Before Ben Stiller’s Hit, There Was an Original ‘Meet the Parents’ You’ve Never Seen

2000’s Meet the Parents, which pitted Ben Stiller’s character against a suspicious prospective father-in-law played by Robert De Niro, became a blockbuster rom-com, making more than $330 million at the box office and inspiring two sequels (with a third on the way). But it all started with a 1991 version you probably haven’t seen — and likely never will. According to writer, director, and star Greg Glienna, Universal Pictures won’t allow the release of the original Meet the Parents…

1991’s Meet the Parents is darker than the 2000 remake

As he told Little White Lies last year, Glienna was a stand-up comedian and aspiring filmmaker in the 1980s when he and a friend improvised a scene in which Glienna’s character met a potential father-in-law for the first time. Glienna later turned that ad-libbed sketch into a short film called The Vase and then, with funding and production help from stand-up comic Emo Philips, a full-length film called Meet the Parents.

That 1991 film took two weeks to make, with Glienna and his crew shooting many scenes in one take.

It’s a darker story than the remake, with one canine character and multiple humans dying by the last frame. The film screened in a few theaters in the United States and some festivals in the United Kingdom. Then came the film’s drift into obscurity…

Greg Glienna & co-screenwriter Mary Ruth Clarke only got “story by” credits on the Hollywood version

At one point, National Lampoon made and then scrubbed plans to release the original Meet the Parents on VHS. Steven Soderbergh met with Glienna to get him and co-screenwriter Mary Ruth Clarke to write a remake for Universal, but they eventually got the boot after selling the rights to the studio.

Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg took over scripting duties for the remake, while Glienna and Clarke got “story by” credits after losing a Writers Guild arbitration, as the Chicago Tribune reported.

“We got screwed by the Writers Guild because if you write the first draft, it’s very hard to not get a script by credit,” Glienna explained to LWL. “They said it was based on a previous source and put us in a category that’s usually for adaptations of books.”

In 2000, Clarke told the Tribune, “What I say is things like ‘They’re making $59 million off of my idea,’ and then I go back to the job I hate that I’ve been doing for years, and I pretend it didn’t happen.”

Universal won’t allow Glienna to release his version

Glienna’s version of the film got buried because of an error his lawyer made: the contract stipulates that Universal owns the script for the original and the film itself, and the studio won’t let him release his work.

​“I don’t know why, but they just will not let me show it,” he told LWL. “I just wish I had a lawyer who knew what he was doing at the time and would have made that clear to me. My lawyer back then didn’t separate the film and the script in the contract, so the wording of it means when they bought the script, they bought the film.”

In the end, Glienna and Philips got associate producer credits on the remake, as did Jim Vincent, a producer from the original (and the friend who originally improvised Meet the Parents’ source material with Glienna).

“It’s a great feeling to hear a full theater of people appreciating the comedy,” Vincent told the Tribune. “Of course, I enjoy seeing our names up there and knowing we got it to a certain point before it went to the next level.”

The original impressed critics, who called it “wonderfully twisted” and “very funny”

British Independent Film Awards co-founder Elliot Grove listed the original Meet the Parents in his top 10 films of all time — alongside Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs — saying it “was much funnier and tighter than the Hollywood version,” in which “most of the good jokes were watered down.”

Variety called Glienna’s work a “wonderfully twisted black comedy” and a “blatant attack on marriage, suburban indifference, Christian hypocrisy and the nuclear family”

And the Tribune’s film critic at the time called the film “a very funny, very original piece of work.”

Even so, the film’s lack of recognition continued to haunt Glienna, as the Tribune recounted: When Glienna sold the script for the 2003 film A Guy Thing to MGM, a studio exec unaware of his backstory asked him, “Can you make it more like Meet the Parents?”