Since I loaned my legit VHS copy to a neighbor that I hadn't seen since the move (more on that later), I asked him to pick me up one.
Honestly, the movie's so painful that I've never been able to watch the entire thing without fast-forwarding, but since I get asked about it so frequently (possibly because I find myself referring to it or my time in LA relatively often), I find it handy to have one around. And while it's nice to now have a copy with decent resolution, I more prize my "bootleg" copy (given to me prior to release by my supervisor on the movie, Ted) that has copies of the auditions on it. If you think the movie as it exists now is bad (and it is), you should see the people who didn't make it in...
So, having nothing better to do while I ate lunch (Campbell's vegetable beef soup and peanut butter & jelly between two pieces of bread -- which is to say that the PB&J betwen the bread, not all three, but you knew that), I popped it in and immediately regretted it.
As you saw above, the film has been retitled "Reckless + Wild," but for some inexplicable reason they kept the theme song taken from the original title. Okay, not that inexplicable. It was undoubtedly a financial decision. Why they retitled it that, though, I'll never know. "Desperate But Not Serious" is fairly cumbersome, but "Reckless + Wild" is just dumb, although I suppose the latter promises slightly more sex than the former.
Not that the movie delivers on that one bit. The closest you get are a lot of lame sex jokes and two shots of the lead actresses adjusting their breasts. Inside their clothes, so don't get too excited.
(Guess the marketing to the sexually frustrated worked fairly well... Check out this comment from one IMDB user:
This childish escapade featuring a couple of California bimbos shouldn't appeal to anyone, thanks to the labored humor and mindless performances. What this picture lacks is what it really needs: the leads should have taken their clothes off as often as possible to offset their acting abilities. Everyone is noticeably taller than Joey Lawrence in this movie.
Heh.)
The movie was supposed to be a female version of Swingers, but where that film was somewhat clever and also the singular vision of one writer, this script had more hands on it than a stripper at a bachelor party. Hell, even I got to write a line. I feel sorry for the actual credited screenwriters, not only because their names are attached to this, but because the final version is probably nothing like what they wrote. (And here I should apologize to one of them, Abbe Wool, who is probably best known for writing Sid and Nancy, and who I once erroneously credited with the first draft. She e-mailed me to correct my mistake, but I never changed the corresponding page. Until now, that is. Sorry, Abbe.) I don't think I'm breaking any Writer's Guild bylaws by revealing that the final writers on the project were Rodney Lee Conover, a standup comic and sometime actor, and Jeffrey Hause, whose biggest credit was scripting the Jim-Carrey-Before-He-Was-Jim Carrey film Once Bitten. (From looking them up, I see that these two had another movie produced in 2002, BachelorMan, which appears to star relatives of some of our best and brightest B-movie and sitcom actors. Check out the IMDB comments page, with its suspiciously glowing reviews, and compare that to its middling average rating and something smells fishy. To me at least...) I find it hard to blame Jeff and Rodney, though; they were nice enough guys, and really just cogs in the whole machine of bad moviemaking.
If you had to find the point where things started going wrong, it would probably start with the involvement of this woman:
Though she's nearly unrecognizable, that's "supermodel" (defined as: a model from the planet Krypton) Claudia Schiffer, best known either for pushing out her breasts and looking pouty for Guess Jeans or schtupping David Copperfield. Notice nowhere in that description does it mention "acting." Because, you know, she couldn't. As one person on the set put it to me, "Claudia couldn't walk through an open door without explicit written instructions. And those you'd have to read to her." But without Claudia, the film probably wouldn't have been made.
...
I'm sorry. I had to ponder that last sentence for a bit.
You see, in foreign (read: not America) markets, two things will always sell: "Boobs and bombs." Or more accurately "boobs and explosions," but "boobs and bombs" has that nice alliteration. I mean, check out this poster from Norway, where they substitute Playboy Playmate Stacy Sanches for Christine Taylor (who mysteriously still gets credited), and you'll see what I mean:
Given her prominence on the poster, one might be led to believe that Sanches has a somewhat significant part in the film, but she only has two lines in one scene. (And thank God for that. If anyone were to steal the Worst Acting in This Film Award away from Schiffer, it was Sanches. I wish I could relate how painful it was watching all six-foot-plus-in-a-miniskirt of her try to say the line "I just loved 'Crash Test 2.' It was so... so... crashy" with any feeling. The editor deserves an Oscar for somehow making it seem like half a performance.) While there's no actual nudity in this film, just the name "Claudia Schiffer" has enough sex appeal associated with it to insinuate that there might be nudity.
That promise is enough to sell the film to hundreds, possibly thousands of non-English speakers (and they really ought to be glad they don't understand the dialogue), and maybe a few domestic masochists, that canny overseas marketers were willing to give producers of the film money up front in exchange for the right to sell the video to unsuspecting suckers in their respective countries. And since the money is provided prior to production, the distributors have no guarantees of the quality of the resulting project.
Poor bastards.
Claudia was truly a nightmare by all accounts, my own included. It's somewhat ironic (in the Alanis sense of the word) that I mentioned a peanut butter sandwich earlier, as that just happens to be what Claudia insisted upon having in her trailer before she arrived. Creamy peanut butter and without the crusts if memory serves. She rarely ate it, but threw a fit anyway if one wasn't there. Now, if you're going to be a diva, you should at least be able to bring the goods, but Claudia couldn't even play dumb if that's what the script called for. Her concept of acting seems to be saying her lines and seeming bored. Her performance is so stiff and wooden that one might mistake her for a cardboard cut-out.
