Interview: Producer Andrew Muscato On Bringing 'The Greatest Beer Run Ever' To The Big Screen
Muscato
It’s been 3 years since Peter Farrelly’s last film Green Book won big at the Academy Awards. After decades of directing quirky cult comedies with his brother Bobby, the filmmaker seemed to find a new niche: telling true feel-good stories. This year, he continues that streak with the film The Greatest Beer Run Ever.
The film tells the remarkable tale of a New York native named John “Chickie” Donahue who managed to stealthily travel overseas during the Vietnam war to visit some of his neighbors and, as the name implies, boost their morale with some booze. As the film’s trailer arguably emphasizes too much, the film is based on actual events. Speaking in an exclusive interview with FilmSpeak, co-producer Andrew Muscato explained how the almost unbelievable story found its way to the big screen. Ironically enough, it all began in a bar.
One evening former New York Daily News columnist Joanna Molloy overheard someone telling Chickie’s story. Unsure of its validity, she took it upon herself to track down the real life Donahue, as well as his friends. Word for word, they all corroborated the story. That inspired Molloy to want to write a book. At the time, Molloy was a close friend of Muscato and when she first told him the story, he recalls telling her, “This sounds like a movie.”
“Amazingly,” he adds, “Joanna told me that these guys had lost touch over the years and that they hadn’t seen each other.” Fresh out of film school, Muscato was stricken with a strange idea. He wanted to turn it into a feature length film. However, being a documentarian with no narrative storytelling experience, he thought he could play the long game by making a short documentary about the subject instead.
Courtesy of Apple TV+
“My thought was to kind of play to my strengths,” he said. “You know, I've been making documentaries. So why don't we make this into a documentary, and we reunite the guys and have them tell the story and use that as kind of a proof concept for this amazing story. Then put it on YouTube?” He believed that the same goodwill that guided Chickie through Vietnam all those years before would return and help him spread the story to a modern audience. He was right.
He says that a few years after it debuted on YouTube, he began getting calls. It wasn’t until after Joanna finally wrote her book and he formally obtained the movie rights that things started to become serious. “[In 2019], Skydance reached out. They had discovered the short on YouTube and they were interested in adapting it with me,” Moscato says. “They seemed like ideal partners, being that they make these big action spectacle movies like Mission Impossible or Top Gun. So the fact that it was a period war movie, you know, it [not only] required co-producers who understood the special effects of it all and kind of made sense with scope, but [whp] also were willing to put up a budget required to authentically recreate it.”
Farrelly joined shortly after, and so did Zac Efron. He admits that he didn’t originally envision someone like Efron for the role of Chickie, but it was his “natural charm and charisma” that sold him, saying “The movie kind of lives or dies based on Chickie, and a lot of that is you have to be rooting for the guy. You have to like the guy.” He’s right.
Courtesy of Apple TV+
As Muscato later explains, “Chickie’s kind of hubris and naïveté, in a way, also represents America's own hubris and naïveté entering Vietnam. And by the end of it, there's this realization that this was very misguided.” When Chickie witnesses the horrors of war firsthand, he breaks from the mob mentality he’s fostered at home and begins to question everything he’s ever been told.
“One of the themes of the film is finding the truth and finding common ground,” Moscato says. But he argues that a recent comment he saw online cuts right to the core of the film’s main message. The comment reads, “Anyone who thinks it’s foolish to deliver beer to American soldiers during a war should imagine just how much more foolish war is.”
“That person clearly gets it,” he says. “However ridiculous Chickie’s journey is, just the fact that we were over there in the first place was unfortunate.”