My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (81 page)

‘Marvel: Then and Now’ — a discussion between Stan Lee and Joe Quesada (as mediated by yours truly). Come watch as legions of eligible bachelors line up to hear a living legend and an artist-turned-editor-in-chief talk about wall-crawlers and shell-heads, and ask questions so inside and arcane, you’ll think they were speaking another language! It’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel for you women-folk! You’ll have the pick of the litter: unshaped clay you can mold into your own perfect man!

If you’re one of those women who’re forever grousing that all the best men are either married or gay, quit yer bitchin’ and start your mission! Mr. Rights aren’t simply found; they’re made! Take matters into your own hands this Saturday night at UCLA, with a roomful of certifiably disease-free and undamaged goods!

Yippee-Ki-Yay, Pt. 1

Friday 22 December 2006 @ 3:01 p.m.

My life over the last thirteen years has been a series of wish-fulfillments so consistently mind-blowing (at least to me) as to presuppose that, at some point in my deep, dark past, I sold my soul to Satan (
Angel Heart
style — complete with the caveat that I not recall the diabolical deal until Bob De Niro drops me in an elevator to Hell). Whether it’s been warranted or not (and whether I’ve deserved it or not), it’s nonetheless true. There are some mornings when I swear I’m living someone else’s life... until I look down, am unable to see my cock beneath my hanging gut, and realize “No — it’s you, alright.” Truly, I’ve been blessed. Hate me if you must (some really do).

But, as if that’s not enough for me to be slobberingly grateful for, check this out: lately, I’ve been having dreams I didn’t even REALIZE I had, come true.

For example: for years, I have been in love with Bruce Willis. Not the “drop your nuts in my mouth” kinda love, mind you; the “oh my God — Bruce Willis is the coolest motherfucker on the planet” type of adoration we reserve for the people who set the tone of our early, impressionable years.

Back in the day, I was (and still remain) a massive (in spirit and girth)
Moonlighting
fan. David Addison — like Eric ‘Otter’ Stratton in
Animal House
, Tripper Harrison in
Meatballs
, John Winger in
Stripes
before him — was a smoothie of the highest order: quick with a quip and always in complete control of any situation; even those beyond his ken. Outside of all that delicious rat-a-tat dialogue that comprised nearly every episode of
Moonlighting
, one of my all-time favorite moments in scripted television history (right up there with Cooper’s backwards-talking-midget dream in
Twin Peaks
, Dan, Roseanne and Jackie getting stoned in
Roseanne
, and the Galactica “jumping” into a fast-dropping orbit above New Caprica) is in the Paul Sorvino ep entitled ‘The Son Also Rises’, at the close of which Addison is dancing with Maddie Hayes at his father’s wedding to Anita Baker’s ‘Sweet Love’. Check out that scene, if you ever get a chance: the man is a goddamned pimp. And since David Addison is, essentially, just Bruce Willis with a different name, Willis is, by extension, a goddamned pimp too.

What wasn’t there for me to like about Bruce Willis? He was from New Jersey. He did commercials for Seagram’s Golden Wine Coolers (the booze of choice for my burgeoning teenage alcoholic taste buds). He recorded an album that was the soundtrack of my entire junior year (
The Return of Bruno
), when Ernie O’Donnell was the first in our class to get his license, and Ern, Mike Belicose and I spent the semester in his shitty old truck with no heat, hitting the movies at Middletown and trolling from party-to-party on the weekends. I learned to drive in that ol’ beater with ‘Respect Yourself’ blasting from a
Bruno
cassette in a sound system that cost more than the used car itself. Bruce Willis was, for all intents and purposes, the phantom member of the trio: the guy we all wanted to be.

And that was BEFORE
Die Hard
.

My summer of ‘88 was wiled away watching John McClane make fists with his toes, pull glass out of those same feet, curse like a sailor while he desperately kicked the ass of a thug twice his size, and end up stumbling half-dead out of a building by flick’s end — one of the first action movie heroes to actually appear damaged by the adventure he’d just undertaken. What started out as a revenge-date I went on with Shannon Furey (in which I’d hoped to make my ex-girlfriend Kim Loughran jealous enough to reunite with me), ended with my longtime interest in pussy taking a backseat to my newfound interest in the events of Christmas Eve at Nakatomi Plaza. With that viewing, the term
Die Hard
went from being the brand of a car battery Sears made to shorthand for every action movie of the next ten years that aped its formula:
Die Hard
in a bus,
Die Hard
on a train, etc.

