How the Coen brothers made up a fictional film that already existed: “We were disappointed”
Although they’re no strangers to an adaptation or two, the endlessly fertile imaginations of the Coen brothers have given rise to some of the most unique, audacious, and idiosyncratic movies of the last four decades.
However, when Joel and Ethan thought they were being clever by concocting a ridiculous-sounding fictional feature that served as a film-within-a-film, they were equal parts stunned and disappointed to discover that it was a real thing that was shot and released less than a decade before they mentioned it in a period piece they’d built from the ground up.
The Ladykillers and True Grit underlined that the siblings aren’t averse to telling stories that have already been told on the big screen before, but this was something different. They assumed that they’d been struck by the notion during a bout of feverish creativity, only for their ‘original’ gag to fall flat once they realised they were merely reflecting Hollywood history.
In Barton Fink, John Turturro’s title character and playwright agrees to write scripts for Capitol Pictures in exchange for $1,000 a week, setting up shop in the ominous Hotel Earle, where he quickly captures the attention of John Goodman’s Charlie Meadows, who soon reveals himself not to be the man he appears.
Michael Lerner’s Jack Lipnick tasks Fink to crack the screenplay for a wrestling-focused feature starring Wallace Beery, which was intended to be a throwaway line they thought was funny. Unfortunately for the Coens, Beery had done exactly that in 1932, when he played a wrestler in John Ford’s Flesh, even if the legendary director fought to have his name removed from the production.
To make things even stranger, uncredited rewrites on the Flesh script were performed by William Faulkner, who was one of the main inspirations for the character of Barton Fink. The Coens thought they’d plucked the fictitious idea out of thin air, and they didn’t seem thrilled that it was merely a case of art imitating art.
“We thought it was a joke,” Ethan told Jim Emerson. “It kind of goes past people: ‘Oh, yeah, a wrestling picture’. We were sort of disappointed that there actually was such a thing. It makes it a little more pedestrian that it really exists.” Some audience members steeped in cinema history may have thought it was a direct nod to Flesh, but it turns out that the opposite was true.
In their defence, it’s far from a classic. It barely even ranks as a curiosity in Ford’s career, with the cycloptic maverick trying to wipe it from the history books, even though it was a minor box office success. The Coens claim they were clueless as to Flesh‘s existence before they sat down and wrote the Barton Fink screenplay, which makes it even more bizarre when a wrestling movie starring Wallace Beery is so specific.
It did nothing to affect Barton Fink in any way, with the film still regarded as having a place among the upper echelons of their filmography, but they were still pissed their joke had been watered down by real life.
