Seth Green

Greg’s Previews

Release Date: August 20th, 2004 (wide)

Release Date Notes: (2/15/04) Paramount had been aiming for a wide release on April 23rd, 2004, but following some recent shifting about on their calendar (specifically of The Prince and Me and Mean Girls), they no longer really have space in April for this movie. There’s currently no word about when this movie might be rescheduled. My guess is sometime in the fall. (4/20/04) Paramount has settled upon a release date in the dog days of late August (8/20).

MPAA Rating: PG-13 (for drug content, sexual material, language, crude humor and some violence)

Distributor: Paramount Pictures

Production Company: De Line Pictures (The Italian Job, Domestic Disturbance)

Cast: Seth Green, Matthew Lillard, Dax Shepard, Abraham Benrubi (Dennis), Rachel Blanchard, Burt Reynolds, Bonnie Somerville, Ethan Suplee (Elwood); other cast not announced yet.

Cast Notes: (8/29/03) Seth Green and Matthew Lillard also recently costarred together in Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. Dax Shepard, who is making his feature film debut (not counting extra work) with this movie, is currently best-known as one of the pranksters on MTV’s "Candid Camera"-inspired show, "Punk’d." (9/7/03) As an homage to ’Deliverance,’ one of that movie’s own ill-fated canoers, Burt Reynolds, has been cast as one of the ornery mountain men in this movie.

Director: Steven Brill (Mr. Deeds, Little Nicky, Heavyweights)

Screenwriter: Harris Goldberg (cowriter of Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo and The Master of Disguise) and Tom Nursall (writing team of I’ll Be Home for Christmas); rewrite by Jay Leggett and Mitch Rouse (feature debuts; also have ’Employee of the Month’ coming soon)

Screenwriter Note: (8/29/03) Fred Wolf (Black Sheep; cowriter of Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star) had worked on a rewrite before Leggett and Rouse came aboard, but it appears that his draft may not be used.

Premise: Described as a comedic cross between City Slickers and Deliverance, this is the story of three friends (Green, Lillard, Shepard) from the big city of Philadelphia who go canoeing together out in the woods and mountains of Washington State after the death of a friend, Billy. Billy was obsessed with going there to search for the unaccounted-for $194,200 out of the $200,000 that famed airliner highjacker D.B. Cooper parachuted with (quite possibly to his death) in 1971 ($5,800 of his marked ransom loot was found in 1980). Canoeing down the Columbia River, the trio soon finds that their canoeing experience goes wrong..., both horribly and hilariously wrong, as the river turns dangerous, and they have encounters with the crazy mountain men (Burt Reynolds plays one of them) who live near the river. (Blanchard plays a tree-sitting "hippie chick"; Somerville plays Lillard’s girlfriend.)

Premise Notes: (8/29/03) D.B. Cooper was the subject of another movie, The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper, starring Treat Williams and Robert DuVall, which speculated about what might have happened to Cooper after his famous parachute escape.

Filming: Production is scheduled to start on October 31st, 2003 on location in Philadelphia and in and around Wellington, on the north island of New Zealand. Filming is expected to wrap up by the end of the year.

Genre: Comedy, Crime, Sports (Canoeing)