Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I see Dave Mandel frequently and chat with him. He’s a good guy, direct and honest with his opinion about the experiences he’s had as a writer. I’m glad Mr. Beaks had a good time sitting down with him and his collaborators to talk about their new comedy. Good stuff. Get reading.
Don’t let those cookie-cutter television ads fool you; EUROTRIP is a well above-average teen sex romp from a trio of writers who know how to write comedy. Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer met at Harvard University, honing their craft as contributors to the venerable HARVARD LAMPOON, and going on to distinguished careers as writers for SEINFELD. Since then, they’ve made their bones as screenwriters for Brian Grazer at Imagine, doing what they could with Ron Howard’s HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS and Satan Incarnate’s THE CAT IN THE HAT. Easy, now. Douse the torches and put away the pitchforks; those films are hardly representative of their best work. As you’ll see in the following interview, these are three bright (if unusually cock-obsessed) young lads with a resume that demands your respect. And, now, with the rambunctious, crowd pleasing EUROTRIP opening this Friday, they’re ready to bend the world of film comedy over and roger it like Paris Hilton.
The following was taped at Café 101 on Franklin Avenue, a cacophonous coffee shop not terribly conducive to recorded interviews. I did my best with the transcript, but I occasionally lost bits of conversation to the surrounding din.
Beaks: So, where are you guys from originally?
Schaffer: I’m actually from Ohio. I went to high school in Hudson, Ohio, where our fictional kids grew up.
Beaks: I’m from Bowling Green originally.
Schaffer: Wow. I was really born in Youngstown. I went to boarding school outside of Cleveland in…
Mandel: Warren, Ohio. Say it. (Pause.)
Schaffer: What?
Mandel: Home of the World’s Most Magnificent McDonald’s!
Schaffer: Yes. The World’s Most Magnificent McDonald’s *is* in Warren, Ohio. It’s an amazing place.
Beaks: What makes it so magnificent?
Schaffer: That’s an interesting question.
Beaks: You like that? I know how to do follow-ups.
Schaffer: Yes. It’s three stories tall. It has an amazing “Mac Tonight” player piano. It also has delivery. I actually know some people who got in a big car accident with The Most Magnificent Mobile, which will ferry you food anywhere in the Greater Warren Area. They also try lots of new products there, so your McRib was there first, your McPizzas, some of your special McSalads…
Beaks: And some McThings that didn’t quite make it out of the testing phase…
Schaffer: Yes. It’s the home of wayward fast food.
Mandel: I had a friend whose step-dad – I’m sorry this has nothing to do with anything – but whose step-dad was a VP at Burger King. They were living in Florida, and we would go down to visit – they were spending time between New York and Florida – and they had a microwave years before microwave technology was safe for the home. And their entire refrigerator was filled with products from Burger King that never were. So, it was all of these weird… Burger King enchilada-pizza things.
Schaffer: They’re all dead now.
Mandel: It was the craziest thing you’ve ever seen. (Pause.) But to answer your question, I grew up in New York.
Berg: And I lived in Colorado until I was ten, and then Pasadena. So, if you average us, we average the center of the country.
Beaks: How did you guys decide to start writing as a trio?
Berg: As the options of careers fell away, it seemed like it was more or less (the thing to do.) You know, it’s weird. It was just something we were doing for fun in college. The Harvard Lampoon was like a… it was basically where we got our undergraduate education. I mean, classes were all well and good, but we didn’t spend a lot of time there. We just started doing more and more writing in college, and, then, Jeff and I graduated. The summer after we graduated… every year, there was usually a summer project that the Lampoon would do. Most of the time, it was a parody of a magazine or something. We did USA TODAY, TIME MAGAZINE, and the summer after Jeff and I graduated – David was one year behind us in school, and yet he’s two years older, so you figure it out – Comedy Central wanted to do a television show using the Lampoon. So, the three of us went to New York for the summer, and we did this thing that was an hour long parody of MTV. It was a lot of goofy videos and stuff.
