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Posted (edited)

Saw this story on another forum. Sounds real enough.

Spoiler

The scene with Nicky Katt and McConaughey trash-talking about Melba Toast is not in the shooting script, and it wasn't on the call sheet either. Not only was the dialog improvised, the shooting of the scene itself was improvised! Those of us on the camera crew who were longtime collaborators with the director knew he needed and wanted as many character moments like this as he could rack up on an overloaded shooting schedule. The studio was bringing tremendous pressure on what they considered a first-time director to economize and simplify the shot list each day, and the battle was taking its toll by the time the scenes at the Emporium were shot. We were more or less told there would be no improvised or additional scenes allowed to be scheduled, despite the director's hopes that many of the cast members could contribute to the film by coming up with small bits to throw in that helped their characters. Oh, you say we can't make the movie our way? "Okay, so we mutiny," we figured.

There was a 16mm documentary crew filming that day and we grabbed a B camera and bootlegged their sound recorder to capture the dialog. We set up the lights, camera and corralled the actors without informing the first AD or the producer and rehearsed it on the QT while the main unit was busy inside shooting other scenes. The scene was shot during the official union lunch break, off the clock. The technical jargon was all given to Mathew by the DP, Lee Daniel, a gearhead himself and the owner of the '67 ragtop GTO from SLACKER. Matthew quickly made it his own. Knowing the specs were possibly partially bogus was a nod to Warren Oates' brags on his GTO in TWO LANE BLACKTOP. Why let the truth get in the way of a friendly challenge?

Nicky's Trans-Am ("White Lightning," another cheeky Trans-Am reference) was a deliberate nod to Jeff Bridge's stolen TA in THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT and the SS may or may not have had all the attributes listed. We did one take of the exchange before we got busted, but as they say in ZZ Top, "(we) let the machine do the talking." There were screaming matches with the suits over this sort of roughshod behavior but we're not sorry. Better to ask forgiveness than permission when you know the answer in advance.

The film needed some genuine car talk to balance the trash talk about girls, of which there was plenty. The pair's rivalry is revisited in the quick montage of driving to the moontower party with a great tossed-off line about bringing your wood screws, "'cause I'm gonna blow your doors.... completely off."

Edited by retread
  • Hook 'Em 3

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