The atrociously titled movie that Jack Black regrets making: “Well, it means shit stain”
Jack Black has seemingly taken a laid-back approach to his career. Don’t get me wrong, he’s no slacker. He’s been working pretty constantly since the early 1990s, and all that wild energy can’t be easy to maintain. That said, he doesn’t exactly give off the vibe of a cool-headed businessman who carefully maps out every incremental shift of his professional trajectory.
If that is indeed the correct impression, it’s worked out pretty well for him. If the Minecraft movie has taught us anything as a society, it’s that he is one of the most intergenerationally beloved talents in Hollywood. Few people can unite a 40-year-old and a 14-year-old quite as harmoniously as the wild-bearded comedian. Over the years, he’s crossed the generational divide on countless occasions with movies like Kung Fu Panda, the Jumanji reboots, and that Super Mario Bros adaptation. Seriously, he deserves some sort of honorary diplomatic appointment for his services.
All of this makes his career seem almost divinely ordained, as if he were simply able to make his talents known and let fate handle the rest. Like many actors, however, Black struggled early in his career to find his niche, which meant taking on some projects that, in retrospect, are a little embarrassing. On this front, no film could be quite as cringeworthy (at least on the face of it) as the 1998 movie Johnny Skidmarks.
Despite its title, this movie was not a gross-out comedy but a gritty crime thriller starring future Oscar winner Frances McDormand and the voice of Lord Farquaad (and six-time Emmy winner) John Lithgow. At the time, Black was appearing in minuscule roles in major movies, most of which were a far cry from his future comedic work. Demolition Man, Dead Man Walking, and Enemy of the State all cast him and completely ignored the comedy goldmine they had stumbled upon.
At first, Black was all-in on Johnny Skidmarks. “I actually really liked the script,” he said in a 2021 interview with Variety. “Frances McDormand was in it.” The first day he was on set, he tried to tactfully address the elephant in the room. “I said, ‘Guys, I’m really excited to be here, but this is just a working title, right?’” They didn’t seem to understand, so he threw tact to the wind and said, “It means shit stain.”
Somehow, that didn’t seem to deter them in the slightest, and, in Black’s phrasing, the movie “skidmarked its way straight to the DVD bin.” Luckily, Johnny Skidmarks did not derail the promising careers of three of its stars, and Peter Gallagher, who played the titular Skidmark, has had a fruitful career as a character actor. Perhaps if it had been seen by more people, it would have put a dark stain on their CVs, so to speak, but it was to everyone’s benefit that it remained pretty obscure.
Sadly, Johnny Skidmarks (a title that truly does not get old) is not even so-bad-it’s-good. It’s just a straight-down-the-line, deadly serious thriller that is zero fun whatsoever. Incidentally, the German title, Skidmarks – Blutspuren, translates roughly as “Skidmarks – trails of blood,” so the audience would have been even more surprised to discover just how humourless it was.
