Free Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good by Kevin Smith

was day two.
    The rest of the shoot with him was just as fun. Bruce would openly bitch about how little money he was making on this show (he was the highest paid cat in the flick by millions, naturally) and dug his heels in to grind the production to a halt over the weirdest, dumbest shit. There was a scenein which the script called for Bruce’s character to jump out of a parked car so he could race across the street to attend to his fallen partner, who’d just been fired upon by the bad guy with an Uzi. It’s a panic moment, with the crowd scattering while candy-glass windows are shattering. We were doing Bruce’s coverage, and when we yelled, “Action!” he stepped out of the car and
walked
across the street, looking more casually irritated than worried that his partner might be dead. AD Michael Pitt and I watched Bruce’s low-impact saunter with mouths agape. At the end of that first take, I let Bruce know we were doing a second. He seemed genuinely shocked that I wanted to go again.
    “I know you’ve been in a hundred movies where you jump out of the car carrying a gun, Boss,” I said to him quietly. “But this is the first time I’m ever doing it. And I’ve been looking forward to rolling cameras on you running across the street with a gun, because it’s so movie-badass. So can we do it one more time?”
    Bruce rolled his eyes and waved me away. I went back behind the monitor waiting for take two, but Bruce wouldn’t get in the car: He was just leaning on the driver’s-side door. I went over and asked him if anything was wrong. He said he was ready to shoot.
    “Awesome. I just need you in the car again,” I told him.
    “We already did that.”
    “Can you do it one more time on
this
take, too?” I asked in the same tone of voice I’d use to beg a chick for a hand job back in high school.
    As serious as a Republican clergyman, he looked at me with disgust and said, “So you want me to get out of the car again,
too
?!”
    The lazy, fat-ass settler in me felt his pain. The lazy, fat-ass settler in me, however, wasn’t getting paid millions to make pretend he was a cop whose partner was being gunned down. So pretty please, with sugar on it—get in the fucking car and get out of the fucking car once more with feeling. The second (and last) take is in the finished film. If you’ll notice, when we cut to Bruce he’s already out of the car—that’s because as tough as
Cop Out
might have been for some critics to swallow, it would’ve been a true spitter if they watched Bruce’s character’s ultrablasé reaction to a loved one whose life was in danger. It was so disappointingly close to the first take, the message was clear: This was the best he was going to give me.
    Where was the happy-go-lucky charmer who made Maddie Hayes fall so madly in love? There were no staff limbo parties like there’d been at the Blue Moon Detective Agency whenever Bruce was around. The singing pitchman who made me believe that Seagram’s Wine Coolers were a manly enough spirit to chug at a high school kegger? He turned out to be the unhappiest, most bitter, and
meanest
emo-bitch I’ve ever met at
any
job I’ve held down. And mind you, I’ve worked at Domino’s Pizza. I signed up to work with John McClane but spent the whole flick directing Mikey, the talking baby, minus the Scientological serenity of Kirstie Alley and John Travolta.
    “See if you still like this job after you do it for twenty-five years,” Willis said to me once, on the subject of our chosen field of the arts.
    “I’ve been doing it fifteen years, and I still love it,” I countered.
    I guess he took that as a challenge, though, since he fosteredan unpleasant and unproductive working environment whenever he was on set. He’d bitch about not being shot first, and he’d bitch louder about not being shot
out
for the day, so he could go home. He hated night shoots and blamed cinematographer Dave Klein for not wanting to shoot the scenes in broad