Despite White's initial knowledge of the best shortcuts to LAX (which was glossed over in last night's briskly-edited, airport-light premiere), his team is definitely one of this season's underdogs, as he's competing alongside his 68-year-old father Mel. Nevertheless, the White duo persevered to place fourth in the inaugural leg after braving a Switzerland challenge that forced them to transport hundreds of blocks of cheese down a slippery hill. Was it a more arduous task than incorporating School of Rock 2 script notes that insist, "Can't Jack Black have a son like Seth Rogen (or Zac Efron, Y/N) who also wants to rock?" Only White can say for sure.

• The Amazing Race [CBS]

So where did the idea to do the show come from?

I'm a not-so-closeted reality TV fan, a traitor to my own. I think I've watched probably every Survivor and Amazing Race—I'm a weird reality fanatic, I guess. During the strike I was watching my usual shows because I couldn't work, and at some point I was like, "What the crap! I should just go on The Amazing Race." I actually just made a video, I didn't try to pull any strings, I just made a video with somebody besides my dad and sent it in.

Who?

I was gonna go with this screenwriter that I met on Freaks & Geeks, this guy Jon Kasdan. Our little sorta reducible idea was "neurotic screenwriters who never leave the house." And it turned out that he really was too neurotic to leave the house. We got to the semifinals of the prior season, Season 13, and he had sort of a meltdown at the Hilton at LAX and was like, "I can't do this!"

So how did your dad get involved?

We had gotten pretty far along and you know, it's a relationship show and they want to show the most interesting relationships, so they encouraged me to go with someone in my family [father Mel White, the founder of the gay rights group Soulforce].

You know, it's an interesting trajectory: so many reality stars want to make it in Hollywood, and you're sort of doing the reverse. Were you concerned about becoming known for reality instead of writing, directing, acting?

[laughs] Honestly, I just can't give a flip about that. For me, the show's about to start airing, and it really is less about that than being able to go do it. Like, the idea of just traveling and partying and having this crazy experience was reason to do it, and let the chips fall where they may. I think I started off by thinking, "How can I be in the race but not of the race?" but after about ten minutes, I was just like, "I've gotta be of the race to do this right."

So how was the idea of doing it different than actually doing it?

It was actually way more fun doing it. You're in a circus! You're running through airports with a camera crew and there's like, dwarves and giant Amazonian women's basketball players and everyone's in matching outfits and it's so fun. You know, when you're in LA, you're always like, "Maybe there's something more fun going on somewhere else," but for that period of time where you're on the race, there's definitely nowhere else you'd rather be than there.

So when you're on that starting line with Phil, and the race is about to begin, what should we know was going through your head?

The whole time, I was just like, I wanna get to LAX! [The race starts in Los Angeles.] I didn't think we had many advantages past the point of getting to the airport. I didn't want to be in the back of the train—I was like, "All the times I've dropped friends off at LAX needs to come into play now!" But you'll see, it doesn't exactly end up the way that I expected.

Have you seen the first episode yet?

I haven't seen any of them. I've seen the promos.

How do you think you'll be portrayed? Like, what elements of your story do you think are the ones they're highlighting?

Honestly, I did read a review of the first episode, and the reviewer said I'm perpetually grinning. [laughs] If that's all they have me as, the "laughing fool," then that's fine with me. That's how I was on the race. For the first 24 hours, I literally could not stop smiling. I felt like Jason Bourne and his old gay dad, driving this Mercedes to the airport trying to outrun these musclebound mofos. It was literally the time of my life.

Did any of the other contestants recognize you?

A couple, not many. I mean, I'm the king of "you look vaguely familiar." I think some people scratched their heads. It didn't necessarily endear me to anyone, like they were trying to suck up to me because I'm from Hollywood or whatever.

Had you done anything to prepare for it beforehand? Like, a lot of map reading?

