“Before we did this show, I did a set at the Hayworth in L.A. with no monitors, no nothing,” Adam Sandler said during the premiere of his new stand-up special, Love You, at New York’s Paris Theater. The special’s composer and co-writer, Dan Bulla, who also writes for SNL, wasn’t there: “I just went up there with a guitar and did it all. The jokes are nice when they’re just jokes.” The idea of doing a no-frills performance by necessity became the basis for the special, Josh Safdie said during the Q&A of his first foray into directing comedy specials: “We’ll make it the worst venue ever: a liminal space you feel like you know, but you don’t know.” Welcome to the wonderful world of Love You, in which the comedian, with the help of Safdie and producer Ronald Bronstein, concocts a special full of chaos in which the show literally has to go on.
To make it believable, Safdie said, “We had to sell that the monitors didn’t work, so we built a venue where that would make sense.” But Love You’s venue does actually exist — it’s no set — as a typically functional space known as the Nocturne Theatre in Glendale, California. The spot had been recently bought by a local couple for small theater productions. Safdie and production designer Sam Lisenco basically trashed the place, adding carpeting and upending a two-liter bottle of Coke to give the whole place an off-putting odor (and presumably sticky floors). “We wanted to make it look like it’d been there for 60 years,” Safdie added. “It had a real vibe. John Turturro said it was like hanging out his friend’s basement and laughing at his funniest friend.”
Love You, which runs a little over 70 minutes, had to be cut down from more than three hours of footage from six shows performed at this purposefully ramshackle spot where the mayhem could come at any moment. While Safdie had control over some of the internal chaos — a collapsing stage, busted monitors — there’s a brief audience interruption during the show that is 100 percent real.
“He didn’t know these things were coming, but when the fight happened, part of him was probably thinking, Was Josh behind this?” Safdie said.
Sandler shook his head. “No, it felt like real energy. I was fucking scared for everyone,” he said with a laugh.
Sandler’s 2018 special 100% Fresh combined tour footage from various venues of varying sizes, but Love You remains set in that dingy little theater with an intimate audience of what looks like about 75 people. A cold open depicts Sandler arriving a little late, windshield busted on his car, to a swarm of autograph seekers, including Mitchell Wenig, whom audiences may remember as one of Uncut Gems’s goons. It’s the first sign that things are not exactly as they seem. Once Sandler makes it in the building, there are guys and distractions everywhere. Part of what the mostly planned havoc shows is that it’s the comedian’s job to go out and be funny, regardless of where they are, what’s happening, and who’s in the audience. That Sandler titles the work Love You suggests that there’s a way to move through these difficulties with frustration and anger — of which there’s plenty — but mostly with affection. Does the chaos make it more fun for a comedian up onstage? As Sandler told Vulture on the red carpet, “Only when you get out of it okay!”
Love You streams on Netflix starting August 27.
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