Fixing Hollywood's Casting Mistakes: "Bonfires of the Vanities"

Fixing Hollywood's casting mistakes

By Matt Zoller Seitz

10. "Casino" (1995)

"This Las Vegas crime epic's reputation has grown since 1995. But skeptical critics and viewers weren't wrong to complain that it revisited terrain that director Martin Scorsese had strip-mined in "Goodfellas." Part of the problem -- for me, at least -- is the casting. Sharon Stone is perfect as the self-destructive gold digger Ginger -- possibly the role she was put on earth to play. Robert De Niro is brilliant as Ginger's would-be Prince Charming, Sam "Ace" Rothstein, an anal-retentive phony tough guy who ensnares his wayward wife with purse strings and subcontracts his violent whims to hired muscle. And as Ace's enforcer Nicky Santoro, Joe Pesci is, well, Joe Pesci. Yes, of course he's funny, scary and repulsive. But let's face it: You saw this performance in 1990. In "Casino," he's playing a slightly smarter version of Tommy DeVito from "Goodfellas," but with a nasal Kansas accent. The scene with the pen is "Go home and get your shine box" revisited. There are no surprises here, except in the hideous death scene, when Nicky's bravado disappears and he wails and begs for his life.

Solution: I would have liked to have seen Pesci and De Niro switch roles. What's on-screen is fine, sometimes better than fine. But think of how much less predictable the main triangle's energy would have been if the leading men were playing each other's parts. So let De Niro be the aggrieved thug-for-hire Nicky -- a character who suggest what De Niro's cocky, explosive Johnny Boy from "Mean Streets" might have become if he'd wised up just a little, developed some ambition, and become a feared veteran mobster -- but one who was denied what he believed was a rightful leadership position because he couldn't shake off that street-corner stink. Powerful as Pesci was in that cornfield scene, De Niro might have made an even stronger impression, because for the last couple of decades he's rarely played men who show fear. Picture De Niro, the cool mastermind of "Heat" and "Ronin," stripped to his skivvies and begging for mercy. Inconceivable, right? All the more reason to wish we could have seen him play it.

And let Pesci play Ace, the would-be visionary who owns Las Vegas but can't buy his wife's love. I think Pesci's Ace would have been as complex and infuriating as De Niro's, but more affecting, maybe even poignant, because Pesci is a much warmer actor than De Niro. If you don't believe me, watch 1992's "The Public Eye," a gangster fantasy that stars Pesci as a tabloid photographer modeled on Weegee. It's less a period drama than a noir-flavored riff on "Beauty and the Beast," with Pesci's awkward shutterbug pining after a gorgeous nightclub owner played by Barbara Hershey. As a movie, it's just OK. But Pesci's magnificent, against-type performance suggests that his work with Scorsese, however acclaimed, was a gilded cage that typecast him as a gleeful goblin. He always had more to give, and it would have been nice to see him prove it."


This is quite interesting; there is no doubt that "Casino" is a remake of "Good Fellas", at least to some extent. And that Pesci plays the same role in both, and one is frankly enough. I never attributed that to miscasting as much as Scorsese being in love with gangsters.

 

9. "Come Back, Little Sheba" (1952)

"As a Burt Lancaster completist, I applaud the title of Gary Fishgall's biography of the actor: "Against Type." Throughout his long career, the brawny, brainy actor made a point of pushing against audiences' preconceived notions of what he could and could not do. If it were up to studio bosses, he might have played nothing but film noir heroes ("The Killers," "Brute Force") or acrobatic swashbucklers ("The Crimson Pirate," "The Flame and the Arrow," "Vera Cruz"). But his desire to prove himself as an actor -- to be accepted as an actor, period -- led him to stretch, and without that pretension and stubbornness, we might never have seen him in "From Here to Eternity," "Elmer Gantry," "Sweet Smell of Success," "The Leopard," "The Swimmer" and other signature Lancaster roles.

But Lancaster's earliest foray into against-type acting, "Come Back, Little Sheba," is a dud, I'm afraid. Daniel Mann's 1952 screen version of William Inge's play -- about a middle-aged recovering alcoholic (Lancaster) and his dumpy wife (Shirley Booth) dealing with dark feelings awakened by a lovely young boarder (Terry Moore) -- is a solid and often touching film, if sometimes overwrought and overtly Freudian in that postwar American way. And the weakest link is Lancaster, who used his industry clout to nab the role of the beaten-down Doc Delaney. Lancaster was 38 when he played the part -- probably too young no matter what yardstick you use. But it's absolutely too young for a prime specimen of American manhood like Lancaster, who's so handsome and imposing, and projects such overwhelming physical confidence even when playing troubled characters. The outward signifiers of age and defeat -- slumped shoulders, gray junk in his hair, weird "aging" eyeliner -- are even more distracting. Imagine Jeff Bridges' role in "Crazy Heart" recast with the late-'90s George Clooney. Or better yet, don't.

