Amy Poehler, who plays Nick Vanderpark’s other half, Natalie, agrees, “Once Nick and Natalie become rich overnight, they lose touch with how they appear to other people. They start to live and dress in a way that’s absurd, but in a nice way. What I found most funny about Nick and Natalie is that they think experiencing something vicariously is the same as actually experiencing it. They are totally oblivious to how envious Tim and Debbie have become. They assume that everyone—especially their best friends—would be really happy for them. I also liked how Natalie always supports Nick in his inventions, even though there were probably a lot of failures that came before Vapoorizer. She’s a dreamer herself, so it’s kind of sweet that the couple who are the dreamers are the ones who hit it big.”
Once the Vanderparks do hit it big, one of their more ludicrous decisions is not to move, but rather to build a huge mansion on the exact spot that their tiny house had stood in a suburban cul-de-sac. Levinson says, “Nick is worth a few hundred million dollars and builds a mansion—not somewhere else—but directly across the street from his best friend. So you have this little modest house and on the other side of the street is this fabulous mansion. Nick is not thinking about what it’s doing to Tim to have this giant mansion staring him in the face every single day when he walks out to go to work.”
Black affirms, “To Nick’s way of thinking, having Tim still living right across the street is awesome; it’s the best of both worlds. He could have moved to someplace like Beverly Hills, but that would have been phony. That’s just not him; he’s keepin’ it real.”
The design of the Vanderpark mansion allowed production designer Victor Kempster to let his imagination run wild, envisioning how someone with loads of money, but little taste, would decorate his home. “The house is outrageous, perverse, baroque… It’s completely debauched," he laughs. “It looks like one of those giant hotels gone terribly wrong,” Levinson adds.
Adding to the strange juxtaposition of a literal palace in a middle class neighborhood were some typical suburban trappings. Kempster notes, “I started by showing Barry several different kinds of suburban backdrops, and then I threw in the capper: the gigantic network of power lines looming over the neighborhood. He absolutely loved that. It gave the mansion’s location an even more bizarre identity. What I loved was the absurdity of it. Someone with millions of dollars is very unlikely to build a mansion in the exact spot he lived before, but even more unlikely to build one under those massive power lines. I mean, it’s utterly ridiculous.”
The exterior of the mansion was a façade, while the interiors of the house were mainly shot in a huge mansion in Beverly Hills that had all the over-the-top elements Kempster was looking for, including an indoor bowling alley and an indoor swimming pool. In keeping with the Vapoorizer’s primary use, Kempster incorporated a canine theme for the décor, showcasing gigantic, brightly colored paintings on the walls featuring cavorting cartoon-like canines. There were also statues of dogs and a huge marble statue of Nick on his prized horse, Corky.
Movie Database
In Theaters
