Taglines: Come and get some.
Seth and Evan are best friends, inseparable, navigating the last weeks of high school. Usually shunned by the popular kids, Seth and Evan luck into an invitation to a party, and spend a long day, with the help of their nerdy friend Fogell, trying to score enough alcohol to lubricate the party and inebriate two girls, Jules and Becca, so they can kick-start their sex lives and go off to college with a summer full of experience and new skills. Their quest is complicated by Fogell’s falling in with two inept cops who both slow and assist the plan. If they do get the liquor to the party, what then? Is sex the only rite of passage at hand?
“Super Bad” revolves around two co-dependent high school seniors (Hill and Cera) who set out to score alcohol for a party, believing that girls will then hook up with them and they will be ready for college. But as the night grows more chaotic, overcoming their separation anxiety becomes a greater challenge than getting the girls.
Superbad is a 2007 American teen comedy film directed by Greg Mottola and produced by Judd Apatow. The film stars Jonah Hill and Michael Cera as Seth and Evan, two teenagers about to graduate high-school. Before graduating, the boys want to go to a party and each lose their virginity. However, their plan proves harder than expected. Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the script began development when Rogen and Goldberg were 13 years old, and was loosely based on their experience in Grade 12 in Vancouver during the 1990s. The main characters have the same given names as the two writers. Rogen was also initially intended to play Seth, but due to age and physical size this was changed, and Hill went on to portray Seth, while Rogen portrayed the irresponsible Officer Michaels, opposite Saturday Night Live star Bill Hader as Officer Slater.
About the Production
Columbia Pictures’ hilarious new comedy Superbad began in the most unlikely of places: the brains of the then-teenage neophyte screenwriters, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. After watching movies that they felt weren’t accurate (or even funny) portrayals of high school life, Rogen and Goldberg decided to give it a try themselves.
Rogen explains, “We tapped into the mind of a desperate high schooler in a way that very few films do.” And why not? After all, the first piece of advice many young writers receive is “write what you know.”
Rogen and Goldberg had written a screenplay with characters inspired by themselves and the people around them—and they went so far as to name the main characters Seth and Evan. The movie focuses on a shared experience, “that one night in which everything that can go wrong goes wrong,” says Jonah Hill, who plays Seth in the film.
“Everything in the movie is just like high school in real life,” says Christopher Mintz-Plasse, the first-time actor plucked from his Los Angeles high school to play a role in Superbad. “I mean, I never got arrested and hung out with the cops, but the parties and guys trying to get with girls — that’s just like everyone’s high school experience. That’s how Seth and Evan wrote it; they wanted it to be realistic.”
“Superbad doesn’t have the traditional high school hierarchy that you see in movies,” adds Michael Cera, best-known for his role as George-Michael Bluth on the television series “Arrested Development,” who plays Evan. “Jonah had a good point — high school isn’t divided into the jocks and the losers. You might not be hanging out with the popular girls, but you know them, say hi to them, and are passing friends with them. You slip under the radar.”
Producer Shauna Robertson notes that even though the film represents the universal high school experience, it is also inspired by the experiences of its two writers. “It’s fun to watch Seth and Evan — they wrote this when they were so young, and now, they argue about how things really went down. They have two very distinct images of how their pasts played out, and it’s fun to watch them argue about it.”
A few years after beginning the screenplay, Rogen made his way from Canada to Los Angeles, where—almost immediately—he came under the wing of producer Judd Apatow. “It became clear I wasn’t going to graduate high school, so I needed some kind of avenue of making money for myself,” the writer-actor relates. “I was doing stand-up and decided to try acting when I auditioned for ‘Freaks and Geeks.’” Rogen was cast on that show, and when it ended, he transitioned to both the cast and writing team of Apatow’s next show, “Undeclared.
It was then that Rogen gave the screenplay to producer Judd Apatow. “At some point during ‘Undeclared,’ Seth said to me, ‘I wrote a script with my friend Evan from Canada. It’s called Superbad. Will you read it?’ I thought it was hilarious, but there weren’t any other movies like it out there.”
Apatow took the opportunity to guide the screenwriters, pumping up the emotion at the center of the outrageous story. “At its heart, Superbad is a movie about being terrified to move on,” he notes. “The characters are terrified to go to different colleges and be apart for the first time. There’s nothing more painful than separating from your high school friends. That’s how you know you’re growing up; you don’t have those people to depend on anymore. That fear and pain turns into an obsession of accomplishing this goal — getting with these girls. To me, that makes this a sweet movie, despite the fact that all of the comedy is really far out.”
Once the movie was on the fast track, finding the director was the first issue of business. Apatow relates, “Greg directed five episodes of ‘Undeclared’ — he was always one of our favorite people to work with. Over the years, I’ve always looked for an opportunity to collaborate with him. He was the first person I thought of.”
