On Movies: Two old comedy pals make a movie

Bobcat Goldthwait and Robin Williams have been friends now for 25 years. They first met on the stand-up circuit - Goldthwait was the one barking like an electroshocked seal, Williams did the ricocheting, stream-of-consciousness shtick - and they've remained close.

So when Goldthwait, his second career as a filmmaker well under way (see Shakes the Clown, see Sleeping Dogs Lie), told his pal that he had just finished a new screenplay, Williams asked to take a look.

"I can honestly say I wasn't, like, secretly pimping him," says Goldthwait, on a visit to Philadelphia recently. "Because I always tell him about whatever I'm up to . . . and he really liked Sleeping Dogs Lie. So, I mentioned I had just finished this script, and he said, 'Well, let me see it.' "

And Goldthwait sent Williams the screenplay, World's Greatest Dad. And Williams said he wanted to do it.

"That really changed everything," says Goldthwait, "because my last film was shot in two weeks with a crew from Craigslist. So this meant now that I could get a whole month of filming, and shoot on film, and do multiple takes. It became serious."

In World's Greatest Dad (per the slogan on coffee mugs and T-shirts, favorite Father's Day gifts), Williams is Lance Clayton, a quiet and kind of lonely English teacher at a Seattle high school. He harbors dreams of literary fame and fortune, and has the literary-magazine and publishing-house rejection slips to prove it. He also has a teenage son (Daryl Sabara) who's a complete jerk - a borderline sociopath with nothing but contempt for his classmates, his teachers, and his father, too. But Williams' character does his best, parenting-wise, anyway.

Until a tragic accident throws everything out of whack. And throws Lance the chance to remake himself - by creating a big, whopping lie.

Things get pretty twisted in the process.

"I'm uncomfortable when people call the movie dark," says the writer-director, born (in 1967) as Robert Francis Goldthwait. "And that's not just me being cute, because I don't see these movies as dark."

True, Shakes the Clown, his 1991 debut, was about an alcoholic clown pinned with a murder rap. And 2006's Sleeping Dogs Lie (also known as Stay) revolved around a bride-to-be's confession of bestiality. In World's Greatest Dad, one of the key characters gets off on autoerotic asphyxiation.

Goldthwait acknowledges that "on paper" these might seem like dark, weird themes.

"If I heard about these movies, I truly would think that they were slob comedies," he says. "And I would probably shy away from them if I had heard the synopses. I'd need a friend to go, 'No, dude, it's not that way. You need to see this!' "

Which is what Goldthwait is hoping people will say about World's Greatest Dad - which opened at the Ritz at the Bourse Friday and also is available through video-on-demand.

There's kink, there's profanity, there's even full-frontal Robin Williams nudity, but there's also a sort of quasi-happy ending. It's a moving portrait of a middle-aged man trying to make sense of his life.

"That's why I don't perceive these movies as dark," Goldthwait explains. "They are kind of life-reaffirming, which I think is harder and a little more subversive to pull off. . . .

"Occasionally I hear that these aren't likable characters. I'm not too concerned about that. I think that's the problem with a lot of comedy: They make these people that don't have any flaws. And Lance is very, very flawed. . . . He has to figure out what he really wants out of life."

Shorts. From a 19th-century London detective to a 21st-century comic-book bounty hunter - that's the career zag director Guy Ritchie is taking. Variety reports that the whooshing-camera-obsessed Brit filmmaker, who's wrapping up work on the Christmas Day-bound Sherlock Holmes - with Robert Downey Jr. in the title role - will next do Lobo, based on the DC Comics character. No word on who's going to play the blue-skinned, seven-foot-tall, motorcycle-riding E.T. who chases bad guys around Planet Earth. . . . Speaking of adapting comics, Stephen Frears (The Queen, High Fidelity) is turning his attention to Tamara Drewe. The acclaimed graphic novel - originally a series of strips in the U.K.'s Guardian - is the work of Posy Simmonds, who took her inspiration for the modern-day tale from Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. Gemma Arterton, the Quantum of Solace Bond girl, will star. . . . Cult director Monte Hellman, whose 1971 road pic Two-Lane Blacktop put singer/songwriter James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson in a '55 Chevy, is back on the road. Road to Nowhere, to be exact. It's a thriller set on a film set and starring Dominique Swain, Shannyn Sossamon, Cliff De Young, John Diehl, and Waylon Payne. It's shooting now in L.A. . . . Law Abiding Citizen, the Gerard Butler-Jamie Foxx psycho-thriller made in Philadelphia earlier this year, will open the 13th annual Urbanworld Film Festival, held in New York starting Sept. 23. (For info: http://urbanworld.com/.) The film opens everywhere Oct. 16.