We knew the answer. “We’d cut a few minutes and reshoot the ending. It’s just underwhelming.”
Peter agreed.
In the Sundance version of the ending, we were undercover local cops who bust a meatpacking factory. It was fine, but it lacked comedy and energy.
We wrote a new ending that brought back the stoners from the opening, and our test scores went up ten points.
Searchlight hired the editor, George Folsey, to help us trim seven minutes. George was the editor/producer of all of the John Landis movies we loved so much, including Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, Coming to America, and the rest. Folsey is a great guy and had us spellbound with his amazing show business stories, including the time he attended a test screening of Animal House in Atlanta mostly comprised of drunk businessmen, who mostly slept. After the screening, John Belushi chewed Folsey out. A week later, they tested the exact same cut in Denver for college students, and the place went crazy. Afterward, Belushi hugged Folsey. Love the new cut, George!
THE RELEASE
Searchlight loved the movie and they were immensely collaborative on everything from the reshoot to the advertising campaign. Getting the trailers and the imagery right is critical to a film’s success, and Nancy Utley and her group just flat-out nailed it. Pulling a page from our Puddle Cruiser Winnebago promotional tour, Searchlight put us back on the road, but this time in a rock-and-roll tour bus wrapped with the Super Troopers poster. It was a rolling billboard that slept ten and had a kitchen, a master bedroom, and a living room.
We kicked off the tour with a screening at the Mann Village Theater, near UCLA, and followed that with a party. Around midnight, we loaded onto the bus and drove off into the night, heading for Tucson, Arizona.
Searchlight hired a British tour manager named Derek Wilkenson (Wilkie) to escort us across the country. Wilkie was a rock-and-roll guy who had road managed acts such as the Allman Brothers, the Average White Band, and many others. On the drive, he told us the story of how, at age fifteen, he was hanging out in a roadie bar in England when a guy walked in.
“Who wants to road crew for Led Zeppelin?!” He raised his hand, left the bar, toured around the world, and didn’t return until he was seventeen.
Our days went like this: We would wake up in a new town, put on our highway patrol uniforms, and do a round of radio interviews. In the afternoon, we’d hand out free screening tickets to passersby. That evening, we’d introduce the screening and then have dinner. After the screening, we’d do a question-and-answer and then head to a Fox-sponsored party, where we would get bombed with the audience. Wilkie would press condoms into our hands, cackling his rock-and-roll cry: “Come back with these used or don’t come back at all!”
It was the dead of winter and we did a lot of harrowing night drives. We had bunks, which we nicknamed “coffins” because when you crawled in and pulled the drape shut, it was pitch black. With the road rumbling beneath our backs, we’d awake to a sudden surge of fear brought on by the wheels slightly drifting over a rumble strip. Had our driver, Dave, fallen asleep? Were we about to fly off the road, or were we just approaching a toll or a rest stop? Sometimes we’d hear squealing brakes and then feel the awful feeling of the bus sliding on ice. Luckily, Dave was a great driver and always managed to keep us safe.
On Friday, February 15, 2002, Super Troopers opened on eighteen hundred screens across the United States. Broken Lizard was in New York City, and we went to Times Square to take pictures under the film’s three-story billboard. Our plan was to spend the evening slipping in and out of bars and theaters. Appreciative film festival crowds were one thing. We wanted to know if we could make strangers laugh. At the theater in Times Square, we found out we could. The room was packed and the people were laughing.
At seven P.M., I got a call from Steve Gilula, the head of distribution for Searchlight. He was happy. He said the numbers of the East Coast matinees had been quite good. On Saturday, our numbers went up, which meant word of mouth was good. Peter Rice called and said we could relax. The release was a success. Yeah, they know that quickly.
A couple of weeks after we got back, I was in my Laurel Canyon house, which was in a bamboo forest, on a one-and-a-half-lane mountain road called Gould Avenue. Gould overlooks the Laurel Canyon Country Store and is known for being the street where David Letterman lived during the roaring Comedy Store days. The phone rang and a voice said, “I have Adam Sandler for Jay Chandrasekhar.” That’s how the powerful do it in Hollywood. An assistant calls on behalf of their boss. Only once it is confirmed that the less powerful person (me) is on the line will the boss get on the line. I didn’t buy it. Why would Adam Sandler be calling me? It had to be Lemme pranking me, doing a new Sandler imitation, right? So I said, “Okay.” After a few seconds, the real Adam Sandler got on the phone. It was the cool, quiet, subdued Sandler, the one from his movies when he’s talking to a kid about something serious. He said he had gone to a crowded theater, ordered a popcorn, and watched Super Troopers. He said people were going crazy and that he loved the film. I thanked him, still star-struck.
Then he said, “Don’t worry about the reviews. I get shitty reviews all the time, and the people still come. The people are gonna come for this movie.” What Sandler was referring to was that Super Troopers got a 35 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (Yes, this is the same movie that Huffington Post readers voted the funniest movie of the decade from 2000 to 2010.) My hometown reviewer, Roger Ebert, gave it two stars and said, “I can’t quite recommend it—it’s too patched together—but I almost can; it’s the kind of movie that makes you want to like it.” That hurt.
Sandler finished up and said that if we ever needed any help making a movie, we should call him. What he meant was if we had an idea that we wanted him to produce, we should partner up. Wow. Hollywood has the capacity to really blow you away sometimes.
Super Troopers grossed $20 million at the box office, which was good for an indie film without stars, and Searchlight was happy. But it was the massive wave of DVD and VHS that took everybody by surprise. We got lucky. Our film came out at the height of the DVD market, that moment when people actually bought DVDs for their home collections. Millions and millions of copies of Super Troopers were sold, which made Fox a profit north of sixty million dollars. Those DVDs were bought by people who smoked grass and watched the movie repeatedly with groups of friends. Super Troopers benefited from the old way of watching films, the way we watched at Colgate, when you went to someone’s house, looked at their DVD collection, and then just picked one.
CHAPTER 12
—
9/11: Another Case of Mistaken Identity
On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, I called my mother, worried. Would people think that we were Muslim and attack us? Were we going to have to leave the country? Should I join the CIA? Someone who looked like me would have an easier time infiltrating al-Qaeda than would a Kentucky farm boy. Crazy, I know, but we talked about it. Mom assured me that while 9/11 was insane and traumatic, America had a big heart and would vent for a while, before moving on. “Just be careful,” she said. Since the Super Troopers release date was still six months away, I selfishly wondered if the country would even go to a film with a brown guy on the poster. It was an insecure time.
On September 12, I put on my most American outfit—a Willie Nelson T-shirt, flip-flops, and some Chicago Blackhawks shorts (not only have I never seen a terrorist in shorts, but I bet there’s not a single member of ISIS who digs hockey), and I went to Whole Foods to get a sandwich. As I rolled my cart through the store, I could feel the rage in the angry glares of rich white moms.
On the way back up to my house, I bought one of those American flags for my car. A few days later, in San Francisco, my girlfriend and I went into a tattoo parlor, where I chose an American flag design for my shoulder. And while my girlfriend and I talked about me tattooing Old Glory on my shoulder as an a
ct of patriotism, the unspoken motive in my mind was that it would be beating repellent. In the end, I decided against for two reasons. One: I don’t like how tattoos look on brown skin. Two: While I feel enormous sympathy for Muslims in America and the awful discrimination they’re enduring, I shouldn’t have to brand myself because of a case of fucking mistaken identity.
When I got back to LA, I drove down to Studio City, where I signed up for karate classes, since I was pretty sure my new life would be a series of street fights. Which brings me to our first story . . .
One month after 9/11, I had to take my first flight. The airport was tense, and I was chosen for extra security screening. I get it. I totally get it. But it was embarrassing to be patted down in front of my fellow citizens. I wanted to say, “It wasn’t us! We’re the Indians! You ever see Gandhi? We’re the peace guys!” But instead, I just smiled and tried to look nonthreatening.
