Same guys, dumber stunts

TURNING the hit MTV series “Jackass” into a feature-length film sent star Johnny Knoxville to the emergency room only three, maybe four times; he can’t really recall. One stunt gone awry left him in an overturned vehicle with a bloody gash on his head, footage of which is shown in the film with an off-screen voice yelling, “Don’t move him!”

“It’s healed, I think,” Knoxville says over lunch at a West Hollywood dive. “Not that many stitches. Seven or eight.” With the injury coming after a series of concussions he suffered on the TV show, Knoxville began having bouts of vertigo. “Finally they gave me some medicine that made it go away a little, but I still get it,” he says.

“Jackass,” which ended after three seasons as MTV’s highest-rated show at the time, was all about this kind of self-destruction. Knoxville and his cohorts pioneered a new brand of squirm-inducing, moronic-yet-riveting diversions, in segments such as “beard of leeches,” “human BBQ” and “slingshot skateboarding.” It was a new low for reality TV: idiotic pratfalls almost guaranteed to fail, executed by gutsy young men who would apparently do anything.

The 90-minute “Jackass, the Movie,” which opens next Friday, takes the crude pranks, breakneck stunts and nudity-filled shenanigans to even greater extremes. It’s simply a larger version of their lowbrow indulgences. As Knoxville puts it, “Same crew, same cast, same level of incompetence.”

“The guys really just let loose,” says “Jackass” co-creator and director Jeff Tremaine. “They were all pent up and ready to go. When Paramount committed to an R-rated movie, everyone was just gung-ho.”

Some would say they’re lucky to have a movie at all. After a rash of backyard imitators, including a 13-year-old Connecticut boy who suffered second- and third-degree burns while attempting a “Jackass”-type stunt, there were threats of legal action and calls for MTV to pull the show, most notably from Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.).

“I do feel horrible that it happened to that kid,” Knoxville says. “But no, I don’t feel responsible for that.” He and Tremaine say the show and the movie carry strict warnings against copying anything, that any videotapes sent in by viewers are returned unopened and that they tried to avoid easily imitable stunts in the film.

Even Knoxville was initially cool to the idea of a film version, though for a different reason. He believed that after 24 episodes, the television series had gone as far as it could go. Four months after the last show aired, however, Tremaine says, “I think everyone missed the antics. The ideas were flying out of us.” A movie looked more and more like a possibility.

Among the arsenal of props assembled for their big-screen debauchery: alligators, firecrackers, mousetraps, wasabi, tightropes, panda outfits, and -- as usual -- all manner of human excretion. With an upgrade to a movie-sized $5-million budget, the “Jackass” troupe was able to go international, wreaking havoc from Mexico to England to Japan, where they did “things that would have got you beat down in the United States,” Knoxville says. “We almost got thrown out of our hotel every night,” Tremaine adds.

The movie was shot in six months, with one to eight Digital Beta cameras capturing the mayhem. Given that mayhem, the cast thought it unlikely that the finished film would be approved by the MPAA ratings board. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s one of the naughtiest films ever to get an R rating,” Knoxville says. “They should have given us an R-plus.”

To the “Jackass” team’s surprise, they didn’t have to cut any of the bits, only avoid “lingering,” or spending too much time on provocative images. “We constantly had to keep sending it back and forth,” Tremaine says. “But we ended up with the movie we wanted.” Tremaine adds that they wanted the film to be R-rated to keep young kids out.

Knoxville sees “Jackass, the Movie” as a coda to the series and is unenthusiastic about the prospect of a sequel. “People become inured to the type of comedy we do after a time,” Knoxville says. “We all want to quit before that happens.”

He does allow, however, that “we did have quite a few ideas that we didn’t get to.” Fans can catch DVDs of the second and third seasons of “Jackass” in December. (The rights to the first season have not been cleared.) For now, Knoxville, who lives in L.A., will focus on his fledgling movie career, which has included supporting parts in this year’s “Men in Black II,” “Big Trouble” and “Deuces Wild.”

Knoxville, Tremaine and director Spike Jonze are also working on a pilot for Fox, and Knoxville still hopes to star in the comedy “The Ringer,” with the Farrelly brothers producing, and the action-comedy “Big Ticket,” both of which have been stuck in development.

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Essential viewing

Before they were “Jackasses,” the crash-helmet crew were already infamous for their antics in a series of skateboard videos-- leaving behind a hilarious trail of videotape.

Big Brother Magazine’s “Number Two”

(1998), “Boob” (1999), “Crap” (2001), Big Brother Video

CKY (Camp Kill Yourself): “Landspeed” (1999), “CKY2K” (2000), “CKY 3” (2001), Ventura Distribution

“Don’t Try This at Home: The Steve-O Video & The Career Ender” (2001), Image Entertainment

“MTV’s Jackass Volume 2 & 3” (coming Dec. 10), Paramount Home Video