LOS ANGELES–Adults offended by Superbad's foul-mouthed kids, underage drinking, and teen sex can always blame the Vancouver school board.

It's possible the film would never have been made had the VSB not allowed the writers of the movie, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, to cross catchment boundaries to go to Kerrisdale's Point Grey secondary school. As Goldberg tells it, Rogen lived on Vancouver's East Side, close to John Oliver secondary school, and Goldberg lived in the Winston Churchill catchment area. Rogen had attended Talmud Torah, a Jewish private elementary school, and wanted to move on to high school with friends who were attending Point Grey. Goldberg applied to cross Granville Street to attend the school, and was also approved.

Within a year, Rogen and Goldberg were writing about what they knew: fake IDs, wild parties, and rejection by girls. In the film, which opens in Vancouver on Friday (August 17), the characters, also named Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera), recruit the nerdy Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse)–named after another Point Grey friend, Sammy Fogell–to get them liquor for a party after he tells them he has a connection for fake IDs. Fogell shows up with an ID that only has a last name, McLovin. He gets to the liquor store as someone tries to rob it, and two police officers arrive. Seth and Evan set out to find another way of getting the liquor they need, while Fogell goes off in a police car with two crazed cops (one played by Rogen).

In interviews he did in May related to his acting role in Knocked Up, Rogen said that the script for Superbad was written because neither he nor Goldberg–nor most of their friends–could relate to the teen films they had grown up with. "I don't know if it [Point Grey] was any funnier than any other high school," he said. "We just knew that our experience wasn't being represented in movies."

In a Los Angeles hotel during interviews for Superbad, Rogen says he was 14 and Goldberg just 13 when they started writing. Eleven years later, Goldberg says, some of the key parts of the original script remain. "The general plot was the same, and there are all sorts of tidbits," he says. "We went to wild parties with older people and we tried to buy alcohol to impress girls."

Rogen left Point Grey at the age of 16 to pursue an acting career in Los Angeles. He was hired by Freaks and Geeks executive producer Judd Apatow to costar in the series and stayed in L.A., working with Apatow again on the 2001 series Undeclared. He eventually got up the nerve to show the script to Apatow, who said he would work with Rogen and Goldberg on improving it. (Apatow is a producer on Superbad, while Greg Mottola directed it.)

"The real change in the script after we worked with Judd on it was the relationship between the guys," Rogen says. "After we wrote our first draft, we were told that the characters were too much alike–and we are kind of similar. We had a tough time wrapping our head around that, but slowly we started changing it. Judd helped us to develop it into an emotional story between the guys."

Since they had used several of their friends' real names, Rogen and Goldberg decided to bring them together for the premiere. Rogen says that almost all of the people they wrote about were happy to sign release forms.

"We are still friends with them. Thirty of them are coming to the L.A. premiere from Vancouver. We were going to have it at Oakridge [Centre], but we were able to bring them all down here. I think the fact that pretty much everyone we went to school with signed the forms was a good indication that we maintained good relations with them. A few bastards didn't, but we had told people since high school that we were writing it. It was weird 10 years later when we could say, 'It's actually happening.' But everyone seems psyched."