One of my favorite things about having my own damn blog is that nobody else gets to dictate its content. Of course the better I self-govern and sharpen its focus the more likely I am to curate something worth your time and mine so I've an incentive to keep it between the lines.
Crime is the focus here and more specifically crime fiction and within fictions hardboiled and noir flavors are what I'm most interested in. I've taken detours into speculative fiction and horror, espionage and pulps, but there's a very specialized sub-genre of crime I've been saving myself for...
Cop Humiliation!
With the recent announcement of plans for
Dolph Lundgren to pick up the premise of Arnie's original Hulking Hardboiled ESL Detective Undignified and Undercover as a school teacher flick, no doubt
Kindergarten Cop 2, will soon be thrilling us in the most anticipated new star, new writer, new director, new millenium "sequel" since
Werner Herzog blew our minds with that spiritual companion piece to
Abel Ferrara's
Bad Lieutenant.
Kindergarten Cop ain't the only game in smallville, but
Ivan Reitman's film is clearly remembered beloved more than the
Burt Reynolds vehicle
Cop and a Half or the formula's inverse:
Sylvester Stallone and
Estelle Getty in
Stop or My Mom Will Shoot. Likewise, Cops 'n Kids is not the only sub-sub-genre of Cop Humiliation, but it was one of the most popular amongst...
Cops 'n Psychics
Cops 'n Ghosts
Cops 'n Movie Stars
and the hugely popular and lucrative
Cops 'n Black People
occasionally re-mixed with mixed results
The relative success and failure of the formula's permutations are usually laid at the feet of the trajectory of the vehicle's star and one wonders what coulda, woulda been had some of these career making/breaking roles been switched. What if Lundgren had been cast in the original
Kindergarten Cop and Arnold been Frank Castle in
The Punisher? Would Dolph have gone on with Reitman to do the pregnant man flick
Junior or even hijacked Arnold and
James Cameron's relationship and become a mega-star in
True Lies? Would Arnold's star have dimmed and he been reduced to second banana to
Jean-Claude Van Damme in
Universal Soldier? One wonders.
I do anyhowe.
And so does
Adam Howe.
If you've read this blog in the last couple years, chances are you've seen his name attached either to favorable comments from me about his novella collections
Black Cat Mojo and
Die Dog, Or Eat the Hatchet or perhaps you read his guest pieces on
Joe Spinell or
Joe Ball. If you've read his fiction or non, you know you're encountering a writer loitering at the crossroads of rare wit and disgusting obsessions.
One of those obsessions? Bad movies.
Today I'm pleased to present Mr. Howe's factual account of events that never happened with the stars of rival projects in another beloved Cop Humiliation genre... Cops 'n Dogs
DOG EAT DOG: How K-9 and Turner & Hooch Determined the
Career Trajectories of Jim Belushi and Tom Hanks
By Adam Howe
Incredible as it seems,
Tom Hanks and James ‘
Jim’ Belushi, two of the
finest American actors of their generation, have appeared together on-screen
only once, in 1985’s espionage farce
The Man With One Red Shoe, a forgettable
remake of a French film I haven’t seen.
According to Hollywood scuttlebutt, the tension between these two rising
stars was palpable.
Belushi, in
particular, resented playing second banana to Hanks.
During his short-lived stint on
Saturday Night Live, Belushi
had honed his comic skills to a razor-sharp edge; on the set of
The Man With
One Red Shoe, the actor delighted in adlibbing Hanks off his game.
For the first, but certainly not the
last time, cracks appeared in Hanks’s carefully cultivated everyman
persona.
After fluffing yet
another take due to Belushi’s improvisational genius, witnesses were shocked to
hear Hanks call Belushi a “jerk.”
True to form, Hanks immediately apologized and retracted the insult, but
the damage had been done.
For the
rest of the shoot, relations between the actors were best described as frosty.
Such was
the hostility between Hanks and Belushi, one wonders if somehow they knew that
within just a few short years, they would be competing at the box office in
rival ‘buddy cop dog’ pictures, then a radical new movie sub-genre. What they couldn’t possibly know – what
no one knew – was that their choice of buddy cop dog picture, and perhaps more
crucially their canine co-star, Jerry ‘K-9’ Lee and ‘Turner &’ Hooch, would
determine the course of their future careers.
But what
if each actor had made the other’s buddy cop dog picture? Would their careers have been
different? Let’s find out…
The year
is 2011.
A
despondent Jim Belushi, his career on the rocks and recently diagnosed with
gout, which he announces to the world to abject indifference, is ejected by
security from the New York branch of Planet Hollywood, after drunkenly
attacking an item of movie memorabilia.
