Casting What-Ifs
Clint Eastwood and Richard Pryor nearly made it in the late seventies; Jeff Bridges turned down Jack Cates; Gregory Hines was the first choice for Reggie; Sylvester Stallone and Burt Reynolds reportedly turned down Jack Cates; the studio nearly fired Eddie Murphy days into the shoot
In the discussion (5)
Approx. transcript time · 00:25:55Read transcript
- In the late seventies the film almost happened with Clint Eastwood and Richard Pryor until Eastwood did Escape from Alcatraz instead; that version would surely be far less racist and would become a Richard Pryor movie in the Brewster's Millions or Stir Crazy mold, probably sillier, and Pryor was coming apart on sets then, setting himself on fire in what the hosts date as 1982.
- Jeff Bridges turned down Jack Cates because he did not want another cop movie; nobody could be better than Nolte, though a method Bridges putting on twenty pounds and going dark might have been pretty good, and Nolte is still permanently Jack Cates in a way an Ed Harris version would not have been.
- Gregory Hines was the first choice for Reggie and dropped out to do Cotton Club, prompting a Running Scared tangent: a total 48 Hours ripoff in which Hines is really funny, and whose Florida Keys stretch with Michael McDonald is the movie one host wanted the whole time; Hines would have been pretty good, obviously not Eddie Murphy good.
- Sly Stallone and Burt Reynolds allegedly both turned down Jack Cates, the kind of claim attached to every movie of the era; Reynolds could have taken the part to a bad place and might have ruined the movie, though Longest Yard-era Reynolds was good in tight roles like this.
- Earlier, the studio nearly fired Eddie three or four days into the shoot because they did not think he was funny enough, with Michael Eisner running Paramount; called a good what-if that would have been a bad decision.