‘Oh, the first cut of the movie was 4 hours long’ and I’m like ‘Okay! I guess we had enough footage.’ So, yeah, that was the surprise to me. We made a movie. [Laughs]

Q: When did you guys bathe?

SEBASTIAN MANISCALCO: Bathe? I was constantly washing myself throughout the tour.

BRET ERNST: Everyday. We had a shower on the bus and we also had a hotel room when we would go to the city that we would shower in.

AHMED AHMED: The venues had showers too so we would go to them.

Q: Ahmed, you just finished The Axis of Evil comedy tour. Which was harder, your audience in the Middle East or the audience in America?

AHMED AHMED: One wasn’t harder than the other because the material translated. I did my act in English in the Middle East and I did it in English here. It translated pretty similarly to both audiences.

Q: Vince, how did these guys end up on your radar so that you recruited them in particular for this tour?

VINCE VAUGHN: Well I had known Ahmed. In fact, Ahmed and I became friends at the same time that I became friends with Peter Billingsley which was that Steroid After School Special. Looking back on it, it’s kind of like looking at “The Outsiders.” Who would have thought that all these guys would have come from one particular special. And then Ahmed, there weren’t a lot of parts for him so he sort of turned to stand-up comedy as an avenue for expression because there weren’t a lot of parts for Egyptian kids. I’d have to go watch him like a friend in need is a pest. Every month it’d be like ‘Oh I gotta go watch him tell that joke again.’ But as I went down, he started to get better because he started to talk about himself and his families and these kinds of things that Ahmed really became excellent at what he does. In going to watch him, I watched these guys as well and my favorite comedians and the one thing they all had was they were talking about real life experiences and sometimes stuff is not that flattering whether it was relationships or family situations but they had a sense of humor about themselves. There was kind of a connection in the film with all kind of old country western songs and their comedy in that.

You’re talking about what you know. It comes from a genuine life experience and audiences I think, the question you asked Ahmed, if you’re being authentic and truthful, especially stuff that happens everywhere – relationships or parents stuff or brother/sister stuff, those kind of things – it’s relatable, that’s universal, that’s translatable anywhere. And so I thought, ‘Oh let’s do a show. It’ll be kind of fun. I’ll improvise. I haven’t done that in awhile.’ I did originally for a friend of mine in New Orleans just to help him out with his venue and it went tremendous so I started doing more shows as sort of benefit shows. I did some for the Army Emergency Relief Fund and the response was always good so I thought this would be fun to kind of go on the road. I’d like to play a bunch of different places, take a variety comedy show which you haven’t seen in awhile and go to some folks’ backyards that don’t get shows like this usually. Give them something fun to see where you don’t have to go to Los Angeles or New York or even Chicago to some degree or Vegas and I kind of thought of the idea and I thought let’s film it.

I knew it would be a movie obviously and we thought let’s shoot some venue special and then we’ll have cameras. But I didn’t know what the story would be. I knew it would be funny as it is but you didn’t know quite what it would be. You didn’t know what would happen as far as when we ran into the hurricane stuff that happened down there and meeting their families. What is that going to be like exactly? You don’t know and so the editing process for something like this becomes like screenwriting when I’ve done that because you have all this footage but you really have to kind of say ‘What is the story within this that’s the most compelling?’ And for me, kind of the underdog story of these guys and sort of their journey in realizing that their comedy came from real life experiences sort of became the most interesting thing as well as the special guest stars and all the stuff that’s fun. It really turned into kind of an event movie where it’s like a road trip. It’s a capsule of sort of what was going on at that time. It’s an insight into stand-ups that I don’t think you’ve quite seen before, sort of what they go through. It’s sort of became a lot of components of different things. But the idea originally when I thought of it was just to say, ‘This is a fun thing. Let’s go as many places as we can.’ And what came out of it was sort of the result of what happened. But I had the easy job of thinking of it. I only thought of it six weeks out so my sister Victoria and John Isbell and Sandra (Smith), they had to really in six week’s time find these buses, book 30 venues, convince people I was really coming, you know, what the Wild West Show was. Is Vince going to come and rope horses? What’s happening here? So they really had, as far as the logistics were concerned, a much more challenging job to put it all together.

Q: Was the autographing of boobs a nightly thing?

VINCE VAUGHN: I think that was John.

JOHN CAPARULO: I envisioned the breasts.

VINCE VAUGHN: Sometimes you get asked stranger things than that to autograph. It’s kind of a dealer’s choice I think.

JOHN CAPARULO: You know the weirdest one for me was some dude. First of all, it was a dude, but second of all, it was a guy… You know we would autograph people’s T-shirts because we would sell Wild West T-shirts outside. It was like ‘Hey, here you go!’ And some guy just had me autograph his shirt like you’re wearing. It was a nice shirt. He could probably wear it to a job interview or something. [Laughter] It’s not going to look good with my autograph on it but alright. It just felt weird.

Q: What was the most memorable venue you performed at?

BRET ERNST: The Ryman.

JOHN CAPARULO: Yeah, the Ryman.

BRET ERNST: The Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville because, you know, just all the old history there. And I’m a big Elvis fan and I know he was on that stage. So it was just awesome.

JOHN CAPARULO: I’m telling toilet jokes with people sitting in church pews so you know that’s pretty cool. [Laughs]

Q: Vince, you’ve done a lot to bring attention to the whole of America from this tour to shooting films in Chicago, what has that done to improve this sort of bi-coastal mentality?

VINCE VAUGHN: Oh I don’t know. You know I think that there are more similarities between people than there are differences. I’ve always seen myself as an American. I’m proud of where I’ve come but I believe I was given an opportunity in California that I wouldn’t have had back home so I’m very thankful. California has always been kind of a Gold Rush state where you could come out and individuals are kind of respected and allowed to be that here so there’s great things about this as well. I’m not saying you don’t have that back home but it’s definitely a place where you come to for opportunities. In a way California becomes symbolic of America at its best. It’s a place where you can come and pursue whatever your particular dreams are. I was definitely shaped from being from middle America. My grandfather was a farmer. Dad was the first one off the farm.

My other side of the family were immigrants and worked hard. But I think that’s the same in Boston as it is in Tennessee. I think that’s kind of why we have one constitution. We’re all from the same place. You might have different specific things in different places but we’re all on the same side and I think for me that was really the point of the movie on some level. I’ve always tried to be sort of including with comedy and it felt to me that some of these things that came up – be it Katrina or the war or other things – was dividing people and it felt like some of the comedy would be almost acidic or sort of against a certain side one way or the other. And I’ve come to find in my life that people shut down when you approach them that way. They feel defensive and they don’t listen. They’re less open and obviously they feel like they’re being attacked. For me personally, I don’t think I have any friends that we agree on everything but we respect each other, we listen to each other, and I’ve always learned from listening to people with different approaches so the one thing I wanted to do with the movie and what I thought that these guys had in their comedy was unify and bring people together – whether it’s the stuff Bret talks about with his family or Ahmed talks about. People from different backgrounds were laughing and enjoying and sharing because they could relate I think to the human connection of what they were talking about. So hopefully I think the film at its best is a unifying thing that makes people kind of laugh and feel closer to each other. The feeling that we would have after the show I think is very similar to what we felt like after …the feeling you have in the movie is you do kind of feel closer to the people in the group. It’s kind of a feel good feeling where you feel warm I think and open. It’s not something that makes a division.

Q: What’s been the impact on the comics from doing this movie now that they have greater visibility? Has it changed anything?

SEBASTIAN MANISCALCO: For myself, I did a Comedy Central special. I filmed an hour-long DVD. It’s opened up a lot of doors for me and the last 2-1/2 years I just keep pinching myself because for myself it’s been kind of like a dream come true to just perform in front of these large audiences and have a major motion picture coming out with VINCE VAUGHN: and my parents in the movie also. Not too many people can say ‘My parents are in my first movie.’ They’re loving every minute of it. For myself, it’s opened a lot of doors and I just pray every day that this [continues]. It’s been a great ride.

BRET ERNST: A lot of things have happened to me because you had the heat of the tour and then you have the heat of the movie. It’s almost like that Advent calendar and now it’s Christmas Eve. And now you’re like, ‘Alright, now Christmas morning is happening. I can’t wait to see it and see what happens.’ As comedians, it’s not based on how talented you are. It’s pretty much based on how many tickets you’re going to sell as a comic. Visibility is the best thing you can get as a stand-up comedian. And I always said the only reason why I would want any type of notoriety was so I can get a lot of stage time. You know what I mean? It seems like once this happened, then people are like ‘Okay, well now we can put you in the club.’ And what’s great is all the hard work that you put in for the 11 years I’ve been doing stand-up now that you have the visibility because of the movie, you’re in the club. That’s when your talent meets the hard work and the opportunity and then boom! That’s all you can ask for as an artist and this movie has provided that.

AHMED AHMED: Johnny Carson used to put comics on his stage and they would get recognized the next morning. They’d get a TV deal or whatever so, not to compare Vince to Johnny Carson, but his endorsement speaks for itself if people like you because Vincent says, ‘Hey, I think this guy’s funny or this girl’s funny.’

VINCE VAUGHN: I don’t know if that’s true. I think that people respond to you guys because they like your stuff and for me, I got as much out of this as I gave. It was a great opportunity to travel and go play live and all those kind of things but I think the work was done by these guys. I just saw them perform but they had… Bret’s been doing it for 11 years. They were always doing well wherever they performed.

BRET ERNST: But nothing like this has ever been done in stand-up comedy.

JOHN CAPARULO: Especially in this era.

BRET ERNST: In this day and age.

JOHN CAPARULO: Yeah, I mean how many comics really get to do stand-up on the big screen? It doesn’t happen anymore so I mean the four of us were really lucky.

BRET ERNST: It’s like if you look at the 80s, to do the Tonight Show was so rare and then as comedy progressed, you have the Comedy Network now. You have five, six talk shows. You have the internet where everybody’s things are on there. Now the big screen has become the Tonight Show. I mean nobody has done this.

VINCE VAUGHN: There’s been others like “The Kings of Comedy” and stuff like that, films and stuff. I think there’s similarities. I think it has its own thing. It’s a different look at it and it’s different stuff too. But there’s been stuff I think that touches on it in different ways.

Q: Do you guys have any plans to get back on the big screen after this film?

VINCE VAUGHN: To be honest, I don’t care if these guys live or die. [Laughter] It wore me out. [Laughs] No, I’m kidding. I’d like to do stuff again. I’d like to do a tour that starts in Boston and kind of goes down through the East Coast down to Florida. I’d like to do one in the Pacific Northwest and go to Toronto and maybe go other places with it. It’s fun. It’s a lot of fun. There’s a different energy that comes off of it. But I have to wait and see what our schedule is and sort of how things translate but in and of itself, it’s a very magical special thing. The big thing is that you don’t go and try to recreate something that you couldn’t predict. You have to, I think, try to start from another place that felt authentic, if that meant getting different comics. After doing it and looking at it I’d like to maybe bring different kind of comics out as these guys did and I think there’s a tour to be done perhaps with these guys again and that could be interesting and it’s also nice to give some other opportunities to some other people. It’d be interesting. I think it would be interesting to see a female comic go on the journey.

Q: How about acting together?

VINCE VAUGHN: Acting? Yeah, absolutely. These guys are talented guys so it could happen. I’m sure they’ll have their own things going on from this and stuff that they’re doing. I like to act with people like (Jon) Favreau and that again so it’s possible.

Q: For Ahmed and Vince, you guys have known each other for a long time and then Peter and later John, can you talk about how you stay bonded through the ebb and flow of your careers?

VINCE VAUGHN: Well I heard your breath so I pulled back. That was like a tennis match where the ball went down the middle and we both looked at the other person like ‘What an idiot!’ Some doubles partners. [Laughter]

AHMED AHMED: We just always had this great friendship and just always supported each other. I think we all were cut from the same cloth. We all have not similar upbringings but our parents instilled in us respect and they worked hard and Vince is really close to his family as am I and so is Peter (Billingsley). So I think the family values has a lot to do with it and us being supportive of each other. I think we also have certain visions we were going for that we also supported. You know Peter has become a really successful producer aside from his acting and stuff. Obviously Vince has done extremely well for himself. For me, as a comedian, that was always a dream of mine to achieve a certain level of success as a comedian. So there’s that support, going back to what Vince said, and coming down to the comedy clubs and stuff, watching me night after night try to work out a joke or whatever, and a year later turn a corner and find a new angle or story and just having him there in the trenches with me was always really a great feeling to have a friend like that, that comes down and supports you. We always just had this mutual respect and support for each other in our art and our friendship.

Q: Have any of your families gotten any deals from any of this?

BF: My father thinks he should get an agent. My stepfather. He’s delusional. [Laughter]

Q: Do people recognize and approach you on the street because of this film?

VINCE VAUGHN: It hasn’t come out yet.

JOHN CAPARULO: My sister called me last night because one of her friends called her and saw her on HBO because the HBO First Look came on so my sister called to say ‘Hey, I’m a star.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay! Good for you!’

Q: Can you talk about the interaction with Ari (Sandel) and how he came to shoot everything?

VINCE VAUGHN: Yeah. What happened was…I guess talking about that and also about our friendship with Ahmed…for me is I was not a good student. I had learning disabilities. I was bright but I learned in different ways and some things came easier. I wasn’t a great athlete but acting was always something that I really loved. But it took a lot of hard work. In fact, because I did have some learning disabilities, it seemed like a lot of things were hard work. So the one thing I really responded to with Ahmed was here’s this guy who’s Egyptian and wants to be an actor. There’s no parts for him but it’s just his tenaciousness that I really responded to. I knew what it felt like to feel like ‘Boy, there’s not an easy way in but you really want to try to work at something.’ The same for Peter. A lot of child stars when they get to a certain age it’s very difficult because no one wants to see you anymore because you’re so recognizable for what you did [when you were] younger and you don’t have a normal kind of maturation process where you have a normal social [life] like playground stuff. Everybody kind of treats you really well and then all of a sudden people don’t want to be around you. And Peter’s work ethic to become a producer and get involved behind the camera was like nothing I ever saw. I’d say ‘Let’s go to the race track’ or ‘Let’s go do something’ and he’d say ‘I have to work from 10 to 6.’

I’d say, ‘Peter, you got nothing to work on’ and he’d say, ‘Well I’m gonna write a screenplay. I’m gonna try and put something together’ for years with no results. So, for me, I found it easy to root for. And then as I was able with Favreau, what we accomplished with Swingers was to try to provide opportunities if someone was kind of trying hard and working in that way. There’s something about that that is motivating and inspiring to me. Ari Sandel was a guy that Peter gave an early opportunity to and worked with Peter on a TV show that they did when Ari was starting off. When we first initiated the tour, Ari was just a hired cameraman the first day on the bus. He was not the director of the film. He was a guy with a camera. And as we went out and got…as I said we put together in 6 weeks…originally I said to Peter because Peter had run so much different stuff, he produced “Made” with me, “Dinner for Five,” “The Break-Up,” he produced “Zathura,” and now he’s done “Iron Man.” He’s producing “Four Christmases” with me. But he also produced this TV show and sort of was a mentor to Ari about how to get field segments and stuff. As we were there, so much of Peter’s day became about putting together the technical show and making sure stuff was running that I came to Ari who I really liked his short film obviously that everyone knows of now which won the Academy Award. And I said to him, ‘Will you direct this movie?’ He was thrilled of course and I said, ‘We’ll talk to you at the end of the day and sort of talk about what’s going on and go get footage.’ And he worked really hard and did a good job. My style, where I come from in the creative process, is the best idea wins. I don’t need to be right. I don’t need anybody else to be right. I need whatever is right for the movie and I really like a collaboration where if you have an idea, we’ll through it up there. I don’t want to debate it for 45 minutes. Let’s see, let’s go, let’s watch it, let’s watch. I feel like when people feel included, they feel like they have a voice, they feel incentified, they’re excited. You’re getting the best ideas. So Ari was a huge component and very much a part of the idea, but so was Peter Billingsley and so was my sister and so was the editor, Dan Lebental, who cut “American Pimp” which was a great documentary. He cut “The Break-Up,” he cut “Elf.” So really what you see as a final result I think is better than what any one of us could have done. It really became a true collaboration with all of us.

Q: How did you feel about doing the Swingers routine 10 years later?

VINCE VAUGHN: What I kind of liked about it was it was that kind of simple comedy set up where I’m kind of tough on Justin and kind of not giving him an out and then the fun is at the end he gets to humiliate me. I always knew Justin did a really good imitation of me that was not flattering, that was kind of funny at my expense. I knew that like okay, we could be tough on him at the beginning because he’ll do a good job of making fun of me and that’ll make everyone happy.

Q: Thank you.

VINCE VAUGHN: Thank you guys very much. I appreciate it.

Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights—Hollywood to the Heartland opens in theaters on February 8th.

Spotlight: Vince Vaughn

By Shirley Halperin
February 1st issue of Entertainment Weekly

At 6 feet 5 inches, Vince Vaughn barely clears the ceiling of his tour bus— glitzy, leathery behemoth befitting a band like the Rolling Stones. But back in the fall of 2005, the 45-footer served as temporary home to Vaughn and the posse of comedians he handpicked for a monthlong cross-country stand-up tour. Vaughn's resulting documentary about the trek, Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show proves he may have had the rocker trappings down, but the actor had to learn a thing or two about the lifestyle: "When we decided to book the tour, I had no experience with any of this," Vaughn laughs. "I originally thought 30 days and 30 nights because it had a nice ring to it. I didn't realize you need a day off once in a awhile. It's like you're being Federal Expressed from stage to stage."

Today, Vaughn is back on the bus to promote West (in theaters Feb. 8) and parked outside of one of his favorite stops—the Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, Calif., a shrine to the late Buck Owens. A Chicago-area native, Vaughn is quick to defend his country cred by dropping the fact that his grandfather was a dairy farmer and his family hails from Ohio. As a result, he says, he feels perfectly at home here. "A lot of these guys, like Buck and Johnny Cash, had these extreme existences, picking up, moving, and looking for work," the 37-year-old explains with a hint of Hee Haw awe. "The songs were just expressing that." It was his deep admiration for those musicians and their struggle that inspired West. "The emotion, the experience came first, which is a correlation I made when I saw these comics… It's a hard lifestyle to get up every night and [perform] to just 20 people. The movie is about learning who they are, and how their comedy comes from a real place."

Though Vaughn was never officially a stand-up, he's been a regular in L.A. comedy clubs since the early '90s, when he met Ahmed Ahmed, one of the comics who'd tour with West. In fact, almost everyone involved in the film is family (sister Victoria serves as an exec producer) or a longtime friend, including Jon Favreau, who drops in at the Hollywood show to compare Vaughn's acting style to that of "a windup monkey."

So when it came to releasing Wild West, Vaughn didn't want to see his passion project degenerate into Guys Gone Wild. "When we took it to Toronto, it played phenomenally," says Vaughn of the film's first major screening in 2006. It earned the attention of Harvey Weinstein, who agreed to buy distribution rights—until the two clashed over their visions. "how they were going to market the movie was very different from how I saw it," Vaughn explains. "It was presented as more of a screwball comedy. I just felt that it wasn't in sync, and Harvey was nice enough to let me have the movie back." Back on Vaughn's terms, the film will debut on more than 700 screens. "It's a small release, but at least we have a chance to make some noise. What mattered to me most was that it got the right shot."

Of course, not every job can be a labor of love; luckily, Vaughn's brand of motormouth comedy remains in demand. These days, he's the poster boy for Christmas; he'll follow up recent hit, Fred Claus with Four Christmases, costarring Reese Witherspoon (slated for November). While Claus was for the kids, Vaughn likens Christmases, in tone, to Favreau's agonizing phone call in Swingers. "It's really funny and relatable, but also, like, hide your eyes," he says. As for reports that he and Witherspoon have been clashing on the set, Vaughn has nothing but raves for Reese: "She's one of my favorite actresses."

Vaughn may be working on mainstream fare, but he keeps a memento of West nearby: He bought the tour bus, which he's now using as his trailer on Christmases. It reminds him what you can accomplish in Hollywood. "It's not encouraged to put yourself in a documentary," he says. "But I didn't do it to be different. I'm just looking for what keeps me inspired."

'I Had a Blast'

Vince Vaughn lets us in on the making of his Wild West Comedy Show. Plus, putting the Reese rumors to rest, his take on Owen Wilson and more

By Jeanne Wolf
Parade Magazine
Published: January 9, 2007

Last year, Vince Vaughn made us laugh as Santa's problem-prone brother in Fred Claus. And he offered up a poignant cameo as a wheat farmer in the critically praised Into the Wild.

Now you can catch another side of Vince in the upcoming Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights--Hollywood to the Heartland. It chronicles Vaughn's tour of the U.S. with four stand-up comedians--6,000 miles of traveling in a cramped bus to perform 30 comedy variety shows in 30 nights, from coast to coast.

"I really had no idea how draining doing it would be," Vince told me for PARADE's January 13 issue. "None of us had ever been on tour before, and after ten performances, I started to feel like 'What did I get everyone into?' But, I wanted to take a high quality live variety show to smaller towns that normally didn't get them. And, after every performance, I'd get to meet fans and talk to them. I had a blast."

Since you're an actor and not a comedian, did you have any doubts about putting yourself in to the show?

"When we first started I was a little desperate to add something because the stand-up comics each had their own act. I suddenly decided to do karaoke. So they got me a karaoke machine and I did a pretty good Yul Brynner. I'm not a great singer, but it was fun doing it with an audience because I'd get everybody singing."

And let's not forget your moment belting out a song from 'Grease' with Justin Long in a blonde wig. We won't get to see that 'til the DVD comes out.

"Usually we'd have a moment with somebody throwing balls at Justin, which was having fun with his movie Dodgeball. But, one night I had the idea to do something from Grease. I said to Justin, 'You can play Sandy.' And, he was like, 'What?' Fortunately, he's a good sport. So we put him in a wig, which we got from a costume shop because it was close to Halloween. We added a nightgown and we got girls from the audience to be background singers and we did a duet and I was Danny Zuko. The whole place went crazy."

You weren't afraid to make yourself the target of some of the jokes, were you?

"I've always been a fan of a Johnny Carson because he was so great with an audience and not afraid of self-deprecating humor. I loved it when Justin did a take-off on me in Swingers and somebody else did a scene from Wedding Crashers. I don't mind being made fun of."

You also seemed to have some fun just taking questions from the audience.

"It went well, but it reminded how tough it is to be a stand-up comic. It's grueling never knowing if the audience is going to think you're funny. It's soul-destroying when they don't laugh."

Now you're doing a film with Reese Witherspoon, and there's been a lot of tabloid gossip that you guys have been mad at each other.

"I think there were stories that we were clashing on the set. That couldn't be further from the truth. I adore her. She's not only a great actress, she's very funny. We've been having a really good time. You predicted that the press would say that we were dating, but they went the other way and said we're fighting. The two of us get along great."

There was an avalanche of stories about the tough time that Owen Wilson went through recently. What's your take on what happened?

"Owen Wilson is still a very close friend. Honestly, he's the nicest, smartest, greatest guy in the world. I don't really know what happened to him, truthfully, and I don't really care. I don't think anyone knows. Everyone has stuff to go through. We all do in life."

You talked to me about not having a cell phone. In car-crazy L.A., I've heard that a set of wheels hasn't been number one on your list either.

"I've never been big on cars. When I first got to Hollywood, I bought a used car from Avis. I drove that until I almost had to pay someone to tow it away. Then, after Swingers, the producers bought me a used Ford Bronco."

"Meanwhile, once I made some money, I had been buying brand new cars for members of my family. So they finally all pitched in and bought me a new car that I still drive -- a Pontiac Firebird convertible. But, it's only the third car I've had since I've been here."

Is it more than a coincidence that you and your sisters all have names that begin with "v"?

"My dad's name is Vernon and my mom liked the initials, VV. My sisters and I got named Victoria, Valerie and Vincent so we'd be VV's, too. But, then when you start getting pets' names that start with a 'v,' it's a little embarrassing. When you are Vince Vaughn, and you go out to scream for 'Viking' the dog to come home, that's a little much. Then, Mom started looking in a dictionary for names and we ended up with a female Chihuahua, named Vanadis after some mythological goddess. So Victoria, Valerie and Vince were out playing with Vanadis. When I finally got a dog, I named him Rowdy. I had to break the chain."

You've said that you don't need a family of your own since you have your sisters' kids. Are you still having fun being Uncle Vince?

"I just got a cold from being around them. Every time I'm with them I get sick. So I'm all congested, but I love them to pieces."

Read more about Vince Vaughn in the January 13 issue of PARADE.

Video: Q&A From the CMJ Film Festival, October 19

Is it true, Vince?

I've never worked with him before, but I always thought Vince was the modest, unassuming type. Liz Smith of the NY Post and Variety says otherwise. What do you think?

HEY, IT'S A DIFFICULT BUSINESS

An informal panel of publishers, editors and public relations pawns voted recently on who the most impossible persons are in show business. This probably won't be printed anywhere but here, as these pros all have to stay in business.

But Numero Uno, at the top of the list, is the rather newish star Vince Vaughn, he of the current "Fred Claus." (This so-called comedy is about as funny as a lump of coal in one's stocking.) Insiders call the guy who emerged triumphant from "Wedding Crashers" and from a failed romance with Jennifer Aniston "the most egotistical, the most difficult, the kind of person who calls at 3 a.m. to demand different things."

And who, asked I, is his female equivalent? I was a tiny bit surprised when in unison came this reply - "Sharon Stone." As Sharon Stone raises so much money for the AIDS fight, I am reluctant to add her here, but I will - just in case her detractors have a point.

Here's a GREAT interview on Rove Live from Australia

Thanks, R!

Fred Claus Unscripted - Complete Interview

Here is the interview where fans got to ask Vince and Paul questions. (original post)

Claus and effect

Vince Vaughn delivers offbeat Christmas message

By JIM SLOTEK, TORONTO SUN
Found Here

LOS ANGELES -- It flies in the face of Vince Vaughn's reputation of being single-and-darned-well-going-to-stay-that-way, but he says one of his favourite TV shows is the reality series Supernanny.

"The kids on the show are, like hopped up on Pop Rocks and Coca-Cola and they're uncontrollable," Vaughn says. "And the Supernanny comes in and sets boundaries and says, 'Use your words' and they start listening.

"I got a nephew and nieces, and my sister says, 'Don't talk to me about that damn Supernanny!' But sometimes I'm left alone with them and I don't want to be the uncle that disciplines them. I'm the one they have fun with. But they start hitting each other and you have to have some kind of law."

Supernanny dovetails nicely with Fred Claus, the offbeat take on the Santa Claus story in which Vaughn stars as Santa Claus' resentful "naughty" brother. It's a movie that takes on the naughty-or-nice legend with its message that "there are no naughty kids -- just misunderstood ones." Like that little Hussein kid Saddam, he just needed a hug. But I digress.

Fred Claus, the latest addition to the Santa Claus movie pantheon, begins in the 12th century with the sibling rivalry of a pudgy Nicholas Claus, who gives away his Christmas presents to the less fortunate, and brother Fred, who, unable to compete as a good kid, goes the other way.

Nine centuries later, Fred (Vaughn) is a repo man with dubious debts to pay. And Nick (Paul Giamatti)? He's got this job up at the North Pole, overseeing a bunch of toy-making elves. Happenstance finds Fred getting a job at his brother's factory, just as an efficiency expert from "The Corporation" (Kevin Spacey) arrives to write a damning report on the whole operation.

The idead for the film began as a bedtime story writer Jessie Nelson (I Am Sam) told to her daughter, Molly. "My daughter one night asked me if Santa Claus had a family, and I thought, 'Of course he did!' And then, 'What would it be like to be Santa Claus' brother and live in the shadow of that, and how hard would it be to be Santa as a kid, to be the perfect kid, pudgy and jolly all the time.

"And a few nights later, I was watching The Godfather and I thought, 'Oh, he's got to be called Fred, as a tribute to (Michael Corleone's brother) Fredo.'"

The project landed in the lap of director David Dobkin, who had directed Vaughn in Wedding Crashers and the lesser-known 1998 dark comedy, Clay Pigeons. And it was a short hop from there for him to cast his favourite child-man Vaughn.

That the star of Wedding Crashers, The Break-Up and Swingers could convincingly play an immature "bad boy" wasn't exactly a shock. What did surprise some was the knack he had with children.

"My daughter was on the set with us the whole time," Nelson says. "And Vince used to crack me up because they'd shoot a scene and he'd turn to the 10-year-old on the set and say, 'How was that, Molly? Did you believe that line?' "

"He talks to kids like adults," director Dobkin says. "We really felt he could bring heart to the story of a naughty kids' Christmas, and the message that there are no naughty kids."

Okay, maybe just a little naughty. Like when Vaughn is asked a generic question about what he'd consider the perfect Christmas gift, he answers, "A hot tub, a couple of girls from Brazil and a 'Do Not Disturb' sign ... And oh yeah, peace on Earth."

It turns out Vaughn isn't finished with Christmas yet. As soon as this year's holiday break is over, ironically enough, he begins shooting Four Christmases opposite Reese Witherspooon. "It's about people that come from divorced families, so you're forced to go to four Christmases. And it's about the kind of stress that comes from being forced to be with people you don't get along with.

Movies Online: Cast Interview, Fred Claus

Movies Online

MoviesOnline sat down with Vince Vaughn, Kevin Spacey, Paul Giamatti, director David Dobkin, and writer Jessie Nelson at the Los Angeles press day for their hilarious new movie, "Fred Claus.”

Fred Claus (Vaughn) has lived almost his entire life in his little brother's very large shadow. Fred tried, but he could never live up to the example set by the younger Nicholas (Giamatti), who was just a perfect...well...Saint. True to form, Nicholas grew up to be the model of giving, while Fred became the polar opposite: a repo man who steals what he repossesses and has run out of luck and money. Now Fred's dirty dealings have landed him in jail. Over Mrs. Claus's (Miranda Richardson) objections, Nicholas agrees to bail his big brother out on one condition: that he come to the North Pole and work off his debt by making toys in Santa’s workshop.

The trouble is that Fred isn't exactly elf material. With Christmas fast approaching, this one bad seed could jeopardize the jolliest holiday of the year. When a mischievous elf (Chris "Ludacris” Bridges) drives Fred over the edge by playing the same Christmas song over and over just as efficiency expert Clyde Northcutt (Spacey) arrives at the North Pole to size up Santa’s toy making operation determined to shut it down, it may take more than Rudolph to set things right.

Here’s what the director, writer and cast had to tell us:

Q: What was your best or worst Christmas?

VINCE VAUGHN: Best or worst? Well, they were all good. When you’re a kid you get toys and stuff and your family, your extended family comes in from out of town. When I was a kid and you’d feel the package and you knew it was socks, that was no fun. I don’t want socks. The next thing was like jeans. Jeans? Ugh. I was so painfully skinny it just reminded me how awkward I was shaped at the time. So then you would open toys and that was great, but then you get to a certain age and all you get is clothes so the fun is over, but now that I have a nephew and some nieces the fun is back in it. There’s nothing like kids at Christmastime. The joy that they get opening the gift they’ve been asking for. I’m not really that good at helping set stuff up, but setting up and playing with it that day, that’s really a time to connect and have fun. It’s a lot of fun.

Q: Do you think this movie is too adult for kids?

VINCE VAUGHN: I tell you the great thing about it is that the movie has played phenomenal with all audiences. I think Fred in a lot of ways is a big kid. He is a kid. I think he’s one of them so I think when you watch the film as a child you are really connected to this great role David created. All these great actors are playing their parts. It’s almost like those great claymation films we grew up with right? Where you walk on this live action sort of reality? The writer who writes a lot of the Pixar films, this is similar. It’s got a lot of funny and emotion in it and the stuff that works for adults; not to give scenes away, but the siblings scenes and stuff, is really just smart and clever. It’s not just that it’s grotesque or shocking or risqué. It’s a real compliment to David and the tone of the movie that we never had a need to go there to be enjoyable for adult audiences and I think the kids love the great theme that there’s no naughty kids and Jessie Nelson really was the one that came up with the story of Fred Claus and I think she found a really different kind of way of looking at the genre of Christmas films in a fresh, new way. That’s what was most inspiring for me. My best friend Peter Billingsley did A Christmas Story, which is one of the best. "You’ll shoot your eye out kid.” (Laughter) Of course, It’s A Wonderful Life, but both of those movies have some real drama in them as well.

Q: And darkness.

VINCE VAUGHN: And darkness. This does in a way that’s not dark as in inappropriate, but as in serious and consequences which is a sort of testament to the character that Kevin (Spacey) plays, but Jessie I guess I’ll leave to you to sort of- I guess the true essence as to why it works so well is because Fred Claus was originally as simple as a bedtime story from a mother to her daughter.

JESSIE NELSON: Yeah, my daughter asked me one night if Santa Claus had a family. I thought, "Oh my god, of course he did.” And "What would it have been like to be Santa Claus’s brother?” There’s a shadow of that and how hard it would have been to be Santa as a kid; having to be the perfect kid, and giving your birthday presents away, and being a little pudgy, and jolly all the time. Slowly the story evolved and I thought, "Wow that would make a great movie” and two nights later I was watching The Godfather I thought "Oh, he’s got to be called Fred as an homage to the character in The Godfather.” We always slightly had Vince in our mind as we were working on the script because we always felt he could bring so much heart to the sort of naughty kid story of Christmas. You know, that there’s no naughty kids just misunderstood kids.

DAVID DOBKIN: You say that now to be funny, but pretty much you saw Freddy and you said "Let’s get Vince.” (Laughter)

JESSIE NELSON: Yeah. That’s true. The one thing I was gonna say is that my daughter was on the set with us the whole time and Vince and David used to crack me up when we were making the movie because they would do a scene and then they would turn to Molly. You know all these great actors would do a scene and then they would turn to this ten-year-old and say "How was that Molly? Did you believe that line?”

VINCE VAUGHN: She was our secret weapon. She’s so great.

JESSIE NELSON: So from the very beginning we sort of had a kid’s sanction on the movie.

DAVID DOBKIN: By the way, another interesting thing is that when we first started testing the movie and you’d ask; the kids all think the movie is for them. The kids think the movie is for them. The adults think the movie is for them. There’s this really interesting thing that happens where you realize; I mean that’s what you hope for when you are making a family film that everyone thinks the movie is actually directed to them.

KEVIN SPACEY: We do a thing at the Old Vic that they call panto and it’s a tradition in England and it’s a family entertainment and what makes it work and I think, if I can use this as a comparison, for the kids you create the traditional family story. This year we are doing "Cinderella.” We did "Aladdin” a few years ago. So the kids follow the traditional story. It’s exactly what they know it to be from their childhood and from books, but what makes it fun for adults is that there are all kinds of double entendre and innuendos and songs and dances. So the adults have a really good time while they are watching a sort of traditional, certainly Christmas panto which is oddly the biggest money-making theatrical in England and yet it’s for everybody so you see kids as young as three. At times some entendre goes flying by and you think, "Did they get that? I hope not.” and they don’t. It goes right over their heads and the adults are falling all over themselves so it becomes a real family oriented experience and I think that this movie achieved that same goal.

Q: Was your character a kid at heart too?

KEVIN SPACEY: Oh, I think yeah. You know, when anyone says "Oh you’re playing this really bad, villainous character” hasn’t seen the whole movie. Stay to the end of the movie and then you’ll see who he really is because it’s the kind of character that goes through a journey that starts out in one way and obviously in the same way there’s resentment that this character feels and this (other) character feels toward each other. He actually ends up being a catalyst for that happening and by the end of the film he’s definitely got them a little more efficient. They’re using spreadsheets now.

VINCE VAUGHN: Oddly, you know, I think that Fred and Clyde are bedfellows in that they can relate to the similar brother circumstance and they each handle it a little differently although in the same ball park, in a similar fashion, but I think that somehow through both of their ways of handling it they come to the best answer with Nicholas being involved as well the three of us play out something that needed to be played out because there’s lessons in all of it.

PAUL GIAMATTI: Yeah, yeah, I learned all that stuff about you, but also the thing I find interesting in that scene that I love, it’s timeless. The most I am like Santa Claus should be is in that scene.

KEVIN SPACEY: It’s about forgiveness.

PAUL GIAMATTI: Yeah, and he sort of takes possession of being Santa Claus again because he’s sort of lost it.

KEVIN SPACEY: He’s so overworked.

PAUL GIAMATTI: He’s so overworked. (Laughter)

DAVID DOBKIN: There’s a real ownership about how he does it in that scene where he goes "Clyde Northcutt” because he’s just thought that this is the way to approach kids now.

PAUL GIAMATTI: Right. He’s figured it out and he can sort of do it again.

DAVID DOBKIN: (to Kevin) The bit at the end, by the way, with the cape under the sweater and you don’t really want to draw attention to it. The way you play it is perfect. You emotionally aren’t comfortable with knowing it, but it’s there!

KEVIN SPACEY: I shouldn’t really admit this, but I’m still wearing it (laughter) Just my hope for a sequel.

Q: It is very heartwarming and it sort of flies against the idea we have of kids being sort of cynical. Chris (Bridges) already talked about his daughter giving him raised eyebrows and the story not making sense with Santa Claus. My own kids, probably by seven were rejecting it, but going along with it for the presents. (Laughter) What do you perceive in the audience that has changed? In fact, are kids tougher customers?

KEVIN SPACEY: My feeling is that I don’t even really care if kids even believe that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. I still think there’s a desire to believe in something because it’s not about a person. We have certain images in film and now we have a new one in Paul. Images of what Santa Claus is like, but it’s more. It’s a feeling, an idea. I hear people say all the time "Oh, kids are too cynical these days. They grow up too fast. They’ve got too much access to this, to that, and the other thing” and I just go "Yeah, but you’re not six years old.” (To Vince Vaughn) What did that kid say to you at the World Series thing?

VINCE VAUGHN: Oh yeah, it’s a great the more things change the more they stay the same. The thing that I never lost- as actors and stuff too there’s that make believe child like thing that you have to have. Also, for me is what kind of always got me through things is that faith in that kind of goodness and hopefulness. I think Kevin says it really well when it’s really not what this person is in it’s human form, but it is what it represents and I think that the thing Jessie found with "No naughty kids” and the story David put together and how he hits those themes so beautifully when he sets stuff up so simple and then brings it back around in a way- for me the third act of the movie has such a huge emotional impact, but it’s all those great feelings that you want to feel at Christmas. (It’s) the kind of impact that makes you feel afterwards kind of optimistic, almost freed of some stuff. I think that’s Santa Claus.

KEVIN SPACEY: Tell them what the kid said to you.

VINCE VAUGHN: Yes. We did this short for the World Series that aired last night where I played a little league pitcher. I have a little league team.

KEVIN SPACEY: Coaching them.

VINCE VAUGHN: Yeah coaching them. So we shot the whole thing; all the posters have been up and what not for Fred Claus and when it was over this young boy that had to be about nine or ten years old came up to me and said "Hey Fred”. I felt a little bit like Mean Joe Green. (laughter) He looks at me and he goes, "Tell your brother to get me something this year.” And I said "Oh yeah, yeah we got you. We got you.” Then I kind of thought to myself, "Oh, I hope his parents do get him something.” I made a promise I’m now on the books for. It just was a reminder going to the theme that we are saying that there is that feeling. And by the way, you know what, even when you get to that age for us that can remember; where you go "Yeah, yeah, I don’t believe it” or you don’t want to be embarrassed, there’s a side of you laying quiet that says, "I hope he is there. I want to believe it.” You still want to believe it. I believe all of us in our own way, as adults, find that way to still have that faith.

Q: How old were you when you stopped believing in Santa?

VINCE VAUGHN: I don’t know what you’re talking about. (Laughter)

Q: What would be your ideal gift?

KEVIN SPACEY: Sequel. I think sequel. (Laughter)

PAUL GIAMATTI: God, I would go with that. Gee, I don’t know. There’s not a whole heck that I want anymore. You know what I mean?

Q: I mean "Peace on Earth” anything-

PAUL GIAMATTI: Oh sure.

VINCE VAUGHN: I think that makes sense. Peace on Earth is something good to say too. Here’s where I would go: a hot tub, a couple girls from Brazil, and a "Do Not Disturb” sign. (Laughter)

Q: That’s what I wanted to hear.

VINCE VAUGHN: There you go.

Q: -and Peace on Earth.

VINCE VAUGHN: -and Peace on Earth. That is Peace on Earth. Good will to men!

Q: Kevin, as the guy who wants his cape, what is something you wanted, but never got as a kid?

KEVIN SPACEY: I just don’t covet things. I just never did. I was not raised to, you know, if I didn’t get something my life would be over. I was grateful to get what I got. I had great parents who believed in me and gave us a lot of love.

Q: Were you Amish? (Laughter)

KEVIN SPACEY: No.

Q: What was the best thing about working with Vince?

KEVIN SPACEY: Oh, I think the process that Vince goes through to discover what is going on in a scene. Often he uses improv. What’s great about it is that it’s not always about trying to be funny or trying to be slick or trying to be this. It’s about what improv does and where it leads you to. Maybe a solution or maybe it might even lead to "Oh that’s a good idea. Let’s expand on that.” A lot of that kind of process is really, really fun and when I saw the movie and saw what they chose and how the film had evolved, I thought "Whoa, what an incredible thing to see that come to life and to see how much that character came through.” A lot of that, and (to Vince) you’d know more than me the amount of stuff that came through those sessions where you’re kind of just riffing and you don’t necessarily know how it’s gonna go. You sort of set up a situation and say "What would I do if I stop doing the lines in the script and I just try to find where this character is emotionally and what the relationships are like and so for me that’s very much rooted in the kind of work I am used to doing in theater. I was also very grateful that he came and did our 24-hour plays at the Old Vic. That was a blast. It was a lot of fun.

VINCE VAUGHN: That was a great experience for me as well and also I think there is, in any sort of live theater or this process or whatever, a starting point and I think that’s the right place to work from. There could be different ways to the waterfall. There could be different ways to do it, but I think there’s just one good place to start from. It’s a compliment to David too in that there is a lot of material that comes out there, but you feel safe with him in that you know he’s gonna go through that stuff in the editing room and kind of get what you are saying and find a better way of saying it; what’s efficient, what’s not efficient, but we’re all so much a part of the process of how we go through it that there’s almost like an old improv group. There becomes a group mind. The shorthand that’s shared, that’s sort of unspoken. He sort of translates all of it to the ultimate form that you see which is not always the easiest job. It’s like sifting through all the dirt to find the golden (sounds like) ham.

Q: Did the British actors go along like Miranda or Rachel?

DAVID DOBKIN: Yeah. Oh Yeah.

VINCE VAUGHN: They are all such great actors. I think that’s the thing. I was talking to Kevin about this when I did the thing in England, which was such an honor and so much fun. Sometimes I’ve always found all of it to be very child-like. It’s make-believe. That’s where it comes from for me so there shouldn’t be such a religious approach sometimes to the arts where it’s sacred in this way. You should be respectful, but it’s also very including and child-like so whether it comes from the stage- These beautiful stage actors that come from the stage and are just terrific in films and film actors that can go be terrific in plays or people that can work with lines who can improvise, it’s just having a door open and having that opportunity. You’ll find that most people that have a great work ethic and take their work seriously will adapt because they’ll try hard enough to find a way. (to Paul) Do you feel similar to that?

PAUL GIAMATTI: Absolutely. I had never done as much improvisation as I did in this thing.

Q: That’s what Joel said. He said at the beginning you were a little horrified.

PAUL GIAMATTI: I didn’t know what the hell was going on. (Laughter) But once I got on the train-

VINCE VAUGHN:-seriously though. That’s like trying to teach a lion to hunt. Even the trailer we did was right off the bat.

PAUL GIAMATTI: It was a lot of fun. Like you said, I just had to open a door I’d never really opened before.

Q: What was it like to shoot in Chicago?

VINCE VAUGHN: It was fun. It’s my hometown. I’m from there so I love Chicago. I think everyone loves where their home is so it’s great to go back to Chicago always.

Q: Your rant towards the young girl about "get a motorcycle, be a lady,” did that come from you?

VINCE VAUGHN: Yeah, we wrote that that day. Sometimes I write stuff. Sometimes it’s improv and some of it I’ll write prior to the session. This movie was particularly tough because we did have a normal prep time that we had to write on something like (Wedding) Crashers. That being said, the writer did do a good job; Jessie’s story, the superman cape scene, there was some good stuff that was already in the story, but it was just our process to sort of go through it and, you know, do material. That was something that came out of the repo situation and again that’s a great situation where I did improvise and got to push the limit feeling safe knowing David would go and make sense of the thing. Any of those, by the way, rants left in and of themselves might not work, but all put together-

DAVID DOBKIN: -you’re really not giving yourself enough credit. He really wrote that one and it was interesting because Fred was always like a difficult character to find and especially the way you work you create these characters that are really- The way Vince flushes it out is he wanted him to be a guy that is trying to share something positive with this girl, but he was so off-base and he was completely unaware so you are sort of forgiving of the character in a way and entertained by the concept that he’s trying to connect with her and you always have an incredible way of talking to kids. He talks to them like they are adults and it’s so funny, but umm you had written down so many ideas on that scene. Once he starts going sometimes it’s hard to stop.

VINCE VAUGHN: Yeah. "Vince that’s enough. We got it.” (Laughter)

DAVID DOBKIN: But in that scene in reticular, Fred’s point of view was never really totally grounded all the way and Vince came in and wrote that into the script. The thing where the DJ’s got a problem? That was a huge breakthrough. When you had that moment. We didn’t know how to get out of that moment like "Okay, what is this argument gonna be now?” Obviously he’s got all these elves dancing. And he did this whole thing.

VINCE VAUGHN: That’s the whole part that is tough. There is some stuff that wasn’t in the movie that’s out that thankfully David took out because they work probably as individual scenes, but as a whole it becomes that dynamic where you are at the North Pole and you become a bit of a cat in the hat causing problems. So far Santa is still on your side and wants to be there for you and the believability; it’s a real balancing act.

KEVIN SPACEY: So that must have been hard too because Chris (Bridges) wasn’t even there.

VINCE VAUGHN: Yeah Chris wasn’t there.

KEVIN SPACEY: You’re improving with yourself.

VINCE VAUGHN: With that one, I liked that show "Super Nanny” because I have a nephew and some nieces. Have you guys ever seen that show "Super Nanny”? That woman is unbelievable. These kids are hopped up on Pop Rocks and Coca-Cola. They won’t listen to anybody and then the Super Nanny comes and sets boundaries and "Use your words” and all of a sudden they start listening. So I’d watch that with my sister and I’d say "Come here” and she’d be like "My kid’s too, Vince.” I’d go "No, no, but the Super Nanny” and she’d say "Don’t talk to me about the damn Super Nanny.” ‘Cause sometimes I’m left alone with both of them and I don’t want to be the uncle that disciplines them. You don’t want that. You just want to have fun with them, but the problem is they start hitting each other and you have to put down some kind of law. We tried to Super Nanny it. So then when we tried the thing with Ludacris I thought "This is crazy” and I’d start saying stuff like Super Nanny. You know like "Use your words” and whatever and I think it’s like David is saying. It’s that his point of view is that he’s being positive or respectful and the fact that it’s a little off and it’s not completely that way is forgiven because he’s not malice in intent.

Q: Has the paparazzi attention died down? Can you go out without billions of them following and trying to take shots of you?

VINCE VAUGHN: You know I’m left alone a lot of times. Sometimes I have moments where I’m followed. It’s something that just sort of comes with it. It’s a drag. It’s not the kind of thing you can empathize with folks though. There are just bigger problems obviously and most times you realize they are just trying to do their job to make a buck.

Q: Whenever you’re on a date, do they come out?

VINCE VAUGHN: No. Not always. If you are dating someone who is sort of famous, then it sort of happens. Yeah. It’s more of a phenomenon to a ridiculous point nowadays. The pendulum swings so far one way and not the other way and you know it’s not that big of a deal.

Q: Are Fred and Santa in this movie when we see them 800 years old?

VINCE VAUGHN: There was a scene that we shot that was inspired by the (Sir Laurence) Olivier/Tony Curtis scene in the bathtub that was cut out of this movie where he was like "Do you like oysters?”

PAUL GIAMATTI: -and there was a sponge-

VINCE VAUGHN: (laughter throughout) Yeah, and David for whatever reason took that out. Giamatti came to the set and said, "I have the perfect idea.” I’m like "We’ve seen this scene. It’s a classic scene.” And Giamatti was like "I’ve seen that movie. That’s not what this scene is. This is different.” I said, "This is almost the same. Can we just shoot?” I asked for the scene and they were like "Fine, we’ll shoot it.” Right, Paul?

PAUL GIAMATTI: Yeah, oh yeah. It worked, but they had to take it out.

VINCE VAUGHN: It’s on the DVD though.

DAVID DOBKIN: It’s on the DVD! (Laughs)

Q: Did you seek out a family movie?

DAVID DOBKIN: No, and by the way, I never would have sought out a Christmas film in particular. (to Vince) You love Christmas films. When it came, I actually read it because I know how much Vince loves Christmas movies. I never have an idea of what’s gonna happen. It’s just whatever drops in front that finally clicks with me and I read it and something bit. We actually went around the block twice with this one. We almost did it once earlier, but our schedules weren’t open and our schedules opened later on, but the naughty kid thing really got me. I really was like "Okay, I have never seen this.” The concept of moving the Holiday from Grimm’s fairy tale to what it really is about which is family and forgiveness and sharing, you know, safety and security. The concept of creating that in a theater as an emotion and letting people leave on that was something that I’d never really done in any other work and I just thought it’d be amazing. The role just seemed like something that would just stretch with us. You never think about the rating really.

VINCE VAUGHN: For me, I do work with themes. Like I am about to turn Labor Day on its ass next year. (Laughter) That’s kind of my starting catalyst point. I got to a calendar and go like this (points) and I’m like "President’s day, get ready. You’re about to be kicked.”

Q: Do you think that you’d make a good dad since you’re such a great uncle?

VINCE VAUGHN: Here’s the thing that I’ve found is advantageous about being an uncle. I get to play with them. I get to say they’re great and then I get to go home. I think I would be a good dad once they got to be about six or seven and I could communicate with them. I love kids. I have always loved kids, but being around them in those early stages- and by the way, David is just a dad recently and I’m sure he’s going through it in a real way. The thing is that you know they’re crying and there’s only a few things they could possibly want, but it’s figuring which one of those three or four that seems like an eternity.

DAVID DOBKIN: Like Three-Card Monty.

VINCE VAUGHN: His son, by the way, is awesome. Jacob, and he looks like a dockworker.

Q: Would you ever put them in the naughty chair?

VINCE VAUGHN: No. I never put them in a naughty chair. I just separate them. I say, "Uncle Vince says you can’t be hitting her.”

KEVIN SPACEY: -and they watch hours and hours of "Super Nanny.” Watch this! (Laughter)

VINCE VAUGHN: What happens is they’ll come over and I’ll hit the power button and go, "How did that Swingers DVD get on? Oh yeah, that’s your uncle’s.” No, I’ll tell you one thing about my nephew. He was at the Grove here with my sister and he’s four and he saw the poster of Fred Claus and he said "That’s Uncle Vince and that’s Santa Claus” and my sister was mortified because she doesn’t want the concept of Christmas to be wrecked obviously and Dexter’s big thing wasn’t so much that. The big thing he was upset about was "Uncle Vince knows Santa Claus. How come he hasn’t introduced me?”

Q: What about at the end when you play "Silent Night” and you take out the line "Christ Our Savior is born”? Are you saying that isn’t a part of Christmas?

VINCE VAUGHN: No way. That’s a part of what Christmas is I think. It’s where it comes from. It’s an individual’s way into it, isn’t it really? I love Christmas. I grew up with Christmas, grew up Christian and to me I really loved the holiday. For different people in different cultures it’s how you were born. That’s your way in. That’s what you find. The thing with this movie and for Christmas and what it means is that we all found that common denominator coming together. To me, that’s what that gesture was about with the Hassidics was to say "We have more in common. There’s a faith and a connection irregardless that trumps everything.” That’s really what’s being said. It’s more on the higher "everyone together” connection level.

Q: Aren’t you doing another Christmas movie?

VINCE VAUGHN: I am. It’s called Four Christmases, yeah.

Q: Have you started doing it?

VINCE VAUGHN: We did, and in this one we are gonna have Christmas and Ramadan kind of come together.

Q: Is it a comedy?

VINCE VAUGHN: It’s a comedy, yeah

Q: About four families?

VINCE VAUGHN: It’s about people that come from divorced families so you are forced to go to four Christmases. It takes the point of view of the kind of stress that can come if your parents marry people that you don’t sort of get along with.

Q: Kevin, I keep thinking of Swimming With Sharks a little bit with your character here. Did you think of that at all and was the Superman reference the reason you wanted to do this?

KEVIN SPACEY: No. I thought the Superman reference was very funny and I thought it was inspired that David asked me to do it. No. I think I answered the question; it’s the caliber of talent, the caliber of material, and the fact that it was shooting in England and that it was very easy for me to get to work.

Q: Paul, when you put on that suit, did you feel a bit of a sense of responsibility to the kids of the world?

PAUL GIAMATTI: I sure don’t want to shatter any illusions, any kids’ illusions, but having me play Santa Claus in the first place is probably gonna shatter some illusions, but yeah, you know I felt a certain sense of responsibility to it, but ultimately it’s a character that supposed to be a regular guy. I wanted to be able to do the "Ho ho ho” thing right so I worked on that.

Q: Could you tell me what your favorite Christmas movie is and why?

VINCE VAUGHN: I have to say A Christmas Story because Peter Billingsley is my best friend so I love watching that one, but there’s a lot of good ones. I won’t name them ‘cause I don’t want to take the answers away from my colleagues here.

KEVIN SPACEY: It’s a Wonderful Life.

Q: Because?

KEVIN SPACEY: Well part of it is now being in the film industry and learning about the history of that movie and it was a "failure” and I just love the fact that when it started showing on television in the 70s it became a classic. It became a film that not only people watched every Christmas, but they have tapes of it and DVDs of it and they enjoy watching it because it’s not only a Christmas story. It’s set in that time, but it’s one of the best movies ever and the fact that it just makes me laugh when a movie doesn’t make money you know and it’s judged as a failure and it all depends on how you judge success. If you judge success on only money than 90% of films that come out are a failure, but the truth is that sometimes movies that don’t make money can still have a life and do what I think movies should do and stand the test of time.

PAUL GIAMATTI: Oh there’s a great movie that Albert Finney did called Scrooge.

DAVID DOBKIN: I like the original Christmas Carol from 1934. It’s scary and it’s emotional and that performance when he turns at the end is probably one of the most unbelievable moments. It’s Incredible.

JESSIE NELSON: I’m with Kevin It’s a Wonderful Life.

Q: Has anyone talked to you about the next Superman?

KEVIN SPACEY: Yes, but not anyone involved with the film. My point is yes, I’m supposed to do a second one. That’s already been decided. I can’t give you anything other than it’s scheduled to be done, but I don’t know when.

Q: Vince, you have another movie coming out?

VINCE VAUGHN: Yes, I have another movie out on February 8th called Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show where I took these four stand-up comedians and (John) Favreaux and Justin Long, Dwight Yoakum, and we did a live, variety comedy show. The movie turned out really funny and really heartwarming so that’ll come out and, of course, I am waiting for David to give me a call about the next one. Labor Day here we come.

Q: So Four Christmases is for next Christmas?

VINCE VAUGHN: Four Christmases is for next Christmas, yeah. I’m really excited to work with Reese (Witherspoon) I think she is a terrific actor.

Q: What about the scene with the therapy group?

VINCE VAUGHN: We try not to talk about that too much because it’s such a great surprise, but I think that’s a great testament to the adults in the audience getting it and the kids appreciating it on a different level.

DAVID DOBKIN: Which is so weird. I’m sorry. During the test screenings, that is a purely adult scene, and the kids are laughing as hard as the adults and we don’t know why that is.

"Fred Claus” opens in theaters on November 9th.

Vaughn supremacy: The rise of Vince

Vince Vaughn has gone from class joker and cruising bit-parter, to ex-Aniston man and $20m-a-movie star. Gill Pringle talks to Hollywood's rebel with a Claus

The Independent

Vince Vaughn talks so incredibly fast that an hour in his company is equivalent to four hours with anyone else. Known for his speedy screen spiel, his wry motor-mouth monologues are more evident than ever in his latest movies, Into the Wild, Sean Penn's film in which he plays a good-natured, talkative farmer and Fred Claus, family fare laced with Vaughn's trademark wickedly adult humour.

When Vaughn captured Jennifer Aniston's attention in the aftermath of her 2005 split from Hollywood golden boy Brad Pitt, the public perceived him as an unworthy contender for the A-list actress' affections.

It was almost as if she'd taken a step down into the B-list when she fell for her party-loving Break-Up co-star. But the movie industry is fickle and Vaughn suddenly found himself in public favour following the huge success of Wedding Crashers that same year.

Paid $3m for his hilarious role as Owen Wilson's dissolute partner-in-crashing, the film became the highest-grossing R-rated comedy in US movie history, taking $178m (£85m) at the box office and propelling him into the elite $20m-a-movie league, alongside his old pal – and Aniston's ex – Pitt.

But the hollow seal of tabloid approval was meaningless to Vaughn, who'd thus far flown beneath the Hollywood radar and had rather hoped to keep it that way. The home-loving, Chicago-born actor's discomfort with life in Aniston's ever-present spotlight was painfully evident as he embarked on a rocky 18-month romance which ended late last year. Not that he has any regrets.

"For me it's more, if you like someone, you like someone," he says, proffering a disarming smile. "I think when we're younger we all say that, don't we? We say: 'I won't date anyone like this or that...' And then you always end up dating someone like that. Because that's what love is. You can't really pick from a logical place. For me, the people I've dated for any period of time, there's always been a friendship there. Life is made up of all those little moments, so it's nice if you have someone who you enjoy doing things with."

One can only speculate but you get the impression that Aniston must have had a hell of a lot more laughs with Vaughn than she did with Pitt. He scrubs up rather well, too.

He is considered a leader of the media-invented "Frat Pack" along with fellow comedy icons Ben Stiller, Wilson, Will Ferrell and Jack Black – his co-stars in Zoolander, Old School, Anchorman, Dodgeball and Starsky and Hutch. It emerges that he and Wilson are discussing a possible Wedding Crashers sequel: "I've never done a sequel. I always have to know: is it a movie that can stand on its own? Or are they just trying to be a sequel and there's no real story there? Crashers was so much fun so we started kicking around ideas of what it could be and we came up with some really funny stuff for what that next transition would be."

Reluctant to discuss the recent suicide drama surrounding his old pal, he says: "Owen's great. He's doing good. I think he's funny and he's a nominated writer and he's just a terrific actor. He's one of the most genuine, kind people I've ever worked with. "

Vaughn claims that laughter has helped him survive many personal trials. "When I was younger I did dramatic stuff and small movies, and then I started doing a lot of comedies," he says, referring to his early roles as drifter Clay Hewitt in The Locusts, A Cool, Dry Place's single dad, Domestic Disturbance's sinister step-dad opposite John Travolta, plus an improbable turn as Norman Bates in the 1998 remake of Psycho.

"But I felt like things in the world got really tense. Things have been so heavy lately. I really like comedy that brings people together. There's a lot of comedies lately that have been at people's expense or been kind of acidic or mean-spirited. And some folks like that, and I think there's room for that, but that's not my style. I like something that makes us all feel closer. Comedy, at its best, can be healing."

Having watched Vaughn deadpan similar corny sentiments in countless comedies, it's hard not to respond to his seemingly heartfelt speech with a pinch of scepticism. My suspicions are confirmed when, following an overly sincere discussion of the tragedy surrounding the recent California fires, he adds: "I will also say, nothing screams Christmas more than California brush fire..."

Even Penn – who lost two trailers in the Malibu fires – would recognise the humour in Vaughn's off-the-cuff remarks. The two men bonded after Penn cast him in a pivotal role – as a farmer who employs Emile Hirsch's character Christopher McCandless, a spoilt rich kid who abandons everything he owns and hitchhikes to Alaska to live in the wilderness – in his drama adapted from a true story, Into The Wild.

In person, Vaughn comes across as the guy-next-door, a regular bloke who doesn't quite understand what all the fuss is about. This despite the fact that he's been an unofficial babe-magnet for 11 years since Swingers established the 6ft 5in actor as the new face of masculinity and a poster boy for every woman who insists that a sense of humour is the biggest turn-on.

In Fred Claus – also upcoming – Vaughn plays Santa's naughty brother Fred. It's not a million miles from his real life personality. "As a kid, I think I was naughty in a nice way, hopefully. I always liked to joke around. I've always found in life that you go through peaks and valleys. Sometimes things run smoothly and sometimes you have tough stuff. But a sense of humour has always served me well. Being able to laugh at things, and most importantly, being capable of laughing at myself. I was an OK student; nothing great; just an average athlete so I started making jokes when I was younger in order to get along and make friends."

Today, heading Fred Claus' stellar cast of Oscar winners Kevin Spacey and Rachel Weisz along with Academy nominees Paul Giamatti and Miranda Richardson, Vaughn knows his place in Hollywood's hierarchy: "This movie had a bunch of big stars – and me," he quips, confident in the knowledge that, in fiscal terms, he tops the list with a $20m pay cheque.

Vaughn is one of that rare breed of untroubled, undamaged actors who relishes spreading his good fortune among family members. He put his divorced parents on the payroll as minor actors in The Break-Up, Vernon Vaughn playing Aniston's dad while Sharon Vaughn makes a fleeting appearance as a boat tourist. Vaughn's older sister Victoria likewise served as associate producer on the film. A former salesman, Vernon has further appeared in cameos in his son's Swingers and Made, while Vaughn's other sister Valeri has progressed from assistant duties on The Prime Gig to director status on Vaughn's upcoming documentary, The Untitled Belfast Project.

Unashamed to admit how much effort he's put into his craft, Vaughn is mystified by his fellow thespians for whom fame is the ultimate goal.

"When I was 18, Entertainment Tonight was the only movie business show in America," says the 37-year-old actor who, at 18, won his first break with a Chevy commercial, following through with bit parts on TV series 21 Jump Street, China Beach and Doogie Howser MD. Steven Spielberg would later see Swingers, casting him in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, thereby launching Vaughn into mainstream Hollywood.

"All my friends, like the guys in Swingers, were more like vaudeville actors – none of us ever even thought about being famous. We just thought: 'Can I work as an actor?' When we talked about Swingers, we'd talk in terms like 'Can we get our movie made?'

"I was happy to get a TV commercial or get a couple of lines on a TV show. There was never a thought of: 'I want to star in a movie' or 'I'm going to have my own show.' I don't even think I felt, at 18 years old and coming from middle America, that that was even possible.

"When I was younger you were embarrassed to say that you hadn't taken classes. People would be uncomfortable to admit that. I don't know of any industry where hard work isn't its own reward. To me that's how you learn about yourself by working hard at something.

"My grandfather was a farmer so I was always raised that you worked very hard whatever your job is; my sister was a teacher. You're to be respected if you try hard and try to be good at something and the results are less important. You can't control that. The more important thing is that you tried your best. But now there's much more of an intention where some of these kids don't want to be actors – they want to be famous! Their focus isn't necessarily on craftsmanship."

Despite the tabloid hysteria surrounding his relationship with Aniston, Vaughn still obstinately refuses to perceive himself as a celebrity: "If you go out with someone famous, you'll get a certain level of attention around you but it was never something I focused on.

And ultimately I do the best I can; I make my movies, and that's all you really can do. I've never done a lot of magazine covers. I don't go to a lot of premieres. I don't really cultivate that. To me that's almost a separate thing from the making of a film. And I think it's fine if people do that. For me I've always made the best movies I can make and then just walked away. That's kind of it."

Vince Vaughn gets his Claus into Christmas comedy

Vince Vaughn relies on irreverent improv to avoid any sense of slickness that could wreck a scene's comic possibilities.

By Ian Caddell
Straight.com

BURBANK, CALIFORNIA –He is, arguably, the hottest comic actor in Hollywood. However, unlike most of his contemporaries, Vince Vaughn didn't come from standup comedy or television shows. Instead, he played killers in Clay Pigeons and Psycho before most people even noticed he was particularly funny.

His acting skills are strong enough that his Fred Claus costar, Kevin Spacey, invited him to work with London's Old Vic Theatre Company, of which Spacey is artistic director. Spacey says that Vaughn's approach to the material allows him to do almost anything.

"Vince uses improv to discover what is going on in a scene," he says on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. "What is great is that he is not trying to always be funny or slick. You think, 'What would it be like if I stopped doing the lines in the script and tried to find where this character is emotionally?' It was fun making Fred Claus because of that approach."

In the film, Vaughn plays Fred, the older brother of Santa (Paul Giamatti). Santa's success has left Fred feeling like a failure, but he may be the only person who can save the North Pole from a vengeful efficiency expert (Spacey). The movie opens in Vancouver on November 9.

Vaughn says that he has always felt that he's at his best when he isn't taking the work too seriously. He says that make-believe is not religion and that improvisation helps to remind him of that.

"I was talking to Kevin in England and I said, 'It is all childlike. It is make-believe,'" he explains. "So there shouldn't be such a religious approach to performance. If a play is sacred, there should be respect for it, but acting is childlike. Anyone who takes their work seriously can adapt to improv, because they will be able to find their way through the material."

Vaughn met Fred Claus director David Dobkin on Clay Pigeons. They went on to make Wedding Crashers together and have followed it up with this, another comedy, that Warner hopes will bring along Vaughn's Wedding Crashers audience. Vaughn says that although he was aware it might be difficult to get his fans out to a family movie, he felt the film could beat the odds.

"When we have tested the film, it has played well with all audiences. I think that is because Fred is just a big kid. The scenes that work for adults are smart and funny, but they are not risqué or shocking. We never had the need to go there to be enjoyable for adult audiences. What was most inspiring to me was that here is a genre [Christmas films] that has been done forever. But we forget that the good ones have some serious elements, whether you are talking about A Christmas Story or It's a Wonderful Life. This film started out as a bedtime story that evolved into an edgier film, but it's smart and funny and has some lessons."

Vince Vaughn: Naughty & Nice for the Holidays

People.com
Vince Vaughn hopes to put the "ho ho ho" back into the holidays with his new movie Fred Claus – in which he plays the older, overlooked brother of the big man in the red suit (Paul Giamatti as Santa). It opens Nov. 9. At a press conference for the comedy, a very unScrooge-like Vaughn, 37, talked of Christmases past, present and future.

What was it like going down the chimney for the movie?
Here is the good news. Sometimes I would come down the chimney, and that was fine, because I would just kind of come down the chimney. [But] when you see people falling and doing weird stuff? That is a stunt guy named Joe Bucaro, out of Chicago. I'm an actor, and it's not fashionable to mention stunt guys. A lot of actors are like, 'Yeah, I do my stunts.' I don't do any of my stuff. I don't like to do my stunts. I like to have a stunt guy do my stuff. So, Joe will go and fall on his head and then we'll do some kind of high five thing or something, and then I will lie on the ground and get up.

What is your secret Christmas wish?
I guess, understanding. As a kid, Christmas is fun because you want toys. Then when you get socks or shirts you kind of don't want those. As you get older that is all you get. It's nice to have kids around, because you kind of get to enjoy Christmas. I have a nephew and some nieces and them opening presents and being excited in that way is fun.

Do you remember when your belief in Santa was first shaken? (SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you still believe in Santa Claus.)
I remember the day I had neighbors that let me know – I was 6 years old – that there was no Santa Claus. They go, 'You know there's not a Santa Claus, right?' – and, of course, covering in front of them I was like, 'Well, yeah. Of course there's not a Santa Claus, guys.' Then I went to my sisters, and they said, 'Okay, now you know the painful truth, there is not a Santa Claus.' I was the youngest. They said, 'Don't tell mom and dad, because then we may not get gifts anymore. You got to keep pretending that you think there is Santa Claus, or you are not going to get any gifts.' I was like 16 going, 'Dad, when is Santa coming down the chimney?' My dad was like, 'Look it's getting weird, you are getting older, you know there's not a Santa, right?' "

What would it take to restore your belief in Santa?
Funny how that works. We just did this fun short [film] for the World Series with these kids. We did Claus kind of coaching. We did the whole thing and it was over, one of the kids was 9 or 10, came running up to me afterwards. He goes, 'Hey, Fred.' I felt like Joe Green in that Coca-Cola commercial. He's like, 'Hey, Fred.' I turned and looked at him, I said, 'Yeah.' He says, 'Tell your brother to get me something this year.' I looked at him and I said, 'Oh, I got you. I got you.' So, now I'm just hoping that this guy is getting something good. Otherwise he's going to hunt me down."

Naughty or nice ... which were you?
I would have been naughty, but in a very nice way.

The plaid is back!

Tanika Ray quizzes Vince. Click here to view

Vince Vaughn Talks 'Fred Claus'

ET's KEVIN FRAZIER gets VINCE VAUGHN to weigh in on whether he's naughty or nice, as the two talk about Vince's upcoming film, 'Fred Claus,' set to open in theaters on Nov. 9. The film asks and answers the question: Does Santa Claus have a brother? Naturally, Vince plays Santa's slacker brother, Fred.

Click here to view

Big Vince Country

This was posted in the Knoxville News Blogs - By Betsy Pickle, The Pickle Dish

Direct link to article

I don't know how Vince Vaughn is feeling, but I'm still worn out from his visit to Big Orange Country Thursday.

Get your mind out of the gutter. I'm just saying that, what with working and playing with the "Wedding Crashers" star, it was a very long, busy yet fun day.

Vaughn came to town to promote his upcoming film "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights -- Hollywood to the Heartland." (Yes, the title is almost as long as Vaughn is tall.) The documentary doesn't reach theaters until February, but Vaughn -- who appears in the film and is one of its producers -- is trying to put some heat behind it by holding special screenings in college towns and cities around the country.

Vaughn's modern version of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show consisted of Vaughn taking four rising comedians (Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, Sebastian Maniscalco) out on the road to do 30 shows in 30 days. Vaughn and some special guests warmed up the crowd at each venue before the comics took the stage. The documentary captures more than just their performances. It addresses the state of live comedy, the struggles each of these guys has faced and the growth they make during this marathon tour.

Which, by the way, took place in September 2005 -- right after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast.

Yes, that played a large role in both the tour itinerary and the perspective of the men on the tour.

During his Knoxville stop Thursday, Vaughn did press interviews and visited the UT campus during the day, After a sneak-preview evening screening at the Regal Riviera downtown, he met with fans at an invitation-only reception at nearby Sapphire.

Guests included several UT football players, including quarterback Erik Ainge, who was quick to show me that he was drinking water and not something alcoholic. I already had a crick in my neck from talking with 6-foot-5 Vaughn earlier in the day. Ainge, at 6-6, had me wondering if I was going to have to visit a chiropractor. These guys are seriously tall, especially next to a hobbit like me. As you might expect, Ainge had his own fans hitting him up for photos and such. But nothing like Vaughn's.

The crowd thinned out eventually, and I was able to hang with Vaughn, his best friend, Peter Billingsley (yes, Ralphie from "A Christmas Story"; he's now a producer), and several other members of his team, including some of the sharpest and coolest publicists in the world (I'd name names, but they don't like that; they want to keep the focus on their peeps). Anyway, I was able to ask Vaughn about something that I didn't get to bring up during our interview earlier.

I'd read on Wikipedia that Vaughn is a registered Republican. Now, some of my best friends (and even family members) are Republicans, but it's just not something I like to know about people I like. I told him about seeing that bit of trivia, and he was not pleased to hear it (and even made plans to correct that entry -- note to self and everyone: don't believe HALF of what you read on Wikipedia). So here's what he told me:

"I'm probably one of the most conservative people in Hollywood, but I'm not a registered anything."

I can live with that. I believe in voting for the candidate, not the party. And however Vaughn might view himself politically, he's nothing if not liberal in his generosity. That's obvious from the "Wild West" movie. First, you see him giving his time and support to four comedians he believes in, as well as to young actors he's worked with whose talent he wants to spotlight. Then you see him turning several of the "30 Nights" shows into benefits. The tour itself was inspired by a benefit that Vaughn arranged.

I'm not saying Vaughn's a saint. He's human like the rest of us. But this is a guy with his feet on the ground and his heart in the right place. If his head's in the clouds, well, so would mine be if I were 6-5.

Money: Daley has it, Mayor Vince is it

John Kass
Chicago Tribune
Found Here

Vince Vaughn--mayor of Chicago.

That's right. Vince Vaughn will be mayor of Chicago. Say it, wish it, think it.

With top candidates out, the Chicago actor and philosopher is the only guy who could challenge Mayor Richard Daley, who will announce a re-election campaign with only token opposition.

All Vaughn has to do is use his winning slogan: "You're so money, Chicago, you don't even know it."

He's been a Swinger, a Wedding Crasher and likes motorboats. But he's also Old School, a guy who reportedly would love to drive an Olds Cutlass to work.

Just picture Mayor Vince pulling up to City Hall in a beater Cutlass, announcing he'll hold the next City Council meeting at the White Castle at 94th and Jeffery at 4 a.m.

He'd force those sniveling food Nazi aldermen to eat double jalapeno sliders, saying: "Please don't take a turn to negative town."

According to his wisdom recorded at Vince-Vaughn.com, he already understands Chicago politics.

"I want you to remember this face," he said in the movie "Swingers." "This is the guy behind the guy behind the guy."

Exactly how Chicago politics works. According to my sources, the guys behind the guy scheduled a $5,000-per-person fundraiser for Daley at Gibsons.

Say 200 people showed up. That's $1 million for a mayor who has no real opposition in a town he locked down years ago.

But all that could change. The game plan is in a sequel to "The Break-up" co-starring Jennifer Aniston.

In my version, she's a corruption-busting assistant U.S. attorney, looking quite perky in her pinstripe suits. He's still Gary Grobowski, who along with his two brothers runs a Chicago tour company until their bitter rivals from Lucky Charms tours squeeze the Grobowskis out.

City inspectors shut the Grobowskis down. They go broke, and Vince complains to a newspaper columnist who looks remarkably like Jude Law or George Clooney, only more attractive. He tells Vince to run for mayor.

"There's no one else," the handsome writer says. "As you said yourself, Columbus wasn't looking for America, my man. But that turned out to be pretty OK for everyone."

Vince refuses, until one bitterly cold night he wanders past Gibsons, where the purely fictional Mayor Rain Man (Dustin Hoffman) is having a fundraiser.

Vaughnian rage boils over, and he barges in, confronting Mayor Rain Man, vowing to campaign on behalf of all the little Grobowskis out there.

"What do you want me to do? Take my pants off?" scoffs Mayor Rain Man. "Take my pants off? Take my pants off?"

The mayor grabs Vince's arm as Vince starts screaming: "I've got a stage-five clinger!"

"What else do you want?" snorts Mayor Rain Man. "Do you want to take my shorts? Give me a break."

Unfortunately for the incumbent, famous TV reporters Carol Marin (Nicole Kidman) and Andy Shaw (William H. Macy) put it all on the air, kick-starting the Vaughn campaign.

"We'll provide no public service of any kind!" Vince announces like he did in "Old School." "This much I promise you."

Realizing such an approach will cut taxes and increase jobs, taxpayers rally to his side, particularly women.

"All I do is stare at their mouths and wrinkle my nose, and I turn out to be a sweetheart," he tells Kidman on her public TV panel show.

There is much intrigue behind the scenes. The crafty Ald. Edward Burke (Anthony Hopkins) offers Vince political insight. So do Ald. Dorothy Tillman (Wanda Sykes in big purple hats) and Gov. Rod Blagojevich (Ben Stiller, who also plays U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel in a dual role.)

Blagojevich's indicted fundraiser, Tony Rezko, is played by "Borat" star Sacha Baron Cohen, who offers to give Vince $300,000 for a mansion, promising no one will ever know. Vince must decide: Does he want power or Jennifer Aniston?

Leading in the polls, he starts to crack under pressure, entertaining an offer from the guy behind the guy (Robert Duvall) and his hapless son (Will Ferrell).

"You can have all this," Ferrell says. "Just dance when we say dance."

The audience thinks he has sold out, but Vince is secretly wearing a federal wire. The crooks go to prison, Vince becomes mayor by a landslide, and Aniston agrees to marry him, promising never to demand he get 12 lemons for a stupid centerpiece while a game's on TV.

He promises to leave politics, but only after freeing enslaved city workers who never have to pound precincts again for job security. He resigns the mayoralty, they open up a Paul Bunyan restaurant at Wisconsin Dells, where their children grow up to become expert water-skiers, performing in the Tommy Bartlett show.

Think this is a bad joke? Perhaps. But consider the 2007 mayoral campaign, and tell me it isn't a joke already.

That's why we need Mayor Vince.

Hollywood star Vince visits Belfast

Found here

One of Hollywood's biggest names proved a big draw for two Northern Ireland politicians on either side of the divide.

Vince Vaughn came face to face with Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams and loyalist politician David Ervine during a whistle-stop visit to Belfast.

The star of Swingers, Wedding Crashers and Old School interviewed Mr Adams in west Belfast and Progressive Unionist leader David Ervine in the east for a documentary on the city's murals.

Locals in the republican heartland of Andersonstown were stunned to see Mr Vaughn with two cameramen interviewing Mr Adams in front of a mural of the IRA hunger striker Kieran Doherty at Slemish Way.

A passer-by said: "You know what it's like. People see camera crews and they're immediately intrigued. People heard he was filming on the Falls Road yesterday and then they saw him with Gerry Adams.

"Vince Vaughn was really friendly, really open. He talked to the locals, signed autographs and had a bit of craic with them. He seemed really interested in the murals."

Mr Vaughn, who is dating Friends star Jennifer Aniston, then travelled to the east of the city to interview Mr Ervine off the Newtownards Road.

The East Belfast Assembly member said the 36-year-old actor told him he had developed a fascination with the murals during a previous visit to the city.

"He was taking a break from shooting a film in London with Kevin Spacey to do this documentary and came over for this weekend. There's no question he's genuinely interested in the subject. He was telling me his interest was sparked on a previous visit when he took a black taxi tour from the Europa Hotel. He knew nothing about the murals before that trip.

"We did a spot of filming in Dee Street around a mural depicting people coming to the shipyards," the PUP leader said. "I was explaining to him that years ago we would not have a mural like this because it would all have been about politics and our divisions. I told him that, for me, the mural was the epitome of the change process that is going on in Northern Ireland. The murals are changing."

Vince Vaughn to Participate in London's 24-Hour Plays Benefit

Found here

By: Brian Scott Lipton

Film star Vince Vaughn will participate in the London benefit production of The 24 Hour Plays at 7:30pm on Sunday, October 8 at The Old Vic.

The event will be introduced by Oscar winner Kevin Spacey, artistic director of the Old Vic, and will be hosted by actress Catherine Tate. Other scheduled participants include Alexander Armstrong, Jonathan Cake, Pam Ferris, Dexter Fletcher, Anthony Head, Greg Hicks, Clare Higgins, Patricia Hodge, Tom Hollander, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Adrian Lukis, Nichola McAuliffe, Nick Moran, Tamzin Outhwaute, Clarke Peters, Greta Scacchi, Rachael Stirling, Dominic West, Alicia Witt, and Susannah York. In collaboration with six writers and six directors, the actors will create and stage new works in just one day.

Vaughn's many film credits include The Break-Up, Wedding Crashers, Old School, Swingers, Mr and Mrs. Smith, and Starsky & Hutch. He also played Norman Bates in the remake of Psycho.

On October 23, at the American Airlines Theatre in New York, The 24 Hour Plays will present its annual benefit for Working Playground. Jennifer Aniston, Elizabeth Berkley-Lauren, Rachel Dratch, Rosie Perez, and Patrick Wilson are among the actors who will perform works by Adam Rapp, David Lindsay-Abaire, and other playwrights in this event.

For more information, visit www.24hourplays.com

Thanks, Kathy for this news. :)

Here's another older item...totally worth reading.

Originally posted Wednesday, May 31 on thejay.com

Vince Vaughn is arguably the most quotable actor in movie history (with Val Kilmer coming in a close second). In only ten years and fifteen movies (I discount his dramatic movies because, like Rocky 5, they were all a dream and never really happened; especially Domestic Disturbance), he has established himself as the go to star for kick-ass cultural-swinging dialogue. From “You’re so money” to “Earmuffs” to “Lock it up!”, his lines have changed the way we converse, the way we think and the way we speak. He has reached the point in his career where his every line of dialogue is a laugh waiting to happen. Vaughn has garnered such tremendous audience goodwill that as soon as he opens his mouth we are waiting to love what he has to say. No matter if he’s playing a scoundrel (which he was in Wedding Crashers) or a lovable loser (Dodgeball) or even an assassin (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), we cannot help but root for him. When Vince Vaughn speaks, we listen, and we love every word.

It’s almost as if he’s created a new language, one defined by witty quips and cutting rejoinders. Think about this for a second, if you had to create a new language, one that would be accepted across the globe and universally recognized, what would it be? It would be movie quotes. Everyone loves them, there isn’t a person alive that hasn’t adopted a movie line into their own speech (Mine is “You’re killing me Smalls”, and if you don’t know where that’s from than I suggest you press the little red “X” at the top of the window, because you don’t belong here.), and if everyone started talking in movie quotes, the world would be a funnier, more dramatic and more romantic place to live.

Like the English language deriving mostly from Latin, our new movie quote language has to start somewhere. If I were to choose, I would want our Latin to be Vince Vaughn. He’s the only actor alive whose quotes can be used for all spectrums of speech, and are widely recognized as some of the funniest, smartest and coolest in movie history. His quotes would and should be the basis for our new language. Let’s take a look at how we will develop our new movie quote language, Vince Vaughnese. (More in the extended entry.)

Most people think his quotes are primarily about scoring chicks, and that’s almost fair. After all, he is the man that brought us these gems:

Vince Vaughn On: Honesty (Swingers)

“There’s nothing wrong with letting the girls know that you’re money and that you want to party.”

Vince Vaughn On: Playing The Odds (Old School)

“Well why don’t you give me your number in case anything happens to my wife.”

Vince Vaughn On: Getting Lucky (Dodgeball)

VV: “There’s someone out there for everybody.”

Owen: “You think?”

VV: “Absolutely. In some cases, there’s two somebody’s for one person. I like to call that “the jackpot”.”

But look past his “Trent from Swingers” personality and you’ll see that the man is a treasure trove for lines about how the world could be made into a better place to live. Take for instance his stance on some of the major social and political problems plaguing the world today.

Vince Vaughn On: Gun Control (Swingers)

“People get carjacked.”

VV: “Who’s gonna carjack your *beep* K-Car? He’s right Sue you don’t need to carry a gat!”

Vince Vaughn On: Breaking Stereotypes (Wedding Crashers)

Owen Wilson: “Don’t waste your time on girls with hats. They tend to be very proper.”

VV: “Yeah? Well, the proper girl in the hat just *beep* the *beep* out of me.”

Vince Vaughn On: Exploration (Old School)

“Well, Columbus wasn’t looking for America, my man, but that turned out to be pretty okay for everyone.”

Vince Vaughn On: Spirituality (Wedding Crashers)

VV: “Do you know what that awareness is, Gloria?”

Gloria Cleary: “What?”

VV: “That we’re all one. That separateness is an illusion, and that I’m one with everyone - with the Prime Minister of England, and my cousin Harry, you and me, the fat kid from ‘What’s Happening,’ the Olsen twins, Natalie Portman, the guy who wrote ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ Nat King Cole, Carrot Top, Jay-Z, Weird Al Yankovic, Harry Potter, if he existed, the whore on the street corner, your mother. We’re all one.”

Vince Vaughn On: Acceptance (Be Cool)

“I’m just sayin’ if that’s what this is gonna be, it’s gonna be that.”

Truly, Vince Vaughn is a man who believes in a better world, and our new language should respect his beliefs.

And it’s not just social ills that his quotes can be rallied around. Raising children is an important part of life and Vince is no stranger to Fatherhood. He has spoken out on Family Values on multiple occasions, and those speeches have come to be some of the most influential words of wisdom that this world has ever seen.

Vince Vaughn On: Parenting (Swingers)

“Our baby’s all grown up.”

Vince Vaughn On: Marriage (Old School)

“Alright, let me be the first to say congratulations. You get one vagina for the rest of your life. Real smart, Frank. Way to work it through.”

Vince Vaughn On: Bad Language (Old School)

Luke Wilson: “I’ve had a hell of a day and even worse week. And all I want to do is get some *beep* sleep.”