The memorabilia in question is the Zoltar make-a-wish machine from the
1988 Tom Hanks hit, Big.
As
Belushi is shown to the street, weeping, witnesses hear him shouting, “
I wish I
was Tom! I wish I was Tom!”
Next
morning – SHAZAM – Belushi finds himself back in 1989.
These
are the glory days for Jim.
The Red
Heat and The Principal days.
Life is
sweet.
And it’s
about to get sweeter.
Belushi
is offered the human lead in two movies. One is K-9, the other Turner & Hooch. Both are buddy cop dog movies. A new sub-genre, his agent tells him. After much deliberation, despite the
apparent similarities of the projects, Belushi chooses the nuanced, lighter
Turner & Hooch over the grittier, hardboiled K-9.
And
movie history is changed forever, some might say for the better.
1989 is
remembered in Hollywood as The Year of the Dog.
For
movie fans, the box office battle between Tom Hanks’s
K-9 and Jim Belushi’s
Turner & Hooch is our Beatles vs. Stones.
Both
films contain almost identical plots, such that one suspects the studios
employed corporate spies to get the scoop on their rival’s script. A cop (K-9’s maverick wiseass Dooley
vs. the buttoned-down OCD Turner) is partnered with a pooch (police German
Shepherd vs. junkyard Bordeaux) to solve a murder. You have to hand it to Hollywood; this is classic
‘high-concept’ stuff.
Highlights from the films include Jerry Lee biting a criminal’s genitals
to extract a confession, and banging a poodle to James Brown’s I Feel Good, and
Hooch just generally slobbering and destroying Turner’s property. “Not the car!”
But
which dog is the better actor?
Not to
devalue Jerry Lee’s fine performance, but the Walter Matthau-mugged Hooch has
personality in spades, and in my opinion – here goes my impartiality and
journalistic integrity – displays the better, albeit slobberier acting chops.
German
Shepherd-lovers will take me to task for this, but face it, Hanks carries Jerry
Lee with another uniformly endearing performance as maverick wiseacre
Dooley.
As Turner, Belushi wisely
plays straight man to Hooch, with all those years living in the shadow of his
legendary brother finally paying off.
When the
movies are released, only three months apart, the smart money is on Hanks’s K-9
to win the dogfight. (During the
earlier Hollywood fad of ‘body swap’ romps, Hanks’s Big dwarfed Vice Versa,
despite that movie’s combined star power of Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage, hot
from Beverly Hills Cop and The Wonder Years respectively.) But moviegoers take both canine cop
flicks to their hearts, with Hanks’s K-9 and Belushi’s Turner & Hooch each
earning approximately $75m at the box office. Hollywood is proved eerily accurate in predicting that
late-eighties movie audiences simply cannot get enough of buddy cop dog
pictures. In fact, looking at
those numbers, it’s safe to presume the exact same audience sees both
movies. By 1995, when Chuck Norris
releases his own Top Dog, sadly for Chuck, the fad has passed.
Flush
from his
K-9 success, Hanks plays it safe and continues carving a career as a
comic leading man – with the occasional supporting role or cameo in prestige
pictures like
Who’s Harry Crumb? and
Only the Lonely.
He enjoys fair to middling success with
Taking Care of
Business, Mr. Destiny and
Curly Sue.
But critics wonder: Where is the risk-taker, the wannabe serious
dramatic actor of
Every Time We Say Goodbye and
Punchline?
Belushi
appears to be a one-hit wonder.
He
follows
Turner & Hooch with the flop
Joe Versus The Volcano.
The Bonfire of the Vanities, in which
director
Brian De Palma casts Belushi as an unlikely Master of the Universe, is
the epic turkey of its day.
(Through no fault of Belushi’s, it must be said, and of all the egos
involved in the Bonfire fiasco, as detailed in
Julie Salamon’s scathing
tell-all
The Devil’s Candy, only Belushi emerges with something like his
dignity intact.)
Hollywood begins to wonder if the success of Turner & Hooch was due
largely to Hooch; not for the first time, Hollywood has seriously
underestimated Jim Belushi.
After
rediscovering his form in A League of Their Own, as the alcoholic coach of a
women’s baseball team, Belushi reinvents himself as a romantic lead opposite
Meg Ryan, with Sleepless in Seattle becoming the sleeper hit of the ’93 box
office.
Who
would have predicted that Belushi’s brand of boorish, blue-collar Chicagoan,
watching-the-game-with-a-brewski, Belushibility would translate so effectively
to romantic comedy?