Mandel: It was a classic project. It started off with Comedy Central going, “We’ve got MTV’s complete cooperation,…”
Berg: “…all of their VJ’s,…”
Mandel: “…it’s going to be fantastic! We’ve got big music stars! Everyone’s in, everyone’s in!” And we ended up with Martha Quinn, JJ—
Berg: Martha Quinn, but only because she had previously been married to the DP who was shooting it. He called in a favor. And Nina Blackwood kept calling in—
Mandel: But we wouldn’t use her.
Beaks: Ooh!
Berg: But Mark Goodman was a trooper!
Beaks: So, that was…
Mandel: A wonderful disaster. It was great first job.
Berg: You end up learning a lot more from the things that don’t work, so, suffice it to say, we learned an enormous amount from that project.
(There’s a break in the discussion as we put in our food orders. For those who care, Berg gets the Smoked Salmon Omelet, Mendel and I hit the Breakfast Burrito, while Schaffer boldly makes a bid for the Rush Hour Special despite the fact that we’re forty-five minutes shy of noon. Foiled, he settles for its pricier equivalent, “The Nicky P”.)
Schaffer: So, basically, Alec and I came out to L.A., and started working on a lot of Fox midseason replacements that never got on the air. David started working at SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. Alec and I started working at CONAN O’BRIEN. Everybody was always reading each other’s stuff.
Mandel: It was just one of those funny things where… I had to go back to school for a year, which was awful. They were around for about half of that year… working on their spec stuff, and I was like, “Ohhhh, they’re leaving!” They went to L.A. I went to New York and SNL. They then came to New York to do CONAN, and were working in the same building. I was on the seventeenth floor, and you guys had your offices on…
Schaffer: The ninth.
Mandel: Which was really cool. A lot of this was in the early days of email, so there was a lot of faxing back and forth from L.A. to New York, because who else are you going to trust to read something before you let the world read it?
Schaffer: We’d walk down the street to Kinko’s to get a fax, and pay $17 for it.
Mandel: And that was just how you had to do it. But, also, those were the days… I remember my first year on SNL, everyone was handing things in on yellow legal pads. So, it was… pre-computer, I guess you’d say.
Beaks: What year did you start with SNL?
Mandel: I was there at an incredibly weird time. I came in for the last year of Dana, Phil, Mike, Kevin Nealon, etc. My first year there the show won an Emmy. We were (EW’S) “Entertainers of the Year”. Then Dana left the following year, and it was the emergence of the guys who had been the featured players. Suddenly, it was “Saturday Night Dead”. Then my third year was the attempt at a reboot, where they blew the cast up to seventeen.
Beaks: With Michael McKean…
Mandel: … who was fantastic. Jeneane (Garofalo), Chris Elliott, who hated it. It was a crazy year. But then everybody left, and they finally did what they needed to do, which was bring in all new people. They brought in Molly (Shannon) at the end of my last year… and it was a really nice breath of fresh year. And then they built a new cast somewhat around her.
Schaffer: While he was doing his last year at SNL, we were at SEINFELD.
Mandel: I’m hating SNL at that point, and I’m visiting SEINFELD.
Beaks: Oh, god!
Schaffer: I couldn’t listen to him complain about SNL anymore. I was like, “Just get a driver’s license, come to Los Angeles, and work on the show.” So, we were there for four years, he was there for three years, and we worked on SEINFELD until it got cancelled.
Beaks: What episodes were yours?
Mandel: We wrote a bunch separately and some together.
Schaffer: I’ll just go through them. Our first was “The Gymnast” where George gets caught eating out of the trash, “The Label Maker” with the re-gifting… what else?
Berg: “The Doodle?” Was that our first year?
Schaffer: Yeah.
Beaks (trying to recall the episode): “The Doodle?”
Mandel: The fleas….
Berg: … where George wears the velvet jumpsuit.
Beaks: Oh, right. So, Larry David was still there.
Berg: We were there four years. The first two years, Larry was there, and the last two he was gone.
Mandel: I had one year with Larry. It was the “Death of Susan” year. And then Larry left.
Beaks: How was that?
