Lowell Ganz and Mark (Bobaloo) Mandel met about 25 years ago at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. It was a place where unemployed comics and comedy writers hung out looking for a chance to whine, the possibility for a little sympathy and the opportunity to poke fun at the working stiffs who filled the audience.
What Ganz, 56, and Mandel, 55, found instead was a lifetime partnership that has resulted to date in 18 produced screenplays, including “Splash,” “Parenthood,” “City Slickers” and “A League of Their Own.” The pair has two films coming out this year: “Robots,” an animated feature that opens nationally March 11, and “Fever Pitch,” starring Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon, which opens April 8.
Ironically, the meeting was less kismet than beshert. Both were born in the Bronx, both vacationed in the Catskills within a couple of blocks of each other (“We’re almost certain we brushed paths there as kids,” Mandel said), and both grew up in a Jewish environment where being funny was the norm.
Ganz’s father was a temple member, the family kept kosher in his formative years and he celebrated a bar mitzvah. Similarly, Mandel’s parents were observant — at least while his grandmother was alive — and he proudly exclaims that each of his six children also celebrated a bar mitzvah. But it is that uniquely Jewish sense of humor that drove them.
“In my family it was my dad and my grandmother,” Mandel says, “I don’t know how far back it went. Apparently, we are all the same people.”
“Nobody thought I was especially funny,” Ganz says. “Where I grew up, my mother, my dad, my family, the friends I hung out with, everybody was funny. I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t funny. To this day, I find my friends as funny as they find me. The difference was that I could organize it on paper.
“I think there’s a sound, that New York noise, that has very, very deep roots in traditional kinds of American comedy. Before our time, on radio and television, people like Sid Caesar set the sounds of American comedy and it was a sound that was very natural to us.
“Mel Brooks and Neil Simon and Woody Allen, even though they’re of an older generation, [what they created] kind of became an American comedy sound and it suited us. When I started on ‘The Odd Couple,’ it was a sound I recognized. It was hard to do it. It’s very hard to do the craft of writing dialogue, writing stories and writing scenes, but the sound was very familiar to me.”
If writers such as William Faulkner and others are to be believed, screenwriters are the pond scum of Hollywood, the lowest rung of the creative ladder. “You don’t have power,” Ganz says. “You accept that you don’t operate from a position of power like producers and directors and studio executives. But the truth is we have very few complaints about disrespect.”
Says Mandel, “Fortunately, we’ve always been included in the process.”
Adds Ganz, “Even early on, we worked with people who valued the creative contribution of anyone who seemed worthy of respect.”
The pair’s first films were with Ron Howard, starting with “Night Shift,” and since then they have continued to work with people who did “not characterize us as somebody automatically subordinate.”
That’s held true even to their latest film, “Fever Pitch,” where they worked with Peter and Bobby Farrelly, brothers who have “huge reputations,” says Mandel. “Yet they were open and generous and collaborative and we’ve made them officially Jewish. We gave them a diploma and everything.”
To date, though, there has been no mention of a brit: “We’re building up to it.”
Ganz and Mandel don’t write scripts on speculation. “We’re not sales people. We’re not good at taking scripts and carrying them around town trying to get them produced.”
They prefer to have someone come to them with an idea, “someone who already has some enthusiasm,” Ganz notes.
“And also has a hunger and desire to get it made,” Mandel adds.
“We take it back to the office and work on it.” If something clicks, they sketch it out, bring it back and say, “If we were to do this movie, it would look like this. If that pleases them, we make a deal.”
That’s what happened with “Robots.” “The people at Fox had this idea and were playing with a couple of scripts,” Ganz says. “I guess it wasn’t coming together. They asked us to look at test drawings of characters and atmosphere and we made the decision the way we make all our decisions” — that is, the project appealed to them.
Over the years, they have built a reputation for having a nice, light way with comedies, and that’s just fine with them. They have no desire to write something serious and grave, say the “Passion of Moses.” “If we did it would be funny,” Mandel contends.
“Why fight with one hand tied behind our back?” Ganz adds. “We don’t think we have to position ourselves differently.”