Jeremy Garelick Gets a Hall Pass From 'American High' to Direct 'Murder Mystery 2'

pretty unorthodox transaction. He bought a high school. We'll be back with Jeremy in just a minute to find out why. Now we're back with Jeremy Garlick, the director of Murder Mystery two, which is out now on Netflix. Welcome to Strictly Business. So I think listen may not necessarily be

familiar with your name, but they know your work. You've done everything from direct that Kevin Hart comedy, The Wedding Ringer, doing a script polish on The Hangover, and of course we're going to talk about your American high movie series in a moment. But is it safe the same Murder Mystery too? Is this sort of like the biggest project you've ever done. This is one percent the biggest project I've ever done. This is the biggest movie I've ever done,

for sure. Okay, And how did you come to direct this, especially because you've got your whole interesting side business going with American High Yeah, it's a great question. I got a call out of nowhere from agents saying do you have any interest in directing Murder Mystery Too? And I said, yeah, I do. That's simple. Apparently I was on a short list of possible directors that jen Aniston wanted to meet with. I knew and I worked with her on the film

of The Breakup, which was your big break right. You wrote the script you I wrote the script of The Breakup with Jay Lavender, who was my co writer and co producer. We co produced it. Vince Vaughan was a producer on that movie, and we we got it to Jennifer Aniston and she said she read the script and she wanted to do it. And we made that movie a long time ago, and jenn and I have he'd been in touch ever since, and I've always wanted to work together. And I got that call out of the blue.

It was a nice call to get. Yeah, I mean Hey, it's nice to have high powered friends like that. Now, this was the first time you worked with Sandler? What was it like working with someone? I mean, this is a comedy legend too, So Adam Sandler was my hero from the time I was growing up. Saturday Night Live. When I was in high school, all I wanted to do was write jokes for Adam Sandler. I walked around doing Billy Madison and in fact, my sister, my older sister,

won a raffle to go to Saturday eight Live. I was in I think I was fifteen. I went with her to Saturday Night Live and were they were doing one of those They were doing a skit where they were using our seats, so we had to go stand on the side. And I was standing on the side of the stage and all of a sudden I look up and it's Adam Sandler and um he was. I said, oh, what are you dressed up as? And he said, oh, I'm doing UM. I was like, are you doing weird?

Are you dressed as? I was like, are you dressed as weird Al Yankovic And he said no, no, that'd be funny though He's he was Gary Delabate Howard's Dern Show, right, and he was in So Sweet and I had met him a couple of times playing basketball, and we had talked about working together a few times in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles when I was out here, you know, I was at Sony. I would play at the Sony a lot of All of a sudden, Adam Sandler which up in the so Many lot and he was playing

basketball with Adam Sandler, which was pretty incredible. I had written a script a while ago that he had read and we met on that he liked and wanted to do, and we had always talked about working together. And now I had to interview to direct the movie. And what is it like interviewing with Adam? Saying, I mean you're talking about interviewing with Sandler? Yes, okay. So I had gone through, I had pitched my take on the movie. I had met with all the different producers. There's a

lot of producers on this movie. I had met all the producers. Then I met with Netflix, had met with Jen and then I had to do the final meeting and interview with Adam. And I kept on getting text, Oh it's going to be tomorrow at eleven o'clock, he's gonna call you the next day. It was like on Thursday at two o'clock, he's gonna call. And this kind of went on and on for a couple of weeks, and then I got a text that said something like, hey, Bud,

you're around. I said, yep, any any time, and then he FaceTime and me from the golf course I was in, I was in Kazan, I was in Syracuse, New York, by my house, and I walked around and he was in between holes. Just we were talking about life and kids and really nothing to do with the movie. At the end of the at the end of the college was like, all right, let's do this. This will be fun. Hey, that's what it takes. Not bad. Did he remember you from your basketball days? He did, he did. He did

remember me. He remembered me from my basketball days. He remembered me from a few times that we had spoken about business. And he definitely he checked me out for sure, because I know a bunch of people who were who he had called ahead of time, and yeah, I was. It was obviously a dream come true to be able to work with him. So what was your approach to the material, because what I remember from Murder Mystery the first one is it's the mix of who Done It,

