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"We didn't want to talk down to teen-agers," says Chris Weitz, who directed the movie with his brother Paul (though only Paul gets credit). "Teenage life is not PG-13. It's a lot more R-rated than people are willing to admit." The good people at the movie industry's rating board thought American Pie was a bit more than R-rated. The Weitz brothers had to make four trips to the principal's office before the movie was softened from a toxic NC-17 to a respectable R. In fact, Pie is no Mary. Last year's film was about emotional embarrassment; this year's is about sexual humiliation. The Weitz brothers have really made a millennial Porky's (more sex play, stronger roles for the girls). That would be fine with Hollywood too: Bob Clark's 1981 ode to horniness cost $4 million and earned $105 million in North America.
"We're in an up period for vulgarity," says Chris Weitz. "I'm proud of our film's vulgarity." Of course he is: it will sell his movie the way that darned zipper sold Mary. Hollywood smells a hit too. Brian Grazer, who runs Imagine Entertainment with Ron Howard, gets a little awed as he tells of taking his son and a friend, ages 13 and 14, to an early screening: "They went insane. They wanted to see it again, like the next second. They go, 'Can we just stay and see it over?'" On the strength of the screening, Grazer hired the Weitz brothers to rewrite the sequel to Murphy's The Nutty Professor.
Pushing the movie envelope of bad taste--also spitting on it, scrawling dirty words in crayon and sealing a fake turd inside--is as old as Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles (a toccata of farts around the campfire, 1973) and Steve Martin's The Jerk (a certain Shinola gag, 1979). Humiliation humor is nothing new to Brooks (whose 1974 Young Frankenstein Sandler watches in Big Daddy). "Humor is basically pointing out the flaws in the human condition," he says. "I'm sure cavemen and -women sat around the fire at night, roasting whatever animal, and talked about how Murray couldn't get out of the way of this big, charging buffalo and was crushed to death, and they all laughed. That was the first joke, and that joke holds true. Murray's still getting crushed, and we're still laughing."
Bowfinger, about a hapless producer (Martin) who makes a movie by shooting scenes with a big star (Murphy) who doesn't know he's being photographed, is relatively mild--a dish of sherbet next to American Pie. Its kookiest scene, set in a dark, deserted garage, has Murphy being dogged by the sound of mysterious high heels. (Actually, it's a dog in high heels.) But Martin appreciates the need for comedy: broad, narrow, all widths. "People just want to have a good time at the movies," he says, "whether it's a science-fiction movie or just a comedy they trust. A science-fiction movie doesn't have to succeed as well as a comedy; you just need some aliens and some special effects. But with comedy, you think, 'If I don't laugh, I'm gonna die. I hate that I came in here.' The audience has to trust it."
There's a sweet scene at the end of Bowfinger: the bootleg film has been completed, and all the perpetrators are at the premiere. The movie they've made is probably irredeemable junk, no better than Big Daddy. Yet the producer and his cast stare in wonder at the big screen. However feeble the images, they move! And they move those who watch them.