LOS ANGELES — Adam Herz, the screenwriter whose raunchy “American Pie” was a sleeper hit in 1999, wanted to set the record straight before the release here of “American Pie 2.”
He never got fresh with baked goods, the 28-year-old said in answer to a question everyone has been asking since the film’s infamous pastry scene made pop culture history. He did not make a pact with his high school buddies to lose his virginity before graduation (though lose his virginity he did). He never got caught watching a scrambled porn channel with a sock on his member. His dad didn’t try to educate him about sex with a copy of “Jugs” magazine.
“It’s just that I always wanted to bring back the kind of teen movie where partying and sex were of the utmost importance,” said the cocky, wickedly funny writer. “But I wanted the characters to be like real, actual kids who acted like I did when I was a teenager. So I just wrote the way we talked and the types of people that I knew.”
“Pie,” opening in Bay Area theaters today, is another example of how Hollywood takes one Jew’s experience and transforms it into a pop culture phenomenon. The movie, which grossed about $240 million worldwide, obviously resonated for many.
Before Herz’s Jim, there was Jerry Seinfeld, whose Jewish neuroses provided the biggest laughs on TV in the ’80s and ’90s. Billy Crystal and his cronies lived out their Jewish childhood fantasies on the range in the movies “City Slickers” (1991) and “City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold (1994).
The NBC hit “Will & Grace,” created by David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, is based on the friendship between the gay Mutchnick and a straight Jewish woman. “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David essentially plays himself — an ascerbic curmudgeon — in HBO’s darkly comic “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Now comes another slice of “Pie,” which will again turn a geeky Jewish kid and his friends into the summer’s uncontested teenage heroes.
The character of Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) is reminiscent of the brainy kids who squeamishly avoided the bathroom at Herz’s school. Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) is like the doofus who repeated her band camp stories ad nauseum in Herz’s physics class. Jim (Jason Biggs) is the likeable shlemazel who couldn’t get to first base with girls. “His thing is all about his insecurity,” Herz confides. “At his age, I also used to get very nervous and tense up and withdraw around girls.”
Even today, he quips, “I don’t do ‘good date.’ And the only other dates I can find are the women who don’t do ‘good date.’ So we butt heads and it’s just futile.”
In the sequel — which takes place the summer after the characters go off to college — we officially learn that Jim, like Herz, is Jewish. His last name, Levenstein, is revealed just after a humiliating sequence involving Superglue and a sensitive body part. “In my mind, Jim, like me, is a guy who had a bar mitzvah but protested going to Sunday school,” says Herz, who identifies more with the cultural aspects of Judaism.
He was one of only a few Jewish kids at his high school in East Grand Rapids, Mich., but that didn’t stop him from being elected president of his class. He says his classmates were too ignorant to be anti-Semitic. “It was like, ‘So, you’re Jewish. Have you gotten your Christmas tree yet?'” Herz recalls.
One of his primary goals in high school was drinking and partying. His term paper of choice at the University of Michigan: dissecting teen flicks such as “Porkys.”
A few months after graduation in 1996, Herz was working as a production assistant in Los Angeles when a friend suggested he try writing. Within a year, he had a manager and a project labeled “Untitled Teenage Sex Comedy Which Can Be Made for Under Ten Million Dollars Which Studio Readers Will Hate But We Think You Will Love.”
He wrote the infamous pie scene after reflecting that “warm apple pie” is the kind of metaphor a naive teenage boy might use for “third base.”
Herz was 25 the day his script went out to five studios on Jan. 23, 1998. Hours later, he’d made $650,000. His response to the sale: “I yelled ‘Holy s–‘ many times,” he says.
Though a “Pie” sequel was a no-brainer, Herz was initially reluctant to write it. “The last thing I wanted was to get pegged as ‘that teen comedy guy,'” he says.
He caved in when his schedule cleared and another scribe fell through; for inspiration, he put all his old fake ID’s on his writing desk. He also recalled the summer after his freshman year of college, when he painted houses with his old high school buddies and daydreamed about sexy housewives inviting him inside for lemonade. His characters come to the same realization as Herz did that summer: “In high school, friendships are automatic, because you see your friends every day,” says the writer and executive producer of “Pie 2.” “After you go away to college, the relationships take work.”
Herz will explore his current dating pet peeves in an untitled project he’s slated to write and direct for Universal. “In high school and college, you can date with impunity,” he explains. “But in your [late 20s], there’s the pathos and the desperation. It’s like, ‘Can I pleeeeease buy you a sandwich?’ I just hate that.”