but it's also kind of silly comedy. I mean, are you staying in that vein with number two or did you do something different? Yeah, it's a little bit of a genre bending movie. They wanted this to be more more of like Taken and a little bit more action. Eka, So I really and worked off of Jamie Vanderbilt script and Jamie created a He wrote the first one and he created amazing characters and did a great job with

the second script two. When I came in, I really wanted to build upon what he had initially put in there and did a lot with the romance between the two of them, really try to push the comedy and really try to push the action a lot. And James was actually incredibly helpful during the entire process. We worked together and yeah, this is so when you watched this movie, it's hard to say what genre it falls into it exactly because there's definitely a who Done It, there's definitely

an element of action. There's a huge element of action, and of course there's a romance between Adam and Jen and yeah, and it's funny and the thing I remember about the Breakup movie was also somewhat of a genre bender, where it seemed like it was a typical romantic comedy and then it gets a little dark towards the end. I mean that was something back in the day where

you didn't see romantic comedies go there. And I'm just curious, you know, how did you get a studio to take the leap with material like that at the breakup or a murder mystery the breakup? Oh, so the Breakup we wrote a pretty um we wrote a pretty great script, Like as a team, we wrote a pretty great script, and we wrote it on spec and we went out to every studio and Vince had just come off of wedding Crashers. I think so he was. He was definitely

a hot commodity. Yeah it was. He was couldn't have been hot. And we went out with it and every studio wanted it. Almost all of them said, well, we want this, but we want you to change the ending, which was the dark part. We won't spoil it for those who haven't seen it. I read to end those

fifteen years ago. Hey, it's still out there. I remember getting a call from Scott Stubor, who was the head of Universal at the time, and that was the head of Netflix, and he said, I love this script so much, and I want to do it here, and I don't want you to touch this ending. This is the perfect ending. And we ended up going with Scott Steubert at Universal and we shot it. And after we shot it, we tested the movie and I remember the head of this studio,

I think it was Ron Meyer at the time. We say, I think his line was have them get together at the end and you get back the brink struck in. So we ended up having to go and reshoot an ending. We should reshot two different endings. One it was a big Hollywood ending, it was pretty ridiculous. And then we shot what's now in the movie, where there's kind of a there's a glimmer of hope at the end that

maybe they'll get together at some point in time. But at the time, when you had dark endings like that or endings that weren't the perfect Hollywood ending, testing doesn't people don't love those endings. But I'm so happy that we stuck with that because over the years I received so many emails and comments about how much people appreciated that ending because it was so true to life. And I'm curious. You know, you've worked on a lot of

films since then. Do you feel that Hollywood has become more or less risky in terms of the kind of creative decisions that you know back then that was so courageous for a movie like that. Is Hollywood still friendly towards that kind of material? I think Hollywood itself is not friendly to that, is less friendly to that kind

of material. Right now, everything is algorithms, right, but there are companies like A twenty four or our company, American High, where you where you're seeing a lot of original thoughts and original visions that are kind of outside of the Hollywood system. We'll talk more about American High. We'll be back in just a moment with Jeremy Garrelck. We are back with Jeremy Garlick. He is the director of the new Netflix movie Murder Mystery Too. Let's talk American High.

Murder Mystery Too is separate from that. This is this is really it's one of the more fascinating stories I've heard in terms of taking an unusual entrepreneurial role to making movies. You bought a high school in Syracuse, New York walk back towards what made you do something like that? What was the point of it? Thank you? I was I had just finished shooting The Wedding Ringer with Kevin Hart and Josh Gad and it tests that one tested through the roof at the time, and I was everyone saying, Okay,

what do you want to do next? What do you want to do next? I said, I want to do this. I want to do it in orated high school comedy, like the movies I grew up on Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Poor Keys and of course super Bad and all the John News movies. And the studio response was, we can't make this kind of a movie. And I said,

I don't understand. If we're you know, we could make this movie for five, five, ten million dollars, And they said, well, you still have to spend twenty to twenty five million dollars to put it out there, and if the movie makes seventy five in the box office, which would be massive, it's still not worth that risk when the same studio is doing Spider Man, right. So this was the philosophy

at the time from all of the studios. So nobody wanted to make these So I was trying to figure out why and like, why couldn't we just do this on our own? And I started just read. I started telling everybody all I want to do, every agent, every producer, all I want to do is make high school movies. I want to find this R rated high school movie. We started getting all of these submissions, and as I'm reading the high school movies, they all have the same sets.

