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

daylight.
    When Bruce wasn’t around, the shoot was fun and fruitful; when Bruce was on set,
A Couple of Dicks
felt more like that week I’d spent on
Live Free or Die Hard
, but with
me
in the director’s chair instead of Len Wiseman. All that was missing was
my
necklace of human ears.
    The days he didn’t want to do dialogue were always interesting. Mark and Robb Cullen’s script for
A Couple of Dicks
had been a Black List favorite around town—the Black List being an unofficial collection of the best unproduced screenplays in the business, as suggested by an informal survey across all studios. Originally, the movie had been set up at another company, with the screenwriters attached to direct Robin Williams as Jimmy and James Gandolfini as Paul. When that version was put into turnaround, Warner Bros. grabbed
Dicks
with the caveat that the Cullens step down as first-time directors.
    This is all a way of saying that the script for
A Couple of Dicks
was well-liked, strong, and funny. So it was always a little astounding whenever Bruce opted out of doing his dialogue. Sure—an actor is bound to run into lines he wants to
change
in a script. But this was a case of a guy dropping his lines altogether—in the midst of
dialogue.
It’s one thing to make a choice to play a
monologue
with a penetrating gaze or a single expression, but when you’re one half of a two-person scene and you make a “choice” to not do
your
half ofthe dialogue? That leaves the other actor in exposition hell—because now the other actor has to deliver his lines and
yours
as well.
    Bruce did this at the L&B pizza joint shoot in Brooklyn. We get to the set for a blocking rehearsal and Bruce tells me and the Cullens he’s not doing any of the dialogue. His rationale was that his character Jimmy, who’d just been Tasered and robbed of a very expensive baseball card, would be so mad at Tracy Morgan’s Paul for his partner’s lack of intervention, that he’d simply refuse to speak to him in the next scene. As if it wasn’t going to be awkward enough, he also insisted on wearing mirrored sunglasses so we wouldn’t even see this groundbreaking, nonverbal performance in his eyes. Douche Bag Achievement: UNLOCKED!
    So there’s me, Robb Cullen, and Tracy, rebalancing all the
dialogue
into a
monologue
. Now Tracy has to convey twice the information in the scene, incorporating lines he never thought he’d have to learn. And as we got to the eighth and ninth takes, poor Tracy is struggling to even remember all the information he’s suddenly had to impart in what was once a two-hander but is now more of a one-hander, with a guy who we’re not even really sure is awake behind those mirrored glasses. At one point, he rocked us with his big move—he took off his sunglasses for a minute, cleaned the lenses with his shirt, then put the glasses back on. It was a little too David Caruso for my taste, and it didn’t help Tracy one iota.
    I’m a lazy, fat fuck, so I can spot my own kind pretty easily. At the blocking rehearsal, Bruce took one look at all the unsexy, expository dialogue he’d have to deliver in the scene, and I guess he suddenly decided two pages’ worth ofhis half of the dialogue would be best not said at all—at least not by
him
. You can call that an actor making a choice; I call that an actor making a choice for another actor, and then making the double burden he’s suddenly heaped on the guy no easier by barely being present in the scene with him. No fairness merit badge for the Last Boy Scout.
    What made his “choice” even tougher to work around was the fact that he’d also dropped his dialogue in the previous scene. In the flick, Bruce is robbed of a valuable baseball card, and Kevin Pollak and Adam Brody, who play the nemesis cops opposite Bruce and Tracy, needle their cop frenemy about being the victim of a crime during their questioning. We’d shot Bruce’s coverage first, as per his request, but rather than read his half