Berg: Larry was great. Larry taught us (so much). He called me the other day, after we sold this script, and he said, “Hey, I’m telling people that I’m your mentor.” We go, “That’s the biggest compliment we’ve ever gotten.” He taught us *so much*. SEINFELD wasn’t like all of the shit shows where the writers just sit in a room. They were like, “Come up with your own story.”
Mandel: On a standard sitcom, it’s somewhat outrageous. You sit in a room with forty million people, and they cobble it together, and then one guy gets assigned to go write it. They have no stake in it, didn’t really have anything to do with it, but it’s his “turn”.
Berg: Or sometimes, they’ll actually write it as a group. I’ve heard of some shows where they just rotate the credit. It’s, like, ten guys writing, and… “This is your script this week, and then next week you get the credit.” So credits don’t reflect the way that most television is written. SEINFELD wasn’t really written that way.
Beaks: And HERMAN’S HEAD was before this, correct?
Schaffer: Yes. That was actually the first show that we worked on that was on the air. We were there for the last fourteen episodes of HERMAN’S HEAD.
Beaks: HERMAN’S HEAD is one of those shows that still comes up.
Mandel: Just for the record, I want to say that I had nothing to do with HERMAN’S HEAD.
Schaffer: Those were the great days. The great, old days.
Berg: That was produced by Witt-Thomas, and they had about six shows on the air. They were, like, the last of the great 1960’s sitcom factories, where they were all on the Sunset-Gower lot, and Tony Thomas and Paul Witt would walk from office to office to office.
Mandel: They had this really cool internal T.V. system. Remember that thing? You could press a button, and it would be, like, NURSES! Or EMPTY NEST. Or… I can’t remember any of their other shows, but you could see them all.
Schaffer: Witt-Thomas makes shitty, shitty television. And it was just…
Berg: SOAP was good.
Mandel: Oh, SOAP was great!
Schaffer: But after that…
Mandel: BENSON…
Schaffer: Actually, I liked BENSON. But we were there in the later years when the tree was rotten. With NURSES…
Berg: … THE JOHN LARROQUETTE SHOW, BLOSSOM, EMPTY NEST…
Beaks: Well, I just had to bring it up, because HERMAN’S HEAD shows up on, like, THE SIMPSONS as a gag every now and then. It’s some weird, pop cultural touchstone.
Berg: It is.
Beaks: Anyway, on to happier times. After SEINFELD… ?
Mandel: The easiest way to explain it is to imagine a college football team of all-stars that were highly touted, and are drafted by all the best teams, paid lots and lots of money, and then they all realize, “Oh, we don’t want any of that.”
Schaffer: The way the analogy would really be complete is if the owners finally decide, “Oh, we just want shitty players.”
Mandel: Like they decide, “We just want Junior College guys.”
Schaffer: We all had development deals, and we all wanted to write the same kind of comedy that we did at SEINFELD. Not the same kind of show, not based in New York, but…
Mandel: Attitudes, sense of humor, structure… that actually has structure. Structure that occasionally challenges, that you don’t sit there in front of the television, and predict the next line, and basically know everything that’s going to happen.
Berg: The problem with most T.V. shows is that they are stuck in very traditional storytelling, which is that they’re morality plays. Usually, the character either has to do the easy thing, or the right thing. He does the easy thing, and then bad things happen. And at the end, he decides to do the right thing, and that’s the end of the show. Whereas SEINFELD was the opposite: characters do the wrong thing, and are severely punished for it.
Mandel: And sometimes do the easy thing, because it’s easy, and then sit around and talk about how easy it was, and how they would do it again.
Berg: And if they get caught, they lie about it. What most people in television wanted were these morality plays. They didn’t understand the kind of storytelling that was on SEINFELD. A lot of executives on these shows would just impose their rules on SEINFELD, going, “No, no… *this* is how SEINFELD worked.” And we’d be like…
All: “We were there!!!”
Berg: “We know how it worked. And it didn’t work that way, trust me.”
Schaffer: This was also the beginning of the deregulation where networks could own their own shows.
