Starsky and Hutch move to film as the Two Stooges
| • | Review: 'Starsky' amounts to amusing, recycled spoof |
By David Germain
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — Ben's Starsky and Owen's Hutch.
Warner Bros
This is the story of how the bumbling comic duo of Stiller and Wilson came to stand in for the hip and able grandpappies of buddy cops in "Starsky & Hutch," the big-screen version of the 1970s TV series.
Ben Stiller plays a "prequel" Starsky as an uptight bumbler in the 1970s. Starsky's cool Gran Torino car also gets played for laughs.
Real-life pals Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson have teamed up on half a dozen movies, "Meet the Parents," "Zoolander" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" among them. "Starsky & Hutch" makes the most of the on-screen personalities each actor has cultivated — Stiller the tightly wound fanatic, Wilson the laid-back bad boy.
When the TV show premiered in 1975, curly-haired brunette Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) and blond Hutch (David Soul) already were amigos, a team whose strengths and weaknesses nicely complemented each other.
Set in the '70s, the movie version goes back to the beginning to show how Starsky and Hutch first partnered up and the growing pains as the salt-and-pepper pair struggled with their wildly different approaches to crime-fighting.
"We just kind of did it almost as if this was the original pilot of 'Starsky and Hutch' and then they ended up firing us and hiring Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul," Stiller told the Associated Press in an interview alongside Wilson. "Two cooler guys. That was sort of the idea behind the tone of it."
The series had comic undertones but essentially was a straight-ahead police show with two street-chic undercover cops standing in for the prim, polite officers of earlier crime stories such as "Adam-12" or "Dragnet."
The movie aims for laughs, putting Starsky and Hutch through action-comedy paces as they are reluctantly hitched by their captain and set out to pursue a drug dealer (Vince Vaughn) peddling a dangerous new type of cocaine.
Snoop Dogg plays Starsky and Hutch's flashy underworld snitch, Huggy Bear. And of course, the movie co-stars the coolest of cool cop cars — Starsky's red Gran Torino with the white stripe.
The car becomes the centerpiece of some key sight gags, and Starsky and Hutch come across more like Curly and Moe as they blunder through some less-than-stellar police work.
"Some of the comedy maybe in our movie came from the fact that in those guys (Glaser and Soul's Starsky and Hutch), there was some kind of inherent coolness in the way they work that I don't think we quite have," Wilson said. "Ben and I try, but in trying to kind of match that, maybe we fall a little short, and that's where some of the humor comes from."
Stiller, 38, and Wilson, 35, grew up with "Starsky and Hutch" in the '70s. The son of actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Stiller recalls playing Starsky and Hutch on the streets of New York City. Wilson had a "Starsky and Hutch" lunchbox and the Hot Wheels Gran Torino as a boy in suburban Dallas.
They are among millions of men worldwide in their 30s and 40s who got early lessons in the school of cool from watching "Starsky and Hutch."
"I can't walk the streets of London without some guy in his mid to late 30s coming up to me and saying, 'You're the man,' " said Soul, who lives in England. "These people just identified with these two characters. They were new. They weren't cops first, but people first."
"They were multidimensional characters, and also, this was the advent of the buddy show. The two friends who did things together in all aspects of their lives, not just work," Glaser said.
The movie includes several nods to the original actors, including Wilson crooning "Don't Give Up On Us," Soul's 1970s pop hit. Glaser and Soul turn up briefly in their Starsky and Hutch personas, hesitantly passing the baton to Stiller and Wilson.
Soul and Glaser have kind words for Stiller and Wilson, though they speak with frank bemusement about the liberties the movie takes with their original characters.
"The movie was being made the way they wanted to make it. I just felt, OK, good luck to them," Glaser said. "It's a compliment to us they wanted us there in whatever capacity to give a wink to our own audience and say, 'We're still here, folks.' "
Stiller had been thinking about a "Starsky and Hutch" update for a long time and initially began developing it with director Todd Phillips ("Old School") as a contemporary action comedy.
While other '70s shows such as "Charlie's Angels" and "S.W.A.T." were set in modern times for their big-screen revivals, the filmmakers decided to leave "Starsky & Hutch" back in the Me Decade.
Wilson knew Stiller was developing the project and figured since they had worked together and "because I had blond hair, I thought maybe I might be a natural for Hutch."
The two met when Stiller cast Wilson in his 1996 black comedy "The Cable Guy," which starred Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick. Stiller and Wilson first shared screen time in the 1998 comic drama "Permanent Midnight," and Wilson played Stiller's romantic foil in 2000's "Meet the Parents."
They were rival male models in the 2001 comedy "Zoolander," which Stiller directed and co-wrote. Later that year, they co-starred in the ensemble family tale "The Royal Tenenbaums," which earned Wilson and director Wes Anderson an Academy Award nomination for their screenplay.
Stiller and Wilson's on-screen charm derives from their oil-and-water relationship, said "Starsky & Hutch" director Phillips.
"Ben has this thing where he looks like he's holding everything in, holding everything back. Owen looks like he's holding nothing in, where what you see is what you get," Phillips said. "Ben takes being funny very seriously and Owen has this sort of breezy attitude. You put those two things together, it plays against each other."
