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Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First?’ Was Kind of a Rip-Off

12 trivia tidbits for friday, july 5, 2024, 34 trivia tidbits about unbelievable statistics, the ‘moops’ argument from ‘seinfeld’ was based on a real board game screwup, 30 random bits of trivia that don’t require your approval, take ’em or leave ’em, we don’t really care, an oral history of the cult classic ‘eurotrip’.

Since Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer were all teens in the 1980s, they grew up watching the same kinds of movies. Sex comedies like  Weird Science  and  Real Genius were wildly popular back then, and they were one of the things the trio bonded over when they first met at Harvard. 

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After writing for  The Harvard Lampoon , they began working in television, eventually landing in the  Seinfeld writers’ room, where they wrote  some of the most memorable episodes of the show’s final seasons . After  Seinfeld ended, they transitioned into film, often working as script doctors to punch up comedies. But they wanted to direct their own movies, too. When it came to what kind of movies those would be, they went back to the sex comedies they’d watched as teens. Out of that came  Ugly Americans , which would later be renamed  EuroTrip in a very deliberate attempt by DreamWorks to trick the audience into thinking they were buying tickets to a  Road Trip sequel. 

But the ruse didn’t work. When  EuroTrip debuted on February 20, 2004 it finished fifth at the box office,  just behind the  Ray Romano / Gene Hackman flop  Welcome to Mooseport .

It was a gut punch for Berg, Mandel and Schaffer, but they all landed on their feet, working on  Curb Your Enthusiasm afterwards. They’d go on to other hits too. For Berg, there was  Silicon Valley   and   Barry ; for Mandel, there was  Veep   and  White House Plumbers ; and for Schaffer, there was  The League and  Dave . But as they presided over the next phases of their careers, something was happening with their theatrical flop.  EuroTrip was being viewed in basements late at night by the kids who were too young to see it in theaters, much the same way that Berg, Mandel and Schaffer had consumed their beloved 1980s sex comedies.

EuroTrip ’s cult status also grew thanks to the very specific drumbeat of “Scotty Doesn’t Know,” the song from the film about the hero’s ex-girlfriend cheating on him. Performed by the Boston-based rock band Lustra — and lip-synced by  Matt Damon in the film — “Scotty Doesn’t Know” gradually became a hit, and in 2023,  Rolling Stone ranked it number two on its list  “Fake Bands, Real Songs: The 50 Best Tunes by Made-Up Musicians.”

While Berg, Mandel and Schaffer were always proud of the film, it’s been especially vindicating for them to see  EuroTrip become a hit after their own studio hated it, critics were divided on it and audiences barely showed up to see it. So, here to take it all off and reveal everything about the film on its 20th anniversary, are Berg, Mandel and Schaffer.

Before There Was ‘EuroTrip,’ There Was ‘Ugly Americans’

David Mandel, writer/producer/(uncredited)director of  EuroTrip : In 2002, Jeff, Alec and I were doing a lot of movie rewrites. We were also getting invited to look at rough cuts where they’d already made the movie, and they were asking us, “How do we fix this?” So, we came to this conclusion: “Boy, comedy directors aren’t great, and it doesn’t seem to take a lot to be a comedy director. The bar is low — why not us?” 

Then, we tried to,  scientifically almost, write a movie that we thought we could sell and that was cheap enough where they’d let us direct it. Those were the parameters we constructed for ourselves. 

Jeff Schaffer, writer/producer/director of  EuroTrip : Conceptually, we wanted to make a movie that was like the movies we grew up watching. 

Alec Berg, writer/producer/(uncredited)director of  EuroTrip :  You could have stopped after just “Conceptually, we wanted to make a movie.”

Schaffer: Yes, that’s true. But we wanted to make a movie where you’d steal your parents’ liquor — or your friends’ parents’ liquor — and go into the basement and watch a funny, R-rated sex comedy. 

Mandel:  There were also two other things that happened in the lead-up to us writing  EuroTrip . One, there was a brief moment where they talked to us about writing the sequel to  American Pie , and we pitched them going to Europe. No one listened, but that was in our brains somewhere. Second, we were doing a rewrite of a movie called  Out Cold , which is a snowboarding movie. We did a one-week rewrite of it, and there was this hot tub scene we came up with. It made us laugh so hard that, at some point we said, “This is too good to give to  Out Cold , we need to keep this and put it in our movie that doesn’t exist.”

Soon, we got to writing it while we were doing rewrites for  The Cat in the Hat at Imagine. We did what we always do and gathered all the funny stories we’d ever heard from friends. They weren’t  our stories because the three of us all graduated and became comedy writers, while our friends went to Europe and had a fun eurotrip of their own. What we had was  their stories because, again, we didn’t have any stories of our own. 

Berg: Every one of them had had a run-in with a creepy Italian guy on a train and got felt up. It was also about the iconic things someone might do while going to Europe, like a nude beach and going to Amsterdam and getting stoned, seeing the red light district. What are the European backpacking touchstones? We kind of reverse-engineered a movie out of that. You can tell by watching  EuroTrip that this movie didn’t come out of some deep need to shed light on the human condition.

