We Hate to Guess What Was on the Buffet

The Scene: Tuesday’s premiere of TriStar and Touchstone’s “Starship Troopers” at the Village theater. A party followed at the Museum of Flying. The film is director Paul Verhoeven’s spoofy, campy, ludicrously violent close-encounters-with-killer-bugs epic. “I grew up with ‘RoboCop’ and ‘Total Recall’ and this is a progression on that,” said Harry Knowles, founder of the Ain’t It Cool News Web site the entertainment industry both loves and loathes. “It’s something we’ve never seen with a sci-fi film. We’ve never seen an alien on that type of scale. That might be a weak reason to make a movie, but it’s a damn good reason for me to go see it.”

Who Was There: Verhoeven; stars Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Patrick Muldoon, Clancy Brown and Neil Patrick Harris. (Many in the cast had their first brush with fame on Aaron Spelling-produced TV shows--so the film’s been dubbed “Melrose Space” and “Starship, 90210.”) Among the 1,400 guests were Mark Hamill, Tim Allen, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Matt LeBlanc, Harry Hamlin, Rob Friedman, Mike Medavoy, Lou Pitt, Brad Krevoy and studio execs John Calley, Bob Levin and Chris Lee.

The Buzz: When a jaded industry audience laughs, gasps and enthusiastically applauds, this is a good sign. Said one savant: “Right film, right time. People are hungry for an action movie after a summer that never really paid off.”

What the Film Says: In the future, we’ll have Frederic Fekkai hair, Mt. Rushmore-style chiseled chins, lips so vibrantly full they look like caterpillars have been implanted, Pepsodent smiles, blue contact lenses, Erik Estrada’s acting style and still wear tuxedos.

The Directorial Method: “On the first day we were asking Paul what our motivation was and over-analyzing the scene,” recalled Denise Richards, “He got frustrated and said: ‘It’s an action film! It’s about bugs killing people!’ ”

Quoted: Verhoeven on why he made the film--”I wanted to make a movie about giant bugs. Clearly.”

Subject of Discussion: That the film has an R rating, but a target audience of young teens. “An R never kept me out of a theater when I was 13,” said director John Singleton.