One of the upsides to taking as long as it did to finance the film was that as we were raising money, and as we were casting, we kept writing—in the end, we shot draft twenty-two of the script. Our low-budget-inspired philosophy was to write the living shit out of our scripts, so that when we arrived on set, we all agreed that what we were shooting was already funny. And if we don’t improvise a single line, we’ll still be happy. We improvise a lot more nowadays, but Super Troopers has only about ten improvised lines.
CHAPTER 10
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Making Super Troopers: How We Focused on Jokes We Thought Were Funny
The story took place in a Vermont border town, so we were looking for rolling hills and rural highways. We scouted Big Bear, California, but since all of our crew contacts were in New York, Rich felt that we’d be better able to maximize our budget back east. Eventually, we settled on the small town of Beacon, New York, which is near Poughkeepsie.
Regardless of our confidence in the script, I wasn’t feeling confident as a filmmaker. Puddle Cruiser had turned out well, but Super Troopers was a lot bigger, with fights, car chases, stunts, and real actors. Wouldn’t they know that I was a know-nothing fraud? But since nobody wants an insecure quarterback, I faked confidence. The anxiety took a toll on my body. Regardless of eating and drinking everything in Poughkeepsie, stress ate away ten pounds.
THE OPENING
Due to the softness of Puddle Cruiser’s opening scene, we invested a great deal of energy in making sure that we didn’t repeat the mistake with Super Troopers. To that end, we wrote draft after draft after draft of the opening and didn’t stop until we finally arrived at a scene that we thought could start the movie right. In a riff on our friends’ bachelor party story, our film started with Vermont stoner college kids driving over the border into Canada to get some French fries and gravy (poutine). They are pulled over by the highway patrol, who mess with them before turning to the bigger fish—the speeder in the white Miata.
In an amazing bit of luck for our low-budget indie, we found a six-mile, four-lane highway (two lanes on each side) that, because a bigger one was being built nearby, had mostly fallen out of use. In a funny case of life imitating art, when we needed the on-ramps shut down to traffic, the local cops and the highway patrol got into an argument over who had jurisdiction. The highway patrol said that the ramp was an extension of the highway, so they should be the force to shut down traffic, but the local cops said that the highway began at the end of the ramp, so they felt that they should be the ones to shut down traffic. In the end, neither force would back down, so the on-ramps ended up being really well shut down.
The stoners drove a sky-blue Impala, which fit the seventies vibe we were going for, but the car broke down after the first pullover. That was a problem since the script called for the stoners to pull back onto the highway after the first pullover. So when Joey Kern (the shotgun stoner) said, “Shit, I was about to pull out my nine and put a cap in that pig’s ass,” their car was supposed to be moving. With no other choice, we did a quick on-set rewrite and lucked out with two great improvs:
ANDRÉ (DRIVER): “We’re already pulled over!”
And
JOEY: “He’s already pulled over! He can’t pull over any farther!”
Those two guys were great, as was Geoff Arend in the backseat, who stole the show when he licked the bulletproof glass. “The snozzberries taste like snozzberries.” (Thank you, Willy Wonka.)
Meanwhile, Erik and I were both doing our best to channel Clint Eastwood. Was that choice going to be funny? We weren’t sure, but we liked this couplet:
THORNY: “Do you smell something, Rabbit?”
RABBIT:“Fear.”
Eventually, Mac, Steve Lemme’s character, blows by in a white Miata (we wanted a red Ferrari), and we begin our car chase. Our stunt coordinator, Manny Siverio, really captured the Smokey and the Bandit style I was hoping for.
Later, when Mac runs out of the bar and hops into the stoners’ car, I get great joy from watching him scream, “You boys like Mexico?!” Steve had come a long way from the day he showed up drunk to our college audition. Well done, pal.
THE DINER
After having breakfast at a local diner, the troopers get into a scuffle with the local cops. Kevin thought the scene needed a little Vermont flavor, so he suggested a maple-syrup-chugging contest. The problem with writing a syrup chug into a movie is that you’re going to have to do it. Initially, the prop master filled two syrup containers with very thick iced tea, but it wasn’t thick enough, so we sent a production assistant to the grocery store to buy the real stuff. Take after take, we drank that sweet, thick syrup down. I drank two full bottles, and Erik drank three. (It’s good to be the director.) I’ll say this. Over the years, I’ve put a lot of bad things into my body, but this was by far the worst. When the scene ended, I ran to the bathroom to pull the trigger. Already stepping out was a sweaty-looking Erik, who shook me off. “Don’t bother. It won’t come up—too thick.”
