Movies

The Beer Has Not Gone Bad: How ‘Can’t Hardly Wait’ Became a Teen Cult Classic

Twenty years later, the cast and crew share the behind-the-scenes story of how the film got made—and how it finally found its audience

Movies

The Beer Has Not Gone Bad: How ‘Can’t Hardly Wait’ Became a Teen Cult Classic

Twenty years later, the cast and crew share the behind-the-scenes story of how the film got made—and how it finally found its audience

By Andrew GruttadaroJune 11, 2018, 10:30 am UTC • 16 min

When Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, writing partners in their late 20s who had just finished the script for 1996’s A Very Brady Sequel, were trying to come up with an idea for a movie they could both write and direct, they asked themselves one question: “What could we do if we wanted to make a movie for as little as possible?”

“OK, well, we have a house or an apartment and we have a lot of young actor friends who are unemployed,” Kaplan remembers thinking.

“Like, young,” Elfont adds. “Like, a lot of them played high-schoolers and we thought, ‘We should do a throwback to John Hughes.’ And we also talked a lot about Say Anything, specifically the party scene, and then we were like, ‘What if that’s the whole movie?’”

For a couple of writers without much money trying to become first-time directors, the idea seemed inspired. Elfont and Kaplan could rent a place, gather up all their friends, throw a literal party that’d last an entire weekend, and then boom—there’s your movie. “Then as we wrote it, we realized that’s a crazy idea,” Elfont laughs. “We could never actually do that.”

But it turns out they more or less could. Can’t Hardly Wait is, true to Elfont and Kaplan’s initial idea, a party scene stretched out into an entire movie. Focusing on a handful of high school archetypes—the hopeless romantic everyman, the jock, the nerd, the prettiest girl in school, the one who desperately wants to get laid—it weaves through a house party thrown the night of graduation, a night that signifies the end of one part of a teenager’s life and the beginning of another. It is, essentially, a series of smaller stories stitched together and united by the fact that they all take place at the same tumultuous rager. There are two love stories; there’s the captain of the football team’s tragic fall from grace; there are coming-of-age stories; there’s the class dork taking his first sip of beer and exclaiming, “THE BEER HAS GONE BAD.”

Released on June 12, 1998, the movie is one of the forefathers of the late ’90s teen movie craze. Following in Clueless’s footsteps, Can’t Hardly Wait helped pave the way for movies like She’s All That, Drive Me Crazy, and 10 Things I Hate About You. It is a time capsule, not only because of its loud fashion and Smash Mouth–and–Blink-182–heavy soundtrack, but because movies like it—major studio teen/rom-com flicks—no longer exist. And, of course, because its cast from top to bottom is loaded with ’90s icons or young actors who would go on to have extremely successful careers. There are Ethan Embry, Breckin Meyer, Melissa Joan Hart, and Jennifer Love Hewitt, but also Seth Green, Lauren Ambrose, Peter Facinelli, Charlie Korsmo, Jaime Pressly, Donald Faison, Sean Patrick Thomas, and Freddy Rodriguez, as well as Jerry O’Connell, Selma Blair, Clea Duvall, and Jason Segel in “blink and you’ll miss it” cameos.

Can’t Hardly Wait didn’t dominate at the box office, or even make year-end best-of lists, but it’s stuck to viewers’ ribs. “I meet [people] who are like, ‘Dude, that movie, I loved it, I watched it so many times,’” says Embry. “It means something to people.”

“Over the years, slowly, gradually, it’s just one of those movies that’s had staying power,” says Facinelli. “And people kept watching from different generations. I mean, my kids have watched that movie.” The little movie Elfont and Kaplan set out to make because it could be done on a budget is now one of the warmest reminders of a bygone era—and often of a bygone moment in a person’s life.

