36: How $25 Million Changed One Gag
The Hudsucker Proxy had a long road to completion. It was first conceived in 1985, directly after the completion of Blood Simple. The Coens, with Joel’s then-girlfriend Frances McDormand had moved into the 1 bedroom LA apartment of their friend Sam Raimi while looking for distribution of their Texas noir film that had been financed by small loans from Minnesotan dentists and lawyers. While living in that apartment the three male residents started work on a screenplay set in a skyscraper about big business with people who talk fast and wear sharp clothes. It became reality as a finished motion picture in 1994. The only other film of theirs that has had a longer road to release is 2016’s Hail, Caesar! which was first conceived as an idea on the set of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)*. In addition to its long development time, Hudsucker was the second screenplay the Coens had written. After having filmed Blood Simple they realized that with hard work, conscious planning, and an adequate amount of money, the visions in their heads could be made into reality. It’s a heady thing to realize a creative dream, to go from writing songs in one’s bedroom to holding a finished and pressed record, or to go from having an idea for a story to holding the first edition hardback of one’s first novel. Film though, requiring dozens of moving parts and comparatively huge financial investment is probably the hardest dream to achieve, and the Coens had achieved it, and even more than that there had been no real point of compromise. The vision in their heads of Blood Simple had been matched by its reality, and neither practical concerns or meddling from its investors had changed the vision from script to finished print, both of which confounds many filmmakers, be they scrappy indie filmmakers or established studio veterans. Joel & Ethan had done it once, why couldn’t they do it again with their big business comedy?
The answer, initially, was money. Period pieces are expensive, and period pieces that require giant setpieces and dozens of filming locations are even more so**. While the Coens purposefully wanted to make a comedy after Blood Simple, the setting of Hudsucker made it too grandiose for their meager finances, and so they turned their attentions to a comedy set in the much cheaper-to-film Arizona desert of the present rather than the much more expensive New York of the 1950s. Hudsucker was always present in the Coens’ minds though, simmering on the back burner in case the opportunity came to make it.
This opportunity ultimately presented itself in 1992, just after Barton Fink had won so many awards at the Cannes film festival that the festival had to put a cap afterwards on how many awards one film can take home. The Coens had been indie darlings for years, but they had proven to the staunchest and frenchest gatekeepers of the movie world that they could make compelling films, and do so for cheap as well. When Hollywood big shot Joel Silver then offered the Coens the ample production budgets available from his Silver Pictures company, the Coens knew that Hudsucker’s time had come.
The key to the Coens’ success up to this point had always been planning. On a traditional film set, a scene is set up and the entirety of the scene is shot in wide shots, medium shots, and a series of close ups. The scene is then put together in post-production, with the director and editor having a variety of options allowing for multiple options of how the dialog is delivered and what the camera (and thus the viewer) sees and doesn’t see. Because everything is captured from effectively all angles, a filmmaker might not have planned for an amazing eye roll or scoff reaction when the main character is being lectured by their antagonist, but the actor may have in the moment done exactly that, and because of the complete coverage, that moment can now go in the film. This, however, is not how the Coens work. The film, from opening credits to closing credits is not just scripted, but tightly storyboarded with every shot already planned out, so that when, for example, Holly Hunter and Frances McDormand coo over the baby in Raising Arizona in a single medium shot containing both adult actors (but not the baby), it’s not that a wide shot of the two of them with the baby wasn’t used, nor that closeups of either McDormand or Hunter weren’t used, they simply weren’t shot because the Coens knew they weren’t needed.
The elimination of unnecessary material, potentially at the expense of potentially not discovering something worthwhile in the moment has been a hallmark of the Coens’ moviemaking career, and what has let their films be so good for so cheap. They’ve continued to operate this way since, even after establishing themselves as commercial successes, as the ability to work cheaply has let their artistic freedom continue. No one was clamoring for a movie about Greenwich Village in the 1960s with a main character based on the life of the 15th or 16th most famous folk musician of the era, but still Inside Llewyn Davis got made primarily because its producers knew that they could make a quality movie for $11 million that wouldn’t rake in all the money in the world, but it would pay for itself and make a nice little profit.
As any creative person knows however, the thing that lives in your head and the thing that ends up being created are not always the same thing. Distressingly often, a picture, a song, a story don’t quite line up between the planning and creation stage. In this instance does one abandon the project? Tweak it? Barrel ahead and hope it works anyway?
