Meet the Man Who Made ‘Meet the Parents’ Before ‘Meet the Parents’

The Birth of ‘Meet the Parents’

I used to make short films in the 1980s when I was a stand-up comedian, and I made one called The Vase, which was a five-minute short where a guy is told “Be sure to compliment the vase!” and he breaks the vase. That was on a TV show in Chicago called Image Union. Basically, the comedian Emo Philips had seen that, and when I met him, we got talking and I told him I had this idea for turning this short into a movie like Peter Sellers’ The Party, where the entire plot is about him going to a party and ruining it. I thought, “Why can’t you just do a movie where a guy goes to meet his girlfriend’s parents and everything just goes wrong?”

Philips said he’d put some money into it, so I went to Jim Vincent, who I went to film school with — he was making commercials at the time — and said, “What’s the least amount of money we could do this movie for?” He said, $30,000. So I went to Emo and got $30,000. Then we held auditions. We shot it on 16 millimeter, and the shoot took two weeks.

I tried to make a comedy with no jokes. By that I mean, no character is saying something funny to be funny. It was just horrible things happening. When I was directing the actors, I’d tell them, “No one’s having a good time here. This is not a lighthearted thing. They’re having a horrible weekend.” And that’s the way they played it. 

Filming ‘Meet the Parents’

Meet the Parents was just a horrible shoot. That’s what happens when you try and do a movie that cheap. The house we used was a friend of my mom’s. At first, she was excited, but then, when we were moving equipment and crew into her house at all hours, she wasn’t happy about that. She’d come down the stairs and say, “Could you guys keep it down a little bit? We’re trying to sleep.”

We had a scene on a fishing boat, and it bothers me to watch it now because it’s just a tight shot of me and the guy playing my fiancée’s father in a boat on the water. I wanted a shot of that boat in the middle of the lake, but someone forgot to charge the battery and we were racing against the sunset, and we didn’t get that shot.

In the finished film, there’s a scene where the dog dies — I throw a stick into the lake and he drowns. Originally, we were going to have him die a different way, but we didn’t have money to do it. We wanted to show him going in the water, but then he comes out and everyone is relieved. Then we cut to them driving home at night and in the backseat is the sister, my fiancée and I, and the dog is on our lap. The sister’s eating a popsicle, and she hands the stick to me to throw out the window. Then I throw it out the window, and the dog jumps out. But we couldn’t do it. We didn’t have the budget.

The hardest scene came at the end when my fiancée’s sister sings for me. There’s a whole 10-minute sequence where she sings and then breaks down all in one take. We only had enough film to do it once, and she did that whole thing all in one take. I told her, “Just pretend you’re on stage, and if something happens, just go with it.” That was a little tricky, but she did it.

The movie ends with the urn of the father-in-law’s mom getting destroyed. Originally, I hit it with my hand when I was gesturing, which is what happened in The Vase, but when we had some previews, I noticed the audience was way ahead of everything. They knew, as soon as I started gesturing, I was going to hit it. So we went back and shot the scene where I gesture, but I don’t hit it, then I slam the door and that makes the picture fall onto it. 

Funny enough, that had to be shot at a different location. In just that two-week window from when we finished shooting to when we needed to do the reshoots, my mom’s friend had painted that room. I don’t know if she did that to keep us from coming back or not, but we had to find a different place for that shot. 

From Independent Feature to National Lampoon to Universal Studios

Right off the bat, when we just finished it, we got it to National Lampoon, and they were going to release it. They actually did advertisements in the magazine, “National Lampoon’s ‘Meet the Parents’ Coming in October.” But they got cold feet, and they signed a deal with New Line to make a bunch of National Lampoon comedies for $2 million. So they didn’t want our little film on the shelf with their films. 

Later, Jim Vincent — who produced the movie and also plays the role of the gas station guy — went to a filmmaking seminar in New York, and one of the speakers was a producer named Nancy Tenenbaum, who had done Sex, Lies and Videotape. He gave her a copy of Meet the Parents, and she loved it and sent it to Steven Soderbergh. He loved it and he was going to direct it, so Universal bought it because they wanted to work with him. 

Still, it took five years from when we signed the contract to the movie coming out. At one point, Jim Carrey was going to play the Ben Stiller role and Steven Spielberg was going to direct it. It went through a lot of changes. It was a joke with my friends: “How’s that movie coming along? Who’s in it now?” 

‘Meet the Parents’ Hits It Big

I went to the premiere. It was exciting, and I really liked it. There were a few things I questioned, but I like the movie. I never would’ve imagined they could get three sequels out of it. I’m very happy with the deal. The only issue I have is that when they bought the script, they bought the original film too, but they won’t let me release the original film. It’s very low budget — and it looks low budget — so I don’t know why Universal won’t let me put it out. It’s just a little home movie. It’s not going to compete with their film. I would love for people to see it because it looks terrible on YouTube. It gets huge laughs if you see it with an audience — it’s very fun. But, it is what it is.