Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (7 page)

Ironic, I know. The writer of that piece was a defender of the faith. Now? He’s more like Martin Luther.

I remember my friend Jon Gordon asking, “Dude—‘balding clock-puncher’?”

“That’s Jeff Robinov,” I confirmed. “He’s that guy at Warner Brothers.”

“I
know
,” Jon replied. “Everybody who reads that piece is gonna know, too. You might as well have written, ‘whose name rhymes with Eff Obinov.’ You sure you wanna burn a bridge that big?”

I rocked him with a condescending cock eye and scoffed, “Like I’m ever gonna wanna work at Warner Brothers, sir …”

Warner Bros., you see, was the home of bloated, giant event pictures with costly budgets—like the one Harvey wanted to make called
The Green Hornet.
One day he asked me if I wanted to write and direct what was going to be their first big attempt at a franchise. When I asked him why he chose the least obvious candidate for the job, Harvey asked, “You like comics, don’t you?” I signed on to write and direct what was meant to be a seventy-five-million-dollar franchise-starter for Miramax, but quickly lost interest
when all the meetings were about product placement and merchandising. The day they showed me designs for the Black Beauty before I even wrote a single word of the screenplay, I wanted out. This wasn’t ever going to be
my
film: It was too expensive and it wasn’t even my idea. So I wrote a script and ditched the sting of the
Hornet
directing reins, opting instead to make
Clerks II.
Lots of folks wanted bigger and better, but my heart was in making flicks nobody else wanted to make—which was fast becoming a dying business. And while Miramax was a haven for that kind of filmmaking, Harvey seemed to have a different agenda at the Weinstein Company—one befitting a start-up media company: Make only sure things. It was the opposite of what he’d taught his filmmakers: There is no such thing as a sure thing in the movie biz, so make the interesting thing instead. You can’t count on the weather or the audience: Both are capricious and mercurial.

But many insisted they had the formula. The marketing team on
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
was throwing focus-group numbers at me for trailers and TV spots that flat-out sucked. “This trailer tested through the roof!” I was told by people who made the place sound less and less like an indie film studio. “Harvey listens to the numbers, and the numbers on this trailer are strong.”

Zack and Miri Make a Porno
opened on Halloween—Harvey’s handpicked date, pulling in a weak ten million its opening weekend. After that, I buried myself in my library office and started fearing it was all over. Choosing to leave film is one thing; this was like having no other option
but
to leave film, because I’d just made a movie with the
Knocked Up
kid and nobody knew it was happening. You start wondering
about your relevance. Am I a filmmaker people take seriously, or just the one-hit wonder Comic-Con clown?

Turns out I’m
both
. While promoting
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
at the San Diego Comic-Con, I was onstage in hall H—the massive six-thousand-seater where most of the bigger panels take place. The
Entertainment Weekly
sponsored panel was called “The Visionaries: Directors.” Marc Bernardin from
EW
had invited me to sit on the dais with Judd Apatow, Zack Snyder, and Frank Miller—three dudes who’d all known the sweet taste of a blockbuster. One of these things was
not
like the other.

I may not be much at fucking you cinematically, but I can melt your mind with my oral skills. That day was no exception: I crushed on that panel. I’d been a Comic-Con fixture for years by then, and the folks in hall H let me know it that day with the warmest welcome and biggest applause. They knew I wasn’t a Comic-Con carpetbagger who only drove down to San Diego whenever he had wares to whore; I’d been attending Comic-Con for a decade, obviously more fan than pro. That crowd reception and the panel that followed was the last good moment before
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
would open softly three months later.

Because Zack Snyder was on the panel and because the earliest
Watchmen
footage was being shown, the Warner Bros. top brass were in attendance. A half hour after the panel, my agent called me to say, “Jeff Robinov wants to sit down with you at Warner Brothers next week.”

Yes—
that
Jeff Robinov. The balding clock-puncher.