It's always it's a gym, it's the auditorium, it's the local diner, it's the classroom. And having been on a bunch of movies Spittrol Schumacher for a while, I was like, Oh, the locations are It's are so expensive. There's such an expensive part of making a film that I wonder if we made instead of just doing one movie, if we made three high school movies and we just said everything

it was the same same location. And I try to like run the numbers as to what that would would save us, and it ended up saving about a third of the cost in terms of the production cost. So then I was just thinking, if I were to just own the location and can completely control the location, we could store all the equipment there, we could have all the production there, we could house people close by, We could make a pretty expensive looking, high quality film for

a third of the cost. So I started googling, you know, I literally just started googling how to buy a high school, like high schools for sale, and um, many high schools were for sale, there were a lot of them. And I was looking in tax incentive where there were tax incentives, and I was looking in Detroit, and I was looking in Georgia, and I got one one popped up on my loop net account. In loop I've not heard that.

I was a little plugged for loot neet. I hope I can get some some free membership from loop neet on that um. But it was in Liverpool, New York, and it looked like the perfect John Us town and a perfect John Us thing um building. And I just remember Will, who was my assistant at the time now

my partner. We hopped on a flight and we flew to Liverpool, New York, which is a suburb of Syracuse, and I said, this is this is it, like this is where we're going to make this happen, and um, I bought this, made an offer, bought the school for how much we have to ask it's public, it's public records, so it was a million we we I bought it for a million dollars. Wow. It's one hundred thousand square

foot building on eight acres a lane. So coming from Los Angeles, where land and buildings are very expensive, it seemed like a pretty incredible deal. Did you get backers to help you with this investment? I took out a lot of yes. I took out a lot of loans, went into a lot of debt and was able to

do it. And then once I had the high school and this business plan, I then went to a handful of different investors and backers and initially made a deal with Mickey Ladell or ld Entertainment, who was just incredible who when I pitched him this idea, he was like, great, let's do it. And but I would imagine you may have pitched this elsewhere and people might have thought you

were nuts. I mean, this is different I did. I pitched it to a bunch of places and everyone thought I was nuts, and everyone asked to see the scripts. I was like, well, let's see what the scripts are, and Mickey didn't even Mickey was just like, I trust you. I trust that you're you know, just from what you've done. I believe in you. I believe in this vision, and if you want to go do this, let's just go

do this. And he was able. He basically started writing checks and we started making these low budget high school movies. But I'd imagine it's not so simple to walk into a town in Syracuse and say, hey, I'm just going to start making movies here. Okay, so this is probably a podcast in and of itself, but yes, I the school is located in the village of Liverpool, which is a small village. It's a suburb of Syracuse, and there's a there's a mayor of Liverpool, and there is a

board in Liverpool. And I had purchased the building and we were ready to go, and we were told that we couldn't make these movies because it wasn't zoned for commercial use. I said, so, okay, so this plan already starting off. Not so again. I said, what's a zoned for? They said it zoned for a school. It's zoned for either a trade school or or high school. I said, well, we're going to let's start a school. And we then went around to all the local university Syracuse University on

a doga community college. When we went around and we pitched all of these colleges on what we were going to do, and we partnered with all the colleges to create internships where these students would come and they would work on our films and we would whoever was coming in, whatever producers, actors, directors would be the teachers and the mentors for all of these students, and we became a

qualified trade trade school. That's just genius. But what we were doing it just to solve that initial challenge of you can't do business here. And what the result was was we created a local crew where there really was no local crew before. And the school is now a huge part of our business. We've I think we've we've had over one hundred crew members become union crew members having gone through our academy training program. So it was an accidental solve that resulted in um in a huge

part of our business model. So fast forward how many years now as American hyve in operation five years and you've made how many movies over that time? Wow? That that is a very good question. I think close to fourteen, maybe fifteen, and COVID was COVID was was a struggle because nobody was making movies during COVID. We actually were think we were the first movie to movie studio to go back into production during COVID. And if you were all of these movies on Hulu, no, So the first