Can’t Hardly Wait was originally titled The Party, and Elfont and Kaplan had structured it so that all of the movie’s main characters—Preston, Mike, William, and Kenny—were friends, and Preston was meant to fall for his best girl friend, Denise. The story wasn’t coming together, though. “It just didn’t feel like we were reflecting enough as a whole,” Elfont says. “It felt like just a subsection of the high school experience.” It wasn’t until they had the idea to break up the characters and turn them into representatives of relatable high school archetypes that things fell into place. “What if the characters don’t even really know each other?” Elfont says, remembering his and Kaplan’s eureka moment. Elfont and Kaplan kept the through line of Preston finding love—but with Amanda Beckett, the most popular girl in school, who had just been dumped by her equally popular boyfriend, Mike Dexter—while writing vignettes featuring William, Kenny, and Denise that would orbit the main plot. “Once we hit on how the stories would be separate in a woven story, once we figured that out, it didn’t take that long [to write] at all,” Kaplan adds.

As the partners were putting the finishing touches on the script for Can’t Hardly Wait toward the end of 1996, Scream was released on December 20. Wes Craven’s high school horror flick made $6 million in its first weekend, but surged to over $10 million in its third weekend and steadily remained near the top of the box office into March 1997. When all was said and done, Scream had made over $100 million domestically on a $14 million budget—and studios were looking for more movies like it.

“Suddenly every place was open for business for teen movies,” says Elfont. “It didn’t even need to be a horror movie. [Studios] just realized that there was a huge teen audience that was being underserved, so everybody was looking for teen scripts. And we had one.” Maybe even more important, they had one that could be shot on a tight budget.

Elfont and Kaplan had a deal to make Can’t Hardly Wait with Columbia Pictures, through Sony, by mid-1997. To their surprise, the studio also agreed to their demand that they direct the film. “I think the budget for the movie was $9 million, so it wasn’t that big of a gamble,” Elfont says. That Elfont and Kaplan also had noted producers Betty Thomas and Jenno Topping signed on to help only eased concerns more.

“Betty gave us a test,” says Elfont. “Because there’s the scene where Preston sees Amanda but we never see her face, and Betty said, ‘How are you going to shoot that?’ So we storyboarded it. We drew it out. And when we showed it to her she was like, ‘Oh, yeah. Great. You guys know what you’re doing.’ And then there was never another question.”

“Every actor at the time was literally begging to be in this movie,” says Joel Michaely, who played X-Phile #1 in Can’t Hardly Wait and who Elfont and Kaplan refer to as “the guy who runs the reunion.” “It was like, I have to be in this movie. This is gonna be a teen classic.”

That Can’t Hardly Wait was a movie with a solid script and large ensemble meant different things to different people. For young actors like Michaely, it meant opportunity. For Elfont and Kaplan, it meant that casting was going to be of the utmost importance. Not only did they need a couple of good leads, they needed good actors in basically every role, because there really wasn’t that much difference in screen time between Preston and Watermelon Guy. They needed actors who could—no matter how small the role—take their character off the page and make them feel like a real person you had gone to high school with.

“What’s crazy is that there were good options for all of the roles because there were so few movies for these actors,” Elfont points out. “There were some shows that they were on, but there were no movies for actors who could play teenagers, so everybody came in. It was really exciting because everybody wanted to be a part of it, and a lot of the supporting actors—like, all the friends—came in to read for the larger parts and [if they didn’t get it], we would just cast them as the friends.”

Casting the movie turned out to be a combination of leaning on friends (or friends of friends), decisiveness, and serendipity. Both Embry and Facinelli were turned on to Can’t Hardly Wait because of Breckin Meyer, who was dating Kaplan at the time. Meyer also put up his friend Seth Green.

“It was the ’90s kids,” Embry says, remembering a group that also included Ryan Phillippe. “But Seth would never come out with us. He had this business where you would mail him a picture of yourself, and then he’d sculpt and paint your head and put it on any action figure you wanted. Then he would do stop-motion with them and make VHS videos. We’d call him a nerd and go out and get drunk while he was making himself a millionaire.”

