Tagline: True love is a blessing and a curse. She’s the blessing. He’s cursed.
It all started when Charlie Logan was ten years old. Breaking the cardinal rules of spin-the-bottle, Charlie refused to lip-lock with a demented Goth girl – and she put a hex on him. Now, twenty-five years later, Charlie (Dane Cook) is a successful dentist…and still cursed. While his plastic surgeon best friend, Stu (Dan Fogler), pursues as many of his patients as possible, Charlie can’t seem to find the right girl. Even worse, he discovers at an ex-girlfriend’s wedding that every woman he’s ever slept with has found true love – with the next guy after him.
Before he knows it, Charlie’s reputation as a “good luck charm” has women – from sexy strangers to his overweight receptionist – lining up for a quickie. But a life filled with all sex and no love has Charlie lonelier than ever – that is, until he meets Cam (Jessica Alba). An accident-prone penguin specialist, Cam is as hard-to-get as she is beautiful. But when a genuine romance develops, Charlie realizes he’s got to find a way to break his good-luck curse…before the girl of his dreams winds up with the next guy she meets. Most single men would probably call Charlie, the titular hero in GOOD LUCK CHUCK, a blessed man.
A “good luck charm” who miraculously helps women find true love with the next man they sleep with, Charlie can’t get through the day without relationship-obsessed women throwing themselves at his feet.
“At first it seems fantastic,” says comedian and film actor Dane Cook, who stars as the lovelorn dentist. “He gets to play the field with no strings attached and he doesn’t even have to try.”
But things change when Charlie meets the girl of his dreams: Cam, a cute, hopelessly klutzy penguin specialist. All Charlie wants is to be with her; but he knows if he sleeps with her, he’ll lose her.
“The sexual tension is huge, and he’s got to be the one who backs away from her, which leaves her wondering why,” explains Cook. “It’s like the most painful, film-length foreplay ever.” If that weren’t enough, Charlie has to find a way to break the curse that was placed on him when he was only ten years old, grapple with bad advice from his sexed-obsessed best friend, Stu, and navigate a journey marked by malicious penguins, the most disgusting one-night stand ever, and lots and lots of sex.
Says Cook, “I believe we are making a very funny film with a high comedy quotient. We’ve got three or four major moments that people are going to be talking about long after they leave the theater.” Adds co-star Dan Fogler, who plays Charlie’s buddy Stu, “This movie is truly hysterical. It pushes the R-rated envelope.”
It all sounds like the high-concept creation of a Hollywood screenwriter, but GOOD LUCK CHUCK is actually inspired by the life of a real man named Steven Glen. Seven years ago, producer Mike Karz attended a party in Los Angeles and met Glen through a mutual friend. Glen was relating his romantic misadventures to his friends and revealed that at least seven women he had seriously dated met their ideal match soon after breaking up with him. “It just seemed like the perfect idea for a great romantic comedy,” remembers Karz. He urged Steve to write a treatment, and later brought on screenwriter Josh Stolberg to pen a script.
Karz set up the project and partnered with Mark Helfrich, a highly regarded Hollywood film editor who was preparing to direct his first feature. Helfrich had a proven talent for comedy – he edited all three RUSH HOUR films – and his instinct was that GOOD LUCK CHUCK, which was originally conceived as a PG-13 film, would be far more successful as an R-rated comedy. He urged Stolberg to take another pass at the script and push it into more risqué territory. “There was so much potential that could be mined with an R-rated version,” says Helfrich. “The language we could use and what we could show was unlimited.”
Adds Karz, “The earlier drafts of the script aren’t nearly as irreverent or edgy as the shooting script, and that was really Mark’s influence. He helped make the movie a lot funnier than it was before.”
Both Karz and Helfrich believed that comedian and rising film star Dane Cook was the first and only choice to play Charlie. Arguably the most popular stand-up comedian of his generation, Cook has amassed an unprecedented following through constant touring, HBO television specials, and an increasingly busy acting career. “Dane Cook was a natural to play Charlie because he’s handsome and funny – he’s a star – but he’s still got this very real, guy-next-door quality,” says Helfrich. “And he certainly has the comedy down. He was the perfect choice.”
Helfrich flew down to New Mexico to meet with Cook, who at the time was completing Lionsgate’s comedy, EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH, with Jessica Simpson and Dax Shepard. After an encouraging meeting, both Cook and his manager, producer Brian Volk-Weiss, read the script. “I couldn’t put it down,” remembers Volk-Weiss. “We were shooting nights, and I was exhausted. But I lay there in bed for two hours until it was done. Dane did the exact same thing.”
“With GOOD LUCK CHUCK you have a movie that plays into Dane’s audience the way they know him,” says producer Barry Katz, who also manages Cook. “He can be a regular sincere guy, but he can be crazy and really animated and really powerful. This movie takes huge risks the way Dane does in his stand-up. And if you don’t take risks, the audience these days knows it and they’re not interested.”
