Grinding to the Beat

On a very clear, cool July day, I drove to the Marina del Rey area of Los Angeles to the courtyard of a high rise office complex where the girl band The Donnas were shooting a music video for the new Warner Brothers skateboarding comedy film Grind, a kind of Road Trip meets X-Treme Sports meets Jackass movie. Skateboarding extras dressed as everything from cops to hospital patients wheeling along with their i.v. stands, were cris crossing, popping stunts and grinding rails across the courtyard while The Donnas, not too fresh off their Lollapalooza tour (they had performed late the night before in Atlanta, got maybe two hours' sleep and were brought to the set) were setting up and singing to a playback track, a very upbeat new tune called "Too Bad About Your Girl" all about a girl moving in on a cute guy whose girlfriend just wasn't good enough for him.

Between takes, the Donnas got swarmed by make-up artists. It's hard to interview a girl when she is having tons of lip gloss applied to her mouth! So, although friendly during lunch, the girls didn't have time for a real interview with me but check out our cool streaming video chat with The Donnas up on TeenMusic.com. However, I did chat with two of the hot male young cast members of Grind.

Grind is about four guy pals who want to be skateboard professionals. They hit the road on the ultimate road trip to chase their dream. One of the pals, Vince Vieluf, a cute, curly-haired actor with a wild sense of humor came zooming past me on his board and I grabbed him...

TeenHollywood: Hey Vince! Hold up a minute! Who do you play in Grind?

Vince: Hi! I play Matt Jenson. I'm the high school drop out of the group living in the back of a garage and I become a professional skater.

TeenHollywood: Do you go on the road trip with the guys?

Vince: Absolutely! I go without question.

TeenHollywood: Who is driving?

Vince: Joey Kern (who plays Sweet Lou). He's the only one with a license, you know?

TeenHollywood: Did you know how to skate before you did the film?

Vince: Yeah. I've been skating my whole life. (Hummm, he rolls his eyes here so we're not sure).

TeenHollywood: Do you get a girl is this movie?

Vince: No. Sadly, I started without one and ended without one.

TeenHollywood: How did you get interested in the project?

Vince: I read the script and the writer called me and told me what his idea was; to make a movie that was somewhere in between Hollywood and Jackass. It's more freeflowing and whatever hijinks we came up with while shooting, that's what's in the movie. We ad-libbed the whole time. This movie is all about underdogs and we're all actors who need a break so we gave it our heart and soul.

TeenHollywood: Do you do your own stunts?

Vince: No. The only stunt I did is skate off the roof of a house into a pool. And I'd been drinking... I'm kidding. All the characters have a professional skater who doubles as them. We wanted to stay remotely legitimate in the skate world so we did some of the stuff.

TeenHollywood: Did you try to match the doubles' style?

Vince: Absolutely. My skater is way more on a street level. People like Mike Vogel, who is the lead in the film, his double was more like a professional ramp skater.

TeenHollywood: Did you ever go on your own road trip?

Vince: Yeah, when I was shooting Rat Race, Seth Green and I were flown up there [Canada] a couple of weeks early to get to know each other because we were supposed to be playing brothers. It was 'hey, let's rent a car and drive around and go into the woods in Canada'. Like total nerds from Los Angeles, we got lost in a National Forest for three days. We argued our way out with each other. We kept asking people for directions. All I knew is to say 'eh' after every sentence.

Their directions were like 'you'll see a big rock'. That was a memorable experience and it worked. We got to know each other. My girlfriend and I go on road trips all the time though. We'll go visit family in Texas and stop in weird little towns. She designs clothing. We met in a bar. I was out of my mind and I saw her and creeped under the table and kissed her foot. She said 'who in the hell are you'? We've been going out five years and I still kiss her feet.

Vince got called back to the set so I caught cute, blonde, surfer-type dude Mike Vogel, who plays lead character Eric Rivers in the film, while he was kicking back relaxing. He and co-star Jennifer Morrison were cutting up under a HUGE cowboy hat worn by one of the skateboarders. Mike told us about a wild time he and his fellow Grind road trippers had soaking in a hot tub and smoking cigars after a long day of shooting " somebody dumped bubble bath in and the bubbles were like a foot over our heads".

Mike skated in high school and had fun going back to his roots for this film. He and his castmates worked a bit on the script but Mike wants people to know that this film is in no way a documentary reflection of the pro skating world. "It in no way says 'this is what the sport is'. It's a fun time, a road trip about four guys and not Hollywood saying, 'this is what your sport is'.

TeenHollywood: Did you ever take a road trip?

Mike: Yeah. I'm from Philadelphia and every November we'd go up to New York to ski and one year, it was me and four or five friends and we went up in my parents' conversion van and my friend had brought back this tear gas gun from New York. It was about three o'clock in the morning and we're driving through nowhere. He points it out the window and shoots the tear gas and pulled the gun back in. You know it takes a while for the gas to actually come out of the gun. He pulled it back in and filled the entire van with tear gas. We're in the middle of the van, crying, laughing, throwing up for about 15 minutes until things cleared but that's my road trip story.

TeenHollywood: How was working with Jennifer Morrison who plays your girlfriend in Grind?

Mike: Great. Great chemistry. We're both really fun loving people so it translated on the screen.

TeenHollywood: Where was the film shot?

Mike: We shot all over L.A. and Santa Monica pier to the desert and Malibu. We doubled different spots in the country. We're not really going from state to state. It's the magic of film.

TeenHollywood: Who were your doubles?

Mike: I had Brian Patch who was awesome. He has the Guinness book record for the longest gap jump or something. Then Bucky Lasik doubled me on the half pipe and that was incredible. He'd just won the gravity games. The trick that he pulls in this movie had never been done before. It happened right there. It was a huge rush.

TeenHollywood: What was the most fun you had shooting Grind?

Mike: The greatest scenes were the group scenes. It made me analyze my friendships. It's every friend group. You have to have the optimist, the jokester, the downer, the cool guy. My character is the optimist, the dreamer. We winged half the scenes and the stuff was really funny. It was cool for me to get some of that optimism back because I'm the total opposite. If it's sunny outside, I'm like 'It's gonna rain in five minutes'. But we're both very passionate about what we do.

Grind opens in theaters August 15th.

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.