Given
the success of Sleepless, Belushi can be forgiven for playing it safe, like
Hanks, and churning out endless light romantic comedies. Instead he wows the critics with a
straight role as a gay lawyer with AIDS in Philadelphia, for which he is
awarded his first Best Actor Oscar. During his acceptance speech, Belushi unwittingly outs his closeted high
school drama teacher as a homosexual. People laugh off Belushi’s tactlessness; that’s Jim! At the after-show party, secure in his
own identity as Not-John Belushi, Belushi and Dan Akroyd appear as The Blues
Brothers, performing Bruce Springsteen’s song, Streets of Philadelphia.
Forrest
Gump sweeps the board at the next year’s Oscars, with Belushi reigning in the
retard to secure his second successive Best Actor award, a feat not achieved
since Spencer Tracy in 1938/39.
After
that, The Belush is loose.
Apollo13.
You’ve
Got Mail.
Saving
Private Ryan.
The
Green Mile.
Castaway.
Catch Me
If You Can. (Does the title refer
to Hanks, one wonders?)
An
unprecedented run of smash-hit movies that catapults Belushi to the very top of
the A-list, and makes him one of the most bankable stars of all time.
Envying
Belushi’s success, fearing he has been typecast as ‘
the new Jimmy Stewart,’ and
determined to prove his own dramatic chops, Hanks fires back with 1992’s erotic
thriller,
Traces of Red. (After
the success of
Basic Instinct, erotic thrillers are, like buddy cop dog
pictures once were, the latest Hollywood fad; I’m unaware if Chuck Norris made
his own erotic thriller during this period.)
Audiences are repulsed by the very idea of a naked Hanks
rutting with co-star
Lorraine Bracco, let alone will they pay good money to sit
in a movie theater and watch images of it.
An actor of two-time Oscar-winner Belushi’s ability might
have transcended the role – made it the
Last Tango in Paris of its day – but
not
‘Mr. Nice’ himself, Tom Hanks.
The movie stiffs, irreparably damaging Hanks’s status as a viable
leading man.
Hanks
finds himself sinking in a quicksand of Direct to Video movies, failed TV
pilots, cartoon voiceover work (a pitiful riposte to Belushi’s success with the
Toy Story franchise) and the occasional cameo in Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
In 1999
many believe Hanks’s career has finally rock-bottomed when he stars in K-911,
the eagerly unanticipated sequel to his biggest hit; but no, the final
indignity comes in 2002, with the threequel, K-9: P.I. Alas, as Chuck Norris has already
discovered, the buddy cop dog picture gravy train has stopped rolling.
Both K-9
sequels are released DTV and quickly vanish without trace.
Hanks
finally accepts defeat, gives up his dreams of movie stardom, and takes the
lead as ‘Tom,’ an overbearingly nice variation of himself in the painfully
middle-of-the-road television sitcom,
According to Tom.
Belushi, in what insiders consider to
be one last
fuck-you to his vanquished foe, refuses to allow Hanks to enjoy his
TV success, such as it is, and produces
Band of Brothers for HBO with close
friend
Steven Spielberg, with whom he has previously saved Private Ryan.
Belushi is also credited with coining
the title of infamous gay porn parody
Shaving Ryan’s Privates, proving he has
lost none of his sparkling wit and is totally secure in his heterosexuality.
Then, in
2011, a despondent Hanks, his career on the rocks and recently diagnosed with
type-two diabetes, is ejected by security from the New York branch of Planet
Hollywood, after drunkenly attacking an item of movie memorabilia. The memorabilia in question is the
Zoltar make-a-wish machine from his 1988 hit, Big. For Tom, ’88 feels like a lifetime ago. As Hanks is shown to the street,
weeping, witnesses hear him shouting, “I wish I was Jim! I wish I was Jim!”
Next
morning – SHAZAM – Hanks finds himself back in 1989.
These
are the glory days for Tom.
The
Bachelor Party and Splash days.
Life is
sweet.
And it’s
about to get sweeter.
Hanks is
offered the lead in two movies. One is K-9, the other Turner & Hooch. Both are buddy cop dog movies. A new sub-genre, his agent tells him. Hanks chooses Turner & Hooch.
And the
status quo of movie history is restored, some might say for the worse.
_____
Thanks to Sarah Lu and James Merrills for the pix…
Adam
Howe writes the twisted fiction your mother warned you about.
A British writer of fiction and
screenplays, he lives in Greater London with his partner and their hellhound,
Gino.
Writing as
Garrett Addams,
his story
Jumper was chosen by
Stephen King as the winner of the
On Writing
contest, and published in the paperback/Kindle editions of SK’s book.
His fiction has appeared in places like
Nightmare Magazine, Thuglit, and
The Horror Library. He is the author of two novella collections,
Black Cat Mojo,
and
Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet, both published by Comet Press and available NOW
