There's Something About Ed

One of the highlights of last summer's Reunion was the screening of There's Something About Mary in the CFA cinema. For Ed Decter '79, who co-wrote the movie, the event was especially significant. The CFA cinema "was the place where I dreamed of someday being involved with films. So it was really a nice circle." To the delight of fellow alums, Decter followed the movie with a question-and-answer period in which he fielded questions about everything from the chorus in Greek dramas to Cameron Diaz's salary.

While Decter dreamed of working in the entertainment industry since early childhood, he says it was Wesleyan, and more specifically professor Jeanine Basinger, who turned his desire into ability. "She has the clearest, most concise vision about what film is," Decter says about Professor Basinger.

With his Wesleyan training and unbridled enthusiasm, Decter launched into a career writing for film and television. While making a living as a Hollywood writer seems unbelievably glamorous for most of us, within the entertainment world, the career path of Decter and partner John Strauss ("an honorary alumni of Wesleyan-he knows everybody") was solid but unremarkable.

It was the inspiration of a lovely young woman from across the street and the intervention of two brothers from Rhode Island that changed Decter's life forever. Early in their writing partnership, he and Strauss were watching a woman who lived across the street. Voicing his discomfort, Decter said to Strauss, "We're stalkers." Strauss consoled him with, "No, don't think of ourselves as stalkers. We're detectives." From that humble beginning, a script was born.

Decter and Strauss sold the Mary script, only to see it languish with a studio which loaded it with "billions and billions and billions of notes ... It was very frustrating." Finally, the Farrelly Brothers, whom Decter describes as "the funniest human beings I've ever met" and "the least pretentious guys on the face of the earth" obtained the rights to the script. The rest is hair-gel history. The years before Mary started breaking records have given Decter a valuable perspective on success: Fame and fortune early on, he says, "would have been maybe a lot of fun, but I don't know if I would have appreciated it as much as I appreciate it now." And while Decter obviously enjoys his higher profile, his love for his job comes from something deeper, something which strongly echoes the spirit of a liberal arts education: "The single best part of being a writer," Decter relates with relish, "is the research...It's fascinating. That for me is the true joy." Recently, for example, research for an upcoming television show had Decter riding shotgun on a fire engine in South Central Los Angeles, an experience he describes as "eye-opening."

Coupled with the research is the opportunity to work with many of the "great, talented people" who populate studio lots. Decter compares working on a successful project to being part of a "little happy army unit. You labor to produce these things, but there's a lot of camaraderie and esprit de corps." Great people notwithstanding, Decter has on occasion "worked on projects where you'd rather have committed suicide than continue." And there is also the frequent conflict between Ed's desire to tell a story according to his artistic vision versus the studio's interest in fattening up the bottom line.

But neither occasional difficulties nor heady success obscure Ed's fundamental joy of doing what he does. In his own words: "To me it's still pretty incredible anybody lets me onto a soundstage. I'm just thrilled to get a pass to the studio."

With a solid string of writing and producing credits, with Head Over Heels-a romantic comedy starring Freddy Prinze Jr. due out in the spring, and oh yes, with that Mary movie which has grossed over half a billion dollars worldwide, Decter can just maybe take that studio pass for granted.