Matt And Ben Script Pdf

Good Will Hunting Original Script by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck an Original Script by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck The following is Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's Award Winning Script for Good Will Hunting. It is what Matt Damon and Ben Affleck originally wrote on paper before the movie was made. It's well-written, well-played, and inspired - if the script for Matt & Ben fell from the sky into Kaling and Withers's hands, they sure knew what to do with it. Matt & Ben runs at the ACME Comedy Theatre in Hollywood through May 16, 2004. For information, see www.mattandben.com.

• Matt And Ben Script Pdf

Matt & Ben Presented by Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre Company Boys will be boys. Sometimes, these days, girls are also boys.

So consider Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers’ satirical spoof Matt & Ben about how two fractious twenty-something guys happened to write an original screenplay that was instantly produced and won an Academy Award. Kaling and Withers, who were also twenty-something when they wrote Matt & Ben, saw the roles as vehicles for themselves. Keeping with that casting choice, the season finale at (through June 17), directed by Shana Gozansky, puts two women in the title roles. Not so much for feminist politics, as for laughs. As the reader has already assumed, the title characters are Boston-area actors Matt Damon (Caitlin Nasema Cassidy) and Ben Affleck (Lilli Hokama), whose first attempt at a film script was the phenomenally successful Good Will Hunting (1997), set on streets they both knew well. Both Damon and Affleck had already played prominent supporting roles. A poster for their 1992 movie School Ties adorns the wall of their squalid apartment.

They were hardly nobodies, but the Kaling-Withers script implies a note of jealousy: Why these two jerks instead of us? Matt & Ben appeared in 2002, and since that time playwright Kaling has also made it, with TV’s The Office and The Mindy Project.

Kaling and Withers have assumed that the two guys have been so much in the public eye that we know quite a bit about their off-screen personae as separated from roles they have played. The shorter, more intense Damon is the son of a stockbroker and a university professor who grew up in the rarefied dovecotes of Cambridge, Mass. It does not take much exposition to portray him as a driven overachiever. The rougher-edged Affleck came from a bit lower on the social ladder and moves with a coarser manner. This means that Hokama can have more fun with Affleck’s macho mannerisms, his swaggering gait and thrust shoulders.

Matt And Ben Script Pdf

She has perfected the guy trick of throwing a nugget of sugared cereal into the air and catching it in her mouth every time. Good as this is, the character seems to be lurching toward Oscar Madison and short-changes the mature Affleck, auteur of The Town and Argo. The boys’ initial attempts at writing a vehicle for the screen are hopelessly lame: an adaptation of the unfilmable Catcher in the Rye. In a moment of magical realism Catcher’s author, the famously reclusive J.D. Salinger (Cassidy wearing a bow tie), appears before them to tell them he’s against the adaptation. So is the Matt-and-Ben script the result of 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration?

No, it’s too good for that, Kaling and Withers say: The script for Good Will Hunting just falls miraculously from the sky. La Cage aux Folles Presented by Syracuse’s Redhouse at City Center More gender-bending humor is on deck with the second production, now taking place through Sunday, June 10, at the capacious Austin & Allyn Auditorium in the restored Sibley’s building. The Redhouse has slated another show with wide audience appeal: La Cage aux Folles, with Jerry Herman’s golden score and Harvey Fierstein’s quick-witted lyrics, has been wowing local theatergoers for three decades. The question is: How to give it a different spin from what has gone before? Enter two forces: ebullient Steve Hayes, a company favorite as the cross-dressing lead, Albin/Zaza, and Cassie Abate, a director-choreographer with top national credits, now on the faculty of Texas State University in San Marcos. Download play store for windows 10. Abate reduces the chorus, the Cagelles, down to four, sometimes numbering four times that many in other productions. She also jettisons the conceit that gender is ambiguous, with female legs mixed in with the male. Not only do we know who’s what, but one character named Mercedes (T.J.

