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. David Schwimmer just celebrated his 60th birthday this month. So, let’s revisit that time the “Friends” star starred in his own Miramax film – and got the shaft when Harvey and them buried his directorial debut.
Thirty years ago, Friends ruled the airwaves. The sitcom about an unbreakable sextet of twentysomething pals living way-too-comfortably in ‘90s-era New York was both a top-rated program and a pop-culture juggernaut. The charming, attractive cast became A-list stars, and it seemed everyone was ready for them to make the move to the big screen.
That move began in 1996. Courteney Cox struck the most gold when she co-starred in Wes Craven’s slasher genre-reviving Scream, while Matt LeBlanc teamed up with a baseball-playing chimpanzee in the DOA sports comedy Ed. Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, and the gone-but-not-forgotten Matthew Perry were off making comedies that would show up in theaters the following year.
But Cox wasn’t the first Friend that year to appear in a Weinstein & Weinstein production. Earlier that spring, David Schwimmer made his leading-man debut in The Pallbearer – or, as I like to call it, The Graduate 2.0.
Schwimmer stepped away from his Friends role as Ross Geller, the self-centered neurotic in his crew of New York besties, to play Tom Thompson, the self-centered neurotic in his crew of New York besties. He gets called on by a grieving mother (a bleach-blonde Barbara Hershey) to do pallbearing/eulogy duties for an old high-school chum, a guy Thompson doesn’t remember. Nevertheless, he goes through with it, corralling his married pals – which includes previous Miramax players Toni Collette (Muriel’s Wedding) and Michael Rapaport (Beautiful Girls) – to help him with the eulogy and attend the funeral. (If you’re wondering how that goes, I have three words for ya: Chuckles the Clown.)
Unemployed and living with his mom (Carol Kane, delightful as always), Thompson is basically Benjamin Braddock with tousled hair and a punchable hangdog expression. (As the editor of this fine website once wrote, Schwimmer “chooses to basically play Tom as Ross Geller with a Clooney-on-ER haircut.”) He spends most of the movie practically stalking Julie DeMarco (Gwyneth Paltrow, Miramax’s most prized possession), a longtime crush who comes back to town and gets won over by the creep. He even engages in MILF-alicious action with the dead guy’s mom.
Yes, it’s another one of those morally questionable ‘90s movies where a young white male protagonist does a lot of selfish, unforgivable shit and, somehow, still manages to have sex with shiksa goddesses. (Outlaw critic Vern said it best about Schwimmer’s character: “The guy just sucks.”) Thankfully, there are some future Hollywood heavyweights working behind the camera to make this far-fetched, quasi-farcical mope movie look more appealing than it is. It’s directed by first-timer Matt Reeves, who would go on helm The Batman and several Planet of the Apes movies, working from a tonally jagged script by TV scribe Jason Katims (Friday Night Lights, Parenthood). Beloved franchise-reviver J.J. Abrams (who would later co-create the WB show Felicity with Reeves) is credited as a producer. And before he became the go-to cinematographer for Paul Thomas Anderson, Ben Affleck, and other directors, Robert Elswit did some fascinating DP work on this.
Despite Miramax’s slick-ass plan of marketing this dark dramedy as a perky rom-com, the $8 million Pallbearer only grossed $5 million. Its lack of success didn’t stop Harvey and them from locking Schwimmer into a three-picture deal. He agreed, but only if his first film, an ensemble comedy titled Stepping in the Dogwater (later retitled Since You’ve Been Gone), would also be his directorial debut.
