American Pie
Writer Adam Herz
“It was never, ‘What can we get away with? How much is too much?'," says screenwriter Adam Herz describing the making of American Pie (1999), "it was only, 'Is this funny? Is this believable?'"
The distinction is important because this R–rated teen sex comedy has been lumped together with other summer movies like Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut as part of the new gross–out vanguard. In one sense, the comparison is warranted because American Pie does benefit from Hollywood's embrace of envelope–pushing comedy ala the Farrelly brothers.
"When I originally wrote it — that was December of 1997 — I thought most of the jokes would sort of be implied," Herz explains, "that we wouldn't see as much as we're seeing. Much later, There's Something About Mary came out and that gave the Weitz brothers [directors Chris and Paul] the freedom to at least shoot the things that we weren't sure we could see or not."
But the 26–year–old native of East Grand Rapids, Michigan, whose father is a brain surgeon and mother is active in local community organizations, wasn't looking to merely string together naughty jokes and call it a movie. American Pie seeks to capture the awkward emotional state of adolescents who see the opposite sex as this "mysterious, other, desirable thing," says Herz, but continually stumble on the road to sexual experience.
"If there's anything like a secret, or trick, to the comedy in this movie," he says, "it's that embarrassment can be funny. At the same time, it's funny because it can be painfully truthful. I tried to take [incidents] from any horny teenager's life and turn them into the worst possible scenarios."
With an impressive $750,000 paycheck for his first–ever screenplay, Adam's success will undoubtedly prompt the purchase of many one–way tickets to Los Angeles. But his good fortune is actually that rare case of a script ideally capturing the Zeitgeist.
Herz headed to Los Angeles after graduating from the University of Michigan in 1996 (with a degree in Film and Video Studies and Communication) and working as a production assistant on the independent film Polish Wedding, which shot in the Detroit area. Thinking that this experience gave him an edge, he was disappointed to find that none of his contacts panned out in LA. But he landed a few PA jobs on low–budget television series, including Sweet Valley High.
As Herz explains via telephone from Los Angeles, twelve–hour days are standard for movie or television shoots, and PAs, being at the bottom of the production hierarchy, can count on thirteen to sixteen hour days. It was grinding work, with no sign of advancement in sight. But he had taken a friend's advice and wrote scripts for two of his favorite television series, Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show, to show around as writing samples.
These made their way to literary agents Warren Zide and Craig Perry who brought Herz on as a client. Seeing how screenwriter Kevin Williamson had resurrected the teen horror genre with Scream, Adam Herz approached his agents about doing a teen comedy.
"I said to them, 'I want to revive this genre and reinvent it and I think I know how to do it'," Herz says, "but the problem was I had to keep PAing to pay for my existence in LA."
So during October and November of 1997, he stopped working full–time and finally sat down and started typing, supporting himself by cashing in his bar mitzvah savings bonds and maxing out his credits cards. He turned in 30 pages to Warren Zide, who told Herz to toss out 28, but keep the first two, a scene which is now the eye–popping opener of American Pie.
"It was at that point that we said, 'Let's make this whole movie raunchy and let's push the boundaries'," explains Herz, "which wasn't difficult for me to do."
But at the same time, they realized that it had to be real, or it wouldn't work as anything more than sketch comedy, and Herz was more ambitious than that.
"I had always wanted to do a movie about high school on my terms," he continues, "realistic and also hysterically funny."
By the time his agents began showing Herz's script around to Hollywood studios, teen movies were having a resurgence. The spec market had heated up, he explains, referring to spec (or speculation) screenplays, which are self–generated as opposed to assigned, and some scripts had started to sell. Universal bought Adam Herz's script, which he'd jokingly called Untitled Teenage Sex Comedy Which Can Be Made for Under $10 Million Which Studio Readers Will Hate But We Think You Will Love.
