What would you do if your parents will all but disown you if you don't make it into college? Well, one solution would be to create your own college and pocket your parents tuition check. And that's exactly what happens in the comedy movie, Accepted, starring Justin Long as the guy who gets rejected by every college but one - the one he and his buddies dream up.
The PG-13 Rating for Accepted: When Long first received the script for Accepted, he believed the college comedy would work better with R rated material. “I can truly say that yeah, I was hoping that it would be and was kind of very apprehensive about doing it when I found out it wasn’t. I had a real hang-up about it having to be R, especially because Lewis Black was involved. In my experience, if you can do a college comedy, my college experience - just personally - to say it was R-rated would be sugar-coating it. It was NC-17.
If you’re making an accurate, realistic college film I felt it was sort of necessary, not only because of the sexual stuff but just the ease with which college kids say the ‘f’ word. It just sort of rolls off the tongue. We were ad-libbing a lot of the movie and, when you’re in that zone, it’s such a temptation to say, ‘Ah, f**k.’ It’s such a crutch. I’m tempted to say it right now, but they were adamant about it being PG-13. We fought it for a little while but I had no real leg to stand on. Who cares what I thought?
But now, having seen the movie, I’m sort of glad they didn’t. Had they gone for the R rating, it would have been a hard R and, in that case, you have to make a concerted effort to show a lot of boobs and, ‘F**k this and that,’ and that might detract from what the movie is, which is not about sex. It’s nice. More people can watch and it has more the tone of like an ‘80s comedy, like a John Cusack or Michael J. Fox movie. Those were pretty much like PG-13. Those were movies that I grew up with and I loved, that inspired me.”
Long continued, “I feel like it may have detracted from this movie if they had attempted to make it R-rated. It’s not a sex comedy. It’s a comedy about people trying to find their path. But, I did fight it for a while. I was like, ‘But Wedding Crashers and 40-Year-Old Virgin, these movies have been so…. If anything, I’d think you guys would want an R-rating. Old School those movies have been doing so well.’”
A Class He’d Like to Take: In the film, Long allows the students at his made-up college to come up with their own ideas for the classes they like to see offered. What make-believe class would he enroll in? “How to Answer Interview Questions You Aren’t Prepared For 101’,” joked Long. “Lately it would be…I’m in this great relationship now but I’m discovering all these relationship pitfalls. Like simple things I could have done to get myself out of an argument, like ‘How to Diffuse a Potentially Serious Argument With Your Girlfriend 101’. Simple things, flowers, ‘I’m sorry’, very simple things but I didn’t know that and I’m discovering all that now. I wish I’d taken a class on that before I got into the relationship. I could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble.”
Getting Into Character: Long says he could really relate to his character Bartleby in Accepted. “I was always the wiseass, sort of the go-getter but for the wrong reasons. I was kind of like the slacker guy who concentrated too much on ways to get out of things. That sort of typical Ferris Bueller-type guy. Had I put as much concentration into studying, I would have gone to MIT and I’d have a great job as some kind of engineer right now. But I focused on sicknesses to come up with and ways to get out of writing papers and charming my teachers. I feel like that was sort of the seed of what I’m doing now.
[This character] did come naturally, especially since a lot of the script wasn’t really there and we had to ad-lib a lot, encouraged by the writers, director and the studio. Jonah [Hill’s] casting, 90% of it was due to the fact that he was a genius improviser. All the auditions, we did one scripted and it wasn’t quite in working condition and we threw it out and we improv’d a lot.”
A lot of what the cast improvised made it into the film. “The scenes were all structured but I remember we came up with…we needed transition scenes. When I’m walking with Blake [Lively], showing her the school, there’s a scene that starts when Adam Herschman is giving us drinks. We walk away and he calls me on the phone, ‘You guys like the drinks?’ ‘Yeah, they’re great.’ We just came up with stuff. I was proud of that, but I don’t know. 90% of Jonah’s funny lines were him ad-libbing. The scream we came up with because Jonah had lost his voice and I was like, ‘Well, why doesn’t Maria [Thayer] just scream? It might be funny. You just open your mouth like you’re screaming.’ That’s what happened.”
Page 2: His Career, Comedy, and The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang
