Is ‘Chad Schmidt’ the best movie Brad Pitt never made?
In terms of solid gold premises for a movie, Chad Schmidt has one of the best I’ve ever heard, and it’s bitterly disappointing that Brad Pitt was never able to bring it to life.
As written by Steven Conrad, who later went on to create the oddball TV series’ Patriot and Perpetual Grace LTD, Chad Schmidt was a comedy noir set in the early 1990s about the titular actor, a man who can’t get hired in Hollywood because he looks too much like an off-brand Brad Pitt.
Schmidt works in a used car dealership and moonlights as a store Ronald McDonald, all while trying to get his big break. However, when he loses out to the handsome up-and-coming Pitt for his star-making role in Thelma and Louise, he thinks his dreams of stardom are dead in the water.
Then, out of the blue, Schmidt comes across a script for a British independent film that blows him away: Four Weddings and a Funeral by Richard Curtis. Nobody in America knows about it yet, and Schmidt is desperate to option the script before some floppy-haired Englishman with a penchant for stuttering ever-so-charmingly steals the lead role from him. In order to drum up the cash, though, he becomes involved in a people-smuggling ring run through the shady car dealership, and finds himself in way over his head with some very scary people.
In Conrad’s mind, Chad Schmidt was intended to be a noir in the classic tradition, even if it had the sheen of a meta Hollywood comedy starring a guy whose name rhymes with Brad Pitt. “It’s not a sketch, it’s a film,” he told One Heat Minute, “I happened to be a fan of a genre that I thought Chad Schmidt could Venn diagram over, which is the noir character who’s not going to get what he’s trying to get.”
So, in Conrad’s nihilistic script, Schmidt will never achieve his Hollywood dreams and instead be cursed to make bad decision after bad decision, leading to his own ruin.
One of the script’s big scenes saw Schmidt actually meet Pitt, and Conrad envisioned the Se7en star playing both characters: a super handsome movie star version of himself, and the considerably less attractive Schmidt. “Chad Schmidt was not going to be good-looking,” Conrad laughed, “He was going to have male-patterned baldness; his ears were going to stick out a bit, there was probably something we could do with the chin to take some of Brad’s attractive edge off a bit.”
Overall, Conrad wanted Schmidt to look “off” somehow, like someone who looked 80% like Pitt, but it all went wrong somewhere along the way. Hilariously, he also described Schmidt’s face as “like Brad Pitt dragged behind a bus for a little bit”.
Once again proving that he’s always had great taste, Pitt met with Conrad and was tickled pink by Chad Schmidt. “He responded to the idea straight away,” Conrad claimed, and the megastar proceeded to work closely with him on a couple of different passes of the script. The longer they worked on it, though, the more Conrad began to think the chances of him actually getting to direct the movie were getting slimmer and slimmer.
For starters, his directorial debut, The Promotion, starring John C Reilly and Seann William Scott as warring grocery store managers, had just tanked at the box office and received not-particularly-kind reviews. As hard as it was to admit, he knew he didn’t really have the profile to get the movie greenlit, even with Pitt attached. However, he also knew that if the actor took the project to the shortlist of directors he was thinking of, the film wouldn’t get made either.
“Brad, if I remember correctly, made a small list of names that he would work with on the project,” Conrad recalled, “It was Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, the Coens, [Quentin] Tarantino. And when I saw that list, I knew it wasn’t going to happen.” As soon as he clapped eyes on those names, each one an auteur who writes his own movies and builds his projects from scratch, he knew they’d be barking up the wrong tree.
“They curate their material and generally don’t just make projects that land on their desk,” a defeated Conrad acknowledged.
Ultimately, Chad Schmidt fell by the wayside, and a gutted Conrad admitted he would never again write anything “that only one actor in the universe can play”. Still, there is a somewhat happy ending to the tale: he still chats with Pitt every now and again, and they’re keen to collaborate on something. Even though the F1 star “routinely” brings up Chad Schmidt, Conrad is pretty sure it will forever remain the greatest movie Pitt never made.
