A raunchy new Netflix animated movie called “Fixed” — about a dog living it up one last night before getting neutered — is largely based on the lives of the filmmaker and his best friends who all graduated from Lane Tech.
Not the neutered part, though. No one was neutered.
That part was dreamt up on the spot by Genndy Tartakovsky when Hollywood studio execs said the idea for his animated buddy film needed something more.
“It was one of those things like lightning struck, and I said, ‘What if they’re dogs, and one of them finds out he’s going to get neutered in the morning,” said Tartakovsky, whose directing resume includes “Dexter’s Laboratory,” “Powerpuff Girls,” “Samurai Jack,” “Primal” and the movie “Hotel Transylvania.”
“It’s very R rated. I think people are kind of shocked animation can go this far, and it’s raunchy, but there’s some heart to it, too,” Tartakovsky said of the film, set in Chicago, which has already made Netflix’s Top 10 Movies list since its debut Wednesday.
The dogs are voiced by actors Adam DeVine, Idris Elba, Kathryn Hahn and Fred Armisen. Tartakovsky drew inspiration from movies that featured funny friends such as those in Judd Apatow’s “Superbad” and “Knocked Up.”
“I figured, I have real people I can base this on, I’ll see if I can do it,” he said.
Friends like family
Tartakovsky reached out to two friends from his high school days (Lane Tech, class of 1988) who had writing chops — Steve Greenberg, a Sun-Times sports reporter, and Rich Lufrano, an advertising copywriter — to have them write dialogue based on the banter, ribbing mostly, that would occur when they all got together.
“We bust on each other a lot, make fun of each other in a loving way. Nobody gets upset about it. In real life, guys aren’t like ‘How are you feeling? Are you OK?’ We’re kind of mean to each other, but it’s really not, because you know it’s coming from a good place,” Tartakovsky said.
Both 55, Greenberg and Tartakovsky met through sports in grade school.
“From the time I met him, I thought this is a kid who’s different from my other friends, and he wound up being more interesting than any of them,” Greenberg said.
Lufrano, who lives in Portland, Oregon, was quick to point out how he never lost to Tartakovsky in one-on-one basketball in high school despite spotting him 10 points every time they played to 11.
“Can you imagine the humiliation? I’m surprised he ever recovered from that, to be honest,” Lufrano, 54, said.
The 12-page outline put together by the trio was fleshed out with the help of professional screenwriters. That was in 2008. The project stalled for years, with Tartakovsky shopping it around until he finally found a movie production company willing to take a chance.
“I didn’t think it would ever get made,” he said.
One common memory that makes the friends laugh is Tartakovsky’s 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme that — with half the key broken off in the ignition — was an iffy mode of daily transport to their favorite burrito place on Lincoln Avenue.
Tartakovsky emigrated from Russia to the United States when he was 7. His dad was a dentist in the Soviet Union, but his medical credentials didn’t transfer, so he worked as a dental technician in Chicago. He died when Tartakovsky was 16. His mother, a clerk, died when he was 22.
His friends from high school are like family, he said.
‘Oh wait, you can draw?’
A defining moment as a young animator came when he shot the moon and landed a date with a beautiful Lane Tech classmate, but their night out happened to be the opening night of the animated kids movie “The Land Before Time,” the 1988 Lucasfilm classic about an orphaned brontosaurus.
“I asked her if we could go see this movie, and she agreed, so we’re sitting there and within 15 minutes she’s done,” he recalled. “She nudges me and was like, ‘Can we go?’ And I looked at her and how beautiful she was, and I looked at the beautiful animation, and then I had a big life choice at that point, and I said ‘Well, I really need to finish watching this.’ And she left the theater. It was kind of like one of those defining moments where you go, ‘Yeah, I’m pretty serious about this.’”
His pals didn’t even know about his ability to draw until one night while a few of them were working post-high school jobs as bellhops at a suburban Holiday Inn. He effortlessly sketched a few cowboys on a banner promoting a chili cook-off.
“Everyone was like, ‘Oh wait, you can draw?’ I never talked about it. I didn’t want to be judged as a nerd,” said Tartakovsky, who attended Columbia College Chicago before transferring to the California Institute of the Arts.
Tartakovsky didn’t hesitate when asked about the future of his animated dogs.
“We want to do another one,” he said.