Producer Shauna Robertson takes great delight in finding creative ways to invite me to visit the sets of the various films that she and Judd Apatow have been busy making over the last few years. And if those invites manage to create some sort of controversy in my house, then even better.
For example, when I was in Vancouver working on the second season of MASTERS OF HORROR, a fairly hefty stack of mail accumulated. My wife opened the envelopes to make sure there were no bills and to see what DVDs showed up, and when I got back to town, she told me I should go through the stack. “You might want to start with this one,” she said, handing me an oversized manila envelope.
Inside, I found a pregnancy test. It was positive. And the enclosed note simply read, “I’m pregant! And it’s yours!” It was about a three day process to convince my wife that it was an invitation to visit a set, and not actual grounds for divorce. When I told Shauna this, she seemed delighted.
So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was sleeping in one recent morning and woke up to the sound of my son running through the house bellowing “MARAWAMA! MARAWAMA!” like Steve Martin playing Ruprecht the Monkey Boy. When I got up and walked to the bedroom door, I was rewarded with the sight of Toshi toddling along at full speed holding a large pot plant. Not a potted plant, mind you, but a marijuana plant in full bloom, with giant green sticky buds perched on top. I relieved him of the plant and went to figure out what happened. On the kitchen counter, I found two bags, a card, and a pineapple. Evidently, one bag had held the pineapple, while the other held the pot plant. And the card was another invitation to a set, this time for the upcoming buddy comedy, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS. Thankfully, the pot plant was the creation of the film’s art department, part of a grow room scene, and not the real deal. Even so, Toshi’s vocabulary is off to a fascinating early start thanks to my mother-in-law’s shocked reaction to the delivery, and I once again found myself chagrined and, a few days later, on my way to see what madness Shauna and Judd and their cohorts were up to.
David Gordon Green has always been, in my mind, a serious filmmaker. When I first saw GEORGE WASHINGTON, I was moved by the deceptive simplicity of it, by the humanity of it. When he followed that up with ALL THE REAL GIRLS, I was equally blown away. I’ve heard people compare Green’s work to the film of Terrence Malick, and I think that’s an apt comparison. His collaboration with his cinematographer Tim Orr has yielded some of the most beautiful moments in American independent cinema in the last ten years. So when I heard that he was the director of PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, it seemed to be an incredibly odd choice, and I had no idea what to expect when I showed up on the North Hollywood location where they were shooting.
The strip mall at Laurel Canyon and Victory is one of those places that has been dying in slow-motion for as long as I can remember. There used to be a theater there; no more. There was a decent comic book store there; no more. There was a Macy’s at once point; long gone. Instead, they’ve now got a sleazy lingerie "modeling" place where I'm fairly sure you can get more than just a lap dance, a head shop, and a whole lot of empty store fronts. They’ve also got a pretty sizeable parking lot, which is where I parked, and where I first spotted Seth Rogen standing with a large group of people.
As he spotted me walking across the parking lot, he waved me over. “Oh my god, man, perfect timing. This is gonna be great.” I realized Evan Goldberg, Seth’s writing partner, was standing next to him and said hello to him. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen, and both Seth and Evan directed my attention to another part of the parking lot. Not more than a minute after I walked up, a police car came screaming into the lot at full speed, then flipped upside down, tore the top off another parked car, and slammed into a dumpster before coming to a stop.
Right in front of me, a wiry guy in shorts and a t-shirt spun around, positively beaming. “That was perfect. PERFECT.” He bounced away, and Evan turned to me, smiling.
“That was David Gordon Green. Doesn’t he look like he just got his first handjob?”
Okay. So it’s obvious right away that this isn’t going to be like GEORGE WASHINGTON or ALL THE REAL GIRLS. Not a lot of cars flipping over in those film. Not a lot of car chases.
And Rosie Perez absolutely positively does not get kicked in the pussy in either of those films.
So what is PINEAPPLE EXPRESS? Well, it’s a crazy hybrid of a stoner comedy and something like DIE HARD. It’s the story of Dale (Rogen), a process server in Los Angeles who basically just wants to make enough money to support his very modest lifestyle. He sort of drifted into the job, and he’s got a bit of a knack for it. He doesn’t have any passion, though. He reserves that for Angie, his high-school-aged girlfriend and for smoking pot. Which he does a lot. His dealer is Saul (James Franco), an amiable goofball who genuinely thinks of Dale as one of his best friends. On one of Dale’s stops by Saul’s place, Saul sells him a bag of what he says is a brand-new strain that no one else in LA has yet: Pineapple Express. When Dale later witnesses a murder and drops his bag of weed at the scene, it sets off a chain reactions of events that leads to all sorts of mayhem.
