So it’s one of those things where I think none of us really let go of it in our head. KN: It would have been a really funny movie. “You never do recurring characters! You just sit on ‘Update’! You don’t even have a catchphrase! Listen to us! We have more than you can even count!” They’re still funny, because they’ll never let the flag touch the ground. I’d like to go on “Weekend Update” now with Kevin and say something about 2023. We had a moment in time with the biggest star in the world who was onboard, and it was written so beautifully for Arnold. It’s a marathon.ĭC: I wonder what the numbers are of comedy movies written, with people going all out on a script, that become actual movies? 100 to 1? 200 to 1? There’s a lot of reasons to not make it, and maybe only one propelling reason to make it. Then you’ve gotta sell it, and then you’ve gotta get a distributor and cast it. It always amazes me that it’s so hard to write a screenplay, and once you finish it, that’s only half the battle. KN: We wanted to get the script out there. They were hiding behind this curtain, and this was a very flimsy kind of disguise, just like their defensiveness. They weren’t strong, and they were hiding. KN: I didn’t think so, because they couldn’t pick anything up. That was my internal logic, but it could have gone either way. RS: I was wondering that, because in my mind they always had muscles, and the joke was that it was just a ridiculous costume for SNL.ĭC: I thought they had muscles. Let me ask you a question, fellas: Did we ever, for our own internal logic, decide that they literally had no muscles and they were stuffing the sweatsuits? I started doing the cocky little guy later on because of that. Another thing that we probably didn’t anticipate visually is Kevin is bigger and taller than me, so it was like Batman and Robin. But Kevin and I always want to make ourselves laugh, and Kevin had his own character and a really funny rhythm to it. I was probably showboating a bit, as I do. KN: Your Hans slowly became almost a little effeminate.ĭC: I didn’t want to think of him as effeminate, but the taunting, and the joy of the taunting, got so extreme, and he was so sure he was outwitting some of these people.ĭC: “Yah! How can you stand it when you see our muscles and you don’t have muscles?” Sometimes I get bored and extrapolate things. But after a while, we’d say, “We want to pump,” and the audience would clap with us. We did have a lot going for us, but it didn’t land that hard. I remember that distinctly.ĭC: The gap teeth. Lorne gave it a shot, but he put it on at the very end of the show. It must have done well enough, and they had a lot of confidence in you guys by then to deliver it. Smigel would come in later on and riff with us. We could have done it all night, right, Dana?ĭana Carvey: We would do it for hours. We established an outline, and we were just kind of riffing on it and cracking up. I don’t remember specifically pitching it, but Dana and I went back to our office we were sharing and threw ideas around. Kevin Nealon: It was like any other sketch. Also, they do a lot of voices! Read some excerpts from the interview below, or listen to the full episode of Good One wherever you get your podcasts. On Good One, Carvey, Nealon, and Smigel talk about how the characters were born, how the movie was written, and what it was like revisiting the project. Until now! Carvey, Nealon, Schwarzenegger (voiced by Smigel), and O’Brien have reunited to read scenes from the previously lost-to-time screenplay, and you can listen to “The Lost Hans & Franz Movie” episodes on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend when the series drops on May 17. But once Schwarzenegger backed out, the project fell apart, and the movie became just something the four writers would bring up occasionally in interviews and on each other’s podcasts. The result was Hans & Franz: The Girlyman Dilemma, a road-trip comedy/show-business satire/musical starring the duo and Schwarzenegger himself. The frequency of their appearances and placement in the show - Hans and Franz often showed up during cold opens - is incredible by today’s standards, in which big characters might appear only a few times over the course of a cast member’s entire run on the show and, increasingly, on “Weekend Update.” So, after a few years on the show, Carvey and Nealon decided it was time to take Hans and Franz to Hollywood, and they wrote a movie with the help of Robert Smigel and Conan O’Brien. In the late ’80s, Hans and Franz, Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon’s muscle-bound cousins of Arnold Schwarzenegger, were an SNL sensation.
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