Published : Oct. 25, 2013 - 19:26
Johnny Knoxville (right) portrays accident-prone Irving Zisman while Jackson Nicoll plays his grandson in “Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa.” (MTV Films/MCT)
The right ring finger. ... No, “THE LEFT RING FINGER!”
It’s minutes before sunrise at Westchester’s Kerlan-Jobe sports medicine clinic and Johnny Knoxville has very nearly, accidentally, authorized orthopedic surgery on the wrong hand. His uninjured hand.
A clinic administrator taking down Knoxville’s information shakes her head in disbelief.
Within the hour, the co-creator and breakout star of MTV’s cultishly beloved series “Jackass” ― and a trio of spin-off movies that have a combined gross of more than $335 million ― will be under general anesthesia and no longer able to rectify any self-inflicted finger fiascoes.
Looking jaunty in the waiting room, wearing a garrison cap and Buddy Holly glasses, Knoxville can’t quite stifle a laugh. “That would’ve been pretty silly,” he says, attempting to make a fist without the cooperation of his unbending digit.
Given the Tennessee native’s unique occupational hazards as Hollywood’s preeminent stunt doofus ― a fall guy who has voluntarily been shot by a riot-control sandbag gun, offered up his left pectoral to be bitten by a baby alligator and launched himself skyward on a giant rocket Wile E. Coyote style all in the name of fun ― you can forgive Knoxville for being somewhat cavalier about his physical well-being. This is the guy for whom the opening line from Roger Alan Wade’s famous country ditty “If you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough” applies as both lifestyle choice and mission statement.
While filming his ribald candid-camera comedy “Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa” (arriving in theaters Friday and featuring Knoxville, 42, as a libidinous, pratfall-prone octogenarian) the performer sustained a torn shoulder, a fractured elbow and “a screwy thing” with his foot.
But the ripped tendon that brought Knoxville to Kerlan-Jobe, primarily known for treating players from the L.A. Lakers, Dodgers, Angels and Kings, is a different kind of sports injury. One that can be traced back to the loved-up high accompanying a certain designer drug.
“We were shooting a promo at this frat house in Arizona,” Knoxville explains in the pre-op waiting area. “I was sitting with all the students watching the movie. One of them dosed me with Ecstasy. So I was running around ... out of my mind. ‘No pain!’ I smashed through a table. I was climbing up a basketball net and hanging close to the rim. That may have snapped it.”
In full prosthetic makeup at the time as his “Bad Grandpa” character Irving Zisman ― a white-haired, polyester-clad 86-year-old of loose moral caliber who has cameoed to hilariously vulgar effect pranking unsuspecting passersby on the show and in previous “Jackass” films ― Knoxville chose to accept the druggy predicament. He, ahem, rolled with it, rather than try to buck his karmic fate.
“Any other movie promo where the talent had been dosed would have been shut down immediately,” he says. “We just kept shooting. Everyone on my crew was psyched; they thought it was hilarious. Derek, our producer, texted me: ‘Do you need a hug?’”
Life has a funny way of battering Knoxville over the head for giggles while also ― incidentally but assuredly ― helping propel his stardom. In 1998, the then-underemployed actor (ne: Philip John “PJ” Clapp) parlayed stunt demonstrations for the skateboard-humor magazine Big Brother into the “Jackass” franchise. Among the stunts, Knoxville shot himself with a .38-caliber pistol while wearing the cheapest bulletproof vest on the market and got zapped with a 120,000-volt Taser.
Forming a loose confederacy of like-minded dunces with such series regulars as Ryan Dunn, Bam Margera, Stephen “Steve-O” Glover, Jason “Wee Man” Acuna and Chris Pontius ― and Academy Award-nominated writer-director Spike Jonze rounding out the team as an occasional on-camera performer and producer ― the “Jackass” collective proceeded to generate shock entertainment from ritual humiliation and deliberate self-harm with a dash of winking homoeroticism thrown in for good measure.
The MTV series ran from 2000 to 2001, spawning a trio of low-budget/high-yield films in its wake (the most recent, 2010’s “Jackass 3-D,” was shot for $20 million and grossed a robust $171 million worldwide).
And Hollywood came calling to offer Knoxville minor acting gigs in such mainstream films as “The Dukes of Hazzard,” “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” and “The Last Stand” opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But “Bad Grandpa” represents a departure for the self-described “half-assed stuntman,” a kind of career shot in the arm.
As far back as 2006, Paramount Pictures, the studio that has theatrically distributed every “Jackass” film, began urging Knoxville to spin off a film centered on Irving Zisman, or “old man” as he’s informally known. The idea was to practical joke his way across the country a la Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat character.
But Knoxville resisted at every turn, convinced the hidden-camera prank premise was too thin to support a traditional narrative and cowed by the rough time he was going through personally.
“I couldn’t have done this movie then,” he says. “I was really all over the place, spinning my wheels. I was out in the bars all the time. I wasn’t in the right head space. I couldn’t have written or performed it.”
Added Jeff Tremaine, producer-director of the TV series and all the “Jackass”-branded films: “From a production standpoint, it’s a terrible idea for a movie. On the show, we could wing it. We’d run around and shoot stupid stuff ― whatever we could get. Never did it seem like it could sustain a story.”
By Chris Lee
(Los Angeles Times)
(MCT Information Services)