EuroTrip EuroTrip is a 2004 American comedy movie directed by Jeff Schaffer. Plot At the Class of 2004 Ohio High School graduation party, Scotty Thomas was dumped by Fiona, who started dating a rock singer. He made the song Scotty Doesn't Know, which is about his sexual acts towards Fiona while Scotty doesn't know about it. Scott has been exchanging emails with a German woman named Mieke. Scott believes that Mieke is a male name but his younger brother explained that Mieke is a common name for German women. Scott regrets not knowing that Mieke is a woman and plans to go to Europe with his pals Cooper Harris and twins Jenny and Jamie. The group travels from London to Bratislava. While drunk on Absinthe, Jenny and Jamie kiss, to Scott and Cooper's disgust. Cast - Scott Mechlowicz as Scotty Thomas - Jacob Pitts as Cooper Harris - Michelle Trachtenberg as Jenny - Travis Wester as Jamie - Matt Damon as Donny - Jeffrey Tambor as Mr. Thomas - Vinnie Jones as Mad Maynard - Fred Armisen as Creepy Italian Guy - J.P. EuroTrip is a 2004 American teen sex comedy film directed by Jeff Schaffer, from a screenplay he wrote with Alec Berg and David Mandel. The film was produced by The Montecito Picture Company and distributed by DreamWorks Pictures. It stars Scott Mechlowicz, Jacob Pitts, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Travis Wester. Mechlowicz portrays Scotty Thomas, a recent high school graduate from the Youngstown, Ohio area who travels across Europe in search of his German pen pal, Mieke (Jessica Boehrs). Accompanied by his friend Cooper (Pitts) and twin siblings Jenny and Jamie (Trachtenberg and Wester), Scotty's quest takes him to England, France, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Germany, and Italy, encountering awkward, humorous, and embarrassing situations along the way. EuroTrip was released in theaters on February 20, 2004. It received mixed reviews from critics and underperformed at the box office, grossing $22.6 million against a $25 million budget. It gained popularity through its home video release and eventually attained a cult classic status. It is considered a spiritual successor to the 2000 DreamWorks release Road Trip, but was not originally intended to serve as such, with the original title being Ugly Americans. As she was 18 years old at the time of the film's release, Trachtenberg was the only main actor in the cast who was an actual teenager, while the rest of the cast were in their 20s or older. Travis Wester as Jamie: Jenny's fraternal older twin brother. Wester described Jamie as a lifelong learner whose aspiration is "the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge". Jessica Boehrs as Mieke Schmidt: Scotty's German pen pal. Boehrs made her film debut with EuroTrip. The cast also includes Vinnie Jones as Mad Maynard (leader of the Manchester United football hooligans), Lucy Lawless as Madame Vandersexxx (a sex-club dominatrix), Patrick Malahide as Arthur Frommer, Diedrich Bader as Mugger, Fred Armisen as Creepy Italian Guy, Kristin Kreuk as Fiona (Scotty's ex-girlfriend), Nial Iskhakov as Bert Thomas (Scotty's younger brother), Matt Damon as Donny (Fiona's new boyfriend), J. P. Manoux as Robot Man, Rade Šerbedžija as Tibor, Jana Pallaske as Anna the Camera Store girl, and Steve Hytner as the Absinthe Green Fairy. Jeffrey Tambor (uncredited) and Cathy Meils were cast as Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, respectively. Due to Screen Actors Guild rules that dictated every American actor had to be paid for travel and accommodations - as Berg put it, "to get somebody to come from America to deliver one line, it’s like $20,000." - extras were Czech, and most American actors were already in Prague to begin with. This included Matt Damon, who was filming The Brothers Grimm in Prague and agreed to play the punk singer, given he could shave his head for the wig he wore in Grimm; and Lucy Lawless, invited as she prepared to return to New Zealand for a one-day cameo as the dominatrix Madame Vandersexxx. Even if they eventually got together in the later scene where she becomes his roommate, test audiences reacted negatively, so during reshoots the directors replaced it with the scene of both having sex in a confessional booth. Post-production had DreamWorks executives frustrated at the content, eventually conceiving the title change from Ugly Americans to EuroTrip to lure in fans of Road Trip, ironically getting backlash from said film's director Todd Phillips. To ensure a high score at the final test screening that would allow its release, the directors invited "anyone we knew who was younger than us and wasn’t in the [film] business", including Harvard Lampoon writers, and asked some of the men to mark in the post-screening query that they were women to improve the score in said demographic. == Release and reception == === Critical response === Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives EuroTrip a 46% rating based on 119 reviews, and an average of 5.1/10. The site's critical consensus says, "A trip worth taking if one's not offended by gratuitous nudity and bad taste." On Metacritic, the film scored 45 out of 100 based on 30 reviews, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. In her review for Salon, Stephanie Zacharek wrote, "The giddy ridiculousness of Eurotrip is a pleasant surprise: The picture starts out slow and unsteady in its rhythms. The version on streaming services is the theatrical cut rather than the Unrated version. === Legacy === Although not as successful at the box office as the producers' Road Trip (2000), EuroTrip did well on home video and became a cult classic. Ultra Culture blogger Charlie Lyne, who introduced a screening of the film in 2011 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, wrote in 2012 that "EuroTrip is satire at its most brazenly self-loathing and audaciously entertaining". Matt Damon reportedly has said that despite appearing in notable films like Saving Private Ryan, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and the Bourne franchise, fans often repeat "Scotty doesn't know!" to him.