I’d first met Jeff in 1996, when he was transitioning to Warner Bros. studio exec from being the Wachowski brothers’
agent. I was working on the script for
Superman Lives
, and we didn’t get along at all. Years later, we had an agent-engineered general meeting, which was fairly disastrous—leading to the crack in that pro-Harvey
Variety
piece I wrote. When I heard he wanted to meet after Comic-Con, my inner Admiral Ackbar shouted, “It’s a trap!” Regardless, I took a meeting at Warner Bros. for the first time in nearly a decade.

The Jeff Robinov I’d met years prior and the Jeff Robinov I encountered at the meeting that day seemed very different, but the tough shit is this:
I
was the one who was likely different. I was more mature about my art. I’d done some cool shit and established my place at the table, and the Miramaxkateer in me had outgrown his ears with the name embroidered on the back. Maybe I was just ready to
hear
what a studio suit had to say finally, after being told for so many years that they spit lies and wallow in creative cowardice, and drink baby’s blood.

When I cleared the propaganda out of my ears, this is what I heard Jeff Robinov say to me as I entered his office that day: “People here have been asking what I plan to do when I don’t have this job anymore, and I tell them I want to produce Kevin Smith’s talk show.”

I was expecting an ambush, but it turned out Jeff just thought I was funny at the Con panel, and felt it was worth exploring whether my sensibility could work at Warner Bros. I offered to show him
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
, which he watched a week later. Afterward, out of what I assumed was studio politeness, he said he’d figure out something for us to do together. I didn’t believe him, but I still
thought he was a class act. He made the trip to my house to see the flick: You don’t get curb service from most studio heads.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno
opened (or rather,
didn’t
open), and I figured that I’d never hear from Warner Bros. again. Indeed, on the opening weekend, I didn’t even hear from Harvey.

I did, however, get a call from Jeff Robinov.

Jeff dug the flick and was seemingly invested in its success. He’d call or e-mail me with financial breakdowns and encouraging statistical data. We’d taken in merely $2.2 million on Friday night, but Jeff called on Saturday to say all the numbers were coming in double from the night before—which meant we might be able to crawl to a double-digit opening number (ten million) as opposed to the six or seven million the Friday-night numbers pointed to. He’d break down metrics like the flick was a WB movie. He kept me off the ledge that weekend and the next. This loathsome creature of the Satanic studios was my rock in a very troubling time. And I didn’t even work for him or Warner Bros.

I was drowning at this point, holding on to a buoy for dear life; and instead of stepping on my fingers so I’d slip into the sea, Jeff Robinov—the guy I dismissed as a balding studio clock-puncher—extended a suited hand, pulled me up on deck, and gave me a blanket and cocoa. That’s not the work of a faceless corporate money-machine; that’s the kind gesture of a bona fide human being. I was a little sorry I’d called him balding, even if it was true.

About a month after seeing
Zack and Miri Make a Porno,
Jeff sent me a script for a flick called
A Couple of
Dicks.
It was a buddy-cop picture that I instantly warmed to because it reminded me of the flicks my father would pull me out of school to go see at a Wednesday matinee:
Lethal Weapon
,
Beverly Hills Cop
,
Running Scared. A Couple of Dicks
reminded me of the seminal action comedies I grew up watching.

“This script’s hysterical,” I told Jeff after reading it. “I don’t know if I can rewrite it because it’s plenty funny.”

“I don’t want you to rewrite it,” Jeff hinted.

“You want me to be in it? Totally! Can I play Dave?”

“I don’t want you to be in it either.”

I was puzzled. I asked, “You want me to run craft service?”

“I think you should direct it,” Jeff said. He felt that
Zack and Miri
proved I knew what I was doing with a camera and actors, and he wanted me to bring that sensibility to
A Couple of Dicks
.

At that point, the attached cast was Will Ferrell and Marky Mark. Negotiations weren’t going well, as the studio wanted to make a PG-13 movie for the seventy-million-dollar budget, and everyone else wanted to make it R. Eventually, they all agreed to disagree, and Will and Mark went across town to set up the very expensive
The Other Guys
—a movie that did not resemble
A Couple of Dicks
in the least.

I assumed it was all going away. However, Jeff Robinov called and said, “You still wanna do this flick?

After the loss of their cast, I was shocked the studio was still interested in making the flick at all, let alone with me. Robinov said we could make it as an R, but the budget had to come down. It went from seventy million dollars to
thirty-five million overnight. I opted to stick around to see where it all went, bolstered by Jeff’s confidence in me.