Newton) has a running gag that drag is exhausting work. Little wonder: All the dance numbers are ambitious and gymnastic, with multiple splits and sky-high kicks. No expense has been spared on constant costume changes, usually showing muscular calves as fetching. Dance also unites father and son. The premise of the plot is that fresh-faced Jean-Michel (C.K. Anderson), son of Georges (Dirk Lumbard), owner and emcee of the St.

Tropez transvestite nightclub cited in the title, wants to marry Anne (Liana Rose), from a reactionary homophobic family. As has not been seen elsewhere, father and son break into a show-stopping tap number as they reconcile and head toward the finale. Steve Hayes has become a familiar face at the Redhouse. He was recently featured there in an autobiographical show, Raised by Warner Brothers, Born in Syracuse, and previous appearances include a vaudevillian Polonius in Hamlet (March 2014) and Edna in Hairspray (December 2012), a role not unlike Zaza/Albin. Although his silhouette must have been a challenge to costumer Raven Ong, the results are dazzling in scene after scene. Hayes leaps into some of Zaza’s best scenes, featuring naughty interplay with people sitting in the first two rows.

He elaborates on these with some favorite imitations, including Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich and Bette Davis. Hayes is just as adept at pulling tears as evoking laughs. When Harvey Fierstein rewrote Jean Poirot’s stage play, he emphasized the pain inflicted on gays by puritanical bigotry.

When Zaza is rejected and alone, Hayes becomes the mater dolorosa. Company regulars John Bixler, of the iron diction, and Laura Austin, with a newfound giggle, deliver the goods as the nominal villains, the Dindons, both decency fanatics. Local veteran Aubry Panek is reliably sexy and provocative as the rival nightclub owner Jacqueline. And music director Bridget Moriarty leads a four-part ensemble on stage, making Jerry Herman’s score a part of the action.

ALTHOUGH her name is not mentioned in any of its forms - J. Lo, Jenny, Jen -the inescapable image of Jennifer Lopez hovers over the clever Off Off Broadway satire 'Matt & Ben.' ' Set in 1995, when Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were struggling actors, the play has Ben fantasize about being famous.

'I'm going to meet Daisy Fuentes,' he says. 'I like Latin women.' ' The line gets a huge, easy laugh because we are all saturated with too much information about the couple sometimes known as Bennifer.

Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers, the women who wrote the play and also appear as Ben and Matt, turn celebrity overload to their advantage, embracing our shared image of the actors - Matt is the smart one, Ben is cute but dumb - even as they send up the embarrassing amount of trivia we carry around about movie stars. The play shrewdly connects to its audience by tapping into our encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. 'Matt & Ben' (now running at P.S. 122 in the East Village) had its premiere a year ago at the New York International Fringe Festival, at the very moment when the Ben and Jen Show was about to overshadow the Legend of Matt and Ben. Despite the hovering spirit of J.

Lo (the line about Latin women has been added since the Fringe performances), it's the Legend that is central to the play. We all know the story, of how two best friends came out of nowhere to win an Oscar for writing 'Good Will Hunting,' their first and so far last script together.

'Matt & Ben' depicts the only plausible explanation: the screenplay fell from the sky. Actually, here it falls from the ceiling into Ben's shabby apartment, cluttered with beer cans, nachos and a framed head shot of himself. 'Gigli' is a bad, boring movie. Any romantic comedy about a smart lesbian mob enforcer who falls for a bumbling male mob enforcer who has kidnapped a brain-damaged young man is probably going to stink.

But it's not unwatchably, off-the-charts, 'Showgirls' bad. It's 'Hollywood Homicide' bad. Like this summer's excruciatingly dull Harrison Ford film - a widely panned box-office dud - 'Gigli' is the kind of big-budget turkey that's never hard to find. Only Ben and Jen overload can account for the savage critical response. The heads of critics and audiences are bursting with icky echoes of the couple's hourlong 'Dateline' interview, in which they pretended to be surprised at the media attention, and with images of her flashing what is inevitably described as her 6.1-carat pink diamond engagement ring custom made by Harry Winston. People magazine, Jay Leno and the rest of the adoring infotainment industry maintain the pretense that celebrities matter to us personally. The creators of 'Matt & Ben,' with their fond but pointed sendup of celebrity overload, understand that while we're insatiably fascinated by stars and their bizarre spectacles, we don't care in any profound sense.

