Doug Ellin made one thing, Entourage, and made it the way Vincent Chase makes films: fast, cheerful and without much thought about the morning after. It is good company for two seasons, and nothing else he has done suggests there was more to come.
Fi1m perspective
A phone rings, Ari Gold answers it, and before the sentence is finished somebody has been insulted and a deal has moved. That is the sound of a Doug Ellin scene, and for a while it is a fine sound. Around Ari, four men from Queens drift through a house that is too big for them towards cars that are too expensive for them, and nothing any of them does costs them anything. Ellin's gift is speed and good temper. His weakness is a suspicion that consequences spoil the fun.
He came to television by a roundabout route. There were two small features in the 1990s, Phat Beach (1996) and Kissing a Fool (1998), the second with David Schwimmer, and a stretch as a staff writer on Life with Bonnie. Then, in 2004, Entourage, loosely built on Mark Wahlberg's own arrival in Hollywood, which Ellin created, wrote, directed and ran for eight seasons and 96 episodes. Everything since has been the same thing again or nothing at all: a feature in 2015 that most critics took for a compressed ninth season, and pilots that have not been made. Most careers have phases. Ellin's has one long, sunny afternoon.
What works is Jeremy Piven, who has now played Ari Gold for Ellin nine times across series and film. Ellin writes for him in rhythm: the abuse arrives in threes and the apology never arrives at all, and Piven can make a man screaming into a headset look like the only adult in the building. The friendship works too, up to a point. Ellin has called the show "a very realistic look at male friendship that you don’t see that often", and he is half right; the fondness between these men is real, and it is pleasant to sit with. We laughed at Ari, a great deal, for two seasons. Somewhere in the third we noticed we were laughing at the same joke, that nobody on screen had changed since the pilot, and that we were slightly cross with ourselves for still being there.
What does not work is everything the show thinks is a plot. A famous face walks in, the boys react, the episode ends. The women arrive and leave without names, and the jokes made at their expense were tired in 2004 and have not improved; the charge of casual misogyny, made often, is fair. Ellin knows how a Hollywood deal is done, and the detail is by all accounts accurate, including his own. Knowing how the business works is not the same as having something to say about the people who work in it, and Entourage never finds the second thing.
He has a boxing drama with Spike Lee in development and a pilot called Ramble On. We would watch either, mostly to find out whether Ellin can write a man who loses something and has to stay lost. On the evidence so far, he would rather send a car for him.
Biography
Doug Ellin is an American screenwriter, producer and director. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he graduated from Tulane University in 1990. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, initially working as a stand-up comedian and later in the mail room at New Line Cinema. He wrote and directed the short film The Pitch (1992) and made his feature debut with Phat Beach (1996).
Ellin wrote the screenplay for Kissing a Fool (1998). He served as a staff writer on the sitcom Life with Bonnie (2002–2004). His breakthrough came as creator, head writer, executive producer and occasional director of the HBO series Entourage (2004–2011). He also wrote, directed and produced the 2015 feature film adaptation of the series.