It was a misnomer because studio readers, the first filters for unsolicited screenplays who write a review and then send it up the chain of command (and have the reputation of being film snobs), actually gave Herz positive feedback. The title then morphed into Great Falls, then East Great Falls High, and finally to the catchy American Pie, which also happens to emphasize one of the most notorious scenes of the movie.
Adam Herz, who was on the set for the filming of American Pie, describes that day of shooting. Actor Jason Biggs, playing the sexually eager but inept Jim, has been told that a warm apple pie approximates "third base," and proceeds to experiment. In a soon–to–be infamous shot, Biggs is holding the pie and has his back to the camera. First assistant director, J.B. Rogers, who'd been first AD for the Farrelly brothers, stopped the action, walked up to Biggs and pulled his boxer shorts down nearly to his knees.
"That scene," describes Herz, "instead of calling 'Action!,' it was, 'And...humping!'"
Whether this strikes audiences as funny or disgusting depends on how their sense of propriety affects their sense of humor. Adam Herz isn't worried about the reactions, adding that everyone is entitled to their opinion. But then, he's already gone through his first round of criticism by people who haven't seen the movie.
"When I first sold the script over a year ago, the Grand Rapids Press ran a front page article," he explains, "I mean, it was nice that they put me there. Then a few people wrote nasty letters that I was encouraging teenagers to fornicate, something like that. When people say that, I don't even think that deserves a reply, I think their ignorance is obvious, and it only makes me sad and disappointed that people can think that way and be so blind to what actually happens, and there are better ways to deal with [teenage sexuality] instead of ignoring it."
Despite this reaction, Adam Herz doesn't see Grand Rapids as an inherently intolerant place and emphatically states that he didn't encounter anti–Semitism growing up there.
"They say there are more churches than gas stations," he says, "which I believe. But I never saw anybody on the corner preaching the word of God. I'm always confused when people say Grand Rapids is conservative, because it certainly doesn't rub off on the kids. It's not like we're crazy and delinquent, but the kids I knew [there] were pretty darn similar to kids everywhere and weren't especially close–minded or whatever conservative means anymore."
At the end of American Pie, there's a thank you to the East Grand Rapids High School class of 1991, and Herz's affection for his Alma Mater is apparent in the way he portrays life in its fictional counterpart.
"I think it's BS when there's a high school movie," he explains, "and it's about, 'I want to be popular, I want to be homecoming king.' All this stuff that I never experienced. When I went to high school, there were groups of friends, but we all intermingled. There were no cliques that you were trying to get into, and I didn't want to see that in this movie. I didn't want to imply that these kids [the four main characters] were the geeks, the whatever. They were just a group of friends with varying interests."
For his cinematic models, Adam Herz went back to the John Hughes oeuvre, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, as well as the less revered Bachelor Party, "which is about all these buddies having a party, and to me, that's what high school was."
Herz has been making short movies on Super 8 and video since he was a kid, took film classes at New York University, and had always wanted to work in this business. But he found that he functioned more effectively on his own than in the academic environment of U of M.
"I screwed around a lot," he admits of his college days, "I took one screenwriting course which I thought was too hard, so I withdrew."
But it was in class called Laughing/Screaming, which examines teen horror films and comedies, that he wrote several papers on the immensely popular and equally reviled Porky's, adding "maybe that's where it started."
"It was a bunch of horny guys," he expounds, "and they would chase girls, and girls were just objects. In American Pie, I wanted it to be just the reverse.”
After turning down other teen movie assignments, Herz is now working on a television pilot and his dream project, a revival of the Smokey and the Bandit comedy/action genre called East Bound and Down. As for the experience of seeing his first screenplay being made into a movie, he says it couldn’t have been more positive.
“The typical story is, you write a screenplay,” he explains, “you sell it, then [the studio] brings in tons of different people to rewrite it, and the director ruins it.”
“What happened,” continues Adam Herz, “is the movie ended up being what I hoped it could be, and I learned a ton from it.”
© 1999, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.