John C. Reilly to Walk Hard
Source: Variety
August 10, 2006
Columbia Pictures has acquired the comedy pitch Walk Hard, which Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan will write and produce as a vehicle for John C. Reilly. Kasdan will direct.
Variety says the story is about fictional music legend Dewey Cox, whose life becomes as messy as the protagonists in Ray and Walk the Line, films that inspired the comedy. Reilly, who has sung and played harmonica in blues bands, last sang onscreen in Chicago.
"It's an idea Jake had after seeing one too many musical biopics and feeling it was time to have some fun with that," Reilly said. "My character is an amalgamation of a number of classic musician stories, tales of excess, highs and lows and bad behavior."
Production begins early next year.
Quote from: modage on August 10, 2006, 10:05:56 AM
Reilly, who has sung and played harmonica in blues bands, last sang onscreen in Chicago A Prairie Home Companion.
yeah, but nobody saw that. i think he might sing a line or two in Talladega Nights though.
Sex and drugs? Got it — now they need rock
Everything's in place except the music for Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow's latest creation--John C. Reilly's mockumentary 'Walk Hard.'
Source: Los Angeles Times
John C. Reilly's poignant performance of "Mr. Cellophane" in "Chicago," for which he earned a best supporting actor Oscar nomination, may have come as a surprise to moviegoers whose only previous exposure to his musical talent was "Feel the Heat," the '80s rocker he belted out in ironic splendor with "Boogie Nights" costar Mark Wahlberg five years earlier.
But writer-producers Jake Kasdan ("Zero Effect") and Judd Apatow ("The 40 Year-Old Virgin") have created a starring vehicle for Reilly that will take full advantage of both of these approaches to his prodigious musical talent: "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," a comedic take on tortured musician biopics. The three filmmakers and a variety of musical talents are in the studio recording 15 songs for the project.
"It's a parody of the genre," says Kasdan, who cites "Ray," "Great Balls of Fire" and, uh, "Selena" as inspirational touchstones. "The character is an amalgamation of a lot of different guys, but the movie is playing on the conventions of 'great-man' movies and biopics in general."
Kasdan and Apatow's screenplay tracks the tumultuous life and five-decade career of early rock 'n' roll star Dewey Cox, who bursts onto the scene during the Buddy Holly era. The film will emphasize the '50s, '60s and '70s, but Reilly will play the character from age 13 into his 60s — an artist ravaged by a life lived (and walked) so hard he makes Sid Vicious seem like Haylie Duff.
"The movie charts the character's rise and fall and rise and fall that happens many, many times," says Kasdan, who is also directing the film. "He's addicted to pretty much everything you could possibly get addicted to, in and out of rehab, many, many children, and several wives.... It's an American epic."
After writing song titles and lyric fragments into the screenplay, Kasdan and Apatow reached out to musicians they admired who could use the script cues for songwriting inspiration. The brainstorming has resulted in songs like Cox's first huge hit, "Walk Hard"; a tune from his "dangerous period" called "Guilty as Charged" and songs from a protest album he turns out during his socially conscious political phase named "These Are My Issues."
Marshall Crenshaw penned the title song, and indie singer-songwriters Dan Bern, Charlie Wadhams and Candy Butchers co-founder Mike Viola are contributing material. The filmmakers have also recruited Van Dyke Parks, a legendary composer and producer who wrote lyrics for Brian Wilson, produced early Randy Newman and Ry Cooder records, and composed the feature soundtracks for "Goin' South" and "The Two Jakes," to write a musical sequence.
As the song demos come in, Apatow, Kasdan and Reilly are tweaking and arranging them with Kasdan's usual composer, Mike Andrews ("Orange County," TV's "Freaks and Geeks"), to make sure they best fit both the character and Reilly's style. The songs aren't straight parodies in the Weird Al Yankovic vein, but "good songs that are funny within the context of the movie," Kasdan says. "Some of them are kind of jokey, and some are less jokey. For the purposes of the movie, we don't want the comedy to be dependent on listening to the lyrical content of the song line for line. It's got to work in a sequence."
The filmmakers are recording the songs at Andrews' home studio in Glendale before shooting starts in February so Reilly has the tracks to perform to, and Kasdan plans to release an accompanying soundtrack album of complete studio versions of the songs along with the film.
Though Kasdan showed off his songwriting skills in his first film, "Zero Effect," which included star Bill Pullman performing two songs they had co-written, he and Apatow will not be performing on the "Walk Hard" soundtrack. "We both play really mediocre adolescent Jewish-boy-who-loved-Bob-Dylan, campfire-type guitar," Kasdan jokes. "We both know the same six chords."
Longtime friends and collaborators ("Freaks and Geeks," "Undeclared"), Kasdan and Apatow wrote the script, mostly over the phone, in the spring after Kasdan offhandedly mentioned the idea and Apatow "totally responded to it, in the way that he is able to do, and immediately came up with 40 jokes on that phone call," Kasdan says. This evolved into frequent riffing sessions over a few months in which they recalled classic tales of rock 'n' roll excess and passed scenes back and forth for a "real rock comedy" that also expresses their deep love for the music.
"There's so many great, crazy rock stories and it's all kind of fodder," Kasdan says. "The more you work on it, the more stuff you want to include."
It all sounds good to me, but this part...
Quote from: MacGuffin on December 26, 2006, 11:38:53 PM
Reilly will play the character from age 13 into his 60s
... did have me laughing out loud just thinking about it. I think this could be a pretty funny movie, especially if they don't go too, too broad with it. I think they're smart enough not to do a Scary Movie version of the music biopic, though.
Fischer walks the 'Walk'
'Office' actress cast opposite Reilly in comedy
Source: Variety
Columbia Pictures has set Jenna Fischer to star alongside John C. Reilly in the Jake Kasdan-directed comedy "Walk Hard."
Judd Apatow and Kasdan wrote the script.
Fischer will spend her hiatus from "The Office" playing Darlene, a June Carter Cash-like love interest for fictional troubled music legend Dewey Cox (Reilly). Fischer also will sing in a comedy custom-fit for Reilly, who has sung and played harmonica in blues bands and last sang onscreen in "Chicago."
