My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (83 page)

“Right on.”

Less
than twelve hours, I’m now thinking. I might be out of here by lunch.

Problem was, I hadn’t factored in B.W. Time.

Bruce arrives, glad-hands and chit-chats with the crew and Len for a beat, and then suggests we run through the scene. Len lays it out for him just as he’d laid it out for me moments earlier. Bruce tentatively nods then says “Let’s take a look.”

Rosemary Knower, who plays my mother in the flick, escorts Bruce and Justin down a fake set of stairs. Back to them, from my chair, I bark at her for letting people into my inner sanctum, Justin joins me, we run through the dialogue. We’re maybe three lines in when suddenly, everything comes to a grinding halt.

“Len, hold up, hold up,” Bruce says, without uttering his first line to me. “If Kevin’s sitting, then I’ve gotta go all the way over there to address him.”

“That’s right,” Len confirms.

“Why would John McClane go to this guy?”

“Because you wanna know about Thomas Gabriel.”

“The whole world’s ending, I’ve just been through a bunch of shit, and two strangers come into this guy’s basement and he doesn’t even get up? It’s like he’s expecting us.”

“He never leaves his chair. It’s his command center.”

“But it’s not logical, Len. I’m a cop. He’s a criminal.”

“He’s a hacker.”

“Isn’t hacking illegal? I think we’ve established in this movie that hacking’s illegal. So why would a cop go to a criminal? He’d make the criminal come to him. Or at least get him out of his seat to turn to address him. A guy he barely knows and a total stranger come into his basement and he doesn’t even get up to see who it is?”

“When I saw this scene in my head,” Len began. “Warlock’s always in the chair. My shot list is based around Warlock in the chair. It’s why I picked this chair.”

Dead, awkward silence, as a hundred people wait to hear how the chair saga’s gonna unfold. Then...

“You’re the director, Len. It’s your movie,” Bruce relented. It seemed like we’d be moving on, until he post-scripted with “I’m just saying it’s not logical that he doesn’t get up when we enter.”

It was my first shot, so I figured it was too early to point out that he was arguing for logic in a movie that featured his character jumping off an exploding jet’s wing. And thank God I didn’t, as it would’ve prolonged the twenty minute logic discussion that ensued even further. Dude had a point, though: me in the chair the whole scene was gonna result in a pretty un-cinematic ten minutes. But considering the simplicity of my body of work, I wasn’t gonna pipe in with my two cents on how to shoot an action movie.

Ultimately, a compromise of sorts was reached: the scene would start with me in the chair until McClane and Matt entered, play for the duration with me on my feet, then end with me back in the chair. Len would get what he needed, Bruce was afforded the logic he was craving, and Justin and I could finally go back to rehearsing the scene.

Two more lines into it, Bruce stopped the rehearsal again.

“I don’t get this,” he interjected, breaking character. “As far as we know, the world’s about to end. Me and Justin’ve been shot at a million times, I’m bloody, I blew up a helicopter with a car, and we’ve traveled all this way just so these two can make jokes about MySpace and goth chicks?”

Uh-oh, I thought: homeboy wasn’t feelin’ my pages. * Gulp *

“We’re being too jokey,” Bruce continued. “This is the start of act three, and we’re putting the brakes on to make jokes. Look at this: these guys have two pages, going back-and-forth about ComiCon and shit. McClane wouldn’t stand for that. He’s trying to find out who the fuck Thomas Gabriel is — that’s the whole reason he’s here. Why’s he gotta bargain with this asshole? He’d be like ‘Tell us what we wanna know or I’ll beat ya’ to death,’ and we’d move on.”

“The studio always saw this scene as a comedic pause,” Len counters.

“I’m not saying it’s a bad scene, Len. I’m saying there’s too much going on in the movie to stop and make jokes, at this point. We’ve gotta keep it
Die Hard
.”

It was my first shot, so I figured it was too early to point out that he was arguing against humor in a franchise that kicked off with his character having an entire discussion about Roy Rogers that results in the unofficial tagline for every
Die Hard
flick that followed: “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.” Humor, as much as bullets, was always a key ingredient in any McClane epic.

“We should be using this time to let everyone know what a bad motherfucker Thomas Gabriel is,” Bruce cautioned. “We’ve got a lot of information to get across, and this is the only scene it makes sense in.”

