How Hollywood makes and unmakes

For an offbeat kind of guy, Jon Favreau has knack for tapping into the zeitgeist. Back in 1996, he and his pal Vince Vaughan put together a ?lm for $250,000. Swingers followed a rat pack of struggling LA types not unlike Favreau and Vaughan through their hyper-romantic, hedonistic misadventures. It proved a cult hit, making martinis and Frank Sinatra fashionable again and turning the word ìmoneyî into a hip superlative, as in: ìSwingers is so money.î

Vince Vaughan proved to be money too: Swingers propelled him to stardom in such ?lms as The Lost World and The Matrix. Favreau, meanwhile, lingered in the wings with ephemeral stints in Very Bad Things and Love & Sex while cooking up new projects for himself and Vaughan. Years passed, until one day on the set of The Replacements, in which he had a supporting role, he got an offer he couldnít refuse.

ìIt was a strange course of events,î he recalls. ìI was shooting The Replacements in Baltimore, and I got a call from David Chase [creator of HBOís The Sopranos], whom I had spoken with months before about the prospect of possibly doing a guest stint on the show because I was such a fan of it, and he asked me if I wanted to play myself on the show, and I said, yeah, thatís great. The way he justi?ed me being in that world was that I was writing a movie about the mob. And I was writing a movie about the mob, but he had no idea that that was the case.î

And so Made was made. Favreau directs for the ?rst time, and he and Vaughan co-star as a couple of lowlife LA dreamers not nearly as cool or accomplished as their counterparts in Swingers but with the same captious chemistry. A crusty mobster played by Peter Falk offers them a mystery job. They take him up on it, and off they ?y ?rst-class to New York to be picked up in a stretch limo piloted by no less than Vincent Pastore, the Sopranosí late, lamented Big Pussy.

ìI was de?nitely in?uenced in my casting and the way that I wrote Made by being on that show,î Favreau acknowledges. Especially when Pastore confessed on the set of The Sopranos that he was a big fan of Swingers. ìI was a big fan of his, too, and I said, ëMy God, someone this enthusiastic and talented ó thatís the type of person you want around your set.í And so I started to mold the movie, the part, for him, without discussing it with him, but I knew that if I reached out to him, he would be there.î

Pastore didnít disappoint him. But a lot that has happened to Favreau in Hollywood, post-Swingers, has. ìAs positive an experience as it was, it was very shocking and offputting for both Vince and myself. It was overwhelming, and I think thatís why it took us so long to settle in and let the smoke clear. It was a wonderful opportunity, and we tried to encapsulate a lot of what we experienced in the context of the mob movie, things like riding in a limousine, ?ying ?rst-class for the ?rst time, staying in nice hotels, dealing with characters who are trying to woo you and manipulate you. Those are qualities I ?nd in Hollywood that really transpose well into a genre piece about the mob.î

Like the mob, Hollywood has changed in the ?ve years since Swingers was released ó especially for independent ?lmmakers like Favreau. These days itís much more a corporate than a family business.

ìI think a lot of the small studios, Miramax for example, made a hell of a lot of money [during that time],î Favreau observes. ìAnd theyíve won a lot of Oscars. And so itís like after the coup, the new boss starts to resemble the old boss a lot. Theyíre being driven by movie stars and youíll see fewer small companies like Artisan [which is releasing Made] or Lions Gate and itís very hard to ?ght for screen space. Love & Sex, another movie I was in, was a darling of the Sundance ?lm festival and it disappeared after a couple of weeks because they just canít compete on a money level.î

And while weíre on the subject of money, did Favreau expect any new catch phrases from Made?

ìI made sure there would be no catch phrases. Iím very charmed to have people screaming ëYouíre money!í in my face, but when theyíre drunk at the end of the night in a bar, it starts to get on my nerves.

-- P.K.

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Mob scene

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