VV: “Whoa. Whoa. Why the F-ing? Why in front of the kid? All ya gotta do is say “earmuffs” to him, and you can say anything, *beep* *beep* bitch.”

Vince Vaughn On: Family Life (Old School)

“I have a wife and kids. Do I seem like a happy guy to you, Frank?”

Vince Vaughn On: Having Your Mom’s Back (Anchorman)

Champ Kind: “I will smash your face into a car windshield, and then take your mother Dorothy Mantooth out for a nice seafood dinner and never call her again!”

VV: “Dorothy Mantooth is a saint! You understand me? Dorothy Mantooth is a saint!”

So we’ve seen that Vince Vaughnese covers Family Life, Socio-political issues and Chicks, but it goes even further still beyond those areas. After doing some research on the subject I have found that Vince’s words can extend to the field of sports:

Vince Vaughn On: Physical Skills (Wedding Crashers)

“You and I both know I’m a phenomenal dancer!”

Vince Vaughn On: Knowing Your Own Skills (Wedding Crashers)

“John, I was first team All-State. I can put the ball anywhere I want to. I’ll make it rain out here.”

Vince Vaughn On: Water Sports (Wedding Crashers)

“Why don’t you try getting jacked off under the table in front of the whole damn family and have some real problems, jackass. Hey, what were they like anyway? They looked pretty good, are they real? Are they built for speed or comfort? What’d you do with them? Motorboat? You play the motorboat? [makes sputtering motorboat noise] You motor boating son of a bitch! You old sailor you! Where is she? She still in the house?”

His words can extend to the field of Physical Development:

Vince Vaughn On: Death (Old School)

“Don’t beat yourself up over this, Mitch. It’s not your fault. Dammit, Blue was old. That’s what old people do. They die.”

Vince Vaughn On: Getting Older (Be Cool)

“Nice ass won’t get you through your whole life. Once you turn thirty you better have a personality.”

Vince Vaughn On: Body Art (Wedding Crashers)

“Tattoo on the lower back? Might as well be a bullseye.”

And the field of Business:

Vince Vaughn On: The Entertainment Industry (Swingers)

“Everybody steals from everybody, that’s Hollywood.”

Vince Vaughn On: Business Tactics (Old School)

“He’s playing hardball. And I got to admit. I’m impressed.”

Vince Vaughn On: Party Planning (Made)

“Here’s what I’m gonna ask of you… We’re going to be spending the night in New York, so it worked out well for all of us. I want you to take it back to the business class, I want you to round up a couple of honeys… At our hotel room we’re gonna have kind of a pool party. California gangster-style, you know what I mean? Kick ass pool party thing.”

But who are we kidding? The basis of any new language is not how we speak about the challenges we face in our daily lives, but in the way we communicate we each other. The way we talk to our friends; the way we treat other people. Even before the birth of Vince Vaughenese, the traditional English language was adopting his quotes to use as definitions for friendship and communication. You in fact may have used one or two in the past. These quotes were the main arbiter in the birth of Vince’s language, the catalyst for the need of a Vince-specific method of speaking, and most of all, why we think he’s so goddamn funny.

Vince Vaughn On: Helping Friends (Wedding Crashers)

“A friend in need is a pest.”

Vince Vaughn On: Being a Good Wingman (Swingers)

“Look at this, OK? I want you to remember this face. This is the guy behind the guy behind the guy.”

Vince Vaughn On: Giving A Friend Some Confidence (Swingers)

“I don’t want you to be the guy in the PG-13 movie everyone’s really hoping makes it happen. I want you to be like the guy in the rated R movie, you know, the guy you’re not sure whether or not you like yet. You’re not sure where he’s coming from. Okay? You’re a bad man. You’re a bad man, Mikey. You’re a bad man, bad man.”

Vince Vaughn On: Betrayal (Wedding Crashers)

“I hope you flip your bike over and knock your two front teeth out! You selfish son of a bitch! You leave me in the trenches taking grenades, John!”

All good languaticians (I just made that word up) know that the specialized words and phrases we make up with our friends are what constitute a real language. Being able to personalize speech and create unique ways of saying ordinary things is what makes a language popular. This is how Vince Vaughnese will truly reach widespread, global popularity. For instance, if you were proud of your friend and wanted to tell him in a cool way how you feel, you could say: “Good job man, way to go. You’re kicking ass.” but that would still be kind of lame. Let’s see that same phrase in Vince Vaughnese:

Vince Vaughn On: Compliments (Swingers)

“You’re so money and you don’t even know it!”

And if you were at a party and somebody asked what you did for a living, you could give some boring answer like “Hi, I’m The Jay, I’m a stock broker”. But c’mon, really, wouldn’t the conversation be so much more fun if you used a Vince Vaughnese-ism, instead?

Vince Vaughn On: Being Who You Are (Clay Pigeons)

“I’m Lester. Lester the uh, molester.”

Moving to the most important part of language, communicating with the opposite sex, we find that this is the area Vince Vaughnese-ism excels at the most. It’s fairly common knowledge that in the last decade Vince has redefined the dating scene and male/female relationships. From changing the time men take to call women (“Six days‿), to what men call women (“beautiful babies”) to even where men go to find women (“All right, all right I’ll ask her. Miss, miss! Do you know where the high school girls hang out around here?”), Vince’s relationship-based movie quotes have established a new set of rules, one’s that will make Vince Vaughnese the linguistic touchstone for which all twenty-something’s will go to pray. Let’s take a lesson from some more of Vince’s views on sex, dating and relationships.

Vince Vaughn On: The Secrets of Flirting (Swingers)

“All I do is stare at their mouths and wrinkle my nose, and I turn out to be a sweetheart.”

Vince Vaughn On: Respecting Women (Made)

“Here’s 50 bucks, take this in case I get drunk and call you a bitch later.”

Vince Vaughn On: Enjoying the Nightlife (Wedding Crashers)

“Go out there and get some strange ass!”

Vince Vaughn On: Getting Over A Breakup (Wedding Crashers)

“She hasn’t answered your calls, she didn’t respond to any of your letters, she didn’t respond to the candygram. God only knows what happened to the kitten you got for her. ‘Cause she didn’t keep it, and I know you’re not raising the goddamn thing. I think it’s very obvious at this juncture that she just flat out does not wanna see you anymore.”

Vince Vaughn On: Obsession (Wedding Crashers)

“I got a stage five. Virgin. Clinger.”

Vince Vaughn On: Dating (Wedding Crashers)

VV: “Janice, I apologize to you if I don’t seem real eager to jump into a forced awkward intimate situation that people like to call dating. I don’t like the feeling. You’re sitting there, you’re wondering do I have food on my face, am I eating, am I talking too much, are they talking enough, am I interested I’m not really interested, should I play like I’m interested but I’m not that interested but I think she might be interested but do I want to be interested but now she’s not interested? So all of the sudden I’m getting, I’m starting to get interested… And when am I supposed to kiss her? Do I have to wait for the door cause then it’s awkward, it’s like well goodnight. Do you do like that ass-out hug? Where you like, you hug each other like this and your ass sticks out cause you’re trying not to get too close or do you just go right in and kiss them on the lips or don’t kiss them at all? It’s very difficult trying to read the situation. And all the while you’re just really wondering are we gonna get hopped up enough to make some bad decisions? Perhaps play a little game called “just the tip”. Just for a second, just to see how it feels. Or, ouch, ouch you’re on my hair.”

So now you can see that the language of Vince Vaughnese successfully covers all aspects of life, and if used in conversation can make you smarter, wiser, funnier, more confident and just plain cooler. But let’s ask one final question to determine if Vince Vaughn is truly worthy of naming and conceiving a language around. Does it make you a better person? In English I could describe myself in a multitude of ways, all designed to make me feel better about who I am, and more attractive to other people. Can I do that in Vince Vaughnese? Let’s find out…

Vince Vaughn On: Goals (Dodgeball)

“I found that if you have a goal, that you might not reach it. But if you don’t have one, then you are never disappointed. And I gotta tell ya… it feels phenomenal.”

Vince Vaughn On: Discipline (Wedding Crashers)

“Lock it up!”

Vince Vaughn On: Pessimism (Wedding Crashers)

“Please don’t take a turn to negative town.”

Vince Vaughn On: Labels (Wedding Crashers)

“I’m a cocksman!”

Vince Vaughn On: Standing Your Ground (Wedding Crashers)

Owen Wilson: “He lived with his mom till he was forty! She tried to poison his oatmeal!”

VV: “Erroneous! Erroneous! Erroneous on both accounts!”

Vince Vaughn On: Excuses (Wedding Crashers)

“Rule #76: No excuses. Play like a champion!”

I think we can put that question to rest. Truly, the language of Vince Vaughnese can do anything. It can help you find a boyfriend or girlfriend, it can help you raise a family, it can help you live your life smarter and come to accept the course of human events. It can get you laid. It’s the perfect language. In a world where movie quotes are the new social currency, Vince Vaughnese is the Benjamin, the high water mark, the only language you wanna speak. Besides, wouldn’t you rather sound like Vince Vaughn than just about anyone else?

It’s All Deadly!

Charisma is all in the ears

Chicago Tribune

By Patrick Kampert
Tribune staff reporter
Published August 6, 2006

Barack Obama has it. Your cousin Ernie doesn't. Vince Vaughn has it. And maybe you wish you had it.

The "it" is charisma. Everyone has some. But if you don't naturally have buckets of it like Bill Clinton or Oprah Winfrey, can you develop more of what you have?

You betcha, says Howard Friedman, distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California at Riverside.

"Like any change in personality, charisma improvement takes time and practice," he said in an e-mail.

Charisma isn't just based on physical features either, he said, adding that it has to do with "emotional communication and emotional expressiveness."

Jane Alderman, the dean of Chicago casting directors and who recently portrayed Vaughn's mom in "The Break-Up," says the Chicago-area native's charisma has little to do with being tall. "Vince is a very strong, kind person who's hysterically funny," she said. "But he's probably one of the best listeners I know. He makes everybody feel good; he makes them feel included."

Social scientists like Friedman are able to measure charisma by analyzing non-verbal communication and watching how observers react to certain individuals.

--Patrick Kampert

For tips on how you can get charisma, read read the rest of the article.

Vince Vaughn: It ain't what he says, it's the way that he says it

The Belfast Telegraph

A run of hit comedies has made Vince Vaughn one of Hollywood's most bankable stars. Adam Rynne meets the man who's put a smile back on Jennifer Aniston's face
28 July 2006

Actors have voices. Of course, they have faces also, but unanimously, it is the way that they intonate, utter, relay and convey that becomes - if perhaps subconsciously for an audience that is staring upon a widescreen facade - characteristic and influential. And Vince Vaughn has a voice that almost sounds unlike any other.

He leans on certain syllables with a seemingly haphazard inconsistency, allowing sounds that the rest of us would normally accentuate come out untouched, before taking the last letter of the final word in his concluding sentence and elongating it out into a lingering drone.

There is no sense to the way that his voice goes up and down at will, no pattern to jump aboard. So that his pragmatic deduction that "people are just doing their jobs. They're trying to sell a magazine or they're trying to sell a TV show" becomes a rollercoaster of breathless rhythm and timbre. He speaks inordinately quickly and with a disregard for conventional punctuation until the closing sound is delivered as smooth and never-ending.

He never appears to need a breath and, as he soars, stays high and then plunges down into a stretched dip, it all becomes rather hypnotic.

"You really can't moan about it," the remarkable voice starts. "I mean, my outlook on it has always been that people are just doing their jobs. They're trying to sell a magazine or they're trying to sell a TV show. It's not personal.

"They do it to anyone, whether it's an actor, a musician or a politician. If you realise it's not personal, you don't take it personally. And I really just sort of laugh at it. I'm always curious to see what I've been up to lately or what the next big plan is.

"It's a bit ridiculous," he continues, as I start to feel like Mowgli in The Jungle Book having just encountered the spellbinding snake with the captivating voice (I wonder if my eyes are doing big, hurdy-gurdy circles and swirls).

"There's such a fascination these days with the celebrity side or the success side. Even outside of acting there's such a focus on success, on accomplishing, on money, but not really a focus on working hard or doing a good job on something.

"When I started at 18, there was only one show in America called Entertainment Tonight that was on for half an hour and was about celebrity lives. Now, there's like seven shows. There's entire networks dedicated to it and, sadly, I think a lot of the younger kids are choosing to be actors or musicians, not because they want to act or be musicians, but really they're just looking to be famous. And I would really caution them that that's the kind of the stuff that you deal with that's not the most fun side."

The actor who became famous, through Doug Liman's Swingers, for his rampant talking, rampant whining and rampant berating - the actor who has been regularly positioned onscreen as a feral motor-mouth - has now become a whole different Hollywood animal.

When the insanely dumb and extremely entertaining Dodgeball was released in 2004, Vaughn told me that he liked to keep a low profile, that when he was dating someone he didn't need to have it dissected and profiled and visualised in journals and newspapers.

He was an actor, at that time, about whom little, personally, was discussed or speculated upon. Then a couple of things happened.

Dodgeball took over $$100m - the golden milestone in the genuine creation of a top-line, commercial movie star - at the box office.

Vaughn then played a supporting loudmouth in Mr & Mrs Smith, which brought back $$428m.

Next, the Chicago-raised actor starred opposite Owen Wilson in Wedding Crashers; the budget was $$40m, the return was $$283m. And so, Vince Vaughn had become a dependably and remarkably profitable comedy star, of which there is only a handful.

Just as significantly, however, Vaughn appeared to begin dating Jennifer Aniston, having met her on the set of his new picture, The Break-Up. The actress had recently - and to the disturbing and lascivious interest of global media - finished a marriage with fellow actor Brad Pitt, and anything to do with the former Friends comedienne - clothes, where she ate, whom she appeared in public alongside - had been deemed of essential importance.

Which brings us back to photographers now sifting through Vince Vaughn's rubbish, bidding wars for exclusive portraits of a couple-at-rest and, on the other side of the fence, the sale on E-bay of a jar apparently containing a quantity of Californian air through which Pitt and his new partner, Angelina Jolie, had just strolled through.

Relaxed and smoking, laid back across a London sofa, Vaughn has just attended to the matter of "people are just doing their jobs, they're trying to sell magazines..." He is unusually tall, well-dressed in a dapper suit and is both charming and easily likeable. (I overheard a breathless: "Oh my God, he's a beaut" from a small corner of ladies that he's just met).

His demeanour betrays hardly any worries, as he explains in regard to his new-found notoriety off-screen: "My grandfather was a dairy farmer, both my parents worked to support us, my sister's a school teacher. I just think there's kind of like real problems and real struggles that people go through and I think it's all a bit ridiculous. It's not that important." Many say that, but with him you believe it. Fine, let's move on.

The Break-Up is an unusual and interestingly fearless movie, almost a harking back to classic Hollywood comedy where married couples argue, try to poison each other, and remarry, all to the beat of a rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, all under the roof of a handsome and confined city apartment.

Directed by Peyton Reed (Bring It On and Down With Love), the picture tells of Gary and Brooke (Vaughn and Aniston) and the downward plummet of their two-year relationship. She accuses him of being unthinking and unsupportive; he charges her with nagging. The break-up comes. Neither wants to leave the shared apartment so both set out to undermine the confidence and security of the other.

Blending often wonderfully timed comedy with darker, closer drama, The Break-Up (which, in keeping with Vaughn's newfound capacities, comfortably passed through the $$100m at the US box-office) was something of a pet project for the actor-turned-producer.

The first picture to be put through his recently established production company, Wild West Picture Show Productions, the project offered Vaughn the potential to nurse through the Hollywood system an unconventional romantic comedy that could also take him back to the Swingers days of mass collaboration between cast and crew, irregular American movie making and on-set improvisation.

"I think I was always influenced by the American movies of the 1970s," he tells me, "which of course was influenced by the European cinema. You have much more flawed characters and a lot more ambiguity in the movie, less sort of definitive stuff.

"These two young writers," he continues of Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender who authored The Break-Up alongside Vaughn, "were very good, but I said, 'We just really can't go and sell this idea to a studio and have them pay us, because we'll never get this story to be told the way we want it to be told. There'll be too many voices and too many notes and we'll get lost. We'll have to sort of write it and then take it to a studio.'

"Me being an actor and coming from improvisation, I really like to improve the characters. I like to sit back and say (to other actors), 'What's your interpretation?' and I think you always want to have an environment where ideas are welcome. You get a better movie because of it."

With Vaughn's long-time collaborator Jon Favreau (Swingers, Made) starring as Gary's loyal, if easily confused best friend and Joey Lauren Adams (Chasing Amy) appearing as a mature ally of Brooke's, The Break-Up observes the eviscerating competition and terribly human ruthlessness that can define the implosion of any relationship.

Brooke appears naked and attractive in front of Gary, before allowing her new date and her ex-boyfriend to meet only a couple of minute later; Gary hosts what looks like an orgy in the apartment that he still shares with his ex-girlfriend. Attempts at a civilised co-existence descend into bitter and frequently appealing comical farce, while friends and colleagues fashion a reluctant chorus line.

Described by Vaughn as, "much more independent in nature, but made at a studio level", The Break-Up, deliberately shot in muted colours so as to avoid the sugary lustre of traditional rom-com, appears to be Vaughn's latest attempt at some genuine adult comedy, at some genuine intelligent filmmaking.

"I would be open to doing anything if it was good. I've been on a comedy run for a while and part of that was with everything that was going on in the world, I thought it was a good time to try to make folks laugh, maybe bring people together through comedy.

"With this movie, I wanted to do something different in this genre."

Behind the enjoyable rudimentary on-screen persona, Vince Vaughn has masked a more weighty and insightful reality. It is this astuteness that has ensured the longevity of his career. Following Swingers in 1996, a role in The Lost World: Jurassic Park in 1997, the portrayal of a caring father in A Cool Dry Place a year later and the re-interpretation of Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant's restoration of Hitchcock's Psycho, his identity is that of a flexible, interested actor.

His return to high-profile comedy, first with Old School in 2003 and then Starsky & Hutch in 2004, saw him construct for himself a position at the forefront of the new breed of Hollywood comedy actors, a troupe of performers that include Ben Stiller, Owen and Luke Wilson and Will Ferrell.

Having raised more than half-a-billion dollars with three movies, Vaughn now appears intent on revising one of film's oldest genres, the protected romantic comedy.

"If this movie is successful," he suggests, "it could open the door for other people who want to do non-traditional movies and maybe get a chance for there to be some other options out there, instead of the same story over and over again."

The Break-Up is at cinemas across Northern Ireland.

Just good friends?

Found here

He's the 6ft 5in Hollywood charmer who built his reputation on buddy movies and screwball comedies. But Vince Vaughn has swapped the Frat Pack and the fart jokes for emotional confessions about love and relationships. Does this mean he's finally ready to confess all about Jennifer Aniston, asks Carole Cadwalladr

Carole Cadwalladr
Sunday July 9, 2006
Observer

Oh, the glorious absurdity of it all. One minute, you're reading all about the is-it-or-isn't-it romance between Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn in Heat, and the next, you're at the Dorchester Hotel and Jen's swishing past you on the way to the lifts.

But, goodness, she is tiny. Even in her heels and bouffed-up hair, she's just a wee slip of a thing, about five inches shorter than she looks on screen, with the kind of micro bone structure that makes you think she might have been shrunk in the wash.

I feel like I might have accidentally fallen down an Alice in Wonderland-type rabbit hole, because hanging out at the Dorchester on the day that the publicity entourage for Vaughn and Aniston's new film, The Break-Up, sweeps into town is not much like life. It's more like being on the set of a soap opera, where there's lots of people with fabulous hair and the dialogue has a slightly strained relationship to reality.

But still, I get to stare at Jen, who doesn't seem to mind too much and gives me a bright smile, before a panicked publicist appears, attaches herself to my elbow, and steers me out of the way. Because I'm here not to interview Aniston. I'm here to interview Vaughn. And I've inadvertently broken through a Maginot line of flunkies who are attempting to ensure that they're kept apart at all times. There are to be no pictures of them together. No joint interviews. And yet just their presence at the Dorchester is causing uproar. There's a dozen broadcast journalists coralled in a suite. There's a clutch of paparazzi parked outside the front. And then, just to add to the sense of being somewhere outside the normal time-space continuum, Britain's very own Jen'n'Vince wander past: why, yes, it's Richard and Judy.

They've just done an interview with Jen, apparently, and I interrogate Judy on the grounds that if anybody knows a thing or two about the nature of celebrity coupledom, it's surely going to be her. She tells me that they'd met them at the premiere the night before and 'they were ever so charming and friendly - they just seemed like such a lovely couple together.'

She's as spot on as ever, of course. He's funny, she's funny. She was broken-hearted, he was single, what could be more perfect? But it's all so tricksy because they still haven't officially come out as a couple. Trickier still is the fact that the film they're publicising is all about coupledom. And it was while filming the story of a relationship's demise, last summer, that, to the tabloids' great delight, they got it together. Or didn't get it together. But, hell, probably did get it together. And this, of course, was after Jen had been dumped by Brad after he'd had a thing with his co-star, Angelina Jolie, before impregnating her and then running away to the Namibian desert.

Not even Hollyoaks would try to get away with that as a plot-line. And it leaves me with several problems, if I'm honest. Because although the film is billed as a romantic comedy, it's also terribly adult. Not in the porno sense of the word, but in the emotionally complex one. So. How precisely do you interview someone about a film about relationships, specifically about relationship break-ups? A film, moreover, that they've co-written and produced, when they're in a totally top-secret but totally public relationship with their co-star, the most famously broken-up-with woman on the planet?

With difficulty, it turns out. Not that Vaughn isn't charming. He's more than charming, giving me a rather earnest two-handed handshake of the type you'd expect from a particularly sincere vicar. What's more, when he talks it's in a rather soft and diffident vicar voice. Not vicar, actually, since he's got a distinctive Midwestern twang, but a pastor maybe, or an Episcopalian minister; but not, in any case, what you'd expect from the man you saw burying his head in Isla Fisher's bosoms in Wedding Crashers or whipping up the frat house in Old School.

'Can I offer you some water?' he asks. 'Which chair would you like? Thank you so much for coming, it's great to meet you.' It's a bit like going to meet the Fonz and getting Richie instead. Any minute now, I think, he's going to start calling me 'ma'am' and apologising for saying 'heck'.

It's really all very confusing. But then Vaughn's career is nothing if not confusing. He had eight long, hungry years in Hollywood before his best friend, Jon Favreau, wrote a semi-autobiographical script based on their friendship and turned it into 2002's indie hit, Swingers. Steven Spielberg saw it and promptly wrote him into The Lost World: Jurassic Park, after which he went on to play a string of not-so-memorable straight parts - A Cool Dry Place, Psycho, The Cell - before being rediscovered as a comedian in Old School

It was Wedding Crashers, though, which grossed more than $200m at the US box office, that propelled him into the big time, as one-half of a womanising double act with Owen Wilson. And now there's The Break-Up, in which he plays Gary, an unreconstructed feet-up-on-the-coffee-table-beer-in-the-hand sort of bloke who slowly evolves into being a more touchy-feely-let-me-cook-you-dinner sort of bloke. If that sounds crass, it's not meant to be, because it is a far more intelligent version of relationships than traditional rom-com fare.

'I think life is all about going through experiences and learning better how to communicate, and in a way this movie is a cautionary tale,' he says. 'Because even if you're in love with somebody, if you don't honour the relationship or if you're too caught up in not wanting to look foolish or not really communicating about the way that you feel, you can really do damage to the love that's there. You have to really love someone to go through hard times with them, and at the end you learn really valuable lessons. You think, "Oh I see, I was with that person because I really needed to learn this.'"

This isn't what I was expecting. Where are the fart gags? Nowhere, that's where. Gary is a breakthrough role for him in many ways. Although he's an undeniable dish - he's 6ft5in, has a handsome face and is attractively dishevelled on account of growing a beard for an upcoming part in Into the Wild - up until now he's been what Rolling Stone magazine called 'a guy's guy'. The Break-Up is the first time that he's played a woman's sort of man.

And, boy, can he talk the talk. I feel like I've stumbled into a north London encounter group.

'The easy thing is to think, well they did this wrong, and they did that wrong. And I think the harder thing to do is to take accountability and say, what could I have done better? It's always kind of painful, but I also think you can come out on the other side of it, and be better equipped at finding someone else. And usually, or at least hopefully, you start to choose people who are in a better place, too, and have learnt some things as well...'

He's almost word-perfect on all the stuff that, as a 36-year-old woman - like me - you'd hope to hear from a 36-year-old man - like him. Although there's something, perhaps, just a little too word-perfect about it for someone whose longest relationship - to actress Joey Lauren Adams - lasted just over a year and who's never been short of what used to be called 'female companionship'.

Trent, the semi-autobiographical character from Swingers, was the definitive ladies' man. And prior to Aniston, Vaughn had been through a string of co-stars (Joey Lauren Adams, as above, from A Cool Dry Place, Ashley Judd from The Locusts, Janeane Garofalo from Clay Pigeons). But you'd never know this from all his talk about communication, and emotional openness, and growing as a person. Although he does admit that he's been a bit rubbish at relationships in the past.

'I've not been very good at committing myself, it's true... As an actor, you're always really nervous about continuing to work, and trying to make sure you have opportunities, so when relationships would not get easy, it was very simple for me to lose myself in my work. But then, as you get older, I think you're more open to having a friend, someone to have experiences with, and to share the ups and downs of life. I think it just comes with maturity really.'

It's a good answer and if I was interviewing him for the role of Jennifer Aniston's boyfriend, I'd tick another box here. But I'm not, and I haven't yet mentioned Jennifer, and he hasn't yet mentioned Jennifer. Although there's no doubt that she's here with us. She has a starring if silent role as the elephant in the room. A really huge elephant sitting slap-bang between us who makes asking questions tricky, as I have to mentally double check all his answers in case there's some sort of coded reference to her.

And yet Vaughn is intrinsically more interesting than just another piece of eye candy. He went to school with writer Dave Eggers and they occupy similar cultural niches in their respective fields: both achieved early success slightly outside the mainstream. And it's not the first time that he has found himself in a confusing life-art-art-life maelstrom. He was the main character in Swingers - Trent Walker. And, to a degree, Trent Walker was him. He was Jon Favreau's inspiration for the character, and, a decade ago, that character was a womanising, confident, struggling young actor. 'Swingers was based on a reality, but it's really exaggerated for comedy,' says Vaughn. 'Me and Jon never went to Vegas together, I never said, "You're the money, baby" 20 times a day. All that stuff was made up, but it came from a real-life situation.'

Spielberg was so impressed with him in Swingers that he arranged a meeting. As well as describing Vaughn as 'a film icon to be', he said, 'I found him to be so different from Trent that immediately I was struck by his ability to play character parts.'

What I can't figure out is if he's in character now. This is only one of a handful of print interviews he's doing and here we are having a nice, cosy chat about feelings and emotions.

But, the fact is, he's put a huge amount of time and effort into making a film that is all about feelings and emotions. He was only a hired hand on Wedding Crashers, whereas he was the driving force behind The Break-Up. He was, he says, exasperated with the romantic-comedy scripts he got sent. 'It was always the same thing: people were perfect, they always did and said the right thing... and I wanted to do something different, to tell a more character-driven story, like Swingers. I thought audiences would really respond to something original and fresh. The studios are kind of afraid of it, but audiences aren't really given credit for wanting something different.'

He's right, we're not. And while various critics have been snooty about it, they're missing the point. The Break-Up, for all that it's a big-budget Hollywood movie, also manages to convey the ordinary, everyday misery of what it is to be in a dissolving relationship. It's a different sort of humour than Vaughn has done before, more sophisticated and observational than his fratball efforts, where there's always one fat person to make fun of. What's more, it does manage to pull off the trick of being both funny and affecting.

It's also that rare beast: a rom-com without a happy ending. 'When I wrote the screenplay, I wrote it without a studio, and when I went to Universal, part of the reason I was a producer on it was because I knew I had to protect this movie. They said, "We want to collaborate, we want to be able to try some stuff," and I said, "Absolutely, as long as I get to make the final decision." So, we did a couple of endings, and credit to them, they said the more traditional ending didn't feel right either. And so the ending we have is true to our original intention. We wanted it to feel as authentic as possible.'

Which is perhaps one reason why, in its opening weekend in the US, it grossed an impressive $39m. That and the fact that the opening sequence is a montage sequence of stills of the kind of coupley shots that OK! would kill for: Jen'n'Vince bowling. Jen'n'Vince at a ball-game. Jen'n'Vince snogging. It's almost enough to make me feel sorry for the paps outside the hotel. One of them tells me that the first snap of them looking romantic together, 'you know, like them holding hands next to a fountain', would sell around the world for thousands upon thousands of pounds.

'What was funny,' says Vaughn, 'is that we'd just started shooting in Chicago, and we were doing those pictures all over the city, and the tabloid magazines were shooting us shooting them and then using them for real.'

But then what's real and what's not real is a pretty wobbly line. Vaughn denies the film is autobiographical in any direct sense, and that 'the greatest compliment anyone can ever give me is to say that it just looks like I'm playing myself'. Yet there's a thread that links Trent from Swingers and Gary from The Break-Up, not least in that they're both fast talkers, both have a way with women, neither are what you'd call new men, and they both, like Vaughn, like computer games. What's more, as well as writing it, starring in it and producing it, Vaughn also managed to film it in his home town, Chicago, cast his dad, Vernon, as Jennifer's dad, and have his mum, Sharon, playing a tourist. That's as well as having his best friend, Jon Favreau, play his best friend, and his ex-girlfriend, Joey Lauren Adams, play his girlfriend's friend.

His dad is, he says, his 'good-luck charm'. It was his love of Westerns that first interested him in film, and he played a part in Swingers alongside Favreau's grandmother. The pair also featured in the next film he and Favreau did together, Made. 'So, when it came to The Break-Up I wanted to put my dad in it, for luck, and because it's fun for me to watch him do a scene, and I figured, boy, you've put your dad in two movies, you'd better put your mom in one.' It's this home-spun aspect to the production that suggests that Vaughn might actually be, or least as much as anyone who happens to be a Hollywood mega-star could ever hope to be, just a little bit normal. He's close to his parents, who came from relatively humble backgrounds and never forgot it: his father was a successful businessman who had started life as an Ohio farm boy, his mother became a successful real-estate and share broker but only after she'd tried her hand at hairdressing, and growing up in well-to-do Chicago suburb Lake Forest with them and his two sisters, was, he says, 'like The Beverly Hillbillies'.

What's more, although he's at the centre of what's come to be called the 'Frat Pack', along with Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson and Jack Black (or as the New York Times describes them, 'the comedy mafia'), he says he likes to make films with his friends as he likes to work with actors 'I can bounce off' - roughly 70 per cent of The Break-Up was improvised.

But, oh it's so frustrating. He's a dish who's happy to talk about emotions and loves his mum. But he ought to know that a key requirement of character is that you show, not tell. And yet it's all tell with him. He talks about communication, and he gives detailed answers, just not really to the questions I ask. He doesn't banter and, when I actually get a laugh out of him - I say that I think women fancy actors who play characters they like, whereas men will fancy the axe-wielding psycho so long as she's a hottie - it feels like a minor triumph.

I'm not sure if it's because he's shy, or because he's uncomfortable, but there's a joyfulness about him on screen which he's either not willing or not able to put on in a suite at the Dorchester with the publicity circus in full swing. He was, by his own admission, wildly popular at school - the unacademic goofer-arounder. He was sent to his first drama group by his parents after he was diagnosed with dyslexia and attention deficit disorder and the psychiatrist suggested Ritalin. He channelled his nervous energy into acting, skipping college after landing a break in a Chevy commercial and moved to LA at the age of 18, and he's never lost his most-popular-boy-in-the-school charisma. It carries over into all his films, but yet he's so scrupulously polite and articulate and serious about his work, I feel rather like I'm Melvyn Bragg interviewing Roger Scruton for a South Bank Show special.

And I can't help thinking I'm getting one particular Vince Vaughn here, a romantic-hero Vince Vaughn, rather than a buddy Vince Vaughn or a screwball-comedy Vince Vaughn, a suspicion compounded when he says, 'I think we have 1,000 different people inside ourselves, but what happens in life is that we all get comfortable presenting one of those to the world... and what is fun about being an actor is that you get to bring different sides to you to the surface, depending on the character.'

But then I do, actually, believe him when he says he went into acting for the acting, not for the fame and fortune. He's never hung out with the Hollywood set. He recently moved back to Chicago. And he refuses to talk about his private life, because he wants to keep it private, a stance I find hard to fault, although it is making my Jen'n'Vince: Official! scoop just that little bit harder to get.

Then he says, 'Ask me anything you like.'

So, well, it has to be Jennifer - true, or untrue? And this is his answer: 'Well, I've always kept my personal life to myself. I've never been an actor to go out and put my personal life out there. I've never been an actor to talk about politics a lot. I just see myself as an entertainer... And I feel like nowadays there's such a focus on celebrity, and such a major focus on celebrity life... And I really feel a lot of kids now go into acting because they want to be famous. And what I'd say to them is that that's really the hard stuff to deal with, and you really have to love what you're doing to put up with all of that... You know, I do really laugh at it. I do find it kind of funny, and I don't take it serious, but I definitely don't enjoy the feeling.'

Hmm. So, that's clear then. Still, he does say that 'with Jennifer what you see is what you get: she's very genuine, she's very humble, very considerate and I think that always comes across. She has a dignity and a warmth and a kindness to her, that I think comes across in her performance. You have this very flawed character on a journey, I thought it was important to have someone who you'd think, "Oh, I like her.' And I think she has a goodness to her.'

'But don't you see that's what the public is doing?' I say. 'We're rooting for her. We've watched the journey, and that's why we just want to know what happens next.'

'I think the one thing to know is that Jennifer is one of the brightest, most emotionally intelligent people I've ever met, and I think whatever experience she has only betters her. She's a very warm, genuine, happy, great person and I don't think there's anything to worry about her being able to... she'll always have an optimism and a brightness about life. I think it's just innate to who she is.'

Gosh, I don't know. Either he is a honey peach, or that's how celebrities say I-love-you-I'm-just-not-in-love-with-you these days. But still, I'd like to believe his theory that as we get older, we get better at relationships, so who knows?

I can't really say I met Vince in any meaningful sense, but I do know that he wants to be perceived as serious-minded, hard-working, sensitive and humble. And if you consider those important enough virtues to want to be perceived as having, there's an argument that you'd consider those virtues important enough, also, to actually have. And, anyway, I feel confident that a 37-year-old woman would have chucked him by now if he wasn't walking the walk as well as talking the talk. So, there it is: Jen'n'Vince: Official! It may or may not be true of course, but that's life down the rabbit hole for you...

· The Break-Up opens on 21 July

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Cover larger
Inside photo

Entertainment Weekly…Gavin Bond…I love you.

I think I'm going to start a Gavin Bond fansite. I just love his work and the Vince/Jen spread in this week's Entertainmant Weekly is no exception. Get yours while they're still available.

Newsstand Date: May 26th (June 2nd issue)

The rest of the photos, plus some outtakes can be found in the gallery. As always, enjoy!

Pitch Man

Chicago Magazine
Issue Date: May 2006

At a meeting in L.A., the screenwriter Jay Lavender wanted to pitch Vince Vaughn on a new project, but the actor had another idea. The result: The Break-Up, Lavender’s first movie, made in Chicago.
by Noah Isackson

Talkative and driven, Lavender (above) is from Evanston; Vaughn, from Lake Forest.

The meeting was supposed to seem routine: on the high floor of a glass-walled corporate building, just off Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, the two writers were joined by some Hollywood executives to confer with the actor Vince Vaughn. The writers planned to discuss their script for The Golden Tux, a comedy in which, they hoped, Vaughn might play the lead. Because the script was a work in progress, Vaughn was asked not to read it beforehand.

Still, for the writers, it was hard not to consider the implications. Jay Lavender and Jeremy Garelick, fans of Vaughn’s since he starred in Swingers in 1996, were just starting to get some traction in the business, and they had devoted the past year to a gamble, writing a part just for him. Now they couldn’t blow the opportunity. Make a good impression, the writers thought, and then talk business. Besides, they knew they had a chance: Vaughn—who had grown up in Lake Forest—was fresh from some movies that had flopped. Maybe he actually wanted to meet them.

Vaughn arrived last, all six feet five inches of him, and changed the game plan entirely. He sat down and started improvising, riffing on lines and scenes. “Just knowing what the premise was and the character’s name, he started cracking jokes,” Lavender recalls. “In the script, the character’s name is Jimmy Callahan. And there was Jimmy Callahan.”

Despite the high-ranking men beside him, and the fact that the meeting was still, in some way or another, a job interview, Lavender wore a baseball cap and jeans, his uniform since his grammar-school days in Evanston. “I always tell people that I met Michael Jordan when I was a kid,” he says, referring to an encounter at the Evanston Golf Club when Lavender was in junior high. “That took care of everything in terms of being in awe of a person.” And then the Vaughn interview took a dramatic turn. “He pitched us,” Lavender says. “He said, ‘I want to do a movie called The Break-Up, and I want it to be an antiromantic comedy about a couple that breaks up at the start of the movie.’”

That was December 2002. And what a difference a few years can make. Lavender, Garelick, and Vaughn would collaborate to write The Break-Up, then sell the script to Universal Studios for $2.25 million. In early June, the movie opens in theatres in what is already—thanks to Vaughn, his costar Jennifer Aniston, and some serious love gossip—one of the most anticipated débuts of the year. “It was our perfect storm,” Lavender says. With The Break-Up, Lavender, 31, will see one of his scripts turned into a movie for the first time.

“In college, I learned that I should never stop writing, because it’s unlocked a series of doors,” he says. “When Vince walked into that room, we had spent over a year writing something for him. We wrote ourselves into the room. And that’s what I’ve figured out: that I can write myself into the rooms that I want to be in.”

It is early fall, nearly a week since The Break-Up wrapped in Chicago, and Lavender is walking along North Michigan Avenue, heading to a quick lunch in the basement deli of the Seneca Hotel, his home for three and a half months while The Break-Up is shooting. “A lot of people stayed at The Peninsula,” Lavender says. “But it’s expensive. My sister works for me, and I wanted to be able to put her up, too.”

Lavender is tan from a few days of golf and a day at Great America, and he is obviously enjoying his first extended vacation in eight years. After lunch, he will head to Martha’s Vineyard and then Ireland. He is scruffy, wearing a faded Chicago Bears cap, jeans, and a paper-thin blue Nike workout shirt. If he weren’t talking about his role in a multimillion-dollar movie, he could easily be a college kid heading to class. “For an L.A. guy,” says Tom Glynn, a set designer and friend who worked on the film, “Jay flies under the radar.”

On the movie set, Lavender and Garelick worked beside Aniston and Vaughn and the director, Peyton Reed. The writers revised scenes on their laptops throughout the day. Still, it took a few weeks before some set workers realized that Lavender wasn’t a grunt-level employee. “People thought he was a production assistant,” recalls Glynn. “He’s saying hellos to everybody, giving hugs to security guards, getting everyone water.”

At night, after a minimum 12-hour day on the set, Lavender typically went to bed. Toward the end of shooting, even though he doesn’t drink, Lavender hosted a party at McGee’s Tavern in Lincoln Park so he would have at least one chance to see the Chicago friends he had missed.

Studio rules forbid Lavender from disclosing much about the movie before it comes out, so at the Seneca deli he talks about the future—“Our game plan, our design, was that writing would open the door for producing, and producing would open the door for directing”—and picks at a salami and bologna sandwich with a knife and fork.

Lavender is well known as a monumental talker. But at the quiet deli, his voice is muted and his thoughts run in rapid-fire succession. Occasionally, he silences a call on his cell phone, many of them business related. For a screenwriter, there is no better time to get work than when he has signed on to a major project, the buzz is positive, and no box-office report or critic has ruined the run just yet. Suffice it to say, Lavender is a popular guy these days.

For the record (or in case you have not walked past a newsstand recently): Vaughn, already a popular actor, moved to Hollywood’s A-list last spring with the success of the naughty-guy romantic comedy Wedding Crashers. Aniston had already spent seven years in the nation’s living rooms on the TV show Friends, but when her marriage to Brad Pitt dissolved, she became a tabloid obsession—soon joined in the spotlight by her new boyfriend, Vaughn, a romantic entanglement apparently sparked on the set of The Break-Up.

Lavender knows that he has been blessed by association. But his career also testifies to the ambition, drudge work, false starts, talent, and perseverance that it takes to succeed in Hollywood. “Jay has the uncanny ability to stay focused and, no matter what, make it happen,” says the filmmaker Mike Meiners, Lavender’s friend. About nine years ago, as an aspiring moviemaker with an Ivy League degree and two scripts he had written in college, Lavender moved from Chicago to L.A. without a connection or a shred of professional experience. Before he left, friends asked when he might return. Lavender vowed that he would be back someday, and he would be making a movie.

Jay Lavender was born in Albuquerque in 1975, but his Southwestern days didn’t last long. As the family story goes, Lavender’s father, Harold, also known as “Big H,” was a lawyer thinking about switching careers when he visited the Chicago Board of Trade. “Harold called me that night,” his wife, Judith, explains, “and said, ‘I just saw the craziest thing in my life.’” The family eventually settled in Evanston. A second child, Meredith, was born in 1978.

Even as a child, Jay Lavender was a phenomenal talker—capable of exhausting his friends, teachers, his friends’ parents, anyone. “If there’s a word to describe Jay, it’s ‘energetic,’” says Dan Fahner, a longtime friend. “My father used to always say, ‘Oh, OK, Jay, that’ll do.’ He just wouldn’t stop talking.” The boy loved movies, particularly teen draws like Hoosiers and Naked Gun, and he bought movie soundtracks for the films he liked. An avid reader, Lavender says he liked writing, but not any more than he liked to play baseball, soccer, and golf.

He says he wasn’t even fully aware of his writing skills until his senior year in high school at Loyola Academy. One night in late fall, a dean from the Dartmouth College admissions office called the Lavender home and asked to speak with Jay. The call wasn’t to admit the teenager, but the dean wanted to say that he had been reading applicants’ essays for years, and Lavender’s were the best he had ever read. “It was the first time that somebody really made a point of saying ‘keep writing,’” Lavender recalls.

He followed the compliment to Dartmouth, where he played on the golf team and, as a senior, officially started to learn how to write movies. Unlike novels, scripts don’t rely on words so much as images created by the writer. Some writers never acclimate to the terse screenwriting style. But his Dartmouth professor Bill Phillips says that Lavender was a quick study, and one script in particular caught his eye, a story about a New York graffiti artist. Lavender had written the script with a few classmates on a lark, independent of class, but showed it to Phillips anyway. Nine years later, Phillips still remembers his reaction to the work. “If a script is truly wonderful, I’m looking for a visceral reaction,” he says. “Can you make me cry or laugh or scream when I read it? In 15 years of teaching, I’ve come across maybe a half-dozen, at most, that could do that. And I’d put that script in the top half of that half-dozen.”

Eventually, the script received “pass coverage” in Hollywood, Lavender recalls, an elegant term for “close, but no cigar.” Still, he felt confident enough to work the phones, hoping to make some sort of connection. He kept writing and, in the fall of 1997, moved to L.A. “That script started the dominoes,” Lavender says.

That September, Lavender’s best Hollywood contact, an agent’s assistant at Creative Artists Agency who admired his writing, gave Lavender his first Hollywood job: one month of chauffeuring a director of ER for $50 a day. Never mind that Lavender hardly knew the city. “I totally lied about knowing my way around,” he says. Nine months later, that same agent’s assistant told Lavender she was leaving her job at the agency and suggested he interview for her spot. At 23, Lavender was uninterested in the business side of Hollywood, but he felt compelled to meet with her boss, the agent Adam Krentzman. “I told him what I wanted to do: write, produce, and direct,” Lavender remembers. “He said, ‘Well, come work for me and I’ll teach you the business side, and when you can support yourself as a writer, get out of here.’”

Lavender took the job on that condition, figuring he could work and still find time to write. For the next 16 months, he hardly slept. The huge Creative Artists Agency features a roster of powerful executives and scores of eager recent college grads who act as their assistants. For the assistants, the work is often brutal, boring, insulting, or all three, and anyone who complained was told that others would happily take their place. “You’d come back from lunch and some assistant would be gone because they couldn’t take it,” recalls Garelick, who started at Creative Artists shortly after he graduated from Yale.

Lavender typically worked from about eight in the morning to eight at night, answering phones (up to 200 calls a day), typing and reading contracts, drafting memos, scheduling appointments, reading scripts. On most work nights, around nine or ten, he would go home, turn on some music, and write until 3 or 4 a.m. On weekends, he hardly left his apartment. Meanwhile, Garelick was doing about the same thing. The two became fast friends. To keep motivated, they agreed to let each other read the projects they were writing.

By November 1999, Lavender had sold his first script, The Bear and the Bull, a drama about the Chicago Board of Trade. Lavender will not say how much money he got, but the trade journal The Hollywood Reporter put the sum in the “low six figures.” (The movie has yet to be made.) In any case, it allowed Lavender, who had left his job at Creative Artists two weeks earlier, to concentrate on writing full-time. He and Garelick, also on his way to a different industry job, promised to stay in touch.

Two years later, Garelick approached Lavender with what screenwriters like to call a “what if”—a hypothetical situation to get a story idea flowing. In this case, it had to do with a movie about a guy who worked weddings as a professional best man. “From the beginning,” Lavender says, “we wanted to write it for Vince Vaughn.”

The writers set to work, but not everyone was encouraging. “People gave us grief when we wrote it,” Lavender says. “They were like, ‘Oh, Vince Vaughn, the guy from Swingers, whatever.’ They didn’t view him as this star who could open movies at that time.”

A year later, that “what if” became The Golden Tux, and the writers found themselves in that corporate office being pitched by Vaughn himself. “We were, like, ‘Did Vince Vaughn just ask us to write a movie?’” Garelick recalls.

Negotiations, other projects, and the business side of Hollywood would delay The Break-Up for about two years. (The Golden Tux was bought by Dimension Films for a deal in the mid–six figures, though it has not yet been turned into a movie, and Vaughn was cast in another movie about wedding shenanigans, The Wedding Crashers.) Finally, though, Vaughn, Lavender, and Garelick got back together, working feverishly to turn Vaughn’s idea into a screenplay. The trio wrote mostly in the dining room of Vaughn’s Spanish-style L.A. home. Lavender and Garelick worked without pay, and regular schedules were abandoned. “We were on Vince time,” Garelick recalls.

Some days started at six in the morning; others ended around then. “He wanted to get it done so he could shoot over the summer, and we wanted to get it done because we weren’t getting paid,” Garelick says. “We turned down a lot of jobs to do the project, and we were running out of money.” Day and night for about two months, the collaborators sat at Vaughn’s dining room table, the writers with their laptops and Vaughn at the head of the table dictating his ideas. Sometimes, the group would move to the living room and improvise a scene. At quitting time, Lavender, who lived about ten minutes away, would drive home, and Garelick would crash on another friend’s sofa. Hours later, they would climb over the stone fence surrounding Vaughn’s building, let themselves inside, wake the actor, and start again.

With two of the three writers hailing from the Chicago area, the finished Break- Up script, by Lavender’s account, turned into an ode to the city as much as anything else. The script provoked a bidding war, not least because Vaughn’s star was rising with the success of the comedies Old School and Dodgeball, and with the buzz for Wedding Crashers. Vaughn backed the hope of Garelick and Lavender to see the film through from start to finish and negotiated a role for them as coproducers. “It gave us the opportunity to be on set from call time to wrap every day,” Lavender says. “It also put us in meetings involving casting, production, and marketing that the writers normally wouldn’t have been in.” Vaughn also insisted that the film shoot on location in Chicago, thwarting the studio bean counters.

Today, it is hard to imagine Universal thinking that it got the bad end of the deal. When The Break-Up opens, it will be Vaughn’s first film since the blockbuster Wedding Crashers. It will also have been a year since the romantic saga of Vaughn and Aniston began, with no sign that the pop culture world is losing interest.

Back at the hotel deli, Lavender continues his nonstop account of the dates, names, and details of the past several years—the swirl of Hollywood events that have brought him to The Break-Up. His voice is mellow, but there is still that trademark speedy banter. From a faraway table, his memories might sound like a long hum. “This story begins my senior year,” he says. “That script started the dominoes, and the one thing I learned was never to stop writing. Every time I finished a script, I started another, and so each thing I’ve written has unlocked another series of doors. That’s what I meant when I said I believed I could write myself into rooms.”

I interrupt him with a question about his own hopes for The Break-Up after it makes its début. “I always think it’s premature as a writer to discuss it,” he says. “Because at this point the public hasn’t spoken yet, so we don’t know how well it will be received.” I ask about the buzz surrounding the film, and Lavender is just as terse. “People ask, ‘Is your head spinning?’” he says. “Well, to be honest, I can remember every day it took to get here.”

Put another way, The Break-Up is Lavender’s watershed, and he is clearly tamping down his anticipation. He is also in a tough spot. Lavender is a screenwriter suddenly near the top of his profession, despite the fact that hardly anyone has seen his work. His first movie, a dream realized, is set in his hometown, where scrutiny could get personal. Meanwhile, The Break-Up will have a multimillion-dollar publicity blitz, all but guaranteeing that nothing about the movie, good or bad, will pass quietly.

Several weeks later, after his vacation, Lavender calls on a blustery winter afternoon to say the studio is changing The Break-Up’s release date, pushing it back from next winter to this June—a summer movie, maybe even a summer blockbuster. You’re charmed, I say. “Honestly,” he says. “We have to have a great movie before anything else.” Lavender’s voice is soft, as if he were describing plans for a casual weekend. And then he changes the subject.

Hollywood coming to Bullhead City in June

Found here

BULLHEAD CITY - Hollywood comes to Bullhead City for a day or two next month, when scenes from a new movie “Into the Wild” will be filmed here, as well as Laughlin, Topock and Kingman, according to Steve Johnson, Bullhead City public information officer.

The movie will be directed by Sean Penn and will star Emile Hirsch as Christopher McCandless.

Catherine Keener and Vince Vaughn will co-star.

“Into the Wild” is based on the 1996 non-fiction best-selling book by the same name, written by Jon Krakauer.

McCandless was an affluent, educated young man who left his old life behind to live off the land and eventually end up in the Alaskan wilderness, where he died.

The man's odyssey was chronicled in letters to friends.

“For about two years, he traveled around and he spent ... the greatest amount of time in Bullhead City,” Johnson said.

“(He) commented to somebody in a letter that he liked Bullhead - liked the wide-open space, the river and all that.”

“And what he did was he worked at McDonald's and camped out in the desert,” according to Johnson, who is currently reading the book.

“He liked hanging around with dispossessed people, the transients,” Johnson said.

“He didn't keep his driver's license, didn't use his Social Security number ... he rejected society,” according to Johnson.

McCandless only spent a few weeks in Bullhead City - just enough time to earn some money to fund his Alaska journey, Johnson said.

The film's location managers have been scouting sites, and it's rumored Penn has been here as well, according to Johnson.

“Where they're going to go, when they're actually going to do it, is all yet to be decided,” he said.

“They've been here several times. As they got closer to a date, they contacted us and said, ‘here's what we need. What do we do to make this happen?'”

“Basically, we need to know what they're doing so we can help them out,” Johnson said.

“They're going to need traffic control for the street scenes.” One of the areas of interest to the location managers is Highway 68 as it enters Bullhead City, according to Johnson.

This won't be the first time the area's served as a backdrop for movies. 2003's “View from the Top” had scenes shot at Laughlin Bullhead International Airport, Lake Havasu and Golden Valley.

The film starred Gwyneth Paltrow and Rob Lowe as flight attendants.

“Into the Wild” will be Penn's first directing job in five years. The movie is being produced by Art Linson and Bill Pohlad, who was executive producer of “Brokeback Mountain.”

“Into the Wild” will be distributed by Paramount Pictures' specialty division.

Vince Vaughn talks about his comedy with Jennifer Aniston, ''"The Break-Up",'' plus other projects

by Joshua Rich
Entertainment Weekly
Found Here

Entertainment Weekly caught up with Vince Vaughn late last week — in Vegas, baby! Mum was the word on his personal life (though, really, is there anything we don't know these days?). But between doubling down on 11 and dropping by the ShoWest convention, where he was being honored as Comedy Star of the Year, Hollywood's hottest funnyman filled us in on '"The Break-Up"' (his comedy with Jennifer Aniston), other upcoming projects, and his NCAA basketball tournament pick.

Are you still in the editing room on "The Break-Up"?
Yeah, we're still finishing up.... And then I'll do a movie with David Dobkin, who directed Wedding Crashers, called Fred Claus. It's a Christmas movie. I love David. He's just someone who I have similar sensibilities with. Even when we were doing [the 1998 indie] Clay Pigeons we had a great time. So it's nice to work with someone who you kind of share tastes with.

That's the one where you play Santa's cranky brother. Where's that going to shoot?
We're not sure.... We have to build the North Pole. So we're looking for a place that's big enough.

There's all sorts of other movies that I've heard you're going to be in.
Really? Because those are the only ones.

Do you have a sense that you've been bombarded with offers recently?
Not really. I don't own a cell phone and I bought a place that I've been living in in Chicago. I mean, I've been [in L.A.] working and staying with my sister a lot, and I talk to my agents, but I haven't been focused on [other opportunities] that much.... I'm not very good at multitasking, you know, having three or four or five projects going at once. I'm much better at just sort of submerging myself in one thing and trying to focus on it.

What's up with Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show, which you took on tour last fall?
We're editing the documentary, 30 Days and 30 Nights — it's really funny. And in between finishing up "The Break-Up" and going into production on Fred Claus, I'd like to go and hit some cities that I hadn't been to.... I really enjoy going to different places in America, [but] it won't be 30 days and 30 nights again. [Laughs.]

Yeah, how did that go?
It was great. You know, I was never in a band or anything, so I didn't realize what a grueling schedule it was to every night have to get up and perform. I can see why people take a day off every three or four days. We worked every day. So it was sort of ambitious in that I wanted to go to as many places as we could because I didn't want to waste a lot of time. But we'll go out and do a tour, I don't know how long it will be, but we'll hit five or six cities, maybe more — it depends on what time permits.

Cool. So who you got in the tournament?
I'd like to see Illinois win. They got close last year and [coach Bruce Weber] has done a good job this year with this team — they weren't supposed to do much, they lost a couple of guys. So, yeah, I hope they do well. [Editor's note: Illinois was bumped out of the tournament two days later, but we still think Vince is money.]

Swingers explain their film's magic, 10 years on

Aspen Daily News

Ten years after a then little-known movie called "Swingers" was released, writer/actor Jon Favreau, actor Vince Vaughn and director Doug Liman reunited in the St. Regis Ballroom to celebrate what they refer to as the "slow-burning success" of a comedy about camaraderie, coolness and chasing girls.

The independent film -- shot in 20 days on a $250,000 budget -- achieved limited success at the box office after initial release. But, as months turned into years, the film gained a following. Eventually, a phrase from the film ("so money") became as common as the growing independent film culture.

During Saturday night's Comedy Fest panel discussion, the trio talked about the three-week journey it took to create the movie, and the roller coaster of events that ensued in producing a low-budget film.

"There were points when the cops were literally going to arrest us if we didn't shut down filming," said Liman. "There was a subtlety of emotion that was delivered under insane, insane conditions."

Filming in unapproved locations, the trio said they would set up shop in bars that were still open to the public and in diners that were serving breakfast, and drive down highways in which traffic was freely flowing.

A baby pulled from a car stopped at a red light was the only paid extra in the movie, replacing a 3-year-old hired through a casting service that turned out to be too old, as well as the "ugliest baby you've ever seen," said Favreau.

But producing the movie was not all theatrics.

Writer Favreau said he had been going through a difficult time in his life, after leaving love behind, and his character in the movie dealt with the self-esteem issues he was also experiencing.

"People get hooked onto the wrong message from the film, like how to get a girl in bed," said Favreau. "But really motivating the film is the characters' love for each other and they are longing for a companionship."

And for a film that focused largely on how to score dates and get over an ex, the panel said it really paid tribute to femininity and the way men deal with the opposite sex.

"We're dressed up, looked like the s-t, pretending we're in a Scorsese movie, but zoom in and we're really just scared," said Favreau.

Vaughn also agreed that a central theme was the nuances of masculinity.

"It's truthful and genuine because at that time these guys talked about girls a lot more than they got girls. They played video games, and they listened to that kind of music," said Vaughn. "By talking about women it was exposing male innocence for what it is."

Just as Favreau's character discovers that the path to finding love is to stop looking for it, Vaughn offered advice on relationships as well.

"Be yourself. If you have a connection with someone, great, but if you don't, move on," said Vaughn. "You are who you are, be yourself, that's the only way to go through stuff."

Well, Mr. Vaughn, I'm a hard worker, smart, loyal, honest...

Do I get the job??

This magnificent photo is from the current issue of Stop Smiling (the magazine for high-minded lowlifes).

The current issue is about Chicago and Vince is on one of the three different covers. All of the photos can be found in the gallery and the article is below.

THE DOOR IS OPEN

The Stop Smiling Interview with Vince Vaughn

BY JAMES HUGHES / PHOTOGRAPHY BY ZEN SEKIZAWA

While the two top-grossing films of the summer were fruitful returns to outer space for perennial favorites George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, the season will be remembered for an entirely different reason: the return of the R-rated comedy. With admissions down 13 percent over summer 2004, according to the Hollywood Reporter, studios and analysts were left searching for a silver lining. The biggest winner: Wedding Crashers, an adult comedy starring Chicago's own Vince Vaughn and frequent co-star Owen Wilson, which became the highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all time, with over $200 million in earnings. Add to Vaughn's successful season a supporting role in the action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith, another overachiever (to the tune of $180 million), and one thing becomes abundantly clear: the tradition of Chicago supplying the industry with quality comedic talent continues.

Born in Minneapolis in 1970, Vaughn moved with his family to Illinois in the mid-'80s, eventually settling in the North Shore suburb of Lake Forest. It was there that he began performing. While his family encouraged the usual public school outlets - school plays and talent shows - Vaughn had larger ambitions. While shadowing a high school friend's audition at a Chicago casting session, he was given his first chance. "The casting director asked me to read for the part, and I ended up getting cast in this industrial film that was later shown in health classes," Vaughn told us recently in Chicago. "I was something like a boyfriend who was mad at my girlfriend because she wouldn't sleep with me." Much of Vaughn's early work - straddling exercise equipment for a Sears Roebuck infomercial, appearing in a spot for Indiana Farm Insurance - was instrumental in getting him noticed, but he wanted to expand beyond commercial work in the Midwest. In 1988, he headed for Hollywood, eventually picking up supporting roles in after-school specials and sitcoms, while remaining largely unaccustomed to industry protocol. "My first headshots were of me holding a tennis racket, me with glasses on holding a phone. I had no idea what these shots were," Vaughn said. "I just wanted to act."
After years of paying dues in bit parts, Vaughn and fellow actor Jon Favreau sketched out a story about a circle of self-deprecating L.A. actors over-compensating for their lack of work by inflating their social lives to mythic heights. Swingers (1996) was written by Favreau and directed by Doug Liman, who operated the camera himself through Los Feliz nightclubs as the actors worked the room and launched into epic rants about the rules of dating. Vaughn was the undisputed standout as Trent, a brash but disarming sidekick who rattles off each line with the immediacy of a coach giving a fourth-quarter pep talk. Audiences embraced the film's quotable dialogue, throwback soundtrack and refreshing editing style. Directors also took notice of Vaughn's command onscreen. Focusing for a while on darker material with the likes of Steven Spielberg (The Lost World), Gus Van Sant (Psycho) and Tarsem Singh (The Cell), Vaughn decided to move back into comedy, most notably as the ringleader of an aging frat house in 2003's Old School. As a tribute to the movie, a USA Today article from May 2004 dubbed Vaughn's crew of recurring co-stars "the Frat Pack." The alumni - Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller and Luke and Owen Wilson among them - would cross paths in a string of 2004 buddy pictures and remakes (Starsky & Hutch, Dodgeball and Anchorman) before graduating to the ranks of blockbuster with Wedding Crashers in 2005.

With his next project - the romantic comedy "The Break-Up" - set in Chicago, and the West Coast-based actor bracing for a move back to the Windy City, STOP SMILING got a preview of Vaughn's homecoming at a hotel on North Michigan Avenue this past October.

Stop Smiling: What's been the reaction to you leaving the West Coast for Chicago?
Vince Vaughn: No one really says anything. People are more curious about it, but I'm not really in many social settings with actors. I love actors, and there's a lot of them I respect and like, but I also like people who do something different. For me it's fun to hear other perspectives. One of the things I like about Chicago is that it's not driven by a fashion industry, whereas in Los Angeles, everyone is in that industry to some degree. I kind of like hearing about people who work in a completely different background. Chicago is the Second City not because of New York, but because it burned down and was rebuilt. There's an optimism and friendliness here.

SS: Does it worry you that every step you take in Chicago is documented in the press?

VV: Where the tabloids are concerned, I've never really been in the situation I'm in right now, as far as being followed. I've always managed to be an actor and be recognized, but I've never been covered in this way. I always look at it as them doing their job, it's not personal. That's not to say that it can't be unpleasant sometimes. On one hand, especially being from the Midwest, I can't help but think, "Oh, poor actor. Poor movie star. How exhausting to get paid money to do what you love and have people follow you." I completely understand that. But when lines are crossed - for example, if you're driving and they try to steer you off the road or cut in front of you because there's such a big financial reward for getting these shots, then it becomes a safety issue. You can't really say that publicly as much, because people will say you chose to be in the public eye and this is what comes with it. I think there's some truth to that. But it's also true that boundaries are crossed. That said, you have to take it with a grain of salt and laugh at it. It's unfortunate, because, especially when it's kids, I like when people have something to say or want to strike up a conversation about movies. I can enjoy that a lot. You're thankful people like your work.

SS: After high school, you moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actor. How was the transition?

VV: I moved in 1988. My parents insisted I sign up for community college while I was there. I lasted two weeks, and never went to college after that. I just got an agent and started auditioning. I was discouraged, getting turned down for a year. Then I got an after-school special, some small parts on sitcoms. Maybe I'd get a lead guest star, but otherwise it was spurts.

I got a call from my manager that I was getting a part in this movie Rudy. They were filming in South Bend, Indiana, and having a hard time casting locals for the part, so they were looking at tapes from L.A. It was a weird coincidence that I got it. I went to South Bend and I knew Jon Favreau, who had a larger part in the movie. Most of my scenes in the movie were cut. I was disappointed, but Favreau and I became friends.

We lived in L.A. together. Favreau was dating a girl in Chicago and he was depressed about leaving her behind. I'd take him out at night. The dating scene in L.A., even to this day, is very different than Chicago. A lot of wasted energy goes into it - you have to act like you're not interested there. It's a strange ritual. But the kind of places I liked hanging out in were different. I would go to see the lounge act Marty & Elayne at the Dresden or the Derby, where these ex-punk bands had now become swing bands. I liked the atmosphere at these places - the people were friendly, it was more conversational. That's where I took Favreau, and I gave him some encouragement and advice about talking to girls. Years went by and I said to Favreau, "I'm really frustrated. I don't like being reactive and waiting to go audition, especially when it's material I'm not connecting with. It's not truthful or interesting. I'm gonna write a movie for us." So I started writing a screenplay. I got about 90 pages in. Two weeks later, Favreau came to me with a finished screenplay, which was Swingers. In looking at my screenplay, it was oversincere and had an inflated importance compared to the events that were taking place. Like most young people when you're starting to write, it's all so profound. When I read Swingers, it was based on our experience, but exaggerated for comedy. As soon as I read it, I stopped writing my project and said, "This is great. We gotta make this."

Then Jon and I began the journey of trying to raise the money to get the movie set up. We found Doug Liman, who wanted to direct the movie and help with funding. He had people who wanted to sponsor him for $250,000. For that price, we could make the movie. And Favreau really stuck up for all of us to get to play the parts he wrote for us. So we went to a lot of the places we really did hang out in and asked if we could shoot there. Most people agreed. They said they couldn't shut down or lose business over it, so we were allowed to shoot while the bar was open. We benefited from having real patrons in the frame.

The thing about Los Angeles is that it's not very cool to look interested - it's not cool to act like you're really trying at something. So here we were, doing our makeup on the set, setting up the cameras, and we had all these kids rolling their eyes at us, like, "Look at these nerds." For them, it's better to act like you're not that concerned about doing well. We made the movie, really just hoping to get the thing shot and finished. We had no grand plan, other than getting into Sundance, which we didn't. But we had a screening for it, and we sold the movie. It did okay domestically, but it really got its legs afterwards on DVD or, before that, on video and cable. At the time, the pendulum in music had swung so far that things became androgynous and rap had gone real aggressive. It swung back to men in suits, women in dresses and a kind of throwback romance. People liked that. This was a small community in Los Feliz that we had no hand in starting, we were just there observing it. But it got so popular, and we were able to get it out there.

SS: After Swingers, there was an effort to steer you into a leading man role. Were you comfortable with that?

VV: I didn't have anything to balance stuff on. I'd done Swingers and been offered a lot of roles that were similar in spirit, or bigger films. Everyone said I was funny and charming, and I thought, "I don't want to be known as that. I have to take roles that are really opposite of that." I did Clay Pigeons, and the role was a funny guy who's charming, but then he's really dark and starts cutting girls up. In my mind, that destroyed the myth of that character.

SS: How about getting involved in larger projects?

VV: I wasn't motivated to do bigger movies, because I didn't like any of them. So I did smaller films without realizing at the time that not many people knew who I was. I started playing more-traditional villains and bad guys. Suddenly I found that when I wanted to go back and do comedy, I couldn't get hired. Studios were saying I wasn't funny and I would get offered villains instead. Even after Old School, there was still a reluctance to hire me in a comedy, because I think you're known for whatever you've done most recently. I made a real effort to do comedies, the kind that are grounded in reality and influenced by the films I watched growing up, especially from the '70s, where the characters were flawed. Even with Dodgeball, it's a family comedy, but you get layers to it that make it a little more effective because there are some flawed characters that people can relate to.

With Wedding Crashers, the studio left us alone. We all knew the director. One thing that's great about New Line is that they're one of the few studios left that really love movies. The movie industry originally was kind of circus people, and people with life experience. As it's developed now, you get a lot of kids - and not to come off like I'm knocking it down - but kids who come from colleges and go the corporate route and approach it from the business perspective. They really know film, but they don't love movies. They see it as a place to be profitable, and maybe think it's fun. They like movies, but they don't love movies. When it comes to wanting to make movies and take chances, New Line is the best. I would do stuff in dailies on Crashers and think, "I'm sure I'm gonna hear notes on this shit." And they came in laughing.

SS: Wedding Crashers was last summer's highest-grossing comedy. What drove its success?

VV: I think people wanted to see an R-rated comedy that wasn't just language based, but situation based. Whether it's the hand-job scene or being tied to the bed - the situations make it more R than shocking language. I think there's such a calculated process with PG-13 and figuring out what can and can't be advertised. We just had fun and our movie wasn't about people who, on the surface, are characters you can root for. Because it did have an innocence to it, with a reckless abandon that I think audiences really responded to. Now in Hollywood there's a movement to make R comedies. But it comes from the wrong place. They always think it's the genre that's topical, not the specific story that takes place within that genre. You can't just go in and say, "Let's make crazy R-rated comedies." It's like when Unforgiven came out, there was a slew of westerns. But they couldn't match the story. They would follow the bullets and have crazy camera shots versus establishing characters that you were worried about, or at least knew what was at stake for them, and then putting them in situations of life or death. But I feel like, a lot of times, given how things are, studios react more to what's been successful and focus on the wrong thing. They don't quite understand what is it that makes something get over. Even in the casting of actors and actresses - with young actresses, you see a lot of girls and their focus is being as pretty in a traditional sense as they can be, even to the extent of plastic surgery. When you look at the great actresses, like Meryl Streep or Sissy Spacek, none of them are necessarily women you would see on the cover of a magazine. I think it's because their emotional truth is so great, you connect to them and you take a journey with them.

SS: How can you tell when a project is really working?

VV: I used to watch movies with my dad, and he would always say, "Oh, that's bullshit. That would never happen." And the movie was over for him at that moment. "That ain't how it goes down, Vince!" That became my litmus for acting and watching films. "Do you buy it?" For me, it's always been more fascinating to start someone in an extreme place and have them move just a little bit by the end, just a glimmer of hope - the door is open, they could go in this direction. But it's not wrapped up entirely. That, versus taking someone and making a complete transformation and having everything fall into their life perfectly at the end. I liked those kinds of movies where you start in one place and leave with the possibility of things changing. In life, you're always in transition. Nothing is ever completely over. There will be more good times and more bad times to come, you're just talking about this one transition.

SS: That's consistent with your characters, because you often play someone who's encouraging your co-stars or freeing them up to get at what they want. Is that something you seek out in scripts, or something that you develop on the set or with the director?

VV: On some level, I unconsciously bring that specific thing. In Wedding Crashers, it's a little different because I'm being put upon the whole movie. I'm telling Owen Wilson not to go. I'm giving him the wrong message, that we shouldn't really care about these girls, then I'm having events happen to me that I'm forced to deal with, and I'm not encouraging him, I'm saying, "What's wrong with the way we live?"

SS: In Thumbsucker, you play a debate coach trying to break through to a student because he sees potential there.

VV: There was even a flaw there, in that the teacher might even be getting a crush on the kid. I played that a little bit. It was in the screenplay more so that the teacher was hitting on the kid, but I didn't want to go so overtly with it. It was played in a way that is not necessarily sexual, but this is a teacher that obviously has invested a lot into these kids, and why does this matter so much to him? He's really pressuring his student to be the best, so he's living vicariously through him and telling him to do things that my character isn't comfortable doing. It's not sexual, but it's a codependent relationship. He's deficient and not self-reliant and there's an imbalance there. It's not just that the kid went wrong, it's that the teacher was crossing boundaries for what this relationship was.

SS: How were your own experiences in school?

VV: When I was younger in school, I had learning disabilities. I was tested for ADD. I had to go to classes where they asked questions like, "Vince, where does paper come from?" I felt a real need to give the right answer, or they might have thought something was wrong with me. Here I was, seven years old, and I'd say, "From trees." They would ask, "Is that it?" I'd say, "No, they put it through some type of machinery and then there's paper." I was doing everything to appear normal, because I was terrified that I was going to be sent away from school. I had that feeling of being in school and seeing everyone have sack lunches and being happy and having their day planned out, but knowing that one period a day, I would have to go to this classroom. It was depressing, when they'd call your name over the intercom and say, "Vince Vaughn to Mrs. Cross's office," and all the kids would look at you like there's something wrong.

SS: Was that how you were treated by the other students?

VV: I was always very well liked because I always had a good sense of humor and could joke around. But a lot of the kids that were in this class were not very popular. At first I was sort of mean to the kids. It was like, "What am I doing at age seven playing Candyland?" So I was mean because I was almost denying that I had learning disabilities. Then I became very protective of the kids, and I really liked them and lured them over to play kickball at recess. I'd tell everyone they were on my team, what's the problem? I stuck up for them and looked out for them. I could switch from being insecure, and then identify with how I could feel small inside, but not allow it to feel that way. It's like the tallest kid in school who would never talk because she sticks out already - she doesn't want to raise her hand and talk more.

SS: How did your family react to these classes you were taking?

VV: I was lucky because my dad said, "You're not taking Ritalin. You're not going through life doped up, you won't process anything." He refused to let me take Ritalin. When I read Thumbsucker, I could identify with those types of things - a family trying to do its best to navigate without a lot of information, what's the right way to handle it. It was difficult at times, words used to move around on me. If you're deficient in some areas, you probably have more aptitude in other areas. You just need to find where those areas are. Some people learn differently. But you learn a great work ethic, that by nature you have to work harder, and I think that you can then have more acute perception in other areas. But the big thing is that I was lucky enough to have parents who kept my self-confidence and made me feel like I could accomplish something. What happens to a kid who doesn't have that voice? Especially if you're giving a kid medicine, you're telling him he's sick. They don't have someone telling them they're smart or that they can do something. There's someone who could maybe go on and do something great, or have a high quality of life, that's not going to be given that chance. There are kids out there that are feeling that. I know that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you're made to go to that class.

FROM HOLLYWOOD TO THE HEARTLAND

On October 11th, the Vince Vaughn Wild West Comedy Show wrapped up its 30th show in 30 nights at the Vic Theatre in Chicago. The tour featured four national touring comedians (Bret Ernst, John Caparulo, Ahmed Ahmed and Sebastian Maniscalco) from the Los Angeles Comedy Store, with Vaughn serving as master of ceremonies. A documentary about the tour is currently in the works.

SS: With the Vince Vaughn Wild West Comedy Show, you were able to reach people who don't often get a full-scale comedy show in their town. Did the tour fulfill your expectations?

VV: I think I had a much more romanticized notion, as far as seeing the country. It really came out of inexperience on my part. For some reason, 30 dates in 30 nights rang in my head and I thought, "That's great. From Hollywood to the Heartland." Also, I'd get a chance to go through the South on the way to where I'm from, the Midwest. But, by playing a different venue every night, we didn't really get much time to spend anywhere, especially when the drives were extremely long. Even when they weren't, it didn't account for getting out and seeing much, just glances from the bus window. But, as far as hitting the most places possible, it was effective. That was the fun part - getting a chance to go to the kinds of towns that don't normally get that kind of entertainment. It was also good for the comedians to go to places where they're not from and see how their material related to different crowds. Regionally, some of the struggles are the same, it's just with a different accent. They'd have to change their set-ups if a place didn't have what they were talking about. If you have a sense of humor about yourself and are self-deprecating, it's easier for people to hear things. Otherwise you come off threatening, as if you're arrogant about whatever your background is and it's cooler than everyone else's.

When these comedians work out material at a place like the Comedy Store during the weekdays, you sometimes only have 20 people in the room. So there's an adjustment to playing a larger room, like most of the venues we were in. But they all did really well. They all had their own ways of getting in, and other than that they weren't gimmick comics and the jokes were about their life experiences. They were hard on themselves. The thing I was most impressed with was the camaraderie that they had. I think everyone wants to strive to do their best, but they weren't competitive with each other - they were almost protective of each other, because the environment they were going into was so unknown.

SS: You've done a little stand-up here and there, but did you ever pursue it seriously?

VV: I never had a calling for it. I much preferred situation comedy, particularly awkward situations. But I've always had respect for comedians. When I was younger, there was "The Tonight Show" and "Late Night" and they had a lot more stand-up. There was a time there in the '80s and '90s where a lot of stand-ups were getting exposure and it would change their lives. Nowadays it's interesting because most of the talk show hosts were stand-ups, but they don't really have stand-ups onstage all that much. This is a kind of depression time for stand-up comedians. They're not getting the opportunities they once did. So I wanted to get exposure for some guys who obviously chose stand-up because it's really what they like. There's something pure about the art form - you're just up there by yourself with a microphone, standing in front of a crowd and trying to connect. I respect that purity.

GQ Article

Here's the article from GQ.

Scene One: Vince Does His Best Al Roker

If Vince Vaughn weren't Vince Vaughn, it would seem a little creepy for him to be standing around watching half-naked little kids splashing each other in a fountain in a public park. A lone male figure at the periphery, slightly pale, sweating, watching a kid in a bathing suit make for the water—probably an individual to whom Megan's Law should apply.

He's a robust character—six feet five inches, in jeans and a snap-button cowboy shirt, handsome, strong-looking—but just a little, if not depraved, nocturnal for the environment. If VV weren't VV, people would probably clutch their children and walk briskly toward safety. But since he is W, the parents of the kid in the bathing suit ask if they can get a picture with him. And seeing that it's okay to approach, the others, until now circling warily, go in for the kill. A man from a pawnshop in a white knee-length T-shirt gets an autograph ("Sign that shit to Jackie," he says); a teenage boy in a rakishly angled White Sox cap just wants a bro hug; a middle-aged woman in fuzzy pink fleece paces back and forth in tiny steps before saying, "I'm from Nova Scotia?" This, she hopes, will be dispensation enough.

"Come here, Nova Scotia," VV says, gathering her up in his arms like a sexy, subversive Al Roker. "You had me at hello."

VV undergoes a minor transformation when he's around the general public, the seekers of bro hugs and camera-phone pictures. He slips into character, distributing patter and slightly cocked affection without making anyone feel bad about asking for it.

"Get in here, sweetheart," he says to a girl in platform shoes and a miniskirt, as her boyfriend takes their picture. "She's a great girl," he says to the boyfriend, giving him a wink. "I like where your head's at."

I'm not saying there isn't a little fatigue back there behind the curtain while he's being Vince Vaughn. That, like a department-store Santa Claus who smells faintly of bourbon, he doesn't seem sometimes to be going through the motions. But it's a violation of his principles to let on as much. He believes in the covenant—he works for these people, kind of belongs to them, and so is obligated on occasion to really be that dude from the movies. It's like that scene in Wedding Crashers in which he's making balloon animals for a group of children, and one little bratty kid with blond hair says, "Make me a bicycle, clown!" And instead of hauling off and smacking the kid, he says, "All right, I'm going to make you a bicycle. But I don't want to make you a bicycle." VV gets paid to be an entertaining personality, and he'd find it unprofessional to get pissed off when people see him and say, "Make me a bicycle, clown!"

"I don't mind it, I really don't. Those guys were cool," he says, having extricated himself from the clusterfuck and now walking up a knoll toward Lake Michigan, glittering placidly on the horizon. "If you're stationary, people can kind of swarm on you. But if you keep moving, you're fine."

VV is spending this afternoon wandering around Millennium Park, the new municipal crown jewel of Chicago, a tract of former rail yards so strenuously parceled out and landscaped that it feels overlaid with an architect's blueprint. He has just finished shooting the movie "The Break-Up" here, with Jennifer Aniston, which he starred in and produced. He brought the production to Chicago because he wanted to shoot a film in his hometown. He was raised here, in the hushed, tree-lined, country-clubbed Risky Business suburbs north of the city, where, as he puts it, "kids were wearing Polo shirts at a young age." And he lives here now, as much as VV can be said to live anywhere (for instance, tomorrow he leaves for Iraq to tour American bases and screen Wedding Crashers; soon after his return, he begins filming a comedy with the director David O. Russell in L.A.).

"I don't always think things through all the way," he says. "But I sold my house in Los Angeles, and I bought a town house here, downtown. I was doing "The Break-Up" in Chicago. So it was like, I'm going; I might as well buy a place. I don't know how you feel, but I get really bored living in the same place forever. Once I get comfortable, I like to do something a little different. I like getting new information."

And what he means by "new information" is, I think, this: As distant as Vince can feel sometimes (when you're interviewing him, anyway), as tiresome as it can feel to be Vince Vaughn whether or not he's in the mood, he gets genuinely jazzed by witnessing regular people doing regular things. (For instance, he goes practically bananas when he sees a guy in the early stages of trying to pick up a young woman on a park bench.) His whole being changes when he's under the spell of the normal; it's like he just got out of the penitentiary or stepped off an alien spacecraft. His interest in quote unquote regular people may be kooky or even condescending, but it's genuine. When he says he's moving here to get "new information," he means new information about regular people, newer information than you can get in Hollywood, because everyone knows quote unquote regular people do not live in LA.

Stay with me here. This is VV's second go-round being a magazine cover guy. The first time, he was coming off the heels of Swingers. The young-buck period. The matinee-idol period. You should see his guns on the cover of the December 1998 issue of GQ. But his next slew of movies didn't really stick. Clay Pigeons; A Cool, Dry Place; Return to Paradise; Domestic Disturbance; a movie called The Cell, in which he played opposite Jennifer Lopez's paranormal psychotherapist (!). It's what VV would insist on calling his not dark period.

"They said, 'Vince, you should go do bigger movies so people know who you are, and then you can do these kinds of movies and open them,'" he says. "I didn't give a shit—I was in my twenties. And I wouldn't take any of it back. I learned from all of it."

Then, about three years ago, he reemerged, beginning with the movie Old School—slightly weathered, less shiny and cut, a few burgers down the road of life-with a new and entirely formed alter ego. A normal dude. Maybe a debased, unhinged, freakishly quick-witted normal dude, but still. And he inhabits this dude completely. Every line he says seems ad-libbed, like he doesn't need a script because he's just being himself. And it's something that connects on a pretty deep level to all the other regular dudes out there. Wedding Crashers was the movie of the summer, because no one thought you could make an R-rated blockbuster, keeping out all those marauding 15-year-olds and their disposable income. But what Vince Vaughn teaches us is there's a marauding 15-year-old living within most of us.

The reason it works (besides his being an excellent comedic actor) isn't that VV is normal. Normal people do not make out with the world's most famous recently divorced actress. It works because he seems to genuinely believe, as certain people between the coasts do, that one should aspire to be normal. That's what gives him that weird on-screen humility (more on that later). So even when he's stealing scenes, which he does with remarkable regularity (see especially Starsky & Hutch), he never appears to be grandstanding. It's not easy to do, and most actors don't even try.

A Brief Historical Interlude: The Frat Pack, from Reality Bites Through Wedding Crashers, i.e., the Ascendance of Vaughn

First there was Ben Stiller. The progenitor of the movable-parts ensemble regrettably called the Frat Pack-Stiller, the Wilson brothers, Will Ferrell. Stiller was pretty funny. Not like Eddie Murphy/Bill Murray/South Park funny, but he had a good run: Reality Bites (admit it: when it came out, it seemed cool), There's Something About Mary, and especially Meet the Parents. Stiller was good in roles that took a kind of unattractive quality- a simmering, ever present frustration with other people, a modest sense of superiority, a nebbishness—and allowed the world to punish him for it in a funny way. But after a while, he didn't seem so keen on being unattractive. And that's a problem in a comedy. It's been noted that, beginning with Zoolander and continuing through Starsky & Hutch and Dodgeball, Stiller seemed to be making fun of vanity while actually being kind of vain. He was, in short, a little too ripped to be a comedian. Will Ferrell's naked flabby ass in Old School is funny. Really great pecs: never funny.

Wedding Crashers is the post-Stiller Meet the Parents (it even has the same plot, kind of). Certain people will argue that Wedding Crashers was Owen Wilson's movie. These people are wrong. And not just because Wilson was the straight man and Vince Vaughn got to do the dinner-table jerk-off scene and the late-night-bedroom scene with the gay brother. Owen Wilson is funny. He's created a brilliant Owen Wilson character—dreamy, almost creepily credulous, the drawly delivery, the sad eyes, the absurdity of just how serious he seems. But we've seen it a lot, and sometimes even he seems to be getting bored by it. And occasionally he appears, not unlike Stiller, to like the cut of his own jib. Whenever he showed up in Wedding Crashers, you wondered: Does he get his hair highlighted at the same place Meg Ryan does?

When presented with this theory, Todd Phillips, who directed both actors (Old School and Starsky & Hutch), says, "I understand what you're saying, although I don't think Owen is that way. I think there are other, better examples." I ask if he means Stiller, and he talks about something else.

It's not just that Vince Vaughn doesn't frost his hair or whiten his teeth or eat a raw-foods diet. He doesn't have a trace of self-consciousness. He never looks desperate for attention. You never get the feeling that he's watching himself, admiring himself, which always seems to ruin things as far as acting goes. Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, etc.—they have an almost awesome beauty, an ability to seem like static advertisements for themselves even as they're machine-gunning people in abandoned department stores. Their talent is to be so fucking flawless, so stupendously unhuman, that we can, for a while, unload our own humanity while we watch them. But you're never really going to laugh laugh while you're watching them in a movie (or bawl your eyes out, either) the way you will with someone like Vince Vaughn. Who is, granted, abnormally good-looking himself but also comparatively out of control, addled, a prisoner to his appetites and foibles. It was when Stiller crossed that golden line from one (foibles) to the other (pecs) that he stopped being that funny. "The thing about Vince is that he makes it look effortless," Phillips says. "I think that's why audiences love him. I mean, look at Mr. and Mrs. Smith. It's a good movie. But Vince comes on, and you're just like, 'Ah, we're in good hands now.'"

