THE RETURN OF HAROLD AND KUMAR

There was only one reason I ever imagined I’d find myself in Louisiana—to drown in the delirious melee of beads, booze, bare breasts and brass bands that calls itself Mardi Gras. But rather than spending Fat Tuesday cruising down Bourbon Street in search of my own personal Girls Gone Wild episode, I was hundreds of miles north in the rundown riverboat town of Shreveport, dragging along Red River in the back of an old taxi. So why am I in the Atlantic City of the bayou, you ask? Because it also happens to be one of the country’s cinematic capitals, and the place where New Line Cinema has chosen to shoot the new Harold and Kumar movie.

The parking lot of Louisiana State University is cluttered with trucks and trailers, and I nearly take a nosedive navigating the snake pit of cables leading up into the school’s library. At the top of the stairs, I’m welcomed to the set by H&K writers John Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who this time around have also assumed the directorial duties. These two high-school chums from Randolph, NJ, started out on very different career paths—Hurwitz majoring in finance at Penn State, and Schlossberg studying pre-law at the University of Chicago. But they shared such a love of movies and comedy that halfway through college they started writing scripts together. They sold their first screenplay during senior year, moved to L.A. and never looked back.

“In every script we wrote, no matter what the story was, there was always an Asian guy named Harold and an Indian guy named Kumar,” Schlossberg tells me. “For us they were staples—almost like our Jay and Silent Bob.”

“See, where we grew up, there were a ton of Indian and Asian kids,” explains Hurwitz. “And the thing that struck us was, whenever we saw Asian characters in movies, they always had thick accents and were exchange students—they weren’t real. We wanted to write a youth comedy where the Asian and Indian characters were just like any other American kids—like the guys we knew. That’s how we came up with the idea for H&K.”

Once the guys shifted the focus of their storytelling to what had until then been two peripheral characters, it made all the difference—resulting in the 2004 cult classic Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. While the film’s gross at the box office was less than spectacular, it’s since earned a whopping $30 million in DVD sales—all but guaranteeing the green light for a sequel.

“We purposely wrote the last script where it left off on a cliffhanger,” says Schlossberg. “We wanted to give it a to-be-continued feel, so we could say to the execs at New Line: ‘If you put some money into this movie, you could end up with a franchise—it could be the next Cheech and Chong.’”

“So you see Harold and Kumar as a modern-day Cheech and Chong?” I ask.

“No … I think the big difference is, with Cheech and Chong, weed was their whole lives, whereas Harold and Kumar have regular jobs—Kumar is a talented med student, and Harold’s an investment banker. But at home on a Friday night, they want to chill out, and that’s just how they take a load off—they get high.”