“The movie was shit”: Kurt Russell’s spiteful revenge after being robbed of his dream role
When an actor has been promised their dream role, only to have it ripped away from them at the last second, how should they respond? If that actor is Kurt Russell, then a spiteful prank is the answer.
Most people wouldn’t expect him to resort to underhanded tactics to exact revenge on the people who wronged him, since Russell has navigated his entire career without incident. Sure, he quit a movie once because he didn’t want to wear tights, but for the most part, he’s been a beacon of professionalism.
Stars throwing their toys out of the pram because things haven’t gone their way is common practice in Hollywood, but that wasn’t strictly the case in this instance. It was, to a certain extent, but with Russell having been involved since the film’s inception before being replaced, he was entitled to vent his frustrations.
If it wasn’t for an injury, John Carpenter’s muse may well have permanently swapped the silver screen for the baseball diamond. He was caught in two minds about which career path to pursue, but when that decision was made for him, he dedicated himself to acting, and he’s done pretty well for himself out of it.
Much like Walt Disney’s former protégé and confidant, aspiring filmmaker Ron Shelton was a former minor league baseball player, so they had plenty to talk about when they first worked together on 1986’s The Best of Times, where he served as second unit director. For his feature-length directorial debut, he began devising a baseball story of his own.
Russell assisted Shelton in concocting the tale of a veteran catcher who seeks to prepare a youngster for a tilt at the major leagues, but when it came time to pitch the project around Hollywood, he could only secure financing for Bull Durham if Kevin Costner played Crash Davis at Russell’s expense. At first, it appeared he’d been graciously forced out of a role written for him to play, but that wasn’t all true.
“I went to Europe on a vacation, having said the script was great, and I came back to discover Kevin Costner was doing it,” the erstwhile Snake Plissken recalled. “Ronnie got a better deal. So I pulled a practical joke on him that wiped the slate clean for me.” 60 miles from where Bull Durham was filming, Russell was shooting Winter People, and he hatched a plan to pose as the founder of Orion Pictures.
“I got on the phone, pretended to be Mike Medavoy, ordered that Ronnie be pulled off the set, and I told him that the dailies were shit, the movie was shit, and Costner was not working,” he explained. “‘Here’s what we’re going to do’, I told him. ‘Kurt Russell’s 60 miles north of you finishing Winter People tonight. He will be on the set Monday morning.'”
Understandably, Shelton was caught in a state of panic until everything clicked into place. After an awkward silence, he branded Russell a son of a bitch, but Russell didn’t mind. “I had him going for a few minutes, though,” he remembered, and as far as revenge plots in Hollywood go, his had to be one of the most hilarious and wholesome.