Cook immediately recognized in GOOD LUCK CHUCK the opportunity to bring the edgier, no-holds-barred spirit of his stand-up into a commercially viable comedy. “I knew when I was about thirty pages into it,” he recalls. “The script pushes the limits a bit, and it felt like it would be something my fans would appreciate. Plus, there were nude scenes with the beautiful Jessica Alba. So I was actually doing crunches while I read the script. I was preparing before I even knew I had the role.”
After making her name in serious, special effects-laden Hollywood fare like FANTASTIC FOUR and SIN CITY, Jessica Alba was eager to try her hand at comedy. But finding a good female role in a genre dominated by men felt like an impossible task – until she read Stolberg’s script. She instantly fell in love with the part of Cam, and she lobbied hard for the role. “Not very many comedies are written as well as this one. And in a lot of them, women are just token characters,” she says. “Cam gets to do all the physical comedy. And that was a rare opportunity.”
While Cook and Alba immediately hit it off when they met, the producers were concerned about her lack of comedy experience – that is, until Cook watched Alba host the MTV Music Video awards. The opening sketch was a spoof of King Kong, and Alba nailed it. “She was flawless,” reports Cook. “It’s so hard to find an actress who is attractive and can own her sexuality and is still comfortable enough to do physical comedy. Jessica did that during the King Kong sketch. The moment it finished, I called my manager and told him, ‘She’s the one. I don’t want to talk about anybody else.’”
Alba calls Cam “more me than any other role that I’ve played,” and she jumped into the part with unbridled enthusiasm, insisting on performing all of her own pratfalls and stunts. “I’m usually a lot more self-conscious and aware that I have to be somebody else,” she says. “But with Cam I got to be as goofy as I really am. I’m not afraid to be an idiot. I really just took the bull by the horns and did it. I even got a few bruises to prove my dedication.”
While Alba was initially intimidated by the idea of working with a seasoned comedian like Cook, their chemistry flourished on set. She says, “From the first day of rehearsals, I knew that we were going to be okay. From morning till night we were laughing out butts off, and that’s very rare. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner in crime.”
“Jessica is fantastic and I think that what she did was genius,” adds Cook. “She’s like a pistol. You don’t know when she’s going to go off and use her physicality. I hope this movie’s successful simply so that we can work together on something else later.”
“They kind of bust each other’s balls a little bit, and it’s great to watch,” says producer Michael Karz. “The movie’s improved because they have such a great rapport. When you see them onscreen, you see two people who truly enjoy being around each other.”
Alba’s and Dane’s comedic enthusiasm reached unprecedented heights in a pivotal set piece depicting Charlie’s and Cam’s passionate – and apartment-destroying – first kiss.
Remembers Dane, “We come into the house and we’re knocking over lamps. We’re smashing into the bowl of chips. We’re going through the drywall. And we didn’t take into consideration that when her head hits the wall, it would bounce back. Our mouths collided and we both chipped our teeth.”
Rounding out the trio of leads is theater actor Dan Fogler in the role of Stu Klaminsky, Charlie’s sex-obsessed, foul-mouthed best friend who works as a plastic surgeon across the hall. Fogler, who won a Tony Award in 2005 for his work in William Finn’s and Rachel Sheinkin’s musical, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” relished Stu’s combination of crassness and vulnerability. “Stu Klaminsky is a guy who’s constantly squeezing boobies or pinching asses, making sure people’s body parts are in the right place,” explains Fogler. “He has no time for himself or relationships, and often goes home at the end of the day and has sex with some form of produce. So he lives vicariously through Charlie, who basically has every single woman who wants to get married at his disposal.”
“Stu and Charlie are like Goofus and Gallant in many ways,” adds Cook. “They’re polar opposites, but with the same ethic when it comes to friendship.”
“I think once this movie comes out, everybody’s going to ask, ‘Who is Dan Fogler?’” states Karz. “Dan’s chemistry with Dane is fantastic. And he’s hilarious. He’s going to be doing a lot more films from now on.”
Fogler’s theater training and Cook’s knack for improvisation proved to be a winning combination. The pair ad-libbed constantly on set, a habit that Helfrich encouraged whole-heartedly. “This is a romantic comedy with an emphasis on comedy,” says the director. “So whatever made me laugh or the crew laugh was great. We got what was in the script, and then they embellished. And you know, when you’re working with talent like that, you can’t lose.”
With primary casting completed, producers Karz, Volk-Weiss and Barry Katz grappled with how to solve the script’s biggest production challenge: creating the penguin habitat where Cam works. Karz laughs, “While he was writing, Josh Stolberg was at Sea World and thought, ‘Hey, I should put this penguin exhibit in the movie.’ Little did he know it would cost us millions of dollars, bring us all over the world looking for penguins and ultimately be the biggest production value we have in the movie.”
Extensive research revealed that most traditional penguin habitats are far too small – only about ten by twelve feet – to accommodate a full-sized film crew. The production solved this problem by building its own habitat in Edmonton (near the production’s home base in Vancouver) and renting a small troupe of penguins that lived on display in a local mall.
