| Fletch | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Michael Ritchie |
| Produced by | Peter Douglas Alan Greisman |
| Written by | Novel: Gregory Mcdonald Screenplay: Andrew Bergman |
| Narrated by | Chevy Chase |
| Starring | Chevy Chase Tim Matheson Joe Don Baker Dana Wheeler-Nicholson |
| Music by | Harold Faltermeyer |
| Cinematography | Fred Schuler |
| Editing by | Richard A. Harris |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
| Release date(s) | May 31, 1985 |
| Running time | 98 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Fletch is a 1985 comedy film about a wisecracking investigative newspaper reporter, Irwin M. Fletcher (Chevy Chase), who writes under the name of Jane Doe. The film was based on the popular Gregory Mcdonald novels, the screenplay was written by Andrew Bergman and it was directed by Michael Ritchie.
In the 1970s, Burt Reynolds and Mick Jagger were considered to portray Fletch on the big screen but these suggestions were rejected by Mcdonald. The author agreed to the casting of Chevy Chase despite never seeing the comedian in anything. Chase reportedly enjoyed the role because it allowed him to play several different characters and work with props. In a 2004 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Chase confirmed this was his favorite role.
Fletch earned several positive reviews from critics and performed well at the box office and home video. It has since developed a cult following and was followed by a 1989 sequel, Fletch Lives. A prequel, Fletch Won, has been in talks for more than a decade.
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The film opens with one of Fletch's many, often humorous, monologues. The drug trade is Fletch's latest story, and while investigating undercover as a beach wanderer one day he is approached by a well-groomed man, Alan Stanwyk (Tim Matheson). Stanwyk says he wants Fletch to murder him because he has inoperable cancer; this way his family will receive his life insurance. Unaware that Fletch is actually an undercover reporter, Stanwyk thinks he would be the perfect man for the job, as he appears to be a person of no consequence, who can thus simply disappear after the shooting without any suspicions being raised. Fletch agrees to kill Stanwyk when offered a considerable sum of money, but is suspicious of Stanwyk's motives. Fletch starts to dig, and uncovers a story much greater than his exposé of small-time drug dealers. As he uncovers the lurid truth about Stanwyk, he also discovers that a sinister police chief (Joe Don Baker) is behind the drug trafficking on Los Angeles' beaches.
Gregory Mcdonald's novel was very successful and soon Hollywood came calling. His Fletch books were optioned around the mid to late 1970s but the author had retained the right of approving the actor cast to play Fletch. He rejected the likes of Burt Reynolds and Mick Jagger. When the studio mentioned Chevy Chase as Fletch, Mcdonald (even though he had never really seen Chase in anything) agreed.[1] Years before, Chase's manager recommended Mcdonald's books to him but he was not interested at the time. When an old friend and producer Alan Greisman and screenwriter Andrew Bergman got involved, Chase agreed to do it.[2] Mcdonald sent Chase a telegram saying, "I am delighted to abdicate the role of Fletch to you".[3] Bergman was hired to adapt Mcdonald's book into screenplay form. Bergman remembers that he wrote the screenplay "very fast – I did the first draft in four weeks ... Then there was a certain amount of improv, and something that we used to call dial-a-joke".[4] Mcdonald read the script and was angry by how far it strayed from his book. He wrote to the studio and listed his many objections to the screenplay. Director Michael Ritchie invited Mcdonald to the set of the film and took him out to dinner where, according to Mcdonald, "Point by point, he showed me where I was wrong. I was beautifully chewed out".[5]
According to actor Tim Matheson, Fletch was the first film Chase did after cleaning up his drug problem.[6] However, the studio hired director Michael Ritchie to keep Chase in check. During principal photography, Ritchie would do one take sticking close to the script and then another take allowing Chase to ad-lib.[6] Chase enjoyed the role because it allowed him to play a wide variety of different characters. He said in an interview, "I love props, like wigs and buck-teeth and glasses. At one point I wear an Afro and play basketball with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. There were some scenes where I didn't recognize myself".[7] The comedian enjoyed working with director Ritchie because he gave him the freedom to improvise: "It all began when [costar] Tim Matheson asked me what my name was. Right away, with a straight face: 'Ted Nugent'."[3]
| Fletch (Music From the Motion Picture Soundtrack) | |
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| Soundtrack album by Various artists | |
| Released | 1985 |
| Genre | Soundtrack |
| Length | 36:13 |
| Label | MCA |
| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | (not rated) [8] |
Fletch was released on May 31, 1985 in 1,225 theaters, grossing $7 million on its opening weekend. It went on to make $50.6 million in North America and $9 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $59.6 million.[9] The film performed well on home video, earning $24.4 million in rentals.[10]
