Bottoms Up(2006)

Submitted by Tornado Dragon

Over time, as Owen (Jason Mewes) becomes more and more involved with Hayden (Brian Hallisay), his inner circle, and Lisa (Paris Hilton), he and Lisa end up developing a mutual attraction to each other, and one evening, he kisses her up on the roof of the Wishing Well Homeless Shelter that she operates (and is the place where she secretly funnels all the money her movie executive father, A.J. [Tim Thomerson], gives her towards her designer clothing boutique). She then asks him to be her date to tomorrow’s premiere of Hayden’s new movie, Crazy Town, having decided to dump Hayden, and he accepts.

Later that night, while Owen is attending a party at Hayden’s house, Hayden tells him that Lisa broke up with him, but he isn’t all that bummed out about it. Hayden then offers to pay Owen $20,000 in exchange for letting him be the first person to interview him, both because Owen had led him to believe that he was a writer (as part of his integration into his posse) and because he wants to help Owen’s father, Frank (Raymond O’Connor), out of his financial problem with his steakhouse, having earlier been told about it by Owen. He also gives Owen a video camera to record the interview with. Hayden’s friend, Jimmy (Jon Abrahams), sees this and becomes even more upset with Hayden and (especially) Owen than he already is, having never taken to Owen and having come to believe that he is pushing him out of his spot in Hayden’s clique. Shortly into the interview, Hayden goes off the record and tells Owen that he got his break in the movie business by doing a masturbation tape for his agent, Bill (Alan Woolf), and how, over time, the story about it was twisted into a different bizarre story about him that got spread around.

The next day, while Owen and his uncle, Earl (David Keith), are in the latter’s house watching a videotape that Jimmy made showing him having sex with Dorothy (Lindsay Gareth), an aspiring actress, and performing unsatisfactorily, Owen switches it over to the interview he did with Hayden. Just as he begins to tell Earl the story that Hayden had told him, Jimmy shows up at the front door and tells them that he wants the interview tape, claiming that Hayden has changed his mind about it. Earl hands a tape over to Jimmy, but just after Jimmy departs, Earl shows Owen that he tricked Jimmy and gave him a different tape (which is later shown to contain a recording of Earl’s last birthday party). They then see Hayden on TV doing his first interview with somebody else, and feeling that Hayden has betrayed Owen, Earl tells him that this will just give them more ammunition for their exposé on Hayden and therefore a bigger payday. When Earl then declares that all they need now is one juicy thing that will take Hayden down, Owen finally tells him about Hayden’s masturbation video, and Earl realizes that he has a copy of it, which he takes out and shows Owen. Though Earl is very eager to get this information out to the public and get rich from it, Owen tells him that maybe they ought to hold off on doing that for now because he is going to the premiere of Hayden’s film with Lisa tonight, plus he is not keen on making dirty money off Hayden because he considers him to be a nice guy. Earl tells Owen that Lisa has gotten him all messed up and tries to explain to him that she is just using him to get back at her father, but Owen dismisses his beliefs.

Meanwhile, Lisa meets with A.J., and he tells her that he knows that she has gotten herself involved with Owen, and she in turn informs him that she doesn’t love Hayden and has ended their relationship. He then explains to her that now is not the best time to break up with Hayden because Hayden is about to premiere (what he considers to be) a real turkey of a movie and is already neck-deep in promotional work for it, so he needs her to reconcile with him. When Lisa tells her father that going out with Hayden again won’t improve the quality of the film, he reveals to her that he knows about the Wishing Well shelter and how his money is going into it, then warns her that, if she doesn’t go back to dating Hayden immediately, he will cut her off financially. Lisa decides to acquiesce to her father’s demand, so when Owen shows up to the premiere of Crazy Town that night, he sees Lisa arriving hand-in-hand with Hayden. When he gets her attention to find out what is going on, she tells him that what happened between them was a mistake and she is sorry that he got the wrong idea. He then gets fingered by the media as her “stalker” from the tabloids, and he walks away disappointed while she watches him go with a sad look on her face. As Owen makes his way back to Earl’s house, he finally calls back Rusty #2 (Kevin Smith) – since he has tried calling Owen several times already – from a payphone, and he finds out from him that Frank’s steakhouse will be shutting down tomorrow because it wasn’t approved for the loan that Frank applied for, nor has Owen sent him any money from the bartending contest he competed in (which he lost, but hadn’t told his father about it yet). Owen promises Rusty that he is getting the money, but Rusty replies that it is too late for that. In the morning, Owen tells Earl that they will put the masturbation tape to use.

