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Beyond the Lens
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Trying to Stay Cool
Columnist Todd Gilchrist pulls an all-nighter in downtown Los Angeles with John Travolta, Vince Vaughn, The Rock and director F. Gary Gray.
Thursday, April 29, 2004
By Todd Gilchrist
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It seems that even for those of us whose business on a movie set is simply to visit with some of the actors and film~makers, the basic credo remains, ‘Hurry up and wait.’
Take for example my time spent last fall at the gargantuan fake airport erected in Palmdale, Ca. for Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal. A brief interlude by Tom Hanks notwithstanding, the occasion was marked by a lot of waiting and wandering, confirming that the dominant atmosphere for on-location Hollywood PR opportunities is mostly anticipation. Of course, in the case of The Terminal, the set itself was the star, so Dreamworks publicists tended to soft pedal our access to the talent.
However, last Friday, my desire to interact on set with a film’s principals was more than sated during a trip to downtown Los Angeles to watch a night of filming on Be Cool, the follow-up to the 1995 Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty. Though it boasts only one returning cast member from the original film (John Travolta, naturally), director F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job) has done well to ensure that neophytes of the series will be supplied with sufficient star wattage to draw their attention: Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Harvey Keitel, and The Rock - and that’s just for starters. [Correction (05/03/2004): John Travolta is not the only returning cast member from Get Shorty. Danny DeVito will also appear in Be Cool].
Although the process of moviemaking may turn out to be as dazzling as the day you first discovered it, set visits become much more tolerable if you’re joined by a group of journalistic colleagues whose company you enjoy. Still, even in front of your peers, it’s tough to be cool when your hero since you were in short pants, Harvey Keitel, casually walks by to shoot his final close-up of the night.
Travolta, the last performer our motley group spoke to at 4 a.m. Saturday morning, approaches us as graciously as if we were the first people he’d spoken to the entire evening. Explaining what we had been watching for the past five hours, the actor says excitedly, “This is the first scene where we're all together. You've got Vince, Uma, Harvey, Duane and myself, sort of the five leads of the movie all together in the same scene. We didn't even have that in rehearsal, so this is the first time we're all together in the same space. It's awesome.”
“This is the end of the movie, where the gangsters basically want to get back the girl I've managed. We're putting on her big video and they basically want to bump Uma and I off,” adds Travolta with a laugh that seems to acknowledge the potential silliness of the scene.
My comrades and I were certainly punchy from a night spent lingering around the periphery of a film set, but Travolta admits that even he, despite his decades-long career in the business, occasionally loses his composure while working on an overnight shoot. “Vince and I, we can barely hold it together,” he admits. “If I look at him a certain way, he laughs and vice versa, so we're not good with each other as far as keeping our control.”
“We did another movie together,” Travolta continues, referencing the suspense thriller Domestic Disturbance. “It was just as bad, trying to make each other laugh. We don't even try. We just do.”
“With everyone else, it’s just good conversation. Harvey will talk about cigars and wine and our histories and people we knew. Uma, we have a lot of history because of Pulp. Duane [Johnson, The Rock] is new, so that's kind of a discovery. But mostly Vince and I just try to laugh.”
There appear to be many similarities between Travolta’s conversations with his co-stars and those taking place among our little cadre of journalists, which run the gamut from Real World/Road Rules glories to pet horror stories. Maybe a star’s work life isn’t so different from yours or mine after all!
Contrast Travolta’s informal tone with the more businesslike approach of director F. Gary Gray, who starts off the evening’s interviews with more on his mind no doubt than cigars, unintentional crack-ups and reality TV catfights. Only a little bit of his real life personality emerges as he describes the daunting proposition of following in the footsteps of Barry Sonnenfeld’s hugely successful original film, Get Shorty.
“There haven’t been a lot of surprises,” he claims. “Maybe the biggest was the first day of shooting, when John showed up and turned into Chili Palmer. It’s been eight, nine, ten years, and you just don’t know in rehearsals, because everyone’s really casual and I don’t require the actors to jump right into character. But when John became Chili Palmer, that kind of freaked me out.”
Coming onto a project that was a novel first, Gray is quick to defend his adaptation’s fidelity to author Elmore Leonard’s source material. “It’s a large book; you can’t do everything,” he suggests. “But there are some things that actually surprised [Elmore].”
“I think we went above and beyond even the book with some of the details, with the music, the hip-hop references, and some of the things that I’m familiar with because of my background,” the former music video director continues. “We kind of went beyond even some of the details in the book, and we ripped off a lot of the book too.”
Given the imposing legacy of Get Shorty, one of the most beloved pictures in Travolta’s illustrious career, Gray says he focused on his film as if it were its own entity, free from the strictures of a preceding volume and widely seen movie. “I just make sure it stands on its own,” he says.
“I really enjoyed the original, but people are going to go see Be Cool to see Be Cool, not becau~se it’s a continu~ation of Get Shorty,” adds Gary. “If you watch this movie and you never saw Get Shorty ever, you would be satisfied.”
“That was the only reason I would do it. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise; if I felt like there had to be some connection to the original, I would just do my own original and then do the sequel to that.”