Including, as I said, Rosie Perez being kicked in the pussy. And, really, isn't that worth your ten dollars all by itself?
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg co-scripted SUPERBAD, which you’ve probably read a bit about here on the site already. I visited that set as well, and as much as I liked that script, the finished film is a knockout. Low-key, charming, hilarious. It strikes me as one of the most natural comedies in a long time, self-assured and honest. Rogen and Goldberg were writing from experience. Their first draft was written when they were 13, and even though it’s been rewritten and revised since then, it doesn’t feel like a calculated Hollywood script.
With PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, Goldberg and Rogen have taken a fairly standard Hollywood formula -- the buddy comedy -- and they’ve twisted it into a new shape that’s all theirs. For one thing, they’ve defied conventional Hollywood wisdom by making this an unapologetic pot comedy. This film doesn’t just feature pot as a part of the movie... it wallows in it. It practically celebrates weed. It never positions Saul as a bad guy because he’s a pot dealer, and it gets the subtle dynamics of a relationship between customer and dealer right in a way mainstream movies never do.
The film demolishes stereotypical attitudes about pot, too. Even Cheech and Chong movies made sure to play into the entire notion that stoners are inherently stupid, and that’s where most of the laughs came from. That’s not the case here. This is a film that spends the time to carefully establish these characters as real and flawed and multi-faceted. On the page, it works really well, but the question is, of course, how it works onscreen. I was personally interested to see how James Franco and Seth were going to be together. I loved them on FREAKS & GEEKS, and since then, Franco’s been on this “serious” career path. It’s given him some box-office cred, but I’ve really wanted to see him try his hand at unabashed comedy again, and in many ways, he’s the real comic presence here, with Rogen almost playing the straight man. Saul’s certainly a more outrageous presence in the script, and I was curious to see how he’d be approaching the role.
I showed up just before lunch, and Shauna invited me to join them for dailies, which they always do as they eat. They’ve got a new dailies trailer, even nicer than the one they were using on the KNOCKED UP set, and after everyone got their food, we all headed over to the trailer where the DVD had already been put in the player. Once Saul and Dale are on the run from the crooked cops, including Rosie Perez, they have to figure out where they can go that’s safe for them. Saul has a fairly hefty bag of weed with him, but no cash, and so they decide to make some easy money by approaching a bunch of high school kids and offering them a simple trade. David Gordon Green intentionally found the youngest-looking kids possible, which makes the scene hilarious, although I can picture some studio executive getting a brain hemorrhage at the idea of the movie’s two stars selling drugs to kids for laughs. The kids were hilarious, striking a tough deal and negotiating with Saul over the price. After some back and forth, the kids throw in all their cash and some ninja throwing stars and some fireworks, and in return, each of them gets to take a giant handful of weed out of Saul’s bag. As is the habit on each of the films I’ve been to where Apatow and Robertson are the producers, there was a lot of latitude here for the cast to riff off of each other, tweaking the scene as they played it. Rogen and Franco seemed to be enjoying the kids and their energy, and in return, they kept throwing fresh curveballs to see how the kids would react.
After the kids leave, Saul goes to get some supplies, leaving Dale sitting in the back alley, high as a kite, feeling good for the first time since realizing his life was in danger. As he’s sitting there, Mo’nique rolls up in a cop car. She’s playing the officer assigned to the high school, and she caught the kids coming back onto campus. She’s on the warpath when she jumps out of the car, and Dale isn’t prepared for it at all. I know Mo’nique isn’t part of the ensemble that Apatow’s been putting together from film to film, but she came ready to play, and in the dailies we saw, she was in Seth’s face, frisking him, making him as uncomfortable as possible. In a couple of the takes, she managed to sexually harass him during the frisk, and it was obvious that Seth wasn’t ready for it. She ends up throwing him into the back of her car so she can run a search to see if he has any warrants out.
And, of course, he does. Which ends up leading into the scenes that we saw them shooting after lunch. As she leaves the alley with Dale in the back of her car, she ends up hitting Saul, who’s walking up the alley with munchies and Slurpees. The Slurpee coats the front window. She jumps out to investigate. Saul jumps behind the wheel and takes off with Dale, while Rosie Perez, notified by Mo’nique, shows up ready to kill the both of them. We saw dailies of some of the ensuing car chase, and it’s really kinetic, kick-ass footage. I was still having trouble believing how good Green is at shooting car chases, and I was even more impressed at the notion that he’s trying to use as little second-unit as possible. I always hate it when action films are directed by guys who hand off the actual action sequences to other people to shoot, so Green won even more of my respect when I saw how careful he was to shoot these as real scenes, and not just disposable action between the “important” moments. As we returned from lunch, Tim Orr and David were checking the monitor to see if they were ready to shoot some of the interior footage of Saul and Dale in the cop car.