Fischer and Reilly recently starred with Seann William Scott in Dimension Films' "Quebec," the directorial debut of "The Pursuit of Happyness" scribe Steve Conrad. Fischer also will be seen in the Paramount/DreamWorks comedy "Blades of Glory" and "The Brothers Solomon" for Screen Gems.
Apatow and Kasdan are producing "Walk Hard" with Clayton Townsend.
Judd Apatow On Creating A Fake Musical Biopic
In his second column for MTV News, '40-Year-Old Virgin' director also talks about favorite musical films.
Judd Apatow is the writer/director of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," the upcoming summer comedy "Knocked Up," and producer/writer of the acclaimed television series "Freaks and Geeks." The following is the latest in a series of guest columns by Apatow for MTV News:
Lately I have been paying a lot of attention to movie musicals because myself and Jake Kasdan recently wrote a film called "Walk Hard" that is kind of a goof on music biopics. It is based on movies like "Ray," "Walk the Line," "Great Balls of Fire" and "Selena." To prepare to write it we watched a ton of those films — and we realized they are all the same movie. So we decided to create our own music-industry giant, Dewey Cox, and tell the world his story. Let's just say he goes to rehab a lot. He has a very addictive personality.
The next assignment is to write all of the hits that spanned his 40-year career. That is a hard assignment, because now we need songs that are both funny and good enough to kind of sound like they could be hits. We enlisted a bunch of songwriters to help with this process; it is going on as we speak. Right now someone is sitting in a room working on a Dewey Cox guitar part.
Dewey will be played by John C. Reilly, who I worked with previously on "Talladega Nights." He has an amazing voice, sort of Roy Orbison-like, which makes the songs funny. The fact that this incredible voice comes out of John is shocking and thus humorous.
What are my favorite musicals? "Hair," starring Treat Williams — who also has an amazing voice — and a guy who joined the band Chicago soon after making the film [Donnie Dacus]. Also John Savage, who is awesome as usual. Milos Forman directed it. I don't know if people consider this a good movie or not, but I love it. I sing it. My family gets annoyed as I sing it. So I stop singing it.
I also love "Harold and Maude" which is filled with songs by Cat Stevens. I guess it isn't a musical — it is more of a black comedy — but I believe the director Hal Ashby saw it as a bit of an operetto. Is that a word? [Editor's note: Nope. An operetta is a romantic-comic opera that includes songs and dancing, but that's not 'Harold and Maude' either.] It is a really funny movie and it makes you cry: My favorite kind of movie.
"The Rocky Horror Picture Show" had a big effect on me. I sang it at a talent show in a negligee at summer camp. There was a period when I did wear women's clothes a little too often for a child entering puberty.
The movie I just made, "Knocked Up," has a score written by singer/songwriters Loudon Wainwright III and Joe Henry. We went about it in an odd way. They wrote a bunch of songs with lyrics, then we took the melodies of those songs and made them recurring themes [without lyrics] in the film. Two of those songs play over the final credits. And now we have a soundtrack album coming out which will contain all of those songs with their lyrics. Playing on many of those tunes is the great guitarist/songwriter Richard Thompson, who scored the film "Grizzly Man."
Loudon is someone I have been inspired by for a long time. He is a folk musician whose songs are both funny and biting, and also deeply personal and emotional. I saw him on David Letterman's old morning talk show in 1980. He sang a song called "Unrequited to the Nth Degree," which is basically about trying to make your ex-girlfriend feel bad about your impending suicide. It is really funny, and really dark. In a way all of my work is going for the same honesty and humor that he puts into his music.
The one thing I have learned from trying to make a film about musical icons is that it is really hard to create music, so maybe it is wrong to make fun of them.
What the hell — we're gonna do it anyway.
Meadows walks 'Walk' for Apatow
Source: Hollywood Reporter
Tim Meadows is in final negotiations to join Columbia Pictures' "Walk Hard," the John C. Reilly comedy being produced by Judd Apatow.
Directed by Jake Kasdan from a script by Apatow and Kasdan, the film pokes fun at the musician biopic genre and centers on a singer named Dewey Cox (Reilly) who overcomes adversity to become a musical legend.
Meadows will play the drummer in Reilly's band.
Also cast in the movie is Raymond J. Barry, who will play Cox's cold and angry father who is constantly telling him he is a failure.
Jenna Fischer and Kristen Wiig already are onboard.
The film is scheduled to start shooting this month in Los Angeles.
Meadows, who recently signed with APA, recently wrapped "Nobody Knows Anything" and is a contributor to "The Colbert Report." His feature credits include "The Benchwarmers" and "Mean Girls." He is additionally repped by Brillstein-Grey.
Barry's most recent credits include features "Steel City," for which he is nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, and "Little Children."
Jack White Walks Hard as Elvis Presley
Source: IESB.net
John C. Reilly is walking pretty hard these days as Dewey Cox in "Walk Hard," a parody based on the "poor boy with musical talent does good then gets into drugs and goes downhill and then redeems himself and does good again" storyline.
We got an email today with some news on casting of the film. Seems Jack White of the White Stripes is making an appearance as Elvis Presley. Will Ferrell and Jack Black are also rumored to have bit parts. Here ya go --
Jack White of the White Stripes has just filmed (or will shortly film) a cameo in Jake Kasdan's music-industry comedy "Walk Hard" starring John C. Reilly. White is playing Elvis Presley.
My source is 100% certain about the White cameo, but he also thought that Reilly's Oscar-night cronies Jack Black and Will Ferrell are also playing bit parts in the movie, probably as real-world musician figures as well.
I don't think this has been reported anywhere yet...
Hey if Kurt Russell can play Elvis, so can Jack White. White and his Stripes counterpart Meg, reunite this summer after a few years hiatus at the Bonnaroo Music and Art Festival.
I'm waiting for the Seth Rogan cameo, can't be a Judd Apatow movie without Seth Rogan.
In other "Walk Hard" news, our local SoCal newpaper The Daily Bulletin reported on the shooting in Pomona for the film and dammit why didn't I know they were shooting there? It's only 20 minutes from me! Ah well, here's the low down,
Leroy's Lounge, Sherrods Jewelry, Quality Meats, the Shot Glass Bar and the Shoe Shop all sprung to life in one block of Pomona's Garey Avenue last week, complete with stylish vintage signs.