Mandel:  I mean, I hate to say it, but it was very joke-sequence-driven. “What could we do in London?” “Let’s do soccer hooligans.” Jokes and cities were very interconnected. We weren’t going to do a city if we didn’t have a great joke, and we weren’t going to do some great joke if it didn’t fit in a city. 

When it was finished, it went out into the world as a spec script, and it went out with our lawyers and representatives saying, “They want to make this.” As the bidding war heated up, because it was a hot spec script, it went to who gave us a path to production, which meant, in under a year, we would be making this movie. That was the entire goal of  EuroTrip — for us to direct a movie. That was everything to us. 

Schaffer:  Also, as it was conceived and when it went out into the world, the movie was called  Ugly Americans . It was never called  EuroTrip .  EuroTrip isn’t anything we would have called it in a million years. It became  EuroTrip in post-production.

Mandel: A lot of studios went after it, including Ivan Reitman on behalf of DreamWorks.

Berg: This was  Ivan Reitman , so we were very much in awe of him. 

Mandel: Yes, but we went with DreamWorks and Ivan because we got our path to production. We got a really nice deal for us to write and direct, and more importantly, they had 12 months to put it into production or we got it back. That was huge. 

That was June of 2002, and we were shooting by the following February in Prague.

Beautiful Americans, Finding the ‘EuroTrip’ Cast

Mandel:  We cast Michelle Trachtenberg early on because she was the closest thing we had to a name. She’d already had a career.

Berg:  She was just a pro. 

Schaffer: Travis Wester as Jamie had a real cockeyed optimism to him. You could smash him down, and he kept getting back up. Jacob Pitts came in and read for Cooper, and he had such an off-kilter read. He made us laugh in ways that we didn’t expect.

We found Scott Mechlowicz a week before we were leaving for Prague. He got the part of Scott because he was handsome, he was fun and he was able to win some. You don’t want a soft center with a bunch of stuff just put upon him. You want him to be able to give as much shit to Cooper as Cooper is giving to him.

Mandel: As for Jessica Boehrs, who played Mieke, Scott’s love interest, we found her once we were overseas. 

Schaffer: She was in a soap and had a music career. Once we saw her, it was done.

Also, we were shooting this in 2003 in the Czech Republic. There was a war going on and there was SARS, so people weren’t dying to fly out. We flew in Steve Hytner as the green fairy because we all worked with him as Bania on  Seinfeld , but half the people that are in the movie are in it because they were shooting another movie in Prague. That’s how we got Lucy Lawless and, most notably, Matt Damon.

Czech Your Bags: Filming in Prague

Berg:  Every single thing in the entire movie, except for the nude beach, was shot in Prague, or within an hour of Prague. 

Schaffer: Every extra is a Czech extra, including for the scenes in America. Bert, Scott’s younger brother, is from Uzbekistan.

Berg:  When you hire an American actor, they work under SAG rules. So if you hire an American actor to work in Europe, you have to pay them for every day that they’re traveling. You also have to pay for first-class travel and their hotel. In other words, to get somebody to come from America to deliver  one line , it’s like $20,000. 

For a while, we had this running joke about the kid who played Bert. We paid him like $150 to be in the movie. So as a joke between us, a “Bert” was a unit of currency. “How many Berts will it take to put a sign on that wall?” “Oh, that’s six Berts. I don’t think we can afford that.”

Schaffer: Another thing that’s worth mentioning is that, even though I’m credited as the director, I’m  not the director. All three of us are the director. What happened was, the Directors Guild gets super uppity about multiple people directing, and they just wouldn’t let us have it. Instead, we had a semi-Buddhist Czech P.A. with a long rat tail named Jaroslav Jablonský pick our names out of a hat. We filmed it and put it on the DVD; it’s called “How to Pick a Director.” 

The Sweet Sounds of ‘Scotty Doesn’t Know’

Mandel:  Even for the scene set at a Ohio high school graduation party, we shot in Prague. We must have scouted a million houses before we found that house. It was the only house in Prague with a backyard. 

Schaffer: For that party, we had to fly in red Solo cups. They don’t exist in Europe. 

Berg:  We had a mostly Czech crew, and we sometimes struggled with language barriers. A great example happened at that party scene. We found the right American-looking house, and we made it look exactly like an American high school party. Then, on the day of shooting, we see the stage where the band plays, and there’s this giant banner that reads, “Congratulation.” 

Mandel: Of course, the party scene is notable for including “Scotty Doesn’t Know,” which I think works so well because it’s truly worked into the script. It’s not just a song in the movie, it’s  in there. 

Schaffer: It’s a narrative engine. Plus, the surprise reveal that it’s Matt Damon doing it is so good.  EuroTrip is such a surprising thing on his resume. It’s like if Einstein was also the pledge master of his fraternity. 

Mandel:  He’s done other comedy things now, but at the time, he was exclusively working with incredible directors.

Schaffer:  We got him because he was in Prague shooting  The Brothers Grimm ,   and we said, “Hey, do you want to do this?” And he said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” 

When I saw Matt once later on, he said, “I was Ryan in  Saving Private Ryan . I was Ripley in  The Talented Mr. Ripley . But I walk down the street and people go, ‘Scotty doesn’t know!’” He also said, “It was one of the only movies that my 17-year-old daughter goes, ‘Yeah, that was pretty cool.’” 

