A team that's picked up steam

Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant sat down on a patio at the San Diego Convention Center Saturday morning -- with Lennon in Lt. Dangle sunglasses, natch -- as they prepped for a Comic-Con panel that included footage from their new comedy "Balls of Fury." They seemed relaxed, if a little awed, by the hijacking of the once-"secret" comics convention by the behemoth film industry.

Their own stature has ballooned comparably. They've already turned in a first draft of a sequel to the $251-million-grossing "Night at the Museum," and they're tweaking their own script for "How to Survive a Robot Uprising" at Paramount for the long-attached Mike Myers.

Despite the perverse sense of humor they've displayed in "The State" and the "Reno 911!" TV show and movie in the last four years, Lennon and Garant have become the comedy rewrite guys studios have on speed-dial -- they've been called in on "Starsky & Hutch," "Herbie Fully Loaded" and the first "Museum."

"We don't change our sensibility based on the kind of movie we're writing," Lennon says. "The sense of humor from 'Reno 911!: Miami' and 'Night at the Museum' is basically the same."

And yet, they claim to know just where that "hard line" is with regard to ratings, and when not to cross it.

"When you're writing on 'Night at the Museum,' you don't have to remind yourself: 'No masturbation jokes,' " Garant says.

"It's easy to remember," Lennon adds.

Lennon and Garant's "Balls of Fury" has been floating around since 2000, when they first came across an article about Werner Schlager, an Austrian ping-pong champion with Elvis-like fame in Asia usually reserved for martial arts masters.

Garant: "So we thought, why not just do . . . "

Lennon: " . . . a revenge kung fu movie in which you took out most of the kung fu."

Garant: "But when the two champions meet, they don't kung fu, they ping-pong. It's not really a stretch. . . . " They laugh. "But it is. It's a very, very aggressively stupid film."

Lennon: "As you could probably tell by the title."

Survival skills

The filmmakers behind "I Am Legend" -- notorious for its legendary 10-year-plus development -- are apparently feeling bullish on its franchise prospects five months before the film (finally) opens. Original writer Mark Protosevich has already pitched Warner Bros. on a sequel, though no deal has yet been finalized.