When the crew went to lunch, Erik and I went to my trailer instead, where we shut off the lights, lay down on the ground, and shivered, in the throes of what felt like looming diabetes.
Erik had the afternoon off, while I had to shoot another scene. (It’s bad to be the director.)
Afterward I went back to the motel, where I ran into a smiling Erik. “Have you pooped yet?”
“No, I just got back.” I grimaced. “But I can feel it coming.”
He nodded sagely. “There’s a reason maple syrup is part of the Master Cleanse. Hold on tight, matey.”
I’ll spare you the gory details. Actually, I won’t. Things came out of me that I have no memory of ever ingesting. Aside from lots of water and air, I shat what appeared to be a stick with a petrified leaf attached. I shat a fully intact robin fetus.
Today, at restaurants, chefs will often sit down at our table brandishing two bottles of syrup, hoping to re-create the chug. But I just politely tell them to fuck off, as I’ll never drink syrup again.
CHOCOLATE SOAP
In the first morning meeting, O’Hagan tells the guys that their ticket numbers are low and that their station is under threat of being shut down. O’Hagan tells Farva, who is under suspension for “the school bus incident,” to get coffee for the gang. When Farva pops his head out and asks, “Who wants cream?” we all just stare at him because, though some of us may want cream, no one wants to admit it because of how it might reflect on our manhood. This joke came from my father, who only drinks his coffee black. At the time, I drank my coffee with hazelnut creamer. When I asked my father why he didn’t use cream or sugar, he’d just shrug. “It’s unnecessary.” And while my dad never said a word about my hazelnut creamer, I always felt that he was secretly disappointed that his son didn’t drink coffee like a man.
When Farva comes out with the coffees, he has slipped a bar of soap into Rabbit’s cup as a “prank.” But the bar of soap is so clearly visible that it’s a really lousy prank. When Mac sees the soap, he nonsensically suggests to Rabbit that he should bite it to “make Farva look like a dick.” Rabbit ignores him, but Mac won’t give up trying to get Rabbit to bite the soap. Meanwhile, Captain O’Hagan is trying to tell a story about how much he loves living in Spurbury (the town we named after our Colgate friend Jim Sperber). The script called for O’Hagan to snap on Mac, grab the soap, bite it, chew it, and swallow it. We wanted to show that, though O’Hagan was pissed, he was also enough of a nutjob that he would eat soap to make a point. To make it easy, we made soap bars out of white chocolate, but, on set, Brian told us that he was a diabetic and couldn’t eat chocolate. As a fix, Brian bit the “soap,” chewed it, and spat it out at Mac.
WHAT'S THAT MEOW?
During the writing process, still a year from the green light, we were in LA meeting on a TV project for NBC and sleeping five to a room in the Travelodge motel in Santa Monica. It was four A.M. an
d we had been up smoking and joking, getting into some real abdominal-busting laughter. I remember someone saying, “All right now.” I have a bad left ear, roughly half of normal hearing, so I asked if he had said “meow.” I mishear things a lot, and I get a lot of shit for it. In this case, someone mocked me for my mishear, and then we riffed for half an hour on “meow” replacing “now” in a sentence. We weren’t writing at the time, but luckily someone, I think Paul, wrote the riff down on a napkin and brought it back up again at our next meeting. Had Paul not rallied at five A.M. to scribble that down, the meow scene would have been lost forever in the smoke. Take notes in life, folks.
To be clear, I didn’t invent the meow gag. Not even close. We all did. And this story happened at four A.M., so I’ll admit that there could be multiple versions of who said “meow” first. I mention this because Heffernan has a different memory of the night, and you should read his book for that one.
We wrote the scene into the script and rehearsed it, but it wasn’t quite as funny as we had imagined. So we tried it in a southern accent. Hearing it that way really unlocked the funny for us. The problem was that it felt like a bit of a stretch to think that a Vermont cop would speak with a southern accent.
