‘The Last Detail’: The Hal Ashby movie that inspired ‘Superbad’
Back in the mid-2000s, there were few comedy movies as funny as Superbad, the beloved coming-of-age buddy film directed by Greg Mottola and produced by Judd Apatow. By today’s standards, perhaps Superbad feels a bit outdated and a touch flat, but back then, there was nothing and side-splittingly hilarious.
Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and inspired loosely by their own experiences at high school, Superbad tells of two teenage friends, played by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, who are on the verge of graduating from high school and want to party and preferably lose their virginity in the process.
We might think of Superbad as being a one-of-a-kind movie without any influence other than that of Rogen and Goldberg being stoned out of their minds, but the matter of fact is that the two writers had actually been inspired by Hal Ashby, particularly by his 1974 movie The Last Detail.
In a feature with Rotten Tomatoes, Rogen said of the film: “Hal Ashby shoots very simply. He kind of takes a step back and shoots stuff as it happens. Things are never about the shot, you know? It’s always about the joke. It’s never about how the camera moves. That’s a very interesting style.”
Rogen added: “Superbad is very Last Detail-ish. We wrote Superbad before we saw Last Detail, but after we saw it, it helped clarify what we were going for, I think.” Rogen and Goldberg had indeed already written Superbad before seeing The Last Detail, but after seeing it at the suggestion of Judd Apatow, they returned to the script to give it more emotion.
The Last Detail is Ashby’s film from Robert Towne’s screenplay, based on Darryl Ponicsan’s 1970 novel of the same name. Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, Randy Quaid, Clifton James and Carol Kane all star in a narrative telling of two sailors who are tasked with taking a reclusive recruit from their base in Virginia to a naval prison in Maine.
In another interview with the Academy, Rogen further opened up on how Ashby’s films inspired his own. “The Last Detail had a major influence on Superbad,” he said. “It’s kind of a ridiculous thing to say, but at the time, me and Evan [Goldberg] were very against what we considered Hollywood conventions,” he added.
Both Rogen and his writing partner felt that having emotional narratives in a comedy was to “sell out”. “You couldn’t have a great comedy and be emotional at the same time,” he said. But then the pair watched Ashby’s Harold and Maude and cried and laughed all in the same breath and understood that they, too, could incorporate both comedy and tragedy together.
“We had this script Superbad, and it was just filthy, just profanity,” Rogen added of how The Last Detail inspired his writing. “Judd [Apatow] was imploring us to add some sort of undercurrent of emotion. We watched The Last Detail and thought, ‘This is everything we could ever hope to accomplish in a movie.’”
Check out the trailer for The Last Detail below.