The basic gag was simple. Because there’s no visibility, Saul tries to kick the window out while driving. Unfortunately, he gets his foot stuck, and for a moment, he’s stuck in the middle of a high-speed pursuit with one foot on the gas and one sticking out the front of the windshield. It’s a funny bit on the page, but watching Franco actually work it out and run through a few times, it was obviously a complicated joke to bring to life.
Franco tried it several times, but he kept hesitating, trying not to break the glass out too much. It was pre-scored to break with as little pressure as possible, and so Franco was telegraphing the moment. The other problem was that he kept putting his foot through in a way that would make it too easy to pull his foot back out. David and his cinematographer talked about what they were seeing, and finally they managed to get Franco to do a take where he pointed his foot as he put it through the glass, then turned it so it was convincingly stuck. Everything came together perfectly on that take. Seth’s ad-libs from the back seat, Franco’s freak out, the way the window broke... everyone in video village was laughing out loud, and it was apparent that this was the perfect take.
Satisfied, David led everyone around the corner to look at a small strip of park where he’d be shooting part of the chase the next morning. As we walked over, we talked about the car chase at the end of DEATH PROOF, since this was still a few days before GRINDHOUSE came out, and I was the only one onset who’d had a chance to see it yet. Whatever conversation I imagined myself having with David Gordon Green, it wasn't about the finer points of shooting car stunts. But that's what made the entire day such a great surprise.
Once David was satisfied with the location and how they’d be shooting it, everyone walked back to video village, then across the street to where they were setting up the shot where Mo’nique’s cop car was supposed to hit Saul. I saw someone walk by dressed exactly like Seth, and I asked him how strange it is to see Seth Rogen stunt doubles on set.
Both he and Evan were wildly enthusiastic about all the stunts and action and special camera rigs and explosives and everything else they’ve been able to use on this film, and I can totally understand the energy they could just barely contain. When you’re a kid, dreaming of making movies, you can’t help but imagine yourself making the sort of big Hollywood action films that are part of any film geek’s diet. Seth and Evan are both producers on this film with Shauna and Judd, and it’s obvious that they’re still having a hard time believing that anyone would pay them to do something they’re enjoying this much. The third act of the film goes from being a chase movie to being something even crazier, and I wish I’d had a chance to return to the set to see them shoot some of that stuff. As it is, I had to leave after the first few takes of Franco’s stunt double getting pegged by the cop car, and I never did find a day to go back down to see them shoot more of the film.
No matter. With guys like Danny R. McBride (whose starring role in THE FOOT-FIST WAY has become a full-blown obsession for Shauna) and Gary Cole and James Remar joining returning Apatow-production veterans like Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio, I am convinced this is going to be another genre-bending killer for these guys. The script is rock solid, but every single thing I saw makes me think that they’re going to make it work better onscreen.
Right now, I’m going to wrap this up. It’s 3:30 in Los Angeles, and in two hours, I’m leaving for the airport with my wife and son. We’re heading to the set of another Apatow/Robertson production, this one called FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL. This time, Jason Segel is going to be starring in a script he wrote, with Nicholas Stoller directing. I’ll be meeting people like Jason, Russell Brand, Nicholas and female lead Kristen Bell for the first time, and I’ll be seeing some familiar faces like Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, and Shauna. I’ll be gone all week, and I’m sure it’s going to be a difficult, punishing trip...
... oh, wait, no it won’t. Because the film’s shooting in Hawaii, and the entire crew is based at the Turtle Bay Resorts, where much of the film’s action takes place. While I’m there, I’ve got a lot of stuff to finish, but I won’t be online at all. As a result, you won’t hear from me again until next weekend, by which point KNOCKED UP will already be open. Not only is the film great, but the Loudon Wainwright soundtrack is one of the best things I’ve listened to all year.
I’ll be back on Saturday with reviews of MR. BROOKS, also opening this coming weekend, and PAPRIKA, which is open now in NY and LA, but which will be rolling out wider in the weeks ahead. I’ve got an interview with Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio that you’ll be able to read when I get back, and I’m getting ready to start the DVD coverage back up, including a special month-long series to celebrate the 100th birthday of film icon John Wayne, whose birthday (May 26th) I shared this past weekend. I just finished a creative project that’s occupied much of my headspace for the last seven months, and now that we’re done, I’m ready to dig in and really sort through some of the great stuff that’s stacking up here on my desk. I think it’ll turn out to be worth the wait, and I look forward to getting into it as soon as I’m back in town.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
