“I’m screwed”: the 1994 movie that made John Goodman an enemy for life
Although he’s always come off as an affable chap, there’s darkness within John Goodman. Not to a massive extent, but it’s there nonetheless, and he’s spent his life trying to keep a lid on it.
As was the case for innumerable others, alcohol was to blame. Goodman’s hard-drinking days lasted for decades, and he wasn’t always the easiest guy to be around. Whether he was working with Martin Scorsese or Roseanne Barr, self-loathing and shame were the clouds constantly looming above his head.
If you gather 100 people in a room, one of whom is obligated to be John Goodman, and ask everyone in it if he’s one of the best character actors in modern Hollywood, he’d be the only one who said no. Keeping things to yourself is never the wisest idea, and when one of cinema’s most famous directors pushed him into a movie he didn’t want to make, the star shouldn’t have kept his mouth shut.
It might have a certain nostalgic appeal to the generation who watched it the first time around as nippers, but 1994’s The Flintstones isn’t a good movie. Goodman knew that it probably wasn’t going to be a good movie, and he had no intentions of auditioning to play the patriarch of the titular family, but he didn’t have a choice.
Steven Spielberg, who’d recently worked with the sitcom staple on Always, took it upon himself at the table read of the forgettable fantasy, which he’s adamant is the most underrated film he’s ever made, to tell everyone that he’d found his Fred Flintstone in the formidable shape of Goodman, who called the in-development family flick “not something I was looking forward to doing,” but Spielberg had spoken.
Even more unfortunately, it was a huge hit. Whether he was making the publicity rounds, appearing on talk shows, or going about his daily business, one of the inevitable side effects was that wherever Goodman went and whatever he did, people demanded that he give them a yabba dabba doo. How did he feel about it? Well, he summed it up in two words: “I’m screwed”.
Having gritted his teeth to grin and bear it through The Flintstones, director Brian Levant, who returned to helm the follow-up, Viva Rock Vegas!, revealed that when plans were put in place for a sequel, the original plan was to shoot them back-to-back, making Goodman go through personal hell twice more in quick succession.
When word reached his ears, he couldn’t have made himself any clearer, with the leading man going directly to Spielberg and telling him, in no uncertain terms, “Please don’t make me do any more of these.” His wish was granted, and he was freed from the shackles of Fred Flintstone, but things were never the same between Goodman and Spielberg.
The first time they worked together was on Always, and Spielberg proudly announced him as The Flintstones‘ leading man before a single frame of the former had even been shot, but after enduring a miserable experience he never wanted in the first place, the pair have never collaborated again, which is enough to make you wonder what happened in that meeting behind closed doors where Goodman laid down the law.