And as if he didn’t already seem like Santa, Jeff sure went North Pole with his next gift: They were going after Bruce Willis for this flick he wanted me to direct!

You gotta understand what that meant to me. I
loved
Bruce Willis.
Moonlighting
was one of my all-time favorite TV programs because Bruce’s character David Addison was a living, breathing representation of Bugs Bunny on TV. Bill Murray was giving us
his
pitch-perfect, smartest-underachiever-in-the-room, proto-slacker in cinema (John Winger in
Stripes
, Dr. Peter Venkman in
Ghostbusters
) and here was a guy doing what we called “the Kmart Bill Murray” on TV once a week, in a sharply written, hilarious detective show.

Bruce Willis made fame seem
fun.
Once he got his foot in the door, he pursued passions that appealed to him beyond acting, like singing. I learned to drive listening to his album
The Return of Bruno
over and over, simply because the tape was jammed in my friend’s car stereo. But it didn’t matter, because we loved that album and the man who made it, the pride of Penns Grove, New Jersey, Walter Bruce Willis—the guy most of us wanted to be when we grew up.

I’d even been lucky enough to act beside Bruce in his most iconic role, John McClane, in the fourth
Die Hard
flick,
Live Free or Die Hard.
Casting director Deb Aquila had put me in
Catch and Release
as the chubby buddy of Jen Garner’s dead fiancé a year before, and when she called me about auditioning for director Len Wiseman for a small but pivotal role as the Warlock in the new
Die Hard
, I said only, “Please tell me I’d get to be in a scene with the man himself …”

It was months later when I arrived at the corner of the Universal lot that was the home to the Warlock’s basement. Len and his crew had been shooting the picture on the East Coast, and they were finally back in town to wrap up lots of stage shooting. When I got to the set, the bright-eyed and eager Len Wiseman I’d met months prior—the guy who loved
Die Hard
and couldn’t wait to bring McClane back to the big screen—was gone. Len had a thousand-yard stare, the kind only Vietnam vets are normally known for. He’d been to war, it seemed—all that was missing was a necklace of human ears.

There was a marked difference the moment Bruce was on set. You could feel something change in the air. I assumed it was excitement—the electricity all must have been feeling simply because a movie legend was nearby. Shit, even when Len would
tell me
why he looked so grave and reveal the cause of his sudden peptic ulcer to be the star of his show, I thought, “This guy must be soft. If he can’t handle Bruce Willis, it must be his fault somehow. ’Cause who’s cooler than Bruce Willis?”

I was supposed to shoot on
Live Free or Die Hard
for a day. Instead, it stretched to four days. Bruce refused to shoot for the entire first day. Oddly, during the blocking rehearsal, he felt the need to explain to me
why
he was holding up production: The production had been filming for months, and every time there was a plot hole, they’d say, “We’ll add that info to the Warlock scene.” My scene had become a dumping ground for lots of exposition nobody wanted to deal with, so Willis felt the scene didn’t make sense and needed work.

Eager to impress my new best friend, I said, “If you
gimme a laptop and an hour, I think I can get the dialogue where you want it.”

Bruce liked this. I was sent back to Len’s trailer to craft the scene Bruce was refusing to shoot. I gave Willis the pages, he gave notes, I redrafted, then he had the pages faxed to Fox.

But the studio wasn’t happy with the changes—particularly a line about Boba Fett that had disappeared. They wouldn’t allow us to shoot the new pages. That’s when I watched what I then thought was the coolest move in Hollywood history: Bruce called someone at Fox, someone in a position of power—the head muckety-muck who wasn’t Rupert Murdoch. There was a cell phone conversation during which I listened to John McClane essentially
be
John McClane over the new pages he wanted. I melted like a fifties teen girl seeing Fabian at a sock hop. Shit, I got as
wet
as a fifties teen girl seeing Fabian at a sock hop. In that phone call, Bruce was like a modern-day Harvey Weinstein, telling the studio—the very hand that feeds—to go fuck itself. Hard. I was in
love.