Here at ComingSoon.net, we’d been looking forward to the directorial debut by “The State” cast member Michael Ian Black even before we were the first place to announce the name change from the original The Pleasure of Your Company to Wedding Daze. In the time since that announcement, MGM has moved the comedy around the schedule before removing it altogether. Unfortunately, the other movie Black wrote Run, Fat Boy, Run, starring Simon Pegg and Thandie Newton, was just moved back to late March (actually a good thing since it will allow them to get more theaters), but when ComingSoon.net spoke to the “Ed” star about that comedy, which was directed by David Schwimmer, he updated us on the status of when MGM might release Wedding Daze.
“They f**ked me over, is essentially what happened,” he stated quite bluntly. “They said they were going to release it and then just changed their mind. It’s kind of in limbo at the moment. The production company that I made it with is trying to get it back, but the f**kers at MGM just f**ked me.”
Despite his discontent, Black has been keeping busy, and he’s not looking back or waiting for it to come out. “At the moment, it feels pretty dead to me, so I’ve moved on from it,” he admitted. “If it comes back great ”
The good news is that Black has produced two pilots for Comedy Central, one starring him and the other starring his “Stella” collaborator Michael Showalter, which we can keep our fingers crossed about, and he also has his first solo stand-up album “I’m A Wonderful Man” coming out next Tuesday. Recorded over two nights at the Lakeshore Theater in Black’s hometown in Chicago, it’s his first attempt to do stand-up without one of the groups he’s best known for.
“It’s been great. It’s really been the most fun thing that I do,” he told us about his first true solo gig. “It’s the freedom of it that’s really appealing to me and the immediacy of it, unlike a movie where you’re spending a year on it. This is something that you work on an hour a day basically in front of an audience, and you have a chance to reinvent it every single night, and you’re not beholden to anybody but the audience. It’s a really really great art form.”
“I don’t really know how to describe my own stuff,” he said when asked about the material. “It’s just things I find funny, I guess. It’s not really observational the way that Seinfeld would be. I think it’s my voice, so people who are familiar with me at all I think they’ll recognize it somewhat.”
You can look for more from our exclusive interview with Black closer to when Run, Fat Boy, Run opens March 28, 2008. (Hopefully Wedding Daze will have been released, because we have more with Black about the experience.) In the meantime, you can order his CD from Amazon and check out his stand-up when he goes on tour in November.