one was bought by was Sony. It was distributed, bought and distributed by Sony called Holly Slept Over. Then there was Banana Split, which was universal. Then there was there was the Ultimate Playlist of Noise right Um. Then there was a movie called Big Time Adolescence which was bought by Hulu at Sundance. C Davidson was in that one from Saturday Night Live. Jason Orley wrote and directed the script. And we then made our deal with Hulu to do got It eight movies for Hulu. And now we're learning

that you were doing more for them. Yeah, we have one more with Hulu on the original deal, and then we have another slate. We just closed a deal to do another slate of films for them, which we're really excited about because we've had a pretty amazing working relationship with So. How looking back at you know, you took a really interesting risk. Did it play out the way you thought it was. Did you learn things that maybe you weren't even expecting. This played out so differently than

anything I could have ever imagined. I didn't really have a full plan when I was going into it. I was kind of like, Oh, this could be this could work, this could be fun, and we'd go make a few movies and see if this works. This could be a

fun thing. I was going to do them out a little bit higher of a budget and with the hope of everything being theatrical, and then theatrical basically was killed during our first release of Banana Split, and Big Time Adolescents were supposed to be theatrically released and they were so Banana Split came out the week that Tom Hanks announced that he had COVID and the NBA was canceled right about March twenty twenty, I want to say yeah.

And then Big Time Adolescence was scheduled to come out theatrially two weeks later, and that basically changed our entire business model into just stream a streaming business model. The biggest thing I probably didn't expect was the impact on

the local community and economy. Um. I've had so many people who are in Syracuse who who've wanted to be in the film industry who just didn't have the opportunity because they can't leave Syracuse for you know, family reasons or financial reasons, and people people who have been working with us now for four or five years. And what he didn't expect is that now every there are so many people who depend on us. How people to employ

there full time? Probably ten okay, but we're consistently making films, so people make the bulk of their their living just working on our movies, which is a tremendous amount of pressure because I I've had people say, oh, thank you, we can now have a family. My wife is now pregnant. Now we could feel good having your family, And I'm like,

oh God, don't put that one on me. But that's the thing that I didn't I didn't expect to have the impact on the local community and feel like that was now my job more than actually making the movies,

if that makes sense. Sure, I feel more of a responsibility to continue to make movies for the local community and local economy then I that would have ever dropped up now is every movie that you're doing in American high in that sort of teen friendly vein that you set out to do, or do you branch out or so for the most part, um, the movies we're making are in the teen space, sort of the John Usian type films, but with a diverse cast and telling stories

of characters that would have been in the background and John you use movies or like the butt of the joke and having them be the main characters. We have branched out if a script jumps out at us as being particularly special, like, um, we did a film called I Love My Dad, Yeah right, with Patton and James Morrissini wrote in and directed. It was just incredible and it was just one of those scripts where I started

reading I couldn't put it down. So so we did do that film, and we will branch out if there's something special, But for the most part, we're doing high school high school stuff. That's our main focus. And describe the market today for those movies, because you were saying earlier that financially there was a time where Hollywood was like, yeah, this doesn't make sense. Now I assume in the streaming age it makes a lot of sense, or maybe it's still to sledging to get these done. It's all tough.

Everything's tough. It's not easy to get a film made at all. Every movie we've made so far has been a miracle and has taken a lot of work. I what I know is that people still like watching these movies. My kids who are My oldest is thirteen. All of his favorite comedies were from before he was born. So there's a market out there. It's just about figuring out a way to get it to this market. And that's

what we've really been pushing to do. And you described, you know, John Hughes as someone who kind of loomed as an influence for these movies. I'm curious due today's teen movies. Are they just a completely different sensibility than back then or actually it's very similar. You No, I think it's it's it's very similar being a teenager's universal. Um, it's the same. You know, teenagers want the same thing now as they did back then. They want they're discovering

who they are. There's you know, it's all about first It's the first time you fall in love, it's the first time you kind of discover your parents aren't perfect. The first time you you try alcohol, or you try drugs, or you you steal a car and driving into a lake or whatever that thing is that that's your first. The technology has changed, and the storytelling has the logistics

of storytelling has changed because of technology. Um, the voices have changed because there are a lot more opportunity for people of color, um for for um, for people of the LTQ community to have a voice. But it's still all about discovering who you are and finding love and you know, feeling loved and popular and um. So it's

