RIGHT PLACE, WRONG TIME: THE CHAD SCHMIDT STORY
Much like the titular character in his comedic noir ‘Chad Schmidt’, it was a case of being in the right place at the wrong time for writer/director Steven Conrad. He had the script, he had Brad Pitt on board to star, but fate wasn’t willing to let the tale of a struggling actor with an uncanny resemblance to one of Hollywood’s leading stars reach the screen.
‘Chad Schmidt’, the tale of a struggling actor whose career is hampered by an unfortunate resemblance to actor Brad Pitt, had its origins in the most unlikely of places - coffee with indie actress Lili Taylor.
“We hadn’t met before. I was in the restaurant where I was expecting her, and I thought when I saw her that there was no mistaking her for somebody else,” writer/director Steven Conrad said.
“The idea just dawned on me - what if there was someone who existed in that physical orbit of someone whose looks are widely known, with small alterations to make them less perfect. I thought of that, and the name (Chad Schmidt) just popped into my head. I had been a fan of Brad Pitt’s forever because he does this sort of magic thing. He’s a leading man, but he’s tremendously funny. He has this light. There’s something going on behind his eyes all the time.”
And while Conrad ultimately spent a year developing the project with Pitt, he was at one point considering a variation involving another hot box office talent at the time.
“I talked to Jim Carrey about a version at some point when we were trying to find something to do with each other - but that one didn’t quite come together either,” he said.
“Those two guys, I’d put them in the same category of actors who care about the quality of the films they’re in... they use their power as leading men to make movies that might not otherwise get made.”
Conrad said he wasn’t apprehensive about approaching Pitt, despite coming up with a pitch that would require one of the sexiest men alive to get ugly.
“He doesn’t look like a TV star; he looks like a movie star. He’s like the Steve McQueens or the James Deans of this world. They don’t belong on your TV screen; they belong on that bigger one,” he said.
“He’s got this magnetism, and it’s not just his looks, he’s got a bearing that’s also dynamic. Chad Schmidt was not going to be good looking. He was going to have male patterned baldness; his ears were going to stick out a bit, there was probably something we could do with the chin to take some of Brad’s attractive edge off a bit - enough, so it just felt ‘off’... like Brad Pitt dragged behind a bus for a little bit. I think he was excited about playing someone who represented a bit different physically. And I was excited because I thought this was a cool idea that someone should’ve thought of already. He responded to the idea straight away... he liked it.”
Conrad said a vital issue for both him and Pitt was ensuring the film was more than just a quirky premise.
“In the very early going, I said to anybody involved that it ought to have its own merit - it can’t just live on that concept,” he said.
“It’s not a sketch, it’s a film, and that (the premise) should just be a way into something that exists beneath it - the real story, the real reason why we’re all there. I happened to be a fan of a genre that I thought ‘Chad Schmidt’ could Venn diagram over, which is the noir character who’s not going to get what he’s trying to get. There’s this different set of math that exists in these genres - there’s a distinction between a heist movie and a noir. Heist movies are like ‘Ocean’s 11’ - the characters get in, and they get out with the thing. In noir, they don’t. Noir’s like ‘The Killing’ where the bag of money’s opened up, and the money blows into the wind or something like ‘No Country For Old Men’. I wanted ‘Chad Schmidt’ to be a noir-like that, where Chad doesn’t get what he wants - it had those elements that belonged to that world. So the conception of Brad playing this guy was just the way to get the studio behind the movie, and then we were going to try and sneak in a 70s noir energy to it.”
One area the duo was less concerned about was historical accuracy - given Chad’s interaction with a number of “real-life” characters, including Pitt himself.
“We weren’t trying to authenticate the early years of Brad Pitt’s career, and he didn’t fill me with facts that he felt we ought to be mining - I think he’d have preferred to be spending more time playing Chad Schmidt than the Brad Pitt aspect of the story,” he said.
“I made up the world and then we worked together on a couple of different passes to try and clear things up. He gave me good producing notes - making sure there was a texture that meant the character’s just a little altered by the experience, and the audience can be a little altered by the experience too. (In developing ‘Chad Schmidt’) We’d talk generally about themes that were interesting to him - he likes to participate in films that push the art form, and I think he recognised this would be an invitational way into writing about something that’s worth writing about - our relationship to fate.”
The story, as it resulted, centred on Chad Schmidt - an aspiring actor who makes ends meet working in a used car dealership, while also moonlighting as a Ronald McDonald at the Ronald McDonald Charity House.
After losing out in a gig in ‘Thelma and Louise’ to Brad Pitt, Chad manages to score the rights to an indie film penned by a then comparatively unknown (in the States at least) Richard Curtis called ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. Schmidt desperately wants to star in the film but is struggling to come up with the cash to retain the rights. With fate stymieing his attempts to land a feature acting career. The money earned from various odd jobs (including a gig working for porn actor Jeff Stryker) not getting him the cash he needs, Chad teams up with some of his shadier coworkers in a people-smuggling ring operating through the car dealership.
In true noir tradition, Chad ends up in over his head.
