[1] While writing screenplays at night, both spent the day attending jobs to pay their tuition, selling homemade T-shirts, starting their own food delivery service, and opening shoe shops in Los Angeles.
The only finished project was an uncredited rewrite to the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Maximum Risk (1996), while an unproduced Liberace biopic (unrelated to Steven Soderbergh's TV movie Behind The Candelabra) introduced them to future collaborator and producer Peter Safran.
Tired of unmade projects as screenwriters, and with Regency Enterprises unable to find a director for their romantic comedy spoof, Seltzer and Friedberg opted to direct Date Movie (2006) themselves.
[47][48] Common criticisms of their work include being heavily reliant on pop culture references, passing trends, product placement, scatological gags, gratuitous nudity, casual violence and offensive stereotypes for their humor, as well as mistaking plagiarism for parody.
They're sad, limp affairs that have all but single-handedly reduced the "spoof movie" from parody to mere quotation: From Napoleon Dynamite to Borat to the "Leave Britney alone!"
guy, no payoff delights these comic geniuses more than cutting away to the flavor of the month, presumably causing the audience to roar with laughter, smack themselves on the forehead, and exclaim, "Hot damn, how the hell'd the Kardashians end up in thar?
Critic Josh Levin of Slate stated: Isn't it massive consumer fraud to charge $10.50 for a barely hour-long movie?
They're a plague on our cinematic landscape, a national shame, a danger to our culture, a typhoon-sized natural disaster disguised as a filmmaking team, a Hollywood monster wreaking havoc on the minds of America's youth and setting civilization back thousands of years.
But, the films that these two directors make are so blatant at being nothing more than a juvenile finger pointing at an image or mention of a popular trend that, to me, they seem exploitive of a young culture raised to have an ever-decreasing attention span, thanks to the internet and channel surfing and, this may sound a little crazy, but, I think it shows a slight de-evolution in what people will accept as entertainment".
[57] Critic Nathan Rabin also gave their work an indignant condemnation, calling them "comedy antichrists"[58] and saying about their films: Spoof movies, as practiced by the cultural blight that is Seltzer-Friedberg, aren't just troubling from an aesthetic viewpoint.