Oh he is boots. It's show tied.
People say good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater.
They want clothes, sodas, pop, popcorn, and no monsters in the protection booths.
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Got it off from the guys who brought you the forty year old virgin of Talladega Knights and knocked up.
Now get ready.
For its super bad cases.
What's up, guys?
I was just walking down the hall and Nicola was wearing these tight white pants with this black chee streak.
Uh, it's ten thirty three? What I told her?
What time of check check?
After a lifetime of missed opportunities, Heycca.
They've got one final chance. You You hear girls saying like, I'm so calm last night. I shouldn't have slept with that guy. We could be that mistake to get it right. Oh no, it's the tall super Bad.
Hey don't.
I'm not a piece of meat.
Hey, folks, Welcome to a special episode of the Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking with Andrew Buss. He is the author of I Am McLevin, How super Bad became the biggest comedy hit of its generation. It is a brand new book that is out all about the film super Bad, which I know a lot of people have seen, even I have seen that one wasn't necessarily the audience for it, but I definitely was a good audience for this book. Had a great time
reading it, and I think you will too. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed the interview. Before we start talking about I am McLevin, I want to know a little bit more about you, how you get into writing, and what's your day job or is this your day jobs?
Right now? This is my day job. This is what I'm focusing on. It's definitely tough, but yeah, this is where my primary focus is writing right now. As far as how I got started with writing, I've always been a big fan of just writers in general. I grew up a big fan of comedy and writing. Saturday Night Life was a big influence on me, and I knew I was a super fan when I become obsessed with
people like Robert Smidel or Jim Downey. You're a fan of the show when you know who wrote What's the Growing up, I was a big fan of comedy, and I went to film school in the screenwriting, but I always had a mind towards journalism. I was always thinking, maybe go down that route. I got disillusioned with going into the world of film. I realized as a screenwriter, I wasn't setting myself up for success as much as
I could have. And I realized that I love talking about things, and I'm very passionate about what I loved, and I realized that journalism is a great way to do that. So I was mentored by man by the name of bill's Amy, who is a brilliant, absolute genius journalist for Rolling stilled at Esquire, New York Times bestselling author last my Laborn interviewed Johnny Carson. He took me under his wing for the last seven years of his life, and I learned so much from him as a mentor.
And then I wound up working with a bunch of different publications. I've written for manby Fair, Vocal, Sure, and that's how I got into it. Now.
I know, before you wrote this book about super Bad, you wrote one about High Fidelity. Can you tell me how that project came about?
Yeah, High Fideli is a movie I've always left, being from the Chicagoland suburbs. It's a movie that's always been very near and dear to my heart. And I did an oral history of the film in twenty twenty for Consequence of Sound, and I got to talk to everybody, John Cusa, Jeff Black, Tablulaiso, the film's cast, and then also the screenwriters. Deveen Sentchus Steve Paint, as well as director Stephen Fears and the author of the book, Nick Hornby.
So I got to talk to everybody. But a year or two later, I was nearly represented by an agent and we were talking about what I could do, and I brought up the High Fideli oral history, and then we talked about pitching that around as a book, and we did that, and then Applause books who I did I'm mcleven with wound up picking it up. So that's how that one came with me.
When was the first time you saw super Bad? And what did you think?
The first time I ever saw I was fourteen years old, just about to enter high school, and it was the day I came out August seventeenth, two thousand and seven, and I went with my dad and my grandfather and so it's the free generation of matter, I mean, bonding over this really raunchy teen comedy. And it was unlike a movie experience, a movie going experience. Rather, I've ever seen one of those experiences that really sticks with you, and to this day I refer to it as the
best filmgoing experience I've ever had. There was an electricity in the air. The movie's very funny, of course, but the crowd, it was just firing out all cylinders with everybody was the night came out, and I just remember that feeling of being in that theater, realizing, oh, I'm part of something. Even at the time, this movie is something different than what we usually see. And I've seen all the Appaton movies up to that point. I loved Anchorman.
I loved Four year Old Virgin, which was the first R rated movie I ever saw in the theater. Actually not dub but SuperM was just different. It just had a different kind of vibe. And getting to see it with my damn my grandfather who's no longer with us unfortunately, came to see it with them made it even more special. So I got to dedicate the book to them.
How did the book project come about?
