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Rob Schneider finds work
as a he-bitch in first star role
MOVIE-REVIEWING, media-covering investigative newshounds and snoops like me always have plenty of sources. Getting exclusive background stories means having contacts at movie studios, TV networks and local radio and TV stations, not to mention knowing individuals at PR firms and talent agencies on a first-name basis.
However, when a major source turns out to be your own son, then you know you've got a pipeline into something that could be astonishingly honest, delivered with a candidness and purity that only comes out of the closeness between family members. In short, only from kin can you get the real lowdown dirt.
That was the case when I got a call from my kid the other day. Even though he turned 34 last November, I'm still calling him "the kid" because he still doesn't look his age. Or maybe it's just that old habits die hard with me.
His real name is Russ Stanley and he went to Terra Nova High School with Rob Schneider, so I knew he was onto something big when he excitedly told me:
"Dad, I just got back from L.A. I saw the world premiere of Rob's first big movie. And he's the star. He even co-wrote the thing. A comedy. Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo. It was at a big theater in Westwood. Packed. We barely got in at the last minute. Not an empty seat. Everyone was screaming their heads off. Rob playing this fumbling aquarium-cleaning guy, who becomes a ladies' man. You wouldn't believe this movie. Remember his 'Sensitive Naked Guy' on Saturday Night Live? Well, Rob gets naked in this one. I guess he's got a thing about getting naked."
I should explain Russ was personally invited by Rob because they're still chums after all these years. Rob loves Giants' baseball games and is always hanging around Candlestick--oops, Three-Com Park (that's a name change I never could get used to).
And since Russ is the director of marketing of ticket sales for the Giants, that makes him a very important guy for Rob to know. (Rob even turned out for the very last baseball game at Candle--Three-Com last fall and was observed with the players and big-shot guests at a post-game party.)
Let Russ tell you a little more about the Hollywood gala they threw for Rob's movie after that premiere screening in early December:
"It was a night to remember. I think there were like a thousand people at the bash. Everybody who was anybody in Hollywood, including Adam Sandler, who produced the picture through his brand-new production company. Rob told me that the film is Sandler's baby. I guess Rob doesn't have to worry so much if the picture's a flop. It's Adam who's going to take the heat from Touchstone.
"One of the co-producers was a guy you once knew, dad: Sid Ganis, who used to be the director of marketing for George Lucas back in the 'Star Wars' days. And listen, I saw some of the most beautiful Hollywood women I've ever laid eyes on. Actresses in outfits that looked like they'd just come off the racks at Neimann-Marcus, Victoria's Secret, Frederick's of Hollywood. They were all hanging around Rob. Like maybe they were hoping to get a part in his next comedy. I even had my picture taken with Martin Landau. He and Rob have been friends since they made 'The Adventures of Pinocchio' together."
Ain't it great when you're kid ends up knowing more people than you do?
AROUND my neighborhood, Pacifica's Linda Mar Valley, Rob Schneider will always be remembered as the local wild and woolly kid who made good (plus plenty of money) playing wild and woolly characters as an adult. Or what passes for an adult when you're still basically a kid at heart.
Rob was graduated from Terra Nova High School in 1982 and went off to Hollywood to make his fortune as either a comedian or an actor, whichever happened first. Well, Hollywood wasn't quite ready for him so he ended up on the comedy-club circuit and that ultimately led him to an HBO special for "Young Comedians."
Spotted by Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels, he became a cast regular in 1991 playing a lot of goofball characters with goofball voices -- weirdo guys like "Tiny Elvis" and "Richard [The Richmeister"] Laymer" and "The Sensitive Naked Man."
In fact, my son Russ tells me that during his years at Terra Nova he remembers Rob dressing up as "Little Elvis" and singing "Blue Suede Shoes," "Heartbreak Hotel," "Hound Dog" and other Presley standards at all the school assemblies and rallies. As Russ recalled it: "Rob was more extroverted than some strippers and topless dancers I've seen."
Rob, according to the keen-eyed Russ, "even got himself bounced out of a few classes," although I couldn't tell if my son was serious or just kidding me, as it seems to me maybe Russ did some bouncing around himself back in those scholastic days.
