The director of ‘Billy Madison’ and ‘Half Baked’ is ready for the big screen again.
Technically, Tamra Davis hasn’t gone anywhere. She’s been directing for television consistently for more than a decade, and she’s helmed a couple documentaries, too. But Davis hasn’t directed a narrative theatrical feature for Hollywood since 2002’s Crossroads. No, the Britney Spears dud didn’t kill her career. Davis made the decision afterward to slow down to have and raise children with husband Mike D (of the Beastie Boys).
“Mike and I were together for such a long time, and he would tour and I would make movies, and I was in my mid-thirties,” she told Birth.Movies.Death in 2015. “It was getting to the point where, if I don’t have a baby now, I may not ever be able to have a baby. So that’s what I did, even though my career was going really well.” Now the kids are teens, and she’s looking to make movies again.
This week, Deadline revealed that Davis will direct the feature comedy Turned On for Fox and producer Paul Feig (whose company FeigCo is making good on its inclusion promises). The movie was written by newbie Charlie Kesslering, who was James Corden’s assistant for The Late Late Show when he sold the script. It’s about an engineer who builds a robot clone of herself to handle stuff she doesn’t want to deal with, but the android self-actualizes and hilarity ensues. Sounds like Multiplicity meets Making Mr. Right.
If you followed comedies of the 1990s, you should be happy about Davis’ return to the big screen. Along with Penelope Spheeris and Betty Thomas, she was one of the few women working on broad studio entertainment back then. And she had a great track record for not just delivering funny movies that were box office hits relative to their budgets, but with each of her three biggest titles, she helped break out major comedy stars, namely Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, and Dave Chappelle.
Davis got into filmmaking in a roundabout way, including an early apprenticeship with Francis Ford Coppola, then film school, then a stint directing music videos (as one did in the late ’80s and early ’90s). She made her feature debut with the indie crime film Guncrazy, starring Drew Barrymore in her bad girl days, and followed it quickly with the spot-on gangster rap parody CB4 (it’s basically the original, funnier Straight Outta Compton), starring then-departing Saturday Night Live cast member Chris Rock in his first lead vehicle, at Universal. It was a perfect transition from music videos to comedy film.
Next, she helped launch another SNL star with Sandler’s first major solo outing, Billy Madison. Still arguably the best Adam Sandler Comedy (as in the ones not helmed by auteurs such as Paul Thomas Anderson and Noah Baumbach), the movie is silly but surreal and Davis executes the most childish and ridiculous jokes, gags, and musical numbers with such skill that it works in spite of how dumb it all is. Was Sandler funnier at his start? Not really, but he was in better hands than he would be for much of his subsequent output.
The post Tamra Davis is Finally Coming Back With the Sci-Fi Comedy ‘Turned On’ appeared first on Film School Rejects.
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