Filmed on location in Chicago, where he studied acting at Northwestern and co-founded the Lookingglass Theater Company, Schwimmer snapped up a $4 million budget and assembled many of his Lookingglass alums to assume the aimless adults who convene at a hotel for a ten-year high-school reunion. (Along with directing, Schwimmer also plays the egotistical class president/reunion organizer.) Since the main cast mostly consists of unfamiliar faces (though then-TV ingenues Lara Flynn Boyle and Teri Hatcher appear as loathsome, poorly-written attendees), Schwimmer did call in some recognizable folk for cameos: Jon Stewart and Rachel Griffiths briefly play a bickering couple, while Marisa Tomei, Molly Ringwald, and a dance-feverish Liev Schreiber (stepping in for Brad Pitt, who had to drop out of the role) do quick work as fellow former classmates. The late, Chicago-based trash TV-titan Jerry Springer even shows up as a photographer.
Since ended up getting shelved, quietly making its world premiere not in a theater, but on ABC one Saturday night back in 1998. There are several possible explanations for this cold-blooded burial from exec producers Bob and Harvey. They might’ve gotten pressure from Disney, their parent company, to get rid of it. After all, Disney already dropped Grosse Pointe Blank and Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, two less-than-lucrative, class reunion-themed comedies (and inevitable cult faves) that were released a couple weeks apart from each other in 1997. The movie’s lack of star power might’ve made the Weinsteins decide to cut their losses and ship it to the small screen. But the real reason may be because, quite simply, it’s not good.
Schwimmer, who said he turned down the Will Smith role in Men in Black to direct this, makes a jumbled mess out of screenwriter Jeff Steinberg’s flimsy, episodic script. It’s more like a bunch of random, one-joke scenes cut and pasted together; a couple feature characters initially greeting each other after already appearing in several scenes together. It’s no wonder the Weinsteins dropped this off in broadcast-TV land: the vapid, sitcommy tone reminds me of the lazily-written comedies that tried (and usually failed) to follow Friends during its “Must See TV” prime. (Fun fact: Joey Slotnick, who plays a gay songwriter in Since, co-starred in The Single Guy, a short-lived NBC sitcom that followed Friends and where Schwimmer guest-starred as Geller.)
You could say Schwimmer’s short-lived partnership with Miramax made him chill on his movie-star aspirations. He would go on to supporting turns in films like the Harrison Ford-Anne Heche romantic actioner Six Days, Seven Nights and the coming-of-age thriller Apt Pupil, directed by the now-disgraced Bryan Singer. But he didn’t give up on directing, later helming the 2007 Simon Pegg comedy Run Fatboy Run and the 2010 dramatic thriller Trust, which tackles the issue of online predators catfishing and sexually abusing teenage girls.
After the Weinstein scandal broke, Schwimmer (who came up with the story for Trust) received some props for being an unproblematic man in the biz. Critic Neil Minow recalled how she interviewed Schwimmer about Trust in a noisy hotel restaurant back in 2011. When Schwimmer offered to continue the interview in his hotel room, he also suggested bringing a third person along to chaperone the whole deal. “This wasn’t just about his being a good guy who would not have tried anything,” Minow said. “He understood what it is like to have to be constantly on the alert and he wanted to make sure I understood I was safe.”
Even before Weinstein’s allegations dropped, Schwimmer produced #ThatsHarrassment, a series of PSA shorts that featured stars like Cynthia Nixon, Emmy Rossum, Zasie Beetz, and Schwimmer himself acting out real-life stories of sexual harassment. He also wrote an NBC News op-ed piece where he discussed how hearing myriad stories of harassment from his mother and his sister inspired him to be an advocate for child and adult victims of sexual violence. “I’m the father of a six-and-a-half year-old daughter; if I’m going to do something about this for the future generations, now is the time,” he wrote.
It’s nice knowing that Schwimmer is, in fact, a decent guy; he’s just really good at playing dopey-looking assholes on the big and small screen. But a part of me likes to think that his non-toxic rep is also his understandably petty way of getting back at the man who tried to torpedo his film career back in the day. I guess Schwimmer learned early on that the best way to get revenge on Weinstein is by, quite simply, not being a complete piece of shit.
“The Pallbearer” is available to stream on Hoopla. “Since You’ve Been Gone” is available to rent or buy.