Mortal Thoughts
,
Billy Bathgate
,
Pulp Fiction
,
Nobody’s Fool
,
12 Monkeys
,
Armageddon
,
The Fifth Element
,
The Sixth Sense
,
Unbreakable
— I’d follow Willis’s career anywhere (even to
Hudson Hawk
). Last year, I was beside myself when they released
The New Twilight Zone
on DVD, because it meant I could finally re-watch the Wes Craven-directed segment entitled ‘Shatterday’ — in which Bruce Willis, as Peter Jay Novins, accidentally dials his home phone number and hears an alternate version of himself answer. This past summer, while in Cannes with
Clerks II
, I watched the daily festival coverage in French just to see the man arrive on the red carpet for the
Over the Hedge
screening.

Fuck you all: I am an unabashed Bruce Willis fag.

So last week, after I wrapped the
Manchild
pilot (which went phenomenally), the very next morning, I reported to work on a flick that’d reveal a heretofore unrealized dream I’d unwittingly harbored since I first watched David Addison limbo in the Moonlighting Detective Agency offices, twenty years prior...

For five days, I acted opposite Bruce Willis in this summer’s
Live Free or Die Hard
.

Yippee-Ki-Yay, Part 2

Prior to that December morning in the makeup trailer on the Universal lot, I’d only brushed up against the Pride of Penn’s Grove, the mighty Walter Bruce Willis, just one other time.

It’s May of 1994. Scott Mosier and I are at the Cannes Film Festival with
Clerks
, and our new boss, Harvey Weinstein, invites us to a
Pulp Fiction
soiree aboard a yacht Miramax has rented in honor of the flick that’ll eventually bring home the fest’s top honor, the Palm D’Or. Being relative virgins to not just the company, but also the film biz in general, Mos and I aren’t rubbing elbows and clacking champagne glasses with the bigwigs and super-famous at the stern; we’re huddled with a pack of six lower-level development execs, assistants, and interns at the bow of the über-boat, making fun of our betters.

These are the cats we feel most comfortable with and can relate to better than the Power Lords: the Miramaxkateers who can actually recite dialogue from our newbie effort and truly give a shit when we win the Prix de la Jeunesse and the International Critic’s Week grand prize — two smaller fest awards that were bestowed on our flick during our initial Cannes visit. But as much as we play it cool and disaffected and giggle about Lawrence Bender’s nervous tic or Uma Thurman’s lack of a proper bikini-line wax, we still all share this wide-eyed, hearts-in-our throats amazement and appreciation for the fact that we’re in the belly of the beast and under the wing of the Man of the Moment. This is Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax at its apex: the company that, for a decade straight, could do no wrong and would redefine cinema — bringing the art film into the multiplexes. Granted, it wasn’t akin to being in Dallas when Kennedy was shot, but in some small way, it
was
like living through history.

And as our little group of inside outsiders cackled and cracked wise, safely out of the earshot of anyone who could eject us from a party we didn’t really deserve to be at in the first place, one of our number — Patrick McDarrah — suddenly puts us into stealth mode with the quiet utterance of “Here comes Bruce.”

I followed his glance to see Mr. Willis rounding the bow, casually doing a saunter-lap around the boat, heading in our direction. As a long-time David Addison acolyte, I was dumbstruck: there he was, live and in the flesh, quietly singing to himself in the Cannes’ harbor evening, the master of all he surveyed. He moved with effortless cool, as if an invisible posse of scantily-clad hotties led his way, tossing rose petals in this path. He wasn’t just pimp-smooth: he was the
Emperor
of Pimp-Smooth.

And he was now four feet and closing from me.

What would I say? Should I say
anything?
Should I blurt out that I, too, was from Jersey, in hopes it’d spark a conversation during which I could bust out the Seussian “I’m looking for a man with a mole on his nose” back-and-forth from the ‘Murder’s in the Mail’ episode of
Moonlighting
? Should I tell him that the album from said show was my go-to fuck soundtrack and I knew I was doing well if I could make it to his cover of ‘Good Lovin’’ without nutting? Or should I go Willis-smooth and simply drop a “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker” on him — which wouldn’t be Willis-smooth at all, on second thought, as I imagined him getting that as much as Robin Williams gets “Nanoo-nanoo” from adoring-yet-annoying, desperate-to-be-clever fans.