To us, the Ben and Jen Show is a real-life popcorn movie, a humorous diversion; the ring only proves that Harry Winston can be gauche too. That attitude helps the play speak to a younger audience raised on movies, television and entertainment gossip, for whom 'Saturday Night Live' and 'Mad TV' are bedrocks of popular comedy. It's not surprising that 'Matt & Ben' was the only play at this year's United States Comedy and Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. Its irreverent tone and the blithe way the women assume male roles would have fit right in with the stand-up comedy and sketch humor all around it. Like the campy, now-aging 'Real Live Brady Bunch' play and the current 'Avenue Q,' the adult puppet musical that nods to 'Sesame Street,' 'Matt & Ben' represents a theater that appeals to a younger generation's pop cultural assumptions, a forward-looking theater that is not snobbish about movies, television or US Weekly. The play's biggest laughs come when its creators are lampooning the familiar smart-Matt, dumb-Ben images.

Withers is dressed like a preppie, in khakis and an Oxford shirt. Kaling sits at the computer typing their work-in-progress, a screen adaptation of 'The Catcher in the Rye,' and asks for help with spelling. Matt has just auditioned for a Sam Shepard play; Ben is insulted that Matt thinks he doesn't know who Sam Shepard is.

'He was in 'The Pelican Brief,' ' Ben says. 'I love that guy. With the wrinkles?' ' (That exchange may seem to encapsulate the difference between traditional, serious drama and Hollywood-driven fame, but think about how Mr.

Shepard himself veers between the two worlds and it's evident that the lines blurred long ago.) We get the in-jokes, laughing with perfect hindsight when the intense Matt warns his slacker friend: 'Look, Ben, you can't just coast this way forever. It won't get you anywhere.' ' We understand that when Gwyneth Paltrow (played by Ms. Kaling) stops by, she is a visitor from the future.

She drops the name of her then-boyfriend, Brad, whom she calls 'a hunky leading man who can't read.' ' 'Brad Pitt can't read?' ' Matt asks, in case there's the least doubt about his identity, but the line is hardly necessary. Advertisement Of course we remember that Gwyneth was with Brad before she moved on to Ben, who later moved on to Jen. Some of us even remember that Diane Sawyer then asked Ms. Paltrow on 'Good Morning America' if the rumors were true: was she appalled that her former boyfriend was with Ms. The implication was that Ben had moved from a princess to a vulgarian.

Paltrow loftily replied she didn't talk about her own relationships, much less other people's. (O.K., she gets to be the princess for that.) More to the point, this is the kind of useless information we have collected, and that the creators of 'Matt & Ben' exploit so well. With their success, Ms. Kaling and Ms. Withers are in some small danger of begetting a media legend of their own. Read anything about 'Matt & Ben' and you'll hear the story of two Dartmouth schoolmates and aspiring actors who, while rooming together in New York one hot summer, stayed indoors reading celebrity magazines that featured Ben Affleck's rehab saga on the covers. They began improvising.

Like Matt and Ben themselves, they wrote a script they could act in. The Legend of Mindy and Brenda was born, and the media cycle goes on. So far, the real Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have had nothing to say about the fictional Matt and Ben, at least not publicly. They are not known to have seen the play. They've had other things to do. Affleck turned up on 'The Tonight Show' with Jay Leno - the sacred shrine of celebrity worship - doing massive damage control.

He read from the bad reviews of 'Gigli' and laughed off tabloid rumors that his engagement was on the rocks because of his widely reported visit to a strip club in Canada. Like Hugh Grant redeeming himself on the Leno show by acting abashed after he was caught with a hooker, Mr. Affleck arrived with a transparent goal: to make viewers admire his self-deprecating wit and honesty. The savvy, celebrity-saturated audiences for 'Matt & Ben' would see through that strategy in a flash. But as the play's authors and audiences know, that doesn't make the spectacle a bit less entertaining.