Scene Two: Vince Vaughn Eats Two Hot Dogs and a Large Fries

At the Wieners Circle, the venerable Chicago hot-dog restaurant where young drunk white kids come to be safely, dependably, and authentically abused by the young sassy black women who work there, VV is not shy about scarfing down two char dogs with everything—in Chicago, that means pickles, onions, tomatoes, relish, and the underappreciated celery salt. And a large fries. And three root beers. Not to overanalyze, but drinking three root beers is kind of a departure from what other people in his situation—the wheatgrassers out in Los Angeles—would do. (Like, for example, the last actor who was profiled for the cover of this magazine [November], who showed the writer his juicer and protein powder.) W is a man of appetites, and he looks like it. He’s not a guy who puts his face on for you. His is the same crusty, bleary, three-day-growth charm as Belushi or Bill Murray or Walter Matthau, all men who look right in bathrobes at 1 p.m.

"I brought a friend to the set one day," one of the crew members on "The Break-Up" said. "And she said he looked dissolute. I had to go look it up. But that's what he looks like: dissolute."

"I don't like going to the gym, getting on a treadmill, and putting on my Discman," VV says. “That’s not my idea of a good time. I like hiking or going outside for a half hour. I like being healthy. But I don't like the gym."

He quit smoking seven months ago, and he's put on fifteen pounds since then.

"What do I miss about smoking?" he says. "The reality is: nothing. Because it's such a trick, cigarettes. It's not a depressant; it's a stimulant. It makes you more anxious. But there's a psychological thing where it makes you feel like you're relaxing. And maybe just out of insecurity, it becomes part of your personality. It's always in your hand. You're always talking with it. I think you have to just kind of relearn yourself without it."

But what about other appetites? Is it true you are a friend to Budweiser?

"Well, Wedding Crashers had a product-placement deal with Budweiser that I had nothing to do with," he says. "And they liked Wedding Crashers, so when we did "The Break-Up", we went to them again."

That's a yes. But I meant more...personally.

"When I was younger, I used to go out a lot. But not anymore as much. I've been working so much. And I never really saw myself that way."

Todd Phillips takes the same line. Here he is on Vince's work ethic: "There's this misconception about Vince that he's sort of this hard-partying guy, when he really is one of the great actors of this generation."

And on his presence on the set: "He's not some hard-partying guy; he's an actor who wants to end up in a good movie."

And once more, this time on what he does when they hang out: "With Vince, you just go out, have dinner; you know, he's not like this really party guy."

I'm not saying dissolute. I'm just saying: defensive.

Scene Three: Vince Vaughn (Sort of) Discusses Sex with Jennifer Aniston

One morning he shows up at a diner, in a working-class suburb, that he used to go to when he was in high school, late at night, when everyone was drunk. He rolls into the parking lot in a pearlescent Lincoln Town Car, an appropriate vehicle for him: masculine, a little too big, luxury of a type that is no longer fashionable. He orders two eggs over easy, bacon, white toast, hash browns.

Are you dating anyone?

"Not seriously."

Going on dates?

"I hate dates. I don't like even the concept. It's like that rant I give in Crashers. Isn't the whole point to kind of see if you can be comfortable around someone and if there's a connection? The nature of a date is so formal, it kind of stifles that."

What are your relationship issues?

"Mine are probably the same as most other people's, where you have your trust issues. Then you have your own issues with being faithful. And then you kind of balance it with saying maybe it'd be good to be with someone, and then you say maybe it'd be good to be open to stuff. The one thing I've sort of learned is there's no real planning in any of it. The only real thing you can do is be honest and be yourself."

But you're right in the middle of some very public relationship issues. First you shoot Mr. and Mrs. Smith with Brad Pitt. Then you shoot "The Break-Up" with Jennifer Aniston. Then people whisper about how maybe the world's most famous recently divorced woman is spending lots of time in your hotel room. And then there's a picture in People magazine of you kind of making out with the world's most famous recently divorced woman. How was life in the vortex of the Brad-Jennifer-Angelina-Vince-love-quadrangle tabloid war?

"That stuff is like, to me, people are doing their jobs. They're trying to sell magazines. I think it's kind of unfair. Things can be manipulated, taken out of context. But I try not to take it too seriously."

Well, it would be great if you just tell me what sex was like with Jennifer Aniston.

"Yeah. Exactly. But see, in my position, you're just like, whatever. There's nothing that can come out of talking about that stuff."

Scene Four: Vince Vaughn Says Why He Likes Forms of Endearment So Much

In September, VV begins a thirty-day stand-up tour called Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show that consists of thirty shows in thirty nights. He's touring with four other comedians—all regulars at the Comedy Store and purveyors of fairly typical male-observational stand-up, the kind where you talk about Starbucks and women being crazy and how France is a pussy country. That he can draw 2,000 nonstalkers on a Monday night to see a bunch of guys you can watch on Sunset Boulevard any night of the year is a testament to, as one agent in the VIP section says, his juice.

Vince does some sketches with his friends and introduces the comics. He's funny, emanating goodwill, always appearing to cede the spotlight, like a midwestern boy should. He doesn't seem to be using a script and is totally at ease ad-libbing. "I just filmed a movie this summer in Chicago with Jennifer Aniston," he says to the audience. [Pause.] "I guess none of you heard about that."
After the show, there's a party on the roof, sponsored, of course, by Budweiser. A bunch of Hollywood executives are there, as is producer Joel Silver, director David O. Russell, and a swarm of guys who look like agents—youngish, well built, wearing expensive blazers. Vince stands off to the side with Dwight Yoakam, who's wearing a trucker hat and looks weary. Neither talks much, and they both seem comfortable with that. It is what men do.

Then, like a breath later, VV is doing what men usually do not do: talking about how much he likes the movie Terms of Endearment.

"That to me is like, what a movie is!" he says. "That scene where the kids come in and the mom says she's gonna die. And the one kid's being kind of a smart-ass, and she won't let him get away with it. And the other kid's real sad. It's so complicated, just like life. People don't have just one response. And it gets you, because it's real and you can feel what it would be like to be in that situation. Other movies, you feel manipulated, or it just doesn't seem real, and you're not invested. But not Terms of Endearment."

Vince is unquestionably masculine. He's not immediately intimate; he does his honest best not to be a typical narcissistic movie star, but he's more comfortable talking about his personal human condition as a performance than he is talking about it in person. Like: He lets the name of the world's most famous recently divorced actress cross his lips onstage, but never in conversation. In this way, he is kind of reminiscent of Johnny Carson, who was reticent and private while also being open and affable every single night in front of millions of people. If you've ever seen old footage of Carson when he's smoking a cigarette, talking to Dean Martin and some forgotten golfer who's wearing a royal blue blazer and everyone seems like he should have a scotch in his hand, that's the kind of vibe VV cultivates.

"A friend of mine who knows us both said we'd like each other because we both do what she calls 'chick talk,' " David O. Russell says. "Like talking about our emotions. I remember a couple of years ago, I went with my family to see The Wizard of Oz at the Hollywood Bowl. Every year they play the movie with a full orchestra. And I saw Vince standing by himself, to the side, when I was walking to the concessions area. And I went up to him. You know, the guy doesn't carry a cell phone. The guy drives a Trans Am. The guy does not have a posse. I think we're in different territory here from 99 percent of movie stars. We chatted for a while, just talking about how much we fucking love The Wizard of Oz. How it made us feel. We were going on and on and on about the movie and the music. And then this girl walked by and said, 'Excuse me, are you Vince Vaughn?' And he said, 'No,' but he said it in this Vince way, with like a little gleam in his eye. And then he said, 'Get over here, you.' And she went over to him, and I walked away. It was sort of sweet how he did it."

Scene Five: Vince Vaughn Does a Mini-Rant (But It's Still a Rant!)

When he walks into the hotel after the hot-dog lunch in Chicago, all the attention and brain waves momentarily disengage and refocus on him. He stayed here when he was shooting "The Break-Up", and the girls at the concierge desk remember him and twitter at his approach; he doles out personal affection in response (How are you, beautiful?). Waiting in the vast, dim, casino-like lobby are Sandra (his assistant-pal-manager) and a woman from the hotel, who wants him to sign some papers for reasons unknown.

Normally, they have this really great flavored tea out, he says. It's delicious. The berry tea is amazing. The hotel woman says, Oh, well, that's only out on Fridays, but I'm sure we could find some for you. A few minutes later, a man in a white tunic appears with carafes of tea, and everyone tries it and agrees the berry and mango flavors are delicious. Vince and the hotel woman talk. He seems interested in her kid and her cop husband. As happens between nice people who don't know each other that well, the conversation careens from dull/strange subject to dull/strange subject: baby names, Laundromats, Americans versus Europeans, the nap-friendly culture of Spain, and finally, bullfights. Here he finds some traction. He went to a bullfight in Madrid once, when he was on vacation with a friend.

"On one hand," he says, "I liked the tradition of it. The old men in the stands. The kind of macho thing. On the other hand— and I might sound like a guy my father would find ridiculous—but isn't it kind of fucked-up?"

He starts to warm up a little now, feeling his way into a bit. The hotel lady's eyes gleam, and a thought bubble appears over her head that reads: Oh Vince, please be entertaining so I can retell the story to my husband when I get home!

"First, these guys on horses come out and they throw spears into the bull. And they, like, wear him down. He's tired, the bull. Bleeding. The bull is basically near death. And then here comes the bullfighter in this, like, really tight suit."

He leaps up from the table and struts around with one hand in the air, accepting the adulation of the crowd with a down-turned smile, nodding his head in false humility.

"He's like, 'Yes, yes, my friends. I know. Thank you. I am frightened, but I shall do my best.' And meanwhile, here's this bull with, like, five spears sticking out of him."

The quotes above are from memory; no notes were taken during the iced-tea stop. Later, I call W and ask him if he'd mind performing it again so I can get it down right, or at least make it funny (it wasn't vintage VV, but it was better than rendered above).

"Oh man, I'm just stream of consciousness with those things," he says, sounding fried from the grind of doing nightly shows. "I can't even think of anything funny about bullfighters right now."

He clears his throat, hacks a little.

"But I will tell you that I have started smoking again. I was off for seven months. I think it's a reminder to me how strong it is, that I'm not someone who can just smoke four or five a day. I lost weight, though. Like for the romantic comedy, I quit smoking and put on about fifteen to twenty pounds? And now that I'm done, I've started smoking again, and I've taken the weight off very graciously."

Let us hope this is not a prelude to great pecs.
________________________________________________________________________________________
DEVIN FRIEDMAN lives in Rome.

From the upcoming GQ...

Here's an excerpt from the upcoming issue of GQ:

DUDE
Vince Vaughn is not coming off a thirty-seven-hour bender. He only acts that way. And that’s what has made him the funniest, most appealing man in Hollywood this year

By Devin Friedman

For the full article, pick up the December issue of GQ.

Scene One: Vince Does His Best Al Roker

If Vince Vaughn weren’t Vince Vaughn, it would seem a little creepy for him to be standing around watching half-naked little kids splashing each other in a fountain in a public park. A lone male figure at the periphery, slightly pale, sweating, watching a kid in a bathing suit make for the water—probably an individual to whom Megan’s Law should apply.

Bigger

He’s a robust character—six feet five inches, in jeans and a snap-button cowboy shirt, handsome, strong-looking—but just a little, if not depraved, nocturnal for the environment. If VV weren’t VV, people would probably clutch their children and walk briskly toward safety. But since he is VV, the parents of the kid in the bathing suit ask if they can get a picture with him. And seeing that it’s okay to approach, the others, until now circling warily, go in for the kill. A man from a pawnshop in a white knee-length T-shirt gets an autograph (“Sign that shit to Jackie,” he says); a teenage boy in a rakishly angled White Sox cap just wants a bro hug; a middle-aged woman in fuzzy pink fleece paces back and forth in tiny steps before saying, “I’m from Nova Scotia?” This, she hopes, will be dispensation enough.

“Come here, Nova Scotia,” VV says, gathering her up in his arms like a sexy, subversive Al Roker. “You had me at hello.”

VV undergoes a minor transformation when he’s around the general public, the seekers of bro hugs and camera-phone pictures. He slips into character, distributing patter and slightly cocked affection without making anyone feel bad about asking for it.

“Get in here, sweetheart,” he says to a girl in platform shoes and a miniskirt, as her boyfriend takes their picture. “She’s a great girl,” he says to the boyfriend, giving him a wink. “I like where your head’s at.”

I’m not saying there isn’t a little fatigue back there behind the curtain while he’s being Vince Vaughn. That, like a department-store Santa Claus who smells faintly of bourbon, he doesn’t seem sometimes to be going through the motions. But it’s a violation of his principles to let on as much. He believes in the covenant—he works for these people, kind of belongs to them, and so is obligated on occasion to really be that dude from the movies. It’s like that scene in Wedding Crashers in which he’s making balloon animals for a group of children, and one little bratty kid with blond hair says, “Make me a bicycle, clown!” And instead of hauling off and smacking the kid, he says, “All right, I’m going to make you a bicycle. But I don’t want to make you a bicycle.” VV gets paid to be an entertaining personality, and he’d find it unprofessional to get pissed off when people see him and say, “Make me a bicycle, clown!”

For the full article, pick up the December issue of GQ.

Aniston Joins the Guys

The man of the year is a woman?

By Karen Thomas, USA TODAY
Found here

For the first time in 10 years, GQ magazine is featuring a woman on one of three covers of the annual Men of the Year issue. That woman: Jennifer Aniston. (Related story: Aniston remains our favorite Friend)

Actor Vince Vaughn and rapper 50 Cent also are sharing GQ's 2005 honor. The covers will be distributed to subscribers randomly, and all three will be sold on newsstands Nov. 22.

In 2003, GQ started featuring women in the issue, but "we wanted to choose the one woman who we find most compelling," says articles editor Mark Healy. The decision to run topless photos of her, he says, was between the photographer and Aniston.

In what GQ is billing as its first ever Woman of the Year, the nomination is "an honor" for Aniston, says her spokesman, Stephen Huvane. The actress was "inspired" by photographer Peggy Sirota, he says. "Jennifer has always been interested in creating images that are inspired and different from what you may have seen before."

Aniston, 36, earned the 2005 title, Healy says, because she "exhibited a lot of poise, unbelievable amount of grace and good humor this year."

She tells GQ, "Look, I'm not de{filig}ned by this relationship (with Brad Pitt). I wasn't when I was in it, and I don't want to be in the aftermath of it."

Ever since the former Friends star announced the end of her marriage in January and endured weekly tabloid attention, she "showed the best of herself," Healy says.

And Aniston is "ending 2005 really strongly with good performances" in films that make her a worthy man of the year. Derailed, which opened in third place last weekend, is a departure for the actress, who usually is cast in romantic comedies.

The appeal of the other men of the year, according to Healy:

•Vince Vaughn. With the summer's movie hit, Wedding Crashers, Vaughn, 35, nailed the honor. "Once again, he was hilarious, charming and smart." Editors do recognize that there are more well-known stars, "but there's not one who better represents who our (readers) think is cool than Vince," recently photographed enjoying a weekend in Chicago with Aniston.

•50 Cent. That the 30-year-old rapper has the year's top-selling album, a best-selling autobiography and a new video game is just the start of his appeal. Now, he is crossing over into movies with the just-opened Get Rich or Die Tryin'. "He's one of those public figures we're endlessly fascinated by."

Healy "can't say" whether a female MOTY will become a regular part of GQ's annual issue. "Sometimes, when you think someone is as deserving as (Aniston), then you make room."

Now let's find the cover with Vince on it! I can't wait until the 22nd! Thanks, Lindsay for finding all three covers! :)

I Love Your Work

It's been awhile since we've heard anything about the film, I Love Your Work. I wrote something back in January about the problems they were having finding a distributor.

I just found out that it played in L.A. last week and will be playing in New York beginning December 2nd. Hopefully, it will be released on DVD soon. Vince's part is small, but it's always worth seeing him, even if it's only a couple of scenes.

Here's a review from the L.A. Times Calendar. And you can watch the trailer here.
Official site

Also, I've added some captures from the trailer in the gallery. Edit: Rebecca just sent me 23 better quality captures which are now in the gallery. Thanks so much, Rebecca!

Jon Favreau: Behind the scenes

By Gary Thompson
Philadelphia Daily News
Found here

Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, one time "Swingers" and archetypal Hollywood outsiders, are now the twin towers of the $200 million Hollywood blockbuster.

How did this happen?

Favreau said that in Vaughn's case, it was the moviegoing public finally catching up with how funny he is.

"Vince has succeeded by doing the opposite of what people are accused of doing, which is changing who they are in order to appeal to the masses. Vince is still doing the same goofy stuff he's always done - believe me, I've known him for 13 years," Favreau said. "But it's only since 'Old School' and 'Wedding Crashers' that audiences have started to embrace it."

Favreau's case is different. He's not a persona, like Vaughn. In their movies together, it was Favreau's quiet character who provided the emotional arc, and behind the scenes it was Favreau telling the story, writing the script.

Though he's got some chops as an actor, Favreau liked being the guy who told the story, and that's where he's made his mark - turning what could have been a throwaway Will Ferrell comedy "Elf" into a $275 million smash that charmed moviegoers of all ages.

He's followed that with "Zathura," Sony's entry into the insanely crowded fall schedule, a sci-fi adventure about two feuding brothers who bond when a strange board game takes them on an outer space advenure.

A lengthy chat with Favreau reveals what a smart, perceptive, intelligent guy he is - or, put another way, someone who agrees with me about so many things.

Like why "Zathura" is so much better than "Jumanji," its effects-choked predecessor, and why Favreau's old-school approach to fantasy (explosions, stunts, miniature models, guys in monster suits) makes his movies accessible and endearing to audiences.

"CGI made it possible to show anything, and the thinking became that because you can show anything to people, you should show everything," he said.

"I don't think you should. When you're working with real creatures that are molded or sculpted, for example, you have to use darkness and shadow and photography. You have to be selective in showing the object to maintain the illusion. That's what made 'Jaws' scary, and 'Alien.' The audience's imagination is complicit in creating the feeling of fear and wonder."

Overuse of CGI made movies explicit, to their detriment.

"I think a lot of directors were lulled into thinking the more they showed, the more enjoyable and more engaging the movies would be. If that were the case, pornographic movies would be the most romantic," he joked.

On "Zathura," Favreau employed a small army of old-school craftsman (like monster-designer Stan Wilson, who did the "Alien" beasties) to give the movie its tactile feel - he even hired the pyrotechnic experts and miniaturists from the original "Star Wars" trilogy.

There are computer images, to be sure, but most of the stuff you see on screen is real. The giant robot is really a giant robot, the boys' gyrating house is really a house, manipulated by hydraulic arms.

"We used a lot of people from the analog world, talented people who are not called upon as often as they used to be. You are able to put together a dream team of people who work with incredible enthusiasm because they want to show their crafts are still viable," he said.

Favreau also used iconic images to give "Zathura" a timeless feel that would appeal to multiple generations - the robot and spaceship designs are borrowed from sci-fi and horror classics dating to the '50s.

It's a technique that's worked for the director before. When he got the "Elf" job, he concocted a lengthy opening "Toyland" sequence that employed retro, stop-motion animation that was both a novelty to contemporary children and catnip for adults weaned on "Rudolf" telemovies and commercials of Santa plowing through the snow on a Norelco razor.

He hopes the all-ages appeal of "Zathura" will serve it well as it goes head-to-head first with "Chicken Little," which might be too young for older kids, and "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," which he's heard is too scary for younger kids.

He also hopes "Zathura" has made its money before the arrival Peter Jackson's "King Kong," - Favreau says the tech people

who've seen it say it's a special effects marvel that takes computer effects to another level.

"We could be turning the page again," he said. "I've talked to people who've seen it, and they say watching King Kong is like watching a real creature, that its interaction with Naomi Watts is emotional."

Vince Vaughn to be honored at Diversity Awards

via Associated Press
Found Here

LOS ANGELES - Vince Vaughn will be honored for his creative achievements by the Multicultural Motion Picture Association's Diversity Awards on Nov. 13.

Vaughn will receive the Innovator Award for his "witty, creative" style, said association President Jarvee Hutcherson.

"He has people on the edge wondering what he's going to do next," Hutcherson said.

Dakota Fanning, Tyrese Gibson, Terrence Howard, Paul Haggis, Carlos Mencia and Sandra Oh will also receive awards at the 13th annual event, to be held at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Honorees are chosen by the MMPA's 1,200 members, Hutcherson said.

The organization, founded in 1990, supports "a diversity of ideals, not just a diversity of cultures," Hutcherson said.

Vaughn to return for an encore

Article posted in The Bakersfield Californian, Nov. 2nd
Found here

He just couldn’t stay away.

Actor Vince Vaughn and his comic friends are coming back for a double-dose of Bakersfield.
Along with country music stars Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam, Vince Vaughn and his Wild West Comedy Tour are putting on a New Year’s Eve Party bash at Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace, 2800 Buck Owens Blvd.

The event is Saturday, Dec. 31.

Tickets go on sale for the show this Saturday. Call 328-7560 for more information.

Vaughn and his comedy tour were recently in Bakersfield this September. They played the Fox Theater to a near sold-out crowd.

I called to inquire about tickets--they're $100-$135 without dinner and $175-$250 with dinner. They go on sale at 11AM this Saturday.

Vaughn vamp . . .

BY MICHAEL SNEED SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Found here

Watch out, Jennifer Aniston: Actor Vince Vaughn just made a throng of new female admirers.

*The dope: As one of 1,700 notable figures in the Chicago Public Schools' Principal for a Day program, Vaughn took the helm of Amundsen High School on the North Side (Oct 27, 2005) and wowed every female student and teacher in the building. "I couldn't control my female teachers," exclaimed "real" Principal Carlos Munoz.

*The scope: "I was greatly impressed with him," Munoz said of the North Shore native, who stayed at the school from 8:30 a.m. until about noon and visited nearly 20 classrooms in the process. "He spoke to my special-needs students about his own learning disabilities and told them, 'Don't feel out of place. A lot of people might be laughing now, but you're going to be a lot stronger if you stick to what you believe in and want to do.' "

*The hope: Vaughn pledged a donation to Amundsen and promised to make a return visit, according to Munoz. "'I'd like to make this a lasting thing, because I like the message that your school has for its students,'" Munoz quoted Vaughn as saying.

*The rope: Only a few students asked Vaughn about his kinda/sorta romance with Aniston, to which Munoz said Vaughn replied: "I didn't know the paparazzi was here."

Photo credit: MARLENE SALK

Who needs Dr. Phil when you've got Vince Vaughn?

Here's a GREAT radio interview with Vince during the Wild West Tour. (Interviewed by Rich from Kidd Kraddick in the Morning). The commentary from the radio show's cast is hilarious. Click here and scroll down the page and look for Vince's picture. The interview is in two parts.

Thanks so much, Krissy for sending this link! Just listening to Vince talk and talk and talk and TALK reminds me of why we love him so much!

Vince with Rich Shertenlieb and his wife, Mary.

Back Where He Began

A decade after launching his film career in 'Rudy,' actor Vince Vaughn returns to Notre Dame
By Rama Gottumukkala
The Observer Online
Found Here

The last time Vince Vaughn performed on campus, he caught the harsh end of an Ara Parseghian tongue-lashing and was dropped from the third-string to the practice squad.

Times have changed. Vaughn is no longer the scapegoat he was in "Rudy," his first major film role. The A-list Hollywood star has since enjoyed tremendous success with blockbusters like "Swingers," "Dodgeball" and "Old School." His most recent film, "Wedding Crashers," earned over $200 million this summer, ranking it as the year's top comedy and the third highest-grossing film of the year.

Still, despite all the success, Vaughn has a soft spot for the University where he first launched his film career. His first speaking role was playing running back Jamie O'Hara in "Rudy."

"I'm sure it's going to be a great experience for [Vaughn] to come back to where his film career started," said John Pisani, Vaughn's publicist. "I think he's always had a fondness for Notre Dame, and there's a great tradition there. So to be able to come and do a show on the campus, he's thrilled about it."

Saturday, Vaughn brings his national comedy tour, "30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland," to Stepan Center, the 27th stop on the tour's nationwide road trip. Vaughn will act as the event's emcee and also take part in some of the skits. The show will also feature national touring comedians Bret Ernst, Sebastian Maniscalco, Ahmed Ahmed and John Caparulo, all comedians from the famed Los Angeles Comedy Store.

Playing in 30 cities in 30 days is a daunting task for any performer, but Vaughn and his comedy crew have embraced the rare opportunity to tour all the way from Los Angeles to America's heartland, taking in the sights along the way.

"We've been having a great time and it's been awesome performing at all these venues, some more historical than others," Ernst said. "We visited a few college campuses already, but nothing to the magnitude of Notre Dame. I'd love to go down to the [football stadium] field, especially since 'Rudy' was one of my favorite movies."

The idea for the tour was spawned from Vaughn's previous work on comedy benefit shows for charity. He organized a similar show with the Comedy Store performers more than a year ago to support the Army Emergency Relief Fund. The success of that Memorial Day weekend show convinced Vaughn to spawn a nationwide tour. Proceeds from the current tour's profits have been used to support various charities, including those aiding the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The tour is also being filmed for an upcoming documentary movie detailing the trip's experiences.

"Vince really respects what we do as far as stand-up comics go," Ernst said. "He's really an amazing individual as far as his work ethic and his character. [He and his staff] put this all together in pretty much four weeks, which is unbelievable. The idea of doing it for charity just motivated him even more."

For Maniscalco, a fan of Vaughn's 1996 hit comedy "Swingers," the tour has offered a chance to travel around the country and work with someone who had inspired him onscreen years ago. When "Swingers" came out, Maniscalco was still living in Chicago and thinking of pursuing a career in standup.

"To work with Vince Vaughn was a pretty surreal experience - to watch this guy's movie nine years ago and love what he did, and now, nine years later, we're roommates on a tour bus," Maniscalco said. "For me it's been great because now I get to tap into Vince Vaughn's audience base and he's validated us as his favorite comedians. It's been great. He's like the Johnny Carson of the millennium."

As the comedy tour has neared South Bend, more discussions on the tour bus have been directed towards football and Notre Dame. Vaughn, a college football fan, also grew up in Lake Forest, Ill.

Between his love for college football, growing up in the Midwest and starring in "Rudy," Ernst isn't surprised that there might be a correlation there.

"[Vaughn] is a big Notre Dame fan," Ernst said. "We were arguing on the bus. He kept bringing up Notre Dame and saying, 'classy program, Notre Dame doesn't do what the University of Miami does.' He's pretty attached to it and plus he's a Midwestern boy, which might explain why he loves Notre Dame."

It's been over a decade since Vaughn started his film career on this very campus. He met fellow actor and good friend Jon Favreau during the filming of "Rudy," a relationship that opened an avenue to "Swingers," the film that helped launch the pair to stardom. This Saturday, Vaughn's career progression will come full circle.

"I'm sure it's going to be a great experience and one that he's excited about - being able to come back after the success he's had in films like 'Dodgeball,' 'Wedding Crashers,' and 'Old School' that helped him become an A-list movie star, which is a nice arc," Pisani said.

Not bad for a third-string running back.

Vaughn supports comedy show

By Chris Azzopardi / Entertainment Editor
Echo Online
Found Here

Loose-tongued speed-speaker Vince Vaughn was destined to act. As an awful student in high school, Vaughn graduated only after being elected student-body president.

"I was senior class president but the whole reason I ran was because I figured if the senior class president had to give a speech at the end of the year, they're gonna have to graduate me," Vaughn says. "My dad always made the joke: I'll be the first senior class president to run for two terms."

Most notable for his role in "Old School," Vaughn also played nut-case Norman Bates in the "Psycho" re-make, shagged countless women in "Wedding Crashers," and will star alongside Jennifer Aniston in ""The Break-Up"," due out in February June 2.

But while Vaughn willingly dishes about his 30-city Wild West Comedy Tour, don't expect Vaughn to spill the beans, or lack there of, about the alleged relationship between him and Aniston.

Eastern Echo: How's the show going?

Vince Vaughn: The show's going great, man. I mean we've been having a lot of fun and the response has been overwhelming. So, it's been a lot of fun to get out every night.

Echo: What made you put together this show?

Vaughn: I had done it a couple times as a benefit and it always went over so well. The response was always so great. I thought it would be fun to take it around. Coming from Illinois, it seems like you have to go to the coast -- either New York, California, or Vegas to see these kind of shows. I wanted to take a really great live comedy show and bring it to people's towns. Give them a chance to see the four best comics that are around right now in America and also to see folks that they normally just see in movies get up on stage and do comedy sketches live.

Echo: How did you go about selecting the line-up for the show?

Vaughn: Well, these are my favorite comedians. A friend of mine is a regular at the Comedy Store and I go down to the Comedy Store and watch him perform a lot and pick the best guys of all the young comics around. And then I have friends that come and meet me in different cities who are actors who come and do different sketches with me.

Echo: You ever get stage fright?

Vaughn: I always get a little nervous. That's natural. I enjoy the interaction with the crowd. I like playing ref.

Echo: So, you don't get all sweaty like Whitney Houston?

Vaughn: I do get a little nervous before going out. It's normal. It's a good kind of nervous. It's more kind of anticipation and excitement.

Echo: You've acted, produced, written and now you're hosting a comedy tour, which role do you like most?

Vaughn: Well, my favorite is to get on stage and perform. I kind of liked putting the tour together just because I think it's a great show and I think people will like it.

Echo: Now, in high school, you weren't on the honor roll, right? I've read you weren't the best student.

Vaughn: It was awful. Out of like 397, I graduated like 390.

Echo: Uh-oh. What happened there?

Vaughn: I started going downtown [Chicago] and started pursuing acting and I wasn't that motivated academically. I knew I wasn't going to go to college. I just started focusing on acting. It [high school] wasn't my calling. I didn't really take grades seriously my senior year. If I failed one class I wasn't gonna graduate. I enjoyed high school for what it was. I was very lucky I knew what I wanted to do really young.

Echo: A lot of people don't figure that out until halfway through college.

Vaughn: Yeah, they don't figure that out until later. I was taking acting classes in Chicago and performing live, doing live improve.

Echo: If you had decided to go to college, aside from acting or film, what would you have majored in?

Vaughn: I don't know. I never really gave it much thought. I mean, my dad was a salesman, if I would've gotten married young and had kids, I would've done whatever I had to do to take care of my family.

Echo: I'm not sure if this is true -- but is your nickname "Mr. Sunshine"?

Vaughn: No, not really. It came from a friend of mine. I've been in a bunch of movies with him -- three different movies -- he said that as a joke and now all of a sudden people kind of ask me if that's my nickname.

Echo: I had heard you had some influence over where "The Break-Up" was shot. You wanted to shoot it in your hometown, right?

Vaughn: I kind of insisted we shot it in Chicago. I've always liked the mid-west, that's where I'm from. I love Chicago, and in the summer time you can't beat the mid-west. And so I really wanted to go back and be close to my mom and kind of showcase the city.

Echo: Okay -- my last question is about the big rumor between you and Jennifer Aniston. And I know you've already denied it.

Vaughn: You write for the college paper, you gotta get a job at "Hard Copy," kid.

Echo: I wish. Anyhow, what would you say to the tabloids for making such a big hoopla out of it?

Vaughn: I'm not saying anything. They're just doing their job trying to sell papers. I understand it.

The Wild West Comedy Tour hosted by Vince Vaughn makes a stop at Detroit's State Theatre on Friday at 8 p.m., Vaughn's first tour features comedians from Los Angeles' Comedy Store: Sebastian "The Hit Man" Maniscalco (HBO's "New Faces" comedy special and Comedy Central's "Premium Blend"), Ahmed "The Egyptian Lover" Ahmed (MTV's "Punk'd" and Comedy Central's "Tough Crowd"), Bret "Captain America" Ernst (Headline of the Montreal Comedy Festival and Comedy Central's "Premium Blend") and John "The Ohio Player" Caparulo ("Tonight show with Jay Leno").

There's a new sheriff in town

Vaughn brings old school comedy and wild west fun
By Ian Story
The Lantern
Found Here

Vince Vaughn is a god living among mere mortals. With the ability to star in smash-hit movies as both a devious villain ("Domestic Disturbance" and "Psycho") and a smooth hipster ("Swingers" and "Old School") Vaughn has made a name for himself as a talented, versatile actor willing to take on any project placed on his table.

Vaughn has spent most of autumn on a whirlwind 30 cities in 30 days comedy tour that is sweeping across the Midwest like a dust storm. On the new endeavor dubbed "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show," Vaughn emcees a cadre of comedians from Los Angeles' world-famous comedy club, The Comedy Store.

"These are the funniest men operating in the comedy world right now," Vaughn said in a phone interview Monday. "These guys talk and joke about issues and things that are relative to the audience."

Vaughn said the thread that runs between all of these comedians is a notion of the purity of comedy and how it works the best in a real world application.

"They rely on life experiences to tell jokes, not gimmicks," he said. "They are the real guys, they've been on everything from "Premium Blend" to "The Tonight Show" to their time spent at The Comedy Store."

The four featured comedians on the tour are Bret "Captain America" Ernst, John "The Ohio Player" Caparulo, Ahmed "The Egyptian Lover" Ahmed and Sebastian "The Hit Man" Maniscalco. According to the Wild West Picture Show Productions' Web site, all four of the comedians are well-known prime-time featured acts.

Ernst's first prime-time stand up performance was "The Late, Late Show with Craig Kilborn" and he has since guest starred in "CSI: New York" and in Artie Lang's upcoming release "Beer League." He is currently in development with Touchstone, The WB, and show creators Barry Kemp (creator of "Coach" and "Newhart") and Eric Lapidus (creator of "Two and a Half Men") to star in a sitcom based on his stand-up comedy.

Caparulo, according to the Production companies' Web site, grew up not far from Columbus in the Ohio Valley and is a Kent State University graduate. He then made his national television debut on "The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn" and gave a memorable performance. Appearances soon followed on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" and The Game Show Network's "Funny Money."

Ahmed is the most prolific comedian of the bunch. Born in Helwan, Egypt, Ahmed's parents immigrated to the U.S. when he was one month old and raised him in Riverside, CA. At 19, Ahmed moved to Hollywood to pursue a career in acting and stand-up comedy.

Ahmed has been seen in such films and television shows as "Executive Decision," "Swingers," "Tracey Takes On," "Roseanne," "JAG," Comedy Central's "Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn" and MTV's "PUNK'D." He has also appeared on CNN, "The View," and NPR, and was featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal and in Newsweek. He can be seen in the upcoming "Onion Movie" for FOX Searchlight and "The Break-Up" for Universal Studios. Currently, Ahmed can be seen on the "Fahrenheit 9/11" DVD bonus track performing stand-up comedy.

Maniscalco has been featured on HBO's "New Faces" comedy special and Comedy Central's "Premium Blend."

"I do have plans to continue to showcase talented comedians such as these guys in the future," Vaughn said. "I just want to put on the funniest, most invigorating show I possibly can. We're getting standing ovation's every night and I don't think Columbus is going to be any different."

Tour de Vince

Vaughn brings comedy show to town for one-night-stand
Michael K. McIntyre
The Plain Dealer
Found here

Vince Vaughn - movie star, heartthrob, guy's guy - is marshaling a bus tour of America with four of his stand-up comedian pals. He, himself, has become a comedic force on the big screen, what with "Wedding Crashers" and "Dodgeball" and "Old School" and all that. But we're trying to understand why the GQ cover man, Jennifer Aniston's rumored love interest, has left Los Angeles for a long road trip through the country's heartland, bunking with four guys, and all their smelly socks, on a bus.

One thing we already know: If Vince Vaughn's doing it, it's definitely cool.

"We've been having a lot of fun," he said in a phone interview while waiting to perform in Austin, Texas. "But I don't know much about going on the road. Thirty days and 30 nights. It just sounded so damn catchy. Now I'm wishing it was 25 days, with five days off."

Lucky for Cleveland, Thursday is not a day off. Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show - a play on the old Buffalo Bill shows but with punch lines instead of gunshots - rolls into town for a night at the Agora Theatre and Ballroom. Vaughn is filming the tour for a yet-to-be-determined movie project, being host of the show and performing in skits.

"These old types of variety shows really don't exist anymore," he said. "It's great to meet people live. The coolest thing is to go to these towns like El Paso where they don't ever get stuff like this and to get to see the reaction."

Vaughn was born in Minneapolis and grew up in Chicago. His dad was raised in Zanesville and his mom in Newark, Ohio.

"I'm just a Midwesterner," he said. "I grew up so far removed from the entertainment industry. My grandfather was a dairy farmer from Brewster, Ohio."

Which makes it natural that he's the cream.

"I've played crowds up to

3,000, but never with so many hot young women," said comedian Ahmed Ahmed (a hilarious regular on MTV's "Punk'd"), a longtime friend of Vaughn's and one of the four comedians performing in the show. "Thank God for Vince's audience. He is a force of nature on stage, like Dean Martin or Elvis. It's almost like being at a rock concert."

The tour grew out of Vaughn's and Ahmed's friendship. Ahmed was an extra in the 1990 CBS after-school special "The Fourth Man," that featured Vaughn and Peter Billingsley, who Clevelanders know as Ralphie from "A Christmas Story." After Ahmed moved into stand-up, Vaughn would show up at the world-famous Comedy Store in Los Angeles, or another club, Dublin's, to see Ahmed's shows. Vaughn had done some improvisational acting and remembers trying open-mike nights in his native Chicago, but stand-up "was never my calling." He became a fan of the stand-up craft.

The genesis of the traveling comedy tour came several years ago when a buddy of Vaughn's opened a bar in New Orleans.

"I went down to do a thing for him at his bar, trying to give him a good night. I said 'Let me bring some comics in,' " said Vaughn. He did a similar show last year in Dewey Beach, Del., while filming "Wedding Crashers," with proceeds benefiting Army Emergency Relief, a nonprofit helping soldiers and their families. Vaughn then mounted a show this summer in Chicago, also to benefit soldiers, and with the crazy reaction he got, the idea of a tour struck.

Vaughn said audiences "get to see the best young comics that are all on the verge of breaking."

Those would be Ahmed, Sebastian Maniscalco, Brett Ernst and Kent State University graduate John Caparulo, a native of East Liverpool, Ohio.

Vaughn, who was host of his talent show in high school, said he's enjoyed being on stage. Friends have joined him for special appearances in different cities.

Two surprise guests are planned for Cleveland. One, he said, starred in "an American classic shot in Cleveland."

Hmm. "A Christmas Story" was shot in Cleveland, and Billingsley is a good pal of Vaughn's, no? Vaughn clammed up. So we asked about Aniston.

"People have to do their jobs, and they're there to sell papers and write stories," he said. "It's a very flattering thing, and Jen's a great person. You just take it with a grain of salt."

"Vince is a gentleman," said Caparulo, who met Vaughn through Ahmed and has stayed up all night at Vaughn's house wearing out the PlayStation.

Caparulo, who graduated from Kent in 1998 and has a development deal with NBC for a series, worked out his act at places such as Mad Hatters in Painesville. He headed to Los Angeles in 1999, got a job working the door at the Comedy Store, and now he's playing to sold-out theaters with a big-screen star.

"Everybody is coming up to see this guy, and we're the guys around him," Caparulo admits. "He's a matinee idol, and I'm definitely the ugliest guy on the tour." He said it's amazing what a regular guy Vaughn is.

"To attach his name and allow us to be involved with his name is flattering," said Ernst, who wears his patriotism on his sleeve during his act. "I've worked with a lot of comedic celebrities, so to speak. Vince is just a really good dude."

Most nights, the troupe heads to the bus and a long ride to the next place, but once in a while they get an evening to kill. Maniscalco loves when that happens.

"It's really different than going to a nightclub on your own. Next month, when this tour is over and I go out, I'll be waiting outside the rope," he said. "With Vince, it's carte blanche, through the kitchen, secret entrance."

Wild is the word when Vince rides into town

By Angie Fenton
The Courier-Journal
Found here

The last time Vince rode into town, Funny Cide stole the show at Kentucky Derby 129.

"That was kind of the surprise winner of the day," Vaughn, 35, recalled.

This time, the 6-foot-5 star is headed back to Louisville with a surprise all his own: He's playing the host of Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show -- a 30-day, 30-show improv and sketch comedy tour headlined by a bus full of upstarts.

"This is the best of the next generation of great comedians," Vaughn said. "If you want to see shows like this, you have to go to New York or Los Angeles or Las Vegas. … I wanted to bring it to places that don't get these types of shows."

When the bus stops here Saturday, don't expect to see the same Vaughn who co-starred with Owen Wilson in this summer's smash comedy, "Wedding Crashers." Or the one who pegged audiences with scripted wit alongside Ben Stiller in "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story." And especially not the Vaughn from the cult classic "Swingers," which he did as a favor for his pal, writer Jon Favreau.

This time, Vaughn is on an unscripted mission and anything goes.

"I love getting up and laying live on stage," he said.

In homage to his tour, Vaughn laid live in a little game of impromptu word association.

What: "Swingers."

Why: This is the movie that put Vaughn on the map. Steven Spielberg saw the budding actor in the flick and cast him in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" in 1997, which paved the way for Vaughn's stardom.

Vaughn's response: "My favorite."

What: "Mr. Sunshine."

Why: A nickname of unknown origin that interviewers often refer to.

Vaughn: "Vincent D'Onofrio (his co-star in the upcoming 'Thumbsucker') teasing me."

What: Chicago Blackhawks.

Why: Vaughn grew up in Illinois.

Vaughn: "That's my favorite hockey team, although I'm not a hockey fan."

What: Jane Seymour.

Why: She gave a titillating and much-publicized performance in "Wedding Crashers."

Vaughn: "Very nice."

What: Multiracial.

Why: Vaughn is of Lebanese, Italian, Irish, English and German ancestry.

Vaughn: "Wonderful."

What: His latest crush

Why: C'mon -- aren't you curious?

Vaughn: "The Wild West tour."

What: Smoking cessation.

Why: The fast-talking funnyman gave up the nasty habit … didn't he?

Vaughn: "I quit for seven months, (but) I've broken on this tour. I started smoking again. It's a very difficult habit to kick."

What: Snoop Dogg.

Why: The rapper nearly stole the show in "Starsky & Hutch" as Huggy Bear, whom Vaughn's characters slaps.

Vaughn: "I love Snoop. Very childlike."

What: High school president.

Why: Vaughn was at Lake Forest (Illinois) High, which he attended with Pulitzer-Prize-nominated author Dave Eggers.

Vaughn: "That's how I graduated. My father said, 'You'll be the first senior class president to run for two terms.' " (He managed to graduate on schedule.)

What: Wilmington, N.C.

Why: After an April 2001 brawl, Vaughn was banned from Wilmington's bars, ordered to undergo alcohol assessment and fined $250.

Vaughn: "Nice place."

Vince Vaughn Gone 'Wild'

Movie star showcases 'the best comedians' and some mystery guests
By Michael Donahue
commercialappeal.com
Found here

He won't wear a cowboy hat, a beard and long locks like Buffalo Bill Cody, but, like the famous frontiersman/showman, Vince Vaughn will announce the featured acts at "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show" tonight at the Orpheum.

"Buffalo Bill used to take famous characters from the past and put together a live circus show," said Vaughn, star of the summer's hit comedy movie, "Wedding Crashers" as well as "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story," "Old School" and "Swingers."

Vaughn is taking "the best comedians," putting them on a bus and presenting them in one traveling show.

He simply wants people around the country to witness "the next generation of comics coming out of here."

Playing in 30 cities over 30 days, the show will feature national touring comedians from the world famous Los Angeles Comedy Store including Sebastian Maniscalco, Ahmed-Ahmed, Bret Ernst and John Caparulo.

Mystery guests also are a part of the show. Vaughn won't reveal who will show up in Memphis, but country singer Dwight Yoakum and Justin Long from "Dodgeball" appeared in past shows.

A native of Minneapolis who grew up in Lake Forest, Ill., Vaughn said, "My dad always had a great sense of humor."

Asked if Vaughn was the class clown, he said, "I liked to joke around."

After appearing in a Chevy commercial, Vaughn moved to Hollywood, where he appeared on television and made his first credited movie, "Rudy." On that film, he met Jon Favreau, who was writing a script about his life as an out-of-work actor and looking for love in Hollywood. Favreau got Vaughn to play Trent Walker in the critically acclaimed movie.

Because of that film, Steven Spielberg signed Vaughn to appear in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park."

His roles also included playing Norman Bates in the remake of "Psycho" and a serial killer in "Clay Pigeons." But even though he played a murderer in the latter, he still brought humor to the character.

Vaughn doesn't necessarily prefer comedy over serious roles. "I like comedy. I'm glad I'm able to do both. It's boring if you're just doing one."

Asked if he was more of a Laurel and Hardy or Three Stooges fan growing up, Vaughn said, "I was probably more Laurel and Hardy. The Stooges, to me, after a while got to be the same thing."

But, he said, "It's all subjective."

What makes him laugh is a comedian who "talks about their own experiences, things that happen to them. Very genuine. The one thing they (the comedians he's featuring) have in common is that they laugh at themselves. Human relatable stuff."

An example of a funny scene to Vaughn is the scene in "Swingers" in which the character played by Favreau makes six phone calls to a woman he just met that night. Vaughn likes "things that are sort of truthful to human nature that are also sort of awkward."

Vaughn did standup comedy "just for a laugh, but I never pursued it seriously. It was never my calling."

He won't do standup comedy in the Memphis show. "We'll do some comedy sketches on stage. I prefer doing scenes and things like that."

Vaughn selected Memphis as one of the stops because he's never been here before. "There's a lot of musical history."

He likes "old country music, classic rock music, big band, R&B music."

And Vaughn's an Elvis fan. "I first listened to Elvis when I was a little kid. He made a good impression on me. (There was) a lot of warmth and sincerity to him. I was sort of drawn to him."

Vince Vaughn knows comedy

by Joshua Michael Torres
The Oklahoma Daily
Found here. Thanks, Krissy for passing this along!

The "Wedding Crashers" movie star's "Wild West Comedy Round Up" will take place at the Bricktown Events Center on Sunday, beginning 8 p.m.

Vince Vaughn, who has entertained movie audiences with his comedic performances in such modern classics as “Swingers,” is bringing some of his own favorite comics to Oklahoma City.

Vince Vaughn’s “Wild West Comedy Round Up” will take place at the Bricktown Events Center on Sunday, beginning at 8 p.m..

The Daily' caught up with Vaughn earlier this week to see what he had to say about the show feauring comics Bret “Captain America” Ernst, John “The Ohio Player” Caparulo, Ahmed “The Egyptian Lover” Ahmed, Sebastian “The Hit Man” Maniscalco.

The Daily: How have the shows been so far, Vince?

Vaughn: Its been a great show. It’s been a lot of fun to take this show so many places. Everywhere we’ve had a great response.

The Daily: Whose idea was this shindig in the first place?

Vaughn: It was my idea. A friend of mine had a bar in New Orleans that would bring people to these comics. When I was doing "Wedding Crashers" I thought, "Why not do a benefit working for the Army Emergency Relief?" It went great. I brought [John] Favreau. The idea came from there. I figured why not take it the show on the road. Make this a variety show, take it to a lot of different places. I personally had to go to L.A. to pursue entertainment. Folks in the middle part of the country have to go to the coast to see anything good. Why not bring a top notch variety show where they don’t usually get to see these type of people?

The Daily: Tell me about the comics.

Vaughn: I have four comics. This is the next generation of comedy greats right here.

The Daily: Did you hand-pick these guys?

Vaughn: I did. Richard Pryor gave his personal award, and he gave it to Ahmed. That’s no small award to get, especially coming from Richard Pryor. One time I had Dwight Yoakam come out as a surprise along with the show, also John Favreau. Lots of different surprises are in store. I’ve got a couple good surprises for you guys.

The Daily: What have these guys done on the scene?

Vaughn: John Caparulo has a TV show coming out. He’s been on "Tonight Show" and "Premium Blend." Sebastian has a TV show in development. Brad has a TV show coming as well and he’s been on Craig Kilbourn and "C.S.I. New York." These guys are all on the verge of really breaking.

The Daily: You said this is going to be a variety show. Do you mean like Second City type variety?

Vaughn: Not so much Second City. What we do is the stand-ups come out, and then I’ll come out and do some improv with the audience. I’ll do two or three segments of sketch comedy. I change it up a every night.

The Daily: These crowds that you are trying to reach—those who never get to see this type of show— how have they been enjoying it?

Vaughn: We get a standing ovation everywhere we play. People really like it. You're seeing the best young comics in America. You don’t usually get to see people you see in films onstage everyday.

The Daily: How is this affecting your schedule back in Hollywood?

Vaughn: I do this for thirty days and thirty nights. After that I go and do another movie back in Los Angeles. It’s a movie by David O’ Russell, he did "Three Kings." It’s a big studio movie for Universal.

The Daily: Are you guys doing any benefits with the money that’s coming in?

Vaughn: Some of the shows down south have turned into benefits for Katrina. Texas had to cancel that because they had an evacuation happening. The second show is in Dallas, and that is going to be a benefit for Beaumont.

The Daily: Would you ever do something like this again?

Vaughn: Yeah! It’s always fun to do this. The crowd’s reaction makes you encouraged to do this again. I wanted to do a live show like this for awhile. This sort of thing hasn’t been done in a long time, especially out of Vegas with actors that have been in films. I don’t know what will happen in the future.

Funny Guys: 'Wedding Crashers' star riding easy -- with whirlwind tour

By RODNEY HO
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

VINCE VAUGHN is fast approaching A-list status after his massive summer hit "Wedding Crashers." And now he's rumored to be canoodling with true A-lister Jennifer Aniston after the pair filmed "The Break-Up" over the summer. But instead of kicking back and enjoying his fame Chris Tucker-style, he's storming the country with four up-and-coming comics in a whirlwind 30-day, 30-city tour dubbed "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show." We learn that the motormouth actor talks as fast on the phone as he does in the movies:

Why are you hosting this?

I love performing live in front of an audience. There's something thrilling about it that's different from doing a movie.

But a 30-day bus trip sounds pretty rough.

For me, it's a chance to go to places I haven't been before. I've only been to Atlanta once for the Super Bowl. I haven't had a chance to spend any time there.

You'll barely have time this time around. . . . So why these particular comics?

I like these stand-up comedians. They hang out at the world-famous Comedy Store [L.A. comedy shop partly owned by Pauly Shore]. They've done Comedy Central and "The Tonight Show" but haven't quite broken it big. I get to MC and do sketches with the comedians.

Will this be like the "Kings of Comedy" or "Blue Collar Comedy Tour"?

I never thought of it that way. It's more of an old-school, Rat Pack variety show.

So how much did you bribe Jennifer Aniston to wear a T-shirt promoting your show [seen recently in various tabloids]?

I heard about that picture. I haven't seen it. We're selling those shirts online. People are buying them up.

Let's cut to the chase: Are you and Aniston an item?

We're just good friends [chuckle].

Bakersfield, Florez Welcome Actor Vince Vaughn

Thanks so much to Jennifer from the office of Senator Dean Florez for sending us this wonderful news story:

Bigger

BAKERSFIELD -- Bakersfield welcomed Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show to town Thursday night, and Senator Dean Florez was on hand to honor the actor and comedian for his many contributions, both in entertainment and to the community.

Florez, D-Shafter, presented Vaughn with a resolution highlighting his many accomplishments in the entertainment field, from crashing weddings to cartwheeling through casinos, and praising his lesser-publicized charitable works.

The framed Senate Resolution commended Vaughn for his visits to troops in the Middle East, as well as for his contributions to the Children’s Defense Fund, Smile Train, Cure Autism Now, UNICEF and Army Emergency Relief, an organization that helps those who have lost a spouse while on active duty for the armed services.

Vaughn, who has starred in such hits as Wedding Crashers, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, and Swingers, was in Bakersfield to perform as part of his national “30 Days & 30 Nights – Hollywood to the Heartland” comedy tour.

Click the extended entry below to read the resolution language. It's pretty neat.

By the Honorable Dean Florez, 16th Senatorial District; Relative to commending

WHEREAS, Vincent Anthony Vaughn, an entertainer of world renown, has been selected for special distinction on September 15, 2005, and in recognition thereof, he is deserving of special public commendations; and

WHEREAS, Vincent Vaughn was born on March 28, 1970, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Vernon Vaughn, a salesman, and Sharon Vaughn, a real-estate agent and stockbroker; and

WHEREAS, Raised in Lake Forest, Illinois, Vince is the younger brother of Victoria Vaughn and Valerie Vaughn; and

WHEREAS, Vince was interested in theater early on and appeared in a spot in a Chevrolet commercial; he then packed his bags and headed for Hollywood where he became a struggling actor; and

WHEREAS, Vince made a few television appearances, but his real goal was to make it to the big screen; and

WHEREAS, Vince made his first credited role in the film Rudy in 1993, where he met his friend Jon Favreau, who was writing a script detailing his life as an out-of-work actor; and

WHEREAS, Vince was written into Swingers in 1996, by Jon to play the character of Trent and coined the phrase "money"; he signed on just as a favor to his buddy, not realizing it would be a career changing role, and though not a commercial success, Swingers was a critical success in which Steven Spielberg saw him and cast him in the big budget sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park in 1997, and this role gave Vince the exposure he needed to become a movie star and, for the first time, choose roles; and

WHEREAS, In 1998, he portrayed a loving father in A Cool, Dry Place; in Return to Paradise, he was cast as a man having to make a life or death decision to save a friend, and Clay Pigeons cast him as a serial killer, and he also was cast as Norman Bates for the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho; and

WHEREAS, For some, the college years were the best of their lives, but Vince's character Bernard in Old School shows that being a husband and father of two can be just as fun, if not more, and that all you need are a pair of ear muffs; and

WHEREAS, Vince single-handedly brought the 1970s playground game of dodgeball to a whole new level and was the funniest Norman Bates ever witnessed; and

WHEREAS, As Ricky Slade, Vince Made audiences want to keep their day jobs and never even think about freelancing their services to the mob, and he also has been known to bust out with a good series of cartwheels on the floor of casinos; and

WHEREAS, Committed to his fellow countrymen, Vince Vaughn visited troops in the Middle East in July 2004 and again in September 2005, and, committed to give back to the community, he donated a costume from Be Cool to The Clothes Off Our Back auction in which proceeds will benefit the Children's Defense Fund, Smile Train, Cure Autism Now, and the UNICEF Tsunami Relief Fund, and, in 2004, he hosted a charity show Outlaws of Stand-up Comedy in which the proceeds went to the Army Emergency Relief, an organization that helps those who have lost a spouse while on active duty for the armed services; and

WHEREAS, Throughout his career, Vince Vaughn has made a lasting impression on millions of fans, and his immense and varied talents have earned for him the respect of his professional associates and the general community alike; now, therefore, be it pride and pleasure in commending Vincent Anthony Vaughn, a truly extraordinary individual, for his invaluable contributions to the entertainment industry, that have brought so much pleasure to so many people over the years.

Bikers, gamblers and Vince Vaughn

Bruce Japsen
Chicago Tribune
Found here

It wasn't too difficult to pick out actor Vince Vaughn as he paraded early Sunday through the Golden Nugget casino amid the Las Vegas BikeFest 2005 crowd.

It was the latest stop for the actor, now filming a documentary. And the "Wedding Crashers" star seemed to enjoy himself as he sipped a cocktail and grabbed the dice to roll some craps after hosting "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show" at the hotel Saturday.

Vaughn signed autographs and chatted with gamblers and bikers alike in front of the dice pit while being filmed by his documentary crew. The traveling comedy show, which moved to Phoenix later Sunday, will be included in the documentary, which Vaughn told Nugget spa staff would premier next year.

Asked which NFL team he was betting on Sunday, Vaughn wanted some advice. We said take the Bears and the "over."

Vince Vaughn visits Valley with a tour just for laughs

Found here

By Kelly Wilson, East Valley Tribune

Vince Vaughn will dish openly about his 30-city Wild West Comedy Tour. He’ll excitedly discuss his film career. But mention his famous "friend" Jennifer Aniston, whom he’s rumored to be romancing, and the actor becomes tight-lipped and distant.

In fact, all he’ll offer is a simple "No, I’m not getting into all of that" when asked if he’s dating Brad Pitt’s soon-to-be ex, who will co-star with him in next year’s ""The Break-Up"."

"I understand people are trying to sell papers, but it’s not something that I spend my time focusing on," he says, shrugging off gossip during a call from Los Angeles.

But bring the conversation back to his comedy tour, which will swing into the Celebrity Theatre on Sunday, and the charismatic actor — who made a name for himself in comedies such as "Swingers," "Old School," "Dodgeball" and, most recently, "Wedding Crashers" — becomes very animated.

"It was all my idea," he boasts of the tour. "A friend of mine has a bar, and I went and watched some comedians down there and sort of hosted the show, and the show went really well. And last year when I was shooting "Wedding Crashers," I put together a show in Dewey Beach (Del.) as sort of a benefit for the Army Emergency Relief Fund.

"And I did another benefit for the same organization in Chicago, and the shows have always been so well received. The audiences just go crazy for them. . . . I figured it would be good to get on a bus and get to go to a bunch of places, some places that I’ve never seen before."

Vaughn says he handpicked Los Angeles Comedy Store comics Bret Ernst, John Caparulo, Ahmed Ahmed and Sebastian Maniscalco for the tour.

"They’re all, like, great comedians who have been on ‘The Tonight Show,’ " he says. "They’ve been on Comedy Central’s ‘Premium Blend.’ They’ve been in movies and television shows."

Those looking for their Vaughn fix won’t be disappointed, says the funnyman. In addition to hosting the show, the actor will perform sketch comedy in between acts. And he even promises a special guest performer (no, probably not Aniston!).

"We had Justin Long from ‘Dodgeball’ come out during one show," he says. "You never know who will come out."

Vaughn says he’s looking forward to the Phoenix show because it will be a homecoming of sorts.

"My dad will be there, so I’ll get to see him and his wife and some family friends, which will be nice," he explains about his father, who lives in Paradise Valley. "I try to make it out there two or three times a year to visit. I spend all my Thanksgivings out there."

Did you miss the Vince Vaughn show?

By DANIELLE C. BELTON, Californian staff writer
e-mail: dbelton@bakersfield.com
Found here

Have no fear, entertainment reporter Danielle Belton made the show and has got a recap — including the after party dirt.

“Vince Vaughn is so hot!” shouted a quintet of blondes from the back row when the actor strutted out onto the stage at the Fox Theater Thursday night.

He smiled. He winked. He flirted and he charmed. With four other comics and two special guest the Rat Pack was reborn.

There was no Sinatra but the spirit of Frankie and Sammy came in the form of Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy show with a country twang and twice the raunch.

Featuring the star of “Swingers” and “Wedding Crashers,” Vaughn pulled a Dean Martin, hosting the show and participating in skits in between the sets of his four comic friends, Bret Ernst, Sebastian Maniscalco, John Caparulo and Ahmed Ahmed.

But the show wasn’t just stand-up only. Dwight Yoakam sang three songs, then forced Vaughn into a rendition of “Streets of Bakersfield” that was both throaty and off-key.

Former child star Peter Billingsley came out as a special guest chatting up with Vaughn about their days together starring in After-school Specials, notably one on steroids where the diminutive Billingsley, not the 6’5” Vaughn, played a young man raging on steroids.

The new, working air conditioning at the Fox was set to freeze (the A/C infamously broke during a steaming Chris Isaak concert this summer). And the show moved at a clip, with a crowd of more than 1,100 people packed in the 1,500 seater Fox, giving Vaughn and the comics a reception was that was beyond warm.

Especially when it came to the jokes — both from the audience and the comics.

• “I love you too, honey,” Vaughn cooed at the ladies who shouted out to him every time he graced the stage. “I love you more.”

• “Arabs — we’re the new black,” shouted comic Ahmed during his set about post 9-11 racism.

• “We hate Brad Pitt,” bellowed some men.

• “I love him,” Vaughn said. The actor is rumored to be dating Pitt’s soon-to-be ex-wife, Jennifer Aniston. “He’s a great guy.”

• “You can’t be single guy with a cat. You’re either gay or a villain,” Caparulo said on pet ownership.

• “Porn — it’s a me time kind of thing,” Caparulo said on a bit about friends who turn pornography viewing into a social event.

• “You’re money, baby,” Vaughn said before launching into all his catch phrases from all his films, ending on “Wedding Crashers” infamous quotes.

• “Come to my wedding!” shouted a fan.

• “Come to your wedding? Congratulations but I’m not coming to your wedding,” Vaughn said.

• “You have to be on drugs to like techno,” Bret Ernst said during his music based stand-up.

• The “Go Blind” and “Never Walk Again” are two out of the three types of shot drinks Ernst said he doesn’t want to imbibe in.

• “I’m sensitive to sensitive people,” Ernst said while talking about his hatred of the overtly politically correct.

• “I have a Yul Brynner range,” joked Vaughn about his horrific singing abilities.

• “Doyle, you’re awful! You shouldn’t be that way!” Vaughn repeatedly shouted at special guest Dwight Yoakam as Vaughn goaded him into a skit. Vaughn was still in his suit, but wearing a wig and playing a woman, Linda, from the film “Sling Blade” which starred Yoakam and Billy Bob Thornton.

• “You’re starting to scare me,” Yoakam said after Vaughn screamed the line at him and would not stop. Eventually Yoakam did act out the scene with Vaughn and Caparulo, who played the child.

• “Have a little class, ladies — wrap up the gift,” comic Sebastian Maniscalco said about women who wear half tops but have flabby stomachs.

• “Sock it!” shouted Maniscalco in his rant on men who wear thong sandals and have “Golden Grahams” for toenails.

• “Sweet Caroline” was the karaoke song Vaughn invited the audience to join for a sing-a-long as he ended the packed show, thanking Bakersfield for being good hosts.

And after the show....

• At the after party at the Crystal Palace a girl waited in the restroom “for Vince,” but Vince Vaughn didn’t show for either after-party.

• As comic Sebastian Maniscalco danced with a girl at RJ’s he was busy looking at his cell phone text messaging someone. He joked about text messaging in his stand-up.

• “I got this! I got all this!” shouted Ahmed Ahmed as he bought almost everyone he could find drinks for at RJ’s Bar after the show, referring back to Bret Ernst’s schtick on Italians and drink ordering at bars.

• Rumors about actress Jennifer Aniston being in town abounded (she’s rumored to be dating Vaughn) but she was no where in sight.

Viva Vince!

He can play goofballs, yes. But did you know that this too-tall heartthrob is smitten with Bakersfield?

By DANIELLE C. BELTON, Californian staff writer
The Bakersfield Californian

Vince Vaughn is not your traditional heartthrob. He's not a pretty boy like Leonardo DiCaprio or Orlando Bloom. He's not a chiseled Adonis like Brad Pitt. He's not cuddly like Elijah Wood or a cute nerd, like Tobey Maguire.

He's gruff. He's rough. He's tall.
He's, dare we say it -- a man. A massive, tall (6' 5"), throwback, bad boy hunk of a man. And not a pretty bad boy. A cruel, sexy one like Ray Liotta in "Goodfellas" with a face a little too angular; cheekbones cut a little too sharp; eyes just a little too steely; jaw square.

But something about it works and makes it all right. Vince Vaughn, ever since he popped up in the cult film "Swingers," has done weird things to ordinary women. And -- sit down, ladies -- Vaughn's headed our way, as host of the touring "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show," coming to the Fox Theater Thursday.

In this newsroom alone, countless deskmates and co-workers asked me if I needed help with my phone interview with the actor who loves Bakersfield and Buck Owens. They're plotting to buy tickets in bulk for glimpses of Vaughn at the comedy show.

The four featured comics, Vaughn's friends, Brett Ernst, John Caparulo, Ahmed Ahmed and Sebastian Maniscalco don't even stand a chance.

By golly, Vince Vaughn will be in the room. Pray the ladies will play along and laugh at the stand-up routines.

Maybe it was this summer's hit flick "Wedding Crashers"? Or maybe it was the cosmic timing of playing the romantic interest of Jennifer Aniston in the midst of a paparazzi season that has been nothing but wall-to-wall Aniston? Maybe that's what put Vaughn over the top. Regardless, the top is where he is now and he's going to buck this bronco named "fame" and "female adoration" until they have to shoot the horse.

"I don't want it to stop," Vaughn said. "I can't handicap this thing."

For the interview, Vaughn called from his hometown of Chicago where he'd just finished filming "The Break-Up" with Aniston. Phone interviews with celebrities are often awkward or even grueling. With Vaughn, it was a fast-talking, lively game of "let's have a conversation even though I don't know you."

Highly personable, even over a phone, Vaughn went into how he ended up hosting "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show" with his friends:

"I thought it would be fun to start in Hollywood and take a road trip to a lot of the great places in California," Vaughn said, adding he got the idea after participating in several comedy benefits for charities.

If Bakersfield were a woman, she'd be the one her stepsisters of Los Angeles and Fresno tease all the time for being different. She's not used to being called one of the "great places in California," but to Vaughn, Bakersfield is one of the prettiest girls in the room.

"I'm a big fan," he said of the hometown of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, Dewars Chews and unwanted Los Angeles-based sludge. "I've always liked it. It's a very important place musically. There's something very American about Bakersfield. It's beautiful."

"The landscape," Vaughn said continuing in his unabashed flattery. "I've been up there four or five times to the Crystal Palace to see Buck. I'll bring my friends to stay up there with me.

"I love Buck," Vaughn said. "I've always loved Buck's music, and Dwight Yoakam is a close friend of mine. I've had the pleasure of seeing him play a few times. He's really kind of a pioneer when it comes to music -- the Bakersfield Sound. Big fan. I've always liked it."

Because Vaughn loves Bakersfield so much he thought it would be a kick to bring his comedy tour to town as well as taking it to other places celebrities not Vince Vaughn, fear to tread.

"It's a great chance to get on the bus and drive across America," Vaughn said. "I'll emcee the show. Do some scenes. Joke back and forth with the audience. Show video clips that are kind of funny.

"My sense of humor has served me well," Vaughn said. "I was never a great athlete. This is a chance to get out live and have fun with an audience. It's a different energy," he said. "It will be relaxing for me. Energizing to get up on stage. Do improv ... see what I can get away with. I like to get out and see different places and get out and see different things."

It's also a break from the paparazzi who love his chiseled mug so much. Especially when it's cozied up next to Brad Pitt-free Jennifer Aniston.

"You know, you can't take it too serious," Vaughn said. "They're looking to sell papers. Create a story. I don't take it personal."

Vaughn said he just lets it roll off his back.

But one thing he doesn't let just roll off is all that serious lady love he's getting. Vaughn has no problem with being the man of choice in the newsroom or anywhere for that matter. He's not complaining one bit. He's not even questioning it.

"I don't know (what's causing it), but I don't want it to stop," he said with a laugh. "Sometimes when things go good, you don't ask too many questions. I'll take it, man."

Coming home!

98 from N.Y.'s 69th tapped for first flight back

BY NANCY DILLON
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Found here.

CAMP VICTORY, Kuwait - It was the best news he'd heard all year.
Sgt. Israel Mahadeo, 32, of Huntington, L.I., was in Kuwait less than four hours when he got word he was on the first flight back to Fort Dix, N.J.

"Awwwright!" he screamed as he jumped on the back of pal Sgt. Robert Vergith, 45, of upstate Celoron, N.Y. "I'm going home. I get to hug my wife, hug my kids. That's all I need."

A happy swarm of 98 soldiers in New York's famed Fighting 69th made the cut for the first flight home last night, while about 90 more were told to cool their boots in Kuwait until today. A few hundred others were even farther behind in the pipeline, still en route to Kuwait from Baghdad.

"We're used to it," said Spec. Acisclo Melendez, 27, from the South Bronx, who didn't make the cut. "It's the military. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don't. At least we get to see the USO."

Indeed, actor Vince Vaughn visited the Kuwait base to introduce an outdoor showing of his latest movie "Wedding Crashers."

"I've been in the Army long enough, if they say something's gonna take one day, they probably mean three," said Sgt. Danny Burdiez, 32, of Throgs Neck, the Bronx, itching to get home to his two kids and the new Harley-Davidson motorcycle he bought with a military discount in Baghdad.

"I'm just trying to burn off the time, and maybe get a burn," said Sgt. John Szemplinski, 35, of upstate East Greenbush, as he soaked up the scorching midday sun in nothing but black Army shorts and bracelets commemorating two fallen comrades.

"Yup, a nice shade of pink just in time for everyone to slap us on the back," said fellow sunbather Lt. Dan Hoover, 32, of Jersey City. "After spending a year in the desert, I can't go home pasty white."

Other soldiers dreamed of vacations.

"I'm going to take two weeks off, buy a kayak and go out on the Hudson," said Spec. Manuel Martinez, 29, of Yonkers. "I'd just like to hear the river sounds - actually hear birds whistling - instead of the constant drone of generators and artillery."

Sgt. Edwin Feliciano, 36, from the Bronx, was planning a trip to Jamaica with his wife, Patricia. He's missed two anniversaries and is hoping to make up for lost time.

"It's bittersweet. I should be excited about leaving, but half of me is staying here," he said, remembering the countless hours spent patrolling Baghdad and the time he once paid a farmer $20 from his own pocket to clear some grass that might otherwise conceal a roadside bomb. "We lost 19 guys, some of them real good friends. I think about them everyday."

Sgt. Philip Sampson, 57, had just one thing on his mind. "My wife, Judy," the medic from Buffalo said. "She's my treasure. I'm taking her straight to bed."

Originally published on September 5, 2005

Vince to travel to Iraq again?

BY BILL ZWECKER
The Chicago Sun-Times

Found here

VERY CON-VINCE-ING: After the big celebrity fund-raiser Saturday night for the future Police Memorial, a bunch of the celebs trooped to Gibsons on Rush for an afterparty, where Vince Vaughn learned that former Bears QB Jim McMahon's 20-year-old son Sean is a big fan. That led the "Wedding Crashers'' star to call Sean at the University of Kansas -- thrilling the younger McMahon with a bunch of pals at a party. Afraid their younger son Zach would feel left out, Nancy McMahon convinced Vaughn to call him, too!

In a more touching moment, Vaughn told the Police Memorial event's emcee Tom Dreesen he heads to Iraq to entertain the troops Friday. That led Dreesen (who did the same with David Letterman back in December) to share stories about that moving experience with Vaughn.

(Thanks, chicago_love for posting this in the forum!)

VINCE WAS A SCRAWNY CLASS CLOWN. GIRLS DIDN'T FANCY HIM

I have to say that although I'm quite against making assumptions about Vince's personal/love life, this article was a fun read.

SHY PAST OF JEN'S NEW MAN
From Ryan Parry
Mirror.co.uk
Found here

HE'S the hunky Hollywood comedy actor who is at last giving Jennifer Aniston something to smile about. Vince Vaughn's rugged good looks and funny ways are helping to make her bitter split from Brad Pitt a fading memory.

But the Wedding Crashers star, now dating one of the world's most beautiful women, was once a gawky teenager who was luckless with the ladies, the Daily Mirror can reveal.

"He was just hopeless with girls at high school," classmate and pal Todd Nelson confides.

"They saw him as the class clown. He was tall and scrawny and always playing practical jokes on teachers. The girls laughed at him but never fancied him.

"He hid behind his pranks and I never once saw him with a girlfriend."

On Saturday, we told how Vince and Jennifer, 36, were spotted kissing and cuddling in a nightclub. One onlooker said: "They couldn't keep their hands or lips off each other."

And a week earlier the couple were caught canoodling in a US park during a lull in filming "The Break-Up" together.

This is clearly not the same Vince that Todd remembers. The 35 year-old, a concierge at a Chicago hotel, continues: "He was the wise guy with teachers, always causing trouble. There was this janitor who Vince would goof around with between classes. It made everyone laugh.

"The two of them would gamble during lunch break and Vince would get into trouble for it."

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on March 28, 1970, Vince's dad Vernon was a salesman for a meat company while mum Sharon was an estate agent and stockbroker.

They moved to Buffalo Grove, a middle-class suburb in Illinois, when Vince was little and then went to Lake Forest in the same state when he was eight.

There, Vince, who has two older sisters Victoria and Valeri, started to stretch his teachers' and parents' patience to the limit.

Aged 14, he and friends bought a clapped-out Chevy hatchback for $700 and would go haring around the neighbourhood. Vince would drive his pals to the mall to hang out or show off the car at school. But his popularity never extended to girls. Todd laughs: "He definitely wasn't the ladies' man he is today. He probably hid behind a lot of his tomfoolery when it came to girls. He played football but he was never really any good.

"He didn't have the physicality he does today, he was tall and skinny. Now he's got the beefy physique."

But while Vince's wise-cracking and jokes failed to impress the girls it made him a hit with the other kids.

"He was always popular because he made everyone laugh," says Todd. "He made jokes at the teachers and had witty comments that were a little saucy.

"His humour is very much like his movies, one-liners, fast, off-the-cuff stuff. He's always been like that."

David Strain, Lake Forest High School's Dean of Students remembers a smart-mouthed, fast-talking kid who MCd the school's talent show one year. "I knew that he would do something with humour," Strain says.

"But I figured he would end up in some kind of sales position."

Vince got bitten by the acting bug thanks to dad Vernon's obsessive interest in movies. "My dad loved westerns fanatically," he says.

"He used to watch them with me when I was young and he'd say to me, 'Now see, I don't believe this character, Vince. He don't carry himself right.'

"He would point out stuff like that, so I started watching and observing that way."

The youngster appeared in every school play he could manage and dabbled in community theatre.

Todd remembers: "You could see that he was talented. You can't be jealous about the guy because he didn't make it big straight away." Rather than follow his mates into office jobs Vince always hankered for something a bit more exciting. After high school he started performing in Chicago with an improvisational troupe. That led to landing an agent and national TV commercials.

He got on the movie map as fast-talking womaniser Trent Walker in the film comedy Swingers.

Todd recalls: "He took risks, a lot of challenges and slowly you'd hear 'Vince Vaughn's in this TV commercial', and 'Vince has got a role in a movie'. It was all from his own luck and pluck and I admire the guy for that."

S WINGERS was written by his best pal Jon Favreau and Vince, who had not worked for 14 months before appearing in the movie, admits the role was based partly on him.

Handily for him, Hollywood heavyweight Stephen Spielberg caught the indie flick and cast the fledgling actor in his Jurassic Park sequel, the Lost World.

Today, Vince is one of Hollywood's most sought-after comedy actors, with Spielberg branding him "a film icon".

The Lost World made Vince box office material and he was cast to play Norman Bates in the remake of Psycho, later starring alongside Jennifer Lopez in The Cell. But he quickly went back to comedy, scoring a string of hits in Made, Zoolander and Old School.

And he stole scenes as a crime lord in Starsky & Hutch and Dodgeball, both starring good pal Ben Stiller.

His latest offering is as a committed ladies' man in Wedding Crashers alongside Owen Wilson.

In the film the duo raise hell as they gate-crash weddings to pick up women.

The plot is not too unlike Vince's hard-partying rise to the top. He is a regular on the wild Hollywood after-hours scene and is known for always having blonde beauties hanging off his arm.

His party personality emerged early - at 16 he was cruising the bar and club scene in Chicago using a fake ID to buy booze. But there is a downside to 6ft 5ins Vince's hell-raising antics - he has a habit of getting into brawls.

In 2001, Vince and Con Air screenwriter Scott Rosenberg were arrested outside the Firebelly Lounge in Wilmington, North Carolina.

The pair, along with actor Steve Buscemi, were caught in a fight after Vince spoke to the girlfriend of a regular drinker.

Buscemi - who tried to "The Break-Up" the scrap - was stabbed in the face, arm and throat.

In another scuffle in March 2003, Vince was left clutching a bloody nose after getting into a brawl on his 33rd birthday.

The star had spent the evening celebrating with pals when he got chatting to a blonde girl around 2am. Then suddenly another clubgoer yelled: "Faggot."

Vince turned to face the man and was promptly smacked in the face. One eyewitness said: "It all happened so quickly - it stunned everyone".

But for now Vince is out of trouble and enjoying life among the Hollywood elite.

And for Jennifer he is the perfect partner to raise her spirits with a smile - though any talk of a wedding to crash would be premature.

Vince talks about his Wild West Comedy Show in Entertainment Weekly

From Entertaiment Weekly's September 2nd issue

An exclusive look at Vince Vaughn's next gig

WEDDING CRASHERS MAY BE the summer's top comedy, but star Vince Vaughn, 35, isn't resting on his laurels. He's informed EW exclusively that next he'll emcee Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show, a 30-day, 30-gig U.S. tour featuring stand-ups Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, and Sebastian Maniscalco. The bus gets rolling Sept. 12 in L.A. and drives through the South and Midwest before parking in the Windy City on Oct. 11. (For more information, go to wildwestpictureshowproductions.com.) "Bands travel around and perform every night," he says. "That kind of live interaction with the crowd is always great." In other words, he's ready to rock. —Joshua Rich

How did you assemble this ensemble from L.A.'s Comedy Store? There's something really pure about these comics. Like my friend, Ahed is Muslim-American, and there are not a lot of roles or opportunities for him, so stand-up comedy became his only road, the way for him to express what's going on. For all the comics, there's some truth in that for the comedy they do.

Is your hosting style more Miss America or Wrestle-Mania? [Chuckles] It's just myself. My favorite was Johnny Carson. You come out, try to make people feel comfortable, try to have fun. I don't want to pick on the audience—it's not my style. If there's any teasing, it's self-deprecating.

Do you have any fond road trip memories? My family would take road trips all the time—we'd go [from Illinois] to Ohio or down to Florida. That was always a big deal: being in a car, traveling with your family, trying not to get grounded byt the time you get there!

Now that you're an expert wedding crasher, what advice would you give to folks who plan on crashing the shows? I don't think they're crashable. I mean, you've gotta guy tickets.

From the UK

Bar over in the UK sent me a couple of nice items. First is a link to a BBC Radio interview with Owen and Vince talking about Wedding Crashers. (July 4)

Also, she made some great screencaps from a television interview from the UK premiere. The larger versions can be found in the Wedding Crashers album in the gallery. I'm looking forward to seeing this interview when Alberta adds it to her site.

Bar says this about the interview:

"There is a precious part towards the end where Vince laughs heartily at a party crashing story told by Owen - it's adorable."

I hope you don't mind me sharing your lovely comments with the fans, Bar. ;) I know other fans will appreciate them as much as I did. Thanks so much.

The Most Valuable Players of Summer

Bigger
From the 8/26/05 issue of Entertainment Weekly

The Most Valuable Players of Summer

#6 Age 35 Position Divorce mediator Jeremy Grey in Wedding Crashers; hitman Eddie in Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Season Highlights Now he really is money. Vaughn was hilarious chasing "babies" and waxing eloquent in 1996's low-grossing Swingers. but after a run of serious-role duds–including his onanistic interpretation of mama's-boy pyscho killer Norman Bates in that Psycho remake–he couldn't land comedies. Old School in 2003 and Dodgeball in 2004 finally made him not just a lovable motormouth but a bankable one, and this summer he topped himself, coming on like some nattering Barry Levinson character after a double espresso. Whether bellowing pissed-off patter at an unseen mom as Brad Pitt's assassin-agency pal in Mr. & Mrs. Smith or gleefully demonstrating how to "motorboat" a woman's breast to Owen Wilson in Wedding Crashers, Vaughn's unstoppable air of hedonistic brio makes him the buddy you want to hang with after the movie's over.

The movie stars who saved our summer

From Entertainment Weekly's Popwatch:

The movie stars who saved our summer

This could have been a pretty disastrous moviegoing summer, but if you saw any of the following 10 performers in the multiplex this summer, they made your time worth what you spent on tickets and popcorn. None of them is a name you would have expected to steal moviegoing thunder from the likes of Tom Cruise, Will Ferrell, or Russell Crowe, but that's what they did. Here are the 10 MVPs of the recent movie season, as rounded up in the forthcoming issue of EW.

In no particular order, they are:

-Terrence Howard, for his starmaking role as pimp-turned-rapper DJay in Hustle & Flow, as well as his supporting roles in Four Brothers and Crash
-Matt Dillon, who pulled off the trickiest role in Crash and a comic villain part in Herbie: Fully Loaded
-Cillian Murphy, extra-creepy in Batman Begins and Red Eye
-Angelina Jolie, who rescued herself from box office poison status in Mr. & Mrs. Smith
-Vince Vaughn, who took his aggressive motormouth act to new comic heights in Smith and Wedding Crashers
-Dakota Fanning, who stole War of the Worlds from Cruise and Steven Spielberg
-indie queen Amy Adams (Junebug)
-Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know)
-Star Wars: Episode III emperor Ian McDiarmid
-MVP Hall of Famer Paul Giamatti (Cinderella Man)

Thanks, Alicia, for passing this along!

First jobs — Vince Vaughn

Metro Toronto
Found here

Metro: What was your first job, and what did you learn from it that you are still using today?

Vince Vaughn: My first job, sadly, was telemarketing. My sister was looking for summer jobs. I go with her, we all get a job.
We would sell tickets to the Lake County Sheriff's Police Rodeo. I don't know if there ever was a rodeo. I'm calling these families asking them if they wanted to go to a rodeo and if they said no, I was supposed to push these orphan packages. It was horrible, and these were seniors and people on fixed incomes.

What I took away from the experience was that I don't like being in a sales position. My dad was a salesman and I respect him and he had to feed his family. For me, I don't like that feeling of trying to get people to buy something.

— Metro Toronto

Celebrity Gossip Perplexes Vince Vaughn

Associated Press via Yahoo! News
Found here

LOS ANGELES - Vince Vaughn, who co-stars with Owen Wilson in the new romantic comedy "Wedding Crashers," says he doesn't understand people who are interested in the love lives of celebrities.

"I don't know who spends their time on `Oh my God, what happened today?'" Vaughn told reporters recently, according to AP Radio.

He has this advice for those who are obsessed with celebrity gossip: "Go kiss someone and go get something to eat and take a nap, you're going to be fine, kid."

Vaughn said he wouldn't be good at picking up women at a wedding because he doesn't like blind dates.

"You don't really know the person. You're kind of forced into the situation where you're not really comfortable," the 35-year-old actor said. "It is easier, I think, to meet someone and say, `Let's meet out somewhere. Or both bring our friends.' And that way, there's less of a pressure on it, you're more comfortable."

Vaughn's screen credits also include "Old School," "Starsky & Hutch" and the upcoming ""The Break-Up"," co-starring Jennifer Aniston.

Radio interview from NPR

On July 15, NPR re-aired an interview of Vince's from 2001. You can listen to it here.

Audiences fall for Vince Vaughn

By LOUIS B. HOBSON -- Calgary Sun
Found here

HOLLYWOOD -- Vince Vaughn is not expecting to hear wedding bells in his future any time soon.

"I'd like to think I will get married some day because I'd like to have kids but, as you get older, it definitely gets easier to be on your own," says Vaughn, 35, whose most serious relationship was with actress Joey Lauren Adams.

He confesses his biggest problem these days is that he "likes down time by myself. That's asking a lot of a woman.

"I had a girlfriend who liked to include me in every decision. She's ask me questions about colour schemes and furniture. I don't like being asked questions. Instead of explaining that to her I'd do mental shut-offs and that's real mean."

Vaughn insists he's not presently in a relationship. "I get caught up in my work more these days than I do in relationships."

He's currently shooting the romantic comedy "The Break-Up" with Jennifer Aniston in his native Chicago. It's the story of a couple who are divorcing, but are forced to share the condo they purchased together.

Vaughn is producing with Jay Lavender and Jeremy Garelick, who wrote the screenplay. "I came up with the idea. I brought it to Jay and Jeremy and they allowed me to have a lot of input into the script. I love Neil Simon's The Odd Couple and that's how I see Jennifer and my characters in this movie."

Vaughn and his friends were working on the screenplay for "The Break-Up" while he was filming his summer comedy Wedding Crashers.

In the movie, he and Owen Wilson play committed womanizers who crash weddings in order to seduce women caught up in the romantic spirit of the celebrations.

"I don't think weddings make women desperate, but I think they are more open to a guy's advances. I think weddings are a good place to score."

When asked what he looks for in a woman, Vaughn chooses his words carefully. "Pretty is good. Funny is good. Smart is good. Willing to sign a pre-nup is really good."

He admits he had his share of relationships even before movies such as Swingers, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Old School and Starsky & Hutch made him a celebrity.

There have definitely been more as a result of his profile. "I've missed the boat on a lot of relationships. That's for certain but I comfort myself with the knowledge there are more boats coming in. I keep a constant look-out on the harbour."

Wedding Crashers gives Vaughn full reign to explore physical and verbal slapstick. Director David Dobkin feels this is the first time Vaughn has had the chance to "bring his full manic, crazy, fun energy to a movie. Vince is definitely the fireworks in the film."