At this point, I feel compelled to remind Gary that The Italian Job was technically a remake, but decide to let him return to work unscathed by more penetrating inquiries. Of course, soon after the interview ends, my discovery of the craft service table and it’s bustling container of Red Vines leads me to forget all questions except, ‘You got any more of these?’
Vince Vaughn only has about five minutes for us in between eating dinner and resuming shooting, but he is able to give us some background about his character. “Raj is a guy in the music business, who sort of adopts the behavior and speech of kind of hip-hop,” he explains. “He wants to be associated with it and kind of convinces himself that he is part of that.”
Though Raj falls in line in many ways with the hapless conspirators Vaughn played in Swingers and Made, if not Old School and Starsky & Hutch, the character still seems to possess a bit more guile than he’s previously displayed on screen. “He kind of has schemes to try get everyone else out of the way,” confirms Vaughn. “Nothing’s going to get in the way of his success. There’s a lot of inter-dynamics within the relationships in the movie, where people try to on the one hand be funny and on the other to outfox each other.”
| Like the hard-working Travolta, Vaughn says he sometimes struggles with overnight shoots, but in this case his reasoning is perhaps a bit more defensible than the excuse of merely staying up past his usual bed time. “I’ve been shooting this other movie, The Wedding Crashers, during the day,” he reveals. “We shot Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday during the day, but I had to make the switch today to come over and play a different character at night.”
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“This character has a different way of speaking than the other character, so it’s just trying to maintain your energy and stay focused and concen~trate.”
Soon after Vaughn returns to the set, The Rock makes a brief appearance and, in typical form, energizes our fatigued group with his irresistible charm. “It's funny, because I sing this crazy song by Loretta Lynn called “You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man),” which we'll shoot next week,” he says of his character Elliot Wilhelm. “Then there’s this big dance sequence, so it's just all singing and dancing; not what you would expect.”
| The Rock confesses that the character of a lounge singer and bouncer who harbors aspirations to act was a bit of a stretch. “[Gary and I] got together a long, long time ago and talked about the character and things like keeping the tattoos, which is very important, and the hair and the goatee,” he says, calling attention to a modest afro. “There's not a Samoan in the world named Elliot, or one who is singing an old school country song by Loretta Lynn.”
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But perhaps the most surprising thing about the role of Eliot is that the character is gay. In deciding to play such a departure from his trademark masculinity, The Rock says he was careful not to add too much camp to that element of the character’s personality. “I think the balance lies in just finding place of honesty,” he says. “Keeping it real, so to speak.”
“Here's a guy who wants to get out of this world,” The Rock continues. “At the same time, he's trying to hide. Not only is he gay, but he doesn't want to be this bodyguard, this thug, and he doesn't want to hurt people. He wants to sing, he wants to act, he wants to do all these things.”
“So, I think as long it comes from not being over the top, like a Saturday Night Live skit,” The Rock explains, referencing his hilarious turn on SNL as a bouncer at a gay bar. “It isn’t like that, but more real. Like, talking to you guys just like this, and if a guy walks by, I go, ‘Oh.’”
| Even with so many stars to choose from, Travolta turns out in the end to justify his standing as the most highly sought-after name of the night. Moving amongst our group with as much facility as Chili Palmer was able to navigate the movie industry in Get Shorty, Travolta highlights some of the differences his character faces in Be Cool.
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“He's a little more comfortable in the music industry because they are more gangster-like, which he's used to,” Travolta says. “The angle on this movie is they’re artist-gangsters, so he can talk to them as musicians and artists, and then if they move over into the gangster world, he can talk to them that way too. So, he's a little more comfortable.”
“In the movie industry, he probably had a little more difficultly figuring people out, because he didn't know where they were coming from. But in this world, he knows more about them.”
| When a production coordinator comes by to pull Travolta back on set, we nervously try to solicit a few more answers without annoying our hosts. Asked about returning to the franchise without the comfort of the same cast, Travolta answers like he has all the time in the world, which I guess he does, since technically he’s the center of this cinematic universe. “I did a movie with every one of these people before, so I had no trepidations about working with the new people, because I love them.”
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“It was a really good script,” he continues. “I know [audiences] care about me, but I think [my co-stars] did it because the script was good and I was part of it. I think they responded to the material even more than me.”
And just like that, the conversation is over. “Nice talking to all of you,” says Travolta, walking away to shoot another part of the film’s climactic confrontation. As the MGM publicist, my three colleagues and I step into the shuttle van, I notice the aforementioned Keitel walking past en route to his trailer.
Asking the publicist if I can go up and just shake his hand, she jokingly replies, ‘Don’t be that guy, Todd.’ I choose not to pursue the issue any further, and lazily take a seat next to one of my companions for the ride to the parking lot.
| Despite an abundance of cool comments and insightful observations, in that moment the evening felt almost anti-climactic. Then again, I did get to shake John Travolta’s hand, make fun of The Rock’s fake afro and pretend not to be intimidated by Vince Vaughn’s intense gaze.
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So what was I complaining about? My mission had been accomplished and my goals had been achieved. I guess being “that" guy will have to wait until my next set visit.
[Twice a month, Beyond The Lens examines the latest big screen trends and personalities responsible for them. To reach the author, please email mtgilchr@aol.com. Meanwhile, to comment on this week’s topic, please go to our BeyondBeyond The Lens Discussion Board.]
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