A retro-style economic revival?
Alas, no. The storefronts were phony, added for a movie shoot requiring a 1950s look.
That wasn't all. The Mayfair Hotel's facade, hidden for months by construction screens, was revealed in freshly painted splendor. For the movie, it will double as the Linden Arms Apartments, with the faux Maureen's Flowers next door.
Along Third Street, the Fox Pomona became the Romona after the change out of one letter in the neon marquee. Cooney's Hardware ("Open Since 1926"), Pee Gee Paint and Olson's Bakery were installed nearby.
The parking lot by the Mayfair became McAvoy Motors - "Brand New '54 Models! They're Here!" a banner boasted - and Planet Recording Service set up shop feet away.
"All of a sudden the town is looking a whole lot better," downtown landlord Dave Armstrong told me approvingly as we surveyed the handiwork Friday.
The work was done for "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story." The Columbia Pictures comedy about a musician's struggle over adversity parodies recent Johnny Cash and Ray Charles biopics. John C. Reilly stars.
Pomona's vintage downtown "had an all-American feeling" perfect for 1950s scenes, Assistant Location Manager Jim Small told me during Friday's all-day shoot.
Passers-by gathered on the sidewalk and Verizon employees gawked out their windows as the brief car-lot scene was readied and filmed. By the way, this was a few paces from East Second Street, where colorful paint from "The Cat in the Hat" shoot in 2002 is still visible.
Six "Walk Hard" vignettes were filmed in Pomona. Merchants were cooperative, which is "the kind of thing that brings (movie crews) back," Small said.
The scenery should be gone by today.
Too bad. The signs were so cool, I was kind of hoping someone would open a real Leroy's Lounge.
Walk Hard is set for a February 2008 release date.
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Trailer here. (http://www.slashfilm.com/2007/08/15/walk-hard-movie-trailer/#more-4187)
Release Date: December 14th, 2007 (wide)
Starring: John C. Reilly, Jenna Fischer, Kristen Wiig, Tim Meadows, Raymond J. Barry
Directed by: Jake Kasdan
Premise: Singer Dewey Cox overcomes adversity to become a musical legend.
This looks awesome.
"in my dreams you're blowing me... some kisses"
"let's play machete fight!"
best trailer ever
To expand my thoughts: what's so brilliant about this is that it looks exactly like one of the movies its a parody of. Most spoofs look like shit -- this looks like a real movie, which throws the obvious jokes for a loop. Brilliant!
Quote from: Ghostboy on August 16, 2007, 02:33:33 PM
To expand my thoughts: what's so brilliant about this is that it looks exactly like one of the movies its a parody of. Most spoofs look like shit -- this looks like a real movie, which throws the obvious jokes for a loop. Brilliant!
I'm glad that the Date Movie/Epic Movie guys can't make Biopic Movie now. This movie's going to rock.
I love that ridiculously overdramatic music in the scene with JCR and Kristen Wiig.
Already a Second Trailer here. (http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809833581/video/3727302/)
oh shit! Jack White as Elvis! HA!....
trailers are going to ruin this aren't they...
fuck.
A second trailer?
No thanks.
I know I wanna see this.
Four minutes was already more than enough.
Goddamn previews.... "It's gonna be funny! See! And what about this! And this! Oh, and this joke! Come see these jokes! You'll also see this joke!..."
This is hilarious... I laughed so hard with the first trailer I dont want to watch the second one...
you dudes are missin out on some awesome jokes
i only saw the first ten seconds of the second trailer.
\
fucking hilarious.,
I rather see them in the theater, it's like the spider pig joke, I laughed so hard when I saw it here that when it happened in the movie it lost a little hilarity, they should have saved that one even though it made me want to see the movie.
Walk Hard
Source: Entertainment Weekly
It was around the third day of shooting when director Jake Kasdan decided that Walk Hard — a satirical biopic about fictional music legend Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly) — was probably going to work out okay. ''We shot this elaborate scene in a recording studio,'' says Kasdan. ''Dewey's meeting his band for the first time: Chris Parnell, [Tim] Meadows, and [Asssscat's] Matt Besser. And everybody's in perfect 1955 period clothes...and we've got the songs, which we'd been working on for months...and in between, they're improvising in this incredibly loose style. When you see really great improvisationalists, it's like watching a magic trick.''
If you're a fan of modern comedy and you're not highlighting Dec. 21 on your calendar right now, there might be something wrong with you. With apologies to Johnny Cash, Walk Hard traces the story of Dewey Cox, spanning more than six decades, countless musical genres, tons of sex, and every drug known to man. It could be one of winter's most outrageous films, but for Reilly, the film had another thing going for it. ''They say all rock stars want to be actors, and all actors want to be rock stars,'' he says. ''I fit strongly in that category.'' Reilly has recorded more than 30 songs in character — which the team hopes to collect onto a CD set titled, naturally, A Box of Cox.
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This is gonna be sweeet. And this poster is fucking hilarious!!
Apatow, Kasdan and Reilly Walk Hard
Source: ComingSoon
**READ AT OWN RISK**
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the fictional biopic and spoof on rock stars won't hit theaters until December, but ComingSoon.net got a sneak peek at selective footage when Columbia Pictures invited us to preview scenes from the film and talk to producer Judd Apatow, director Jake Kasdan and the star of the movie, John C. Reilly.
The comedy starts off with the crowd cheering and Reilly leaning against a wall with his head in his fists about to go on stage to perform, but before he goes does, he flashes back to his life as a child and we see the tragic accident of his brother and his father wishing it was Dewey that died instead. Sound familiar? Think Walk the Line/Johnny Cash.
In the flashback, we also see Cox at age 14 singing in a high school talent show which causes great controversy among his family and other adults in the audience. As a result, he's kicked out of the house and runs away with his 12-year-old girlfriend (Kristen Wigg) to pursue his music career.
Another clip we were shown was the beginning of the rock star's troubles. He married his high school sweetheart, but soon became intensely attracted to his backup singer Darlene, played by Jenna Fischer, who very much resembles June Carter Cash in the scene. They were singing "Let's Duet" and the tension between them was hilarious as they tried not to give into the temptation. Here's the lyrics:
Dewey Cox: Hello, Darling.
