“One out of ten of your movies will get made. If you went one for ten at anything else, they’d fire you.”

Thomas Lennon co-created Reno 911!, wrote Night at the Museum and its sequels, played Lieutenant Dangle, and co-wrote Writing Movies for Fun and Profit — a book that turns up on more screenwriters’ shelves than most people expect.

He was interviewed in the bar where he wrote Night at the Museum. Every word of it, he says, at the old Cat & Fiddle on Sunset.

Edited for length and clarity.

People still read your screenwriting book. How did it come about?

That’s a tough one, because I always feel weird when people ask what the path is to doing the thing you love.

The strange answer is that I do this out of a compulsion. I can’t stop writing, and it makes me very happy to write. I’d write anyway. And that’s a nice thing to know — if you write every day, you could also make it a job. But it also won’t necessarily be a job. It could just be something you love to do.

As for the book — we’d read so many screenwriting books that we got a little cynical. A little mean, if I’m honest.

There was originally a chapter dedicated to all the movies written by people who’d written other screenwriting books. It was so mean we took it out, because we just seemed bitchy.

But the guy who wrote Save the Cat has half of one TV credit.

I know that’s shi*ty and I shouldn’t mention it. But there are a lot of screenwriting gurus who’ve never had a hit movie. Or a movie. You can’t be an architecture guru who’s never built anything.

There’s a whole industry of that now.

We rag on the ones who say, come meet us at the airport, Mary, so we can see if you’re a good writer.

Don’t. You don’t meet anyone at the airport, Mary. Anyone.

If you like writing, do it a ton. Then you’ll have seven hundred bad days in a row where nothing happens. And then one day, one thing will be good.

What was your first door?

I came up out of sketch comedy. We were very serious about it.

Then we came out to LA, and me and another guy from our group got asked: do you think you could adapt this book into a movie?

F*cking blindfolded.

Now — not only had I never thought about whether I could write a movie script, I had never read a movie script. Ever. But someone said, can you adapt this book, and we said, in our sleep.

So we wrote what was basically a very long sketch movie. And everyone read it and said: oh, nobody will ever make this. But it’s very, very funny.

They said, we’re never going to make the movie you wrote, because it’s insane, and obviously you’ve never read any movie scripts.

And we said — I don’t know. Might have. Maybe we read all of them.

We had not read any movie scripts. But it became a calling card.

What does the job actually look like?

Nobody says, come in and pitch us your dream movie. Just think of anything you like.

That’s never the case.

The answer is: we own the rights to Mountain Dew. Can you make us money? Or: we accidentally bought every book ever written, can you pick one and turn it into something?

If you love writing, you can also be a contractor sometimes. There’s being an auteur, and there’s being a contractor.

Is there a through-line between the tiny indie and the Mountain Dew movie?

Everything I write feels exactly the same. I can’t tell you whether that’s good or bad. I write jokes for Kerri Kenney to tell at an award show with the same passion as a novel.

How do you stay relevant when comedy keeps changing?

There’s something to be said for acting like you’re confident, even if you don’t feel it.

The difference between pretending to be very confident and being very confident is not noticeable to anybody else. The only person who knows you’re pretending is you. Everyone else just thinks: oh, that’s a cocky person who really knows they’re right.

People want to feel like you know what you’re doing. Very early on we started pretending to know what we were doing, even though there was no evidence that we did. It’s so much easier if the room thinks — thank God, they know.

What are the actual odds?

This is a tough thing to say, but if you’re the busiest screenwriter in the world, one out of ten of your movies gets made.

If you made any other product and went one for ten, they’d fire you. But go one for ten in screenwriting and you’re the all-time best. Ever.

Fitzy — if you went one for ten in stunts, you’d be long dead.

What’s it like writing with a partner?

It can really be great. But here’s the tricky part.

When you’re writing there’s a part in the back of your head going: no, no, no, I’m going to undo that. Let’s not do that. I’m going to go back and fix the beginning right now.

You don’t need one of those. And you definitely don’t need two of those.