Elfont and Kaplan certainly weren’t imagining Embry when they wrote Preston, an affable, romantic, perhaps somewhat stalker-y teen who’s convinced that fate has finally smiled on him when he hears that his longtime crush, Amanda Beckett, was dumped by her jock boyfriend, Mike Dexter. By then, Embry had already played a bunch of weirdos, most notably the kid who headbangs to Gwar and slams pot brownies in Empire Records. “Nobody saw him as a leading man when he came in to read,” says Elfont.

Plus, Kaplan adds, “he had just fallen off his skateboard and he had his whole arm, and like, the side of his body was wrapped in white mesh because he had such road rash. The whole side of his body was torn up.”

Elfont and Kaplan wanted Embry to read for William, the nerd, but Embry was insistent. “I said no. I know I’m not your typical leading man type, but I thought this movie was better suited if they didn’t cast that guy.”

“So, we had him read for Preston and there was something so charming and winning and endearing, because he read the part with some distance,” Elfont says. “Somehow Ethan was able to make it really sympathetic; he just had an openness and innocence.”

Casting Facinelli as über-jock Mike Dexter was an easier proposition, and it was sealed the second Facinelli kicked off his audition by doing push-ups. “I thought it was a very egotistical and confident [thing to do],” the actor tells me. “It was either the most asinine thing or the most perfect thing he could have done,” says Kaplan. “It was such a Mike Dexter move.” Kaplan adds that they were also looking closely at James Marsden for the role, but Facinelli had a hint of danger that he didn’t: “There was just a malice to the way he played it.”

Green was also meant to read for William, but when it was clear that Meyer wouldn’t be able to have a large role in the movie—he was filming 54 at the time—the role of Kenny was up for grabs. “Seth will do anything for a laugh,” Elfont says, which made him the ideal actor for Kenny, a white kid who quotes Tupac and Biggie, unironically wears JNCO Jeans and ski goggles, and who carries around a backpack he calls “the love kit” that’s full of condoms, oils, and scented candles. “We needed someone who would just kill it comedically,” says Elfont, “and Seth just fully, fully committed.”

To play Amanda, the object of Preston’s—and really, every man at the party’s—affection, Jennifer Love Hewitt was always the first choice. “She was the only one who didn’t really audition,” says Elfont. “We just kind of offered it to her and she said yes. She was really excited to play this part she never had, and we were thrilled to have her.” Casting Hewitt was another case of perfect timing: She had already made a name for herself as one of the stars of Party of Five, but it wasn’t until after she signed onto the movie that she truly blew up. “While we were shooting, I Know What You Did Last Summer came out and it was a huge hit,” Elfont says. “It was like, ‘This is great!’”

Conversely, the production team went through a lot of names before landing on Lauren Ambrose for the role of Denise, Preston’s antisocial, cynical best friend. “I remember writing Alicia Witt a letter—just visually she was what we were looking for,” says Elfont. A couple of other recognizable names—Reese Witherspoon, Christina Ricci—came across the directors’ desk, but when they saw Ambrose’s audition tape, they knew she was what they were looking for. “I think [casting] deleted half of her tape,” says Kaplan. “It was like they hadn’t even meant for us to see it. Half of her audition showed up at the tail end of a tape and we were like, ‘Wait, who’s that?’”

Elfont adds: “Lauren showed up and it was like, ‘Oh, it’s got to be her. Lauren is the one.’”

The casting for Can’t Hardly Wait ran on instinct—Elfont and Kaplan knew what they were looking for. But perhaps their real genius was how they applied the same care and thought to each role, packing the ensemble with talent from top to bottom. “They really put time and care into every single role,” says Michaely. “They took actors who were good enough to play leads and gave them one-line roles. And everyone agreed to do it because all of us kids were dying to be a part of it in any fashion.”

Can’t Hardly Wait started shooting in October 1997. The exterior scenes were filmed at a house in Altadena, California, and the interiors were on a soundstage. Elfont and Kaplan may have been first-time directors, but the 26-day shoot ended up being remarkably easy.

