My Cousin Vinny

The Hollywood Reporter/Hollywood Report
Friday, March 6, 1992

THE SKINNY ON 'VINNY': PROD'N TEAM'S A WINNER
By Martin A. Grove

"Vinny" views: For any studio head, the name of the game as far as production goes is marrying the right director to the right script. With "My Cousin Vinny," which I began focusing on here Thursday, 20th Century Fox chairman Joe Roth put together a winning combination by hiring Jonathan Lynn to direct Dale Launer's terrific screenplay.

"The studio was very happy with the way 'Nuns on the Run' turned out," Fox executive vp Tom Sherak told me referring to the comedy Lynn had previously written and directed for Fox. "Joe Roth believed it was a very funny comedy and he believed in Jonathan. When this material ('Vinny') came in, he was looking for someone who could direct comedy and that's how it happened. It was all his belief in the director."

Not only has Lynn delivered a marvelously funny movie, but he made it so inexpensively that its profit potential is significant. "It was budgeted close to $11.9 million and, in fact, it came in a little under budget," observed Lynn.

"There's been some talk already about doing a sequel to this movie," Sherak noted. "We try to temper that because the worst thing you can do is talk about a sequel before the original one opens up. But we know that there are many more things that if this picture really works will come out of this movie. You can just imagine what happens to the two characters (Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei, who plays his girlfriend) after they get married. "There are a lot of different places to go - and that's what's exciting about it. That it's not just necessarily this movie - which is important - but what makes studios majors is what spawned from the movie. If the movie gets to that plateau where a sequel can be made out of it, that's where the money really comes."

Was "Vinny" difficult to make? "No, as movies go, it was organized and well-planned. We were cast well before we started," explained Lynn. "Obviously, the casting was crucial. Casting is everything. We shot it all in two or three small towns in Georgia. We shot the trial scene on what we euphemistically called a soundstage. It was actually a stage on which you could hear absolutely everything outside and it was intensely hot. Everything else was on location."

Marketing a wildly funny comedy like "Vinny" is harder that it seems, Sherak pointed out. "One of the things about the marketing of this film - and it happens sometimes when the film is so funny - is that no matter what we have been trying to do with material, we can't get the material to be as funny as the movie. And, believe me, we've been trying. We've had a trailer out there for quite a long period of time that we know, at best, plays OK. It's not a trailer that will have people cheering in their seats." But the movie will.

One of its funniest scenes is a prison meeting between Pesci and Mitchell Whitfield that's based on mistaken identity. It's humor that's so very British I was sure Lynn, who's English, deserved the credit. No so, he said: "This was a scene Dale Launer wrote before I was involved with the picture and it's a really funny scene."