Jason Biggs as Jim with the object of his affection (aka an apple pie).

My, My, Miss
AMERICAN PIE

Take four teenage guys desperate to lose their virginity before the prom but a little unsure of how exactly to go about it. Make sure they get humiliated in the most outrageous and public way possible. Then mix in four girls who are equally keen on having sex - but only when they’re in charge. Finally, add one apple pie and you get one of the funniest movies of the year and certainly the only one which features pastry products as sex aids.

Tapping into the same tradition of teen classics as Porky’s and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, American Pie is an irreverent, earthy and good-natured look at the end of school and the beginning of adult life. With its cast of mostly fresh faces, the $10.8-million production is already being touted as one of the summer’s potential break-out hits, much to the mock horror of Paul and Chris Weitz, the brothers who, respectively, directed and produced the film. "Our aim was always to do justice to the script and make our money back, so it does worry me that expectation is very high," claims Chris.

Jason Biggs as Jim caught in the act by his dad (Eugene Levy).

"The idea started when I was in college," says Adam Herz, whose brainchild the script was. "My friends and I would always wonder what happened to those teenage party movies, like Porky’s. So it started as a joke, you know - ‘Let’s bring that back’." The first scene of the film, in which the hero, Jim (Jason Biggs), is caught by his parents while watching a porn movie, sets the tone for a non-stop sequence of mishaps that should have audiences laughing and groaning as they remember their own early sexual escapades. "I think everybody has their own personal mythology of how awkward and embarrassing their first sexual experiences were. Hopefully, they can look back on those now and laugh. That’s what resonates," says Paul Weitz.

But few of us have been broadcast live on the Internet while attempting to seduce an improbably beautiful foreign exchange student, or have tried to satisfy ourselves with the aid of an apple pie. Hertz, though, denies that anything in the movie was based on his own schooldays. “None of the jokes were from personal experience. They were more like you take typical teenager situations and you supply the worst possible outcome. A lot of it came out of the horror of ‘what if?’ because, if you’re a high-school kid gratifying yourself, then 10 million of the worst possible scenarios run through your head. So that wasn’t tough to put down on paper.”