It’s amazing how that scene and that song has endured. Shoutout to Lustra who wrote a great song. We all helped with the lyrics, but the song is catchy as hell. We’ve even got gold records for it. 

Vinnie Jones and the Double-Decker Bus

Berg:  Vinnie Jones was one of the few names we got into the movie. He cost as much as 20 other people.

Schaffer: He was over 40 Berts.

Berg:  He was  hundreds  of Berts. Well worth it though. He was super game. He’s a professional soccer player who is unbelievably associated with certain teams, but we were making him talk about how Manchester United was the best team ever. He was like, “This is hard for me, guys.” It’d be like hiring Derek Jeter to talk about how great the Red Sox are.

Schaffer: That bar we filmed at was just a bar in Prague. We called it “The Feisty Goat.” Again, we had a lot of issues with language barriers. So, we showed up to the location, and “The Feisty Goat” is misspelled as “The Fiesty Goat.” We kept blaming the Czech art department for it. Finally, someone said, “It’s that way in the script.” Turns out, we’d misspelled feisty the whole time. 

The Robot Fight

Mandel: At one point, there was this idea that, in each city, we’d somehow cast real actors and comedy people from those cities. That plan was a disaster. Either everybody stunk, or in the case of the French, they were just offended and didn’t want to play the role.

Berg:  We, as Americans, have these conceits of what Italian people are like, what French people are like, what German people are like. But Italian people, French people and German people don’t necessarily feel that same way about themselves. 

Mandel:  Ultimately, the French robot guy was played by J.P. Manoux from the Groundlings, and the Italian guy is Fred Armisen from  SNL . We did end up with a few foreign stars, just not as many as we once thought.

As for the scene in Paris, the robot fight, that was one of the sequences of the movie that we’d actually bothered to storyboard because we had all these ideas about it. Then, of course, you get there and, to do what we storyboarded, it would be like, 11 setups. It was too much. Fortunately, it helped that J.P. Manoux already came with his own bag of tricks, and Scott had taken a mime class. I think Scott had been trained by the guy who played Barney. That saved us.

Crans sur Mer: The Nude Beach

Mandel: The Crans sur Mer train station was day one of  EuroTrip shooting. It’s not a particularly significant scene, but it was momentous because we were going to be judged on the quality of those dailies by DreamWorks, as there were a few DreamWorks executives who came for the first few days of shooting. We did that shot with Cooper popping up into frame when he hears “nude beach.” That got a laugh, and it was a huge sigh of relief for us.

Berg:  The nude beach itself was filmed in Rostock in former East Germany, very close to where Wernher von Braun’s rocket factory was. 

Mandel: We got to that set still trying to figure out what we were going to do with the nudity. I remember us making a conscious decision that we weren’t going to do the Mike Myers version. We weren’t going to hide everybody with umbrellas and frisbees. I feel like it was on the beach where we had a discussion saying, “We’ve seen that joke; it’s bullshit. Let’s go for it. Let’s just have a lot of naked guys with penises flapping at you.” We’d never seen that anywhere.

Schaffer:  I can’t believe all those genitals weren’t burnt to a crisp by the sun. You had a whole bunch of Nordic wangs and a long summer day. Those guys were troopers.

The Unused Anne Frank Scene

Schaffer: In the spec script, in Amsterdam, there was a different scene before the sex stuff with Lucy Lawless and the flűggåənk∂€čhiœβøl∫ên. Originally, Cooper is going out to look for a sex club, and he gets a flyer for a place called “The Secret Room.” He’s very excited to go to the secret room, and he’s looking around for it. He sees a line of people for this house, and he asks, “Is this the secret room?”

Mandel: People are also walking out of it, shaking and crying, and he asks them, “Were you in the secret room?” And they said, “Yes,” and he thinks this sounds incredible.

Schaffer: He goes in, and we tilt up and realize it’s the Anne Frank museum. He goes up, and there’s no one in the secret room except a mannequin of a girl. He figures the rest of the people will come soon, so he strips and waits. Then he realizes where he is, and some relatives of Anne Frank—

Mandel: Hold on. It was Tessa Frank, Anne Frank’s only living relative. It was a 100-year-old woman being pushed in a wheelchair.

Schaffer: He realizes “Oh shit,” and he doesn’t have any clothes on. He grabs the only thing he can to cover his genitals, which is that mannequin. So, when the door opens, it looks like he’s fucking Anne Frank from behind, and we just cut to police putting him back on the train.

Berg:  When DreamWorks bought the movie, that scene was this elephant in the room. We didn’t want to say anything or ask about it, and they hadn’t said anything about it. So we just kept proceeding as though it was okay. We actually got a couple of months down the road, and finally, because it’s DreamWorks, Spielberg read the script. He called us and said, “Guys, I think it’s really funny. I loved it. I have one note, and I’m sorry, but you have to cut the Anne Frank thing. I actually thought it was funny. I laughed. But, guys, my name is  literally on that museum.” He was actually one of its biggest donors.

Schaffer: We heard him out and hung up. Then we said, “Fuck no!” We fought tooth-and-nail for it. At one point, between us, we flirted with taking it to New Line just to save this joke. 

