Time has been only slightly kinder to Revenge of the Nerds than to, say, Sixteen Candles. Or Driving Miss Daisy. Or Tom Arnold’s TV career. When it came out in the summer of 1984, Jeff Kanew’s comedy was a feel-good revenge story about plucky antiheroes who wanted to make the world safe for oppressed weirdos everywhere. Now, the film is more than a little problematic.

Immortalized along with Booger’s belching and Poindexter’s hip-hop violin-sawing are the nerds’ secret filming of naked sorority women and, especially, horn-rimmed Lewis Skolnick’s conquest of Betty the cheerleader while wearing a mask and pretending to be her boyfriend. (“I do think that scene needed to be fleshed out,” Julia Montgomery, who played Betty and is now a Los Angeles Realtor, says today.) For the movie's 35th anniversary, GQ talked to the cast and writers—covering the good, the bad, and the coke-fueled, behind-the-scenes shenanigans.

Miguel Tejada-Flores and Tim Metcalfe wrote the original script based on Tejada-Flores’s father, a “brilliant, brilliant nerd” who immigrated from Bolivia to the community of mischievous hackers and scientists at Caltech. “Pasadena was a terrestrial paradise for nerds,” he says.

Ted Field (producer): The title Revenge of the Nerds was something I came up with. Joe Wizan, who was head at [20th Century] Fox, finally agreed to give it a shot at a budget of $6 million, and it surprised everyone.

Jeff Buhai (screenwriter): I don't think we knew how to spell "nerds." We spelled it N-U-R-D-S.

Steve Zacharias (screenwriter): The story was actually a true story at the University of Wisconsin. Our next-door neighbor didn't get into any of the fraternities, so he started his own fraternity. They'd lose 80-to-nothing in football, and their parties were nerdy, but they had fun.

Buhai: You make the fraternity guys the perfect villain, and then you make the weak and the oppressed and the different the heroes. That's going to work forever.

Jeff Kanew (director): Wizan sent me several scripts. One was Bachelor Party, one was Gimme an 'F,' about cheerleader camp, and the other was Revenge of the Nerds. I said, "That sounds stupid." But I realized, "I relate to this."

The first key casting choice was Curtis Armstrong as Booger, a crude outcast with crazy hair and a leather jacket. Armstrong had just been in Risky Business.

Zacharias: We thought, "If we get him, we've got a hit." And we were right. He takes our stupid lines and turns it into Shakespeare.

Curtis Armstrong (Booger): The money I'd made on Risky Business was just disappearing. You can't imagine the difference between being sent a script of Risky Business, then being sent, for your next film, Revenge of the Nerds, particularly when it was in the condition that it was in at the time, which was not great.

Ted McGinley (Stan): When I first got it, I was almost embarrassed to say the title.

Larry B. Scott (Lamar): I got tired of doing these roles: “I’m gonna cut you, man!” I wanted to do something different. [Revenge of the Nerds] allowed me to do something other than N----- #36, excuse my French.

Kanew: Bobby Carradine said, "Look, I don't know what I'm doing here—I'm not a nerd, I'm probably a guy who would beat up a nerd." He used to drive fast cars on Mulholland Drive, and he was a Carradine brother. But he was a secret nerd.