Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story by Chris Nashawaty

Author:Chris Nashawaty [Nashawaty, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Comedy
ISBN: 9781250105950
Google: 2ndQDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1250105951
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Published: 2018-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

9

Rappin’ Rodney

FROM THE BEGINNING, Rodney Dangerfield had always been the wild card. At fifty-seven, the stand-up comic looked at least ten years older, and had been performing on and off since 1940. He’d logged some hard miles on the road. Hollywood, with its cushy movie-star pampering, might as well have been Mars to him. In a long, itinerant career that took him from the small-time “Jewish Alps” resorts of the Catskills to the three-shows-a-night Naugahyde pseudo-glitz venues off of the Las Vegas strip to, finally, the rarefied high altitude of The Tonight Show, Dangerfield had never really entertained the idea of a career in film. Who would pay to look at a mug like his writ large on the silver screen?

In his four rocky decades in show business, Dangerfield had appeared in only one feature film—an obscure 1971 no-budget comedy called The Projectionist. In it, Dangerfield plays a tough-talking Brylcreemed cinema owner named Renaldi, who torments a daydreaming Walter Mitty–ish employee (Chuck McCann). The film opened and closed in New York and San Francisco without anyone’s noticing, which suited Dangerfield just fine. Years later he would joke that the film was so bad “they showed it on an airplane and people were walking out of the theater.”

But now that he was experiencing a miraculous late-career surge, maybe it was time to leverage his newfound popularity and see what this acting racket was all about. Caddyshack seemed like an ideal showcase, made to order for his unique brand of off-the-cuff patter. Not only did the filmmakers make their fandom flatteringly plain to him, they seemed to understand his limitations and weren’t remotely put off by them. The character of Al Czervik, a superrich vulgarian blowhard condominium developer, didn’t have a lot of lines in the first draft of the script. But, if anything, that made Dangerfield more confident about accepting the part. It was a juicy, glorified cameo. He didn’t have to carry the movie; he could be carried by it, popping into the frame, dropping a couple of crass, rim-shot one-liners, and waltzing off as suddenly as he appeared. He thought, I can do this.

Dangerfield’s first scene in Caddyshack comes midway through the first act, when he pulls up to Bushwood in a fire-engine-red Rolls Royce with custom CZERVIK Illinois plates and a horn that blares “We’re in the Money.” With his silent, Nikon-snapping stereotype sidekick Wang riding shotgun, he steps out of the convertible like a Tex Avery sight gag, wearing a white golf hat, red leisure slacks, a white belt fighting a losing battle with his gut, a lime-green shirt, and a rainbow cardigan sweater. He peels off a gaudy tip for the valet from an obscene knot of bills and instructs him to “park my car, get my bags, and gain some weight, will ya?” As the hard-charging bull walks into the Bushwood pro shop, Czervik turns to his pal and cracks, “I think this place is restricted, Wang, so don’t tell ’em you’re Jewish. Okay? Fine.”

Ramis and his crew had spent the morning of Dangerfield’s first day of work dressing the set.

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