“No, man,” said Martin. “Will’s character’s name. Mike Lowry.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I can’t say the last name. Lowwwwwry.”
I really hadn’t noticed it yet. But every time Martin Lawrence had tried to fit his mouth around the name, it came out elongated and strange.
“Okay,” was all I could muster. The call ended, I passed along Martin’s central request to Lucas Foster and Michael Bay. They both rolled their eyes.
Two weeks later, the script had barely begun to take shape. And we were an equal number of days away from
photography. We’d been having trouble casting the character of the witness, Julie Mott. Columbia Pictures had insisted on employing an “actress of color” in order to serve the “urban quality” of the movie. In other words, Bad Boys had already been earmarked as a “black film,” thus requiring all black leads. But in Miami, we cared far less about color than we did about funny. And without a completed script, we were having trouble attracting quality talent. Enter the very game Téa Leoni who’d been introduced to us via the casting director. I threw together a test scene. We put her on tape. Téa killed it.
Then my phone began ringing again. It was Martin.
“Need to tell you something,” said the comic. “I ain’t doin’ no sex scenes with a white girl.”
“We haven’t cast the part yet,” I told him.
“I know you haven’t,” said Martin. “That’s why I’m callin’ you and everybody else so they know I’m not doin’ no sex scenes with a white chick. Not a racist thing. It’s a tv show thing. Gotta think about my audience.”
After a few minutes of verbal wrestling, I was finally able to explain it this way to our reluctant star: Martin’s character, Marcus Burnett, is a happily married man who is put in the unfortunate position of guarding a reluctant female witness. In order to get the witness to trust him, Marcus must pretend to be his partner, cop-slash-lothario Mike Lowry. I explained to Martin that the funny stuff will come from his character trying to remain faithful to the woman he loves while posing as a playboy.
“I getcha,” said Martin, swallowing my sales pitch. “But that name. Mike Lowwwwry. Hate it, man. You gotta change it.”
I pocketed the win and moved onto my next challenge. In the meantime, I totally forgot about Martin’s request to change Will’s character’s name.
One week later. The cast arrived in Miami. We’d begun three days of rehearsals with our three principals. Joining Michael Bay, Lucas Foster, and myself were producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. The sessions were fast and loose and loaded with laughs. Then, once again, Martin tried to fit his mouth around that name.
“Julie? My name is Mike Lowwwwwwwry.”
Everybody laughed. That’s when Martin spun on me.
“Goddammit. I thought you were gonna change that dumb-ass mother-fuckin’ name!”
“Sorry, Martin,” I said, quickly falling on my sword. “My bad. Just slipped off my to do list.”
“What’s wrong with the name?” asked Will.
“Can’t fuckin’ say it,” admitted Martin. “I can say Mike okay. Just change the last name to Jones or Wilson. What the fuck do I care as long as it’s not Lowwwwwwry.”
Everybody laughed again. Martin was not amused. I made a note to change the character’s last name.
After the lunch break, Will was quick to take me aside.
“You are not changing that name,” Will insisted.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Funny every time he tries to get his mouth around it.”
“So we’re good. You’re not changin’ it, right?”
“And when Martin tries to fire me, you’re gonna protect me?”
“Got your back, brothuh.”
The following Monday we started filming. And come Tuesday evening we were on the first scene where Martin would have to pretend to be Mike Lowwwwwwwry. I’d not-so-coincidentally driven down to our South Beach set for the big moment Martin knocked on Julie’s apart
ment door, flashed his Miami p.d. badge, and announced that he was Mike Lowwwwwry.
I glanced around. Will Smith was nowhere in the area code. Our assistant director informed me that the future world’s biggest movie star had jetted up to New York City for the night.
Sure, Will, I griped to myself. Who’s got my back now?
“Action,” yelled Michael Bay.
“Julie? It’s Mike Lowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwry,” said a dutiful Martin Lawrence.
