by Nathan Rabin
Adapting Vonnegut’s Breakfast was always going to be a tricky proposition. It’s a cartoon tragedy, a slapstick meditation on existence and the meaning of life. Without Vonnegut’s indelible voice—an ironic, blackly comic howl of despair at an absent and perverse God—it devolves into a crazed cacophony of clattering cartoon caricatures, a headache-inducing parade of all-American grotesques. Vonnegut’s corrosive philosophical satire stumbles nobly toward transcendence and grace, attaining a strange cumulative power in its heartbreaking final pages. Rudolph’s adaptation retains only the stumbling.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Failure
Michael Jai White On Breakfast Of Champions
Michael Jai White is perhaps best known as the title character in the 1997 feature film adaptation of Todd McFarlane’s cult comic Spawn. He had a memorable supporting role as a gangster whose flunky becomes the victim of the Joker’s infamous “pencil trick” in The Dark Knight and played a superhero of sorts in the delightful blaxploitation parody/homage Black Dynamite, which he also cowrote.
Michael Jai White: I was confused, man. I didn’t know what I was doing there. The day I got there, I knew I was going to do this scene with Buck Henry, but I hadn’t met him yet. On the way to the set, I see Nick Nolte running down the street in a dress, and I’m like, “What is this movie about?” Even while I was on the set, I didn’t quite understand what I was doing or what was going on. I did the scene with Buck Henry, and Bruce Willis was dancing on top of a car. It was so surreal. He danced on top of the car, which he wasn’t supposed to do, destroying the hood of the car. They had to get another car. I didn’t get a chance to read the script until I was there, and then I read the script, and I was like, “I still don’t know what’s going on.” And I remember sitting in the theater not understanding. It felt like a bad dream. I didn’t quite understand anything that happened.
Nathan Rabin: How did you end up in the movie if you hadn’t read the script?
MJW: I don’t remember how I got in the movie, to be honest. I got offered that job, and I remember my manager said, “You should do this. This is a Kurt Vonnegut novel with Bruce Willis in it. It could be big.” My manager says, “This is a good thing.” I always felt Albert Finney was one of the greatest actors who ever lived.
So I agreed to do it, but it was definitely a last-minute thing. I felt like maybe I was replacing somebody who fell out. And all I know is I was on my way to, I think, Idaho maybe? It was a blur. So I’m headed to Idaho all of the sudden, to shoot some scenes with Buck Henry. I’m thinking, “This is the guy who wrote The Graduate. He’s the guy from Saturday Night Live.” I was afraid to ask things. I was just in point-me mode. I didn’t quite get anything. So it’s just weird.
NR: Did you ever get around to reading Breakfast Of Champions?
MJW: Yeah, back then. I think I read it on set. I think I worked for only three or four days on that thing.
NR: But you were thoroughly confused, and still are 10 years later.
MJW: Right. If you were to ask me about it eight years ago, I could have given you a much clearer answer, but it’s almost like that was erased from memory. Even now, as I re-create this, it’s just a fog. It was like all of a sudden, two days later I’m off to Idaho to do something, and I don’t quite know what.
Hickory Dickory Dock, George H. W. Bush–Era Playground Shock Book-Exclusive Case Files: Dice Rules And The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane
When my first girlfriend dumped me, I made a spiritual journey to the Alley, a tacky quasi-Goth shopping complex in Chicago’s Wrigleyville neighborhood, to pick up an item I hoped would transform me from a heartbroken shell of a man into a sentient ball of awesomeness: a black leather motorcycle jacket. It was the least practical item of clothing imaginable. Wearing it ensured that I was too warm in spring and fall, but too cold during the merciless Chicago winter. (The Alley, incidentally, was around the corner from what would become The Onion’s first Chicago office, a hovel where the entire A.V. Club staff squeezed into a tiny bullpen and the defining feature of the building was the overpowering stench of urine from an entry stairwell where bums would gather to relieve themselves after a long night of drinking rotgut.)
Oh, the magical powers of the leather jacket! It transformed an aggregation of skinny, ugly Queens dorks collectively known as the Ramones into the funnest rock band in the planet. It made a short, nebbishy Jewish journeyman actor named Henry Winkler into the personification of cool. More germane to this double Case File, a leather jacket transformed an undistinguished Jewish comic named Andrew Clay Silverstein—whose signature bit was a cute routine about Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro, Eric Roberts, and John Travolta hanging out at the zoo together—into Andrew Dice Clay, the biggest, most controversial stand-up comic of the late ’80s.
