Trailer Park Boys are making a movie

:lol This shows hilarious.. I hope a US studio picks it up.

Can Canada's red hot Trailer Park Boys become the next Meatballs? Ivan Reitman is banking on it.

Reitman -- who launched his Hollywood career with a cheap Canadian camp comedy that became a big U.S. hit -- was on hand at the ShowCanada movie trade expo in Halifax yesterday with Ricky, Julian and Bubbles and the rest of the TV show's braintrust to announce Alliance Atlantis' Trailer Park Boys feature film.

The film, to be shot on a modest budget of about $5 million, will be released in Canada in the summer of 2006. From there Reitman hopes to repeat history and drum up interest at a major studio for a U.S. release.

"We want to show it all over the world," said Reitman, the film's exec producer and co-financier. "It's relatively unknown in America, and so was Meatballs, a movie we made for $500,000. We screened (Meatballs) in Hollywood and had three different studios bidding for it. So hopefully, we can do the same here."

Ironically, Trailer Park Boys' creator Mike Clattenburg originally debuted his project as an almost-feature-length one-hour short at the Atlantic Film Festival.

It's now a series entering its fifth season on the cable channel Showcase in Canada, and in the U.S. it aired on the BBC America digital channel for two seasons before being dropped, mostly over language issues.

Trailer Park Boys follows the adventures of a trio of lowlifes at fictional Sunnyvale Trailer Park outside Halifax. Ricky and Julian (Robb Wells and John Paul Tremblay) are low-rent entrepreneurs, whose dream of "Freedom 35" involves various schemes -- usually some form of marijuana grow-op -- which invariably land them in jail at each season's end.

Bubbles (Mike Smith) is their sweetly clueless geek friend, and the show's most popular character.

The trio appeared in character at the announcement yesterday.

"It's the same kind of thing, cameras following us around interrupting our lives," Ricky said.

"It's just bigger cameras they're tellin' me. It's Julian's idea, so I guess I gotta go along with it."

Added Julian: "Well, we watch a lotta movies in jail, so the boys are gonna be pretty proud of us in jail -- as long as they don't make us look like dicks."

The show has been a huge hit for something so far up the cable dial. Members of Rush have appeared on the show, and the Trailer Park Boys have toured with Our Lady Peace. This month, they brawled at the pitcher's mound at the Blue Jays' opening game -- their version of throwing out the first pitch.

"It's already screwin' things up for me," moaned Bubbles about his higher profile. "I get shoppin' carts out of the lake for a living, and after it's been on TV, all of a sudden it's really cool to pull out shoppin' carts and I go down there and there are none left. Everybody's got 'em all, so I'm kinda pissed off."

"I've been friends with these guys through it all," said Clattenburg. "And the buzz really started in our second season, when we went on tour with Our Lady Peace (at whose concerts fans took to throwing bags of weed at the boys). Throngs of people recognized them wherever we went. It was really strange."

The movie is set to shoot in Dartmouth over 40 days -- short by the standards of most features, "but that's as opposed to 9 to 15 pages a day we shoot for the show," Clattenburg says.

"It's really funny stuff, but now we can slow down and you'll see what they can do when we have a little time. It'll be a little easier for us."

U.S. hasn't gone Boys crazy ... yet

In Canada they're the hottest thing since hockey.

But in the U.S.? Put it this way. BBC America recently dropped the Trailer Park Boys after two seasons -- mainly because of the profuse freestyle profanity.

"They were facing huge fines, and they really couldn't take that chance," says Trailer Park Boys director/creator Mike Clattenburg.

Of course, it's a new ballgame with Ivan Reitman's shepherding of the Trailer Park Boys movie. Reitman is even working on getting the Boys back on U.S. TV. "It will be on again, we're working on it," Reitman says.

"In Canada it's crazy. There are definitely moments when I say, 'What have I done to these guys?' " says Clattenburg, who's been friends with Robb Wells and John Paul Tremblay (a.k.a. Ricky and Julian) since they went to high school together in Dartmouth.

"I say it mostly when we're at the airport and guys are running and chasing them, trying to take their pictures. They love it, they really do, but ... "

They have, however, had one "Hollywood paparazzi moment," Clattenburg says.

"We were in L.A. to meet Ivan, and we're at the Rock 'n' Roll Hyatt on Sunset Strip, with the bar downstairs owned by Justin Timberlake, and y'know, heavyweight stars there all the time.

"And there's a lineup of paparazzi and Wells is in a (crummy) old cab and the paparazzi look at him for a second and ignore him. And then all of a sudden one guy in the back yells, 'Ricky!' and that one guy starts shooting away.

"And I thought to myself, 'Well, that's gonna change.' "