Both Vaughn and Wilson are known for improvising whole scenes, not just lines, and for rewriting speeches to make them funnier.

"Owen and I did more rewriting than improvising on Wedding Crashers," explains Vaughn. "The night before we'd shoot a scene we would talk about what we wanted to do with it with the director. The three of us would toss around ideas and then Owen and I would write some stuff so what we did for the camera the next day wasn't your classic ad libbing."

It was Dobkin's idea to team Vaughn and Wilson. He'd directed Vaughn in Clay Pigeons and Wilson in Shanghai Knights.

"I was determined to work with both of then again. I invited Vince to the premiere of Shanghai Knights," recalls Dobkin.

"When I saw how instantly he hit it off with Owen I knew I had to find a vehicle for the two of them. A few months later I read Wedding Crashers and knew it would be perfect."

Vaughn says he and Wilson have already talked about teaming up for another movie.

"Maybe we'll do Still Crashing," he jokes, then says he "feels really relaxed and creative around Owen. He inspires me because he always has so many great ideas. It reminds me of working with Jon Favreau."

Favreau wrote the breakthrough role of the lounge lizard in Swingers for Vaughn, helping him kickstart his career.

Phony Purple Heart Taken Off Film Web Site

By JENNIFER TALHELM, Associated Press Writer
Found here

WASHINGTON - Following complaints from a congressman, the producers of Wedding Crashers on Monday yanked from the movie's Web site a printable Purple Heart advertised as a gimmick to pick up women and get free drinks.

The movie characters — played by Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn — use the medals to pick up women. But advocates for a bill introduced by Rep. John Salazar, D-Colo., say it's no joke — impostors also use the fake medals or fraudulent stories of medals to get ahead in business.

"We understand the sensitivity regarding the medals and did not intend to make light of their significance in any way," New Line Cinema spokesman Richard Socarides said Monday.

Wearing, manufacturing, buying, selling or trading a Medal of Honor is a crime. Salazar's Stolen Valor Act, introduced Friday, would expand the law to include more medals and would allow prosecution of anyone who falsely claims to have earned a military medal or a Purple Heart.

His office drew attention to the Web site. On Monday, he claimed victory.

"If any movie-goers take the advice of the 'Wedding Crashers' and try to use fake Purple Hearts to get girls, they may wind up picking up an FBI agent instead," Salazar warned in a statement. "I am pleased that New Line Cinema has agreed to take down offensive parts of the Web site. Our veterans and FBI agents are working hard to make sure that we honor our true heroes, no one should undermine their efforts."

The movie's Web site included a "Crasher Kit" with instructions on how to win attention at a wedding.

"Print your own Purple Heart," it invited. "To get one of these babies, some dudes have to prove their physical, mental and spiritual strength with great feats of bravery on the battlefield. All you need to do is press the button below."

Socarides said it would be removed by the end of the business day. "This is a comedy, and it's intended to be funny," he said. "It's really not intended to offend anyone."

Advocates for Salazar's bill praised the producers for altering the Web site. In a way, some said, the flap over the movie has helped by bringing attention to a cause they have been working on for years.

"With Hollywood you have to give them a little bit of license," said B.G. Burkett, one of the authors of the book "Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History," about fake Vietnam vets. "I'm hopeful Congressman Salazar's bill is going to go through, and it will put a clamp on the people who are doing this."

Vince Vaughn Heads Back to Chicago

Found here

By WENN

Old School star Vince Vaughn is turning his back on Hollywood to return to his native Chicago, Illinois.
The actor has sold his bachelor pad in Los Angeles and has bought a home in Chicago while he shoots new film "The Break-Up" with Jennifer Aniston there.

He says, "I bought a place out in Chicago... I'm gonna live there for the next couple of years at least. I like Chicago... I like the people, I like the Mid-West."

But Vaughn fears he'll lose touch with his agents and managers in Hollywood because he refuses to own a cell phone and he hates emailing people.

He adds, "I'm just not comfortable with them... I don't email, I don't do any of that stuff.

"Your agents and managers call you a lot and it's just kind of rude--you're sitting there having a conversation... I just don't like being on the phone that much.

"I have been given one when I do a movie but I usually lose it... I just don't think about it after a week or something I'll lose it.

"If I had kids maybe I would have a cell phone, but I would prefer not to have any kids."

Article Copyright World Entertainment News Network All Rights Reserved.

Vince Vaughn Talks About "Wedding Crashers"

Vince Vaughn on "Wedding Crashers," the Script, and Embarrassing Scenes

From Rebecca Murray*
About.com movies

Vince Vaughn and "Wedding Crashers:" John Beckwith (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy Grey (Vince Vaughn) are a couple of life-long buddies who happen to love crashing weddings. Adhering to a strict set of wedding crasher rules, the two spend their weekends enjoying free food, free alcohol, and the attention of a bevy of lovely bridesmaids.

Read the rest of the article here.

Daily News article

Special thanks to Sarah, for scanning this article that ran last week in L.A.'s Daily News. The article is posted here.

Inside 1
Inside 2

Cover of Chicago RedEye, July 15

Thanks to Krista for passing this along. Is there anyone out there who has this and can scan the article for us? Thank you so much!
Found here

For Vaughn, comedy starts with characters

BY CHRIS HEWITT
Pioneer Press
Found here

In "Wedding Crashers," there's a classic Vince Vaughn moment. Informed of a creepy sexual encounter, he reacts with appropriate disdain. But his character is also a horndog, so he immediately flips it around and asks if the woman involved in the creepy encounter was hot.

The ability to turn on a dime ��� to find the sweetness in a silly moment, the sadness in a joke ��� is a trademark of Vaughn's performances in movies such as "Dodgeball," "Old School" and "Swingers." And it's there in "Wedding Crashers," too, in which he plays a guy who, along with a pal played by Owen Wilson, hangs out at weddings because they're good places to pick up chicks. It's a raucous comedy, but Vaughn's character is more complicated and likable than your average sex comedy lecher.

"One of the things that makes the characters likable is they're excited," says Vaughn. "They love to eat the cake, they love to dance. They elevate the wedding. They don't ruin it ��� it's more fun because they're there."

That kind of analysis is why Vaughn's characters have more staying power than, say, Adam Sandler's. Vaughn's characters are just as funny, but they make sense as characters. You understand why they behave in the often gross, frequently stupid, ultimately lovable ways they do.

Vaughn ��� who chats for half an hour without ever acknowledging the weird fact that he's sitting in front of the headboard of a hotel room bed that has been removed so there will be enough room for him to stretch his lanky frame ��� says his instinct for character comes from improvisation. Raised in suburban Chicago, Vaughn took classes at the famed Second City improv theater, and he generally helps reshape scripts for his movies: "A lot of the dialogue we rewrite right before we shoot it."

"You want to make it seem like it all �Ķ was improvised," says Vaughn, adding that improvisation should not be about finding jokes but about finding the character. "If you're going to just improv, it might be funny, but at what great cost? You may lose the story."

It's a balancing act between comedy and reality, and there's a similar balancing act in Vaughn's physical presence. He's basketball-tall ��� 6-foot-5 ��� but he conducts an interview slumped low in a swivel chair. He's well-dressed in a tailored gray shirt and gray pants, but the shirt flies open at the waist to reveal belly. He seems a little shy, but his eye contact never wavers. His conversation is laid-back, but it's accompanied by wild hand gestures.

Vaughn's hands really start flying when he's excited about a scene that works. Like, for instance, at one of the weddings in "Crashers," when an invited guest seems on the verge of unmasking Vaughn and Wilson as impostors. Wilson freaks, but Vaughn remains calm, faking a friendship with the guest and pushing it to the point of semi-fondling him.

"My job in that scene is that my friend has done something that makes us seem bizarre," says Vaughn animatedly. "So I have the burden of plugging the dam. It's one of those weird things where (the semi-fondling gesture) is inappropriate but also comfortable. Only someone who knew you would touch you with that intimacy."

The other thing that keeps Wilson and Vaughn from being discovered is this: Who would want to crash a wedding? It makes sense to drop in uninvited on a kegger or a VIP party with the members of Coldplay, but who wants to see people they don't know pledge eternal devotion in front of hundreds of other strangers? Vaughn says his character's wedding-philia is what makes him so easy to love.

"Weddings have that feeling of optimism," says Vaughn, who says he has been a bad luck charm at weddings ever since he was the best man for a cousin who later divorced. "It's the fairy tale potential of love forever after."

And it's true ��� that's part of the message of the R-rated "Wedding Crashers." But, since it's a Vince Vaughn movie, the fairy-tale-potential-of-love stuff is balanced with: a. comic bondage, b. Jane Seymour taking her top off (as the lecherous mother of the bride), c. laxative abuse and d. a sense that, whatever you just saw in the last scene, the next one is bound to feature something completely different.

`Swingers' to `Crashers,' Vaughn hones his chops

Terry Armour
metromix.com
Found here

In the comedy "Wedding Crashers," Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson play buddies who figure out that the best way to meet women is to crash weddings.

Terry sat down with Vaughn, who is in town shooting "The Break-Up" with Jennifer Aniston, to talk about "Wedding Crashers" and how his career has evolved since he starred with pal Jon Favreau in "Swingers."

Is it safe to call "Wedding Crashers" a guy movie?

Vaughn: [Laughs] "Steel Magnolias" for men! "Crimes of the Heart" for dudes! Yeah, we like to crash weddings and, yeah, we want to meet girls! Oops! Are we supposed to apologize? [Laughs] But the fun thing about the movie is women have really reacted to it because they can see the child side of all men. It's about a love of women and not knowing how to make it happen. There is something you can laugh at in that; there's something human in that.

Some critics are calling it Vince Vaughn's movie.

Vaughn: Owen has the job of really grounding the movie and being the eyes of the audience. He's the guy you can trust. I have an easier job in that I am the guy with all the jokes. In "DodgeBall," I was more like Dorothy going through Oz. In this one, I get to be the crazy, zany friend. But it really wouldn't work without Owen . . . .

When I watch you on the big screen, I wonder: How much of your characters are improvised? Your lines seem to roll off the tongue too easily.

Vaughn: What I do is I sort of go through a script and rewrite some of my lines prior to shooting. But in this case, Owen and I both went through some ideas--"this will be funny" or "that will be funny."

And even in "Wedding Crashers," you come across as playing some semblance of yourself.

Vaughn: I think all of us have a bunch of different people inside of ourselves. Depending on the circumstance, we all tend to go to whichever character we feel most comfortable with. [Laughs] In school, you go, "I'm gonna be the tough guy" until you get your [butt] kicked. Then you go, "Well, I guess I'm going to be the athlete." That doesn't work and then you go, "I guess I'll be the guy who's friends with the athlete."

And at some point, you were all of those guys?

Vaughn: Well, as an actor, one of the good things is that you get to bring all those different people to the surface. But in this movie, I kind of made this guy a big kid who's innocent and likes to have fun. There are parts of me that are similar, but he's more of a one-dimensional character than I am.

Are you finding now that writers are coming up with so-called "Vince Vaughn" roles?

Vaughn: When that first happened was for "Old School," which was written for me. Subsequently, I've had a bunch of stuff where people say, "This was written with you in mind." It's funny because after I did "Swingers" and before I did "Old School," I did something darker, "Return to Paradise." After that, a lot of studios didn't see me doing comedic stuff. Then I did "Old School" but still I had to fight to do "DodgeBall." Now, all I'm getting offered is comedies. That's just the ebb and flow of anything. I feel very blessed just to be working and having the opportunity to even make movies.

Vince Vaughn: Wedded to comedy

By Stephen Schaefer
Found here

Above all, ``Wedding Crashers'' is a confirmation of the starry charms of Vince Vaughn.

With divorce mediator Jeremy Grey alongside Owen Wilson's fellow divorce mediator and wedding crasher, this film has an inspired partnership that recalls the nuttiness of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.

Both Vaughn and Wilson are bachelors in real life. But what would it take to get Vaughn serious enough to have his own wedding?

``Pretty. That's good. Funny is good. Smart is good,'' he said.
Would he want a prenup?

``That's good. Why do we have to label this thing we have?''

As for why he hasn't settled down, he said, ``You know, people have said that to me a lot. They've said, `Vince, do you feel like you've missed the boat on some relationships?' Or they say, `Vince, you have missed the boat on some relationships.' I say, `Well, you're right. I can't split hairs with you. I think that I have missed the boat in some relationships. But the good news is that I look out into the harbor and there are more boats coming in every day. And some of the new boats are beautiful.' ''

Like Wilson, Vaughn knows what he wouldn't want at his own wedding.

``I can't hear `Shout.' I can't hear that anymore. You hear it so many times in this movie. At first you kind of like it because it's a fun song, and then you're like, `Oh God, really? We're going to shout?' Plus, it's like 2 in the morning and now you have to go scream and shout. It's exhausting.''

Hollywood is betting ``Wedding Crashers,'' with a buzz that suggests a box-office behemoth, will cement Vaughn's standing as a major box-office star. So, next up he's getting $12.5 million, a career best, for the romantic comedy ``"The Break-Up",'' with Jennifer Aniston, which is now filming in his hometown of Chicago.

It wasn't that long ago that Vaughn, 35, was starring in flop remakes such as ``Psycho.''

``At a certain point it almost becomes like a report card,'' he said. ``But the thing that I like most is that right away when I got (this clout) to do stuff, I went and set up `"The Break-Up",' which is something that I thought of and something that I'm really creatively behind.''
He came out of nowhere with the low-budget 1996 ``Swingers,'' a cult comedy that established the distinctively Vaughn personality.

``It's funny, because after `Swingers' I got offered a lot of comedies, but I didn't do any because I didn't like a lot of them. The first one that I got that I liked was `Old School.' I really liked that screenplay, but it was weird because the studios didn't see me as a comedian because I hadn't done it in forever. People just kind of remember what you did recently. Now all of a sudden I'm doing comedies, and I'm only getting offered comedies.

``See, for me the fun was kind of like in `Dodgeball,' I was kind of the straight man in that, kind of quieter and reacting. In `Wedding Crashers' I get to swing for the fences. `"The Break-Up"' with Jennifer is a romantic comedy which is a different thing - and pretty broad.''

Vaughn works best when he is allowed input, from improvisatory flights of dialogue to plot points. With Wilson on ``Wedding Crashers,'' he said, ``we really cared about the story of the movie a lot. So you improvise - there's room for that - but a lot of the stuff we kind of knew what we were doing. We would work on it that day or the night before and say, `What's funnier? What's the better way to get there?' And the writers wrote a good script. We had a great starting place because the concept itself was very funny.''

No crashing this 'Wedding' premiere

Wilson and Vaughn offer a crash coarse in humor

By Donna Freydkin, USA TODAY
Found here

They do: Stars Vince Vaughn, left, and Owen Wilson join two actresses posing as bridesmaids for the New York premiere of Wedding Crashers.

At Wednesday's premiere, the stars of Wedding Crashers walked down a white carpet strewn with rose petals and were accompanied by smiling bridesmaids in reception-mandatory pink dresses.

In the comedy, which opens Friday, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson play two smooth-talking divorce mediators who in their spare time specialize in infiltrating weddings to pick up girls.

In real life, Wilson is not in the habit of crashing weddings.

But, the actor recalled, "I was the best man at my older brother (Andrew's) wedding. It was a beautiful ceremony, but the marriage lasted only about nine months. I wasn't exactly a rabbit's foot."

As for Vaughn and his character, Jeremy, "the one thing we have in common is that I love chasing girls," he said.

Any choice pickup lines that have worked for him?

"I don't have a real story like that. Just go up and say 'Hi!' " Vaughn said.

Jane Seymour, in Kevan Hall, plays the mother of the bride and was accompanied to the premiere by her husband, James Keach.

She recalled their own wedding disaster when they exchanged vows in May 1993: "A lot of paparazzi were climbing over the walls, and helicopters were coming in. It sounded like Vietnam."

Keach, meanwhile, hadn't seen the movie yet, so he was in for a surprise seduction involving Seymour and Wilson. Wilson shared that his most uncomfortable moment of filming was a scene with Seymour in which she "does the Mrs. Robinson."

"It was just hard to get my head around putting my hands on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman's breasts," he said.

Wilson's main love interest in the film, Rachel McAdams, the last to arrive, breezed through a few interviews before being ushered in to the screening.

But her co-star and movie sister, Isla Fisher, who in real life is engaged to comedian Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Ali G), shared the worst pickup line ever used on her: "Who stole the stars and put them in your eyes?"

At the wedding-reception-themed after-party at Cipriani, guests were handed garters and yarmulkes.

And for dessert, they feasted on white wedding cake.

As for the night's main attraction, it came when Rebecca De Mornay strolled in.

De Mornay, who plays a divorc��e in the movie, attracted hordes of appreciative guys, all asking to have their picture taken with the Risky Business babe.

Frat Packers just get better

Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell and company take over Hollywood

By Erik Lundegaard
MSNBC contributor
Found here

So where was Owen Wilson while the other guys were filming ���Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy���? Will Ferrell starred and Jack Black, Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller and brother Luke Wilson all managed cameos. But no Owen. Maybe it was an in-joke. Owen���s ultimate slacker role. So laid-back he didn���t photograph.

They are called ���The Frat Pack��� now because, like Sinatra���s original ���Rat Pack,��� they are friends who keep popping up in each other���s movies, and because nothing makes a journalistic career like noticing a trend or coining a term.

Entertainment Weekly was the first to give it a go, offering us ���The Slacker Pack��� in spring 2004. Nice, but at the time Stiller was appearing in six movies, hardly a slacker, so USA Today countered with ���The Frat Pack,��� which seems to have stuck. It beats ���Slacker��� in the Google sweepstakes 3,370 to 233 (as of this writing), and it reminds us of ���Old School,��� the boys��� semi-breakout hit in which a group of middle-aged men create a fraternity to recall the wild days of their youth. Fun is in the past, and in nostalgia.

Stiller and company have done something similar; they���ve created a fraternity to recall the wild movies of their youth: ���Stripes��� and ���Animal House��� and, unfortunately, ���Neighbors��� and ���Dr. Detroit.��� Fun may be in the past, but so is not-fun. See ���Envy.���

Intense vs. laid-back
Each frat boy has his own persona. Luke Wilson is the handsome, lovelorn everyman, while brother Owen is the laid-back lothario who lucks into things. He succeeds without trying and this plays nicely against Stiller, who tries furiously but fails. Ferrell is the doughy man-child, and never funnier than when expressing honest emotions as either child (���Elf���) or man (���Anchorman���). Vince Vaughn plays the pal who needles the protagonist into action. Jack Black is pure anarchic intensity.

In fact, you could split up the fraternity along these lines:

Problems arise when a picture stars two guys from the same category. Maybe if Owen Wilson had played the dreamy neighbor who lucked into a fortune in ���Envy��� the movie would���ve worked; instead you had Black and Stiller, two intense performers with nothing to offset them. ���Dodgeball��� did phenomenal business ��� $114 million domestically ��� but Vaughn felt wrong as the Bill Murray-esque, schlubby good guy. Playing laid-back, his considerable charm disappeared. Apparently if his fingers aren���t snapping he barely registers. See his cameo in ���Anchorman.���

With the exception of Wes Anderson���s offerings, their movies together are formulaic. The dumb guy who learns just enough to get the girl in the end (���Zoolander���; ���Anchorman���). The buddy who creates havoc in the life of the normal guy (���The Cable Guy���; ���Orange County���; ���Old School���). Rivals must be overcome, lessons learned. When in doubt, add an inane contest. Thus ���Zoolander���s��� walk-off between male models, and thus ���Starsky & Hutch���s��� disco dance-off, and thus ���Anchorman���s��� battle royale between competing news teams. And thus all of ���Dodgeball.���

New InStyle scans

I rescanned the InStyle spread using my trusty Epson, and then pieced it all together. Here you go...

Cover of Rolling Stone!

the whole cover

I just caught on TRL* that Vince and Owen are on the cover of the latest Rolling Stone!

*If you aren't watching, You are missing the most energized Vince I have ever seen. OMG

Profile: WEDDING CRASHERS��� VINCE VAUGHN

By: CARL CORTEZ, Contributing Editor, iFMagazine.com
iFMagazine.com
Article found here

In 1996 Vince Vaughn broke through with his fine comedic turn in SWINGERS. Almost ten years later, he���s still the life of the party but crashing weddings in the new comedy WEDDING CRASHERS co-starring Owen Wilson.

"When I first heard the title, it made me laugh," explains Vaughn. "I've always liked Owen [Wilson] since BOTTLE ROCKET and I liked it, not only was he funny but I always thought of him as a really good actor too. [Director] David [Dobkin] and I had a great experience doing CLAY PIGEONS with so I was really excited about getting the chance to take this concept and work with those two guys on it."

The movie chronicles two lifelong bachelors (Vaughn and Wilson) who crash weddings for food, women and a good time. Problems arise when real relationships with women start to form from their antics.

"There's innocence when you're younger, you kind of don't know any better," says Vaughn. "But these guys know better and it gets to that place where, you've been on auto pilot for awhile and now you're no longer happy. You're starting to have to come to terms with the whole coming of age. That's my favorite thing about it, I like that I get put in a situation and end up having a resolve or an arc that is not obvious -- that you don't think is what the movie is about."

In some ways, Vaughn admits there is a kinship to his character from SWINGERS and the one from WEDDING CRASHERS, though he also notes there are differences as well.

"There are similarities, but this latest character is the cooler guy," says Vaughn. "This guy's more manic, again he's going through more manic situations. But I saw this one as kind of like, he loves to eat, he loves life. He's kind of like the big loveable friend. Where Trent's more of a smoother kind of more ladies man type than this character."

Some improvisation occurred on set too, though most of that happened prior to coming to set which Vaughn says is sometimes beneficial in milking a premise like WEDDING CRASHERS for all its worth.

"We would take the scenes and work on them prior to getting there," says Vaughn. "Sometimes people that are very good at improvisation in life, meaning like stage improvisation, aren't good in films because you have to ultimately take a scene where it needs to go. It's not about just saying something that's funny. You can say something funny, but if it's not on story or driving the scene to its end, it's really not very helpful at all. So we would really sit and plan out stuff that was said to make sure that not only was it funny but it got across the point. So we would write sometimes that day or the night before, but most of the lines were written down in the form that we like prior to shooting. Then of course not much different than method acting, the main thing about improvising is listening so if something happens that wasn't expected and you know your character, you know what has to happen in the scene, you can react to that in a way that is honest and it might take you in a different direction but go to the same place. It's not like you go to scenes and say 'Oh let me think of crazy things to say.' There is kind of a method to all of the madness of talk."

Reuniting with his CLAY PIGEONS director David Dobkin was also a great experience for Vaughn.

"We were trying to make a character comedy that we took very seriously as far as story was concerned," says Vaughn. "We really treated it very seriously, so as a result we set up, I think a really nice environment for people to feel comfortable to play and to bring ideas. The thing that is great about David is that he's a great listener. Most of the really good directors that I've worked with are pretty comfortable taking ideas from any road. They don't see it as giving up power, they have the power and they are comfortable enough to do that. So we got great ideas from everyone, it became a great collaboration. Everyone who played any part had really good contributions to their characters. Bradley Cooper did, of course Isla [Fisher] I think is really funny. The fun thing for me about Isla was, so many times in these movies the girls really get the short end of the stick, in that they are there just to kind of laugh at whatever the guy says, whether it's funny or not. In this movie Isla really gets to be funny and she really gets to drive some scenes with some comedy with kind of an over commitment to the absurd, which is what comedy really is. I like that the movie has some original things in it like that that you don't get in every film. It was fun for me, while I am kind of driving scenes and being the comic relief that sometimes with Isla there's oddity that she's even crazier and I, by default become kind of the straight man who's reacting to her kind of adding to the scene. So it's a unique flip."

While Vaughn has been high profile recently popping up in everything from STARSKY AND HUTCH, BE COOL and last summer���s big comedy hit DODGEBALL, Vaughn admits his real love in the comedy world is creating comedy from the characters themselves.

"My real partner in crime, always was [Jon] Favreau, so my thing is always real character driven comedies like SWINGERS and MADE, not sketch comedy," says Vaughn. "Not that there's not room for both or one isn't enjoyable, just my personal taste. I like movies that comedy coming from out of flaws of people. Things that aren't comfortable, to have a tragedy, like Favreau's phone call in SWINGERS. Real but it's also kind of funny, but it's hard to watch cause you've done it yourself. Owen's of that type of comedic actor so I really enjoyed doing this with him particularly."

Currently, Vaughn is lensing "The Break-Up" with Jennifer Aniston for a 2006 release, which he says is a dark romantic comedy.

"All the scripts I would get for romantic comedies always have some really stupid concept like if you marry her you get the million dollars, if you don't, you don't,���" says Vaughn. "Or ���hey I'm going to write an article on how to meet someone and then "The Break-Up" with them.��� It's like relationships are crazy enough I always felt like this is insane, why? This doesn't happen. I always like the movie THE ODD COUPLE where you have the friends that were stuck in the place together. So "The Break-Up" is about a young couple, not so young, really, who buy a condo together. The movie starts, they've already bought it, and it takes both of their salaries to upkeep it and to pay the mortgage and they really have a bad thing and "The Break-Up". So they are kind of stuck, living under this roof together, figuring out their lives, but they've just broken up with each other. They "The Break-Up" right away, it's not like down the road, and I think it's really fun. It���s the anti-romantic comedy."

From E! Online's Megaplex

By Team Megaplex
E! Online
Found here

Three Amigos: Here in the middle of summer movie season, the poor members of Team Megaplex can't step outside without bumping into one of our good celebrity buddies. They're all over us! So, this week, we bring you encounters with three of our favorite hot-weather homies: Vince Vaughn reinvents the idea of wacky hijinks; Jennifer Connelly wants to freak us out; and Lisa Kudrow has a few happy endings for us.

Crash Course: Come to think about it, Vaughn seems like everybody's best friend. Everybody's big, crazy, scary best friend. In The Wedding Crashers, he nails every bridesmaid he can while playing mutual wingman with Owen Wilson. He says insane things. He's groped at a fancy dinner party and tied to a bed by perverts. All in a day's work for Hollywood's reigning king of obnoxious comedy. On top of it all, he's a nice guy who's still friends with the star of his last movie (Mr. and Mrs. Smith's Brad Pitt) and his next one ("The Break-Up"'s Jennifer Aniston). Oh, and us...

How much personal experience went into Wedding Crashers?
I never did crash a wedding when I was younger. But it seems like a great idea, in a way, because it looks like it would be a lot of fun.

The multicrash sequence looks like a blast, with you and Owen ending up in bed with a bevy of naked beauties.
That was the only time that Owen showed up early and left late. He kept going, "Guys, I don't know if we have this yet. Let's keep shooting." I was more professional. But that was a lot of fun, with those girls dancing and then laying 'em down on the bed.

You end up with a clingy but perverse little firecracker played by Isla Fisher. Ever really have a girlfriend that freaky?
Not to that extreme, thankfully. There were some people that, after breaking up with them, I thought were a little bit crazy.

Christopher Walken plays her dad. Remind you of anyone's scary father?
A lot of girlfriends I've had, I've never even met their fathers. Even if I dated them for a long time, their parents were somewhere else, and I never made the trip back home. That's the one nice thing about L.A., I think. Although you would like to have your family around, it is kind of nice to put off that experience.

What's your worst dating memory?
I always hated that feeling, when I was younger, of having to pick someone up for prom. You're not even dating the girl, but you have to go to the door, meet the parents, you take the photograph. It's like, what's going on here? There's something that's kind of stuffy about that whole experience. But maybe that's just me. I'm oversharing here.

The tabloids really want you and Jennifer Aniston to have an affair. How weird is that?
Sometimes I go, That's a good idea! No, I don't really look at it that much. And I've never been someone with a celebrity status that the paparazzi cares about. I'm more, We think it's happening, but it's not really happening, sadly.

Do you care if people believe the gossip?
I don't know who spends their time worrying about what happened today. It's like, What the hell are you doing? Go kiss someone, get something to eat, take a nap. You're gonna be fine, kid. It's crazy. It's like people who get caught up in science fiction too much. They get in arguments over things that aren't even real!

In the movie, which was sexier: the crash scenes with all the different women or the one where the topless girl ties you to the bed all night?
It wasn't as sexy in that way, 'cause you're tied up.

Depends on what you like.
Wow, interesting. We're starting to learn a lot about each other.

Always a Bridesmaid

Skirt-chasing Vince Vaughn is Wedding Crashers' master of ceremonies

By Robert Wilonsky
SF Weekly
Found here

If Vince Vaughn puts any effort into what he's doing, it doesn't show, which is perhaps one of the benefits of always appearing to be hung-over. The man probably has to check the bags under his eyes at the airport, and he's about as in shape as a toddler's fistful of Play-Doh. This is no doubt why audiences dig him; he is us, dude, and we am him. On-screen, he looks like any other buddy who'd loan you a smoke, buy you a beer, or give you a call when he needs to get bailed out of jail. He's no more or less than a giant schlub of a man, someone who got tall enough to look like he ought to be selling frozen peas in jolly green bags but stopped maturing around the time he finally realized he wasn't gonna last through his eighth year of college. He's a role model for every guy who ever dreamed of living in his parents' basement till he was 35.
In Wedding Crashers, a movie about two guys who troll for tail during strangers' nuptials and stretches its sketch-comedy premise into epic proportions (two hours, sweet Lord), Vaughn doesn't even give co-star Owen Wilson a chance to own a piece of the property. It's all his, even when Vaughn isn't on-screen; we're forced to bide our time till his return, because any scene featuring just Wilson and his would-be lover (Rachel McAdams) is slower than a turtle in a bear trap. Vaughn stakes his claim from the jump, in an opening scene featuring Dwight Yoakam and Rebecca De Mornay as a splintering couple feuding over frequent-flier miles. Vaughn and Wilson -- as Jeremy Klein and John Beckwith, respectively -- are there to mediate the couple's dispute, but instead Vaughn delivers a long-winded, mile-a-second monologue about how beautiful weddings inevitably lead to the husband's screwing mistresses in Denver motel rooms and the wife's wiping her Latin lover's sweat off her naked bod. He rambles and ambles for what feels like minutes, and the scene plays as though wholly improvised -- not even Vaughn seems to know what the hell he's talking about.

He does it again one scene later, informing the female assistant who's trying to fix him up that dating only leads to the uncomfortable end-of-the-evening "ass-out hug" and, if you're really lucky, a game of "just the tip," referring, of course, to how far a man should insert his penis into his date. The woman ought to be appalled, but she just stands there glassy-eyed, bemused and confused by what she's heard. But what else can she expect from a man who has set up an open bar behind his desk? The poor woman, like Wilson and everyone else in the film (even Christopher Walken, as the U.S. treasury secretary), is just there to play straight man to a schmuck who is seriously bent.

Wedding Crashers, whose director, David Dobkin, has worked with both Wilson (Shanghai Knights) and Vaughn (Clay Pigeons) before, is that rarest of entities in these appalling appeal-to-everyone days of moviemaking, when studios rip the guts and nuts from their comedies to lure in that cheap teen coin. It flaunts its R rating -- Vaughn and Wilson punctuate their sentences with more fucks than a porn movie -- and recalls the heyday of National Lampoon's Animal House, Caddyshack, and Stripes, comedies made for grown-ups who still giggled like preteens. It's to be celebrated for its fearlessness, for being so wrong that it can't help but feel right to laugh at Vaughn when he says, after a night of particularly rough sex with his nutty wannabe lover Gloria (Isla Fisher), "I felt like Jodie Foster in The Accused last night."

The movie has two problems, one of which is that it indulges in what's becoming an irritating trait in films starring Vaughn and at least one of the Wilson brothers: the pointless cameo of an actor who, when he appears on-screen, isn't so much a surprise as he is a groaning distraction. (You'll know who it is long before he emerges from the shadow; just this sentence alone probably gives it away. No, it's not Ben Stiller. Could have been, though.) Its other flaw, which is significantly more fatal, is that Wedding Crashers goes on far, far too long. (The thing has more false endings than all three Lord of the Rings movies combined.) It begins with too much of a bang -- an orgiastic montage, set to "Shout," in which the boys crash a handful of weddings and crash into bed with a handful of topless women -- and winds down with too much of a whimper. It's almost as though the movie becomes ashamed of its actions and feels the need to apologize for having too good a time; it all but flagellates itself by giving into so much True Love, you'd be forgiven for feeling truly disappointed. Here's a tip: When Vaughn and Wilson are outed as imposters and forced to leave Walken's estate, grab your stuff and walk out. You'll think you just saw a comedy masterpiece.

Hollywood's in-Vince-ible comedy star

By NANCY MILLS
NY Daily News
Found here

'Wedding Crasher' Vaughn has 'em rolling in the aisles

HOLLYWOOD ��� As long as humiliation comedy makes people laugh, Vince Vaughn will have no problem finding a job. Neither will his pals Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell and Owen Wilson.

These four musketeers shared billing in "Starsky & Hutch" and "Zoolander" and have regularly popped up in each other's projects. Vaughn and Stiller made "Dodgeball" together and cameoed in Ferrell's " Anchorman." Vaughn and Ferrell worked opposite each other in "Old School," and now they are whooping it up with Wilson in "Wedding Crashers," opening Friday.

To paraphrase George Gershwin, how long can this keep going on? "Until the audience gets tired and stops laughing," says Leonard Maltin, film critic/historian with "Entertainment Tonight."

"Vince has proved many times that he's very capable of doing more," adds Maltin. "But right now it's working for him to do the same thing over and over. He makes me laugh. If he's still making me laugh in five years, fine. Vince seems like a smart guy, and he knows that overexposure will kill the golden goose."

"Clearly this is Vince's moment to shine," says producer Michael De Luca, who hired Vaughn for "The Cell" (2000) when he was head of production at New Line, and again for "Old School" (2003) when he was head of production at DreamWorks. "He's such a great instigator, and his delivery is deadpan ��� you can cut to him in any scene.

"Every generation has its comedy stars, and this is the Vince-Owen generation. They're doing contemporary versions of 'Stripes,' 'Caddyshack' and 'Animal House.' This kind of classic comedy never ends, although the cast of characters will change."

De Luca doesn't think Vaughn's number is up yet. "I wanted to buy '"The Break-Up",'" he says, referring to Vaughn's new project, a romantic comedy with rumored girlfriend Jennifer Aniston, now filming in Chicago. But he lost out to Universal, which is reportedly paying Vaughn $12 million to produce and star.

Vaughn, 35, is well aware that the comedy niche can be a trap. After "Swingers," the film that finally got him noticed after seven years in the Hollywood trenches, he veered away from humor.

He played a serial killer in "Clay Pigeons," an evil businessman in "Domestic Disturbance" and Norman Bates in the "Psycho" remake. But he stayed on the B list until he went back to being funny in "Old School."

"A lot of comedies are sketch movies, just a series of funny scenes," says Vaughn, whose nervous energy causes his knees to knock into each other while he talks. "I look for character-driven comedy. You're invested in an emotional journey, and the jokes come out of that."

The journey in "Wedding Crashers" involves two aging bachelors finally growing up. "My character is still a kid who's really excited about meeting girls this way," he says. "These guys are a little bit flawed, but they're getting older and realizing that this isn't the best thing to do. How are they going to handle it?"

Not always gracefully, but Vaughn, still a bachelor, doesn't mind. "I've always been able to laugh at myself," he says. "My favorite stuff is human and painful."

Vaughn learned the upside of risk when he played the drag queen in his Chicago-area high school production of "A Chorus Line." "One reason I got the part was that I was very popular, so I wouldn't get picked on," he says.

"Vince doesn't care about humiliation, awkwardness or embarrassment," "Crashers" director David Dobkin says. "He's fearless. He'll commit fully. Owen has a more sophisticated sensibility but shares the same enthusiasm for goofiness and this cool, Hollywood bad-boy personality."

"When I was young, I was a very sweet, nice, polite kid," recalls Vaughn. "As I got older, I became a clown and anti-authority. I think learning disabilities played into looking for validation in other areas.

"I like being challenged. Feeling nervous forces me to work hard. When I was reading 'Crashers' and got to the masturbation scene, I thought, 'That could go horribly wrong!'

"But you prepare, and when you get there, you just go for it. You can't tiptoe through it."

"Vince has a lot of energy," Wilson says. "If you were to design the actor of the future, Vince would be the 'Terminator' of comedy. He's a 6-foot-5 master of the rapid delivery. He comes up with thousands of ideas."

Now that his dance card is full ��� he just signed to play a radio deejay in David O. Russell's next film ��� Vaughn is reading investment books. "Schools should teach kids how to balance their checkbooks, buy homes, have a positive cash flow and make their money work for them.

"I'm learning out of necessity."

InStyle July Issue

Tappanga sent me these scans of the new issue of InStyle magazine tonight. I've beem anxiously awaiting my copy in the mail, but it hasn't arrived, yet. So much thanks toTapp! And everyone else, enjoy!

Bigger

Bigger

Bigger

Bigger

Bigger

Pack 'em in: Stiller's pals party on

Bill Muller
The Arizona Republic
Found here

With Wedding Crashers, which opens Friday, the frat pack is partying once again.

The prolific group of actors (who take their name from the film Old School) often work together. Members include Wedding Crashers stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn (who play guys who sneak into weddings to hit on women), as well as Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Owen's brother Luke and Jack Black. Among their movies are Dodgeball, Starsky & Hutch, Anchorman and Zoolander. Even when they don't have major parts, they often make cameo appearances in each other's films.

We caught up with Vaughn, 35, in Chicago, where he's filming "The Break-Up" with Jennifer Aniston.

Question: What do you think of being called the frat pack?

Answer: It's a little bit constructed to be honest with you. . . . The big common denominator to the whole thing is Ben Stiller, the guy that gave opportunities to a lot of us. He put Will Ferrell in Zoolander, put Owen in a bunch of stuff, he fought for me to be in Dodgeball. The only movie I've done with Will really is Old School, and then we both were in Starsky. I did a cameo for him in Anchorman, he did something in this, but this is Owen and my first movie together. We were both in Starsky, we didn't have much to do together. And I've never even been in a scene with Jack Black, the only movie I've been in with Luke is Old School, and we both did a cameo for Will in Anchorman.

Q: Is it fun to work with friends?

A: I really like Owen and consider Owen a friend, he's great and look forward to doing something else with him again, and of course Ben I like as well, so yeah, I like a lot of them. . . . The comedies we do are very different. . . . Envy (starring Stiller and Black) and Duplex (starring Stiller) are different movies than Wedding Crashers. Wedding Crashers is more of like a 1970s drama, in that you have a very character-based movie that's very grounded in reality. Of course, you have comedic stuff that can go broad at times, but then you also have scenes that play very real.

Q: Do you see any similarities between your group and the Saturday Night Live/ Second City comedians of the '70s who made films together, such as John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and Chevy Chase?

A: No, those guys all started off with Second City, then they went to Saturday Night Live together. Will (Ferrell) was a Groundlings actor, Ben started off doing The Ben Stiller Show. Owen (Wilson) came out of Texas really, where he was doing those smaller movies. Me and (Jon) Favreau (who co-stars with Vaughn in "The Break-Up") met on a movie called Rudy and made Swingers and then we made Made together and pursued independent lives as well. I have respect and think all those guys are talented and I have enjoyed working with them, but it's not like it's an organized group saying, 'What's our next move?'

Q: Do you think it's important that your characters redeem themselves?

A: If you do a movie like Hud, the whole point is that they don't ever redeem themselves, but for the purposes of these characters and these movies, yes. . . . What I've always liked is you have flawed characters who have some goodness in them and stuff, but they're crippled in some ways and have made mistakes in some ways, they're struggling with a particular issue.

Q: Why "The Break-Up"?

A: Not that I didn't want to do a romantic comedy, it's just that all the ones I got I found ridiculous. It's always like, "If you don't marry the girl, you don't get the $10 million," or "Hey, I'll date this girl then I'll write an article about it in the paper." I've always just thought . . . the dating was weird enough on its own. You didn't need some weird concept attached to it.

Q: Wedding Crashers is rated R. Do you think with most movies being rated PG-13, there's a shortage of films for adults?

A: No question about it. . . . I think you deal with the adult subject in a way that the movies when I was kid that I loved, like Animal House, like Blues Brothers, like 48 Hours. You look at the original Bad News Bears, that movie's really edgy by today's standards. That's what makes that movie have such a heart and such an impact. So many people miss what it is that's making you laugh so hard at those old movies is also they kind of get uncomfortable sometimes, and comedy really comes from an overcommitment to the absurd and tension being created, then being able to laugh at it.

Illinois sweetens deal for movies

By John Chase
Chicago Tribune
Found here

Since becoming governor more than two years ago, Rod Blagojevich has wooed Hollywood like a teenage underdog in a melodrama trying to get the prettiest girl in school to notice him.

He's held news conferences. He's passed laws. He's traveled to California, all with an eye toward getting directors and producers to make Chicago and Illinois a frequent locale for films and TV shows.

And Blagojevich has had some success. But on Monday, the governor plans to take his love affair with Hollywood to the next level by signing legislation extending tax breaks for movie producers and enticing them with greater incentives if they hire more minorities from Illinois to work behind the camera.

The bill-signing is expected to take place in Chicago on the set of ""The Break-Up"," a romantic comedy being filmed in Chicago and starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston.

Two years ago, the governor signed the state's first tax-break legislation for the film industry on the South Side set of "Barbershop 2." Since that time, big-name stars such as Julia Roberts, Christian Bale and Nicholas Cage have been spotted about town while filming "Ocean's 12," "Batman Begins" and "The Weather Man." State officials say the movie industry has since poured more than $144.5 million into the state's economy.

"Illinois has once again become the Hollywood of the Midwest," Blagojevich said. "By extending and improving the tax credit that has been instrumental in generating millions and millions of dollars for our economy and putting thousands and thousands of people to work, you can expect to see Chicago and other parts of the state on the big screen for years to come."

Under the new legislation the governor is expected to sign, Hollywood studios will see their tax credits for wages increase to 35 percent from 25 percent if the companies hire more minorities from Illinois, especially those in high-poverty areas.

State Rep. Kenneth Dunkin (D-Chicago), one of the legislation's chief sponsors, said traditionally blacks, Latinos and women have had trouble finding work both behind and in front of the camera.

"You don't see too many grips or light technicians or people behind the camera that aren't white and male," Dunkin said.

"What we want to do is bring the film productions back here to Illinois and ... give folks who live in the state a chance to work on your production. Don't discriminate and give people an opportunity to work."

The new legislation also gives some filmmakers another financial benefit by allowing them to transfer unused tax credits to other companies that want to make TV shows and movies here.

The governor and General Assembly passed the first tax credit law in 2003 after what they said was a precipitous drop in the number of films, TV shows and commercials being made in Illinois. Much of the work, the governor has said, moved to Canada, where similar tax breaks were offered and the nation provided a favorable exchange rate.

The state's film office reported in the late 1990s that the movie industry generated $124 million annually in Illinois. That number dropped to just $25 million in 2003, said Andrew Ross, a spokesman for the state Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

In 2004, Ross said, the industry employed 14,500 people while filming in Illinois and poured $76.5 million into the state's economy. So far this year, the industry has provided work for 5,000 people and generated $68 million, Ross said.

Critics have questioned the need for the state to offer significant tax breaks to giant Hollywood studios at a time when the state is struggling to stay afloat financially. But Ross said that without the breaks, film companies just wouldn't come here.

"The bottom line about this is the fact that but for these tax credits these productions wouldn't be in Illinois," he said. "It's an ultra-competitive world that we live in to try to get film productions to come to your locales."

Vince Vaughn: the actor we hate to love

By LESLIE GRAY STREETER
The Palm Beach Post
Found here

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. ��� The hot movie cad is an old-school phenomenon ��� Robert Mitchum, Clark Gable, Steve McQueen and Diner-era Mickey Rourke practically branded the smooth operator who was most definitely up to no good, but who had enough sex appeal and Kryptonite-strength vulnerable charm to fool well-meaning women into believing they were just lost souls who could be redeemed with some old-fashioned TLC.

Well-meaning women are such suckers.

But it's a little trickier to pinpoint the unmistakable allure of guys that "Wedding Crashers' " star Vince Vaughn, that tall, gravel-voiced drink of sexy snarkiness, specializes in.

Because they're jerks. Big, honking, tell-you-your-shoe-is-untied-and-stick-you-with-the-check-when-you-look-down jerks. His signature sleazes in "Dodgeball," "Swingers," "Made" and "Old School," among others, are right up in your face with their know-it-all-ness, their matter-of-fact tendency to exaggerate, and their blatant, confounded untrustworthiness.

But still, you could see yourself falling for their act. And maybe, in a weaker moment, giving them your phone number.

Darn it if I'm not one of those well-meaning sucker women.

Owen Wilson, his frequent costar and "Wedding Crashers" sidekick (the movie opens Friday), has also made a name for himself as a sexy buffoon, but his creations have a sly, surfer-boyish charm that disarms.

Vaughn's collection of loudmouths, sleazes and outright losers are more in your face, whether he's doling out the ridiculous ring-a-ding relationship advice to his neo-hipster buddies in "Swingers," goofing his way through the Las Vegas mob in "Made," or blithely leading a crew of shockingly inept misfits into a red rubber ball sea of terror in "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story."

If these guys were played by anyone else, they'd be strictly cartoon movie villains, like, say, the jock frat guys in "Revenge of the Nerds" or any one of "The Karate Kid's" WASP-y dastardly Kobra Kai, or character-acty Peter Lorre/Steve Buscemi weirdos. But with his crinkly eyes, fetchingly self-conscious swagger and wink-wink cleverness, Vaughn makes schlubby sexy. It's a little scary.

I'm sure the real Vince Vaughn's a lovely person, but he gives his characters an odd combination of blatant jerkiness and blistering sexiness that makes Trent, "Swingers' " clueless talky scenester or Bernard "Beanie" Campbell, an insensitive married lout reliving his frat days in "Old School," both repellent and compelling.

Peter le Fleur, the deadbeat, debt-plagued gym owner in "Dodgeball," is probably the closest thing to a leading man in Vaughn's stable of schlubs. When he hits on Christine Taylor, the too-sensible bank representative who's come to shut him down, we know immediately that she should steer clear of this bozo, you're rooting for him.

Not that Vaughn's a one-trick pony ��� he's shown he can be a Serious Actor. As a struggling single dad in 1998's "A Cool Dry Place," an imperiled psycho-hunting FBI agent in 2000's "The Cell" and as Norman Bates, the biggest "Psycho" of them all, in Gus Van Zant's odd but stunning reshoot of Hitchcock's slasherific classic.

But as good as he is comforting a hurting child or running around the Bates Motel dressed like his dead momma, Vince Vaughn seems never so subversive or edgy as when he's complaining about the lack of hot girls in the area, or hitting on some poor waitress who knows he's full of it. She knows it. He knows it. And we know it. And still, we're all here, enjoying his shtick, preparing to be suckered.

And knowing, somehow, we're gonna enjoy it.

Being Vince Vaughn

Terry Armour
Chicago Tribune
Found here

Let's just call him the man who would be Vince.

Local bartender and sometime actor Brad Nelson stumbled into a sweet gig as Vince Vaughn's stand-in for ""The Break-Up"," which is filming in town through the summer. Nelson read for four different parts and was turned down. "As always, I was too tall," said the 6-foot-6-inch Nelson, who tends bar weekends at Crobar. "So they called my agent and asked if I would be willing to be the stand-in. At my size, you have to get in where you fit in."

The 39-year-old Nelson has done his share of commercials. But he's never landed anything quite like this. And though he looks nothing like Vaughn, people have been snapping his picture as he walks to and from the set thinking he is Vaughn.

"I guess from 200 feet away, we look like the same guy," Nelson told Armour & Co. when we caught up with him during a break from shooting last week. "There's going to be a lot of people upset when they get their film back."

Not into big weddings

Vaughn altar cad in new comedy
Prefers small for self, when and if

SEAN DALY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Found here

BEVERLY HILLS���Vince Vaughn already knows exactly what his own wedding day will be like: "Very traditional, very small, and very family based. I won't be having 200 people."

Now all he needs to do is find a bride.

"I would really love to have kids and a family," says the 6-foot-5 star of Wedding Crashers, a new romantic comedy opening Friday.

Vaughn, an overnight star thanks to the 1996 indie hit Swingers ("You're so money!"), has been previously linked in the tabloid press with names like Anne Heche, Joey Lauren Adams and now Jennifer Aniston. He denies all, adding that right now "there is no one serious."

It seems Vaughn ��� once rumoured as a possible replacement for late-night host Craig Kilborn ��� isn't really that into dating. At least not in the traditional, prearranged way.

"I don't like the feeling of having to go and pick up someone I don't know at their house and then take them to a formal restaurant," the 35-year-old shares during an informal chat at the Four Seasons Hotel. "It's just like that feeling you get when you are younger and your mom makes you dress up and go to some formal function. You just don't feel comfortable."

The most important lady in his life these days is mother Sharon, a former real estate agent and stockbroker from Hamilton, Ont. She divorced the actor's toy salesman father, Vernon, many years ago and now resides in Chicago. That's one reason Vaughn recently traded his Hollywood Hills home for a townhouse in the Windy City.

He's making his next movie there ��� a romantic comedy with Aniston called The Breakup. Vaughn will earn $12 million (U.S.) to produce and star in the Odd Couple-like story of a man and woman who "The Break-Up" but are forced to continue living in the condo they purchased together.

Vaughn takes another stab at comedy in Wedding Crashers, in which he and Owen Wilson are a pair of divorce mediators who have yet to find a ceremony, or a bridesmaid's heart, they can't work themselves into.

"I just heard the title originally and it made me laugh," says Vaughn, who shares his birthday with singer Reba McEntire and actress Julie Stiles. The actor admits he has only a few rules when it comes to picking up women: "I prefer meeting someone separate from my friends so you don't have any other dynamic going on besides your own."

To prepare for the role, Vaughn took six weeks of ballet lessons at the Actor's Center in Chicago. He was no stranger to the studio. "My mom used to teach dance classes," he says. "When I was younger I went down to the local rec centre and took tap class. It was a beginner class for 5- and 6-year-old girls. I was 11."

Born in Minneapolis, Vaughn was raised in the tony suburb of Lake Forest, Ill. He was the last of his parents' "double Vs" ��� his sisters' names are Valerie and Victoria; the family dogs were Viking, Vero and Vladimir.

A popular student and president of his class at Lake Forest High School, Vaughn caught the acting bug after landing a TV ad for Chevy trucks.

"I got that commercial and thought, `This is it now,'" he told The Washington Post. Vaughn made brief appearances on Doogie Howser, M.D. and 21 Jump Street before landing his first studio movie, the feelgood football flick, Rudy.

"Most of my scenes, I'm in a helmet," he remembers. "It was kind of embarrassing. I called my parents and had to tell them to look for number 44."

It was on that movie that Vaughn met fellow up-and-comer Jon Favreau and later agreed to appear in his movie, Swingers.

He hasn't been as proud of any role since. Unless you count quitting smoking earlier this year.
"I take every conversation and I steer it towards how I quit smoking," Vaughn revealed in March. "People will be like, `Vince, do you wanna go see a movie?' I'm like, `That's terrific, because I have quit smoking and you can't smoke in a movie theatre.' You just wanna find a way to talk about that."

Vaughn says he only took up the habit at age 24, so he "didn't want to look fake" on film.
"But I looked totally fake in the first movie I smoked in," he now laments. "I got addicted from doing that and that's how I started ��� for the craft, isn't that so beautiful?"

Vince Vaughn takes humor seriously

By John Cook, Special to The Times
Found here
Despite his work in "Swingers," it took many years for the actor to get cast in comedies. Now? That thinking is so old school.

Tell someone that you're scheduled to interview Vince Vaughn at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, and you're likely to get a response along the lines of, "Yeah, good luck." Not our Vince Vaughn ��� Trent, the prowling Lothario high on nightlife in "Swingers"; Beanie, the married electronics impresario desperately holding domesticity at bay with a beer bong in "Old School." No, at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, Vince Vaughn will be recovering from the exploits of Friday night, if not still living them.

And yet there he was at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Chicago on a recent Saturday, Starbucks cup in hand, without even the benefit of dark sunglasses to shield him from the unforgiving light of day. With his imposing 6-foot-5 frame, slightly puffy eyes and mild case of bedhead, Vaughn, wearing jeans and an untucked shirt, stood out a bit from the crowd of Midwestern early risers already filling the Ritz's 12th-floor restaurant.

Eight-thirty is a late call for me," said Vaughn, who is in Chicago shooting "The Break-Up" with Jennifer Aniston for Universal Pictures. "It's been 5 or 5:30 this whole week. I think I speak for all actors when I say sometimes you get punished for being successful. People see you a certain way. And that's your job ��� to come off and make that character seem very real. So it's a compliment, sort of."

Vaughn has been getting his fair share of compliments lately. Ever since his pitch-perfect comedic performance two years ago as the fast-talking, ear-muffing arrested adolescent in "Old School," the 35-year-old has been on a midcareer roll: "DodgeBall," the goofy buddy flick in which he starred opposite Ben Stiller as an, um, arrested adolescent, took in $114 million at the domestic box office last year, according to Box officemojo.com, beating out "The Aviator" and "Million Dollar Baby." He stole a good deal of the spotlight and some critical praise from Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie ��� no small feat ��� with a supporting role in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" as a professional assassin who still lives with his mother. And there is buzz about his performance with Owen Wilson in "Wedding Crashers," in which he plays a �Ķ well, if divorce mediator Jeremy Gray isn't exactly an arrested adolescent, he's too old to be elbowing his way into strangers' weddings to meet women at their most vulnerable.

The attention helped him shepherd ""The Break-Up"," a romantic comedy that he developed with writers Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender on spec and which he is producing, into a reported $12-million payday at Universal ��� four times his previous top fee.

The Ben Stiller connection

"For a while, before 'Old School' came, I couldn't get any comedies," he said. "People would say 'Vince Vaughn's not funny' because I hadn't done anything since 'Swingers.' Even after 'Old School,' Ben Stiller had to really fight for me to get the part in 'DodgeBall.' "

Stiller, Vaughn said, is the common link in what has come to be known as the comedy Mafia ��� the rotating cast of performers said to include Vaughn, Stiller, Wilson, Will Ferrell, Jack Black and others, who regularly appear in one another's films and have gained enough box office clout to develop movies on their own. But aside from Stiller's generosity, he said, the comedy Mafia is a myth.

"I have respect for all those guys, but if anything I started with ['Swingers' writer, star and co-producer Jon] Favreau. And I guess Favreau directed Will in 'Elf,' but somehow he's not a part of whatever this comedy Mafia is. It's very confusing how the lines are drawn." (A studio spokesperson says the producers haven't begun to address the role of a director yet.)

However the comedy Mafia lines are drawn, there seems to be a single line running through most of Vaughn's characters. Are they just different shades of Trent? Not according to Vaughn.

"To me these characters are really different," he said, making an impassioned if not entirely convincing argument. "The character in 'DodgeBall' is sort of not trying at life; he's very lazy. Whereas the guy in 'Wedding Crashers' loves life, and he's extremely motivated. Trent is a smoother character than Jeremy. Where Jeremy loves to eat, likes to dance, Trent never dances in 'Swingers.' He's not a big eater. He's more of a card player. The one thing they have in common is they're both trying to pick up girls."

While it may seem that Vaughn is putting too fine a point on his characters' eating and dancing habits, it's because he is at pains to point out that he takes his job seriously. Perhaps it's the Midwestern upbringing ��� he was raised in the suburbs of Chicago ��� but he seems genuinely uninterested in discussing the ins and outs of Hollywood power plays or analyzing his ascent in the pecking order. He'd rather talk about the acting classes he's taken over the years, or how to come up with a third act in a romantic comedy that's not trite, or why it's a shame that so few young actors are conversant with films like "Hud." In other words, he is not a comic. He's an actor.

"My journey has always been one of working my hardest, not handicapping how to get over," he said. "If you start trying to get over, and you're doing stuff that you don't love, there's something hollow in it." The role he is playing now, opposite Aniston, places him for the first time squarely in the sights of the celebrity media machinery as paparazzi scour Chicago for shots of the actress post-Brad.

"I haven't dealt with it on the level that [a lot of people] have," Vaughn said of the crush. "But in seeing it and being friends with people who have gone through it, [it's no fun] to be there. But at the same time you have to realize that there's nothing personal about it. [The photographers] are just trying to make a living, you know." (Days after saying that, Vaughn would wind up on the cover of Us Weekly, arms wrapped around a bikini-clad Aniston, under the headline "Jen's Revenge.")

The biggest drawback Vaughn sees to the ever-increasing celebrity obsession is the swarm of wannabes flooding Hollywood. "You have a lot of younger people wanting to be famous first and foremost," he said, "and then secondly wanting to be actors. Whereas when I was younger, we really loved acting and worked really hard, and were kind of nerdy and innocent by today's standards. You have a lot of these kids coming up who are very fashion-conscious and wear ski hats in the middle of summer. It's bizarre. They talk in a jargon that's kind of odd. I talk to kids, and their references to movies start with 'Jerry Maguire.' "

Vince Vaughn isn't a swinging single anymore

BY CINDY PEARLMAN
Found here

LOS ANGELES -- A man can only swing for so long. Vince Vaughn actually thought about settling down a few years ago. It's just that when it comes to long-term relationships, the star of "The Wedding Crashers" could be dubbed "The Heart Crusher." "OK, let's look at my last long-term relationship," Vaughn confides in an interview that would even have Dr. Phil salivating.

Did he cheat? No.

Did he leave socks in the sink? No.

Did he have Angelina on his speed dial. Definitely not.

"This is really just so terrible," Vaughn, 35, begins, explaining how his last relationship crashed and burned. "I used to have this girlfriend. And she just didn't understand that I like to have some downtime for myself when I walk in the door at night.

"She would come up to me and ask me questions. And I didn't want to be asked questions. Too many words have gone through my mind all day long, and when I get home, I just can't think anymore."

Now, comes the part where women might want to brace themselves.

"My girlfriend would say, 'Vince, what color do you want the new blinds to be?' I really don't even care about the new blinds. I won't even notice the blinds. So I used to say to my girlfriend, 'Listen, I'm not going to go to bed in the physical sense. Physically, I'm awake and sitting on the couch. But mentally, I'm asleep. Mentally, I'm checking out. Goodnight, mentally.'"

Men of Chicago, we caution you: Do not try this at home.

"Oh, my girlfriend hated it," Vaughn says in the most sheepish tone.

And you feel bad for him because he sits on a couch at the Four Seasons Hotel looking so sad. Bulky and all shoulders and curly hair, Vaughn looks like the kind of guy who could do these deeds and probably get away with them.

It's not like he feels no remorse.

"Do you think I was awful?" he asks the reporter.

Well, yes. Horrible, in fact.

"Thanks for not lying," Vaughn says.

Here's another truth about Vince Vaughn: It's hard to not like him, even when he's mentally checking out, which he never does during an interview. Why should he? Vaughn is poised to enter the next stratosphere of his career on Friday with the comedy "Wedding Crashers." Hence, all of the relationship talk -- and we haven't even gotten to the Jennifer Aniston rumors, but give us a second, please.

In the new movie, Vaughn plays a guy who is lucky in one-night stands, because he crashes weddings to meet chicks. He's a pro at his work, thanks to help from his accomplice, played by Owen Wilson. But both get a little bit jammed up when they meet two women who want to get serious and possibly walk them down the aisle.

Having a big-buzz summer movie like "Wedding Crashers" is already very, very good for Vaughn's career.

He's in Chicago as you read this, producing and starring with Aniston in the relationship comedy ""The Break-Up"." Oh, and the man who coined the phrase "he's so money" finally could use that phrase about himself. Vaughn was reportedly paid $12.5 million for the project.

That's a lot of cash when you hail from the northern Chicago suburbs, and used to do phone solicitations during your summer break.

"Yep, it feels almost not real," Vaughn admits. But then again, he hates rumors about celeb paychecks. "At a certain point, it almost becomes like a report card."

If so, he just got an A-plus. "It doesn't seem real in a financial way," Vaughn admits. "I can't even fathom it." Likewise, he can't fathom being gossip column fodder because he's making a movie.

You might have seen Vaughn canoodling with Jennifer Aniston on the latest issue of US magazine. He hates to burst your bubble, but those two wacky kids were just shooting a scene for "The Break-Up" by the lakefront and the scene required a clinch. He laughs about how the few times they've had dinner it has set off a flurry of rumors.

"Jennifer is just awesome. Both of us just ignore all the stuff because we're working on a script we love," he says. If you press him, he is happy to sing Aniston's praises. "She's just a great actress and really, really funny."

The same funny applies to "Wedding Crashers," one of the few adult comedies of the summer. "We wanted a fun R-rated comedy," Vaughn says. "Just when you think Owen and I will stop with a joke, we'll push it to the next level."

The film's premise is that single women are easy to seduce during a wedding. Does Vaughn think they're more vulnerable?

"I think the word vulnerable has negative connotations to it," he says. "I would say they're more open at weddings. I mean, love is in the air."

The film is also a throwback to his own crashing days, although Vaughn makes it clear that he never crashed weddings. Chicago bars were another matter.

"Remember Medusa's?" he says, laughing. "I'd drive in from the suburbs, and it was a real big deal to crash that bar. I would be kind of scared, too. I'd also go to Kingston Mines and the Green Mill. Let's just say I did a lot of driving in from the suburbs."

A typical overachiever, Vaughn was class president of the Lake Forest High School Class of 1988. His first job wasn't in acting, but in telemarketing in Waukegan. Around that time, he started to get interested in acting and got his professional start in Chicago doing a Chevy commercial and a small role in the movie "Rudy" (1993).

"Chicago is a good city for actors to start in because the focus is the work," he says. "It's not, 'Can I get on this sitcom?'

"I was ready for the frenzy of L.A. when I left Chicago because I had that Windy City optimism in me. Think about it. My city rebuilt itself after it burned down. My city is called the Second City. Given those things, we're the city that has taken hustling and made it an artform."

Vaughn also made swinging an artform in the indie hit "Swingers" (1996), which launched a film career that includes, among others, "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" (1997), "Clay Pigeons" (1998), "Psycho" (1998), "The Cell (2000), "Old School" (2003), "Dodgeball" (2004) and most recently "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" (2005).

He realizes that with the expected success of "Wedding Crashers," he and Wilson might be dubbed the new Hope and Crosby. "We talked about doing something else together. The truth is I like working with Owen because he's not only funny. He's also a really good actor and that inspires me."

As for romance, he's not so inspired. When Vaughn mulls over his future, he is thinking marriage and kids. "The only problem is frankly I'm more caught up in my work than I am in relationships," he admits.

But back to his own wedding. "I like to think that maybe there will be a wedding someday. It's more about will I ever meet the right person," he says.

Does she have to be a supermodel? "No, no," Vaughn insists. "Funny is good. Smart is good."

But bachelorhood is good, too. "The thing is as you get older, it's easier to be alone. You have your own habits."

No one bugs you about the new blinds.

"But if I met someone who made me happy, I'd get married, have kids and buy blinds with her," Vaughn says with a smile.

"People have said to me, 'Vince, do you feel like you've missed the boat on some relationships?' I say, 'I think I have missed the boat in some relationships, but the good news is that I look out into the harbor and there are more boats coming in every day.

"And some of the new boats are beautiful."

Distributed by Big Picture News

Lifelong Friends Write a Buddy Pic

The 'Wedding Crashers' star is cool, cocky, and always fun to watch -- even in atrocious films
By Hugh Hart
Found here

Los Angeles -- "Wedding Crashers" stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as two swinging divorce lawyers who pose as guests at strangers' nuptials in order to pick up women for one-night stands. The writers, Steve Faber and Bob Fisher, drew on their lifelong fascination with the Kennedy clan to flesh out the story and found additional inspiration in a fake-identity scam they'd practiced back in their starving student days.

"In college I interned one summer for Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey in Washington, D.C.," Fisher says. "I had zero money and needed to eat, so I'd make up these fake name tags saying I was a legislative aide for Sen. Tunney or Sen. Cranston or whoever and crash these lobbyist events. They threw huge spreads, with free liquor, and you could sit down and eat with senators and congressmen."

When Fisher returned to UCLA, he regaled Faber with his adventures, which included a tipsy cloakroom encounter with Sen. Ted Kennedy. Together, Faber recalls, "We crashed Democratic platform committee meetings in L.A., Republican, Libertarian, Green Party functions."

"We'd line our pockets with Saran Wrap and leave with our pants stuffed with cold cuts," Fisher says. "This shows you the level of how pathetic this all is, because the guys in our film crash weddings for sex. Um, we were crashing for food."

Every detail of the film's elegant Cape Cod-like setting was hashed out at Jerry's Deli in Studio City. A showbiz haunt frequented by the "Seinfeld" cast during their heyday, Jerry's Deli serves as the de facto office for Faber and Fisher. Here, over pitchers of diet cola, the writing team outlined the "Crashers" story on yellow legal pads, then accomplished a rare feat by a) producing an original concept not based on a TV series, comic book or earlier hit movie and b) selling the story, without a completed script, to New Line Cinema on the strength of their zany 45-minute pitch.

"It was just this adrenaline-fueled, dancing-monkey, idiotic clown Jerry Lewis crap with all these set pieces," jokes Fisher, sitting with his partner at their customary sidewalk table on Ventura Boulevard. "Humiliating."

But it worked. New Line approved "Wedding Crashers" in March 2003. By July, the script was ready; shooting began in the fall of 2003, and by last summer, the movie was ready to go.

"They could have released it a lot earlier," Fisher says, explaining that the studio wanted to wait for a plum midsummer slot. "Without wanting to brag, it tested extremely high," Faber adds. "We were told it's the highest-testing comedy in New Line history."

Faber, 43, who resembles a mildly disheveled Don Johnson, and the tightly wound Fisher, 44, are well equipped to craft a buddy comedy. They've been best friends for 28 years, first collaborating as authors on left-wing editorials for their high school paper in Chatsworth, a Los Angeles suburb. Both attended UCLA. Then Fisher got married and practiced law while Faber remained single and tended bar.

Collaborating all the while, they finally broke into showbiz in 1994, writing sitcoms including "The Bonnie Hunt Show" and "Married With Children." Three years ago, disenchanted by the "homogenized, mediocre" products resulting from network television's prevailing jokes-by-committee system, they tried their hand at feature scripts.

Early on in the creation of "Wedding Crashers," Faber and Fisher pictured Vaughn and Wilson in the title roles.

"We wrote the thing all along with their voices in mind," Fisher says. "Owen is this really well-trained comedic persona who makes a great counterpoint because he's so understated and dry." Taken with Vaughn's breakthrough performance as the know-it-all ladies' man in "Swingers," Faber explains, "We knew Vince would be great doing this rapid-fire delivery, which is a classic comedy technique from the '30s and '40s, like William Powell meets Groucho Marx."

In the past couple of years, Vaughn has co-starred with Wilson, Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell in comedies including "Old School," "Starsky & Hutch, " "Anchorman," "Dodgeball" and "Be Cool," earning his screen time by delivering highly energetic takes on men behaving ridiculously.

"I think what 'Crashers' has going for it is that it's coming out with a rare point of view of not trying to please everyone," says Vaughn, speaking from Chicago, where he's filming ""The Break-Up"," a romantic comedy with Jennifer Aniston. "Owen and I were already fans of 'Animal House' and all those R comedies when we were younger -- '48 Hours,' 'Stripes' and what not. We really wanted to make a raucous comedy.

"I think of comedy acting as over-commitment to the absurd," he says. "On one hand, the fact that my character is (tied to the bed) with ropes by the younger brother is absurd, but it's also kind of awkward and shocking. I don't like to make things safe for people. I think a little bit of danger is good. Edge is good."

"Wedding Crashers" ultimately comes down on the side of commitment over promiscuity, and the appeal of hearth and home has finally struck a chord for Faber. In October, he's getting married for the first time. Fisher is already worried about his role in the ceremony, and it has nothing to do with impressing the female guests. Instead, the pressure's on to deliver a hysterical toast.

"I got married in 1988," he recalls. "There were 800 elderly people at my wedding and Bob wowed 'em. I have a much tougher gig because I've got to give my best-man speech in front of 200 comedy writers. The material better be good or I'm screwed."

There's something about Vince

The 'Wedding Crashers' star is cool, cocky, and always fun to watch -- even in atrocious films
By Janice Page, Globe Correspondent
Found here

Why doesn't Vince Vaughn annoy me? This is what I find myself wondering during a recent preview screening of ''Wedding Crashers," a summer-weight comedy scheduled to open Friday, starring Vaughn and the effortlessly annoying Owen Wilson.

Putting aside, for the moment, dramatic credits that include the ridiculous ''Domestic Disturbance" and Gus Van Sant's redundant ''Psycho" remake, you'd think at this point we'd all be pretty tired of revisiting the cocky man-child who fast-talked his way through ''Swingers," ''Made," and ''Old School," among other films.

Even allowing that he's by far the best thing in the Doug Liman-directed ''Mr. & Mrs. Smith," one could argue that Vaughn's shtick should have long ago started to grate and bore, the way it might if delivered by Jim Carrey, Chris Rock, or (worst-case scenario) Tom Arnold. In fact, in an early episode of Jon Favreau's ''Dinner For Five" series, Peter Falk revealed just this kind of exasperation behind the scenes, calling Vaughn a ''hog" for allegedly stepping all over Falk's gravelly lines in ''Made."

Still, here I am chuckling while on-screen the thinking man's John Belushi jams catered foods into his mouth and laps up the sophomoric, homophobic humor penned by ''Wedding Crashers" screenwriters Steve Faber and Bob Fisher.

Under the direction of David Dobkin (''Shanghai Knights"), Vaughn and Wilson come together for the first time as equal-opportunity headliners to play middle-age bachelors out to score free drinks and farklempt women by infiltrating the nuptials of complete strangers. As a pair, they couldn't be less inconspicuous (Vaughn is 6-foot-5; Wilson's famously mangled schnoz would stick out at a cockfight), and their escapades couldn't be more ridiculous. This is a frat-house comedy minus the frat house, so while the slight Wilson is good for some light romantic-comedy-type lifting, it's both remarkable and crucial that his big, goofy buddy is a guy who can get away with overcommitting to every absurd thing he's given to run with, and then some.

In the past, Vaughn might have appeared destined to be the overshadowed, Joey Bishop-level member of the so-called Frat Pack fronted by Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, and the Wilson brothers (Owen and Luke). But on closer examination today, he's arguably the most promising and least one-dimensional actor of the bunch -- a real human with untethered sides that compel you to keep your eye on him, even in the silliest of vehicles.

It helps that he's also NBA height and Victor Mature handsome, with androgynous Betty Boop features and a hint-of-a-cleft chin that make him sexy fodder for gossip page rumors about relationships with everyone from Jennifer Aniston (his costar in the upcoming ''"The Break-Up"") to Janeane Garofalo.

When he first came to widespread attention as Trent, the brash young club hopper who ruled ''Swingers" back in 1996, the Midwestern improv veteran was heralded as the new Dean Martin, with a manic splash of Jerry Lewis built right in. That future cult classic of a movie (directed by Liman; written by leading man Favreau, who first worked with Vaughn in ''Rudy") defined a new kind of vulnerable neurotic cool, and its hilarious ''cocktail nation" chatter led to enduring catch phrases such as ''You're so money," supposedly lifted from Vaughn's own peculiar verbiage.

Steven Spielberg was so impressed that he cast Vaughn prominently in ''The Lost World: Jurassic Park," but then forgot to give the actor anything worth doing, such as feeding Jeff Goldblum to the velociraptors early on in this dog of a sequel. A year later, ''Return to Paradise" offered a meatier role in an exotic adventure film that actually wasn't half bad, but unfortunately for its young stars (including Anne Heche and Joaquin Phoenix), it wasn't all that memorable either.

Too few people saw Favreau's ''Made," a dark-humored disorganized-crime companion piece of sorts to ''Swingers," and too many saw the ''Psycho" remake, which was so shot-for-shot faithful to the original that it put Vaughn in the impossible position of trying to be exactly as creepy as Anthony Perkins. For the record, Vaughn does a more compelling job in another psychotic 1998 film, the uneven, Dobkin-directed ''Clay Pigeons," as a demented cowboy who thoroughly trumps the remade Norman Bates, right down to his nervous laugh.

Like most moviegoers, I was impressed by the visuals in Tarsem Singh's ''The Cell," but I lost interest in the muddled story way before Vaughn's FBI agent character gets psychotherapist Jennifer Lopez to crack open the mind of a serial killer. On the other hand, ''The Prime Gig" was interesting in spite of its predictable path, mostly because it lets Vaughn do the smooth-talking con man turn that he's always seemed genetically built for, even if you didn't know he was raised by parents who worked in sales.

There are almost three dozen feature films on this 35-year-old actor's resume, but the chapter that currently matters most begins with a quiet cameo in 2001's ''Zoolander" (enter the Ben Stiller connection) and a starring role in Todd Phillips's 2003 ensemble romp, ''Old School," featuring Ferrell and Luke Wilson as fellow architects of a latter-day ''Animal House" fraternity.

Vaughn, who reportedly had to convince the makers of ''Old School" that he had the comic chops to play an opinionated family guy named Beanie, followed its blockbuster success with a subtle lead performance in last year's ''Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story," another popular broad comedy that they'll be downloading on college campuses for years.

His Frat Pack status gets him cameos (''Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy") and the occasional mustachioed Jewish coke dealer part (''Starsky & Hutch"), but he was apparently acting on his own when he accepted the racially and critically controversial role of hip-hop slang master Raji, a shady white gangsta wannabe who -- love him or loathe him -- is practically the only thing with a pulse in ''Be Cool."

If you want recent proof that fearless doesn't always mean funny, or wise, Raji is Exhibit A -- a dumbed down Vanilla Ice clone Vaughn got away with embodying only because the rest of ''Be Cool" was such a train wreck.

Still, he did get away with it -- a few even labeled it a brilliant comedic performance -- which in my book crowns him the Teflon Vaughn.

I think the reason he doesn't annoy me is because there always seems to be a brain working behind those mysterious doe eyes, so I wonder not just ''What's this jerk up to?" but ''What might he do next?"

In the words of Raji, the answer invariably comes back: ''Twinkle twinkle, baby. Twinkle twinkle."

I'm not quite sure what that means, but I know it makes me smile.

Wheeeeee!

View image
View image
View image
View image

The best man

Vince Vaughn's money when it comes to comedies
By Bob Strauss
Film Writer
Found here

Smokin' career. Membership in Hollywood's hottest clique. And that sure sign of superstardom: the gossip industry desperately trying to create a romantic link with his latest leading lady. It's all happening for Vince Vaughn.

If any of this is going to the 6-foot-5- inch, 35-year-old actor's head, he isn't showing it. Unlike the brash, trash-talking screen persona Vaughn established nine years ago in "Swingers," recently displayed in the likes of "Old School," "Dodgeball" and the new, R-rated sex comedy "Wedding Crashers," the real guy comes off humble and genuinely grateful for his recent success.

Though he talks a mile a minute, Vaughn not only lets you get a word in edgewise, but seems happy to hear your point of view.

"No, I'm not always like that," says the lanky Midwesterner, wearing a sharp gray suit and elegantly slouched across a hotel suite sofa. "I really enjoy being quiet sometimes and just relaxing. I feel I'm a pretty good listener. Maybe that's partially why I can portray such fast-talking guys in the movies, from listening a lot and taking in a lot of information."

In the new movie, Vaughn plays the more manic, stream-of-consciousness half of a pair of pals whose hobby is picking up babes at weddings they weren't invited to. Even for someone who coined the would-be catch phrase "You're so money!" in the well-reviewed but under-seen "Swingers," Vaughn's dirty-minded verbal dexterity astonishes in "Crashers."

"He has rapid-fire delivery and a lot of ideas, which was very appropriate for his character," observes co-star Owen Wilson. "It wasn't so much about keeping up with him, but figuring out where this would take the scene and stuff."

"Sometimes people that are very good at improvisation on stage aren't very good in films because you have to ultimately take a scene where it needs to go," Vaughn says, revealing a big secret of his success. "You can say something funny, but if it's not on-story, it's really not very helpful at all."

Following a string of post-"Swingers" dramatic duds ("Clay Pigeons," "Return to Paradise," the "Psycho" remake), Vaughn's approach to comedy has not only helped his own star rise, it's aided other actors' vehicles as well. On the weekend we spoke, for example, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," in which Vaughn made an extended guest appearance for his "Swingers" director Doug Liman, opened to spectacular box-office numbers.

"I was just a little bit more than a cameo in the movie, but it's exciting that the movie did so well," he said with a shrug, then cracked, "They needed me on this one!"

Of course, the tabloid heat around the presumed affair between "Smith" stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie probably sold a few tickets. But there's no denying that Vaughn's small role became more and more prominent in the film's advertising leading up to its release.

His rising profile might also be partially responsible for so many small minds wanting to believe that Vaughn and the ex-Mrs. Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, are more than just co-workers on the currently filming ""The Break-Up"," which co-producer Vaughn describes as an "anti-romantic comedy" about a split couple who must still live together in the Chicago condo they can barely afford.

Vaughn - who, like Aniston, vehemently denies that there's anything more than professional friendship between them - hopes to weather any media madness with a smile.

"I think that now people realize we're working together on this movie '"The Break-Up",' " he says optimistically. "But that just comes with the territory. I've never dealt with it at the level that these people are dealing with it at all. So, for me, it's easier to have more of a sense of humor about it. It's not personal. But I can see from the side how it's a horrible experience for some entertainers, that type of attention."

The type of attention Vaughn appreciates comes from his fellow film comedians - Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Owen and Luke Wilson, etc. - who have been dubbed the Frat Pack. Like the extended "Smith" cameo, Vaughn's smaller roles in such comedies as "Zoolander," "Starsky & Hutch" and "Anchorman" are considered extra value in the current funny-movie market.

"Someone came up with this, and it is kind of a reach," he says of the Frat label, which plays off the guys-in- their-30s-start-a-fraternity concept of Vaughn's comeback film, "Old School." "But I think that once you establish it, it is kind of real. The common denominator is Ben Stiller. He really wanted me to be in 'Dodgeball.' He asked Will and Owen and me to be in 'Zoolander,' asked us all to be in 'Starsky & Hutch.' So Stiller's really the guy who's been very supportive and championed a lot of people's careers in a lot of ways."

This Hollywood buddy system reflects the arrested adolescent nature of many of the Pack's films - none more so than "Crashers." To get serious about the subject of a very silly movie for a moment, we asked the never-married Vaughn what this cinematic trend toward noncommitment means to him.

"Part of it is just the time that we live in; it's generational," he muses. "Women are working a lot more, people are pursuing their careers a lot more. They're more kind of into their own thing, more selfish in a way. But I think it's also healthy, because sometimes, in the past, people got married a lot younger without any experiences. They didn't really marry the right person and didn't know who they were at the time. So, there are pros and cons to it.

"But I do think it's something that comes with time, and the timetable is different for different people. I don't think there's one universal answer for it. But I do think that, ultimately, the highest relationship that you can have in life is with that person of the opposite sex who you're in love with and are best friends with. But it's always great to have good friends. There's a healthy balance, I think."

Uh, does that mean Vaughn's a romantic at heart?

"Yeah, I think I'm romantic to some degree. I'm more romantic with someone I really like than I am romantic for romance's sake. You know, I'm romantic like, 'You're allowed to sleep over.' I'm very old-fashioned that way. 'Yes, you can say hi to me in public.' I'm a real softy that way."

Such a starry-eyed person must dream of a spectacular wedding, mustn't he?

"I feel, if I have a wedding, it'll be very traditional," Vaughn says. "Very simple, family, traditional wedding. I would prefer there not be a lot of people. But you know how it is. I have no dog in that fight; whatever the girl wanted, that's what it'd be. Don't you think? I don't care what the cake looks like, I don't want to get in an argument over it, so go ahead. I would choose my battles more wisely than what the bridesmaids' dresses look like. 'That's fine, Honey, whatever you want.' "

Though he tries to avoid acting the joker full-time, Vaughn obviously understands that humor has been very, very good to him.

"It's strange, in that there's something about doing comedies," he reasons. "You can move up quicker than you can with anything else. There are no special effects and people either laugh or they don't. I have done all of these darker, smaller movies. But comedies - especially if they're mainstream comedies and they do well - you do rise a lot faster than you do in other genres."

And, at least in Vaughn's case, you get to make like more of a jackass than you'd ever think of actually being.

"I'm probably more inhibited, or shy sometimes," Vaughn, who began acting in his suburban Chicago high school, says of real life vs. the reel. "The good thing about acting is that it gives you a playground to do that kind of stuff. I was always confident with acting, for some reason ... but I've always worked hard enough at it to get good at the things that didn't come easy."

Asked if there was anything he wouldn't do to get a laugh on film, Vaughn had to think long and ... quietly.

"Not really," he finally reckoned. "I feel like, if it makes sense for the story, it's kind of fun to be able to go there. Especially if you're dealing with something called 'Wedding Crashers,' you don't want boundaries. You want to make an R movie, and you want to deal with it in a way that's ... not reckless, exactly, but unapologetic."

Heeheehee

From MTV Movie News

As fans of "Swingers" can attest, Vince Vaughn is a pretty decent con man. So when he recently gave us a plot breakdown of his upcoming film with quirky director David O. Russell ("I Heart Huckabees"), we were a bit skeptical. "Me and David are doing a movie called 'I Guess I'm Different,' " Vaughn said with a poker face. "It's about a 13-year-old Filipino boy who has an outie bellybutton [and hangs out] at a park district pool. All the other kids have an innie and they kind of tease him, and he's forced to come to grips with the fact that his bellybutton is different from all the other kids'." Sounds like a real blockbuster, and we wouldn't put anything past the "Spanking the Monkey" director who once made the Oedipal complex disturbingly appealing, but word has already leaked that his untitled film with Vaughn is about a sarcastic call-in show host who finds himself taking on the traits of his callers. After being called on it, Vince fessed up: "David O. Russell and I are doing a movie about a radio talk show host who goes on an interesting journey. I'm very excited to work with him. He's one of my favorite filmmakers out there right now." The film, which Vaughn said will be more mainstream than Russell's typical fare, is due at the end of 2006.

Invinceible

He broke big in comedy, but he wanted people to see his range. Bad idea. Mr. Vaughn kills again in 'Wedding Crashers.'

By Devin Gordon
Newsweek
Article found here.

July 11 issue - For the first hour and a half of his interview with NEWSWEEK, Vince Vaughn is���oh, might as well come right out and say it���a bit of a snooze. He is polite, professional and completely unrevealing. His agenda on this lovely day in Los Angeles is to plug the raucous new comedy "Wedding Crashers," in which he and Owen Wilson play bachelors who bluff their way into weddings to pick up girls, and he's diligent about staying on message. He quotes liberally from the modest-celebrity handbook���"My focus has always been work"; "I'm just an actor"���and often begins answers by saying, "You know, it's interesting..." But don't be fooled. It's not. Perhaps it was silly to expect the guy to conjure up the speed-talking, bile-hurling bons vivants he made famous in "Swingers" and "Old School," the twin pillars of Vaughn's movie library. But something about his careful blandness suggests that that guy really is in there, lurking, like a class clown waiting for the teacher to leave the room.

And then, just as the interview is winding down, the reporter points out that Vaughn has spent nearly all of it fiddling with a bottle cap, then a plastic straw. "And I will begin chewing it shortly," says the actor, 35. Then he stands up suddenly. And here it comes. "I quit smoking four months ago and since then I have been biting-chewing-fidgeting with anything that isn't nailed down. I quit cold turkey. I was up to two packs a day, I'm coughing, my eyes are red, I don't have energy, I'm not even enjoying it, so I just said, 'That's it.' I think it might've been easier if I went with Nicorette or one of those supplements, but I just don't get that. Let's see, I'm addicted to something, so I know! Let's pop some pills to get over it! Yeah, that makes sense. But now I find myself in conversations where people are looking at me and I'm salivating all over myself." He laughs���a 6-foot-5 man with a giggle like the Pillsbury Doughboy. "This is how pathetic and sad it is: you start thinking, 'Who am I without a cigarette in my hand?' "

Ten years into an up-and-down career, here's who Vince Vaughn is now: one of Hollywood's kings of comedy. After his blazing turn as a latter-day Rat Packer in 1996's "Swingers," Vaughn kissed off comedy for a string of dramas, including "Return to Paradise" and "Psycho." All of them tanked. "Old School," the 2003 hit about a trio of men who start a college fraternity, was his penance���the film in which he stopped milking his tall, dark handsomeness and returned to mocking it. Ever since, Vaughn has been money, baby. He killed as the villain in "Starsky Hutch," turned "Dodgeball" into a $114 million smash, made "Be Cool" almost watchable and nailed cameos in "Anchorman" and "Mr. & Mrs. Smith." This spring he signed a $12 million deal with Universal to produce and star alongside Jennifer Aniston in ""The Break-Up"," a romantic comedy he developed. But his piece de resistance may be July 15's R-rated "Wedding Crashers," which has generated so much buzz from sneak peeks that $100 million should come easy.