Berg: Ultimately, though, New Line said “no,” and we were like, “Fuck!” I remember Ivan Reitman telling us, “You’re out of your fucking minds. You have a greenlit movie here that they’re going to let you guys direct. You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing!” 

Mandel:  However, we fought to get our original script included on the DVD. Remember how they used to include scripts as a DVD extra you can read on the screen? We fought for that.

Schaffer:  No, we just gave them that script because we knew that no one was ever going to read it. 

The Little Girl Peeing in the Street

Berg:  For Bratislava, we found this old Soviet airbase an hour outside of Prague. When the wall fell, they told 25,000 people to pack their shit, and they airlifted them all back to the Soviet Union. They abandoned this massive tract of buildings. 

Schaffer: When we scouted it, it looked like shit — just like we wanted.

Berg: There was graffiti and broken windows. It was perfect.

Schaffer: Then, we got there on the day, and it was spotless. They told us, “We cleaned it up!” We were like, “What!?!? No!” 

Berg: We spent a lot of money putting those apartments back to the way they were before they cleaned it up.

Mandel:  There was a female production assistant from Bratislava who took great offense at the Bratislava depiction in the film. I have to say, I’m especially fond of the little girl that he waves to and she pees in the street. Was that in the final cut? I forget.

Berg:  It’s in the end credits. I remember that was a particular lightning rod where the DreamWorks people were like, “You’ve got to get that fucking thing out of the movie. We will not have it. So, us, being contrarian assholes, said, “We’ll cut it,” then we put it in the end credits.

The Hitler Kid

Schaffer:  I got to teach a four-year-old how to goose step. In the end credits, you can see me teaching him that, getting him a first-class ticket to hell. 

Mandel:  That’s Jeff  pretending  like he’s never goose-stepped before.

Schaffer:  Look, if you’re going to do it, you do it right.

Berg: Thank God we were in Prague, because if we were in Germany, no one would have been comfortable shooting that.

The Vatican

Schaffer: We should also talk about how there was a different ending at the Vatican than what ended up in the movie. In our original ending, when Scott comes down from the Vatican, he tells Mieke, “I’m here.” She says, “Who are you?” But when we did our screening, it was a big energy downer.

Berg:  The  math of the joke was very appealing to us. We thought it would be funny if he does all this, and she goes, “What?” Then when we screened it, the audience was like, “That sucks.” 

Mandel:  It literally killed the movie. She was still going to show up at the very end at his dorm, but that took like 20 minutes. 

Schaffer: So we shot a different ending with them having sex in the confessional during reshoots.

Mandel: A lesson from that scene is something I still talk about with writers. I call it “The Humor of Disappointment.” It’s comedy writers getting too smart for their own good and saying, “You know how, in every movie, the guy and the girl get together in the end? Wouldn’t it be great if you watch a two-hour movie, and nobody gets together?” It’s basically giving the finger to the audience. It never works. 

Berg: Sometimes the classics are classics for a reason. Boy gets girl affirming. Give them what they want. 

Coming Back to America

Mandel:  As we started editing the movie, it became apparent that the studio that made our movie fucking hated it. We’re not talking about them not liking this joke or that joke, we’re talking about this unfortunate sense that it was beneath them.

Berg: They thought this was a barnacle on the ass of their studio. Mike De Luca, who bought  EuroTrip , was brought on to expand the scope of DreamWorks, but once he did that, there was this sense that he let in a bunch of derelicts behind their walls. DreamWorks didn’t like it. 

Mandel: Things just got worse and worse throughout post-production. The definitive moment for me was when I said to Terry Press of DreamWorks, “Why did you make this movie?” and she said, “I don’t know.” 

Schaffer: Ivan even tried to take the movie away from us and cut a PG-13 version of it.

Mandel: We watched that version once with Ivan, and it was so terrible that, when it ended, even he said, “Nevermind.”

Berg:  I remember he said, “I mean, it was a valiant effort, right?” 

Schaffer: He was not in our corner.

Mandel:  He was in our corner at the beginning. He gave great comedy notes and directing notes in pre-production. But from the moment we started shooting, it felt like he wanted to kick us out of the directing chair and direct it himself. As for the PG-13 cut, that wasn’t a conversation   with us. We walked in one day, and he was just doing it. It really sucked.

Berg: He was in a precarious position. His company had a deal at DreamWorks, and for him to curry favor, he had to get along with them. If he had to throw us under the bus to do that, there were places where I think he did that. 

Schaffer:  In post, the title became a recurring issue too. The basic thing when we came back from shooting was, “Let’s try to trick people into thinking this is a  Road Trip sequel.” 

Mandel: At one point, they were even talking about having Tom Green do a trailer for  EuroTrip where he says, “Remember my friends from  Road Trip ? These are my new  friends who go to Europe!”

Berg: I remember this meeting with the DreamWorks marketing people telling us what  Road Trip ’s opening box office was, what their eventual box office was, how many units of home video they shipped. They just kept talking about how much  Road Trip was such a great piece of business for them. And we’re like, “Okay, what does that have to do with us?”

