The movie ended and the credits started rolling—still no Harvey. The moderator stepped in front of the happy audience to solicit verbal opinions. How did everybody feel about the film? The reaction was super-positive. Then Harvey walked in, standing in the back, smiling and listening to the positive chat. One of the NYU kids looked back—Holy shit, that’s Harvey Weinstein. Soon they were all looking back. Guess what happened? One by one, they turned on us. Suddenly, everyone in that room was Pauline Kael, trashing Puddle Cruiser for not being part of the French New Wave. If two things had been different, we probably would have sold the film to Miramax. First, we should have tested the film in suburban New Jersey, not the East Village. Never test near a film school. Short of an audience full of film critics, you’ll never find a worse audience to rate a comedy. I’ve tested six films since, and none of them have been within seventy miles of those film school fuckers. Second, had we been able to get Harvey into the room during the screening to hear the laughter, he might have gone with his gut and bought the film. There’s just no substitute for having the check writer hear the audience laugh. Puddle Cruiser was dead at Miramax, and dead everywhere else.
After the audience filed out, I thanked Harvey for coming and tried to salvage something out of the disaster. “Do you still want to make a TV show?”
Harvey smiled, shrugged, and said, “Bring me your next script and let’s start from scratch.”
We eventually sold Puddle Cruiser to a straight-to-video distributor out of Canada called Oasis. While we were disappointed at not getting a theatrical release, we were able to pay our investors back, plus a tidy profit. Against our wishes, Oasis slapped an unrelated foxy cheerleader’s torso on the cover, assuring us that research showed that guys would pick up the DVD if there was a hot girl on the cover. Ouch.
But it was time to move on. We needed a new film idea to pitch to Harvey.
CHAPTER 8
—
Super Troopers: How It Happened and Almost Didn’t
Kevin and I had moved into a house on Twentieth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues that Colgate grads had passed down to one another through the years. It was a slightly run-down five-floor brownstone with a backyard and roof and it was called the Flop House. Six guys lived there, and we threw huge parties and smoked a metric ton of grass.
I was a waiter at an uptown restaurant called Busby’s along with Erik, Steve, and four other Colgate friends. Waiting tables at Busby’s was fun, drunken, hilarious, and sexy, and it formed the basis for our script The Slammin’ Salmon.
In the summer of 1997, the members of Broken Lizard spent a week at our friend’s lake house, which was on the Vermont side of the US-Canadian border. If you paddled a canoe across the lake, halfway there you’d be in Canada. It was a magical week. We played a lot of Ping-Pong, drank and smoked everything in sight, and laughed at what felt like millions of jokes. The soundtrack to the week was the haunting wailing of Neil Young and his album Harvest Moon.
At week’s end, we headed back to New York City—all of us packed into my car, pitching new ideas for a film for Miramax. When we saw that some college kids had been pulled over by the Vermont highway patrol, we laughed. Gangsta rap was king at the time, with songs like N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police” (1988) crossing into the suburbs and creating a generation of “whiggers.” These were preppy white kids, speaking Ebonics and talking tough about cops—at least when there were no cops around. The idea of this power dynamic started a small creative fire, which led to us trading stories about being pulled over by the police. There were some good ones, but Steve Lemme went over the top when he recounted the story that would inspire the opening scene of Super Troopers.
A few years after we graduated from college, a friend of ours got engaged and, along with four other guys, rented a van to drive to Montreal, where they planned to throw a bachelor party at the world-famous strip joint Club Super Sexe. Hoping to avoid looking for a weed dealer in Montreal, they hid six joints in cigar tubes to take across the border. They also ate shrooms, timing them to kick in when they arrived at their destination. Included in the group were two brothers. I’ll call the older one “Jethro” and the younger “Cornelius,” both fake names to protect the guilty. Jethro and the groom were in the same class, while Cornelius was two years younger and tagging along. Cornelius had a secret plan, which he thought would make him a hero to his older brother’s friends. He had brought a secret bag of even more shrooms, which he planned to break out for a mid–strip club “reload.”
