The program for the penultimate night of the Tribeca Festival featured Matthew Broderick and Judd Apatow and it was easy to assume that they would go under Cable type memory lane.
The film, which was planned as another big Jim Carrey block in 1996, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber And The maskThe comedy star received an incredible $20 million for the film from Columbia Pictures. The film, directed by Ben Stiller, was an unforgettable experience for Apatow, who produced it, as it was here that he met his wife Leslie Mann. The cable type flopped in the US, a milestone in Carrey’s box office streak at the time, grossing only $60 million in the US. Broderick played the serious comedian opposite Carrey’s snarky cable technician in the film. Carrey was attracted by a script that was hot in the ’90s and sparked a bidding war for $750,000; the project was much darker and weirder than his gross-out comedies.
“I remember thinking at the time that these were Matthew’s first adult roles,” Apatow teased Broderick, since Broderick already had roles of younger men on his resume.
But Broderick remembered even more the headlines about Carrey getting a big check for the film. “I got a Swiss cheese sandwich,” the actor joked about his payday.
Apatow said: “Jim was so hard on you every day. I remember one day when he was so right in your face on every single take that you said to me between takes, ‘I don’t know how to react anymore! I have no reaction to this anymore!'”
Broderick said of Carrey’s $20 million salary: “As nice as it is to earn all that, it also put a lot of pressure on him in some ways. It wasn’t that long ago that he was relatively unknown and suddenly he’s the highest paid. You have to be the greatest genius of all time every minute, so I understood the pressure he must have put on himself.”
“When you have such success, it’s a double-edged sword. I took that with understanding,” Broderick added.
“I don’t know many people who have gotten so big so quickly in this way,” Apatow said.
Other memorable moments for Apatow included an agonizing night shoot – a scene with Ichabod Crane in which Carrey’s cable guy chases Broderick – that ended with a lot of mud in both actors’ eyes. Apatow recalled that Broderick suffered a corneal injury, but Broderick remembered that Carrey had to be hospitalized. The scene did not make the final cut.
Then there was a scheduling glitch during filming on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. Broderick had to wait all day in his trailer on set. Apatow remembers checking on the actor after 14 hours: “You were so mad at me and said, ‘don’t do that again.’ I always remember that. I never did that to anyone else again. You were the person who taught me to be careful not to waste an actor’s time. So when someone isn’t filming for six hours, I think about the look on your face that day and how scary that was. You don’t want Bueller to be mad at you, he’s going to throw you out!”
Apatow showed a ten-minute clip of the film to then-legendary manager Bernie Brillstein, who didn’t find Carrey’s lisping character funny. “Is he going to talk like that for the whole movie?” Apatow remembers Brillstein asking.
Apatow found Carrey funny and told Brillstein that the film was similar to John Belushi’s Neighbors.
Brillstein certainly remembered this film and said to Apatow: “I know! I produced that film! It didn’t work!”