The “foul, disgusting, misogynistic, crass” Coen brothers script that couldn’t find a star
As a pair of modern cinema’s most consistently acclaimed filmmaking minds, most actors would fall over themselves for the chance to work on a Coen brothers project, apart from that one time the siblings wrote a screenplay that burned through six potential leading men before finally settling on a star.
Joel and Ethan have gradually amassed a sprawling repertory of performers who’ve appeared in several of their pictures, and, as fate would have it, the person who eventually played the role everybody else seemed content to turn their nose up at was someone they were familiar with. Not only that, but they embodied the role to such an extent that it’s impossible to imagine it being filled by anyone else.
While writing and directing their own self-penned screenplays is how the Coens became who they are, they weren’t averse to working on stories they didn’t intend to helm themselves before they split. Intolerable Cruelty was supposed to be one of them, but they ended up taking the reins when Ron Howard and Jonathan Demme both dropped out.
They’ve also been credited, or worked on at one point or another, Sam Raimi’s Crimewave and Darkman, Michael Hoffman’s Gambit remake, Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, and George Clooney’s Suburbicon. And yet, despite their credentials, it took a long time for the Bad Santa script to land on Billy Bob Thornton’s desk.
“I asked a Universal executive, ‘Why’d you guys pass on it?'” fallen mogul Bob Weinstein told The New York Times in 2016. “And he said, ‘It was the most foul, disgusting, misogynistic, anti-Christmas, anti-children thing we could imagine’. That’s exactly why I bought it.”
Glen Ficarra and John Requa, who polished the Coens’ original draft, were only given a solitary instruction: “They had only one caveat,” Requa recalled. “They said, ‘It’s a story about redemption, but push it to the very end. Not too much redemption too soon’. We wrote a really crass script, then the Coen brothers added a bunch of crass jokes.”
Once they’d fulfilled their end of the bargain, casting turned out to be a nightmare. The Academy Award-winning pair asked Ficarra and Requa “to write it for James Gandolfini,” but when he couldn’t do it, “Bill Murray was attached, but he stopped returning calls, like Bill does,” and “they were also courting Jack Nicholson” at one stage.
Weinstein “went to Robert De Niro, who was going to do it,” but when that didn’t work out either, Thornton came on board, albeit after another couple of actors had flirted with Willie Stoke. “I heard Sean Penn was considered, and Nicolas Cage,” he added. “My manager called and said, ‘Wait until you read this script. I’ve never seen anything like this’. I’d read maybe a third of it, and I called him and said, ‘We’ve gotta do this’. It was kind of a no-brainer.
After burning through two Coens, Ficarra, and Requa on the scripting front, Bad Santa passed through Gandolfini, Murray, Nicholson, De Niro, Penn, and Cage before Thornton seized the opportunity, where he promptly delivered one of his best-ever performances in an instant cult favourite that’s become a mainstay of the festive viewing calendar.
