Hollywood Causes Cancer: The Tom Green Story

For the first time, Tom Green—who shot to fame as host of MTV’s The Tom Green Show; starred in a hit movie; wrote and directed his own film, which was soundly trashed by the entertainment press; married and divorced Hollywood royalty; and suffered a very public, poignant, and even darkly comic battle with testicular cancer—tells the wild story of his unlikely journey from media darling to media punching bag and how he survived the Hollywood hype machine.

Seven years ago, Tom Green was a skateboarding fanatic who lived with his parents in Canada, worked on comedy with his friends, and dreamed of becoming a talk-show host. He was doing a public access show up north when MTV heard about him and brought him to New York to see what he could do in the big city. Tom became an instant smash, slicing up dead raccoons on stage, introducing his parents to Monica Lewinsky in the middle of the night, and pioneering a type of shocking humor that begat Jackass, Fear Factor, and other reality shows.

In the next few years, Tom starred in the hilarious Road Trip and three other movies (Freddy Got Fingered, Stealing Harvard, and Charlie’s Angels), married and divorced Drew Barrymore, and recorded his surgery for testicular cancer in a well-received, hysterical, and oddly moving documentary for MTV. But the fearless Canadian with the outrageous sense of humor, hit show, and tabloid-hyped marriage got a taste of the darker side of Hollywood, too, as the media that made him the toast of Tinseltown cut him down to size in the wake of his divorce, illness, and some professional bumps in the road.

Hollywood Causes Cancer not only tells the full story of Tom’s wildly entertaining trip to celebrity but is also an absorbing and even revelatory look at a dramatic, excessive, ruthless place called Hollywood, and how one man survived his journey into the heart of it all.