So we watched as the kid/adult from Pacifica continued to grow with his characterizations on Saturday Night Live (his gig lasted until 1994, when he felt it was time to move on to hunt bigger game). Then the Kid from Pacifica started popping up in feature movies. Nothing big, just cameos or supporting roles. What carefree Rob called "stepping stones."
Maybe you remember him as Cedrick the Bellman in Home Alone 2 or Iggy in Surf Warriors or the despicable Woodrow Tyler in The Beverly Hillbillies or the officious submarine officer Marty Pascal in Down Periscope."Or maybe you saw him clowning around with Sylvester Stallone and dodging laser-gun fire and karate kicks in Judge Dredd as comedy-relief guy "Fergie."
"Hey," Rob told me one Christmas, when he came around for my across-the-street neighbor's midnight party, "it's a living."
As recently as last year, I was still seeing Rob popping up in those cameo and bit parts: as a scheming TV executive in Muppets From Space and an Iranian delivery boy in Big Daddy.
It was clear Schneider was coming up into the big time in another way when he landed his first sitcom on NBC, Men Behaving Badly, which opened with the slogan: "Men Are Dogs . . . They Just Are." For two seasons (1996-1997) Rob played unemployed photographer Jamie Coleman, a chauvinistic, messy, unkempt guy who never had luck with women and never understood why.
Or, as Russ so subtly put it, after watching more episodes than I did, "a real slob, the Felix Unger of the '90s." Rob seemed to have a clear picture of Jamie, describing him as "totally out of himself. He's like a 10-year-old in an adult body, but he can get away with stuff because he's likeable. Guys will try to get away with as much as they can until they get busted. This is a real-life kind of guy."
With Men Behaving Badly it was beginning to become clear for the first time that maybe Rob was headed in a new direction of playing gross and/or stupid misfit characters, and that in turn was moving him closer and closer to the arena of offensive, politically incorrect screen comedy. Where playing dumb or stupid or idiotic or imbecilic might translate into smart box-office dollars.
It turned out that playing the Cajun guy Townie in The Waterboy was fortuitous and took him a step farther into movies because it reunited him with his former "SNL" associate Adam Sandler and strengthened their relationship, just when Sandler was forming his company, Happy Madison, a name combining words from his screen successes Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore.
So, when Sandler liked Rob's concept for Deuce Bigelow and Rob's own first-draft screenplay, he gave the project the green light. (The final writing credit includes the name Harris Goldberg.) And they hired Mike Mitchell, who had worked on the Ren & Stimpy cartoon series, to direct live-action for the first time. Not a politically correct name in the credits.
So, now Deuce Bigelow has opened big in December, and Russ is calling me again and saying he wants to see it a second time and would the old man like to tag along? Figuring maybe I could get the kid to pay for my ticket, I agreed and off we went to a multiplex in Redwood City for a big evening on the town.
I'm back and now you can ask me: What the deuce is Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo, anyway? Well, it's a little Dumb and Dumber and a lot of There's Something About Mary. We've entered a time when there's a genre of movie that purposely sets out to offend us in the grossest way, to slap us in the face with a lot of toilet and penis humor and just all-around bad taste. One critic called these movies "bottom feeders."
And yet these movies, on a gentler note, with their depiction of down-and-out losers, convey a portrait of people who want a place in the world but don't know quite how to find it. It's a sad quality but a real-life one that almost gets lost beneath the facade of crassness.
It's clear to see what Schneider, in writing his own screenplay, wanted to do as Deuce Bigelow--hit his stride as a down-and-out but earnest character that could sustain a feature movie and perhaps become popular enough to carry a series of Bigelow or Bigelow-like movies. Just as his mentor, Adam Sandler, has found a kind of formula in his comedies by playing variatons on "grown-up children" types.
But does Deuce Bigelow work? Ironically, were you to strip away all the bad taste from this movie--the flatulation gags, the toilet jokes, the references to the male sex organ, the fun made of people with health disorders, and the idea that exposing yourself in public is falling-down funny--it might have had half a chance.
