The third season of ‘Entourage’ ended just a few weeks ago and just as the series started to fade from my mind, the fourth season began. And what a great beginning it was! Rather than devoting the entire season to Vince and his crew making Medellin, we got the Cliff’s Notes version of it in tonight’s season premiere, titled “Welcome To The Jungle.” Shot in a cleaned up version of a documentary-style episode, we got to see Drama desperately trying to get a part in the movie, Eric desperately trying to get an ending out of Billy and Billy desperately trying to get into an actress’s pants.
What worked for this episode was video-diary-style interviews with the various characters which served to give us their thought processes as most of them sweated it out in the Colombian jungle. Ari was still in L.A., as was Nick, though he wasn’t stuck in California by choice. Nick got busted for cocaine possession when he tried to drive to Colombia. He explained that he wasn’t trying to sneak drugs into the country; he just forgot he had a giant bag of coke in the trunk of his car. This becomes relevant when Eric tries to find a way to hire Traffic writer, Stephen Gaghan to do the rewrites for the film, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Billy decides that he doesn’t like the ending in the original script for the movie and says he wants to rewrite it. For months while the movie is being filmed, Eric tries to get him to give them the ending but as time goes by, Billy becomes more and more obsessed with one of the actresses in the film (played by Sofia Vergara). He’s convinced someone on the set must be sleeping with her because she told him she just wants to be friends. Vince swears he hasn’t touched the girl and after a lot of interrogations by Billy, so does everyone else. Eric finally confronts Billy and tells him to get his act together. In the process of finally standing up to Billy, Eric ends up paying him a complement and it is this that snaps Billy out of his insecure funk.
The two agree that they need help with the rewrites and they want to get Gaghan on board to do them. In order to do this, they need more money. This is when we learn that Nick’s accounts are all frozen. Eric ends up working out the money situation and to Ari’s surprise (how hilarious was his reaction?), gets Gaghan on board. Meanwhile, Billy figuratively chained himself to his typewriter and did an entire rewrite of the script. By the time Gaghan arrived, everyone in love with Billy’s rewrite – so much so that Gaghan basically read the script over, got paid and left without really doing anything.
Even Drama managed to score a small part in the final scene of the film.
Everyone seems to be confident that this movie will turn out fantastic but Billy has proven time and again that he’s a loose canon. He’s extremely insecure and totally self-absorbed. The project isn’t over yet. Chances are, there will be at least one or two more obstacles before this movie (sorry – “film”) is ready to hit the theaters.