At this point, Bruce turned to me and said “The problem is, we’ve been shooting for months now, and every time there’s a loophole in logic or something we didn’t shoot that needs to be explained, we’ve been saying

‘We’ll do it in the Warlock scene.’ And now we finally get to the Warlock scene, and none of that information’s been included. It’s just a scene with two geeks talking to each other while my guy’s standing off to the side, waiting to get a word in edge-wise.”

I.E. — “Has everyone forgotten this is
my
movie?”

“So what do you wanna do?” Len asks, rubbing his temples as if this isn’t the first time he’s watched his shot list crumble before his eyes.

What followed was another half hour of logic discussions and story plotting that I kept an ear on while playing Asteroids against Justin as the crew slowly dissipated. Occasionally, the urge to interject would arise, and I’d be screaming in my head “LET’S JUST RUN THROUGH THE ENTIRE SCENE AT LEAST ONCE SO WE CAN GET IT ON ITS FEET TO FIGURE IT OUT INSTEAD OF TALKING ABOUT WHAT IT’S NOT AND WHAT IT SHOULD BE!” It was a maddeningly frustrating position to be in, because seventy-five percent of the issues Bruce had could’ve been addressed simply by getting through one rehearsal in an effort to discuss what could be lost and what we needed to add. But like I said: it was my first shot on my first day. I wasn’t the director here; fuck, I was barely an actor.

So, an hour and forty-five minutes into a blocking rehearsal that normally would’ve taken twenty minutes max, Len finally broke the set to figure out what he needed to do to tell his story.

As we headed back to the trailers, the McClane in me — the guy who’s gotta get things done at any cost — finally came out.

“If you guys gimme twenty minutes and a laptop, I can figure all this shit out and we could be rolling right after lunch,” I said to Bruce and Len. Rather than offer me a pat on the head or a punch in the face, both shrugged.

“Skip?” Bruce said to a body-builder, bouncer-looking dude to his right. “Give Kevin your laptop. Take him back to Len’s trailer and let’s see some new pages.” Then, to me, Bruce said “Remember: this scene’s all about telling the audience what a bad motherfucker Gabriel is. We don’t have that in this movie yet. Nobody knows why we’re supposed to be scared of this guy. Make him scary.”

Skip led me back to trailer world, during which time, I tried to figure out why Bruce felt like I needed his bodyguard at my side. Turns out Skip wasn’t Bruce’s bodyguard: Skip was Skip Woods — the writer of
Swordfish
and the writer/director of a 1998 indie flick called
Thursday
. Waiting on his next directorial gig, Skip was one of the hundred guys who makes their living doing punch-up on in-production action movies. He’d worked with Willis on something else previously, so Bruce brought him onto
Live Free or Die Hard
for a week. The dude may’ve looked like a muscle-head, but he was an incredibly sweet movie-geek who’d been ‘round the block on pictures like this too many times to be phased by the lack of forward momentum.

“I don’t have to do this, Skip,” I said, as I settled in to Len’s trailer. “You can do this. I don’t wanna get up in your kitchen.”

“It’s not my kitchen,” Skip graciously deferred. “I’m only on for the week. You won’t bruise my ego taking a crack at the scene. All I did was take your audition tape and transcribe it for the Warlock stuff anyway, because that’s what Len wanted.”

“Sounds like all that MySpace humor’s going away anyway,” I offered. “We’ve gotta keep it
Die Hard
.”

“You’ll hear that a lot around here,” he smiled.

And with that, I started writing.

Bruce rolled by a half hour later to check on the progress. I let him read what I’d had so far, and he was happy.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” he smiled, eyes on the computer screen. “But the Gabriel stuff can be even more bad-ass. This is the guy who stood up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

“Got it,” I said. “Gimme twenty more minutes.”

As I wrote, Skip filled me in on all the
Live Free or Die Hard
gossip unfit for print. Nothing mind-bendingly juicy, mind you — just all the normal little fires (and a few big ones) that’d been put out along the way. I read my stuff aloud to him to see what he thought. That’s when he dropped the bomb on me.

“You can’t say fuck,” he told me.

“McClane always says ‘fuck’.”

“Not in this
Die Hard
,” he explained. “They’re going for a PG-13.”

“Get the fuck out of here!”

“It’s true,” Len said, joining us in his trailer. “That’s the only way Fox would approve the budget: if the flick was PG-13.”

“What about Yippee-ki-yay?!” I demanded.