Darlene: Hello, Mr. Cox.
Cox: Are you ready to sing one?
Darlene: I'm always ready.
Cox: Alright. In my dreams you're blowing me...Some kisses.
Darlene: That's one of my favorite things to do.
Cox: You and I could go down...In history.
Darlene: That's what I'm planning to do with you.
Together: Let's Duet. In ways that make us feel good. Let's Duet.
Darlene: Uh! Dewey Cox, I am not that type of woman.
Cox: Alright.
Darlene: That doesn't mean we can't still be friends.
Cox: Okay, then here's to us being great friends.
Darlene: I can't. We're friends! (Slaps Dewey in the face)
Cox: I'm going to beat off...All my demons.
Darlene: That's what loving Jesus ought to bring.
Cox: Looking in your eyes, I start believing.
Darlene: Lets bring this whisper to s shout.
Together: Lets Duet. In ways that make us feel good. Put two and two together, perfect harmony. We know its only natural. Lets do it.
Cox: I only want to make out...What you're saying.
Darlene: Read my lips. Its what you are looking for.
Cox: Here I am, sneaking up behind ya.
Darlene: You can always come in my backdoor.
After the clips, Apatow, Reilly and Kasdan came out on stage and talked to us about their new film.
ComingSoon.net: Why don't you start off by telling us how you came up with the idea for this film?
Jake Kasdan: It was just sort of a thought one night, to make a fake biopic. I called up Judd after a day or two of having that thought in my head and said, "Does this seem funny?" We then started writing it together. Within a few days, even. Just kind of coming up with rock biopic jokes. We are both big music fans. And we enjoy crazy stories about rock lore. We just started throwing things back and forth. We discovered that if you took real stories that you knew and made them five percent weirder, or even just two percent weirder, you had something that was pretty out there and pretty funny.
Judd Apatow: We started watching every single biopic we could get our hands on. We even watched the Marilyn Monroe HBO biography. Just any kind of biopic.
Kasdan: And also rock documentaries. I was watching people's actual life stories.
Apatow: There was this great, terrible Jimi Hendrix rock biopic from Showtime that was just great. I just recommend that you hunt it down at your video store. It looks terrible. They would cut to stock footage from the '60s. Then they would cut to him. He would be sitting in these over-lit rooms. Very early on, we thought, "If we can convince John C. Reilly to do this, this would be incredible." So we started talking to him during the writing process.
CS: Can you guys talk about creating the soundtrack? How did that all come about?
John C. Reilly: The creation of the soundtrack? Jake can probably speak pretty elegantly about this too. But we had this great stable of songwriters. And we kind of had this friendly, open competition. We had our own web page server, and people would post their songs on there. "What do you think about this?" And, "What do you think about this?" A lot of them started coming in. The one that really knocked it out of the park was Marshal Crenshaw's "Walk Hard." The title song. There were a bunch of great songwriters that we worked with. Mike Viola, Dan Burn, Charlie Bottoms. Did I miss anybody?
Apatow: Mike Andrews.
Reilly: Yeah, Mike Andrews.
Kasdan: Mike Parks came in and worked on the Beach Boys psychedelic period. We asked him to make fun of himself.
Reilly: We started putting this album together more than a year ago. The cool thing about working on this movie was, I wasn't nervous on the first day of shooting like I usually am because I felt like I'd been meditating on the character for four months while we were recording. We kind of found a lot of the tone of the movie, and a lot of the ideas as we were recording. Once we started, it was really hard to stop. We recorded thirty-five songs. It's hard enough to make one album. But somehow, after only four months, we had thirty-five songs. Five of which were covers. But still, that was thirty original songs. I was pretty blown away by that. And it kind of gave us a tonal blueprint for the whole movie, when we started shooting it. It was easier with this music that we already had.
Kasdan: It seemed like in the beginning, the album was going to be the hardest part of this. Like there were several conversations that Judd and I had in the very beginning. We were just trying to figure out how funny the songs should be versus how good they should be. And if they could be both things at once. It was about coming up with a strategy. It's seemed daunting to come up with an album. There was a lot of music written into the script. Titles for songs. There were specific scenes that were built around these songs. And its true. We opened it up to a whole bunch of people. And we ended up with about five people that wrote the majority of the songs. These were guys that I had actually known before. Dan Burn and Mike Viola were two of the first guys that I ever mentioned this movie to.
Apatow: Mike was the voice on "That Thing You Do!"
Kasdan: Yeah, he is the voice of John and Shep's characters in "That Thing You Do!" And Dan has recorded a bunch of albums with his band called The Candy Britches. So he's done a couple of albums himself. I had a feeling that both of those guys would be great contributors. Once it got going, suddenly, everybody had more ideas. It got to where we could say, "Is there any song that we haven't thought of that we don't have?" And we could generate them pretty fast.
Reilly: To Jake and Judd's credit, a lot of the songs already existed in the script as concepts. A song like "Guilty as Charged." About him taking these things he'd done in his life and how he turned them into a song. So the songwriters already had a leg up on a lot of these songs. Because they already had a song title or the feeling that a lot of these songs were supposed to convey. Rather than purely coming up with some idea. The script guided everybody.
CS: John, can you talk about your influences? Who did you study and what were you trying to convey with the voice of the character?
Reilly: The cool thing about the music in the movie is that I didn't really have to pick one person. As the time periods move on, the guy is such a chameleon, that he goes with the times. So, when he hits the '60s, I was looking at people like Elvis and Roy Orbison. Even a little early Johnny Cash. When it started to move out of the '60s, I looked at Brian Wilson. As it went along, there was a new person to emulate. I have very eclectic music tastes myself. So, yeah, like they say. Every rock star wants to be an actor, and every actor wants to be a rock star. This was a dream come true for me. Just the studio part. Just recording the album in the studio was a real dream come true. Not just with the singers and the songwriters, but also with the musicians they collected. I was walking into this dream job. I'd done music in movies before. But much more limited. Usually one or two songs here or there. I mean, I think the music in this movie stands alone as a great achievement. I am really proud of the movie. But I am also really proud of the Box of Cox that we will have coming out. It will include all thirty songs.