Owen and Earl bring the tape to the studio of the Hollywood Scoop TV show, where Earl used to work as a cameraman until he got fired by the show’s obnoxious host, Pip Wingo (Phil Morris), earlier in the film. They meet with Pip and sell him the tape for $500,000 cash, and afterwards, Pip calls his co-host, Penny (Nicholle Tom), and tells her to make an announcement stating that the tape will air on tonight’s edition of the show. However, when Pip shows his superiors the tape before the broadcast, he finds out that Earl had conned him; the tape shows something completely different and is left unseen by the viewer for the moment. Pip then realizes that, when Earl had farted in his presence while they were making their deal and he turned his head away in disgust, Earl and Owen must have secretly switched out Hayden’s tape for the one he now has (which is exactly what happened). That night, when Hollywood Scoop goes on the air, Pip is forced to play the video he was given, which turns out to be Jimmy’s sex tape. However, Dorothy’s face has been pixelated out and hers and Jimmy’s voices have been dubbed over, and the person performing Jimmy’s voice makes insulting remarks about him and his genitalia. This causes Jimmy to lose a role he just received on an upcoming TV show and also ruins his image, and we last see him working as a cook at a diner and dealing with the patrons making fun of him. Pip gets fired from the Scoop for his blunder, much to the delight of the entire staff because he was very unpopular amongst them. During all of this, Owen gets a call at Earl’s house from Frank, who tells him that a bigshot lawyer – on behalf of Hayden – wired $25,000 to his bank account, which will enable him to keep his steakhouse open.

Crazy Town becomes a box office smash, and Hayden starts dating a new woman. Also, thanks to Penny’s announcement on Hollywood Scoop about his masturbation tape, the tape gets renewed attention put on it and quickly turns into a hot-selling item. The Scoop rehires Earl and makes him the new host of the show. We then see Owen paying Hayden a visit at his house, both to thank him for sending his father the money and to say goodbye to him because he is heading back to Minnesota in a couple of days. As they chat, Hayden tells him that his next movie is going to be called Valet Whore, and it is written by Jesus (Adam Beach), the parking attendant and aspiring writer who had a fling with Lisa a while back (which Earl and Owen had used to blackmail Lisa with in order to get her to introduce Owen to Hayden and his inner circle). After telling Hayden that he is leaving soon and then thanking him for what he did for his father, Owen apologizes to him for both lying about being a writer and lying about being Lisa’s cousin, explaining that he blackmailed Lisa to say all of that and that he did it because he was desperate to find a way to save his father’s restaurant. He also apologizes to Hayden for his part in letting his masturbation tape become public knowledge. Hayden replies that he considers all of this to be water under the bridge, because after consulting with his yogi, he has come to the conclusion that Owen was sent to him to help exorcize his demons, and that’s why he told him about his masturbation video. Hayden then asks Owen if he has talked to Lisa, and when Owen replies that he hasn’t, Hayden tells him that he knows that he is attracted to her, then informs him that Lisa only went to the film premiere with him because her father ordered her to. He also tells Owen that Lisa has recently moved out of her father’s house and is now trying to make her own money.

The next day, when Lisa shows up for another shift at the Wishing Well shelter, she discovers that Owen has donated some nice gifts to the place. She stops by Earl’s house (off-screen) and asks him where Owen is, and Earl tells her that she can find him at the nearby movie theater. She locates him in the auditorium showing Crazy Town (which he is watching because he has a small role in it), and after thanking him for the donations, they smooth over whatever problems they have between them and share a kiss. The movie ends back at the steakhouse, where Owen, Lisa, Earl, Hayden, Frank, and their friends all come to the place for dinner one night, but they get the full red carpet treatment with photographers and interviewers.

In a mid-credits scene, Pip is shown doing an outdoor weather report for a news station somewhere in the Arctic.