Strippers, church ladies, and the 1996 Robert De Niro movie that almost ended up in legal hot water: “Bury the evidence
Little old ladies who go to church and strippers occupy opposing ends of the cultural spectrum, but they were brought together under the unlikeliest of circumstances in a Robert De Niro movie, and the meeting of two wildly disconnected worlds almost ended in legal trouble.
The actor may not have been involved, but he was the top-billed name in the cast, so he’s implicated by default. While Martin Scorsese’s Casino and Michael Mann’s Heat deservedly occupy most of the acclaim, it’s definitely worth remembering that De Niro virtually cornered the mid-1990s market on crime thrillers.
It might have been a box office bomb that was greeted with a shrug of apathy during its initial release, but Tony Scott’s 1996 effort, The Fan, is much better than its reputation suggests. Along with James Mangold’s Cop Land, Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, and John Frankenheimer’s Ronin, the two-time Academy Award winner was on a hell of a hard-boiled run in the latter half of the decade.
The film, De Niro’s recently fired salesman and baseball obsessive becomes increasingly infatuated with his favourite team’s latest star signing, Wesley Snipes’ Bobby Rayburn. The former’s Gil Renard takes things so far as to kidnap the latter’s on, threatening to kill the kid if he doesn’t hit a home run in an upcoming game and dedicate it to his number one fan.
The baseball scenes were shot on location in Anaheim and San Francisco, which required a number of extras. As the picture’s physical production executive, Ray Zimmerman, explained, things took a turn for the unexpected when first assistant director Jim Skotchdopole’s birthday coincided with one of the days the cast and crew were filming at Angel Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Angels.
“I’m back in my office, and I get this phone call, and it’s the head of legal,” he recalled. “He’s going, ‘Ray, Ray, we’ve got to get down to the set right away’. I went, ‘What’s going on?’ He goes, ‘I’ve got SAG calling’. Apparently, they had the Jumbotron out, and they cut for lunch, and it was Skotchdopole’s birthday, and the second AD hired a stripper to come and dress as a cop.”
Naturally, having a stripper serenade the assistant director with a sultry dance in front of the cast, crew, and assembled extras, never mind the footage potentially being captured, disseminated, or even beamed on a Jumbotron so everyone in the vicinity could get a decent view, didn’t sit too well with the legal department.
That, and the little old church ladies who were also present. “We had brought in all these church groups with little ladies to staff the extras,” Zimmerman continued. “Those were back in the days where you didn’t do all the CG extras. So me and the head of legal go down there, and the first thing the head of legal goes is, ‘Who’s got the tape of that? Bury the evidence.'”
Presumably, the tape was seized, since it didn’t gain any widespread attention. Another by-product of The Fan bringing strippers onto the set without telling anyone beforehand was that, from then on, Zimmerman “had to go out to every single movie set and give the sexual harassment spiel,” in the off-chance any more little old church ladies were inadvertently exposed to exotic dancers.