Two people going ah, ah, let’s start over — just stop. Two people can write really well together if you both step back from that.

And by the way, you’re going to rewrite everything later anyway.

People agonise over dialogue.

I meet people who write something and ask, is this dialogue good?

It will never f*cking matter. Ever.

No movie star is going to say the dialogue you wrote. Not even kind of. They’re going to come in in the morning and say, that’s dumb — what if I just look up and go, no.

And you’re like: oh. Okay. I wrote a whole thing about you being sad.

You toil over it, and then once the movie’s going, nobody’s stressing about it. All that dialogue you wrote thinking you were Tennessee Williams — let’s put on nice clothes and go down to Galatoire’s — that is never going in the movie. No movie star is saying that. They woke up, they had something they wanted to say, and they worked out.

Cross out all of that.

Does acting help the writing?

I do basically the same job. Writing is just improvising with your hands. To me they’re identical.

The fun thing about scripts and books is: what if you were every character? Especially in books, which I’m getting more into. I’m going to fill the next hundred pages inside the head of this person. What are they doing with their foot?

Writing is just acting. As far as I can tell.

I won’t say acting is also writing. It’s a weird one-way street.

How do you know if an idea is a movie or just a sketch?

It’s still confusing to me. I kind of hate the part of my brain that kills ideas like that.

You could argue Get Out is a premise that sounds like a sketch. But no — it’s a f*cking amazing movie.

Sometimes it’s good to get out of your head and not judge it. A lot of amazing movies have very simple premises. That filter will stop you writing things that I think are good.

If you think there’s any merit at all, start going. Don’t go back and rewrite the beginning. Just keep going. You’ll look back and tweak it later, but press on. There will be enough people to tell you they didn’t like it.

How long did it take to write?

For everything, the answer is: my entire life, or a week.

It took my entire life and also a week.

People ask that question meaning: if I had that much free time, I’d have written that too. And you’re like, no, you wouldn’t have. Also, I don’t write in my free time.

It’s like the line in The Social Network, when the twins say they invented Facebook, and Zuckerberg says: if you’d invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook.

Tell us about Taxi.

This is probably the best story I have.

We’d done some sketch things, written a couple of movies, started getting hired to fix scripts. And then we got hired to write a movie that was going to be a giant hit — a remake of the Luc Besson film Taxi.

It tested so well that audiences lost their f*cking minds. Taxi with Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon! Give us a hundred of these! Never stop making these!

That was the test feedback. So we signed a deal to make Taxi 2.

Then, about a month before release, the producer called and said: I’m leaving the country for a while.

I said, hey Bob, what’s up?

He said, yeah — the movie’s tracking. It’s a disaster. Everyone hates it. It comes out on Friday, but I’ll be far away.

And then he actually said: we’re going to be radioactive for a little while.

I said, what happened? Everybody loved the — what?

Everybody loved the duck, though. The duck was on the poster.

So how did Night at the Museum happen?

We got summoned to Fox, because we owed them a script.

There’s no Taxi 2. You’re lucky to be alive. It’s like when you walk in and there’s plastic on the ground.

They put out a deck of three or four children’s books they owned. None of them were of much interest, except one very short one called Night at the Museum.

The premise of the children’s book is that if you walk through a museum and the guard is asleep, it’s because at night he has to take everything in the museum for a walk around Central Park. So in the morning, don’t bug the guard. He’s very sleepy.

We knew the Natural History Museum well. And then we thought about why would things come to life — and got to Egyptian mythology. The idea that there’s a life after this one, so you pack everything you’d need for the next life.

Then we stole the Temple of Dendur, which is actually at the Met, and moved it over to the Natural History Museum.

Sometimes things just come very clearly. If you logically think about it — who would believe they’d come to life after this life? The Egyptians. Very specifically, they were ready for it.

That’s where all the mythology in those movies comes from.

And how did the release feel, after Taxi?

It didn’t feel like much at the time. The only thing that felt neat was the head of Fox calling to say the movie would make more in its second weekend than its first. That’s one of the rarest things in the movie business — a film that builds instead of declining. I didn’t realise what that meant.