If you are Joel and Ethan Coen in the midst of a production of your first high budget feature film, a film you have been planning for seven years, you might find for the first time that you’re allowed the freedom to adapt if something might not work. You’ve been planning gags about wisecracking reporters and stuffy businessmen for longer than it takes to become a doctor, and they’re largely working! The dailies look good! The goofs are goofy! But then a crossroads appears. The sight gag and slapstick humor you were planning for isn’t necessarily the slam dunk you might hope it would be. The Joel & Ethan Coen shooting film in central Texas in 1983 with precious little money raised from their uncle’s dentist would simply cut the gag and figure another way to bridge the gap in the scene, but the Joel & Ethan Coen who have been given $25 million of Joel Silver’s money want to make it work. They have paid in years of blood, sweat, and tears for the freedom to make the movie they’ve wanted to make since 1985. No gag is being left on the cutting room floor.
Hudsucker was made with the money of a large production company that had the expectation of a larger box office draw than the quiet indies the Coens had made. This meant a longer promotional rollout with a hard and fast release date and thus a hard and fast post-production deadline. Such is the consequence of getting the money you need to make your screwball 1950s comedy. As a result, the film needed to be edited as it was shot. All the Coens prior films (and most of them afterwards) had been edited by “Roderick Jaynes”, a pseudonym for Joel & Ethan Coen who felt that their names were appearing too many times in the credits. Editing their own films meant that traditionally all cuts had been done after principal shooting had been completed. When Joel Silver and all his money is involved, this would take too much time and is thus not an option. Enter Thom Noble, a British film editor with nearly 30 years experience when Hudsucker was in pre-production, who had expressed interest to his agent that if the Coens ever needed or wanted outside help in editing their films he would love to do it, a match made in heaven. Upon meeting Noble, the brothers noticed that he bore a striking resemblance to the vision in their heads of the tall, aloof, and angry Finnish investor in Hudsucker Industries Thorensen Findlandsen. Thom Noble however, had no experience in front of the camera. He almost had; after having been hired to cut the film Body of Evidence (1992) starring Madonna and directed by Uli Edel he had been asked if he wanted to play (in Noble’s words) “the guy [Madonna] fucks to death at the start of the movie”, but Noble’s then-fiancé objected to him pantomiming coitus with the era’s most notable sex symbol. The Coens then had a choice to make, do they keep the gag as scripted and rely on an untested actor to pull it off, or do they rewrite it for this perfect looking man with no acting experience?
At the Hudsucker Fancy Dress Christmas Gala, Norville exists to make a fool of himself. He is surrounded by incredibly important and expensive people who he needs to impress as the new president of the company, and the purpose of the scene is to have him fail spectacularly at it. If Norville can embarrass himself and thus the company at this important social function it will further convince investors that Hudsucker Industries is not a company worth holding shares in, and they will sell their stock for cheap and depreciate the price so that Sidney Mussburger and his cronies can hold onto the company. He succeeds in making a fool of himself in an awkward interaction with Mrs. Braithwaite and Mrs. Mussburger, and by accidentally insinuating that a wealthy cowboy investor is “yeller”. The hat trick of this scene was to be an interaction with the aforementioned Thorensen Finlandsen, who as Sidney puts it “heads a radical splinter group of disgruntled investors.”