“I was in a cafe with my wife in Brooklyn, where I live, procrastinating because I was supposed to be writing a script, and my cell phone rang. It was Judd,” remembers Mottola. “‘Hey, Greg, it’s Judd. Remember Superbad? Do you want to do it?’ I tend to be long-winded, so I started to say, ‘Well, you know, actually, it is one of the few scripts I’ve read…’ And Judd’s like, ‘Yeah, fine, okay. I’ll call you in a week. We’re making it.’ He called me in a week and said, ‘Okay, you gotta fly to L.A.’ I didn’t realize it could be that easy. I wasted eight or nine years of my life thinking it was much harder than that.” Producer Robertson says, “We never considered anyone else and we were thrilled he wanted to do it.”
In fact, Mottola had been familiar with the screenplay for some time. “I went to a reading of Superbad a couple of years earlier. What I liked about it the most was the jokes were behavioral — not just people telling jokes. A lot of it came out of some kind of ridiculous teenage psychology. The fact that it all takes place in one night really appealed to me. That kind of story has a ticking clock.”
With Mottola on board, the filmmakers turned their attention towards casting the film. Obviously, Rogen and Goldberg had written the characters Seth and Evan as extensions of themselves. For Rogen, it once seemed natural that he would play the part that bears his name. “Evan never wanted to be in it and the real Fogell was never interested in acting, but I wanted to play Seth,” he says. Fleeting time stole the opportunity from Rogen. “My inability to look young has destroyed everything,” he says.
“The fact is, when I was 16 I looked 30. Now, I look like I’ve been dead for four years.” Rogen may have taken some comfort in the fact that he proved to be nearly impossible to replace. Mottola explains, “It was difficult to find somebody who had the combination of personality quirks and the hilarity to make that character palatable, tolerable. In the auditions, everyone was a little bit hateful, not through any fault of their own. It’s a very hard character to pull off.”
The search was both exhaustive and exhausting. “I was getting really frustrated,” says Apatow. Then, inspiration struck when Apatow looked around at those closest to him. “At that time I was directing Knocked Up, another film in which Jonah Hill was acting. I was walking with Seth and looked over at Jonah and said, ‘I guess Jonah will do it.’”
The writers did not respond kindly to the suggestion at first. “I was like, ‘Like hell it’s Jonah,’” says Goldberg. “‘He looks 27. You’re all crazy. You’ve all lost your minds.’” Rogen adds dryly, “Jonah was our dead last choice.”
Robertson explains, “Jonah was just someone we forgot to consider because I don’t like to admit that he’s that young. He’s one of my wisest friends, so I keep forgetting that he’s not a 43-year-old man.”
Hill says, “Judd just looked at me and asked, ‘How young can you play?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. 17 or something.’ And then he asked me if I wanted to play the lead in Superbad.” On the spur of the moment, the actor shot a videotape of himself in the role of Seth. Apatow sent the tape to director Greg Mottola and the chairman of the studio, and that was that. He had the part.
“The minute Jonah opened his mouth on the audition tape, I knew we had the guy,” says Mottola. “I felt really lucky, because I knew I didn’t really have to work that hard. Jonah would make me look good, no matter what.”
“It’s one of those crazy Hollywood stories that you hear sometimes,” says Hill. “You think stuff like that just doesn’t happen and then it happens. I’m lucky.”
“It’s funny — Jonah is only a year or two younger than Seth,” says Apatow. “I don’t know why, but Jonah was able to pull off the illusion of being an eighteen-year-old high school student.”
Casting Evan was a much easier task. “I’d directed a couple of episodes of ‘Arrested Development,’ and was a big fan of Michael Cera,” says Mottola. “I’d seen what he was capable of. That show was filled with a lot of funny, talented people, and Michael completely held his own—sometimes, he was the best in the room.”
Mottola adds that Cera and Hill make a perfect combination: “Michael makes being sweet and dorky incredibly hilarious. Jonah makes being a vulgar loudmouth into something really kind of sweet.”
Cera was the first actor cast and when Jonah fell into the mix, the filmmakers, unaware that the two already knew each other socially, and wanting to make sure they had chemistry, came up with a brilliant idea. “We wanted to force them to spend as much time as possible together,” recalls Robertson. “Judd said to me very early on, ‘Maybe we should make them live in the same apartment together!’” After all, this is a group that is well known for working with their own friends. Robertson explains, “We mostly make these movies to put our friends in awkward situations.”
“We did a lot of rehearsals and read-throughs before shooting,” says Cera. “Jonah and I hung out a lot. It’s kind of funny the way they were trying to plan these hang-out dates for us, when we were already hanging out.”
“There’s something just naturally funny about Michael and I together,” says Hill. “I think Judd put us together because there’s something weird about it. I’m brash and angry, while Michael is quieter, softer.”