Mandel: We were at Dreamworks, and… it ended all feasible competition. In the old days, it’d be, “We need to have good shows on our network.” Now, it’s, “We don’t care, but I know I own the Jim Belushi show, so let’s just put that on.”
Schaffer: After that, with all of the SEINFELD syndication money, now it’s like… syndication dollars is this big pile of chocolate, and all of the networks are grabbing for it. But they have shit on their hands. So, they keep grabbing for the chocolate, and they go, “(mimics stuffing chocolate in his mouth) Yuck, this tastes like shit!” The problem is, they brought the shit in themselves.
Mandel: They don’t understand that you can leave a show a show on for 400 years. Just run it from now until the end of time. Ten hundred years of Jim Belushi, and nobody cares. It is like a sign of the apocalypse, that show.
Schaffer: We all ended up at Dreamworks Television, but it was very clear that networks just aren’t going to buy something they don’t own.
Berg: By the end of our deal, I remember that we had a (pitch meeting) at CBS, and we pitched this whole thing like, “Picture this guy, he’s like Matthew Broderick, he does this, that, blah, blah, blah.” And at the end of the pitch, they were like, “Well, let us know if you can get Matthew Broderick, because that’s the only way I could possibly buy this show.”
Beaks: So you’d have to package a star.
Mandel: And even then, they’d want to own it.
Schaffer: So we used these Dreamworks and Disney deals as if they paid us to go to movie writing college. And we just started writing movies really because the movie people liked our writing. It’s basically like, if you open one door and somebody blows your nuts off with a shotgun, and then you open another door and somebody hands you a bag of money and pats you on the head… eventually, after a series of years, you learn not to open that first door.
Mandel: But it was this crazy thing where we were… pitching or writing pilots. (To Berg and Schaffer:) I think you guys got a pilot made. I handed in a script that I was literally never spoken to about again. Just gone, or something where it’s like, “Oh, no, we can’t cast this.” A thousand and one excuses when they just basically don’t like what you’re doing. And, all of a sudden we get a call from Imagine Films going, “Wow, we really like your writing, we really like the dialogue you write, we’re looking for that SEINFELD style.” Not that we were the creators of SEINFELD, but they were looking for a challenging sense of humor and biting dialogue. It was so perverse.
Beaks: So, what did you guys work on at Imagine Films?
Mandel: We started working on rewrites. We had also written an original that was floating around out there that we had written once on summer vacation. But we started doing rewrites, and… what was the first thing, CURIOUS GEORGE?
Berg: I think that was. Yeah.
(There’s a pause as the food arrives.)
Schaffer: So, we’d just do a few rewrites…
Mandel: … one week here, two weeks there, and the next thing you know, people are going, “We like it! Would you consider doing a larger rewrite?”
Berg: I actually remember it was the same day… we were doing a rewrite – this is at the end of our Dreamworks Television deal – the same day that we had that CBS pitch. We went back to the office and got a call saying that Spielberg had read the thing we’d done, and really enjoyed it. So, we got back from getting kicked in the nuts pitching television to find out that Spielberg really likes our work. At that point, it’s not hard to know in which direction to go.
Beaks: Did you guys write on THE GRINCH?
Berg: Yeah. We spend close to a year on that. We came in five weeks before they started shooting. Structure was locked, all the sets had been built, and the movie had been cast, so there wasn’t that much we could do, except we rewrote virtually every word of dialogue in the entire movie. It was the same sort of flawed structure, but, basically, we rewrote every line that Jim said.
Mandel: So, we got to work with Jim.
Schaffer: Which was awesome.
Mandel: If we were going to hang our hat on something, the scenes with Jim alone in the cave I’d argue are very funny. I’m not going to get into the whole overall movie structure, but that’s where we really felt that we were doing something good.
Berg: And that led to CAT IN THE HAT. We got in on the ground floor of that one.
Beaks: And that was…
Mandel: How’d that come out?
Schaffer: It made $100 million.
Berg: I heard it was very warmly received.
Beaks: But as an experience?
