Ben-Nadav Hafri
speaker
333 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Ben-Nadav Hafri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Christmas movies always do well. And there was one Stan loved. Christmas in Connecticut.
He got a writer to work up the script.
This is Janet Brownell, one of the all-time great bards of TV movies. Writer on Eloise at the Plaza, 12 Dates of Christmas, Days of Our Lives, and the uncredited rewrite of Tim Allen's The Santa Claus. All Brownell. She loved the original Christmas in Connecticut.
Janet wrote a draft of the script for Stan's remake.
It's the middle of 1991. In Hollywood, Janet and Stan's low budget television movie remake isn't really the sort of thing to get people talking, but they're making progress. He's got the old school movie star Diane Cannon cast in the lead as the Martha Stewart character and an offer out to a director. And then one day, his phone rings. His assistant says it's a big Hollywood agent named Lou Pitt.
Lou Pitt, legendary agent to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
To be clear, Arnold had just finished shooting James Cameron's epic Terminator 2.
Terminator 2 is the one where Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a killer cyborg sent from the future to protect young John Connor from a different killer cyborg also sent from the future to kill him. As you can imagine, such a plot necessitates a lot of elaborate production work. It was moviemaking on a scale that was practically unheard of, especially in Los Angeles.
Anyways, back to Stan and Lou, the agent.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was 44 years old. He had two kids. Nobody is an action hero forever. Maybe it was time to explore some alternatives.
Stan gets the green light from the executives at TNT. There's some negotiating and they offer Schwarzenegger $100,000. And then one night, Stan's phone rings.
He goes over for a meeting at Arnold's offices in Santa Monica.
They sit down. Arnold has notes on the script.
And all of a sudden, Janet Brownell, who wrote the original script for the remake, is looking at a very different movie.
Arnold wants them to get someone else to come in and punch up the script.
Commando, the 1985 action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, which the critic from the LA Times referred to as a, quote, gory crowd pleaser and a glorified fireworks display.
Jeff Loeb, the friend who wrote Commando, gets hired to do the rewrite with his writing partner.
I just have to say, everyone in this episode is going to do their own Schwarzenegger impression, which is good because even though we couldn't land an interview with him, I feel like he's here with us in spirit. Anyway, they settle in and start rewriting the film Commando style.
They start burning through the script. A big job for any director is giving notes on the rewrites. Schwarzenegger was calling in help from his director friends, including legendary comedy director Ivan Reitman, the guy who did Ghostbusters. Everyone was working to realize Arnold's vision.
This was beginning to look like a train nobody would step in front of. Back at TNT, the executives had a dim sense of what was going on.
Showing 261–280 of 333 · page 14 of 17
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