“It didn’t feel like we were scrambling,” says Elfont. “For some reason it was a smooth shoot. And the more comfortable we got as we went along, the firmer the ground we got on as directors. Everybody was like, ‘Enjoy this, because it’s not usually like this.’”

“Honestly, I think there was a lot of tension in the sense that it was Harry and Deborah’s first movie, and it was a lot of other people’s first big movie,” Facinelli points out, “so there was an attitude of, ‘We gotta get this done.’”

“We had some very experienced crew [members],” Kaplan points out. It was Thomas who lent the production a hint of experience, and who brought in seasoned veterans like cinematographer Lloyd Ahern II, who often shot for director Walter Hill. “Part of the reason Betty wanted us to work with him was because … he knew how to shoot fast, and he could shoot a lot of pages and make it look good. And he always had a fix.”

Elfont and Kaplan were also lucky enough to land costume designer Mark Bridges, and they solely credit him with not only creating the movie’s iconic looks, but also bringing characters to life. “A lot of [Kenny] is a credit to the genius of Mark Bridges,” says Kaplan. “When Seth put on those goggles and that jacket—it was a hat on a hat on a hat. It was so much, and yet it worked. The whole thing, it’s just noise. It’s brilliant.” Twenty years later, Bridges was riding off the Academy Awards stage on a Jet Ski after winning an Oscar for his work on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread.

“I think [the crew] is a testament to Deb and Harry, but also Betty and Jenno,” says Embry. “They were able to say, ‘This is the DP you want; this is the costume designer you want.’ … It’s no surprise that a lot of budding careers were attached to this movie, because those two women are incredibly talented filmmakers and they know how to put quality teams together.”

There was really only one major hiccup: Just days into filming, Elfont and Kaplan realized they had made a mistake in casting the role of William. Adam Hann-Byrd, a then-15-year-old actor who had amazed with his turn in 1991’s Little Man Tate, was initially given the role, but it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t working out. “We started worrying like, ‘Oh my gosh, this guy is gonna have to sing “Paradise City” at the top of his lungs on a bar,’” says Elfont. “It just wasn’t who he is.”

“It was hard,” Kaplan chimes in. “I remember before shooting, Betty saying something like, ‘You know what you could do is you could fire somebody the first day so that people know not to fuck with you.’ And we’re thinking, ‘We’re not gonna do that!’ And then we had to fire the most tender, wonderful person. There couldn’t have been a worse person to fire.” (Hann-Byrd could not be reached for comment.)

With a cast full of young, insecure actors, the firing reverberated throughout the set. “The entire cast would see each other and be like, ‘Well, I’m still here today, you’re still here, that’s good,’” says Michaely. “‘Do you think you’re next? I think I’m next!’”

“I remember Lauren being completely freaked out and I remember I was nervous, too,” says Facinelli.

“Peter was very scared,” Embry remembers. “[But] I remember telling Peter that it wasn’t him—it was going to be me.”

No one else got fired, and to replace Hann-Byrd, Elfont and Kaplan turned to Charlie Korsmo, another actor who had wowed in performances as a child. Korsmo, who had been in Hook, Dick Tracy, and What About Bob? as a child actor, had left Hollywood for college at MIT. (“He’s freaking brilliant. I feel like he was on the shortlist to go to Mars,” Embry says, sounding somewhat unsure of that last fact.) In his sophomore year, however, he decided to get back into acting. “I had called my old agent and said, you know, I’m willing to start doing auditions again,” Korsmo recently told Page Six.

“He put himself on tape,” says Elfont. “He rapped and chugged a real beer at the end of his audition.” Michaely, who filmed most of his scenes with Korsmo, remembers, “All of a sudden they rolled in Charlie Korsmo and it was like, ‘Whoa!’ Because Charlie Korsmo was big. I was like, ‘Let’s party! Wanna go out tonight?!’ He was like, ‘I don’t go out.’”

