Comedy Writer Mike Sacks Thinks Most Gen X Movies Were Bullshit…And Now He’s Written One

Sacks working at Kemp Mill Records in Aspen Hill, Maryland, around 1994

Over the last few years, comedy writer Mike Sacks, author of NYTimes bestseller Poking a Dead Frog, has begun publishing comedic novelizations of fake movies. His 2017 release, Stinker Lets Loose!, was a novelization to a fake trucking movie from the ’70s, in Passable In Pink, it was a John Hughes-esque movie from 1983. Now he’s releasing a novelization to a screenplay based on a fictional 1993 movie called Slouchers. The book both mocks and pays tribute to those early ’90s Gen X movies such as Singles, Reality Bites, and Slacker that center around lost twenty-somethings rebelling, barely, against the establishment to which they already belong.

Sacks, a Gen Xer himself who’s interviewed some of the greatest comedy writers of all time, grew up when these movies were released and admits most of those films were movie studio cash grabs, with no bearing on reality; they romanticized the unromantic life of being a slacker, in itself no accomplishment to begin with.

I spoke with Sacks about writing his fake novelizations, his pre-internet days working in a record store, and what’s been keeping him sane during the pandemic.

ALSO: Slouchers is out now!

How have you been since the pandemic started? Has it…