The World Is Wrong, Vol. 2: Who is "The Hudsucker Proxy" For?
The film that almost killed the Coen brothers' career
Hollywood executives are basically amateur psychologists with billion dollar budgets. Their job is to figure out what people want and then cram that thing into our orifices until it starts leaking out of our eyes. After Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, we got a Wizard Renaissance; after The Hangover, we got a million movies that should have been called Exactly Four People Engaged in Hijinks. 90 percent of non-creative Hollywood jobs are about figuring out what people want, and the remaining 10 percent are marketing jobs to lie about how it’s all about the art.
In that context, it’s amazing that Joel and Ethan Coen exist. Or at least: It’s amazing that they exist as successful filmmakers — they probably exist in other dimensions as guys who teach writing workshops or the owners or Crazy Coen’s Carpet Country in Minneapolis. The Coens make unique, offbeat movies that are never formulaic, and with that being true, it’s shocking that Hollywood didn’t do to them what Peter Stormare did to Steve Buscemi in Fargo.
The Coens’ movie career did come close to the woodchipper at one point, though: 1994’s The Hudsucker Proxy was a major setback. Hudsucker was their fifth movie, it had a bigger budget than the first four movies combined, and it made back 7 percent of that budget at the box office. For anyone not familiar with movies, accounting, or the concept of numbers, generally: That’s bad. But I’m here to defend the The Hudsucker Proxy — I think it’s an excellent version of what it is. The problem was just that not many people wanted that thing.
The Hudsucker Proxy is a screwball comedy that parodies the fast-talking wholesome movies of yesteryear, especially the films of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. So, right away: The Coens have a buy-in problem, because how many people remember those movies? Making a film that riffs on a genre of movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s is like an impression comic starting a bit with “What if Errol Flynn, Alan Ladd, and Alf Landon were trapped in an elevator?”
The main thing The Hudsucker Proxy retains from the Capra/Sturges genre is the cadence: The characters speak in the rapid-fire style from those movies that nobody uses in real life. Here’s a typical scene:
Did you find that funny? If the answer is “no”, then you should not see this movie. The Hudsucker Proxy probably should have come to theatres with a detailed intake form, like when a hospital screens people to determine whether they’re eligible for a treatment. If you do not enjoy jokes about old-timey newsreels, archaic language, and ‘50s fads, then your body might reject The Hudsucker Proxy.
The rapid fire cadence allows the Coens to densely pack the movie with jokes. It might not be a coincidence that Hudsucker was made when The Simpsons was at its peak, and the standard for the number of jokes that can be squeezed into a minute was being raised. Hudsucker follows The Simpsons’ “joke in every possible location” ethic — at one point, we see a newspaper for two seconds, and the headline, subheading, photo, and tiny story next to the story we’re meant to see are all jokes. When Tim Robbins’ character looks at a board with job postings, many of the jobs that flash by are jokes — see how many unusual jobs you can spot in this clip:
Seeing jobs like “Third Base Coach” and “Card Shark” aren’t laugh-out-loud jokes, but they’re free jokes. Tim Robbins is already staring at a jobs board — why not have some of the jobs be funny? No time is taken up, so any humor is gravy. Plus, it helps establish the movie’s absurdist tone, because why would a “Dough Kneader” need experience? “Subtle” doesn’t even begin to describe some of the jokes in The Hudsucker Proxy — a lot of them belong in the subatomic realm — but there are so many of them that, for me, they add up to fun.
And there are a few jokes that I consider Lebowski-quality one-liners, such as:
“The Hindus — and also the beatniks — believe that…”
(a character introducing himself to Tim Robbins) “What’s this I hear about you bein’ an imbecile?”
(a German scientist explaining the hula hoop) “It operates on the same principles that keeps the Earth spinning around the sun, and that keeps you from flying off the Earth into the cold reaches of space, where you would die like a miserable swine.”
Basically, I like The Hudsucker Proxy because I like the jokes. This is the second installment of “The World is Wrong”, and the two subjects I’ve covered (the first was the Conan O’Brien/Robert Smigel pilot “Lookwell”) share a common trait: They’re goofball oddities designed to be efficient joke delivery machines. I applaud both for efficiently delivering jokes, but the world did not. The reviews for Hudsucker were middling-to-bad, and mostly focused on how hard it was to get invested in the story — Gene Siskel said the movie “didn’t have much heart”. It all seems to come down to what you want from a movie or TV show: If you want relatable characters, compelling plots, and an emotional investment in the outcome, then Lookwell and The Hudsucker Proxy are not for you. But if you’re a joke junkie who’s just wants jokes mainlined into your veins, then Lookwell and The Hudsucker Proxy deliver.
If you walked into a pitch meeting and said “This movie will resonate with anyone who watches a lot of Jai alai,” it wouldn’t get made. Same if you said “anyone from Fernley, Nevada will get this” or “it’s hilarious if you know a lot about the Pazzi conspiracy.” It’s incredible that the Coen brothers got this movie made considering that it fails the “who is this for?” test perhaps more than any other movie I’m aware of.
The “who is this for?” question does have an answer, though: The Hudsucker Proxy is for me. I had a grandma who would entertain me by renting movies from the library, and the library didn’t have Batman, but it did have The Maltese Falcon and Yankee Doodle Dandy. I have a sister who loves Dragnet — the apotheosis of the fast-talking genre — and she married a film nerd who especially loved the movies of the 1940s. My favorite joke of all time is “the past is ridiculous”, and — as we’ve established — I’m fine with a movie that only delivers jokes. Enjoyment of The Hudsucker Proxy is like life forming on a planet, in that a stunning number of things need to go just right in order for it to happen. But — sure as I’m sitting here — those things did happen at least once.
Speaking as possibly the entire audience for The Hudsucker Proxy: I think The Hudsucker Proxy is a good movie. It’s an excellent version of what it’s supposed to be, which — to my mind — is the main thing that determines quality. The fact that the Coens made a quality movie that appealed to almost nobody isn’t their fault: It’s the producers’ fault. Come on, producers — start thinking about the bottom line! It can’t always be about the art! But their loss of tens of millions of dollars is my gain, and maybe the money they lost will come back around in the form of good karma.
The World Is Wrong, Vol. 1: Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel's "Lookwell"
I love a good failure. And I know why: Seeing other people fail tell me that I’m not the only one whose best efforts often turn into an exploding ball of shit. Failure is the norm in creative fields — there are times when it feels like my daily schedule is basically this:
"You know...for kids!"
I LOVED this movie, Buzz the elevator operator's "Waring Hudsucker" jokes, the expert mailroom worker (THEY DOCK YA), so many precious moments, you have to watch it more than once.
Jim True-Frost (Buzz) went on to play Pryzbylewski on The Wire.
I have to suspect the only reason they were allowed to make this film is that because, as you noted, the Coens make non-formulaic, unique & offbeat movies that the suits essentially said, "We don't get it, but their other films have been boffo, so why not". (Though it is notable this film is the only movie they ever made for Warner Bros.)
I also think if this movie had been made 5-10 years earlier, there may have been enough folks who remembered the Sturges and Capra films still going to the theatre that it may have been successful. In the time before cable networks really took off, local UHF channels usually aired old movies every night. (Basically TCM before TCM became a thing). So you probably could have had a quasi-grassroots effort to get people familiar with the concept underpinning the film.