CS: Joaquin Phoenix worked specifically with T-Bone Burnett. Did you have someone you worked with?
Reilly: Well, yeah. We just mentioned Mike Andrews as the producer of the music. He was the one that was pulling all of the levers and arranging the music. He was the one guiding the musicians, and pulling the right groups of people together for the different sounds that we needed. He was our guru. I'll mess up if I try to name everybody. I will miss someone, so I just wont do that. But, Mike was the ringleader in the studio.
Apatow: John brings a lot of heat on his own. He can really sing.
Reilly: I was about to say that. I bring a lot of heat on my own.
Kasdan: He wasn't like someone that had to be taught from the beginning. He knew it.
Reilly: I grew up doing musicals as a kid. And I had a lot of music in my family. So, yeah. Though, this movie made me feel like I'd been working my whole life for this moment. I didn't know it was coming. I didn't know it would be like this. But everything that I've learned before this has come into play in this movie.
CS: Jake and Judd, this might be one of the broader things you have done. Maybe since "The Ben Stiller Show." Has it been freeing to go a little bit larger with some of the comedy?
Apatow: Yeah. I remember we used to do these U2 sketches back in 1992. Where Bono was played by Ben. And we did this very elaborate Metallica sketch. Metallica did the theme to a body-switching movie starring Fred Willard and Pauly Shore. That's why we were cancelled. These things had some very dense levels. So, for me, as soon as Jake mentioned the idea, I thought this was going to be the most fun thing ever. My grandfather was the producer that produced the first Janis Joplin record. He did a lot of albums, and a lot of jazz. So it's always been an arena that I have been fascinated by. I also thought it was time to make a movie where you saw a man's penis. In a comedy. For a long time. I thought, "We already did the crowning shot...What else could we do?"
Kasdan: Not to give anything away.
Apatow: Yeah, not to give anything away, there is a penis in this movie. I'm not going to obsess about how great the songs are. There is a penis.
CS: Whose penis is it? Is it a stunt penis?
Apatow: Well, that's the surprise. It's my penis. I have gotten a big ego, and I just thought I wanted to show it.
Reilly: One of the cool things about making this movie, and one of the great things about doing biopics, and I have been in a couple of them, is the level of production design and the attention to detail. Usually you have the epic spread of the time period. But, often times when you are on those kinds of movies, there is this almost sanctimonious feeling about it. "We have to get it right for the memory." There is this overly serious vibe. Like, lets talk to some people. And read about them. See what they really say. The cool thing about this, you get all the bang of doing a real biopic, but you also got to have so much fun on the set every day. We got to make fun of it, yet we also got to live in all of these different time periods. And the music. I will go back to the music again. The cool thing about the music was that we didn't set out to write bad music. Or dumb music. You very quickly learn that when you set out to write music, even if it's meant to be funny, that you really have to put your heart in it. You have to try your very best to write a good song. It's really hard to write one good song, let alone thirty. I really hope that comes across. Just the amount of care and love for music that went into making it. Everyone here, and behind the scenes, really has a love for the musician's journey. We're not just taking the piss.
Kasdan: And all of the guys in the band. Tim Meadows, Chris Parnell, and Mike Besser are all improv comics. None of them played. And they all learned all of the songs live. That required a tremendous amount of work. Tim had never played drums. But he spot-on can now. Those guys can play those songs now. They sat there and learned it. They gave it as much intensity and devotion as if they were playing any other type of character.
CS: The tone of this film is very close to the tone of "The Rutles: All You Need is Cash."
Apatow: Oh, sure. That is one of the great ones of all time. It is very daunting to look at films like "The Rutles: All You Need is Cash" and try to make a funny movie about music. Their music is so great. All of those Eric Idle songs are powerful. They were fantastic. They hold up. That whole movie holds up. So, we were aware of that. We had a lot of conversations about how funny the songs should be. What makes me laugh is that a lot of the songs are beautiful. If you weren't really listening to the words, you wouldn't realize how dumb some of them are. I was listening to this song the other day. It was called Dewey Cox Died Today.
Reilly: I write my own posthumous song while I am still alive. Before I died, so that I could get it all on record correctly.
Apatow: I felt bad that it was such a dumb song. When this is over, someone should write normal lyrics for this song.
CS: Do you get nervous poking fun at a band like the Beatles?
Apatow: Do I think Yoko Ono is going to come after me?
Reilly: That has yet to be seen. If they get mad. I hope not. It was pretty hard to cast the Beatles. Should we tell the truth to the journalists? Seriously, where are you going to find someone who looks at least vaguely like them, or seems like them in sprit? And they had to be funny. They couldn't be afraid of this daunting challenge of playing Paul McCartney or John Lennon. Then to get four of them that are available on the same day. It was an on going game every day. "Who else do we have for the Beatles? We need someone to play the Beatles. It shoots in a week."
Apatow: And then Justin Long shows up and he has a George Harrison impression? He's just got that in his back pocket, waiting for the call.
Reilly: And Jason Schwartzman is obsessed with Ringo. He has been making the Ringo face his whole life. Once they all got there, we were like, "Of course! This is the perfect team of people."
CS: Were there any surprises as far as casting?
Apatow: Well, John, you can talk about our music cameos.
Reilly: Yeah. Well, another tough part to cast was Elvis. Elvis Presley has a brief walk-on. He comes off the stage just as I go on to sing that song. That was another one. You'd be amazed at what scaredy cats some of these actors are. You say, "You want to play Elvis?" And they say, "Oh, I don't know man. That's a lot. Everyone knows who Elvis is." And I'm like, "So what. Why don't you forget about all of that and come have some fun." It turns out the only guy with balls is Jack White from the White Stripes. He showed up in the middle of a really busy schedule for him. And he was amazing. I don't think he'd ever acted before. He was in "Cold Mountain." He had a small part. But, he really hung with the improv. I don't know what is actually going to end up in the movie. These guys are still toying with a couple of different versions of that scene. But we did one take where all we did was talk in what I call Tupelo Pidgeon. This weird sort of country talk, where only he and I can understand each other. We are both from the south. It sort of becomes a mix of those things right now.
