MrSkin.com sat down with Beta House screenwriter Erik Lindsay to talk about his new movie, the previous Pies, and raunchy puberty farces of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
The bar has been set pretty high by the previous American Pie (Picture: 1) movies. What can we expect from the sixth installment?
OK, the first one is a classic, obviously. I don't think any sequel's ever going to top that. It was a once-in-a-generation film. I think the second and third movies were pretty good, and American Pie Presents Band Camp (Picture: 1) was kind of an anomaly.With American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile (Picture: 1) we got the chance to re-jump the franchise with a totally new cast, and the response was so great that now we're doing a true sequel with Beta House.
What excites you about the teen-sex-comedy genre?
What excites me about it is that it's a wide-open world and you're never going to run out of material in this world. Some of the themes that we're dealing with in the American Pie movies are universal and they go back to when your grandparents were having sex.The brilliance of American Pie, I think even more so than Porky's (Picture: 1), is that it lets you get away with all these ridiculous jokes because at the heart of it, there's heart. You actually care about the characters and it's not just a come-shot joke for a come-shot joke reason. There's a story behind it and it helps to develop the character. It sets him back two steps in his quest for the Holy Grail, which is usually getting laid.
We're keeping to that theme in this movie, but one of the great things about Beta House is that I don't have to deal with the virgin plot anymore. Everyone is sexually active and everyone has been sexually active. It's a college movie, and I really enjoy being able to take off those handcuffs as a writer and let the characters go a little bit.
So it's easier to write for characters who are in college than it is for characters who are in high school?
The thing is that when you're writing for high school, you have to straddle that lineis this kid a sophomore or is he a junior? Then the studio weighs in, "Are they drinking? How much are they drinking? Is there any driving involved?" Then when you get to college, it's like, lookwe've all been to college. Fucking anything goes. If you've had a 10 p.m. curfew your entire life, the second you land in the dorm room you can drop all your classes and stay out until 4 a.m. partying. Then when you go home for Thanksgiving break, if you keep your mouth shut, you can go back and finish off [the semester] partying before you parents find out your grades.What do you keep in mind when you're writing a nude scene?
With American Pie (Picture: 1) it's a little different than with Bound (Picture: 1) or with Basic Instinct (Picture: 1). You've got to find that fun balance between boobs bouncing around and hot sex, but there's got to be a joke somewhere in it. Going all the way back to that Shannon Elizabeth (Picture: 1) sceneas sexy as that was, there was a joke involved there.And pretty much in almost every scene in an American Pie movie where there's sex involved, there's some kind of joke involved with it. Except for some of the sweet moments in the end, like in Stifler's cottage in the first one, or at the end of The Naked Mile where Erik actually loses his virginity to his girlfriend, Tracy [Jessy Schram], and runs away from the hot sorority girl [Candace Kroslak] (Picture: 1). That's the sweet moment.
But try to think of raunchy and sexy, something that's going to drive teenagers crazy but that's also going to make twenty-year-olds and even fifty-year-olds laugh and get the story because something else is going to come full circle from that.
What actress today would you most like to write a raunchy scene for?
Let's see . . . who's the most uptight? Jennifer Love Hewitt (Picture: 1).What would you have her do?
Female ejaculation. We've already got someone doing that [in this movie]. No, something like in Bound. No humor involved. Like in Basic Instinctjust straight thrown-up-against-the-wall sex.What is your favorite nude scene, and what is the first nude scene you remember seeing?
Jesus, I don't even remember the first one, I was so young. Because where I grew up we had cable boxes and my buddy taught me how to turn my cable box into a black box by sticking an index card into it. We had all the late-night stuff like Emmanuelle (Picture: 1). Complete Skinemax. And then I had this crazy friend in sixth grade who had the actual old school VHS porn. So that got passed around.
We had seen stuff like Red Shoe Diaries (Picture: 1) on Cinemax, but this was the whole thingthe bullshit, public-school sex education in full 3-D. We were like, "Oh, that's how it's done! That fucking gym teacher is full of shit, man!" Those are my first experiences with it. Maybe that's why I'm so screwed up writing these movies.
And your favorite nude scene?
It would probably be the threesome scene from Wild Things (Picture: 1) with Neve Campbell and Denise Richards. Maybe it's because I'm doing a schoolgirl party in this movie, but when she drops that little schoolgirl skirt, it's like, this is ridiculous.And how much of your own experience did you draw from in writing The Naked Mile and Beta House?
These scripts are 95 to 98 percent biographical, which is kind of frightening to my parents, probably. But yeah, all the money that I spent on booze, extracurricular activities, and strip bars has come full circle in the last two movies. So everybody who told me I was wasting my money over the last twenty years, just look at the DVD shelves, baby, because it's all coming back. Every dollar I dropped into a G-string has come back tenfold on me.What would you say to someone seeing Beta House without having seen an American Pie movie before?
I would say give it a chance to stand on its own. This is one of the first movies where we're not running away from Animal House (Picture: 1). Animal House is the gold standard of frat movies and it always will be. Nothing is ever going to top that.But we decided we're going to make a straight pledging movie. I was in a fraternity for six years, stayed in college way too long. I was a real life Van Wilder before there even was Van Wilder (Picture: 1). I said, look, "Let's make a straight pledging movie. No one's done it since 1981. It's a new generation, there's all kinds of shit that we can tap into. Let's not hide from the toga party."
We've got a toga party with 250 girls in some of the sexiest togas you've ever seen in your life dancing in ways that they didn't dance in the '60s. We're going to be compared to Animal House, but at the end of the day people are going to laugh their asses off.
American Pie Presents: Beta House (Picture:1) will be available on DVD on December 23, 2007.