Later, I was sitting at the gate, reading my New York Times, when a guy walked up. Okay, a Muslim guy. He was in his thirties, he had a full-length robe, a full beard, a circular cap, and he was carrying two plastic bags. The man put his two bags down on the open chair next to me. Then he pulled out a prayer rug, unrolled it at my feet, got down on his knees, faced Mecca, and started praying. The whole room turned, staring at him, and then staring at me. You could feel the tension in the room go up a notch. Are those two Arab men traveling together?
Now, I’m a liberal guy. I believe that people should have religious freedom, including the freedom to pray after a touchdown, or pray five times a day facing Mecca. That said, the country was a little on edge at the time, and this guy knew that. But he felt strongly enough about his religion that he was going to pray anyway, regardless of how uncomfortable it might make people feel. And that’s his right, because this is America. That’s freedom. But that doesn’t change how the rest of us felt. Personally, I was thinking that if this guy was a terrorist about to blow up a plane, wouldn’t he pray one last time before he got on? I know, I know. Terrible, but that’s what I was thinking, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one. As I watched him pray, I wondered if I should just turn around and go home. Later, I’d be able to tell one of those near-miss stories—You know, I had a ticket on that flight.
A very close friend of mine, Ben, has two of those near-miss stories. For color, Ben is a six-foot-four, half-Sikh / half-white-American guy I went to Colgate with. In the fall of 1988, Ben spent a semester studying abroad in London. When the semester was coming to a close, Ben bought a ticket home on Pan Am Flight 103, which was to leave London on December 21. When the plane blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, four Colgate kids were among the dead. Word spread through the grapevine that Ben was one of them. As it turned out, he and some of my other friends had gone out boozing the night before and couldn’t pack up their apartment in time to make the flight. So he missed the flight and lived to tell the tale. Score one for hard drinking.
In 2001, Ben was working at an investment bank on, roughly, the eightieth floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. After the first plane hit, Ben remembers seeing a printer explode out of a shattered North Tower window and fly by his office. Following his instinct, he grabbed two buddies and jumped into the elevator to get out of there. When he exited on the fiftieth floor to take the next elevator down, a Port Authority cop stopped them. The cop said that they were still figuring out what had happened but that they should all just stay there and await further instruction, because they didn’t want a bunch of people running through the plaza with all of that falling debris.
Here’s the thing about Ben. Like Burt Reynolds and my mom, Ben has an anti-authority streak a mile wide. He’d been arrested multiple times, once for stealing a cab in Traverse City and joyriding it into Lake Michigan. The other times were for fights and minor drug possession. After the Port Authority cop left, Ben said, “Fuck that! I’m outta here and anyone who stays is a fuckin’ sucker!” While I’m certain that I would have stayed as the cop had asked, Ben didn’t give a shit, and he left. Everyone on the floor followed.
As they headed down the fifty flights of stairs, the second plane hit the South Tower just above the seventy-fifth floor. Ben said it felt like an earthquake, and the temperature in the stairwell went up to what felt like 110 degrees. As smoke filled the stairwell from above, Ben said they all held hands, sang “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” and kept pressing down.
Finally, they emerged onto the plaza, where it was pandemonium. In addition to falling, burning plane parts, people from the upper levels of the North Tower were leaping to their deaths to avoid burning alive in their offices.
Because of limited communication, all we knew was that Ben worked on an upper level of the South Tower. Once again, we were all sure that Ben was dead. On September 14, I was feeling lonely and lost in the world, so I got in my car and drove up to San Francisco to see my girlfriend, Jenny. It was two A.M., and I was speeding up the 5 freeway, listening to NPR’s terror analysis, when I heard Ben’s voice. He was alive and telling his story to the reporter. Fuck al-Qaeda. Ben has nine lives.