Four takes later, the new director was on to his next set up. This is when Martin Lawrence sidled up to me.
“Motherfucker,” he began rather softly. “You didn’t change the name.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Need every laugh we can get.”
“S’pose that shit’s funny,” said Martin. “When I get back to L.A., gonna ask my tv show producers to hire you as a writer.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m not a sitcom guy.”
“I hear ya,” said Martin, who gave me a friendly nudge before disappearing into his trailer.
With the Martin hurdle cleared there would be five thousand more before we wrapped. Maybe someday I’ll tell you how Jerry Bruckheimer kindly asked me to write Don Simpson out of the movie. That was a doozy.
Writer’s Nightmare
I’d just typed fade out for the umpteenth time in my short career. The draft was neat and a tightly wound one hundred and fifteen pages of thrills and chills. It felt bulletproof and as close to perfect as anything I’d yet fashioned. Once it was bound by three brass brads and a cover page, had you gently flicked it with a fingernail, I would’ve bet a dinner at Spago you’d have heard it ring like Waterford crystal.
Then into the batter’s box stepped actor Paul Reubens, aka Pee Wee Herman. We weren’t more than acquaintances, but there was a period when Paul would occasionally swing by my tiny studio office to seek refuge amongst my guitars and silly desk toys. On this day he flopped into the chair across from me, humming a tune, and found a sudden interest in the freshly minted screenplay I’d just culled from the printer.
“Ooooooh,” said Paul in a rare, non-paid detour into his Pee Wee Herman persona. “New words.”
“Hot off the printer,” I proudly said.
“Ever hear of Writer’s Nightmare?” he asked.
“Uh… no.”
Paul released a laugh channeled directly from Hades. He fanned the pages of the new screenplay like a deck of cards.
“Need to pick a random page,” he said. “Tell me when to stop.”
“Stop,” I said.
“And let the Writer’s Nightmare begin.” The actor grinned as he stopped thumbing pages and from the very top left of the clean sheet, began reading my screenplay aloud. “Exterior. Theme park entrance. Day…”
Now, if you’ve ever imagined a talented actor reading your work aloud and hearing the musical notes of a heavenly chorus, this wasn’t it. This was a talented comedian who, with certain glee, was hell bent on initiating me into a select club of word-jockeys who’ve been through the nightmare and lived to tell. That’s because Paul Reubens, choosing to orate sans anything remotely resembling his famous alter ego, switched into his best staccato and read my chosen page with the flattest and undramatic affect imaginable. Sure. The action description sounded dry, like a Christmas toy instruction manual read by a robot low on battery power. It was when he came to the dialogue that I felt the first stab of pain.
My carefully chosen dialogue, scrutinized in a myriad of self-revisions, spilled from Paul’s lips with more wood than can be found at a Viagra convention. Every word was stilted, stuffed, disconnected from one another, and horrific to the ear. This was nails across a blackboard stuff. Seriously. I think I would rather have been waterboarded by the Pakistani secret police.
Of course there was no mercy from Paul. He read until the page ended, creased his face with a knowing smile, and dropped the script back on my desk.
“Fun, huh?” he asked.
>
“That was so effing cruel,” I said.
“Reminding you that there’s no such thing as actor-proof dialogue. See ya, Dougie.”
The torture was over. But the impromptu and purposefully leaden reading of what I thought was a perfect page of script left me with two resonant lessons. One: even the best of writing, read out of context and without the injection of a well-crafted performance, can be made to sound awful. And two: I would one day soon feel the need to pass on the gift that was Writer’s Nightmare.
But first a few thoughts on the actual nightmare of writing dialogue to fit into an actor’s mouth. And I do mean fit. No matter how sterling the words sound to your mind’s ear—or even that of your roommate, boyfriend, girlfriend, lover, mom, dad, and family pet—they are only as pithy as the pie hole that’s been engaged to deliver them.