Schaffer: Imagine’s been great. It was a fun script to write, and, actually, THE CAT IN THE HAT script got us so much work. It was actually a really good script. We stuck around for a little bit, but we were in pre-production for our movie when they started. So we were trying to do two jobs at once, and we finally had to… go make our movie.
Beaks: Was EUROTRIP envisioned as a continuation of the ROAD TRIP franchise?
Mandel: The title EUROTRIP came about very late in the game, and we didn’t have much to do with it. We sold it under the name UGLY AMERICANS. We sold the movie as a teen comedy in the sense of the rich history of teen comedies. We thought sending people to Europe would be (something new), so we weren’t seeing yet another prom. We thought it was a rich area that people maybe hadn’t seen. We really liked the title UGLY AMERICANS, and no one else did.
Beaks: I can’t imagine why.
Mandel: Exactly. We’re making a movie called UGLY AMERICANS. “You unpatriotic bastards!”
Berg: “Now is not a time to be ironic about patriotism.” Also, people seemed to feel, and I don’t know if they’re right or not, that the phrase “Ugly American” was not enough a part of the average person’s vernacular. They’d break it down, and people would say, “’Ugly?’ Why would I want to see a movie about ugly people?” They thought it would be confusing.
Beaks: Getting back to structure, it was really nice to see the kind of well-structured gags that we don’t normally get from films in this genre, like AMERICAN PIE.
Schaffer: This movie was written the same way we’d do a SEINFELD script, which was come up with a whole bunch of ideas, find funny things that you like, and try to hammer them out into a structure that you find satisfying. We spent a lot of time doing that. We had a little more freedom here because you can switch cities. But it’s not a question of whether London come before Paris, or Berlin before Paris, but, like you were saying, we’re doing a joke here, it should pay off again in a little bit here, and then pay off again here. We like having threads running through the movie that can build on each other. It’s like the “Scotty Doesn’t Know” stuff.
Berg: That said, we very intentionally structured this movie… I mean, the story of this movie could not be simpler. It could not be less challenging. Nobody is going to walk out of this movie going, “Whoa! I can’t believe that story!” That’s not going to happen. One of the things we found, having written a few other things that are floating around development hell, is what we were trying to do was write a very challenging concept, and also put in challenging humor. So there was a concerted effort on (EUROTRIP) to make the concept as simple as simple can be. Let’s build a very flat, stable platform to put as much funny stuff on as we can.
Mandel: It’s not just that the structure is simple, but that it’s known. And because it’s a known beast, we’re going to go extra “out there” with some of the jokes, because, if nothing else, it was always, “Well, we’ve got to get going to Berlin.”
Schaffer: So you could have a kung-fu robot fight with a street performer, and keep moving.
Beaks: Did you write that knowing Rob Schneider would do that?
Mandel: That’s not Rob.
Beaks: Christ, I just assumed it was.
Schaffer: It’s a guy named J.P. Manoux. He was in a million commercials.
Beaks: Damn. Ever since I saw the trailer, I just immediately thought it was Rob Schneider, and continued to believe that. That’s Bizarre.
Berg: If you want to continue to tell people that Rob Schneider is in our movie, that’ll probably help our box office. But, like a lot of the jokes in the movie, and why it’s such an advantage that there are three of us, is that comedy is so much about the unexpected twist, and misinterpreting something. It’s hard to do that in your own head – to think one way, and put a twist on it. Originally… they had no money, so one of them was going to do a robot thing for money. But then we thought, “Oh, wouldn’t it be funny if one of them was freaked out by robots, and hated them? And they got into an argument?” So, it grew from “they need money” into “what if they get into a fight, and they both stay in their (robot characters).”
Mandel: But it also is a really interesting thing, because on the written page, it just says, “They ‘robot fight’.” It was certainly, from our experiences, one of those things that was easy to write, and then someone goes off to film it, and we complain about how they film it. Except, of course, this time, we were the ones that had to film it. At one point, we talked about getting rid of the scene. It seemed like a lot of work, and it could fail miserably. And we didn’t know how the hell we were going to do it. But everyone really laughed at the idea of it, so we left it in. And we got really lucky that J.P. Manoux got hired. We looked at robot men the world over. It was a worldwide search. We tried actual French guys, English comedians, circus performers, guys from over here at the Santa Monica Pier. We searched everywhere, and J.P. is a commercial actor. You’ve seen him in all sorts of stuff; you just don’t know who he is.
