Collision Course

[00:00:08] From Los Angeles, California, the entertainment capital of the world, it's The 80s Movie Podcast. I'm your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. Welcome to our first show of our seventh season, and before we get started, I owe you, my loyal listeners, two apologies. First, as you may have guessed from the title of this episode, I will not be covering the mid-1970s car chase classic Gone in 60 Seconds as I said I would on the previous show.

[00:00:34] So, there's a long story about why it took me so long to work on and then, for now, abandon the episode. It's almost completely written, and it will show up someday in the future. I hope you'll check it out when we finally get there. Second, I'm sorry that it's been more than six months since that last episode. A portion of that had to do with getting hit with a Mandela effect during the research into Gone in 60 Seconds,

[00:00:58] the film that got me into movies on a near spiritual level that made me question exactly who I am and what the heck I'd been doing with my life for half a century. But the delay was also due to my responsibilities as a husband and now father, things that I'll probably get into more into future episodes. But for now, let's get back into doing this show. Today, I'll be talking about the only movie in which comedian Jay Leno, best known for playing Jay Leno in movies like EdTV,

[00:01:27] Joanna Mann, and The Astronaut Farmer, is featured in a leading role, Collision Course. Chances are you've never heard of this movie. I know people who worked with Jay Leno who have never heard of it. And that's where we're going to get started on this story. Back in January of 2023, I received an email from a casting agent I knew, asking me if I would be willing to try out for the third season of the Jay Leno-hosted show, You Bet Your Life. The casting agent was a friend of a friend, and

[00:01:57] wanting to be a good friend to that good friend's friend, I said I would love to. Now, I've been invited to be part of a number of game shows over the years, and for whatever reason, I never got cast. But this time, I had a really good reason to try to get on the show. I had known about this movie, Collision Course, as the only film to ever feature Jay Leno in a starring role for a number of years. I knew about its history, and I knew that if I were able to get on this show,

[00:02:23] I could mention a Jay when they do that little host-contestant-getting-to-know-you banter, that I have a podcast about 80s movies, and I just happened to have completed an episode about the only film to ever feature Jay Leno in a starring role. Had I been picked to appear on the show, oh, I wouldn't have actually recorded that podcast episode until the week before whatever show episode I was on was going to air, because often, game shows are filmed months before they air. But first, I needed to take a timed quiz online, which I aced.

[00:02:53] I scored a Zoom meeting with one of the other casting agents who not only lived less than two miles from me, but was not aware that his boss, Jay Leno, had once starred in a major motion picture in the 1980s. I mentioned my idea to him, and he thought it was hilarious that I might bring up that fact on the show. I then scored a Zoom meeting with one of the producers of the show, who lived quite a bit away from me, but was also not aware that his boss, Jay Leno, had once starred in a major motion picture in the late 1980s.

[00:03:20] He, too, thought it was hilarious that I might bring up that fact to Jay himself. By then, it was April 2023, and I was told filming would take place during the summer and that I would be contacted about a week before my episode would shoot to make sure I had time to get my affairs in order to make the shooting. And then nothing. Spring turned to summer, summer turned to fall, and still, nothing. Fall turned to winter, winter to spring again, and still,

[00:03:51] nothing. Now, it's important to note that from May 2nd to September 27th of 2023, there were several strikes in Hollywood, including a writer strike. And although he was not a writer on the show, Jay Leno refused to cross the picket lines as a member of the Writers Guild America, especially after the flack he took during the previous writer strike in 2007 and 2008, when Jay continued to host The Tonight Show, writing his own jokes and monologues, and earning a strike violation from the Guild.

