Ray Pride

I see David Spade get smacked around, I laugh.

Maybe it's just me. Spade's newest star vehicle, likable, headlong and often nonsensical, finds the small comic playing an obstinate, put-upon janitor in acid-washed jeans and a ratty mullet wig, who lives for Van Halen and a dream of rejoining his family -- who deserted him at a Grand Canyon rest stop when he was only 8 years old.

This PG-13 concoction was brewed by episodic television veteran Dennie Gordon ("Jack and Jill," "Dawson's Creek"), who identifies her attraction to Spade as "Just vulnerability. Women especially respond to that," she believes. "I'm always laughing, every time I see him, he's with some new babe, some new supermodel babe. I think he has a warmth and a humanity to him. One of the things that attracted me to this script was that this was a genius of a loser, a Forrest Gump-type character. Who better than David Spade to play the little guy?"

She's the kind of schmoozy talker you can imagine on the set of a television show, getting responses fast and economically. "I encouraged ad-libbing. When you've got comic geniuses like David Spade, Dennis Miller, Chris Walken," she sells, "You're lucky enough to get those guys in your cast, my job is just to make sure I've got the camera coverage that allows them to play. When you have a comedy like this, you get such gold when you get them to relax. It's a party atmosphere."

But at the end of the day, "Joe Dirt" remains a sentimental slob comedy about a diminutive scrapper in search of his folks while meeting up with the likes of Jaime Pressly, Kid Rock and the giddy, voluptuous Brittany Daniels. (Joe's resemblance to "American Movie"'s Mark Borchardt is only mullet-deep, Gordon insists.) "With a comedy like this, and it's something I learned from Tracy Ullman when I was doing [her] HBO show, get it early and get it fast. This kind of comedy, the more takes you do, the more watered down it gets, it becomes a pale imitation of what was once sparkling and funny and great. If I didn't get it by take three, there was something wrong."

But, c'mon, this is a movie where the major comic set piece involves the delicate maneuvering necessary to disengage a sad-faced hound's testicles after they've frozen to a porch. That is a painful scene. "Yes, 'Dog Balls' is a painful scene, indeed. We never thought it would see light of day. The whole time we were shooting, we thought, this is the one scene the MPAA will never ever let. It just flew by. The stuff they objected to was language, there were words we couldn't say. But the dog ball scene is intact. Although we can't tease it. You won't see it in any trailers. The only thing we can do is talk about it. In our test previews, it just killed." And it is the scene were Spade meets his love interest, Brittany Daniels. "I'm not sure how we would have introduced the two characters. We never really shot an alternative. We also figured somehow, some way, we would slice it into something [acceptable]. We probably would have just had the dog whining. We really went for it. Thank god we got to do what we had in our brains at the beginning. The dog, Ren, who did the real heavy lifting in that scene, he retired. He's now living with my assistant director. That was his final curtain. That was a great dog. I tell you, that dog was good for so many takes. But by the end of the second night, with that appliance on him -- he had to keep getting up and going down. He'd have to get up and he'd be pulled back down [with the fake testicles stretching to rubber band proportions]. He must have [done this] 150 times. By the end of the night, he gave me the look like very tired actor, 'I am not doing this again.'"

I wondered how a director of well-regarded episodic television would consider that the sort of stretch to be making. "A couple of things, y'know," she says, agreeably. "Not only are these kinds of movies popular -- I didn't make it [just] for it to be popular -- I did want to make a comedy for my first film. I've got a lot of serious drama under my belt from 'The Practice.' A fair amount of comedy, 'Sports Night,' 'Ally McBeal,' Tracy Ullman. I think if you're gonna make a comedy, you should be in business with Adam Sandler [the film's co-producer]. I really loved this script. I laughed out loud so many times when I read it. I had read a lot of material before chasing after 'Joe Dirt.' I'm a big fan of Spade's, I knew we could cast the wee-wee out of it. It excited me on a lot of levels."

And it doesn't require the ultimate in finesse. "Riiiiiight," she says. "I didn't see how we could lose with it. There was romance, there was crazy physical comedy, there was a sweetness to it. It just seemed nonstop. Our test screenings were amazing. Whenever I want to be cheered up, I play the tape of the audience laughing, this nonstop tittering. That's joyous."

(2001-04-12)

Also by Ray Pride

WORLDS KNOWN
A mirror of language and a dance of desire, the culmination of "The Beauty of the Husband"'s performance takes the breath away.
(2001-04-05)

BLOWN
"Blow," more than six years in the planning, is a pop tapestry of urge and need. The flip side of "Traffic," Ted Demme's fifth feature embellishes the life story of George Jung, the most profligate of drug dealers, who, working in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Colombia druglord Pablo Escobar, filled our fair land with kilos of "disco shit -- pure as the driven snow."
(2001-04-05)

THIS AMERICAN SO-CALLED LIFE
A thirteen-part series, drawn from 2,800 hours of video capturing the lives of fourteen students, their teachers and family, over the 1999-2000 school year at Chicago suburban Highland Park High School, it surpasses its creators' claim that they've made the nonfiction equivalent of "My So-Called Life."
(2001-03-29)

WHOLE CLOTH
Liars, cheats, two-timers, eager-to-please fantasists: And those are the good guys.
(2001-03-29)

COLOR BIND
(2001-03-22)

WORDS ON PICTURES
(2001-03-22)

OFF CAMERA
(2001-03-22)

MANNY FROM HEAVEN
(2001-03-08)

RAINSTORMS OF WORDS
(2001-03-01)

MEET JOE BLOW
(2001-03-01)

KNOWING DICK
(2001-02-22)

CROUCHING PRODUCER, HIDDEN EGO
(2001-02-22)

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