Beaks: I just always think he’s Rob Schneider.
Mandel: He just came in the door with that asshole French thing that we were looking for that French people can’t do when you ask them to do it. Only people making fun of the French can do it. But also, he knew how to do all of this robot mime stuff. And it turned out our lead Scott had all of this weird mime training also. So, what we thought was going to be this horrible thing, we, on a Saturday afternoon – and this is the wonderful thing about Prague – walked three blocks from our hotel to the location, sat there with a couple of bottles of water, and choreographed the fight. “Let’s do that MATRIX thing. Let’s try this from the Bruce Lee movie.” So, we choreographed it in, I don’t know, a ridiculously short amount of time.
Schaffer: In ten minutes. And the fight… we trimmed it down a little, but everything that we put in there is there. There’s no extra stuff left out. And they ended up doing their own noises and sound effects.
Berg: That was one that I actually remember. The biggest difference between our T.V. background and movies is in T.V. you write the show in a week, and then you put it in front of an audience. And you know, before you’re done shooting it, whether it works or not. The audience gives you that immediate feeling. Whereas in a movie, a lot of times, when you put it together, the first time you’re screening it in front of an audience, we didn’t know what was going to work and what wasn’t. I mean, you suspect. There were some things where you go, “That’s definitely going to work,” or “That’s not going to work.” But it’s always really surprising where the laughs fall, and you have to actually re-jigger the timing of a lot of stuff. I remember that, really specifically, after we shot the robot fight, the first time we ran the scene, all of the crew was standing around and really laughing. And I thought, “Okay, we got this.”
Beaks: Did you run into any resistance with the Pope bit?
Schaffer (laughing): No
Berg: Not really resistance. There was a lot or concern about like, “Well, what if the Pope dies?” And we covered ourselves. We shot alternate things where, if the Pope had died two weeks ago, and it would be a real bummer to make a reference to the Pope, that we could get around it.
Schaffer: I’ll tell you what. I was thinking in the shower today, and we hadn’t talked about this in a while, even though we did cover ourselves, and I was thinking, “Wow, that little bugger’s really holding up!”
Berg: I saw him watching those breakdancers. He seems to be doing great.
Beaks (laughing): That was one of the silliest things I’ve ever seen. Now, was there anything that was too much? Anything that ended up getting cut out?
Schaffer: Look, I’ll be honest with you… there’s a lot more German cock on the cutting room floor.
Berg: That was one that we really had to, pardon the term, “play with” quite a bit. Just in terms of, how do you get the humor value of wall-to-wall cock without, again, pardon the term, beating people over the head with… cock.
Schaffer: They say “tragedy-plus-distance equals comedy”. Well, in this case, it’s like “cock-plus-distance equals comedy”. It’s great from far away, but the closer you get, the *scarier* it gets.
Berg: You want to punch it once or twice, but you don’t want them to be (covering their eyes) going “enough!”
Mandel: It was also one of those things where, during the testing process you get these frat boy crowds in who laugh their asses off at it, and, then, immediately write down on their score cards, like…
Berg: “What’s your least favorite thing?”
Mandel: “Penises! I’m not gay! I’m not gay!” It’s like, “Well, they liked it, but…”
Berg: It was always the least favorite and most favorite scene.
Beaks (joking): On the same card.
Berg: No, seriously, *on the same card*.
Schaffer: “I didn’t like the cocks.”
Mandel: “But I kinda liked ‘em. Or did I? Screw you!”
Beaks: Followed by a lengthy, soul-searching essay on the back.
Berg: The other thing, and it’s in the credits now, in Bratislava – and it’ll definitely be on the DVD – is…
(Okay, I’m not going to give this one away. Y’all need to see this one for yourself. We talked about this sequence for a bit, which then led to a discussion about how you can sneak some potentially offensive material into the credits and not lose your audience. I finally got us back on track with this terribly pertinent question:)
Beaks: How does it feel to be the first people to use Harriet the Spy (Michelle Trachtenberg) as a sex object?