Sitting in the long, snaking line of cars at the Canadian border, they could see that the border patrol was pulling a lot of cars over up ahead. They debated. Should they ditch the weed out of the window? Or risk it? They decided to go for it and slid the cigar tubes into the cloth back of the van seat. Meanwhile, Cornelius slid his secret baggie of shrooms into another crevice of the rental van. When they got to the booth, the border patrol agent looked at the five twenty-something dudes and selected them to search. The guys got out of the van and watched as a team of agents rifled through their van. Eventually, the head agent emerged, holding six cigar tubes, which he opened, dumping the joints into a little pile.
“Would you mind telling me what these are?”
“Just a couple of joints, sir,” said one of the guys, whom I’ll call “Smartass.”
“Well, whose joints are they?” Silence. “Okay. Whose van is it?”
“We rented it,” said Smartass.
“You rent a van in the US and it just comes with joints?” asked the agent.
“The good ones do,” said Smartass, earning his nickname.
Not laughing, the head agent turned to his underling. “Take these guys to lockup until someone owns up to the marijuana.” But then, instead of taking them to lockup, the agent stepped aside for a conference, leaving our heroes to whisper furiously about what to do: It’s just pot. How much trouble can we get into? Cornelius, though, knew that it was not just about pot, so he leaned into the van, snatched his secret bag of mushrooms, and covertly ate them all, licking the bag clean, while the others looked on, dumbfounded.
Then the head agent walked over, making one last attempt. “Tell me whose marijuana this is or you will all suffer the consequences.” Dead silence.
In lockup, the guys debated who should take the rap. Since all had career plans that they felt couldn’t survive a drug charge, no one budged. The conversation got emotional and weird, as the shrooms they had timed for liftoff at Club Super Sexe started to buzz in their ears. Over the next two hours, each of the guys was led into a private interrogation room, but none of them broke. It had now been three hours, and while all of them were shrooming, Cornelius was spinning past the twenty-third moon of Saturn. Worse still, Cornelius’s turn at interrogation was coming up, which older brother Jethro knew would go . . . poorly. So in a gesture of brotherly love, Jethro raised his hand.
“The joints are mine. All of ’em. Mine.” The other four guys signed a document promising not to return to Canada for a year. To Jethro, the head agent said, “You, sir, are not welcome in Canada for seven years!”
As Jethro tells it, he shrugged and said, “So what?”
—
When Broken Lizard makes a film, the first requirement is that the story is able to accommodate five male leads. Playing highway patrolmen fit that bill. It was early in the process but, tonally, we wanted the cops to feel real, not wacky. Like the hockey players in the great film Slap Shot, our guys needed to be tough, real, and funny.
We pitched the idea about a Vermont highway patrol unit that was so bored they made up games to entertain themselves to Miramax executives Jack Lechner, Robert Kessel, and Michelle Raimo. They dug it, and Miramax bought the pitch. Kevin Heffernan’s mom, Jane, who had recently been pulled over for speeding by the Connecticut highway patrol, gave us the name of the film when she snarked, “Oh, you’re making a movie about the super troope
rs, huh?”
We wrote five drafts, incorporating notes from Jack, Robert, and Michelle along the way. Months later, it was time to show Harvey Weinstein. Harvey had been so supportive of Puddle Cruiser, and now it was time to take the next step. We’d written a script we were all proud of, so Jack felt confident that Harvey would give us the green light. A week later, Jack called, disappointed. Harvey had read the script and said, “I’m not sure it’s funny, but don’t feel bad because I don’t always know funny when I see it.” Miramax was passing. The hint of good news was that Harvey was going to let us have the script back. This was a huge give, because 90 percent of the time a studio will “shelve” a script it’s not making, rather than risk letting another studio turn it into a hit. Had Harvey done this, Broken Lizard would have died in the cradle, and we would have broken up having only ever made Puddle Cruiser. So, thanks, Harvey.
Now we had to find another studio that would be willing to finance our film. John Sloss sent the script to the two remaining major New York film companies, October Films and Good Machine, but both passed.
Our agents at CAA said it was time to move to LA, where our comedic sensibilities would be more valued. It made sense. We wanted to make studio comedies, like John Landis and Rob Reiner had made, and LA was the center of all that. Erik had already moved out there and seemed to really like it. Kevin and Paul, though, were noncommittal. They weren’t going to move to Los Angeles until a job forced them to. Steve and I were on the fence. We understood that Los Angeles was probably a smart move, but we were New York snobs.
