Mustache Shenanigans

by Jay Chandrasekhar

  Then I got back in the car and drove a bunch of doughnuts, as the still-mic’d Ehren panicked: “Get me outta here! Oh shit! I’m gonna fucking die! Why did I agree to do this? It wasn’t even my fucking idea!”

  When I stopped the car and popped the trunk, a confused Ehren crawled out. Then came the sound of his friends laughing. Ehren’s reaction was rage coupled with relief. Seeing me standing there, laughing, he was confused. “Are you some kind of fucking actor or something?”

  Offended that he didn’t recognize me, I said, “Come on!” He hugged me in relief.

  Finally, Knoxville came in with the final insult, informing Ehren that his beard was made out of our pubic hair. When Ehren found that out, he puked, finishing the prank off in poetic fashion. Good fun.

  CHAPTER 16

  —

  Beerfest: Origin Story

  We’re going to go back in time now, back to the movie that we couldn’t get made after Club Dread, but now possibly could. I’m talking about Beerfest. But first, here is its origin story.

  After the successful US release of Super Troopers, Fox Searchlight decided to send us to Australia to promote the film there. Mildly concerned by the reports of our fun-filled drinking on our US tour, Searchlight’s then president Peter Rice made a surprise visit to the airport to see us off. He smilingly asked us not to drink all of the booze in Australia and told us our nickname at Fox was “Drunken Lizard.” We laughed and assured him that we’d represent Fox well, and off we went.

  We loved Australia. Not only is the country beautiful and hip, but the people in Australia are rebellious, funny, and less concerned about social strata than Americans are. In Sydney, the president of Fox Australia was giving Heffernan and me a tour. We were riding in an elevator when a twenty-year-old dude got on. Now, in America, if a twenty-year-old saw the president of the studio on an elevator, he’d wait for the next one. Not this kid. He got on. Then, after we ascended for a bit, the kid looked the president up and down and said, “Oy, my sister has that same shirt.”

  Without missing a beat, the president said, “Yeah, she left it at my apartment last night. Nice girl.” They both laughed as the doors opened, and we all got off.

  Baffled, I asked the president who that was. He shrugged. “I think he’s an intern.” That’s Australia.

  We were there for the two-week lead-up to the release of Super Troopers. Promoting in Sydney, Brisbane, and Surfers Paradise, we were paired with two Australian publicists named Leslie and Leonie.

  We were struck by how much Australians loved to drink. We left a bar at two A.M. and saw a drunken guy run facefirst into a tree. Down he went. Laughing, he propped himself on his elbow and used his legs to propel himself around and around in the dirt patch like a cartoon character.

  While our promotional screenings in Australia were going great, the fact that we were total unknowns there made it hard to get the media’s attention. To juice things up, Fox asked us to wear our trooper uniforms for all of our appearances. We groused a little, joking that looking like cops wouldn’t make us very popular in this former British penal colony. We took a grassroots/volume approach to promotions, showing up literally anywhere that would have us.

  Dressed as cops, we went to a mall and stood on a six-inch stage in the food court, while a guy who was inexplicably wearing a tuxedo introduced us to moms and their children. “Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to the Super Troopers from America!” A smattering of applause. “You should go and see their movie!” The moms looked confused. Wait, the cops are in the movie?

  They took us to a tire-store opening where we ate meat pies and cut a “Grand Opening” ribbon, while confused families looked on. Everyone just thought we were real cops.

  Sensing the awkwardness, Leslie pivoted. “There’s a beer garden nearby. Let’s pop in. Your people are bound to be there, right?”

  “You mean because they’re drunks?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  We filed into the packed beer garden, found a table, and started drinking. After a few pints, Leslie talked the manager into letting us go onstage to tell the crowd about the film. We were hesitant. The manager grabbed the microphone, calming the rowdy four-hundred-person crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to give a warm welcome to the Super Troopers from America!” The crowd slowly stopped talking to study us. As we five cops walked onstage, one chippy Aussie yelled, “Fuck you, coppers!” The whole place burst into laughter. Hoping to turn around a looming disaster, I grabbed the mic and started vamping, telling the crowd that we weren’t real cops but that we were in a movie about cops who like to play pranks. No one was listening. They were all talking again.

