Casting What-Ifs
Mickey Rourke signed a $400,000 holding deal and left; Sylvester Stallone rewrote it as a straight action film with Axel Cobretti and quit two weeks before filming; Martin Scorsese was offered the director's chair and dismissed the script; Eddie Murphy was hired two weeks before shooting
In the discussion (6)
Approx. transcript time · 01:00:59Read transcript
- Mickey Rourke signed a $400,000 holding contract and then left the project; a New York Times quote has Don Simpson tearing a picture of Rourke out of a magazine, holding it up and saying 'isn't he great', which the hosts attribute to all the cocaine, although one says you did not need cocaine to want Rourke in 1984.
- This is the movie missing from Rourke's run before he started messing up his face: Heaven's Gate, Body Heat, Diner, Rumblefish, Pope of Greenwich Village, then the gap where Beverly Hills Cop could sit, followed by Eureka, Year of the Dragon and Nine and a Half Weeks; the holding deal's schedules did not work out.
- Stallone was more extreme: he made it a straight action film with the lead renamed Axel Cobretti, Michael Tandino as his brother and Jenny as his love interest, an opening meant to be like Saving Private Ryan on the beaches of Normandy, ideas deemed too expensive, and a climax of him driving a Lamborghini down the train tracks at a freight train driven by the villain; an urban legend has him quitting two weeks before filming over orange juice in his trailer.
- Scorsese was offered the director's chair while trying to get Last Temptation of Christ made, was bewildered by the script and dismissed it.
- Earlier context: Eddie was hired two weeks before filming on a script kicking around since the 70s, a cop-comes-to-another-town movie set up for various stars and directors, and he transformed it with improv; it does not work with Sylvester Stallone, who would have made it a dramatic action movie, and if Stallone is in that cigarette truck the movie weighs 150 pounds more; with anyone else it would be actively bad because we know who killed his friend in the first 30 minutes.
- The parts of Bogomil, Rosewood and Taggart were probably not rewritten after the casting changes, so the other actors are playing a script written for Mickey Rourke or Stallone with Eddie as the star; it was hard for them to handle his ad libs because takes got ruined by laughter.