Schneider is believable at playing a loser you can't help but like. Unshaven, unkempt, incapable of seeing ways of improving his lot in life, he makes Deuce Bigelow someone you sympathize with, especially when he fantasizes impossible dreams. (Don't we all?).
Somewhere in all this, a good movie is crying to get out. But it never quite makes it.
Deuce is a fish-tank cleaner at the L.A. Aquarium who gets caught one day cleaning the tank naked while underwater, so he's out of work and looking for a place to live. That's when by chance he encounters a professional gigolo (Oded Fehr of The Mummy), who hires him to take care of his $6,000 custom-made fish tank while he's away in Europe.
Deuce thinks he's finally getting somewhere, living in the gigolo's opulent Malibu pad, but that moment is literally shattered when he destroys the fish tank and sets half the kitchen on fire. Now he needs cash fast to replace the tank and clean the place up, so he assumes the role of his absentee host after encountering one of his clients: Marlo Thomas, of all people, who pops up as a vixen who dresses Deuce up to look like a German tourist. Deuce gets the full professional indoctrination from Fehr's pimp T. J. (Eddie Griffin of Malcolm & Eddie) and now he's ready to swing as a "man-whore" or as T.J. affectionately calls him, "a he-bitch."
But Deuce is a male prostitute without one night of on-the-job experience. Funny idea. So is the idea that he never goes to bed with the succession of fouled up women Griffin provides for him: Each client is as big an oddball as Bigelow and suffers from a major problem. One is a bed-ridden obese butterball nicknamed "The Jabba Lady," more eager for food than sex. Another (Amy Poehler) suffers from a disorder called Tourette's Syndrome, an inability to keep from crying out obscenities in public. (To overcome this on their date, Deuce takes her to a baseball game where all her screaming fits in with the rest of the cursing spectators.)
The funniest of these misfit dates is an eight-foot-tall woman whose head is always out of frame. Their only physical contact is when Deuce rubs her feet--and are they big feet. Another of the dates is narcoleptic, in danger of falling asleep at any moment. (There are some very funny visual gags here, including one where her ponytail is tied to the wall of a restaurant, so her face won't fall into a bowl of soup should sleep come suddenly during dinner.)
Out of all these women Deuce is able to find true happiness with only one, and she appears to be normal. Kate (Arija Bareikis, whose surname almost sounds like a Deuce Bigelow joke), in fact, falls in love with Deuce, who at heart just wants to marry her and settle down, if only he could get out of this predicament. However, Kate turns out to be an amputee -- her artificial leg not becoming known to Deuce until their first night of love. But it's a case of artificus interruptus.
Making fun of deformities or ailments seems acceptable in a movie diabolically designed to offend. But it's when Schneider keeps returning to far more distasteful comedy that his movie falters. Deuce's father (Richard Riehle) is a men's room attendant in a classy restaurant who dutifully cleans up the toilets. A meeting between father and son in the washroom leads to the film's nosiest moments, if you get my drift.
Then there's William Forsythe's plainclothes cop, an intensely driven, half-crazed character who is constantly exposing himself in public in his attempts to arrest Deuce. This kind of seemingly psychotic personality is too bizarre and sociopathic to work within even a vulgar comedy and is a betrayal to the likeable people Schneider has created beforehand.
You can carry such outrageousness just so far, and Schneider plunges over the edge. Granted, the Forsythe character is ultimately softened to become a more acceptable comedy foil when Deuce helps him resolve his own marital troubles, but the transition is unbelievable and the cop character remains an obstruction to me enjoying this movie more than I did.
The final irony is that Schneider really doesn't need all the crassness and bad taste. He has a talent for being a down-and-out guy and he has a natural bent for comedy, as Russ reminded me on the way out of the theater. He definitely has a future in movies. If he can find a more tasteful way of presenting himself, without sacrificing the intrinsic values of his talent, he could make himself more accessible to far greater numbers of people. The kind who like to see movies that don't offend.
About that kid of mine? I ended up paying for my own ticket to see Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo, after all. Maybe I raised him smarter than I thought.
© 2000 by John Stanley
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