Solution: Cast Van Heflin, one of the great, mostly underrated leading men of his era. Heflin was just a few years older than Lancaster, and nearly as imposing physically. But he always read as more vulnerable, more human-scaled, than Lancaster, and something about his face made him seem, if not older than he actually was, then more aware of (and affected by) life's indignities. Think of what Heflin did in "Green Dolphin Street," "Madame Bovary," "Shane," "The Prowler" and other outstanding films. His characters always seemed lived-in, as if their existence long preceded the point where the viewer began observing them. With Lancaster playing the lead, "Sheba" is a well-meaning misfire; with Heflin, it might have been a minor classic."

Lancaster is 15 years older than Booth, and entirely the wrong physical type.

I'd have let Humphrey Bogart have a crack at it.

 

The Casino idea is really fascinating. I think I agree with them that Pesci's Ace would have been more poignant than De Niro's.

 

8. "Gangs of New York" (2002)

"I've often described "Gangs of New York" to friends as the second-greatest movie ever made in the Hollywood studio system with two wildly miscast leads. (And yes, in case you're wondering, the other is in this slide show, too.) For purposes of this highly theoretical and admittedly very silly exercise, let's list the problems with casting DiCaprio as Amsterdam Vallon, a young Irishman trying to avenge his father's murder by gang boss Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis) in 1863 New York. First, although he's been good-to-brilliant in a solid dozen films, he's not credible as a street-tough Irish hoodlum who saw his father brutally murdered and grew up an orphan in a reformatory. The easiest way to tell if a man can fight is to read his eyes and hands before the fight starts. If he knows what he's doing, he doesn't give off any particular expectation or feeling, except perhaps a sporting interest in seeing how things turn out, or a bemused contempt for his opponent. And if, after sizing you up, he barely bothers to put his fist up in defense, watch out; you're done. But if he puts up his dukes like Lucille Ball pantomiming fury on "I Love Lucy" and narrows his eyes and puckers his mouth into a "mean face," well, different story. DiCaprio is in the second group. To steal a phrase that critic Andrew Sarris once applied to the actor Skeet Ulrich, he looks like half the waiters on Melrose Avenue. Not for a second do I believe him as a petty hoodlum who lives by his wits and knows how to use his fists. (DiCaprio in "The Departed," on the other hand, I totally believed, because Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan solved the perception problem in the script. They didn't ask DiCaprio to play a tough guy, but a life-battered private school kid struggling to be accepted by two fraternities -- the police and the Irish mob -- that would stuff guys like him in a locker if they knew who he really was inside.)

Solution: Recast DiCaprio with Mark Wahlberg and the problem is solved. Wahlberg was once an actual thug in South Boston who spent 45 days in jail for beating a Vietnamese man nearly to death. He's still got a touch of that meathead crudeness, even when he's playing soulful, quiet and in-over-his-head (which he does very well; what he cannot play is an intellectual, as the irredeemably horrible "The Happening" proved). Wahlberg deserved his Oscar nomination for Scorsese's overrated but engaging "The Departed," in which he held his own against an array of blisteringly funny, super-macho actors. He is not, to put it politely, an actor with tremendous range. But cast him as a hunky innocent (like Dirk Diggler in "Boogie Nights," a role DiCaprio was going to play until he dropped out to do "Titanic") or as a person whose sense of self-worth is bound up in primordial stereotypes of manhood ("The Yards," "We Own the Night," 1995's "The Basketball Diaries," opposite DiCaprio) and you're golden. With Wahlberg as Vallon in "Gangs," I would have believed almost every second of the movie, including the parts where Vallon has an opportunity to kill Bill but for various reasons doesn't (Wahlberg is never more affecting than when he's wrestling with the moral implications of a choice).

What to do about Cameron Diaz? This is a less urgent problem -- she's playing the love interest, and as is so often the case in Scorsese pictures, the guys take center stage, which means she can't mess up the movie too badly. But in terms of look and bearing, she's as wrong as DiCaprio -- too 21st century Hollywood, even if you factor out the bee-stung lips and just-been-to-the-spa complexion. This was a job for Kate Winslet. Or Samantha Morton. Or almost anyone else."

DiCaprio doesn't seem to me to be overtly miscast, though Diaz is. The movie doesn't fail for that reason.

 

7. "The Shining" (1980)

"No, seriously. Hear me out.