[00:04:20] As the 2023 writer strike wore on, Fox Television, who aired the show, had to make a decision. Keep airing reruns of the 22 episodes of You Bet Your Life, which had been produced over the previous two seasons, or cancel the show. In mid-August, they canceled the show. But I didn't find out about this until about a half a year after the cancellation, when I came across the original email from the casting agent while I was doing an irregular cleansing of my email inbox

[00:04:49] just before my daughter was born, and I got curious about whatever happened to the show. And of course, I had done all this research on the movie by then, and I wasn't going to just let that research go. So I filed what I'd already written away for a rainy day when I needed to get a quick episode of the podcast up. And it has been raining in Los Angeles for the better part of a week, so here we are. An honest-to-goodness rainy day. I've never really been a fan of Jay Leno. Like Jerry Seinfeld,

[00:05:18] I found Leno's delivery rather annoying, which further annoyed me back when he, in my not-so-humble opinion, stole the Tonight Show hosting gig from David Letterman when Johnny Carson announced his retirement. I stopped watching the show altogether after Johnny's retirement, and I still haven't gone back. I first became aware of Jay Leno in the late 1970s from his regular appearances on the Tonight Show, as well as his occasional appearances on sitcoms like One Day at a Time and Laverne and Shirley.

[00:05:46] He would start guest hosting the Tonight Show sometime in the 1980s, but he never compared favorably with me to Johnny's other guest hosts like Don Rickles or Bob Newhart or Joan Rivers. But the man did work hard, and he had built up some kind of fan base. In 1986, the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group the mini-major studio formerly known as Embassy Pictures, purchased from Coca-Cola by legendary Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis the year before,

[00:06:14] purchased a screenplay called Collision Course written by two first-time screenwriters, Frank Darius Namai and Robert Reznikoff, about a Japanese special agent who was sent to Detroit to track down a stolen turbocharger engine. And as you have seen in many a better movie, cultures clash when the agent is teamed with a boorish, loud American detective. Pat Morita, recently Oscar-nominated for his role as Miyagi and the Karate Kid,

[00:06:42] would be cast as that Japanese special agent, Natsuo, while Jay Leno, who had been looking to expand past stand-up comedy and being Johnny Carson's main guest hope, signed up to play the American cop, Costas. The remainder of the cast was pretty good for a mid-range PG cop comedy, including Chris Sarandon, who had come onto the film after making The Princess Bride, Ernie Hudson, everybody's not-so-secretly favorite Ghostbuster,

[00:07:12] Tom Noonan, at the time best known for playing serial killer Francis Dollarhide in Michael Mann's Manhunter, beloved character actor Al Waxman, and boxer-turned-actor Randall Tex Cobb, who had just been seen on screens as the bike-riding hellraiser Leonard Smalls in the Coen brothers Raising Arizona. Rehearsals for the film would begin in Detroit in April of 1987 under the direction of John Gillerman, a French-British filmmaker who had a short stint on the A-list

[00:07:41] directing The Towering Inferno and King Kong in the mid-1970s, but had fallen back into semi-obscurity with movies like 1984's Sheena, Queen of the Jungle with Tanya Roberts, and the ill-conceived 1986 King Kong Lives. Although he had made several movies with producer Dino De Laurentiis over the years, there would be a clash of personalities, and Gillerman would leave the film just a few days later. Bob Clark, the director behind Black Christmas, Porky's, and A Christmas Story,

[00:08:11] would be brought in several days later, having made the Judd Nelson comedy from the hip for De Laurentiis the previous year, and the production would get pushed back four weeks to accommodate the change of directors. This would give Leno the time to return to Los Angeles for a few weeks to fulfill his obligation to be Johnny Carson's permanent Monday night guest host on The Tonight Show, without the pressures of having to fly back and forth every week between the talk show and the movie. Clark and Tom Noonan

[00:08:40] would hit it off almost immediately, and the two men would start working together rewriting the script as the new production start date of May 11, 1987, approached. Production began on schedule, with dailies being sent to De Laurentiis' office at his studio in Wilmington, North Carolina. But after nine days of production, De Laurentiis wasn't liking what he was seeing. Leno was arguably a funny guy, as was Merida, who had spent several years on sitcoms like MASH, Sanford & Son, and Happy Days.