it's all universal. It's just it's just updated logistically. But it's interesting to hear you describe kind of this diversity because it makes me think back to those teen movies, which we're not only kind of lily white cast wise, but like some of the things you watched you watch now some of the jokes they got away with then that were racially insensitive, and it's just sort of like it. Political correctness did not really exist in the Hughes age. And I'm curious, do you feel the weight of that

as you're making movies today. Do you feel you have to be in too narrow a lane? Um, I don't know if we have to be in too narrow a lane. It's definitely I definitely feel it because we want to be telling stories a modern stories, and the modern age is political correctness. The it's definitely a challenge. It's definitely a challenge comedically for someone like me who was raised on Porky's and some of you know, some of the

John Use films, which are just crazy. If you go back and you watch them, you're like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe they said that, or um, so it's not. So. It takes a lot. There's a big learning curve for for people my age who grew up that way, which is why I really love having first time directors and

first time writers. In fact, we've had I think nine or ten first time directors and many of them female, queer people of color, and I'm I'm watching them and kind of providing the kind of the tools for them, but I want to see their voice. I want to see the story told through their eyes, if that makes sense. Totally. Now, to bring the conversation full circle, and we talk about something like murder Mystery too, which is not necessarily in

the vein of the American high stuff. Do you do that kind of movie because you don't want to be pigeonholed. You want to be a director and a writer or a producer who's going to do other things, Well, yeah, I mean I think I did this movie because I got a call that Jennifer and Adam want to meet for me to direct a massive movie for them. It was a dream come true and I definitely could not say no to the opportunity. Sure, and if those opportunities come along, I know I'll weigh them out based on

against what I have going on at American High. Being able to do these bigger films is definitely helpful for the American High model because it allows me to get it allows me to continue to make connection ends with cost and with crewe to have to learn more on how to make these films. So many people who are doing these larger movies want to come and work on the smaller, fun indeed films that we're doing. So it's been, it's been. It's been really helpful. It's been, and I'll

continue to do them move forward if they let me. So, you know, a murder Mystery too could lead to a Murder Mystery three. Or you're doing Sandler's next project or Asison's next project at some point do you have to pick a lane though, or it's like, no, I gotta keep minding the American High Store, I can't do X. Or there's room for both. There's definitely room for both. I am incredibly grateful to have the greatest partner in

the world, Will Phelps, who started as my assistant. He flew with me that night to on the Red Eye to go look at the school and has you know, he kind of had to take on a lot of the responsibility while I was doing some of the I did a show called Best Work Weekend Best Worst Weekend Ever on Netflix in LA while we were getting American High off the ground. So he really took on a huge, huge amount of responsibility. And he's an incredible producer and

I have a lot of faith in him. If I'm going to go off and do something and take time, that good stuff is gonna happen. Is there a next level or a next phase for the American High business? Do you buy another high school and another part of the country or I don't know, at a junior high

I mean, how does it work? We actually have been we've been we've been keeping our eyes open for another space, potentially a university a college so that when we graduate from high school we can go into the college space. We've been looking at various states again with tox incentives. One of the challenges with the upstate New York, which has an incredible incentive, it doesn't have above the lineup incentive.

If so you're kind of limited to the amount of the size of the film you can make up there. That being said, there's a bill now that the Governor hokel is recommending a budget word includes above the line. They will be voting on that in April, and if that happens, and I hope it does, we're gonna try to really build an upstate New York and not necessarily look out of state. So American High could become American University. It's like you're building in an entire American cinematic universe.

That was actually the initial That was actually the initial concept was to have American High be the the universe. It was a cinematic universe where the extra who would kind of be the nerd who is thrown into the locker in one film, was actually the star of night. And we were going that was the initial pitch and something we're hoping to get back to very soon. But yes, it's funny you bring up the American Eye Universe, which

is something that we've been talking about for many, many years. Well, congratulations both on Murder Mystery Too and the renewal of the Hulu deal. Can't wait to see what movies come from you next, Jeremy, thanks for taking the time out. Thank you, Andrew. It's good to talk to you and it's so good to see it. This has been another

episode of Strictly Business. Tune in next week for another helping of scintillating conversation with media movers and shakers, and please make sure you subscribe to the podcast to hear future episodes. Also leave a review in Apple Podcasts and let us know how we're doing