It’s taken a quarter of a century, but a Simpsons’ script written by writer director Judd Apatow has finally been made into an episode. It will air on Sunday January 11th.
In the past 25 years Apatow has either written, directed, produced or done all three in dozens of movies and television programs. These included The Larry Sanders Show, The Ben Stiller Show and his own creation the short lived but critically acclaimed cult classic Freaks and Geeks. Then there were all of the hit movies like Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin.
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The upcoming Simpsons episode is about Homer Simpson getting hypnotized into thinking that he is only 10 years old. Later on he does not want to have to grow up again. We are eagerly awaiting seeing how Homer will interact with his son Bart.
Apatow told the story of how he came to write the script for the episode at the ripe old age of 22 to TV Guide. “I was 22, a huge fan of The Simpsons, and hoping for a TV writing career. At the time I was a fledgling standup comic and people said, ‘If you want to write for sitcoms, you need to do spec scripts.’ Only six episodes of The Simpsons had aired at that point but I tried to copy the style and did a spec script where Homer gets hypnotized and thinks he’s a 10-year-old.”
“He has such a great time being Bart’s friend that he doesn’t want to become an adult again. I sent it in — in fact, I sent it to all my favorite shows — and got no job offers. I also wrote a spec script for the great Chris Elliott show Get a Life. They at least brought me in for a meeting, but that didn’t lead to any work, either. Then, all these years later, [Simpsons executive producer] Al Jean calls and says, ‘Hey, we’ll make it now!’”
The writer/director explained that his script was remembered by the show’s producers after Apatow spoke about it at a recent event at the L.A. County Museum. Parts of his interview there were published and apparently Al Jean read it.