Basically, they thought, “If we can trick the audience into thinking this is a sequel to  Road Trip , and if we can get 70 percent of the audience that movie had, that’s a win.” We quickly realized, “Oh, we’re fucked.”

Mandel: At some point, they scheduled a final test screening, and they more or less told us that, if we didn’t get above an 85 audience score, it wasn’t going to get released. We knew when they were going to test it, so we got one of the flyers recruiting the audience. We Xeroxed it and gave it to anyone we knew who was younger than us and wasn’t in the business. We gave it to a shitload of young  Harvard Lampoon comedy writers who had recently moved out to L.A. and anybody else we knew who was young and wasn’t a comedy writer, an agent or a lawyer. We packed the audience with people that we knew and told some of the men to fill out that they were women. We told them “Don’t give it 100, but give it 90s and 95s.” After the screening, we went to some restaurant. They tallied it up, and we got over that 85. I remember the guy saying, “And we moved up in women, too!” 

There was just one thing left: the name. They said, “We will release this movie, but you must change the title.” We reluctantly went, “Fine, call it  EuroTrip ,” which was a title cooked up in a petri dish by DreamWorks marketing. The irony is, Todd Phillips got pissed at  us for the title. As if we thought it was the greatest idea in the world. We got it from both ends. 

There are probably a million things, in hindsight, that I wish we could fix about  EuroTrip , but number one above everything else is, I wish it was called  Ugly Americans .

The End of the Road

Mandel: But hey, the marketing worked. We came in third that weekend behind the 11th week of  50 First Dates and  Welcome to Mooseport . 

Berg: And there was that Lindsay Lohan movie. 

Mandel: We were fourth? I thought we beat them and that Meg Ryan boxing movie. 

Berg:  I feel like we beat  Mooseport. 

Mandel: No, we lost to  Mooseport . I will stake my reputation on that!

Berg:  I’m going to look it up…

Schaffer:  Needless to say, it was a race to the bottom. 

Berg:  Okay, I just pulled it up. Number one that weekend was  50 First Dates . Number two was  Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen . Number three was the third week of  Miracle . 

Mandel: Holy shit.

Berg:  Number four,  Welcome to Mooseport .

Mandel: Holy shit. This is worse than I remembered.

Berg:  Number five,  EuroTrip . To our credit, we did beat the living shit out of the Meg Ryan boxing movie,  Against the Ropes .

Mandel: I do remember that, on that Friday, by 10 a.m., we were dead in the water. It was deflating because it was over so quickly. When we were fighting with DreamWorks and losing, at least we were fighting. But then, on Friday morning, to be dead on arrival, it was deflating. 

Berg: It was a gut-punch. When someone calls you and says to you the last two years of your life were kind of wasted, that’s brutal. 

On the Road Again: ‘EuroTrip’ Finds Its Audience

Mandel: In the aftermath of  EuroTrip , we tried to get other directing gigs, and people were saying things to us like, “Maybe you’ll direct a sample scene,” as if we’d never even made the movie. In a great way, it’s how we ended up at  Curb Your Enthusiasm . Had  EuroTrip never bombed, we never would have gone to Larry, who was looking for people to bounce ideas off of for  Curb . 

So we went away very quickly, but it was really “Scotty Doesn’t Know” that kept the movie going. Obviously, there was the DVD, where all the people who were too young to see it in theaters could now watch it. But it was “Scotty Doesn’t Know” that I heard was being played at proms by live bands and DJs. And now, on social media, “Scotty Doesn’t Know” and a handful of shots from  EuroTrip are now memes. 

Schaffer:  That and “Mi Scuzi” from Fred Armisen. 

Berg:  And there’s “Mail Motherfucker.” That’s a drop used on Howard Stern. They still use it all the time, whenever he’s reading email from listeners.

Berg: People call  EuroTrip a “cult hit,” but you don’t set out to make a cult hit. You set out to make a blockbuster. Below that there’s “kind of a hit,” then there’s “sort of okay,” then there’s “cult hit,” followed by “total bomb.” A cult hit is just one step above a total bomb, but it has to be a total bomb   first   for that to happen. It takes a while for the soup to cure and become a cult hit.

Schaffer: The interesting thing is, because it took that journey, the generation that watched it, watched it in their basements, like the movies we watched. 

Mandel:  Sure, we would have liked the giant blockbuster, but at this point, I’ll take it. 

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Are the wheels falling off ‘the daily mail’.

Its online editor is MIA (he was last seen frantically deleting emails), his temporary replacement is said to be equally erratic and frustrated staffers are abandoning its newsroom in droves.

By Lachlan Cartwright

Lachlan Cartwright

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As guests sipped from The Daily Mail -branded coconut drinks in the courtyard of the Hotel Martinez at the annual Cannes Lion advertising gabfest in the south of France last week, the New York newsroom of the British tabloid was suffering from a leadership crisis that has grown more dire by the day following the mysterious departure of its now former online editor-in-chief Gerard Greaves .

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When he did not appear back in the newsroom following a trip to London, senior editorial leadership was advised he was on “compassionate leave” with no further explanation. By the end of last month, the Mail announced Greaves, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, would be leaving the company after 24 years and Katie Davies , currently the U.S. editor of The Times and The Sunday Times , had been poached for the top job. Davies does not start her role until the fall. 