Except, that is, when she's writhing on stage, pretending to be a singer. And here is where things are truly embarrassing: Claudia sings like she's got a severe head cold, and she writes lyrics in a manner suggesting she was chugging NyQuil. That's right, they let her pen her own lyrics. Apparently Ms. Schiffer's idea of good rock lyrics is "Rock out/slice him up/Yeah!" Though I suppose this could have worked for early Whitesnake.
Perhaps she intended to play a mediocre singer singing high school-poetry lyrics. But I highly, highly doubt it. It's hard to ascribe intent to anyone who changed her mind so randomly and so often about what type of character she wanted to play several times. When the script was first written, the Gigi character was written as a supermodel, which, the producers presumed, would be easy enough for her to play. But Claudia decided instead that she wanted to be, first, a writer, and then a rock star. (There were possibly other changes that either I don't recall or I'm not privy to.) I'm glad they didn't go with the writer, as that would have pushed suspension of disbelief to its limits. Regardless, her waffling cost the producers more than one script rewrite, not to mention their share of headaches. I think that's why, in the final script, there are more than a few snippy comments about Gigi, added, no doubt, by frustrated screenwriters. Which may explain why there were so many of them.
Good for them, I say. Claudia was far too busy pitching fits about sandwiches and coming up with disturbing hair, make-up and costuming ideas to notice. In the film, she looks like the love-child of Rob Zombie and the post-drowning Laura Palmer. The posters you see here are all severely color corrected, to add skin tone that Schiffer worked extremely hard to eliminate. The cumulative effect of her character decisions and her wooden performance give the impression of a female version of the dead guy from the Weekend at Bernie's films.
All this could have been workable, I suppose, if the writing weren't so forced and the directing so impotent. On the set, the director, Bill Fishman (whose previous credits include the fine Tapeheads and the wretched big-screen version of Car 54, Where Are You?, made in the frenzy of big-screen TV adaptations that followed hits like the Addams Family hits; as one IMDB reviewer put it:
Oh my god! This has to be the worst f---ing movie I've ever seen! I saw this when I was 10 years old and this gave me a stomache ache.... Honestly! I'm not kidding. That's how bad it is. Serious. I'm a fan of John C. McGinley, but what the hell was he thinking?! Aaaah! I think this is the worst movie ever made!
...and from the five minutes or so I caught on Comedy Central one night, he's probably right) usually seemed more dazed than anything, and on screen, he opted for overly broad over nuance nearly every time.
Surprisingly, the rest of the crew was top-notch, as was most of the cast, who have done and will undoubtedly do better work. (It would be hard not to.) John Corbett was in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Christine was in Zoolander, Paget has been absolutely hysterical in Andy Richter Controls the Universe, though its future at the moment is woefully uncertain. The two funniest people in the movie, though, are easily Patton Oswalt and Brian Posehn, who both did work on the best sketch comedy show since Python, Mr. Show with Bob and David, and who continue to do excellent stand-up and supporting work in sitcoms.
As it stands, though, I personally have relatively little, if any, responsibility for the quality (or lack thereof) of the film. I wound up working on the movie through a series of coincidences. I was in LA for an internship on Movieline magazine, which I discovered was staffed exclusively by stuck-ups and ass-kissers who had no interest in showing the interns the ropes, preferring instead to use us as indentured servants. Fortunately, the internship only took up two five-hour shifts a week, with a good portion of that spent killing as much time as I could get away with on whatever errands they sent me on. So when some film company wanted to shoot on my street in West Hollywood, I approached them and offered to work for free.
Now, as bad as the final product was, I had a blast on the set. Usually. Several times, for reasons I don't fully understand, I was often given "security" duty, which entailed standing (alone) by the film truck for hours on end because they didn't want to lock it. Apparently the ten seconds it would take to lock and unlock it when they needed more film from the truck would put the film irretrevably behind schedule. After a few days of that, I wised up and brought a legal pad and pen with me so I could write letters while I waited to be relieved.
But, like I said, there were good times, too. I made some really good friends, mostly the other interns and PA's. In particular, I bonded with Bob, Amber and Gina, as well as our boss, the head PA, Ted, and Christian, the office coordinator. We called sarcastically referred to ourselves as the "I-Team," as in "Intern" (this was the year after Lewinsky), but also "not quite good enough for the A-Team." We managed, in that month until I had to go home, to have more fun than I'd had the other two months I'd been there. One weekend, Christian offered all of us a choice of the LA Confidential location tour or the Swingers location tour. We opted for the latter, and proceeded to break the smoking ban at several of LA's finest bars.
I had a terrible crush on Gina, but I'm fairly sure she didn't fancy me back, and I was never very overt about my feelings. Amber was a sweetheart too, but she had a real thing for the camera assistant, Ray, who I just found out went on to do some work on the Lord of the Rings movies. They wound up moving in together not long after the movie wrapped. And then there was Bob, who was my comrade-in-arms, my right-hand man. We most of our time on the set laughing at the absurdities of the goings on. We were a regular Statler and Waldorf. Last I heard, Bob got frustrated with the red tape in Hollywood, moved back to Ohio and made a low-budget film called The Last Cowboy, I believe. Good for him. I wish I was still in touch with him. Hell, with all of them. It's a bit bittersweet to see this movie again and see us in the backgrounds, and remember the odd things that went on just before (or sometimes during) shooting.
Yeah, I got to meet some semi-famous people (Henry Rollins seems to be the one most people want to know about, but I was also thoroughly impressed with world-famous music producer Daniel Lanois, who did Claudia's backing tracks), some decent actors, a supermodel and a Playboy Playmate of the Year, but if I had the choice, I'd rather have lunch again with my friends than any of them.
I-Team, if you're out there... I hope you're all doing well. Maybe sometime we could get back together and make another crappy movie. You know, for old time's sake.
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