Considering what a joke he’s become in the ensuing decades, it can be easy to forget just how massive Clay was at the time. He was a rock star of comedy who put out albums on Rick Rubin’s American label, sold out Madison Square Garden for a solid week, and was primed for mainstream superstardom in the early ’90s when he scored a super-slick, Renny Harlin–directed big-budget action vehicle (1990’s The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane) and his own theatrically released concert film, 1991’s Dice Rules.
And he owed it all to a leather jacket and also the rank misogyny, xenophobia, and mindless hero worship of his fans. But mainly, the timeless cool of the leather jacket.
Dice Rules opens with a billow of smoke emanating from the neck of an empty sentient leather jacket that swivels around to reveal the words “Dice Rules” in magical, glowing lipstick-red rubies. Clay sings a forgettable blues-rock number surrounded by adoring fans and a heavily mulleted backing band. Then the film segues into an almost 25-minute sketch positing a creation myth for the Diceman that borrows equally from early David Lee Roth videos, Jerry Lewis movies, Welcome Back, Kotter, and the revenge fantasies of disturbed 10-year-olds.
The Diceman was once like you and me: an übernerd with his hair slicked up into an Alfalfa cowlick. He had a domineering, verbally abusive, morbidly obese, shower-cap-sporting wife; an unfortunate predilection for wearing overalls over a lumberjack shirt; and a high, nasal whining voice that fell somewhere between Horshack and Eddie Deezen.
Everywhere he goes, the trepid hero of Dice Rules is abused. His mountain of a wife verbally castrates him. The clerk at the bank where he squirrels away his nest egg heaps scorn in his direction. Even his friends do nothing to hide their contempt. At a gas station, an impossibly young Eddie Griffin holds him responsible for the sins of white men everywhere.
Things look hopeless for this sad little schmuck until he stumbles upon a leather emporium where a gravel-voiced salesman (also played by Clay) shows him a jacket of destiny and utters words that will change his life forever: “Leather makes it happen. That’s right. Anybody that was ever cool, that ever got the chicks, they wore the leather. James Dean. Leather jacket. Marlon Brando. Leather jacket. Arthur Fonzarelli. Leather jacket. Am I right or am I right? You can be one of those guys. You gotta want it, though.”
With a single purchase, Clay makes a magical transformation from Jerry Lewis putz to Cinderfella. The concert film begins in earnest, with Andrew Dice Clay coming onstage at Madison Square Garden to perform before tens of thousands who otherwise would be occupied committing date rapes and/or beating up homosexuals. In that respect, Clay was performing a valuable public service by keeping these people off the streets for a few hours.
The applause is thunderous. The anticipation is palpable. These people don’t like Clay: they worship him. Instead of crucifixes and rosary beads, they express their religious devotion with crude signs and homemade T-shirts adorned with Clay’s catchphrases. The audience—which seems to score as much screen time as Clay himself—doubles as a museum of regrettable late-’80s fashion: stonewashed jeans, baseball hats with wacky messages, child-molester mustaches, big hair teased and permed to the heavens, enough hair spray to burn a
continent-sized hole in the ozone layer.
After an eternity of Clay-fueled pandemonium, the Oracle speaks: “Korean delis. Indian newsstands. Greek diners. And ass-fucking parties every night of the week. That’s New York. Howaya?”
The crowd erupts. In a preview of what’s to come, there are constant reaction shots of Clay fans stomping their feet, clapping their hands, and holding ecstatically onto one another, lost in what is either orgasmic comic rapture or violent, possibly life-threatening seizures.
Clay begins slowly, with animal-themed bits on his dog eating his girlfriend out, his hatred of turtles, and the sneering attitudes of New York pigeons. In the grand tradition of elementary-school bullies, Clay picks only on people unable to defend themselves, but he warms up by snapping on creatures farther down the evolutionary chain. Before he can stick it to stuck-up amoebas, his rant veers into his misogynistic comfort zone.
