Slouching toward Hollywood

Produced for somewhere around $40 million, the picture was a musical about the personal frustrations and career conundrums of a group of film industry professionals. For reasons understood only by Brooks himself, it had been cast with people who could not sing or dance, including Nick Nolte, Julie Kavner, Natasha Richardson, and Albert Brooks. Following disastrous previews, the director was faced with an ugly predicament: he had to cut out all the expensive musical numbers he had spent so many months filming, and turn the movie into a straightforward comedy.

Meanwhile, Polly Platt and assorted studio executives busied themselves with preproduction work on Bottle Rocket--assembling a cast and crew. Brooks pitched in as often as he could--quite often, considering the career nightmare that had unexpectedly entangled him.

The process was slow, but everything was falling into place.
Only one obvious piece was missing: Mr. Henry. It was a small part, but crucial. They had to find just the right guy.

The great James Caan expressed interest. He set up a meeting to talk about the movie and the part with Brooks, Wes, and Owen.

"He was dressed like a big kid," Owen remembers: an oversized surf T-shirt, faded jeans, and cowboy boots. "When he came in the office, everybody was trying to put him at ease and make him feel comfortable. It turned out the thing he felt most comfortable talking about was karate and kicking people's asses."

Caan had been studying martial arts for some time with a smallish middle-aged Asian man named Tak, who accompanies Caan all over the country to film shoots. Tak is a martial-arts expert who acted as technical advisor on a number of chopsocky movies; he carried around a wallet full of pictures of himself posed beside various second-rung action celebrities, including Christopher Lambert. He was Caan's physical trainer, spiritual advisor, and close personal friend. "Jimmy calls Tak his master," Wes explains.

Caan decided to strut his stuff. "Some of the moves Tak taught Jimmy were pretty amazing," Owen says. "The rest seemed kind of strange. I wasn't sure why he was so proud of them."

First Caan demonstrated one of the amazing ones--something he called a "submission hold." He grasped one of Owen's arms, then jerked it in an odd direction. To everyone's shock, Owen's arm popped right out of its socket. "Everybody freaked out," Owen says. "Then my shoulder popped right back in, and I told everybody, 'I'm okay! It's all right! I'm okay, see?'"

Then Caan demonstrated a technique he claimed would immobilize any opponent with just one touch. He stood before Owen and poked him in the chest with one knobby index finger. "It kind of hurt, I guess," Owen says. "But I wanted Jimmy to feel good, so I pretended it really, really hurt."

"Ow! That hurt!" Owen cried. Then, perhaps hoping to deflect Caan's attention, he said, "Show Jim!"

James L. Brooks stood up from the couch he'd been sitting on. As Caan walked over to him, he kept repeating, in the melodramatically panicked tones of a victim in a teen slasher film, "No. No. No. No. No."

Caan poked Brooks in the chest. Brooks hurled himself backward onto the couch, crying out in exaggerated agony.

"Holy shit!" Brooks yelled, touching his chest in mock astonishment. "Holy shit! You gotta teach me that, Jimmy!"

Caan smiled. He was very happy.
Enter Mr. Henry.

In the spring of 1994, I'll Do Anything flopped.
Suddenly, Bottle Rocket wasn't a side project to Brooks anymore. It was his chance to rebound from disaster--to prove to Hollywood he still had the magic touch.

Wes and Owen showed him their various drafts. To their relief, Brooks seemed to like what he saw.

Sometimes, though, Wes wondered if the rewritten scripts explained too much. But he didn't obsess over it. The shoot was drawing near. Come November of 1994, Bottle Rocket would finally take off.

But first there was the matter of the Mentor Wars.
L.M. "Kit" Carson and Cynthia Hargrave were embroiled in a minor power struggle with Brooks and Platt. Carson and Hargrave, whose sensibilities were grittier, were urging Owen and Wes to fight any attempts to turn Bottle Rocket into a more obviously commercial project.

"What drew me to the story was the combination of innocence and irony," Carson says. "If I'd been involved, the irony would have been a lot stronger."

He had many other suggestions as well, involving everything from characterization to pacing. "Cynthia and I were like parents," he says.

But things had obviously changed. Carson realized that as the rewrite process dragged on, Wes and Owen were increasingly inclined to side with Platt and Brooks when disagreements arose.

Finally, just a couple of weeks before Bottle Rocket began shooting in Dallas, Carson got a phone call from Wes. He asked Carson not to come to the set.