Hollywood career awaits Penn senior

MGM recently acquired Jon Hurwitz's comedic screenplay 'Filthy.' "I haven't made it yet," Wharton senior Jon Hurwitz told 34th Street magazine last month. "My movie could never be sold. The door has just been opened a crack." Little did he know then that his door was about to open -- by far more than a crack. Hurwitz was at the movies a few days after the Street interview when the call came. Cell phone in hand, he slipped out of the theater. Agent Jewerl Ross' words were beautifully direct. "MGM is buying your movie. Congratulations: You're a Hollywood screenwriter." Late this February, Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg -- his co-writer and best friend from high school -- flew to Los Angeles with their screenplay for a movie called Filthy, a raunchy tale of two recent college graduates trying to figure out what comes next in life. Within a week, they had picked out an agent and a manager. Their script then landed on the desks of over 20 companies. And MGM, eager to get in on the lucrative American Pie genre, stepped up with the highest bid. And if it's raunchy comedy that MGM wants, the studio has struck some gold. "It's much raunchier than American Pie," Hurwitz says proudly. "Maybe even more than South Park." While signing with MGM does not guarantee that the movie will be made -- the studio's final answer will depend on rewrites and its continued interest in the script -- Filthy's chances of success look promising. The movie's producer Matt Berenson predicts that Filthy -- a story about two twentysomething friends, Ben and Evan, forced to grow up after college -- will "be huge at the box office, especially with 16-to-30 year olds." From a scene of Evan dressed as a giant penis to one of Ben masturbating with a picture of Hillary Clinton, nothing is taboo. "I was afraid to read it," Hurwitz's mother Ilene admits. (Says Hurwitz, "They like to think that the dirty lines are Hayden's.") Sold for an amount in the low six figures, the screenplay opens with a scene of Ben and Evan's college graduation party. Evan's dad informs his son, a jobless Beach State graduate, that he'll be kicked out of the house by the end of the summer. Ben, a Harvard grad, develops a plan to help Evan put his life together. In the months that follow, the two go through messy break-ups, awful jobs, romances, fights, beer kegs and some reality checks. "The jokes are executed really well," Ross says. "A lot of other movies really don't make you laugh out loud. This movie is comedy writing, not just a comedic screenplay." But according to friends and Hollywood folks who have read Filthy, the screenplay -- for all its outrageous hilarity -- hits some sober chords. "It is smarter and more 'real' than your typical broad comedy," Berenson says, "and it has a theme which I can relate to: Follow your dreams." The screenplay, whose title will be changed before it hits the theater, has already gone through about 15 drafts. In a few weeks, the two writers will be flying to L.A. for a rewrite with MGM. And in the last month, they've lined up over 20 interviews with curious members of the media. With more than 10 new ideas for future screenplays in mind, Hurwitz and University of Chicago senior Schlossberg plan to keep writing. In June, the two will be moving into an apartment in LA. If Hurwitz has his way, investment banking -- his alternate career option -- will be a thing of the past. "I think these guys are going to be enormously successful," manager Paul Young says, "much like the Weitz brothers who wrote American Pie and the Zuckers who did the Airplane movies." When they began writing two years ago, everyone saw Filthy as a fun summer project -- except Hurwitz. In high school, Hurwitz had written in Schlossberg's yearbook that one day the two would be writing for Hollywood. "Definitely none of this would have happened so fast if I didn't have a partner like Jon," Schlossberg says. "He was aggressive about getting? everything moving." Hurwitz had never read a screenplay before writing Filthy. His material, he says, comes from talking to a diverse group of friends. "I pay attention to how people phrase things. It's something I do unconsciously." A self-proclaimed "realistic optimist," Hurwitz says he's become more laidback recently because he now knows what he wants to do. "Jon is a bright, funny self-confident guy," Berenson says. "I think he has the potential to do whatever he wants in the film business." Both Jon and Hayden want to have some influence in the casting of Filthy. They're toying with the idea of Rob Schneider as a mental patient and Chris Elliot as the character Filthy Sid. And they've each requested a small role in the movie. "I eventually want to have my own production company," Hurwitz says. "I want to look for talented people who don't have an agent and help them develop." Two years ago, when Hurwitz and Schlossberg were starting to think about writing Filthy, Kevin Smith -- the director of Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma -- spoke at Penn. Recently, Hurwitz posted a note on the Web site of Smith's production company, View Askew, thanking Smith for his inspiration. In about two hours, 30 strangers had e-mailed Hurwitz with congratulations and requests for advice. So it comes as no surprise to know that life is different for Hurwitz these days. His cell phone rings a lot. The Hollywood Reporter has written about him. Random people ask him about his screenplay on a daily basis. But for Hurwitz, writing what he hopes will be "one of the funniest movies ever made" is only the beginning.