The real smart kids

The film “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” opens normally enough for a teen comedy -- two young white guys are racing out of their office to try to “get some.” They turn to the requisite Asian cubicle drone, Harold, and half cajole, half bully him into doing their work. He reluctantly agrees, and they run off singing.

Suddenly, though, we veer off the beaten-to-death track. The movie shifts to Harold (John Cho), who morphs from drone to person. Put upon, lovelorn, uptight -- and fully realized -- Harold is soon perfectly matched by his smooth, laid-back, wisecracking best friend, Kumar (Kal Penn). The movie swings into action with a bong and a quest: to find the ideal munchies.

But wait -- the two leads, they’re not, well, white. And they’re not nerds, or gurus, or kung fu fighters. They’re just guys, acting with as little grace and clarity as any young white male protagonist who’s having a life-altering night in a movie. What’s going on here?

Don’t adjust your screen. This production has been brought to you in living color.

How could such subversion happen, in a mainstream Hollywood movie of all places? Blame the writers for wanting to make a film that looked like real life.

Screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, 26 and 25, respectively, are two clean-cut Jewish boys from suburban New Jersey whom you could take home to meet your mother, as long as she doesn’t see “Harold & Kumar,” opening Friday. They’ve been friends since high school, bonding over movies like “Kingpin.” They went to separate colleges, where Hurwitz was a finance major and Schlossberg was pre-law, but they always talked about writing screenplays together.

“Halfway through college we realized we didn’t want to do what we were planning to do for a living,” Hurwitz says. “And we were very frustrated with the state of comedy in movies at that time” because there didn’t appear to be any characters who represented them or their buddies.

They wrote their first script, which they sold to MGM. (“Harold & Kumar” is their fourth sold script, and the first to reach the multiplex.) The two happily ditched their previous career plans and moved to Los Angeles. About that time, “American Pie” came out, containing the first Asian character they could relate to -- a regular, ridiculous, horny teenager played by Cho. The portrayal encouraged the young writers.

“It wasn’t like in the old John Hughes days, where I felt like a lot of writers and directors used Asian and Indian people as foreign exchange students,” Schlossberg says. (Tellingly, in “Harold & Kumar,” Harold mentions that “Sixteen Candles” is his favorite film, bringing to mind the blatant Asian stereotype in that movie.)

Hurwitz says that their main objective in writing “Harold & Kumar” was to make the characters feel like actual people. “I think with most people in their everyday lives, whether you’re Jewish, Asian, black, every now and then your background comes up. And we just let it lace through there every now and then with the characters.”

Danny LEINER, who directed the film, initially didn’t even want to read the script because he expected the same old story. “The thought of doing another stoner road trip really had very little appeal,” says Leiner, who directed “Dude, Where’s My Car?” “But (a) it was hilarious and (b) it had that ethnic component. It wasn’t two white guys, or a white guy and black guy. That’s so played.”

Leiner found that his leads brought a depth to the characters’ adventures from their own experiences of being pigeonholed into certain roles in their careers.

What was it like portraying Kumar?

“So refreshing,” says Penn, who is a marvel of insouciance in the role. “When you train to be an actor, you don’t think to yourself, ‘I’m training to be an Indian actor.’ It’s not until I moved to L.A. that I realized race really overrides talent.” He says casting directors and producers repeatedly told him that America wasn’t ready for an Indian actor in a nonstereotypical part.

“Artistically, independent of race, it was amazing to play a lead in a movie,” Penn says. “And then obviously because of what I’ve noticed and experienced, it’s very refreshing to play a role in kind of the all-American road trip movie, with characters whose ethnicity is not ignored by the film but also is not used to advance the plot. It really is about guys who could have come from any walk of life.”

The experience crystallized for Penn at a screening for a predominantly white audience in Columbus, Ohio. A scene came on in which our heroes triumph over a bunch of extreme jerks, and Kumar uses a phrase that had been used to insult him earlier, in a lilting Indian accent. The audience erupted in applause.

“John and I were standing in back of the theater,” Penn recalls, “and that came up, and we just gave each other a hug.” What went through Penn’s head at that moment was: “Those studios are wrong. The ones that have used race to justify a lack of diverse or realistic casting, this just proves that they’re wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

For all that, “Harold & Kumar” isn’t a message movie by a long shot. The writers made a point of not making a point. Says Hurwitz: “We didn’t want to make ‘Harold & Kumar Have a Chip on Their Shoulder.’ ”