Vaughn walks away with "Wedding Crashers," but the film works because it's a classic buddy flick built on pitch-perfect chemistry. Wilson, the mop-topped blond with a breezy Texas drawl, plays the romantic lead who, naturally, falls in love with one of his would-be flings ("The Notebook" 's Rachel McAdams). Vaughn, meanwhile, blows holes through the lovey-dovey stuff with his spitfire delivery. His character spends much of the film in panic mode after bedding a virgin and watching her escalate into a "stage-five clinger." "It's hard to keep up with him," says Wilson, who met Vaughn during nights out with his brother Luke while the men were shooting "Old School." "All I know is, I'd be exhausted at the end of the day. Even off camera it can sometimes reach a fever pitch, where we're both trying to get our point across. I can boil most of our conversations down to 'Your comments are valuable, but allow me to continue'."

The film's hilariously hokey pickup lines ("Scientists say we only use 10 percent of our brains, but I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts") are sure to be invoked at every real wedding for years. Alas, if those don't help close the deal, you're on your own. Despite his lifelong bachelorhood, Vaughn says he has no additional expertise. "I've never really hooked up at a wedding," he says, though one has to wonder what "really" means. "My only advice to single guys out there is this: go out and star in a couple movies. That makes things alot easier."

One thing it doesn't necessarily help with, however, is career flexibility. After Vaughn's run of dramatic roles, executives at DreamWorks had to be talked into casting him for "Old School"���even though he broke out with a near-identical part in "Swingers." "They thought I wasn't funny," he says. "I was, like, 'Wait a minute, I started with comedy'." Now he faces the opposite problem. People���like, say, moviegoers and NEWSWEEK reporters���expect Vince Vaughn to play Vince Vaughn, whether he wants to or not. "It's really hard for a guy like him. You succeed in an area and people love you for it, so you want to de-liver more of that," says David Dobkin, who directed Vaughn in "Wedding Crashers" and in the failed 1998 noir "Clay Pigeons." "But there's also gonna be a point when you want to try other things, and you just hope you can be lucky like Tom Hanks." For the moment, being lucky like Vince Vaughn is plenty lucky enough.

�� 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

Dark Horizons Interviews Vince

By Paul Fischer
Article found here

From Mr and Mrs Smith to Wedding Crashers, Vince Vaughan is everywhere and having quite the time of his life. He's come a long way since Swingers, and it seems he can do just about anything, and will do just about anything for his art, including be prepared to be tied to a bed, as he finds himself wooing a very strange politician's daughter in Wedding Crashers. Talking perpetually fast, the very tall Mr Vaughan spoke to Paul Fischer.

Question: It seems that the character from Wedding Crashers could be your Swingers character later on in his life...

Vince Vaughn: Well, no. He was very different. I mean there are similarities, but the Swingers character is kind of a cooler guy, while I think this guy's more manic, going through more manic situations. But I saw this more as kinda like, you know, he loves to eat and he loves life. He's kind of like the big loveable friend, you know, where Trent's more of kind of the smoother kinda more ladies man type than this character is.

Question: What was the attraction of doing this?

Vince Vaughn: Well, I just heard the title originally and it really made me laugh. Wedding Crashers I thought was funny and, I've always liked Owen since Bottle Rocket and I liked it. Not only was he funny but I always thought of him as a really good actor too. And, David I had a great experience doing Clay Pigeons, so, I was really excited about getting a chance to take this concept and work with those guys on it.

Question: How much room is there for improvisation in this, because it seems to me that... because your speech pattern is so, ah, so fast...

Vince Vaughn: Not as much as people think, although there was a lot - meaning, we would take the scenes and work on them prior to getting there. I think sometimes people that are very good at improvisation in life, meaning like stage improvisation, aren't good in films because you have to ultimately take a scene where it needs to go. It's not about just saying something that's funny. You can say something funny but if it's not on story or driving the scene to its end it's really not very helpful at all. So we would really sit, you know, and plan out stuff that was said to make sure that not only was it funny but it kind of got across the point. So we would write sometimes that day or the night before, but most of the lines were written down in a form that we liked prior to shooting. And then of course that's not much different than method acting... the main thing about improvising is listening so if something happens that wasn't expected and you know your character, you know what has to happen in this scene, you can react to that in a way that's honest and it might take you in a different direction to go to the same place. But it's not like you go to scenes and just say, oh, let me think of crazy things to say. There is kind of a method to all of the kind of madness of talking, you know.

Question: Your character does some not so nice things in the movie, such as lying through his teeth--- Are there any parallels between you and this character?

Vince Vaughn: Yeah, sure. I think we all have a bunch of different people inside of us, and then for a particular role you bring a certain side of that self of yourself forward to sort of play, but it's always really dimensionalised. You know, he's sort of the comic relief so it's not really his story so he's there to represent a certain note or certain colour in the painting. It's not kind of a full journey for him. But, yeah, there's that side definitely that wants to go out and have fun and have this kind of friendship and then also have the ability to sort of fall in love with someone and kind of get caught up in that.

Question: This film has three main comedic geniuses, I'd say you and Owen, and, ah, Will Ferrell. Is there anyone else that you would have liked to have...

Vince Vaughn: I would say that you are right on the first one, but I don't want to get into semantics with you... keep going. (Laughter)

Question: Who would you have liked to have seen be added to the cast for more humour, if possible?

Vince Vaughn: I think that we, we... sometimes you can overdo it with stuff. It just seemed really perfect that this guy... for Will to come in and play this particular part made a lot of sense, and he was gracious enough to do it for us and very funny with it. But sometimes you can get taken out of the movie, I feel, if there's too many of 'em. It's like, what's going on, and what's that dude doing in the movie. Do you know what I mean? But this was kind of an iconic type character who we talked about earlier in the movie and made out to be kind of a big deal, so it made sense for him to come in. But I think that sometimes you can, you can overkill.

Question: What's the best date you've ever been on?

Vince Vaughn: The best date? I don't like dates, kind of like my character in the movie. If you meet someone that you like then meet them out somewhere. That's good because that's comfortable. I don't like the feeling of going to pick someone up that I don't know that well at their house and then take them to kind of a formal restaurant.

Question: Did you have a bad date experience?

Vince Vaughn: Never bad, it's just that feeling that you get like when you're younger and your mom makes you dress up and go to some formal function, you just don't feel comfortable. I never did anyway. You don't feel honest, I guess. You don't really get to learn about anyone. You're kind of being polite and you can ask the questions, it's just not a great time for me. But I like to go somewhere that people can feel comfortable to joke around and have a sense of humour and you can really get to know each other.

Question: Are you a romantic?

Vince Vaughn: Um, yeah, I think I'm romantic to some degree, if I really like somebody. Not... I'm not romantic, ah... I'm more romantic if there's someone that I like than I am a romantic just for romantics sake. You know, I'm romantic like, um, you're allowed to sleep over. (Laughter)

Vince Vaughn: Very old-fashioned that way. No, I'm kidding. (Laughter)

Vince Vaughn: Yes, you can say hi to me in public. Um... I'm a real soft heart. (Laughter)

Question: Nice guy.

Vince Vaughn: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just to get out my softer sides. Go ahead.

Question: Can you talk about what they're calling the frat pack. I guess it's the five or six of you guys who are popping up in each other's movies and... you know, like with Ben and you, in fact, and Will - your careers, at least are all going through the roof together...

Vince Vaughn: Yeah.

Question: Is it... but is this frat pack thing, is it more of a media construction or do you guys...

Vince Vaughn: I would say it's a whole media construction, but someone came up with this and I think it is a little bit of a reach. But like anything, once you establish it then it kind of does become a reality too, then it is kind of real. But it was kind of a little far-reaching at first, I think, in that the real common denominator is, is Ben Stiller, meaning that Stiller did Zoolander and Owen had a big part in that, Will had a part in that, I just had a cameo, I didn't speak, I didn't have scenes with either of them. The first time I ever did a movie with Will was Old School, then he asked me to do something in Anchorman, I did and then he did something in this. It's not like we have this long kind of thing. I've never even been in a scene with Jack Black. I think we've done cameos in the same movies but we've never done a scene together, and Owen, the only time we've ever worked together was Starsky, and we barely had anything to do together. This was the first real movie that we had a lot to do together And so I think the real common denominator is Ben Stiller. You know, Ben Stiller, um, ah, you know, really wanted me in Dodgeball, asked me to be in Zoolander, asked Will and Owen to be in Zoolander - had a lot of movies he did with Owen. I think he kind of developed Starsky and Hutch and asked me to be in that and asked Will to be in that and that's it. So Stiller's really the guy who's been very supportive of people's careers and really championed a lot of careers in a lot of ways. and kind of very selflessly, like not making a big deal out of it, but he really has been giving a lot of opportunities to people: Will off of Saturday Night Live, me off of Swingers and Owen off of Bottle Rocket. So he's kind of the real common denominator if there's anything going on.

Question: Are you and Favreau working together again?

Vince Vaughn: Yes, I will work with... Favreau is going to be in the new movie I'm doing called "The Break-Up". It's a romantic comedy and Favreau is going to play my best friend in that. It starts filming a week from Monday with Jennifer Aniston. Vincent D'Onofrio plays my older brother, Cole Hauser plays my younger brother, John Michael Higgins is in the movie, Justin Long from Dodgeball is in the movie.

Question: Is it a romantic comedy?

Vince Vaughn: Vince: Romantic comedy, yeah.

Question: A different kind of comedy than something like this... is it...

Vince Vaughn: Vince: Yeah, it's different... it is kind of an anti-romantic comedy because all the scripts that I would get for romantic comedies always have some really stupid concept like, ah, if you marry her you get the million dollars, if you don't you don't... or, hey, I'm gonna write an article on how to meet someone and then "The Break-Up" with them. It's like... relationships are crazy enough I always felt, like this is insane, like why... this doesn't happen. so, I kind of always like the movie The Odd Couple where you had the friends that were stuck in the place together. So "The Break-Up" is about a young couple, not so young really... (Laughter)

Vince Vaughn: ...who buy a condo together... the movie starts and they've already bought it... and it takes both of their salaries to kind of upkeep it and that, and to pay the mortgage, and they really have a bad thing and "The Break-Up", and so they're kind of stuck living under this roof together figuring out their lives but they really have just broken up with each other So, it's not like... boy, like, they "The Break-Up" right away, it's not like, you know, down the road. I think it's really fun.

Question: What else have you finished?

Vince Vaughn: Vince: I have a small movie I did that was at Sundance that I had a good time called Thumbsucker...I thought they did a really good job with it - Mike Mills - and that was fun to get the chance to go do that. So I did Thumbsucker, that's come out, and I did a small little cameo in this Mr and Mrs Smith thing, although if you look at the trailers, you'd think I was in the movie a lot more. I just did a cameo in that. And, um, this is it. And then this Wedding Crashers and then I'll go film "The Break-Up".

A few quick (really quick) words with Vince Vaughn

By Roger Moore | Sentinel Movie Critic

Vince Vaughn is spent. He's just finishing up a grueling movie shoot in his hometown of Chicago. "Five-day weeks," he gripes of "The Break-Up". And most every day, he has to get all mushy with Jennifer Aniston.

"I know, I know, 'Cry me a river,' right?"

It's a tough job, but Vaughn is willing to do it. Even if certain tabloids have concocted a whole Vince-Jen romance out of shots of them canoodling on the set. "Lies," she says. "Guess they've gotta sell papers," he says.

He's an instant best friend, a "How's it hanging, brother?" type, which gets him labeled "frat boy" more often than not. But he makes friends easily. And in a business known for its short-term relationships, he hangs onto them.

Vaughn, 35, is the fast-talking charmer who burst on the movie scene with his lady-killer turn in the indie hit Swingers back in '96. He's talking fast and killing the ladies again in his latest. Wedding Crashers, co-starring Owen Wilson, opens July 15.

His character, Jeremy, is a guy who crashes weddings and picks up women at them. Isn't he an older version of the infamous Trent, from Swingers, the dude who called everybody "baby" and everything good "money" -- as in "Baby, you're so money"?

"These guys are totally different," Vaughn says. "OK, OK. They both like to chase girls. But Trent is a young, smooth operator who is very cool. Jeremy is the scared one. He's like a big kid, a child, the best friend, the emotional guy. Trent's clever and a fast talker and easy and cool. Jeremy's more of a big Labrador retriever."

He says he has grown out of Trent. He has played movie villains (Domestic Disturbance, Psycho) in his 30 or so screen credits (look for him in Rudy). But he's most at home in the comedies of his friends, Jon Favreau, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller and Owen and Luke Wilson. Some have taken to calling this Old School/Starsky & Hutch/Dodgeball/Zoolander gang "the Frat Pack," which Vaughn finds amusing. It's not as if they went to college, or worked together on the same movie, or Saturday Night Live or anything.

"The only common denominator in all this is Ben Stiller, who has found work for all of us.

"Ben put Owen and Will in Zoolander, and I did a cameo in that, as a favor to Ben.

"Ben produced and put me into Starsky & Hutch, with Owen.

"Todd Phillips wrote Old School for Will and Luke and myself.

"Will and me do cameos in each other's movies. My partner in crime, Jon Favreau (who wrote Swingers and Made) directed Will Ferrell in Elf.

"And Ben put me opposite him in Dodgeball. Ben finds people who are funny and gives them these opportunities for doing this stuff . . . Ben is the man. He fights for you."

Vaughn speaks up for his friends, which may be why he has been so good at keeping them. The guy who got him his break? His "partner in crime," Favreau, with whom he has made a couple of early movies and still chums around with. His fellow Chicagoan Roger Ebert has been most effusive about Vaughn when he works with Favreau, saying of Vaughn in Made that "another actor might take his dialogue and turn it to lead."

But it's not just the cute catchphrases that make the roles work, Vaughn says.

"Swingers and Made and Wedding Crashers are all character comedies. And with Wedding Crashers, we take the next step because we've got a character comedy with a story behind it. Laughs come bigger and work better if you're paying attention to the story."

The heels in Wedding Crashers are not "calculating, cruel people setting out to ruin people's lives. They're like big kids who like girls. But they like eating and dancing and celebrating and play-acting that they belong there. They don't ruin these people's weddings, they make their weddings. They make everybody have a good time. They cut the cake with the bride and groom, entertain the kids, flatter the old ladies and make the whole thing fun."

Vaughn's place within those character comedies, with the occasional exception ("I was the straight man in Dodgeball."), is those breathless silly soliloquies that make for big laughs. He's like the clever best friend who can riff on anything, the guy who coins the catchphrase that the entire college dorm picks up.

"I've never intellectualized that," he says, thinking fast and talking faster. "I don't know if speed has a whole lot to do with it. I like coming up with this stuff, or going through something really long and complicated really fast because that's kind of who I am, where me and the character I'm playing intersect.

He does those riffs so fast that they play like one-liners, even if they're twenty-seven lines long. Case in point, his fu-shizzle-speak as Raji in his film, Be Cool, which is new to video. Vaughn isn't the star; he's a supporting player, a fast-talking hip-hop producer wannabe who is a little too white to be living so ghet-TO.

"Growing up in Chicago, and then moving to L.A. when I was 18, I always had friends from all different walks of life, "Vaughn says. "I know black people. I know white people sort of taking on that black street pose.

"Raji was more about being hip-hop than just black. He takes on this vernacular and it becomes his entire personality.

"I watched a lot of Sanford & Son to pick up the comic timing of Raji's lines."

Be Cool, the Get Shorty sequel, didn't do that well at the box office. And if this is going to be "The Summer of Vince," Wedding Crashers will have to do Something About Mary business. No worries, though. Vaughn has already been in one big summer hit -- Mr. & Mrs. Smith. That's him, having too much fun as Eddie, a CIA contact for Brad Pitt's government assassin, but a CIA man with a twist: Eddie still lives with his mom.

"You come in, you work for a few days, you come up with some stuff to do," Vaughn says. "I sort of wrote my scenes, because [director] Doug Liman's a friend from Swingers."

Another "friend?" Isn't Liman, who directed Swingers, an honorary member of the Frat Pack?

"Hey, I love working with friends, but not just old friends," he says. "You do something with somebody you've never worked with before; if things go well, they become your new friends."

Article found here

Famous article

Kara has so kindly scanned the article from Famous magazine. Here it is:
Page one
Page two

(There is a weird thing happening on the first page. I'm going to try and re-download it and see if those broken parts get fixed. I might need you to re-scan that page, Kara. I'll let you know. And thank you so much, again!)

Jen's Revenge? We knew this was coming.

At least the article inside says they are just friends. Why must they promote this if they know it's not true? Oh yeah...they want to sell magazines.

Famous Magazine

Vince is on the cover of the current issue of Famous, a Canadian publication. I found this on ebay. If anyone has this and would like to scan the article for me, I would totally appreciate it! Thanks so much! Kara has so kindly scanned the inside pages for me. Here they are:
Page one
Page two

(There is a weird thing happening on the first page. I'm going to try and re-download it and see if those broken parts get fixed. I might need you to re-scan that page, Kara. I'll let you know. And thank you so much, again!)

The Happiest Bachelors in Hollywood

Thanks to all of you who informed me about or sent me this article/scan from InTouch Weekly--Brooke, Sylcia, Aiden, Liz & Val. I've been meaning to add it to the site, but have been so busy this week. So here it is, and thanks again, guys!

Bigger
VInce closeup

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson: The happiest bachelors in Hollywood!
They're hot, funny, and totally available! But the Wedding Crashers co-stars aren't planning to settle down anytime soon.

Although Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are two of Hollywood's most eligible bachelors, there's a wedding in their foreseeable future - on-screen, at least. In Wedding Crashers, in theaters July 15, they play a pair of womanizers who attempt to meet girls by sneaking into the nuptials of strangers.

So, how are these funny friends handling their real-life single status? "As you get older, it's easier to be alone," says Vince, 35. "But, I'd be very happy to get married and have kids." Owen, 36, agrees, "I thought I'd be married by the time I was 30 and be starting a family," he admits. Here, the actors open up about dating, women, and weddings.

Have you ever crashed a wedding to meet women?
Vince: I would sneak into parties when I was younger, but never weddings.

What's been your worst dating experience?
Owen: It was a blind date. You know instantly upon meeting the person if there's a chance. And I knew she wasn't quite my speed, but I was going to have to go through the motions because I didn't want to be rude.
Vince: I don't like the feeling of going to pick up someone I don't know well at their house. It's much better ot meet them out. I like to go somewhere that people can feel comfortable to joke around. That way you can really get to know each other.

What do you look for in a woman?
Vince: Pretty, that's good. Funny is good. smart is good.
Owen: First, you have to be attracted to them. After that is the big hurdle: Do they make you cringe? I remember this girl I was out with saying she believed babies come into the world knowing everything. I said, "You mean like, algebra as well?" She goes, "Yes, but the world, it beats it out of them."

Which of you is the romantic?
Vince: I think I'm romantic to some degree, if I really like somebody. I'm romantic like, you're allowed to sleep over, but on the couch. I'm very old-fashined that way. [laughs]

You're two of the hottest actors around - so why are you still single?
Owen: You want ot make the right choice, because it's forever. I have a strong scientific side that demands you must experiment and compare.
Vince: People have said to me, "Do you feel like you missed the boat?" I think I have, in some relationships. But I look out into the harbor and there are more boats coming in every day. And they're beautiful!

Assuming you do eventually settle down, what won't you have at your wedding?
Vince: No "Shout." You hear it so many times in this movie.
Owen: I'll have a very traditional wedding, like in a church. I tried to put that in there for the women! And if I never hear that song agains, it'll be too soon for me, too.

July issue of Vogue

The current issue of Vogue has an article and photo of Vince and Owen. Krista was wonderful to scan it AND transcribe the article. Thank you so much, Krista!

On the Boardwalk--Vince Vaughn in Calvin Klein and Owen Wilson in Paul Smith.
Photographed by Jason Bell. Sittings Editor: Amy Hall Browne.
View image larger
and realllly big!

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson star in this summer's buddy blockbuster.

The most surprising thing about Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson is that they behave exactly the way you'd expect them to. Surrounded by fans during a Santa Monica shoot ("I love you, I love you," a teenage girl cries), the six-foot-five Vaughn amuses everyone with this Swingers-style patois. "You've got to be digging the energy I'm giving you, man," he says to the laughing photographer. Meanwhile, the sun-bleached Wilson ambles around with his sweet, lazy grin, pausing to charm each woman, young and old, who stops him for an autograph.

The two have every reason to be cheerful. Not only are they members of the boys' club that's defining today's "smart" dumb comedy, they're starring in what looks to be the summer's most raucous hit, The Wedding Crashers. They play two buddies who sneak into strangers' nuptuals to woo young beauties softened up by the romantic atmosphere, until Wilson's character does the unthinkable: He falls in love.

Though they're know for their trademark styles -- Vaughn channeling the old Rat Pack ring-a-ding-ding, Wilson being the soul of slacker unflappability -- these real-life friends actually have a lot on the ball. Wilson co-wrote Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums with Wes Anderson; Vaughn in producing "The Break-Up", "an anti-romantic comedy romantic comedy" that pairs him with Jennifer Aniston. And as Wilson dubs his costar the LeBron James of comedy -- "You've got this superhuge guy with the defense mechanisms of a little guy" -- Vaughn hails Wilson's uncanny knack for making everything seem effortless. Of course, everything's easy when you're having a blast with your pal on the set. "We had a great time making the movie," Wilson tells me. "I know I always say that, but in this case, we really did." --John Powers

Celebrity Chatter: Vince Vaughn Is New 'It' Guy

Michelle Solomon, Staff Writer
theKCRAchannel.com

Vince Vaughn is definitely Hollywood's next big "it" guy. The fact that everyone's trying to link him with the former Mrs. Brad Pitt doesn't hurt either.

Vaughn is spending time in Chicago filming a new movie with Jennifer Aniston called ""The Break-Up"," plus his new movie with Owen Wilson, "The Wedding Crashers" hits movie theaters July 15.

The actor, who is originally from the suburbs of Chicago, was hosting the press this weekend to talk about "Crashers."

The 6-foot-5-inch, 35-year-old is ready for his close up. He's sitting at a make shift table set up in a suite at the Ritz Carlton.

When I ask him why he doesn't have a drink waiting (it's a joke), he says "don't women like to go Dutch treat nowadays?"

It's in line with his movie character, Jeremy Grey, who crashes weddings for a hobby each spring. Jeremy finds that weddings are the perfect place to pick up women and get free stuff. Vaughn and I talk about his start down the acting path. He was in a Chevrolet pickup commercial.

"I was the guy who the big brother throws the IROC keys to, remember?"
He also believes his growing years in northwest suburban Buffalo Grove, outside of Chicago, helped him in his career.

"I still have that Midwestern thing going on," he said.

Speaking of going on, is it true that the former Mrs. Pitt is finding comfort with Vaughn's charms now that she's divorced?

"People will think what they want to think," he said.

Meanwhile, Chi-town is going crazy with spottings of Aniston, who will be spending two months filming in the Windy City. Celebrity Chatter sources says that the former "Friends" star is fond of the Ralph Lauren store on Michigan Avenue. (Aside to Jen: It's one of my favorites, too.)
She's also been seen jogging along Lake Michigan and dining at the stylish Coco Pazzo Caf��. Rumor has it, she checked into the upscale Hotel Peninsula under the name Mrs. Smith. Isn't that Angelina Jolie's moniker?

At any rate, Vaughn's "Crashers" is destined to be a hit, with "The Break-Up" following just behind when it's released next Valentine's Day.

Vince, if you're listening, I'll take that free drink. Dutch treat is only for wedding crashers.

A-B hails new movie as one big Budweiser commercial

By GREGORY CANCELADA
Of the Post-Dispatch
06/26/2005
Found Here

Who doesn't love a wedding? For that reason, Anheuser-Busch Cos. is inviting Budweiser drinkers to the New Line Cinema comedy "Wedding Crashers," which opens nationwide July 15.

Besides placing Budweiser in the movie, the St. Louis brewer will roll out two television spots that use clips from the movie, something A-B hasn't done for a promotion since "Backdraft" in 1991.

"Wedding Crashers" fitted perfectly with Budweiser's image, said Michael Gianino, director of film and television branded entertainment at A-B's domestic brewing unit.

"When we saw the finished product, we realized it was just like one big Budweiser commercial: funny, very humorous," he said.

t is a perfect vehicle to strengthen the image of the Budweiser brand, Gianino said.

The movie features Luke Wilson and Vince Vaughn as two lifelong friends who have taken up the habit of inviting themselves to weddings. Obeying a secret set of wedding-crasher "rules," the pair finagle their way into weddings and the hearts of duped bridesmaids.

But the story takes a twist when one of the friends falls in love with a wedding guest and decides to break the rules to pursue her, leading to some unusual situations.

"These characters are right out of our Budweiser commercials," Gianino said. "The situations are very believable."

Though this is A-B's first major movie promotion in 14 years, the brewer hasn't neglected Hollywood. The brewer has placed its products in thousands of movie and television programs.

Besides product placement, A-B identifies about four movies annually to use in efforts to promote its beers in bars and other on-premise locations, such as "Seabiscuit" two years ago.

However, "Wedding Crashers" stood out because of the comic situations and the uniqueness of the movie, Gianino said.

"It is one of the few comedies out this summer, so it's a little bit different from the usual summer genre of action films, big special effects, and comic-book characters come to life," he said.

This isn't the first time A-B has found something funny about a wedding. A few years ago, the brewer ran a series of television spots featuring a best man making a speech that embarrasses everyone.

The Budweiser television spots promoting "Wedding Crashers" will start running July 5 - 10 days before the movie opens.

The first Budweiser ad, "Ladies Beware," shows female guests being taught how to recognize wedding crashers and deal with their propositions. When each sign is told, a relevant clip from the movie is shown.

The second ad, "Get Ready," features an older brother teaching a younger one about wedding-crasher rules, each point triggering a clip from the movie, before ending with the punchline.

Starting Monday, consumers can also go to www.budweiser.com and try New Line's "Crash the Trailer." The program allows visitors to put their photo in the movie's scenes and then send the edited trailer to friends.

A-B also will be the host of on-premise promotional activity - such as giveaways, table-tents and posters - in 30 markets. St. Louis isn't among the selected cities.

The brewer also will sponsor advance screenings of the movie in those 30 markets.

Reporter Gregory Cancelada
E-mail: gcancelada@post-dispatch.com

Vince Vaughn Speaks to Megaplex of Love

From E! Online

Never had a romance quite like the ones they have in the movies? Join the club, buddy. With rare exceptions, few have.

That's why we catch up with Vince Vaughn to talk about "The Break-Up", a romantic comedy he's working on about the end of a relationship. Party animal Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston play a couple that continues living together after they "The Break-Up". You see, they co-own their condo...and, well, they can't keep up the payments alone.

According to Vaughn, he's no fan of all those movies that contrive situations to get boys and girls together. "Like if you marry her, you get a million dollars," Vaughn says. "Or, hey, I know, I'll do a report in my magazine on the dating habits of New Yorkers. Or something insane. Relationships are off the reservation anyway."

Wait a minute, isn't sharing a condo with your ex, you know, a little high concept? "Not really, because it's a couple living together and it breaks up. Not concept in the way of putting out something unorganic like "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days", that kind of thing."

Vaughn says he wants to release "The Break-Up" for Valentine's Day, i.e., the worst day ever. "I always hate Valentine's Day. Any guy hates Valentine's Day. Even if you're in love, you can't win on Valentine's Day. If you're married, you can't win on Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day is like the thing you want to avoid at all costs. If you've been dating for two months, what do you get him? Do you get him something? What does that mean? So, I want to come out like, 'This Valentine's Day, "The Break-Up".' "

We like the sound of that.

But just because he hates Valentine's Day doesn't mean the actor isn't pro-women. Hear this enlightened male expound on what he dislikes about romantic comedies where the woman plays second fiddle to the comedian. "A lot of times in these comedies, girls are stuck laughing at what the guy says whether the guy's funny or not. Jennifer gets to be really funny. She is really funny and she's also a good actor."

You know who else is good? Jon Favreau! That's right, baby: Vaughn and Favreau together again! And some other people, too. "Favreau's going to be in the movie playing my best friend. Vincent D'Onofrio plays my older brother. Cole Hauser plays my younger brother. John Michael Higgins, a very good actor in the movie, plays Jennifer's brother. Justin Long from Dodgeball is in the movie. Jason Bateman is in the movie."

We might just be falling in love. Really, for all its forget-romance attitude, "The Break-Up" is romantic, isn't it? "Most people go through a lot of breakups before they meet that person or even are in a place where they're open to be in a relationship. So, to me, the fact that you broke up doesn't mean the world ends. Sometimes it means that it just begins."

Found here.
Thanks, Krista for passing this article along. :D

Chicago Red Eye

Jaclyn sent me these scans from Chicago's June 17 Red Eye. Thanks so much!

Cover
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4

Total Film Interview

Here is the interview from the Total Film magazine, dutifully transcribed by Pam. Thanks so much, Pam for doing this and for sharing it with everyone.

TOTAL FILM INTERVIEW ��� JULY 2005

���I���m not this slick, perfect guy. I have my demons �Ķ���

He is, though, consistently the best thing in everything he does. And now, starring alongside Owen Wilson in the Wedding Crashers, Vince Vaughn is confirming his cred as, simply, The Coolest Man in Film.

Here���s how it works. Vince Vaughn talks, Total Film listens, occasionally lobbing in a crafty query during the very, very occasional breath breaks. At one point, he talks non-stop about how he���s been compared to Brando (everyone is) and why he won���t do big action movies (rubbish scripts) and how much he likes documentaries (simple truths) and why Harrison Ford is great and what makes a good sports movie and how The Lord of the Rings relates to ���80s action heroes and why James Bond is cool �Ķ all in around three minutes. The guy must have gills hidden away somewhere.

When he was five years old, doctors tried to tame Vaughn with anti-hyperactivity drugs. His parents resisted, but teachers insisted on ���special��� classes. A counsellor once resorted to belittling tactics, telling Vaughn he wasn���t special and it might be an idea to stop thinking he was. He says he just laughed in her face (���I knew I was bright and I wouldn���t take shit���). Growing up in suburban Chicago, he ���wasn���t very good at sports���, so his folks enrolled him in after-school theatre workshops where he channelled his wise-ass dynamism into acting. As turbulent teenage hormones lent him an early Brando vibe, he bagged the national ad for Chevrolet and moved to LA to hunt for movie action. For seven years, he schlepped, scrapped and hawked around those cheesy head-shots.

Then he met Jon Favreau and the two conceived Swingers, the witty, soulful story of plausible faux-hipsters sashaying around underground nouveau swing clubs, trading pick-up tips. It was a hand-to-mouth guerrilla shoot for dogged Doug Liman, who sent the finished film to Steven Spielberg for a yay or nay on a sequence featuring the Jaws music. Spielberg gave his blessing and nabbed Vaughn for a part in Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World while he was at it.

That���s where the choices get a little uneven, as though hanging out with The Beard brought on a touch of perspective loss. There was serial killer schlock (The Cell, child-in-terror poppycock(Domestic Disturbance) and that copycat Psycho remake, complete with the notorious critic-baiting scene where Vaughn transforms not-so-normal Norman into Master Bates.

As 2003���s Old School inaugurated a much-gabbed-about comedy new wave (Owen/Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Jack Black), Vaughn���s acting classiness gave the group a steadying influence which has secured him a part in every ���Frat Pack��� film since (Zoolander, Starsky & Hutch, Anchorman, Dodgeball). Vaughn has pretty much been the best thing in each. And while he hasn���t quite been handed the leading-man reins yet, recent show-staling turns in Be Cool and Mr and Mrs Smith have sealed that reputation with aplomb.

Next is a hook-up with another Frat Packer emerging as a rangey acting force, Owen Wilson, in Wedding Crashers. ���It���s the best of the lot,��� Vaughn says. ���The funniest movie I���ve ever been involved with.���

So yeah. Settle in. Vince Vaughn, son of a toy salesman and a real estate saleswoman. Most definitely ���money���. And talking �Ķ

Shall we start with masturbation?
(laughs) Uh, yeah! You mean the Psycho remake, right? Listen man. That scene ��� where Norman is spying on Marion in the shower? Here���s my interpretation �Ķ He���s sexually aroused by women and he���s turned on, so he���s gonna sort of punish himself and feels guilty and become his mother and kill the women because he���s not supposed to have those urges. How would he do that before he���s climaxed? With sex ��� for me, anyway ��� you only regret sleeping with someone after you���ve done it. You have this strong, primal, physical drive to sleep with them and it���s only when you release that urge that you���re in a place to start getting fucked up about it. While aroused, you���re not thinking logically. In the original, Norman kind of rises and rises up to that point but then ��� click!- he suppresses it and turns into Mother. For me, it���s an even dirtier act in the mind of someone if they achieve some kind of sexual release ��� through masturbation.

What do you think ol��� Hitchcock would have made of it?
Well, he was kind of a mischievous guy�Ķ And he was never shocking for the sake of being shocking. He always tried to justify the things he did. His stuff pushed the envelope but it all made sense and it was all very real. I like to think that he���d appreciate it. The most important thing is that I thought it was right ��� and all the critics who hated it, they were wrong.

How much of you is there in Swingers��� Trent?
A lot. Favreau and I totally based it on us. We were regular guys who wanted to be actors. We played lots of video games and gave a lot of power to chintzing the girls but weren���t really the greatest operators, truth be told. A lot of it is obviously exaggerated for comedy, but the phrases ��� money etc ��� yeah, I used to say that. To me it was a sort of hip-hop urban term ��� you know, he���s so money, so on the money. I was just making a little fun of it. Swingers was great for me, because I���m a gambler. I still go to Vegas a lot. My dad was a very good card player. He taught me all the games from a very early age. I���ve been playing Blackjack sine I was four.

The scene where Mike (Jon Favreau) blows his chance with a girl by calling her too soon is still chilling �Ķ
Yeah, that���s my absolute favourite scene in the movie. It���s such a male thing ��� the way you meet someone, get on well and then have to resist the urge to just dive in and mark your territory before someone else claims it. I think we���ve all felt caught up in a moment like that. It���s a slippery slope where you just keep giving energy and giving energy. You start chasing when you should actually just cut it off and leave it alone. You���re looking for a result so badly, you can���t help but go about it the wrong way. That���s the sort of comedy I like and that���s where Swingers came from. It���s painful. It makes you want o hide your eyes. But it���s real. As humans, it���s good that we can laugh at ourselves like that.

Ever done anything that desperate yourself?
Sort of. I tend to go the other way. Not letting myself be vulnerable. Being a little too cool. So that whatever happens, I can think, ���Oh, it doesn���t bother me.��� The stuff about the four day call-back still stands, though, guys. You know ��� make it look like you���ve got �Ķ stuff to do before you call ���em.

So, how was it working with Speilberg on The Lost World?
Ha. I went in to meet Steven and we talked about the script, character development, how he wanted the sequel to be grittier than the first one. We talked a lot about Westerns. I was more excited about working with him than I was about what it meant for my ���career��� in general. I���m kind of child-like so, yeah, it was great to play video games with my director on set. He���s pretty child-like, too. But also very smart and confident with a lot of time for actors. I couldn���t have gone from more of an extreme ��� shooting Swingers in 21 days to doing Jurassic Park 2.

Did you sense any resentment from other actors that you���d gone from zero to hero in such a short time? You know, you hadn���t quite paid your dues?
Ah, I don���t really give a fuck. I guess there was some resentment, but I never paid any attention. I didn���t fell it from anyone in my life that I cared about. That kind of stuff usually has more to do with the person who���s projecting it on to you. I try hard not to give any energy to things that feel negative or destructive like that. You���re better off focussing on what you can do to make your life how you want it, rather than projecting ruin onto someone else.

Do you still think the Psycho remake was a good idea?
Fuck yeah! No apologies. A lot of songs and plays have been re-interpreted by lots of different people, so why not films? I never look at art as a kind of religion. I always try to see things through child-like eyes ��� you know, a place to play, a place to explore and ask a few questions ��� investigating human nature and the human spirit. It���s a movie. Whatever anyone does with it, the original will still be there. I saw it very much as a compliment, a homage. I remember Hitchcock���s daughter was very excited about it. If someone tried to remake a movie I���ve been in, I wouldn���t see it as blasphemy, I���d think it was pretty cool. To just say, ���No, you can���t touch it. It���s sacrilegious�Ķ��� That���s kind of like censorship. Art is there to be interpreted. But, your point about unlikeable characters�Ķ Yeah, the more flawed your character is, the more interesting the job is as an actor.

You don���t want to be Jimmy Stewart all the time?
Well, I love Jimmy Stewart, but I know what you mean. I don���t want to be the kind of guy who���s looking to please all the time -a nice guy, a sweetheart. It���s not interesting to me. I think all of us have many, many different sides and as an actor, it���s fun to bring a few of those up and kick ���em around a little. It���s like Dodgeball ��� it���s basically a more child-like version of the classic sports movie structure. We got to fuck around with all the obligatory stuff in a knowing kind of way ��� the coach dying, the moment of doubt, the underdog triumph �ĶDodgeball is a kind of punk-rock sports movie.

Are you and Jon still up for making Swingers 2?
People thought we���d already done that with Made�Ķ But that was a little darker than Swingers, a little different. Jon���s written a screenplay for an actual Swingers 2, though, and it���s incredibly good. It���s all about commitment ��� which is a very male concern. Favreau���s character is agonising about whether to marry the Heather Graham character. My character, who was always on top of everything, is now battling depression and won���t leave his house. Ron Livingston���s character ��� the guy who was kind of square ��� is now dressed as an older hip character and talks like a rapper. He���s a straight up Yale guy who���s now been infected by LA, trying to play it all ���street���. It���s meant to be four or five years later. We were due to shoot in the late ���90s, but we decided there was just no reason for it. Swingers was its own animal and we were so proud of it we figured it was best just to leave it alone and let it live by itself. I���ve often said to Jon that he should release it as a screenplay because it makes a great read. But Jon and I have a new pet project - a Jewish Western where he���s the fastest gun in the West but won���t shoot on Saturdays. Who knows whether we���ll ever get it off the ground, but for the moment, Jon is playing my best friend in a movie I���m shooting with Jennifer {Aniston, "The Break-Up"}. We���re never too far apart.

What���s the story with the David O Russell film you���re working on?
It���s in development. We���re working on the script. It���s about a talk show host who has these grand mission statements about how everyone else should live their life. Then he starts to take on his callers��� characteristics and has to walk in their shoes. It���s gonna be great. Am I nervous about David���s reputation? Not really. I try to judge people on how they are with me, not how they���ve been with others in the past. I hear some pretty silly stuff about my own reputation, man! You never know for sure until you work with someone. I like David���s movies. I find them to be very passionate and child-like. I always like to work from a place of trying to connect to something emotional and human. A journey of someone���s inner character.

It must be hard moving from serious films to comedy. How did you play your cartoon bad guy in Starsky?
I think my job there was to ground the movie. I couldn���t be too goofy because then the movie would be too fluffy and have no threat. The bit in the beginning, he shoots the guy and you realise ��� woah! ��� this is a comedy but people can actually die. So I knew I had to play him up a little but not go too far. I did a lot of improve work in actor training. I don���t go for Method acting, but it���s very similar to improve. You���re in the moment and you can respond to what the other actor���s doing in a way that���s real. You���re not just there to obediently read your lines. I can work with anyone. You just have to get into a place where you can deliver and then be respectful of someone else���s process and allow for it.

How���s Wedding Crashers?
It���s terrific. The best of the lot. Owen���s great in it, the story���s really good. It resolves in a satisfying way but not the way you���d expect. It���s the funniest movie that���s been out in a long time. In the beginning, Owen and I are total operators ��� lying to women so we can sleep with them, sneaking into weddings by pretending to be people we���re not �Ķ

So it���s a guy movie �Ķ
It���s funny, because it���s been testing incredibly high with women. I think it���s because there���s a kind of innocence to Owen and myself. They���re not nasty guys, just rogues. Apparently it���s one of the highest-testing movies in New Line���s history. With men, it touches on something that kind of goes back to the Swingers thing. You want to get over on a particular girl so you do or say what you want, but at some point you have to take responsibility for all that bullshit. They have to face up and show some character ��� and both the male and female test-audiences have really responded to that.

You seem to be the key man in the ���frat pack.��� The constant, dependable guy. You did Anchorman with Will, Dodgeball with Ben and now Wedding Crashers with Owen �Ķ
Yeah, I love ���em all. I can see how it might look like a big clique from the outside, but that���s just been constructed ��� it was never done like a team. Will is hilarious, he���s so overcommitted to a character, taking it so far but with a lovability and warmth that you root for. Ben has a little of both but he prefers to really push it with extreme characters. It���s a big thrill to be working with and learning from those guys. I���ve liked Owen Wilson since Bottle Rocket. his comedy is like mine in that he comes from a place that���s very real ��� as in The Life Aquatic. That���s what it���s all about for me. Funny but real. Acting is all about knowing who you are and being comfortable enough with yourself that you can become different things.

Have you ever been offered anything enormous, like Spiderman or a big action-movie lead?
I have, but I don���t wanna be an asshole and start naming the stuff that would have been better with me in it. I wouldn���t have a problem with doing those kinds of films, but the scripts they���ve sent me just haven���t been very good. I like the way that action films were done in the ���70s and ���80s. The heroes were much more interesting. Take Harrison Ford. In Star Wars, he looks like he���s doing exactly what he���s told, but there���s something there underneath. Then, in Raiders, he���s kinda nervous and vulnerable. He���s become big enough to get away with being more truthful to the character. Same with Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry. He���s kind of a villain and mean and uncompromising but he has so much rage in him and feels like a genuine person. You feel that something really horrible must have happened to this guy. These days, they all know kung fu, and it���s all so slick and groovy and boring. I like action movies to be character driven. It���s like how any great sports movie isn���t about the sport, it���s about what���s going on with those guys emotionally, what their sporting struggle symbolises. Average guys put into sensational situations.

Uh-huh .. it���s �Ķ
Look at The Lord of the Rings, man! That���s exactly what that is, These average little Hobbit guys put into Middle Earth in this amazing situation and being forced to deal with it. These days all you get it (adopts gravelly trailer voice), ���Heeee was a slick, trained killer!��� Yeah, yeah. Whatever. I like the Bond series because that���s almost like a comic book or superhero. Even though you know that Bond is always gonna survive whatever they throw at him, its played like more of a tease. You get to participate in the fantasy ��� wouldn���t it be great to win at gambling, get the hot girl and beat up all the scary dudes, y���know what I mean?

Yeah. And �Ķ
I just want action heroes to have a bit more vulnerability! People like Steve McQueen. You can watch them and take this emotional journey with them. Even the Westerns did a good job with that, because it was always about revenge. Bruce Willis in Die Hard was another one. An ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation. And Stallone with Rocky. He was vulnerable and likeable but not all good. He was working for a loan shark, remember? He didn���t have the heart to break this guys thumbs but he still had to chase him down and demand the money. He���s like the rest of us. Like me, like you. I���m not this slick, perfect guy. I have my demons.

So, are you a film scholar? Do you study performances? Analyse DVD commentaries?
Nah, man. I don���t buy DVDs. I���m a member of the Academy so I get ���em all sent to me. It���s a scam. I would never buy a DVD personally. I watch ���em and give ���em away. The only stuff I keep are my absolute favourite films ��� like The Bad News Bears. I recently visited my Dad in Arizona and we rented Maria Full of Grace, which I loved. Really minimalist and ���70s. I���m not a collector of anything. I find it a bit unhealthy. But I���m pretty simple, really. Yeah ��� old school. I don���t have a cellphone, I don���t use email. I���m just a scared old man. A dinosaur drowning in a sea of �Ķ technology tar. The guy in the village who invented fire? I���d be leading the charge to have him burned at the stake�Ķ

InStyle Magazine

I've been told that Vince is going to be a "man of style" in the August issue of InStyle, on newsstands July 15!

Vince Vaughn denies Aniston rumour

By LOUIS B. HOBSON - Calgary Sun
Found here

HOLLYWOOD -- Sometimes the math just doesn't add up. Jennifer Aniston is in the process of divorcing Brad Pitt.

The Wedding Crashers star Vince Vaughn, who once dated Ashley Judd, Joey Lauren Adams and Janeane Garofalo, has been a swinging single for almost a year.

The two were seen numerous times these past few months in Los Angeles, including for a cozy date on the eve of Valentine's Day.

But Vaughn says two and two don't necessarily make four.

"I think Jennifer is an awesome actress and an awesome person, but we're not a couple," he says.

"We met those times because I wanted her to be part of the film. We were talking business.

"I'm one of the producers on the film and I wanted Jennifer to be my co-star."

Aniston and Vaughn are set to film a romantic comedy with the rather tantalizing title "The Break-Up".

He insists neither he nor Aniston would ever consider changing the title because of recent events.

"Honestly, Jennifer and I don't think of those things as much as other people. It's the media that draws those kind of parallels," says Vaughn while in L.A. this past weekend to promote The Wedding Crashers, which opens July 15.

When asked how he felt Aniston was handling the publicity surrounding her own break-up, Vaughn replied: "People always have things in their lives. It's a part of life."

Vaughn says he isn't in a serious relationship.

"I get caught up in my work more than I do in relationships.

"I like to think that some day I will get married, but as you get older it does get easier to be alone."

He adds the greatest appeal of married life is that he would like to have kids.

"But I also like downtime by myself and that's not the best thing in a relationship, let alone a marriage."

Found here

Total Film Magazine (UK)

I bought this magazine on ebay today (after seeing the photo on Alberta's site). I probably won't receive it for about a week, so if anyone has it, can you tell me if this photo is in the issue, as well? And how is the article? Is he on the cover?

From the magazine: "He is, though, consistently the best thing in everything he does. And now, starring alongside Owen Wilson in "Wedding Crashers", VINCE VAUGHN is confirming his cred as, simply, The Coolest Man In Film."

And a quote from Vince:
"I'm not this slick, perfect guy. I have my demons..."

"Total Film"

MTV said it better, in my opinion

I receive news alerts from Google and Yahoo, and articles from contactmusic.com frequently come up. I don't always post their releases because usually they're old news or just irrelevant. One came through today that was very familiar sounding. I knew I had read something similar before, but couldn't remember where. Michelle thought the same thing and finally found the original article. So here is MTV's take on the story. If you want to read contactmusic's report, here it is. But I'm pretty sure contactmusic.com is wrong about Vince playing a disabled person in the film. He plays the high school guidance counselor and Lou Taylor Pucci plays the teen with disabilities. And thanks, Michelle, for finding this. I was going nuts trying to remember where I saw it!

UK Cinema Magazine - June/July 2005

I found this magazine (UK Cinema?) on ebay with Vince and Owen on the cover. If anyone has this, is it a good article? Worth buying?

Oh, Brad...you silly!

Excerpt from this article. The whole article is quite funny as it talks about how Brad and Angelina used humor to handle questions from international journalists. The press was barred from asking anything personal.

When asked how they managed to make their chemistry as a couple look "so real on-screen", Pitt promptly replied: "Between me and Vince (Vaughn)?"

One seat away, a visibly-amused Jolie remarked to producer Akiva Goldman: "Trust Pitt to say that �Ķ "

Brad later added that Vaughn was a "handsome, handsome fellow. Tender lover." (found in another article)

Too bad Vince wasn't at the premiere tonight.

Vince Vaughn Dodges a Ball and Leaps to the A-List

Article found here

By SHARON WAXMAN
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES
In Hollywood, when you're hot, you're hot. The hard part can be figuring out when that's going to happen.

Take Vince Vaughn, the 35-year-old actor who grabbed the public's attention with "Swingers" in 1996 but who has languished far, very far, from the A-list since then.

Not anymore. In January, Mr. Vaughn became the object of a bidding war when a romantic comedy that he was producing called "The Break-Up" went on the auction block. Universal bought the script - by two young writers hired by Mr. Vaughn - for $2.25 million, and paid him $12 million to star and produce. Mr. Vaughn's top fee was previously $3 million, his representatives and a studio executive said.

Suddenly, Vince Vaughn has become a bankable commodity. "I wouldn't accuse them of overpaying him," said Toby Emmerich, the president of production at New Line, referring to Universal's winning bid.

Asked if he would green-light a movie based on Mr. Vaughn's participation, Hutch Parker, the president of production at 20th Century Fox, recently said: "Yes, probably, presuming it's the right role. He's truly viable."

And then in early April, the director David O. Russell cast Mr. Vaughn as the lead in his next film, a comedy for Universal. Mr. Vaughn will play the wisecracking host of a radio call-in show who finds himself adopting the characteristics of his callers.

How does an actor go from lukewarm to red hot? In Mr. Vaughn's case, it's been years coming, with the nearest proximate cause the high-intensity buzz on "The Wedding Crashers," a comedy that co-stars Mr. Vaughn and Owen Wilson and will be released by New Line in July. Mr. Vaughn plays a gangly, obtuse but good-hearted divorce lawyer who hits on women at weddings. He proves to have a knack for physical comedy, using his large size (he's 6 feet 5) to mock his own clumsiness and playing the sensitive type against his particular brand of dark masculinity.

But Mr. Vaughn wasn't initially known as a comedian. After the success of "Swingers," Mr. Vaughn spent years concentrating on dramatic roles, cultivating a dangerous persona, whether as a serial killer in "Clay Pigeons" or as Norman Bates in the remake of "Psycho," both in 1998.

It was not until Mr. Vaughn began revisiting comedy, in roles in "Old School" in 2003 and in "Dodgeball" and "Starsky & Hutch" last year, that he started to attract attention again. With the surprise hit "Dodgeball," in which he starred with his friend Ben Stiller, Mr. Vaughn could lay claim to a bona fide success. At the same time, he took his career into his own hands by cultivating ""The Break-Up"."

"Comedy is what I was offered first and foremost," Mr. Vaughn said by phone from the Universal lot, where he was working on that film, which will also star Jennifer Aniston. "But I chose to shy away from that. In my na畏vet茜, I didn't want to get pigeonholed, but I didn't realize that probably not enough people had seen the film to even know who I was."

And when Hollywood executives took a chance on him, his forays as a leading man did not result in box-office success. "Psycho," for example, was a bust, taking in $21 million domestically.

"The Break-Up" is an "Odd Couple"-type story about a man and woman stuck living together as their relationship is ending. He sold it to a studio where it languished, so last year Mr. Vaughn reclaimed the pitch and recruited two novice writers, Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender. "I paid them nothing," Mr. Vaughn said. "I just said, 'Come to my house every day, we'll write the screenplay together.' " That gamble paid off handsomely with the script's auction, coinciding with growing interest in "The Wedding Crashers." A recent screening of that movie, organized by New Line to generate word-of-mouth, suggested that it was poised to become a hit. The room was packed and rocked with laughter.

"Vince is so likable, so sympathetic, there's a vulnerability to him," said David Dobkin, who directed Mr. Vaughn in "Clay Pigeons" and "The Wedding Crashers." "As a fan of Vince's, I'm always attracted to roles where he appears to be the kind of guy that maybe wouldn't have that vulnerability and turns out to have it."

Mr. Vaughn said he was more prepared for this round of Hollywood heat, having been there once. Born in Minneapolis, Mr. Vaughn moved here at 18 after landing a role in a national car commercial. He expected to be discovered but instead struggled for seven years as an unknown, until "Swingers" became a pop culture hit.

The cycle makes him cautious. "I don't want to come off as if I've accomplished anything yet," Mr. Vaughn said. "It feels ridiculous. What I'm most excited about really is the chance to be involved in what the story is, to have more control over the actual story unfolding."

Article found here

They're having a laugh

Ben Stiller and his pals are the powerful new kings of Hollywood comedy. And the studios don't get a look in

Liz Hoggard
Sunday April 10, 2005
The Observer

Article found here.

One has a broken nose. Another a rubber face. The short, chubby one doesn't even brush his hair. And yet these are the new kings of Hollywood. Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jack Black and Owen Wilson operate as an unofficial repertory company. The group, which revolves around Stiller, are friends, with some relationships going back 20 years. From Dodgeball and Anchorman to Elf and Zoolander, they appear in one another's films so often you get confused as to whose movie you're watching.

What's more, the Slacker pack have virtually shut the studios out of the development process. By coming up with their own concepts, finding screenwriters and then offering the whole package for production, they are reshaping screen humour.

'Right now, they're the ruling oligarchy in terms of comedic films,' confirms OK! 's LA columnist Ashley Pearson. 'And they've managed to translate that worldwide. Often, American comedies don't do well overseas because of different cultural sensibilities. But they've managed to find things that are universally funny without going for the easy laugh. They're able to inject all the different elements - romantic comedy, drama and slapstick - into a new genre. And they play against each other as comic foils.'

'What all these guys have in common,' says Greg Gutfeld, the American-born editor of UK Maxim, 'is they're not out to show that they're cooler than you are by bringing you down. They don't operate with wise-ass humour. Most of their comedy is directed at themselves; it's a self-loathing kind of humour that is more disarming. They enjoy making themselves look idiotic and, if you think about it, that's really, really smart.'

'They're happy to approach sentiment,' agrees Steve Coogan, who took part in a recent read-through of Stiller's latest film, Tropic Thunder. 'They're very comfortable with vulnerability. British humour tends to be about the head and not the heart, there's a bit of a kneejerk reaction to sentimentality. What these films do is play to the strengths of actors like Ben Stiller or Jack Black, so it feels like a natural extension of character. It's very instinctual and organic.'

Ever since There's Something About Mary, Stiller's position as Hollywood's top comic antihero has been unshakeable. Rumour has it he rang his agent and said: 'I have five words for you: Owen Wilson; Starsky & Hutch.' Within days, he had sold the idea to Warner Brothers and landed a budget of $60 million. But then few actors have made so much money out of their own pathologies. Meet the Fockers took $204m, There's Something About Mary $176m and Meet the Parents $166m.

What Stiller et al have done is create a new brand of comedy that goes beyond the gross-out humour of the Farrelly Brothers. Next-generation humour is 'smart-dumb' comedy, inspired in part by the films of Harold Ramis (Animal House, Caddyshack). Yes, there may be body fluids, but the writing is sharp and character-based. 'Slapstick is stupid,' argues Gutfeld. 'Someone falling down, or getting a ball in the groin - it's been done. But they seem to find new ways to make you laugh while they're enduring horrible pain. Will Ferrell is a pleasure to watch because you know he is almost indestructible.'

Their films reach all demographics. Best of all, they are funny in a way that women don't find offensive. No wonder Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Aniston and Cate Blanchett want to work with them (Kidman handpicked Ferrell for Bewitched). 'What a lot of these actresses can't do is be funny,' says Pearson. 'They put themselves with these sure-thing comedians to make it happen.'

'Most people who meet these guys will tell you they're actually really nice people,' observes Gutfeld. 'You could go up and say hello to them on the street. They're like the antidote to Sean Penn. You see Sean Penn and you don't even want to go near him because he's such a misanthrope. He's the ultimate dead white male. I would never buy a magazine with Sean Penn on the cover, but I'd buy one with Will Ferrell. That's how guys think.'

'I'm not sure they're nice guys exactly,' laughs Pearson. 'I mean Ben is pretty settled down with a second child on the way. But he's very, very difficult on set, which he himself admits. He's never happy with his performance; he's very hard on the other actors. It's not because he's a diva, but he's really committed to the work. As far as the other guys are concerned, Vaughn and Wilson are some of biggest party boys in LA. Owen has dated one lapdancer after another.'

The comic actors started appearing on screen together in 1996's The Cable Guy. And the camaraderie goes back years to shared experience in grungy comedy clubs. Many of them performed improv on Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s, or the little-seen but influential Ben Stiller Show (Fox TV pulled it just as Stiller was awarded an Emmy with co-writer Judd Apatow).

Apatow met Stiller as a student and introduced him to Jim Carrey. Stiller became a fan of Wilson after seeing him in Bottle Rocket and called up the actor to propose collaborating. He had given Jack Black a role in The Cable Guy and used both Wilson and Ferrell in Zoolander. Other members of their clique include Luke Wilson, Owen's brother; Christine Taylor, Stiller's wife who appeared in Dodgeball and Zoolander; Meet the Fockers director, Jay Roach; and rapper Mos Def. 'There is a semi-social scene where everyone bumps into each other,' says Coogan. 'But it's not debauched into the old Belushi generational way. It's much more professional. It's not rock'n'roll.'

Even their agents are creatives. Eric Gold and Jimmy Miller run Mosaic Media Group, one of Hollywood's hottest management companies, but they started out as stand-ups on the comedy circuit, where they discovered both Apatow and Carrey. Today, the managers do much more than just represent clients. They edit and shape their comic ideas. They also get to decide who joins the clique. One film executive complained: 'There's always a wall being put up with those guys.'

During the making of Elf, Ferrell and Miller disagreed with the editing choices of director Jon Favreau (Swingers). Both versions were tested with audiences and although Favreau's choices won out, he is now considered creatively out of touch with Miller and Ferrell, and New Line has confirmed that he won't be part of the sequel.

Over the next few months, we'll be seeing a new wave of Slacker pack films including The Wedding Crashers, starring Vaughn and Wilson as bachelors who prey on women at weddings, and Kicking and Screaming, with Ferrell as a soccer dad, while Fun With Dick and Jane features Carrey and T茜a Leoni as a couple who turn to robbery.

No one is claiming their humour is politically correct, but these actors are happy to play characters who are oddly insecure in their masculinity. Starsky & Hutch even had a homoerotic undercurrent. 'They're not ideologically committed in any way,' says Coogan. 'But it's not the same old macho humour. It's Just Gay Enough.'

They participate in readings of each other's scripts, without the studios present. 'They have free-thinking ideas sessions where a lot of stuff from their personal lives goes into the film,' says Pearson. Apatow's latest movie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, stars Steve Carell as a sexual naif (a refreshing change from 'woman as virgin'). At an early read-through, Paul Rudd suggested a problem of premature ejaculation. Apatow told of a teen experience when he panicked after his girlfriend guided his hand beyond first base. 'These guys are teaching us what comedy is,' DreamWorks's Adam Goodman has said.

Coogan puts it down to an understanding of populist taste. 'Comedy needs to have a broad appeal. In Britain, there's sometimes a feeling that comedy is terminally lowbrow in terms of art, a poor man's culture, and that is not the case in the US. If something's successful, then it's good. If it makes money, even better.'

Not everyone agrees. Part of the appeal of these films has been their low production costs. Now the studios are being forced into bidding wars. 'This is not what a studio wants to see happen,' says Pearson. 'Believe me, the number-one priority is finding a way to recreate this formula in a way it can control.' Meanwhile, Stiller is in imminent danger of being overexposed (he's made eight movies back to back in two years). Roach, who directed him in Meet the Parents, wouldn't be surprised if he moved into more cerebral roles, like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. Stiller has vowed to take a year off.

Gutfeld isn't sure he'll be missed. 'For me, a Ben Stiller film never gets beyond the pleasantly inoffensive. I put Vaughn and Ferrell and the Wilsons in quite another bracket. Ferrell is intensely likable even when he's dangerous. And Vaughn looks like he's always waking up from a hangover; you never know if he's just going to collapse. But if he stays alive, he'll be the next Jack Nicholson.'

Article found here.

Good Morning, Wiseass

From Entertainment Weekly, April 15, 2005 issue.

Microphone Fiend of the Week
"The ex-Swinger will play a snarky radio-show host who adopts his callers' tics in a new comedy from David O. Russell. The project has no title yet. Good Morning, Wiseass must have been taken."

Illustration by Stephen Savage

(I just couldn't resist adding a couple of details to the caricature: View image)

Russell Calls on Vaughn for Universal Pic

Found here.

Vince Vaughn is set to star in an untitled David O. Russell-directed and -written comedy for Universal Pictures.

Vaughn will play the wiseass host of a radio call-in show he runs with his producer girlfriend. His life is turned upside down when he starts taking on the qualities of his neurotic callers. Russell wrote the current draft of the screenplay, which is based on a screenplay by David Cohen and Tony Lord.

The filmmakers are eyeing an early fall start date.

As opposed to some of Russell墜 more quirky and independent fare, the movie is designed to be a big, commercial comedy with his "sensibilities," Russell said.

Russell initially took on the project as a rewrite job but decided to direct it.

"I was so tickled by it, I thought, Gee, maybe it would be fun to make this," he said.

Russell, who met Vaughn at the Festival de Cannes in 1996 when the director was promoting his "Flirting With Disaster," said the actor follows in the tradition of a certain type of humor.

"There墜 Walter Matthau, there墜 Bill Murray and there墜 Vince Vaughn. I think it墜 a certain lineage of comedians," Russell said. "The guys are funny being who they are. They don墜 put on some kind of broad character, usually. It墜 very natural, it墜 very authentic. It墜 maybe a little bit depressed, but in their depression or their groundedness, they墜e funny. It墜 not like they墜e a drag to be around; they墜e funny in their depression in some way. I would say Vince is a bit more manically entertaining."

Russell said that the movie has roles for two female comedians as well as a female "discovery role."

This is the second project Vaughn has set up at Universal. He is starring in the romantic comedy "The Break-Up" with Jennifer Aniston, which is slated to begin shooting in June.

Vaughn also stars in New Line墜 upcoming summer release "The Wedding Crashers" with Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams.

Russell most recently wrote and directed "I Heart Huckabees." He also rewrote and directed "Three Kings" and wrote and directed "Spanking the Monkey."

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

He's Vince Vaughn. Who the Hell are You?

Here is the article from Complex magazine.

Vince Vaughn has lived in the movie capital half his life, but rather than dress the part and kiss ass he's followed an old-school path and distinguished himself as an elite actor. Steve Kotler catches up with Vince at a neighborhood joint wit the best waffle fries in town.

Photography by Terry Richardson

Vince Vaughn is too tall not to notice. He is 6'4" or 7'7" or 9'2', some inhuman Hollywood height, a standout in this business of dwarves. He's a sequoia in a tomato patch. When he shows up at a Los Angeles eatery of his choosing, one of those rare restaurants that's much more of a local's joint than a hipster hangout, he appears at first as a monster shadow on the horizon.¬Ý The shadow moves closer and even in this low-key scene, the approaching darkness garners some local attention. Vaughn is nonchalant. He doesn't act like a guy who knows he's being noticed, he acts like a guy who's just dropped by for lunch. He walks in and distributes a few casual nods to the waitresses, tosses his keys, lighter and cigarettes on to the table and folds his big frame into a small chair. By way of greeting he says, "Try the waffle fries." He's very serious, "The waffle fries," he repeats, "they are the thing they know how to do here."

Vaughn's cool may be the kind of cool that comes from knowing where to get the best waffle fries or where to find the best bowling alleys, which of the local piano players can handle a Monk tune, but his cool is not Hollywood's cool. He's a throwback actor, cool in the style of Dean Martin much more than James Dean. His comedy runs in the Chevy Chase tradition; low-key, unpredictable and a little dangerous. In the new sequel to Get Shorty, appropriately titled Be Cool, he plays Raji, a white record executive who thinks he’Äôs more of a player than P.Diddy’Äîand he pulls it off. His comedy is good enough that he’Äôs become Hollywood royalty, part of the Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Owen and Luke Wilson crew, a casual collective that takes little seriously, least of all themselves.

With them, Vaughn fits in just fine, in a town bloated with self-importance, he believes in preparation, long days, ordinary kindnesses. He’Äôs the first one to point out his faults and downplay his triumphs. ’ÄúMy diction is terrible,’Äù he says, frequently, despite the fact that terrible diction might seem a hindrance in his line of work. When asked about the long list of films he’Äôs appeared in, his only comment is, ’ÄúA lot of those were little roles, walk-ons basically.’Äù

He comes stripped down, by other local standards. While everyone else is buying mansions in Beverly Hills, Vaughn has a house in Franklin Hills, a few blocks north of Silver Lake and Los Feliz, his old stomping grounds, the stomping grounds he made famous in Swingers. His difference is not indifference. His way, well, it’Äôs just been this way since way back. He’Äôs been acting since he was seven, school plays, drama class. Sure, he had a normal childhood. He played some sports in school’Äîwith his size how could you avoid it’Äîbut it wasn’Äôt his thing. ’ÄúI was never great at sports,’Äù he says. ’ÄúWhen I got to high school and coaches started yelling at me and getting all serious’Äîit just wasn’Äôt my passion. Anything you do, as it starts to get more serious you have to really like to work at it.’Äù

And what Vaughn liked to work at was acting. He talks about movies in terms of process and technique, something he learned from watching old westerns with his father. ’ÄúMy dad was very of-this-earth,’Äù says Vaughn. ’ÄúHe liked men who acted like men. He judged films by one criteria: Was it believable? Did he really buy that guy as that guy or that girl as that girl. Everything else wasn’Äôt important.’Äù

Acting, for his father, was about hard work. Vaughn took acting classes in Chicago, landed spots in commercials. They earned him a SAG card, and he carried that card and his father’Äôs influence with him to Los Angeles.

’ÄúWhen I got to L.A.,’Äù says Vaughn, ’ÄúI took more classes. I always wanted new information. That was what we all tried to do back then. It’Äôs different now. There’Äôs a real focus on trying to be really famous or coming off really cool and, in Hollywood, it’Äôs not cool to try at something, it’Äôs much cooler to have never taken acting classes, to act like you don’Äôt care, to not try.’Äù

Vaughn wasn’Äôt buying into that kind of cool, but Hollywood wasn’Äôt buying into him either. He got bit work, but it wasn’Äôt leading him to the places he wanted to go. So he teamed up with Jon Favreau, and together they made Swingers. It was pure guerrilla theater. They had no money, no time. They shot it in 21 days, without permits, often in bars crowded with Hollywood crowds. All those folks trying to be cool by being indifferent. ’ÄúWe’Äôd be in a bar shooting and there’Äôd be all these people, all these barflies, just rolling their eyes at us,’Äù Vaughn remembers. ’ÄúLike, ’ÄòLook at these guys, these guys just don’Äôt get it. They really got together their small movie and they’Äôre really trying to do something. What a bunch of fucking losers.’Äô They looked at us like we were totally off the reservation.’Äù

Swingers was off the reservation. It was a totally different kind of indie film. Back in 1996, when everyone else was making serious movies about serious themes like race, child abuse, rape, incest’Äîthe whole earnest indie canon’ÄîVaughn and Favreau made a movie about guys find a little meaning in a whole lot of meaninglessness. And it worked, worked better than anyone could imagine. Swingers busted the ’Äò90s free from the death grip of flannel and grunge and jump-started the whole retro-swing movement. It was a film about their lives and the world they knew and it worked because it was believable. Vaughn was believable. In fact, so believable that it launched his whole career.

Steven Spielberg saw it and declared Vaughn ’Äòa new movie star’Äîan American icon to be.’Äô Then he put his money where his mouth is, casting Vaughn in his first blockbuster, The Lost World: Jurassic Park. This was followed by a string of more serious roles. Some were good, some were okay, a few were downright lousy. But, later, in reflection, Vaughn decided those movies were lousy because of how they were made. ’ÄúPeople’Äôs agendas were not necessarily the best agendas for storytelling,’Äù is how he puts it. ’ÄúWhen you make movies, sometimes everybody’Äôs guessing what’Äôs going to be good, always saying, ’ÄòIs this good?’Äô I prefer people arguing over what they think is good, having an opinion and standing by it.’Äù

So Vaughn decided to have an opinion, to produce and costar in 2001’Äôs Made. And while he still loves the film, it didn’Äôt make the splash of Swingers. Afterward, he faded from sight. Down, but not out. He was biding his time and waiting for the right part. That part came as a shyster stereo salesman in Old School. It was a perfect fit, despite the fact that Vaughn never went to college and found the whole collegiate culture absurd. He used to team up with fellow actor Patrick Van Horn, dress up like college kids and head down to a UCLA bar in Westwood to watch the basketball game.

’ÄúWe’Äôd pretend to be Joe College,’Äù says Vaughn. ’ÄúWe bought two-for-one pitchers and acted like these over the top school-spirit guys. Every time UCLA scored we would high-five as many people as possible. We were pathological, drinking, drunk, high-fiving, the ultimate college guys. But no matter how crazy we got, our high fives were always welcome.’Äù

Whatever it was’Äîthe practice he got at the frat bar or the fact that Old School was so suited to Vaughn’Äôs strengths’Äîthe movie served as a reminder to Hollywood that Vaughn wasn’Äôt to be forgotten, and Hollywood responded. He’Äôs got a batch of new films coming out: Thumbsucker, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and the much anticipated sequel to Get Shorty, Be Cool.

Vaughn’Äôs character in Be Cool is Raji, a white record executive whose entire persona is borrowed from hip-hop culture. It’Äôs a send-up performance, etched with Vaughn’Äôs comedic nonchalance, tailor made for an urban audience that loves to laugh at guys who are too ’Äústreet.’Äù To prepare for the part he watched every episode of the ’Äò70s sitcoms Good Times and Sanford and Son. Those were the shows that Raji would have watched, those were the characters that his character wanted to be. And once he figured that part he did what he always does: He worked his ass off.

These days he’Äôs got an unofficial partnership with a crew of regular funny guys who also like to work their asses off: Stiller, Ferrell, the Wilsons. Together they went from Old School to Dodgeball to the soon-to-be released Wedding Crashers, about two guys who sneak into weddings to pick up girls.

’ÄúOur technique is to hide in plain sight,’Äù Vaughn explains. ’ÄúWe stand out. Sometimes people who don’Äôt belong at a party put themselves right out there, front and center, and no one ever figures it out because they’Äôre doing such outrageous shit that you just don’Äôt question their presence. It works in real life. When I was younger I knew a family who lived in a trailer park. The mom would go into grocery stores and walk out with stuff they needed in her hand, not even trying to hide it under her coat. She wasn’Äôt stealing ’Äòcause she wasn’Äôt hiding anything. It was all about the hiding in plain sight and having the confidence to pull it off.’Äù

As far as preparing for that role, Vaughn is still a method-acting guy but admits tht he’Äôs too recognizable to anonymously crash a party. Instead, he drew on another set of experiences. During the same period he was playacting as a frat boy, he was also going to bars and trying to pick up women’Äîbut doing so as various characters.

One of Vaughn’Äôs favoitres was a real prude. A guy who thought sex was this big important thing, a real extension of two people connecting. He didn’Äôt want to go home with anyone. He wanted to get a phone number, have a proper date. He wanted to hold doors open and buy presents and have long talks. Jon Favreau, his partner in crime for the excursion, played the exact opposite.

’ÄúFavreau played a character who looked at sex like food,’Äù Vaughn says. ’ÄúHe doesn’Äôt give a fuck about feelings, he doesn’Äôt want to hear about this or that. He’Äôs an animal who loves to fuck.’Äù

They’Äôd meet girls, and Favreau would launch into a story about Vaughn’Äôs character, about how he dated this girl for two months and never even went up her shirt. The whole time Vaughn is going on about how he wasn’Äôt emotionally ready for that, how that kind of loose behavior wasn’Äôt respectful.

’ÄúBut here’Äôs the interesting thing,’Äù says Vaughn. ’ÄúThe girls would look at me and say ’ÄòOh, that’Äôs so sweet, that’Äôs the right way to be, you stay who you are.’Äô Yet they were much more drawn to Favreau’Äôs character: they’Äôd act like they hated him, but they’Äôd always turn back to Favrau and say, ’ÄòSo you’Äôre saying you’Äôd take me into the bathroom and screw me right there?’Äô And Favreau, of course, would say, ’ÄòI’Äôll screw you right now, in the bathroom, and I’Äôd be doing you a favor.’Äô’Äù

But were their performances believable?

’ÄúWell,’Äù says Vaughn, ’Äúwe had good nights, we had bad nights.’Äù

Which in the end, is how it usually works for regular guys.

Vince Vaughn Answers Calls

Found here.

Before anyone heard of Vince Vaughn, he was in a little movie called Swingers. He was easily the funniest character in that movie - and then went on to a series of dramatic roles that seemed to kill his career. And But I've always wondered why? But, he's turned it around in the last few years and has become one of Hollywood's go-to guys when it comes to comedy.

News today that Vaughn will join David O. Russell's next project, an untitled comedy at Universal Pictures. In the movie, Vaughn will play the wiseass host of a radio call-in show whose life gets turned upside down when he starts becoming his callers. The movie is based on a pre-existing script by David Cohen and Tony Lord that was re-written by Russell.

Russell last made I Heart Huckabees. Vaughn can be seen later this summer alongside Jennifer Aniston in "The Break-Up". He can also be seen in Wedding Crashers with Owen Wilson. The full trailer for that movie debuted online yesterday. You can check it out here.

Russell calls on Vaughn for Universal pic

Here's another article (with little more info) about the David O. Russell project. Found here.

By Borys Kit and Liza Foreman

Vince Vaughn is set to star in an untitled David O. Russell-directed and -written comedy for Universal Pictures. Studio-based Mandalay Pictures, Gregory Goodman and Russell are producing.

Vaughn will play the wiseass host of a radio call-in show he runs with his producer girlfriend. His life is turned upside down when he starts taking on the qualities of his neurotic callers. Russell wrote the current draft of the screenplay, which is based on a screenplay by David Cohen and Tony Lord.

An early fall start date is being eyed.

As opposed to some of Russell's more quirky and independent fare, the movie is designed to be a big, commercial comedy with his "sensibilities," Russell said.

Vaughn Toplines Fantasy Comedy

Found here.

Vince Vaughn has been set to star in an untitled fantasy comedy that David O. Russell has written and will direct for Universal Pictures, Variety reported.

Vaughn will play the wiseass host of a radio call-in show whose life gets turned upside down when he starts becoming his callers, the trade paper reported.

Russell started with a pre-existing script by David Cohen and Tony Lord, but changed it dramatically. Russell's previous comedies include I Heart Huckabees and Flirting With Disaster.

Universal is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.

Complex Magazine

Here are scans of the cover (it's a dual cover--the Complex website doesn't show the Vince side!) and the three spreads. Awesome photos. I can't wait to read the article.

larger image

larger image

larger image

larger image

Oh, and I bought the magazine at Tower Records.

Larger scan of the article (a)
Larger scan of the article (b)

A little blurb on msnbc.com - "Back to School"

Found here

Vince Vaughn is unhappy with the level of professionalism in Hollywood.

The 35-year-old actor, who has starred in such classics as ’ÄúStarsky and Hutch’Äù and ’ÄúThumbsucker’Äù and who is rumored to be the top choice as the new James Bond* ’Äî bemoaned how today’Äôs stars just don’Äôt take the time to study their craft.

’ÄúWhen I got to LA, I took more classes. I always wanted new information,’Äù the ’ÄúBe Cool’Äù star tells the April/May issue of Complex magazine. ’ÄúThat was what we all tried to do back then. It’Äôs different now. There’Äôs a real focus on trying to be really famous or coming off really cool and, in Hollywood, it’Äôs not cool to try at something.¬Ý It’Äôs much cooler to have never taken acting classes, to act like you don’Äôt care, to not try.’Äù

Rockwell: 'Zaphod is a bit like Elvis'

Actor Sam Rockwell's alien character in the upcoming movie adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is based on a mixture of famous Americans.

The 36-year-old star introduced an Elvis Presley quality to his portrayal of space monster, Zaphod Beeblebrox after jokingly impersonating the rock 'n' roll king with actor Vince Vaughn.

And from that point on, Rockwell couldn't stop bringing other famous Americans to the role.

Rockwell explains, "Vince and I were taking it in turns to be Elvis, just playing around. From that improv came this kind of Elvis/Vince amalgam.

"Zaphod is a bit of Vince, a little Elvis, with some Bill Clinton and a few other things too. Maybe even a dash of George W. Bush."

They're In on the Joke: Hollywood's Funniest Clique

Insiders who are taking comedy back from the studios: From left, Ben Stiller, Judd Apatow, Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson and Will Ferrell.

By SHARON WAXMAN
The New York Times

Published: March 27, 2005
Found here
LOS ANGELES

THE pitch took five minutes. And it went something like this: "Will" (that would be Will Ferrell) "is the driver." (That would be a Nascar driver.) "His whole thing is: I wanna go faster." Does it sound funny yet? Does it matter? Adam McKay, a former head writer for "Saturday Night Live," was doing the pitching. The studios, in competition, were doing the catching. In the end, Sony Pictures agreed last June to pay Mr. Ferrell $20 million to act in the then-unwritten film "Talladega Nights," with a green light almost certain if Mr. McKay, the director, and Judd Apatow, the producer, could keep their budget in the area of $70 million.

It helped that the principals had certain things in common. They'd worked together on last year's "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy," for instance. And they were all clients of both the United Talent Agency and a pair of powerhouse managers, Mosaic Media Group's Eric Gold and Jimmy Miller, making them key members of a very select group.

Ever since Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi hit Hollywood 30 years ago, screen comedy has been something of a circle game. For protection, inspiration or just plain fun, Hollywood's comic talent has tended to cluster and take care of its own. But never, perhaps, has the circle been tighter, or the financial stakes higher, than now.

Mr. Ferrell, Mr. Apatow and Ben Stiller are among the club's kingpins. Mr. McKay, Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Vince Vaughn and Jack Black belong, as do Nick Stevens, a United Talent agent who represents Mr. Carrey and Mr. Stiller, and Mr. Gold and Mr. Miller, who have much of the group in their stable.

The funnymen appear in one another's movies, from "Dodgeball" to "Anchorman" to "Elf" to "Zoolander," creating a wheel-of-comedy effect that can leave viewers wondering just whose movie they're watching. What's more, the stars and their representatives live, work and play in a continuum that has virtually shut the studios out of the development process. By coming up with their own concepts, finding screenwriters and then offering the whole package for production - script, director and cast, take it or leave it - this group is reshaping screen humor to their liking.

"What interests me most about this group is they all participate in readings of each other's scripts, without the studios present," said Stuart Cornfeld, Mr. Stiller's producing partner in their company Red Hour Films. He cited a recent reading of "Tropic Thunder," Mr. Stiller's new project for DreamWorks, at which Mr. Apatow took notes, and Mos Def and the British actor Steve Coogan - recent additions to the in-crowd - read various roles.

Studio executives are well aware of the power in such cohesion. "They seem to function somewhat as an informal kind of comedy troupe," said Hutch Parker, president of 20th Century Fox. "If you check around town and see what projects they all have in development, you find the same alliances."

In fact, the interaction has spawned a new brand of comedy that steps beyond the consciously dumb gross-out humor of the last decade, when the filmmakers Peter and Bobby Farrelly ruled the roost with pictures like "Dumb and Dumber" and "There's Something About Mary." Next-generation humor is "smart-dumb comedy, as opposed to dumb-dumb comedy or smart-clever comedy," Mr. Cornfeld said. The humor is often character-based and owes a lot of its knowing silliness - think of Mr. Ferrell as an oversized Santa's helper, or Mr. Stiller as a vapid runway model - to "Saturday Night Live."

"We are all the spawn of Hal Ramis," Mr. Apatow said, referring to the director or co-writer of the last generation's touchstone comedies, like "Animal House" and "Meatballs." "We all grew up on 'Stripes' and 'Caddyshack' and 'Animal House.' We're heavily influenced by Second City and Albert Brooks. As a result, a lot of us have similar sensibilities."

One such "smart-dumb comedy" was in its birth throes recently, as Mr. Apatow and Steve Carell, another "Anchorman" veteran, found themselves, scripts in hand, sitting at a table in Santa Monica with a few other actors, exchanging stories of their early sexual exploits. What started as a read-through of Universal Pictures' "40-Year-Old Virgin," set for an August release, had quickly devolved into a discussion of how the central character - Mr. Carell as an electronics store clerk - happened to still be a sexual naif.

The cast tossed out situations that might have led to his giving up on sex. Paul Rudd suggested a problem of premature ejaculation. But Mr. Apatow, one of the film's producers, was still thinking. "This one guy told Garry Shandling he lost his virginity to two women," he mused.

"That's a good story," Mr. Carell said.

Mr. Apatow told of an eighth-grade experience when he panicked after his girlfriend guided his hand beyond first base. "In my head I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm going to pee on her,' " he recalled, to general laughter around the table. "I literally stayed in the shower until she was gone."

Romany Malco, a cast member, cheerily told of being seduced by the family baby sitter when he was 6, then by a string of sitters for years after. (No one said comedy doesn't hurt.) Mr. Malco, who served in the military, also told a raunchy tale from the barracks involving masturbation and killing roaches.

Mr. Apatow slapped the table. "That's going in," he said, grabbing a pen.

The concept for this movie came from Mr. Carell, who had riffed on the idea years ago during improvisations in Chicago at Second City, the comedy troupe where he got his start. During down time on "Anchorman," he tossed out the idea to Mr. Apatow, whom he had met on the set, and they sold it as a pitch to Universal. "The 40-Year Old Virgin," which they wrote together and which Mr. Apatow directed with Mr. Carell starring, just wrapped. This has become a fairly normal scenario for a group that has become accustomed to hearing the word "yes" from executives who are willing to rely on the comics' instincts and track record.

Similar telegraphy was behind more than one film that has hit the screen. Mr. Stiller had only to call his agent, Mr. Stevens, and say, "I have five words for you: Owen Wilson. Starsky and Hutch." Mr. Stevens got it. Within days he had sold the idea to Warner Brothers, which owned the title but was doing nothing with it, and eventually landed a budget of $60 million.

In the next several months, a new wave of films from the group will include New Line Cinema's "The Wedding Crashers," the summer's most buzzed-about comedy, starring Mr. Vaughn and Mr. Wilson as overgrown bachelors who prey on women at weddings, and Universal's "Kicking and Screaming," with Mr. Ferrell as a demented soccer dad. Then there's "Bewitched," an update of the television series with Mr. Ferrell and Nicole Kidman, and later in the year comes "Fun With Dick and Jane," with Mr. Carrey and T茜a Leoni as a married couple who turn to robbery, both films for Sony Pictures.

Audiences are likely to sense the connections among these films, if only because everybody on the circuit lends a bit of screen time to everyone else. Mr. Ferrell, for instance, did a cameo in "The Wedding Crashers." That's partly because Mr. Vaughn did a cameo in Mr. Ferrell's last picture, "Anchorman." For that matter, so did Mr. Stiller (as Arturo Mendes) and Mr. Black (as the Angry Biker).

The camaraderie owes much to connections that go back many years, sometimes decades, to shared experience in the grimy comedy clubs of Lower Manhattan and Los Angeles. It extended to "Saturday Night Live" circa the 1990's; the innovative Wayans brothers' show, "In Living Color"; and the ratings-challenged "Ben Stiller Show," canceled in 1993 after one season on Fox.

"Everybody hung out more together when we were unemployed," Mr. Apatow said. Actually, that much of the group became not just employed but also richly compensated owes much to the influential management company run by Mr. Gold, 48, and Mr. Miller, 47. The managers, who rarely talk to the media, are both from Pittsburgh and met during their college years. At the time, both were dabbling in comedy, though it was Mr. Miller's older brother, Dennis, now a talk-show host, who was the rising star of their group. Jimmy Miller spent 13 years as a manager in comedy clubs, from 1981 to 1994, five or six nights a week in the back of the room, first in Pittsburgh, then in Hermosa Beach, Calif. Mr. Gold was a stand-up comedian before moving to Los Angeles to become an agent, then a manager.

Their practical experience in the clubs became invaluable. Mr. Apatow, a friend, became a client. Tipped by him, Mr. Miller booked Mr. Carrey into his Hermosa Beach club and gradually started booking him into clubs on the road, long before the comic made his mark in the movies.

"It's really a small business, still, the comedy business," Mr. Miller said during a recent interview in his conference room on Sunset Boulevard. Contemporary comedy, even as it evolves, still owes its essence to "Saturday Night Live," he said.

Mr. Gold agreed: "It's 30 years old as we know it. It hasn't gotten so big that the people involved don't know each other. We all know each other."

Today, the managers do much more than just represent Mr. Carrey, Mr. Apatow, Mr. Ferrell, Mr. Vaughn, the Wayans and many others. They actively edit and shape their clients' ideas; the stars implicitly trust their comedy judgment.