Apatow: I found Jack White irritating. He is the coolest guy on earth. He is the greatest rock musician. And writer, and performer that you have ever seen. F**k him! What is that? Now he is stepping on my territory. He is so talented. It was so daunting to all of us. He can do what we do in his sleep. As an after thought.
Reilly: Through another person, I was told, "Jack was so nervous! Thank you for being so nice to him."
Kasdan: He really couldn't have been looser. He spent hours improvising with John. It was never the same scene twice. Which we think of as a good thing.
Apatow: And Eddie Vedder came. Dewey gets his lifetime achievement award, and Eddie does the over-the-top induction speech. That was irritating too, because Eddie nailed it on the first take. He did it perfectly.
Reilly: That's because he lived it, dude. He already did it for real.
Apatow: He can act as well.
Kasdan: He actually inducted R.E.M. into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He can act, and he has pitch perfect comedy timing.
Apatow: And he is handsome as sh*t. He is way to good looking as well.
Reilly: I was really in awe when all of these people showed up to support our little movie. Like Jackson Brown, and Ghostface Killer, and Frank Black, and Lyle Lovett, and Frankie Muniz. Is he still in the movie? I'm not trying to be mean. Frankie really is in the movie. He came out of retirement, and took time from his racing career, to play Buddy Holly in one scene. But I don't know if that will stay in the movie.
CS: So are you going for an R rating?
Apatow: Why? Because of the penis? Is that R?
Reilly: It's not hard. Does that get us anything?
Apatow: An R? That basically means a little boy can look down and see it. But he is not allowed to look up and see one on the screen. I don't understand this country.
CS: How much of a biography did you create for Dewey before writing the script?
Apatow: We are not the type of people that sit and write eighty pages of bio background. Because we are lazy. We were forced to figure it out. We had to figure out the details of his tragic yet triumphant life.
Reilly: A lot of the back story stuff we came up with in the studio, when we were recording the music. A song would remind us of something from a specific time period. We filled in a lot of blanks that way. Jake was there when we were recording a lot of the music.
CS: did you guys look at the recent spat of spoof movies for an idea of what not to do?
Apatow: I studied them. No.
CS: Some of them are so bad.
Apatow: Tell that to my ten-year-old daughter. She digs them. But, no, we didn't. But I am a fan of the spoof movies. Some are funnier than others. The Zucker Brothers made some of the best spoof movies of all time. "Airplane!" is probably the funniest movie ever made. There has never been a movie that has gotten bigger laughs in the theater than "Airplane!" when it came out. So, I think, like all movies, there are good ones and bad ones. We just thought it would be fun to make one that wasn't bad. This isn't a joke for joke spoof. This movie is more making fun of the genre and the structure of the movies. And if you watch a lot of biopic movies, a lot of the scenes are the same scenes. It's almost unavoidable. When you are telling the story of a musician, there are going to be multiple wives, and rehab, and loss of senses.
CS: So, Dewey Cox is this chameleon. Was there any genre of music that you couldn't get in? Does Dewey have a rap career?
Kasdan: There was actually this funny sequence where Dewey is older, and semi-retired. This rap star samples "Walk Hard" and makes the filthiest song you have ever heard. And that rapper's name is Lil' Nutsack. That song is really dirty. We asked this guy to write us a dirty rap incorporating the lyrics from "Walk Hard." And man, it is really filthy.
Apatow: Look at me. I'm embarrassed. I don't even like that it's on my computer at home.
Kasdan: What's funny is, when we were shooting that scene, everyone was referring to him as Nutsack. That's the way it was written in the script. We got a memo from the legal department saying that we couldn't call him Nutsack because there are four other rappers named Nutsack. So you have to change his name. So we changed it to Lil' Nutsack. Which is fine. There were four different spellings of Nutsack.
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Quote from: MacGuffin on October 13, 2007, 12:12:04 AM
Apatow: I found Jack White irritating.... F**k him! What is that? Now he is stepping on my territory.
This seems like some other source will take this out of context. It's really just asking for it.
That first poster is a parody of a Jim Morrison photo. What about the one that Mac just posted?
i'm gonna go ahead and guess.. johnny cash finger, ray charles sunnies, and michael buble tie. :shock:
Test Screening of Walk Hard tomorrow (tuesday) @ the Arclight in Hollywood at 7 pm.
call 310-726-3538 to RSVP
some guy was handing out little slips for the screening. Don't know if you need them to get in, when I called to RSVP they just asked for my guest's and my name and age...nothing about a confirmation code to write down or anything...
if you have nothing to do....
International Trailer here. (http://ukpress.waytoblue.com/media/video/walk_hard_redband_trailer_1500k.mov)
ok, THAT made me laugh. this can't come soon enough.
Columbia puts 'Dewey' on tour duty
John C. Reilly to perform in character across U.S.
Source: Variety
Judd Apatow-produced films usually don't need much marketing help.
But in the case of Apatow's "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," Columbia Pictures is launching a novel tie-in for the unconventional comedy. Star John C. Reilly will tour the country in character as Dewey Cox, the fictional rock 'n' roll icon whose music influenced a nation. Reilly will perform live as Cox with his band, the Hard Walkers, for the "Cox Across America Tour."
The tour kicks off Wednesday at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and will wend through Chicago; Austin, Texas; Nashville; San Francisco; Los Angeles; and New York's Knitting Factory.
Each show will be preceded by a special screening of "Walk Hard." Tour serves Sony by promoting the film, which opens Dec. 21, as well as Columbia Records' soundtrack. The album includes 30 original songs and hits stores today.
Col is looking to repeat the successful marketing stunt it carried out last year with another Reilly starrer, "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby." For that film, Will Ferrell made the rounds on the NASCAR circuit as the eponymous Ricky Bobby. That comedy grossed more than $148 million domestically for the studio.
"He's unleashing his inner rock star," said Valerie Van Galder, president of domestic marketing for Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, who credits Reilly and Apatow as the brains behind the ploy. "But this is a little different than 'Talladega Nights,' because it actually requires him to perform live. It works, though, because in addition to being a prodigiously talented actor, John is also a fabulous singer."
The Jake Kasdan-helmed film also stars Jenna Fischer, Tim Meadows and Kristen Wiig. Apatow is a co-scripter and producer.
Reilly was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar for the musical "Chicago," which included a solo number for him.