Since his arrival, the former deputy editor of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday had set about hiring almost exclusively Brits with American journalists routinely passed over for jobs. One senior American employee told Hot Source she was asked by Greaves to take a demotion after having a child. The employee, who left the Daily Mail after the incident, said Greaves told her that he did not like working with women who had children. 

According to the employee, who asked to remain anonymous, Greaves even asked her if she was planning on having another child and said that mothers had a hard time focusing. “It was just a mess,” the former employee told Hot Source. “It was a chaotic mess. I couldn’t believe he was in that position of power.” 

Several current and former employees who spoke with Hot Source say the leadership vacuum has allowed another Brit, Sean O’Hare , to rise in the newsroom. O’Hare, who wasted no time moving into Greaves’ glass office, assumed the role of acting editor, but his chronic absenteeism and erratic management style have only added to the toxic work environment, according to the people familiar with the situation. (O’Hare did not respond to a request for comment.)

In the Mail newsroom, posters on the wall urge staff, “If you see something speak up,” advising anyone with concerns to alert their manager or call a 24/7 independent and confidential “speak-up facility.” But the phone number listed has been disconnected, and the website does not work, according to three people familiar with the matter. 

“The Daily Mail has no comprehensive HR,” Maggie Cole , who worked at the Daily Mail from 2021-2023 as a video producer, told Hot Source. “They are not worried about the safety of their employees and ultimately that’s why I left. There’s no one to really report anything to. There’s no process. It’s very muddy.”

As Brits claim top postings in U.S. media at CNN, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal , the events that have played out at the Daily Mail may serve as a cautionary tale of imports arriving from across the pond with a lack of understanding of American news, its practices or its audience.

But, even before Greaves’ disappearance, the site had suffered a wave of high-profile departures including Amy Maas who had left to join Realtor.com, Louise Thomas who is now at the Independent , Caitlyn Becker who joined NewsNation, Sean Walsh to Bilt, Meghan McCain who left to start her own podcast company, and Lucy White who oversaw the Daily Mail ’s hugely popular TikTok and left without a job to go to. 

Two delegations of senior Daily Mai l leadership have been sent from London to NYC in recent months. Just weeks after Greaves’ departure the publisher and editor of the Mail Online Danny Groom and the U.K. Editorial Director, Ben Bailey , arrived to survey the damage. 

Several staffers who spoke with Hot Source said they alerted the pair to the management issues. Before this year’s White House Correspondents dinner, the chairman of the Daily Mail and General Trust Lord Rothermere , his son and heir apparent Vere Harmsworth also visited the company’s Astor Place offices and were told about the systemic problems. 

Now, Hot Source has learned the Mail ’s London HQ at Derry Street is sending yet another Brit, Nicholas Pyke , to act as its eyes and ears. But for many staffers, the damage to the brand has already been done. 

A spokesperson for the Daily Mail declined to comment.

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Scotland Euro fans in Booking.com hell after being sent to 'horror film dungeon' in Germany

Rory Bradley and his three friends were left shocked when their accommodation turned out to be a terrifying former medical facility.

• 14:32, 17 JUN 2024
• Updated 15:25, 17 JUN 2024

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Tartan Army fans who forked out £2,000 for Euros accommodation in Germany were sent to an "abandoned dungeon".

Rory Bradley, from Glasgow , jetted out to Munich last week alongside 150,000 Scotland fans to support the national team.

But the trip turned into a nightmare for the 28-year-old and his three pals Reece, Lawrence and Kieran, after they turned up to a rental property which resembled a "horror film".

The group were shocked when they arrived at an "abandoned medical facility" with old hospital beds, exposed chemicals and a maze of eerie damp hallways.

Rory, from Thornliebank, told the Record: "We made our way into the property and we were greeted by hospital beds, exposed chemicals, exposed cables and exposed pipes.

"To top it all off there was an axe that looked like something out of a murder film.

"The whole place was like a horror film.

"We are four big guys - if we felt scared anyone would have."

The lads had been given alternative accommodation from Booking.com after their original digs were an "absolute mess".

Rory explained: "We spent a lot of money to travel here and forked out £2000 in total on accomodation on Booking.com.

"After the Scotland match we made our way to our new digs in Duren from Augsburg on Saturday. The flat had beds made out of cardboard held together with duct tape. The other bed was a sofa bed which was mouldy and broken."

After a three-hour-long "nightmare" to resolve the issue, the online hotel site told the footie fans they had found them new accommodation.

He continued: "We walked to our alternative accommodation desperate to get to bed but when we arrived the place looked like a dungeon.

"It was filled with old equipment,hospital beds, exposed chemicals, open pipes and an axe within six feet of the door.

"We couldn't believe it. As we kept walking through we opened a door into what was like a generator room.

"The closer we got to the sleeping area there was a smell of mould and damp.

"One bed was at the end of a long corridor.

"There was no way one person was sleeping there alone. We pulled the beds together before we decided we couldn't stay.

He added: "It was pretty scary and the door didn't even lock."

The group then called Booking.com again but were told they couldn't have an alternative.

After making a complaint, Booking.com refunded the cost of the group's original accomodation but the lads have been left out of pocket after forking out for their own hotel.