Which means Mr. Gold and Mr. Miller can keep people out of the "wheel of comedy" too. One film executive complained that the young comedy club is exclusionary and not always in a good way. "There's always a wall being put up with those guys," he said, declining to be identified for fear of jeopardizing future relations with the group.

During the making of "Elf," Mr. Miller and Mr. Ferrell differed with the editing choices of the director, Jon Favreau, executives close to the production said. Both versions were tested with audiences, but the creative differences led to Mr. Favreau's not being involved in the sequel at New Line, executives in both camps said. Though Mr. Favreau's choices tested better with an audience and won out, he is considered creatively out of sync with Mr. Miller and Mr. Ferrell, and New Line has confirmed that he will not be part of the sequel.

Mr. Apatow came from New York and worked as a stand-up comic at the Improv in Hollywood. That's where he met Adam Sandler, who became his roommate but who today appears to remain outside the club, in an orbit of his own. Mr. Apatow met Mr. Stiller standing in line at an Elvis Costello concert. "Within two weeks we were friends," he recalled. Together, they wrote a sketch show for MTV, then wrote and produced the critically adored but doomed "Ben Stiller Show." Mr. Apatow, who once opened in comedy clubs for Mr. Carrey, also produced "The Cable Guy," which starred Mr. Carrey and was directed by Mr. Stiller, in 1996.

Mr. Stiller further expanded the group when he became a fan of Mr. Wilson after seeing him in "Bottle Rocket" and called up the actor to propose collaborating. He had given Mr. Black a role in "The Cable Guy," and used both Mr. Wilson and Mr. Ferrell in "Zoolander."

Some executives say they are happy to be schooled by the collective, with its accumulated comic lore. "What these guys do, and what makes them exciting, is they're very cutting edge," said Adam Goodman, the president of production at DreamWorks. "These guys are teaching us what comedy is, and where comedy's going. We're simply following their lead here."

Though Hollywood may be following now, the studios were initially slow to catch on. The pitch for "Anchorman" was rejected by the DreamWorks production chief, Walter F. Parkes, who told his executives after the meeting that Mr. Ferrell was no star, more than one person present says. He changed his mind after "Old School" became a hit. Asked about his decision, Mr. Parkes said: "We weren't ready to go forward with a green light with that picture, with that cast, at that moment. It had to do with concerns about the concept of the film, not the star. We were the ones who cast Will in 'Old School' in the first place."

Similarly, DreamWorks, MGM and other studios passed on "Dodgeball." Fox finally agreed after Mr. Stiller reduced his fee to well under $1 million, a fraction of his usual price. The film has so far taken in $114 million domestically and cost $23 million to make.

Indeed, part of the appeal of these films has been their low production cost and their huge return at the box office. But that formula is quickly disappearing as the success of the young comedy-makers is forcing the studios to engage in bidding wars.

And some worry that a comic oligopoly is inevitably raising the cost of doing business with stars like Mr. Ferrell, Mr. Black and lately Mr. Vaughn. After all, Mr. Carrey already costs upwards of $20 million, and Mr. Ferrell is hovering in that neighborhood. In January, Mr. Stevens and Mr. Gold held an auction among the studios for Mr. Vaughn's latest project, a romantic comedy. The script for the film, "The Breakup," sold for $2.25 million, and Mr. Vaughn received his highest payday ever, $12 million, to star and produce.

"Smart guys like Eric Gold and Jimmy Miller are figuring, 'Let's put our own stuff together, go out in a competitive way, and the studio that wants it the most will pay the most and give us the most creative autonomy," said New Line's president of production, Toby Emmerich, who has found himself on the losing end of a couple of recent bidding wars from the Gold-Miller workshop.

For Mr. Emmerich, the trick is not to get into the club but to get ahead of it: "Right now I'd say those guys are worth their weight in gold for comedy. But for us, the bigger challenge is to figure out: Who's the next guy?"

From MTV News

Found here

Vince Vaughn is flexing his twinkle-twinkle this year with "Be Cool" currently in theaters and a thriller ("Mr. and Mrs. Smith"), a comedy ("The Wedding Crashers") and even a hip-hop drama ("The Sky Is Green") on the way. Those who caught his quick-witted guest-hosting appearance filling in for a sick David Letterman awhile back, however, are wondering whether he has plans to be the next Leno, Conan or, at the very least, Tony Danza. "Not really," Vaughn said. "I did host my high school talent shows and that kind of thing. I've always had a good sense of humor, especially about myself. With something like that, I just kind of prepared myself mentally to go to a place where once you get there and do something like hosting 'Letterman,' you have to be open to whatever's going to happen. It's not that different from acting, it's just listening. So if you get there where you can be lost in that moment, then you can flow with what's happening." ...

Found here

Vince Vaughn: Who's laughing now?

Found here

After his dazzling turn in Swingers, Vince Vaughn seemed to go into hiding. Now he's back, as one of Hollywood's comedy elite. He talks to Ryan Gilbey

16 February 2005

The trajectory of Vince Vaughn's career couldn't accurately be described as "rise and fall" - at least, not to his face, and not by someone who measures a measly 5ft 9in, as I do, to Vaughn's chandelier-bothering 6ft 5in.

Certainly, there was a slight falling-off after his dazzling turn in the 1996 slapstick comedy Swingers, as I'm sure Vaughn himself would concede. Then, Steven Spielberg acclaimed the newcomer as "an icon-to-be" before rather unfairly casting him in the most boring role in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. (Vaughn's spin-off action figure seemed to be having more fun than he was.)

But, after a period of being absent from cinema screens, or starring in the kind of films that seem to be made exclusively to fill days of air time on in-flight entertainment channels, the 34-year-old is now part of Hollywood's new comedy establishment, along with his buddies such as Ben Stiller, Luke and Owen Wilson, and the current King Midas, Will Ferrell.

Vaughn wore a zany moustache last year to play the villain opposite Ben Stiller in Starsky & Hutch. In the comedy Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, it is Stiller who is on "wacky facial hair" duty, while Vaughn gets to be the straight-up, good-egg hero in a yarn about searching for the hero inside and laughing at overweight people.

"Everyone else in Dodgeball is really 'out there', really extreme," Vaughn says, spilling out of a tiny armchair. "I have to be the eyes of the audience. If the world around you is insane, it's important to be the sane, still centre. Like Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings. Or Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz." He smiles weakly, perhaps realising that this is the first and last time anyone will hear Dodgeball mentioned in the same paragraph as those films.

We chat briefly about Dodgeball. But what is there to say about it? It's sleazy fun, and will no doubt repeat its US success internationally. Who cares about the film's inherent hypocrisy - denouncing body fascism while wringing humour from the sight of obese characters attempting strenuous physical activity - when the repeated shots of someone getting thwacked in the face and/or genitals transcend all language barriers?

There is a sense, though, that Vaughn might be slightly above all this. He has shown in a handful of films - Swingers, Psycho (1998), Return to Paradise (1998) and Made (2001) - the kind of versatility that makes Dodgeball look like a stop-gap, albeit a highly lucrative one.

He tells me that he doesn't differentiate between comic and dramatic parts. "My approach is always the same. I like character-based films. Comedy isn't about trying to be funny. It's an over-commitment to something that's absurd, whether it's the rules of dating in Swingers or the competitiveness in Dodgeball."

Vaughn got his early breaks in the improvisational comedy troupe Second City, in his hometown of Chicago. "I was performing there after two weeks of joining. Some nights, I really bombed. But I learnt to be calm and serene even when I was bombing."

After landing roles in commercials and TV series, Vaughn upped sticks to Los Angeles, where he befriended another struggling actor, Jon Favreau. "A lot of actors in LA were very self-important," he remembers. He extends his arms and puffs out his chest in a parody of Shakespearean acting. "Jon and I never took it that seriously. We worked hard, but we didn't have any pretensions. Even now, I get embarrassed because my sister's a teacher, whereas I'm just an actor." I check for a smirk, but he means it.

Swingers was based largely on Vaughn and Favreau's experiences hanging out together in 1950s-style LA nightclubs, unsuccessfully hitting on beautiful women and scratching around for acting work. Even the characters' exuberant vernacular was drawn from their own slang - Vaughn's habit of using "money" as an approving adjective (as in: "That's so money!"), and adding "baby" to the end of every sentence, was exaggerated in his role as Trent, a sharp-suited, quick-witted, deluded wide boy to set alongside Michael Caine's Alfie.

"There were similarities between me and Trent," he agrees. "I didn't dress as well as him, but I liked hanging out in those places. I liked the scene. Fashion at that point had got to a very androgynous place, with violence and piercings." He gives a little shudder. "That wasn't my thing. I liked it better where the guys wore suits and the girls wore dresses." Again, there's no hint that he's joking.

He looks back fondly on Swingers. "One time, I went over to the sound guy, Big Al, who usually worked on soft-porn movies. I said, 'Whaddya think, Big Al? We really got something here, huh?' He said, 'Let's be honest, Vince. You and your friends are getting a kick out of this. You can say you've made a movie. But no one's gonna see it.' I thought, 'God, maybe he's right.'" But Miramax snapped up the film, and the rest, as they say, is quoted in student bars around the world. And Big Al? "Oh, Favreau hired him for a pilot he was doing, and Big Al fell asleep on set. Favreau had to fire him."

In the years after the success of Swingers, Vaughn more or less swore off comedy. "I kept getting sent these lousy scripts, so I decided to seek out some darker material," he says. Actually, his background in comedy helped to give a distinctive edge to those more sombre roles. He was a welcome presence in Return to Paradise, in which he and Joaquin Phoenix were sentenced to death after being convicted of drug smuggling. Swingers was still fairly fresh in the memory then, and there was the feeling that Vaughn's wiseacre persona would save the day and spring the heroes from jail. It didn't.

It was brave, too, for him to play Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant's audacious Psycho remake. I mention how he made the role his own, exaggerating Anthony Perkins's effeminacy: he was a drag queen trapped in a psychopath's body. Vaughn talks me through the difficulties of playing another actor's part in a shot-for-shot remake, and takes special care to mention rehearsing at home with "my girlfriend at the time". Possibly he didn't want me to think he was gay. Or for anyone else to think it, for that matter: when reporters collared him a few years back about an alleged affair with Cameron Diaz, his response was gleefully indiscreet and un-Hollywood: "How did you guys hear about that?" he spluttered.

Not that I did think he was gay - more like "heterosexual with aggressive latent homosexual desires". After all, there is a degree of ambiguity to him. There was his undoubted chemistry with Viggo Mortensen in Psycho. And Vaughn looked prettier than any of the women in Swingers. Then there is Made, which challenges Top Gun and Heartbreak Ridge for the title of queerest "straight" movie ever released. In that unexpectedly dark follow-up to Swingers, Vaughn and Favreau share long, wordless looks in between squabbling, and end the movie adopting a child together.

But, rather than representing any kind of coming-out, Made transpired to be something of a retreat - a devilish tease to fans who expected this likeable double-act to yield more vaguely laddish jollity. "There was actually a very funny sequel to Swingers that we had written before the first film was released. But with Swingers becoming what it did, we thought we might be better off just leaving it alone. We didn't want to do the same thing. So we took those character types and made them slightly off. Trent was perceived as being loud but cool: well, what if I played someone who wasn't cool, he was just annoying?" No one went to see the film, of course, but it was full of dry, uncomfortable humour, most of it involving Vaughn being hostile - harassing a flight attendant, mocking an interior designer, bullying a bellhop.

He played that gentle menace so convincingly that I was expecting to encounter it in some form during our meeting. In 2001, he was involved in a bar brawl along with the actor Steve Buscemi, for which he was fined $250 and ordered to undergo an alcohol assessment programme. And on his 33rd birthday he was bopped on the nose by a stranger in West Hollywood.

On screen in Dodgeball, he seems to have gone to seed, with eye-bags and a double chin, though I suppose no man looks his best when called upon to wear pyjamas and have his crotch nuzzled by an excitable Labrador (it's that sort of film). But there is nothing of that big, bedraggled lug in person. The worst you could say about him is that his socks are too white to go with his grey suit. And that he could do better than Dodgeball.

'Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story' is out now on DVD

Found here

Another tabloid tells all...

Jennifer Aniston on the rebound

Herald Sun
Article found here
07feb05

BREAKING up with Brad Pitt would leave most girls inconsolable but Jennifer Aniston seems to have bounced back from the heartache remarkably quickly.

As shots were released yesterday of Pitt "marrying" Angelina Jolie in his new film, 35-year-old Aniston was recovering from a night out with another movie hunk that ended in a lingering kiss.

Aniston was seen outside an LA hotel embracing 34-year-old actor Vince Vaughn, who starred in the Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World and has been praised for his "matinee idol good looks".

Last month, former Friends star Aniston announced the end of her four-year marriage to Pitt, 41, just weeks after he was photographed cuddling and holding hands with Jolie.

Article found here

Vince & Jen?*

JEN'S 1ST DATE

Feb 6 2005

Movie hunk puts smile on her face

By Ben Todd Showbiz Editor
Sunday Mirror
Article found here

FRIENDS star Jennifer Aniston¬Ýhas been¬Ýon her first date since her marriage split - and enjoyed a tender goodnight kiss from Hollywood heartthrob Vince Vaughn.

Movie hunk Brad Pitt's estranged wife shared the intimate moment with Dodgeball star Vaughn after an evening at a five-star Beverly Hills hotel.

Vince escorted her to the plush Peninsula's lobby before hugging and kissing her goodbye.

A pal revealed: "Jennifer and Vince are very close. They've been spending time together. They're taking things slowly and enjoying each other's company. But they've got a connection."

Jennifer was beaming from ear to ear as she jumped into a waiting Range Rover accompanied by her serious-faced minders.

The friend added: "Vince is a funny guy - and he's certainly putting a smile back on Jennifer's face."

Vaughn, 34, has been in over 30 movies. He co-starred in the critically-acclaimed Swingers and played Nick Van Owen in The Lost World - a sequel to Jurassic Park.

He also played motel murderer Norman Bates in the flop 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock's legendary thriller Pyscho.

He even has a small role in new movie Mr & Mrs Smith - starring Brad and Angelina Jolie. Rumours of her husband's on-set "chemistry" with Jolie are said to have contributed to the love split.

Jennifer's date with Vince came just days after she and Oceans 12 star Brad, 41, had raised hopes of a reconciliation by having dinner at West Hollywood's exclusive L'Orangerie restaurant.

Jennifer, who'll be 36 on Friday, split with Brad last month after four years but they both vowed to "remain committed and caring friends with great love and admiration for each other."

Brad still wear his wedding ring, but Jen has been seen with hers since December.

Article found here

*And to loosely quote Vince from Paparazzi: ’ÄúSince this is from a British publication, it must be true!’Äù

Universal brakes for Vaughn spec

Found here.

Vince Vaughn is clearly in demand. Beating out several studios in a protracted bidding war that lasted through much of the week, Universal has paid an estimated $2.25 million for the comedy spec ""The Break-Up"," with Vaughn attached to star and produce. Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender wrote the screenplay, whose details are being kept under wraps. It's based on an original idea by Vaughn, who will receive "story by" credit. Universal vice chairman of worldwide production Scott Stuber, who's socially friendly with Vaughn, secured the deal for the studio and also will oversee the project. Vaughn most recently starred in the 20th Century Fox hit "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story." He next appears in MGM's "Get Shorty" sequel "Be Cool" and New Line Cinema's "The Wedding Crashers." Garelick and Lavender wrote the script for "Golden Tux," which sold to Dimension. Vaughn is represented by UTA, Eric Gold of Mosaic Media and attorney Debbie Klein. Garelick and Lavender are represented by WMA, Principato-Young and attorney Todd Rubenstein. (Liza Foreman and Borys Kit)

Universal lands Vaughn in "The Break-Up"

By Liza Foreman and Borys Kit
The Hollywood Reporter
Article found here

By Liza Foreman and Borys Kit
Vince Vaughn is clearly in demand. Beating out several studios in a protracted bidding war, Universal has paid an estimated $2.25 million for the comedy spec "The Break-Up" with Vaughn attached to star and produce.

Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender wrote the screenplay, the details of which are being kept under wraps. It's based on an original idea by Vaughn, who will receive "story by" credit.

Universal's vice chairman, Worldwide Production, Scott Stuber secured the deal for the studio and will also oversee the project.

Vaughn most recently appeared in the 20th Century Fox hit "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story." He will next appear in MGM's "Get Shorty" sequel "Be Cool" and New Line Cinema's "The Wedding Crashers."

Garelick and Lavender's only previous credit is the script "Golden Tux," which sold to Dimension.

Vaughn is represented by UTA, Eric Gold of Mosaic Media and attorney Debbie Klein. Garelick and Lavender are represented by WMA, Principato-Young and attorney Todd Rubenstein.

Article found here

Set Visit: "Wedding Crashers"

Set Visit: "Wedding Crashers"

by Corey Moss
MTV.com
Interview found here.

PASADENA, California ’Äî Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, on the balcony of a church and clad in tuxedos, are, naturally, talking about weddings.

"If you were going to get married ’Äî and be honest ’Äî would I be one of your groomsmen?" Wilson asks Vaughn. "Would I make the cut? I'd like to think we've hit it off pretty good on this movie."

"Absolutely, absolutely you would be," Vaughn answers. "In fact, you would be the only groomsman, and it would probably take place somewhere in the Eastern Bloc."

"I like the sound of that," Wilson replies. "Sounds like a hell of a bachelor party."

"Me and you and a bunch of mail-order brides," Vaughn says.

As much as that sounds like a scenario for a movie ("The Mail-Order Men"?), Wilson and Vaughn are supposed to be talking about a different wedding movie, one the actors have been shooting all day and night.

For some reason, though, they just seem to want to talk about other weddings.

"Have you ever been a best man?" Wilson asks.

"I have."

"And how did that work out?"

"They separated."

"I was the best man at my older brother's wedding and he got divorced too," Wilson says. "So, basically, if you want to jinx your wedding, ask one of us to be your best man."

Again, as much as that sounds like a scenario for a movie ("The Worst Best Man"?), Wilson and Vaughn are supposed to be talking about the wedding movie they are actually making: "The Wedding Crashers." Oh, that one.

"Vince and I play two guys who go to weddings to pick up girls, and it's the idea that girls might be sort of good to go at weddings," Wilson finally explains with the raise of an eyebrow.

Specifically, Wilson and Vaughn are partners at a Washington, D.C., divorce mediation firm who have come to realize that women are aroused in a nuptial atmosphere. That the lifelong friends are never actually invited to the weddings they attend is hardly a setback. In fact, Wilson and Vaughn's characters have been crashing weddings for so long they have it down to a science.

"You pick a location [to sit for the ceremony] where you can see the bridesmaids enter, but not so close that you have to make eye contact with the wedding party," Vaughn explains, pointing to the spot where he and Wilson sat for the scene shot a few hours earlier. "It's all about positioning for all the things you're looking for. You gotta be able to see all the girls."

To add a little more fun to the experience, their characters also make games out of wedding crashing.

"Some of these services are kind of long, so we sort of make bets throughout the services, like what they're going to read from for the wedding, if the bride is going to cry or not, things to help us get through the service part of it," Wilson reveals.

Where the wedding crashers get thrown off in the movie is when they fall for bridesmaids of the daughter of the Secretary of Treasury, played by Christopher Walken. When Wilson and Vaughn's characters get invited to a weekend's worth of post-wedding festivities, the crashers meet their biggest challenge yet.

"One of the exciting things about this wedding that we're attending is that we're going to be shooting in Washington, D.C., at the National Cathedral, and we're going to have Senator John McCain and James Carville there," Wilson reveals.

The bridesmaids are played by Rachel McAdams of "The Notebook" and Isla Fisher of "I Heart Huckabees," two relative newcomers Wilson and Vaughn have enjoyed taking under their wings.

"It reminds me of when I got a Chia Pet for a holiday occasion and at first it was just this piece of clay, and pretty soon gorgeous green things were growing out of it," Vaughn deadpanned. "I had to water it every day, I had to pet it, talk to it, and it was just a full-on Chia Pet with a lot of beautiful, beautiful, beautiful leaves growing from it. And that's just to sum up my experience working with these two girls."

David Dobkin, who directed Wilson in "Shanghai Nights" and Vaughn in "Clay Pigeons," is helming "The Wedding Crashers," although instead of him bringing Wilson and Vaughn on board it was the other way around.

Wilson and Vaughn met through their group of mutual actor friends, which includes Ben Stiller, Will Farrell and Jack Black, who have made several movies together (and some of whom have cameos in "The Wedding Crashers").

Wilson and Vaughn also co-starred in "Starsky & Hutch" together, although Vaughn insists it's only a coincidence.

"We keep hearing this [Brat Pack-type of] thing lately, but there's no real plan with it or whatever," Vaughn said. "I've always been a fan of Owen's and liked his stuff a lot, and we were both in 'Starsky,' but we didn't have a lot to do together in it. And when this idea came about, [the appeal for me] was more about the concept, and also Owen. But there was no meeting of people, like plotting stuff, although that would be fun if you got to pick places on those types of things. Like based on locations, that may be a good way to start picking scripts."

Eastern Bloc, here they come.

Interview found here.

Vince Vaughn - Exclusive Interview

By Dagmar Dunlevy, Featured Entertainment Writer
Buy Magazine
December 2004

Article found here

Consistent funnyman Vince Vaughn is just as funny in real life, and lets us into his world’Äìwhere dodgeball rules.

’ÄúYou’Äôre so money.’Äù Thanks to Vince Vaughn’Äôs uttering that classic line in 1996’Äôs Swingers, it became a mainstream expression. The film also put the 6'4" Minnesota man on the map. Best known for his comedic attributes, Vaughn is equally adept at drama. Most notable in that stint of dramatic roles includes the shot-for-shot color remake of Alfred Hitchcock’Äôs Psycho, in which he inherited the Norman Bates character (with Anne Heche playing Marion Crane). Two other dramatic parts had Vaughn in roles as a serial killer/con artist in Clay Pidgeons (1998) and then on the other side of the law as an FBI agent hell-bent on nailing a serial killer in The Cell (2000). Yet it appears that audiences seem to prefer seeing the affable, tall, dark and handsome actor playing comedy.

Thirty-four-year-old Vince Vaughn made his film debut in Rudy, a football-themed underdog-rising-to-the-top tale that was very well received by both critics and audiences alike. But more importantly, Rudy marked Vaughn’Äôs first collaboration with co-star Jon Favreau, who had written a script about a group of single Los Angelenos who frequent the club scene. Favreau eventually tailored one of the parts for Vaughn. When Swingers was released about three years later, both men were catapulted into the spotlight, with Vince tagged as the guy who has ’ÄúIt.’Äù Suddenly, doors opened, magazines clamored for interviews and people like Steven Spielberg came calling. Vince starred opposite Mrs. Spielberg, Kate Capshaw, in the romantic comedy The Locusts, and he landed one of the coveted leads in the highly anticipated sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park, both released in 1997.

Vince Vaughn was in demand. His credibility in the industry was firmly established. Then he decided on a series of intriguing roles that were artistically fulfilling but fell short on box office receipts. Following Return to Paradise, Clay Pidgeons, Psycho and A Cool Dry Place, Vince decided to take a career time-out. He then came back swinging with the long-awaited reteaming with Favreu in 2001 in the gangster-themed Made; his performance was touted as ’Äúinspired’Äù by many critics. Then came Old School, a story about a trio of twenty-something buddies trying to recapture their youth by starting their own off-campus frat house. Needless to say, it’Äôs now a cult hit and a staple in all comedy collections. And now Dodgeball has just been released on DVD. With this solid hit full of belly laughs, Vince Vaughn is once again showing his diversity and confirming his capable comedic skills.

Dodgeball at a Glance: Dodgeball is a broad comedy rich in underdog themes that thoroughly enjoys pushing the good-taste envelope with gags that bubble over the top. Vince Vaughn is cast as the owner of a rundown gym facing foreclosure by the bank and nasty competition from a franchise gym operated by a slick fitness guru played by Ben Stiller (who also produced the film).

People are drawn to films about sports teams and individuals who reach for the top and overcome insurmountable obstacles, ˆ° la Rocky or Rudy. Now Dodgeball takes a classic sports tale and slathers it with humor.

VV: I had a supporting role in Rudy. Rudy is about the individual trying to make the Notre Dame football team and the odds he has to overcome. Now Dodgeball is like a whole bunch of Rudys. So that great sports theme of trying to overcome insurmountable odds is there. The fact that the sport is dodgeball, that we used to play it all-out, makes it somewhat absurd’Äîand very funny.

Everyone remembers elementary school dodgeball. Seeing that you grew to six feet four inches and 220 pounds, you were probably quite daunting in your formative years as well.

VV: Actually, I grew late’Äîbetween sophomore and junior year. Most people’Äôs memories of playing dodgeball are either that they loved it’Äîbecause they were the ones taking people out’Äîor they dreaded the dodgeball because they were being taken out.

Which category did you fit into?

VV: I was in between. I got taken out and I’Äôd take a few shots’Äîa little of both.

Were you attracted to the Dodgeball script because it brought back memories of some of your favorite films as a kid?

VV: One of my favorite movies as a kid was Bad New Bears (1976) with Walter Matthau [about a foul-mouthed kids’Äô baseball team]. I was always a fan of Revenge of the Nerds and those ’Äô80s-style comedies, and this movie really reminded me of that. I loved the theme of underdogs trying to save their gym, and how it was symbolic of them looking for a place to be okay, a place to fit into society.

Your Dodgeball character has been described as a lovable loser. Do you agree?

VV: The way I see him is as an unmotivated guy. He owns a gym called Average Joe’Äôs, but no one really works out there. The gym is more of a meeting place for people who aren’Äôt really accepted in other places. This character isn’Äôt motivated to hustle and save the gym until he realizes what it means to all the other Average Joe’Äôs members. That realization sparks his
motivation and he decides that dodgeball is the best way to try to save the gym.

Some audiences will be surprised to learn the identity of the knockout woman you’Äôre chasing through to the hilarious end.

VV: That girl is great!’ÄîChristine Taylor, Ben’Äôs [Stiller] wife. So yeah, I got to mess around with Ben’Äôs wife. (Laughs) Between ’ÄúAction’Äù and ’ÄúCut’Äù she was my baby!

You and some of the guys you’Äôve worked with are being labeled The Frat Pack, and identified as a group of ’Äúcomic-actors.’Äù Were you aware of that?

VV: That’Äôs awesome, but not by design. Jack Black, the Wilson brothers, Will Ferrell, and Ben Stiller and I never planned that, it’Äôs just one of those things that happened. They are all people that I think are funny and smart. It’Äôs especially fulfilling to work with people that you respect.

You guys always seem to show up in each other’Äôs movies. Do you and Ben Stiller arrange that?

VV: We always wanted to work together. Zoolander I was in but just very briefly, a cameo. Then Starsky and Hutch and Dodgeball came out the same time. Then Will Ferrell was doing Anchorman and he asked me and Ben to do cameos in it’Ķ There was nothing really planned and conscious, but I like Ben’Äîand I think he’Äôs funny’Äîand I’Äôve enjoyed doing stuff with them.

Well, you’Äôve defiantly carved a niche for yourselves. You seem to really love being a character actor.

VV: Yeah, I’Äôve always liked that. I’Äôve been fortunate that I’Äôve had a chance to do a bunch of different stuff, whether it was dramatic or playing bad guys or doing comedy. I did a bunch of comedies’ÄîDodgeball, Old School, and Starsky and Hutch. Be Cool was something a little bit different and I was kind of getting tired of doing just only comedies, so when Be Cool came about it wasn’Äôt easy to fit in my schedule, but I wanted to do something that was different than just a straight-forward comedy’Äîalthough there’Äôs a lot of comedic aspects within.

What’Äôs your idea of a ’Äúdream cast’Äù to work with?

VV: I’Äôve had really great experiences with the best casts, period. Aside from the obvious [Favreau, Ferrell, Stiller et al.] I think one of the best casts I’Äôve ever been involved with were in Be Cool. It’Äôs fun when you come to work and you get scenes with Travolta, Harvey Keitel. The Rock and I had a lot of [scenes] together and it was a blast.

Does it ever get serious on the set of a comedy film?

VV: You have to get the job done [right], but when it’Äôs comedy it’Äôs nice to see that the actors haven’Äôt taken their part real serious, which I like. Everyone’Äôs trying to do their best with it. We talk a lot before we started doing stuff and what I like is when everyone knows their characters. When me and The Rock were working, I was taking it real serious, so I like to improvise if it makes sense to the scene, so it’Äôs fun to work with people who can do that and also be very specific, know their characters well and know their intensions.

Thanks for talking with us, Vince. We look forward to breaking up the holiday festivities with a good laugh from Dodgeball!

Article found here

Quotable Dialogue Defines Top Films

Butterball (aww, how cute!) on the Vince Vaughn Network Board provided the link to this interesting article about the quotable dialogue that defines a great movie, such as Swingers.

Article can be found Here

By Phil Villarreal

ARIZONA DAILY STAR

What most defines a great movie as it etches its place into history are its words, not its images.
¬Ý
It's the unfair advantage dialogue has over visuals when it comes to getting the word out about a picture. The heartbreaking, rib-rattling relationship comedy "Swingers" (1996), has an imposing advantage over most other recent films vying for recognition as classics.
¬Ý
Like "Gone With the Wind," "Casablanca," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Jaws," "Swingers" is blessed with a brilliantly quotable screenplay, one of the most electric and insightful ever written. No film gives a better insight into the mind of the single male as he braves the rocky waters of the dating world.
¬Ý
Written by its star, Jon Favreau, "Swingers" is based on his own struggles as a stand-up comedian who uprooted from his comfortable Queens, N.Y., neighborhood to move to Los Angeles. There, love and success don't come as easily as advertised.
¬Ý
Space doesn't allow a recap of every iconic line from "Swingers," but try a sample platter:
¬Ý
’óè "You're so money and you don't even know it."
¬Ý
’óè "I want you to remember this face. He's the guy behind the guy behind the guy."
¬Ý
’óè "Who's the big winner tonight at the casino? Huh? Mike, that's who. Mikey's the big winner. Mikey wins!"
¬Ý
’óè "You take yourself out of the game. You start talking about puppy dogs and ice cream, and, of course, it's going to end up on the friendship tip."
¬Ý
’óè (After scoring a goal in a hockey video game.) "It's not so much me as it is Roenick. He's good."
¬Ý
’óè "Our little Mikey is all growns up. He's growns up and he's growns up and he's growns up."
¬Ý
I could go on for an hour, and often have, in bull sessions with friends, flinging quotes from the film back and forth, which I'm sure have been, and continue to be, replicated in thousands of giddy groups of pals in love with the film.
¬Ý
"Swingers," though, is much more than a compilation of snappy one-liners. It's a heartfelt story of love among friends, the pain of lost romance and the hapless urge that makes a broken heart long to recover something, anything that could pass for romance.
¬Ý
The characters struggle through their existences by playing video hockey, cruising parties and dreaming of the big showbiz break.
¬Ý
It must have been cathartic for Favreau to hoist his intensely personal pain onto the page, and it's a happy irony that a tale of struggle of the underworked actor led to wild success. Before "Swingers," Favreau was best known for a small part as Sean Astin's chubby friend in "Rudy."
¬Ý
The success of "Swingers" turned Favreau into a nice-guy-makes-good icon, which he parlayed into a directing career.
¬Ý
It also propelled his friend and co-star, Vince Vaughn, into a regular on the big-budget comedy circuit. Vaughn established his screen persona in "Swingers" as Frank Sinatra-emulating Trent, the wise-ass, know-it-all chauvinist who understands so much about how to pick up women, he could write a book. And he did, sorta.
¬Ý
"Swingers: The Swingers Rules and a Screenplay" details Trent's banal, yet oddly effective rules of dating and relationship. Among the foremost: "Wait two days to call, otherwise you might scare off a beautiful baby."
¬Ý
Trent is the swingingest of singles in a Los Angeles completely enthralled by the mid-1990s swing-music fad. He gets so many phone numbers, sometimes he'll tear one up right after he gets it, just to show his pals he doesn't need every set of digits he gets.
¬Ý
Under Trent's wing is Favreau's Mikey, who's still stung from the breakup of his girlfriend of six years, even though they've been apart for six months. Mikey is a slave to his answering machine, desperately hoping his ex will call him back.
¬Ý
Trent and Mikey's fellow Queens transplant, Rob (Ron Livingston), do their best to console and rehabilitate Mikey in road trips and late-night heart-to-hearts at dilapidated cafes. So complete is Mikey's obsession with keeping tabs on the answering machine, though, that one night in Las Vegas, Mikey breaks up one of Trent's potential sexual conquests by barging in and demanding to use the phone.
¬Ý
Trent and Mikey's foray into Sin City makes for the centerpiece of the film, in which the men wear suits into a run-down casino, hoping to be treated as big shots. Mikey, gambling with his rent money, loses $200 on one hand of blackjack - "always double-down on 11, baby," Trent insists - and Trent works his mojo on a cocktail waitress, dazzling Mikey with his prowess.
¬Ý
"That's the Jedi Mind (trick)," Mikey says in awe, and Trent eats up every bit of the reverence.
¬Ý
Throughout the film, Mikey tries clumsily to replicate Trent's moves and bumbles horribly. In a fever of desperation, Mikey leaves several consecutive late-night messages on the answering machine of a girl he's just met. The self-humiliation, while hilarious, also penetrates the heart with palpable pain.
¬Ý
As Mikey gradually discovers Trent's secrets will only work for Trent, and maybe not even as well as Trent thinks they do, the film's message is the hidebound "be true to yourself" line. The final movement, in which Mikey flirts with the Heather Graham character, using self-deprecating honesty infused with a newfound confidence gleaned from his friends, ripples with an exuberant thrill.
¬Ý
The epilogue details Trent's cockiness backfiring, in front of a grinning Mikey, who is forever cured of his answering-machine slavedom. It swings the movie on a note so smooth, Sinatra would approve.
¬Ý

’óè Contact reporter Phil Villarreal at 573-4130 or pvillarreal@azstarnet.com.

Article can be found Here

Wedding Crashers Review

Here's a review of Wedding Crashers from Ain't It Cool News. Thanks, Heather for the scoop!

Article can be found Here

And Another

First, a video interview with Vince by Garry Maddox:

And accompanying Article from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Ever wanted to throw something at Ben Stiller? Vince Vaughn lives the dream in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, reports Garry Maddox.
Article found here

It's a familiar formula for anyone who has seen a Hollywood sports movie - a team of hapless underdogs surge towards a climactic championship.

This time it's a geeky kids' game of hurling rubber balls at your opponent, which was played in American school gyms until it was discouraged for being too violent.

The comedy Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story has been a surprise hit in the US, boosting the career of its star Vince Vaughn and bringing the game a new popularity.

"Oddly enough, since the movie has come out back home and did real well, all these dodgeball leagues have been springing up," Vaughn says. "And they have a new extreme dodgeball thing."

When Vanity Fair magazine calls dodgeball the "it" sport, you know either Hollywood hype is out of control or the movie has turned kitsch into cool at least temporarily. It can only be a matter of time before other obscure school activities - maybe tunnel ball or brandings - get the big-screen treatment.

Vaughn, whose recent comic roles include Starsky & Hutch and Old School, deadpans through this film as the owner of a struggling gym called Average Joe's.

When an egocentric fitness guru, played by Ben Stiller, wants to take over, the misfits from the gym form a dodgeball team to win a $US50,000 prize that will keep the doors open.

Vaughn, whose other movies include Swingers, Jurassic Park II and Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho, credits the movie's success to a combination of laughs, spirit and nostalgia.

"The movie has a great heart to it," he says. "Most of us like to root for the underdog ... If someone is not the favourite you kinda like to see them do well."

Curiously, Vaughn likens Dodgeball to The Wizard of Oz for its hapless characters searching for qualities they already have such as heart and courage.

But there are a lot more cheerleader gags - plus hits in the face and groin from thrown balls - than in that classic.

Written and directed by newcomer Rawson Marshall Thurber, Dodgeball was a tough movie to get off the ground.

It took Stiller's involvement as producer to secure studio backing.

"There was a real reluctance for some reason at the studios in making it," Vaughn says.

"We finally found a home with it at Twentieth Century Fox. They made it for, as far as big studio Hollywood films are concerned, a very low budget."

It features entertaining cameos from David Hasselhoff as coach of the German team, Tour de France legend Lance Armstrong and faded action star Chuck Norris as well as many sports-movie cliches.

"In any sports movie, there's going to be a training sequence," Vaughn says.

"It's always a bit extreme. For instance, with Rocky, I remember being a kid ... seeing [Stallone] doing one-handed push-ups and drinking raw eggs.

"You thought that guy is strooonnng. In Dodgeball, in order to learn how to dodge a ball, we dodge traffic and dodge wrenches and tools that were thrown at us."

It seems essential these days to have some sort of boot camp for a Hollywood movie.

M. Night Shyamalan had his actors go to 19th-century boot camp for The Village; Thurber sent his to two weeks of intensive dodgeball training.

"The stunt co-ordinator took it a little too serious," Vaughn says.

"First I was very excited. I thought, 'This will be fun to go play dodgeball.' But I realised why it's a child's game - it takes a lot of energy to play.

"You're constantly sprinting, bending over, throwing."

The tall 34-year-old smoker, who seems to have a relaxed attitude to fitness, found it tough going.

"I was thrilled on the first day of dodgeball boot camp, but I was ecstatic on the last day," Vaughn says.

He seems to be a regular in the production line of recent Stiller movies, but says this has just happened rather than being any kind of comic network.

"We always wanted to work together," Vaughn says. "Zoolander I was in but just very briefly, a cameo. Then Starsksy & Hutch and Dodgeball came about the same time. Then Will Ferrell was doing [Anchorman] and he asked me and Ben to do cameos in it ...

"There was nothing really planned and conscious, but I like Ben - and I think he's funny - and I've enjoyed doing stuff with him."

Article found here

Fun With Acting

Here's a new article about Vince in The Age. I've been seeing a lot of articles from Australia about Dodgeball since it just opened there, but this one focuses more on Vince, rather than just a review of the movie.

By Jim Schembri
September 10, 2004
Article found here

When Vince Vaughn speaks, he speaks with a big voice. Born in Minnesota, raised in Illinois by parents from Ohio, Vaughn hails from the "big voice" states of the American Midwest. And the guy is a flagpole - 195 centimetres tall at full stretch. "I'm too tall, circus tall," he quips, letting out a yawn.

Battling the remnants of a cold and refraining from a smoking habit that has already filled an ashtray with butts, Vaughn is excited by both the box-office success of his latest film, Dodgeball, and of its prospects come Oscar time.

The comedy, a broad, knockabout affair rich in underdog themes and over-the-top gags, casts Vaughn as the owner of a rundown gym facing closure from the bank and brutal competition from a franchise gym run by a slimy fitness fascist played by Ben Stiller, who also produced the film.

"The buzz is there," Vaughn says of the film's chances of taking out the best-film Oscar come February. "The buzz is definitely going around."

Not that Vaughn doesn't take film seriously. With friend Jon Favreau he made the hit independent film Swingers in 1996, which put them and director Doug Liman (Go, The Bourne Identity) on the map. In 2001 Vaughn also did the less successful Made with Favreau, and is busy developing other independent films, including Break Up, a romantic comedy that has no gimmick.

"I've never done a romantic comedy, because it seems they can't just tell a love story," he says between coughs. "It's always something like a radio station does a poll and decides these two people will get along, and if they do they get a million dollars. You don't need all of that to get into a love story."

In Dodgeball, Vaughn plays to his comedy strengths, largely as straight man to a supporting cast of nerdy gym flies and Stiller's scene-stealing fitness guru.

After the success of Swingers, Vaughn didn't take to any of the comedy scripts that came his way, instead steering towards the type of edgier, independent films he loves, such as Return To Paradise and Clay Pigeons. He also took a dive into the mainstream with a part in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park: The Lost World, and jumped at the chance to work with director Gus Van Sant on his widely panned remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, a film Vaughn staunchly defends.

After a recent string of comedy films, including Starsky and Hutch, Old School, Zoolander and the forthcoming Anchorman, Vaughn saw Dodgeball as a chance to pay homage to his cherished childhood films.

"One of my favourite movies as a kid was Bad News Bears (1976) with Walter Matthau (about a foul-mouthed kids' baseball team). I was always a fan of Revenge of the Nerds and those '80s-style comedies, and this movie really reminded me of that. I loved the theme of underdogs trying to save their gym, and how it was symbolic of them looking for a place to be OK, a place to fit into society."

There are two distinct sides to Vince Vaughn. There's the serious actor who will talk earnestly and at length about his performance as Norman Bates in Psycho, where he had to literally copy the movements and mannerisms of Anthony Perkins.

"I had never worked from that place before. My main background is improvisation. In Psycho we did some of it shot-for-shot, where I would have to do identical movements that he did. It was an important experience for me, because I've never worked on that side of my brain. I've always hung loose and see what happened in the moment."

Then there's the side of Vince Vaughn that will partake in a spoof of the prestigious series Inside the Actors Studio . Both sides form a cohesive whole, he insists.

"I take acting very seriously as far as training and studying goes. I believe in method acting. I've taken things from all different types of acting philosophies and I use different parts of all of them. It's kind of a Frankenstein thing where you take from everywhere.

"However, that being said, movies, they're not religion. In fact, that's the joy of it. It's childlike. The greatest gift in movies is imagination, the ability to try new things. I have a very healthy respect for the craft, but I always like having a childlike approach where it's fun."

Hence his well-versed defence of the 1998 Psycho remake. "Movies are not religion, they're not sacred. Songs have been recorded by many different artists. If one person records a song, should nobody ever sing it again? If a play is done, should you never do that play again?"

A line in Dodgeball seems to come from Vaughn's soul. A teenage boy says he wants to impress a girl by making good as a cheerleader. In response, Vaughn offers a blank stare of incomprehension. "High school's changed a lot since I was a kid," he says.

Many things have changed in the past few years, he adds. "A million and one," in fact. He leaves out the million and offers one.

"You know, when I first moved to Hollywood to act, me and most of the friends I had really wanted to be good actors. Everyone studied classes. There was Entertainment Tonight, but there weren't channels dedicated solely to celebrities, about where they eat, where they shop.

"It's become even more so in recent times. I find the younger generations - and all generations feel this way about the generations that come after them - but I feel there's so much more focus and attention on being famous nowadays than there is on being an actor.

"Most of my friends who have gone on to be successful, none of us really sat around and talked about, 'Well, one day I'll get a table here' or 'One day I'll buy this house.' Everyone was trying to become a good actor, talking about what kind of performances they wanted to give, what kind of movies they wanted to be a part of.

"Nowadays, the younger kids I've met seem more interested in their fashion, their image. There's much more consciousness at a younger age about the business side and the celebrity side. If you saw pictures of me, of Favreau, Cole Hauser and Rory Cochrane back then, none of us really knew how to dress. It wasn't important to us. I had a mullet!"

By Jim Schembri
September 10, 2004
Article found here

Yowza.

This advertisement is in the October 2004 issue of Empire magazine. Now I just need to get my hands on a copy of Arena! It's on the newsstands now, so if you're in the UK (or elsewhere with an International magazine selection), go get it!

Thanks, Heather from wilson-brothers.com!

Vaughn and Wilson Together Again

EmpireOnline.co.uk
The article can be found here

Vaughn and Wilson Together Again

Frat pack just keeps on going
31 August 2004

If we didn’Äôt know better, we’Äôd start this story with the catchy little refrain: ’ÄòVince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, up a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G’Äô. Why? Because the charming duo have just agreed to make a new movie together ’Äì their fourth collaboration in three years.

Outsourced tells the story of two American production line workers who, after their factory is shut down and moves to Mexico, decide to head South to get their old jobs back. Hilarity ensues, according to the press release. No word yet on exact casting, but we think Vaughn will play the laidback slobby one, and Wilson will play the laidback surfer dude one.

The movie follows hot on the heels of Zoolander (ok, in which Vaughn and Wilson never actually shared a scene), Starsky & Hutch, and the forthcoming comedy The Wedding Crashers as Wilson/Vaughn partnerships. But before you go running off to the 3am girls with some hot Hollywood gossip, there’Äôs nothing salacious in it. It’Äôs just part of the Frat Pack’Äôs continuing takeover of Hollywood.

The Frat Pack, in case you’Äôre wondering, are a group of thirtysomething comedians who like each other’Äôs work so much that they tend to work together almost every time someone points a movie camera at them. Members of the club include Vaughn, Wilson, Ben Stiller (whose own team-ups with Wilson are legendary), Jack Black, Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson, and Hank Azaria. Pack movies include Dodgeball, Starsky & Hutch, Anchorman, Mystery Men, Old School, and Zoolander ’Äì so these guys are pretty much at the forefront of the US comedy revival.

So when Vaughn and Wilson decide to sign on for a comedy that, in all fairness, sounds like something Cheech and Chong might have rejected, we sit up and take notice. For Outsourced could be one of the comedy hits of 2005. You heard it here first ’Äì and if Jack Black, Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller pop up for cameos, don’Äôt say we didn’Äôt tell you!

EmpireOnline.co.uk
The article can be found here

"The Guardian" Profile of Vince

Profile: Vince Vaughn

Saturday, August 21, 2004
Phelim O'Neill, The Guardian
The article can be found here.

Phelim O'Neill doesn't rank Vince Vaughn among Hollywood's heavyweights, but he's top of the heap when it comes to charm

Most actors have that easy, self-deprecating charm routine down to a fine art. It's up there with sincerity as the quality any actor worth their salt must be able to convincingly fake. But Vince Vaughn's humbling schtick has a certain ring of truth to it. In an industry where egos are as delicate as bone china, Vaughn's hard-earned wit isn't so much a defence mechanism or calculated vote-winner as it is his raison d'être.

His first break came in the early 1990s when the Minnesota teen snagged a role in Chevrolet's schmaltzy "Heartbeat Of America" ad campaign, playing a teen who's, like, totally stoked when his big bro tosses him the keys to his Chevy.

He quickly high-tailed it to Hollywood, only to endure half a dozen or so lean years with little more than parts like "Cheering soldier in crowd". He finally made the billing in two major Hollywood releases, but unfortunately, they were Jurassic Park 2 and Gus Van Sant's critic-baiting remake of Psycho. How galling it must have been to have had barely an acknowledgement of your presence in a glut of press coverage more concerned with dinosaur effects and estimates of just how fast Hitchcock was spinning in his grave.

But Vaughn has continued to reap the benefits of the goodwill he generated in his breakthrough role, in 1996's Swingers. Leading a group of unemployed actors behaving like a bargain basement Rat Pack, dressing to look "money", separating the "beautiful babies" from the "skanks" and chasing the "party", Vaughn's Trent was a man you wouldn't want to be, but couldn't stop watching.

This led to the assumption that Vaughn was great fun to have around - something backed up by his regular cameo roles. Naturally he fell in with the Ben Stiller/Owen Wilson crowd, where everyone plays variations on the same role and looks like they're having a great time doing so. In climbing that particular ladder, he's been a coalminer in Zoolander, a drug baron in Starsky & Hutch, and now he's, ostensibly, the lead in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, where he's pitted against Stiller's ruthless team. Even in a stooge role, he has enough presence to prevent him from being mere canon fodder for Stiller's bully routine. Force Vaughn into a corner and he'll come out charming.

Career high: Swingers. Still getting him employed and still "money".

Career low: Psycho. A doughy Vaughn jerks off to the shower scene, forever leaving his imprint on the role of Norman "master" Bates.

Need to know: Vaughn's mid-tier successes are discussed by the bored characters in Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, assuring him the kind of cool counterculture acceptance that the likes of Tom Cruise will never achieve.

The last word: "I never thought anyone cool was 'really cool' in that way. I always thought, 'Whatever'."

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
Phelim O'Neill, The Guardian
The article can be found here.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith - Movie of the Day

Move of the Day for Thursday, August 19, 2004
David Mumpower, Box Office Prophets
The article can be found here

In the heartwarming tradition of wholesome family entertainment such as Prizzi墜 Honor, Mr. and Mrs. Smith tells the story of a loving couple. By day, bride and groom seek out their professional liaisons and make appropriate contact. By night, they return home to a marriage they once treasured though now both would readily admit the bloom is off the rose.

Life grows a bit harried for the duo when their various business enterprises require them to interact with one another during the day. For you see, both of the Smiths have found employment in an unusual vocation. They are paid assassins and, as fate would have it, each has just discovered that their next target is someone they know. In fact, it happens to be the very person each promised to love until death do them part. They failed to realize at the moment they took their marriage vows how literally those words could be taken.

The premise of Mr. and Mrs. Smith is simple. A husband and wife are hired killers who just found out their next marks are one another. What follows is a game of cat and mouse described as a blend of War of the Roses and True Lies. Will one of the wetworks specialists succeed in their mission? Will the couple figure out a way to escape their unusual circumstances and somehow manage to put the spark back in their relationship? All options are open to a film with such a unique concept.

Casting on the project proved difficult. Initially, Nicole Kidman was groomed for the female lead, but she had to eventually drop out due to multiple scheduling conflicts. In her stead, Catherine Zeta-Jones was selected as a replacement, but she too was forced to exit when the project failed to get off the ground. Meanwhile, Brad Pitt juggled his calendar in order to keep freeing up a spot for this production. When it became obvious that no appropriate A-list female lead could be brought onboard, he announced an intention to exit the project. Before this could happen, another famous actress was wooed for the part of Mrs. Smith, and she accepted. With the luscious-lipped Angelina Jolie on board, Pitt decided that he would honor his commitment to the project.

The combination of Pitt and Jolie immediately makes Mr. and Mrs. Smith one of the most noteworthy projects of summer 2005. They are not, however, the only two famous faces brought onboard. Mr. Swingers himself, Vince Vaughn, also frontlines. Alongside this trio is rising talent Adam Brody, whom you probably know from The OC but whom BOP loves from his days on The Gilmore Girls. Hardworking William Fichtner, last seen in Black Hawk Down and Equilibrium, is also a featured performer. Another interesting name is Greg Ellis, whose face you might not know but his voice is familiar to many. Jackie Chan Adventures fans would recognize him instantly as the voice of the evil patrician Valmont. Kerry Washington, who plays the key role of Della Charles in the upcoming Ray, is also present here.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith sounds a lot like Laws of Attraction but with a body count. With such gorgeous leads and such an unusual premise, the movie is poised to be one of the most publicized productions of the summer. (David Mumpower/BOP)

Move of the Day for Thursday, August 19, 2004
David Mumpower, Box Office Prophets
The article can be found here

WB 'Racer' is back on right track

Vaughn revving up interest in pic

By Michael Fleming, Daily Variety, Article found here

"DodgeBall" star Vince VaughnVince Vaughn has gotten Warner Bros. revved up again about "Speed Racer," the live- action adaptation of the Japanese cartoon series.

Project, which is being produced by Joel SilverJoel Silver and Richard and Lauren Shuler DonnerLauren Shuler Donner, has emerged from a long pit stop after Vaughn pitched his take on the tale, one that casts him in the role of Racer X.

He's the long-lost but protective brother of the title character, the young driver who travels from race to race with his family. Vaughn joins the project as an execexec producer, and will be in the pits as the studio hires a writer. David Lane Seltzer is also exec producing.

"Speed Racer" has remained a viable title at the studio, despite a decade of false starts. The pic almost got to the starting line with such directors as Gus Van SantGus Van Sant, Hype WilliamsHype Williams, Alfonso CuaronAlfonso Cuaron and Julien Temple -- the latter of whom had Johnny Depp ready to star before the vehicle stalled because the budget was too high.

Vaughn revived it by pitching a streamlined take that concentrated more on character and a family angle than budget-busting race scenes.

"I've been a fan of the show since I was a kid and I always liked the theme of the protective older brother who can't reveal his identity," Vaughn said. Vaughn has managed to work on both the drama and comic tracks, even as "DodgeBall" continues a comedy win streak that began with "Old School""Old School" and continued with "Starsky & Hutch." Vaughn will next go the dramatic route by playing the heavy in the "Get Shorty" sequel "Be Cool" at MGM, followed by the New Line comedy "Wedding Crashers," in which he and Owen Wilson raid weddings to pick up women.
㋒
By Michael Fleming, Daily Variety, Article found here

'Dodgeball' Bounces The Wizards And Ogres Out Of Top Box-Office Slots

MTV.com - Article found here

Ben Stiller flick takes in $30 million over the weekend.

Full-sized Hollywood actors knocked the pint-sized magicians and oversized ogres out of the top spots of the box office top 10 this week.

"Dodgeball" was the true underdog story this weekend. The tale of two teams of gym rats who compete against one another in an international dodgeball tournament dipped, ducked and dove to debut in the #1 spot with $30 million in ticket sales, according to early estimates.

MTV.com - Rest of article can be found here

Vince Vaughn doesn't dodge comedy roles

By Stephen Schaefer
Article found here

For Vince Vaughn, comedy is king.

"Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story," opening today, returns the actor to the business of laughter, following last year's "Old School," the sleeper hit that made Will Ferrell Hollywood's flavor of the year, and last spring's "Starsky and Hutch" with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson.

"Dodgeball" has Vaughn as Pete LaFleur, who may have Christine Taylor's character as a girlfriend but must lead a motley team in a dodgeball tournament against Stiller's White Goodman.

"Pete owns a gym of, kind of, misfits, people who don't take exercising that seriously," Vaughn said. "Ben plays a guy from across the street, from Globo-gym. They take it real seriously and they put a lien on my gym, so we end up in this dodgeball tournament and there's a kind of showdown."

For Vaughn, this third teaming with Stiller is the charm. "I love Ben," he said. "My first experience working with Ben was a short comic thing that we did for MTV spoofing James Cameron, 'The Titanic' and 'The Titanic 2.' He's funny and smart. He's got good taste and loves to play around. I enjoy that, and ever since then, me and Ben always danced around with doing stuff. 'Starsky' and then 'Dodgeball' just happened very quickly."

"With Owen Wilson, I'm doing a comedy called 'Wedding Crashers' where me and Owen go to weddings pretending to be related to someone, looking to meet girls."

"I'm fans of their work, and it's comfortable. It was never like a big game plan, 'OK, we're starting a kind of comedy mafia.' Really, it's something that just kind of is happening in the last couple of years or so."

For the guy who was launched in 1996 with the low-budget "Swingers" then struggled with success, this latest career wave is welcome.

"Right now, I'm hot again and sort of starring in studio films," Vaughn said, having just completed the "Get Shorty" sequel, "Be Cool"' with John Travolta and Uma Thurman, in which he plays a would-be hipster with The Rock as his bodyguard. "But the time will come where I'm not, and the time will come where I am - and that's just anything in life, relationships or anything. There's always peaks and valleys. It's nice right now."

If Vaughn has come to terms with using his talent to make people laugh, it's no doubt due to the life lessons he's learned since breaking into the majors.

"You know, when 'Swingers' came out, I really had a lot of opportunities to do comedies, but I really wanted to try and do other stuff."

Instead of being typecast as everybody's favorite funny tall guy, Vaughn opted to co-star with Jennifer Lopez in the trippy thriller "The Cell," which was a hit, then played the homicidal schizophrenic immortalized by Anthony Perkins in Gus Van Sant's scene-by-scene color remake of "Psycho," which was not.

"I didn't want to establish one sort of thing, and now it's fun to come and do comedy with other people I respect," Vaughn, 34, said. "But really, always for me, I started out very naively. I moved out here at 18 from Illinois. I really wanted to be an actor."

"It's a very different time now. Now, you have a lot more shows that sort of talk about the celebrity of it all and more of a point of view of being famous. But I studied Shakespeare, I took acting classes the whole time I was out here, and all my friends were in acting classes."

"Now it's not cool to be in acting classes. It's cool to be an actor, but you can't really train, that's not cool. I don't understand it. I always wanted to sort of have an opportunity to perform. So I feel very thankful - not only just to be working, but also to be given the chance to do such a wide range of stuff. For me, that's what I set out to do."

This Christmas, Vaughn reunites with "Swingers" director Doug Liman on "Mr. and Mrs. Smith."

"Doug called and asked me if I'd come in for a few days," he said. "They had a part as Brad Pitt's best friend, and he said, 'Will you come in and make something out of these scenes?' They wanted them to be comical, so I came in for three or four days."

Next month, Vaughn goofs through "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" with his "Old School" buddy Ferrell.

"I started off as a cameo, but then I went back and did a couple of extra days. So I don't really have a featured part, but I'm in about three scenes or something, which was fun."

Which in Vince Vaughn's world is really the point.

By Stephen Schaefer
Article found here

Wilson and Vaughn: Leaders of the 'Frat Pack'

By Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY
Article found here

OXFORD, Md. ’Äî Vince Vaughn is getting sacked like a week's worth of groceries. The 6-foot-5 actor, along with his equally looming stunt double, suffers serial body slams during a less-than-friendly game of touch football while shooting The Wedding Crashers on the sprawling lawn of a 55-acre Eastern Shore estate.

Meanwhile, co-star Owen Wilson chills out in a rocker on a shady porch, his infamous twice-broken nose tucked into the pages of a newspaper. He awaits his chance to teasingly toss a pigskin with movie crush Rachel McAdams (the main meanie in Mean Girls) and taunt Vaughn ("Hey, baba ganouj!" is one of his ad-libbed jibes) as his partner rolls about on the ground in mock agony.

"I learned from working with Jackie Chan (in Shanghai Noon and its sequel, Shanghai Knights) not to do any stunts," Wilson lazily intones about his knack for stealing scenes without breaking a sweat. "I think by the end, all my roles will just be playable from a chair."

To witness hard-charging Vaughn and easygoing Wilson in action while making the romantic lark about bachelor pals who sneak into nuptial celebrations to pick up female guests is to observe an ongoing comedy cabal of thirtysomething funny guys who can't stop crashing each other's pictures. Entertainment Weekly even coined a term for this Rat Pack redux ’Äî "the Slacker Pack," which also boasts Ben Stiller, Wilson's brother Luke, Jack Black and Will Ferrell.

But the phrase implies a lack of drive and initiative, and this Frat Pack (a preferable label in honor of last year's Old School) is all about the work. Stiller, the de facto kingpin whose 1996 film The Cable Guy inaugurated the male comedy club, is appearing in no less than six films this year. That includes the sports farce Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, opening Friday, opposite Vaughn. And Vaughn is keeping pace, showing up briefly as a rival newshound in Ferrell's Anchorman (July 9).

Vaughn, 34, and fellow charter member Wilson, 35, previously brushed up against each other in Starsky & Hutch and Zoolander. But they never were a buddy team before now. Leave it to director David Dobkin, who did 1998's Clay Pigeons with Vaughn and 2003's Shanghai Knights with Wilson, to play matchmaker and bring the pair together for The Wedding Crashers, expected to be a June 2005 release.

The plot: The incorrigible twosome invite themselves to a swank wedding thrown by a high-ranking politico (Christopher Walken) and hit on the bride's two sisters. Vaughn swiftly beds his catch, but his hopes for a quick getaway are dashed when Wilson makes the mistake of actually falling for McAdams and decides to accept her family's offer to spend the weekend at their palatial getaway. While Wilson pursues the object of his growing affection, his friend "is put through the grinder," as Vaughn puts it.

"Rachel's boyfriend is trying to hurt Owen during the football game, but I keep getting hit," the actor explains. "Her brother is gay and he fancies me. Plus my taxes aren't exactly in line and Christopher Walken is the secretary of the Treasury and I'm starting to get paranoid."

Dobkin denies there is any Hollywood conspiracy afoot to keep the clique together, even though another Frat Pack member puts in a hush-hush Crashers cameo. "I just thought, 'Wouldn't it be great to put them both in a movie,' " the director says of his leads. "They are opposites in many ways, and I wanted to see what the chemistry was going to be."

That all the actors and Dobkin are represented by the same talent agency helps to seal such deals, too. "It's wonderful when you get to work with one another over and over again," he says. "You do get better. It's like being in an acting troupe."

Both Wilson and Vaughn also pooh-pooh any theories. "There isn't any master plan of doing stuff together," Vaughn says. "I just like working with all of them a lot." Adds Wilson: "You get comfortable with people, the people who you admire and think are funny, and so you naturally seek them out. A big part of comedies is being on the same wavelength."

The twosome is getting along well during off-hours, too. The Washington Post, hungry for any hint of Hollywood in its circulation area, has been keeping close tabs on downtime activities, including bar visits. Neither actor owns up to ever crashing a real wedding, though they have no qualms about dropping in uninvited at other party functions. "I learned at a young age that if you walk in like you belong somewhere, no one ever says anything to you," Vaughn says.

However, that attitude didn't quite cut it when he and Wilson tried to get into a private soiree at the Four Seasons, where they stayed while filming in Washington, D.C. "It was for Young Republicans from Texas or something," Wilson says. "Vince actually is a Republican and they didn't believe him. They saw me and said, 'Come on in.' But to Vince, they said, 'We know YOU'RE not a Republican.' "

Vaughn later made up for any hassle by snagging an invite to the White House, getting a private tour and meeting President Bush. No crashing required.

By Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY
Article found here

Local boy Vince Vaughn makes good

BY CINDY PEARLMAN, Chicago Sun Times
Article found here

When he was a young boy growing up in northwest suburban Buffalo Grove, Vince Vaughn used to pretend he was starring in a movie.

"It was pretty simple. A bunch of guys would grab some sticks from the field, and we were set. The sticks were swords, they were daggers, they were light sabers," he says.

"We didn't need much -- and our attention spans were about five seconds. We just went from one fantasy to the next one."

Funny, but all these years later in Hollywood, not much has changed. Vaughn, 34, still is going from one fantasy to the next. He stars in the comedy "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" with friend Ben Stiller, and just wrapped the sequel to "Get Shorty" -- "Be Cool," due out later this year. He's just starting a comedy with his friend Owen Wilson called "The Wedding Crashers."

"We play guys who go to weddings pretending to be related to someone. It's a way of looking for girls."

The lanky, muscular Vaughn isn't looking for much these days. "I found the best career is when you do a bigger film and then a bunch of smaller ones that mean something to you," he says.

It's exhausting work, and Vaughn arrives at an interview at the Four Seasons Hotel yawning loudly. "I've been working nonstop, which means I haven't been going out much. I guess that's just part of getting older," Vaughn reasons.

It's not like he'd like to revisit his "Swingers" days. But then again ... "There seems to be a big surge when it comes to the nightclub thing again.

"When I first got to L.A. from Chicago in the 1980s, it was a big rock scene, which I loved, and then the big swing and rockabilly thing happened. I lived the stuff with 'Swingers.'"

But is he too old to swing now? Vaughn laughs and says, "Maybe I am too old to go to these clubs and understand techno. I just don't get it. It's one long song.

"I went to a club with a friend of mine recently and I said, 'I can't take it. I hate it. I have to get out of here.'

"My friend said, 'Let's just listen to this one song.' I said, 'What song? There hasn't been a break in any song since we got to the place.'

"Then these girls came up and waved some glow sticks in my face," he says. "I thought they looked like air traffic controllers. I just don't understand it."

The man who made his mark with an indie film ("Swingers") also bemoans the fact that it's "so hard now to get smaller movies made. It's much harder than 10 years ago.

"There was a kind of blow-up period where a bunch of smaller films were out and they did really well at places like Miramax and Gramercy. But now those kind of companies are also looking to make remakes of old TV series.

"Everyone would be happy if I was attached to a remake of 'Petticoat Junction,'" he says.

Vaughn isn't willing to give up his indie cred anytime soon. Later this year, he stars in the very low-budget "Thumb Sucker," about a 13 -year-old who has a penchant for keeping his thumb in his mouth.

"Vincent D'Onofrio plays the guy's father," Vaughn says. "I'm his debate coach and the kid comes out of his shell in my class. It's what movies should be -- comedic, serious, sad, funny, everything."

In "Be Cool," he plays a record producer. "He acts and talks like he's from the streets. I have that hip-hop vernacular, and I kind of come up against Chili Palmer, played by John Travolta."

Vaughn, who grew up in Buffalo Grove and Lake Forest, says that he never really had a concrete plan when it came to his acting career. His father was a salesman and his mother a real estate agent and stockbroker. Vaughn was the popular kid, and president of his class at Lake Forest High School.

A Chevy commercial convinced him he could someday see his mug on the big screen.

"I started out very naively. I just decided one day that I'd become an actor," he says. "I did take it seriously back in Chicago. I studied hard and took improv classes and Shakespeare classes in both Chicago and then Los Angeles."

Vaughn moved to the Left Coast when he turned 18. "When I first moved, I just studied acting all of the time," he says. "Meanwhile, I was dying for an opportunity to perform." He got his first movie role in 1993 in "Rudy," where he met Jon Favreau. In 1996, they gave the world "Swingers."

"It was a strange sort of break because we made the movie for $250,000," he recalls. "It was a story we felt strongly about, but you never knew if it was going to sell or anything. You can never predict something like that happening or not. I was just thankful we raised the money and I could act in front of a camera."

A career was born.

"When 'Swingers' came out, I had a lot of opportunities to do comedies, but I really wanted to try other stuff," he says. "I didn't want to establish myself as one type of actor.

"I was very happy to do movies like 'The Cell' and 'Psycho' and other independent films," he says. "I was also glad that something like 'Old School' came around. And now there's a big summer movie like 'Dodgeball,' where a bunch of kids will come see it and think, 'Who is that guy? He's sort of funny.'"

Vaughn says he doesn't regret big budget projects that he passed on along the way. "There is one movie I passed on that did really well, but you can't go into something if your heart is not in it," he says. "You have to be enthusiastic about playing a character because in the end, it's just about your commitment and your performance."

Vaughn doesn't mind watching his popularity rise and fall.

"I guess I'm hot again now because I'm in a few studio movies, but the time will come where I'm not again," he says. "In relationships and Hollywood, there are peaks and valleys. I'm just trying to navigate all of it. Either way, I always have a good time."

Distributed by Big Picture News

BY CINDY PEARLMAN, Chicago Sun Times
Article found here

Vince Vaughn is one stand-up guy

Actor takes stage in Dewey with some friends

By PETE BEISSER
Maryland Beachcomber
05/29/2004
Article found here

Vince Vaughn's a busy guy.

For the past month or so, the 34-year-old actor has been filming the romantic comedy "The Wedding Crashers" in various locations around Maryland's Eastern Shore.

On top of that gig, he recently put the wraps on a role in "Be Cool," a sequel to 1995's "Get Shorty" with John Travolta.

At one point, the two pictures were being shot simultaneously. Vaughn filmed one during the day around Easton, Md., then hopped a flight to do the other at night.

Sure, it's been a rough schedule as of late, but he says he's eager to continue working even on a night off.

Vaughn will be hosting a one-night-only music and comedy show - billed as the "Outlaws of Stand-up Comedy" - tonight at the Bottle & Cork in Dewey Beach with fellow actors Jon Favreau and Owen Wilson.

The charity show - featuring several stand-up comics from The World Famous Comedy Store - starts at 8:30 p.m. Proceeds will go to the Army Emergency Relief, an organization that helps those who have lost a spouse while on active duty for the armed services.

"Being Memorial Day and all I thought that this was a good thing to put on," he said. "It's just going to be a fun night to come out and hear some comedians."

Comedians Brett Ernst (a headliner of the Montreal Comedy Festival), Sam Tripoli (recently seen on "The Late, Late Show with Craig Kilborn" and Comedy Central's "Premium Blend"), Ahmed Ahmed (MTV's "Punk'd") and Sebastian (HBO's "New Faces" comedy special) are being flown in from Hollywood to perform.

Mr. Greengenes and Strange as Angels will be onstage starting at 5 p.m. and they'll play after the comedy show.

"Combining music and comics - it's a huge thing in L.A.," Vaughn said. "We did it once in New Orleans. A friend of mine owns a bar down there and we put on a show like this."

Vaughn made a name for himself after playing a bar-hopping wannabe actor in the 1996 indie-comedy "Swingers." Subsequent starring roles in dark psychological thrillers - a remake of "Psycho," "The Cell" and "Domestic Disturbance" - were less well-received by the masses.

A gradual return to his comedy roots in "Made," "Old School" and "Starsky and Hutch" has helped him regain his status as a dependable comedic talent.

He'll next be seen in next month's "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" with Ben Stiller.

Vaughn says he put the word out to a few friends back in Los Angeles to come join him in Delaware this weekend for the charity event.

Actor-director Favreau - his longtime friend and frequent collaborator ("Swingers," "Made") - will be flying in to help emcee a show. Vaughn's "Wedding Crashers" co-star Wilson is also scheduled to be in the house as a special guest.

"Sometimes it's nice when you're working with people you've known for a while," he said. "You work better because you've developed this kind of shorthand together."

Vaughn initially demonstrated his hosting chops in March when he filled in for an ill David Letterman. Showing off all of his wit and charm, he was a standout during a week of celebrity guest hosts.

"I got lucky it went so well," he said of his one-night "Late Show" job. "I was nervous before going out there, but we had some great guests (Rosie Perez and Geri Halliwell)."

Although he'll just be hosting the show Saturday, Vaughn says he initially worked with improvisational comedy icon Del Close in Chicago before packing his bags for the West Coast. Stand-up turned out just not to be his thing, he said.

"I performed for a few months doing open mikes," he said. "I just never felt comfortable with it. But I have a lot of respect for the stand-ups. I was just more interested in acting."

Article found here

Raising Bucks for Yuks

Washington Post
May 26, 2004
Article found here

So, you're a movie star stuck on the set of "The Wedding Crashers" on the Eastern Shore over Memorial Day weekend. What do you do? Well, when you're Vince Vaughn: Get your Tinseltown buddies to fly out and throw a fundraiser in nearby Dewey Beach, Del. Eureka!

Vaughn's "Outlaws of Stand-Up Comedy" is bringing comics Brett Ernst, Ahmed Ahmed, Sam Tripoli and Sebastian -- who frequent Los Angeles' famed Comedy Store -- to the Bottle & Cork Saturday. Proceeds from the $10 ticket price will go to the Army Emergency Relief organization, "in the spirit of Memorial Day," Vaughn told us yesterday. Also slated to co-host is Vaughn's partner-in-crime Jon Favreau. "Me and Fav might even hang out afterwards," Vaughn said casually. (Could it be a "Swingers" reunion?)

"It starts at 8:30. Not 8:45, not 9 o'clock," Vaughn warned. "First come, first served."

And for those who didn't get a glimpse of the "Wedding Crashers" stars filming in Washington a few weeks back, cast and crew return in two weeks. May the stalking (aka the Vince Vaughn/ Owen Wilson watch) resume!

Washington Post
May 26, 2004
Article found here

Starsky & Vaughn

As the smarmy villain in Starsky & Hutch, Minneapolis native Vince Vaughn continues to reclaim the breezy comedic turf of his breakout hit Swingers and the ongoing DVD favorite Old School.
¬Ý
By Todd Gilchrist, FilmStew.com - Article found here

Hollywood’Äôs turnover rate when it comes to promising young stars seems to be gaining speed with each career it discards. Matthew McConaughey fell prey to it in the early nineties (maintaining a sporadically successful career as romantic leading man after standing out in the ensemble piece Dazed And Confused), and more Leading Men Of Tomorrow, like Josh Hartnett (Hollywood Homicide) and Josh Lucas (Hulk), have given less than impressive performances in starring roles while quietly proving their mettle in ensemble pieces and lower-profile projects.

One actor who knows better than most the volatile nature of the Hollywood career path is Vince Vaughn. After appearing in 1996's seminal Tinseltown tome Swingers, which brought him recognition, opportunity and beautiful babies galore, Vaughn appeared in Steven Spielberg’Äôs The Lost World, the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Cell and Gus Van Sant’Äôs vanity-project remake of Alfred Hitchcock’Äôs Psycho. All three were high-profile releases (erratically successful though they were), but they greatly overshadowed the remarkable work he was doing in films like A Cool, Dry Place, Clay Pigeons and Return To Paradise. As a result, Hollywood’Äôs bottom-dollar mentality quickly booted him from the lineup of commercially viable leading men.

Slowly, however, Vaughn is beginning to re-establish his acting presence at the box office. Last winter’Äôs Old School was a massive success due in no small part to his febrile wit (admittedly, perhaps not as much as Will Ferrell’Äôs naked behind), and with his turn as Reese, the Bad Guy in this month’Äôs Starsky & Hutch, Vaughn may find himself deservedly back on top of the Hollywood heap. The 6' 5" star recently spoke to FilmStew about developing a villainous foil for film’Äôs heroes (played by Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller), playing to the edges of his characters’Äô personalities, and discovering a workable throughline for a career in the entertainment industry marked by personal achievement rather than commercial success.

While Wilson and Stiller are the marquee stars of Todd Philips’Äô big screen update of the ’Äò70s TV series Starsky & Hutch, Vaughn indicated that he wanted his performance to serve their unique brand of comedy - namely, to remain grounded in reality rather than depart from it. ’ÄúI saw this character as really kind of the foundation of the movie,’Äù explains the 33-year-old actor as he lights up a cigarette. ’ÄúI never liked in comedic movies where the villain's kind of petting some strange brand of animal. You just don't take them seriously at all, but at the same time, you really can't play it extremely heavy because it doesn't belong in the movie.’Äù

’ÄúI saw Reese very much as someone who would be grounded,’Äù Vaughn continues. ’ÄúThe plot of [Starsky & Hutch] isn't the focus- it’Äôs more sort of the circumstances that these characters get into. At the same time, you have to cut to the antagonist and check in with that going on, because it's ultimately how you tie the movie up.’Äù

Unlike many of today’Äôs stars, who boast of their lack of preparation like invisible badges of honor, Vaughn sticks to time-honored training processes, even when comes to a character as seemingly lightweight as Reese. ’ÄúI treat it like, just kind of do your background, know who your character is and then be present within the scene and play it simple and real,’Äù he explains. ’ÄúSometimes it would lean more on the comedic side, like if you're pointing the gun at yourself and that kind of stuff, but it would still be based in reality.’Äù

’ÄúWhen you shoot a guy, I think it's important because you tell the audience that someone can die in the movie,’Äù he adds. ’ÄúIt is possible for someone to die, so you can't completely not take it seriously.’Äù

Like other roles he’Äôs chosen in recent years, among them his obnoxious turn as Ricky in Jon Favreau’Äôs brilliant Made, Reese isn’Äôt a nice guy. Rather, he’Äôs a surprisingly complex and profoundly unlikable villain for a movie that is designed expressly to cut to the comedic chase. For Vaughn, aiming away from homogenized performances as sympathetic villains, or larger, characterizations, is just a byproduct of his fascination with the characters he finds intriguing. ’ÄúI'm always more interested in that because I like doing stuff that's kind of more extreme. It's make believe and it's more fun to play that.’Äù

The key, as Vaughn reveals, is to avoid attaching the character to a specific value system, be it his or anyone else’Äôs. ’ÄúThe main thing I've always done is you really don't put a judgment on it,’Äù he admits. ’ÄúIt's like in life, too- you don't worry about being liked. You have to be yourself. So when I play a character like that, he always thinks what he's doing is fine.’Äù

’ÄúIt's the same thing as Swingers, in a way, ’Äù he continues, referencing his breakthrough role as Trent, ’Äúfor a guy that's comedic and likeable. He's so committed to how many days you wait to call a girl back and this kind of stuff, but it's funny. And in this thing, [Reese is] like, ’Äòokay, look, I'm not going to kill him again. Are you happy? Let's move on, let's talk about something else.’Äô’Äù

’ÄúHe doesn't put a judgment on things that most people would, and that's where the comedy or the unlikability comes from. It’Äôs just kind of an okay, obviously if he's doing this stuff, he feels all right about it.’Äù

The opportunity for Vaughn to play an out-and-out villain (after his conflicted portrayals of Norman Bates and Clay Pigeons’Äô Lester Long) notwithstanding, one of the reasons he agreed to oppose Stiller and Wilson was the pure and simple thrill of taking on a new challenge. ’ÄúMy favorite time in film was the '70s,’Äù Vaughn confesses. ’ÄúA lot of those characters, even the protagonists, were very flawed. ’ÄòAntihero’Äô is not a totally fitting word, but not people that were [considered] this is a good guy or this is a bad guy, but people that had good pros and cons about them.’Äù

Maintaining that estimable tradition is second nature for the versatile performer. ’ÄúFor me it's more fun to play someone who's more extreme than someone who's straight down the middle.’Äù

In recalling the waves of acclaim that came with Swingers, Vaughn relates how it felt to be the industry’Äôs possible next ’ÄúIt’Äù boy. ’ÄúIt did pressure me quite a bit, in hindsight,’Äù he says with a laugh. ’ÄúOnce that broke, I was getting a lot of opportunities to do comedies and [playing] leading men, and I sort of rejected it because I didn't feel comfortable with it. I really didn't want to be put in a category, and also I really didn't like the comedies that I was sent.’Äù

’ÄúI really made an effort at the time doing Return to Paradise, remaking Psycho, Clay Pigeons,’Äù he continues, extinguishing his cigarette in a nearby glass of water. ’ÄúI always felt you should really be conscious of capitalizing on this momentum [that] ’Äòpeople want to see you as this guy.’Äô I was more concerned with having a chance to do different stuff and getting a chance to really challenge myself and grow as an actor, so I responded by really pulling away from it and doing stuff that I thought would be something different, frankly, than what I was doing.’Äù

The opportunities for more straightforwardly comedic roles began to proliferate with the success of Old School ’Äú You do [one successful genre movie] and then you get offered a lot of those kind of things, but at that time I wasn't really thought of in comedies - ’ÄòI don't know if Vince is funny,’Äô you know,’Äù he says. ’ÄúSo Old School was something that brought that up, and I had done a lot of the other stuff, so I was excited to do comedies. And I've done a bunch of comedies now.’Äù

Vaughn’Äôs dedication as an actor has always been aimed squarely at his roles rather than some kind of celebrity status, as he sees each step in his career - be it success or failure - as an important learning experience. ’ÄúI always studied, classes and trained a lot, you know,’Äù he recalls. ’ÄúI think nowadays is such a different time, because there's so many channels promoting the celebrity aspect of things.’Äù

’ÄúNowadays, a lot of the young kids you talk to think it's not cool to go to class or it's cool to say you didn't train,’Äù he adds. ’ÄúAll of us, me and Jon would talk. Even the making of Swingers was really about working and trying to do some stuff.’Äù

Reflecting further on a the question of today’Äôs celebrity values, Vaughn inadvertently offers an admonition for prospective stars making their way in the entertainment business. ’ÄúIf you get caught up in trying to just have a movie be successful, that's a much more dangerous game, because once that goes away, you don't have the same opportunities that you would have had,’Äù he warns.

’ÄúWhat happened with Swingers really took me aback,’Äù he adds. ’ÄúIt wasn't as if I had a big studio film that gave me that opportunity. And I was very thankful for what it brought me, but I remember feeling I don't want to go and try to repeat this or worry in my head about whether stuff does well or not.’Äù

With a few high-profile projects on the horizon (including Gary Gray’Äôs Get Shorty sequel Be Cool), the gifted and still-young actor remains upbeat about his prospects as a Star of Tomorrow and, with any luck, many more days after that. ’ÄúI always figured if you do the work and you do your best at it, there will always be a part for you.’Äù

By Todd Gilchrist, FilmStew.com - Article found here

Vince Vaughn Getting A Kick Out Of Being Bad

Vince Vaughn/Starsky and Hutch Interview by Paul Fischer.
Article found here

Vince Vaughn loves to be bad - on screen at least. Since bursting into the public arena in Swingers, Vaughn has established himself at part leading man, part character actor. In Starsky and Hutch he has a ball as the villain, but like everything, he takes it very seriously, as Paul Fischer discovered.

Is there a trick to playing a villain in a comedy?
I don't know. I saw this character in this movie [Starsky and Hutch] as really kind of the foundation of the movie, something to service the movie in that I never liked in comedic movies where the villain's kind of petting some strange bread of animal. You just don't take them㋒ seriously at all. But at the same time, you really can't play it extremely heavy because it doesn't belong in the movie. It's from a different movie. So I saw Reese very much as someone who would be grounded. The plot of the movie isn't the focus. The focus is more sort of the circumstances that these characters of these characters get in.. At the same time, you have to cut to the antagonist and check in with that going on because it's ultimately how you tie the movie up. So I sort of treat it like just kind of do your background, know who your character is and then be present within the scene and play it simple and real. Sometimes it would lean more on the comedic side, like if you're pointing the gun at yourself and that kind of stuff, but still be based in reality. And then sometimes, when you shoot the guy, I think it's important because you tell the audience that someone can die in the movie. It is possible for someone to die, so you can't completely not take it seriously.

Is he the baddest villain you've played?
No. Norman Bates is kind of a bad villain. I think Lester Long is probably the baddest villain I ever played.

How do you develop the unsympathetic portrayal of these types of characters?
I'm always more interested in that because I like doing stuff that's kind of more extreme. It's make believe and it's more fun to play that. The main thing I've always done is you really don't put a judgement on it. It's like in life too. You don't worry about being liked. You have to be yourself. So when I play a character like that, he always thinks what he's doing is fine. It's the same thing as Swingers in a way for a guy that's comedic and likeable. He's so committed to how many days you wait to call a girl back and this kind of stuff, but it's funny. And in this thing, he's like, "Okay, look, I'm not going to kill him again. Are you happy? Let's move on, let's talk about something else." So he doesn't put a judgement on things that most people would, and that's where the comedy or the unlikeability comes from is just kind of an okay, this, obviously if he's doing this stuff, he feels all right about it.

Where did the sense of playing unlikeable characters come from since Swingers?
Just really loving acting and wanting to do something that's different. My favorite time in film for me as a kid was the movies that were made in the '70s. A lot of those characters, even the protagonists were very flawed or antihero's not a totally fitting word, but not people that were okay, this is a good guy or this is a bad guy, but people that had good pros and cons about those sides of them. So for me it's more fun. It's always fun to play someone who's more extreme than someone who's straight down the middle.

Are you surprised Swingers continues to be popular?
Yeah, you know, it was made in such an innocent plays where sadly, in some ways, I guess, it was based on what me and Jon were going through. A lot of people at that times were making movies sort of making themselves out to be cool and tough or these things. And me and Jon really told a story that we knew that was truthful for us which was being actors that were out of work and playing a lot of video games, pretending to know a lot about girls but really not knowing all that much ultimately. So I think there's something universal that people watching it can relate to. There's something accessible that we can understand. My favorite scene from the movie is when Jon Calls that girl six times. It's so painful, but it's so relateable. I think even though the swing scene might not be as popular, thought it wasn't nationwide as much at the time, those things are sort of universal so that's what sort of stands the test of time. It really is a tribute to Favreau. I think even the success of the movie Elf that did very well, that movie doesn't have necessarily the major set piece laughs that a lot of comedies have, but you very much connect to Will's character and root for him and invest in that feeling of wanting to believe in something. And that's Jon's real strong point is tracking some very simple human conditions in a very truthful way and having some people invest in it.

Will you work together again?
Yeah, we have a couple things that we wanted to do. We still have that Hassidic western about a Hassidic Jew who is a gunfighter but we haven't been able to get that set up anywhere.

Sounds great.
It's a great script. It's not only funny, but it's- -

Both playing Jews?
No, I play a guy who's from the city, who's not a gunfighter, who's wanted for sleeping with the wrong guy's wife. Jon plays a guy who's searching for the people that killed his family but he can't shoot his gun on Saturday because of Sabbath. He's a killer, he's the best gun in the west, but he plays it very dead on. So I make like I'm going to help him find these people and people come and try to kill us. I say it's because he's a Jew and he dresses like one so people want him dead. But really they're after me because this guy has a hit on me. I think it's a very smart, very funny movie.

Why is it hard to finance?
It's like getting Swingers set up at the time. There was no real female lead in Swingers. It's not a format that's been done a lot. This even more so I an anteater in a way. Western genre's not considered popular. I think the religious aspect scares people to some degree.

When was the last time you said something was money?
I don't know. I sort of dropped that years and years ago.

You don't still talk like that?
Even at the time it was something we would say that was exaggerated for the film, but we always go through phases where we have different catch phrases and stuff that we're saying to each other.

Is Jon different now that he's married?
Well, he's got two kids and he's a dad, yeah. In a good way too. He's a great father, he loves his kids and spends a lot of time with them and just older.

Do you hang out still?
Yeah, we play poker. My sister throws a poker thing at her house and we played about a week ago.

Talk about playing a hero in Dodgeball?
That was a fun role. I saw that kind of as a Bad News Bears role, kind of a guy who gave up on things a lot in life and stopped trying and was presented with something where he sort of had to respond and try. He hasn't tried anything for a long time.

