When three college outcasts take an experimental drug and find themselves high out of their minds, they have to face their toughest challenge of all: going down three flights of stairs to pick up a pizza.
That’s the conceit of “Pizza Movie,” a balls-to-the-wall stoner comedy starring “Stranger Things” alum Gaten Matarazzo, which debuted last month to a packed crowd at SXSW and hits Hulu this weekend.
If the film’s premise sounds bizarre — that’s the point. In fact, it’s the ethos behind production company American High: pitching “stupid, funny ideas” and turning them into gold.
American High’s CEO Jeremy Garelick and President Will Phelps, who met in their past lives at Paradigm Talent Agency, hit it off right away when they realized they had one key thing in common: “Our craziness levels kind of matched,” Phelps recalls. “Let’s buy a high school!”
Neon sign for “American High’s The Slice Club” above a building entrance. American High And they did just that, purchasing a defunct school in upstate New York from which American High could produce its content and set up shop. With that acquisition came a serendipitous offshoot, Garelick says. “The high school that we bought, unbeknownst to us, was in a village that was zoned for school. So we’re like, ‘All right, we’ll start a school!’”
That school, The Academy at American High, is a nonprofit training program to prepare students who may otherwise not have the resources for a variety of careers in the world of entertainment and media production. “We’ve had over 900 students come through our school, and they’re now working all over the place,” Garelick adds.
It’s an unconventional method of setting up shop – and the American High team wouldn’t have it any other way. “Usually when people are like, ‘That’s a crazy idea. You can’t do that.’ That’s when we’re like, ‘Oh yeah, watch!’ A lot of our decisions aren’t driven by anything that’s thought out or bright,” Garelick says.
So it’s no surprise that they’ve got a couple more wild business plans up their sleeves.
For an upcoming web series shoot, the team decided to up the ante with another custom shooting space. “We bought a barbecue restaurant in Liverpool (NY), which is one block from our high school, and we renovated it to be a pizzeria,” Phelps says.
That’s the conceit of “Pizza Movie,” a balls-to-the-wall stoner comedy starring “Stranger Things” alum Gaten Matarazzo, which debuted last month to a packed crowd at SXSW and hits Hulu this weekend. American High But what happens to the space when filming wraps? There’s a plan for that, the duo shares, leaning back in their seats and acting out an extended bit pitching me as a “Shark Tank” investor.
It’ll open as a real pizzeria, called Slice Club, with a hot and bubbly twist. “It has a giant front porch,” Phelps says excitedly. “It’s gonna be the only bar that you can reserve hot tubs at. It’s like Après-ski, but for Syracuse!”
The hot tub holds particular significance for Garelick, who balled out on a hot tub after wrapping a gig doing punch-up work for “Hot Tub Time Machine.” “We’re working on how to keep it sanitary. That’s everyone’s concern,” Garelick says with a laugh. “Listen, you could catch diseases anywhere! Why not be relaxed? That should be our tagline: Enjoy a pizza, a beer, some antibiotics!”
Once you’ve had your fill of penicillin and pepperoni, Garelick and Phelps are working on yet another venture: a vertical-screen movie theater. What will play on that screen? For now, “Whatever you’re watching on your phone,” Garelick says — but he predicts they’re ahead of the game on a trend that goes beyond social content. “Everybody’s gonna start shooting everything both ways,” he says, citing the Sphere in Las Vegas as an innovator in the theatrical space.
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Being ahead of the curve is precisely what has set American High up for success, establishing themselves firmly in the vertical content space on social media and adapting in the years since – after conquering the high school content space, the team graduated to college settings, and now also produces projects about twenty-somethings.
To boot, their structure gives them the freedom to produce short-form content that can be conceptualized, shot and posted on socials within 24 hours, while they can also flex their muscles on larger projects that can take years of development (like their previous hits “Plan B,” “The Binge” and “Summer of 69”).
“I grew up on all the John Hughes movies, right? ‘Breakfast Club,’ ‘16 Candles’, ‘Ferris Bueller.’ Nobody was making these movies when I was making movies. I couldn’t get any of these movies made when I had already done wildly successful studio comedies,” Garelick says. “It was like, ‘Okay, we can do this up. There’s a niche in the market. These studios would rather spend a billion dollars on ‘Spider-Man’ than $5 million on a high school movie.’”
But don’t get it twisted — the comedy always comes first. American High turned down a real pizza company’s sponsorship in “Pizza Movie” for the sake of a good joke — the pizza delivery comes from “Lord of the Pies.” (Alt titles for the flick included “Pie Hard” and “Mission Im-Pizza-ble”).
Up next for American High is “Rolling Loud,” out this September, which follows an overprotective dad who tries to bond with his teen son by sneaking him into the Rolling Loud hip-hop festival.
Garelick hopes American High can continue its hot streak for years to come: “We want to pollute the minds of the next generation. Just like ours were polluted!”