New York is a tough, sexy, smart place that calls itself the greatest city in the world. And while I’ve never admitted that, because obviously Chicago is, I understand why New Yorkers think that way. New York wins at most things—art, media, nightlife, finance, excitement—but it loses to Chicago at niceness, hot dogs, pizza, and sports fandom, and to Los Angeles at show business, and that latter one bothers New York.
So New Yorkers routinely bash LA at every chance they get. People in LA are superficial. The women are ditzy and have fake tits. It’s one big strip mall. Why on earth would you ever want to live there? Though Steve Lemme and I had bought into this propaganda campaign, we still loaded a U-Haul and made the long drive west. To my view, the bars in LA did seem sparsely attended. And how did you get around? Were you supposed to limit yourselves to two drinks? We drank more than that, which worked when you could just hop into a New York City cab. The women in LA were hot, but they seemed not to want anything to do with you if you hadn’t already made it. And yes, the place did feel like a series of strip malls. To me, New York had it right—Los Angeles was fundamentally flawed.
Before I left New York, I made friends with MTV VJ Karen Duffy (Duff), who told me that if I was moving to LA, I should look up her friend Amy Cohen, who “has LA wrapped around her little finger.” Two months later, as Steve and I pulled our U-Haul into Hollywood, I called Amy.
“Hey, it’s Jay and Steve. Duff said to call you when we got to town.”
Amy jumped right in. “What’s your address? I’ll be there at seven. We’re going to a party.”
I hung up and looked at Steve. “I guess we’re going to a party.”
It was an instant friendship. Amy was hilarious and smart and loved the nightlife. She drove us high into the hills, through winding roads and past groovy houses. This was a part of LA we’d never seen, and, wow, was it beautiful.
We arrived at a party at a fantastic house in the Hollywood Hills. The crowd was eclectic. The guys were comedy writers and the women looked like Entourage extras. A famous animation comedy writer walked up holding a salad bowl full of a hundred white pills. (LA was in the early throes of an ecstasy revolution.) We had an amazing time that first night in Hollywood, really loving the shit out of everything.
Several hours later, at another cliffside house party, I walked up to Steve, who was standing alone, staring contemplatively into the distance at the sun rising over Hollywood. As I got closer, I realized he was actually staring at the pool, where two naked models were casually swimming. He smiled and shrugged. “I guess it’s not too bad out here.”
Steve, Erik, Amy, and I became inseparable. An LA native, Amy was totally plugged in. She seemed to know everybody and got invited to everything. We went to the greatest parties, ate at fantastic restaurants, and hung out at bars that would stay open well past closing. I grew to really understand LA. It is a creative person’s mecca, filled with lots of really smart people who want to be involved in the storytelling business. Admittedly, before this trip, I had only been to bars on the Sunset Strip, which is kind of like judging New York City after only going to bars in Times Square.
At the time, Amy was George Clooney’s assistant, which meant that in addition to running his schedule, she also had to house-sit for him when he was on location. Amy was afraid to stay in the big house alone due to fear of stalkers, so Steve, Erik, and I volunteered to keep her company. We spent weeks sleeping at Clooney’s house, feeding his pigs, staying up late, drinking Guinness, swimming, and having a good old time. (Yeah, he knew we were there.)
CAA and John Sloss’s strategy was to get Super Troopers made at a major studio, so they sent our script to all of the major comedy producers in town, hoping one of them would take a liking to it and set it up. Our first bite came from Bob Simonds, who had produced the Adam Sandler movies Happy Gilmore and The Wedding Singer at Universal. Bob said Universal dug the script and wanted to make the film for $5.5 million. That was easy. We were on cloud nine, until Bob couldn’t work his producer deal out. And just like that, Bob and Universal were done.
Next, two of the Farrelly brothers’ development guys, Pat Healy and Bradley Thomas, asked for a meeting. Pat and Brad thought the script was great but felt it might work better if it was set in the seventies. Since we wanted to make a film tonally like Smokey and the Bandit, we agreed and rewrote Super Troopers, setting it in the seventies. Eventually, the Farrelly brothers read it and dug it, so we sat down with them. Peter and Bobby Farrelly cracked us up with their showbiz stories about going to big studio meetings with one testicle out. They tried to get Fox to make the film, but Fox wasn’t interested in a film starring total unknowns. None of the studios were biting.
