Somewhere in a drawer in Vancouver, there is a very bad first draft of a movie about two horny, codependent teenagers trying to buy alcohol for a party. It was written by two actual, horny, codependent teenagers, and it took nearly a decade of rewrites and false starts before it became Superbad. A $20 million comedy that made $170 million, and gave the world McLovin
Development hell
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg met as kids in Vancouver, and one night after watching a particularly bad film, they said to each other, “We could write a better movie than this,” and they did. It was loosely based on their own senior year at Point Grey Secondary School in the late ‘90s.
Rogen has said while he and Goldberg never actually drifted apart the way Movie Seth and Movie Evan do nearly everything else leans real: the fake ID scheme happened, Fogell was a real friend from school, and by Rogen’s own account, most of the characters’ names belong to actual people they grew up with.
The script kept the writers’ real first names because they never landed on better ones, and by the time anyone else was reading it, Seth and Evan had just stuck. It sat around for years. Rogen was originally supposed to play Seth himself, but by the time the film finally got moving, he’d aged out of playing a high schooler, so the role went to Jonah Hill instead, with Rogen sliding into the cast as one of the two cops. The project only became financeable once Apatow’s run with The 40-Year-Old Virgin made raunchy, character-driven R-rated comedy look like a safe studio bet. Apatow, who was a fan of the script, pushed Rogen and Goldberg to write from a more emotionally honest place rather than just chasing the next dirty joke so it felt more like a “movie”.
What about the title? Rogen has credited his friend Dave Krumholtz with coming up with the name Superbad during a hangout at the Oakwood apartments in Los Angeles. Krumholtz said the title pitch was a joke because when he first read an early draft script, it was awful and he told them, they should call it SUPERBAD.
The Key was Casting
Casting director Allison Jones, the same eye behind Freaks and Geeks, The Office, and Veep, is the connective tissue of the whole film. She’d already introduced Hill to Apatow, which led to Hill’s breakout bit part in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Rogen has admitted they initially worried Hill, then 23, was too old to play a high schooler until a self-taped audition changed their minds (see below). Jason Segel actually read for the part of Evan at an early table read, back when the script “had a lot of heart,” in Apatow’s words, and Freaks and Geeks alum Martin Starr read for Fogell before all three actors eventually aged out of teenage roles.
Michael Cera almost wasn’t in the movie at all. Rogen has said it was his friend Jay Baruchel, while the two were working on Fanboys, insisted, unprompted, that Cera come in and read. Cera’s mother reportedly helped push him to take the audition seriously once the script reached her. At the audition itself, Apatow recalled that no one else was as funny as Cera.
Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s is casting legend. Jones found his camera phone headshot after papering local high schools with casting flyers, and compared him, in build and energy, to the bookish Dill from To Kill a Mockingbird.
Rogen has said the real-life Fogell was so specific that they nearly rewrote the character entirely, certain no actor could play him convincingly, until Mintz-Plasse walked in and did exactly that. It was his first professional acting job of any kind and Goldberg has said what got him the part was that, unlike every other non-actor they auditioned, he didn’t let his nerves show.
The Power of Improvisation
Hill and Cera had never met before shooting, and by their own telling they were essentially forced into a friendship boot camp before shooting began so the on-screen bond would read as real.
Mottola shot on early high-definition cameras, which meant the crew could let the cameras roll far longer than a traditional film shoot and capture tons of improvisational moments but one non scripted moment cost the film a ton. Bill Hader’s blaring of Van Halen’s “Panama” while doing donuts in the squad car was entirely his own in-the-moment choice. Apatow was reportedly furious about once he saw the music licensing bill for that ONE SONG, which according to director Greg Mottola was expensive as every song in his next film, Adventureland, combined.
FAST FACTS
The drawings: the film’s infamous penis-illustration montage was hand-drawn by Evan Goldberg’s brother, Dave who is, hilriously, now a lawyer.
The chaperone: Mintz-Plasse was 17 during filming, so his mother was required on set for his love-scene shoot with co-star Aviva Baumann.
The technical advisor: a real police consultant was let go on day one of filming for insisting Rogen and Hader’s cop antics weren’t realistic.
The opening-credits silhouette dance was originally shot as an hour of Cera improvising for what was meant to be an unlooping DVD menu screen, and only became the film’s title sequence once an editor’s assistant repurposed the footage (Hill’s dancing was filmed afterward, once everyone liked how it looked).
A FAKE Fake ID
Fogell’s fake ID reads only “McLovin”, a 25-year-old, single-named organ donor from Hawaii. It’s intentionally terrible
The single name. “McLovin” with no first name is inherently a red flag real IDs almost never have just one name field filled in.
The validity window is wrong. The ID is shown running 10 years, but Hawaii driver’s licenses at the time were only issued for 6-year terms.
The license number doesn’t match the state format. Real Hawaii license numbers start with the letter “H” followed by 8 digits.
The barcode is the wrong style. Real driver’s license barcodes evolved into 2D machine-readable formats on the back of the card not the front.
(For what it’s worth, one analyst did concede the overall visual style of the card was period-accurate for a real Hawaii license of that era.)
The ending joke, that McLovin gets arrested for statutory rape, is credited by Rogen to his own mother.
In 2019, a 20-year-old in Iowa City was arrested at a bar carrying an actual novelty “McLovin” ID with the same name and birthdate as Fogell’s, purchased on Amazon. When the story went viral, Rogen tweeted back four words: “My work here is done.”
Jonah was too Vile for Better & For Worse
The word “DTF” didn’t originate with Jersey Shore, according to Rogen, even though that’s where most people first heard it. Rogen has said Hill worked the phrase into a scene on his own, having picked it up from real taggers he knew growing up, who used it as their crew name. The line stayed in the movie, the taggers were reportedly thrilled to see it on screen, and years later the cast of Jersey Shore told Rogen directly that Superbad was where they’d gotten it.
Rogen said that Sony, which co-financed the film, decided Hill’s character was simply too “reprehensible and vile” to be seen touching one of the company’s own consoles on screen. In an early scene, Seth and Evan are shown playing video games and the studio’s instruction was that Hill’s hands could not appear anywhere near a PlayStation, out of concern that his character would reflect badly on the brand. Rogen, said he found the note “very insulting” on a personal level since Seth was based on him. In the finished film, it’s Cera’s Evan who’s seen playing a PS2 game while Seth stays conspicuously out of frame, rummaging through a closet instead.
By the numbers
Superbad opened domestically on August 17, 2007, through Sony/Columbia, and immediately became the top movie in the country, outperforming both Rush Hour 3 and The Bourne Ultimatum in its opening weekend.
Critically, it landed just as well with an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes across more than 200 reviews, with the site’s consensus praising how it balances vulgarity and sincerity without losing sight of what actually makes high school awkward. It also broke a small piece of MPAA history along the way: during ratings screenings, the board reportedly told the filmmakers this was the first movie ever to say “FingerFuck” on screen and get away with an R instead of an X.
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I got the audiobook for Seth's book, it was fun to have him read to me about Superbad
The scene where Michael Cera is forced into singing These Eyes kills me every time. "That's Jimmy's brother, he's got the voice of an angel."