As Jack Torrance, the mentally degenerating caretaker of the Hotel Overlook in "The Shining," Jack Nicholson gives an iconic performance in an iconic film. He's funny, terrifying and pathetic, and I understand why the performance has been so widely appreciated, imitated and quoted.

But Stephen King, author of the source novel on which Kubrick's film was based, made an excellent point when he complained that casting Nicholson in the part robbed the story of much of its pathos and emotional power, and turned it into more of an intellectual and visual exercise. That's not a bad thing in itself. I put Kubrick in the elite class of directors who never made a bad film, only interesting, good or great; "The Shining" is consistently interesting and good, with passages of greatness. But it never gives you that sense you get from King's original novel -- that doom-spiral feeling that people get when they're figuratively or literally trapped (like Jack's wife, Wendy, and son, Danny) in a relationship with an abusive drunk who's devolving into murderous depression. And because the character is played by Nicholson ... well, better to let King explain himself, as he did in this 1997 New York Daily News interview:

Nicholson, King says, didn't believe that Jack Torrance "was crazy from the beginning, and Stanley didn't think he was crazy from the beginning. It was just everybody in America who went to see the movie thought he was crazy. Look at those eyes and you see Randall Patrick McMurphy [Nicholson's character in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest']. So you say, 'Okay, the guy's crazy as a s---house rat, he's going to get his whole family up there [to the closed-for-winter Overlook Hotel] and kill 'em, with the result that there's no moral struggle at all. I wanted them to cast Michael Moriarty or Jon Voight. They wouldn't." Granted, King is not necessarily the most reliable judge of how best to adapt his own work. The 1997 TV version of "The Shining," which King oversaw, was an earnest misfire. But there's one notable exception: "Wings" costar Stephen Weber's performance as Jack Torrance. Weber's seeming blandness, which made him so effective as a laid-back audience surrogate on "Wings," makes Jack's metamorphosis into a killer truly upsetting. To look at this man at the start of the miniseries, you'd never think him capable of violence. But that's what possession by spirits (whether alcoholic or ectoplasmic) does to people. Some of them, anyway.

Solution: Entertaining as Nicholson was, I would loved to have seen Jon Voight as Jack -- a better choice than Moriarty, who always had a certain furtive, Peter Lorre quality even when he was younger. Watch Voight in "Coming Home" and you sense the depths of anger boiling behind that student-council-president smile. Watch him play the teacher in "Conrack" or the hick stud in "Midnight Cowboy," and you get a sense of the tenderness and upbeat spirit that might have shown through in the early stages of King's story, before the dark forces rose up. Voight would have been different from, but as good as, maybe even greater than, Nicholson. But of course we'll never know."


Well, I heard you out, and I think you're wrong. Given the story King wrote, yeah, Nicholson isn't the right casting, but given the film Kubrick directed, Nicholson *is* the right casting--in fact, the only casting. Kubrick is certain that Jack is crazy from the beginning, because anybody in Jack's situation (in Kubrick's opinion) would be. Which is exactly his point. Kubrick's sympathies are with him, too.

EDIT: Research on the web says that Kubrick also considered casting DeNiro, Harrison Ford and Robin Williams (!).

 

I like The Shining, and Nicholson is excellent. However as an adaption it fails for the reason King and the author states.

I'd still like to see a good adaption.

 

Meh, Kubrick's Shining is a far better movie, exactly as is, than King's Shining is a novel. The Shining (book) is a genre classic, but the movie is a cinema classic. The point of adapting novels for the screen isn't to create a faithful adaption but to create great cinema. There are times when it's possible to do both. There are weak misreadings and strong misreadings, and Kubrick gives a very strong misreading of King's book. Thank goodness he had an artistic vision strong enough to compete with Stephen King. Adaptations of his stories have been terrible misfires more often than not. Shawshank Redemption and the Shining are the exceptions to the rule.

 

I agree; I am not in general a Kubrick fan, but I think he did *his* thing here, which is the point of adaptation.

 

I'm not a Stephen King fan, so bollocks on matching his vision.

 

The Shining the novel is a classic of horror literature. It is as frightning as anything King ever wrote, and stands up there with The Haunting of Hill House and the Fall of the House of Usher as the greatest "haunted house" story of all time. The book paints Jack Torrance in a positive light, and we build up his past with alcohol, but understand that he has come a long way. That is why his ultimate fall to the Overlook's supernatural entities is so tragic.

The Shining the film paints Jack Torrance almost immediately as insane. He isn't very likable to start with, and becomes worse and worse as the film progresses. It is one of Nicholson's finest performances. This film is incredibly scary as well, with Kubrick bringing his touch to horror. The Shining film is classic cinema, yes, but to deny that King's novel is not as powerful, just in a different way, is rubbish. IMO, of course.

