Greg Mottola works to beat the odds with Adventureland

LOS ANGELES—If you have aspirations of making a comedy about relationships between young people in the new Millennium, it’s unlikely anyone will hand you a pot-full of marketing money unless you allow them to include some elements of broad comedy in the ads and trailer. And it would make it even more inevitable that your movie would be sold that way if your last film was remembered more for its over-the-top comedy than for the relationship aspects.

That was the predicament that Adventureland writer/director Greg Mottola found himself in when he completed shooting the film, which opens on April 3. Mottola, who directed Superbad admits, in an L.A. hotel room, that the movie he made about a summer job he took working at a carnival in the mid-1980s doesn’t have the same tone as the marketing campaign.

“I feel that it is partially the times we live in because the Holy Grail audience is young people and that is who gets courted. When people passed on the film they would say ”˜we would have made it if you had made it contemporary.’ They were all concerned that the fact it is set in the 1980s would mean young people would say ”˜it’s not my generation’ and older people would say ”˜it’s about young people. I don’t give a shit.’ I hope that people who lived through the 1980s will hear about it because they are not going to go to it based on the ads and trailers.”

The film is set in 1987 and stars Jesse Eisenberg as a college graduate who is told by his parents that they can no longer afford to give him tuition for a post-graduate degree in journalism. Having no experience he is turned down for every job except one: a job working on games at a Pittsburgh summer carnival. He hates the job but falls for a girl (Kristen Stewart) who has her own problems. Her father has money but she is working there to protest his decision to marry a woman he was dating while her mother was dying of cancer.

There are very few scenes in the film that would attract young men looking for a follow-up to Superbad. In fact, the film is more reminiscent of classic nostalgia pieces like George Lucas’s American Graffiti or Sandy Wilson’s My American Cousin than any of the recent youth-oriented comedies. Mottola says that when he chose to work in television on shows like Superbad producer Judd Apatow’s Undeclared, it had a lot to do with his inability to find a good follow-up to his critically acclaimed 1996 indie film The Daytrippers. Eventually, Apatow lured him back to films.

“It surprised my agents that after all the scripts I passed on that Superbad was the one I wanted to make,” he says. “I did Daytrippers because I was purposely trying to build a fantasy career between low budget indie stuff and mainstream studio stuff. But I have made an agreement with myself that I will try and stay away from movies about people under 20 for a little bit. I don’t want to find my films in the young adult section of Netflix for the rest of my life.”