“Those penguins in the Edmonton Mall live in a little, normal size penguin habitat,” says Helfrich. “So when we brought them to our set, it was like coming to Disneyland for them. They were running around like crazy thinking this was the greatest place ever. You know, ‘they’ve got a bigger pool, bigger mountains to climb on!’ They didn’t want to go home each night.”
While the habitat was built to accommodate about two hundred penguins, the production only had access to about twenty live ones. In order to keep the habitat from looking like a penguin ghost town, Helfrich used CGI technology to duplicate the live penguins and populate the habitat with digital clones. Explains Karz, “When people see this movie, they’re going to see a hundred penguins in every penguin scene, but in reality only about fifteen of them are real.”
Having taken on the role of a penguin specialist, Alba had to familiarize herself with the waterfowl and learn how to handle them. “I wasn’t really familiar with penguin behavior before. But they are darn cute and now I have a soft spot for them,” says Alba. “I would massage this one in particular and she would always get really calm and settle into my hands. I think became a little bit of a penguin whisperer.”
Though he was faced with choreographing complicated set pieces and wrangling a gaggle of live penguins, Helfrich found directing to be a natural extension of all that he had learned as an editor. “I’ve edited for decades, and I know what angles I want at what given time,” he says. “Instead of shooting everything from every angle, I cut it down, which helped us go faster. It was great.”
Karz reports that Helfrich displayed none of the uncertainty that marks many first-time helmers. “As an editor, Mark had already demonstrated all the skills that you hope to find in a strong director: he knows how to build a scene, he knows what’s funny, and he knows how to identify good performance. He did a fantastic job.”
“I just like Mark, whether or not he’s directing,” says Cook. “When you’re working and collaborating with somebody who’s also just a cool guy, then there’s a buzz, an energy on the set. I know I can bring something to him, or he can bring something to me, and we can create it and figure it out together.”
Freed from the confines of PG-13 standards, Helfrich enjoyed exploring the full comic potential of Stolberg’s outrageous script. For a hilarious sex montage of Charlie taking advantage of his “lucky charm” status, Helfrich was inspired by the many contortionist sexual positions featured on an old Kama Sutra poster. “We actually used that poster and checked off the positions once we got them down on film,” recounts Helfrich. “Dane was game for everything. And each actress was ready to go for broke. They were all thinking, ‘What’s the most outrageous position? How can I top the last girl?”
GOOD LUCK CHUCK also features such rare sights as a three-breasted woman (the result of state-of-the-art make-up effects) and one of the most horrendous one-night stands imaginable. In that scene, Charlie attempts to prove his curse isn’t real by sleeping with Eleanor Skepple, a foul-tempered, overweight shrew with terrible hygiene habits who couldn’t possibly find the man of her dreams, even after a ‘good luck’ tryst.
Helfrich was very specific about the type of woman he wanted for the role, but the casting calls proved fruitless. “It was not an easy task,” remembers Karz. “As you can imagine, we weren’t exactly overrun with actresses in the industry who were looking to play this part.
Casting director Matt Barry decided to put an ad on My Space with the long-shot hopes of finding an appropriate amateur. Much to his surprise, he was inundated with audition videos from across the country. Deep in the heart of Texas, an Emergency Services Dispatcher named Jodie Stewart saw the ad and sent in her video…and a star was born.
“I was at work when I got the call on my cell phone,” remembers Stewart. “I got lightheaded and I almost dropped the phone, I was so excited. All my co-workers were like, ‘Did you get it? Did you get it?’ I’m very thankful that I actually took a leap of faith and tried something that I normally don’t do.
Stewart was flown to Vancouver, ensconced in a suite at the plush Sutton Place Hotel, and began working with acting coach June Wilde on her part. With two hours of help from a very creative hair and make-up team, she was transformed into a character whose mother would have a hard time loving. “Jody was a natural,” says Helfrich. “She had the crew in stitches the whole time she was on set.”
While GOOD LUCK CHUCK more than delivers its share of broad laughs and gross-out gags, it stands apart from many comedies by offering a genuinely affecting love story that is grounded in reality. “There’s a very sweet, very true love story at the core of this,” says Alba. “It’s all about finding your soul mate and not letting that person go once you find them, because it’s so hard to find.”
“My favorite films of all time have great heart,” says Cook. “You want to make movies that are going to be on people’s DVD shelf in ten years, and that’s what I hope this is. It’s a hardcore comedy. People are going to get tons of funny. But they’re not going to expect the amount of depth that some of these relationships and characters have. I think that’s what make this a cinematic adventure.”
Production notes provided by Lionsgate Films.
Good Luck Chuck
Starring: Jessica Alba, Dane Cook, Dan Fogler, Michelle Harrison, Simone Bailly
Directed by: Mark Helfrich
Screenplay by: Josh Stolberg
Release: September 21, 2007
MPAA Rating: for sequences of strong sexual content including crude dialogue, nudity, language and some drug use.
Studio: Lionsgate Films
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $35,017,297 (59.2%)
Foreign: $24,174,831 (40.8%)
Total: $59,192,128 (Worldwide)