Johnny Knoxville: I remember our first screening at Paramount with family, friends, and executives. When we showed it to the executives, it was long. We were really trying jokes out, and it was still raw. One of the executives, who will remain unnamed, stood up and said, "Paramount will never release this picture." We had to fight that battle, but I think that was an emotional reaction from the person just because they had never seen anything like that before, and it was really raw.

Spike Jonze: To the credit of Sherry Lansing, it was her boss that came in and said that, but Sherry, who was like an older, famous, successful woman—well, I don't exactly know how it happened, but they released the movie.

Chris Pontius: Before the official release, they let an audience watch it, and they let us go into the movie theater and basically be in the back room watching everyone react to it so we could see what people thought was funny and so on. But it was crazy watching some people see something and start to get sick to their stomach and puke in the movie theater. Some would be Jackass fans, and some would just be people that wanted to see a movie for free, so you watch some people get pissed and stomp out of the theater.

Steve-O: I just remember getting a call from Knoxville when it opened, and he said, "Dude, we're number one. We did it." That was the experience every time.

Spike Jonze: The premiere was really fun. We had it at the Cinerama Dome, this place where they've had the premieres of famous movies like 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I remember being on the red carpet and seeing Steve-O, Preston, Bam, and Wee Man, and looking at them, and they were just the same dudes but on the red carpet.

Jeff Tremaine: I remember I was getting calls the night it opened. Paramount rented me this little shuttle bus, so we had a lot of the guys and our parents, and we were driving from theater to theater. We started at the five o'clock matinee showing on a Friday, and we snuck into the back after the movie started. I was standing right next to my dad, and we looked around and there was only, like, five people in the first theater. I was like, "Oh, fuck, man," and my dad looked at me, and he went, "Well, looks like we got a lemon." But then, as the night progressed, we were getting calls from Paramount because we were on the West Coast, and we heard how well it was doing on the East Coast, and we kept driving around, and each of the movie theaters was adding showings, so it was doubling and tripling. It was amazing. I remember just getting so nervous because it was doing so well; I was freaking out. Paramount kept calling me like, "It's going to do this, it's going to do that!' They kept upping the number from opening at 10 million to 15 million to 20 million. I was like, "I don't know what that means!"

Wee Man: The craziest first-time feeling of it coming out is when I went on a skate tour with a bunch of other guys, and we went to Japan. Jackass: The Movie had only been out for three months in the States, and it had just hit Japan. The people were running out of stores, like, yelling my name. My skate buddies were like, "Oh, dude, it's over for you now, bro. Everyone knows who you are."