You’ve heard of actors that could act the phone book? I’ve never seen one so much as try. And my guess is that even Meryl Streep would need a Marco-Rubio-awkward-moment-of-hydration before she made it past AAA Plumbing Supplies.
I have worked with actors who could pretty much make anything work. And, as you know, others who had trouble pronouncing their characters’ names.
Let’s just take my trio from Bad Boys. Example: Tea Leoni. Not a whole lot I couldn’t put in front of her that she couldn’t figure out how to curl around her tongue and whip into a something breathy, snarky or ironic. My words were nothing compared to her intention which often contained far more insight and articulation than I’d first imagined.
Then there was Will Smith. He wasn’t yet the world’s biggest movie star. He had, though, shown miles of talent in his videos and hit sitcom and had earned some critical notices for his chops in Six Degrees of Separation. Writing for Will felt like riding a race horse that didn’t yet know how fast he could go. Will, though, was game and willing to try any words on for size.
Lastly, there was Martin Lawrence. Funny. Street smart. Very cool working with a writer. But still he was comfortable only within his own, limited frequency. It was nearly impossible to write dialogue for him. A stumbler would come along every three of four lines, forcing
him to mangle words and chew ’em until they became soft and he could spit ’em out as something better resembling the image he had of himself instead of the character as written.
None of the former descriptions of these actors and their acumen for making a writer’s words fly is either right or wrong. They’re just different styles, all of which I’ve learned to both appreciate and prepare for.
I recall what an actress pal of mine once said of working on a movie with Christopher Walken. She described how Walken would ask the writer to remove all punctuation and direction from the dialogue in order to undo any potential roadblocks that might get in the way of his performance. I never forgot that, and sometime keep that in mind when I compose speeches.
There was one long, rainy night when I was working with The Usual Suspects actor, Kevin Pollock. It was a wet and icy exterior. The only refuge from the elements was a small village of pop-ups to keep us dry. Pollock decided to keep our huddled few in stitches by spending mostly all of his off-camera time in a near perfect, Chris Walken impression. At one point I mentioned Walken’s punctuation trick. Pollock snickered, cracked wise, then the actor in him began to process the concept.
“Know what?” said Pollock, in maybe his only non-Walken moment in a long night. “The writer in me wants to call that a buncha actor bullshit. But the actor in me kind of agrees. Writer. Please get out of my way.”
I still think about that brief conversation whenever I begin the process of scissoring through my dialogue in search of potential landmines for actors.
What’s that you said? Did I ever pass along the rite of the Writer’s Nightmare I’d painfully received from the evil Paul Reubens?
What do you think?
The Best Note . . . Ever
This story goes back about seven years to a screenplay adaptation I’d written for a book called Black Water Transit by Carsten Stroud.
The screenplay, initially written for Joe Roth’s Revolution Pictures, is a crime ensemble piece, often described in industry shorthand as something akin to Traffic meets Crash. When Revolution chose not to proceed to production, the script was quickly picked up by an independent company backed by deep pocket financing. Their plan was to make the movie for a magic number of around thirty-five million dollars, half of which would go towards paying for and scheduling the production around movie stars with foreign appeal. But first we needed to land a director. The indie company was looking for a helmer who was capable, cutting edge, and with an asking price that wouldn’t break their business model.
In no time, the producers had landed on three potential helmers: hot commercial and video director Samuel Bayer; young Frankie Flowers, whose yet-to-be-released film Haven was generating some buzz; and lastly, Lexi Alexander, a German emigre and former kick-boxing world champion turned filmmaker. Her Oscar nominated short had led to her first feature gig, directing Elijah Wood and Charlie Hunnam in Green Street Hooligans.
Usually, a feature writer doesn’t have much say in the selection of a movie’s director. But in the case of BWT, the producers had faith enough to include me, not just soliciting my opinion of a director’s work, but encouraging me to meet with each of the candidates. So that’s what I did. I screened Frankie Flowers’ Haven and later broke bread with the young director, talking through
how he’d execute my screenplay into a movie. The same went for Sam Bayer. Though he hadn’t a film to watch, he had hours of big budget commercials and a shelf full of vma-winning videos to peruse. We traded stories and film references over cigars and whiskey. Sam promised me that if he scored the gig he’d be sure to make a kick-ass movie.
