A few weeks before the release of “Adventureland,” we had the good fortune to sit down with director Greg Mottola and discuss all kinds of projects. We talked about “Adventureland,” and its awesome ’80s college rock soundtrack and “Paul,” his upcoming roadtrip comedy with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.
But one project we especially wanted to know more about was “Life of the Party,” his planned 1998 follow-up to “The Daytrippers,” which was greenlit and ready to go but collapsed at the last minute, leaving the director hurt and disillusioned. He worked in TV on excellent projects (“Undeclared” and “Arrested Development”) for years, but it wasn’t until “Superbad” in 2007 that he would return to feature filmmaking — almost 11 years after ‘Daytrippers.’
Mottola talked a little bit about “Life Of The Party,” to Indie Wire in March, but we only got surface information and wanted to know more, so we asked about this troubled time in his life and he went into the plot in detail.
“That was a painful one because it was one I had a hard time letting go of. We were greenlit and in pre-production and it was Sony, the same people I ended up doing ‘Superbad’ with,” Motolla laughed ironically, having clearly let that baggage go.
“Ultimately it was during that window of time where studios went, ‘Oh, yeah, we can make indie films,’ — and there were a few indie filmmakers who had done their first studio films and they had done well. That door opens sometimes, but it’s not an indie filmmaker doing a mainstream comedy, it’s them doing what they would normally do.”
“Life of The Party” was set to go forward in a similar independent manner that “The Daytrippers” did, but not shooting on a shoestring $70,000 budget. “It was going to [shoot] for like, $12 million, which at the time was insanely cool. As much as ‘Daytrippers’ was a labor of love there were scenes in the film where the actors had one take and one take only,” Mottola recalled.
What killed ‘Party’ was bad luck and bad timing. Another project came in at the studio at the same time that felt too similar, and Mottola believes ultimately they thought his version was the more uncommerical of the two. “It was a little too weird, it was just not what they normally did,” he said suggesting the project was just a hair outside their comfort zone; why not go with the safe project is what we got out of his comments there.
Other companies subsequently wanted to make the picture, changed their minds and the door that had opened closed, seemingly for good. From there legal predicaments surfaced and the project is still tied up in those quagmires. Mottola wasn’t at liberty to talk about them, however he did talk about the idea and concept at length for the first time — or at least to our knowledge.
We joked to him that the synopsis/logline that was presented in Variety back in 1998 — “about a group of friends who travel to the South of France to rejoin an old pal of theirs who is in need of their company” — sounded as if it followed the “Adventureland’s” protagonist, if his economic woes hadn’t prevented him from from traveling to Europe, to which Greg responded with a laugh, “Yeah, and he became an alcoholic.”
But seriously – not really. “Life Of The Party,” essentially was an addiction ensemble comedy that hoped to tell the story from an angle that strayed from the traditional arch.
“The characters were all supposed to be in their mid-to-late ’30s,” explained Mottola, “And it’s about a guy who used to be the charismatic leader of a group of friends who’s moved to the South of France and he always used to be a hard partier and they find out he’s devolved into an alcoholic. And so his ex-girlfriend, his brothers and a few of his closest friends and all these people who once looked up to him reluctantly fly over to do an intervention, but the whole thing is fucked up because they’ve hired an interventionist whose plane is delayed and they’re stuck trying to kill time.”
The story functioned with two plotlines going on simultaneously, both featuring plenty of comedy and drama.
“One [story] is the best friend who just ends up partying with him, while everyone else is hiding, trying not to be discovered [in France by the protagonist] and dealing with all their own issues. It’s very much a glass houses type story; they’ve come there to tell this guy to stop being a fuck up and meanwhile they’re all really fucked up people. Some people have drug problems, romantic problems, others have health problems and basically none of them feel terribly secure that they should be telling anyone how they should be living their life.”
Things that inspired the director on this project include Woody Allen (one of his biggest overall influences), Fellini and the idea of telling this kind of familiar story from a fresh, non-cliched perspective.
“I wanted to do a movie about addiction and hedonism. [But] most alcoholism or addiction stories have a pretty obvious trajectory, they just go straight down, they’re dead or they hit rock bottom and then they’re saved. And I wanted to figure out a way to tell how the pleasure and the self-destructiveness can co-exist. And so the movie’s filled with both the whole time: people enjoying the hedonistic life and paying the consequences of it.”
Will we ever see “Life Of The Party”? As mentioned in the IndieWire interview, Mottola is optimistic that it may happen one day, but the legal hurdle (which he still can’t discuss), has to be dealt with first. Well, it sounds interesting to us and we’d personally love to see it, so here’s to hoping whoever owns it is eventually going to set it free. In the meantime, if you haven’t seen Greg’s mature and understated coming-of-age, sorry, first-love tale, “Adventureland,” you should it’s quite well observed and boasts a kick-ass soundtrack.