Tucker Max Feature Story

(I had the chance to sit down about a month ago to conduct an in-person interview with Tucker Max, writer of the hit book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell and its film counterpart, which you can read my review of by clicking here. Instead of doing a simple question and answer story, I decided to write a feature story on him using the best quotes I received. This story was originally published in the August 31, 2009 issue of Broadside.)

It is a warm spring night. A young man, no more than 30 years old, goes out on the town looking only for a good time. At a local bar, he meets a young woman, a fan of his now infamous website, tuckermax.com. After many rounds of alcohol, he winds back at her place for a night of sexual debauchery. As his lady friend makes it to the bathroom, the bar events prior do not bode well with his stomach, so he does what any normal person would do. He pulls her bed back and vomits under it, coyly hiding it from her, only to have her dog eat it up. Apparently, something doesn’t bode well in the dog either, though the contents of its stomach pour out in a decidedly different manner, producing an unlikely string of events that allow him to pass all the blame for the merciless smell onto the poor little yuppie.

It’s just another day in the life of Tucker Max, author of the New York Times bestseller, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. What began as a simple detailing of the crazy events in his life has now become a nationwide phenomenon and has, perhaps inevitably, spawned a movie.

The book is an anthology of short stories written like blog posts to mirror his online writing style, but is a structure that is not easy to translate well into a feature length narrative. “The movie is a fully fleshed out, realized story. It was hard at first,” Max admits, though he is quick to point out the benefits. “Making movies is probably harder to do, but ultimately, it’s more rewarding.”

To promote his new film, he is traveling the country on a Premiere Tour, showing it off to enthusiastic audiences who come with book in hand, hoping for an autograph and a picture. However, not everybody who attends is pleased with the movie.

At a recent stop in North Carolina, Max and crew were met with protestors who were quoted on FoxNews.com as saying that the film intended to “dehumanize and perpetuate a rape culture.”

Max argues back, “The movie has not been met with criticism. People have criticized what they perceive it to be about. None of those people had seen the movie.”

True to his word, it seems the protestors had jumped the gun, as the Fox article clearly states that no one had attended a viewing and that only one “had read Max’s book that inspired the movie.”

What does Max have to say about all this? “No one believes the media anymore because the media lies to them all the time. It’s preposterous to me that I should be expected to answer an accusation that is based on conjecture.”

But they always say that any publicity is good publicity, right? And this should get the train moving along quite nicely. “The way I see it is there’s no stronger or better marketing than word of mouth,” and he hopes that that word of mouth will reflect back on how others will see the film. “At the end of the day, I feel like we made the movie we wanted to make.”

Throughout the years, Tucker Max has shared with the world some of his strangest, craziest, and most embarrassing stories and he has done it with pride. When asked what we could expect next, he responded with what must be his motto. “On any given night, anything can happen.” And we look forward to reading about it.