From the Tribune

Howland native gets directing credit on film February 18, 2004 By ANDY GRAY Tribune Chronicle Jeff Schaffer can thank a Czechoslovakian Buddhist production assistant for his first directing credit. The Howland native wrote for ''Seinfeld'' and ''Late Night with Conan O'Brien'' on television and did screenplays for ''How the Grinch Stole Christmas'' and ''The Cat in the Hat.'' Much of his television writing and all of his film work has been in collaboration with his writing partners, Alec Berg and David Mandel. They took the same approach when DreamWorks paid them $3 million for their script ''The Ugly Americans'' and hired them to direct it. The trio worked together behind the camera in Prague, Czechoslovakia, but the Directors Guild of America is protective of the belief that the director is the author of the film. A movie can have many screenwriters, but the DGA prefers one director, occasionally two and almost never three. When the DGA wouldn't allow a triple credit on the movie, now called ''Eurotrip,'' Schaffer said they invited one of the production assistants into their office and asked him to draw a name out of a hat. Schaffer won the drawing and the directing credit on the film, which opens Friday in 2,500 theaters nationwide. The movie is a throwback to the raucous and raunchy teen comedies of the 1980s. Instead of toning down the action and trying to get that PG-13 rating that will allow young audiences to see the movie, ''Eurotrip'' revels in its R rating with bawdy bits and bare bodies, both male and female. ''This is a movie about teen-agers going on a crazy Europeran trip,'' Schaffer said during a telephone interview last week from his office in southern California. ''You don't do a teen sex comedy and make it PG-13.'' Schaffer said his parents, Dr. Robert and Ellen Schaffer of Howland, would be seeing the completed movie for the first time this week at the Los Angeles premiere, but he wasn't worried about their reaction. ''You have to look at it in a longer perspective,'' Schaffer said. ''They sent a child to Harvard who was maybe going to go pre-med. Three years later he tells them he's going to L.A. and write sitcoms. That was the big shock. This is nothing.'' The idea behind ''Eurotrip'' was to write a movie that could be made cheaply enough that a studio would let the writers direct it. As supervising producers on ''Seinfeld,'' they were used to working with the actors and having a say in the final product. ''The only way that we could approach that level of control in movies is to direct,'' Schaffer said. ''Everything we did on this movie, we did on a smaller scale on 'Seinfeld.''' When they started pre-production, they realized their little movie wasn't so little. ''Once we started breaking it down, we realized this is a road movie. You're changing locations every day, working with a new guest cast everyday, usually outside. We were shooting on a moving train, working with animals, fire, everything.'' Schaffer drew on his northeast Ohio roots for the movie. The lead characters graduate from Hudson High School in the opening of the film (Schaffer is a graduate of Western Reserve Academy in Hudson), and at one point a character says Europe is, ''The size of Eastwood Mall.'' Hudson and all of Europe is played by Prague with Academy Award-winning production designer Allan Starski (''Schindler's List'') adapting Czechoslovakia for the different locations. ''Shooting in Prague is a great place for carpentry and set building done cheap, but try finding an American keg or an American tap or those Solo plastic cups they have at every keg party,'' Schaffer said. ''We kept describing to the prop people what we wanted, and they were looking at us like we're crazy.'' Schaffer turned to his parents for help when it came to decorating the Hudson bedroom of the lead character. ''I told them, 'Go to the Indians shop, buy it out and ship it over','' and a Jim Thome figurine and a Jacobs Field poster can be spotted in the final film. The four lead actors in ''Eurotrip'' are relatively unknown. Michelle Trachtenberg starred in ''Harriet the Spy'' at age 10 and played Dawn for two seasons on ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer,'' but Scott Mechlowicz, Jacob Pitts and Travis Webster have few screen credits. One of the reasons the filmmakers went with unknowns is that they wanted to avoid the common ''teen'' comedy problem of having actors who are closer to 30 playing the roles. ''We wanted people who looked like they just got out of high school,'' he said. ''A lot of the people you know from teen movies, by the time you want them, they're either too old or they don't want to do another teen movie.'' A different set of concerns involved the minor roles, including Matt Damon as the lead singer in a punk band and Lucy Lawless as the dominatrix at an Amsterdam sex club. Screen Actors Guild rules require first-class airfare, which is $10,000 to Czechoslovakia. To avoid the expense on a tight budget, Schaffer, Berg and Mandel first started looking for actors who already were in Europe. Damon, who they've known for years, was shooting "The Brothers Grimm'' in the country, agreed to do a day of filming. Jeffrey Tambor, who they knew from working on ''How the Grinch Stole Christmas,'' also was filming in Europe. Lawless had been shooting a movie in Ireland, and they were able to get her to take a side trip to Eastern Europe before flying home to New Zealand.