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
Lori Poe's Manteer, one of the TNT executives.
Meanwhile, they've cast the rest of the film. Joining Diane Cannon would be Hollywood screwball legend Tony Curtis, probably best known for playing opposite Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Along with him would be ex-country music star Chris Christopherson. Here's TNT's senior vice president of production at the time, Nick Lombardo.
So armed with one of the all-time weirdest, most stacked casts in the history of film, a comparatively small budget of $3 million, a slot on an upstart cable network, and a script based on a 1940s screwball comedy that's been punched up by two of the writers behind a big 80s blockbuster, an Austrian former bodybuilder, fresh off his repeat performance as a time-traveling cyborg, prepared to direct his first Christmas film.
And everyone was about to find out whether or not he could. Christmas in Connecticut, the remake, began filming about two months before Christmas in Los Angeles.
Because Arnold Schwarzenegger had never before directed a feature film, though let the record show he had directed an episode of the TV show Tales from the Crypt, the production arranged for things to film more or less in the order they happen in the film. There's a lot less to keep track of continuity-wise that way. But this also posed a problem.
One of the anxieties of adapting a great work of art is figuring out how to make it your own. The 1992 made-for-TV remake of Christmas in Connecticut does this immediately by introducing its male lead, a park ranger named Jefferson Jones, mid-workout routine in his mountain cabin.
If you're looking for signs that this is not your grandmother's Christmas in Connecticut, the sight of Chris Christopherson as Jefferson Jones sweating after busting out some chin-ups on a beam in his cabin is your first warning. A man on the television offers some brisk exposition while he cools down.
The phone rings. Another ranger is calling to tell Jones a kid has gotten lost in the blizzard. He has to go out and find him. This is the fabled action sequence Schwarzenegger had requested. They shot the blizzard on a soundstage. It's the moment Jefferson Jones becomes a hero, which is why he gets invited to be a guest of Elizabeth Blaine's for her Christmas special in Connecticut.
It's got to look epic. It's got to have that Arnold Schwarzenegger feeling. Unfortunately, Terminator, this is not. Here's Jim Wilberger, director of production.
Schwarzenegger wanted Jeopardy, but this kind of looks like a snowball fight gone awry. Jones stumbles over a very small hill holding a child that looks like it might be a mannequin. He's groaning and yelling, but his lips aren't moving. So, tough start.
Luckily, though, a lot of the film is set inside Elizabeth Blaine's fake Connecticut house, where she's shooting a Christmas special in celebration of Jones. The bulk of production happened there, so the whole crew set up at a house in South Pasadena for the real work. This introduced Arnold to the second problem of directing, actor ego management and the issue of his trailer.
Diane Cannon was the star of the film, but she was maybe realizing that this production was all about the director. Schwarzenegger, though, was dealing with other problems. Namely, he had chosen one of the hardest genres for his first major directing foray. Screwball comedy is like dancing on the head of a pin. It thrives on chaos, but it has to be a kind of controlled chaos.
With his big personality cast, low budget, short timeline, and hastily rewritten script, Schwarzenegger had an excess of chaos and a minimum of control. I mean, you have one somewhat disgruntled actress portraying fake Martha Stewart, and another who's a macho park ranger, but who for no apparent reason relays this backstory partway through the movie.
This is, I'm pretty sure, the only time in the entire film Jefferson Jones' past as chair of the University of Chicago's comparative literature department is mentioned. And I love Chris Christopherson, but most of the rest of his performance veers between stiff and oddly sexually charged.
There's an extensive shot of that.
So you've got two characters who really just barely hang together. And then you have to direct them in tightly choreographed, zany sequences that have got to feel plausible, yet also hilarious. For instance, the scene with the baby. Remember, in Christmas in Connecticut, Elizabeth is a total fraud.
She doesn't know how to cook, it's not even her house in Connecticut, and she's got this fake staged family with her, including a fake baby. She had to keep up appearances for the sake of her column. In the original film, there's a lovely scene where she and Jefferson Jones give her fake baby a bath.
She, a supposed domestic goddess, is meant to bathe her child, which she suspiciously has no clue how to do. He steps in and does it for her like a total pro. It's part of why she falls in love with him. And because it's so well executed in the original film, we believe they're falling in love in this totally implausible moment.
Now this also happens in the Arnold Schwarzenegger version.
What happens next is the greatest travesty in the history of bath time. It's as if you gave two aliens a baby and said, give this a bath, not realizing that on the planet they're from, not only are there no babies or baths, but actually there's not even water.
Showing 281–300 of 333 · page 15 of 17
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