I've done an oral history for Randy Fair. Just like Hyphidelity, it all starts there, and I'd gotten everybody. It was the first time in my career, and I believe the only time with the oral history. I don't think this has happened before or since, where every single person I've reached out to you said yes, that just doesn't happen when you're working on a big typestt the project like that.
I talked to Jonah Haill, Seth Rogen, Michael Sarah, Christopherman's bloss, Bill Hayter, Emma Stone, Evan Goldberg co writer, as well as Judd Apatow, Greg Tola, producer, Seanna Robertson, and Marthon mcguys that who plays back. Then, everybody I spoke to you had nothing but amazing things to say about working on the film, and it was just so much fun
to work in. Again, similar story, I was talking to my agent and he pitched the idea of maybe doing a book on this, and I love that idea, and it was so much fun to get to turn the oral history into a book.
What's your process to say? Okay, this was an oral history, and I'm sure it was a very apprehensive and big. I keep thinking about the size of this, and then you've got let's turn it into a book. That sounds like a really big task for you.
It is. The oral histories themselves are a lot of work. Having twelve different voices and making them all come together is one cohesive voice. It's not easy. That's an uphill battle. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of late nights. It's me staying up till four in the morning, tearing my hair out. And with the book itself, when I started looking through it, it's like, how I go about writing a book is I don't necessarily go into chronological order. I don't know many writers that do these types of
books that would. I'm sure there are, but it helps me to go section by section. I'll start with a section I feel really confident about. I might have started with the first chapter for this one, actually, because I was really fascinated by the first chapter, which is seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg watching a really bad movie. They can't even remember the title of it, they just know it was bad, and then realizing, holy shit, we could make a better movie than this, and so they did that.
They wrote a movie they were thirteen, and I really liked that idea of just this had drive and ambition at such a young age. Oh, we can do better than the Hollywood system. I love that kind of just thinking it looks so easy, and so they saw how to do it. And so that was the first chapter, I believe. And then the process of things coming together is I start with the interviews that I had done with them for the Oral History, just reading them over
thinking Okay, what do we have. I look at the oral History again, and then I'm like, where do we go from here? And then research hundreds of articles and hundreds and hundreds of articles and interviews. I got lucky with this book more than a High Fidelity because High Fidelity was a little more art house kind of vibe.
Even though it was Touchstone film, meaning it was a Disney film, it was still very artsy, and how it was promoted and everything, it just hit a very intimate vibe where super Bad was a mainstream kind of balsam wall comedy that was marketing. With the Damschebus life. Luckily for me, they were sent on the most exhausting press tour of their lives. If you ask the three leads about doing a press tour for Superbad to this day now might be a lot PTSD involved because of how
much they went through. They talked to anybody you know with a microphone, and that helped me. I'm very crateil they got. They did that because I was able to find new things and these forgotten interviews on the wayback machine. I learned so much that when I talked to Joe Mahel, he didn't tell me things like he lived at his parents' house while making Superbad to get back into the mindset of being a teenager again. That's fascinating, he said at one time in one interview, and I never saw
it again. That one interview for a publication I can't even remember the name of off the top of my head. It was to look in the book. But that one interview gave me so much into the sight into his creative process. So research is the name of the game. Event.
How early I have a draft of the script? Did you manage to find or was it pretty close to what we ended up seeing at the theater?
I wasn't able to final in the earlier draft I scoured. I looked, I asked Greg Matila, I'm like, do you have an early draft and he didn't. But the closest I found was a draft right before shooting. And what was interesting was it was only a couple of months out. And by the way, I picked everybody's brain about the early drafts and I got as much background as possible on the early drafts. Seth and Devan told me a
lot about those early drafts. The draft I found had some differences even right before shooting, entire character names like Becca, who is Michael Sarah's character's love interest in the film. Her name was Helen, and they just had a bunch of different lines changes throughout, nothing too drastic. But in the early days, it was about just going to the party and it ended at the party the missions complete.