Fletch received mixed to positive reviews and has a 73% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "The problem is, Chase's performance tends to reduce all the scenes to the same level, at least as far as he is concerned. He projects such an inflexible mask of cool detachment, of ironic running commentary, that we're prevented from identifying with him ... Fletch needed an actor more interested in playing the character than in playing himself".[11] Vincent Canby in his review for the New York Times praised Chase's performance, writing, "He manages simultaneously to act the material with a good deal of nonchalance and to float above it, as if he wanted us to know that he knows that the whole enterprise is somewhat less than transcendental".[12] Time magazine's Richard Schickel wrote, "In Fletch the quick, smartly paced gags somehow read as signs of vulnerability. Incidentally, they add greatly to the movie's suspense. Every minute you expect the hero's loose lip to be turned into a fat one".[13] In his review for the Chicago Reader, Dave Kehr wrote, "Chase and Ritchie make a strong, natural combination: the union of their two flip, sarcastic personalities produces a fairly definitive example of the comic style of the 80s, grounded in detachment, underreaction, and cool contempt for rhetorically overblown authority figures".[14]
Fletch has become a cult film.[3] In an interview for the New York Post, Bergman tries to explain its appeal. “It’s so bizarre, but Fletch strikes a chord. There’s a group of movies like that in the ‘80s, like Caddyshack, too, that captured a certain wise-ass thing.”[4] In particular, the film appeals to college students who have asked Chase to talk about it at film classes.[4] The actor has said that the appeal of the character is "the cheekiness of the guy...everybody at that age would like to be as quick-witted as Fletch, and as uncaring about what others think."[4] Chase has said that this film is his favorite to date because "it allowed me to be myself. Fletch was the first one with me really winging it. Even though there was a script, the director allowed me to just go, and in many ways, I was directing the comedy."[15] Perhaps the most meaningful praise comes from Mcdonald himself: "I watched it recently, and I think Chevy and Michael Ritchie did a good job with it".[1] The film was voted as the 23rd best film set in Los Angeles in the last 25 years by a group of Los Angeles Times writers and editors with two criteria: "The movie had to communicate some inherent truth about the L.A. experience, and only one film per director was allowed on the list" The 2005 animated feature Hoodwinked depicted the Big Bad Wolf (from Little Red Riding Hood) as a sarcastic investigative reporter in a direct parody of Fletch, right up to the Lakers shirt, disguises, and a version of Fletch's theme playing during his scenes.[16]
Fletch was originally released on DVD in 1998, but this release quickly went out of print. Universal Home Video re-released a special edition of Fletch - the "Jane Doe" Edition on May 1, 2007. The film is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, along with an English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround track and includes the retrospective featurettes, "Just Charge It to the Underhills: Making and Remembering Fletch," "From John Coctoastan To Harry S. Truman: The Disguises" and "Favorite Fletch Moments". IGN felt that this version was a decent replacement for anyone who still owned the film on VHS but for "anyone seeking more than that will be sadly disappointed by the ill-executed extras and slap-dash sound upgrade".[17]
Additionally, the film was also the next-to-last to be released by Universal on the HD DVD format, March 11, 2008 and later released on Blu-ray disc on June 2, 2009.
The film was followed by a 1989 sequel, Fletch Lives.
A follow-up to Fletch Lives had been discussed in the 90s at Universal Studios. During his association with Universal after the production of Mallrats (this was because Gramercy Pictures was co-owned by Universal), Kevin Smith expressed interest in doing a third "Fletch" film as a sequel starring Chevy Chase but it never came to fruition. In June 2000, it was announced that Kevin Smith was set to write and direct a Fletch film at Miramax Films, after the rights to the books, which Universal Studios had owned, reverted.[18] At the time, Miramax co-head Harvey Weinstein, expressed the hope that a new Fletch series would be "Miramax Films' first-ever franchise."
After a disagreement between Chase and Smith in regard to differing levels of priority for the sequel project, Smith settled on adapting Fletch Won, which follows Fletch in his early years as newspaper junior reporter. Smith intended to follow the novel's plot and characters much more closely than earlier Fletch films had. Filming the prequel/origin story would have allowed Smith to make the movie without Chase while still leaving the door open for him to appear in a cameo role in framing scenes and/or as narrator. Around this time, Smith mentioned Jason Lee and Ben Affleck as possible choices to play Fletch.[19]
In August 2003, it was reported that the film was set to start shooting in January, with Smith still at the helm. Though Smith insisted on casting Lee in the lead role, Miramax head Harvey Weinstein refused to take a chance on Lee, citing the general inability of his films to gross more than $30 million at the box office. The role of Fletch remained uncast, with Smith considering a list of actors including Affleck, Brad Pitt, Zach Galifianakis, Will Smith, and Jimmy Fallon.[19] Though Smith considered compromising and casting Zach Braff in the role, he eventually left the project in October 2005.
Smith was replaced as writer/director by Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence, in what would have been his directorial debut. He had enthused, "Not only can I recite the original Fletch movie line for line, I actually read all the Greg McDonald books as a kid. Consider me obsessed — I'm going to try as hard as I can not to screw this up."[20] Lawrence was signed to direct both Fletch Won and a sequel.[20] Scrubs star Zach Braff was rumored to be in talks for the lead role,[20] and in January 2007, Braff posted on his web site that "Bill Lawrence is writing and directing Fletch in the spring and he wants me to play young Fletch, but no firm plans are in place yet. He is still writing the script."[21] In April 2007, Braff announced that he had dropped out of the film to work on his own film, Open Hearts.[22] In June 2007 it was announced that Lawrence was off the project and had been replaced by Steve Pink.
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