We did have enough time for my dad to go insane with the idea of matching outfits. His long-dormant dream of walking around in matching outfits finally came to the fore! They encourage you to wear a color scheme just to identify the teams, and ours was royal blue. So my dad was like, "Oh, we've got to get matching outfits!" and I was like, "Dad, we don't have to wear, like, the exact same clothes. Wearing things with a similar color is enough." And he got so frustrated! And so he went into my closet and saw the stuff that I had pulled out for the race, and went out and bought the exact same clothes! And so I was like, "I guess I'm gonna be that guy, wearing the same thing as his gay dad on national TV."

What was the industry reaction when it was announced that you were on the show?

I think there's two separate people. Half of the people are like, "That is the coolest thing you could ever do," and they're jealous, and half of the people are like, "Why the hell would you ever want to do that?" Especially some of the more Hollywood A-lister types, they're like, "Did you have to fly economy?" [laughs]

You say in the CBS bio that you wanted to pattern yourself after former contestants Charla and Mirna. Mike, I don't know if you know this, but Mirna is crazy!

Well, yeah! But what I like about them is that they had no discernible advantages at all, no physical advantage, no intellectual advantage, and yet they just had the will to succeed. I wanted to channel them. A little crazy doesn't hurt in the circumstances they throw you into.

Have you met them?

No, I want to!

I'm sure you will now that you're all on the reality alumni circuit.

I'll go do a college speaking tour with them. [laughs]

White, you see, has been revealed to be amongst the players on the upcoming 14th season of The Amazing Race, where he will be competing alongside his father, Mel, the founder of the gay rights group Soulforce. Here's an excerpt from the official blurb on the team, which ventures increasingly into "who knew?" territory:

Mel, a gay-rights activist, has worked as a writer, professor, filmmaker and a pastor and is eager to have a once in a lifetime experience with his youngest child. He’s confident that his people skills will give him an advantage over some of the other Racers. He describes himself as energetic, caring and passionate and enjoys scuba diving and racquetball. When asked who he would model his style of game play after, he pointed to Season 7 winners Uchenna and Joyce, while Mike will model his game play after the "never say die" attitude of Charla and Mirna.

We have a lot of questions after this, but mostly we wonder which angle the notoriously reductive Amazing Race editors will choose to preface every White voice-over with. Will we hear a clumsily-edited "As a Hollywood screenwriter...I decided we should skip the Fast Forward," or, "As a bisexual man with a gay father...I cannot stand those Blondes!"

• The Amazing Race [CBS]

And it's not like rookie distributor Variance Films didn't have a trailer (follow the jump), a decent cast (Liv Tyler, Dax Shepard, Mike White) or even a fun poster to market. So what happened?

Part of it is Keaton's own fault. After a tandem comprising Something's Gotta Give (her most recent Oscar-nominated role) and The Family Stone, Keaton has coasted chronically through paycheck after paycheck. We'd seen hints as recently as 2001, when her mob comedy Plan B went straight to video, but her reputation as a selective stateswoman of American cinema slid for real with Because I Said So and the heist flick Mad Money. They combined for $62 million domestically but were generally reviled as beneath their star. And they were beneath Keaton; The Family Stone wasn't going to make anyone forget Annie Hall as a whole, but as late-career matriarch roles go, she was as good as she'd ever been.

Then came the DVD- (and hell-) ready Mama's Boy, co-starring Jon Heder and essentially remade as Smother with a date-movie-palatability quotient bumped up. Neither found traction with critics, but Variance didn't bother with press or preview screenings at all. That settled it for critics, with Ebert-thwacking indie grump Lou Lumenick positing "Diane Keaton Scrapes the Barrel" and another reviewer asking: "Does Diane Keaton owe some loan sharks a considerable amount of cash? Are there incriminating photos of her that she’s insistent never see the light of day?" We wouldn't rule it out.

And the thing is, she's still so smart and funny and beautiful — too much so for all of this. Smother, Diane? Really? The optimist in us has to move ahead assuming it's a rough patch, but so help us, if we her selling credit reports in a miniskirt on Pimp Ed McMahon's arm, we'll come save her ourselves. This is serious.