It wasn't until years later that they found the heart of the separation, anxiety and the friendship and the vulnerability of the film that really, I always say, it's not a film about you guys trying to get alcohols so they can impress their dream girls. Really it's a movie about two guys. It's their friendship. They are the movie. It's not about the girls, it's about them, And that didn't come until later on. I can't imagine two thirteen
year old to writing about that something that heavy. And also they were twenty five when the movie came out, so even people in there, I'm thirty one now, I can't imagine that it's really heavy stuff for these early twenty year olds who are not that far removed from being eighteen years old. So they had a lot of
perspective on it, and I think was really fascinating. And I did wonder while I was working on it how much treat there was to that, because in ninety nine seth Rogen gets cast on Freaks and Geeks and so he comes out to La and him and Evan are They called it a long distance kind of working partnership because Evan was still in Canada where they grew up in Vancouver, and so they were soil writing. But I wonder if a little bit of that was able to
see ben Of and seventeen drift. They never drifted apart, they were always working together, but they were in two different physical locations. I imagine a little bit of that sensibility probably made its way into the film.
As an outsider reading your book, it felt almost like the script was maturing as they were maturing.
Absolutely, the characters were thirteen when I first started, and then they aged out at eighteen because it's a high school with VI and they couldn't tell any older than that. But yeah, it matured as they were And that's something that I love about this book is that the book is also about these two guys. It's about their friendship and working relationship just as much as the movie itself.
You mentioned a lot of people that you talked to for this book. Were there people that you're trying to speak to that you weren't able to get a hold.
Of the book itself. Yeah, so it was difficult because it was in the middle of the actors and Writers' strike. Oh well, yeah, I had to rely a lot on archival stuff just due to that. Yeah, there were definitely people I wasn't able to get to, and but there are a lot of people I did get to talk to, and there are a lot of department and I had some great conversations with some people from the studio, including the Thumb studio president Ammy Pascal and Matt Tolmack, who
also worked very closely on the Face film. And yeah, a lot of department heads. Talking about the soundtrack, I love talking about the soundtrack, because the soundtrack for the film. When you have a movie called super Bad, you need to have that funky set, these vibe, and you got to go right to the source, which was the band that worked with James Brown. So Bootsy Collins and all of those guys were having basically a reunion, like some of them haven't seen each other in years at that point,
and they were together again working on super Bad. And I think over the course of four days, which I was told is a lot for working on a film school I score, I was told usually as a one day session, but especially when there's only about fifteen to twenty minutes of scoring in the film, that they really wanted to get that vibe.
I love the whole idea of them actually making full length songs for these little musical cues instead of just oh, here's a fifteen second, here's a two minutes, here's four minutes and six seconds for the first title track.
Absolutely, and I think it shows because nothing feels interstitial. It feels like every single song in the film is an actual song of that era. Down to the equipment. All of the equipment used was vintage equipment, so they were really going all in on the throwback and a vide.
Yeah, that whole thing about the drum kit that was really old or like renting old equipment rather than the top of the line gear. I thought that was fantastic and.
That was a lot of fun getting to talk about nitty gritty Earth, how the overall sound of that music came to life, and some of them sadly have passed away, So it was really helpful. There's a great kind of making of the music that really was good insight as well stocking a couple of people that were there.
I was glad to read more about the music because I always wondered how Bootsy Collins was doing that almost like narration in the last song, and I'm just like, where the hell did they get Bootsy to come on here? And so I'm glad that he was actually part of the soundtrack itself.
Yeah, they brought him in. It fits the film so well in a way. I think I wrote about it in the book.
The whole movie.
These two guys feel like fish.
Out of water.
They're outcasts. They're not in any kind of click, They're just on their own island. The two of them with Fogel and the music kind of juxtaposes that as well. It doesn't feel like they're on the same wavelength of the music, but also makes sense if that meant yeah.
And then also the clothes helped separate them both the Richard Pryor's shirt and then later on the Dad's shirt and pants.
The dad shirt and pants and the cargo pants like something no teenager would ever wear, right, Nobody was wearing that in two thousand, said even Michael Sarah wearing my order Roy and that green shirt and of course you've got me c Lovin's fluffy it is puppy shirt, yes,
and Aladdin dress like Aladdin, yes, yes, the Alabbin. It really set them apart from the rest of the teenagers because then when they get to the party, all the music at the party is of the era music, and yet when you're watching them on their journey, it's all this funky.
It helps give the film another era as well. I was rewatching it the other night and I was like, Okay, yeah, the music like you said, at the party, but then seeing a world before smartphones and I'm like, oh, yeah, I guess they are using cell phones. But it feels almost like it adds a timeless quality.
