Brad Dourif, Jessica Walter and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
I have been loving the third season of Chucky, just like I absolutely adored the first two seasons. With the possible exceptions of M*A*S*H and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it might just be the best television adaptation of a movie.
As always I am loving Brad Dourif’s portrayal of Chucky. Dourif has managed to invest a killer doll in overalls a shocking amount of complexity and nuance. It’s not just a celebrity voice turn; it’s a real performance.
Dourif is clearly having an absolute blast doing a gonzo impression of his One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest costar Jack Nicholson’s extremely imitable drawl.
This was cheekily referenced in a recent episode that takes place in a mental hospital where Chucky quips, after talking to a particularly off-the-wall patient, “Freaking Cuckoo’s Nest in here.”
Dourif would have had an amazing career and be regarded as one of our greatest and most accomplished character actors even if he had never appeared in Child’s Play. But when Dourif dies, hopefully hundreds of years from now, Chucky is going to be in the first paragraph of his obituary.
In Chucky, Dourif and writer-director Don Mancini created a monster for the ages, a tiny plastic slasher that has won the hearts and minds of the American public with his homicidal ways and dark sense of humor.
Dourif has been eating off Chucky for thirty-five years now. It’s rare and remarkable for an actor to be playing the same role for three and a half decades.
Despite my love for the Child’s Play franchise I only recently discovered that Dourif came very close to not voicing Chucky at all.
Dourif played voodoo-loving Charles Lee Ray in Child’s Play but he was apparently too busy filming Tobe Hooper’s Spontaneous Combustion to do Chucky’s voice originally. So the filmmakers went to Arrested Development’s Jessica Walter, a formidable voiceover artist in her own right, and had her perform Chucky’s voice.
The filmmakers were inspired by Mercedes McCambridge voicing Pazuzu in The Exorcist but when a two hour cut of Child’s Play received a disastrous reception at a test screening they realized they had a problem on their hands.
They then had John Franklin, who played the villain in Children of the Corn, re-record all of Chucky’s lines before Dourif became available again. The rest, as they say, is history. Dourif was scary and intense but he was also funny and wild and weirdly likable despite being a crazed mass murderer.
Child’s Play was a finished film when Walter AND Franklin’s voice tracks were both thrown out so that Chucky could be voiced by the actor who plays him in human form.
This is far from the only time that has happened. Poor Samantha Morton was cast as the voice of the AI in Her. She was even on set to make the character more real.
After filming was completed, however, Jonze decided that Morton wasn’t quite right for the role or the film so she was replaced by Scarlett Johansson, a sexy woman with an even sexier voice.
Child’s Play and Her both turned out great. Their success validated the filmmaker’s choice to recast a key voice role after the film was fundamentally in the can.
The same is not true of Hot to Trot, however. The poorly received talking horse dud, which, hilariously, sought out Tim Burton as a director at a time when he was red-hot, was finished when it received an appropriately dire response from test screening audiences.
Elliott Gould was cast as the wisecracking voice of Don the Horse but test audiences didn’t dig him so he was replaced after the movie was already finished by John Candy.
Everybody loved Candy. He was hilarious! He was not, however, hilarious enough to make Hot to Trot anything other than a disaster.
But the most notorious case of post-completion meddling, with the possible exception of Christopher Plummer replacing Kevin Spacey in All the Money in the World and getting an Oscar nomination in the process, is Best Defense.
The Dudley Moore dud was DOA so the filmmakers decided to pay Eddie Murphy a small fortune to shoot additional scenes after the movie was finished as a “Strategic Guest Star.”
As with Hot to Trot, it didn’t matter. They still had a flop on their hands.
Sometimes making enormous changes after a movie is finished saves it or improves it and sometimes it’s a matter of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic because the movies in questions are wholly beyond repair.
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