I did not expect to be shivering at Willard Airport and waiting for a someone to take me to the Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Performance Center where I was supposed to meet Bret Bielema, the head of coach of the Illinois Fighting Illini to talk about his book. I was out of my element here in the midwest-- my life was on set or in writer's rooms punching up scripts and sampling a blend of exotic cocaines. For thirty-five years, I've been saving shitty writers and producers from themselves in Hollywood, and I was the best. They called me Doc Frankenstein for a long time because I'd drive up and dig up some parts of some other failed projects and then use some unholy magic to get the whole thing to work, at least they did until some jagoff executive producer didn't understand that Frankenstein referred to the scientist and not the monster and after he said "hey someone tighten the neck bolts on Frankenstein over there" I tried to run him over with the Batmobile (I was responsible for about 85% percent of Arnold Schwarzneegger's Mr. Freeze cold puns and I am specifically the person who came up with "stay cool bird boy" after which Arnold personally sent me a reproduction of his grotesquely red and swollen head from Total Recall from his own collection in gratitude).
Every day producers would line up outside my office and beg me to rescue their crummy shows and save their asses. I started from the absolute bottom of the industry. We were filming on a set on Eraser and production had halted because Arnold just shot an alligator in the face and no one had any idea what he says (the dummy who wrote the script didn't have anything, like Arnold was just going to shoot and alligator in the snout and then just stand there like a fuckin' idiot) and I, a lowly PA who was already nearly fired for telling James Caan to get his own fucking walnuts and was saved only because Caan said he "liked the balls on this kid" just stood up and said "now you're luggage" and everyone was really pissed but it worked (the writer cut out "now" because he felt he had to do something). Before long, I was Arnold's top emergency murder pun call. I was also the person responsible for saving the movie Lake Placid by telling Betty White to say "fuckin" and "shit" and also rescued the dying Texas football soap opera by writing the part where that moon-faced kid kills the guy with a shovel, you're welcome.
I made a crucial mistake, though. I wanted to finally make something on my own. For years, I had secretly been working on a treatment of the classic Chekhov story "The Nose" that I had never really read except for instead of a Russian bureaucrat, the titular Nose came from a tough-as-nails Chicago cop named Eddie Noczinsky who just beats the hell out of people for 90 minutes and whose tagline is "I smell crime." None of the big studios would finance it, not even after I selflessly saved their shitty movies for three decades, so I decided to sink all of my own money into it. We ran into problems immediately. No one could get the nose suit right, and none of the top costumers would work with me after I threatened them with one of Christopher Lambert's swords from Highlander III: Sorceror which he gave me after I told them to forget about the goddamn aliens and put the bad guy in a cave. Also, I had already given millions of dollars to the great Dennis Farina to voice the Nose before he passed. Unfortunately, I had burned a lot of bridges while desperately trying to raise money for the movie by threatening, attacking, or pissing in the offices of many of Hollywood's top executives, so I started to take whatever bullshit writing jobs they could cobble together. I don't think that anyone even knew who I was when I was sent over to meet Bielema.
The large, jolly man who picked me up from the airport was Bielema himself. "Hey man, how the hell are ya?" he asked me as I tried to climb into the truck. It was covered in cameras and camera equipment for a TV show he was pitching called "Live from Bret Bielema's Car" where he would interview people from the sports and entertainment world with a variety of ridiculous questions. "Quick, top Thanksgiving foods," he asked me while practicing staring into a camera while switching lanes. "I don't know. I haven't had Thanksgiving since 2002, when Dino De Laurentiis threw me out of his house for trying to slap Bill Paxton with a fist full of cranberry sauce while I was out of my mind on a designer drug called "The Gobbler." "Whoa, look at this fuckin' guy," Bielema said chuckling as we pulled into his office.
Bielema
had a little shtick for everyone we met on the way in. He shadowboxed a
security guard. He had a complicated handshake for one of the
assistants. He did an elaborate gun finger point at a walk-on which
involved him feigning being gut-shot and staggering around a lot before
collapsing to his knees and vowing revenge. It was spellbinding.
When we got into his office, he told me that his publisher explained to him him that they liked to take some life lessons from football and put them into business situations. They'd sell books, but more importantly they were selling the lecture circuit, boardrooms and hotel banquet halls, a money printing machine. I asked him if he ever said anything cool after beating someone like "eat some turf" or "touch down to hell." "One time I called a guy a prick and the university had to send an official apology," he said. "Hell yeah," I said.
As we talked, I realized that writing this bullshit coach book was a waste of both of our time. Bret Bielema was a dynamo, a star. And he had a TV show. Sure it was just a goofy little web series he was trying to sell to Big Ten Network Omega that would also air a select gas stations and interstate rest stops, but I saw something bigger here. I saw a big, lovable tough guy who would have everyone in the palm of their hand. I saw Bielema transcending midwestern football and me getting out of the Hollywood gutter. I saw Eddie "Da Nose" Noscinsky.
"Forget about the fuckin' book," I said. "Everyone's got a motivational book. Dick Wolf's assistant has a book." He looked at me blankly. "P.J. Fleck's got a book," I said quickly remembering the name of a football coach I had seen on TV one time looking really weird. His brow furrowed. "Really?" "We can do better than that," I said. We need to go big. We need to go to TV. We need to get into Bret Bielema's car."
I thought I'd collect a few bucks to meet with Bielema, get his pitch and then go back home and buy some illegal lizard gland stimulants and just write the whole thing in a week, but I couldn't go back. I hauled out my original screenplay for The Nose. I would have to make some serious changes in order to accommodate most of the action taking place in an SUV instead of on city streets. We also would have to accommodate Bielema by filming mostly in Champaign-Urbana and make make The Nose an expert on football crimes where he spent a lot of his time hanging around football fields and film sessions. In this version, the Nose would smell out a guy stealing signs and then throw him from the top of the stadium into an active volcano. But I knew I could make it work. We just had to cobble together this first season secretly by stringing along the publisher and then we'd get our sets and our actors and our feature budget.
It took about a week to convince Bielema to come onboard. I spent every day in his office or hounding him on the practice field, showing him pages of the script and telling him how much easier it would be to get great football players to come to the university if he was an international acting superstar. He finally one day just said, "ah what the hell, I always wanted to be a detective. Let's do it." It felt amazing, like the first time I convinced a producer to spent an extra million on a helicopter because how fucking cool would it be to have a helicopter here.
I did have one major problem. There was no nose costume. I didn't have the money to fly anyone out or even hire someone locally. The whole thing didn't work without a giant nose walking around dispensing nostril justice and giving scumbags the Big Sneeze. In desperation, I decided to make the nose myself. I have no idea how to even go about doing something like that. I always just wrote something and it appeared. But now I was absolutely fucked. I walked into a Michael's and told them I needed to make a giant nose, but no one was that helpful. Eventually, I found an old mattress next to a dumpster. I figured I could get something vaguely nose-shaped out of that, get it on Bielema for a fitting and then make some adjustments. I worked for days not sleeping, measuring, cutting, duct taping, and spray painting until I felt I had a nose good enough for a test pilot. The nose was too big and unwieldy for me to carry so I found an old wheelbarrow and bedsheet to cover it and pushed it for miles to the Illinois football offices. The guard stopped me. "Cool it, buddy, I've got a nose here for Coach Bielema," I said. He told me to get lost. It took a lot of pleading, begging and even tears until they finally called Bielema and he came down. He pulled the sheet off and took a look at the nose, which after the end of my nose-obsessed reverie I now saw was just a dirty, mangled mattress with uneven nostril holes and a deviated septum. "Why don't you put that away and we can talk later," he said.
It
took a few days, but Bielema finally told me to come by his office. I
appreciated that about him. No bullshit, a straight shooter. "I'm not
going to bullshit you," he said to me. Bielema finally talked to his
agents about the Nose and they told him the whole project was insane and
in fact really stupid. He told me they didn't want him working with me
on the book either because I clearly was a "crackpot." I wasn't that
upset. I had been thrown out of fancier offices than the Henry Dale and
Betty Smith Football Performance Center. One time, Michael Ovitz had a
dumpster flown in from an especially disgusting Chipotle parking lot
for his goons to throw me in after I told him that First Kid should have
been called First Shit. But this one stung. "Look, for the record, I
really liked the part where the Nose drove my car into a guy so hard
that he landed in a paint manufacturing plant and then I said to him
'let's paint the town red,'" Bielema told me.
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