Rory continued: "We've had no help from Booking.com. We could see on their website there was a hotel with rooms nearby but when we called back we were told it was against their policy for them to pay for elsewhere.

"We ended up walking to that hotel and scraped together to pay for the night using cash for our food and drinks kitty.

"Now we are in a hostel in Cologne thanks to family and friends.

"It's been a shambles but at least we feel safe.

"I was gutted watching Scotland get battered - then we went on to have a weekend from hell.

"Booking.com is a lead sponsor of the Euros. It's shocking the way they have treated four fans who have travelled to Germany for the games."

A spokesperson for Booking.com said: "This is not the experience we would want for anyone booking a stay on our platform and are in touch with the customer, so we can look into what happened and to make sure they are properly supported."

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Romania show class again by giving hotel staff a huge round of applause as they leave for the airport... after fans praised the team's post-match gesture following their exit from Euro 2024

• LISTEN to It's All Kicking Off! EUROS DAILY : Why 'biggest culprit' Roberto Martinez needs to overrule Cristiano Ronaldo 
• Romania have shown their class again after applauding hotel staff in Germany 
• Eduard Iordanescu's side were knocked out Euro 2024 after Netherlands defeat 

Romania have, once again, shown their class after their players and staff were seen applauding hotel staff following their Euro 2024 exit. 

FIFA's 47th-ranked side crashed out the competition with a 3-0 defeat to Netherlands on Tuesday night - before being praised for how they left the dressing room.

It was their best showing at a major international tournament in 24 years, having not reached the knockout phase of any competition since the quarter-finals of Euro 2000. 

Edward Iordanescu's side topped their group to make the last-16, with the players and fans clearly loving their time in Germany. 

To show their appreciation, Iordanescu and his side were seen holding a round of applause for hotel staff at the Hotel Melchior Park in Wurzburg.

In a video that appeared on X , the entire squad - with staff included - could be seen stood round and clapping for the workers of the hotel. 

Once their applause ended, manager Iordanescu went round and shook the hands of every single staff member, as another token of their appreciation. 

The incident comes shortly after fans praised Romania as pictures of how they left the dressing room after their Euro 2024 exit went viral. 

Pictures on social media have shown that Romania left their dressing room in an impeccable state, while they left behind a letter for the German organisers. 

The letter read: ' EURO 2024 was for each of us one of the most important football experiences lived so far and we are glad that the stage on which it took place was the German one.

'Every match, every emotion, every experience brought us together and made us feel the magic of football. 

'We leave Germany with the thought that we gave everything for Romania and we are grateful for everything we experienced during the weeks spent here. 

'It was an honor to be part of the great family of European football. Signed: Romania’s National Football Team.'

UEFA also paid tribute to Romania by sharing the photos with the caption: 'The perfect guests. Following their elimination from Euro 2024 last night, Romania left their   Munich dressing room spotless with a touching letter to their German hosts.'

A spirited Romania side were knocked out of the tournament after a goal from Liverpool's Cody Gakpo and a late brace from Donyell Malen in the last-16.

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Cruise Britons tell of 'holiday from hell'

British passengers aboard a bug-hit luxury liner spoke today of their "holiday from hell" and described the ship as a "prison boat".

The passengers were allowed off the P&O cruise ship Aurora in Gibraltar this morning after being refused permission to dock in Greece.

More than 500 of the 1,800 British passengers have been hit by the virulent norovirus which causes nausea, chronic diarrhoea and vomiting.

'Holiday from hell'

Paul Brammer, 34, was on the cruise with his wife Nicky, 32, and their two teenage children.

Mr Brammer, a forestry contractor from Southampton, said: "The last few days have been like a holiday from hell. It's been like living in a hospital environment.

"We thought it would be a holiday of a lifetime but it's not like that at all. We can taste chemicals on our tongues all the time, it's coming through the air conditioning because they're cleaning everywhere on the ship.

Mr Brammer, who spent £4,000 on the cruise and £6,000 while on board, added: "I don't know if I can be bothered with the hassle of asking for a refund."

Ronald Martin, 40, with his wife Doreen and their two children Lynsey, 25, and Rebecca, 11, were equally angry.

Mr Martin, originally from Ayr but now living in Snaith, Yorkshire, said: "The kids have not seen land since the 28th. They were confined to a cabin with no windows for three to four days with vomiting and diarrhoea. We were not allowed to leave the cabin."

Mrs Martin added: "They were sanitising the ship wearing suits and they looked like the blokes from ET, which was frightening for the kids.

"It makes you wonder why they are wearing the suits. We've not been ill but it was bad for the people who were. When we went to dinner the ship was like the Marie Celeste.

"Now they have taken our passports off us so we can't go home. They should have turned us straight back to the UK when they realised the scale of the problem."

Michelle Seaborn, 35, a star of TV's Wife Swap, was on the cruise with husband Barry, 43, and described the ship as "terrifying".

Ms Seaborn, from Southport, Merseyside, said: "They should have turned the ship around and sailed back to the UK.

"It's been like a mortuary on board. Everybody is sick and we're not allowed to go in public areas. Coming back from a day trip to Dubrovnik, people were vomiting on the coach.