The scene as written was to be a bit of three-stooges-esque physical comedy, where Norville would accidentally hand Finlandsen a used handkerchief as they shook hands, and then as he retrieves it from the floor and suddenly stands up he accidentally headbutts Findlandsen, giving him a bloody nose, causing him to rear back and knock Norville’s lights out before we fade to Vic Tenetta’s brief performance and ultimately to Norville and Amy’s romantic scene on the balcony. This is not what ended up in the film. It couldn’t be because the Coens don’t know how to direct physical comedy; the existence of Raising Arizona proves that. Even if that weren’t the case and they needed outside help to make the physical comedy work, Three Stooges aficionado and slapstick horror movie director Sam Raimi was already right there as second unit director. It’s not like the film or even the scene was overly long and the 30 seconds of slapstick would make Hudsucker drag. Still though the scripted (and conceivably storyboarded) handkerchief gag did not make it into the film. We still have Findlandsen though as a character, occupying 15 seconds of screen time for a less physical gag where Norville recites some of what is supposed to be his high school Finnish, which causes Findlandsen’s wife to scream*** and Findlandsen to throw his drink in Norville’s face and knock his lights out. The “Finnish” Norville speaks is nothing. It is a nonsense collection of syllables that sounds vaguely scandinavian, but means nothing at all in Finnish or any other language. Thus, the gag of Norville’s offending non-Finnish is the incredibly rare example of a last minute rewrite of a Coen brothers film. There was no time to find a Finnish speaker or consult a Finnish language guide, so Tim Robbins instead does his best Swedish Chef impression for a couple of seconds and seemingly says something horrifying to Findlandsen which causes him to sock Norville right in the kisser, allowing the subsequent scene where Amy is nursing his shiner to go on as written. Without the freedom to rewrite the gag though, Findlandsen could have easily been cut as a character. Not ten seconds prior to Norville being introduced to Findlandsen, he was interacting with the hot headed cowboy investor Zebulon Cardoza, who at the conclusion of his interaction was removing his jacket while yelling “Yeller? I’ll show you yeller, boy!” If a convincing bit of slapstick with the silent Fin didn’t provide a good reason for Norville to have a shiner in the next scene, why not just let the cowboy punch him in the face as he was planning to do? The answer lies in their new found creative freedom. Hudsucker had been marinating for 7 years as an unproduced script before it was picked up. The characters and scenery of the film had been rolling around Joel & Ethan Coens’ heads for years, years in which their brains which can apparently perfectly see movies in their heads had been playing regularly, but had yet to be materialized. Finally, the sets are built, the costumes selected, and this character, the laconic and angry Finnish investor Thorensen Findlandsen was cast in a real flesh and blood human human being, Thom Noble. The vision of Norville being clocked one by him was so close to being realized, that despite the fact that the scene as written might not work, the Coens did not want to eliminate the character that had lived in their heads for so long, and so at the last minute, some non-Finnish gibberish was added so that Findlandsen could stay.
A criticism that is commonly levied at The Hudsucker Proxy is that it is all style and no substance. The film is too in love with its own gags and set pieces and pushes them at the expense of the story’s emotional core. While Hudsucker is absolutely jam packed with pastiches, gags, and silly characters, it is in many ways the purpose of this essay collection to prove that if one takes the time and effort to unpack these gags, that they do in fact serve a very coherent and compelling film, but even still the author of thousands of words on a film might have to admit that one gag maybe felt a bit rushed, and a little underdeveloped. Would the gag have gone off better with its original extra slapstick intent? Possibly, possibly not, but what is certain is that sometimes the “freedom” that comes with extra money and a higher budget can come with some strange and unintended consequences.
*This record may eventually be supplanted if the brothers ever make good on their promise to make their proposed sequel to Barton Fink (1991), tentatively titled Old Fink, which would be about an aging Barton Fink as a professor in Berkeley in the 1960s, haunted by having named names to the House Unamerican Activities Committee in the 1950s and surrounded by a new class of radicals he doesn’t understand. Allegedly the only thing holding back its production is the physical age of Fink star John Tuturro, though I’m not sure I fully buy it, given that the temporal difference between when Barton Fink was set (1941) and the late 60s hotbed of Berkeley activism (1967 – 1969) suggests that Old Fink would have been released somewhere between 2017 and 2019.
** A fascinating footnote of the Coens’ career is that they are both known for making movies on the cheap, and also for making period films. While they opted not to for their first two features, they quickly realized ways to make their settings in the past work with a limited budget. Of their 18 features throughout their career, only 5 aren’t period pieces, possibly the most absurd of which was 1998’s The Big Lebowski, a film that is set in 1990, eight years prior to its release seemingly solely so that Saddam Hussein could make an appearance in The Dude’s hallucination scene and have it be culturally relevant to the setting.
*** Ironically, having found the perfect Findlandsen, the shot of him reacting to Norville’s pseudo-Finnish was nearly ruined by the actor playing Mrs. Findlandsen. The first woman who was brought in looked right but couldn’t convincingly scream. Thankfully for the production the scene involved a lot of background actors of roughly the right demographic for a Mrs. Findlandsen. After their first choice didn’t work out, the women hired for the fancy dress ball entered into an impromptu screaming contest until a suitable screamer was found.