‘My whole life, even now, I’m attracted to mayhem,” Todd Phillips is saying, feet resting on a spotless coffee table inside his spotless office on the Warner Bros. film-studio lot in Burbank, him having turned this lifelong attraction into so much money you can’t believe it.
Take the three Hangover movies, from 2009 to 2013, all of which Phillips directed and two of which he co-wrote. Altogether, they’ve raked in $1.4 billion, with lunacy galore, chain-smoking monkeys, unexpected face tattoos, roofie-puffed marshmallows and so forth, ad nauseam. Crazy stuff, none of which would have happened had Phillips not allowed his $8 million paycheck for the first installment to be cut to exactly $0.00 (“Yeah, zero dollars,” he says) to get it made at a price the studio would approve. He’d…