So, there I was, at the gate, watching this guy pray at my feet. Flying, post-9/11, had become annoying for everyone, but more so for Indians (and Arabs). The government told everyone to keep their eyes open. If you see (a brown person doing) something, say something. But I’m an American, goddamn it. Okay, Indian American, but I’m no more likely to be a terrorist than some white guy. Probably less so, right, Timothy McVeigh? And as much as I wanted to turn around and go home, I decided, Fuck you, I’m getting on that plane, because don’t let the terrorists win, right?
Walking down the aisle, I absorbed harsh stares from middle-aged white guys. I smiled a lot, trying to look friendly, and asked the flight attendants useless questions, so that people could hear my American voice. I sat in my aisle seat secretly cursing the prick bin Laden. After a couple of minutes, the Muslim prayer guy walked on, stopping in the seat across the aisle and one row up. He opened the overhead compartment, put his two plastic bags inside, and then sat down. Looking around, I noticed that all of the white guys in the cabin had taken note of how close the two of us were sitting. Which of these scowling guys was the heat-packing air marshal? I wondered.
After the plane took off and the seat belt sign went off, Prayer Guy stood up, opened the overhead compartment, and started rustling around in one of his plastic bags. He was digging for what had to be two minutes. Just digging. Everyone in the cabin was watching. Since I was so close, I was staring hard, looking for wires peeking out of the bag. Was this dude triggering a detonator? I was staring so hard at the guy, I think he could feel it, because he turned around and started staring at me. Now the two of us were staring at each other, while all of the white guys in the cabin were staring at both of us, thinking that we had to be in cahoots.
After 9/11, Mark Wahlberg said that had he been on one of the planes, it would have ended differently. People made fun of him for that, but I understood the sentiment. And if it happened again, there were a lot of people who were ready to stand up and give their lives if necessary to stop it. People were in hero mode. Passengers on my plane were eyeing Prayer Guy and me, and they were at the ready. Meanwhile, I was in hero mode too. Because if this guy was a terrorist and he made his move, my plan was that I was going to tackle him and take him out! I imagined the New York Post headline would read: Indian guy saves the day! We thought they were the same as those other guys, but it turns out they’re cool and patriotic!
Of course, I was worried that if I did tackle this guy, the air marshal would be so keyed up by two brown guys rolling around on a plane that he’d just shoot us both. Then it would be like when the white uniformed cop accidentally shoots the black undercover cop, and everyone’s sad.
In the end, nothing happened. The guy was not a terrorist; he was just a religiously observant man who wanted to pray. So, I was the racist. I profiled the poor guy for doing noth
ing more than exercising his America-given freedom. Do I feel bad? Yes, but it felt right at the time, and, man, this shit is complicated.
—
A year after 9/11, I was walking through Boston in a tuxedo, heading to a benefit for the Boston Public Library. As I turned the corner, I saw up ahead three bald guys leaning against a car. These weren’t just any bald guys; they were skinheads—Boston skinheads. Now, skinheads are bad enough, but Boston skinheads are supercharged. Because we all know that Boston is the South of the North. I love Boston, but it has some racial issues.
I always wondered about the origin of skinheads. Was there just this supercool racist who was experiencing male-patterned baldness, so he shaved his head? And then all his follower-racist buddies just copied his style? I feel bad for racists with thick heads of hair, though I guess they can always just join the Republican Party. Hee hee hee.
Back in Boston, I was speed-walking past the skinheads when I heard a voice say, “Hey, Muhammad! Islam sucks.” Now, let me say this: I get it. People, me included, are furious about terrorism. And before you hop up and down, I know that Islamic terrorists have a beef with America having soldiers over there, but attacking US civilians still feels cowardly.
What I wanted to say to these guys was, “Hey, skinheads, you’re pissed at Islam, and I get it, but most Muslims are peaceful. Plus, you’re harassing the wrong guy. I’m an Indian. You ever see Gandhi? We’re the peace guys? So, have a nice day, you bald bigots.”
But when you’re being racially harassed, lengthy logical statements don’t really work, so I just waved and said, “Okaaaaaay!” Unsatisfied with my response, the skinheads chased me. “Hey, dickhead! Fuck your Islam!”
Mustache Shenanigans Page 17
