How ‘SNL’s ‘A Night at the Roxbury’ Guys Made It to the Big Screen
As far as movies based on SNL sketches go, A Night at the Roxbury probably had the least to work with. Wayne’s World, MacGruber and even It’s Pat had well-defined characters with reliable bits. The Night at the Roxbury guys, however, didn’t even have names, which is why Steve Koren, who wrote the breakout SNL sketch for those characters, was surprised when Clueless director Amy Heckerling wanted to make a movie about two idiots who aggressively danced up on women in night clubs.
But soon thereafter, Koren, along with Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan who played and created the characters, got to work on the script that would become A Night at the Roxbury.
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I recently spoke to Koren about how the original draft was inspired by Saturday Night Fever, how the Marx Brothers contributed to the film’s title and how they sought to include every slang term for cocaine they could think of.
Birth of the Butabi Brothers
Chris Kattan and Will Ferrell did those characters in the Groundlings. They’d just come out and dance a little and do that little finger thing to their nose, which was a drug joke, obviously. They’d try to dance with Cheri Oteri, and they’d throw her back and forth. That was about it.
When Chris and Will came to SNL, they were trying to figure out how to do this sketch on the show, and as a writer, one of your jobs was how to make something friendly to the audience. How do you package it in a way that the character from the stage show works on television? I’d done that a lot with different characters, like Mary Katherine Gallagher. Molly Shannon used to do that in her stage show, and Adam Sandler told her to come to me. I boxed it up in a sense.
With the Roxbury guys, they did it once on the show, and it didn’t really work. But I saw the sketch and said, “Oh, those characters are very funny! I’ve got to think of a way to do them.” Then Jim Carrey was hosting, and I thought, “What if I do a night out with those characters?” I’ll do little vignettes and connect them. That was very hard to do because, normally, you have one set for a sketch, but this required three or four. When Jim did it with them, it exploded. Jim was at his peak at the time. Still, I was shocked by the reaction.”
They did it several more times with different guest stars. I wrote one more of them before I went to Seinfeld. After I’d left, at some point, I got a phone call from Amy Heckerling. She loved those characters, and she thought they’d make a great movie. Everyone was in shock because Amy had just done Clueless, and she was a hot director. Then we were off and running as to how to make this into a movie.
L.A. Story
The first draft was much closer to Saturday Night Fever. I grew up in New York, so I knew about the club scene there — mainly not getting into the clubs. But when we showed Amy our draft, she said, “I thought of them as guys in L.A.” She thought they were these rich kids, and their father was an immigrant who was disappointed in them for being these club guys.”
As research, we took a trip to L.A. that Amy arranged for us. Tia Carrere’s husband owned all these clubs in L.A., so he took Amy, Will, Chris and I to basically every club in L.A. We saw the back rooms and everything. Then we did a big rewrite, and we created what it became.
An Edgier Roxbury
There was so much material that we didn’t get a chance to do. There was a scene with a guy offering them cocaine in the bathroom. The guy points to his nose and says, “You want some?” They go, “Yeah, yeah. What do you have?” He says, “You know, nose candy.” And they didn’t know what he was talking about. It was three or four pages of him going, “Booger sugar,” “snow bunny,” etc. We came up with every possible word for cocaine, and they didn’t get it the entire time. Finally, the guy says, “Cocaine!” and they go, “Oh no, we don’t do drugs.”
In an earlier draft, we also had this bit about back rooms because, when you’d go into these clubs, people would say, “This is the party, but if you want to go to the real party, it’s in the back.” Then they’re in the back room, and someone says, “You want to go to the after party?” So we had this scene where they go from back room to back room to back room, and the joke was that they just ended up in a closet with a guy.
The Title Came from a Marx Brothers Movie
Going in, we had so little. The characters didn’t even have names, so we had to come up with them for the movie. I just asked Chris and Will, “What do you want your names to be?” We decided they were of Middle-Eastern descent because there were a lot of very rich, Middle-Eastern families transplanted into Beverly Hills. They were the ultimate decisions on that — they were their characters.
As for the title, Amy came up with it. We were thinking of how dumb the characters were, and we were thinking of titles of Marx Brothers movies — A Night at the Opera led to A Night at the Roxbury.