If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Westwood

Milling around a food court in UCLA’s Ackerman Union, the five members of the comedy troupe Broken Lizard--Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Eric Stolhanske--could easily be mistaken for graduate students taking a smoothie break. Instead they are waiting for the end of a screening of “Super Troopers,” a film they have written, directed and starred in, so they can field questions from the college audience.

On the fifth day of a 37-day tour that will take them to 24 colleges from Seattle to New York, they are all in good spirits, excited about the trip and the nationwide release of their Fox Searchlight film on Friday.

After patiently talking one-on-one with audience members, signing some free posters and answering more questions, they will pile into a tour bus with their likenesses on the sides and ride all night to the next day’s appearance in Phoenix. It’s like a rock tour--without the rock stars or the groupies or the roadies.

Their driver proudly recalls such previous passengers as the Allman Brothers and the Doobie Brothers. The tour manager has a leather jacket and a British accent.

The Spinal Tap jokes are not lost on anyone.

They’ve traveled a long distance from their first film, the 1996 indie comedy “Puddle Cruiser,” which they booked and promoted on their own at colleges around the Northeast. One of the stops was Colgate University in upstate New York, where the group was formed in 1989. Unable to secure distribution even after successful screenings at the Sundance Film Festival, they hoped the tour would both raise awareness and maybe make a little money back for the private investors who financed the $250,000 picture.

Comparing the two tours, Stolhanske jokes, “The big difference is the bus. Last time we were all stuffed into a Winnebago and did the driving, which is probably how we ended up in a frozen Vermont ditch.”

“We also had to set up our own press,” recalls Soter. “Now there’s TV ads, radio ads, print ads. It’s just bigger.”

“The last one we couldn’t get enough schools to take us,” laments Lemme. “By the time we knew what we were doing, it was over.”

So when it came time to make another film, they pursued studio financing with the assistance of Jersey Shore, the specialized arm of the Jersey Films production company, which originally saw the project as a possible TV show.

But when that fell through, they again turned to private financing.

A college friend, whom they refer to only as Cricket, introduced them to her father, a retiring investment banker interested in pursuing film finance. He provided the $1.3-million budget for “Super Troopers.”

“We went in to studios and said we want to make this movie, we’re going to star in it, he’s going to direct it, give us the money, and we’ll make it,” Heffernan recalls. “And they’d just laugh, like who are you? So ultimately we had to go do it ourselves.”

Adds Soter, “But the association with Jersey helped to put a more legitimate tag on the project for casting. And the investor certainly felt more comfortable because of it.”

For Fox Searchlight, which paid $3.25 million for distribution rights after a midnight screening at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, the tour is no laughing matter. Although “Super Troopers” is a broad comedy about a bumbling band of small-town cops without Farrelly-style gross-outs or “American Pie”-style raciness, its R rating precludes marketing the film to anyone younger than 17. (The R rating is for language, sexual content and drug use.)

That leaves the 17-to-25 age bracket as the film’s primary target. Additionally, according to Fox Searchlight’s marketing president, Nancy Utley, reaching that age group requires that the film open wide on more than 1,000 screens, an extremely large number for a relatively small film.

After a post-Sundance marketing meeting, where the Broken Lizard team related their college tour experiences with “Puddle Cruiser,” it was decided to use the same tactic with “Super Troopers.”

Although sneak preview screenings on college campuses around the country are not uncommon, and directors or actors sometimes drop by schools in major markets--DreamWorks did this for “American Beauty” (1999) and Woody Allen often does so for his films--an outing of this scope is unusual.

The group ethos of Broken Lizard was at least partly responsible for making the tour a possibility, as the logistics of getting the creative team together for such an extended period would normally make the idea cost prohibitive and unworkable. With the troupe performing its sketch comedy routines before the movie and answering questions afterward, the tour could be a return to old-time roadshows, but with a decidedly computer-age twist.

“The reason we’re attracted to this idea,” Utley says, “is really because of the Internet. College people in particular are on the Internet constantly, and we thought it would be great to see if word of mouth can snowball by touring the guys and having the college kids tell each other about the movie through the Internet.”

Perhaps the tour’s only real drawback is that there is no real way to measure its success as a promotional tool.

“It’s uncharted territory,” Utley says. “The whole cost of the tour, including the bus, hotels, food and so on, is less than half the cost of a 30-second prime-time TV spot. I have to believe exposing the movie in person to thousands of college students across the country is going to be more effective than one TV spot. And if the movie opens well and is successful, we’ll have to attribute part of that success to the tour.”

“It’s a great way to meet people,” Stolhanske says. “You actually talk to people and connect with them, so they take away something more. It’s great exposure.”

Finishing the thought, Heffernan adds, “It lets students feel they’re part of something fun and underground, which makes it seem more worth their while.”

Keeping in mind what Heffernan refers to as their “comedy franchise,” all five are also pursuing outside projects. Stolhanske recently filmed a part on the popular HBO series “Six Feet Under,” and Heffernan, Lemme and Soter are developing a script with Fox Searchlight. All the members of the troupe appear in the movie and share writing credit.

It is Chandrasekhar, though, who seems the furthest on his way to forging a career outside the fold. Besides officially directing the two Broken Lizard features, Chandrasekhar has directed episodes of the Fox TV show “Undeclared” and was recently tapped by Nike to shoot a series of Olympic tie-in spots with Charles Barkley and Marion Jones.

He acts surprisingly blase about his status as an up-and-coming director, genuinely preferring to focus instead on the future of the group. “It’s not that I don’t care about anything else,” he says. “But we’ve got five finished scripts. If we’re lucky and people go to our movie, we could make another seven or eight films together, ideally one a year. And that would take up most of our time. Right now I’m happy just making movies with these guys.”

If nothing else, Chandrasekhar is perfectly clear on what he does not want to do. “I haven’t had to punch the clock yet in this job, and I don’t look forward to the day when that happens. Everybody has a cold streak and takes some lousy job, but I won’t direct a multi-camera sitcom with a laugh track. I’d rather not work in show business.”

Chandrasekhar takes his comedy very seriously. “When people compliment us, they say, ‘That movie was so stupid, it was awesome!’ They probably don’t realize we wrote 25 drafts of the script. Every moment is crafted so that hopefully it’s stupid in the smartest way.”

He mentions with pride that he was able to bring in George Folsey, editor of the John Landis-John Belushi films “The Blues Brothers” and “Animal House,” to help edit a few minutes from “Super Troopers” for its theatrical release.

“What is so great about those Landis films, and what we’re trying to do,” he says, placing special emphasis on the word “trying,” “was to make a great film that’s really funny.”

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Mark Olsen is an occasional contributor to Calendar.