Casting the cops was even easier than casting Cera. “As soon as it became clear that I was too bloated to play a high schooler, I thought, ‘Oh, at least I can be one of the cops.’ It was an instantaneous decision,” says Rogen. One cop down, one to go. To cast the other cop, the filmmakers called on “Saturday Night Live’s” Bill Hader.
“Within five minutes of meeting Seth and Evan, we started talking about comic books,” says Hader. “As we realized we were all nerds, Evan said, ‘You know what he’d be really good as? The cop in Superbad.’ I was like, ‘What’s Superbad? Is that some kind of superhero story?’” Once Hader was aboard, he and Rogen began rehearsing and working on their chemistry and the parts were tailored for the two actors.
Finally, there was Fogell. “The Fogell character always ran the danger of just being a stock nerd guy,” Mottola says. “One of the things I’ve always liked about the script is that the character that you assume is going to be the third wheel turns out to have his own entire storyline.”
Story interest aside, Rogen had concerns of his own. “I knew most of my scenes were with the Fogell character. As a selfish actor, I really wanted there to be a funny guy in that role.”
And so the search began. And went on. And on. Robertson, looking back, says “I feel like we saw 500 actors and they all just were great in their own way but really not nailing it.”
Having seen every professional choice available, casting director Alison Jones started to bring in non-pros. “She found some strange Improv Olympics thing that high schools do where they compete with each other,” says Mottola, noting that the results were less than spectacular. “Most of them were just way too green. They just couldn’t handle it.”
Then, towards the end of the day, came Christopher Mintz-Plasse. “Chris was one of the last ones we saw. I remember him leaving the room and Alison and I looking at each other, thinking, ‘That can’t be as good as it seems, can it?’” says Mottola. “Chris was the first person to play him as the arrogant nerd—the guy who thinks he’s Frank Sinatra, even though he looks like Truman Capote. It was hilarious.”
“Chris is one of those wonderful little miracles,” says Apatow. “You’re looking for a hilarious young person, someone hears about your movie, comes in for a short audition and is instantly great; during the shoot, he gets even better than you ever hoped he could have been.”
“I’ve worked with just about everybody in the cast before except for Chris,” adds Robertson. “Chris came into that atmosphere, where everything is very free and loose, and he just knocked it out of the park.”
“I never thought I would act in my life,” says Mintz-Plasse. “My friend found out about the casting call and said, ‘You look like you could fit the part, you should come down with us.’ I went with two of my friends, we auditioned, I got called back three times, and I finally got the part. It was my first audition, my first acting role — the first anything I’ve ever done.
“The first week was really tough,” adds Mintz-Plasse. “I thought I wasn’t funny, that everyone else was funnier than me, that I didn’t know what I was doing. But by the end of that week, I’d gotten the hang of it and was comfortable.”
Michael Cera says that Mintz-Plasse needn’t have worried about being funny. “It took them so long to find Fogell—they had to find just the right guy. They narrowed it down to a final eight and Chris was the last one and really funny. They took a risk and we’re lucky to have him.”
“It’s weird to say that Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill are my friends now — just a few months ago I was just a regular kid,” Mintz-Plasse continues. “I’m still a regular kid, but my friends and I are all huge fans of The 40-Year-Old Virgin — it’s hilarious — and now, I’m in a movie with those guys. As we were finishing filming on Superbad, I was just so sad. This was the best experience of my life, and it was going to end and I’d go back to my high school and my regular life. Hopefully, they’ll be able to use me for more movies—we’ll see.”
Casting Mintz-Plasse also provided Michael Cera the opportunity to pass on a torch, of sorts. “Superbad is the first show I’ve ever worked on where I haven’t had to go to school on set — I’m 18 now,” he says. “I did that for nine years, and it was really nice to watch Chris go. He was extremely put off about it, but too bad, man. That’s show business.”
Rounding out the cast are the objects of the guys’ affections: Becca is played by Martha MacIsaac and Jules is brought to life by Emma Stone. Mottola says that he wanted to bring an element of realism to the girls. “Neither of them are the bland blonde girl that the teen guys are chasing after,” he says. “They’re both real, young women in the real world and very different from each other.”
At the end of the day, Robertson says, the friendly atmosphere amongst the filmmakers and cast was infectious. “Superbad is really a group of friends making a movie about a group of friends,” she says.
Superbad (2007)
Directed by: Greg Mottola
Starring: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Bill Hader, Seth Rogen, Martha MacIsaac, Emma Stone, Aviva Baumann, Kevin Corrigan, Erica Vittina Phillips, Marcella Lentz-Pope
Screenplay by: Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg
Production Design by: Chris L. Spellman
Cinematography by: Russ T. Alsobrook
Film Editing by: William Kerr
Costume Design by: Debra McGuire
Set Decoration by: Bob Kensinger
Art Direction by: Gerald Sullivan
Music by: Lyle Workman
MPAA Rating: R for crude and sexual content, strong language, drinking, drug use and a fantasy / comic violent images.
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: August 17, 2007
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