How did the success of Swingers put pressure on you?
It did pressure me quite a bit in hindsight in that once that broke, I was getting a lot of opportunities to do comedies and sort of leading men, and I sort of just rejected it because I didn't feel comfortable with it. I really didn't want to be put in a category and also I really didn't like the comedies that I was sent. I really made an effort at the time, doing Return to Paradise, remaking Psycho, Clay Pigeons trying to do types of roles and I always felt you should really be conscious of capitalizing on this momentum, people want to see you as this guy. And I was more concerned with having a chance to do different stuff and getting a chance to really challenge myself and grow selfishly as an actor. So I responded by really pulling away from it and with The Cell, doing stuff that I thought would be something differently frankly than what I was doing. So then you do that and then you get offered a lot of those kind of things, but then I wasn't really thought of in comedies. I don't know if Vince is funny, you know. So Old School was something that brought that up and I had done a lot of the other stuff so I was excited to do comedies and I've done a bunch of comedies now. Then I'll be excited to go do some different kinds of stuff. There's an independent movie coming up, Thumbsucker, that I did with Donofrio where I play a debate coach who's a school teacher, very different. To me, that was always the thing. I moved out at 18. I always studied classes and trained a lot, you know. I think nowadays is such a different time because there's so many channels promoting the celebrity aspect of things. Not that there wasn't that, but I think ET was the only show on that was that way. There were no channels dedicated. So most of my friends, Jon and myself ,we'd go to the New Beverly Theater constantly. We'd go study with some guys. We were nerdy I guess in a way. Nowadays a lot of the young kids you talk to think it's not cool to go to class or it's cool to say you didn't train. All of us, me and Jon would talk. Even the making of Swingers was really about working and trying to do some stuff. For us specifically a lot of the films that we saw younger that happened in the '70s, so for us that was really what we wanted to do. So I never, in response to what happened with Swingers, it really took me aback. It wasn't as if I had a big studio film that gave me that opportunity. And I was very thankful for what it brought me but I remember feeling I really don't want to go and try to repeat this or worry in my head about whether stuff does well or not. I always figured if you do the work and you do your best at it, there will always be a part for you. But if you get caught up in trying to just have a movie be successful, that's a much more dangerous game, because once that goes away, you don't have the same opportunities that you would have had.

Has that changed?
No. I mean, this movie, I love Todd, I loved Old School. I thought Old School was very different than a lot of the comedies that had come out. And that character I liked. I tried to ground him very much in reality and play him very much finding things important to him that are somewhat ridiculous.

Can you discuss this revolving group of actors you work with?
Well, Will [Ferrell] asked me to do it [Anchorma] and I think Will is funny, so I was happy to come and do- - I don't have a large part in that. I really just came in for a few days to do stuff for him. So that was fun. I respect his work and Todd I met on Old School and I had a good time doing that, thought that was good. Stiller and I worked on the thing for MTV, the short we did years ago, Titannie. I loved the Stiller show. I thought that was really funny sketches. I've always thought was just very cool, very simple and very funny. So it wasn't really kind of a game plan that we thought okay, there's this group. It's just sort of turned out that these are people I'm interested in working with and there's been material that supported us doing something together.

What else are you doing?
I'm shooting Be Cool, the sequel to Get Shorty. It's going very well. I play Raji, a record producer/promoter. Then I'm doing Wedding Crashers with Owen. Then I set a movie I'm producing at MGM about toy salesmen who sell toys. Rival salesmen. I've always loved salesmen. My dad was a salesman. As an actor, I always thought there's something funny about salesmen hustling anyway. But in contrasting that, there's something funny to me if they're trying to hustle My Little Pony. It's not like a car and they talk about it just like anyone would talk about whatever their field is. They present it like seeing grown men who gamble, demonstrate the pony and how the pony walks, but also being competitive and aggressive with each other I thought was a nice contrast. Then there's a movie I set up at Revolution called The Break-up which is a romantic comedy. I've been offered a lot of romantic comedies. I never liked any of the romantic comedies. It's always the same shit. Oh, I don't like you. Now I love you. Now I hate you. It's gonna happen, isn't it? So I thought with The Breakup what about a movie where from the very beginning it's the breakup, they're breaking up with each other? You have them out to dinner and have someone say something like, "God, I'm glad your mom's not coming to visit" turning into saying "I hate your drunk of a sister" just saying horrible things and saying "That's it, it's over, we're breaking up." Then I have it so that they had just bought- - they're not married, but they just bought a condo together and neither one wants to move out so they agree to put it on the market and sell it. neither one can afford to pay the mortgage, so they agree to put it on the market and sell it, but they're sort of going through the breakup under the same roof. Very derivative, I got the idea very much from The Odd Couple, having people put in a place and that kind of tone where it's not War of the Roses or very dark, but they're fighting over stuff that most of us do like you didn't do the dishes or you left this here. If she's dating, bringing someone new home or he brings someone new home or a friend's coming over, hearing her friend say that they never liked you.

Won't they force you to get them together?
Well, they might end up together at the end, but like even in The Odd Couple, the way that they handled it in those kind of movies was never such an absolute completion. It was always more of the possibility or the potential of something. It's a much more smaller step. So, I think if at the end of the movie, there's a potential that they'll communicate, even The Odd Couple is positive. In fact, Felix is always wanting to be liked, wanting to be needed. He ends up with the Pigeon sisters. And he's okay, he's found a place where he's accepted, that's his journey. He's wanted. And Oscar now wants his place clean. He has the guys come over for poker, he doesn't want them smoking and leaving stuff out. So you just have to take a small step in a direction of growth. It doesn't have to be that they're married with a final wedding scene. I would never do that. That's way too much. But for them to come to some kind of peacefulness or openness with each other I think is fine. Swingers ends optimistically. It's the same kind of thing. He met a girl. It's not that he's dating her. It's not that he's in love, but he's gotten past what was presented to him. You don't know if he ends up with her or not, but you know he's out of the rut that he was in. Made is similar in that they don't get the money for the job but the little girl's okay, he's got the bad influence out of their life and they're no longer trying to make money in a way that's not safe for them. So I'm a fan of something as long as it's a small step in that direction and not the absolute completion. I think that's too far of a step to take sometimes.

Vince Vaughn/Starsky and Hutch Interview by Paul Fischer.
Article found here

Undercover Brothers

Joblo.com Interviews Starsky & Hutch Star, Vince Vaughn
Article found here

’ÄúYou’Äôre so money.’Äù

It was in the 1996 indie hit SWINGERS that Vince Vaughn coined the phrase that would eventually displace ’ÄúShow me the money’Äù as the catch-phrase du jour at frat houses across the country. ¬ÝAs the Trent, ultra-hip, cavalier leader of the self-styled rat pack of unemployed actors, Vaughn stole the show. After the success of SWINGERS established him as a bankable comic talent, Vaughn inexplicably veered away from comedy, taking mostly serious roles in films like Spielberg’Äôs THE LOST WORLD and Gus Van Sant’Äôs notorious PSYCHO remake.

It wasn’Äôt until he reunited with buddy Jon Favreau in 2001’Äôs MADE that he triumphantly returned to comedy. Then, Vaughn followed that up with last years’Äô comedy blockbuster OLD SCHOOL. The first time I met Vince Vaughn was way back in June, when I visited the Starsky & Hutch set in downtown L.A. When I interviewed him then, he had journalists busting up as he cracked jokes and did his shtick. When I met with him a few weeks ago at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina Del Rey, he was quite the opposite: serious and reflective.¬Ý Here’Äôs what he had to say about his latest role, as the villain Reese Feldman in STARSKY & HUTCH.

What’Äôs the secret to playing a good villain in a comedy?

I saw this character (Reese Feldman) in this movie as really kind of the foundation of the movie, something to service the movie. I never liked in comedic movies where the villain's kind of petting some strange breed of animal. You just don't take them¬Ýseriously at all. But at the same time, you really can't play it extremely heavy because it doesn't belong in the movie. It's from a different movie. The plot of the movie isn't the focus; the focus is more sort of the circumstances that these characters get in.

At the same time, you have to cut to the antagonist and check in with that going on because it's ultimately how you tie the movie up. So I sort of treat it like just kind of do your background, know who your character is and then be present within the scene and play it simple and real. Sometimes it would lean more on the comedic side, like if you're pointing the gun at yourself and that kind of stuff, but still be based in reality. And then sometimes, when you shoot the guy, I think it's important because you tell the audience that someone can die in the movie. It is possible for someone to die, so you can't completely not take it seriously.

You seem to enjoy playing the more unlikeable characters.

I'm always more interested in that because I like doing stuff that's kind of more extreme. It's make believe and it's more fun to play that. The main thing I've always done is you really don't put a judgment on it. It's like in life too. You don't worry about being liked. You have to be yourself. So when I play a character like that, he always thinks what he's doing is fine. It's the same thing as Swingers in a way for a guy that's comedic and likeable. He's so committed to how many days you wait to call a girl back and this kind of stuff, but it's funny. And in this thing, he's like, "Okay, look, I'm not going to kill him again. Are you happy? Let's move on, let's talk about something else." So he doesn't put a judgment on things that most people would, and that's where the comedy or the unlikeability comes from is just kind of an okay, this, obviously if he's doing this stuff, he feels all right about it.

My favorite time in film for me as a kid was the movies that were made in the '70s. A lot of those characters, even the protagonists were very flawed or antihero's not a totally fitting word, but not people that were okay, this is a good guy or this is a bad guy, but people that had good pros and cons about those sides of them. So for me it's more fun. It's always fun to play someone who's more extreme than someone who's straight down the middle.

What was it like to bitch slap Snoop Dogg?

We're both playing characters in a movie, so it's not like I'm bitch slapping Snoop. But in the context of the scene, I want to smack him because he doesn't understand what he's doing.

Are you surprised Swingers continues to be popular?

Yeah. It was made in such an innocent place where sadly, in some ways, I guess, it was based on what me and Jon were going through. A lot of people at that time were making movies, sort of making themselves out to be cool and tough or these things. And me and Jon really told a story that we knew that was truthful for us which was being actors that were out of work and playing a lot of video games, pretending to know a lot about girls but really not knowing all that much ultimately. So I think there's something universal that people watching it can relate to.

My favorite scene from the movie is when Jon calls that girl six times. It's so painful, but it's so relatable. It really is a tribute to Favreau. I think even the success of the movie ELF that did very well, that movie doesn't have necessarily the major set piece laughs that a lot of comedies have, but you very much connect to Will's character and root for him and invest in that feeling of wanting to believe in something. And that's Jon's real strong point is tracking some very simple human conditions in a very truthful way and having some people invest in it.

Will you work together again?

Yeah, we have a couple things that we wanted to do. We still have that Hassidic western about a Hassidic Jew who is a gunfighter but we haven't been able to get that set up anywhere.

Will you both be playing Hasidic Jews?

No, I play a guy who's from the city who's not a gunfighter. He’Äôs wanted for sleeping with the wrong guy's wife. Jon plays a guy who's searching for the people that killed his family but he can't shoot his gun on Saturday because of Sabbath. He's a killer, he's the best gun in the west, but he plays it very dead on. So I make like I'm going to help him find these people and people come and try to kill us. I say it's because he's a Jew and he dresses like one so people want him dead. But really they're after me because this guy has a hit on me. I think it's a very smart, very funny movie.

Why has it taken so long to get the film off the ground?

It's like getting Swingers set up at the time. There was no real female lead in SWINGERS. It's not a format that's been done a lot. This even more so I an anteater in a way. Western genre's not considered popular. I think the religious aspect scares people to some degree.

Is Jon different now that he's married?

Well, he's got two kids and he's a dad, yeah. In a good way too. He's a great father, he loves his kids and spends a lot of time with them and just older.

Do you guys still hang out together?

Yeah, we play poker. My sister throws a poker thing at her house and we played about a week ago.

What about your character in DODGEBALL?

That was a fun role. I saw that kind of as a Bad News Bears role, kind of a guy who gave up on things a lot in life and stopped trying and was presented with something where he sort of had to respond and try. He hasn't tried anything for a long time.

Did you feel that the success of Swingers put a certain amount of pressure on you?

It did pressure me quite a bit in hindsight in that once that broke, I was getting a lot of opportunities to do comedies and sort of leading men, and I sort of just rejected it because I didn't feel comfortable with it. I really didn't want to be put in a category and also I really didn't like the comedies that I was sent. I really made an effort at the time, doing RETURN TO PARADISE, remaking PSYCHO, CLAY PIGEONS trying to do types of roles and I always felt you should really be conscious of capitalizing on this momentum, people want to see you as this guy. And I was more concerned with having a chance to do different stuff and getting a chance to really challenge myself and grow selfishly as an actor. So I responded by really pulling away from it and with THE CELL, doing stuff that I thought would be something differently frankly than what I was doing.

So then you do that and then you get offered a lot of those kind of things, but then I wasn't really thought of in comedies. I don't know if Vince is funny, you know. So OLD SCHOOL was something that brought that up and I had done a lot of the other stuff so I was excited to do comedies and I've done a bunch of comedies now. Then I'll be excited to go do some different kinds of stuff. There's an independent movie coming up, THUMBSUCKER, that I did with D'Onofrio where I play a debate coach who's a school teacher, very different. To me, that was always the thing. I moved out at 18. I always studied classes and trained a lot, you know. I think nowadays is such a different time because there's so many channels promoting the celebrity aspect of things. Not that there wasn't that, but I think ET was the only show on that was that way. There were no channels dedicated.

So most of my friends, Jon and myself, we'd go to the New Beverly Theater constantly. We were nerdy I guess, in a way. Nowadays a lot of the young kids you talk to think it's not cool to go to class or it's cool to say you didn't train. All of us, me and Jon would talk. Even the making of Swingers was really about working and trying to do some stuff. For us specifically a lot of the films that we saw younger that happened in the '70s, so for us that was really what we wanted to do. So I never, in response to what happened with Swingers, it really took me aback. It wasn't as if I had a big studio film that gave me that opportunity. And I was very thankful for what it brought me but I remember feeling I really don't want to go and try to repeat this or worry in my head about whether stuff does well or not. I always figured if you do the work and you do your best at it, there will always be a part for you. But if you get caught up in trying to just have a movie be successful, that's a much more dangerous game, because once that goes away, you don't have the same opportunities that you would have had.

It seems that you’Äôre developing a revolving group of actors that you work with.

Well, Will asked me to do it [Anchorman] and I think Will is funny, so I was happy to come and do it. I don't have a large part in that. I really just came in for a few days to do stuff for him. So that was fun. I respect his work and Todd I met on OLD SCHOOL and I had a good time doing that, thought that was good. Stiller and I worked on the thing for MTV, the short we did years ago, Titannie. I loved the Stiller show. I thought that was really funny sketches. I've always thought was just very cool, very simple and very funny. So it wasn't really kind of a game plan that we thought okay, there's this group. It's just sort of turned out that these are people I'm interested in working with and there's been material that supported us doing something together.

What else?

I'm shooting BE COOL, the sequel to GET SHORTY. It's going very well. I play Raji, a record producer/promoter. Then I'm doing WEDDING CRASHERS with Owen. Then I set a movie I'm producing at MGM about toy salesmen who sell toys. Rival salesmen. I've always loved salesmen. My dad was a salesman. As an actor, I always thought there's something funny about salesmen hustling anyway. But in contrasting that, there's something funny to me if they're trying to hustle My Little Pony. It's not like a car and they talk about it just like anyone would talk about whatever their field is. They present it like seeing grown men who gamble, demonstrate the pony and how the pony walks, but also being competitive and aggressive with each other I thought was a nice contrast.

Then there's a movie I set up at Revolution called THE BREAK-UP which is a romantic comedy. I've been offered a lot of romantic comedies. I never liked any of the romantic comedies. It's always the same shit. Oh, I don't like you. Now I love you. Now I hate you. It's gonna happen, isn't it? So I thought with THE BREAK-UP what about a movie where from the very beginning it's the breakup, they're breaking up with each other? You have them out to dinner and have someone say something like, "God, I'm glad your mom's not coming to visit" turning into saying "I hate your drunk of a sister" just saying horrible things and saying "That's it, it's over, we're breaking up."

Then I have it so that they had just bought- - they're not married, but they just bought a condo together and neither one wants to move out so they agree to put it on the market and sell it. neither one can afford to pay the mortgage, so they agree to put it on the market and sell it, but they're sort of going through the breakup under the same roof. Very derivative, I got the idea very much from The Odd Couple, having people put in a place and that kind of tone where it's not War of the Roses or very dark, but they're fighting over stuff that most of us do like you didn't do the dishes or you left this here. If she's dating, bringing someone new home or he brings someone new home or a friend's coming over, hearing her friend say that they never liked you.

Won't the studio force you to get them¬Ýtogether?

Well, they might end up together at the end, but like even in The Odd Couple, the way that they handled it in those kind of movies was never such an absolute completion. It was always more of the possibility or the potential of something. It's a much more smaller step. So, I think if at the end of the movie, there's a potential that they'll communicate, even The Odd Couple is positive. In fact, Felix is always wanting to be liked, wanting to be needed. He ends up with the Pigeon sisters. And he's okay, he's found a place where he's accepted, that's his journey. He's wanted. And Oscar now wants his place clean. He has the guys come over for poker, he doesn't want them smoking and leaving stuff out.

So you just have to take a small step in a direction of growth. It doesn't have to be that they're married with a final wedding scene. I would never do that. That's way too much. But for them to come to some kind of peacefulness or openness with each other I think is fine. Swingers ends optimistically. It's the same kind of thing. He met a girl. It's not that he's dating her. It's not that he's in love, but he's gotten past what was presented to him. You don't know if he ends up with her or not, but you know he's out of the rut that he was in. Made is similar in that they don't get the money for the job but the little girl's okay, he's got the bad influence out of their life and they're no longer trying to make money in a way that's not safe for them. So I'm a fan of something as long as it's a small step in that direction and not the absolute completion. I think that's too far of a step to take sometimes.

Joblo.com Interviews Starsky & Hutch Star, Vince Vaughn
Article found here

10 Burning Questions: Vince Vaughn

By Miki Turner, Page 3, ESPN
Article found here

MARINA DEL REY, Calif. -- When Vince Vaughn sat down for our interview on a Saturday morning, two things were immediately apparent: He's not exactly a morning dude, nor is he one to ask a lot of questions.

The Vince Vaughn and Snoop Dogg combo was a smart comedy move for "Starsky & Hutch."It would have been nice if he asked this one pertinent question, "Will my smoking bother anyone?" Or, "Does the smoke I'm blowing in your face burn your eyes?"

No luck on that.

But the Chicago-raised actor -- whose breakthrough came with "Swingers," the 1996 comedy written by his buddy Jon Favreau -- was more than considerate when it came to talking about his new film, "Starsky & Hutch" (opens nationwide March 5). In it, he plays Reese Feldman, a creepy leisure suit-wearing crook with a curly perm who's trying to outsmart the film's stars Ben Stiller (Starsky) and Owen Wilson (Hutch).

It's Huggy Bear (Snoop Dogg), however, who takes him down in the end.

Vaughn, who will turn 34 on March 28, talked about his relationship with Stiller and Wilson, fashion in the '70s, his upcoming projects, his affinity for African-American sitcoms from the '70s, and his shortcomings as an athlete with Page 3.

1. What the heck is Vince Vaughn doing in "Starsky & Hutch"?

Vince Vaughn: (Director) Todd (Phillips) came to me and asked me. He said that he had a part for me as a villain, and I had fun working with him on "Old School" and so, I said, "Sure, I'll come and fool around for a little while."

2. Are you old enough to remember the original show?

I am. I was a kid when I saw it and we used to always play it in the playground. I was born in 1970, so I think that I was maybe around 4 or 5 when it was on. There would be one guy who'd say, "OK, I'm Starsky" and the other would be like, "OK, I'm Hutch," and you just run around, and you didn't really even understand the show that much. You thought that it was cool when Huggy came on like in the movie. And you thought that the Torino was (expletive) great.

3. Looking back at the old "Starksy & Hutch" show it was kind of campy. Do you think the film adequately captures that tone?

I haven't seen the show since then, and I didn't watch it in preparation of this because my character is a specific person coming in and I don't like to. ... I didn't see any value in it for me coming in and playing the part. But I think that it takes that and has some fun with the '70's. But like a lot of cop films, I think that there's a lightness to it and a fun thing where it's entertaining in a way and any sort of spoofing ... winking at the audience. I think it is just a sort of fun thing that (Phillips) brings to filmmaking. I think that "Old School" had that quality and not that it was a remake of something, but it's sort of that light fare.

4. You're playing a villain, but how mean and nasty could you get in a comedy spoof?

You know, the part was underwritten in the script somewhat. It's a type of comedy where the plot is really there to set up jokes, and it totally has to be entertaining so that you're following it scene to scene. But it's not really to the side of the dial where it's taken really heavy or very serious ever. But at the same time, from my experience, if you watch a comedy and the villain is totally ridiculous, then there's no tension whatsoever.

So, more so than to go for jokes or to be menacing, I just kept it in the realm of sort of reality and sometimes it would tweak a little bit heavier and sometimes, it'd tweak a little more comedic. That was the best way to service the film. I just tried to play it truthfully within the boundaries of it and let any sort of comedy or fear factor come from that.

5. You wear some really scary clothes in this film-- leisure suits, baby-blue suits. What kind of influence did you have on Reese Feldman's style?

"Swingers" Vaughn (left) and buddy Jon Favreau will always be so money, baby.I always have a lot of input in the wardrobe because I think that it's always important in the film. Sometimes you see films and costumes and the actor doesn't seem like they're really wearing it. It might fit the period or the theme which is too cool in a way or whatever, but these wardrobe people were amazing. I don't just say that because I'm notorious for not always seeing eye-to-eye with wardrobe, but they were really very good and Todd had specific ideas.

I kind of went in one day and said, "I like him kind of dirty in a way, but think Miami." I said, "I want it to be kind of Miami-ish with the color schemes and stuff like that." It just seemed that Reese Feldman would try to be what he thought was impressive which is kind of, I think, gaudy or a little bit unsettling.

6. Looking back on the '70s when you were a kid, was there anything you did then in terms of fashion that you'd never do now?

Well, just a whole bunch of things. That's just life. I was never a big fashion person, and so I'm sure I wore whatever. I was growing, and so I just wore whatever clothes that weren't that expensive and made sense at the time. But I'm sure that I look back and say, "What was I thinking?" My adolescence was more in the '80s and that's more my cross to bear.

No pink leisure suits?

No. I have pictures that I wore a little astronaut thing that I loved that I got somewhere down in Florida, I think. I was with some relatives. I used to have a little cowboy outfit that I had and took pictures in. I lived in the suburbs, and I'd put the cowboy thing on. That was in the '70's. I was 10 by the time the '70s ended. I got out of there in that youthful age when I wasn't making my own decisions. So I was all right.

7. You and Snoop mix it up a bit. What were your scenes with him like?

I love Snoop. I worked with him on "Old School," and he's very accessible. He's very kind. He's always nice to everyone, to the crew. He's always got something positive to say. He's very childlike and loves to come and play. So, I had fun working with him.

8. One of the funniest scenes in the film is you and Snoop at the golf course. Are you at all athletic? Do you play golf?

No, no. I'm a horrible golfer. I had to meet a guy to do that. I've never played golf. I've never had the patience for it, and I had to meet a guy to learn how to kind of fake a stroke. But then, when I got there I forgot it. So, no, I'm not athletic. I played some sports and stuff in high school, and I was very average.

What did you play?

I played football. I wrestled. Those were team sports and I played for the school. When I was younger I played kick the can and stuff like that. I loved that. I didn't like it when they started yelling at you and started taking it real serious. They were like, "If you want it bad enough, run around the block," and I realized that I didn't want it bad enough to run around the block.

Is that when you got into acting?

I started kind of young because both of my parents worked, and so I would get put into different activities, which I loved. For me, that was very good as a kid. I think that partially what made me want to get into acting or even consider doing something outside of the lines was that most of my friends' moms didn't work, and I always respected my mom a lot, especially back then, for working and doing that kind of stuff. She was someone that if she wanted something she'd outwork everyone and create an opportunity for herself. So, it was an activity that I was put in that I thought was fun and because of my experience with my mom, to a large degree, I thought that anything was possible. I saw her overcome stuff, and I thought if you worked hard at something you'd give yourself a chance.

9.Were you surprised by the success of "Old School" and is there a sequel in the works?

I don't know. We talked about it, but there hasn't been a script that I've seen for it. So, there's nothing currently going. I've got something that I'm shooting now. I think that Todd has something he's working on, and Will (Ferrell), I know, is doing some stuff. It's something that has been discussed but it's not immediate..

Can you talk about the magic that happens when you, Ferrell, Wilson, and Stiller get together?

I don't know. I'll say very comfortably that I really enjoy their work, and I'm fans of their work, and so it was never like a big game plan and really something that just is kind of happening in the last couple of years or so. But there was no master plan with it. I mean, "Wedding Crashers" was a situation where I worked with the director on a movie called "Clay Pigeons" and who directed Owen in "Shanghai Nights." He was interested in both of us, and I think that Owen came to me and him both, but there was never sort of a plan of, "OK, we're starting a kind of mafia."

Are there ever any ego problems?

No, I've never had that. Even with Ben; my first experience working with Ben was a short comic thing that we did for MTV spoofing James Cameron's "The Titanic" and "The Titanic II." He's funny and smart. He's got good taste and loves to play around, and I enjoy that. And ever since then me and Ben have always danced around with doing stuff in "Starsky" and then, "Dodgeball" (summer release). It just happened very quickly with each other.

10. You talked about playing Starsky & Hutch as a kid. Is there another '70s show you'd like to be in if it got made into a movie?

"Mary Hartman" (Laughs). No. No, a lot of the shows I watched were like "What's Happening" ... I watched that a bunch as a kid. And I watched "Good Times" a lot and I watched "Sanford and Son." That was one of my favorite shows. I loved Redd Foxx. He was probably my favorite to watch. I watched "Happy Days." I was big into "Laverne and Shirley" at that time. It was real big and "Battle of the Network Stars" was always big.

Is there something that you'd like to do that you haven't done?

A whole bunch of stuff. After "Swingers," I was offered a bunch of comedies, but I didn't do them because I didn't want to just be doing comedies. So, I was fortunate enough to get a chance at a lot of different stuff like "Return To Paradise." "Clay Pigeons" was kind of comedic until I start cutting girls up. I played villains in like, "Domestic Disturbance" and some other things, and then when "Old School" came about, it was kind of a resurgence of me doing comedy, and I'm doing that now.

I'll probably go back and do some dramas after this "Wedding Crashers." I might do one more comedy and then I'd like to go and do some other smaller roles. I did an independent film that'll come out this year with a really talented young director Mike Mills called "The Thumbsucker." I play a debate coach at a high school. So, I've always liked the opportunity to try to do different stuff. You grow more, and you learn more, and it keeps you interested.

By Miki Turner, Page 3, ESPN
Article found here

Still Money

Vince Vaughn on 70s mustaches, Hassidic cowboys and what it's like to put the smack down on Snoop Dogg.

By Fred Topel, The Wave Magazine
Article found here

Movie: Starsky & Hutch
Director: Todd Phillips
Starring: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Snoop Dogg, Vince Vaughn
Studio: Warner Bros.
Vince Vaughn burst onto the scene eight years ago when the indie classic Swingers introduced the actor (and his “You’re so money” catchphrase) to movie audiences. Since then, he’s avoided being typecast as “the fast talking best friend” by taking on a series of diverse roles. He’s starred in campy terror films (Domestic Disturbance), big-budget blockbusters (Jurassic Park 2), tear-jerking dramas (Return to Paradise) and experimental disasters (the remake of Psycho). We caught up with the chain-smoking Vaughn while he was promoting another remake, this one of the ‘70s buddy cop show, Starsky & Hutch. But before we asked him about roughing up Huggy Bear, we had to see how upset he would get when we trotted out the Swingers lingo. Amazingly, he kept his cool…

The Wave: When was the last time you said something was money?
Vince Vaughn: I don’t know. I sort of dropped that years and years ago.

TW: You don’t still talk like that?
VV: Even at the time, it was something we would say that was exaggerated for the film, but we always go through phases where we have different catchphrases and stuff that we’re saying to each other.

TW: Is Jon Favreau different now that he’s married?
VV: Well, he’s got two kids and he’s a dad, yeah. In a good way, too. He’s a great father. He loves his kids and spends a lot of time with them.

TW: Do you hang out still?
VV: Yeah, we play poker. My sister throws a poker thing at her house and we played about a week ago.

TW: Will you work together again?
VV: Yeah, we have a couple things that we wanted to do. We still have that Hassidic Western about a Hassidic Jew who is a gunfighter, but we haven’t been able to get that set up anywhere.

TW: You’ll be a Hassidic Jew?
VV: No, I play a guy who’s from the city, who’s not a gunfighter, who’s wanted for sleeping with the wrong guy’s wife. Jon plays a guy searching for the people that killed his family but he can’t shoot his gun on Saturday because of Sabbath. He’s a killer and the best gun in the West, but he plays it very dead on. I think it’s a very smart, very funny movie. But it’s like getting Swingers set up at the time. There was no real female lead in Swingers. It’s not a format that’s been done a lot. [The] Western genre is not considered popular. I think the religious aspect scares people to some degree.

TW: Is this character in Starsky & Hutch the baddest villain you’ve played?
VV: No. Norman Bates is kind of a bad villain. I think Lester Long from Clay Pigeons is probably the baddest villain I ever played.

TW: Were you worried about the consequences of slapping Snoop Dogg?
VV: No. We’re both playing characters in a movie, so it’s not like I’m bitch-slapping Snoop. But in the context of the scene, I want to smack him because he doesn’t understand what he’s doing.

TW: How did you enjoy having a ‘70s fu manchu?
VV: I liked it. I had a whole group of men hit on me that I’ve never had before.

TW: Did you grow up on Starsky & Hutch?
VV: I just remember thinking that it was badass. I don’t remember the stories and stuff, because I was five when this thing came out. I remember on the playground, we were always like, “Let’s play Starsky & Hutch!” And what happened after that is unclear, but I know that we thought that that was cool, because they were like cool detectives busting bad guys.

TW: Will we ever see you in a romantic comedy?
VV: I’ve been offered a lot of romantic comedies, but I never liked them. It’s always the same sh-t. “Oh, I don’t like you. Now I love you. Now I hate you. It’s gonna happen, isn’t it?” But there’s a movie I set up at Revolution [Studios] called The Break-up, which is a romantic comedy. I thought, “What about a movie where from the very beginning they’re breaking up with each other?”

By Fred Topel, The Wave Magazine
Article found here

Bullz-Eye interviews "Old School" stars

Article found here

When you throw Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn and Luke Wilson onto a movie set together and hand them a script like the one Todd Phillips wrote for "Old School," good things are bound to happen.

Add naked wrestling, a dart gun and Snoop Dogg to the mix and suddenly you've got one of the year's best comedies on your hands.

"Old School," set to open nationwide on Friday, Feb. 21, is destined for box-office success thanks to its hilarious script, memorable scenes and magnificent cast. Ferrell (Frank), Vaughn (Beanie) and Wilson (Mitch), starring as three 30-something guys who start a fraternity in hopes of reliving their college days, recently sat down with Bullz-Eye.com and other members of the press to talk about their latest release. Needless to say, even the press conference was filled with laughs.

Fresh off his split with "Saturday Night Live," Ferrell started working the crowd the moment he walked through the door, announcing to everybody in the room, "So far, we have been unable to detect any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. We probably need another two weeks at least. We've only done the first two floors of the hotel."

Of course, it's this kind of humor that drives "Old School," but as Vaughn explained, it's comedy with a purpose. "I find things that make me laugh are things that are an over-commitment to a very real thing, not just falling down for falling down's sake. When I met Todd (writer/director) and saw this script in particular, I thought what was cool here is in all relationships between guys and girls, the themes that are discussed are universal: Am I ready to be married? Am I not? Somebody cheated on me. I'm married, but am I missing out on having fun? So you take those circumstances that are universal and you make them extreme. You walk in and maybe you catch your girlfriend cheating on you, but you have two naked people jump out of the closet. It's still based in reality墜ｶ. I think what separates this movie墜ｶfrom a lot of big comedies that had scenes that may be effective is you can follow and start to see what's at stake for the characters."

Although Farrell, whose streaking scene is one of the highlights of the film, is best known as the flamboyant actor from SNL who would seemingly do anything for a laugh ("If the money's right, man, I'm there," he joked), he also said that his over-the-top humor provided necessary depth to his character. "The fact that this character, that his streaking was kind of a result of falling off the wagon, the fact that it made sense was the reason why I was really into doing it, and was why I was able to commit on such a level. If it was just for the sake of getting a crazy shot, then I don't think it makes sense."

Apparently, however, not every cast member was as committed as Ferrell. When asked what it would take to get them to streak in front of the camera like their co-star did for "Old School," Wilson admitted, "I would never have the guts to do that," while Vaughn said, "There's not enough booze in this hotel, honey."

Speaking of booze, Wilson suggested that Ferrell had some help getting ready for his "exposed" scene, saying, "Well, I know Will flew in his acting coach from Kentucky, Jimmy Beam, that night."

"He's a great guy," Ferrell said, adding a little later that he needed additional support from "another buddy of mine, Old English 800, which is a malt beverage acting coach," when he had to actually drop his drawers in front of rapper Snoop Dogg, whose cameo appearance really livened up the set. "Snoopy, as I like to call him," Ferrell said. "That was probably more intimidating because we shot that the very last day of shooting, so I'd already done the streaking part by myself. But to actually be in front of Snoop Dogg that close naked, that was more intimidating than anything."

"That was done through bribery," said Phillips on the casting of Snoop, who will play Huggy Bear in "Starsky and Hutch," another film that Phillips will direct. "If you remember the TV show墜ｶHuggy Bear was this street informant, sort of a pimp. And you never knew what he did but he was kind of like a snitch. So all these guys, all these great African-American actors, really wanted to be Huggy Bear because they grew up like I did on the show, and he was the coolest guy on TV. So I know Snoop wanted it墜ｶand out of respect I had to go to him first anyway because he is the coolest guy in the world. So when I went to him I said, 'I want you to do Huggy Bear,' he was really excited. And I said, 'Oh yeah, also will you do this little thing for me in "Old School," a little cameo?' So he kind of had to do it I think."ｬﾝ

So what was it like working with the legendary rapper? "It was great because it was the last day of shooting, so it was very much a party, almost like a rap party mixed in with shooting," Phillips said. "It really was a good way to end the movie. And this was before Snoop quit [smoking pot], so it was a different Snoop."

"I didn't actually get to spend much time with Snoop," a somewhat disappointed Wilson admitted. "I was in my little room watching TV and then I ran into Vince, who was speaking in tongues at that point after having spent a couple hours in Snoop's trailer."

"I got a knock on my door: 'Snoop Dogg's a big fan -- he wants you to come hang out and play games,'" Vaughn continued, picking up the story. "So we all went in there and had a good time. We played video games and just laughed and hung out for a while. Then I came out and I saw Luke and he was watching the news. I was like, 'what's going on?' and he says, 'no one told me everyone was in Snoop's trailer.'"

Vaughn also briefly referenced a scene he shot with Snoop that didn't make it through the final edit, but he didn't give any details. Luckily, Phillips had the low-down. "That was a scene basically -- and I don't even know if I should say this but whatever -- where Vince and Snoop shared a joint. I don't know if it was real or not -- I never really looked into it. We basically put three cameras on them and [they] kind of smoked a cigarette together, and we just thought it would be interesting. It was interesting but it didn't really fit the movie. It's basically 12 minutes of these guys talking philosophy and music and life and speakers. Snoop was really sharp in trying to bring it back to the movie and Vince was a little bit, ya know墜ｶ. It's the chronic, ya know, and I don't know how experienced Vince is with that." Don't worry, though -- Phillips said the deleted scene will be on the "Old School" DVD.

Yet despite the presence of Snoop, the guys admitted that the rowdiness was surprisingly limited when asked by Bullz-Eye to describe the atmosphere on the set. "We [had] this phrase: Let's shoot this movie '70s style," Wilson recalled. "Come on. It's us three墜ｶlet's have some fun on this movie, because we got caught up in just how well behaved we all were at the time. Really, we were, and we never did manage to go '70s style."

"We had a lot of fun, we were always joking around with each other," Vaughn said. "We called ourselves the Wolf Pack because we'd always turn on each other, make fun of each other. It was never safe -- whoever was getting picked on, five minutes later everybody would turn on someone else. But we never got '70s style -- the closest we got was that last night [with Snoop]."

Even though the guys didn't live up to their motto, Phillips said everybody had a great time during filming. "I always think it's important to set the tone of the movie on the set of the movie. We're doing a light comedy, a broad comedy, [so] it was very fun to show up in the day. We would just hang around and laugh and try to make it funny in any way."

So we've got a college, a fraternity, binge drinking, and a bunch of 30-year-old guys who seem to be wading through their own mid-life crises. Who exactly is "Old School" targeting? "This movie's really ultimately not about college and it's not even really about fraternities," Phillips explained. "It's really about that point in life where people in their early 30s get to and they're kind of making a decision about 'should I be a responsible, tax-paying, married this or should I kind of stretch out my 20s a little bit longer, kind of go more the irresponsible route?' So I'm 32 and a lot of my friends, this movie speaks to them probably even more than a lot of college students."

In other words, if you're simply looking for endless laughs then you can't go wrong with "Old School." There's Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Luke Wilson, Snoop, heavy drinking, streaking, a dart gun, more booze, rhythmic gymnastics, a blow-up doll, and even appearances by Jeremy Piven ("PCU"), Seann William Scott (Stifler from "American Pie") and Craig Kilborn. What more could you want?

Oh yeah, the naked wrestling. "Old School" has that too.

Article found here

Interview: Todd Phillips, Vince Vaughn

Article found here.
BY PHILLIP NAKOV | Phillip recently visited the set of "Starsky and Hutch", and had an opportunity to talk with director Todd Phillips and Vince Vaughn.

Did you guys go through various different concepts of how this would be before you decided just, seventies, play it straight?

Yeah, we were playing with it for a while. We started out ’Äì yeah we did, we went through a lot of concepts, actually.

So, what was the evolution?

The evolution was, what plays best for a comedy? We’Äôre making a comedy with action, as opposed to straight ’Äúaction comedy’Äù or ’Äúaction movie’Äù. So, I think it was really, what’Äôs gonna go best with the comedy of it. I mean, the casting obviously lends itself to being a comedy. So, we thought, well, if we play it in the 70s and play it straight, I always feel like, the more real you play it, it’Äôs kind of, you have more to play against.

Charlie’Äôs Angel sets it now, I Spy did it. Then you have stuff like the Brady Bunch, which sets it now, but’Ķ Did you go through those ideas?

Well, no, I mean, I’Äôve seen all those movies, but it wasn’Äôt that we thought, ’ÄúOh let’Äôs not do that because Charlie’Äôs Angels did that.’Äù This movie is a world of difference than Charlie’Äôs Angels, except that they both happen to be shows from the 70s. Umm, and I liked Charlie’Äôs Angels a lot, but we don’Äôt have Cameron Diaz in panties, or anything like that. So, we have to sell something else, which hopefully is comedy, you know.

Is this a parody?

It’Äôs not a parody. You, know, it’Äôs an interesting tone the movie has, because it’Äôs not really a spoof or a parody. It’Äôs really just saying, this is the prequel to the series Starsky & Hutch. This movie takes place before the series was shot, ostensibly, in your mind.

Do you explain that? I mean, how do we know that?

Well, because it’Äôs an origin story. Starsky and Hutch meet in this movie.

We’Äôve already heard that the ( ) character was made larger because of the improv and stuff that have been going on. Who was the evil guy before then?

Well, I’Äôd made Old School with Vince, so I went to Vince first and said, ’Äúwill you play the villain in this movie?’Äù and he said, ’Äúyeah.’Äù Based on that, we wrote his part a little bit bigger, but it was never anybody else that was gonna play it. Cause Vince said yes.

And how much improvising is there?

Well I mean, in Old School ’Äì I did Road Trip, then Old School and this. In all the movies ’Äì in all comedies, probably ’Äì we just kind of let it go a little bit. I mean, if you see us shoot, we kind of ’Äì today is a tricky thing to see because it’Äôs a little bit technical, so it’Äôs a little bit slower going, and it’Äôs not so much comedy here that we’Äôre shooting today, but generally we’Äôll do a take and we’Äôll say, ’Äúwe got it, what’Äôs in the script. Ok, let’Äôs do a free one.’Äù You know, which is basically improving.

Can you give us a little setup as to what the plot is? Is this some kind of Cocaine theft?

Yeah, it’Äôs basically, you know, if you look at those 70s movies, something that I’Äôve always liked is that there’Äôs always a singular villain. It’Äôs not like it’Äôs some crime syndicate with computer disks and a hacker with a thing talking to them on a walkie. You know, it’Äôs very much like they were in the 70s, with a really singular villain. And Vince is basically a guy who’Äôs doing a big coke deal, and Starsky and Hutch kind of stumble onto the biggest case of their lives, you know?

How are you adapting to being an action director?

Yeah, again, it’Äôs not huge stuff. And again, you surround yourself with good people, so it’Äôs not so much adapting.

You’Äôve got the car chase stuff.

Yeah, there’Äôs car chase stuff, but, you know, as a director your job is to really just set the tone of the movie. I always think that you’Äôre the purveyor of tone. It doesn’Äôt matter if you’Äôre doing action or romance or whatever. Once you set the tone and once you and the actors have that tone figured out, it doesn’Äôt matter if you happen to be shooting a car running by or a guy talking to a guy, you know. It’Äôs not any harder, except it’Äôs a little more time consuming. You know what I mean?

How hard was it finding that tone?

Umm...

Was that something that was discussed a lot?

Yeah, it was, because it’Äôs a tricky tone. A lot of times you can just fall into becoming a spoof and that’Äôs sometimes the easier way out. So, it was very much about trying to avoid that and going for laughs in a different way, which is basically the character comedy with Ben and Owen.

How did you decide on them for their roles?

I mean, it was just, that’Äôs the only choice, to me. I mean, either that or you do it with Paul Michael Glazer and David Soul and you do a real one, right? But, I mean, if you’Äôre going to update it and make it now, and you want to make it funny, Ben and Owen seem to be a great team and a logical choice.

Are Ben and Owen critical of each other? Do they coach each other?

Yeah, they’Äôre great friends, and, you know, we’Äôre all critical of each other. On a movie, I think probably any movie, it probably works like that. Probably on a good set where people are getting along. They’Äôre (Ben and Owen) great friends. Vince is a good friend. So everybody is just kind of critical of each other, in a good way.

Do they ever direct each other?

I don’Äôt know about directing each other, but it’Äôs definitely, if somebody were having trouble with a line and it doesn’Äôt sound right, if it’Äôs Ben’Äôs line, Owen might suggest something, sure.

Was it different working with guys who are already kind of a team going in, as opposed to a series of different comedians, or...

No, it’Äôs the same. It really feels the same. Yeah.

One of the famous visuals of the series is the car. Are you having any special introduction to the car?

Yeah, actually. We’Äôre shooting that this weekend, on Saturday, I think. When Owen sees the car for the first time. It’Äôs Ben’Äôs car and, you know, it’Äôs not necessarily a special introduction, but it’Äôs definitely its own thing.

How many shooting days do you have?

55 shooting days.

And where are you so far?

We’Äôre on like 45.

Are you building up a good gag reel on this?

It seems like it, actually. Yeah.

What’Äôs something funny behind the scenes that’Äôs happened while you were shooting?

I don’Äôt know, umm, people always say, ’Äúoh, give me a funny anecdote from the set.’Äù I don’Äôt know. I never can think of one. Gag reels and something funny from the set. I don’Äôt know.

The show had them both kind of on equal footing, it looks like, in the comedy, they’Äôre very different. One’Äôs much more straight-laced; one is not. Can you talk a little about that?

Well, I think that the essence of comedy is conflict, right? So, we wanted to set up some kind of ’Äì by the end of the movie, they get into the rhythm of the show, which is, they’Äôre good partners. But, in the beginning, it was much more of ’Äúwait a minute. We’Äôre coming from different places.’Äù But then they learn to work together and, basically, by each taking a step towards each other. It’Äôs almost like a romantic comedy between two men. You know?

Ben is the much more straight-laced, supercop. And Owen has his own style and his own way of doing it, which is a little bit more subdued and, he thinks, a little bit more effective. And so those styles clash, but by the end they kind of become a great team.

So, besides being TV-inspired, what do you think sets this apart from other buddy cop movies?

To me, movies are all about casting. So, I think the casting in this movie is just so dead-on for right now. Between Ben-Owen, of course, and Vince, Juliette Lewis, and Snoop Dogg. Will Ferrell does a cameo, which is great. We have just some great stuff in the movie. Not that other cop movies aren’Äôt cast well. I just think that this movie’Äôs pretty exciting to cast, to me.

How much of this is done on location, and how much in studio?

90% of it was done on location. But this is basically a studio, right? We come in here and make it look like we want. So, but 90% of it is finding a room like this and then shooting.

You said this is a very technical scene. Can you talk about some of the technical challenges?

It’Äôs not so much technical. I meant more like, it’Äôs not really a funny scene. It’Äôs basically, Vince takes Hutch hostage right here on stage at the thing. And Ben has to decide if he’Äôs gonna shoot his partner or not. Of course, he does. That’Äôll actually be funny. If you stick around today, you’Äôll see that.

And then Fred gets shot, right?

And then Fred Williamson takes a bullet.

He said that you almost broke one of his rules, of not getting killed in a movie.

(laughs) Right. Exactly.

Can you talk a little bit about the casting of Snoop Dogg in the Huggy Bear role?

To me, when I was growing up watching Starsky and Hutch, Huggy Bear was the coolest guy on TV. So I was just thinking ’Äúwho’Äôs the coolest guy, right now?’Äù You know, a lot of African-American actors wanted to play that part, because they grew up also thinking this is the coolest guy on TV. But I thought, out of respect, we had to go to Snoop first.

This is the 2nd time you’Äôve worked with Snoop, right?

Yeah. I bring back a lot of the same people. Juliette Lewis and Will and Vince and Snoop. I like to...(inaudible ’Äì Todd turns his head to see Vince).

(Todd sees Vince arrive)

Whoa. I feel like we’Äôre at a Dead show.

We were watching on the monitors ’Äì that scene missing when they find the cocaine ’Äì Is the second unit going to do that?

No. That’Äôs what we’Äôre filming right now. So on the monitors I was playing back the scene we already cut and now the Scene Missing is what we’Äôre shooting right now, because you kind of edit it as you go along.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Vince Vaughn.

Being a villain, albeit a comedic villain, how do you like that?

Vince: Love it, thank you.

Todd: Next.

From here on out, all responses, unless otherwise noted, are Vince Vaughn’Äôs.

It’Äôs kind of a big day for you. Do you have a lot of lines today?

Not a lot of lines today, but a lot of lines for me, in general, today. You know what I mean?

How are you liking the outfit you’Äôre wearing?

I love the outfit. Makes me feel pretty for the first time in a long time.

(reporters laugh)

Todd: Why is that funny?

How did you decide on the facial hair?

That was Todd’Äôs idea, to wear the facial hair, to go with it. And I liked it. I’Äôve had a whole group of men hit on me that I’Äôve never had before.

Todd: It’Äôs opened up a whole new...

It’Äôs opened up a whole new way to look at the world.

Ever been confused for a cop?

That hasn’Äôt happened yet, but we can play house later.

What are your memories of Starsky & Hutch?

I just remember thinking that it was badass. I don’Äôt remember the stories and stuff, cause I was five when this thing came out. I remember on the playground, we were always like, ’ÄúLet’Äôs play Starsky and Hutch.’Äù And what happened after that is unclear, but I know that we thought that that was cool, because they were like cool detectives busting bad guys.

So was it from the moment that you came on that the part became bigger? Or was it something that was talked about after you came on?

No, I think that either the part was what it was when we had a read-through of it, and Todd, as always, after hearing it out loud, sort of just made the whole script tighter and better. It was almost like an editing process, I think. As we’Äôve gone through it the movie’Äôs been somewhat similar to Old School in that we’Äôre always looking for the best way to service the scene.

What would you think if people compared this villain to Norman Bates?

I would think that they probably had a lot of time on their hands.

How would you say it is working with this director?

Todd: Whoa. Want me to leave? I’Äôll leave.

No. Phillips is the best. I worked with him on Old School. I think you can see it in his movies that, especially for actors ’Äì I just think I speak for myself, I think Will feels the same way and everyone else ’Äì it’Äôs fun when you have a guy you really genuinely find funny, understands what you do that’Äôs funny, encourages that and allows you to do that, and then is good at bringing the whole movie together and making a story out of it.

And what about working with Owen and Ben?

Owen and Ben?

Is there a lot of improv between the three of you?

A little bit, yeah. They’Äôre both great ’Äì we should have some questions for both of us.

Todd: No, no. I’Äôve already done my questions, honestly.

Are you sure?

Todd: Yeah.

Owen and Ben are great. I think they’Äôre both very funny and both very talented, and I like their approach to filmmaking.

Do you guys spur each other on a little bit? Do you push each other to go a little further?

Not really. I enjoy their work and I have fun when I make movies with them, because I’Äôm inspired by what they’Äôre doing. It’Äôs easier to get into a scene, obviously, when you’Äôre working with someone who’Äôs specific and knows what they’Äôre doing. So, it’Äôs fun to, you know, play basketball or tennis or any kind of thing with someone who likes to play and you can have fun with.

Did you do any ass-wrangling on the set?

Oh no. The ass-wrangling? No, I left that at the MTV show. I turned a page.

For both of you: How has your relationship grown since Old School?

I feel very lucky, because I sort of started in comedy, and then really, didn’Äôt really see a lot of comedies that I found funny. And when Todd first came to me with Old School, after sitting with him and talking to him, I really responded to his storytelling sensibilities and his approach to comedy. For me, before I did Old School, a lot of people were like, ’ÄúYeah, Vince. I don’Äôt know if he’Äôs funny,’Äù if they didn’Äôt see Swingers or anything. So Todd gave me a great opportunity in the comedy world when a lot of people wouldn’Äôt. Just doing that has opened up a lot of doors for me.

Todd: It’Äôs weird with Vince and I. I always get the feeling that Vince likes me more than I like him. (laughter) It puts me in an awkward position. No. I am the biggest Vince Vaughn fan on the planet. I’Äôve said it before: we wrote Old School for Vince. He was the only guy we really wrote the movie for. I said it before that, if I could work with him on every movie ’Äì I’Äôm not just saying that, I said this to you ’Äì I’Äôll be happy. And I probably will, because that’Äôs just my goal. I think Vince is one of, right now, one of the funniest guys going. Before Old School, a lot of people didn’Äôt see it. Hopefully, people are going to see it more and he’Äôs going to be doing more comedies, because there’Äôs just such a sharpness to him. I respect Vince tremendously and I love working with him and I hope we always will do stuff.

How does it benefit you to work with somebody more than once?

It only really benefits, I think, if you like the person you’Äôre working with, you know what I mean? Otherwise, it’Äôs like a bad relationship that should’Äôve ended a long time ago. But really, I know that Will would say the same thing, like so many times, especially doing comedic stuff or other stuff, when you work with someone who’Äôs not funny, but they have a real idea of what they think is funny, it’Äôs like trying to fit a triangle into a circle. With Todd, he had real good ideas of what was funny, but was also open to us bringing stuff to it and kind of making us better, by saying, ’Äúthat’Äôs funny, but let’Äôs go this way.’Äù We got that feeling while shooting Old School, but after seeing the movie there was even more trust, because you go, ’ÄúWow. This guy really brought this movie together in a way that was fun, funny and has a nice story to it.’Äù

(Vanessa asks a question about seventies fashion that I couldn’Äôt make out)

I think that all of it’Äôs going to come back. All fashion is like a pendulum ’Äì it’Äôs goes so far one way and so far the other way. Thank you guys for your time. I give you Todd Phillips.

(Submitted by Phillip Nakov on 2003-06-25.)
Article found here.

BBC Films Interview - Vince Vaughn - Old School

Interviewed by Alana Lee
Article found here

Vince Vaughn has never quite lived up to his breakthrough performance in "Swingers". So-so performances in so-what? movies - Gus Van Sant's "Psycho", J-Lo's "The Cell", John Travolta's "Domestic Disturbance" - were followed by a return to form (and more familiar ground) in mob comedy-drama "Made". Now he's a man behaving badly in frat house comedy "Old School".

You were a little reluctant to do this film at first. Why was that?

When I first read the script... You know, I started with comedy with "Swingers" and "Made", but this was like physical comedy. But then I talked with Todd Phillips, the writer/director, and he was so smart and funny. And then, when I found out the cast was going to be Luke [Wilson] and Will [Ferrell], I realised that Todd was going for something smarter than your average college movie. I just wanted it to be a little more clever than that. I'm very proud of this movie. I think it's very funny.

Your character, Beanie, is a married man with a child who starts to regress into this frat guy. Was that fun to play?

Yeah. I don't think my character meant to get involved in anything. He's just trying to help his friend through a breakup. He is encouraging Mitch to imagine all the fun he's going to have now he's single again. But then he's drawn into this situation. He's surrounded by all this stuff and he's tempted by it.

How did you prepare for the movie?

I like to do research no matter what it is I'm doing, because I think you bring that to the screen. I called Will and talked about how we were friends and how we knew each other... you know, the back story. It's not necessarily anything you see in the movie, but I think the more specific you are, it just affects your performance. It's using your imagination. Why did my guy get involved in starting his store? How did he meet his wife? Those kinds of things, for me, are always helpful.

Did you enjoy doing this?

We had a lot of fun, and we were always joking around with each other. We call ourselves 'The Wolf Pack', because we'd always turn on each other and make fun of each other. It was never safe who was getting picked on, because five minutes later we would turn on someone else.

Interviewed by Alana Lee
Article found here

Vince Vaughn Gets Sucker-Punched At Hollywood Hot Spot

NBC4.TV - Article found here

Publicist: Some One Hit Actor And Ran

LOS ANGELES -- Actor Vince Vaughn got sucker-punched early Friday while waiting for his car, after leaving the lounge at the Standard hotel, a New York publicist said.

"All I know is that Vince last night was at a club. He had left and was waiting for his car when someone hit him and ran," Ina Treciokas said.

"Vince never threw a punch. There was no brawl. He was just standing outside and got punched. Authorities are looking for this individual. I have every confidence they will find him. Vince is considering pressing charges," the publicist added.

Sheriff's Sgt. Bruce Thomas in West Hollywood said the 32-year-old actor was the "victim of a fight" outside the Standard about 2 a.m. and was not arrested. The suspects fled, Thomas said, and are being sought.

Vaughn, born in Minneapolis, has appeared in numerous films, including "Swingers," "The Cell," "Clay Pigeons" and the current release "Old School."

NBC4.TV - Article found here

Someone hurry up and give Vince Vaughn a talk show

BY PHIL ROSENTHAL TELEVISION CRITIC, Chicaco Sun Times
Article found here

He sauntered to center stage like he owned the Ed Sullivan Theatre and, in a matter of moments, he practically did.

"Welcome to the 'Late Show,' " he said, standing tall where others have trembled, in place of ailing David Letterman on Tuesday night. "There's been a regime change. ... I'm Vince Vaughn. You loved me in 'Swingers.' You rented me in 'Made.' You missed me entirely in 'Psycho.' "

Vince Vaughn should have his own talk show. He was that good.

It was as if he put on one of Letterman's custom-made suits and, though it didn't hang the same way as it does on Dave, it still fit him perfectly.

Never mind the way he casually tossed off standard-issue monologue material, like the bit about how shingles, Letterman's affliction, is "show business for drying out in Malibu."

Where Vaughn was truly impressive was in making B-list guests Rosie Perez and Geri Halliwell entertaining somehow. He flirted and cajoled, listening intently enough to find the humor in what they were saying rather than on the blue cards in front of him. He pounced on the openings without stepping all over them.

Pressed to try yoga by Halliwell, he reluctantly twisted himself into something just shy of the lotus position. It was a stretch beyond his abilities. But, as a host, it proved him flexible enough.

While Vaughn, a Lake Forest High grad who has no shortage of film work, fits the profile for Letterman fill-ins to date--that is, he has a good enough day job that he isn't likely to want to supplant Dave--he was one visitor you wanted to see again. Soon.

Sure, Bruce Willis was game and all on Night One Without Dave, but his darting eyes betrayed his nerves. John McEnroe, tennis' former enfant terrible, never unwound. Regis Philbin, whose experience should have made this seem easy, instead seemed intent on bringing his lounge act to national TV. And Whoopi Goldberg, a onetime talk-show host herself, had to admit she was rusty.

Vaughn, meanwhile, was pitch-perfect, comfortable and gracious, the best actor to do this unique sort of temp work since Burt Reynolds, in his heyday as a top movie box-office draw, was a regular sub for Johnny Carson.

Regardless of how Elvis Costello fared last night, how Vaughn's "Old School" co-star Will Ferrell fares tonight or even what Megan Mullally does Friday, it's hard to imagine they could be any more funny or focused than Vaughn.

Simply put, no one is that spot-on right from the start. No one. He was--and we're allowed one groan-inducing "Swingers" allusion--so money, baby.

Not only was he truly funny, he was more at ease than NBC's Jay Leno or Conan O'Brien, steadier than ABC's Jimmy Kimmel, sharper than NBC's Carson Daly and cooler than CBS' Craig Kilborn, who struggles to manufacture the persona that comes so naturally to Vaughn.

Vaughn, in fact, was a throwback to the days when late-night hosts did not cast themselves as geeky outcasts the way Letterman and those who emulate him so often do. This was a guy who could flirt charmingly with his guests and do it like he meant it, the way Carson once did.

While young Michael Essany pretends to be Carson in his parents' living room on Valparaiso local access and for E!--where Joan Rivers stumbling through red-carpet interviews and Anna Nicole Smith just plain stumbling are considered entertainment--and convinces himself he has a late-night future, Vaughn gave a one-hour tutorial on just how to host a late-night network show.

Essany is a meticulously traced caricature. Vaughn, without appearing to try, is the real deal.

If Letterman isn't healthy enough to return by Monday, CBS ought to ask Vaughn to host "Late Show" for the whole week.

Hard to say whether he could do it night after night. But it would be fun to watch him try.

BY PHIL ROSENTHAL TELEVISION CRITIC, Chicaco Sun Times
Article found here

Vince Vaughn Is 'Old School'

❾ MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Article found here

(CBS)㋒For some, the college years may have been the best years of their lives, and some graduates may only wish they could relive the experience.

In the new comedy "Old School," Vince Vaughn plays one of three 30-something friends who actually try to recreate the college party days by starting a very unique fraternity.

Vaughn explained on The Early Show that his character and his two friends are at a crossroad in their lives where they must decide between taking the responsible smooth road or the bumpy but exciting reckless path. They choose to follow the reckless path with some hilarious results.

The film also stars Luke Wilson ("Legally Blonde") and Will Ferrell (television's "Saturday Night Live") as Vaughn's buddies looking to escape responsibility, wives and families. Ellen Pompeo ("Daredevil"), Juliette Lewis ("Hysterical Blindness"), Leah Remini (television's "The King of Queens"), Perrey Reeves ("The Suburbans"), Craig Kilborn (television's "The Late, Late Show"), Jeremy Piven ("The Family Man") and others make appearances in the film.

Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell and Luke Wilson are three actors you might not put together, but producer Dan Goldberg says they really worked well as a team. Vaughn plays the cocky friend, Farrell is the naive buddy with a party-animal dark side and Wilson's personality falls somewhere between them and holds the friendship together.

In the movie, Mitch (Wilson) is a conservative real estate lawyer who is about to propose to his girlfriend. But one day he finds his girlfriend has been unfaithful to him. He moves out and buys a house close to a college campus.

His two best friends, Beanie (Vaughn) and Frank (Farrell), encourage Mitch to start a fraternity with pledges that don't fit the traditional mold. Soon the party begins and things fall apart.

Some Facts About Vince Vaughn

* Vincent Anthony Vaughn was born in Minneapolis, March 28, 1970.
* Vaughn attended Lake Forest High School in Lake Forest, Ill.
* Vaughn says he decided to pursue acting at age 17 after a car accident derailed any hopes of an athletic career
* In 1988, Vaughn appeared in a television commercial for Chevrolet's "Heartbeat of America" campaign
* In 1989, Vaughn made his primetime television acting debut in the third-season premiere of ABC's "China Beach."
* In 1993, Vaughn made his film debut, "Rudy"
* In 1996, Vaughn made his breakthrough screen role as Trent in "Swingers."
* In 1997, Vaughn was casted in director Steven Spielberg's "The Lost World: Jurassic Park"
* In 1998, Vaughn starred opposite Anne Heche and Joaquin Phoenix in the drama "Return to Paradise"; he re-teamed with Phoenix in "Clay Pigeons"; He inherited the role of Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant's remake of "Psycho."
* In 2001, Vaughn played a low-level mobsters in "Made"; He played a mysterious stepfather who may or may not be involved in a murder in "Domestic Disturbance"; coincidentally during filming, Vaughn was embroiled in a bar fight that led to his arrest
* Vaughn's upcoming film will be "The Sky is Green," with Steve Buscemi

❾ MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Article found here

Vince 'Mansteak' Vaughn - el Hombre Talentoso Hermoso

an emily blunt interview
Article found here

Those who read Blunt Review.com, regularly, know Vince Vaughn is at the tippity top of the coveted Emily Blunt 'Smitten With' List. That's because Vincent Vaughn's a rare kind of Joe. A one in a trillion type; tall, handsome, beautiful smile with gorgeous brown eyes that would melt half the Arctic should he glance its way. Evil sexy.

M'hum, Vince brings out that shallow desperately hidden unlady like side in all of us man-lovin' breeds and gives you the urge to forget all your years of etiquette schooling and debutante training and leap on him like a rabid Rhesus monkey and mock breed pretending we're there to save the race.

But here's the real attractive thing about this 'man' (and I use that term in its literal encyclopedia version of the definition), not only is he packaged like a fresh loaf of pumpernickel rye straight from the oven and ready to be spread with full fat butter and slowly devoured’Ķhe's quite articulate, intelligent, charming, witty and he's also a talented actor! He is sweet as the maple syrup tapped at first thaw!

Vince has avoided getting type cast (okay - almost in Domestic Disturbance - forgive) and always seems to be playing it from the heart. You're watching roles he chooses 'cause he wants to, not because it's a huge Hollywood pay check. Did I mention class in that list of multiple...’Ķ.attractions?

Blunt Warning: Those with a low tolerance to smittenitous are advised to read on with caution. Vaughn is considered pure man- heroin. Blunt Review acknowledges no claims of fainting, swooning or general brouhaha at the man's comments and or overwhelming charms.

EMILY: Thanks for chatting Vince.

VINCE: Not at all! I enjoy the blunt reviews!

EMILY: Well you should! [laughter] It's basically the how great is Vince Vaughn site. You know you're a favorite actor....
.
VINCE: [laughter and giggles]

EMILY: How did you get started in acting?

VINCE: Well, when I was younger I did plays. Both my parents worked so I sort of’Ķ. in the summer, one of the activities I would do was go do local community theater. It was sort of all children productions under thirteen doing musicals. That sort of thing. I really enjoyed it. I did some plays and stuff in junior high school and hosted a MTV show. Then in high school I stopped doing plays and played sports and that sort of thing.

Then my junior year I went out for a musical chorus line and I got one of the leads in it. I just sort of stayed with it from there. One of my close friends was going down to the city of Chicago, he had an audition for something. I wanted to tag along to see what it was about. My parents were always insistent that I not to go do anything professional till I turned 18. None from my family were entertainers or actors any thing of the such. I went down and the casting director asked me to read for the role.

I ended up getting the part. It was for an industrial film. From that I got an agent and started going out for local things in Chicago and got a national Chevy commercial and Indiana farm insurance commercial’Ķ

Really the greatest thing about Chicago is that there's not a large market there’Ķit's not as if like you're going to do training or plays and be picked up to be in a sitcom or a film. I really took advantage of the training there.

I trained with Del Close who started Second City but now was doing a different type of herald called the Improv Olympic.

And I studied with a guy named David Darlow who was a Shakespeare acting coach. I got the whole summer workshop thing with him where we studied everything from Shakespeare to Suzuki type of walk and breath, dance, voice and just really an extensive great class.

When high school ended I moved out shortly after to Los Angeles were I was lucky and got an agent right away. Just sort of off of being naˆØve and having a SAG card and having a national Chevy commercial was kind of a big deal in a smaller market. I spent a lot of years missing more than hitting. Doing after school specials or guest starring on '21 Jump Street' doing small things here and there.

Then I got a small role in a film called 'Rudy'’Ķmost of it got out. That's when I befriended Jon Favreau. He moved from Chicago to LA to pursue acting. We started up a fast friendship and eventually he wrote a screenplay called 'Swingers.' At which point Favreau really insisted on having the people he wrote it for play the part. And we made the movie for nothing sort of "off the radar" which allowed us to be true to the story we were telling. Doug Liman, who directed the movie, had the money to make it and that was sort of Favreau agreement with him. We were very fortunate that the movie was well received and Miramax picked it up. It became sort of a cult hit. From there on out I had a much greater opportunity of doing films and picking roles.

EMILY: You mentioned being in musicals’Ķdo you sing? [visions of V.V. in his Calvin Klein boxers with a ukulele serenading me whilst I soak in a bubble bath popped instantly and vividly into my mind’Ķfocus’Ķ.focus]?

VINCE: I was awful [laughter] I was a Yule Brenner of the childhood actors’ĶI would sort of talk my way through the roles.

EMILY: Where did you grow up?

VINCE: I grew up in Lake Forest Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago [no wonder he's so nice they breed 'em good up there.]

EMILY: What's been your most trying or difficult role to date?

VINCE: I think they all have been in some ways. Probably the oddest was remaking 'Psycho.' Norman Bates. This sounds a bit, this is probably a poor reference, but it's so a bit like Vietnam; I wasn't really sure of what my agenda was. I didn't know why I was there. We were half way doing a shot by shot remake’Ķsome of the other characters had modernized interpretations. You know Viggo [Mortensen] was a kind of a cowboy, Julianne Moore was girl all dressed in all black. I was kind of was half confused.

We would watch scenes and say 'okay well he did this and this so lets do this.' But I sort of had my own interpretation of it and there was no real clear agenda. And from how I normally approach a role. Build your imagination based strictly on your life experiences and have a short hand with the director and sort of let things fly. It was probably though one of my most rewarding most enlightening experiences.

I learned a lot from it. I'm thankful for going through the experience. Gus [Van Zant] is a highly intelligent guy and the actors I worked with were extremely talented. But again that was probably the strangest. I wouldn't say daunting or intimidating I would just say my process was the most confused during that film.

EMILY: How do you usually prepare for a role?

VINCE: I usually read it aloud alot. Draw on things that I've actually seen; how things sort of go down or happen. Base it’ĶI sort of come up with the psychology or mind set for the person. I don't think I'm much different from a lot of actors. And then try to build your circumstances so when you're thrown into a particular scene or an environment you sort of know what's at stake for yourself; what you want to gain and what your comfortable leaving. I think one of the biggest things that a lot of actors, some actors, not necessarily a lot of actors do do is you always try to think of where you are prior to that scene. Where your character was right be fore that scene began, where your character's headed to when that scene over. There's somewhere your suppose to be afterwards’Ķthere' some where your heading. So you try to make as life like as possible.

EMILY: You ever take any of these roles home? [Thought not spoken: or the outfits....like say a cowboy hat????]

VINCE: I think it affects you to a large degree. I'm a guy who sort of states and says you sort of do your work and that's it. I like to kid around and be myself outside. I'm not in character 24 hours! I find for me it's the same with writing. If I sit at something and try and solve the puzzle for too long I can end up very disappointed. I find when I kind of go away or play a video game, sit outside and read a book or go down and get something to eat that's when ideas will come to me. I'm similar on the set. I prepare that night, or prepare that day in my trailer then I sort of try and forget it and not make it my focus so I'm not over burnt out on it and when I approach the scene I have done my homework and done my research I am able to jump into it real quick.

EMILY: You want to get into this whole super hero thing going on right now? Play a comic book villain or good guy? [Thought not spoken: of course one with tight tights and a costume that shows protruding biceps was the fantasy here’Ķ]

VINCE: I was never an exceptional super hero fan like most kids were. I mean I did enjoy it to some degree as a child. I think I enjoyed the Marvel comics more so only because they were more human and fallible. It interesting I ran into Tobey Maguire out at a place last night who I think is a really nice kid and who I also think is a kid who's been a talented actor for a long time. I thought that not only was his movie a big successful movie but I think he did a nice job in the movie. I know Favreau's doing 'Daredevil' right now. With Sam [Raimi} and I think its cool.

I think it's really no different than the fashion industry’Ķa trend will become popular’Ķ. people sort of capitalizing. But once again I think its relying on the individual piece. Is the piece affective? Is the story affective? You know 'Unforgiven's' a great western and that movie was followed by a slew of poor westerns. There's defiantly a graph you can look at where this is concerned. For me it would be a case-by-case basis. If something came around that really struck me. But that would definitely NOT be in one of me top genres as far as something I want to investigate.

EMILY: You have any other nickname besides Blunt Review's coveted studmuffin, mansteak or even a big edible man kebab sandwich of yum?

VINCE: [laughter - similar to Lester Long's leaks out] Well growing up my dad was really called V. So people called me 'V' or 'Double V' a lot.

EMILY: Or Woo if you will

VINCE: [laughter] Yeah, Woo. People call me’Ķ.some friends called me 'Showtime. That's really it.

EMILY: Any of the roles so far close to the real Vince?

VINCE: I think there's a side of me in all of them. That's the great thing about acting. You bring these different sides of yourself out depending on the character. I think we all sort of find a particular way of acting in real life that we feel most comfortable or suited in. I think you can even find it in yourself that in different groups or dynamics you'll sort of carry yourself or act differently, where you feel safest or most in control. But there's usually one predominant way that you sort of interact that feels most comfortable to yourself. So I think all of them have sides, certainly, strands of sides of myself.

EMILY: The rumor mill spit out a yarn about a SWINGERS 2’Ķis it true?

VINCE: (audio) There was a script of 'Swingers 2' that was written prior to 'Swingers' being shot’Ķbut I just don't think it'll ever be shot. Which is really a shame because it really quite a terrific script in itself. I think people would enjoy it quite a bit! But I think that 'Swingers' was sort of lightening in a bottle. Something that was so simple and such a simple true story that really tried so hard to be anything accept an over commitment to the absurd. Which it was. Something we could all relate to; getting past one relationship and feeling vulnerable and how to enter a new one’Ķso that being said I think you'll probably never see a 'Swingers 2'’Ķ.but you never can say never. Jon and I have other projects that we're fascinated by and again it's like every time. 'Swingers' was very hard to get made because there was no true story to it. 'Made' was very difficult to get made.

This last script that he's written, which was actually greenlit when 'Swingers' done by Miramax but me and Jon decided to take a break from each other at that time, I think might be his best of all of them.

We always have constant other ideas going around. But they're just more difficult movies to find financing for or to do well. Surprisingly, I guess. Because really 'Made' and 'Swingers' both did greater than their box-office cost’Ķthere's such demand for them in video and dvd and stuff.

And actually on 'Made', we own quite a percentage, although we haven't seen any money and we did it virtually for free, it becomes sort of Hollywood accounting. Where their loans are so great it jives in a way that a film still hasn't made money. 'Swingers', supposedly, hasn't made money. So those movies are done really just from a childlike place of stories that we really love and we want to be a part of.

EMILY: Any other gigs with Favreau coming up?

VINCE: (audio) Well, me and Favreau have a western we've pretty well talked about that we've been trying to get made for a time that I think is quite interesting, but we're having a hard time as always trying to get that set up. You know westerns are an odd animal to begin with and when your lead character is a Hassidic Jew who's a gunfighter, which is what Favreau plays and my character's a hustler and not a gunfighter. It's just so non traditional, it becomes a very difficult thing as they run numbers and forward numbers; you know what's a safe bet or what's not a safe bet. And me and Jon have always had a very even open head about that. We've never been very angry or disappointed at the "powers that be" in fact we feel very flattered and fortunate that to get a chance to make a living doing something that we love’Ķbut it does become a bit daunting as you get excited and there's something that you want to dive into and it's unable to get bridged at this point.

EMILY: Can we, and by we I mean me, look forward to any more boudoir scenes like the ones between you and Georgina Cates in 'Clay Pigeons' or with Julia Ormand in 'Prime Gig'? [said as I drifted into a happy place in my memory....]

VINCE: Yeah, definitely! You know I like that kind of thing, especially when there's real chemistry and especially when there's something else going' on that within the scene. You know with Georgina and the 'Clay Pigeons' scene that was really quite interesting because I found it to be so sensual and some sort of a peacefulness and a connection’Ķbut there was such a horrible secret, you know obviously, something going on. With Les it was going on.

I'd love to do a romantic comedy and connect in the way that I know. Which is more with sense of humor and the connection that comes out of that way. But, I tell you, and I'm not just crying’Äî'oh these horrible things'’Äî but these romantic comedies and these love stories’ĶI think a lot of them are people who haven't been in love or really understand love. It's either so torturous and indulgently tragic and 'boy no one else has experienced anything as painful as this!' When in fact that we all have ’ĶI think. And maybe not specifically or its sort of also so kind of economic and these people are all so great they have no choice but to fall together. I would like to see something more in the way that 'Swingers' was. You know kind of a more human story. A kind of fallible’Äî bumbling’Äî in spite-of-yourself you were able to be see and be seen somebody story. [ wrap 'im up I'll take 'im]

EMILY: You're apparently into old school real country music like Jimmy Vaughn, Dwight Yoakum, is this true? [Thought but not spoken: wanna go to Buck Owen's Birthday Bash at The Continental so I can dress you in old-fashioned western wear?]

VINCE: Yeah, I just hosted a thing for Memorial Day for Willie [Nelson] at the Grand Old Opry. I was flattered that he called and asked me to do that. I guess it's the first music I heard. My dad was a big fan of it. He grew up on a farm in Ohio. He was the first one to put himself through college and he was the first one to leave the farm. I'm entirely a suburban kid’Ķ. I only visit the farm occasionally at which point I was no help to anybody’Ķ

[Oh-no! Visions are entering my girly-girl head’ĶVin in manly overall's layin' in the hay’Ķfocus’Ķ.focus’Ķ.]

I was completely out of my element. I think like most kids I think I was like 'I love this music' and as you get older you're like ' Oh, really I hated this music' then you get older and there's just great stories in this music.

So for me, really, Waylon Jennings, and Willie and Merle Haggard and Buck Owen's and just sort of what they were doing musically at that time’Ķthe lyrics they have in those songs, the ability to connect emotionally with those songs. I always found a great value in them. Lately I've listened to it, yeah. When Jon wrote 'Swingers' I was listening to a lot of Dean Martin and Sinatra and those songs. That's mostly of the types of music I listened to.

EMILY: You seem to volley between big studio flicks - like JURASSIC PARK or PSYCHO or THE CELL and smaller quirky films like PRIME GIG or CLAY PIGEONS or SOUTH OF HEAVEN WEST OF HELL is that a career 'exercise" choice?

VINCE: I have no game plan. It goes case by case. 'Lost World' was sort of a thing for me where Steven Spielberg was a guy from a very child like place as a kid seeing 'ET' and these movies that he did’Ķeven Jaws’ĶIt was a chance to work with him in a format that I think he's best at. Which was the 'lost worlds' you know? I thought it would be kind of like a kid to do that. 'The Cell' was really because of the director, Tar Singh. I couldn't believe they were allowing him to visually tell the story the way he was. Visually I thought it was quite entertaining. I thought the movie even works better as sort of a picture book than it does as a linear logical story. That is what was interesting.

It's really a case by case thing. You just have to find something going into that you're going to learn from or be excited by or be a part of that's just always been my approach for better or worse. I've always heard "sayers" or my own representation even has always been frustrated with me that I don't go after movies that have higher built in concepts or big leads in’Ķ

I don't really have any reluctancy with doing that as far as being nervous of having a career that way’Ķit's just I don't know how good I'd be at it because I'm not interested in. And as you know, or anyone knows, if you're going to take on a job or do something you really have to have an interest in it because without that it's really going to be hard to do your best work or to hold your concentration in it.

EMILY: Yeah, and it would be obvious.

VINCE: I agree with you.

EMILY: Who's an acting influence for you?

VINCE: (audio) Acting influences’Ķ. I think I am in popular company. Meaning nothing all that strange or different. Really, the first thing I ever saw was westerns. I think 'Shane' might have been a first film’Ķ'One Eyed Jack' the first film Brando directed’Ķ.'The Wild Bunch'. Those were really my introduction to movies because my dad loved them so much. I really love Gene Wilder’ĶHe's great to watch he's one of my favorites and I like Marlon Brando of course and Spencer Tracy of course. And I love Meryl Streep. Watching Gilda Radner just breaks my heart. And I love Tatum O'Neal, especially in her younger roles’Ķ'Paper Moon' or 'Bad News Bears' even that movie she did 'Little Darlings' with Kristy McNichol. I love actresses quite a bit. Because I find there's such an inner monologue such a beauty to them and a vulnerability to them and such contradictions of strength and frailty.

EMILY: Gilda is my biggest influence. Have you seen the 'Divine Secrets Of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood' yet?

VINCE: I haven't seen it yet.

EMILY: It's a great film for women. The roles are strong and real.

VINCE: I read the book. I liked the book quite much. That always makes me a little bit nervous seeing the film, because the book always lives so much higher in your imagination, you know. [Mom....he reads and he has a JOB. Can I keep him...huh? huh?]

EMILY: Yeah, you cast it as you wish’Ķ

VINCE: Exactly.

EMILY: Do you have a favorite film you could watch over and over?

VINCE: I have so many films that I watch over and over! Lately I've been watching and I'm really not a foreign film guy, I've been watching 'El Apartment'’Ķ'The Apartment.' Have you seen it?

EMILY: No, I haven't.

VINCE: It's just great! Boy it takes such twists and turns’Ķ. you think it's going to be about cheating, then you think its about espionage, then you think it's a love story, then it's a missing person movie! I love it when they throw it out of right field. Time and time again and you just don't know where it's going’Ķand the plots really relying on the next course of action making sense but being something that you entirely don't expect. You can watch it a whole bunch of times and just go back and go 'wow' and catch something else. I've just really been enjoying watching that film lately.

Also the movie 'Two-Lane Blacktop.' I've been watching lately. Monte Hellman? It's a great movie. Its got an interesting cast in it. It's a real minimalist movie and it's its interesting to watch. An interesting way of story telling I think.

[There you go folks! The first eva V.V. review ’Ķ.of course he's welcome to grab them at Blockbuster and come over for a double feature while I whip up movie snacks in my little French maid outfit purchased for just such an occasion’Ķmeow]

EMILY: Well, thanks Vince it's been a pleasure, I can't wait for 'Old School' and feel better.

VINCE: That's sweet! Thank you too. I'm glad you're out there!

END

Bluntly speaking? Lust aside, Vince is an underrated talent who always delivers in whatever he's mixed into and he just gets better and better with each manly helping. I adore this guy on many levels.

an emily blunt interview
Article found here

BBC Interview - Vince Vaughn - MADE

Interviewed by Stephen Applebaum
Article found here

There was quite a gap between "Swingers" and "Made". Did you and Jon try to do anything sooner?

Favs wrote this comedy-western about a Hassidic gunfighter in the Old West, but it's sort of an odd animal and we couldn't get the money. "Made" ultimately came out of him deciding to write something contemporary and inexpensive, just so that we could get something done.

How does your character in "Made", Ricky, compare to Trent in "Swingers"?

Trent was a little wild and said things that were a bit off-the-cuff, but people responded to him positively. Ricky thinks he is very charming and cool but really he is like the most annoying person in the world and you just want him to shut up. It was fun to have a crack at playing him like that, because in most films you wouldn't get a chance to do it that way.

Is this a reflection of your and Jon's taste in humour?

Yeah, we like comedy that makes you feel really uncomfortable. I like things when they're sick but also funny and you feel bad for laughing, like when Jon leaves all those telephone messages in "Swingers" or when Ricky throws vodka at Sam Rockwell's bellhop in "Made".

Finally, Jon and "Swingers" director Doug Liman argued over who had done what on that film. Did you both feel you had a point to prove with "Made"?

Not really. The bad blood that happened between Jon and Doug was similar to the bad blood that happened between Jon and me; we just weren't as public about it as Doug was. When the movie started to do well, it was very easy for a lower side of everyone's psyche to come out and for everyone to feel:㋒"I got to take my claim for what I did in this movie." Unfortunately, we all fell prey to that to some degree.

Interviewed by Stephen Applebaum
Article found here

KING OF THE HILLS

Despite his cocktail-sipping playboy image, Vince Vaughn is more Hank Hill than swinging-lover Sinatra freak. He admires Ronald Reagan, loves country music, drinks Pabst and was involved in a well-publicized bar brawl. No wonder Hollywood doesn't know what to make of him

TEXT WILLIAM SHAW

PHOTOGRAPHY ROBERT MAXWELL

THE FIGHTING broke out sometime after two in the morning on Friday, April 13.

It was a downtown bar called the Firebelly Lounge, near the Cape Fear River waterfront. As the evening had worn on, several locals had recognized the big-shot movie stars who were in that April night. Vince Vaughn and Steve Buscemi were having a drink with screenwriter Scott Rosenberg. The two actors had just started shooting Domestic Disturbance with John Travolta right there in Wilmington, North Carolina — "Home of Dawson's Creek."

Mix celebrities and drunks and you get a volatile cocktail. What's clear is that some kind of argument broke out and some 21-year-old called Timothy Fogerty allegedly pulled a knife on the Hollywood contingent. Next thing, Reservoir Dogs star Steve Buscemi had been stabbed three times, in his head, throat and arm. But it wasn't over yet. The scuffling continued outside the club; Wilmington police ended up pepper-spraying a few of the brawlers. By the end of the night, Vaughn and Rosenberg had been charged with misdemeanor assault.

Over the next few days, locals would tell the papers that the bad feelings had erupted after Vaughn started chatting up someone else's girlfriend. Sound plausible? After all, in the 1996 movie Swingers that's exactly the part he played — a bighead barfly who would make a move on any pretty girl.

"I can't talk about this at all. There's a court case," Vaughn says, sitting in a Los Angeles restaurant two months after the fight. "I don't blame you for asking. Believe me, if there wasn't a court case pending, I would be happy to discuss it" Vince Vaughn is a straightforward kind of guy who likes to give a straightforward kind of answer This time he says, for about the tenth time, "There's really nothing I can say. The good news is that everyone is alright. Steve's OK. Everyone's fine" He takes a pull at yet another Winston cigarette and says, "By no means was it something that any of the three of us were looking to happen. None of us pulled a knife that night"

I ask him what it was like, reading the press accounts of what he supposedly did that night. "Whatever. Whatever," answers Vaughn guardedly. "I know my reality there. You just have to look at who's talking."

THE TROUBLE WITH being a film actor is that everyone thinks they know who you are. In his life on screen, Vince Vaughn has played both ends of the spectrum. He does the swarthy jut-jawed hero (as in Steven Spielberg's Lost World or last year's sci-fi thriller The Cell). But he's equally happy in the role of dirtbag psychopath — as Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho; or as Lester the Molester in the thriller Clay Pigeons.

But the role which defined Vince Vaughn once and forever — and which still threatens to overshadow his other achievements — was his breakthrough in Swingers. Vaughn became the ultimate guy's guy — Trent Walker, the cool, club-hopping, cocktail-swilling dude, always on the lookout for "beautiful babies," looking to make them swoon with his sub-Sinatra patter: "You're so money, baby," he would crow with cocky swagger.

Vaughn seemed to come out of nowhere. An unknown actor from the well-heeled Chicago district of Lake Forest — where Robert Redford's suburban movie Ordinary People had been filmed — who had spent seven years disappointing his agents, failing to get a toehold in Hollywood, suddenly crops up in the ultimate Hollywood zeitgeist movie with his best buddy, screenwriter Jon Favreau.

And because Vaughn created the role of Trent, who was also a struggling actor, everyone believes that Vince Vaughn pretty much is Trent Walker. The real Vince Vaughn, however, demolishes an eggwich and fries, covered in an ocean of ketchup at Home, a Los Feliz diner on Hillhurst. He downs cup after cup of coffee, and his many cigarettes leave the first finger of his right hand stained yellow.

As the waitress clears the plates he asks, "How are you?" as if welcoming her to his restaurant.

He's a regular here. This is his neighborhood — the bohemian end of Hollywood where he's lived for over ten years now, and the one he and Favreau satirized so deliciously in Swingers. The waitress frowns. "I'm tired," she complains.

"You can't soar with the eagles if you're up all night with the owls," Vaughn scolds her.

"I wasn't up all night," she explains.

"Look," he says. "You're an achiever. I want you to be an achiever."

From the mouth of Trent from Swingers, that would be a smooth schmooze. But that's where Vince is different. He really kind of means it.

VAUGHN WAS BITTEN by the acting bug as a teenager, taking roles in any local version of The King and I that would let him on stage. His roots are in conservative, hard-working middle America, and he's proud of that. He'll tell you how his grandfather worked the family farm in Brewster, Ohio, earning extra cash on the railroad. Or that his dad, Vernon Vaughn, put himself through college and graduated before spending two years in the navy. (The Vaughn family liked the V thing: His older sisters are Valerie and Victoria, and the family dogs were Viking, Vera and Vladimir).

His family were right-of-center with a strong work ethic and a taste for Elvis and country music, all values Vince pretty much goes along with. After high school, he hung out with actor friends, won a part in a commercial promotional movie, became part of the Chicago improv group ImprovOlympics, and landed a part in a 30-second Super Bowl ad for Chevrolet. With the ad under his belt he banked a fat fee and headed for L.A., convinced his career was made.

It wasn't. He spent the first half of the '90s lining up for auditions. These were the Reservoir Dogs years, when every young actor yearned to play some cool sociopath in Quentin Tarantino's next movie.

To pass the time, Vaughn worked up an improv shtick satirizing the era's slacker actors. That was the basis of Swingers' Trent Walker, and ultimately the basis for Swingers itself — Vaughn's way of pouring gentle scorn on Hollywood's too-cool-to-care chic.

"The whole thing in Hollywood," explains Vaughn, "is it's very uncool to show any effort and look like you care about whether you make it or not. 'Whatever, man. I don't give a shit'. I don't know if I'm going to the audition or not'."

Another waiter fills his coffee. "When we made Swingers, we were the opposite of cool. We were a small group of geeks, going to all these places like the Dresden and the Derby and the Three of Clubs. The clubs were open and they'd just let us shoot. All the other kids at the club were just looking at us holding the lights and filming, and they were going, 'Pffffff!' We were the kids running around the football field for practice and they were like the kids smoking and going, 'What's with them?'"

Ironically, because of Swingers, the self-styled geek was hailed as the epitome of Hollywood's new cool when the movie opened to critical raves. "How it's perceived is so different from how we intended it," insists Vaughn. "That movie is about a group of losers who play video games and who are so focused on how to get the ladies that they actually don't do anything." Vaughn can't be around people like that. People who just want to party all the time make him uncomfortable. "I can't hate them for that; I used to drink and party, too. But because I would work so hard it was nice to have a release."

After Swingers, Spielberg wanted Vaughn. Agencies that had kept him holding the phone were suddenly laying out the red carpet. (Unable to cope with the absurdity of the turnaround, Vaughn did what actors do: He pretended to be someone else. At one high-profile agency get-together he spent the entire meeting pretending to himself he was his favorite Supercross biker Jeremy McGrath, answering all questions in McGrath's super-confident persona). The downside is that since Swingers, no film has showcased his talent quite so well. In Return to Paradise and Clay Pigeons he delivered great performances, but the movies themselves never quite hit the mark.

Then there was Norman Bates. Again, Vaughn made a perfect deviant. But that wasn't enough for the critics, who bristled at Van Sant's Hitchcock remake. Vaughn was taken aback when critics dismissed the scene where he masturbates while peeping at Anne Heche disrobing as "gratuitous." He suggested that scene. He can offer a long psychological explanation for what was going on in the murderer's mind during that scene. He gives these things a lot of thought. He even considered the precise manner in which Bates would jerk himself off: "Not in a controlled, soothing, healing way — but in a desperate let's-get-this-over-with way!" He demonstrates over brunch, Meg Ryan-style, jerking his wrist up and down; a guy at the next table raises a curious eyebrow.

IN SOME WAYS, Vaughn, now 31, is as much a misfit in Hollywood as a success as he was as a failure. You get the idea that, in a quiet way, he's quite proud of not really fitting in. In his well-spoken, polite manner, he holds on to conservative views which a liberal industry considers deeply unfashionable. "Do I argue about politics? Constantly. My politics are the opposite to everyone else's in this town. I've had people say, I understand you like Ronald Reagan'," which he does, "and it's obvious they hate my ever-loving guts. They think I'm the Antichrist." He shrugs. "What do you do?"

While Hollywood was grooving to Jane's Addiction and Red Hot Chili Peppers, he rediscovered country music. He loves George Jones, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, Hank Williams and — best out of all the new generation — Dwight Yoakam. He and Dwight are friends. This spring, Vaughn took part in the filming of South of Heaven, West of Hell, Yoakam's own strange, violent, self-financed, self-directed movie.

He first met Yoakam backstage at a Carl Perkins tribute show. Somebody handed Dwight a guitar and he started playing, and Vaughn started singing along to half the songs Yoakam had ever recorded, to which he knows all the words.

He enjoys the company of country musicians. Yoakam introduced him to the legendary Buck Owens; he's befriended Waylon Jennings' son, Shooter, who plays in the band Stargunn, and through him has spent time hanging with Waylon, too.

For a movie star who grew up in an upscale suburb, Vaughn has blue-collar tastes. He doesn't enjoy high-end Hollywood nightclubs, he prefers a bar with a good jukebox. Contrary to the Swingers image, he doesn't even like cocktails. Favreau says that if you want to buy him a drink, make it a Jack and Coke or a Bud. "And I like Pabst Blue Ribbon" he says.

"But you know, the thing with the drinking. It's part of an image that's perpetuated and stuff. I'm a gregarious guy. I like to have a drink, but I'm not a guy who wakes up and drinks during the day. With the Swingers thing — there is a truth in it, and the truth is I like going out." Which isn't so easy to do these days, as the Wilmington incident taught him.

"I don't like having security guards," he says. "I like having people come up to me. When you go out to a place where there's alcohol involved, some people are going to have a problem. They're drunk, and they let you represent whatever's bothering them. You have to find a way to navigate those waters." He's been bitten once. It's made him warier. "But I'm not going to stop going out," he says, matter-of-factly.

I HAVE A THEORY: All actors are good liars. Is Vaughn? He shakes his head emphatically. "No."

But then he starts to elaborate. "I have lied, sure, but then I always have to fuckin' tell them I've lied. I can't do it. If I cheated on a girl in a relationship, I'd have to tell her."

As a boy he spent a lot of time on his own. His sisters were much older than him. Sometimes he'd be in his own world, wandering in the woods and cornfields behind his house in Buffalo Grove. The woods and fields are gone now — they've been obliterated by housing — but sometimes, when he meditates, he goes back there in his mind. It's the place where he was happiest.

But one day, out throwing rocks or climbing trees, he came home late. His mother was angry, so he lied: "A guy tried to pick me up in a car." Agitated, his mother took him to the police station, where he had to make out a report and flick through police drawings to construct a likeness of the imaginary pedophile. But the lie tormented him. He couldn't go through with it. Next morning, he owned up to his mom, George Washington-style, and had to confess to the police.

My theory stands. It's not that Vaughn can't lie — what bugs him is that he can lie too well.

THE ACTOR THAT Swingers made famous is finally revisiting the movie that made his name. Five years on, he and Favreau have collaborated on a new movie,

Made. For a long time, the last thing they ever wanted to do was work together again.

After Swingers, Miramax snapped them up to develop a movie about a Hasidic gunfighter, The Marshall Revelation. But the friends' relationship couldn't stand the sudden pressure of success.

"Being honest, I fell short," he says. "I think we all did." The pair started to argue. Looking back, Vince says they acted like rock stars in some VH1 Behind the Music rockumentary. Vaughn resented the fact that Favreau had taken the credit for writing the movie, when some of it was based on the improv he'd done. Favreau resented the fact that Vaughn has apparently hogged all the limelight from Swingers.

One night Vaughn called up Favreau in the small hours, and suddenly all the bitterness boiled over. For an hour and a half they let it all pour out. After that, neither talked to the other much for two years.

It wasn't until around the time when he was working on Psycho that they started to work together again. Another studio had asked Vaughn to work on a space comedy. Vaughn looked at the script and found the jokes too broad for his style. He asked the studio, "Can I have my friend Favs come to rewrite this?"

Slowly, they started rebuilding their friendship. That script went nowhere. By the time they'd finished,

it was a story about Guam's space program — Guam Goes to the Moon. The studio, understandably, balked. Frustrated, Favreau turned around and quickly wrote them a brand new script, calling it Made as an act of faith. "Why? Because he wanted the movie made," smiles Vaughn.

Artisan coughed up five million: a modest budget, but enough to allow them to finally make a movie together again. They still argue all the time, of course. "Me and Favs can really, uh, go at it," Vaughn snickers. (He has a great snicker. He uses it to good effect in all his bad-guy roles.)

Vaughn is intensely proud of his new effort. A mob story set in New York, it's a far cry from Swingers. This time around, Vaughn and Favreau play two below-par West Coast boxers fixated on joining the Mafia back east. But like their overly cool characters in Swingers, they share what Vaughn calls "an overcommitment to the ridiculous," an obsession with doing things right. The comedy comes from two Angelenos, both filled with Hollywood fantasies about what the mob should be like, winding up in the real world of New York violence. They expect their mob connection to be an Italian guy out of some Cassavetes movie; it turns out to be Sean "P. Diddy" Combs. The world they stumble into isn't glamorous, it's just violent and unpredictable.

Looking up from his coffee, Vaughn greets a production assistant who worked on The Cell who is sitting at the next table. They chat. He's charming and polite to her "He's so nice," she says.

I CALL UP VAUGHN a couple of days later. Out of the blue he suddenly tells me what he did the previous weekend. There was a high school get-together in Marin County, so he drove up with some friends. It was great when he first got there. Old friends like the writer Dave Eggers were there. Vince says Eggers hasn't changed a bit since he became famous. "He's real fun. Real, real fun." But, after a while, he felt like he was the only person there who wasn't married or in a long-term relationship. He has girlfriends. He was linked with Joey Lauren Adams. The night before we met in Los Feliz a girl stayed over in his apartment. "It's kind of a new thing," he admits. But he says there's "no one significant" in his life right now.

Up there in Marin County, he says, he suddenly felt awkward, the only single guy, surrounded by all these couples.

I'm wondering why he's telling me this anecdote. I get the sense that really it's about the fact that there's something about Vaughn that almost enjoys the fact that he doesn't quite fit.

So? I ask. What did you do?

"So I flew home," he says, laughing. ■

Vince Vaughn: Swinging Into a New Role

BY TAMARA WIEDER
Article found here

THERE WAS A period, back in 1996, when you couldn’Äôt walk through a trendy bar without hearing guys in spectator shoes calling each other "money" and musing about all the "beautiful babies" lining up for drinks. When the lindy hop was no longer a dance well past its prime. When twentysomethings began ordering martinis instead of Miller Lite.

You can thank ’Äî or blame ’Äî Vince Vaughn and his breakthrough film Swingers for helping launch the retro-swing movement. Vaughn co-starred in the film with his friend Jon Favreau; the pair reunited in Made earlier this year. And though he’Äôs also appeared in movies including The Lost World: Jurassic Park, The Cell, Clay Pigeons, and 1998’Äôs remake of the classic Psycho, Swingers is still the film for which Vaughn is best known.

But in recent months, Vaughn’Äôs also been known as the actor who got into a bar brawl in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he was filming his latest movie, Domestic Disturbance. (The film, in which he stars alongside John Travolta, opens November 2.) Vaughn, 31, and screenwriter Scott Rosenberg were arrested in the melee, and actor Steve Buscemi was stabbed. Vaughn and Rosenberg were subsequently banned for life from all bars in downtown Wilmington. The man with whom they fought will spend 180 days in jail for his part in the incident.

Now Vaughn is glad to be talking about his acting career rather than his police record. But don’Äôt expect warm-and-fuzzy from the actor anytime soon: in Domestic Disturbance, he plays a man whose stepson accuses him of murder.

Q: Do you credit Swingers with changing the course of your career?

A: Oh, without a doubt. I mean, Swingers came out of a frustration of not really having a traditional way in, and so it gave us the freedom that we thought, You know, this movie’Äôs never going to be seen, so we’Äôre going to tell the story exactly how we want to tell it. And then from that to gain opportunity to be an actor in other stuff is just sort of, like, the last thing I expected. So it was sort of an overwhelming sensation of Wow, now I can be in these movies? That’Äôs weird.

Q: When’Äôs the last time you called somebody "money"?

A: Oh, man. I try to avoid it at every turn, but sometimes you still get it. But it’Äôs flattering that it became such a saying, you know? The same with the music that took off; Big Bad Voodoo Daddy were friends of ours, they were a local band, and they ended up playing the Super Bowl. The whole thing was just such an unbelievable result. It was strange.

Q: What attracted you to Domestic Disturbance and to the role of Rick Barnes?

A: I’Äôve always been a huge fan of [John Travolta]. I love JT, I grew up on him. Also I thought the circumstance was interesting: when a parent meets somebody, there’Äôs a courtship between them and that significant other. But the child and the other person are thrown into an intimate relationship without any getting to know each other. So it’Äôs like, What are the boundaries, am I a disciplinarian? And the child thinks, Do I listen to this person, do I not? There’Äôs a rivalry with the other parent ’Äî you don’Äôt want to take their place, but at the same time you want to have a friendship. So it’Äôs complicated. And that being the backdrop for the boy-who-cried-wolf story was interesting to me. And I liked that it wasn’Äôt gratuitous where the child was concerned; it was more about the threat of something going on than continual, physical abuse. I liked that it was more about the limbo.

Q: How do you get inside the head of someone who’Äôs so bad?

A: I think you never play a bad guy like a bad guy; you play him like, in his mind, he’Äôs justified for what he’Äôs doing. Which is all the more disturbing, I think, you know? Because in their mind, they’Äôre validated.

Q: Do you feel like you have to be able to sympathize, on some level, with every character you play?

A: Not sympathize as Vince, no. I mean, as Vince I don’Äôt sympathize at all with this character’Äôs actions. But as an actor playing the character, you have to believe their code, or how they operate. And for me, whether it’Äôs a good guy or a bad guy, it’Äôs fun to play people that have extreme leaps.

Q: So this bad-guy thing ’Äî you’Äôre on sort of a roll. You’Äôve done, what, three now?

A: I’Äôve done a few. Clay Pigeons, Psycho, and this, I guess. But it’Äôs not like an intentional thing: I’Äôm going to be a bad guy, I’Äôm going to be a villain. It’Äôs just more a case-by-case thing of what comes available and what you want to get involved in.

Q: Are bad guys more fun to play?

A: I think just any character that’Äôs out of bounds as far as how most people are in life is fun to play, because you get to go to places that are kind of different than what you would in your normal life. So it’Äôs not really based on good or evil.

Q: When did you first know you’Äôd be an actor?

A: Both my parents worked, so I was involved a lot with different activities during the day over the summers, and one of them was a community theater, where you had to be 13 years or younger to be in musicals. And acting was sort of the one thing, or making jokes, that I was successful at, and I think it was really failure in a lot of other areas: I wasn’Äôt a great student, I wasn’Äôt a great athlete, and acting was sort of the place where I felt like I got a chance to participate. And then I went with a friend when I was 17 down to Chicago to watch him on an audition, and I ended up getting the part, so it just kind of happened to me. I just started getting commercials, and I said, Well, I’Äôll move to Hollywood because they make movies there. You know, very naive. Because I loved it. I would’Äôve been very happy to end up on a TV show or anything; I really just wanted to work.

Q: Tell me about Anne Heche. You’Äôve worked with her a few times, on Psycho and Return to Paradise. What do you think of all the controversy around her right now?

A: You know, that’Äôs just Anne ’Äî she’Äôs always got controversy around her. I know her as an actress, I think she’Äôs one of the best out there, she’Äôs a hell of an actor, and I liked her very much and found her to be very talented and very committed to her work. She’Äôs on a personal journey that’Äôs her journey, and makes sense to her.

Q: What are you reading right now?

A: I’Äôm not reading anything currently. I finished a book recently about prison, called God of the Rodeo. I read maybe two books a year, unfortunately. If I have time off, I can read, but when I’Äôm working I don’Äôt. I really like to read; as a kid, more so than I studied or got good grades, I would read books. In fact, I was fortunate enough that there was a class a day in school where you’Äôd go and you’Äôd just pick up a book and sit and read, and you got credit for it. Which I think is a great class; everyone should have that.

Q: Do you think scenes of the World Trade Center should be taken out of trailers, movies, TV shows? A lot of directors are removing all references to the buildings.

A: That’Äôs an individual decision. You know, someone could feel really justified and say, No, let’Äôs have it. Other people say, It’Äôs too much of a reminder for people, I don’Äôt want to have them watch a movie that’Äôs supposed to help them escape and bring that back. I can see an argument on both sides.

Q: Did you fly into Boston? What’Äôs traveling been like since September 11?

A: It takes a little longer, but people are even more patient now, I think ... given the circumstances. It’Äôs real friendly up there now, people are real nice to each other. Out of all the things that are tragic, hopefully some unity and some love comes out of it.

Q: Can you recommend any bars in Wilmington?

A: Ahh ... are you going down there?

Q: No, I’Äôm just kidding. How do you feel about all the media attention to what happened down there?

A: I’Äôm just happy that the truth came out finally, that the case was resolved. It was hard to be quiet during a time when misinformation was being said, and you’Äôre not allowed to talk because prosecutors are prosecuting someone and you don’Äôt want [the defense] to be able to build a case off of it. So the truth coming out, that the kid was drinking on prescription drugs, then the reality becomes that. There’Äôs a need, in the beginning, to spin some sort of exciting story. Unfortunately, it’Äôs part of what comes with where I’Äôm at. For me, I’Äôm just glad everyone’Äôs all right, I’Äôm glad that justice was served. I do hope that that kid ’Äî I think he made a real bad mistake, but I hope that he’Äôs able to go on and have a life after this as well. There’Äôs forgiveness here for him.

BY TAMARA WIEDER
Article found here

Movie: "Domestic Disturbance" With Vince Vaughn

Article found here

Movie: "Domestic Disturbance"
With Vince Vaughn
Actor
Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2001; 1:30 p.m. EDT

"Domestic Disturbance" stars John Travolta as a divorced father of a boy who cries wolf. Unfortunately, this wolf is at his door in the form of his new stepfather, played by Vince Vaughn. When the boy claims to have witnessed a murder, no one believes him, except his real father. "Domestic Disturbance" also stars Steve Buscemi, is directed by Harold Becker and opens nationwide Nov. 2.
Actor Vince Vaughn was online Wednesday, Oct. 24, at 1:30 p.m. EDT, to talk about his new movie and whatever else he's been up to.

Vaughn's breakthrough role was as Trent Walker in 1996's neo-lounge flick "Swingers." He recently reunited with his "Swingers" co-star Jon Favreau in "Made." He played Norman Bates in "Psycho" and was in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," "Return to Paradise" and "Clay Pidgeons."

A transcript follows.

Adelphi, Md.: What is Domestic Disturbance about?

Vince Vaughn: A boy who cries wolf and the wolf shows up. When people split up and they have a kid and one of them dates and ultimately marries someone else, the kid and the new significant other are thrown into an intimate situation without really knowing each other. A lot of times a great friendship or a great parent-child relationship develops out of the situation but in this case we examine that circumstance going very bad. Who is this new person raising my child?

Mr. Brown's Movies - MADE Junket Interview - Vince Vaughn

Article found here

MD = Michael Dequina; Q = Other press; VV = Vince Vaughn

Q: We have a message from Peter [Falk]. Peter says we should get rid of you fast.

VV: He's a smart, smart man.

[Everyone laughs]

Q: He says you've been taunting him.

VV: Everyone wants to treat him, you know what I mean, on a little [pedestal]. I gotta rough him up a little bit.

[Everyone laughs]

Q: Well, he is the king, you know.

VV: You kidding? Of course! I love him.

Q: That's so sweet.

VV: He touches my heart; I love him. I really do; I just love him.

[Everyone laughs]

[VV grabs copy of the soundtrack]

Q: That's a great soundtrack.

VV: I really like it. I think it's good for what it is. It’Äôs so hard to make these soundtracks. Like the Swingers soundtrack, how do you put a Dean Martin song on with DJ Quik? How do you have George Jones and an Average White Band? But from our generation it’Äôs like you just listen to just about whatever you like; you don’Äôt really have a category, you know what I mean? That soundtrack was such a pain in the ass, and people said, "Blah blah blah" [gags] and this thing here too, at first they were like, ’ÄúWell, you know, I don’Äôt think that an eclectic soundtrack will sell. You should really pick one thing to go for, you know?’Äù But we said, ’ÄúWe’Äôve got to start with Dean Martin because it’Äôs supposed to be a mob movie and [to] set people’Äôs expectations and then go to [the] reality of sort of what it is. So it’Äôs gotta be hip hop there in New York City...’Äù and all of that. We kind of make a soundtrack in the way of what we think makes sense for the backdrop and also kind of stuff that we like.

Q: Do you think that record producers and movie producers think that audiences are a lot stupider than they are? O Brother [Where Art Thou?] is a huge hit now; that's not exactly a soundtrack that you would think mainstream audiences would get into, and everybody seems to be into it.

VV: I don’Äôt really have a flag to wave for any type of filmmaking, but I think there’Äôs good films, and there’Äôs a lot of really bad small movies made, but you just don’Äôt see them because it’Äôs not really worth it to chase the money. So it's not just because you "do something." Sometimes people, what they want to talk about or think is important is really indulgent, and it’Äôs like you don’Äôt even give a shit about what they’Äôre thing is, you know what I mean? But yes, there’Äôs a certain feel to sort of appeal to everybody, and I think you don’Äôt appeal to anybody. I think all I struggle to do, [and] I think Jon struggles to do with Swingers and with [Made], is just be really truthful and tell the story you’Äôre telling. He didn’Äôt pick swing music because it was popular at the time. People were like, "Who’Äôs Big Bad Voodoo Daddy?" and "No one gives a shit about swing music"; "Why don’Äôt you make it a rock or a grunge scene or a hip hop scene?" But it didn’Äôt really fit these characters; they're different than that. Or "No one's gonna understand an area code joke outside of L.A."--but that would be cool because... me, I’Äôm from Illinois. I’Äôll roll with it; I can get it; whatever. It’Äôs more interesting the more specific it is. But there’Äôs just a need to try to appeal to such a wide base that really kind of, I think, cheats people out of kind of the fun of what it is to go [there]. And Fav was so smart; he put so many little clever things in, like with Swingers, with the references to other independent films, and the way these guys see themselves and how they actually are. And in this movie, Grandmaster Flash is really the guy spinning the record in the club. He doesn’Äôt have the long shot of it--it’Äôs just quick because it is what it is, and "DOUBLEDN11" on the license plate. Just these very specific [things]; he’Äôs very much a detail guy.

Q: I just read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius--Dave Eggers' book--and in it they talk about how people in Lake Forest, when they have nothing else to talk about, talk about your career. Do you know Dave Eggers?

VV: Slow town.

[Everyone laughs]

VV: Yeah, I just saw Dave Eggers, actually, two weekends ago. I went up and stayed with him for about three days. I love Dave; a lot of character. What he’Äôs been through and how he’Äôs handled it--you only know if you’Äôre put in that position in your life. He’Äôs just a hell of a guy. What’Äôs unfortunate mostly to me is here’Äôs a guy who does his thing and deals with it his way, and this is his medium as to express and deal with stuff that comes in his life--writing--and sort of embrace people and say, "Interesting, interesting," and inevitably there’Äôs gotta be a thing where people gotta say, "Well, this, this, this, this. I just think it’Äôs a shame." I think people’Äôs energy would be so much better served kinda doing their own thing versus feeling a need to comment on something that they don’Äôt even know.

Q: With this movie, did you have to approach your character a lot differently than the Swingers character?

VV: Yeah. You know, Swingers was a different responsibility in that [in] Swingers, I had to make you believe that the girls would respond to me. So I had to be--although what I was saying was outrageous, I had to be kind of charming and [have] a fun energy with it. So whatever I said didn’Äôt really matter; it was more like "What a great time to be around." But [I] ultimately [had to] be pathetic, be someone who is misfocused, gets smoked in the end with the baby, and realizes that what his commitment is to is absolutely frickin' ridiculous and [that] he’Äôs kind of a geek. You know, I always thought that Trent was funny but never really cool. I never thought anyone was cool, that was "really cool" in that way, you know what I mean? I always thought, "Whatever." You want to think that Trent’Äôs right, but ultimately Trent’Äôs wrong. In this one here, Ricky’Äôs ultimately kind of right about some things. "Max does sleep with all of his girls. Why are you trusting him?" They do need a gun. "This place isn’Äôt safe. Everything’Äôs not all right for us here." But you can’Äôt believe anything Ricky says.

Q: Because he’Äôs the most annoying character in the face of the film.

VV: Sure. But in a way to me that’Äôs comedy--that’Äôs the sick of the comedy that I love in that the obvious comedy is Trent; is [Clay Pigeons'] Lester Long. I want a guy that’Äôs aggressive and thinks he’Äôs an operator that’Äôs not an operator. I’Äôve been an operator that’Äôs a successful operator. I want a guy that thinks he’Äôs a successful operator but has no skills and no game whatsoever and is desperate and hungry and needs things and needs to be understood. I think the movie is more comparable to Midnight Cowboy. Midnight Cowboy’Äôs a great film, I don’Äôt compare it in ways of that--[but it is comparable] in its themes of what it’Äôs discussing ultimately--a love story between two men, all those issues--more so than it is comparable to Swingers. You’Äôve got two guys that are physically fighting. There’Äôs a child that’Äôs not theirs. There’Äôs an evolvement past swearing, looking for an identity: I’Äôm a boxer; I’Äôm a criminal; masculine. Ultimately they go to Chuck E. Cheese, and Ricky’Äôs home with the baby and wants to be understood. He’Äôs not gonna yell and fight anymore, but he’Äôs finally passionate and cares about something. It’Äôs a very female energy, and I think the movie’Äôs way more about that than it is about the mob. Along the way, some people might interpret it as somebody caught up celebrating their unevolvement or comments that they make, but that’Äôs really just there to show a place of evolvement for what the real value and ultimate point of the movie is. Joe Buck in [Midnight Cowboy] is like, "I’Äôm not a fag; that’Äôs fuckin' fag stuff. Girls like me; they’Äôve always liked me. They like the way I fuck." Right? Here, "This is a fuckin' fag joint. Get the fuck out of my room." What’Äôs really going on, you know? Again, I think how it’Äôs looked at is always interesting to me in the same way Swingers is, for what the themes really are that are being discussed--at least for my point of view, what I always thought that we were saying.

Q: Was this character more fun?

VV: This character was so much fun because I didn’Äôt have to worry about trying to be light. I got to play him in a real truthful way and also track him in a way that I thought made sense for the movie, which is that you can’Äôt really think he’Äôs competent because ultimately he turns out to be right--although wrong--about certain things, and there’Äôs an evolvement. I just love it. I got to work 15 minutes, you know? [speaks quickly] "I gotta take a break; I won’Äôt be good to anybody. I need to get out of here. Is this complimentary or are you trying to fool me? Everyone’Äôs fooling me; everyone’Äôs fooling me; everyone’Äôs fooling me; you know what I mean? And I’Äôm saying 'Red Dragon' because I’Äôm looking for a friend. I don’Äôt know you. You’Äôll probably just beat me down like a pimp. I don’Äôt trust him. I’Äôm going to get over on him and get the Red Dragon on my team. Now you need me, don’Äôt you?" [laughs] But I don’Äôt know what I’Äôm doing; I’Äôm spinning out of control, but in a way I’Äôm kind of right. I’Äôm a problem in his life, but really isn’Äôt Bobby a huge problem in Ricky’Äôs life? The guy’Äôs living with a girl that’Äôs dishonest, that’Äôs a stripper. The element that she’Äôs around is the guy that’Äôs totally not up front, Peter Falk; and [Bobby's] taking me on a crime thing where he wants to do everything that they say, but we don’Äôt know what their intentions are? But I’Äôm sticking by him, going through all this stuff with him when I know it’Äôs not right, and I don’Äôt have the necessary tools to handle it correctly. But in a way it’Äôs a mirror; people would never be in each other’Äôs lives if they didn’Äôt mirror or represent or give something--or feel that they did--to the other person. In the same way that Ricky’Äôs a problem for Bobby--it’Äôs a guilt that really one person [is] playing out each side for themselves--Bobby’Äôs an absolute problem for Ricky to have in his life as well.

Q: So how do you and Jon mirror each other?

VV: Me and Jon are very different people, so we bring different perspectives on stuff, but we have very similar tastes. We’Äôre close in age. We both had training with Doug Close at the Improv Olympic, and so we have a similar place of working from and view of acting and storytelling--we have similar, subtle tastes in [storytelling]. "Let the girl call, I love you, hang up, whatever, go out"--you know what I mean, not a big thing? "Very simple with the kid, go to the place"--you know what I mean? "Don’Äôt do the cocaine scene like they’Äôre naked fucking in bed and it's great." Just [a] real, kind of simple, truthful, "how it really goes down from what we know" kind of taste. Just be very simple and truthful, tell your story simply--I think that we’Äôre similar in that regard. Who does Trent really sleep with? He’Äôs a ladykiller but he goes back with a cocktail waitress in a trailer park for five minutes, you know? That to me seemed much more real than if it became really about him scoring and having all these sexual adventures. It was really more for Trent about a perception of how he looked like he could operate the ladies--but he’Äôs probably not all that effective, really.

Q: Has Jon changed since he got married? Now do you see yourself doing the baby thing and all that?

VV: I think his focus, his priorities have changed in the right way for where he’Äôs at. I think it’Äôs a maturity level. He’Äôs having a kid--that really matters to him; he loves his wife very much--great girl--and I think that’Äôs really his focus right now, even more so. It's funny; with this movie coming out, I think that’Äôs where his head’Äôs at--it’Äôs nice to see that. As for me, I’Äôd love to have kids someday, but I think you really gotta be in love with someone. I’Äôd like to just be with one person and be in love with them, but you can’Äôt really create that kind of thing. That’Äôs something that you can’Äôt be looking for, all that kind of stuff. So I’Äôm definitely open to it, but right now I’Äôm not in a place for that at all.

Q: On that, I find it interesting, for instance, that Nicolas Cage is now dating Lisa Marie Presley. It's clearly easy to date somebody who you know has no agenda. Lisa Marie Presley doesn't have an agenda to get Nicolas Cage's money, to get Nicolas Cage's fame. Do you see my point? Are you finding the same sort of thing--that you don't know when you meet girls out in the world whether they want you, or...

VV: Well, I thought I had a spring in my step. [laughs]

Q: It's got to have changed, the way you meet women. It used to be that you had a spring in your step, and you're a tall, good-looking guy. Now, is it something different?

VV: What do you mean?

[Everyone laughs]

VV: I know what you're saying, yeah. You date people that you work with. They do what you do; there’Äôs an understanding there, and there is that kind of thing, but whatever. For me it’Äôs whoever I like. If I like someone, I don’Äôt know; if they’Äôre using me, they’Äôre using me. If I feel something for someone, I’Äôm more than willing to learn my lessons and make my mistakes. I never would run away from something I’Äôm feeling to protect myself because I feel like you hurt yourself a lot more that way. I’Äôve been fortunate that I don’Äôt know that I’Äôve ever gone through that experience, but probably I have, I guess, and not realized it. But I don't know, you know? It is something--you know, where you go out to meet someone too? It’Äôs hard.

Q: Your world has changed.

VV: It’Äôs definitely hard, but then you know you’Äôre never really going to meet someone in a bar, whoever the hell you are. It always comes in a way that you don’Äôt expect, wherever it is, and that’Äôs just sort of how it goes.

Q: Were you ever approached for Jurassic Park III?

VV: No. I think the only one that they brought back was Sam Neill, who was in the first one.

Q: Right. I was just wondering if it was even mentioned.

VV: No. I kind of disappeared in [The Lost World:] Jurassic Park II, and I wasn’Äôt even eaten.

[Everyone laughs]

VV: I think I was forgotten about before they even thought of Jurassic III.

[Everyone laughs]

Q: Going along with what you were saying, that you're trying to live this normal life as a celebrity--how has things changed for you because people do react to you differently now.

VV: I’Äôve always been really lucky for the most part; people have always been very nice to me for the most part. I never had assistants really, or security or anything. I like going out. I really like staying in touch with people and doing that. I really hate to be removed in my house; I just couldn’Äôt live that way. So it’Äôs a price as being a celebrity that sometimes people come up when you want to be alone with your friends and that kind of thing, or talk to you when you want to be left alone--but you understand. Sometimes you can get people that are fuckin' weird; someone will come up to you and it’Äôs more about them in a way, like, "Hey man, I like your movies, and I’Äôm going to work with you one day. My name's Tom..."

[Everyone laughs]

VV: I'm like, "Whoa." I don't understand why you gotta say that. I think the whole focus on this stuff has gone crazy. There's so many shows on fame--not on acting, not on music, but on fame. "Hey, isn’Äôt it cool to get things?"--it’Äôs just crazy. I started acting when I was seven, acted all the way through--at 18 moved out to L.A; did improv and Shakespeare and stuff in Chicago--not because I thought I’Äôd get on a sitcom; it was because it was what there was to do. I came out here, and if I would've ended up in a sitcom, I would've been happy--I just wanted to do acting parts; I loved it. It wasn’Äôt like [acting was] the easiest avenue for me to understand to get a table [at a restaurant] or to be famous. But there’Äôs such a focus on that now. A lot of the kids you see moving out now to be actors could all kick your ass. They’Äôve all got cars, and it’Äôs unclear what they do--but they’Äôre out at clubs every night; they’Äôve got some movie deal going; they know so-and-so; and they wanna set me up with free shoes. I don’Äôt know what the fuck they’Äôre saying to me.

[Everyone laughs]

VV: The focus is just crazy; it really is, like all these shows, "Hey, where so-and-so loves to eat, and we’Äôll be right back"--when people give a shit. It’Äôs like the fame, the fact that you’Äôre recognizable is almost what’Äôs looked at way more so than the work that’Äôs being done. I don’Äôt know why; I really don’Äôt know why. I don’Äôt know what the fuck the fascination is. I don’Äôt know why the fascination isn’Äôt with the performances or the storytelling or the music or that kind of thing. Isn’Äôt that more interesting than if someone was on Quaeludes or not during when they made a record? I don’Äôt really give a shit. I really don’Äôt understand. I just don’Äôt. And also I think it’Äôs when I first came out, which wasn’Äôt that long ago, 13 years ago, all the kids I knew that were actors were really kind of vulnerable, very honest. It wasn’Äôt like, "Hey, let’Äôs go to the gym and pump up some iron, and then we’Äôll go rock some ass tonight"--you know what I mean? It was just a different thing, and it seems now that the focus is more on people who kind of want to get famous. They want to be famous more so than they’Äôre like, "Let’Äôs go to class; I wanna work" and "This is cool; I love that movie." You know what I mean--it just seems like the focus is different over the last seven, eight years than it was before."

Q: There's also this aspect, with stalkers and all this stuff, you can't really tell if the people's intentions are good when they approach you anymore. How do you know? You've had problems recently.

VV: You never know in life with anybody. You just live and learn and have experiences, right? Some things are not explainable. You’Äôre not in control of someone else’Äôs actions or what they’Äôre gonna do. Some people can go to a place that’Äôs just extreme, and you’Äôre not responsible. But that could happen to anybody. Anybody--car accidents, this--good people, too, having things happen to them, and that stuff is just inevitable. And I think it [comes] along with the fame and focus on it, and the money and the travel and that stuff being so cool to everybody. Also, with the violence that’Äôs going on everywhere--I think it’Äôs insane. I just think it’Äôs insane that it’Äôs not like more of a shock to us all that some kid goes to school and shoots it up, and there’Äôs not more done. I guess you do like a stoppage of everything, just a real "What are we doing here?" where that stuff is concerned. I don’Äôt know. Maybe I’Äôm getting older because I know people when I was younger said stuff, and I said, "Well, fuck them." [laughs] So maybe it’Äôs that, but it just seems to me a bit misdirected, a lot of it.

Q: And as they take you away--a little bit off-the-wall. I write for a magazine that wants to know what are your five top stock picks.

VV: Do they want to know what not to invest in?

[Everyone laughs]

Thanks to Fred Topel for help with the transcription
Article found here

AskMen.com - Man of the Week

Article found here.

why we like him?
Vince Vaughn is like an underdog, and we love rooting for the underdog. He is talented, but hasn't yet received the breakout role that will bring him fame and fortune. He probably will someday, and that's the day we'll be bragging that we were way ahead of the curve.

why is he famous?
It all started with his big break in Jurassic Park and then his role in the recent remake of Psycho. So it didn't do too well at the box office but Vince did a great job at being nuttier than a fruitcake!. He's an up and commer with tons of potential to be the next big thing.

quote
"I don't like the glamorous nights so much. I usually leave depressed and I don't know why. Maybe it's the forced politeness. I like the local bar with money in the jukebox and a pretty girl next to me."
-Vince Vaughn

bio
One might think that with the roles Vince Vaughn receives today, he has always been as "money" as his Swingers character Trent. Actually, Vaughn is living proof of an actor finally making it despite the "make it or break it" gritty Hollywood life. Although he will soon be co-starring in one of the summer's biggest movies, The Cell alongside Jennifer Lopez, Vaughn has come a long way since his days of doing the television circuit to pay his bills.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 28, 1970, Vincent Anthony Vaughn's name is the result of his mother's fondness of double "V" names, like his father's name, Vernon Vaughn. Born and raised in the heartland, Vaughn is the youngest of three siblings, with two older sisters Valerie and Victoria. The Vaughns also had an extended family: their three dogs, Viking, Vero and Vladimir.

Many wonder whether Vaughn's hip, trendy and ultra-suave character in the cult hit Swingers is autobiographical. The only thing that Vaughn and swinger Trent have in common is their hyperactivity. Vince was sent to a psychiatrist on his elementary school's request, and was even prescribed Ritalin to calm him down, but his parents refused to give it to him.

While studying at Forest Lake High School, Vaughn was a bad student, to say the least, and even ran for class president to decrease his chances of being expelled from school before graduation. Not only was he elected president, but he also graduated as part of The Class of 1988.

After graduation, Vaughn moved to Los Angeles, joining the hoards of aspiring actors trying to make it in Hollywood. Vaughn did have acting experience when he was young: at the age of 8, he played Daddy Warbucks in a theatre production, while his Annie co-star was 4 years his senior! Playing orphan Annie's adoptive father was not such a hard feat, with Vaughn now standing at 6' 5".

Convinced that he could make it as an actor after receiving a part in a national Chevy commercial, Vaughn learned that getting that big break as an actor was not an easy task. In order to pay the bills, he appeared in several TV shows, such as China Beach, 21 Jump Street and Doogie Howser, M.D.

Vaughn's hopes of becoming a big-time actor were looking pretty dim, and he seemed fated to doing no better than made-for-TV movies for the rest of his life. He came pretty close to winning supporting roles in Alive, School Ties and Dazed and Confused, but hearing the constant rejections of casting agents became his daily routine.

The struggling actor finally did land a role in the football movie Rudy, but most of his scenes ended up on the cutting room floor by the time the film was released in theatres. He did, however, appear in the 1994 film At Risk, but since this role was Vaughn's only one in three years, it seemed his chances of making it big were at risk.

Then came Vaughn's opportunity of a lifetime. He was cast as Trent in the film Swingers, which was written, directed, and co-starred Vaughn's real-life friend, Jon Favreau. Favreau had created Trent with Vaughn in mind, inspired by Vaughn's impersonations of the pretentiousness of his actor friends.

The film about a group of friends doing the tour of the L.A. club scene and picking up women in the process received rave reviews, but was hailed by critics, and spawned a whole new Swinger vocabulary, complete with how to pickup "beautiful babies" in clubs and act "money".

A few interesting notes about the film: Jon Favreau's character in the film was a struggling actor, close in reality to Vince Vaughn's real situation, while Vaughn's real-life father used to be a gambler, and had a cameo in the Las Vegas scene of Swingers.

Vaughn's career began to take off, especially after his convincing portrayal of Trent. His big break came along when Steven Spielberg was shown Swingers during the production process, since Favreau wanted to use Spielberg's Jaws music for a pickup scene. Impressed by Vaughn's performance and even more impressed after meeting the actor, Spielberg knew that he would be perfect for the role of Nick Van Owen in the sequel to the monstrous hit, Jurassic Park.

After The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Vaughn had a starring role in Return to Paradise, co-starring Anne Heche; portrayed a serial killer in Clay Pigeons that same year; and starred as motelier Norman Bates in the controversial remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. In 1999, Vaughn starred in A Cool Dry Place, which went straight to video, and co-starred Joey Lauren Adams, who Vaughn has been romantically linked to.

Now that Vaughn's star is on the rise, you can catch him in this summer's suspenseful sci-fi film, The Cell, sharing the screen with the sexy Jennifer Lopez. Another film with fellow swinger himself, Jon Favreau, and former Bond girl Famke Janssen is also coming up, but the release date is still tentative.

With at least four more movies to be released in 2000 and 2001 to add to Vaughn's acting resume, it's clear that this Vaughn is invince-able.

What else do you need to know?

reader comments

overall rating 85

Vince Vaughn is following a career path closer to Brad Pitt than Tom Cruise, foregoing potential blockbusters for more low-key independent films that illustrate his acting chops more than his muscles.

Is this a smart career move? His stock broker will disagree with the lower paying gigs, but we think that eventually, Vince Vaughn's talent will catch more than just the eye of the latest up-and-coming director. The man has ability and is just as comfortable playing a swinger as he is playing a psychopath, which means he can easily play the two sides of a typical man. ㋒

personality & talent 85

His towering physical attributes (he's 6'5") and his wicked smile give him a definite presence (especially with the ladies), and make all men around him look like sour-puss munchkins that just had soup poured on their heads.

It's there, but nobody has seen it yet. It's like the saying, "if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?" Talent without recognition goes wasted. ㋒

manliness 92

We know better than to hurl any "yo mama" jokes at Mr. V. Have you ever seen the size of a 6'5" guy's hands?

women magnetism 94

His height makes sure that the fairer sex will always take notice of him, but that's not the only reason women love him. He has that face. The tough guy outside -- nice guy inside look that women find irresistible. Women love him because he supplies the bad boy image with the heart of gold waiting to be tamed.

Once again, in his presence we are left on the sidelines looking like munchkins.

accomplishments & fame 73

His big break was Jurassic Park II, a role which allowed him to get cozy with Steven Spielberg, though he followed it up with lower budget, critically acclaimed, audience ignored flicks like the remake of Psycho. Of course to us, he will always be Trent from Swingers, a must see for all the guys who go out to clubs looking for love (both long-term and for one night).

coolness factor 85

There are few other actors we would rather spend a night out on the town with than Vince Vaughn. One night with Mr. V, and you're guaranteed to at least drink more vodka than you knew existed, dance on more bars than you care to count, and hit on more women than Lawrence Taylor hit quarterbacks during his entire NFL career.

He'll show up in cowboy boots, a white t-shirt, and blue jeans and he'll be the coolest guy in the bars, and leave us (all together now) looking like sour-puss munchkins.

personal style 81

Jeans, t-shirt, and an occasional Armani suit. That's the style we like.

Secret Wish
That we become his best friend because of the association factor. He has so many women chasing him, that eventually he can't handle them all. That's where we come in... get it?

Article found here.

The Cell Interview - Vince Vaughn

Vince Vaughn Interview: Inside the Cell
Paul Fischer, femail.com.au
Article found here

It is clear from seeing the visually striking thriller The Cell, why Vince Vaughn was drawn to this unusual serial killer thriller. "I liked it because it was never what I could think of or expect. I kept thinking that we were making a big art-house film, like an exhibit. The stuff [director Tarsem] did was pretty cool. The hardest part as an actor was not understanding the plot in a linear way or having justifications in a common sense or logical way. It was taking a leap of faith. You'd have to create the back-story and fill in the gaps for motivations.

The acting in this film serves the visuals. There's not really a linear story to this film, which I think is kind of cool. The story's told more through the visuals. It's similar to Hong Kong films, where the visuals and cinematography carry you more than the story does. And when you watch the film you can judge it on the basis of a normal action film and say that it doesn't make sense. But if you drop that impression, you're left with an impact, through Tarsem's visuals, of what his intentions were based on using the pictures that you see along the way." In The Cell, Jennifer Lopez plays Catherine Deane, a child therapist working on an experimental new technology that allows for direct access into someone else's mind. However, the benefits of the technology are still unproven. Meanwhile FBI Agent Peter Novak (Vaughn) is hard at work tracking down a serial killer who encloses women in a small glass cell and drowns them. Novak is able to identify the killer as Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), but before he can be arrested, he goes into a coma. The only way to rescue his most recent victim is for Catherine to enter his mind using the experimental technology. However, Stargher's mind is so warped and frightening, there's no way to know what Deane will encounter inside of it.

Unlike many thrillers from Hollywood, The Cell is less about character and conventional narrative and more about colour and ingenious special effects, none of which perturbed the actor. "Visual effects have become more grand and better suited to their specific purpose, but this is almost completely different. These effects are almost like paintings, it's like the composition of the shots are taken into account as well as the colours. It's almost like pioneering in a way, it's original. It's not what you would expect as far as special effects are concerned." While many actors would diligently prepare playing an FBI agent, Vaughn took a different approach working on this film. "For me the big thing that made me want to do the film was Tarsem. I knew I would be part of more of a visually told film. Not necessarily an effects film, but definitely a visually told film. I did go one day down to the FBI station and talk to some agents, just for a starting point. Kind of to see what their perspective on stuff
was." Nor was Vaughn concerned about shooting some pretty grotesque scenes. "Well, I always tend to have a sense of humour. I guess it's just my style with life in general", he says laughingly. The Cell is a film about dreams and nightmares, so when asked whether the actor is easily affected by HIS dreams, he pauses and smiles before responding. "I think you go through stages where you remember your dreams more so than in other times. Not really nightmares, although I have had nightmares in the past. Not recurring nightmares or anything like that, though."

Despite some harrowing imagery, Vaughn remains unconcerned as to how audiences will respond to the film. ". I think this movie will stick with audiences because it is so different. You haven't had to process anything like this before, or at least not as many times as you've had to process explosions or, even with The Lost World, where dinosaurs look realistic. We've gotten used to those kinds of things more than we have compositions, and that perspective is being changed. We had a good time. A lot of times I find, maybe it's just me, but I find that you joke around a lot when the subject matter is heavy. It's hard to stay in that heavy setting; it's nice to break it up. In the movie, there's a short period in which they go through an intense thing. But you can never put those circumstances on you entirely, unless you're filming on an island where the surroundings dictate that. But when you're filming in Los Angeles, you can't sustain it for four months. So you check out of it and bring it back for
the scene."

We live in age where audience remain desensitised to movie horror. As a youngster, Vaughn does recall being terrified by one or two films. "The Exorcist, for sure, is a shocking horror film. When I was a kid, I got brave and my sister and I saw the first Evil Dead. So I went in my basement and turned off all the lights because I was going to make the experience really scary. I put the thing in and I remember that after 20 minutes something really scary happened. I was 12 at the time. I'll make it sound like I was younger, I might have been 17 or something, I don't know. But I ran to turn on the lights and I smacked into a pole in the basement. That movie probably scared me the most because of my age and the fact that I really was trying to scare myself."

Vince remains one of Hollywood's more unique leading men. His career was kick started with the comedy Swingers, which the actor fondly defines as his birthplace. "It was a collaborative process. Anyone who had an idea, we'd listen to it. We'd all be in on the editing and say if something sucked. After that, doing other movies was strange because they aren't really collaborative at all. I think that's destructive to a point." Yet he has no idea why that seminal comedy was such a success in the independent film world. "We had a really fun time with Swingers. People could change lines and we'd all discuss it. It's like having your own video camera or colouring with crayons. When I was in Chicago doing improv, you'd write a scene with a group of people for the stage that night. And people are more comfortable hearing input from other people in that kind of set-up. But when you get into the realm of Swingers and that kind of success, getting acknowledgement, it becomes harder to have that."

Since Swingers, he has gone to play single dads, psychopaths and cops. There is no pinning him down. In choosing roles, Vaughn says that he has no fixed agenda. "For The Cell, it wasn't so much that the character fascinated me. Even with Psycho, it wasn't that the character fascinated me. [Director] Gus Van Sant fascinated me. I remember moving out to Hollywood when I was 18 and that was the year Drugstore Cowboy came out. I was just taken by that film. Gus could say, "Let's remake Spartacus" and I'd do it. In Return To Paradise, I was more interested in that character and story. So I don't know if I plan it, but there are certain people that you feel interested in working with, sometimes it's a character or a script. With The Cell, you expect an action movie to have momentum, effects or explosions, and this is a different kind of action. I think that's what appealed to me." Next up for Vaughn: He will unite with his Swingers pal Jon Favreau in the new comedy Made, revolving around two aspiring mob
sters (Favreau, Vaughn) from Los Angeles who travel to New York to become "made men", getting involved with a money-laundering scheme and thusly, inducted into a low-level crime syndicate. "I think it's pretty funny, a tad different from The Cell."

- Paul Fischer

Drew Live: 5 Minutes With Vince Vaughn

Marshall Fine
Article found here

Vince Vaughn has trouble sitting still. Trying to relax during a recent interview, he lays back on the couch in jeans and a Hollywood High t-shirt. Before long he sits up, lights a cigarette and smokes it, all the while tapping his foot.

He's terse and to the point, not wasting words about his new movie, The Cell, in which he plays an FBI agent, or his youth, which was spent growing up in Illinois. "Academics weren't my strong suit," he admits, saying he turned to acting after a back injury in a car accident knocked him out of high school sports.

But get him started talking about playing video games, and the 30-year-old actor/writer/producer--who shotto fame in Swingers--can go on for 10 minutes about the exhaustion of spending four days beating a new game. Luckily, all we needed was 5 minutes.

drDrew.com: What's your favorite thing to do when no one else is around?
Vince Vaughn: Think.

drDrew.com: Name a guilty pleasure.
VV: Smoking.

drDrew.com: What's your greatest fear?
VV: I don't have any, but if I did, it would probably be something happening to my child.

drDrew.com: What's your favorite part of your body?
VV: My hands.

drDrew.com: If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
VV: Probably being able to do nothing more often. Being able to relax and not occupy my mind with anything.

drDrew.com: What was your worst day job?
VV: Telemarketing, selling tickets to a police rodeo.

drDrew.com: What's your idea of perfect happiness?
VV: I don't know if there is such a thing because we're always trying to take it to the next level. But I guess I'd say my family being healthy and happy.

drDrew.com: What's something you're good at that's totally useless?
VV: Playing video games.

drDrew.com: If they were to make an action figure of you, what accessories would it come equipped with?
VV: A deck of cards.

drDrew.com: Who would you like to trade places with for a day and why?
VV: Nobody.

drDrew.com: What Hollywood star would play you in a film about your life?
VV: Somebody tall.

drDrew.com: If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be?
VV: I have no interest in coming back. Once is plenty.

drDrew.com: When you were a kid growing up, who did you imitate standing in front of the mirror?
VV: My father.

drDrew.com: Name a book you've read recently and liked.
VV: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.

drDrew.com: Finish this line: If we can send a man to the moon, then why
VV: Why can't we make air travel quicker?

drDrew.com: What will you remember most about the '90s?
VV: The Bulls' championships.

Article found here

Vince Vaughn in a pickle

By Jonathan Romney
Friday April 16, 1999
Article found here

When a character in Return To Paradise declares: "I don't think I have that stuff in me" (moral fibre, don't you know) you can set your clock by the big redemption scene 100 minutes later. Vince Vaughn is one of three backpacking slackers in Malaysia; back in Manhattan, two of them discover that the third (Joaquin Phoenix) has been languishing in a Penang prison cell on a drugs charge. Lawyer Anne Heche arrives to offer them the dreadful choice - join Phoenix in jail, or let him hang.

Director Joseph Ruben hardly sets up the most tortuous moral maze: Vaughn can do the noble thing, or he can continue an aimless, demeaning existence as a New York limo driver (New York limo drivers roar in righteous protest). His Brooklyn bedsit, with murky walls and barred windows, is pointedly made to look only one notch of luxury above the Penang pokey.

Although based on a French film, Return To Paradise - co-written by Bruce Robinson - is very much an American paranoid fantasy of Third World hell, with judicial systems you can't trust and food you can't eat. It's plodding and simple-minded, but Vaughn proves considerably more effective as an average cynical Joe than he did as a simpering Norman Bates in the remade Psycho.

By Jonathan Romney
Friday April 16, 1999
Article found here

Vince Vaughn: Playing kooks is OK with him

By Cynthia L. Webb, Associated Press writer
Article found here

Vince Vaughn doesn't care if people think he's crazy for portraying serial killers. He has always been able to do things differently yet still come out ahead.

The 6-foot-5-inch Vaughn broke onto the scene a few years ago as the video-game loving, bar-hopping actor of "Swingers," who was on the prowl for "beautiful babies" and made the saying, "You're so money," seem hip.

Vaughn, 28, plays a killer in "Clay Pigeons" and will star as the equally demented Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant's remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic, "Psycho."

Based on his dead-on performances, will people think he's a womanizing, smooth-talking, borderline psychotic, too?

"It would be nothing new for me," laughs Vaughn, rubbing his stubbly baby face. Still, he warns, "Perception can be a bad thing."

He says the real Vince is often "painfully shy" and only turns up his humor if he likes someone. If people are mean, he can be downright "boisterous."

Over a lunch of chicken tacos near his Los Feliz, Calif., home, Vaughn speaks quickly, almost in a stream of consciousness. If his hands aren't gesturing while he speaks, he taps them on the table. Every so often, his denim-clad leg jitters below the booth. Vaughn is always on the move, even while he sits -- perhaps a remnant of a childhood hyperactive streak.

Vaughn offers a scary portrayal of a madman in "Clay Pigeons" -- a twisted, at times comic tale of a gas station attendant who is befriended by a mysterious cowboy drifter named Lester Long (played by Vaughn).

Vaughn said he didn't know the film would be released only months before "Psycho," but shows no worry about being pegged as the guy who can only portray wackos.

Van Sant said Vaughn's physical appearance helped him get the "Psycho" role.

"Vince came in for a meeting when we started to cast the film and he scared my assistant because of the way he looked," the director said.

"He had close-cropped hair and a short beard ... but there was something quite deep in his gaze which helped me make the decision to cast him. Not looking like Anthony Perkins helped, too."

Vaughn said he drew on personal experience to help the two characters come alive: "I identify with the fact of being young and not being understood -- of having people come at you and not being able to protect myself."

Vaughn has tracked dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg's sci-fi thriller "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," and co-starred with Anne Heche in the recent love drama "Return to Paradise."

"I like people who are real, and I don't like to play characters that try to be liked," he says.

The Midwestern-bred actor -- born in Minnesota, raised in Illinois -- said he has never tried to win praise by following the norm.

"I was weird. I'm a kid that they took to a psychiatrist at 5. They thought I was crazy because I was never a follower," Vaughn says. "I was a kid who would take tap class and then I would go play football. ... I was always lucky that I could do my own thing."

School was not his forte. He remembers talking back to teachers and going to detention, even if it was to stick up for other kids he felt were being wronged.

"I had a lot of confidence. I think I got it from my parents that you can't just let people pick on you," Vaughn says.

"I had teachers yelling at me all the time. But I had one teacher who never yelled or anything. He pulled me outside and said, 'I just wanted to tell you, you let me down.' I cried my eyes out, even at 13 years old, because I wasn't as comfortable with that, I guess. My journey has been getting more comfortable with that sort of thing."

At the suggestion of the school, he went to counseling and then was put in a special class for a while.

"It was like, 'He's got issues. He's hyperactive. Talks out in class and stuff like that.' So they made me go."

Vaughn's parents decided acting would be a good outlet for his energy. At age 7, he was in school plays and community theater. After high school, he did some work in Chicago -- even temporarily joining an improv group.

"I liked (acting) because I liked movies. I thought they were really cool," says Vaughn, who likes to tell stories using Marlon Brando films as a point of reference.

Vaughn skipped college and headed to Los Angeles at 18, leaving behind a life that had always been full of contrasts. He was raised both Protestant and Catholic; born poor but later transplanted to a rich Chicago suburb; obtrusive at school, yet still popular.

He describes his dad, Vernon, as being a hardworking man from a "redneck outdoor plumbing farm in Ohio."

"My dad put himself through college, served in the Navy, and became a self-made man and made a lot of bread," he says. "He worked in an insane asylum at night so he could do his homework and put the kids to bed. He was so determined to change his life existence."

When Vaughn was in elementary school, the family -- parents and two older sisters -- moved to affluent Lake Forest. His parents have since divorced.

"It was such an extreme thing," he says. "So I was forced to sort of look away at the kind of exteriors -- of needing a place to fit in, trying to find a group -- to find the individual."

Vaughn uses this philosophy to stay ahead of the game in Hollywood -- being up front with people and "being honest with yourself."

By Cynthia L. Webb, Associated Press writer
Article found here

A psycho swinger

Vince Vaughn moves easily from killer to lady killer
By BOB THOMPSON -- Toronto Sun
Article found here

Only Vince Vaughn would dare to stylize a long, tall serial killer cowboy. But that's exactly what he does in the film festival feature Clay Pigeons.
Indeed, the David Dobkin-directed "psycho-comedy" seems to fit Vaughn just about right.

You might recall that the 6-foot-5 actor was the silver-tongued smoothie in the low-budget Swingers.

In Clay Pigeons, the only swingin' he attempts is with a very sharp kitchen knife. Still, he seems to move from goofball to madman with the wink of a blood-shot eye.

The dark humour arrives when Vaughn's oddball sets up a smalltown doofus (Joaquin Phoenix) to take the blame for all of his murderous crimes. Also in the cast is Janeane Garofalo, who plays an FBI agent.

However, it is Vaughn and Phoenix who are the show as they put a very peculiar spin on an unpredictable buddy film format.

It also helped, reported a lightly-bearded Vaughn at the Four Seasons Hotel yesterday, that Vaughn and Phoenix got along well during the quick six-week shoot last year.

"I think we genuinely like each other," said Vaughn. "Acting means a lot to him, and I respect that, because it means a lot to me."

There was something else that seemed to be just about right. "We were, like, reduced to 12-year-olds when we'd hang out with each other. When we were flming it was like summer camp."

More tension and a lot more pressure was in the air during Vaughn's last movie effort. He just finished his role as Norman Bates in the Gus Van Sant remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, yet another departure from the Swinger.

"I got my mind around it," said Vaughn, referring to the difficulty of rehashing such a familiar part. "I also wanted to work with Gus, because as a filmmaker he has an opinion and a point of view."

So, are there more crazed killers in his future? Not really.

He's re-teaming with Swingers creator Jon Favreau in January for Favreau's version of a Jewish western. In March, he's set to work on another oater, directed by Dwight Yoakam.

Other than that, he's having fun living the Vince Vaughn L.A. life. Which means he still lives in an apartment he's called home for the last nine years. And he still drives a twin-dented Ford Bronco.

He lives modestly, for a wealthy actor, but he has conservative roots.
His father was from Ohio farm country. "And my mother grew up in Brantford, and her mother was a beautician," said Vaughn proudly.

He's money, eh.

Article found here

Just Add Irony, and Stir

Jane Magazine
September 1998
Article found here

I met Vince Vaughn when we went to Utah to do Clay Pigeons, a twisted murder mystery with Joaquin Phoenix, out this month. He is a fabulous person, a prince among men and Steve McQueen incarnate.

By Janeane Garofalo.

Janeane: Okay, Vince, here are some Jane questions. What role has been the most difficult for you and why?
Vince: Probably the role of Vince. Now they'll print that without the irony.

J: Without the tongue in your cheek.
V: Yeah, I guess we just pulled back the curtain on the swinger.

J: Okay. Why do you think there are so many stories about actors coming to Hollywood with just $20 in their pockets?
V: I don't know, but it wasn't like that for me. My daddy loved me. He was like the American dream. He came from a farm in Ohio, worked in a mental institution to put himself through college; he was the only one in his family to graduate college; he started out in an apartment, then bought a house, then moved to an upper-class neighborhood. So I was taught those values. But I think people look at acting as a pipe dream to begin with, not as work. But it is work -- it's a very tough thing to succeed at. It comes down to the ability to think for yourself and say, "I believe I can do anything." For me, the greatest thing was having a role model who accomplished a lot.

J: That's cool. What aggravates you most in a director and co-stars?
V: Not agreeing with me. Oh, God. This story is now entitled "I'll Never Work Again."

J: There's nothing worse than being directed, I always say. When a movie didn't come out as well as you had hoped, does it bother you?
V: I blame everyone but me -- the director, the co-stars, the script flaws I thought we could get past, no one having the vision I had. It's never me.

J: I actually never minded until it was a movie I really liked -- The Matchmaker. It bombed. And it took the joy of going to the movies away from me. But Vince, in Clay Pigeons you're funny as well as menacing. You should definitely do more comedies, because it's so rare when somebody is a dramatic actor, is as good-looking as you are and funny.
V: Comedies are the best to do, because on the set when someone's dying or the mom was stolen from them or something happened that's not a lot of fun, they're working out their demons. At the end of the day, you kind of have a light laugh, you stumble around, maybe hit your head, and then everyone laughs and has a drink. Maybe I'm not a sophisticated thespian, but that equals F-U-N.

J: That's P-H-U-N. I heard that, motherphucker. I actually would rather do comedy. Sometimes, it causes me great anxiety to tackle straight drama. Like I have hives right now.
V: Really? I've been struggling with that for six months.

J: I'm convinced it's manifested from anxiety.
V: No, it's contagious. You got it from me. I'm a leper.

J: But I haven't seen you in months.
V: Well, then, maybe it's time to look at the dance card...

J: Really, because I can't even name 'em, and I don't use protection. I'm kidding! Completely kidding. I'm totally monogamous. Anyway, so I got hives. And I feel it's definitely physically manifested because I was walking Dew recently at about 2:30 in the morning --
V: The gorgeous dog you got while filming Clay Pigeons.

J: Yes. I was walking him, and this girl came up to me and said, "Are you Janeane Garofalo?" And I said, "Yeah." She said, "Is that Dew, who I saw on the HBO special?" I said, "Yeah!" She said, "Look, I've got to tell you, I think you suck. You get away with this Gen X thing, but your stand-up has gotten worse over the years." I got home, and the hives were in gear, full-blown by 4 a.m.
V: Which says to me this: She's an idiot.

J: Hey, she was a grad student! I should have asked her for some money for the Zovirax and the cortisone cream I need as a result of our chat. Now I have a twofold question for you. Has anything like that happened to you, and what's going on with your stress-related hives?
V: Number one, nothing like that, although I have had some situations where girls have come up to me in bars, and their boyfriends have also come up to me and let it be known that Funny Boy better not approach their girl. But what are you going to do? You have to do what you think is right for you. You know, I don't pick projects so that all the kids at the Starbucks think I'm a classic.

J: But that's why I'm doing it. I want the kids at the Starbucks to think I'm the Cadillac of performers.
V: You are the Cadillac. But as for my hives, I did three movies in a row and -- I don't know if I'm giving away too much, but I tend to drink quite a bit, and I also tend to smoke a little and not sleep all that much. I've been known to stay up entire nights, drinking.

J: And then go right to work.
V: Well, I don't want work to get in the way of a good time.

J: Plus, it helps your work.
V: Well, that was my school of acting. Maybe I'll realize at a certain point when everything's gone away and I'm on The Love Boat...

J: And you lose your looks. For one of your next movies, the remake of Psycho, were you surprised when they offered you the part of the mother? I know you wanted to play the shower, and they offered you the mother instead.
V: I also wanted to play the fly -- just the voice-over. "Hey, this arm looks good, I'll land on this arm." First off, I thought, "God, why would they remake Psycho?" Then I heard Gus Van Sant [Good Will Hunting] was directing it, and I go, "Boy, I like all his films, and I'd love to work with him!" After hearing his approach on it, I felt good, and I was flattered that Gus offered me the part of Norman Bates.

J: Okay. Now I'm going to pretend I'm a Jane reader who gets to ask Vince Vaughn a question: Speaking of the Black Panther Party and the trial of the Chicago Eight back in the day, what was your feeling when you saw poor Bobby Seale literally gagged and bound to his chair, sentenced to that fate by Judge Julius Hoffman?
V: ...What year was that?

J: 1968.
V: Ah, I wasn't born yet.

J: That was a prenatal question. I know how politically active you are. I was 4 at the time, so I can't answer it myself. But I know I would have been outraged!
V: Um, I think I got tears in my eyes when Elvis died.

J: And Frank Sinatra?
V: Well, he seemed like he had a full life and it was his time, you know? Where Elvis is concerned, it seemed like he was taken at an early age.

J: I guess. So after Return to Paradise, with you, Anne Heche and Joaquin Phoenix; and Clay Pigeons, with you, me and Joaquin; and Psycho, with you and Anne; do you have anything else coming up?
V: Nothing booked. I'd love to do a comedy with the Garaf. There's not many scripts that I find funny. Like when we ere talking about doing comedy vs. drama, I think the best films encompass all of them.

J: You mean like Woody Allen's later work, if that's what you're talking about?
V: I'm not much of a fan of Woody Allen.

J: Agh! Crimes and Misdemeanors is my favorite film!
V: I would rather listen to a Hank Williams record, personally.

J: Yeah. Well, you would.

Jane Magazine
September 1998
Article found here

VINCE VAUGHN-- THE MAN WHO WANTED TO BE NORMAN BATES

Article by Guy Flately, Indie Magazine, 1998
Found here

Since his off-screen image was that of a rowdy party animal, Vince Vaughn took me completely by surprise with his soft-spoken politeness when I interviewed him for Indie Magazine in 1998. Although his high hopes for applause as creepy Norman Bates in the remake of "Psycho" were dashed, it’Äôs still possible that Vaughn will deliver on the promise he showed in "The Swingers," "Clay Pigeons" and "Return to Paradise." I hope he does. --Guy Flatley

His smile dazzles, his voice caresses, his dark eyes signal pleasure. Standing in the dusky light of the country-western bar, this 6’Äô5" drifter’Äîthe very image of the Marboro Man in is crisp jeans and his rakishly tilted cowboy hat’Äîis a sexual magnet. He’Äôs sure to walk into the Montana night with a woman on his arm. Maybe it will be the brunette sitting on the next stool, the city-cool girl who’Äôs beginning to warm to his good-old-boy charm. In which case, this may not be her lucky night.

The fate met by the town’Äôs sultriest blonde a few evenings ago could be the fate of this brunette, as well. On the threshold of what promised to be the orgasm of a lifetime, that woman was knifed to death. And if the tall, dark-eyed drifter killed on that night, he’Äôll kill again. Because that’Äôs what serial killers do.

As we sit in the dark of the cineplex watching David Dobkin’Äôs shivery indie comedy "Clay Pigeons," we are not surprised when the murderer strikes again, but we are astonished by the way in which the actor playing him manages to come across as such a personable, amusing, almost lovable psychopath.

On the other hand, it’Äôs not the first time Vince Vaughn has astonished us. In 1996, he charmed us into rooting for a macho, club-hopping boozer-loser in Doug Liman’Äôs "Swingers"; earlier this year, in Joseph Ruben’Äôs "Return to Paradise," he made the high price of courage heartbreakingly real as an American whose loyalty to an imprisoned friend leads him back to barbaric judgment in a Malaysian courtroom. (Last year, Vaughn had stooped into the mainstream in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park, but why not let sleeping dinosaurs lie?)

Not that he’Äôll restrict himself to indies from here on in. For Fox, he recently completed "A Cool, Dry Place," in which he stars as a man who’Äôs been dumped by his wife and must now play full-time father to his son, and in December Universal will showcase Vaughn as sinister mama’Äôs boy Norman Bates in Gus van Sant’Äôs indie-at-heart remake of "Psycho." It’Äôs no wonder Norman went wrong, wearing long dresses, high heels, and making a bloody mess in the shower. He had a rotten childhood.

But Vaughn’Äôs childhood was no picnic, either. "I was considered hyperactive in school," recalls the 28-year-old actor, basking in the L.A. sun, his manner polite, almost serene. Physically and emotionally, he’Äôs traveled a great distance from suburban Chicago, where his father, a representative for toy companies, and his mother, a real estate agent and occasional beautician, raised him and his two older sisters. The Vaughns' marriage was less than idyllic’Äîthey finally divorced in 1971’Äîand turmoil was no stranger to Vince as a child.

"I had a real problem with authority figures. If I disagreed with something a teacher did, I would always vocalize my opinion. If a kid was called up to give a speech and he’Äôd start to cry in front of the class, I would tell him to sit down. The teacher would say, ’ÄòYou stay up here and finish your speech,’Äô but the kid would listen to me and sit down. So they made me go to these special classes, with the problem kids’Äîlike the girl who was taller than everyone else, so she would never talk, and the boy from the wrong side of the tracks who tended to get a little bit violent. When I first went into that class, I was very mean to those other kids, because I’Äôd always been popular at school and was very big on sports and didn’Äôt want to be grouped with these kids. I thought of them as freaks. But after a while, I was like McMurphy in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo’Äôs Nest'’ÄîI looked out for them, because I grew to identify with them. They became my friends.

"Then my dad became more successful, and we moved to Lake Forest, a really wealthy suburb," says Vaughn, neither cherishing nor shying away from the memory. "But my record went with me; when I transfered to a new school, they treated me the same way. Up until I was 13, I had to go to a special class once a day. That experience shaped me a lot, it made me an individual, someone capable of thinking for himself."

What the teenager thought for himself was that he wanted to grow up to be an actor, to play a cowboy like Alan Ladd in "Shane," one of the many westerns he’Äôd watched on the tube with his moviestruck dad. Getting hooked on movies may have prevented him from getting hooked on the sort of drugs that sent some of his peers to jail.

"I never got into drugs," says Vaughn, who certainly fools us with his bang-up job of getting high with Joaquin Phoenix in "Return to Paradise." "I did get arrested for being drunk and for fighting and stealing street signs. But I was lucky, because I always knew I loved acting and that’Äôs where my focus was. There was no way I was going to slip into the destructive world of drugs."

By the time he was 18, Vaughn did his father proud by becoming a familiar face’Äîif not quite a cowboy star’Äîon the tube, appearing briefly but memorably in a "Heartbeat of America" commercial for Chevrolet. He then deemed himself ready for Hollywood. Although movie stardom was not instant, Vaughn did earn martini money by doing bits on such TV series as "Doogie Howser," "M.D." and "21 Jump Street" and in such forgettable features as "For the Boys" and "Rudy."

His lifestyle’Äîconsisting of auditioning, bar-hopping, skirt-chasing and schmoozing with other wannabe superstars’Äîwas remarkably close to that of Trent, the party-boy of the $250,000-budgeted "Swingers," a role for which his buddy, actor-screenwriter Jon Favreau, persuaded him to write his own hip dialogue.

Vaughn also improvised in "Clay Pigeons," most notably in the tense but hilarious barroom flirtation scene with Janeane Garofalo as a hard-drinking FBI agent. In a weird way, his intriguing take on Lester, the aw-shucks serial killer in that film, can be traced back to the days when he watched westerns with his dad.

"Lester is a guy who isn’Äôt necessarily from the west’Äîthat’Äôs just an image he’Äôs created of himself. Whatever his reality is’Äîbeing badly hurt by women or whatever’Äîhe’Äôs made it over, taking bits and pieces of things he’Äôs seen in movies. He sees his life as a strange western movie, with himself as the hero. He thinks he’Äôs a sane person in an insane world."

Many would agree that Norman Bates was insane. And won’Äôt there be some who think Gus van Sant and Vince Vaughn (at right, as Norman) are crazy for following in the footsteps of director Alfred Hitchcock and star Anthony Perkins in "Psycho"?

"I have a lot of respect for Mr. Hitchcock," says Vaughn, taking no offense at the question. "I’Äôm a fan. And I think Mr. Perkins rocks’ÄîI’Äôm certainly not running a race with him. But I feel all movies are something to be grasped and touched and smelled, not something to be venerated, like religious relics. Obviously, Gus and I are fans of ’ÄòPsycho’Äô; we’Äôre simply trying to say, ’ÄòHey, this is a great film, and we want to celebrate and explore it.’Äô If someone 20 years down the line wants to remake ’ÄòSwingers,’Äô I’Äôll be flattered."

That should make his dad, who is undoubtedly a fan of "Swingers," prouder than ever.

"My dad was in ’ÄòSwingers,’Äô" Vaughn says, laughing like a kid. "He’Äôs the gambler at the blackjack table’Äîthe high roller, with a beautiful lady on either side."

Like, father, like son.

Article by Guy Flately, Indie Magazine, 1998
Found here

An Interview with Vince Vaughn

Judd Handler's Articles
The article can be found here.

He has graced the covers of Variety and Details. He's been called the movie star offspring of Ann Margaret and Elvis Presley's combined DNA (Movieline, March 1998). His outgoing, rock-a-billy quick wit and made-for-Hollywood looks (and height; he's 6'5") are the reason why girls want him and why guys want to be him. Meet Vince Vaughn, the newest member of Hollywood's A-list. No longer will Vaughn only be known for his role in Swingers, as Trent Walker. Vaughn was on the big screen recently in Return to Paradise; currently, he can be seen in the indie film, Clay Pigeons and will soon become a household name, after the remake of Psycho is released. A nice break from inflated Hollywood egos, Vaughn, like his character portryal of Trent in Vaughn's breakthrough movie, Swingers, is indeed oh so very money.

I meet with Vaughn in a suite at New York City’Äôs Essex House hotel. Vaughn enters sporting a full beard, whiskers creeping way south of chin level. He's relaxed and momentarily happy not to be a pretty-boy, clean-shaven Hollywood commodity. Throughout the interview, Vaughn is both highly engaging and accommodating. Halfway through the interview, Vaughn’Äôs publicist informs me that we have gone over the time limit. Vaughn replies to her, ’ÄúYo, give my man some more time here’Ķ.’Äù

University Reporter’Äôs Judd Handler: In Clay Pigeons, your character (Lester Long) is a psycho-killer charmer. What’Äôs your motivation to kill these young and sexy women?
Vaughn: Lester probably had a very traumatic experience when he was younger, where women are concerned. He felt very emasculated and probably didn’Äôt have any men at all in his life. I saw him as a kind of psycho-billy Frankenstein. I hope the movie is taken as sort of a dark comedic talent spread. In no way is it meant to perceive that there's anything romantically cool or romanticized about the killings. It's certainly in the order of strange, non-literal sex and that's what most of the movie is telling us.

UR: In the soon-to-be released remake of Psycho, you play Norman Bates, another frenetically-eccentric role. Is this a trend we’Äôre going to see from you?
Vaughn: It's all unplanned. I was just psyched to work with Gus (Van Sant, director) in Psycho. When I approach my acting, I never set off to say, I'm going to do a whole bunch of comedies or I'm going to do action films. I just do anything that I think is good. David Dobkin (Clay Pigeons director) is a first time director, his script meant a lot to him. That s the world that I came from with Swingers and that totally moved me. With Clay Pigeons, I think that (Janeane) Garofalo rocks and Joaquin (Phoenix) is great. Also in Psycho, you got Bill Macy, Julianne Moore, Anne Heche and Hugo Mortenson

UR: Is it a back to earth, reality check to do an indie movie in between Psycho and Return to Paradise?
Vaughn: It’Äôs not even planned that way, but Return to Paradise is really an indie film. I knew it would be a real hard sell, because twenty million dollars is a lot of money to spend on an indie film, but not really that much for a big studio movie. With its dark ending, it's a strange movie to be in. I m not a household name yet, but what bummed me out about the movie was, the subject matter deals with young people, but the edit of the film, the score and the whole feel of it is geared more towards an epic. I always felt it should have a more youthful edit.

UR: With Return to Paradise, Clay Pigeons and Psycho, you’Äôre going from one project to the next, have you had time to chill out at all?
Vaughn: Not much. I'm from Illinois and I moved out at 18 and spent like seven years on the outside. Swingers was something me and Favs (Jon Favreau, writer and co-star of Swingers) did with our friends. It was just totally fun for us and we just wanted to get the movie done. So I think now getting an opportunity now to play and do stuff has been so exciting to me. You wait so long. In Los Angeles the film industry is the predominant industry, you can't escape it. The billboards and everything; it's what you're trying to get into. It's tough, I'm really thankful for those years. I think it's given me such an appreciation now for the opportunity I have. I think that if I would have gotten some roles right away, I probably wouldn’Äôt have appreciated it as much as I do now.

UR: Knowing that you’Äôre going to be compared to Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, what made you strap on a set of balls and take the role?
Vaughn: I think too many people look at the arts with a religious outlook. Arts, music, singing and performing, it's all make-believe. Plays are interpreted time and time again. Because you've seen a great version of Our Town, does that mean you’Äôre emotionally cheating on the experience you had if you go see another performance, another artist’Äôs interpretation? Also with music...you hear Hank Williams sing a gospel song, and then Elvis sings the same song. I think there’Äôs value in that. For me I kind of approached it as a play. I approached it from the point of view of a tribute. I think Perkins gave a beautiful performance and signed his work beautifully, and if my mind-set going in was a competition with him, I would never do it. There’Äôs no value in that. But there is value in great material being reinvestigated 38 years later. Psycho was the very first time in American cinema, where they ever showed a toilet on screen. And so now in 1998, making it contemporary but staying with the dialogue...I thought it was an interesting thing to go back and investigate it in modern day. More than anything else, it’Äôs a tribute to Hitchcock, and actually, Hitchcock’Äôs daughter came down to the set and was giving everyone gifts and was totally thrilled that we were doing it.

UR: What toppings do you get on a pizza?
Vaughn: Pepperoni and jalapeno.

UR: How much consideration did you give in choosing the role in Speilberg's, The Lost World, considering some of your indie brethren would consider you a sellout?
Vaughn: I work selfishly for sense of self, not for perception. I saw Jaws in the movie theater at seven years old, I think Jaws rocks. I saw ET when I was like ten, and I thought ET was the shit. So for me getting a chance to work with Speilberg in a format like playing Cowboys and Indians, but with great toys, was like the coolest thing in the world. I felt like a kid doing it.

UR: You love Sega; name some of your favorite games.
Vaughn: I’Äôm into the Play Station now and I just got the Super Nintendo. I like the sports a lot, like hockey and football. And I like just playing with friends, similar to Swingers, a chance to just bust out on friends. I recently got into these solve-a-mystery games. They're like a bad drug. They just chuck two weeks out of your life.

UR: In Swingers, there is a scene where you’Äôre telling Jon Favreau to be a bear and not a bunny when he’Äôs picking up a girl. Is Vince Vaughn a bear or a bunny?
Vaughn: Probably both. Whenever you re scared of something, don t let that define you. We all feel it, but step up. We can sit here all night or you can go up and introduce yourself and if she says no, it’Äôs cool, whatever. But you're never going to know unless you try.

UR: Swingers seemed like a very natural role for you. Was that portrayal typical of your early LA experience?
Vaughn: I wasn't as big on talking about what independent film rocked, versus what didn’Äôt. My take on it was always, if you’Äôre the guy not working, who are you to say, that movie sucked, or whatever. Like most young guys, I went through my stage of going out to bars and meeting girls and having fun. There was a group of guys that I did that with, but I always preferred the sort of bars that were in the film, because they were kind of real. I was never big on the whole nightclub thing. I like the neighborhood bar. You go shoot pool or have a drink and you know the local bartender. If a pretty girl walks in, great, but it wasn't the focus of my night.

UR: What’Äôs your favorite (modern) swing band?
Vaughn: I’Äôd say (Big Bad) Voodoo Daddy. I also like Muddy Blue Kings from Chicago.

UR: You give Voodoo Daddy props for Swingers?
Vaughn: Totally, back in the day, they were doing us the biggest solid by doing that film. It was one of their regular nights they were performing. They were totally down with us filming.

UR: What’Äôs your favorite Guns & Roses song?
Vaughn: Love G & R by the way. ’ÄúI Used To Love Her,’Äù I liked that one. I like a lot of their stuff but I'll go with that one. And ’ÄúParadise City,’Äù obviously.

UR: Joaquin Phoenix, you've worked with him on successive projects (Return to Paradise and Clay Pigeons). Is he a cool guy to work with?
Vaughn: Totally cool, great actor. We get in a lot of trouble hanging out.

UR: Everyone has their soft spots in their self-esteem, where do yours lie? In what ways are you a loser?
Vaughn: In a lot of ways, as a kid I had a hard time reading in school. I was the kid who would go one period a day to the class for kids with learning disabilities.

UR: Were you a wise-ass in high school?
Vaughn: The teachers thought I was crazy. I was sort of a wild kid. But I always felt like, if a kid is getting up to give a speech and he s starting to cry, he s gotta go to school with us for the rest of the year, and your f***in' with him, making him stand up there. I d tell the kid to sit down. And they'd say, "You can t tell him that, it's my class." And I'd say, ’ÄúGive him a break on the speech, he just f***in’Äô cried in front of you." What do you want? He's gotta go and hang out, he's gotta go to school for the rest of the day. You want him to sit up there the whole period and cry? And then when high school comes around he s the guy who cried forever? So I would get in a lot of trouble for that kind of stuff. I was always confidante enough to say, "This is f***in' crazy."

UR: So you worked with Speilberg. Do you think he got jealous of you hooking up with his wife, Kate Capshaw, in that scene in The Locust?
Vaughn: Well, I mean he's a professional, but I was weirded out. I'm kissing his wife and he's casting me for (Jurassic Park) Lost World.

UR: What’Äôs the smoothest way you ever picked up a girl?
Vaughn: I was never big on lines. My whole thing was always just feel comfortable. And I was lucky I always got along with girls. It was never like a big deal. I had a lot of girls that I was friends with that I wasn't sexual with. I think having two older sisters made me comfortable like that. I just like people, so I can just go up and say whatever.

UR: Are you going to work with Jon Favreau again?
Vaughn: We're going to start work on our first movie together since Swingers. It's called Martial Revelation, a western, about a Hasidic Jew in the old west who’Äôs a gunfighter. Favs plays the Hasidic gunfighter. He’Äôs looking for the man who killed his family and he can’Äôt shoot the gun on Saturday because it’Äôs the Sabbath. I play a Chicago hustler who teams up with the Hasidic gunfighter.

UR: What’Äôs the last book you read and how does it relate to your state of mind?
Vaughn: The last book I read was the book I've been rereading most of my life, The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand). One thing that has been frustrating as an actor is in these movies you go and throw your shit out but you’Äôre not in charge of the edit or how they manipulate it. It can be a hard thing sometimes. But I understand that s my role. I have learned a lot but I think that's sort of what made Favs and me hungry to get back and do the art thing again and have control. Because that s much more a signature of what your taste is in a film. Because you have much more control of how it goes down. When we made Swingers, no one would take that movie. People would offer money to buy it and wanted to change it. "Why is it swing music? What's this, you're so money shit? That will never work." Look, we weren’Äôt trying to make something everyone in the world would love. And I think by doing that, people saw that value in the film.

UR: You mentioned Swingers a lot. You’Äôre not burned out from talking about it?
Vaughn: No, not at all. I'm so proud of it.

UR: When you were younger, who was your Trent?
Vaughn: I thought Elvis was cool as shit because he wasn't a dick with it. He was warm and a gentleman. He was able to make fun of himself. He was just smooth. I have always thought Clint Eastwood was real cool. I like Walter Matthau in the Bad News Bears. I always thought there was something really honest about that. You've got my man driving around with a bunch of kids, he doesn’Äôt want them around and he's drinking the sauce. He's making them clean the pool and shit like that. And Matt Dillon in his earlier movies, like The Outsiders and Rumblefish. I thought he was the man. UR

©Judd Handler, 1999-2002
Judd Handler's Articles
The article can be found here.