When stars Mena Suvari (''American Beauty''), James Marsden (''X-Men''), and Marla Sokoloff (''The Practice'') signed on to ''Sugar & Spice'' (opening Friday), the script was a pitch black satire about a group of gun toting, bank robbing cheerleaders. But that was before April 20, 1999, when two Colorado teenagers stormed Columbine High School, killing 15 people including themselves.
Suddenly, joking about a group of heavily armed teens didn't seem so funny. ''Because of the shooting, we had to change the title, which was originally 'Sugar & Spice & Semiautomatics,''' says Suvari, 21. ''And then there was the whole kids with guns element to face. It had a huge impact.''
New Line Cinema, already part of a $33 million lawsuit that claimed a Kentucky high schooler had gunned down eight fellow students after watching the Leonardo DiCaprio movie ''The Basketball Diaries,'' along with other violent films and video games, had reason to be skittish. (The suit, which named 25 entertainment companies, was dismissed last April.)
According to Time magazine, producer Wendy Finerman (''Forrest Gump'') began expressing her qualms about ''Sugar & Spice'''s violence after the Columbine murders -- and it wasn't long before the caustic script by screenwriter Lone Williams (''Drop Dead Gorgeous'') got a politically correct makeover. (Finerman was unavailable for comment by press time.)
Instead of toting machine guns during an armed robbery, the cheerleaders now carry harmless fake weapons constructed of spare gun parts, colored tape, and glitter. ''The shooting and the guns were right out of there, which makes the whole thing easier to swallow,'' says costar Alexandra Holden (''In & Out'').
The tweaking continued even after filming began in Minnesota last July. But some of the edits didn't sit well with the young cast, who were surprised to see their most daring dialogue scrapped. ''It was really frustrating, because the movie we all signed on to do was very dark and very offensive, and while the finished movie is still that to a degree, it's completely different,'' says Sokoloff, 20, who compared the original script to the 1989 cult hit ''Heathers.'' ''But I totally understand there were two sides of it.''
One side, predictably, had to do with money. Though ''Sugar & Spice'' was initially intended to skew towards adults, New Line began to favor a PG-13 rating, according to several cast members. (The studio declined to comment.) The reason? A snarky high school movie for twentysomethings was likely to be box office poison (1999's R rated ''But I'm A Cheerleader'' grossed a dismal $2.2 million).
Though older viewers will still appreciate in jokes like a high school couple named Jack and Diane (after the 1982 song of the same name by John Cougar Mellencamp), teens who weren't even born in '82 are the audience New Line is counting on for ticket sales. ''There was the question, if we do this in an [ironic] style, will teenagers go, huh?'' recalls Marsden, 27.
But the cast is still yearning for the racier version of the film that audiences won't view in theaters. ''I saw the R rated cut of the movie six months ago, and I just peed myself,'' says Marsden. ''But you're getting rid of half the audience with an R. And I don't believe in marketing an R rated movie to kids.''
So what's on the cutting room floor? ''The ratings board objected to a lot of my lines,'' says Rachel Blanchard (''Road Trip''), whose character, a devoutly Christian teenager, uses horseback riding as means of sexual gratification. ''I had a lot of really racy lines and scenes. And the scenes that were especially focused on by the MPAA were the ones that had sexual connotations linked with her religion.''
A flashback to the birth of Suvari's character, Kansas, was also dropped for its unsettling combo of sex and violence: While Kansas' mother (Sean Young) is in labor, she spies her husband having sex in the adjacent bed with a nurse. Explains Marsden: ''You just see the silhouette of the couple against a screen going at it, and then she shoots him. It was so absurd, it was hilarious.'' In the finished film, the scene is described but not shown.
Though the cast agrees that the cuts may help the movie reach a wider audience, some say a sweetened ''Sugar & Spice'' is still hard to swallow. ''I had a punchline, 'Don't Martha friggin' Stewart me,' and that's just not funny unless you say, you know, the F word,'' shrugs costar Marley Shelton (''Valentine''). Hey, even Martha herself couldn't argue with that.
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