52: Hudsucker’s Legacy Pt 2: The Final Rough Draft
Among filmmakers who come up in the indie world there is sometimes a moment in which they’re given an opportunity to prove that they’re capable of making a big budget studio film. If they succeed, they might go on to become rarified Hollywood royalty. If they fail, they may be doomed to the high-risk-low-reward status of being a “critical darling” for the rest of their careers. Christopher Nolan, having won critical acclaim and buzz for his films Following and Memento was offered a big budget to adapt the Norwegian thriller Insomnia into a mainstream American Hollywood film. It was a hit, and as a result he got to direct a bunch of Batman movies and today has the clout to be the kind of asshole who insists that his new film be exclusively released in movie theaters during a global pandemic. Mike Leigh, whose quiet dramas about everyday working class people in London had won him critical accolades was given a larger budget for his intended large audience breakthrough: the Gilbert & Sullivan biopic Topsy-Turvy. It flopped, and Mike Leigh has continued to make quiet dramas about everyday working class people in London, and has not made even one Batman movie.
It’s the indie filmmaker’s version of being called up to play a season with the Yankees after having played for the Montgomery Biscuits for a few seasons, or the rocker getting the opening slot on a stadium tour after playing bars for years. “Try not to screw this up” the powers that be say, and that moment potentially defines the rest of their career.
For Joel and Ethan Coen, The Hudsucker Proxy was exactly this call up. The question of “did they succeed as budding major filmmakers or did they fail and end up unknown critical darlings” can be answered with “no”.
It’s tough to know what exact aspirations the Coens had as they became filmmakers. On the one hand, no one becomes a filmmaker with any sense of humility. Someone with a creative streak with no intention of making it big will pursue the kind of art where they can make it in their bedroom and be beholden to no one else. They will play the guitar or paint watercolors or write a film blog about an obscure 25 year old movie in their bedroom and will create for the joy of creating. What a person who exclusively creates art for the spontaneous joy of creation will not do is secure millions of dollars of other peoples’ money so that they can hire more people than the average American business to supervise them for weeks or months as they gingerly nudge the nebulous vision in their head into a reality. On some level, the only person who will bother to make a movie is someone who thinks they can sell a movie*. The Coens, as filmmakers, understand that they can’t just make movies purely for the sake of art. Indeed, they’ve publicly said that they are not trying to make arty unsellable movies. Anytime an interviewer insinuates that the Coens make art or art movies, they are quick to correct, clarifying that they are not trying to make art, they are trying to make entertainment. On the other hand, for lack of a better term, the Coens do not make popcorn movies. They make weird and quirky and interesting nonsense. As I write this, their latest release was an anthology film about the American west, with vignettes including a slow and gorgeous adaptation of a Jack London short story, a bleak tale of a quadruple amputee with a talent for recitation, and the story of an upbeat singing cowboy who is comically good at murder. This is not a movie that is designed to get everyone and their mother out to the theaters because it’s fun for the whole family. They will never make a Batman movie, a fact I state with authority not just based on the history of their filmography, but because they were literally offered to make a Batman movie based on the success of Raising Arizona, an opportunity they turned down causing the film to instead be made by Tim Burton.
So the Coens neither want to make inscrutable art films nor big popcorn action movies. What their first few films suggest is that they wanted to make stories that were 100% theirs, eschewing collaboration and adaptation of others’ works, but also films that were easy to understand and thus easy to sell. Their early films largely had a straight ahead story with very little weird artsy nonsense. The hope seems to be that they ultimately hoped to make these kinds of films but bigger, creating a new kind of big tentpole film that isn’t a Batman movie but that would still make gobs of money. The Hudsucker Proxy was to be the first of these, but it flopped. When that business plan didn’t work, they decided “who cares then, we’ll make whatever weird movies we want to make” and ironically, those films became the big success stories they might have hoped to make prior.
Of the Coens first five films, four of them have a fairly straightforward genre. The word “pastiche” or “homage” is often applied to their films, but when these four early films are separated out from the rest, it becomes more apparent that they aren’t so much homages as earnest attempts at recreation. With Blood Simple, they weren’t so much trying to mash up any genres or make a pastiche of film noir as they were trying to create a story in the style of hardboiled crime author James M. Cain. By taking inspiration from the original source materials of their beloved 30s and 40s films noir the hope was that it wouldn’t be thought of as an homage to The Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity but as another noir that would be compared favorably to them. The same thing can be said of Miller’s Crossing and the work of Dashiell Hammet and Raising Arizona and Chuck Jones’s Wile E. Coyote cartoons. The Hudsucker Proxy’s origins and inspirations have been discussed ad nauseum on this very essay series, so it’s no surprise to say that the film takes inspirations from Capra and Sturges and other studio system comedies, but my contention is that the goal was not for viewers to see it and see a pastiche, but for viewers to take it in and love it the same way that audiences had taken in and loved It Happened One Night; that it would be so well loved that it would in fact equal or surpass the legacy of those old films. If that seems far-fetched, another filmmaker had a very similar idea within living memory, except he wanted to make an example of the classic studio system exotic adventure movie that would be such a perfect example of the genre that it would surpass its antecedents in the public’s memory. If you’ve heard of the character Indiana Jones and haven’t heard of the 1943 film China, or the 1954 film Secret of the Incas then Steven Spielberg succeeded in that goal.
The Hudsucker Proxy was supposed to be an earnest attempt at a blockbuster, but with its $25 million budget and $2.8 million box office, it was anything but. Joel & Ethan Coen were not going to become the next Steven Spielberg, this was clear. The question was, what would the rest of their career look like? They were not about to secure funding for another big-budget film anytime soon. If they wanted to continue making films, they would need to continue making the meticulously crafted lower-stakes indies they’d been making prior to Hudsucker. What appears to have changed after Hudsucker though is that they went back to making meticulously crafted lower stakes indies but they stopped sanding the edges off. They started making movies that got weird, weirder than the ones they had been making. Ironically it is these weird movies that caused them to start achieving the kinds of commercial successes that Hudsucker was supposed to be.