  Trying to regain their attention, Steve grabbed the mic and yelled something I thought he shouldn’t have: “Russell—Crowe—sucks—kangaroo—dick!”

  Look, we’re all big Russell Crowe fans, but we needed a spark, and we got one. The crowd exploded with amused rage. People jumped to their feet, shouting at us. Heffernan jumped in: “We want to challenge any five guys to a boat race!” And then the place really went off! Hands shot up. Huge guys pushed toward the stage, desperate for a chance to defend mother Australia against these random, insulting, fake cops from America.

  Five large Aussie blokes took the stage to compete against us in a boat race. There were two five-man teams lined up against each other. The first guys on each team start the race by chugging their pints. Then you go down the line, with guys two, three, and four. The fifth guy on each team (the anchorman) drinks two pints, and then the race goes back up the line, ending with the first guys again.

  We came out of the gate hot. I beat my guy, Erik beat his guy, and Steve beat his guy. We had a full-beer lead and the crowd was shocked. Then Paul started slowly gulping. I’ll spare you the details, but the Aussies regained the lead. But it wasn’t over, because we had Kevin Heffernan, who is the fastest chugger in Broken Lizard. Kevin and I have chugged roughly a thousand times, and I’m 0 and 1,000 against him. Kevin slammed his first and then his second pint, regaining the lead for Team USA! But now it was Paul’s turn again—gulp, gulp. In the end, the Aussies won by half a beer. After the win, all four hundred Aussies stood and screamed all matter of outback insult at us.

  So we had arm-wrestling contests with the same five guys and, much to their surprise, we won those. The energy was peaking as people were pounding their fists and their pints. Leslie reminded us that we were there to promote Super Troopers. So Lemme grabbed the mic. He put his hands up, calming the crowd. “People, if I can have your attention! I just wanna say something!” he yelled. The crowd quieted, eyeing the drunken little cop. “We had a lot of fun today, but I want you all to remember that . . . Crocodile Dundee fucks koala bears!”

  Arghhhhaahahhah!! The place blew up. People started throwing food and half beers at us. Did they care about Crocodile Dundee more than they did about Russell Crowe? I doubt it, but it sure seemed like it. Regardless, it was clear that it was time to go. So Leslie and Leonie shoved us out the back exit and into the waiting van. Screech! We disappeared in a cloud of dust, loving life. Then Heffernan leaned in: “Hey. That could make a good movie.” And the idea for Beerfest was born.

  Years later, after the success of Dukes . . .

  Studio president Jeff Robinov had given Broken Lizard a suite of offices in the Motel Building on the Warner Bros. lot. Soon after we moved in, I met Jeff in his office, where he asked me what I wanted to do next. When I told him we wanted to make a film about an international beer-drinking team that competes against other countries’ teams in beer games, he cocked his head. “You’re serious, right?”

  “We have a great script.”

  “If you think it’s great, I’m sure it is. Can you make it for $13 million?” he asked. “That’s the lowest number we can make a movie for here. I don’t have to ask permission for that.”

  I said, “Sounds like a good number, but
Sony owns it.”

  He said Sony owed him a favor, and within weeks, Warner Bros. had bought the rights to Beerfest and Jeff had green-lit the movie. It was that easy. After years of running around raising money and/or navigating the roadblocks put up by the various low-level development executives, this was different. This was rarified air. We were talking to the boss. And the boss didn’t want to talk about script notes. Thanks to the success of Dukes, Warner Bros. trusted us, and proved it with a quick green light.

  As much as we wanted to shoot in Germany, economics dictated that we shoot closer to home. Since Warner Bros. had a new production relationship with New Mexico, we were asked to see if we could figure it out there. This would require doubling Albuquerque for Munich, so we adjusted the script so that the arena and, frankly, most of the Germany scenes would take place inside. And yes, the rumor is true. The Beerfest arena was inspired by the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Bloodsport.

  We wrote twenty drafts of the script before I cast it—again, to ensure that everyone was writing jokes for every character. We needed brothers and felt that Erik and Paul were the most visually similar, so they got the parts of Todd and Jan Wolfhouse, respectively. To round out the rest of the drinking team, we decided to create drinking specialists. We wrote a part for a scientist who would use science to devise faster ways to drink. We wrote a part for a gluttonous volume drinker who would be our anchorman in chugging contests. And we wrote a part for a beer-games specialist, a ringer who knew his way around a quarter.

