This is perhaps more MPSIMS but since it’s movie related I’ll put it here.
MY COUSIN VINNY is one of those movies like COMING TO AMERICA and STEEL MAGNOLIAS that I’ve seen so often I can pretty much recite it from heart, but having exhausted my Netflix movies this holiday weekend I stuck it in the DVD and for the first time ever listened to the director’s commentary. It’s among the most interesting I’ve ever heard for a movie that I’ve watched a thousand times.
The director was Jonathan Flynn, British writer/actor/director best known as the chief cook and bottle washer responsible for Yes, [Prime] Minister. I knew absolutely nothing about him biographically save that presumably he was alive when My Cousin Vinny was shot (and, for that matter, he still is). Most interesting where the movie is concerned perhaps is that he has a law degree from Cambridge and is a courtroom junkie both in England and here, and he said that one of his pet peeves was legal inaccuracies in movies- things that absolutely could not and would not ever happen in a courtroom- and that he re-wrote a part of the script to minimize these from VINNY. (I had actually heard from lawyers and law professors that it’s one of the best movies about criminal proceedings in terms of this, and now I know why; the main inaccuracy is of course that there’s no way “the two utes” would ever have come to trial that soon.)
More to the point of the title, though, is that he said when he read the script he never saw it as a “fish out of water” comedy that it was marketed as and that most people take it as. He saw it as an Americanized version of a British class comedy: Vinny is the blue collar rookie with street smarts pitted against the “establishment” white collar and patrician Yale educated Judge Haller (Fred Gwynne) and the well-to-do well-connected attorney Jim Trotter, III (who in a moment of biographical exposition mentions to Vinny that he made a fortune as a defense attorney in Birmingham before returning to prosecute criminals instead of getting them acquitted). It’s an interesting revelation, because when you watch it that way it takes on different dimensions.
Other interesting revelations:
Neither Fred Gwynne nor his agent had anything to do with his being cast as he was semi-retired and living on his cattle farm in Virginia. (I remember an interview in which Gwynne said that retirement was the best thing he ever did careerwise because when he was a working actor nobody wanted him and when he left LA and NYC everybody did.) Flynn wanted him because he’d seen him in Pet Semetary which let him know he could do regional accents (“sometimes dead is bettah”) and from Cotton Club which let him know he could do menacing, and from both the fact he was huge was apparent, and once Joe Pesci signed he wanted a very tall man to play the judge to get the “little boy in the principal’s office” visual. Flynn had never seen a single episode of The Munsters and was only vaguely familiar with it and was cautioned that “Americans only know him as Herman Munster” (not quite right but he was typecast to a degree) and thus Flynn wasn’t bothered, and Fred got arguaby the best movie role of his career.
To prepare for the movie Flynn watched several days worth of trials in rural Georgia and used much of them in the movie. He replicated a courtroom almost entirely from the actual one, and little moments that I’d noticed and loved were copied almost verbatim from the trials:
—The judge giving an ass chewing to an attorney who made an under his breath joke
—The white patrician Trotter mentioning “our ancestors back in England” as the camera pans a black juror
—The dignified old lady saying “Fry 'em” when asked about capital punishment
and others.
Also the diet: Flynn had never seen “a grit” until the location shooting (after which he added them to his regular diet) and worked this as well as the lard breakfast and menu with “Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner” written on the inside.
Anyway, there’s more of interest in the commentary- it’s one of the best I’ve listened to throughout the movie. Since there’s no real question or game here I’ll just say use this to discuss anything MY COUSIN VINNY related.