There was one ray of light. Michael Shamberg, from Jersey Films, had read the script and wanted to meet. Jersey was headed by Danny DeVito, Stacey Sher, and Michael. They had produced a lot of smart, great, commercial films including Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Man on the Moon. Michael was a big Monty Python fan and understood what Broken Lizard aspired to. He had produced the hilarious film A Fish Called Wanda, which starred Python members John Cleese and Michael Palin. Though Michael loved our script, he didn’t think he could get a studio to put the money up for it. However, he did think it would make a great TV show, so he gave it to John Landgraf, who ran Jersey’s TV department (John now runs FX). Landgraf brought us to Fox Television, which paid us to write the TV pilot for Super Troopers. In that TV show, we changed the location from Vermont to Reno, Nevada. Yup. Reno. Years later, some guys from the State set their cop show in Reno. It’s pretty common for TV shows to try to ride the wave of a successful film, but considering that Broken Lizard and the State were direct rivals, I found it odd that they would do a show that was so similar to our film. Then, they chose uniforms that looked exactly like ours. When Reno 911! came out, people stopped me on the street to say, “Love your new TV show! Why didn’t you name it Super Troopers?” And look, we didn’t invent funny cops. Naked Gun and Police Academy certainly came before us. But choosing the exact same outfits made it hard for us to make a Super Troopers TV show, because both Reno 911! and Super Troopers are owned by Fox, and they weren’t going to do two shows about cops in tan uniforms. To be fair, Reno 911! is great and very funny. Every time I’ve turned it on, I dug it. So, there you have it.
But back in 1998, Fox read our TV script, dug it, but di
dn’t end up making it, which put us at another dead end.
Amy had a ringside seat to our struggles, and as she was also an aspiring producer, she asked if she could help. When we agreed, she immediately brought new life to the film when she gave the script to her boss, George Clooney. When you meet a movie star, and I mean a real movie star, what you’re struck with is their charisma. As my author friend Michael Craven puts it, “Movie stars have so much charisma, they’re paid for it.” George Clooney is a charisma machine. We met him at his Warner Bros. bungalow, where he told great stories and did a hilarious imitation of a famous female pop singer ordering chicken Marsala that had us rolling.
Clooney told us he thought our script was great, and he wanted Section Eight, the company he’d formed with Out of Sight director Steven Soderbergh, to produce. I had met Soderbergh at Sundance a couple of years earlier, when I’d seen his weirdly hilarious film Schizopolis—a film he wrote, directed, and starred in. Soderbergh is a real original. He read the script and had some notes, so I gave him a call. He told me he liked the script but was worried that it needed “something else” to distinguish it from other comedies. Maybe cops pulling pranks wasn’t quite enough.
He suggested that we should do something like they did in Point Break, where the cops wore president of the United States masks. Now, here’s the thing about script notes. You have to know which notes to try and which ones don’t fit your vision. Soderbergh was doing what producers are supposed to do—he was giving us his honest opinion. But he didn’t see the same movie we did. A couple of years later, after he saw the finished film, he put a hand on my shoulder and laughed. “Thank God you didn’t listen to me!”
With Section Eight onboard, the plan was to reapproach the studios. When Michael Shamberg heard about Section Eight, he said that since Jersey had developed the TV show, they should be able to produce the film as well. So now our executive producers were George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh, Michael Shamberg, Stacey Sher, and Danny DeVito. But going back to a studio with a script, after they’ve already passed, only works if you’ve added a “meaningful new element.” Translation: You’ve hired a movie star to act in the film. When the studios found out that neither Clooney nor DeVito was acting in Super Troopers, their response was the same: “We love you, George, Steven, Danny, Michael, and Stacy, but Broken Lizard still isn’t famous enough to star in a studio movie.” Okay, this was bullshit. Fuck Hollywood. Fuck this shit. They don’t want to make it? Fine, we’ll make it indie style, sell it back to them, and shove it up their fucking asses! (Half of what gets done in showbiz is out of rejection rage.)
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