  Steve Lemme had a high school friend named Finkelstein who was a genetic scientist. The real-life Finkelstein told Steve that part of his job was to masturbate frogs to collect their sperm. We didn’t need to add any comedy there. Lemme modeled Finkelstein’s hairstyle after Sean Penn’s in Carlito’s Way, which meant he had to shave three inches of male-pattern baldness into the front of his scalp, daily. On the weekends, Lemme would let his hair grow back, but it created an ugly stubble effect that looked even worse. Lemme actually endured a few anti-Semitic encounters in Albuquerque, where guys called him “Jewboy.” For a non-Jewish, half-Spanish, half-Argentinian kid, that was surreal.

  One of our bigger friends at Colgate was nicknamed “Landfill.” Heffernan, who is our biggest guy and who also happens to be our fastest beer chugger, snagged that part.

  That left me to play the beer-games specialist. We named the character Barry Badrinath, after one of my childhood friends. And we wrote a scene where the Wolfhouse brothers go looking for and find Barry working at a circus, as a weathered circus roadie. Something about that felt too cute, so we switched it, last minute, making Barry Badrinath a male prostitute who peddles his wares near an overpass. When they find him and ask him to join the team, Barry tries to show them how good he still is at beer games, but he can’t land a single quarter in the cup. The brothers leave, dejected, and head back to their bar. Then Barry bursts in, drunk, and drills one quarter after another, finishing with the oft-heard quarters line, “I’m better when I’m drunk.”

  In addition to Broken Lizard, the cast included Donald Sutherland, Jürgen Prochnow, Mo’Nique, Cloris Leachman, Dukes and Club Dread alum M.C. Gainey, and Super Troopers alum Philippe Brenninkmeyer.

  We approached Donald Sutherland because, once upon a time, he had played a professor in one of our favorite films of all time, Animal House. Sutherland was cool, and his being in the opening scene lent our film an air of much-needed gravitas.

  Cloris Leachman played Great Gam Gam, the boys’ kindly grandmother, and was fully willing to go wherever the joke took her. I love Cloris, and I think the feeling was mutual because she would not allow us to shoot an inch of film until she and I kissed (in front of the crew) for thirty seconds . . . every morning. I’m an actor’s director.

  Jürgen Prochnow was dark and hilarious as Baron Wolfgang von Wolfhausen, the elder statesman of the Germans. The highlight for me was the scene where he is piloting the German team in a cramped submarine. He flips out on his guys for grab assing, before apologizing, “Sorry, I had a bad experience on a U-boat once.” This, of course, was a call back to his legendary performance in the German submarine film Das Boot. It was cool that he was willing to do that.

  Mo’Nique was terrific both as the villain and as Barry Badrinath’s lover. While we had written some good lines for her, it was her improv that stole the show and ended up in the movie.

  We have a theory about bad guys. Kevin Heffernan and I lived in New York City for ten years, and we saw a lot of movies. Afterward, we’d often argue about whether the bad guy was tough enough. If we thought we could beat up the actor playing the bad guy, he wasn’t tough enough. It was the same with James Bond. Bond had to be tougher than us or he was no good. (There has been only one Bond whose ass I thought I could kick, and he didn’t last long.) The villains in Beerfest are five brothers, who are cousins to our heroes, and make up the German drinking team. We wanted a mix of actors, some who would be scary and some, funny.

  Nat Faxon, who played a small part in Club Dread, played the German brother Rolf. Nat’s Rolf is menacing and fucking hilarious. My favorite is when he imitates Schwarzenegger, “Do it! Do it! Kill me now!” Years later, Nat would go on to win a writing Oscar with Jim Rash for their adaptation of the book The Descendants.

