'Project Greenlight,' Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Drama Behind the Scenes

Ken Tucker
·Critic-at-Large, Yahoo Entertainment
Updated
image

Project Greenlight returns to TV on Sunday night after an absence of 10 years. Remember Greenlight? The reality-competition show in which Matt Damon and Ben Affleck executive-produce a fledgling filmmaker’s first biggish-budget movie? The show that gave us Shia LaBeouf in its second season, and that deathless horror film Feast in its third?

For its fourth season, Greenlight wastes no time in holding a competition for a new filmmaker to shoot a comedy while being mentored by the Farrelly brothers, the guys behind the Dumb and Dumber movies. Greenlight quickly settles on the director who is least likely to make a knockabout comedy, a humorless, pretentious, unjustifiably confident nobody named Jason Mann.
I was ready to turn away from Project Greenlight after the first episode, when the producers — there are a slew of them besides Affleck and Damon — passed on many worthier candidates and chose Mann for that most obvious of TV reasons: They knew he’d spark the most friction and drama with everyone he encountered, given his sullen deadpan and stubborn cocksureness.

Related: What ‘Project Greenlight’ Taught Us About Hollywood

Sure enough, he makes an immediate enemy of Effie Brown, the supervising producer who has the most day-to-day contact with Mann. Once I accepted Project Greenlight’s cynical choice of star, I have to admit the show became immediately transfixing: It’s always fascinating to watch people who dislike each other in stressful workplace situations.

The producers decide to bring in a more experienced hand to help whip the comedy script into shape, and who do they choose but Pete Jones, the Greenlight winner from its first season — my, what a coincidence! Jones continues to seem, as he did lo those many years ago, like a super-nice guy, eager to collaborate. He’s thus the anti-Mann, who doesn’t know how to play nice, rejecting all the location scout’s suggestions, quibbling about casting, and trying to bring in a different screenwriter.

For galling obnoxiousness, Mann is well-matched with his chief nemesis, Brown. At once imperious and defensive, she’s constantly telling the camera that she’s made 17 movies, as though this makes all her decisions unassailable. She’s so dismissive of Mann’s artistic concerns, she ends up being the one person on Project Greenlight that makes the stiff-backed Mann seem sympathetic. As you can see by now, I’m totally hooked on the new season. It’s such a pleasure to watch other people have a difficult day at the office, knowing I can walk away from their pressures, and they can’t.

Project Greenlight airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO.