July 26, 2019 at 08:03PM
Carradine: About a week before the filming, Anthony [Edwards, who played Gilbert] showed up and we went over to the campus and tried to rush the fraternities. By that time, everybody on campus knew the nerds were coming, except this one fraternity.
This guy takes us to the inner sanctum of the fraternity, and there's the head guy, he's got one of those helmets on with the two beers attached to it and the tubes coming down to his mouth. He says, "Hey, Biff!"—or whatever the guy's name was—"these guys want to rush."
He turned around and looked at Anthony and me and just said, "No way," and went back to the party. That's how I knew we had figured it out.
Montgomery: The second I met him, Bobby was in character.
Carradine: I think it was Curtis who came up to me. He said, "I get it." I said, "Get what?" He said, "You're playing it for real." I said, "Yeah. These guys don't know they're nerds." And that set the tone for the movie.
The nerds wrote much of their own dialogue on the set. Or so they said.
John Goodman (Coach Harris): [Kanew] ran, in a good way, a very loose ship. We all trusted each other and just kind of let it rip.
Carradine: The movie's full of these little snippets that happened on the moment—like when Brian Tochi, after they had this big pile of jockstraps we're pouring the Liquid Heat on, goes, "Ah, salad!"
Goodman: I was having trouble getting it right. And I wound up making a bunch of stuff up.
Zacharias: It's bullshit. They didn't adlib.
Brian Tochi (Takashi): Curtis and I were passing the time, just goofing around, playing cards and checkers, and we start coming up with these bits and we're laughing, thinking, "Hey wouldn't this be funny?"
Zacharias: Okay, that's possible.
Tochi: We were smoking pot and Ted came in and had never done that, ever, in his life. So we said, "Here, Ted, why don't you try this?" and passed a little joint around. "Now hold it, Ted, hold it!"
Then we're saying, "How you feeling, Ted?" And he says, "I'm feeling nothing at all." All of a sudden, he starts laughing and laughing and cannot stop—it's this shriekish, freakish nonstop laugh, this crazy kind of "ha HA HAAH." Then Tim Busfield took Ted and incorporated that scenario into his stuff.
McGinley: What's funny is I really didn't party. I drank beer, kind of. But that was it for me.
Allegedly, cocaine was snorted.
Montgomery: This was the '80s!
Scott: We partied our ass off, I ain't gonna lie.
Busfield: At 6:00 in the morning, we would go to somebody's room and order 38 orders of bacon and eggs and two cases of beer. We were all in our twenties.
McGinley: I think there were drugs at the time. You can't take it from a guy who didn't do it to be the one who says, "Yeah, it was there"—but I definitely saw some.
Scott: I remember Ted McGinley at 21, 22, and these girls were losing their minds over him.
Montgomery: It became very wild! There was a lot of sexual craziness going on. A lot of the guys were out with different local people. Larry B. Scott [who played Lamar] was, I guess you'd say, dead set on making sure that the entire town of Tucson knew that he was not actually gay.
Scott: I would like to say cocaine back then was rather prevalent. You can still prosecute, so I can't say that for sure.
Carradine: About a week before the filming, Anthony [Edwards, who played Gilbert] showed up and we went over to the campus and tried to rush the fraternities. By that time, everybody on campus knew the nerds were coming, except this one fraternity.
This guy takes us to the inner sanctum of the fraternity, and there's the head guy, he's got one of those helmets on with the two beers attached to it and the tubes coming down to his mouth. He says, "Hey, Biff!"—or whatever the guy's name was—"these guys want to rush."
He turned around and looked at Anthony and me and just said, "No way," and went back to the party. That's how I knew we had figured it out.
Montgomery: The second I met him, Bobby was in character.
Carradine: I think it was Curtis who came up to me. He said, "I get it." I said, "Get what?" He said, "You're playing it for real." I said, "Yeah. These guys don't know they're nerds." And that set the tone for the movie.
The nerds wrote much of their own dialogue on the set. Or so they said.
John Goodman (Coach Harris): [Kanew] ran, in a good way, a very loose ship. We all trusted each other and just kind of let it rip.
Carradine: The movie's full of these little snippets that happened on the moment—like when Brian Tochi, after they had this big pile of jockstraps we're pouring the Liquid Heat on, goes, "Ah, salad!"
Goodman: I was having trouble getting it right. And I wound up making a bunch of stuff up.
Zacharias: It's bullshit. They didn't adlib.
Brian Tochi (Takashi): Curtis and I were passing the time, just goofing around, playing cards and checkers, and we start coming up with these bits and we're laughing, thinking, "Hey wouldn't this be funny?"
Zacharias: Okay, that's possible.
Tochi: We were smoking pot and Ted came in and had never done that, ever, in his life. So we said, "Here, Ted, why don't you try this?" and passed a little joint around. "Now hold it, Ted, hold it!"
Then we're saying, "How you feeling, Ted?" And he says, "I'm feeling nothing at all." All of a sudden, he starts laughing and laughing and cannot stop—it's this shriekish, freakish nonstop laugh, this crazy kind of "ha HA HAAH." Then Tim Busfield took Ted and incorporated that scenario into his stuff.
McGinley: What's funny is I really didn't party. I drank beer, kind of. But that was it for me.
Allegedly, cocaine was snorted.
Montgomery: This was the '80s!
Scott: We partied our ass off, I ain't gonna lie.
Busfield: At 6:00 in the morning, we would go to somebody's room and order 38 orders of bacon and eggs and two cases of beer. We were all in our twenties.
McGinley: I think there were drugs at the time. You can't take it from a guy who didn't do it to be the one who says, "Yeah, it was there"—but I definitely saw some.
Scott: I remember Ted McGinley at 21, 22, and these girls were losing their minds over him.
Montgomery: It became very wild! There was a lot of sexual craziness going on. A lot of the guys were out with different local people. Larry B. Scott [who played Lamar] was, I guess you'd say, dead set on making sure that the entire town of Tucson knew that he was not actually gay.
Scott: I would like to say cocaine back then was rather prevalent. You can still prosecute, so I can't say that for sure.