Whatever happened to Assholes Finish First? Tucker told people to start pre-ordering it on the 16th November of 2006, slating it for release in fall 2007. Then that got pushed back from fall 2007 to fall 2008. Well look, here we are in fall 2008 and there's no sign of the book.Now, on one hand I can understand that maybe there is a reason to delay your book by a year, if you want to add some stories or coincide it's release with your movie launch. But the movie isn't even finished yet, and probably won't be out until April or May 2009. At that stage, AFF will have been put back a grand total of 19 months.
Now, that ain't so bad I suppose.. if you genuinely do have a book ready. But the thing is... Tucker hasn't posted an original story this year. Or all of last year. Or since um.. I dunno. August 2006? The Midget Story is the last actual story that Tucker has posted.
That's over 2 years ago!
So what's he done in the meantime?
- well he wrote a screenplay, a screenplay that contains no new original material or jokes. Wait, sorry, he CO-wrote the screenplay. He couldn't even annotate his own novel into a screenplay without help.
- he pretty much got himself blacklisted at Comedy Central. "I canceled the TV deal with Sony/Comedy Central. There will be no Tucker Max TV show in the near future." Oh Tucker... back when I was a sycophantic fan even I balked at that line, you fooled nobody.
- he wrote the Afterword to Paul Wall's autobiography. Now, I'm no Ernest Hemingway.. but don't you usually write the book first, and then the Afterword. Maybe Tucker is planning to revolutionise the delivery of literature now. "Fuck linear story-telling, bro! Tarantino everything! Begin with the end of the book!"
- the IHTSBIH movie. Well now here's something at least, he found financing for the film and helped cast it. Apparently he turned down big-name studio after big-name studio, until he settled down with indie misfits Darko and three D-List actors. Two years well spent.
Supposedly, Assholes Finish First is good-to-go whenever the movie is released. I find this so hard to believe when he already said that we'd be reading excerpts of it throughout 2008 as he finely tuned his "art". So far nobody has seen a single story from it - do you know why this is?
Three reasons.
#1 - IHTSBIH was the culmination of about 15 years worth of stories that had been finely exaggerated from their original form. AFF can only contain stories that were written in the period between IHTSBIH's publication and the present. That's a time period of 2 years and 8 months.
#2 - All of Tucker's friends have grown-up and moved on. Jojo doesn't even bother with the messageboard anymore, and Slingblade is a happily married man these days. So now Tucker has to be funny all on his own - no Slingblade supporting character, no drunken twenty-something wingmen, just a 33 year old manchild. You want to know the sad truth? Tucker Max doesn't really have that many friends anymore.
And as such, it's not possible for him to be doing any of the things that made the first book a success.
#3 - People want proof. He's e-famous now. There's people who will say they saw him, and that things did not happen the way he says they did. He can't fudge the details anymore, the guy with the camera can't throw up on the tape anymore, the fat girl doesn't run off in real life once she's gotten her "dose" of insults. And now Tucker must actually record things as they actually happened. And he's finding that hard.
So don't hold your breath for Assholes Finish First to be released at the same time as the movie. And when it is finally released, don't be surprised when you see that most of the stories are from the same period as IHTSBIH (yet somehow they were never written in the first 4 years of the site's life?), it's far easier to retcon the past than write recent stories.
If this post gets 20 responses, I will burn my copy of IHTSBIH and post pics here. Don't worry, I bought it second-hand so no money went to the author.