“We get away with one fuck in a PG-13. And that’s the one.”

Bruce joined us again to check on the progress. He read my pages, smiling ear-to-ear.

“I like this speech,” he said in regards to Warlock’s Thomas Gabriel monologue. “This is like the speech in
Jaws
.”

“If the Indianapolis speech had been written by a retard, yeah,” I said, successfully deflecting the undeserved compliment. “It’d be a lot better if I could say fuck throughout it.”

“We’ll shoot one where you do,” Bruce countered. “Len and I have been shooting our secret cut of the movie all along, so that when we do the DVD, it’ll sound more like the real
Die Hard
.”

“Hey! Hey!” Len joked. “This is a real
Die Hard
.”

Bruce put Len in a playful headlock, offering “This man’s making the best
Die Hard
since
Die Hard
. Y’know how I know that? Because he got a fucking ulcer doing it.” Then, heading for the door again, he added, “You should put rewriting into all your acting deals, Kev.”

When he was gone, I turned to Len and asked “Did he
give
you the ulcer?”

“Him and the studio, yeah,” Len confirmed. “Peptic ulcer. The doctor said to stay away from stress. You wanna finish the movie for me?”

“You don’t wanna
see
my version of a
Die Hard
movie,” I offered dryly, tapping at the keys. “All the action would happen off-camera. The only reason you’d know it was there would be because the characters would be talking about it between discussions about their dicks and
Star Wars
.”

“In retrospect,” Len observed, “that might’ve been the way to go.”

I finished the scene and handed it over to Len and Bruce. Both said they loved it, but had to get it approved by the studio before we could start shooting. The pages were faxed to Fox, and we waited for word back.

Four hours later, we were still waiting.

During that time, I watched my Academy screener of
The Departed
in my trailer, hung with Todd and Justin, bullshitted with Bruce, tried to keep Len’s spirits up, met Maggie Q, talked movies with Skip, and generally killed time. Lunch came and went. Bruce’d had Tastycakes shipped from back east, and was handing ’em out to cast and crew alike, making converts of the west coasters who’d never had a Krimpet. We set up chairs outside Len’s trailer and had barbecued chicken, prepared by Bruce’s chef. It was like a party: a low-key party that was costing thousands of dollars a minute.

As night fell, Len finally got word back from the studio: where’d all the humor in the scene go? Why was it suddenly so serious? The Warlock scene was always meant to be a comedic respite from the non-stop action.

Bruce then called the studio himself. Standing three feet away from me, I heard his side of the conversation.

“Fuck the jokes — this is kicking off the third act. We gotta keep it
Die Hard
... Uh-huh... Uh-huh...”

And then, after a long silence during which the increasingly frustrated Bruce listened to the studio side of the equation, I bore witness to one of the most pimp moves I’d ever seen in my life. It was the true mark of movie star power and yet another reason to add to the long list of reasons I’ll forever hetero-love Bruce Willis.

“Lemme ask ya’ this,” he said into the cell phone. “Who’s your second choice to play John McClane?” There was a beat of silence, during which Bruce turned on that twenty million dollar smirk, and then wrapped up with “That’s what I thought.”

He hung up and said to me “Do one more pass on the scene — don’t touch that speech. Throw in a joke or two, and let’s get going.” As I left to do as instructed, Bruce stopped me. “What’s with your hair? I’ve seen pictures of you, and you don’t always wear it like that.”

“This is how the hair department saw Warlock,” I sighed.

“Fuck that. Wear your hair the way you wanna wear your hair,” he tossed off, heading back to his trailer. “That’s what I did.”

Back in Len’s trailer, while banging on the keys of Skip’s laptop, a stranger entered, offering me a puzzled look.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” he replied. “I’m Bill Wisher.”

Bill Wisher... as in William Wisher —
the
William Wisher who was an unofficial co-author of many an action screenplay (this one included), and the coauthor of record of a low budget flick nobody ever heard of called
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
.

And there I was, with my hands in his soup. I felt like he’d caught me fucking his wife.

But I guess decades of being one of many authors on a single screenplay — and often not getting the official credit — tempers a man’s ego, because Bill was about as gracious as you can get in regards to my tampering with his work. He read what I’d done, made suggestions, and complimented me on the pages. After that sign-off, I turned the pages back over to Len and Bruce and hung out in my trailer ‘til Todd knocked at my door.