Ted Griffin writes men who talk their way around trouble, from the crew of Ocean's Eleven to the two unlicensed detectives of Terriers. The plots run like clockwork. What we remember is the talk in between.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Brad Pitt eat. In Ocean's Eleven (2001) Rusty has a snack in nearly every scene, and Ted Griffin's script never explains it, because it does not need to: this is a man who is not worried, and the plot can be as intricate as it likes while he is chewing. Danny talks; Rusty finishes the sentence. Each new recruit gets a small comedy of his own, and then the film moves on. That is Griffin's method. The mechanism is the excuse; the talk around it is the point.
He came up writing films in the late 1990s, Ravenous (1999) and Best Laid Plans (1999), and has said Ravenous was the first script that made him feel like a real writer, because he stopped paying attention to the rules. Ocean's Eleven made his name. Matchstick Men (2003), written with his brother Nicholas, kept him among the con men. He was to direct Rumor Has It... and was replaced twelve days into filming. Then Terriers (2010), made with Shawn Ryan, which Griffin created, wrote and directed, and which ran for one season. Since then the credits are rewrites, other people's films and other people's programmes: Killers (2010), Tower Heist (2011), episodes of Patriot (2015), writing on 9-1-1 (2018–). We have not reviewed them.
Terriers is the case for him. Hank Dolworth and Britt Pollack have no licence, no office and no money, and they are paid, when they are paid, in cash and favours. We sat down expecting a pleasant hour about two skint men bickering in a pickup, and a few episodes in we realised we were watching a noir about debt, drink and what a beach town lets a rich man get away with, and that we minded a good deal what happened to Hank. Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James do the playing, but Griffin gave them thirteen episodes in which little is wasted, and even the tagline, they'll solve anything for the right price, is the show making fun of itself.
The weakness is the one Ocean's Eleven wears openly. It is a robbery staged as a dance and the most purely pleasurable thing Soderbergh has made, and there is nothing underneath it. Julia Roberts is wasted. Griffin's cleverness, left to itself, is all surface, and it needs either a director who wants a party and nothing more, or a season of television long enough for the debts to come due. He also wrote on The Shield (2002), which we rate highly, though we could not tell you which parts were his.
He has been a screenwriter for hire for most of his career and a television creator for one season. We would take the second Griffin over the first, and we would sit through thirteen more episodes of anything he ran.
Biography
Ted Griffin (born 21 December 1970) is an American screenwriter. Born in Pasadena, California, he graduated from Colgate University in 1993, where he helped form the comedy troupe Broken Lizard.
His screenwriting credits include Ravenous (1999), Ocean's Eleven (2001), Matchstick Men (2003, co-written with his brother Nicholas Griffin), Rumor Has It... (2005, as T.M. Griffin) and Tower Heist (2011). He created the FX television series Terriers (2010). His maternal grandparents were director William A. Seiter and actress Marian Nixon.