To it absolutely, and that's one of the most important things about the film to me. Somebody pointed this out, so I can't take credit for it. But one of the coolest things is they do use cell phones, but the cell phones never worked that well, and so what that tells you is that it separates them from technology. In the film, durn I think he uses reception a couple times. And then the other thing is when they're at the only hand to find technology is they're playing
video games at point. The video games I feel like doesn't date it, but that's it. And they shot on digital, but it had a real earthy kind of feel to it. It wasn't loud and vibrant and warm. It felt very of that time as well.
That was rewatching it to speak with you, And after I read the book and I had forgotten just how much of the whole fo goal in the Cops part of the movie there is. Yes, it almost feels like fifty to fifty at times, but I always in my memory thought that it was just a smaller bit. But man, they really go all out with that. And I love the way that the stories intersect and come back together at the end.
Absolutely. I think that's really important that they have that, because as interesting as it is following Seth and even on their journey, we needed a little bit more as well. As they can get heavy with the two of none at times what they're drifting apart put it, that's a comedy after all. You needed some real high stakes just off the wall you weren't, and you really got that with me Gloffin. But then the cops are just as
ridiculous as me Gluffin. As the cops ad these two bumbling idiots, it is scary how horrible at their job stay it really is.
And to read about a hater and Rogan going out on a real ride a law, Oh my god, that was gold.
I didn't follow up on it because I didn't know if this was ture or not. But I did have someone after the actual came out out. They wrote on my Twitter that's not how I remembered it. Oh, and I'm like, huh. So I looked into it, but I couldn't verify. So I didn't want to reach out because I didn't want to have some random person commenting on the book when I couldn't verify. I look up their name.
I looked up everything trying to get some kind of verification, and I couldn't quite do it, and I just didn't want to include a random person in the book. But yeah, someone did at one point reach out.
I wonder if it was one of the original cops.
I have no idea, but yeah, that all that was really fine, And that was when the article came out. And yeah, that quote with there's something two quotes there about the cops and the oral history and that. And then he also had the people that come up to him and say you inspired me to be a police officer. And I think, sock goes that is fucking terrifying. You did not understand the movie at all. If there are people but admire these two jobs, it just it blows my mustard.
So it sounds like it was great, the collaboration with all the folks that were behind the scenes and in front of the camera. But obviously there were a lot of struggles along the way, just the whole having to sit down and write this whole thing is obviously a big struggle because it just doesn't flow from the fingertips like they make it out in the movies that you can just whip up a book in a couple of days. But what were some of the other struggles that you faced.
Definitely with the writer's strike and the actors strike, that was a big struggle. It's all little things with this one, and this one I got very lucky. It didn't quite flow out of my fingertips, but over the course of over a year that I was working on it, I got very lucky with how much, like I said, research, I was able to do, how much material was out there. Not only did they do commentary, they did a commentary for the DVD, but then they also did a reunion
watch party. That was a benefit of one time only benefit that someone random person just put on YouTube. So thank you to whoever that is. You helped me a lot by doing man, but various other things, just going through archives, different libraries, looking at articles, that kind of thing. It really was all that research and in multiple interviews, I talked to fifteen different people for the book alone, in addition to all the people I talked to for
the oral history. Yeah, its struggle was just trying to navigate the strikes and think, Okay, how can I still do this? And luckily it was all able to come together as it was meant to happen. But yeah, it was a lot, and the interview has really helped Christopher Min's Pross's interview really helped a lot because he told me not for book, but for the oral hit. When he and I talked, he gave me a lot of great perspective. I'm most curious about his perspective with the
movie because he is the face of the movie. He is mclovin. He walks into a target. It's one thing to go into a store and see your face on a magazine or even a DVD or something, because it's not necessarily going to be there forever. But we've seen that McK love and ID is going to be around forever. His face is still on graphic T shirts eighteen years later. Walk down the street we Kier in La, you'll see people with the big glove and T shirt all the time.
