How Brad Pitt almost missed the worst movie of his career: “They didn’t know who he was”
It’s hard to imagine Brad Pitt as anything other than a successful Hollywood star.
I don’t picture him growing up in a normal household and attending a normal school, so much as I imagine him just appearing on the floor of a Los Angeles studio lot. He became one of the first household faces of the silver screen, for a millennial like myself, and so, it’s hard to imagine him scrambling around the desperate Hollywood audition scene trying to make a name for himself.
But of course he did. Before his breakout role as the hitchhiker in Thelma and Louise, he bagged several uncredited roles, as well as doing the unrelenting rounds of the American sitcom scene. He earned his stripes before bagging that cameo in Thelma and Louise, which eventually resulted in a career-changing role in David Fincher’s Seven. His time at the grindstone gave him an acute understanding of how precious his opportunity to make it in this industry was, and so he grabbed it with both hands.
But, in 1992, he let that grip slip ever so slightly. In 1992, he starred in Cool World, a film which follows a cartoonist who finds himself in a cartoon-like universe he believes he created. It was a Space Jam idea executed without any of the Space Jam charm and could easily have been a career-ender for Pitt.
You would be forgiven, however, for thinking a leading man like Pitt would have been highly desired by a studio hashing together a film as trashy as Cool World, but it was actually a hire the director had to actually end up fighting for. Ralph Bakshi saw the star potential in Pitt when the studio didn’t, and so desperately wanted him for the project.
“The studio didn’t want him, they didn’t know who he was,” says Bakshi. “They said if I wanted Brad Pitt then I would have to take Kim Basinger, who’s a beautiful woman but a little old for the role.”
Basinger plays the lead doodle, Holli Would, who wishes to break through from the cartoon world and live in the real world. Something in that innocent desire provoked Bashki to look for something younger, but in truth, I don’t think that would have helped the film.
“What I saw was a girl, somewhere around 20, who dances very well,” he explained. “Then they got Gabriel Byrne. I love Gabriel but he’s also a little old for an underground American cartoonist. I came from the underground, and we were all 20-25 when we were doing Fritz. Plus there was Star Wars. One of the interesting things about the younger directors – me, [George] Lucas and Scorsese – was that we saw actors much younger than Hollywood did. They saw them as much older and mature, in that star tradition.”
The film is truly awful, and so for Bashki to herald himself as a director with his finger on the pulse, pulling out talent from the depths of obscurity, is a bit of a stretch. In another universe, maybe a cartoon one, he could have been remembered as the director who tanked Brad Pitt’s career, not made it.