And here’s a great thing to talk about with professional screenwriters.

My life’s achievement is probably writing Night at the Museum.

It is currently at forty per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.

That is a spectacularly bad number. And it is the best you could ever wish for at what I do.

You’ve had the opposite experience too.

We made a movie called Hell Baby. We got into Sundance — opening weekend, prime slot. Amazing.

I got a flu shot the day before, landed, and realised: oh, I have the flu.

We screened Hell Baby. Standing ovation. Everybody lost their minds. We went back to the condo, I took two steps, and broke my toe on the bed.

So now I have the flu and a broken toe. And I’m waiting for the reviews of the movie that are going to be amazing — this will make me better.

It was so despised.

My entire body hurt and everyone hated the movie that had just played Sundance. I thought: did I choose this?

I guess I did.

(My own son still won’t clap for Hell Baby.)

What would you tell someone starting now?

Every movie studio and every network — I would have a thing on YouTube.

No studio or TV channel is even close. Quibi was invented to compete with YouTube, not with Netflix.

I’m on a show on Fox right now, small part, and brand new episodes do a .4 — four tenths of one ratings point. When The State was on MTV we used to do a 1.6 on a Sunday night, and that was a giant number. A network show today that got what our cable show got thirty years ago would be the hit of the millennium.

The world has definitely changed.

Don’t ask for permission and don’t wait for people to say things. If you skipped ahead to just having a YouTube channel of your short films, you’d already be at the head of the pack. Because that’s where it’s going to be watched.

Do you outline?

I never plan anything out, really. The more I do, the less well things go.

Although — I pitched a movie the other day where I wrote a thirty-page outline. But a thirty-page outline for me has a lot of dialogue in it.

So it’s a bit of both. The notion in Save the Cat and others that if you have this structure it will automatically work — I know that’s not true. There has to be a part of you that’s just doing some dumb sh*t and figuring it out as you go.

It’s great to have a plan and an ending. But if you’re not surprising yourself — I’ve seen scripts where you think, well, that’s the structure, in math. And that’s exactly what it felt like.

Sometimes you see the opposite and it’s thrilling. It’s good to know what the rules are, and then not do them sometimes.

An audience member asked about Reno 911! and being afraid of causing offence.

There was a weird period where people were afraid of things that might hurt someone else’s feelings. And the idea that this could make someone mad — well, let me meet them. I want to meet the person this will upset.

There were a lot of people being upset on someone else’s behalf, which is a very strange thing.

On Reno 911! we were never mean-spirited. There’s stuff that’s mean intentionally, and there’s stuff that’s funny and true. Our rule was: if it’s genuinely hilarious, it’s fine.

But this other world of this might make someone we’ve never met sad — I’ve never cared about that.

We got asked to a meeting once, about an episode I directed. Standards and practices wanted a Zoom, down the road, just to talk about it. In case somebody was sad.

I said no. They said, we just want a Zoom where we talk about it. I said, I won’t be there.

I never heard about it again.

I’m in comedy because I’m sad. So if somebody else is sad — I don’t give a f*ck. And if I made them sad, they can call me.

We all got worried about the feelings of people who don’t exist. And the real people we know were saying, that was f*cking hilarious.

How much of your personality ends up on the page?

If you looked at my sketches from The State and then at Night at the Museum, you’d instantly see the overlap.

My most famous sketch from The State is called Monkey Torture.

And in Night at the Museum there’s a scene where Dexter — the capuchin, actually played by a monkey named Crystal — pees on Larry.

If you don’t know that’s my handiwork, you have never met me.

We don’t pee on people. That’s not a thing we do. I was telling you my whole life that I was going to write that scene.

As soon as you see a monkey peeing on somebody — who else would want to do that? Nobody.

Night at the Museum was written, every word of every page, at the Cat & Fiddle on Sunset — the bar where this conversation took place.

Nobody says, come in and pitch us your dream movie. Just think of anything you like.

Thomas Lennon speaking at a Storytelling360 StorySocial