That was the overall vibe on the set of Can’t Hardly Wait—a stark mix of partying and professionalism that created a well-acted but still believably fun movie. “We were all working,” Embry recalls, while Elfont counters that “every day was a party.” And as Kaplan remembers, “There weren’t any grown-ups. It was like a Charlie Brown cartoon. We weren’t even grown-ups.” Or a teen movie.

The first weekend that Can’t Hardly Wait was in theaters was a roller coaster of emotions for Elfont and Kaplan. On that Friday, executives were calling them, celebrating—“You’ve got a big hit,” Elfont remembers them saying. The phone didn’t ring on Sunday or Monday, though. “It was like tumbleweeds blowing through our homes,” Kaplan says. “You’re like, ‘OK, well, I just spent a lot of time on that and I disappointed everyone, I guess.’”

“What they discovered was this is how teen movies went back then,” Elfont says. “We were kind of establishing the pattern of teenagers rushing out to see a movie on Friday, and then doing whatever on Saturday.”

All told, Can’t Hardly Wait made $25.6 million domestically and stayed in theaters for only three weeks—a disappointment, given the movie’s promising testing and the studio’s excitement on that first Friday. “It took a really long time to get over,” Kaplan says. “You’re like, ‘What did I do? How did that happen?’”

Embry still blames the lackluster numbers on the fact the final product was slightly sanitized so that the movie could get a PG-13 rating. In truth, many things were edited out: characters on drugs; Jason Segel not just being Watermelon Guy, but having a sexual relationship with said watermelon; and a character played by Jennifer Elise Cox called “Drunk Crying Girl,” whose lines were all subtitled. “They did it to Empire Records too!” Embry says. “They never even released that shit in the theater. And then Can’t Hardly Wait opened up in [fourth]. Of course it did.” The irony is, most of the stuff Elfont and Kaplan were forced to cut would probably fly today. Asked if he felt any anger when movies like American Pie and Superbad kicked off a wave of successful raunchy teen comedies in the decade after Can’t Hardly Wait, Embry replies, “Absolutely. Like, you fuckers.”

As with all cult classics, the legend of the film grew slowly. “I would notice in stores that it always checked out, or I would go to people’s houses and everyone would have it in their DVD collection,” says Michaely. “You could just feel the love and affection for the movie start billowing up and billowing up.”

“Many years later people started saying, ‘Oh, that movie meant so much to me when I was in high school,’” says Kaplan.

“It had a whole life on home video and TV,” Elfont adds. “We’d meet people who graduated in ’98 or around then and they’d say, ‘Oh, that was my movie.’ That was when we realized we kind of did what we wanted to, which was we made a high school movie that kind of really connected with that generation.”

Even though it’s been only 20 years, Can’t Hardly Wait evokes a simpler time. A time without cellphones or social media. A time when it was still possible to suspend your disbelief and convince yourself that the teenage boy carrying around a love letter for a girl he’s never spoken to is just a hopeless romantic, and not a disturbing stalker. A time when teen movies came with a sweet sheen of perfection and innocence. A year after Can’t Hardly Wait’s release, American Pie came out, not only tossing a gallon of tainted beer on the teen movie sheen, but making over $100 million domestically (and three sequels) in the process. Two years after that, a stake was driven through the heart of the genre by Not Another Teen Movie, a title that now seems a bit prescient. In the wake of those films, teen movies stopped being made for the adolescent crowd who couldn’t wait to grow up, and started being made for the adult crowd who just wanted to go back to high school. But there will always be Can’t Hardly Wait.

“They did a screening at Hollywood Forever Cemetery [in 2015],” says Elfont. “They had, like, I don’t know how many people—I want to say a thousand. But it really played, and people were really into it and clearly knew the movie. It was like, ‘OK, I guess people do genuinely like this movie. I guess this is real.’”

Andrew Gruttadaro