The producer who made an enemy of the Coen brothers: “It was goddamned embarrassing”
Even though they’ve made films for major studios, the Coen brothers have always maintained the independent sensibility that’s defined their careers since the beginning, which made them an odd fit for working with one of Hollywood’s most ostentatious producers.
Joel and Ethan have collaborated with the likes of Sony, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, and Netflix without sactificing the idiosyncratic intangibles that made them two of modern cinema’s most distinct voices, even when they started working with budget significantly larger than the ones they’d been used to in the Blood Simple and Raising Arizona days.
Their first quantum leap on the industry’s monetary ladder came with The Hudsucker Proxy, which was almost as expensive as their previous four features combined. After three films in a row with Fox, the siblings shacked up with Warner Bros for the first time and entered Joel Silver’s orbit.
Although he was the period-set screwball comedy’s biggest supporter after optioning the script and bringing it to WB, the combination of Silver and the Coens always seemed like an odd fit. They were the eccentric darlings of middle America, and he was the boisterous force behind Predator, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and Demolition Man, among others.
Understandably, tensions ran high. Silver saw the Coens as somewhat pretentious, and couldn’t believe they were hesitant to work with a name of Paul Newman’s calibre. “Like it’s a sin to use a movie star,” he scoffed. “God forbid someone should actually be enticed into the theatre to see one of their movies.”
He also claimed that Ethan wanted to cast himself as Norville Barnes. “It was goddamned embarrassing,” he ranted. “I suggested Tim Robbins. Ethan sulked, and things were never right between him and Tim. He never made peace with it. They’d be shooting a scene, and you’d see Ethan off in the corner, mouthing the lines as Tim spoke. It was pathetic.”
That might need to be taken with a pinch of salt, though, especially when conflicting reports suggest it was the Coens who fought for Robbins to play the role when Silver was pushing for Tom Cruise. Either way, it doesn’t sound as though the two parties had the greatest experience working with each other, and Silver hasn’t produced another one of their pictures since.
He almost did when the Coens were briefly attached to write and direct an adaptation of Ross Macdonald’s mystery novel Black Money in 2015, and he kind of did when he produced George Clooney’s Suburbicon, for which Joel and Ethan had written the original draft of the screenplay.
Beyond that, Silver has remained at arm’s length, which might have something to do with how critical he was of their approach to The Hudsucker Proxy, although you never know the real reasons with a high-powered Hollywood mogul.