Riffing on the ’tude of flying rats, Clay reflects, “You can be walking with your chick. All of a sudden, a bird shits on your nose. And your girlfriend will look at you like [Adopts Edith Bunker voice:] ‘Honey, you have shit on your nose.’ And you give her that attitude, like, ‘What! Maybe I like it there. Now shut your fucking hole!’”
Going to a Clay concert in 1990 meant regressing proudly back to the fifth-grade lunchroom and quaking in awe at the cool kid who swears and wears a leather jacket and sneaks smokes from his drunk mom’s purse and talks endlessly, profanely, enthusiastically, dismissively, and maliciously about all the skanks he’s banging.
In Clay’s caveman universe, guys just wanna get laid and women are all needy, desperate, parasitic shrews. People don’t come to Diceman shows to laugh or be entertained. No, people come to Clay’s shows to have their fear and hatred of women and minorities validated. They come to turn back the clock to a time before feminism and identity politics, and live, for an hour or so, in a world where women are interchangeable fucktoys and minorities are faceless verbal punching bags.
In rapid succession, Clay targets midgets, the Japanese, the twitchy, the handicapped, hunchbacks, and stutterers. “Ya ever listened to a stutterer? What the fuck are they trying to say? You’re 30 years old. Talk like other people!” he admonishes. Yeah! And what’s the deal with retarded people? Why can’t they just read a fucking book, get a Ph.D., and land a lectureship at a small, prestigious liberal-arts college instead of always acting retarded?
After the interminable opening sketch, 45 minutes of vitriol, and a rapturously received recitation of Clay’s signature dirty nursery rhymes, Clay just barely pads the film out to feature length by performing an Elvis song in the lip-curling, hips-swiveling style of the King; the aforementioned impressions of Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro, Eric Roberts, Al Pacino, and John Travolta at the zoo; and a perversely faithful performance of “Greased Lightning.”
Like countless prepubescent girls, Clay has devoted endless hours to rewatching Grease and rehearsing its choreography. It’s a weirdly innocent way to end 82 minutes of bad vibes and ugly sentiments, and a reminder that Clay once had a way to entertain people that didn’t involve pandering to their worst instincts.
Dice Rules failed to reach beyond Clay’s core audience, but that was a foregone conclusion in light of the much more high-profile failure of The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane, the film that was supposed to launch his career as a major movie star.
A move to the big screen was a natural for Clay. For what was the Diceman, if not a character he’d been perfecting for years? Yet in the years since Dice Rules and The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane bombed, the character seems to have taken over the actor. When he appeared on Celebrity Apprentice recently—a gig that defines late-career desperation—he acted as if he were still selling out Madison Square Garden. There was a definite Norma Desmond vibe to it. In his mind, he was still big; it was the venues that had gotten small.
Clay’s ego seems to have accepted only the rise, not the fall. When Clay talked to The A.V. Club’s David Wolinsky in 2008, he ended the interview by bragging about an imminent sex date with a “gorgeous redhead, over six feet tall, an hourglass figure, these big fucking tits, and an ass like a basketball.” Is there anything sadder than a fiftysomething man boasting to an interviewer half his age about his girlfriend’s basketball-sized ass? Three decades into his career, he hadn’t evolved beyond bragging to the open-mouthed kids on the playground about how he totally touched this one girl’s boob over the weekend and fingered the shit out of her.
The glory of The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane was that Clay fans no longer had to imagine him making out with all these hot chicks, then ordering them to scrub his toilet and wash his dishes; now they could watch the magic happen on a 20-foot screen in surround sound.
Clay’s success with the ladies figures prominently in the voice-over narration that opens the film: “They call me Ford Fairlane, rock ’n’ roll detective. I have the power to get into the hottest clubs, the hottest dressing rooms, and the hottest chicks. I admit it all sounds pretty nifty in theory. Then why am I here? Why do I wish the music industry and the rest of the globe would suck my Dick—Tracy?” Sure enough, Clay spends much of the early parts of the film dealing with a herd of Lycra-clad, oversexed skanks trampling all over one another for an opportunity to suck his Dick—Tracy, then clean up his sweet-ass beachfront lair. Ohhh!!!