It's just always going to be part of pop culture and the lexicon, I think. And so I wanted that perspective of someone who is constantly reminded of their eighteen year old self. And I think that's interesting and how do you deal with that? And what's it like when you get carded? And I really wanted to get into
that with him. That was so beneficial. And also what happens when the movie comes out, You're recognizable all of a sudden, you go, it's zero to sixty overnight, like all of a sudden, nobody cares about who you are. One day, it feels, and then the next day you're
getting accosted, and then Chipotle like that's wild. He and the girls gramming him, and guys taking their hands is zipping down their pants and putting their hands through Barry zipper on the pants and going, I got a bone and I got a Bononaiir and Hee's lying in the movie, and it's just horrified. He's eighteen. He's an eighteen year old kid who made a movie and all of a sudden, overnight he's having to deal with this, and he was so gracious and I'm so helpful, and I really I
do feel him. I really do. Even though the movie obviously made him down and all that stuff, I've always REALI he felt for him because I knew he got it worse than anybody else on this movie dead as far as had made to put up with the double ed short side of it, which is he's gonna have people shouting loving at him for the rest of his life. It's just gonna happen. And he's come of the term for it. It was he's very happy. He's so grateful
for this one. And I heard from the publisher that they actually spoke to him the other day and he was so happy that the book is coming out. And Christen said, I think, awhile bet that someone wrote to tell your book about our dumb little movie. And it's just it's so great that he's received it so well. But yeah, he was definitely someone that helped me a lot.
That's the thing though. It's interesting because I don't even know how old when this movie came out, and to think, oh, yeah, two thousand and seven, that means a whole generation of people have grown up with this thing. This is their high school movie when you saw this at the right age, and this was my high school movie. Yeah, like you forget about those things. Like for me, it's like more the John Hughes era of things, of course.
And I love those as well. I saw those movies before I saw Super Bad, so I have a connection to Breakfast Club and Weird Science. Farris b Ley's day Off. I'm Chicago Ank and of course I connection. But also I've got a connection to Daist in comput at least the Mayor Graffiti and not High School. But I've got a connection to Animal House. That wasn't my favorite movie. Same time that I discovered Breakfast Club, I discovered Animal House.
So I'm well versed in me comedy realm. I think super Bad holds its own right up there with all those films.
What's next for you? Do you already have your next project in mind?
I don't have anything that I can really talk about next, but I do have stuff on the horizon here. I can talk about this because there is a press release that came out about this. I am a consultant on a documentary that's in the works about Andy Kaufman.
Oh fantastic.
Yeah, I've been the Andy Kaufman historian or art biggest for the last decade. The title and the trailer haven't been anounced or anything like that. All that stuff still in the works behind the scenes, but I guess I can talk about it. David Letterman's producer The Rock is a producer on it. It's ketchen Stein.
No offense to those Foreman or anybody, but I really would have rather had a documentary than that Man on the Moon movie. So I'm excited that there are documentaries, and I'm excited to see the one You're involved with.
The thing with Man on the Moon that I've always said is what it did as far as kept Andy's name alive even beyond the movie. The best thing I think that movie can do is you see the movie, who was this guy? Then you get to go discover Andy. That's how it worked with me. I saw Man on the Moon because it was readily available when I was growing up, when I was like eleven twelve, and then I discovered Andy, and obviously my lunch shifted entirely over
to Andy and who was this guy? And I'm so fascinated with him, growing up in them, getting to meet his family and his sister is a second mother to me at this point. Literally they are my second family. And you know Andy's brother Michael, and Andy's nephew Tyler. They're all the sweetest people. They take such an interest in everything going on, and they always to me alone for the ride. So I've been there at the Hollywood
Walk of Fame ceremony. I was there when he got inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame into the National Comedy Center in James tun New York. I was at the very last Andy Kaufman Awards in New York and fortunate enough to be there for a lot of the really cool and Kaufman stuff.
Is there a good place for people to keep up with you online?
Yeah? I post a lot of stuff to my Instagram, Andrew Albuff's twitters Andrew L. Buss as well. Yeah, those are the two main places I always have stuff coming now. I'm always working on new things, and I do have one other thing I can plug with is I just did a rainy fair piece aple of weeks ago about the Saturday Night Live where I talked to a bunch of different writers from the show, seventeen different writers from
the show. I mentioned my love of the writers. I got to talk to Robert Smigel and Jim Downey, but also Paula Pell and Doctor Chatty, Chase Colin Joe's. I got to talk to all these people about the first sketch they ever got on and their first week at the show. Because I'm fascinated by being thrown to the wolves. I think that's such an interesting thing that show does, where it's like just go talking to people. They got
a sketch on their first week. Like it's mind blowing that all of a sudden you are part of the system when you first get there.
Andrew, thank you so much for your time. This is great talking with you.
It was so great to get to talk with you.
Mike.
I really appreciate you taking the ton.
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