[00:09:10] But none of the footage arriving at the studio felt funny to him, prompting the producer to fly to Detroit immediately to personally relieve Bob Clark of his directing duties. Once again, the production would be put in a holding pattern, while De Laurentiis would find yet another director. And, once again, he would choose a director he had recently made a movie with, Louis Teague, the director of Alligator and Cujo, who had made the Stephen King anthology horror film Cat's Eye for De Laurentiis three years earlier.

[00:09:40] Teague's biopic of Janis Joplin, which he had been working on for more than a decade, had just been cancelled by Orion Pictures, and he was looking for something quick to get back into the directing groove. Production geared back up at the end of May and would continue without much incident until the final day of shooting, August 28, 1987. That day, the line producer on the film, Robert W. Court, and his partner, Ted Field, learned that De Laurentiis, and thus the film,

[00:10:09] had run out of cash, even though there was still a few key scenes to be shot that day. The production would shut down for the fourth and ultimately final time. Everyone would go their separate ways, and the footage would sit at the Technicolor Labs in Hollywood, while the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group tried to find the money to finish this and several other films that ended up in limbo, including a little $8.5 million comedy featuring two up-and-coming actors, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. But we'll talk about

[00:10:38] that most excellent adventure another time. The film would remain in limbo for another year until the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, having burned through more than $200 million in funding with no big-hit movies to their credit in two years and unable to raise more money to continue operations, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on August 16, 1988. Collision Course, like a number of other uncompleted DEG titles, would become the property

[00:11:07] of Wells Fargo Bank, the distribution company's main debtor. And the film would sit around unfinished for another two years, until early June 1991, when Leno was named as a successor to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Wells Fargo hadn't been holding out for someone to reimburse the bank for the $13 million spent making Collision Course without any takers. Now, there were a number of parties interested in the movie, including NBC, the home of The Tonight Show,

[00:11:37] but no one was willing to pay the $13 million for an uncompleted film sight unseen. Wells Fargo would hire a small team to finish post-production on the movie before selling it to HBO, although Wells Fargo would end up taking a loss on the sale. The movie would finally get released on videotape in April 1992, a few weeks before Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show, much to the chagrin of Helen Kushnick, Leno's longtime manager, who lamented

[00:12:07] to the Los Angeles Times just before the home video release that they had nothing to do with the film anymore. It's not a very good movie, in my not-so-humble opinion. Leno is, well, Leno, if that's your kind of thing, so be it. It's not mine. Marita tries to bring some gravitas to the proceedings, and there are some very poor special effects, including with the climax of the film. You'll know what I'm talking about if you ever see it. In fact, the best part of Klisch & Kors

[00:12:36] is the number of classic cars that make appearances throughout the running time. Leno spends a good portion of the movie, driving a black 1960 convertible Corvette. In one scene, there's a 1974 AMC Hornet, which I drove for a short time in high school until I flew it off a freeway on-ramp the first week of my senior year of high school. There's a 1928 Model A, a 1937 Buick Special, a 1970 Chevy Impala, a 1972 Buick Electric 225,

[00:13:06] and a sweet 1980 Camaro with a massive engine sticking out of the front just outside of old Tiger Stadium. I'll have some pictures of the cars up on this episode's page at our website, the80smoviepodcast.com. In late January 2025, as I record this episode, the movie is still owned by HBO, which itself is owned by Warner Brothers Studios, which also owns the Mac streaming service, which of course used to be called HBO Max. But you can't stream

[00:13:36] the movie on Macs or any other legal streaming service. It was released on DVD by HBO Home Video in 2012 in a 1.33 to 1 pan and scan version that didn't sell very well. You can find it on a popular internet archive website, which appears to be a rip of that 2012 DVD, but that's the best you're going to find out there. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, the80smoviepodcast.com,

[00:14:05] for extra material about Collision Course and the other movies we've covered on this episode. The 80s Movie Podcast has been researched, written, narrated, and edited by Edward Havens for idiosyncratic entertainment. Thank you again. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night.