The makers of Ford Fairlane faced a formidable challenge. How do you make Clay palatable to the mainstream without diluting his nasty edge? They begin by plopping him down in a milieu so sexist, sleazy, and heartless that Clay couldn’t help but look like a white knight by comparison. The film takes place in the Los Angeles music scene of the late ’80s, positing its wisecracking antihero as a potty-mouthed Sam Spade for the hair-metal era.
In a blatant act of pandering, screenwriters James Cappe, David Arnott, and Daniel Waters give Clay sidekicks designed to appeal to every conceivable demographic. For the ladies, there’s Jazz (Lauren Holly), a capable, steel-willed girl Friday. For the young people, there’s a plucky orphan (Brandon Call) who idolizes the Diceman, and is known only as the Kid. Animal lovers get an anthropomorphic koala, and for the classic-rock crowd, Clay has an electric guitar once owned by Jimi Hendrix, something he can pick soulfully by a fire during his more pensive moments.
To give Clay credit, his rock ’n’ roll dick is hateful only toward minorities not considered cool. So Fairlane praises Don Cleveland, a producer played by Morris Day, as “the only person in the business I could talk to without vomiting Day-Glo,” and tells a rapper played by special guest star Tone Loc that while Clay may give him guff, he really does dig the new hippety-hop music—a sentiment he delivers with all the conviction of Elvis Presley assuring audiences that he loves the new music from bands like “the Beards” (aka the Byrds) in Presley’s ’68 Comeback Special.
Fairlane’s misadventures begin when heavy-metal scuzzbag Bobby Black (Vince Neil) dies mysteriously and shock jock Johnny Crunch (Gilbert Gottfried) hires Fairlane to find his space-cadet groupie daughter Zuzu Petals (the charmingly out-of-it Maddie Corman). Fairlane’s pursuit of the girl sends him ricocheting through a thick moral morass populated by exiles from the cast of Hollywood Squares during a music-theme week: Priscilla Presley as cold-blooded, rich femme fatale Colleen Sutton; Day as a hip producer reduced to working with an anemic-looking teen idol; sneering, mustachioed bad guy Julian Grendel (Wayne Newton); and wild-eyed, scenery-chewing Robert Englund as Newton’s cackling, deranged henchman Smiley. Ed O’Neill steals the film as Lieutenant Amos, an antagonistic cop who never got over Fairlane blowing off his disco group during his days as a music publicist. Their bickering banter is stupid and juvenile, but intentionally so; call it meta-moronic.
Ford Fairlane is perhaps the best possible vehicle for Clay. Harlin and cinematographer Oliver Wood, who went on to shoot Face/Off and the Matt Damon Bourne movies, give the film an electric, neon sleaziness awash in lurid reds and cool blues. Joel Silver was so impressed by Harlin’s work here t
hat he hired him to direct Die Hard 2: Die Harder based on its dailies alone. If Harlin could make Clay look like an icon of swaggering masculine cool, then just imagine what he could do with stars who didn’t personify doucheiness.
Ford Fairlane is a live-action comic book sticky with the glitter and grime of the Sunset Strip and the sad glam-rock bastard child that was hair metal. It’s a film of big hair and tight, tiny costumes; gleeful, unabashed vulgarity; and a charismatic hero with a certain cornball charm. It wasn’t hurting for production values, either. It’s a product of the Joel Silver adolescent-wish-fulfillment factory, so you better believe that shiny shit blows up but good, and that hired-gun scriptwriter Daniel Waters, well on his way to squandering the abundant promise of his script for Heathers, gives some of the dialogue a profane, pulpy panache.
Ford Fairlane has one big flaw: It isn’t particularly fun or funny. My inner adolescent wanted to surrender to its puerile charms, but the adult in me wouldn’t let him. Turn off the sound, and Fairlane is a candy-colored feast for the eyes, but the film is too inextricably rooted in the machismo, misanthropy, and misogyny of Clay’s stage persona to qualify as even the guiltiest of pleasures.
Clay had every opportunity to cross over from cult hero to mainstream superstar—a high-rated HBO special, comedy albums, sold-out tours, a concert film, and a big-budget, Joel Silver–produced vehicle—but Dice Rules and The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane are rare instances where people lost money underestimating the taste and intelligence of the American public. Un-fucking-believable. Ohhhhhh!!!!!
Dice Rules: Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Failure