The summer of 2008 was a great season for blockbusters, not only because the films were a financial success, but many of them also earned favor from both fans and critics alike. Unlike this past summer, during which audiences had to suffer through the works of Michael Bay and Stephen Sommers, films like Iron Man were not only fun and crowd-pleasing but also contained a well told stories and enjoyable dialogue that didn't make you cringe. So what if I were to tell you that Iron Man had no script? Prepare to have your mind blown.
In Contention recently conducted an interview with Jeff Bridges, discussing the upcoming Crazy Heart, but when the topic turned to last summer's early hit, Bridges let the following bomb drop:
“They had no script, man... They had an outline. We would show up for big scenes every day and we wouldn’t know what we were going to say. We would have to go into our trailer and work on this scene and call up writers on the phone, ‘You got any ideas?’ Meanwhile the crew is tapping their foot on the stage waiting for us to come on.”
According to Bridges, Favreau, Downey Jr. and himself would get together before a scene, improvise what they wanted to say, reverse roles, get the clearance from Marvel and then shoot the scene. Think of it as a two hour episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, only Larry David wears a gold-titanium alloy suit instead of a sweater and khakis.
It's more than likely that Bridges is exaggerating a bit, but it certainly puts a new perspective on the news story from yesterday about RDJ rewriting the script for the sequel. Frankly, if the story does turn out to be true, I sure would like to hear from Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway and find out exactly what they got paid for. Overall, I like to think that this story proves the power of intelligence: you get a bunch of dumb people in a room with a basic outline and you get Transformers 2, but if you put together a couple of brains with the same material, you can get something incredible.