 

Ford could have been excellent.

But he was busy working on pretty much back-to-back classics at that point.

 

When you consider Robert De Niro doing his Taxi Driver schtick in the Overlook, you start to appreciate Nicholson's performance.

I think, yeah, he's totally wrong here. And we had a straight up adaptation of King's novel; it sucked. Novels and movies are different beasts. The Shining is a great novel and a great film. But the attempt to make a great film directly out of the great novel reveals that greatness is hard to grasp. If it works on the page, shouldn't it work on the screen? Apparently not; it didn't, which about says it all.

I also take extreme issue with the characterization of Weber's performance in the miniseries as great. I mean, when your great selling point is that he's actually really bland and boring most of the time, it's hard to buy that. King's novel and Kubrick's movie are pretty different; they're also both really great and compelling and interesting. It is, I think, King's first legitimately great novel (after the altogether too gimmicky Carrie and the more ambitious, but somewhat dull Salem's Lot) and Kubrick's last legitimately great film (Full Metal Jacket, as I've said elsewhere, is a good short film with an epilogue that's longer than the entire film should be, if you follow), so there's a nice poetic synchronicity there for me. I love them both, am glad they are both the way they are and think Jon Voight would probably either put me to sleep for the first hour or else give a more bugnuts performance than Nicholson did. I hope the guy writing this list saw Voight's 'tender and up-beat' performance in Anaconda; he can be just as over the top and psycho as Nicholson.

 

6. "West Side Story"(1961)

"As Maria in the Oscar-winning screen version of "West Side Story," Natalie Wood is beautiful. She's charming. And she can't dance or sing.

Because she can't dance, the film's director, Robert Wise, keeps her choreography as simple (and as boring) as possible. Because she can't sing, her singing voice had to be dubbed by Marni Nixon. Nixon is a veteran ghost-singer who also dubbed the singing voice of Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady" -- an instance of miscasting that I'm sure will be argued about in the comments section of this slide show, considering that Julie Andrews, who played Eliza Doolittle onstage, got robbed of her rightful screen role almost 40 years ago and her fans are still steamed about it.

Solution:I'd like to see the young Raquel Welch give it a shot. She's beautiful. She can really sing and dance. And she's roughly the right age and is Latina (born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago, 1940).

Meanwhile, on the Jet side of the aisle, we have Richard Beymer as Tony. He's not credible as the legendary former leader of a New York street gang. Like Wood, he can't dance. His singing is nothing to write home about, but he's passable. I didn't write him out because I couldn't think of a replacement who wouldn't present a different set of problems. Maybe you have better ideas, readers, so let's hear them. If Beymer was out, who would you put in his place?"



Granted both Wood and Beymer can't sing or dance, and Wood isn't a Latina, but at least she is the right physical type, which Welch isn't. Also the assertion that Welch can sing and dance is dead wrong. I once read a highly amusing book about the Dean Martin TV show, written about the musical director, who said getting Welch to even *fake* it was like pulling teeth. Why not Carol Lawrence, who starred in the stage version?

As for Tony, this is what I said in an earlier thread:

"The director, Robert Wise, considered the following:

Frankie Avalon (!) found unsuitable
Tom Skerritt (later in "MASH") deemed too old
Richard Chamberlain--good reading, but looks and voice too mature
Troy Donahue--dull
George Hamilton--too genteel
Burt Reynolds--too rough-looking
George Segal--too old
Leonard Nimoy (!) too old
Robert Redford--they liked his reading
Jack Nicholson--they briefly considered him
Russ Tamblyn (cast as Tony's best friend)
Warren Beatty (the director's favorite of the above)

And guess who was cast? A guy called Richard Beymer. If you don't know the name, you're not alone. Beymer was reviewed nastily, mainly because he couldn't act and had no charisma. In fact, he had anti-charisma. At least five of the other actors considered eventually became stars."

Beatty seems a good bet, though he couldn't sing or dance. Though I would have loved to see Nicholson.

 

Beatty would have been good. For Wood's part, I fail to see why Rita Moreno couldn't have pulled it off and made it sexy to boot.

 

True, but short of a massive pay increase I can't think of a single good reason why any actress would trade Anita for Maria.

It'd be like giving up Benedick to play Claudio.

 

Again, she's the wrong type.

