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The formula is simple enough. "You expect fried rice with your Chinese dinner, and you expect certain things, like a belching scene, in your teenage comedy," says Jeff Kanew, director of Revenge of the Nerds and the upcoming Gotcha! "They're basically about guys trying to get laid. When I became involved with Nerds, the script already had a party scene, a peekaboo scene, a panty raid, a food fight, a beer-guzzling contest. The studio's instruction to me was, 'Give us Animal House.' I gave it to them but tried to layer it with some humanity and real characters. I didn't think anything was tasteless as long as it was funny." But tasteless is not really in the vocabulary of a gross-out scriptwriter. Some movie people shiver when they think of great film scenes: Gloria Swanson descending the stairs at the end of Sunset Boulevard, or Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains walking into the fog at the conclusion of Casablanca. Gross-out writers receive a similar thrill when they remember John Belushi filling his mouth with mashed potatoes in Animal House--and then popping his cheeks and spewing out the contents.
"These movies are not exactly bogged down with story," says Doug Draizin, who packaged Bachelor Party. "The kids are coming back for the big comedy scenes. So it's important to give them enough, four or five big ones is the rule of thumb." In Police Academy, for example, a woman wails to one of the misfits in blue that her cat is stuck at the top of a tree. "Don't worry, lady," he says confidently. "I'll get him down." He pulls out his revolver, aims and shoots him dead.
Some Hollywood people worry that the day may come when there will be one gross-out too many and teenagers will turn to something else, perhaps even dramas or--is it possible?--books. But so long as adolescents are adolescents, probably not. Sometimes, when you are 14 or 15, say, bad is better than good, dirt is more appealing than clean, and a night at the newest gross-out is more fun than sitting at home watching television with Mom and Dad.