Jason Friedberg

Jason Friedberg (born October 13, 1971) and Aaron Seltzer (born January 12, 1974) are an American-Canadian film director and screenwriter team known for making parody movies that have received extremely unfavorable reviews, but have done well at the box office. They were part of the writing team for Scary Movie and Spy Hard, and have written/directed films such as Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, Vampires Suck, and The Starving Games.

Interviews with the duo are rare, but in an exclusive 2014 interview with the publication Grantland, their background was discussed: Seltzer is part of a Canadian shoe salesmen family from Mississauga, Ontario, and Friedberg, who was born in Newark, NJ, was raised in Paterson, New Jersey and is the son of director Rick Friedberg. Seltzer and Friedberg met at the University of California, Santa Barbara and bonded over their love of film, especially comedy. They did not attend film school, with Seltzer majoring in art history and Friedberg in history, but decided to try a career in the film industry after attending a class about Martin Scorsese in their last semester.

While writing screenplays at night, both spent the day attending jobs to pay their tuition, selling homemade T-shirts, started their own food delivery service, and opening shoe shops in Los Angeles. When Rick Friedberg made the comic instruction video Bad Golf Made Easier with Leslie Nielsen, he showed his son's script for a spy film spoof to him. Nielsen approved, and this lead into 1996's Spy Hard. Seltzer and Friedberg then spent some years as screenwriters for hire, with Seltzer estimating the duo sold "upward of 40 scripts". The only finished project was an uncredited rewrite to the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Maximum Risk (1996), while an unproduced Liberace biopic (unrelated to Behind The Candelabra) introduced them to future collaborator and producer Peter Safran. In 1998, Safran managed to sell to Dimension Pictures a horror film spoof spec script of Seltzer and Friedberg named Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween, later reworked by four other writers under the title Scary Movie. The film was a sleeper hit in 2000, and brought much attention to Seltzer and Friedberg.

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