Then there was the weeknight evening I rolled into a Beverly Hills screening room to view Green Street Hooligans. I was met there by one of the indie company’s execs, a warm fellow I recalled from his former days at Warner Brothers. While waiting for the film to arrive, he shared with me a lone script note from Lexi Alexander, the director whose film I was about to audition. Without getting into the detail of the note itself, just follow the dialogue that transpired.
“You’re not serious,” I said, my voice already thick with incredulity.
“She thinks it’ll provide more tension, especially for the second half of the film,” voiced the executive.
“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s like dropping a big, fat, pink elephant into the middle of the movie.”
“Why?” asked the exec.
“Because it makes the movie about race.”
“I don’t necessarily think it does.”
“The hell it doesn’t. The second I take the racist cop and the angry black chick and put them together…”
“It’s combustible, yeah.”
“It’s an ensemble piece. Everything has to balance. Remember, there’s three other stories we’re tracking. The second we inject a race romance the scales go out of whack.”
“It’s not a romance, really.”
“Movie stars,” I reminded. “Hot guy. Hot girl. Stuff’s gotta happen. No. Bad idea.”
“Just think about it, okay?” encouraged the exec.
“Are you saying you like the note?”
“No. Just saying think about it.”
“Well, based on her one dumb-assed note, we shouldn’t hire her. End of argument.”
“Look. I’ve gotta be somewhere else. Watch her film. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
The executive said so long and left me to stew. The film had yet to arrive at the venue so I had another half hour to be annoyed—pissed at this Teutonic twit who wanted to take my precious script and turn it into her personal polemic on race. Another Euro who couldn’t wait to lay a heavy hand on American culture. My stomach was grinding. I considered bolting, returning to my San Fernando fortress of solitude and putting my protests in a sizzling email. As far as I was concerned, why wa
ste my own time when I was dead certain Sam Bayer had both my vote and the job?
I can’t say for sure why I stayed. I was still chewing on my decision when the film canisters arrived via messenger. Whatever, I said to myself before flopping into a plush chair three steps from the exit. Moments later, the room turned black. Green Street Hooligans unspooled. And, despite my mood, I thoroughly enjoyed the picture. I found Lexi Alexander’s work to be solid, moving in places where lesser directors would’ve relied on the action, and but for some self-limiting acting by Elijah Wood, the over-all performances were sterling.
Damn. There went my plan to torpedo the hiring of Lexi Alexander based on her obvious incompetence.
As an experienced Hollywood scribbler, I’ve learned to be pragmatic. So on the drive home, I pored over my options. One of which was the ultimate what if.
What if they actually hire her?
I gasped at the thought. Then again, stupider things have happened to me. And if Lexi Alexander ended up as the director of BWT, her lousy note would be her first order of business. Surely, I would put up a strong defense. But if push came to shove, and the company backed her, I’d have the inevitable choice of either walking… or finding some way of making the note work.
The night was calm. Traffic was nearly non-existent. In the quiet of my car, I secretly applied Lexi’s note to the complicated, ensemble story. What followed wasn’t quite cosmic. But it was a blinding moment of clarity. The note, as racially loaded as it initially appeared, not only fit with precision into the script but solved a problem I hadn’t yet fully discovered. Suddenly, my blue collar heroes had character drives beyond their own personal agendas. Race, it turned out, was a chemical catalyst for greater purpose.
Damn.
Sometimes there’s no greater fan than a convert. I went from being a critic to a fan in the matter of five blocks. I dialed the executive’s cell and expressed my conversion.
“So you’re saying you were wrong about the note?” he asked.
The Smoking Gun Page 15