The only movie Robert De Niro ever got fired from: “We’re going to have to end it”
Job security is one of the hardest things to come by in Hollywood, but being one of the best actors on the face of the planet certainly helps. Even though Robert De Niro was in the midst of the hottest streak of his career, he still wasn’t immune to being given his marching orders for the first and only time.
These days, the two-time Academy Award winner is a lot more likely to be in a movie that should never exist than one that’ll end in his dismissal. He’s walked out on a couple of projects, including Mel Gibson’s Edge of Darkness, and he’s turned down plenty of high-profile roles, but as a living legend and one of cinema’s most decorated stars, he’s free to do whatever he wants.
Unfortunately, what he wants to do is make as many shitty comedies as humanly possible, with Analyze This and Meet the Parents having the unfortunate effect of convincing De Niro that he’s hilarious. He can be, but only under the right circumstances, and Dirty Grandpa, The War with Grandpa, Grudge Match, and The Big Wedding were not those circumstances.
Fittingly, then, it was a romantic comedy that saw him get the boot. Fresh from his Oscar win for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, the actor sought to collaborate with another one of Tinseltown’s marquee auteurs, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate‘s Mike Nichols, for Bogart Slept Here, which was slated to start production once De Niro had wrapped Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
During the rehearsal process, though, the leading man and the director started to realise that something wasn’t right. “I blame myself,” De Niro confessed, per Deadline. “I didn’t know certain types of things. It was a certain type of comedy, Neil Simon, the timing had to be a certain way; I didn’t feel enthused by it.”
He wasn’t the only one who felt that way, either, and he heard someone say “he’s just not that funny” after a day of rehearsals. “It wasn’t working,” he continued. “I shot for about two weeks. I had about three times in my life where I had that experience with a director, where we can’t make them happy, so this was one of them. I was sitting in my camper, you feel this dread.”
De Niro offered part of his salary to fund an extra week of prep time, but there wasn’t enough time in the world to convince anyone that he was right for the part. A meeting was arranged with the filmmaker, where he delivered the bad news; he was out on his arse. “He said, ‘I think we’re going to have to end it,” Nichols told him. “He felt terrible. He was really upset.”
If late-1970s-era De Niro can be fired from a movie, then it can happen to anyone. Nicholson also ended up walking away shortly afterward, and the film was eventually released as 1977’s The Goodbye Girl, with Herbert Ross at the helm, and Richard Dreyfuss ended up winning a ‘Best Actor’ Oscar for playing the role his predecessor simply couldn’t wrap his head around.
