3/9/24
Newsletter #569
The Crack of Dawn
I have been likened to Richard Dreyfuss any number of times throughout the course of my life. I don’t believe we look alike, although when this likening began in the mid-1970s, around the time of Jaws (1975), he and I both had beards. I don’t think our voices are similar at all. Maybe it’s our snotty attitudes.
In the last year, although maybe it’s already been two years, I got an excited call from Bruce Campbell. He had just been at a horror convention and had somehow ended up hanging around with Richard Dreyfuss the whole weekend. Bruce’s comment was, “He could be your older brother. You guys would either be best friends, or immediately get into an argument about Civil War generals and never speak again” (that may be an exact quote).
Since then, Dreyfuss appeared on Bill Maher’s podcast, Club Random, and he wins from among the more than 50 guests that Bill has had as the weirdest. Not that he wasn’t intelligent and made complete sense, but he slid out of his chair onto the floor a half dozen times. Bill was too polite to make a big issue out of it and simply kept the conversation going. But the only possible explanation is that Richard Dreyfuss’s gravitational pull is increasing. The core of the earth is tugging at him, causing him to weigh twice as much as he really does. Or he’s forgotten how to sit in a chair. He’s eleven years older than me, making him 76, for whatever that’s worth.
So, as I read the New York Times this morning I came to an article entitled, “The Oscars Now Have D.E.I. Rules, but Some Say It’s Just a Performance.” Since I can’t remember any of multi-letter abbreviations that people so dearly love to use for everything, I had to look it up. Diversity, equity and inclusion, eh? In my humble opinion, D.E.I. rules are complete horseshit, and a big step downward in the demise of movies as any sort of art form. It is codified proof that the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts & Sciences has their combined heads up their asses. That anybody takes these silly film industry wannabes seriously is their own fault.
Many folks in the film business had many comments on this D.E.I. subject, of course. Spike Lee said it’s “all a performance,” whatever that means. But the only person who had it right, in my view, was Richard Dreyfuss. He said that the best picture rules were “thoughtless,” “patronizing” and an impingement to artistic freedom. “They make me vomit,” he fumed.
My good pal, Sheldon Lettich, the brains behind the “Muscles from Brussels,” Jean Clause Van Damme, went to Beverely Hills High School. I’m guessing he started matriculating there in 1966-67. In those days it was the custom that on your first day as a freshman, a senior would show you around, which sounds very civilized. The senior who showed Sheldon around was Richard Dreyfuss.
My attitude in casting has always been that if it doesn’t specifically state in the script that a character is a specific ethnicity, then it’s up for grabs; whoever gives the best audition, no matter what their ethnicity, wins. I became friendly with a number of Māori actors in New Zealand during my eight years of Hercules and Xena, and I was able to work them into every episode that I directed. Yes, partially because they were Māori, but mostly because they were good. If I gave any of those guys a part, I knew they’d milk the shit out of it and try to make their couple of lines the best scene in the show. Honestly, I want every actor to think that.
My favorite personal experience of D.E.I casting was for the part of the captain of the space mission in my film, Alien Apocalypse (2005). There was no ethnicity written into the script (which I wrote), and I ended up casting the part in Bulgaria, where we shot. All of the actors in Bulgaria, as good as their English might have been, they still sounded like Boris and Natasha and their voices had to be replaced later by American actors. The Bulgarian casting director searched high and low for American, Canadian or British actors. During preproduction, I was in my office and a tall, well-built, handsome, black actor with awesome dreads, named Michael Corey Davis, walked in and said in perfect American English (because he was American), with a good voice, “I’m here to read for the part of the captain.”
I had written that script 14 years earlier and had never thought of the captain, named Capt. Charles “Chuck” Smith, as a black man. I honestly thought of him like Charlton Heston. However, my first words to Michael were, “You’ve got the part. Will you cut your dreads?” He stated flatly, “No.” I said, “Space captains in the future have dreads.” So, Michael being an actor, and a wonderful, enjoyable actor, but still an actor, had to bitch at lunch on day, “Of course the black character gets killed first.” I said, “I didn’t write the part for a black actor. Whoever played it was going to die first [an alien termite bites off his head].” Michael said, “Right. His name is Chuck after all. Black people don’t name their kids Chuck.” The grumpy, 65-year-old, New York producer, Bob Perkis, said, “What about Chuck Berry?”
The Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences only exits as a self-serving, self-congratulatory form of free advertising; who gives a shit about their inclusion rules, or anything else they believe about anything? These assholes don’t run the film business. These are rules made by people who sit in committees making rules, not people who make movies. The people who make movies are always more than happy to give the part to the best actor, whatever they look like.
I’ve got bad news for these idiots with their rules: the point isn’t diversity, equity or inclusion; it’s talent. And talent is doled out on a purely arbitrary basis, as it ought to be.
That’s what I think.
That Club Random was the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. I swear Bill must spiked Dreyfuss' drink with a date-rape drug, the way he melted into that damn chair. Also, when Bill wraps the show up without having discussed Dreyfuss' silly book that he was there to promote.