No Better Script for Marriage (Published 2010)

WHEN Robert Siegel married Jen Cohn on June 5, 2004, he had already left his post as editor in chief of The Onion, the satirical newspaper, and had gone on to write a movie script called “Big Fan.”

The script, about an obsessive football enthusiast, became his calling card as he slowly made the Hollywood rounds. It got him work doing rewrites, and he was making money, but nothing had yet been produced.

Ms. Cohn was a voice-over actress, merrily switching ages, genders and accents as easily as most people breathe: a 5-year-old girl one moment, an 80-year-old stuffy English dowager the next.

When they married, Mr. Siegel said, “The entire nature of our relationship changed.”

Ms. Cohn said: “Things intensified, and we locked into each other as a team. Our careers took off.” She was doing well when they married. She did better after. He did, too.

Six months into their marriage, Darren Aronofsky hired Mr. Siegel to write the screenplay for his film “The Wrestler,” starring Mickey Rourke. By October 2007, as that movie went into pre-production, Mr. Siegel decided to direct “Big Fan” himself.

What provoked him to become a first-time director?

“We got pregnant,” Ms. Cohn said. Due date for baby Siegel: June 2008.

“I turned and saw my enormous wife, and knew that once the baby is born, I can’t disappear for two months to shoot and be completely self-absorbed,” Mr. Siegel said.

Ms. Cohn understood his motivation to “get out of the house,” as he put it.

“It was an adrenaline thing,” she said, “a guy who is going to have his first baby. He said, ‘I’ve got to do it.’ I saw how passionate he was.”

She not only agreed he should direct, but supported him from 2007 to 2009, while he made “Big Fan.”

“She paid all the bills,” he said. “Together, we watched our bank account drain.”

They paid for nearly all of the film. His mother, Joan Siegel, contributed a small amount. For that he made her a co-associate producer. The final budget was under $400,000.

He recruited his wife to be the executive producer, a title that means asking for money. “I made spreadsheets and called investors and hedge funds,” she said. “Next movie, I want to be the pretty wife on the arm of the director.”

He turned their 1,400-square-foot Flatiron District loft, a rental, into the production office. He finished shooting three weeks before Mickey Sender Siegel was born on June 4, 2008.

The baby was not named after Mickey Rourke but rather “Mickey Cohen, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel,” she said, naming a trio of gangsters.

The baby’s name has “sort of a swagger,” Mr. Siegel said, deadpan.

“He could become a bank robber, or a comedian in the Catskills,” Ms. Cohn said. “If he’s a bass player, he can be Mick Sender. If he runs a bank, he can be M. Sender Siegel, and if he’s a gossip columnist or sportswriter, he can be Mickey Siegel.”

When “The Wrestler” had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008, and won the Golden Lion award, the grand prize, Mickey tagged along with his parents and his maternal grandmother, Arlene Cohn. When the film was nominated for two Oscars (best actor for Mr. Rourke and best supporting actress for Marisa Tomei), Mickey was there, too, although not at the ceremony in March 2009.

When “Big Fan” had its premiere at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, baby Mickey was also there. His parents take him everywhere, often with either their part-time nanny, Maria Madera, or Ms. Cohn’s mother.

“We’re trying to be ’70s parents,” Ms. Cohn said, explaining that they want to be relaxed parents who do not overly worry or program their children, or ban them from watching television. “We’re raising him as our third child.”

They are both 38, and still live in the brilliantly colored loft, with some walls red, others yellow. The oversize sofa is red. Asked who chose the colors for the loft, Ms. Cohn said, “I did.” The colors reflect her own ebullience. “This was Crayola fiesta,” she said. “Now it looks like a pediatrician’s office.”

This year, there are no movie premieres for them to go to. Mr. Siegel is writing a screenplay about a New York City figure. Each day, he rides a bus up the Avenue of the Americas to the Public Library at 42nd Street, where he works in the Rose Main Reading Room, soaking up its grandeur.

He won the 2009 Gotham Independent Film Award for breakthrough director for “Big Fan.”

“I don’t want to sound arrogant,” he said, “but I want to win an Oscar. I want to take another leap.”

Ms. Cohn still does her voice-overs. This spring, she was in television commercials for Wonder bread, Listerine rinse, Cottonelle and Dairy Queen and in a cartoon called “WordGirl” shown on PBS. She likes her life.

“I’ve always loved voice-overs,” she said. “You have to be schmoozing and social, there’s a lot of creativity and instant gratification, and you have to read first, and fast.”

Would she want to have a role in the next film her husband writes? “If he writes me a cameo,” she said, laughing. (She had one line in “The Wrestler,” when she walks in on Mr. Rourke having sex in a bathroom. Her line is not printable.)

“I’d rather be a cheerleader,” she said. “I get encouragement from him — and relaxation.”

Mr. Siegel said, “What she’s trying to say is that women thrive in a marital situation.”

And himself?

He said he eats better, he has become less introspective and he has fun at weddings.

“I think weddings are very unpleasant for single men,” he said. “I think that most guys don’t want to get married. It’s not something men aspire to. You have a dialogue with yourself. You’re not married. You ought to get married. Do you want to get married? You will get married.”

Now, he said: “You can enjoy the buffet. You can drink the wine.”