LOS ANGELES -- It's not cynicism if you call it nostalgia first.

So Sex Drive isn't just some girl-ogling, one-weekend-at-the-box-office cash grab. It's actually a sincere -- even heartfelt -- homage to the adolescent sex comedies of the 1980s. Don't believe us? Just ask director Sean Anders.

"People have the perception that if you're making a teen comedy where there's sex and somebody's losing their virginity, that somehow it's something the suits in Hollywood are perpetrating on the public: 'Look, here's an easy way to make money,' " he says. "But for us, we approached it with great reverence to people like John Hughes, who made those great movies we grew up with. We sat there, going, 'We have to get this right and make one of those movies people quotes years from now because we still quote those movies all the time.' We didn't want to be the guys who made the movie everyone forgot about."

We should know soon enough if they succeeded. Opening Friday, Sex Drive stars Josh Zuckerman as a hapless virgin who embarks on a road trip to hook up with girl he met online. Along for the ride are improbably swaggering ladies man Wayne (Clark Duke) and gorgeous gal pal Felicia (Vancouver's Amanda Crew). Seth Green, as a sarcastic member of the Amish, and James Marsden, as Josh's bullying homophobic brother, help anchor the otherwise mostly unknown cast.

"There are two kinds of people who you can cast when you're making a comedy. There are actors who can do funny, and I call that actor-funny. It's fine, they know where to hit the beats. And then there are people who are funny," says Anders, who made his feature film directorial debut in 2005 with Never Been Thawed. "We insisted to the studio, we had to get really funny people. We couldn't get someone who's on a television show and kinda hot right now. We had to get people who were legitimately hilarious."

Says Marsden, "This movie and the character reminded me of the movies I grew up with in the 1980s that informed my adolescence -- Fast Times at Ridgemont High, all the movies with the guy trying to get laid. Sixteen Candles, Summer School, The Last American Virgin, all those movies. It was fun doing something, given what I'd just completed, something completely different. I could just play this obnoxious a------. You can almost look at it and go, 'Wow, he's almost plagiarizing Bill Paxton' (from Weird Science) ... This reminded me of those movies so there was a little bit of nostalgia to go be part of one."

(Nor did it hurt that this comedy gave him the chance to earn some "guy cred" back after such chick flicks as 27 Dresses, Hairspray and Enchanted.)

Of course, a far more recent teen sex comedy also comes to mind: Superbad, with Jonah Hill and Michael Cera (2007). Anders acknowledges that without Superbad -- and other Judd Apatow-produced hits that earned R ratings in the U.S. -- Sex Drive would probably have been a much tamer film. "The Apatow stuff, not just being rated R but being consistently hysterically funny, makes people a little less dubious about giving a rated R movie a try ... People also can now see trailers for rated R films online, whereas just a few years ago, it was dependent on the strict rules of marketing on television to get an audience."

Nevertheless, despite early support from the studio, Anders admits, "We were terrified every time we wrote something that was a hard R because we thought, 'Man, if they change this to a PG-13, we'll lose this and this and this we're going to kill ourselves.'

"So we're glad the studio just hung in there and kept it R. Some of those (1980s) movies, if you put them out now, they wouldn't be a PG-13 because over the years the rules have gotten tougher about what constitutes an R. So even to measure up to those great movies, it has to be an R."

Yet if though they kept the content, they were forced to change the title -- at least while on location in politically-conservative Florida.

"The location manager called me and said, 'We can't keep calling it Sex Drive. They think it's a porno and they won't let us shoot anywhere,' " Anders says.

Adds Marsden, "For a long time we were Untitled Teen Road Movie."