Frank Beddor
A 1998 trade advertisement for There's Something About Mary. Puffy the dog, in a full plaster body cast covered in passport stamps from twenty countries, is carried by the handle of his cast. Beside him: “$330,000,000 gross worldwide! And still traveling.”

There’s Something About Mary

Thirteen years after the prom went spectacularly wrong, Ted hires a private investigator to find the girl he never got over. The investigator finds her — and decides to keep her for himself.

It started on a chairlift

Nearly thirty years ago Frank Beddor was riding a lift above the Sundance Film Festival with Dylan Sellers, then an executive at Fox. On the way up he described a screenplay two friends had written — John Strauss and Ed Decter’s comedy about a man who hires a private investigator to find his high school dream girl. They got off the lift and Sellers said: let’s make this movie.

That movie was There’s Something About Mary. Frank produced it with Michael Steinberg, Charles B. Wessler and Bradley Thomas, Peter and Bobby Farrelly directed, and in the summer of 1998 it became the comedy everyone had seen.

The door it came through was a ski slope. Two freestyle world titles led to stunt skiing in Hot Dog…The Movie and Better Off Dead, stunt work led to acting, and acting led to the room where the people making films were standing around. Frank tells the whole story on the blog.

The theatrical one-sheet. Cameron Diaz in a pink slip dress, leaning forward with her hands on her knees, beside the title and a yellow warning strip reading “The guys who did ‘Dumb & Dumber’ and ‘Kingpin’ bring you a love story.”

BackStory

Gallery

Frank Beddor and Cameron Diaz between takes, sitting together in canvas chairs on a darkened set with her head resting on his shoulder. The empty chairs around them carry the other producers’ names. A studio portrait of Frank Beddor and Cameron Diaz against a white ground: he stands with his arms folded in a dark jacket, she rests a hand on his shoulder.
Frank Beddor on set, grinning, holding the border terrier who plays Puffy in both arms like a baby. A black-and-white set photograph: six of the crew crowded round a monitor at the video village, most of them in headphones, with Cameron Diaz waiting behind them.
Frank Beddor on set with his arms round two others — Matt Dillon on the right in Pat Healy’s moustache and pale shirt, and a third man on the left.

Credits

Produced by

Frank Beddor

Michael Steinberg

Charles B. Wessler

Bradley Thomas

Directed by

Peter Farrelly

Bobby Farrelly

Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin

Written by

Ed Decter

John J. Strauss

Peter Farrelly

Bobby Farrelly

Released by

Twentieth Century Fox

July 1998