A Script Written By 14-Year-Olds
Columbia Pictures
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg started writing the movie when they were still tweens, and it’s no secret that the jokes and characters were based on their own experiences. In fact, Rogen was originally going to play Jonah Hill’s character Seth, but by the time they made the movie he couldn’t pass as a (believable) high-schooler anymore.
“We wrote some of those lines when we were 14 years old, and they’re still in the movie as it will be in theaters. Which is terrifying, kind of,” said Rogen. “We were trying to tell a high school story that was truthful to our high school experience, which we just weren’t really seeing much in movies. American Pie hadn’t been made when we started writing it, actually.”
Related: 6 Crazy Ways Your Favorite TV Shows Get Written
The Two Main Characters Weren’t Supposed To Have The Writers’ Names
Columbia Pictures
Said Rogen about writing the characters of Seth and Evan: “The straight-up truth of it is, we sat down and were like, ‘Okay, let’s do this thing. First, what are we going to call the characters?’ That was our first issue, which is not the proper way to write a movie, but we just sat down and we literally couldn’t think of names. That’s how poorly we started out. So, we decided let’s just give them our names and change it later. Then someone read the script and was like, ‘Wow, it’s genius how you guys left your names in so people will remember you.’ We pretended, and we were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, that was a good move of ours.’ So we just left it in when it turned out that might be the case.”