By Erin Free
What Happened?
After the phenomenal success of the Austin Powers and Meet The Parents films, director, Jay Roach, continued to develop his Midas Touch for comedy when he helped British comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen, bring his films, Borat and Bruno, to the big screen by taking a hands-on producer’s role. The scathing mockumentaries – which grew out of characters that Cohen had created for British TV – not only broke new comedy ground, but also captured the public’s attention in a way that cinema rarely does. “His comedy is so specific, and he’s so amazing at it,” Roach told Hollywood News of Sacha Baron Cohen. “I’ve never seen an audience laugh harder than they laughed at Borat. I can remember, literally, just looking around at the audience during that naked fight sequence and going, ‘Oh my God, I will never direct anything that has people flopping around in their seats as hard as they are right now.’ So I learned from those experiences that he is a master. I was a producer on those films, and I helped with the post process where we screened it over and over and kept finding the film with the interactions with the audience. It evolved through that.”
Sacha Baron Cohen was initially in line to star in Jay Roach’s 2010 comedy, Dinner For Schmucks (a remake of seminal French comic director, Francis Veber’s cinder-black gut-buster, The Dinner Game), taking on the role of Barry, an unwitting buffoon who gets an invite to a dinner party where wealthy arseholes compete as to who can bring along the biggest idiot. Cohen dropped out, however, when the film was caught up first in delays caused by a strike by The Writers Guild Of America, and then by legal tangling between heavy hitting studios, DreamWorks and Paramount, over who owned the rights to the film. Rumour has it that Sacha Baron Cohen and the producers were also at an impasse over the approach to the story. The British comedian eventually dropped out of the project, and he was duly replaced by the equally funny Steve Carell. “I’m sure that Sacha would have killed it,” Dinner For Schmucks co-star, star Paul Rudd, told The Los Angeles Times. “But I loved the idea of doing it with Steve Carell, whom I consider an actor, and not just a comic. He’ll sacrifice a joke if it isn’t necessary to what’s human and moving about a character.”
Would It Have Worked?
It would have been a very, very different movie, and Sacha Baron Cohen would have unquestionably brought laughs of a far more confronting and divisive nature. In short, he would have made for a very welcome guest at this Dinner For Schmucks…