Just prior to making Hudsucker, the Coens had just made their weirdest movie yet, 1991’s Barton Fink. Part crime thriller and part Hollywood satire, it traces the career of a fictionalized version of playwright Clifford Odets as he comes to Hollywood and discovers he has a terrible case of writer’s block, and this is only exacerbated by the fact that his next door neighbor might be a serial killer. Barton Fink was written in the middle of the writing process of Miller’s Crossing, ironically because while writing Miller’s Crossing the brothers found themselves with a bad case of writer’s block. It’s a unique kind of personality that decides to combat writer's block by writing something else**, but then again Joel & Ethan Coen are unique individuals. Barton Fink was the only one of their early movies that began to defy genre. It’s not exactly billed as a comedy, but it’s also very funny. It’s not exactly billed as a thriller, but it’s also very suspenseful. More than anything else, it has a kind of eerie quality. Everything about its characters and setting feels a little off and a little weird. Among their first five films, Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing are bleak. Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy are zany. Barton Fink was both.
Barton Fink lost money. It made back $6.2 million of its $9 million budget, but it was also the most fêted film they had yet made. It was nominated for three Oscar awards and won the Palme D’Or and awards for best actor and best director at the Cannes Film Festival, an achievement unique enough that Cannes subsequently made a rule for their festival that one film could not sweep the awards in the same way in subsequent years.
While there’s clearly not a lot of money to be made in the box-office-loss-yet-critically-acclaimed movie business, there’s also some money to be made there. Movie producers love winning awards almost as much as they love making money, so what’s a $3 million loss if they get an Oscar out of it? Joel and Ethan Coen, fresh off the bomb that was Hudsucker figured that the next sensible career move was to make a smaller, quieter movie so that if or when it didn’t make any money, it might win some acclaim. Also working with a smaller budget meant there were less stakes. Joel Silver has no kind words for the Coens because he lost $22 million on Hudsucker, but the producers at Circle Films aren’t mad at them for losing $2.8 million on Barton Fink. So the brothers got to work on a film about a crime gone wrong that would be set in their home state of Minnesota. The characters would be both the kinds of hard boiled criminals they had written into their prior noirs and the kinds of people who were their friends and neighbors in the western suburbs of Minneapolis for whom “oh jeez” is the strongest language they would ever use. Much like Barton Fink it would be simultaneously bleak and zany. Fargo had a budget of $7 million. They probably expected it would lose little enough to let them keep working and keep making the quiet and weird films that they wanted to make. It grossed $60 million and was nominated for seven Oscars, winning three. Since Hudsucker the Coens have been celebrated auteurs, known for their eerie genre-bending films full of quirky characters, and it only took them losing $22 million to do it.
I am not in Joel & Ethan Coens’s heads. I do not know what their thought process was when they made their films, but I get the sense that for those first easily classifiable films there was an attempt in the writing to make movies that would sell. They wanted to make films that were easily digestible, films with clear settings and characterizations that would leave no ambiguity or confusion in the viewers mind as to what the kind of movie it was or how they were supposed to feel about the characters. “This is a crime thriller. You know how a crime thriller works” they would say of Blood Simple so that enough people would see it and enjoy it and tell their friends so that they could pay back the $1.5 million they’d raised from dentists and lawyers in Golden Valley MN to make it. The same logic applied to The Hudsucker Proxy. It’s a zany screwball comedy. The goal was to make Joel Silver his money back with a tidy profit, so it was not worth it to try being weird or quirky or genre-defying in its execution, and so it wasn’t. It’s merely that they made an incredibly accurate version of a studio screwball comedy, a genre that moviegoing audiences had stopped wanting to see somewhere around the early 1950s, hence the flop. Barton Fink however was written by the Coens basically for themselves, just as something to do to get through their writer’s block. It had a weirdly specific story and some weird and off putting story beats and a difficult-to-decipher mood. Barton Fink is pretty great but it’s definitely not the kind of movie that brings in the crowds in summer blockbuster season. When Hudsucker flopped, it gave the Coens permission to keep writing those off putting weirdo movies. If you can’t make the big summer blockbuster, why bother self-censoring? “Make the weirdo movie you wish to see” the universe seemed to be saying to them, and so they did, and they’ve succeeded ever since. Without The Hudsucker Proxy failing, we might never have seen them try to make a Raymond Chandler detective story where all the characters are aging 1960s counterculture figures approaching middle age in The Big Lebowski, or the spy thriller that is curiously absent any spies in Burn After Reading, or the pseudo-biopic of Greenwich Village’s 13th most famous folk singer in Inside Llewyn Davis. In short, the failure of The Hudsucker Proxy let the Coens be who we now know them to be. If that isn’t worth celebrating, I don’t know what is. Here’s to failure.
* If you’ve ever watched a spectacularly bad movie like Birdemic: Shock And Terror (2010) or Fateful Findings (2013) this can be a startling realization. Some outsider so-bad-it’s-good art like the music of The Shaggs can be explained as being someone trying their best and not caring what anyone else thinks. A spectacular bad movie doesn't just have a deluded director or writer but dozens of other people who all thought “yes, this is not merely something that sounds like it will be artistically interesting, but something that thousands of people will pay good money to see so that I can make my money back”. People said this and possibly earnestly felt it about The Room (2003).
** I can attest it kind of works. I had a bit of difficulty starting this very essay, so I took a breath, wrote 2000 words on Duran Duran, and came back and the words started flowing like water.