Jay Chandrasekhar & Kevin Heffernan Reveal Their ‘Super Troopers’ Origin Story

Five writers. Twenty pages each. Then roughly 32 drafts and a lot of brawls. That is how a Super Troopers script gets made, and Jay Chandrasekhar and Kevin Heffernan described the process to Rich like it was completely normal.

"There are five of us, so we each write 20 pages the first draft, and then we put it together and the tone is off and the villains are misnamed," one of them explained. Then everyone reads it, picks the tone and the jokes that work, and rewrites their own sections. Then rewrites them again. Eventually one guy takes it over and becomes the point man to smooth it all out.

"And then basically 32 drafts later we shoot the film."

Rich called it serious collaboration, which prompted the actual origin story. They went to college together. All of them. They met at 18.

Colgate University. Go Raiders.

Heffernan set the scene, and it is almost too on the nose. They met in the foyer of their fraternity while being yelled at by a senior. He looked over and recognized the guy everyone said was the funny one in the class.

"I'm like, yeah, we'll see about that," he said.

The class settled it later. Senior year, the vote came in. The other guy won funniest guy in the class and had to give the commencement speech. Heffernan came in second.

"I got to drink all weekend," he said.

The comedy group came from Chandrasekhar, who had studied improv in Chicago and brought it back to campus. They started the first one at Colgate, and here is the detail that stopped the segment cold: the group still exists, and both of their kids are in it right now.

Heffernan's daughter is the president.

"What does that mean?" Rich asked. "She has executive power?"

"She gets veto power. She decides what happens, what gets on stage."

From there the path was New York, live shows, and an independent film called Puddle Cruiser that they brought to Sundance. That became the calling card, and the calling card became Super Troopers, made for a million bucks.

Success took a while, and it did not come from theaters.

"That was the era of DVD," one of them said. "The movie had a little bit of a life in the movie theaters back then, but it was really like three years later, like you're walking down the street in New York and some guy's like, hey you." People passed the DVDs around dorm rooms. It was a slow burn.

The clearest evidence that it had landed came from law enforcement. Getting pulled over started going differently. A cop would walk up, start the line, then stop. Do you know how, oh, I'm sorry, sir. You have a good day.

The best version involves a Padres game and a lot of speed. The guy who plays Farva was driving to San Diego to throw out a first pitch, running late, doing something in the neighborhood of 110 miles an hour. The officer asked where he was going in such a hurry.

"Who are you to throw out the first pitch at a Padres game?"

He mentioned Super Troopers. The officer walked away, came back a few minutes later, and offered him an escort to the stadium. Three more cops were waiting out front when he arrived.

"Oh, thank God you made it," one said. "It went out over the radio that Farva got pulled over, and we thought you might not make it on time."

Red carpet treatment. And yes, he threw a strike. "I always throw a strike."