MAKING a risque comedy turns out to be a lot harder than it looks. It's more than merely cooking up enough off-color jokes to fill a couple of hours. The real challenge is paring down all that R-rated raunch so that an involving, practically G-rated romance can emerge.
And so it was with "The 40 Year-Old Virgin," a comedy about hooking up -- or, more accurately, \o7not\f7 hooking up. At a June research screening of the R-rated movie to which The Times was invited, the sex threatened to eclipse the comedy. The preview at the Mann Janss Marketplace 9 in Thousand Oaks had started with laughter so explosive much of the film's dialogue couldn't be heard. But then, as several hundred moviegoers watched one particular scene, the laughs began to evaporate.
For a moment, "The 40 Year-Old Virgin," which lands in theaters Friday, was uncomfortably dirty, and not all that funny.
Director and co-writer Judd Apatow assessed the lull from a back row, jotting down a few notes. By the next morning he was back in the editing room reworking the scene in which the film's undersexed lead, played by Steve Carell, settles down to watch, and perhaps enjoy, a pornographic movie.
By the time the next round of moviegoers was recruited for a research screening two weeks later, Apatow had toned down the porno footage, which he'd culled from an adult movie. With that, the scene -- now a shade less bawdy -- was no longer stopping the movie.
Successfully calibrating the balance between love and sex, between story and shock, has made hits of movies such as "Wedding Crashers," "American Pie" and "There's Something About Mary." When they work as blockbusters, these movies invariably surround ribald jokes with sweet boy-gets-girl stories, and the amalgamation of raunch and relationship leaves audiences not only laughing but also rooting for the couple to succeed.
"The very first thing we talked about was tone," says Carell, the "Bruce Almighty" costar who also co-wrote the "40 Year-Old Virgin" screenplay. "Did we want it to feel like a romantic comedy? Or a sex comedy? Or a combination of the two? Would it be broad? Or grounded?
"We decided it needed to be more grounded. If people are not involved with the story, I don't think any of the comedy is going to work. So it's a love story, masquerading as a sex comedy."
