Jay Chandrasekhar & Kevin Heffernan ‘Super Troopers 3’ & More with Rich

The best argument for making a movie about state troopers is that it eventually gets you a police escort.

Kevin Heffernan was running late to throw out the first pitch at a Padres game, and driving accordingly, when he got pulled over. So he reached for the only card he had. "What you always try to do is to drop Super Troopers so that you can get out of the thing," Heffernan told Rich. He mentioned the first pitch, and the officer asked, reasonably, "Who are you to throw out the first pitch at the Padres game?"

Heffernan said he made a movie called Super Troopers. The officer walked off, came back a few minutes later, and offered an escort to the stadium. Three more cops were waiting when he arrived. "He goes, well, it went out over the radio that Farva got pulled over and we thought you might not make it on time."

Rich asked the only follow-up that mattered. Did he throw a strike? "I always throw a strike," Heffernan said, before conceding it was more of an eephus.

Baseball ran through most of the visit. Heffernan is a Yankees fan out of West Haven, Connecticut, and Jay Chandrasekhar is a Cubs fan out of Hinsdale in the Chicago suburbs, which made for a low-grade border dispute with the two teams meeting in New York that weekend.

The allegiances have gotten in the way of the work. Since the films are set in Vermont, Chandrasekhar once floated a wardrobe note. "I said to Kevin, I'm like, you should really be wearing a Red Sox hat. And he said, I won't come out of my trailer." Heffernan later held that line at an actual Red Sox game, where organizers asked the group to wear caps. "I said, no, there is no chance I'm wearing a Red Sox hat." They found him a commemorative green Fenway cap instead.

The writing process is exactly as chaotic as the movies suggest. Five of them each write 20 pages of a first draft, then staple it together and read something with the wrong tone and misnamed villains. They rewrite, rewrite again, and eventually one person takes over as point man to smooth it out. "And then basically 32 drafts later we shoot the film," Chandrasekhar said. Someone added the honest footnote: "After a lot of brawls."

That survives because the group met at 18. All five went to Colgate together, where the pair first crossed paths in the foyer of their fraternity while a senior yelled at them. They started the school's first comedy group, which still exists and now has both of their kids in it. One of their daughters is the president, which they figured gives her veto power over what gets on stage.

The path out ran through New York shows, an independent film called Puddle Cruiser that got into Sundance, and then Super Troopers, made for a million bucks. It took years to catch, because dorm rooms passed the DVD around. "It was a slow burn for us."

Brian Cox is back for the third one, and he has gotten harder to be insulted by since Succession. "The way we communicate in our group is sort of through insult," Chandrasekhar said. Cox remembers the vibe and joins in, "but he doesn't have it calibrated quite right. And so he hits you very hard." Now he arrives as Logan Roy, throwing F bombs and asking, "Besides Super Troopers, what else have you done?" He keeps coming back anyway. "And we're not paying him."

Chandrasekhar also directed four or five episodes of Arrested Development in his mid-twenties, which meant walking onto sets where established actors openly wondered who he was. Liza Minnelli simply would not say her line. He fed it to her from behind the camera until she finally delivered it and asked, "Happy?" Rich supplied the answer on his behalf: "Yeah, in fact yes."

Super Troopers 3 is in theaters nationwide Friday, August 7.