When writing our scripts, we try to achieve balance when it comes to divvying up funny scenes. Since Erik and I had the opening scene, and Paul and Steve had the repeater pullover, and Erik had the German swinger scene, and Steve had the jerking-off-in-the-car scene, it was a toss-up between Paul and me as to who got the lead in the meow scene. Remember, Farva wasn’t on the road. Creatively, we could live with a northern cop with a southern accent, but since none of us had ever encountered an Indian with a southern accent, I felt like Paul should probably play the part. And in the end, he really nailed it.
While we were shooting the meow pullover, we were only able to shut down one side of the highway, so the sound of the passing cars was driving our sound guy, David, crazy. Since I was wearing a highway patrol uniform, I walked across the grass median and stepped onto the highway, raising my hand. The traffic stopped dead. “Action!” I yelled, as I watched the feed on a handheld monitor. Was it impersonating an officer? Considering that I was wearing a Vermont highway patrol uniform and I was directing traffic in New York, you bet. Sorry about that, guys.
CHARLIE RICH
Rabbit is washing a patrol car when Farva happens upon him in the garage. In our minds, Farva is a huge country music fan. So Erik called upon a bit of music history that he thought would give the scene some obscure color: In 1975, Charlie Rich, high on painkillers and gin and tonics, took the stage to hand out the award for the Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year, the award that he himself had won the year prior. When Charlie opened the envelope and saw John Denver’s name, he pulled out a lighter and lit the card on fire.
In Farva’s mind, he is the old-school Charlie Rich, while Rabbit is the new boy, John Denver. Farva goes nose to nose with Rabbit to let him know that he’s going down.
This is a good example of how group writing works. Though Erik came up with the idea and wrote the original monologue, he felt that it would be better coming out of Farva’s mouth.
GLAMOUR PET
Rabbit and Thorny are called out to a crime scene, but when they arrive, they find that the local cops are already there. Inside an abandoned Winnebago, they find a dead woman—eyes open and facedown in a dog dish. Chloe O’Connor (Rich Perello’s assistant) played the dead woman, and she did a nice job not breathing or blinking. While inside the Winnebago, the cops hear a sound and assume it’s the killer. It turns out to be a pet pig, which Thorny calls a “glamour pet.” We had originally written it as an attack dog, but after our weeks feeding George Clooney’s pigs, we decided on this more original idea for a pet.
SHAVING CREAM
After the brawl with the local cops outside the Winnebago, Thorny turns the investigation over to them out of a desire not to deal with the wild hog. This pisses O’Hagan off because he feels like they could have used the murder case to justify the highway patrol’s budget and existence. After O’Hagan chews the guys out in the locker room, he leaves, and we reveal that Rabbit has been hiding in a locker full of shaving cream the whole time. The prop master accidentally bought menthol shaving cream, which caused Erik’s skin to “really fucking burn!” Since we didn’t have time for someone to run to the store and buy regular shaving cream, Erik muscled through and got the scene done.
BOBBY McGEE
Thorny is the coach of his seven-year-old son Arlo’s baseball team. We named Arlo after the folk singer Arlo Guthrie. Years later, I would become friends with his daughter, Cathy, who is part of the great and hilarious band Folk Uke. Talking to Thorny at the game is his hippie lover, and Arlo’s mother, Bobbi, whom we named after Bobby McGee, from the great Kris Kristofferson song. Bobbi owns a head shop and she and Thorny are swingers, of course.
THE LARGEST COTTON CANDY EVER PUT ON FILM
During college, Kevin and I traveled across Europe together, stopping in London, Venice, Rome, and, eventually, Geneva, Switzerland. While in Geneva we visited a park that boasted the world’s longest bench (it’s in The Guinness Book of World Records). We laughed at how lame the record was and talked about how when we got back to Colgate we would build a bench three feet longer just to fuck Geneva over. We never did, but out of this came the idea for Foster to send Local Officer Rando a massive cotton candy. And while it may or may not be the biggest cotton candy ever made, we’re pretty sure it’s the biggest cotton candy that’s ever appeared in a movie. So take that, Geneva.
