It’s hard to tell if the upcoming Entourage film is going to be impressive or despicable. The show was glamorous, intoxicating, and from time to time even rather funny. However, it was also painstakingly simple and predictable. Its stand-out star, and far and away most hilarious character, was Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold. Now a short film that connects the show to the film proves that Piven will be back to his glorious, obnoxious best for the feature film, and suggests that Entourage could be hilarious after-all.
Doug Ellin, who not only created the original Entourage television series but wrote and directed the feature follow-up too, admitted to The Hollywood Reporter that he really wanted to find space for the action in this short in the final edit. However, he just couldn’t locate the pristine spot for it. He was pretty confident that people would want to know what Ari has been upto since the end of the series though, so he decided to simply develop it as a short.
For those of you who missed out on Entourage’s run on HBO between 2004 and 2011, Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold is the agent of Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier), the protagonist of the show, and he’s constantly trying to keep his client in check while also cunningly advancing his own career.
However, at the end of the series, Ari decided to quit show business in order to save his marriage to his long-suffering wife Melissa (Perry Reeves). The pair are shown living in Italy at the end of the series, but the tease that ultimately blossomed into the film was planted when he got a phone call offering him the job of running Warner Bros. during the end credits.
It looks as though Ari Gold accepted the offer too, because not only does the above short film show him looking miserable in Italy with his wife – which has less to do with her and more to do with him missing being a Hollywood bigwig – the various trailers have shown us that Gold is back in cahoots with Vinny Chase and his merry-band of idiots.
Piven is in fine form in the short, and if Entourage is to truly succeed as a feature film he will need to punctuate it with a hilarious supporting role. For me, the series only really prospered when either he or Kevin Dillion’s Johnny Drama was on screen. Entourage picks up where the series finished, and sees Vinnie making his directorial debut, which spirals over budget, while Ari deals with running a studio in his own apoplectic way. Entourage hits theaters on June 3, and it will be interesting to see just how popular it is on the big screen.