While unusual, the concert promo is not unprecedented. In 2004, Kevin Spacey launched an 11-city tour to promote the Bobby Darin biopic "Beyond the Sea." Spacey performed in character at venues including L.A.'s Wiltern Theater.
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John C. Reilly and Jake Kasdan on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13&prgDate=3-Dec-07
I remember liking the trailer, but this eventually morphed into some boner comedy in mind, and I've been writing it off. But after hearing this interview, I cannot wait to see this movie. Kasdan has definitely put some thought into it, and they played three songs. The Bob Dylan song had me cracking up! Listen at your own risk, they do discuss some jokes that have now convinced me to see it, though I wish I didn't know about them.
Saw this tonight.
Very good. Not the most impressive Apatow related comedy this year, but certainly the most ambitious.
All the jokes were very easy, some were almost lazy... but that didn't stop it from being continually enjoyable and funny. There are even plenty of jokes not spoiled by the many, many long trailers that are already out there.
The cameos, even those spoiled in the trailers, were good clever without being distracting.
The songs worked. Enough that I just bought the soundtrack.
Actually, everything I'm saying sounds more glowing than my response to the film. I don't really have much to fault, though.
Just... very... pleasant.
Although, I'm curious what audience is gonna see it. We'll see.
HOLLYWOOD - Knocked Up director Judd Apatow is on a mission to put penises in every movie he makes--and end America's fear of male members.
The filmmaker placed a penis behind actor John C. Reilly's head in an orgy scene in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and watched as audience members stormed out of a test screening in disgust.
Undeterred, Apatow kept the penis footage in the film--and then made a "c**kumentary" about shooting the scene, which will appear on the DVD.
He says, "The original shot was way longer, where the penis is in close-up, and then one night we showed it to a test audience and 22 people walked out. I think we went too far with too much penis.
"We went with different angles to make sure there weren't too much testicles being shown... America fears the penis and that's something I'm going to help them get over.
"I'm gonna get a penis in every movie I do from now on. When this writers strike ends, that is my dream. It really makes me laugh in this day and age, with how psychotic our world is, that anyone is troubled by seeing any part of the human body; that is amusing to me."
This was great! My favorite apatow yet, which is saying something...
spoiler...
The rehab scene was hilarious... i never realised how often movies handled "coming down" like that...
"UUUghhhh... im so c-c-cold..... AAhhhh... im so HOT!!!...." <--gold.
Very few laughs.
The majority was boring, though others in the audience seemed to enjoy it more than I and my friend did.
I enjoyed some of the songs and the references to different musicians, but it was just a waste for me, overall.
I might say more at a later date. Don't really care to talk about this too much right now.
When I heard the Fresh Air interview, which focused on the music (which is just fabulous), I knew I had to see this. I was not disappointed. Within fifteen minutes, I think I had twice cried laughing. It settles down a bit, but the parody genius is carried to the end.
Well, almost. Some jokes are explained too much, like the jew thing, the mixed race baby thing, the beatles thing. And the last five minutes or so was maddening. It's as if they switched off the subtlety filter and dumped all their scrapped ideas and cut footage into that last song. It reminded me of the gag reel that runs through the credits of a cheap mid-90s comedy. Great movies with horrible endings annoy me. But I still like this one very much.
EDIT: Just saw the trailer. It's so misleading... they picked out all the lowbrow stuff. It also spoils half of the best jokes. What a crap trailer.
more people should be seeing this. the movie doesn't take itself seriously in any way and so just about every line is hilarious.
what a fun movie.
Lame movie. I expected a lot out of this and came away with very few laughs. It reminded me too much of the recent string of bad Will Ferrel movies. The only differences is that the references were good ones that people who knew about music could get, but they were so obvious and blah it didn't matter anyways. The Beatles scene was really funny (Paul Rudd can still do no wrong) and so was the midget rally.
I love John C. Reilly, but his character was made to be a poor man's Will Ferrel only. Considering Ferrel's style of movie has become such a bad trend that has influenced other bad movies, replicating it doesn't seem like a good idea at all. Not even a better subject can really do much to solve the problems. All the jokes and nods to its own superficiality was too forced.
GT, you seem quite stuck on the Will Ferrel thing, and it really doesn't apply. The humor is not about Dewey Cox's outrageousness or goofiness. It's about parody. How is this film at all related to Will Ferrel?
Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on December 28, 2007, 02:01:52 AM
GT, you seem quite stuck on the Will Ferrel thing, and it really doesn't apply. The humor is not about Dewey Cox's outrageousness or goofiness. It's about parody. How is this film at all related to Will Ferrel?
You don't think Will Ferrel's movies have some semblance of parody? Just because they aren't takes on well known figures doesn't mean they are. His movies mock all different things. This movie is as overblown as a Ferrel movie is.
GT did you stay after the credits were over?
Quote from: Cinephile on December 28, 2007, 08:54:22 PM
GT did you stay after the credits were over?
Naw, I had to be somewhere. What happened?
Spoilers... I guess...
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on December 28, 2007, 08:58:59 PM
Quote from: Cinephile on December 28, 2007, 08:54:22 PM
GT did you stay after the credits were over?
Naw, I had to be somewhere. What happened?
at the very end of the credits you hear another guy singing the Walk Hard song.. and you think, who the hell's that? then they show a black and white clip of "the Real Dewey Cox" and its reilly 'singing' on a stool real slow and quiet and the whole tone of the song is mellow. the idea obviously was that the real dewey cox wasn't even as glamorous as he's made to be in the movie. because of the different singing voice, you get a sense that the 'real' one was actually a little boring and so the hollywoodized version had to juice him up a bit.
i thought it was worth pointing out because i felt it added that extra layer to really hit it home that this wasn't some ferrell knockoff, they really had crafted this to be a full fledged spoof of music biopics. that final shot with a boring black and white dewey cox from the 50's really blew my mind a little bit.