"It's horrendous. They are walking around in white suits like Ghostbusters spraying everything with chemicals. P&O should have been honest from the start."

Her husband, wearing a Rochdale FC football top, added: "It's like Strangeways, like a prison, locked in a cabin with no food or water. I feel like David Blaine."

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Is ‘fluggaenkoecchicebolsen’ a real word?

From The New York Times :

When it happens I feel as if I have stepped into a Far Side cartoon. I am a magazine editor, and the galley of an article will come back from a proofreader with a low-frequency word circled and this comment in the margin: “Does this word even exist?” or “Is this a real word?” Usually the word’s meaning is perfectly self-evident, and the word itself is relatively simple like “unbuyable,” if not deliberately goofy like “semi-idiotic-like.” And I think to myself, of course it exists. Look, there it is, right in front of us. Sometimes the reader puts his or her suspicion differently and asks, “Is this word in the dictionary?” Having recently spent a large amount of time researching how a particularly well-known American dictionary was made, I have a very different notion of what a word’s presence, or even its absence, in a dictionary implies. Don’t get me wrong: I like dictionaries, including several that I consult online and most of the 11 that are sitting within arm’s reach as I write this. But my recent affair with lexicography has left me certain of a couple of things. One is that no dictionary contains every word in the language. … Another is that dictionary users and dictionary makers sometimes have very different notions of what a dictionary is for. From Eurotrip , DreamWorks Pictures, 2004

“The Role of a Dictionary”, David Skinner, The New York Times

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Why Matt Damon Agreed To Cameo In EuroTrip, According To Matt Damon

The best movie cameos are the ones that pop up out of nowhere, when you see an actor you know in the last place you expect. One of the all-time unexpected cameos had to be seeing an Academy Award winner in a low-budget sex comedy. How in the hell did Matt Damon end up in 2004's Eurotrip ? As it turns out, he was old friends with the writers, and he was in town.

Early in the movie Eurotrip, a band starts playing at a high school party which is fronted by a bald and pierced Matt Damon. This was the same Matt Damon who won an Oscar for Good Will Hunting and had recently become an action hero thanks to The Bourne Identity , so it led to many questioning how such a bizarre cameo happened. Matt Damon recently explained in a Reddit AMA that he was already in Prague filming when his old college friends, who wrote Eurotrip, called him up and asked him to be in it. Sure, why not.

So EuroTrip was written by three guys I went to college with, Alec Shaffer, Jeff Berg, and Dave Mandell. ... I was in Prague shooting The Brothers Grimm, we were in rehearsals, and I had a wig in that movie, and so Alec and Dave and Jeff were making EuroTrip and they said "Will you come play this, you know, Howard Rollins kind of insane, bad version of a suburban, you know, punk band guy?" And I said "Yea, I'm in Prague". So I showed up and I'm sitting there, and I'm like "I'm wearing a wig, just shave my head, let's just go for it." and we did it, and put a bunch of piercings all over. ... So it was kind of a family affair.

The scene is probably the most famous in the entire film, and not even because Matt Damon is in it. The band performs a song about how the band leader is sleeping with another guy's girlfriend. "Scotty Doesn't Know" is the way that the movie's lead discovers that his girlfriend was cheating on him. He then heads off to Europe to get away from it all, where the song follows him everywhere. And it's catchy as all hell.

And now that's you've listened to "Scotty Doesn't Know" for the first time in several years, you'll now be singing it in your head all day long. You're welcome.

There are few friends I would shave my head for, wig or not. Here's to Matt Damon going the extra mile for some friends. Now, I think I need to go watch Eurotrip again.

That's not even the best story Matt Damon shared this week. Someone asked him about the time South Park DESTROYED him in Team America . His opinion on that movie is an instant classic. Read on to see what he said!

When you're a celebrity in the public eye it's pretty much expected that you will be the butt of jokes; it's difficult to avoid. Matt Damon was among many targets in Team America: World Police , and the actor recently spoke about his caricature in puppet form. One might expect that Damon would be mildly insulted that his character in the film is only capable of saying his own name in the film. Either that, or maybe the actor took it in good fun and laughed along with everybody else. As it turns out, his reaction isn't really either of those things. He's mostly just confused by it.

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I was always kind of bewildered by Team America, I think because it's hard for us to understand what our images are in public, I think we're not good judges of that, and when I saw myself on screen just only able to say my own name and not really that well, I kind of wondered "Wow, is that how people perceive me?" At that point I just kind of was like, I'm a screenwriter and an actor, and like really? I can barely say my own name?

Read the rest of his quote right here !

And check out the trailer for The Great Wall next...

CinemaBlend’s resident theme park junkie and amateur Disney historian, Dirk began writing for CinemaBlend as a freelancer in 2015 before joining the site full-time in 2018. He has previously held positions as a Staff Writer and Games Editor, but has more recently transformed his true passion into his job as the head of the site's Theme Park section. He has previously done freelance work for various gaming and technology sites. Prior to starting his second career as a writer he worked for 12 years in sales for various companies within the consumer electronics industry. He has a degree in political science from the University of California, Davis.  Is an armchair Imagineer, Epcot Stan, Future Club 33 Member.

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