“It’s bullshit”: the scenes John Goodman didn’t improvise, according to the guy who wrote them
The sad truth in Hollywood is that movies are not a writer’s medium, such that when you think of the great screenwriters, like Billy Wilder, Nora Ephron, or Quentin Tarantino, they almost always turned to directing, presumably to keep executives, directors, and actors from messing with their carefully chosen words.
On the other hand, as far as the press and audiences are concerned, it is far more impressive when an actor goes off script to deliver a scene-stopping monologue than when a writer spends months crafting an Oscar-winning speech, leading to some actors becoming famous for ad-libbing.
For example, Denzel Washington is known for being something of an improvisational genius, and Christopher Guest has made an entire career out of making shit up on the spot, with a whole body of work proving that sometimes, no script is the best script.
With all of this glorification of improv, there are bound to be some actors who either misremember their track record or, ironically, make it up, and apparently, John Goodman is one of them.
It would be a crime against cinema to besmirch the man who gave us Walter Sobchak without solid evidence, so let us break down the facts. In 1984, Goodman played a supporting role in the seminal college comedy Revenge of the Nerds, which follows a group of long-suffering dorks at a fictional university who decide to seek vengeance against their fratty tormenters, as Coach Harris, an ageing, testosterone-crazed football jock with a weird fixation on the nerds.
The film was directed by Jeff Kanew, who apparently enjoyed keeping things pretty loose, not minding letting the actors find their way into a scene, and neither did he Aaron Sorkin anyone when they tried something new with the dialogue. In a 35th anniversary retrospective about the film for GQ, though, some cracks emerged in the narrative about just how far the performers strayed from Steve Zacharias and Jeff Buhai’s script.
“The movie’s full of these little snippets that happened in the moment,” actor Robert Carradine, who played one of the primary nerds, said, and Goodman agreed, saying, “I wound up making a bunch of stuff up”. In response to these recollections, Zacharias was clear: “It’s bullshit,” he said, “They didn’t adlib”.
To be slightly charitable towards Goodman, it’s more accurate to say that he and other members of the cast recalled going off-script, but one writer is absolutely adamant that everything in the film was in the screenplay. In his defence, Zacharias based the story on his own life in college, where the guys who lived next door were the inspiration behind the nerds, and he decided to turn their serial rejection into his inspiration.
Regardless of the precise facts in the case, it’s clear that the methods that were used on set worked for the people, and while Revenge of the Nerds is one of those cult 1980s comedies that is wildly out of step with the times (there’s a notorious rape scene that is played for romance), it still seems to delight new audiences.