“I probably could’ve swapped Richard (Curtis) out for someone else,” Conrad said of the real-life figures at the periphery of Chad Schmidt’s world. It’s part of the job of the filmmaker to trick the audience into paying attention to people they wouldn’t otherwise, and the character of Jeff Stryker - he does that for me. Jeff Stryker so fit the path of the movie and the story. I really felt like that could work.”
And while Pitt and Conrad had settled on the script, there was one outstanding element which, unfortunately for Conrad, signalled the demise of ‘Chad Schmidt’.
“I would have loved to direct it but, at that point in time (‘Chad’ was being developed around the same time as Conrad’s feature directorial debut ‘The Promotion’ was arriving in theatres), it was tremendously unlikely,” Conrad said.
“One of the things I like about Brad Pitt is that he’s good for the art form - he makes good decisions when he takes projects, and he has choices. Where that leaves him is he can handpick among really terrific directors - he works with Malick, he works with Tarantino. The chances of him allowing me to direct that film at that stage were slight. We spent time getting the story together and when I felt I was happy with the tale and the way the script was articulating these themes, Brad - if I remember correctly - made a small list of names that he would work with on the project. And it was Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, the Coens, Tarantino. And when I saw that list, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. Those filmmakers are auteurs - they curate their material and generally don’t just make projects that land on their desk; they build them from scratch. And it was an understandable decision on his part - there aren’t that many great filmmakers... directing is a tremendously demanding walk of life, you need at least a hundred qualities to do it well. I’m sure it’s been the case for him that he’s been on movies where he recognises he’s in the hands of someone who isn’t quite there. I’ve seen it as a writer, where people weren’t dedicating that amount of force and investment to it - where there was lazy camera vocabulary, where there wasn’t the appropriate amount of rehearsal relative to the scene. He’s been out among the masters and, when you have choices, that’s where you ought to choose to be - in the hands of masters.”
Some element, such as a character’s love of magic found their way into other works of Conrad’s.
“We scavenge here - I saw we because Elephant (Conrad’s production company) is four people... when you’re writing for television, and you’ve got to write ten hours of stuff, you look through the old stuff and see what can linger and what still deserves to exist,” he said.
“The magic - I knew I was going to find a home for that. And I think it’s better in Perpetual Grace Ltd because the character that Damon Herriman plays - in season two he’s going to take over the show is an indomitable, peculiar spirit. He’s going to take this little conception all the way, and it can now live longer than the two-hour version in ‘Chad Schmidt’.”
One element Conrad’s yet to find another home for, though, is the film within a film Chad’s shooting to earn some money - a low budget ‘Apollo 13’-esque drama written by an indie writer/director with a unique concept of authenticity.
“The thing I was most excited to do with Brad was the film inside the film,” he said. The dialogue of that film just seemed to be, that antithetical dialogue, to me it’s the saddest thing about the idea that ‘Chad Schmidt’ was never made. I’d never get to watch Brad do that. It would have been pretty special.”
To this day, Conrad still fields questions about ‘Chad’, and he remains acutely aware of what might have been.
“I’ve had these TV shows out over the past five years (‘Perpetual Grace Ltd’ and ‘Patriot’, and interviewers ask why that work feels so different than the stuff I’ve written for films I didn’t direct,” he said.
“And in the back of my mind, I’m thinking it’s no different from some of the scripts I’ve written that were never made - like ‘Chad Schmidt’. I’ve always liked it an awful lot. It’s the one that got away. The guy I made ‘The Weather Man’ with, Gore Verbinski, has been a tremendous influence in my working life - we had a movie we spent forever on fall apart, ‘Pyongyang’. It was set in North Korea, and we were just about to make it at the time that Sony had their hacking scare, and the movie was pulled on us. We went out to dinner to commiserate, and he said the hardest part was that he’d already made the film - in his head, it was already created - and it couldn’t be shared. ‘Chad Schmidt’ occupies that same hurtful place in my creative space - where I just know how cool this was going to be. And it hasn’t gone away, I still get questions about it, and I know Brad does too. I think that’s attributable to people just wanting to have seen him do it. They know he would’ve been great at it. The one thing I’ll never do again is write a role that only one actor in the universe can play - I will not do that again. I love Brad, he knows it, but I’m only going to be able to write for 40 years, and one of them was spent on something that was never going to happen. Ten years ago, I couldn’t get that job. Having had these two TV shows since then - where we get to shoot tons of film and edit forever... I could make ‘Chad Schmidt’ now - I could get that job now.”
And while ‘Chad Schmidt’ may be long gone, Conrad remains hopeful some form of the project may ultimately live.
“He (Pitt) likes ‘Patriot’ an awful lot, and we had recently been talking about doing something together - and he routinely brings up ‘Chad Schmidt’,” Conrad said.
“We’ll have to figure out another way to do it, another iteration - but it may happen yet. It would have to be a slightly newer idea - take that conception, that theme of fate and figure out another way to articulate that story. Also, I just get excited about new writing a lot more than old writing. I like what’s ahead.”
Anotherfilmnerd's earliest cinematic memory was seeing Don Johnson throw up all over a suspect in John Frankenheimer's 'Dead Bang'. Ever since, he's devoted his life to searching out cinema that's weird, wonderful and features vomit in the most unlikely of places.