Broken Lizard Film Update

BrokenLizardGroupShotEarlier today, I sat down and chatted with Broken Lizard’s Kevin Heffernan and Steve Lemme about the comedy troupe’s latest film, The Slammin’ Salmon, hitting theaters tomorrow. I’ll have the majority of the discussion for you then, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share what was discussed about some of the other projects they have in the pipeline, including their newest project, Rogue Scholars.

Rogue Scholars– “The new one we’re writing [for Universal] is called Rogue Scholars, where we play college professors. We’re the authority figures and our nemesis are the students, who attack us. We get into a little tit-for-tat with them. You could say that it is Super Troopers on a college campus.” – Lemme

“Or a reverse Animal House.”- Heffernan

Nutcracker– “We just gave [Slammin’ Salmon co-star Michael Clark Duncan] a script that we wrote for a big menacing linebacker at the end of his career, called Nutcracker. We were doing some interviews in New York last week for our live show and Michael was telling us he used to be a dancer. I don’t mean at strip clubs. But he used to take ballet. We were like ‘We have a script called Nutcracker’ and he didn’t believe us. We didn’t believe him that he did ballet. But we gave him the script and he loved it. So we’re going to figure out what to do with that.”- Lemme

Freeloaders– A group of friends who live for free in a rock star’s house suddenly find themselves scrambling when the singer decides to sell the home.

“That’s a movie we’ve produced. It’s done and they’re submitting it to film festivals now. Adam Duritz, the lead singer from Counting Crows, is a fan of our films and he had some guys that he worked on a script with, somewhat autobiographical, and they wanted to make a movie in the same way that we made Super Troopers. They used our infrastructure and our crew. We helped with the script and have little cameos.”- Heffernan

The Babymaker– Heffernan would star in this story of a man who finds that he has become infertile and must retrieve the last remaining vial of sperm he donated in his younger, more viral days so he and his wife can have a baby.

“That was a project at Warner Brothers. I think its still there, possibly we could make it. It got eclipsed by a few things like Rogue Scholars.”- Heffernan.

“That would be Broken Lizard creative producing.”- Lemme

“And [Broken Lizard cast mate] Jay [Chandrasekhar] would direct.”- Heffernan

Pot Quest– As promised at the end of Beer Fest.

“While it well not be a direct sequel to Beer Fest, it will be a Broken Lizard, high concept –“ – Lemme

“- pot adventure”- Heffernan

The Greek Road– Heffernan and Lemme as Greek philosophers Plato and Socrates on a road trip being interfered with by the Gods, portrayed by the other three members of the group.

“We’ve come so close so many times to getting it greenlit. When we got our deal at Warner Brothers they said we’ll greenlight any movie you want. We said ‘Here it is! We’ve been dying to make this movie.’ We were talking about shooting it in Bulgaria, shooting it in India. We just couldn’t get there and we had [the less costly] Beer Fest so that was an easy decision [for the executives].- Lemme

“Sword and sandal epics are making a come back. Because of 300 there are other ways to shoot it now from when we were trying to get it made.”- Heffernan

Super Troopers 2– “Over the course of the last few years, whenever we get some free time we go back and work on a script. So we’ve been writing the script over the course of a couple of years. We just want to get it right. We’re about four drafts in now.”- Heffernan

“Next week we’re sitting down to start work on the new draft.”- Lemme

On the film being a prequel to the original-

“That was something that happened in one interview where we joked about it and were like ‘oh that would be pretty cool. The 70s and we could play our dads and drive our hot rods…’ But actually, with that one we’re going to pick up right where the story left off.”- Lemme

“I think people want to see what happens next. Pure sequel. There was a push to do a sequel very quickly after the first movie came out, but we wanted to make some other movies to do some other things. It’s a blast when we sit down to write it. When you write a script from scratch, you have to make up the characters and the way they talk. But when you revisit somebody, you’ve already established that so it’s a very simple writing process. ‘Mac would say that… Farva would say that… That’s hysterical.’”- Heffernan

“I’m 50 pages in to the new draft and just nice seeing those guys and how O’Hagan is reprimanding everybody and the obnoxious things Farva is saying. It’s going to be fun, but we want to be careful with that.”- Lemme

Avatar für Rich Drees
About Rich Drees 7185 Articles
A film fan since he first saw that Rebel Blockade Runner fleeing the massive Imperial Star Destroyer at the tender age of 8 and a veteran freelance journalist with twenty-five years experience writing about film and pop culture. He is a member of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle.
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments