When Robert Zemeckis was on pre-production of his motion-captured, computer animated film Beowulf, he thought long and hard about which actors could provide the right kind of otherworldly performance that was necessary for Grendel, the legendary monster of the tale. He eventually came to the conclusion that there was only one actor in the world who could do it, and that actor’s name is Crispin Glover. It must have been a hard decision to come to, and an even harder phone call to make, because nearly twenty years ago, Glover sued him!
Crispin Glover appeared in Zemeckis’s 1985 sci-fi adventure Back to the Future as George McFly, the father of the lead character, Marty. When it came to start work on the two sequels, the producers claim that Glover made various demands that were far in excess of his standing as an actor at the time, so they chose not to use him in the next two films. Instead, they came up with a plot that contrived to work around this problem.
Back to the Future Part II has four distinct sections:
The Present (1985): Actress Claudia Wells who played Marty’s girlfriend, Jennifer, in the first film was not available and so she was re-cast with Elisabeth Shue. This necessitated filming a recreation of the end of the first film which features actor Jeffrey Weissman, as George McFly. He wears sunglasses and is generally filmed creatively;
The Future (2015): in which George McFly is in his late seventies and played by Weissman in heavy make-up;
Alternate Timeline 1985: in which George is dead, and finally;
1955: In which Weissman is seen in a few distance shots, and - as it replays events from the original film - archive footage of Crispin Glover from Back to the Future was worked in.
Guess which bit caused the problem!
Glover brought a lawsuit against the production, including Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg as he had not given permission for his image to be used, was not paid and was concerned that the “trick” might make people think he was in the film. As a result of the lawsuit, Glover got a credit at the end of Part II for the archive footage and, positively, the Screen Actors’ Guild altered their guidelines to make sure footage could no longer be used in this way without obtaining permission.
In an interview with The Guardian, Glover said that before he went in to meet with Zemeckis to discuss Beowulf, he had read the book How to Be a Gentleman, and took one of its bits of advice - “don’t bring up sore subjects” - to heart, thanked Zemeckis for thinking of him, and accepted the role.
That’s nice and neat, then, but a nice wrap up like that is rare in the film world. If you’re a fiend for muck-raking gossip magazines, then you’ll love the work of Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer. As Kenneth Anger, he is the man responsible for the two Hollywood Babylon books, detailing the scandals of the golden age. They contain much that is inaccurate, or downright untrue, but for lurid detail they are unsurpassed - truth be damned!
For old school movie trash talk, you certainly can’t beat the titanic bitching missiles that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford aimed at each other. This relationship is often called a “feud”, a term refuted by Davis in her book “This ‘N That” - presumably meaning they had no real face-to-face bust up. However, they were clearly rivals - and comments they made about each other in interviews bears this out, with Davis claiming that Crawford had “slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie” (yes, I know - but they’ve always used male dogs to play the role), and Crawford offering up “poor Bette, It appears she’s never had a happy day, or night, in her life”. Davis may take the pennant though by giving the world the incredibly ferocious barb which is “you should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good . . . Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”
Okay, so we’re well out of the golden age and the exclusive studio system that created such rivalries no longer exists in that form, so predictably you don’t get such epic tales as this, but what we DO have is new technology, and the Internet and - increasingly - DVD commentaries are proving to be ripe picking grounds for some prime dirt.
On the forum of director Kevin Smith’s website, viewaskew.com, the man himself responded to a forum post about Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “Magnolia” saying he didn’t really like it much. In fact he said that he would keep his screener copy on his desk as “a constant reminder that a bloated sense of self-importance is the most unattractive quality in a person or their work”. Web forums and fandom being what they are, it all blew up into a whirlwind and as a result of what Smith calls a “slow news day” his comments apparently made it into the New York Post and Entertainment Weekly. On his fantastically entertaining (and somewhat dirt dishing) DVD, An Evening with Kevin Smith, he recalls meeting Paul Thomas Anderson at a later date and being somewhat humbled at how polite this man who he “bitchslapped on the internet” was to him (and suggested that his response in the inverse situation would have involved a chair to the head).
On DVD commentaries, people are generally on their best behaviour, but there are a few offenders. Paul Verhoeven can be a little indiscreet, but for the complete unprofessional back-talking package, you really need to do two very difficult things. One of them is watch an entire film directed by Uwe Boll while he comments on it, and the other is to import the rare Japanese DVD of Vincent Gallo’s controversial film The Brown Bunny - the only edition to feature a commentary (parts of which are audible in this episode of The Hollywood Saloon podcast.).
Uwe Boll is noted for making films based on video games, something for which he appears to be almost universally criticised, and yet still seems to able to secure funding to make more. His commentary for Alone in the Dark savages actress Tara Reid, particularly her refusal to bare her breasts during a sex scene (suggesting she wears less when going clubbing than she does in that scene - and, erm, to various parties) and as such he starts it by apologising to the audience for not being able to edit her out of the film entirely.
Vincent Gallo’s film, The Brown Bunny, is the one that became notorious for its final scene in which Chloe Sevigny performs fellatio on him (I’m not going to link to that!). For a while it was rumoured that a prosthetic stand-in for Gallo (well, part of him anyway) had been used in the scene - however, Sevigny (Gallo’s former girlfriend) later explained that the scene had, in fact, been done for real. In his commentary for the film, he has some choice words to say about both Kirsten Dunst and Winona Ryder, calling them “jerks”. Both were dropped from the project before even making it to the set (internet speculation tends to err towards the seemingly obvious conclusion of that particular scene being the contentious issue involved).
Hollywood dirt is always amusing for the normals, and yet it’s not all about bitching or people complaining that things don’t go their way. Sometimes, in the case of the Back to the Future Part II issue, it can actually lead to a positive outcome, and even a reduction in hard feelings if everyone’s prepared to just be reasonable.
So thank God that they aren’t!
