Road Trip

Todd Phillips arrived here from documentary. Frat House, co-directed with Andrew Gurland, won the documentary grand jury prize at Sundance in 1998, though HBO, which produced it, never aired it. At that festival Phillips met Ivan Reitman, who brought him to this picture and then to Old School. It is his first fiction feature, written with Scot Armstrong. The University of Ithaca is invented, its name taken from Ithaca College and Cornell, but the campus material was shot in Georgia, at Georgia Tech, Emory and the University of Georgia. The story is not told first hand. Barry, the campus tour guide played by Tom Green, relays it to the group he is walking around, so the film advances inside a tour and stops wherever the guide wants. Green won a Teen Choice award for the part; the same year the Stinkers gave him two negative awards for this film and Charlie’s Angels. The drive is about 1,800 miles and the film cuts it into stops. DreamWorks released the rated and the unrated version together in December 2000. A good fit if you like a story handed to you second hand by a tour guide. Not for you if the period’s crude set pieces sit badly now; the school for the blind and the sperm bank are among the main stops.