In the same scene, Foster gets up to go to the concession stand and asks the guys if anyone wants anything. Rabbit says, “Hey, see if they’ve got any chocolate bananas [beat] Foster.” Paul loved Bananas Foster, so we honored that love by putting it in the movie.
ENHANCE, ENHANCE, ENHANCE . . .
Distracted by playing the repeater game, Mac and Foster are locked inside the back of a Bunty Soap truck. Back at the station, Thorny is printing an image of the truck driver from the dashboard cam and pretends to “enhance” the photo in an homage to the Harrison Ford film Blade Runner.
AFGHANISTANIMATION
In Rabbit’s youth, before joining the police academy, he traveled with the Grateful Dead, so he knew his way around a joint. When O’Hagan brings up the marijuana with the cartoon-monkey logo on it, Rabbit offers his (secretly expert) opinion that some drug dealers use cartoon characters to mark their product, like a brand name. When we lived in New York, we had a pot dealer who delineated his different brands with colored stickers. And at a Dead show at Alpine Valley, we bought LSD with Bugs Bunny’s picture on it. Though Rabbit is just being helpful, Farva senses a chance to undercut him and says, “Where’d you learn that, Cheech? Drug school?”
We made up the cartoon character Johnny Chimpo to be the pot brand. Paul was into Japanimation, so we started riffing on what country Johnny could be from. After we made suggestions like “Sudanimation,” “Chinamation,” and “Italimation,” someone said “Afghanistanimation,” and we knew we had a winner. Afghanistan was in the news at the time because of the rise of the Taliban. Choosing Afghanistan was also our way to subtly tweak Islam’s nose since the religion bans cartoons. We named the monkey Johnny Chimpo because it felt like the kind of generic, Western-sounding name a foreign TV producer would come up with to appeal to Afghani kids.
In the cartoon’s fictional backstory, Johnny Chimpo is a monkey who spends his days getting into mischief, while his English butler tries to keep him in line. Johnny Chimpo was a metaphor for Afghanistan, which was generally misbehaving on the world stage at the time, while the butler stood in for the Western powers, who were chastising Afghanistan to behave itself. In the clip of the show, Johnny Chimpo gives the camera a thumbs-up and says the generic English words, “Cool beans!” After 9/11, we seemed prescient for choosing Afghanistan, but it was really just how silly “Afgha
nistanimation” sounded that drove our decision.
HOW A RANDOM PERSON ALMOST ENDED UP IN A BIG ROLE IN SUPER TROOPERS
After Foster and Ursula find the grass in the Winnebago, Foster brings some back to the station, where he and Mac pose for the newspaper cameras. When Mayor Timber arrives, he asks O’Hagan if he can jump in on the photo shoot. Our original plan was to cast ESPN anchor Dan Patrick as Mayor Timber. And when we made the offer to Dan, he immediately said yes, without so much as a meeting or a phone call. That felt strange, but we were thrilled and figured he must just have the acting bug. Then our casting agent called to tell us that she had made a mistake. The Dan Patrick who had accepted the role was an unknown actor from Portland, Oregon—not the ESPN anchor. The mistake had happened because Portland Dan Patrick had joined the Screen Actors Guild first and “owned” the name. In the end, we rescinded the offer and got lucky when Trading Places alum John Bedford Lloyd agreed to play the part. John was hilarious and perfect and fell in with our tone easily.
For the record, we’d still like to work with the sportscaster Dan Patrick.
THE GERMAN SWINGERS
When we shot the German swinger pullover, we didn’t budget our time well earlier in the day, so we were left with only two hours to complete the fairly complicated scene before the sun set. I took the approach of shooting only the shots that I thought we needed. When the sun finally dropped, I was worried that we might not have all of the shots necessary to make a good scene. But in the edit room, it cut together really nicely, so crisis averted. Erik is great in the scene, as are the two actors who played the Germans, Philippe Brenninkmeyer and Maria Tornberg. This scene has one of my favorite jokes in the film. It’s at the end, when we all get back into the car to head to the station. I tell my son, Arlo, to sit on Uncle Rabbit’s lap, but Rabbit objects (because of his hard-on): “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Thorn.”
Mustache Shenanigans Page 14
