STAN & OLLIE
Jon S. Baird on recapturing the magic of the original Chuckle Brothers.
STAN & OLLIE is, more often than not, about Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy when they were being themselves, in the twilight of their career as they toured the UK, rather than the lauded Laurel & Hardy. But that doesn’t mean that director Jon S. Baird shied away from showing exactly why the duo became (and remain) the most beloved comedy double act this side of Hale And Pace. The film is packed with nods to, riffs on, and even extensive recreations of, some of their best-known routines.
THE HOSPITAL SEQUENCE
Taken from a short film called County Hospital, Baird included this sequence, in which Stan visits an incapacitated Ollie and proceeds to drive him mad with nothing more than a hard-boiled egg, “because on their stage tours they used to perform that sketch”. We see it three times in the film — once when Stan & Ollie perform it on stage, again when Stan decides not to go on after seeing Ollie’s replacement, British comedian Nobby Cook, in the hospital bed, and finally when Stan visits the ailing Ollie in hospital and unwittingly recreates the routine. “It was a very convenient storytelling device,” he says. “John and Steve wanted to pretty much recreate it down to the last second. They were so respectful of Laurel and Hardy.”
THE WAY OUT WEST DANCE
Arguably the most iconic Laurel & Hardy routine, in which the pair dance amiably against a rear projection, Baird bookends the film with two very different performances. The second time, coming after Ollie has suffered a heart attack and is told he can’t perform again, is an emotional highpoint. The first is a slavish recreation of the original, which Steve Coogan, John C. Reilly and choreographer Toby Sedgwick worked on over a fourweek rehearsal period. “They noticed that Laurel and Hardy had made a few mistakes in the dance, so they built the mistakes into their routine as well,” says Baird. “CBS in America played the original movie and our recreation side by side, and it’s pretty much as close as you could get.” Interestingly, Baird confesses that the number wasn’t in Jeff Pope’s original script. “It started with them on set of Below Zero, dubbing their own movies into different languages,” says Baird. “We changed it to Way Out West because we thought it was a far more iconic routine. It has energy and momentum, and it really helps the storytelling. It wasn’t a case of recreating it for the sake of it.”
ROBIN HOOD
Throughout the movie, Stan is hoping to have one last shot at making another Laurel & Hardy movie: ‘Robin Hood’, their take on… well, you know. In fact, Laurel did write a script for the film, which was never made. And although Baird and Pope never saw that script, they were inspired enough to recreate a chunk of it for a fantasy sequence in which Stan and Ollie imagine what the film might have been like. The recreation sees Hardy, as Little John, fall into water. “Because John’s fat suits were so expensive to make, we only had one shot at that,” says Baird. “We had one spare, so we had three cameras set up to make sure we got it right. John did it in one take.”
ANOTHER NICE MESS
That same sequence sees Ollie deliver the duo’s catchphrase, “another nice mess”. Yes, nice. Not fine. “Everyone thinks it’s ‘another fine mess’,” says Baird. “They did a movie called Another Fine Mess, but it’s actually ‘another nice mess’. We wanted to use that line once, and we figured that was the right place, when they were both dreaming of what might have been.”
THE STAIRS SCENE
“The movie they won the Oscar for was The Music Box,” says Baird. “The most iconic moment from that is when a piano falls down the stairs. We wanted to give a nod to that.” With the budget not quite stretching to pianos, Baird and Pope instead came up with a scene where Stan and Ollie, during their travels, lose control of their luggage. Baird planned it. He storyboarded it. He had figured on 12 camera angles. Then it all started going wrong. “We were near the end of the day at this train station and we had 30 minutes,” he recalls. “It’s the most unprepared thing I’ve ever done. In the end we had just two camera set-ups. We did most of it in two takes, and thankfully it worked. Simplicity is the way forward.”
THE HIGH HAT
A scene where Stan goes to see a movie producer, and is forced to wait by a stern receptionist, contains what Baird calls a “buy one, get one free of Easter eggs”. One is a reference to a similar scene in Martin Scorsese’s The King Of Comedy (“Scorsese was a real mentor to me on this film”), and the other is taken from the Laurel & Hardy film Toad In The Hole, in which Stan makes it appear that he’s making his hat levitate. “If you look carefully, the hat has a brim on it,” explains Baird. “He leans that back and puts a little bit of pressure on the back of the hat and pushes it against the wall behind him. If you push it gently enough it starts to raise up. It’s simple, but took me ages to work out how he did it.” Don’t try this at home, folks. Steve Coogan is a professional.
STAN & OLLIE IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD