Wayans spoof made in the Shade

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This article was published 30/01/2016 (3627 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A s an actor, writer and producer, Marlon Wayans has parodied everything from horror movies to inner-city dramas to dance-competition films. He insists he doesn’t go out looking for subjects to spoof. They have a way of finding him.

“I think if you go looking for something to parody, it’s not going to be genuine,” Wayans, 43, said on a recent afternoon. “Something has to hit you, and once you start putting your pen to pad, it’s just joke after joke after joke — and before you know it, you have a movie.”

A few years ago, curious about what the housewife-flustering fuss was all about, Wayans picked up a copy of E L James’ runaway erotic bestseller, Fifty Shades of Grey. The Harlequin-romance-meets-S&M novel about a billionaire who draws an ingenue into his sexually kinky world instantly struck him as ripe for mockery — exactly the sort of thing that could be transmogrified, Wayans-style, into an over-the-top spoof movie.

“Sex and comedy go hand in hand,” Wayans said. “Sex is something everybody does, and every comedian has five to 20 minutes of sex material. It was just a fun place to explore.”

Fifty Shades of Black, which opened Friday, follows the rough formula of earlier Wayans parody films such as Scary Movie, Dance Flick and A Haunted House, taking ostensibly serious material and heightening its inherent sillier aspects, then putting it into a blender with over-the-top slapstick, topical pop-culture gags and unexpected cameos. (Suffice to say, after this film, fans of the The Brady Bunch may never look at Florence Henderson in quite the same way again.)

Wayans, who steps into the pervy businessman role opposite Kali Hawk, hopes to draft off the success of the Fifty Shades of Grey book and last year’s big-screen adaptation, which earned US$500 million. But the goal, he said, was to make a film that would work whether you love Fifty Shades of Grey, hate it or are indifferent to it.

“I want the movie to be funny to anybody who watches it,” said Wayans, who also watched erotic thrillers such as 9 1/2 Weeks and Indecent Proposal for inspiration while working on the script with his writing and producing partner, Rick Alvarez. “I never really try to bash a movie when I send it up. It’s not about pointing fingers at a movie — it’s a celebration as well because (the original) was such a phenomenon.”

The spoof movie has occupied its own unique place in the cinematic ecosystem, a kind of comedic remora that rides along the back of the leviathan blockbusters. Though spoofs are not the kind of movies that get showered with critical plaudits and awards, writer-director Jim Abrahams — who, along with Jerry and David Zucker, co-wrote such exemplars of the genre as Airplane! and The Naked Gun — believes they have a valuable, court jester-like role to play within Hollywood.

“The ultimate target of spoof is to allow us all to laugh at things that we tend to take seriously,” Abrahams said. “I think it’s a very healthy kind of humour when done right.” He laughed. “The whole idea is not to take things seriously — and here we are taking it seriously.”

Spoof movies have existed for almost as long as there have been movies to spoof — in the silent era, Stan Laurel was cracking up audiences with parodies such as Mud and Sand and Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pride. But Wayans — along with Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who have co-directed such spoof films as Date Movie, Meet the Spartans and The Starving Games — grew up in what was, in retrospect, their golden age.

The 1970s and ’80s saw an explosion of spoof movies and genre send-ups, from The Kentucky Fried Movie to Monty Python and the Holy Grail to Mel Brooks classics such as Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, many of which were embraced not just by audiences, but by critics as well.

“My brothers took me to Airplane! when I was like eight,” said Wayans, whose first big-screen appearance was in his older brother Keenen Ivory Wayans’ 1988 blaxploitation spoof I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. “It stuck in my head: ‘These are the kinds of movies I like going to: They make statements, but they’re subtle and yet loud. It’s just silly and broad and physical.’ “

Into the late ’90s and early 2000s, the parody genre was still going strong; 2000’s Scary Movie, also directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans, pulled in US$278 million worldwide and spawned four sequels. In recent years, though, the spoof movie has lost some of its lustre and box-office potency as the Internet has created an endless glut of parody of varying quality. Type Fifty Shades of Grey parody into the YouTube search bar and you’ll find seemingly no end of videos: Fifty Shades of Gay, Fifty Shades of Bae, Fifty Shades of Broke, Fifty Shades of Frozen. There’s a FunnyOrDie video featuring Selena Gomez called Fifty Shades of Blue.

“Right now, parody is a struggle,” said Wayans, who has appeared in many non-spoof films, including Requiem for a Dream, White Chicks and The Heat. “A lot of parody can come out that spoils the taste of the audience. It’s the same with standup: Everybody is going to have some version of the joke. There’s no guarantee. It’s all about who’s telling the joke and do you like what they’re saying.”

That said, spoof movies continue to be a viable proposition on the big screen — provided the budgets are kept in check. “If you spend a ton of money on a movie like this, you’re going to lose your shirt,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at the box-office tracking firm Rentrak. “Nobody is looking for Academy Award nominations out of any of these movies, but they’re obviously making enough of a profit to make it worthwhile. At the end of the day, scoff all you want at these movies, but if the film makes money — if it ends up making a US$10 or US$20 million profit — then the filmmakers are laughing all the way to the bank.”

Fifty Shades of Black was financed by IM Global at a production cost of less than US$5 million and is being distributed by Open Road Films, which also released Wayans’ 2013 found-footage-horror parody A Haunted House and its 2014 sequel. Open Road CEO Tom Ortenberg is confident that, between its theatrical release and eventual home-video afterlife, where parody films tend to do well, the film will find a sizable audience.

“Every film needs to have an economic model that supports it — it doesn’t matter whether it’s a raunchy R-rated comedy, a historical drama, a superhero film,” Ortenberg said. “Fifty Shades is hilarious and stands on its own as an outrageous comedy. There was a strong feeling from the beginning that the film needed not only to be as big, but as broad as possible, and I think they really achieved it.”

The enormous popularity of Fifty Shades provides a certain level of insurance. Abrahams pointed to the failure of the 1984 Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker film Top Secret! — an odd hybrid of an Elvis Presley movie parody and a Second World War film — as an illustration of the need for that kind of solid foundation when doing on a spoof.

“Top Secret! launched off of a genre that didn’t exist — there were no World War II Elvis movies,” he said. “If you look at the parodies that have done best — Young Frankenstein or Airplane! or Scary Movie — they all launch off of very firm grounding.”

But even with that firm grounding, there is one Fifty Shades audience member who may go into the movie with a somewhat less amused attitude: the book’s author. Wayans says he met James recently in L.A. Over drinks, he tried to ease any worries she might have about Fifty Shades of Black.

“She was like, ‘Am I going to be upset at your movie?’ ” Wayans said. “I said, ‘Look, mockery is the best form of flattery.’ “

— Los Angeles Times