Wait, wait, wait — there's a sequel coming for The School of Rock?

White nodded. What's it about, we asked? "I can't tell you."

"It's a studio!" Hardwicke groaned.

"I literally just turned it in," White added. "It's a little too fresh off the boat for me to get into right now. And I don't even know if it's gonna be made."

White was a little more forthcoming about the process for returning to the original without succumbing to franchisee cynicism. "It was easier," he said. "Every time you're creating something, you're always thinking, 'What is the pleasurable part of this? What is the theme that's going to resonate with people?' I've had experiences where I loved what I did, and no one came. And times when I said, 'This could use some editing,' and everybody loves it. Our job is to pretend we know what everybody wants to see, but I don't know. So with this, you want to have a reason to go to the well again. You want it to not just be a reason so people can cash in. But at least now I have a better sense of what it was we created — what worked and what didn't. I can kind of reboot it."

On April 15, a pro-Apatow operative yanked the details:

On several occasions in his movies, there are loud, expletive-filled arguments and frequent sexual-related discussions, which are a trademark.

His male characters tend to be immature, lazy, misogynist, sex-crazed and drug-consuming slackers.

We guess that's not so bad; they're vague, and they do sort of violate Wikipedia's "neutral point of view" guidelines. But then someone dropped by Sunday night to cut some far less-arguable context:

New York Magazine noted that [former Apatow associate] Mike White ... was "disenchanted" by Judd Apatow's later films, "objecting to the treatment of women and gay men in Apatow's recent movies," saying of Knocked Up, "At some point it starts feeling like comedy of the bullies, rather than the bullied."

Apatow has claimed to strive to avoid marginalizing women in his work and to develop authentic female characters. Following many of these accusations, in a highly publicized Vanity Fair interview, lead actor Katherine Heigl admitted that though she enjoyed working with Apatow, she had a hard time enjoying [Knocked Up] itself, calling the movie, "a little sexist," claiming that the film "paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight." In response to accusations of sexism ... Apatow did not initially deny the validity of such accusations, saying flippantly, "I'm just shocked she [Heigl] used the word 'shrew.' I mean, what is this, the sixteen-hundreds?"

This isn't nearly as fun as the revision that had Apatow dying April 7 after "stealing a bucket of mythical walrus," but it seems a fair enough concession to the historical record. But you tell us: Should it stand?

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• Judd Apatow [Wikipedia]

Now, the two don't speak. "This was an old friend," she said. "He knew how personal it was to me. He would laugh at things that I was doing [rescuing cats] ... and then using it and made it feel like it was his experience."

But White maintains that he based his film on his life — not hers.

White, who has two cats and two dogs, said the movie "came out of me losing a pet and replacing that pet with a lot of pets and becoming involved in animal rights, becoming a vegan." He noted that he had a cat named Bootlegger, a former stray, who was found dead in the neighbor's yard.

"That whole story line came out of my own life," he said. The reason he made a movie about dogs instead of cats was because "dogs are easier to train in movies and easier to [film]."

In an anguished e-mail to The Times, White wrote, "I would never do what she's accusing me of doing" and called her allegations "a surreal ... nightmare from which I hope to wake."

"The only thing that has ever mattered to me as far as my work was that people thought I was original and that I had integrity," he wrote. "I never cared if they thought I was weird or uncommercial or an acquired taste or whatever. That Laura is seeking publicity for herself by trying to damage what I have spent my career trying to create seems cruel."

Even though we suspect that the relationship is as doomed as a curious beagle who's gotten into a neighbor's unattended bag of slug poison, it's still possible to imagine that the creative pair will somehow settle their differences in a way more fitting than a mundane, prolonged legal battle. Perhaps White will soon return home to discover a ransacked house filled with dozens of rescued shelter dogs and a note from his erstwhile friend recognizing that while the scene might seem uncomfortably similar to the one in his movie, she arrived at it all on her own.

• Screenwriters Laura Kightlinger, Mike White fight like cats and dogs over script [LAT]