The Coen brothers classic they didn’t think anyone would watch: “Three people will end up seeing it”
Predicting what will be a big hit at the box office and what will disappear without a trace is often more complicated than it appears. After all, if every studio, director, and actor knew for a fact what audiences wanted to see at any given moment, there would be no flops. In truth, some may argue it’s better not to think about the whims of the marketplace at all, because if movies were only greenlit because of box office potential, some amazing films would never have seen the light of day. For example, if the Coen brothers chose their movies for purely commercial reasons, they’d have never made one of their undisputed classics.
In 1994, the Coens released The Hudsucker Proxy, a passion project that had gestated for six years while they secured financing for it. Its $25million budget was by far and away the biggest they’d commanded at that point in their career, and they had a lot riding on the film’s performance. However, despite the movie starring Paul Newman and Tim Robbins, the screwball comedy about a business graduate who invents the hula hoop in the ’50s wasn’t exactly an easy sell. In fact, Warner Bros reportedly ordered reshoots because it feared the film was destined to tank at the box office.
Ultimately, the studio’s fears were realised and The Hudsucker Proxy was a bomb, grossing only $11million and receiving some of the most mixed reviews the brothers had yet received. It looked like their big gamble hadn’t paid off, so when they returned two years later with a $7million neo-noir set in present-day Minnesota, some critics could have argued they’d retreated to familiar territory to secure an easy hit. Interestingly, though, the Coens didn’t see it that way. In fact, they believed Fargo was likely to suffer the same fate as The Hudsucker Proxy, with Joel telling Arts Beat LA, “It will probably be a real failure.”
Of course, the brothers couldn’t have been more wrong about Fargo, which became arguably their signature movie. It raked in $60million at the box office, was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and spawned a spinoff television series in 2014. To this day, it’s one of the biggest success stories of their career – but they claim they still have no idea why.
Indeed, when the brothers were asked by Moving Pictures magazine why they thought The Hudsucker Proxy flamed out, Joel turned the question back on the interviewer. He shrugged, “I dunno, why was Fargo not a flop? It’s as much a mystery to me that people went to see Fargo, which was something we did thinking, ah, y’know, about three people will end up seeing it, but it’ll be fun for us.”
In truth, while the Coens have always resisted efforts from the press to analyse the meaning of their movies, it’s undeniable that Fargo was very much a reaction to the excesses of The Hudsucker Proxy. With Hudsucker, they created an entirely stylised world from the ground up, but in Fargo, they intentionally ensured it had “an almost documentary or cinéma vérité feel to it.”
“We wanted to take a new approach to style in this film, to make something radically different from our previous films,” Joel confirmed in 1996. “And it is true that we were pressured in this direction because the preceding film was the most ‘theatrical’ of them all. But curiously, working from actual events, we came to yet another form of stylisation, in the largest sense of that term.” And in that stylisation, an unanticipated classic was born.
