Ben Stiller: Beyond Parody

Ben Stiller, king of the TV send-ups, has taken up directing and now walks among those he's become famous for ridiculing.

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"How do you guys at Movieline get away with it?" Ben Stiller asks me the moment I sit down to interview him. "You say anything you want about everyone in show business, and people give interviews to you anyway!"

I'd anticipated that the 28-year-old Stiller, whose quicksilver mind has been behind some of the most knowing, hilarious movie parodies in TV history, initially on "Saturday Night Live" and later on his two TV series (both were called "The Ben Stiller Show"), would be fast and funny. I hadn't foreseen that he'd try to interview me.

"Look who's talking," I say to him. "You've done send-ups of the biggest people in the business. What's it like when you run into the people you've parodied?"

"It depends," replies Stiller. "Tom Cruise was really, really nice to me when I met him."

This is hard--okay, impossible--to believe, for Stiller has repeatedly nailed Cruise, including the unforgettable TV sketch in which he portrayed Cruise as a desperate show biz has-been reduced to doing a one-man show in which he recreates (badly) scenes from his film career. The image of Stiller, as Cruise, doing that Risky Business dance in sequin-bedecked undies is hard to reconcile with the news that Cruise was "nice" upon meeting Stiller. And since Stiller's fiancee, Jeanne Tripplehorn, co-starred with Cruise in The Firm, it wasn't a matter of running into the megastar just once.

"Why do you think Cruise was nice to you?"

"Well," Stiller says with a grin, "perhaps it was because he hadn't actually seen the skits. He'd heard about them, though."

"Didn't he ask to see them?"

"As a matter of fact, he did. But, strangely enough, the whole time Jeanne was shooting The Firm with him, I could never find a copy to send him," Stiller says, laughing. "He was so nice to me, I felt like a heel."

"Here's another strange thing," Stiller volunteers. "When Jeanne called me to tell me that she'd got the role in The Firm, which was directed by Sydney Pollack, I was on the set [of "The Ben Stiller Show"]. We were in the middle of shooting our parody of Husbands and Wives, and I was dressed in full Frankenstein monster makeup, playing Sydney Pollack."

"Why do I get the feeling you never told Pollack this story?"

"I forgot," says Stiller.

"But surely you heard from Oliver Stone after playing him on TV?" I'm referring to what may have been Stiller's finest hour, when he wore monstrous makeup to resemble Stone and guided viewers through "Oliver Stoneland," a megalomaniacal theme park with rides based on his films.

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