Mandel: First off, I would argue that HARRIET THE SPY was the first movie to use Harriet the Spy as a sex object.
Schaffer: But we are grateful to be in second place. No, I think it’s a fantastic thing. “Look, Buffy’s little sister is all grown up!” She’s a great actress. She was seventeen when she shot it. People always ask us, “Is Michelle Trachtenberg nude in the movie?” No, she’s *seventeen*! We don’t want to have to stay in Europe and play in Roman Polanski’s card game for the rest of our lives, you know? We want to come back and eat McDonald’s.
(Michelle) came in; she was young, but she’d been acting for seventeen years. Fantastic. We loved her.
Berg: It was great having someone with that much experience who could anchor things. You knew that you weren’t going to have to worry about her.
Schaffer: And she was game for everything. There are scenes… it seemed like any time she had to be in skimpy clothing, it was forty degrees and drizzling. I felt so bad.
Mandel: It was a difficult part, playing the girl who’s one of the guys. I’m sure there’ve been a thousand variations, but it’s still difficult because she’s an attractive young girl, and she has to play that “one of the guys” thing, and then emerge and get comfortable with herself. It’s a difficult part; we wanted someone like her, and we got her. In the movie, the things that we noticed, which I’m not sure other people would notice, it’s the little stuff. Like when (censored for spoilers), everyone turns around and smiles. But watch Michelle’s face; she smiles, sees it’s Scott, and is horrified. That’s why she’s worth a million dollars: the bikini shots and the reactions.
Berg: I also think, from her side, she had played the little sister for years on BUFFY. This is a great thing for her. This is why she did the movie. I mean, I don’t think when she was doing HARRIET THE SPY, she was thinking, “Someday, I’d like to play a girl in a bikini in a teen movie.” But it’s great for her, because no one’s going to see her as the little sister from BUFFY anymore.
Mandel: When she was in HARRIET THE SPY, she was sick of working with so many naked cocks. There’s like 200 naked cocks (in that movie). I’m sure she was like, “I’d like to work with only fifty.”
Schaffer: And we gave her that opportunity. We “seized” the opportunity.
Beaks: So, you’re not going to go back in twenty years like Rob Reiner on the commentary track for THE SURE THING, and go, “Oh, this is awful. I could never shoot this.”
Mandel: Does he really do that on the commentary?
Beaks: Yep.
Berg: Oh, no, really? That’s one of my favorite movies of all time.
Beaks: Yeah, on that opening shot of Nicolette Sheridan.
Berg: Oh, I hate that.
Beaks: He goes on and on about, “Oh, I couldn’t shoot this. I had to have my DP do it without me. This is very hard to watch.”
Berg: I understand going back and watching stuff you did years ago, and cringing about it from…
Mandel: … a camera placement perspective, or an angle you didn’t get.
Berg: But that’s not the commentary I want. What a bummer.
Schaffer: Look, we screwed up a ton. But the only thing we would go back to change would be to put in more penis.
Mandel: In forty years, we’re hoping to get that George Lucas money, and fifty cocks becomes 500 cocks.
Berg: We could use that “Massive” technology from WETA!
Mandel: But our cocks fire first. (Laughter.) You can’t have an Ain’t It Cool interview without that.
At this point, I was having such a blast chatting with the guys that I didn’t notice my recorder had switched off. Alas, that’s forty-five minutes of yakkin’ from Berg/Mandel/Schaffer.
Good luck this weekend, boys, and I’ll hopefully chat talk with you on the next one, at which point you can tell me about the *other* excised scene I’ve since found out about thanks to El Grande Rojo. Now, *that* bit would make Larry David proud. In fact, it’s gags like that that help EUROTRIP put other films in this genre… how should I say it… “to shame”.
Faithfully submitted,
Mr. Beaks
That was a damn fun read, Beaks. Thanks, guys, for sitting down with him.
"Moriarty" out.