It's a good idea, but I don't know what it would have changed. I can argue structure in a comedy all day long, but it doesn't matter as much because it's all so subjective. It still wouldn't have made the rest of the film funny for me.
i know what you mean... i just think kasdan and apatow took a smarter approach to writing a spoof and that their efforts were far superior to anything ferrell and mckay have tried to do. so even if it looks like they're trying to emulate ferrell's work.. they've outshone him nonetheless.
funniest movie of the year.
in the age of Scary/Epic/Date Movie and the upcoming shitfest Meet the Spartans (http://www.meetthespartans.com/)... dewey cox is exactly what the world needed.
SPOILERS
the Don't Look Back interview and the animated beatles segment seriously had me crying with laughter. amazing.
Walk Hard has Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker-style gags where people say and do ridiculous things with a perfectly straight face, but it is less about those kind of jokes than about parodying the musical biopic genre. The portentously foreshadowing dialogue, the dramatic incidents, the phases in Dewey's life, are the main targets of the film. So the film is less dense with gags than it could have been, but that's how it should be.
Tim Meadows had some of the funniest lines in the film.
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on December 27, 2007, 02:24:28 AM
I love John C. Reilly, but his character was made to be a poor man's Will Ferrel only. Considering Ferrel's style of movie has become such a bad trend that has influenced other bad movies, replicating it doesn't seem like a good idea at all. Not even a better subject can really do much to solve the problems. All the jokes and nods to its own superficiality was too forced.
The scene with JCR in his underwear was Ferrellish, but Ferrell couldn't have pulled this role off. JCR plays it with complete and utter sincerity, as if he doesn't know he's in a comedy.
It is a very funny movie throughout, but not quite the sum of its parts.
Of the three Apatows this year, this was by far the weakest one. I'm a sucker for stupid comedies with a little bit of a brains like this and I laughed my ass off through a lot of it but I was hoping for it to be legendary, and it just wasn't. Too many lulls, probably the result of too many gags and having to reshape the movie to be reasonably coherent, if the trailer half-full of footage that didn't make the movie is any gauge.
Quote from: Ravi on January 01, 2008, 01:07:02 PM
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on December 27, 2007, 02:24:28 AM
I love John C. Reilly, but his character was made to be a poor man's Will Ferrel only. Considering Ferrel's style of movie has become such a bad trend that has influenced other bad movies, replicating it doesn't seem like a good idea at all. Not even a better subject can really do much to solve the problems. All the jokes and nods to its own superficiality was too forced.
The scene with JCR in his underwear was Ferrellish, but Ferrell couldn't have pulled this role off. JCR plays it with complete and utter sincerity, as if he doesn't know he's in a comedy.
I'm kind of torn because, though Reilly was perfect in this role and better than Ferrell would have been, I couldn't help but think that if Ferrell had made this instead of Talladega Nights, I wouldn't be sick of him now.
Quote from: Ravi on January 01, 2008, 01:07:02 PM
Tim Meadows had some of the funniest lines in the film.
He really is the best part of everything he's in. If only he had better writers for the Ladies Man movie.
In a perfect world, Walk Hard would be as unfunny as it would ever get. This, however, is not a perfect world and so, movies like the ones Hedwig mentioned two posts up bump this into the upper echelon of movie comedies by default.
Walk Hard Backlash: Apatow's army gathers one evening...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNeOyax79k (http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNeOyax79k)
that pisses me off that there was a bit after the credits.
my friend actually alluded that there might be, but then the theatre turned on the lights and the attendants were looking at us with body language for us to get out.
i laughed pretty hard at times.
this is actually the first Apatow related thing i've seen.
i need to get around to seeing the other stuff.
oh wait, i did see Heavyweights on tv one time...
it looks like this film really bombed though.
any theories as to why?
Quote from: bigideas on January 05, 2008, 11:41:50 PM
it looks like this film really bombed though.
any theories as to why?
Superbad and Knocked Up were Apatow related comedies... but so was The TV Set, and audiences stayed far, far away from that.
His name certainly holds sway for a lot of discerning audiences bloggers, and magazine writers... but for most Friday night audiences, I think the biggest selling points of an Apatow comedy are dick jokes, dudes playing X-Box... and more dick jokes.
Walk Hard certainly had plenty of dick jokes, but for the average asshole, it was a comedy about something they probably didn't give a shit about in the first place... a fictional musician from forty-years ago.
Brian Wilson jokes don't go over so well as "do you know how I know your gay" with the myspace crowd.
There probably is an audience for this... and it'll probably find it on DVD.
Quote from: Cinephile on December 28, 2007, 09:07:04 PM
at the very end of the credits you hear another guy singing the Walk Hard song.. and you think, who the hell's that? then they show a black and white clip of "the Real Dewey Cox" and its reilly 'singing' on a stool real slow and quiet and the whole tone of the song is mellow. the idea obviously was that the real dewey cox wasn't even as glamorous as he's made to be in the movie. because of the different singing voice, you get a sense that the 'real' one was actually a little boring and so the hollywoodized version had to juice him up a bit.
I was going to put this in the "stupidest thing you've ever heard someone say about a movie" thread, but I'll put it here instead.
When the bit at the end of the credits came up, with "The Actual Dewey Cox" on-screen, a guy on the other side of the theater (out of only a handful of people who stayed through the credits) said out loud, as utterly sincere and perplexed as a man can be, "Wait, there's an
actual Dewey Cox?"
Quote from: john on January 06, 2008, 12:48:42 AM
Quote from: bigideas on January 05, 2008, 11:41:50 PM
it looks like this film really bombed though.
any theories as to why?
Walk Hard certainly had plenty of dick jokes, but for the average asshole, it was a comedy about something they probably didn't give a shit about in the first place... a fictional musician from forty-years ago.
that could be very well why.
i also wonder if the time of the year has something to do with it?
a lot of families go to films together at this time and this is definitely not a film for kids.
also having "cox" and "hard" in the title might have something to do with.
then again, 3 of the top 10 are R films.
it was a good gamble though.
you would think the popularity of Cash/Walk the Line and Apatow's success would make it golden.
Amazon is listing the DVD and Blu-Ray for April 8.
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This was really funny. I was looking forward to it for a long time but just got to see it today.
It was a bit long though. I got distracted at some unfunny parts also and I think its cause it was way too long.
John C. Reilly is amazing in this. And I loved all the cameos, especially the Beatles and grownup dead brother Jonah Hill!
The songs also excellent. I'm downloading the soundtrack right now!