 

5. "The Godfather, Part III" (1990)

"As I mentioned in a couple of recent slide shows -- one on classic films , another on gangsters -- "The Godfather, Part III" has problems that I don't think could have been completely solved. But I feel certain that casting issues hurt it severely: specifically George Hamilton as family lawyer B.J. Harrison and Sofia Coppola, director Francis Coppola's daughter, as Michael Corleone's daughter, Mary. Luckily, in my position as fantasy studio boss, I can fix them both.

Solution: Robert Duvall was originally going to reprise his role as Corleone consigliere Tom Hagen, but he refused to do it unless he was paid the same salary as Al Pacino. As fantasy studio boss, I'd pay Duvall what he asked for. And I'd tell Coppola that it was OK to delay production for as long as it took to allow his originally scheduled Mary, Winona Ryder, to overcome the "exhaustion" that knocked her out of production and play a part she would have been great in. (Ryder got an Oscar nomination three years later for playing Mae Welland in Martin Scorsese's version of "The Age of Innocence.")

The downside of this approach is that by doing whatever is necessary to cast Duvall, we might crowd out Talia Shire, whose Connie Corleone develops in fascinating ways. But you can't have everything, even in fantasy studio boss land."



Well, what about Laura San Giacomo instead? And yeah, pay Duvall what he wants. By casting Hamilton, you didn't **** all over Duvall as you intended; you **** all over your film.

 

I'm over all the crying about Sofia. She's fine. Duvall probably should have been in the film, though.

 

Although the absence of Hagen is felt, I don't really mind Hamilton. He's not really doing anything detrimental. Unlike Sofia Coppola.

Thing is, I'm not entirely sure Winona Ryder would have done that much of a better job.

 

The problem with Hamilton isn't that he's doing anything detrimental. It's that the character isn't doing anything, period. I mean, what a completely pointless character. He could have been written out entirely.

And, seriously, I know it's hip to bash Sofia. But . . . she is astoundingly bad. I mean, she is absolutely gruesome. The makeout scene in the kitchen with Andy Garcia? It's literally unwatchable. I mean, I'm sorry, but it's true. Ryder is not Meryl Streep, but she would have been about fifty times better than Sofia.

 

Lol I knew as soon as I saw the thread title for GF III Sophia would be named! lol

As far as Duvall goes, I had no idea that he was even supposed to be in it! That sux, I wish he could gotten his way he is a brillant actor and his presense is def missed in III I think.

 

The problem with Hamilton isn't that he's doing anything detrimental. It's that the character isn't doing anything, period. I mean, what a completely pointless character. He could have been written out entirely.

It's been a while since I've seen III. I prefer to watch 1 and 2, and then end it, but did they explain why Tom Hagan wasn't in it? I think I remember something along the lines of it's because he wanted to go completely legit, but I may be mixing up scenes here. I really didn't mind George Hamilton either though, although it was a pointless character.

And, seriously, I know it's hip to bash Sofia. But . . . she is astoundingly bad. I mean, she is absolutely gruesome. The makeout scene in the kitchen with Andy Garcia? It's literally unwatchable. I mean, I'm sorry, but it's true. Ryder is not Meryl Streep, but she would have been about fifty times better than Sofia.

But even worse than Sofia was Bridget Fonda. Granted, her part was minor, but talk about gruesome scenes. Her character was painful even being nothing more than a basic plot device for Vincent. Personally, I would have given Bridget Fonda's part to Wynona Ryder, and cast someone else completely for Mary Corleone.

 

RE: Hagen, they did what they did to Richard Castellano's character, Clemenza, when he demanded more money for Part II - the character is mentioned as having died in the intervening years. In the case of Hagen, his son, played by John Savage, pops up out of nowhere, and then basically sods off for the rest of the film.

Apparently the role of Hagen was crucial in the original Coppola/Puzo outline. The Vatican was going to kill him, and then Michael was going to feign redemption in order to investigate just who within the church had done it. But when Duvall didn't come back, it threw a massive spanner in the works. So what you get is the salvaged remains of that plot.

 

I think they say that Tom Hagen has died of a heart attack or cancer or something. Maybe. It's vague.

 

In the case of Hagen, his son, played by John Savage, pops up out of nowhere, and then basically sods off for the rest of the film. Yeah, he became a priest, right. Oh well, here's the son of the closest "brother" you've had, much closer than your real brothers, and let's just everyone forget him.

Apparently the role of Hagen was crucial in the original Coppola/Puzo outline. The Vatican was going to kill him, and then Michael was going to feign redemption in order to investigate just who within the church had done it. But when Duvall didn't come back, it threw a massive spanner in the works. So what you get is the salvaged remains of that plot.

That sounds like an interesting plot outline. It's a shame it didn't work out, because I think "salvaged remains" fits the movie to a T.