Craig D. Lindsey
Welcome to Harvey’s Hellhole, a monthly column devoted to spotlighting the movies that were poorly marketed, mishandled, reshaped, neglected or just straight-up destroyed by Harvey Weinstein during his reign as one of the most powerful studio chiefs in Hollywood. I thought this movie came out thirty years ago this month. It turns out it was thirty years ago last month. Anyway, here’s a late anniversary piece on one of the funniest dysfunctional-family comedies/road movies/sex farces you may not know a damn thing about.
When David O. Russell went to Miramax to direct his second feature, Harvey Weinstein made one thing perfectly clear to him: he didn’t want a muthafuckin’ movie about mother-fucking.
Back in 1994, the then-young filmmaker freaked out Sundance crowds with his debut film Spanking the Monkey, an unsettling tragicomedy about a self-pleasuring college student (Lost alum Jeremy Davies) who takes care of his injured mom (Alberta Watson) — in more ways than one. Along with winning the festival’s Audience Award, Russell was also the first recipient of the Independent Spirit Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Although Monkey, budgeted at $200,000, would go on to gross over a million at art houses, Weinstein wasn’t in the market for another Oedipal flick. He was already done with incestuous indies after Miramax flopped with Neil Jordan’s 1991 import The Miracle, where a MILF-y Beverly D’Angelo gets infatuated with a young Irishman, both unaware that they’re – spoiler alert! – mother and son. (Considering that his next film was the Oscar-winning sleeper hit The Crying Game, also distributed by Miramax, it seemed like Jordan was really into making movies with sexually-charged twists that either left you titillated or disgusted.)
Since Spanking was giving Russell a rep as a perverted provocateur (“A lot of people regarded me as a dirtbag,” he said in Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures), Russell was ready to keep it somewhat tame with his latest comedy, Flirting with Disaster. In fact, it’s about a man escaping his mother and looking for another one.
Neurotic New Yorker/new dad Mel Coplin (Ben Stiller) goes on a search for his biological parents, which predictably upsets his overbearing, adoptive ones (Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal). He takes a wild journey across the U.S. with his wife Nancy (Patricia Arquette), their baby boy (whom they haven’t named yet), and Tina (Téa Leoni), a leggy adoption agent Mel can’t seem to admit that he’s attracted to.
It’s a trip that leads to several dead ends. They first fly to San Diego to meet supposed mom Valerie (Celia Weston), a caftan-wearing blonde with Confederate roots and a set of statuesque, beach volleyball-playing twins (one of whom is played by Beth Ostrosky, who would become Howard Stern’s second wife). They obviously realize that Valerie isn’t Mel’s mother – the adoption agency made a computer error – but not before Mel accidentally knocks over Valerie’s collection of glass animals. Then, they head over to ice-covered Michigan to track down alleged dad/crass trucker Fritz (David Patrick Kelly), who initially roughs up Mel a bit for coming to his home unannounced.
After determining Mel is too smart (and too Jewish) to be his kid, Fritz tells him his real parents are actually Richard and Mary Schlichting (Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin), hippie artists/ex-cons living in New Mexico. The trip gets more tense when, after Mel gets detained for demolishing a post office (don’t ask), Nancy invites an old high-school friend (Josh Brolin), who’s now a bisexual ATF agent, and his aggressive partner/husband (Richard Jenkins) to tag along with them.
For a ribald, R-rated indie comedy released in the irony-heavy, Gen-X era of Friends (where Stiller did a guest role) and Reality Bites (which Stiller directed and co-starred in), Flirting harks back to the old-school screwball comedies of that hellzapoppin’ holy trinity: Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, and Preston Sturges. (Russell has said he was inspired more by randy, ‘70s-era black comedies like Shampoo and The Heartbreak Kid, the latter of which the Farrelly brothers remade in 2007 starring – wait for it! – Stiller.) The last half-hour is pure farce, as this caravan’s meetup with the Schlichtings descends into hilarious, hysterical chaos, complete with clumsy attempts at infidelity, someone getting dosed with an LSD-covered quail, some armpit-licking (again, don’t ask), and a car crash.
For all its comic mayhem, Flirting tackles the perils of parenthood with surprising sincerity. We get it from all angles, from Mel and Nancy’s post-pregnancy intimacy issues to the fears and regrets expressed by all the parents throughout the story. In an interview included with the published scripts for Flirting and Spanking, Russell admitted that Flirting was inspired by Russell’s own struggles with fatherhood. “I was a new father… my sex life had been disrupted, and I was kind of scared about the commitment and the responsibility.”
It does seem like Russell was attempting to purge himself of his self-centered, self-destructive demons (which we’ll get to later) by making a movie about a man literally going on a quest to get rid of that shit. In a bold bit of self-flagellating, he conceives his stand-in as a jerk who can’t see how good he has it. A master of the art of playing nebbishy nice guys who are really assholes, Stiller works that passive-aggressive prickishness without falling into full douchebaggery. He really makes you feel for Arquette’s long-suffering spouse, who has to witness her husband try not to pine over Leoni’s daffy ex-dancer, even though she’s Patricia Fuckin’ Arquette! (No offense to the coltish Leoni, but Lost Highway is my favorite David Lynch movie for a reason.)
Russell and Weinstein predictably butted heads during pre-production, from casting choices to Weinstein demanding shots of Arquette’s breasts during an undressing scene. After some less-than-exemplary test screenings, Weinstein forced Russell to cut scenes from an end-credits coda showing the characters in their respective bedrooms. Even though one shot has an underwear-clad Moore going down on Segal, ol’ Harv wanted the middle America-offending shots of Brolin and Jenkins in bed and a pregnant Leoni smoking before going on a date outta there. (Don’t worry – the streaming version has the uncut coda.)
Flirting hit theaters in March 1996, winning a lot of love from critics. Roger Ebert praised its unpredictability (“There are conventions in this sort of story, and Russell seems to violate most of them”), while Peter Rainer called it “the right kind of Hollywood family film–unsoppy and rude.” Not everyone was charmed. Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers said “fans of Russell the Monkey boy will be crushed to see him dull his edge with sitcom silliness.” (Years later, in a Reddit AMA, Travers admitted he judged too harshly: “My head was in my nether regions on that one.”
Flirting doubled its $7 million budget during its theatrical run, but Weinstein was shooting for $30 million. Both men parted ways (less than amicably, of course) and went on their respective reigns of terror on Tinseltown. As Weinstein pivoted to movie-mogul status, threatening and abusing people along the way, Russell was also doing it on his film sets. I’m sure we’ve all seen the video of Russell crashing out on the I Heart Huckabees set by now; he also has a sexual abuse allegation – made by his transgender niece! – under his belt. (Weinstein must’ve thought “Amateur!” when he heard about it.)
These toxic tyrants must’ve gotten together for fireside cigars and brandy at some point, since Russell later teamed up with The Weinstein Company to direct the Oscar-winning The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook. They even had a deal to make a $160 million crime series for Amazon starring Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore, but it was scrapped when the Weinstein scandal broke.
Even with all his baggage, Russell still has a relationship with Amazon. His sports biopic Madden (another reportedly contentious production), with Nicolas Cage as football great John Madden, will stream on the service in November. It’s kinda crazy how the same guy who did a charming little piece of cinema thirty years ago for a megalomaniacal sumabitch who ruins everything is now doing big-budget content for Jeff Bezos.
“Flirting with Disaster” is available to stream on Paramount+.