  We targeted Will Forte to play brother Otto. Will was in his fourth year of SNL, and in New York, so I was unable to audition him. I loved him on the show, and Nat Faxon had performed with him in the Groundlings and said he was top-notch. After I gave him the part of Otto, we spoke on the phone. I asked him how his German accent was, and he broke into a few words of something that sounded distinctly Chinese. Then he laughed, nervously, and said he would work on it. When Will arrived in Albuquerque, his German accent was flawless. Will was also an impressive chugger. During the shoot, we did a scene where the Germans had to show their drinking prowess. Will volunteered and pounded a pint of beer in about three seconds. We were blown away. That night, we all challenged him to chug-offs, and he beat every one of us.

  Eric Christian Olsen played brother Gunter with bizarre hilarity. I had worked with Eric a couple of years earlier when I directed him on the show The Loop. The dude had charisma and great timing. Eric is now one of the stars of the long-running show NCIS: Los Angeles.

  There was a point when Jimmy Fallon was going to play one of the German brothers. I sat with him for two hours at the Chateau Marmont while he rolled through his massive repertoire of impersonations. (My favorite was probably Woody Allen.) Jimmy was cool and a Super Troopers fan, and he agreed to be in the film. But in the end, he got cold feet and dropped out.

  With our funnymen in place, we needed some danger. Our casting directors, Mary Vernieu and Venus Kanani, whom I’d worked with on The Dukes of Hazzard, found us a giant of a man in Ralf Moeller to play the role of the eldest brother, Hammacher. A real German, Ralf was six-ten, had a deep voice, was a former Mr. Universe, and was friends with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ralf was exactly what Beerfest needed.

  The final brother role of Schlemmer went to acting novice Gunter Schlierkamp. At six-one, 275 pounds, Gunter was a veritable brick shithouse of a man. He was a former competitor in the Mr. Universe competition, and had a sweet high voice that reminded me of Chicago Bears great Walter Payton. Payton’s voice was deceiving, because that man could run you over like a speed train. Gunter possessed that same energy. He did an imitation of a sex-crazed ape that climaxed with a ferocious chest beating that was both terrifying and hilarious.

  Neither Ralf nor Gunter had ever heard of the mall store Hammacher Schlemmer, which we named them after. Regardless, Heffernan and I felt confident that we couldn’t beat up these bad guys.

  At Colgate, we used to do a thing called a “half-hour party.” We’d go into a cement room in our basement with kegs of beer, bottles of whiskey, and joints and bongs. We’d start a timer and then we would just try to smoke and drink as much as possible before
the buzzer went off thirty minutes later. I partook in only one half-hour party because I got unnecessarily fucked-up—not a pleasant end to the night. Regardless, to up the ante in these parties, we invented something called . . . “the Strikeout.” In a Strikeout, you inhale a bong-load of smoke, then chug a beer and do a shot of whiskey before exhaling the smoke. Again, I don’t recommend it. It gets you wasted in a way that’s really unnecessary. Take your time. No need to rush. Seriously. In the film, the American team goes to a college house party to test their mettle against some “college drinking professionals.” At the party, Finkelstein, played by Steve Lemme, is challenged to a Strikeout. Like Daniel Day-Lewis, Steve is a method actor who likes to be referred to by his character’s name. On the day before we were to shoot the Strikeout, Finkelstein approached. “Jay, everything’s gotta be real tomorrow. Real whiskey, real beer, real pot!” Fink, as he was nicknamed in the movie, was worried that people would see the scene and grouse that we used fake stuff. So we got him the real stuff.

  In take one, Fink inhaled the bong, chugged the beer, downed the shot, and exhaled a beautiful plume of smoke. He nailed it. It was a beautifully perfect Strikeout. There was nothing to improve on, so I told him that the lighting wasn’t great and we needed to do another take. After our ace director of photography, Frankie DeMarco, pretended to change the lighting, Fink did take two. He nailed that one too, but I made up a reason why we needed another. After six takes, poor Fink was finished—TKO. Funny guy.

  After shooting, Heffernan and I held nightly parties at our house. The weekday parties were just games of beer pong and hanging out. The weekend parties went late. During one Friday night fete, the doorbell rang. It was the cops, there on a noise complaint. Walking to the door, I whispered to people to hide the smoking bongs.

  At the door, Officer One was gruff. “Do you live here?!”

  I kicked into charm mode. “I do, Officer. Sorry, are we being too loud?”