In the end, I felt that silence was best. And that’s what he got from our entire group as he shimmied by us: awed, hushed silence.

A silence that he chose to break.

“You fellas smoking weed up here?” he offered, signature smirk firmly in place.

Patrick, the quickest of us, was able to respond with “No. Why? You got any?”

“Haven’t done that in ten years, Holmes,” the Man countered, never slowing his pace, his back now to us as he returned to the stern.

And with that, he was gone, leaving a chorus of “Fuck, he’s cool”.type accolades in his wake. We spent the next twenty minutes dissecting his momentary dip into our lives, which kicked off an hour of discussion about his filmography and how awesome he was in
Pulp
.

I figured that was the closest I’d ever come to Bruce Willis again in my lifetime, and the only tale I’d be able to rock my grandkids with when they watched
Die Hard
for the first time: a feeble story from a feeble old man who once stood in the presence of greatness and made no impression whatsoever.

Then, twelve years later, Deb Aquila called.

Somewhere in the midst of 2005, someone decided I could act — maybe not act as much as
appear
in movies that I didn’t direct. A handful of gigs starting popping up for me, which was odd because the most well-known on-camera performance I’d given over the last dozen years, naturally, was as Silent Bob.

You’d imagine being the fatter half of the white, not-as-groundbreaking-as-Cheech-and-Chong stoner duo isn’t exactly a calling card role that makes casting directors and studio heads all wet and hard to get you into their productions. It’s not remotely akin to, say, Ralph Fiennes essaying the part of Amon Goeth in
Schindler’s List
— which seemed to prompt the movie biz as a whole to squeal “After that killer, breakthrough performance, we’ve gotta get that Nazi in our pictures!” Let’s call a spade a spade: essentially, all I ever did as Bob was a lot of eye work (bug eyes out, roll eyes, close and open eyes really fast eyes when blinking, etc.).

So then how the fuck did I wind up with roles in
Catch & Release
,
Southland Tales
and
Manchild
? Ty Burr of the
Boston Globe
dismissed the phenomenon thusly: “They bring on Kevin Smith, the
Clerks
director and, increasingly, an indiecred muppet for studio movies...”

I’d like to believe that, I really would; because a) it would mean I have some sort of credibility I’m unaware of which the studios think they can exploit, and b) fuck Ty Burr — who
wouldn’t
wanna be a Muppet (especially Fozzie)? But contrary to Mr. Burr’s critic-typical Find-a-Pithy-Way-to-Minimize-the-Fun-Someone’s-Having-in-Their-Career-and-Undermine-It-So-as-Not-to-Confront-the-Unfulfilled-Expectations-I-Had-for-My-Own-Life assertion, the answer lies in what turned out to be the single best audition I ever unwittingly gave: a DVD called
An Evening With Kevin Smith
.

Somehow, that four hours of collected quasi-stand-up at colleges across America became my passport into the world of Other People’s Movies. Susannah Grant and the Cullen Brothers (the folks behind
Manchild
) cited
EWKS
as the inspiration behind my casting, insisting there’s an affability to the way I tell a story that makes me simultaneously naughty and loveable enough for people to root for (their words, not mine). You wanna be in pictures, kids? Here’s the easiest way to do so: stand on stage and talk about how small your dick is.

And in this work-breeds-work business of show, it was
Catch & Release
that got me into
Live Free or Die Hard
, courtesy of one woman:
Catch
casting director Deb Aquila. She called me in July/August of 2006, saying there was a pretty cool and very central one-day role that she thought I’d be perfect for in this flick she was working on, and asked if I wanted to come in and meet/read for the director, Len Wiseman (of the
Underworld
movies fame). I barely heard her, though, as after she casually dropped the title of the picture —
Die Hard 4
— I was already passed out on the floor, overcome by Willis-induced vapors.

I was sent a set of sides — pages from the script with which one auditions — that didn’t contain the words “Die Hard” or the name “John McClane”. The studio was being so tight with security on the picture that they not only numerically coded scripts, they changed the title and the hero’s name, in case the script was leaked. So here I am reading eight pages from
Reset
in which “Grayson” is barking at a character they’d like me to read for: “Warlock” — the Harry Knowles of hackers. I was almost in Heaven.