Poker Jokers
Zak Penn’s ‘The Grand’ has a cast of cards
By Andy Klein
Zak Penn is best known as an A-list screenwriter of special effects titles like X2, X-Men: The Last Stand, and the upcoming The Incredible Hulk. He was still in his early twenties when he got his big break with the original screenplay for the notorious Schwarzenegger vehicle Last Action Hero; that it was substantially rewritten by other hands – Penn received only a story credit – seems in retrospect like a plus.
Much like his previous outing as a director – the hilarious 2004 Incident at Loch Ness – his new film, The Grand, is an improv mockumentary in the Christopher Guest mold. For this story of the world’s second biggest poker tournament, Penn has assembled an amazing cast that includes improv vets (Richard Kind), sitcom stars (Ray Romano, Jason Alexander), movie stars (Woody Harrelson), character actors (Dennis Farina, Barry Corbin), a revered German director (Werner Herzog), real-life poker players (Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth), a fuzzy rabbit (Munchkin), an emissary from the Christopher Guest troupe (Michael McKean), and the long missing-in-action Gabe Kaplan.
In a sit-down a few hours before the film’s premiere, I ask Penn whether he started out with the poker idea or with the notion of making another improvisational film. “The second,” he tells me. “I absolutely wanted to do an improvisational ensemble comedy, and I was just looking for the right setting to put it in. My friend Matt Bierman asked me if I had ever watched the World Series of Poker on TV and pitched me on the whole idea. I actually had very little interest in doing a movie about poker. I like playing it, not watching it. But the setting just worked too well for too many reasons; the characters really worked in that world.”
“Were there other concepts along the way that you considered?” I ask. “Like something that turned out to be what Christopher Guest was going to do next week?”
“Not really. When you’re doing an improv movie, you’re in a kind of small group. It’s Christopher Guest or nothing. And it’s not like he churns out a movie every year.”
Where Loch Ness followed a more fully preplanned story line, The Grand crosscuts among a bunch of aspirants for a $10 million, winner-take-all pot. One-Eyed Jack (Harrelson), who inherited the casino from his gruff Granddad (Corbin) and lost it in a haze of sex and drugs, is hoping to buy it back from coldhearted magnate Steve Lavisch (McKean). Harold Melvin (Chris Parnell) is a human calculator, very close in affect to Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Andy Andrews (Kind) is a schnook who seems to have stumbled into qualifying despite having no poker knowledge at all. And the emotional heart of the story resides in the hugely dysfunctional, longstanding family conflicts between Larry Schwartzman (David Cross) and his sister Lainie (Cheryl Hines), both of them contestants, whose sibling relationship was poisoned in childhood when their father (Kaplan) pitted them against each other while always favoring Lainie.
The shape of the film changed in response to the casting, with the actors filling in their characters’ traits and backstories. “If you read the first draft of the treatment,” Penn says, “Lainie’s husband Fred has maybe two mentions. He’s barely in it. When Ray Romano came along, we expanded the part. And now – even though we shot all his stuff in two days – he’s all over the movie, which is mostly a testament to him. He and some of his buddies came up with all this stuff, and we wove it into the movie.”
Penn started with a core group of friends in the cast. “Werner and Michael Karnow and Richard Kind were all good friends of mine. I’ve always said that Werner would be a perfect Bond villain. And so ‘The German’ is my interpretation of that. There were a lot of people coming in and out, so there were only a couple of performers that I specifically wrote parts for. For the rest of them, Matt and I conceived the characters, using ideas from other people, and then finding the right actors for it.”
What’s really important, he says, is casting and then creating a good environment. “With a good enough environment, you need to have actors who come prepared with material. Well, except for Michael McKean. I feel like you could turn a camera on and say, ‘Michael, we’re going to shoot the whole movie, and you play every part.’ And he’d figure it out as he went along.”
It’s not surprising that McKean, after Spinal Tap and the Guest films, could wing it brilliantly. But I wondered about some of the actors who didn’t have that sort of background, like Barry Corbin. “I wouldn’t say that Barry is as up to the improv stuff as some of the other people. I had to help him more and script it out. But he’s really damn funny, and he was great in the moments where it was just … behavior.”
By coincidence, two of the stars of The Grand, Corbin and Harrelson, were both in this year’s Oscar winner, No Country for Old Men. “We were shooting this at the same time they were shooting No Country for Old Men, so Woody and Barry were going back and forth on what I called ‘the Coen brothers shuttle.’ The Coens were very, very nice about it. They had a lot more money than we did, so they paid for the plane fare.”
The entirety of The Grand builds to the final big showdown, the championship table, which takes up almost the entire last third of the film. Amazingly – perhaps insanely – Penn decided to have the game play out for real, with no advance outcome scripted. “We set it up like a real poker game. We had 10 cameras and a live studio audience. I had some fixed decks in case things went wrong, but it’s so complicated that I didn’t really know how to use them. It was a very strange experience, being around actors in character all desperately wanting to win. Even between takes there was a lot of animosity between them; they were all betting each other on who was gonna win. We said ‘Whoever wins, wins. If Andy Andrews wins, we’ll use a scene where he wins.’ So I had to shoot twelve different endings. We shot scenes with Ray and Cheryl where she won, and then a second time where she lost. And we did the same with Andy Andrews.”
Having real world-class poker players in the cast helped keep things honest. “They’d correct us if we had anything wrong. Absolutely. Phil Laak and the rest of them would point out when we got the odds slightly wrong. Andy Newman, who plays the dealer in the movie, is also a writer and an actor. He’s the guy who created Celebrity Poker on Bravo. So he was on set every single day, and he’s as close as you get to being in both worlds. He’s an excellent poker player. He really knew his stuff. Frankly, he’s the unsung hero of the movie. I should remember to thank him in my speech tonight. We wouldn’t have been able to do the movie without him.”
The Grand. Directed by Zak Penn. Written by Zak Penn & Matt Bierman. With Woody Harrelson, Cheryl Hines, David Cross, Ray Romano, Dennis Farina, Richard Kind, Chris Parnell, Werner Herzog, Gabe Kaplan, Michael Karnow, and Michael McKean. Opens Friday at AMC Loews Broadway.
Published: 03/19/2008
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
